Author: sonofsagan

Brian Duffield's directorial debut, No One Will Save You, is a brilliant film that utilizes conventions from several genres, including alien horror and home invasion thrillers, to play out the psychodrama of a character whose isolation and unspoken traumatic past call out for audience identification.

John Scalzi's Redshirts is a sometimes smart, mostly fun, and occasionally critically interesting novel that sits rightfully, and awkwardly, at the center of recent debates about the origin, aesthetics, and political value of so-called "squeecore" genre fiction.

The Forgotten Realms novel Shadowdale marks the beginning of a major event in the franchise's storyworld and, despite it being somewhat of an eye-rolling chore to read, it offers some promising elements for the rest of the series.

Monica Furlong's Juniper is a beautiful, powerful novel of girlhood and community in ancient Cornwall that transcends its position as middle-grade fiction and demonstrates why Furlong's magical fictions of the ancient Celtic world, told from the perspective of women's experiences, deserve another look.

Gordon Doherty's novelization of the Assassin's Creed: Odyssey video game wonderfully demonstrates everything aesthetically and narratively wrong with so much franchise fiction.

The first in an obscure 1990s Lithuanian historical fiction series published in English, The Captive proves mildly interesting, poorly written, and narratively simple, but might be worth a look if you're interested in the pre-Christian Baltic.