It’s a historical fact that some odious men who happened to be talented scientists had their Nazi pasts whitewashed so they would help America catch up with the Soviet Union in the space race. That doesn’t mean fiction has to let them off the hook.

I never quite bought that Sofie and Jurgen were simply pulled along with no choices. If Sofie truly cared about her Jewish best friend, why didn’t she attempt to tell her children that what they were learning about the “master race” in school was wrong? She might not have changed their minds, but she could have tried. And are we really supposed to believe that Jurgen was able to run a slave-labor factory despite knowing the prisoners were every bit as human as he was? 

The whole thing struck me as a “just following orders” justification, and could have been a better book if it had been clearly written that way. Sofie and Jurgen don’t have to be monsters, but they aren’t innocent victims either (as the author noted in her afterward). The plot wouldn’t even have to change much, with one major exception: Sofie’s Jewish friend wouldn’t be willing to just pick up where they left off before the Nazis came to power. There would be some small cost for a total lack of moral courage, rather than absolution by one of the true victims of the Holocaust.

We all know FDR didn’t get capped on the White House lawn in 1942. Or at least, people who read historical fiction know that.

I haven’t been able to understand the author’s decision to add a totally fictional assassination subplot to the fascinating story of a history-student-turned-sniper who was a hero of World War II. The book already had plenty of suspense around which of Lyudmila’s team would survive and whether she would ever truly be free of the slimeball she’d married as a teenager.

If the author thought the U.S. goodwill tour portion of the book wasn’t dramatic enough, she could have heightened the stakes by putting Lyudmila under pressure to inform the intelligence services of every word Mrs. Roosevelt shared with her. (There’s no way of knowing, but it seems likely to me that they did ask for that information, since one of your people becoming friends with the First Lady must have seemed too good to be true.) Maybe on its face, that’s not as dramatic as an assassination plot, but drama depends on being interested in what happens next. And you just can’t get interested if you already know that what happens is effectively nothing.

If you’re going to give an explanation for the seeming end of the world, it better make sense.

And for the life of me, I can’t understand how cyberattacks led to flamingoes migrating to the greater New York area, a tick bite causing someone’s teeth to fall out the next day, or deer deciding they’re done being skittish around humans.

If you want to have those details – and they certainly are effective in conveying something has gone very wrong – I think it’s best not to explain them. Then the audience can either enjoy the mystery, or come up with their own theories, which could be anything from aliens to climate change tipping points.

If you want to keep the idea of society falling apart in the aftermath of a cyberattack, then just focus on the smaller, human side (the anxiety of not knowing what’s happening, fear for loved ones we suddenly can’t contact, uncertainty about who or what to trust, etc.). And that’s before you even get into what happens when people can’t do routine things like buy groceries because their debit cards are just worthless plastic.

Both could have been good movies, in different ways. When you try to do both, though, it leaves a little something to be desired.

This is the third Mike Flanagan series on here, which is perhaps a testament to how much I like his premises and hate the way he executes them (no pun intended, given that nearly all the characters were bumped off by the end of this one).

I’m a little too squeamish for some of those deaths, but I watched through the end to get the answer to who Verna was and why she was killing the Usher children in reverse birth order. And the answer turned out to be that their dad and aunt made a drunken deal (with the devil?) and forgot about it for forty years. Nothing they – or even Roderick and Madeline – did since then made a bit of difference. They could have been saints who gave away their shares of the family fortune, and Verna still would have shown up and axed them. Not exactly satisfying for the audience.

The easiest way to fix this would be to make the deal more open-ended. Verna could promise Roderick and Madeline that they could do anything they wanted and have anything they wanted, and the consequences would fall on the next generation. All the deaths they caused with their marketing of Ligodone would rebound on their own family, rather than just giving Verna material to lecture Roderick about as his own demise nears.

I would also include some scenes of the Usher children when they were younger. Frederick claims his cruelty is something he learned from his father, and Roderick blames Tamerlane’s prostitute kink on his own tendency to “outsource intimacy,” but we never see where any of it came from. If we could see how Roderick and Madeline shaped their choices, it would make the hideousness of their deaths seem less like torture porn and more like natural consequences of a deeply unloving and unhealthy family.

The biggest problem with this book was that it couldn't decide whether Ann was a sweet ingenue thrown into the worst workplace in academia, or a top predator in an aw-shucks disguise.

It would have strained my credulity to believe anyone could have been naive enough to not see that Rachel might have some ulterior motives for giving her fashionable clothes and a room in a penthouse to live rent-free. Nonetheless, if a protagonist is going to be that innocent, don't ask me to believe that she killed Rachel at the end of the book, even knowing Rachel was a murderer herself.

If Ann was a Tom Ripley figure, much of the book would have made more sense. She'd be playing her own game to exploit Rachel and their creep of a boss at least as much as she's exploited. Unlikeable protagonists aren't everyone's cup of tea, of course, but at least they make more sense than protagonists who are supposed to be likeable right up until they murder their roommates.

Ancient evils too terrible to name actually aren’t that interesting, and nothing throws that into sharper relief than putting one in a story set in a place where humans did specific horrible things to each other.

The story had some problems to start with (it’s actually very difficult to get permission to film in Russia, even before the Ukraine invasion; there’s no way that dilapidated church was built in the Soviet era; is Teig’s friend REALLY willing to risk freezing to death over a debt of a few thousand dollars?), but I was willing to roll with it because I was genuinely curious how they were going to survive the night and what was happening.

And then we find out that what was happening was, well, bad. Really bad. But I couldn’t help wondering: worse than thousands of people being worked to death on a megalomaniacal dictator’s pet project? Unless this thing was going to unleash the Apocalypse, it would be hard-pressed to teach us any evil tricks we haven’t already learned ourselves.

As I see it, there’s only one way to make the ancient evil work, and that’s to make it overtly demonic. It doesn’t have to be a Christian-style demon, but it’s got to either destroy the Earth or somehow damn/imprison/devour our souls. The rest, we can do ourselves.

The other possibility is to set aside deep evils and have the Parnee and his forest spirits directly in conflict with the humans. One possibility is that we’re pushing too deep into his world, and he’s pushing back, which might make a decent ecological fable. The other is that nature and its spirits aren’t inherently good or bad, but we humans corrupted them with the amount of evil we did in places like Kolyma. (This would give Ludmilla a real role in the story as someone trying to restore the balance, rather than just being a kind person whose death gives Teig access to a car when he really needs one.)

I’m all for a creepy horror story, and Siberia is about as ripe for it as any place on earth. But an unspecified ancient evil is a MacGuffin. And as the movie critics say, a MacGuffin is nothing.  

This movie was a lot more fun than maybe it should have been, given all the things that were wrong with it.

I’ll never understand why movies spend so much time justifying why the heroine does a stupid thing when they could have made her decision less stupid. Have her take the DNA test, and instead of immediately agreeing to fly to stay with a cousin she just met, cut to “Five months later” (or an obviously different season, if you can’t stomach titles). Her friend wants to go out, but Evie has her monthly call with her newly found relatives. The oldest relative – say, her great-grandmother’s younger brother – talks about how shamefully the family behaved when she fell in love with a Black man, and expresses a desire to meet Evie and see the bit of his sister that’s still alive. It’s not totally unreasonable to say yes to that, particularly if it’s implied she’s been talking to the family for a while.

The second problem is that it makes no sense why Walter DeVille (subtle, that one) and his two existing brides are so determined to have Evie. There’s some vague explanation about how they need a third bride from a special bloodline to achieve their full powers (why?), but Dracula and Co. already seem superpowered and pretty close to immortal.

The only way this makes sense to me is if Walter is a classic abuser, albeit one who drinks blood and never ages. Emmaline escaped his control – admittedly, via a particularly grisly death – and he’s determined to get her back indirectly by making Evie pay. In this scenario, the Alexanders could have been semi-reluctant participants, luring in their American cousin to try to protect their future daughters and turning a blind eye to what Walter is capable of.

That illusion would be shattered when he has the servant killed at the dinner table. (You can’t tell me even the most insensitive of aristocrats would have an appetite after someone’s throat was cut in front of them.) That would force all of the Alexanders to take sides, either joining Evie to bring down Walter or trying to force her to go through with the “wedding.”

That would give the two actresses who played the vampire brides something to do, as wives of the Alexander men. One could be trying to push Evie through it, in the hope of protecting her own daughter, while the other could realize the only way anyone will find peace is when Walter’s dead. (I see Viktoria as the fighter and Lucy as the appeaser, though it could go either way.)

Admittedly, that would make the class-relations satire a less important element of the movie, but I would argue that if the characters aren’t acting like anything close to normal human beings, it doesn’t work as satire anyway. Start with a story that makes sense, and add the politics from there.

I wrote this for an anthology of horror stories inspired by Shakespeare. Since it wasn't chosen, I thought I'd share it with you.

This is set in the world of Richard III. The historical Richard III and Anne Neville had a son, who died at around age 10. Obviously, he isn't in the play, so this is my take on what might have happened to him.

The Changeling

By Meg Wingerter

     The thing in the cradle only revealed its true nature to Anne.

     That might have been part of her curse.

     Or perhaps it was revenge from the former king. After all, she had gone to weep for his death, and left wearing his murderer’s ring.

     She couldn’t explain, even to herself, why she had agreed to marry Richard Gloucester. She’d caught him in half a dozen 

untruths in – five minutes? Ten? A quarter of an hour? How long had it taken him to break down her resistance, after he’d murdered her husband, her father, and her king?

Perhaps she was mad.

     She must have been, at least for the few days between accepting the ring and standing before the altar. Gloucester had insisted on a hasty wedding. She knew it was so she wouldn’t have time to think and change her mind. She didn’t know what he thought of her, but it was clear he had no intention of letting the rich lands her father had left her go to someone else.

     She’d been so frightened when it was time to go to Gloucester’s bed. She had coupled with her first husband a few times before war tore him away. She was not entirely naïve in the ways of the flesh. But her mind conjured up the most ghastly images of what Gloucester might be hiding his clothing. There might have been a serpent between his legs, for all she knew. It would go with his hunchback, his uneven legs, and his withered arm.

     That fear was groundless. His nakedness was ugly, but human. Stripped of his black, shapeless clothes – which did something, but not much, to distract the eye from what a grotesque jumble his body was – he looked weak, vulnerable. He had undressed her first before removing his own clothes, then hesitated, as if in fear of rejection. Anne had swallowed her dislike and spread her legs. She was a wife again, with all the duties that entailed. And the coupling itself was mercifully brief, with no snakes in sight.

     Not that that was necessary better. An adder wouldn’t have hidden its eggs inside her.

     It wasn’t until she felt the thing quickening, moving in the shadowy world of her womb, that she remembered her curse, spoken just minutes before she agreed to marry its father:

     “If ever he had child, let it be prematurely born, monstrous, that its ugly and unnatural body may frighten the hopeful mother when she sees it. Let that be the heir of his evil.”

     She wondered what she had condemned herself to bear. At best, it might be a copy of Gloucester – all ill-formed limbs, with a hump to catch in the delivery and rip open her cunny, like a wolf rending a lamb.

     It might be much worse.

     She prayed that it might die and spare her.

     The Lord wasn’t listening.

     She had missed her monthly course eight times when it announced its coming in a burst of bloody water. This was too soon. Let it be prematurely born …

     She felt whatever demon she had called down upon herself breathing on her face as she frantically tried to expel the creature from her womb. The breath smelled of urine and blood. She fainted as soon she felt the thing slide from her body.

     She didn’t want to wake. She knew that, even before she opened her eyes and pushed back at the hands floating above her. But they wouldn’t let her slip back into darkness. She must meet her son.

     It – he – was tiny. Tiny, red, and wrinkled, like every other infant. She examined each limb, each finger and toe, every tiny bump on the vertebrae of his spine, strung like beads from head to rump.

     He was perfect.

     Anne fell back against her pillow, weeping and laughing in equal measure. No one seemed to find this strange.

#

     The child, who would be called Edward for Gloucester’s brother the King, was quickly dispatched to a wet nurse. They told Anne it was because her health was too delicate for her to act as a cow or a nanny goat. As the pain built, though, she wondered if they had lied to her, and if some poison was welling up in her breasts. Mother’s milk was never meant to be this sharp.

     Perhaps the pain was the reason she couldn’t think of leaving her room. During her laying-in, when she was confined to that airless chamber, she would have traded all of the lands her father had left her for a simple walk around the grounds, or even to be allowed out of bed long enough to watch the sun set from a chair by her window.

     Now that it was done, though, she could think of nowhere she wished to go and nothing she wished to do. Her bed was no longer a prison; it was a haven. Even from the safety of her window, the outside world seemed too bright, too loud, too … much.

     Gloucester rarely intruded, other than to – what had he been doing? Thanking her for their son, perhaps. It didn’t matter. He was soon gone to do whatever dukes did, leaving her in peace.

     His mother, the dowager Duchess of York, wouldn’t extend the same courtesy. She was always there, trying to coax Anne out of bed, into a day gown, out into the corridors, into other rooms.

     “You must see your son,” the Duchess insisted. “He is much grown already.”

     Grown? How much time had passed? Well, babies grew quickly. Still, Anne thought she might be proud to see the tiny thing plumping from a wrinkled fruit into a little cherub. She roused herself enough to dress and walk to the chamber at the end of the hall.

     Anne gasped when she looked in the cradle. The child had not grown, but it had changed. The limbs had become even more spindly, like branches on a dead tree. One eye was huge, and blue; the other was barely there, and deep red. When it opened its maw, tiny pointed teeth protruded from the infant gums like daggers.

     “Such a fair babe,” the Duchess said. “Would you hold him?”

     Fair? How could she call such a creature fair? Perhaps the Duchess had a blind spot when it came to babies and thought they all were fair. After all, she hadn’t thrown Gloucester on the fire when she first saw him. Perhaps it was pity, or hope that Anne would not see what her offspring had become. Anne didn’t want to vex the Duchess, so she accepted the little thing into her trembling arms.

     Let it be monstrous, ugly, and unnatural …

     The little thing gazed up at her with its mismatched eyes and gurgled innocently, sweetly unaware that its existence seemed a crime against nature. The pain shot through her breasts, and for an instant, she thought she saw a malevolent smile. But then it was gone, before she was sure it had ever been.

     “How could I have created you?” she asked no one in particular.

     “They are wonders, are they not?” the Duchess said with satisfaction.

     “To be wondered at indeed,” Anne mumbled.

     The thing screwed its face into an even uglier shape that made Anne want to cast it away, like a mouse that had found its way into her shoe. With an effort, she set it down gently. Soon it was asleep.

     Sleep eluded her that night, though. Every time she shut her eyes, the thing’s distorted features floated before her. She got up, grabbed her shawl, and paced the chamber, suddenly restless. She couldn’t stay alone in this room any longer. Perhaps she could go to Gloucester? She knew from the few times they had shared a bed that he slept only in fits and starts, disrupted by nightmares of being dragged to Hell for his crimes. But when she entered the corridor, her feet carried her in the opposite direction, until she was standing at the door of the nursery. Yes, this was where she should be. How could she have thought of going to Gloucester? The idea was absurd.

     The wet nurse was snoring peacefully while the babe slept silently in the cradle. Anne crept in noiselessly, to avoid disturbing either, and knelt beside the thing her body had produced.

     Was it possible it had grown uglier in one evening? Its skin had a sickly green cast in the moonlight, like something several days gone. Its fingers had contracted into claws, and its nose had sunk in, leaving no trace it had ever been.

     And then it opened its eyes.

     Anne felt riveted to the spot. Both eyes were red now, and they burned through her. It opened its mouth; the teeth were longer, and they were red. What had it drained from its nurse? And she heard its voice in her head. “I am what you wished for, mother. And I will never leave you.”

     Let it frighten the hopeful mother when she sees it …

     She couldn’t bear to see it, but she couldn’t make her feet run from it. So she did the only thing she could. She threw her shawl over the cradle, to hide the thing and muffle its malicious whispers.

#

     The nurse’s scream woke her.

     Anne started from her bed. Yes, she was in her bed. She had a vague sense that she had been somewhere else; but here she was, and where else would she have gone? The scream repeated, and she ran to the nursery, not even stopping to look for a shawl.

     The child was almost perfect again, except for a slight bluish cast to the skin. Anne picked him up. He was cold. He was stiff. He was insensible to her touch. She clutched him to her breast, all the same.

     The nurse was heaping recriminations on herself for not waking sooner. Anne told her that she was not to blame. Sometimes, the Lord thought better of his gifts.

     It was a rare woman who had not lost a child in infancy, and the world expected Anne to bear her loss with grace and dignity. She did not cry when they placed the little thing in the ground; all she felt was bewilderment. She had had a son, and she no longer did. Sometimes she thought an evil spirit had taken him away and replaced him with a monster, but with each day that passed, the beautiful babe and the ghastly creature faded in her mind until both seemed a half-remembered dream.

     The only thing she was certain of was that she did not want another child.

     Gloucester returned to her chamber, but never touched her again, except when he thrashed about from his nightly terrors. They rarely spoke in the day – he was always in the company of the Duke of Buckingham, whispering things she had no interest in overhearing. She turned her energies toward the princes, Gloucester’s nephews. She occasionally thought she saw some shadow of what her son might have become in them, but generally she was able to keep him from her mind.

     Until George of Clarence was drowned in the Tower.

     The Duke of Clarence was the second brother, between the King and Gloucester. He had fallen from King Edward’s graces – something about a prophecy that G should the murderer of Edward’s heirs be.

     “Gloucester begins with G,” she said to him as she pulled the covers to her chin.

     “Aye, and what sin is that?” he answered carelessly. But he didn’t get into bed with her. He put his boots back on and limped off somewhere. Anne didn’t care where.

     So the cries that shook her from her sleep were not his.

     She would tell herself that Gloucester’s relations were mourning Clarence. Perhaps they were; but that was not what she heard. She knew that shrill, insistent wail.

     She heard it again the next night.

     “The King has taken his journey to the next world,” she said to reassure herself. He had been ill. His death was expected. It was natural that the palace should resound with cries.

     “Aye, mama,” an infant voice whispered in the dark.

     She didn’t shut her eyes again that night.

#

     Anne never told anyone what she had heard. They would think her mad. And she knew there are times when a royal relative may be mad and hope for comfort and succor, but the midst of a succession crisis is not one of them.

     She could imagine a world where there was no crisis. The fifth King Edward would ascend to his late father’s throne, with his uncle Gloucester by his side as protector and guide, and she would be entirely absorbed by her little babe. He was always alive, and perfect, and a delight to both her and Gloucester when she let her fancies run wild.

     If pressed, however, she would have been forced to admit that the presence of an heir was unlikely to be a check on Gloucester’s ambition.

     It was entirely possible, of course, that Gloucester meant no harm in sending Prince Edward and his younger brother to the Tower. It was cold, yes, and unhomelike, but many kings had gone there for solitude ahead of their coronations. She willed herself to believe that all would be well, even as she fretted about how lonely they must be.

     “I will keep them company, Mama,” the voice of the thing crawling about on the floor promised. She could see the outline of its unnatural shape now, skittering like an insect with a few legs missing. She shuddered and crossed herself.

#

     The voice grew louder, stronger, more mature with each enemy Gloucester executed. After the Queen’s brother Rivers went to the block, she heard the thing pawing at the edge of her bed, like an ape just learning to climb.

     She took to curling herself in the middle of the bed, lest her hand fall into its reach when she was asleep and undefended.

     Not that she slept much anymore.

     She hadn’t slept at all the night before she went to demand to see Prince Edward and his brother in the Tower.

     She thought she saw their young faces at a window above, but didn’t dare say so when the Dowager Duchess and the Queen came; she saw little boys’ faces everywhere. Still, she let herself believe it. If she had seen them alive, she could hope that there was yet one boundary Gloucester was unprepared to cross.

     That hope was blasted when Gloucester’s messenger told her she would be queen.

     “Anointed let me be with deadly venom, and die ere men can say, ‘God save the Queen,’” she cried to Heaven. Why she didn’t curse Gloucester instead, she couldn’t say; perhaps in her soul, she already knew no disaster would befall him until the Devil was ready to claim him. The messenger looked at her as if she were a madwoman, but the Duchess and the Queen understood.

     “Wish thyself no harm,” the Queen whispered, comforting Anne even as she learned her own son’s place was being usurped. Anne felt a rush of love for her, and of hatred for Gloucester.

     “For never yet one hour in his bed did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep,” she said, not quite knowing to whom she spoke.

     “Go thou to Richard, and good angels tend thee,” the Duchess said, gently guiding her to the messenger’s arm.

     Anne knew there were no good angels watching her, unless the messenger – she forgot his name – was a far better man than the one who sent him. He never took his eyes off her, though. Perhaps he feared she would jump from the carriage and splatter her brains on the paving stones. She had considered it, but she was too tired.

#

     The coronation must have happened, but Anne remembered only a blur of gaudy gold and ill-played fanfares.

     Gloucester – King Richard III – did not come to her bed to celebrate his triumph. She’d been willing to open her legs and endure his serpent’s bite, if only it meant that he did no other evil that night.

     But he did not come.

     “My father is feeding me, Mama,” the voice said, “as you never could. Tonight, he gives me a double portion of young blood.”

     “He would not,” Anne answered, even though she knew it wasn’t true.

     The voice scoffed. “Don’t be a fool. This is what you asked for. And soon it shall be done. I only require one more sacrifice to live.”

     “No!” Anne sprung to her feet, searching for the thing’s neck. “No more! No more!” But it had disappeared into the night. All she heard was its fading laughter.

     She jumped at a knock at the door. “Are you well, madam?” one of the servants asked.

     Somehow, she composed herself enough to speak. “A frightful dream.”

     “Shall I sit up with Your Royal Highness?”

     “Aye!” she cried.

     “Nay,” another voice answered. “Go to thy bed. I shall sit with the Queen.”

     No one could overrule the Queen but the King. But the voice wasn’t Gloucester’s. Nor was it a stranger’s. It was familiar, and somehow worse for that.

     The door opened. Anne felt herself rooted to the spot. There was nowhere to fly and no one to call, anyway.

     The creature stepped in. It wore Gloucester’s skin, but she knew the truth. She regained enough control of her limbs to scamper onto the bed. She pulled her legs to her chest and pressed herself against the headboard. It made no difference. The thing was now large and strong enough to easily hoist itself onto the mattress.

     “Please, no,” she said.

     “You are mad, my Lady Anne,” it answered. “And a madwoman cannot be Richard’s queen.”

     It pushed her down like a rag doll and held a pillow over her face. She clawed at it and tried to kick, but it laid on her and held her in place. Before the darkness closed in, she saw its red eyes flash and its bloody mouth twist into a smile.

     Let that be the heir of his evil …

I’m not going to criticize the original – it was probably extremely novel at the time for the answer to be “everyone did it.” I do think the Kenneth Branagh adaption went awry in trying to reproduce it so faithfully within two hours.

When you have 13 suspects (even though Poirot didn’t initially consider the porter a suspect), some or all of them are bound to get short shrift in a movie of average length. There just isn’t enough time to give them all something interesting to say or do. And since we know so little about some of these people, it seems like he’s pulling connections out of thin air. (“You seem to know a lot about food. You must be the Armstrongs’ cook, and clearly everyone is ready to kill for a former employer.”)

The easiest thing would be to cut down the number of suspects and redistribute the revelations among a smaller number of players. Count Andrenyi says and does almost nothing, so he should be cut. 

I would also cut most of the people who were just employees: butler Masterman, chauffeur Marquez, and cook Schmidt. As much as they probably liked Daisy, it’s a big step to kill for an old boss.

The governess and the nurse could be condensed into one person, who actually would have known Daisy well and been ready to avenge her. That brings us down to eight suspects, which seems far more manageable within a two-hour time frame.

Never promise what you don't intend to deliver.

And this book promised quite a bit. The set-up, with mysterious and sometimes violent scenes showing up on rented videotapes, was intriguing. The brief glimpses into the tape-maker's head, like describing how people go into the corn where no one can hear them scream, were genuinely chilling. I was willing to put up with the long stretches of domestic life where not much happened, in the hope it would stick the landing with a satisfying climax and explanation.

But all we got was a vague idea that Lisa had done it because she missed her mom who ran off with a cult. And the family who tracked her down just left without ever speaking to her. Did they just let her get away with murder? Or were the heavy hints that she was killing the people on the videos just red herrings?

Since the story already includes a cult, I don’t understand why the author didn’t use that. The tapes could be the leader’s way of trying to lure in new followers/victims. (It never made sense why Lisa made them, let alone why Sarah helped her.) Lisa could have fallen into it when she went to find her mother, or be doing awful things because the leader promises to free her mother if she does.

Of course, you’d need more of a final act, where the leader and probably Lisa are either caught and held accountable, or destroy whoever is coming for them. But I would argue the book needed this anyway. Even if the hints of murder were red herrings, Lisa was kidnapping people, holding them against their will, and harming them in non-lethal ways. 

But it’s a little hard to believe the hints were meaningless. Everyone was let go and just decided not to tell the police they were kept in a shed with bags over their heads? Seems unlikely. So the most logical conclusion is that most, if not all, of them are dead, and the family just waved to the murderer on her porch and kept walking. Books don’t always have to end with the killers getting what they deserved, but someone should at least try to bring justice. Otherwise, we’re just left to wonder what on earth we spent the last few days reading.

The greater the suspension of disbelief a film demands, the more strictly said film must follow its own internal rules.

I’m willing to accept the premise that everybody has a twin living below ground, who they’re somehow tied to (though I do think the explanation that some scientists created them and abandoned them with nothing but rabbits, scissors, and apparently many yards of red fabric to make jumpsuits with is a bit weak). 

The problem is that the mechanics of what the “tethered” can do change so much from scene to scene. We see them essentially forced to repeat every motion their counterparts make (like the people who must have felt silly riding a fake roller coaster), but also somehow managing to plan a coup where they escape and murder their surface-dwelling twins. Are they free to make choices, or are they not? If they are capable of taking actions their counterparts haven’t, why don’t they just walk up the escalator and get on with their lives?

I think there are two ways this could make more sense. One is to go the mystical/supernatural route. Every soul has two sides, like a Jekyll and Hyde, one on the surface, and one in the shadows, operating semi-independently. (Presumably in this scenario, Vladimir Putin is quietly running a judo studio in the shadow realm, since the bad version lives on the surface.) The shadow version of the main family finds a way to break through, and our heroes have to defeat them.

The other option is to go with the idea of a multiverse. There’s the world as we know it, and another Earth that’s perhaps more technologically advanced, but poisoned by human mistakes (nuclear war, out-of-control climate change, take your pick). The other version of Addy found a way to break through to our world, and a few pioneers are trying it out, and sometimes having to get rid of their counterparts. (I envision Kitty being found floating in the bay, only for the police to go to her house, where other-Kitty answers the door.) Addy then has to figure out who’s still themselves and who has been replaced by their other-selves, before other-Addy catches up with her. Because isn’t that fundamentally why we fear doppelgangers – we don’t like the idea of not knowing who we can trust?

I really went back and forth on whether to attempt to fix this one – it really skirted the line with my “at least the premise had to be good” rule.

We’ve seen a great deal of evidence over the last two years that we’re not nearly as good at dealing with natural enemies (like viruses) as we might have hoped. But an incoming comet is precisely the sort of challenge that we humans are good at. It’s relatively imminent (six months), it’s going to kill everyone (no “this only affects those people”), and it can be fixed with a one-time solution that requires the average person to make exactly zero sacrifices.

I understand that the movie’s really about climate change. But that’s the reason it doesn’t work. Climate change comes with an indefinite timeline (we’re seeing some effects, but don’t know exactly when various things will happen), it’s going to affect some people much more than others, and limiting it would require everyone to significantly change how they live. A comet’s not exactly a perfect analogy.

If they wanted to stick with this set-up, it would have worked much better if they’d slowed things down. Jennifer Lawrence finds the comet, which is years out, and her calculations are dismissed as imprecise and alarmist. Over time, scientific consensus starts to build, but the public’s a little worn out from comet talk. And when it’s clear the comet is headed toward some part of the world that’s not a priority for countries with space programs (say the Horn of Africa or Yemen is going to take the brunt of the tsunami), it’s a race to convince people they should care about something that’s not going to affect them tomorrow.

I’m still not sure the fix would produce a great movie. But it’s better than having someone yell in your face for two hours about how everyone is stupid, even if that someone is Leonardo DiCaprio.

Despite some significant flaws (I’m talking about you, excessively long monologues about death and questionable use of makeup to age and de-age the actors), the beginning and ending episodes of this series worked pretty well. I have some real questions about the choices the characters made in the middle, though.

Father Paul/Monsignor John’s questionable decisions (bringing a vampire to town, microdosing the whole community with said vampire’s blood, encouraging the congregation to turn themselves into vampires) makes some sense, given that he thinks he’s just been given a second chance at life. So does Bev Keane’s catastrophically bad choice to burn down the town, leaving the new vampire community with no shelter when the one building she left is destroyed – it was clear she was the sort of person who’d enjoy leaving people she thought weren’t moral enough to burn to ashes.

But why does the original vampire allow this whole thing to move forward? What good is it to him to live on an island full of other hungry vampires? Isn’t it better for him to just keep slowly bleeding the town dry?

And why do so many of the people in the church on the night before Easter just take the rat poison? I’m aware that Mike Flanagan was inspired by the Jonestown disaster, but Jones had had years to indoctrinate people who had agreed to move to a different continent with him. (And even then, many may not have known what they were doing, given that they’d had “drills” for mass suicide before.) You’re telling me it took less than two months to get from “I kind of like this new priest” to “Let’s drink the rat poison”? Unlikely, even with supposed miracles.

This makes more sense if fewer people take the plunge, so to speak. Let’s say, before the planned midnight mass, the closest followers (Bev Keane, Sturge, maybe Mayor Wade and his wife Dolly) decide they’re going to get death over with and become immortal. Maybe Father Paul goes in with the idea they’re going to stand before the church and pitch this new life to the congregation – forgetting how his bloodlust overcame him on his first night as a vampire, when he drained Joe. Predictably, it doesn’t go well, with our new vampires giving in and chomping on their neighbors who can’t escape.

At that point, perhaps Wade and Dolly are penitent, but they’ve already turned others, who are equally overwhelmed by the thirst for blood and keep the chain reaction going, as an increasing number of vampires hunts a dwindling number of humans. I doubt very much that Bev is sorry, though, so she could still decide she’s going to rule over this whole mess and go on her arson spree. Since Sturge seems to do whatever she says, he could still go along with it. (Though I’d like a reason why he does. Maybe his family was dysfunctional and hers took him in, so she’s an older sister/mom figure?)

To me, it makes more sense if the first moments as a vampire are overwhelming, then some sort of sanity returns. I just don’t get why some people resist ever feeding, while others don’t stop until they’ve killed their spouses, children, parents, etc. I know some of us have more difficulty with our cravings than others, but that strains credulity.

You’d probably have a more extended final act, as we have more human potential heroes left to make their final stand, though it could end up in the same place: mass immolation when the sun rises. I would argue it would have even more pathos, as fewer people would have brought it on themselves, so to speak. And maybe one or two adults would survive to help the kids who made it out by boat. Heaven knows they’re going to need someone to pay for all that therapy.

Since multiverses are everywhere right now, I like to imagine there’s a version of existence where the good parts of both the book and the miniseries are put together.

Of course, they’re different media, with different demands. The days of silence at the beginning of the book worked, since we’re spending all that time in the characters’ heads, but obviously you can’t have a TV show where no one speaks to anyone else for a few episodes. 

Still, the ways they filled it in were either annoying, or didn’t add much. I’m still not sure what slaughtering the goat contributed, beyond showing Napoleon was seriously drugged up. And the bickering between Frances and Tony just got excessive. In the book, it quickly established an odd-couple dynamic, hate ready to turn into love under the right circumstances. In the TV version, they just kept finding new ways to insult each other.

That said, the miniseries did address some of the weak points in the book. Jessica was significantly more interesting, once we got to see there was something underneath the obsession with likes and comments. So was Tony, who was struggling with something legitimately hard, rather than coming off 20 years of “moping,” as he told Masha in the book.

If I were writing the Ultimate Universe adaptation of the two, here’s what I’d do:

·      Keep the “who’s threatening Masha” subplot from the show, to give Carmel something more interesting to do than obsess over losing a pound or two. If we don’t know – and maybe she doesn’t know – how far she’s willing to go, that could add suspense.

·      That said, cut the “Carmel shot Masha” reveal. There are some things that can’t be healed by microdosing and one cathartic experience, and being unstable enough to shoot somebody who told you to “f*** off” is one of them.

·      Use book-Lars instead of show-Lars. He did not behave like an investigative journalist for most of the show, so why make him one?

·      Cut the “someone died here before” subplot. We all know none of the nine are going to die, so it doesn’t really add any suspense. (Note: my husband registers disagreement and thought this was a good subplot. So, opinions will vary.)

·      Use the book version, where Masha’s infant son strangled in the blind cords, rather than the TV version, where her daughter was hit by a car. There’s a clear parallel between Masha and Heather, who both walk in and find their sons died in essentially the same way (though at different ends of childhood).

·      Have the Marconis’ hallucinations follow the book’s version, where they aren’t setting out with the idea that they’re going to be with Zach again. I suppose it’s possible that one family member seeing him could influence what the others see, but this seems awfully stage-managed for an acid trip.

I wasn’t totally satisfied with either ending. In the book, Masha essentially trips out and decides she’s going back to the corporate world, then tries to stab Heather (for reasons I don’t fully understand). In the TV show, she gets some sort of catharsis by seeing her lost daughter during a trip. (I’ve never tried LSD, but I feel like you can’t really engineer a specific experience in that way.)

It seems to me like the obvious way to end it is just to not have Masha high out of her mind. She pushes what most people would consider way too far with the fire, and the police show up. Then you’d have essentially the same ending, with the guests left to grapple with whether they experienced any healing that would justify the betrayal of their trust. (The book and the show had drastically different conclusions in the regard, and it’s hard to say one is right or wrong.) Maybe a bit less dramatic, but as I noted before, we all knew no one was going to die, so why try to make it look like the stakes are that high?

I know some will disagree with me on this, but I don’t think the last episode stuck the landing, after such a strong first season.

Not that I object to Jan being the murderer – I wondered if they were building up to that twist. But the way they suddenly revealed that she was a (nympho?)maniacal killer just strained my credulity. And was she really going to kill hundreds of people with carbon monoxide poisoning?

Honestly, since there’s a slight resemblance between her and Zoe, I thought she might be her estranged mother (the girl clearly wasn’t getting much parental guidance). If they had gone that route, she could have blamed Zoe’s friends for her death, and decided to eliminate them. In that case, her relationship with Charles would have been about using him to get close to Mabel, so she could figure out how to get away with another murder.

If they wanted to keep the black widow (black ex-girlfriend?) model, though, they could have really made that decision shine with just a few tweaks. Throw in a few hints that she has a jealous streak (maybe she could misunderstand some interaction between him and his female stunt double, instead of him thinking Pataki is stealing Jan). And just cut the carbon monoxide poisoning – it adds nothing. There’s enough drama if she’s out to kill Mabel, Oscar and Oliver.

The trickiest bit is her poisoning of Charles. I wasn’t clear why she did it on the show, since she gives him the poisoned handkerchief BEFORE he reveals they know anything about her and Tim Kono. (Humiliation that he saw her in the second chair? She just gets a kick out of offing boyfriends?) I think the easiest way to resolve it is if she feels she has to kill him, to cover her tracks with Tim Kono. Most women aren’t in the habit of keeping lethal substances in their purses, just in case, so they would have to meet at her apartment, with Mabel and Oliver's discoveries happening earlier.

That said, for all the Jan-centric flaws in the last episode, I can’t wait for season 2. Here’s hoping they somehow bring back Nathan Lane to steal all the scenes again.

I can understand indulging in a little wish-fulfillment, particularly around a bit of traumatic family history that was never resolved. But unfortunately, it just didn’t work in this novel.

The story is loosely based on the life of the author’s mother, a Jewish girl whose parents had to leave her when they were fleeing persecution in Romania. She really was adopted and raised in an apparently happy family, which fell on hard times under the Soviet-backed government post-World War II. She never learned what happened to her parents, but given that an estimated one-quarter to one-third of Romania’s Jewish population died in the Holocaust, it likely wasn't good.

I understand wanting to write a nicer ending, where Natalia (the fictionalized mother) is whisked out of Romania by her lover, who happens to be a high official in the Communist Party. (Seems unlikely someone who’d clawed his way to the top would risk it all for an affair with a girl from a “bourgeois” family, but people have done crazier things in the name of sex and/or love.) But it’s not convincing. 

What are the odds the parents survived and successfully fled Romania before the pogroms morphed into an extermination campaign? The odds they find the specific orphanage where Natalia was left and manage to get a message to her adoptive family through a friend, who happens to be related to the adoptive parents? The odds they can somehow get a vial of penicillin to save Natalia’s life from Switzerland to Romania IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR? (Don’t even get me started on how her symptoms of drinking from a contaminated well made no sense.) And then, finally, the odds they are able to find her AGAIN after immigrating to the United States and send enough money to have her smuggled out of Romania? I know people beat the odds and survived World War II in unexpected ways, but when you have to beat them that many times, it starts to feel ridiculous.

The simplest thing would be to stick closer to what actually happened. The actual girl must have faced some difficult questions and choices whenever she learned the truth about where she came from. The character of Natalia could start trying to find out what happened to her birth parents, and run up against resistance from people who have a vested interest in keeping what they've done buried. While the most likely scenario would be never learning what happened, learning how they’d died would fulfill the reader’s need for resolution, and be at least halfway plausible. Not a happy ending, granted, but can you really expect one when the story’s about World War II and life behind the Iron Curtain?

I’m perfectly willing to accept that a beach mysteriously speeds up aging. It’s an intriguing idea. But if you’re going to ask your audience to suspend that much disbelief, meet them halfway by not making them accept elements that are just silly:

·      A six-year-old’s swimsuit will not stretch enough to go around a physically mature fifteen-year-old’s body. It just won’t. Have the kids wear towels or borrow their parents’ cover-ups.

·      If the local boy is so worried about Trent, why does he teach him a coded writing system that might lead him to discover how to get off the beach instead of, you know, telling him how to get off the freaking beach?

·      People who have schizophrenia can have careers and successful lives, but are we really supposed to believe that a man whose symptoms are so out of control that he starts killing the other guests is allowed to be a surgeon? (And, why, WHY does every character with a mental illness have to be violent, M. Night?)

·      Why do the police believe Maddox and Trent? You’re telling me a notebook, with no context, was enough to determine people were murdered and arrest the culprits? For all they know, the siblings could have created the notebook themselves as some kind of sick joke.

But all this is nothing compared to The Twist. (With Shyamalan, there’s always The Twist.) Which in this case, is that the resort is a front for clinical trials, so they can see how drugs work over a person’s lifetime in a single day.

I have to assume no one working on that film has read a single article about drug trials. (And to be fair, much of the audience probably hasn’t either.) But this is ridiculous in so many ways:

·      Where is the control group? To know if a drug works, you give it to half the people in the study, while the other half get a placebo (or the usual treatment). If the group getting the drug lives longer or has improved symptoms, the drug works. So unless there’s another beach where they sent the control group to die, any data they collect is more or less useless.

·      Drug companies don’t have to run lifetime trials. Many trials last a few months. The exception is when it’s a drug that’s meant to treat a disease that will kill the subjects soon, like an aggressive cancer. If you want to find out if a drug extends patient’s lives, you have to wait until half the patients in the control and drug groups are dead, then compare. If half the control group died in two years, but it takes three years for half of the drug group to die, you can show a real benefit. But you’d never use that model for some of the conditions they show in the movie, like low blood calcium levels. (Just give the woman a freaking calcium supplement!)

·      I can’t figure out how the people are supposed to be getting these drugs. Even if you gave them extended-release pills that lasted a month, you’d still have to dose them every two-and-a-half minutes, if a year passes in a half hour. The only way it makes even a little bit of sense is if they were trying to replace defective genes, but gene therapy requires having the treatment infused into your veins. There’s no way you wouldn’t know you were in a clinical trial.

The easiest way to fix this is not to provide an answer: just focus on the dread, redemption, etc. as the characters face their ends much sooner than any of them were prepared for. That’s what the original graphic novel it’s based on, Sandcastle, did. 

If they must have an answer, though, they could have gone all in on the supernatural or sci-fi angle. An alien/monster/malignant deity that sucks the life from people and must be appeased with human sacrifices. That’s almost easier to accept than the idea that the FDA would be impressed with results from a study like this.

Don’t get me wrong, this movie was an enjoyable ride. But it had a serious timing problem.

I don’t mean that they made it too late, since it takes something out of the story when you know how Natasha’s story ends (though that’s a problem). The story’s internal timeline just doesn’t make sense.

For starters:

·      Why is this the first we’ve heard of Yelena? If she died in the Snap, why didn’t the other Avengers acknowledge Natasha’s loss? If she didn’t, why do they still say Natasha didn’t have a family after she sacrificed herself? Did anyone even send Yelena a sympathy card?

·      Why is Alexei/Red Guardian going on about Captain America? He looked to be around 40 in 1995, so Captain America had been on ice for a decade when he was born. Does this mean there were multiple successor Captains America? If so, why are we only hearing about it now?

·      Why was stealing the secret to mind control a priority for the Russian Federation in 1995, when it was fighting a war in Chechnya and its economy was falling apart? Who financed this mission?

As I see it, there are two ways to fix this problem. The first is go back to the comic books roots, where Natasha was orphaned in World War II and was enhanced, if not quite to super-soldier levels, enough to keep her young for decades. Since the Black Widows were given false memories, she could still go searching for her origins and find a fellow widow. Sorry, fake mom and dad, you’re out, since you’d be over 100.

The other option is to keep it in the 90s, but still cut out the fake parents. (I love Rachel Weisz, but she and David Harbour are a problem if the timeline’s going to make sense.) Natasha is orphaned and grows up in the Red Room, becoming a master spy. Then at some point, the Russian government’s priorities shift, and they decide they’d rather invest in cyber-espionage than femmes fatales. Natasha and some of the widows become free agents. She told Loki that she didn’t care who she used her “skill set” on, so it makes sense if she was essentially a mercenary for a while.

Presumably Dreykov doesn’t take this well and goes off the grid. (Though not into a flying fortress. Why is it always a flying fortress? That would show up on radar and raise some alarms.) Without any constraints, he goes even more extreme, making the move from psychological conditioning to mind control. Maybe he gets back some of the free-agent widows with a promise of a one-time job, then takes control of their minds, and basically rents them out to do dirty work for anyone willing to pay (basically making himself a rich and powerful middle man, I guess). Then Natasha could have been telling the truth when she said she thought Yelena was free. You could then more or less continue the movie with their quest to bring down Dreykov and free the other widows, minus the “catching up with fake mommy and daddy” scenes.

Disney’s latest villain origin story (Cruella) brought to mind how much squandered potential there was in its first.

I get why they decided to focus on Maleficent, rather than Aurora, in their live-action version of Sleeping Beauty. Aurora’s a nice kid, but she doesn’t get to make any choices of her own and basically sleep-walks through the movie (when she’s not literally asleep). I would argue that they could have made her side of the story more interesting: what DOES a person do when she finds out she’s not who she thought she was, and by the way, she’s also going to essentially die at age sixteen because her dad ticked off a sorceress?

That’s a completely different movie, though.

To make Maleficent better, they should have given her a motivation that makes more sense. Of course, she’d want revenge after Stefan cuts off her wings so he can become king. But there’s no logical reason why she gets that revenge by cursing the baby – except that the plot requires it. Why not maim Stefan? She doesn’t know if he even cares about the baby; he wouldn’t be the first king to see a daughter as little more than a disappointment.

Since the story requires her to curse baby Aurora, however, she should have a good reason. The movie introduces her as kind of a queen of the fairies/forest creatures, so it makes sense that she and Stefan would be in conflict over their shared border, without needing to be ex-lovers. Maybe she has her own daughter, who is killed in the conflict (caught in the crossfire or deliberately targeted, depending on how awful they want Stefan to be). At that point, it makes a lot of sense for her to come gunning for Aurora, seeking an eye for an eye.

I also would make Maleficent’s redemption a little more nuanced. By the end of the movie, Maleficent saves Aurora by giving her true (mother) love’s kiss; Aurora plans to go live with her (bit of Stockholm syndrome, given that Maleficent cursed her?); and everyone’s cool with Stefan plummeting to his death. Really?

The idea of mother-love saving her is good, since it’s not terribly realistic that a boy she briefly met once is suddenly so deeply in love that it breaks the spell. But why not have her actual mother give her the crucial kiss? That could force Maleficent to decide whether to keep trying to punish an innocent girl, or to deal with her grief instead of inflicting it on another mother. I suppose they’d still want the final battle between Maleficent and Stefan, to send him off the side of the castle and free her, leaving Aurora and her mother to build some kind of peace between their kingdom and the magical folk.

A perfect story? No. A more coherent story? I certainly hope so.

I admit, I’m stretching to call this one a fix. The reason the book is so popular and has been adapted so many times is that the fundamental story works, even if the trial and travel scenes don’t add much.

Call it a modernization, then, or shameless self-promotion. I’ve been writing my own version, set in Colorado in 2020. I attempt to fix some of the scientific impossibilities (you can’t just make an eight-foot-tall body out of regular-sized people and spare bits from the slaughterhouse, nor can you work with dead flesh for nine months in a time before refrigeration was invented). Also, Elizabeth Lavenza finally gets to speak for herself. 

If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can read it here.

This is one of those movies where I left the theater thinking, “That really worked,” because of the strength of the acting. It was only later that I thought, “Did it?”

The film revolves around a mother fighting a police department that’s more interested in arresting Black people for misdemeanors than solving her daughter’s rape and murder. That’s an interesting premise, but makes a lot less sense when the daughter is a blonde who looks like the prom queen. You can’t tell me that the particularly racist officer Mildred’s tangling with wouldn’t have tried to pin the murder on a Black man, instead of just shrugging it off.

It would make more sense if the daughter was Black. It’s shameful that police tend to put fewer resources toward Black victims, but they do, and that seems especially likely to be the case in a department who employs an officer known around town as “n***** torturer.”

If the director wanted to keep Frances McDormand and the guy who played the loutish ex-husband, he could have made them the grandparents, whose son or daughter married a Black person. Perhaps Mildred still is acting in the mother role, because the girl’s parents died in an accident/went to prison/lost custody because of neglect/took off and haven’t been heard from since. Take your pick; any number of awful things could have happened that set up a rocky relationship between the girl and her grandmother.

McDormand noted herself that a woman her age (late 50s, at the time) probably wouldn’t have a teenage daughter, particularly when the character doesn’t have a lot of spare income for fertility treatment. And changing the relationship, with her fighting for her Black granddaughter, would avoid one of the major problems with the racist officer’s redemption.

Officer Dixon (subtle, I know) reads a letter from his late boss telling him he doesn’t need hate, then gets injured when Mildred throws a Molotov cocktail into the police station, not knowing there’s anyone inside. Leaving aside whether our heroine should have checked before firebombing the place – she should have – it doesn’t really make much sense why this is the start of his redemption. Wouldn’t painful, disfiguring injuries just make him angrier, and isn’t it likely he’ll take that out on the people he already hated?

But even if we assume that he did a lot of soul-searching while in the hospital and emerged a better person, he tries to make amends by apologizing to a white man he attacked and looking into the daughter’s murder. So the guy who tortured Black people does nothing to actually address the harm he caused them; it’s all about the white victims. Not unrealistic, perhaps, but not redemption.

If he were less bad (abusing his discretion in who to pull over, for example, rather than TORTURING PEOPLE), you could create a real redemption arc, where he goes looking for the girl’s killer and has to try to build some trust with potential witnesses who have no reason to believe he cares about people like them. It might be uncomfortable for some audiences to watch the hard work of attempting to make up for harm done to others, but it would make more sense than that someone who behaved monstrously suddenly became good from one letter and a trip to the burn unit.

I understand the desire for a film to provide an answer about the spooky goings-on – ambiguity is more tolerable in a novel (though it frustrated some readers too). 

But why did they choose an answer that made so little sense?

While no one exactly says what happened, it’s heavily implied that Dr. Faraday is driving the poltergeist activity. Since poltergeists in stories are typically associated with hysterical women, tying the disturbance to a man, and one who’s supposedly completely rational, makes for an interesting reversal. The problem comes from having it start with a prepubescent boy with a serious case of house envy.

School-aged Faraday goes to a party at the mansion, is jealous of the wealthy family’s daughter, breaks a decorative acorn from the wall, and gets a scolding from his mom. Bad day for little Faraday, but enough to create a poltergeist that might have killed the daughter, Suki, as the film implies? Doubt it. (In the book, she died of diphtheria, which unfortunately was common before we had a vaccine for it.)

If you must keep the idea that the poltergeist started with a very young Faraday, it would make more sense if his jealousy came from something children are more likely to value: Suki having lots of toys his parents couldn’t afford, being showered with attention and affection while he’s ignored or put to work, etc. Even then, though, I’m not sure it works. Kids don’t tend to suppress their emotions that way. They yell, or break something, or kick somebody, but they get the feeling out and move on.

That’s why it makes more sense to focus on the adult Faraday as the source of the paranormal activity. You could still flash back to little Faraday, to give a sense that he’s had a complicated relationship with the family for a while, but there’s no reason we need to see that acorn snap over and over. As a responsible, supposedly rational grown-up, he has to keep his emotions in check, and when he fails to actually deal with them, the poltergeist is born.

To me, it would have made more sense if the source of the overflowing emotions was sexual jealousy (a strong desire for Caroline, frustrated by her family’s ideas about what background a suitable husband must come from) rather than a yearning to possess the house. It’s a nice house, granted, but is it so incredible that not owning it produces a jealousy strong enough to kill two people? 

If the feelings came from frustrated romantic/sexual desire, it could also make Faraday more sympathetic. It’s hard to get behind a guy who is courting a woman solely to take possession of her house, particularly when getting away from that house seems like it would do her considerable good. Of course it’s not a good thing if a romantic frustration turns into destructive rage, but at least you could give him the credit for trying to behave decently.

To judge by the reviews on Goodreads, I’m not the only person who loved the first half of this book. It took the Gothic tropes (young woman on her own, half-ruined castle, servants and distant family members who may not be trustworthy) and did something different with them, by putting a quest to understand her repeated miscarriages at the center.

Then it went off the rails.

Bert, our heroine, discovered that the fertility problems across multiple generations are because her great-great-great-great-grandfather had children with an Icewoman, part of a tribe that seems like something between a human and a yeti. After Bert's estranged husband Luca freezes to death on his way to rescue her from the castle, she runs off into the mountains for more than a year to live with the Icemen, adopts an Icebaby whose mother died, and does nothing while a kidnapped child (who was going to be forced to breed with the tribe, if she had lived to grow up) wastes away. The whole thing reads like Bert’s having an “Eat, Pray, Love” experience while a kid starves to death in front of her.

Also, the genetics make no sense. Generations pass, and then somebody has an Icebaby, who is furry and born with pointy teeth. How does this work? Not really explained. Also unclear: why having one Icewoman ancestor would result in fertility problems for generations to come. If the Icewoman genes are truly so bad for reproduction, how on earth did they survive this long? And if it’s not an Icewoman problem, did we just read a whole book where the heroine goes searching for an answer, doesn’t get one, and just forgets that she was looking in the first place?

The easiest way to fix this is to get rid of the Icemen. Bert’s family was part of the nobility at a time when nobody knew it was a bad idea to keep marrying your cousins. A recessive mutation (the kind where you only inherit the disease if you get one copy of the defective gene from each parent) could have resulted in stillbirths or miscarriages, if the condition it causes is severe enough. Bert’s husband, Luca, is descended from commoners from the same village, so it’s entirely possible he would also be a carrier (you can’t tell me none of the counts ever had affairs with their servants). Infertility explained, no yeti necessary.

To keep the general “what’s out there” sense of dread, some of the Montebiancos who inherited the condition could have survived birth, and been cast out by their family members, who didn’t understand the cause of their differences and were ashamed. The villagers could have then concluded that these unusual-looking people who lived in the mountains and probably had to steal livestock to subsist were some kind of monster, fueling the legends – and the conflict between Bert’s physically typical great-aunt, Dolores, and her great-grandmother with the condition, Vita.

I would change the poisoning scene, so Dolores succeeds in killing Vita, instead of Vita turning the tables. To me, that makes it more understandable that Bert tries to escape, despite having no idea if she can safely get to the village. If one of her lost babies was far enough along to know it had the condition, that makes it urgent to get away from the great-aunt who wants to purify the family line.

When Bert makes it to the village, she could run into the two remaining descendants who inherited the condition, who I’m going to call Paolo and Francesco. Paolo, the older one and the leader, decides they’re going to keep Bert, as part of his plan to build up his “side” and take back his inheritance from the remaining Montebiancos. Francesco agrees to help Bert escape by taking her as far as the edge of the castle grounds. He tells her he won’t get closer, because the residents have shot at him, but he doesn’t want her to fall to her death like a previous captive did. (We would later find out Paolo actually killed this captive, who Francesco saw as a mother figure, when she tried to get away.)

Paolo realizes they’ve escaped and follows. Francesco tells Bert to hide and lies to Paolo that she’s already made it to the castle. They fight, and Paolo stabs Francesco. Bert tries to help Francesco, but is quickly overpowered. She’s only saved when the castle groundskeeper, who was sent to find her, comes across the fight. (A little convenient, I know, but he also saves her in the original, where her captivity was a lot less plausible.) The groundskeeper shoots Paolo and is going to finish off Francesco, but Bert orders him to take the injured man to the castle instead.

Dolores loses it when she finds out that one of the “impure” descendants is under the castle roof and decides to kill him. (I know a senior citizen coming after you isn’t the scariest thing, but maybe she brought one of the family’s old swords.) Bert tries to talk her down, but Dolores tells her Francesco is actually her grandson. She blames him for her daughter’s death, which came shortly after his birth and launched her obsession with purifying the family line. Bert then tells her there’s no “pure” version – she also carries the genes for the condition. 

Predictably, this doesn’t calm Dolores down, and she tries to kill both remaining descendants. Bert finds a knife and tries to hide in the unused part of the castle, but Dolores discovers her, forcing her to fight. Since Bert isn’t exactly an expert knife fighter, it’s not going well, but she lures Dolores into ever-more-precarious positions in the ruins, until all it takes is a push to send her to her death.

Now the last acknowledged Montebianco and firmly in control of the castle, Bert calls the helicopter to bring her and Francesco down to safety. After an investigation determines she acted in self-defense, Bert takes control of the family fortune. Having gotten the answers she needed at the castle, she decides to turn it over to a historical preservation group, while she and Luca (now reconciled) turn to shoring up the Montebianco’s businesses and planning to expand their family through adoption. She also helps Francesco to adjust to life in the world, telling him that the family “curse” was never having children who were different, but being unable to accept and love them. 

Sentimental? Yeah, no arguments. But what can I say, I’m a sucker for a happy ending. And it makes a lot more sense than Bert retreating to the castle to hide away with her Icebaby for the rest of their lives.

This was the cinematic equivalent of throwing a bunch of prime ingredients into a pan, tossing it in the oven for a few minutes, and hoping it all works out.

The good ingredients? Leads Fay and Everett, who are determined to track down the source of an unexplained sound; the potentially entertaining premise of aliens visiting a small town; and hints that the aliens know who won’t be missed or believed.

The problems? The stakes are low – if Fay and Everett don’t find the source of the sound, it’s not clear that there’s any consequence other than disappointment, and maybe getting fired for abandoning their shifts to go monster-hunting. There's brief discussion of a cover-up of illnesses among Black and Latino soldiers sent to deal with a mysterious aircraft, but it’s never mentioned again, or connected to the disappearance of a boy whose mother was considered a “fallen woman.” And when you’ve hinted that the mysterious sound has something to do with aliens, a flying saucer doesn’t cut it as the big reveal.

To fix it, I’d keep the basic premise of two teens working their night shifts and chasing the source of the mysterious sound while the rest of the town is at a basketball game. But I’d add an outsider character who also isn’t at the game. I’ll call him Richard. Maybe he has a disability, or is socially awkward – whatever the reason, he doesn’t feel welcome at the game and is alone when he hears the sound, which draws him in. 

I’d also add two secondary characters: Fay’s up-for-anything older sister, Doris, and her boyfriend, Chuck, who also aren’t at the game because she’s home “sick” and he plans to sneak over. (The baby sister Fay had to bring along at the end of the movie added nothing to the plot.) With Fay and Everett actually doing their jobs manning the phones and the radio station’s tip line while Doris and Chuck chase leads, they could actually start to put together what they’re dealing with.

Once they realize that the aliens have their sights on a new victim, it’s a race to get to Richard before he’s lost forever. I’m an optimist, so I like to think they save him, both from the aliens and from the sense of being unwanted. If you’re not one for happy endings, they could arrive too late, just as he’s being transported into – we don’t know, but probably not a good situation. In that case, I’d still give it a tiny silver lining, though. Maybe Chuck was a bit of a bully, and he starts changing as he realizes that ostracizing people has consequences. 

And of course, the four (and Richard, if they saved him), commit to protecting their town and getting the story of the exploited ex-soldiers out, to shame the government into compensating them for the illnesses they developed from contact with otherworldly technology. Can they do it? Maybe not, but they’re teenagers, out to save the world, as they see it. That’s something we can all relate to.

I realize many people will disagree that this needs fixing, but THAT IS NOT HOW TRANQUILIZERS WORK.

It’s not clear whether the orphanage is giving the kids benzodiazepines or barbiturates (unfortunately, either is very believable in the 50s), but either way, those drugs have a strong sedative effect. That makes Beth’s initial reaction, where she almost passes out after taking her first pill, somewhat realistic. But then it goes off the rails.

Somehow, the writers then turn tranquilizers into a performance enhancer, that sharpens Beth’s mind and lets her see things she normally wouldn’t in chess. That’s the exact opposite of what they would do. If she was really popping a half-dozen tranquilizers at a time, she’d be out cold, if not in the throes of an overdose. Also, the fact that she is able to save up her pills for a late-night ceiling-chess session indicates she doesn’t have a dependency, and wouldn’t experience withdrawal. If she had a dependency, she couldn’t go days without a pill and not deal with any symptoms (though she might still break into the pharmacy to feed her growing tolerance).

This all could be fixed very easily, if they want to keep the pill addiction plot. If Beth had severe anxiety, she might find the tranquilizers helpful to her chess game, because they’d be holding off symptoms like a racing heart. (Used correctly, benzodiazepines can be helpful for some people with anxiety disorders.) Of course, the orphanage isn’t careful about using them correctly, so it’s believable that she could move from treating a medical issue to overusing the medication – perhaps as a way of dealing with the trauma of losing her parents, since she never got any guidance on handling emotions.

Other easily fixable issues:

·      Given the importance of chess and sports nationalism during the Cold War, the Russians would not have preferred her to their own champion. Take it out, and you haven’t lost anything.

·      How does Beth never encounter anything but the mildest expression of sexism, in a male-dominated game, in the 1960s? It would actually make her eventual triumph even greater if not every guy she defeated suddenly decided to dedicate himself to furthering her career. And if there’s one thing we know, it’s that everyone loves to kick a fallen prodigy, especially a female one.

·      Why does Jolene show up to straighten Beth out after Beth apparently made no attempt to find her for years? It would be more believable if they had acted more like “family,” as Jolene said they were. And don’t even get me started about how one cathartic moment isn’t enough to undo an addiction.

I was annoyed enough by Season 3 of Stranger Things that I essentially redid the whole thing from Dr. Alexei's perspective. (Did we really need all the Jopper relationship drama, let alone the teenage couples' angst? No, we did not.) I take major issue with the lazy 80s trope of the invading Russians anyway (more about that above), but I wrote a fanfiction story the size of a small novel with the one fun new character at the center. Make of that what you will, and check out the story here.