Happy Halloween, everyone! I’m writing this early and scheduling it to be posted on the big day. As you read this, Alexa and I are living it up in New Orleans, where we’ve scheduled a semi-private cemetery tour for this afternoon.
Here’s wishing you and yours a happy and safe Halloween. Oh, and here’s a treat to get you in the Halloween mood:
Burnt Black Suns by Simon Strantzas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
After four collections, weird fiction author Simon Strantzas is still going strong. Maybe even better than ever. Strantzas’s brand of weird fiction draws from numerous sources — Lovecraft, Chambers, Ligotti, Aickman, Barron — but thematically they are unmistakably his own. His protagonists are deeply flawed people, usually fragile men who have suffered some terrible emotional blow and are making the wrong choices to set it right, and who uncover unknowable and relentless occult secrets that shatter what’s left of them. Of the nine stories present in BURNT BLACK SUNS, the ones I liked the most are “By Invisible Hands,” about a senile old puppet maker who is charged with creating a new and terrible puppet by a secretive client; “Emotional Dues,” which follows a struggling artist as he falls into the hands of an eccentric benefactor; and my favorite of them all, the centerpiece novella “One Last Bloom,” which is a stunning piece of scientific horror with an ending that packs a wallop. Any of Strantzas’s collections are a good jumping-in point, but BURNT BLACK SUNS presents the author at his most confident. Highly recommended.
“The Woman Who Lived,” the second part of the story that began with last week’s episode “The Girl Who Died,” is, quite simply, the best episode of the season so far. It may in fact be the best episode of Doctor Who in a very long time.
***MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD***
Maisie Williams, as Ashildr/Lady Me, is a big part of the reason why this episode is so good. Clara isn’t in this episode, and it has never been more obvious how little the show needs her. I didn’t miss her at all. In fact, by the time she shows up for a brief scene at the end of the episode, I had mostly forgotten she existed. Ashildr steps into the companion role effortlessly and with far more panache, and the adventure they share is an enjoyable one, a compelling mix of humor, drama, and science-fiction nonsense.
It’s the conversations between the Doctor and Ashildr that make this episode work. The way she accuses him of leaving too soon after a problem is fixed, thereby freeing himself from having to experience the consequences of his involvement. The way he throws it back in her face that she’s the only one responsible for her decision to stop caring about other people, not him and not the gift he gave her. The Doctor explaining how he can never travel with someone who, like him, is essentially immortal because he needs someone to remind him how precious and fleeting life can be. We even get a mention of Captain Jack Harkness, possibly for the first time since “The End of Time, Part Two” in 2009, and the Doctor’s cheeky response to Ashildr not knowing who that is: “He’ll get around to you eventually.” The dialogue, written by Catherine Tregenna (incidentally the first female writer the show has employed since 2008), absolutely crackles. She turns Ashildr into a far more memorable character than she was in “The Girl Who Died,” and in Sam Swift she creates a hilarious comic foil (and potential love interest?) for quite possibly the rest of Ashildr’s days.
How much Ashildr has forgotten (and sometimes how much she has wanted to forget) over the eight centuries she’s lived is perhaps the most realistic portrayal of a normal human being granted with immortality I’ve seen. In movies like Highlander, it’s implied that the immortals’ memories are fully intact, that they can remember events from hundreds of years ago with ease, but the human brain can store only so many memories. The way Ashildr is forced to keep journals so she can remember, and the way she has forgotten her Viking village and even her original name, is handled compellingly and with a sense of authenticity. (Although if she rereads her journals regularly, it strikes me that she wouldn’t have forgotten the name Ashildr at all — though I may be taking her initial protests of ignorance too much at face value.)
The plot itself is of less interest than the character interplay. Something about a magic amulet and Lion-O Leandro, a lion-headed, fire-breathing (?) alien who tricks Ashildr into something something invasion. There’s lots of fun running around and some good heisting along the way, though, including a hilarious highwayman showdown between Ashildr and Sam Swift. Seriously, this may just be the best written and best acted episode of Doctor Who in recent memory. (No props for the clearly fake horse the Doctor was riding, though. During close ups, was Peter Capaldi sitting on a plastic horse replica on the back of a flatbed truck that was driving down the street? I think the answer is obviously yes.)
I was delighted to read a news item this morning that said we haven’t seen the last of Ashildr this season. I continue to stand by my assertion that she will be heavily involved in the finale as the Minister of War hinted at a couple of episodes ago in “Under the Lake.”
Silliness aside (Dalek poop, the sonic sunglasses, “I know why I gave myself this face”), this is turning out to be a remarkably thoughtful and mature season of Doctor Who. I’m more optimistic about the show than I’ve been in years. Please don’t let me down, show!
And now for some Doctor Who neepery! When I first saw Lion-O Leandro in the promos for this season, I thought we might be seeing the return of the Tharils, the lion-faced, transdimensional aliens from the 1981 Fourth Doctor serial “Warriors’ Gate.” That supposition had me wondering in turn if Maisie Williams’s character was going to turn out to be Romana, whom we last saw leaving with the Tharils to free them from slavery in E-Space. It didn’t turn out that way, of course, which is probably for the best since I think Ashildr is far more interesting as her own, new character than as a returning character in disguise. Also, Tharils don’t breathe fire. (Neither do lions in general. What the fuck?)
When the Doctor mentions to Ashildr that the Great Fire of London is coming in 1666, she wonders if she’ll be the one to start it. The Doctor replies no, it will be started by the Terileptils. This is a reference to the 1982 Fifth Doctor serial “The Visitation,” in which the Terileptils, a race of reptilian aliens, invade England in 1666. They accidentally start the Great Fire at the end of the serial, when a Terileptil drops its weapon into a fire and it explodes, destroying the Terileptils and starting the notorious fire on Pudding Lane.
Next week, the Zygons are back. And so, strangely enough, is Osgood. Will she be a Zygon replica, or the real human? And what does that mean for the Osgood we saw murdered by Missy in last season’s finale?
This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Melissa Groeling, whose latest novel is Lights Out. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Even when the lights are out, he can still see you…
Paul Holten’s profession doesn’t leave much room for doubt or conscience, but he’s reaching his breaking point. The nightmares are getting worse, the jobs are getting harder to finish, and the volatile relationship with his boss Aaron is falling apart. Now faced with the possibility of an impending death sentence, Paul makes the fatal decision to run. Drawn into one hellish situation after another, he’s forced to confront his dark past — and wonder if perhaps dying isn’t the better option.
And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Melissa Groeling:
Say you’re scared of heights and clowns and you’re stuck with one at the top of a Ferris wheel. What do you freak out about first — the clown or the height? Say you’re locked in a tiny room with no light and you’re claustrophobic and afraid of the dark. Which one makes you break out in a cold sweat first — the dark or the lack of space? Multiple fears abound but really, how do you decide which one takes priority? Or do you simply play dead and wait for rescue?
I realized about two chapters into writing Lights Out that playing dead would’ve made life a lot easier for my main character, Paul Holten. For him, fear is a constant presence and there were many, many times where I seriously thought that hey, I should really give this guy a break.
But fear is also a great motivator. It pushes Paul to stay alive, to stay one step ahead and if I were to narrow down the scariest of this book, I would have to choose:
The Tunnel and yes, it needs to be capitalized.
This is the place where, as someone in the book so delicately put it, “the trash is taken out.” It’s three-deep in goosebumps. It’s pitch-black. It’s cold. It’s filled with…leftovers and I don’t mean your mother’s meatloaf.
It’s a mixed bag of treats here — sheer panic, adrenaline and of course what we all fear in the dark: the unknown. Mix it all together and the only thing that comes close to The Tunnel’s creepiness is having your power go out. You know what that’s like, right? You’re sitting there, reading or watching TV and suddenly, you’re plunged into complete and total darkness. Everything becomes disoriented. You don’t know what direction to go in. You don’t know where anything is. Your furniture looks like crouching monsters, ready to sharpen their teeth on your bones. Then all the weird scenarios start going through your mind: maybe it’s just the breakers tripping or a car hit a telephone pole or maybe someone cut your power lines. Your brain races with all of these possibilities and then two seconds later (and admit it, it feels more like two hours), the lights come back on and you feel like a monumental fool for getting so worked up in the first place.
In Paul’s case, however, the lights never come back on. He plunges further and further into The Tunnel’s total darkness. Things that sound inhuman echo off the walls. His feet crunch through things that squeak — could be living, could be dead — and all the while, he can hear something scuttling towards him from behind. But he keeps moving. He has to because going back is much, much worse than going forward.
Melissa Groeling: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads / Instagram
Lights Out: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / Apple
Melissa Groeling is a fiery redhead who grew up in New Jersey and now resides in the City of Brotherly Love. Only after she graduated from Bloomsburg University did she start to take her writing seriously. She’s a diehard New York Giants fan, loves chocolate and stalks cupcakes. Traffic Jam is her first young adult novel. Lights Out is her first dip into adult fiction.
