Links: All About Romance, Queer Desire, & More
Feb. 11th, 2026 07:00 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Welcome back!
Hey, remember when I had the flu earlier this year? Well I have it again! Yipee! This sucks!
I also got to talk with KJ Charles today for a separate project and it was so much fun, despite me sounding like a chain smoking frog. I’m going to start dousing my body in hand sanitizer.
On the plus side, I’ve eaten a lot of soup and I love soup.
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After thirty years, All About Romance has announced its retirement. The site will be kept up as an archive, but will not be posting new content.
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Sonja Norwood of Wickd Confections is recreating lost Black American recipes on her Instagram channel. I’ve been following her for awhile and enjoy her stuff!
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This link was sent in by EC Spurlock. Author Olivia Waite is talking about Heated Rivalry and queer desire over at Reactor.
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I’ve been loving Rebecca Black’s post-“Friday” career. Here’s her genius cover of Addison Rae’s “Fame is a Gun.”
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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
Snowflake #14 - Batfamily Crack
Feb. 11th, 2026 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingswordChallenge #14
In your own space, create a promo and/or rec list for someone new to a fandom. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it and include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
I think I did a Star Wars one a while back, so now maybe it is time for #Batfamily Crack to get its own post.
In first place we have Jason Todd POV crack for GRATE JUSTICE: The Right Substitution is Key by AddictedApple
“The Red Hood has been good for Gotham,” Robin continued. “Crime in Park Row decreased by sixty one percent almost as soon as you showed up, and that’s even taking into account all the crime you commit. Drug overdoses have decreased by twenty two percent in adults and seventy nine percent in minors. Homeless minors are ninety two percent less likely to—”
“Kid,” Jason interrupted. “Enough statistics. What the hell is this about?”
Robin slowly lowered the tablet with his powerpoint presentation and looked up at Red Hood.
“You care about Gotham,” Robin summarised. “Gotham needs Batman. Batman is missing and so is Nightwing. We need you to fill in for Batman.”
“You want me to cover Batman’s patrols?” Jason clarified.
“No,” Robin said. “I want you to be Batman.”
Jason bluescreened.
(Or: Batman and Nightwing mysteriously disappear before Red Hood has even started antagonising them, Robin is desperate, Gotham needs Batman, and Red Hood is Batman-Shaped.)
Second and third place are a tie by the same author: Are My Riddles a Joke to You?
& Gotham Knockoff by Raven_of_Hydecastle. Both are more Tim-Drake-Robin centric, feral little shit that he is, and will make you smile 'til your face hurts.
There is not nearly enough Signal fic out there, but The Robin Declaration by waterunderthebridge12 is the best I've read for getting his characterization right while still being funny.
Is now the time to say that I am not really into Dick Grayson's headspace, and most of the Batfam stuff that is from his POV is not really that funny? Moving right along!
Steph! For Stephanie Brown, my beloved flower who hits like a truck, precious goblin mode girl: Sophomores by LakeAwen. Steph&Jason family bonding! Found family and crack: two great tastes that taste great together!
[I will update with Cass-POV crackfic if there ever is any.]
In your own space, create a promo and/or rec list for someone new to a fandom. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it and include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
I think I did a Star Wars one a while back, so now maybe it is time for #Batfamily Crack to get its own post.
In first place we have Jason Todd POV crack for GRATE JUSTICE: The Right Substitution is Key by AddictedApple
“The Red Hood has been good for Gotham,” Robin continued. “Crime in Park Row decreased by sixty one percent almost as soon as you showed up, and that’s even taking into account all the crime you commit. Drug overdoses have decreased by twenty two percent in adults and seventy nine percent in minors. Homeless minors are ninety two percent less likely to—”
“Kid,” Jason interrupted. “Enough statistics. What the hell is this about?”
Robin slowly lowered the tablet with his powerpoint presentation and looked up at Red Hood.
“You care about Gotham,” Robin summarised. “Gotham needs Batman. Batman is missing and so is Nightwing. We need you to fill in for Batman.”
“You want me to cover Batman’s patrols?” Jason clarified.
“No,” Robin said. “I want you to be Batman.”
Jason bluescreened.
(Or: Batman and Nightwing mysteriously disappear before Red Hood has even started antagonising them, Robin is desperate, Gotham needs Batman, and Red Hood is Batman-Shaped.)
Second and third place are a tie by the same author: Are My Riddles a Joke to You?
& Gotham Knockoff by Raven_of_Hydecastle. Both are more Tim-Drake-Robin centric, feral little shit that he is, and will make you smile 'til your face hurts.
There is not nearly enough Signal fic out there, but The Robin Declaration by waterunderthebridge12 is the best I've read for getting his characterization right while still being funny.
Is now the time to say that I am not really into Dick Grayson's headspace, and most of the Batfam stuff that is from his POV is not really that funny? Moving right along!
Steph! For Stephanie Brown, my beloved flower who hits like a truck, precious goblin mode girl: Sophomores by LakeAwen. Steph&Jason family bonding! Found family and crack: two great tastes that taste great together!
[I will update with Cass-POV crackfic if there ever is any.]
Jason Momoa Will Fight Bugs in Justin Lin’s Helldivers Adaptation
Feb. 11th, 2026 06:42 pmreactor_feedJason Momoa Will Fight Bugs in Justin Lin’s Helldivers Adaptation
But will this character also have a great gold manicure?
Published on February 11, 2026
Photo: Universal Pictures
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<p class="syndicationauthor">Posted by Molly Templeton</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/jason-momoa-justin-lin-helldivers/">https://reactormag.com/jason-momoa-justin-lin-helldivers/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=839411">https://reactormag.com/?p=839411</a></p><post-hero class="wp-block-post-hero js-post-hero post-hero post-hero-horizontal">
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<h2 class="post-hero-title text-h1">Jason Momoa Will Fight Bugs in Justin Lin’s <i>Helldivers</i> Adaptation</h2>
<div class="prose post-hero-description prose--post-hero">But will this character also have a great gold manicure?</div>
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<p class="post-hero-author text-xs font-aktiv uppercase font-medium [&_a]:link-hover">By <a href="https://reactormag.com/author/molly-templeton/" title="Posts by Molly Templeton" class="author url fn" rel="author">Molly Templeton</a></p>
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Published on February 11, 2026
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<div class="post-hero-caption post-hero-caption-vertical [&_a]:link"><p>Photo: Universal Pictures</p>
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<p>In December, Sony Pictures and PlayStation Productions found a director for their <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/helldivers-movie-justin-lin-sony-1236438370/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Helldivers</em> movie</a>: Justin Lin, the man widely credited with bringing the Fast and Furious franchise back to life. Lin is a bit divisive in some SFF circles; there are those who enjoyed his beats-and-shouting approach to <em>Star Trek Beyond</em>, and those who did not. (Whatever else there is to say about that film, the man knew how to drop “Sabotage.”)</p>
<p>Lin’s resume certainly suggests that he knows how to handle an action story about soldiers vs. aliens (though some fans were a bit testy that he signed on to the film despite not being a gamer; that was reportedly part of his pitch). Now, said story has a star who also has plenty of action experience: <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/jason-momoa-justin-lin-helldivers-video-game-movie-1236502599/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>The Hollywood Reporter</em> brings the news</a> that Jason Momoa has landed a lead role in the film, though it’s not been announced exactly what that lead role is.</p>
<p>Momoa recently starred in <em>The Wrecking Crew</em> with Dave Bautista, and plays Momo in this summer’s <em>Supergirl</em> film. You may know him as <em>Game of Thrones</em>’ Khal Drogo, or as Aquaman, or from <em>Baywatch</em>, or from <em>Stargate: Atlantis</em>, or as the guy in the pink jacket in the <em>Minecraft</em> film. He also eventually joined the Fast and Furious franchise, though by that time Justin Lin had handed over directorial duties on the increasingly absurd films (Momoa was in <em>Fast X</em>, pictured above, which was directed by Louis Leterrier).</p>
<p><em>Helldivers</em> basically sounds like <em>Starship Troopers</em> but not. The PlayStation website describes the game as “a hardcore, cooperative, twin stick shooter from the creators of Magicka. As part of the elite unit called the HELLDIVERS, players must work together to protect SUPER EARTH and defeat the enemies of mankind in an intense intergalactic war.” (Those all-caps terms are straight from the horse’s PlayStation, so to speak.) The sequel game, <em>Helldivers 2</em>, has sold more than 12 million copies.</p>
<p>Lin “aims to find the humanity in the characters and weave timely themes into the story, while building out a world and mythology,” according to <em>THR</em>. But he’s not the writer on the adaptation; that honor falls to Gary Dauberman, whose horror-heavy resume includes <em>Annabelle</em>, <em>It</em>, and <em>The Nun</em>. </p>
<p><em>Helldivers</em> is set to premiere on November 10, 2027. They all better get diving.[end-mark]</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reactormag.com/jason-momoa-justin-lin-helldivers/">Jason Momoa Will Fight Bugs in Justin Lin’s <i>Helldivers</i> Adaptation</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reactormag.com">Reactor</a>.</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/jason-momoa-justin-lin-helldivers/">https://reactormag.com/jason-momoa-justin-lin-helldivers/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=839411">https://reactormag.com/?p=839411</a></p>
We Should Have Asked for Directions: Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “A Travelogue for Oneironautics”
Feb. 11th, 2026 06:00 pmreactor_feedWe Should Have Asked for Directions: Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “A Travelogue for Oneironautics”
Published on February 11, 2026
Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “A Travelogue for Oneironautics,” first published in the September 2022 issue of Sirenia Digest. You can also find it in Kiernan’s recent Bright Dead Star collection. Spoilers ahead!
Null: On a crimson sea, a dreamer pilots a dory over mountainous waves and monstrously deep troughs. Sunlight breaks so rarely through the storm-gray clouds that it’s become mythical. Featherless not-seagulls with leathery wings wheel overhead. He doesn’t know his name or that of the woman huddled in his dory, wrapped in tattered sailcloth. She asks if he’s trying to reach shore. He replies that he must be, for he’s come from somewhere and is going somewhere else.
Long ago, the woman lived in a yellow house overlooking the sea. She grew a vegetable garden, so the sun must have shone there. She imagines she traded her name for passage over the sea. Perhaps the dreamer did the same. He assures the woman of his boating expertise, though he’s not sure he’s telling the truth. For all the waves, the air’s windless. Wouldn’t a boatman have noticed that before?
Eines: The dreamer arrives at the cathedral-vast Pumphouse, all brick and wrought iron. He climbs a spiral staircase that rises through a “tireless labyrinth” of machinery. At the top, seven ancient men pore over schematics and blueprints. One complains that the dreamer’s late for his job standing watch. He apologizes and goes to windows overlooking a desert “scrubbed raw by long ages of scouring wind and parching drought.” Nimbostratus clouds flick violet lightning towards the barren ground. What, he wonders, could approach the Pumphouse unseen?
A woman appears beside him, who used to have the guard job. She responds with sarcastic vagueness to most questions, but says the desert was once an ocean. The Pumphouse masters found it inconvenient and risky, so drained it. The wind howls and the dreamer thinks of rain.
Zwei: The dreamer enters an old-fashioned movie theater, where he’s been many times. He sits beside the only other moviegoer, a woman with golden eyes and a wolfish smile. He wishes he’d chosen another seat. The movie begins. It shows the theater exterior, the dreamer entering, seating himself, watching himself watch himself on the screen. He thinks of Russian dolls, infinite regressions. The woman’s breath smells of raw meat. She says the film’s disconcerting at first, but gets better.
Onscreen, the woman becomes an actual wolf which devours the onscreen dreamer. The actual woman assures him it won’t “be anything like that.” On screen, the well-stuffed wolf trots out into the night. The woman assures him that this is where the movie gets good—he’ll enjoy it, she certainly does.
Drei: I drive through the Virginia Appalachians to reach a lake crossed by a limestone bridge. I talk with a floating black sphere; it explains now that there’s “no gender, no sexuality, no race…no religion…” There’s no desire, no dissatisfaction, no need for government, laws, police, or prisons. But when the sphere adds that there’s also no art, I object. People “outgrew both representation and abstraction… outgrew differences in point of view and experience,” without which there is no art, only “perfect global homogeneity.” The lake holds animals from all over the world. The sphere explains that “Anthropogenic biogeographic redistribution” and “habitat reformulation” have corrected evolution and plate tectonics’ failure to distribute resources and experiences evenly. “Sameness is salvation.”
I protest: Not everyone wants to live as “unfeeling black spheres in a homogenized world.” These people, says the sphere, are shown their error, sometimes through “humane somatic discard.” I look at the lake and wonder what’s across the bridge.
Vier: The narrator roams through a deserted town. He wears no watch, nor can he remember the year. Exhausted, he sits on a park bench. Nearby is an enormous live oak, under which the shadows are darker than night itself.
A nondescript dog follows him. It’s very chatty but can’t tell him what befell the town. The dreamer’s the first person the dog’s seen in ages. Can he help it access the canned dog food in the IGA? It also insists he stop looking at that live oak; something might be even hungrier than the dog. The dreamer agrees to go to the IGA.
Fünf: In a library lapsed into “genteel shabbiness” sit six men, including the dreamer. They meet regularly to listen to a true but weird story. The dreamer’s tale concerns a cryptid he discovered while researching the Beast of Gevaudan. He obtained an obscure volume describing a man-made monstrosity used by the Nazis. This “Judenhund” could sniff out Jews but would also kill non-Jews. Its hindbody looked like a greyhound’s. Its forebody had human arms and hands and a face with huge glowing violet eyes. Its other features were hidden under matted white hair, except for rows of sharklike teeth.
The dreamer has also heard of an unpublished account by an Austrian rabbi who immigrated to Israel, The Book of the White Hound. He hasn’t been able to access it yet. As proof of his story, the dreamer produces an eighty-year-old black-and-white photo…
Null: The dory runs aground on a rocky island. The dreamer and woman sit on the beach while not-seagulls wheel overhead. The woman holds a cigar box full of keepsakes: a plastic Virgin Mary, a silver medallion, an antique key. Though the dreamer apologizes for not landing near her home, the woman gives him her box. She discards her tatters and sheds her skin, to emerge as a praying mantis/jellyfish hybrid. It drifts away, leaving the dreamer contemplating the unclimbable black cliffs guarding the island’s interior. Perhaps he’s nameless because he’s only a ferryman. Taking the cigar box, he returns to his dory.
* * *
What’s Cyclopean: The dream sea is “the color of a cardinal’s feathers, the color of sindoor, of Turkey Red and the delicate petals of Remembrance Day poppies.”
The Degenerate Dutch: In a stuffy library, the dreamer tells the story of a Nazi monster created to hunt Jews (and anyone else who happened to be in the way).
Libronomicon:The future of the spheres has removed all books that might offend someone, anyone. Which, eventually, means removing all the books—all “memories of discrimination or slavery or colonialism or genocide or discovery or freedom or joy.”
Presumably this includes the books cited during the storytelling session: Le Démon Pâle: Le Récit d’un Soldat (ostensibly in German despite the title being French), and The Book of the White Hound.
Weirdbuilding: Are those leathery-winged creatures in the sky perhaps nightgaunts?
Ruthanna’s Commentary
I admire authors who can get something story-ish out of their dreams. Mine tend toward “late for a flight while stuck in an overflowing bathroom during the apocalypse,” with emphasis on the terrifyingly unusable toilet. My little corner of the Dreamlands is not the sort that a weird fiction author ought to get assigned, but I suspect that I’m better off not complaining to the management.
Kiernan’s travelogue has that same sense of being stuck in the middle, cut off from either assignment or resolution of goal. But the settings seem worthier of sharing. Dream stories will almost always be fundamentally mood pieces, but I like the way the different dreams interweave, echoing characters and fears and tropes in a way that feels both story-like and dreamlike. [ETA: Unlike Anne, below, it didn’t occur to me that the different dreams might belong to different dreamers. After some consideration, I find them interesting as aspects of the same set of anxieties and obsessions, and am sticking with the idea of one dreamer tossed from dream to dream.]
My first reference for dream stories is usually Lovecraft, who wrote snippets of actual dream, and the Dreamlands themselves—though of course he’s taking a page from Dunsany and Poe. These set the boundaries of what you can do with such a tale: you have to have enough logic for the paragraphs to hang together, but not so much that it stops being plausible as a dream (or a place that’s a source of dreams). You need continuity of mood and setting, but also the weird shifts that make dreams so wondrous and frightening.
Kieran manages that balance admirably. The pumphouse guard struggles with the same uncertain, maybe impossible sort of goal as the man at the tiller, but the pumphouse has also destroyed the sea he was navigating. The woman is an uncomfortable companion no matter where encountered, and regardless of whether she’s a wolf hanging over your shoulder or a mantis-jellyfish abandoning you on a desert island. You’ll never know where you’re going, or if the journey will end, or who you started out as. Emptiness, forgetfulness, endless repetition. And someone keeps counting in German in the background.
Religion weaves through the dream-places too: gospel stations in the “high places” of Appalachia, even in the face of a far-future sphere promising the destruction of all sources of difference (religion included alongside art). A rabbi records a Nazi “hound” with about as much resemblance to a dog as the Hounds of Tindalos.
Travelogues tell you about the places a traveler has gone. Usually, though, they include both landmarks and maps to find them, destinations and routes. Separate those out, and it’s hard to tell which is which. The dory can’t be following a route, because we will never know where it came from or where it meant to go, or even if such things exist. The pumphouse sits amid impassible desert. The Appalachians are unstuck in time. The storytelling library is in New York, but we never see the city out the windows. If you, too, are an oneironaut, you will learn nothing here about how to reach specific places or times. The best you can get is the reassurance that, if you find yourself in one of these dreams—and can remember anything from beyond the dream—you are there in company.
Anne’s Commentary
In their introduction to Bright Dead Star, Kiernan offers insight into two recurring features of their fiction: characters seeing psychiatrists and characters dreaming. About the dreams, they write:
“[My tales] are replete with dream. I would argue this technique isn’t some lazy shortcut to the mind of a character. They are, in the parlance of our computer-battered times, a hack, circumventing the firewall of the conscious mind so that we might access the chewy Tootsie Roll center.”
What a great metaphor. As a veteran Tootsie Pop fan, I know there are basically two kinds of Pop-eaters, those who patiently lick and/or suck away the hard candy coating and those who eventually just bite into the damn shell to free the chocolaty core. Kiernan visualizes the writer using dreams to crunch into a character’s unconscious mind. I’m visualizing the reverse, where the unconscious mind uses dream-tongues and dream teeth to subtly or explosively communicate with the conscious mind. Such a Tootsie Pop would be interactive candy for the adventurous, rather like Monty Python’s Spring Surprise sweetie. (Jump to the sketch titled “Crunchy Frog,” another fine confection manufactured by the Whizzo Chocolate Company.)
Ahem. And now for something incompletely different.
To “A Travelogue for Oneironautics,” Kiernan appends an author’s note. Themself an oneironaut or chronic “dream-sailor,” they often feature dreams in their fiction. Some, part of a longer narrative, are associated with a particular character. Others stand alone, as in “A Travelogue,” allowing readers to decide for themselves what the dreamer-protagonist’s “waking life” might be.
I take up that challenge.
The two “nulls” or “zeroes” bookend “Travelogue.” My guess is that their dreamer’s an avid boater. Maybe he sails on weekends, or takes his bass boat out to hook some big ones, though not as big as that snaky thing underneath his dream-dory. Maybe he’s single in waking life, but wishes he wasn’t, hence the woman who just shows up in his dory. Too bad she morphs into a mantis-jellyfish and slithers off, leaving him alone on the beach. Maybe the dreamer, though a ferryman, does have a name, say, Charon. Maybe his job’s to transport the dead from their little yellow houses to Hades. It’s a bitch of a job, especially if you fall in love with one of your passengers.
Dream “eines”: The real-life dreamer could be a Secret Service agent, or else a mall security guard. From the Pumphouse and Pumphouse masters he envisions, he’s a steampunk fan. He’s in a “What’s it all about” crisis re his career, possibly his whole life. He fanboys Daenerys Targaryen, hence the pale, white-haired, blue-eyed woman who joins him at the windows. The doorkeeper kid isn’t her son but some miscellaneous Targaryen, because you can’t love (or hate) just one.
Dream “zwei”: The real-life dreamer’s a fixture at repertory theaters: A film buff and/or snob. He even knows what a 35 mm Kinoton FP30ST projector is, and his heart beats to its click-click-click. He may be conflicted about his movie obsession, though, hence the way he finds himself watching a movie of himself watching the movie of himself, and so on in infinite regression. In real life, he’d never be brave enough to sit needlessly beside an unknown woman. That this woman turns out to be a maneater reflects his deepest fears. Or is she really only “drawn” as a maneater on screen? Meat-locker breath isn’t a good omen.
Dream “drei”: Here’s a change, a first-person dreamer. In real life, they’re into nature and environmentalism. Their favorite song is Lennon’s “Imagine,” but they wonder if its philosophy is workable. Not to the extremes the black sphere takes it! They’re also a Fahrenheit 451 fan, dream-revising the “Montag-Captain Beatty” conversational duel. They may want to escape over the bridge, but remember its guardrails are rusted out, and if one fell into that lake full of “anthropogenically redistributed” predators, game over.
Dream “vier”: The real life dreamer has watched too many shows about sole-survivors of the apocalypse. A Boy and His Dog might have made him ambivalent in his anxiety. A talking dog would make a good companion post-Armageddon, as long as you could keep it fed. Oops, another anxiety-driver.
Dream “fünf”: The RL dreamer could be a young academic approaching the horrors of an oral defense committee, hence the five other storytellers much older than he. Or he could be a tenured professor having a flashback dream. Walt Whitman’s not his favorite author. The dreamer should ditch his tired Bete du Gevaudan thesis for one about his Judenhund find. But what if the National Library of Israel won’t let him access The Book of the White Hound? This could reflect the dreamer’s struggles to access the Necronomicon or something.
That would be enough to give anyone nightmares.
Next week, join our new longread with Chapters 1-2 of Stephen Graham Jones’ Buffalo Hunter Hunter.[end-mark]
The post We Should Have Asked for Directions: Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “A Travelogue for Oneironautics” appeared first on Reactor.
Harlequin Is Ending Its Historical Romance Line After Nearly 40 Years
Feb. 11th, 2026 05:55 pmreactor_feedHarlequin Is Ending Its Historical Romance Line After Nearly 40 Years
The publisher’s decision to end its historical romance line in 2027 comes on the heels of controversial changes to its international publishing tactics
Published on February 11, 2026
Reactor has learned that publisher Harlequin Enterprises plans to shut down its historical romance line.
Founded in 1949, Harlequin quickly established itself as one of the biggest publishers of romance novels in the world. The company led a boom period for romance novel publications throughout the 1960s, and notably launched a major expansion into European markets throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Launched in 1988, the Harlequin Historical line has long been part of the company’s growth and cultural presence. Its titles helped establish the line as one of the premier sources for romance stories set in various historical periods. Such works have become closely associated with the rise of romance novels in global culture. Though Harlequin Historical has drastically limited the distribution of its physical works in the U.S. beginning in the late 2010s, it remained a significant part of the publisher’s international presence, especially after 2014 when Harlequin was acquired by HarperCollins and its parent company, News Corp.
Now, though, the line is coming to an end. According to a recent email Harlequin sent to its authors (which was also published on the company’s Authors’ Network), Harlequin is shutting down its Historical line in September 2027 (though the spines of titles published at that time will list October 2027). The move includes ceasing U.S. and U.K. retail efforts as well as digital publishing related to the line in those markets. The company reportedly will not acquire any new works for the line moving forward.
An author familiar with the line informed us that Harlequin’s Historical Romance program has suffered through steady reductions over the past several years, including reduced retail presence, narrowed genre focus, and fewer monthly releases. As recently as last year, their move to Regency/Victorian-only titles was presented as a stabilization strategy, and the line was still actively acquiring books under those guidelines. The author says the subsequent decision to end U.S./U.K. retail and digital publishing came as a surprise. While Harlequin will stop acquiring new historical romances, the author suggests the company plans to continue exploiting foreign language rights in markets where historical titles remain strong, and to publish the already contracted works through the planned shutdown period.
We have reached out to Harlequin for further information regarding this decision, but have not received a response as of the time of this writing.
Harlequin’s success in international markets (including the international success of its historical romance line) has certainly been a big part of the company’s recent history. In a 2014 press release from HarperCollins regarding their acquisition of Harlequin, it was noted that the publisher hoped their acquisition would “extend HarperCollins’ global platform, particularly in Europe and Asia Pacific, helping to fuel its international growth strategy.” In a New Yorker piece published that same year, author Adrienne Raphel noted that Harlequin’s industry presence had declined in more recent years, but that the publisher still had a “strong international presence” that offered a “foothold into digital and international markets that HarperCollins and News Corp. will be able to exploit.”
Earlier this year, the company faced criticism over reported experimentation with AI-assisted translation tools after cutting ties with some contracted translators in France. While Harlequin has not publicly linked these moves, taken together they suggest a broader shift toward lowering production costs while maintaining revenue streams from established catalog titles abroad. The company’s recent decision to shutter its previously successful Historical line raises further questions about the future direction of the imprint.
We’ll be sure to update you regarding this story as new information becomes available.[end-mark]
The post Harlequin Is Ending Its Historical Romance Line After Nearly 40 Years appeared first on Reactor.
"Would you give money to a bully to keep him from beating you up every day?"
Feb. 11th, 2026 12:44 pmconulyWhat the hell sort of question is that? Of course I'd pay up! I have money, pride, and my teeth, and of the three, I can least afford to lose the last. Wouldn't almost anybody submit to the shakedown? That's how protection rackets work, after all - everybody does the same math and comes to the same conclusion as I just did.
(Of course, the context was "I think this company was rude to me over the phone, therefore I decided to live without hot water and heating because I have my principles" so, you know, I guess we have different approaches to life?)
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( Read more... )
(Of course, the context was "I think this company was rude to me over the phone, therefore I decided to live without hot water and heating because I have my principles" so, you know, I guess we have different approaches to life?)
( Read more... )
How a Stephen King Character Becomes an Unlikely Source of Hope
Feb. 11th, 2026 05:00 pmreactor_feedHow a Stephen King Character Becomes an Unlikely Source of Hope
Holly Gibney embodies the ethos of “do no harm but take no shit.”
Published on February 11, 2026
Photo credit: Bob Mahoney
Photo credit: Bob Mahoney
A lot of Stephen King’s most iconic characters feel all too relevant to our current moment, be they the toxic fan who escalates to far worse, the entity that feeds on a community’s fear and prejudice or the frustrated family man who lets his demons turn him into a monster. His 1977 school-shooter novel Rage, written under his pulpier nom de plume Richard Bachman, was found in the personal effects of so many real shooters that King had his publisher take it out of print.
It seems far rarer for a King character to provide us with a guide to navigate this terrible American moment. His protagonists tend to be varying shades of admirable or sympathetic, but they’re often stuck reacting to the horror with which they’re confronted. This is blessedly not the case, however, with one of his newer creations, the neurodivergent private investigator Holly Gibney.
Holly made her debut as a supporting character in King’s 2014 mystery Mr. Mercedes, enlisted as an assistant to retired cop Bill Hodges as he hunts the titular killer who, in another bit of ominous resonance, killed eight people in a car attack at a job fair. Since then, she’s appeared in the rest of the Hodges trilogy (End of Watch and Finders Keepers) as well as the novels The Outsider, Holly, and Never Flinch and the novella If It Bleeds. Holly is introduced in a position far too many autistic and neurodivergent people will recognize: despite her latent skills at the kind of observation and deduction a detective needs, she’s borderline reclusive and under the thumb of her mother Charlotte, who has conditioned Holly to believe she can’t function in the world or offer it anything. However, under Bill’s guidance, and later through her friendship with her neighbors, siblings Jerome and Barbara Robinson, Holly comes to understand her own strength and capability and starts an investigatory career in her own right.
To see yourself in a fictional character often comes with the corollary of wishing you had more of their strengths and fewer of your weaknesses. Generations of teens have been captivated by Spider-Man, for instance, because he shares their frustrations and struggles but also has superhuman powers. Holly is aspirational in subtler ways—her detective skills aren’t presented as the trope of disability as a superpower or clairvoyance, which even King himself has not been immune to. Holly doesn’t have Will Graham-esque visions that help her get to the bottom of things, she’s just astute, patient, and smart enough to let people underestimate her.
Holly is also, not incidentally, perhaps the single kindest character King has created. Much of modern fiction runs on the assumption, often by male writers, that a strong female character must be relentlessly snarky, violent, and antisocial. Holly is the exact opposite—her friendships with the Robinsons and Bill are a major part of her characterization, and her fierce loyalty and gratitude for them is instantly recognizable to any neurodivergent person who’s worried they might never find their people. She’s got a spirit of bruised but indefatigable optimism that gets her through what she experiences, referred to as “Holly hope” by both her and her friends.
That’s not to say she can’t scrap, of course—every King book featuring Holly has climaxed with her dispatching the antagonist in self-defense, including El Cuco, a murderous, shapeshifting supernatural entity, in The Outsider. She embodies the ethos of “do no harm but take no shit.”
One of my single favorite Holly moments comes in 2023’s Holly, in which she finds herself investigating a string of disappearances that ultimately lead to two elderly married academics who believe in the restorative power of cannibalism (it’s still Stephen King, after all). What ultimately leads Holly to realize the victims have all been snatched up against their will is that all of them had a community, something to live for, loved ones that they wouldn’t have left behind: a college professor who loves his job and boyfriend, a woman who has nominally returned to her family in Georgia despite their having disowned her for being a lesbian, the son of an alcoholic mother who’d been making real progress in getting her drinking under control. Holly has known a life with these ties and without them, and her empathy and gratitude are what make her realize what doesn’t add up.
I’ve loved Holly since I first encountered her, only compounded by Cynthia Erivo’s and Justine Lupe’s performances in the TV adaptations of The Outsider and Mr. Mercedes, respectively. King himself admits to an infatuation with writing the character, saying “I wish she were a real person.” But after the last few weeks, when the news has been wall-to-wall images of a campaign of state terror in Minnesota and its targets standing in solidarity, I appreciate her even more. The streets of the Twin Cities have been filled with Fargo-accented moms and the “helpers” Fred Rogers famously spoke of, not just protesting on the front lines but providing more low-key, behind the scenes mutual aid. Like Holly, they’re not action heroes or revolutionaries–they’re people who love and dare defend their community with whatever talents they have. The state has already extra-judicially murdered two of them, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and it hasn’t made their neighbors more violent, it’s only made them braver.
To draw on fiction for solace against real evil can become a crutch—witness the popularity of Harry Potter analogies in the first Trump presidency, made awkward by Trump and Harry’s creator having identical views on trans rights. But at their best, fictional heroes can be not just power fantasies but something like secular saints, figures we use as a sort of lantern in the dark to help find a path through uncharted territory. I don’t know if anyone protecting their community in the Twin Cities, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, or Iran, is a fan of Holly Gibney, but seeing those communities has reminded me that everything I love about Holly exists in millions of real people too.[end-mark]
The post How a Stephen King Character Becomes an Unlikely Source of Hope appeared first on Reactor.
Mary Balogh, a Boxed Set, & More
Feb. 11th, 2026 04:30 pmsmartbitches_feedGive Me a Reason
RECOMMENDED: Give Me a Reason by Jayci Lee is $2.99! Guest reviewer Lisa gave this an A-:
Give Me a Reason is absolutely packed with restrained passion and yearning. There’s too much hurt between Frederic and Anne for them to initially approach each other, and yet they still want to be together.
An instant USA Today bestseller!
In this modern retelling of Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, a K-drama actress gets her second chance at love with the man she left to save her family, if only she can work up the courage to risk her heart on forever…one last time.
For ten years, Anne Lee told herself that Frederick Nam was her past. To save her father from bankruptcy, she dropped out of UC San Diego to pursue an acting career in Korea. Anne had to stop Frederick from following her and ruining his future. Breaking up with him was the best way she could love him.
After Anne left him, Frederick spent years loving her, missing her, and hating her until he decided to live his life for himself. He followed his dream and became a firefighter in Culver City. He didn’t need romance. He had his work and his friends.
When she returns to Los Angeles, Anne and Frederick find themselves in the same wedding—she as her cousin’s bridesmaid and he as his friend’s groomsman. Even though he is cold and distant with her, Anne can no longer deny that she never got over him. Not even close. As for Frederick, needing to take care of Anne is a habit he can’t seem to kick, but that doesn’t mean he has to forgive her.
Someone to Honor
Someone to Honor by Mary Balogh is $1.99! This is the sixth book in the Westcott historical romance series. Balogh is a favorite at SBTB, especially if you’re looking for tender romances and comfort reading.
First appearances deceive in the newest charming and heartwarming Regency romance in the Westcott series from beloved New York Times bestselling author Mary Balogh.
Abigail Westcott’s dreams for her future were lost when her father died and she discovered her parents were not legally married. But now, six years later, she enjoys the independence a life without expectation provides a wealthy single woman. Indeed, she’s grown confident enough to scold the careless servant chopping wood outside without his shirt on in the proximity of ladies.
But the man is not a servant. He is Gilbert Bennington, the lieutenant colonel and superior officer who has escorted her wounded brother, Harry, home from the wars with Napoleon. Gil has come to help his friend and junior officer recover, and he doesn’t take lightly to being condescended to–secretly because of his own humble beginnings.
If at first Gil and Abigail seem to embody what the other most despises, each will soon discover how wrong first impressions can be. For behind the appearances of the once-grand lady and the once-humble man are two people who share an understanding of what true honor means, and how only with it can one find love.
A Seditious Affair
READER RECOMMENDED: A Seditious Affair by KJ Charles is $1.99! This is a gay historical romance and was the subject of one of our very first Squee from the Keeper Shelf was about this book:
Many congratulations to K.J. Charles proving that it can be done. Romance can incorporate meaty socio-economic and political context into the story-telling. And the resulting tale can be riveting and most definitely hot.
K. J. Charles turns up the heat in her new Society of Gentlemen novel, as two lovers face off in a sensual duel that challenges their deepest beliefs.
Silas Mason has no illusions about himself. He’s not lovable, or even likable. He’s an overbearing idealist, a Radical bookseller and pamphleteer who lives for revolution . . . and for Wednesday nights. Every week he meets anonymously with the same man, in whom Silas has discovered the ideal meld of intellectual companionship and absolute obedience to his sexual commands. But unbeknownst to Silas, his closest friend is also his greatest enemy, with the power to see him hanged—or spare his life.
A loyal, well-born gentleman official, Dominic Frey is torn apart by his affair with Silas. By the light of day, he cannot fathom the intoxicating lust that drives him to meet with the Radical week after week. In the bedroom, everything else falls away. Their needs match, and they are united by sympathy for each other’s deepest vulnerabilities. But when Silas’s politics earn him a death sentence, desire clashes with duty, and Dominic finds himself doing everything he can to save the man who stole his heart.
New Zealand Ever After
New Zealand Ever After by Rosalind James is $1.99 at Amazon! This set features three full-length contemporary romances with rugby players. Are you a James fan?
Escape to New Zealand once again with the new series from bestselling author Rosalind James.
Over 1,300 pages of funny, heartwarming, heart-pounding, steam-inducing entertainment, starting with combat of both the military and the more metaphorical sort and ending with an escape from a religious cult, with plenty of stops along the way.
Meet a rich-lister ex-model home from Afghanistan minus a leg, Debbie the Boy Duck, a retired rugby player with a yurt and a strong desire not to be a hero, a four-year-old who is convinced that she can lay an egg if she just tries hard enough, and a whole lot more.
Includes Book 1, KIWI RULES, Book 2, STONE COLD KIWI, and Book 3, KIWI STRONG.
Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz Are Really Truly Returning to The Mummy in 2028
Feb. 11th, 2026 04:09 pmreactor_feedBrendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz Are Really Truly Returning to The Mummy in 2028
One more reason to count the days until 2028
Published on February 11, 2026
Screenshot: Universal
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<h2 class="post-hero-title text-h1">Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz Are Really Truly Returning to <i>The Mummy</i> in 2028</h2>
<div class="prose post-hero-description prose--post-hero">One more reason to count the days until 2028</div>
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<p class="post-hero-author text-xs font-aktiv uppercase font-medium [&_a]:link-hover">By <a href="https://reactormag.com/author/molly-templeton/" title="Posts by Molly Templeton" class="author url fn" rel="author">Molly Templeton</a></p>
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Published on February 11, 2026
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<p>Sometimes, getting your hopes up works out. Back in November, <em>The Mummy</em> stars Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz were <a href="https://reactormag.com/the-mummy-returns-brendan-fraser-and-rachel-weisz/">in talks</a> to return to the beloved franchise with a new film. Now, it’s official: <a href="https://variety.com/2026/film/news/the-mummy-4-release-date-may-2028-brendan-fraser-rachel-weisz-1236658527/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Variety</em> brings word</a> that Universal Pictures has sealed the deals and dated the movie for a 2028 release.</p>
<p>At present, 2028 does not feel like a real year, but I’m sure it’ll be here sooner than any of us are ready for it. </p>
<p>The as-yet-untitled fourth <em>Mummy</em> film will be directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who work under the name Radio Silence and are also the directors of <em>Ready or Not</em> and the upcoming <em>Ready or Not 2: Here I Come</em>. The screenplay is by David Coggeshall, which seems like an odd choice. Coggeshall is the writer of the films <em>The Family Plan</em> and its sequel, the horror films <em>Orphan: First Kill</em> and <em>The Deliverance</em>, and 65 episodes of the 2000s TV series <em>Watch Over Me</em>.</p>
<p>The plot of the new film is being kept under wraps (sorry, but one must make at least one mummy joke when writing about <em>The Mummy</em>). </p>
<p><em>The Mummy</em>, as I surely don’t need to tell you, is a widely adored bisexual awakening film that swept into theaters in 1999 and almost certainly led to more than one person emulating Rachel Weisz’s character’s move of tipsily standing up and announcing “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v11yXGKHtOA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">I am a <em>librarian</em></a>.” Weisz plays Evelyn, who along with her brother Jonathan (John Hannah) travels with treasure hunter Rick O’Connell (Fraser) on a quest to find the Book of Amun-Ra. It is all a lot more complicated than that, and many scary things happen, including booby traps and biblical plagues. Oded Fehr also stars as Ardeth Bay.</p>
<p>Much of the cast returned for <em>The Mummy Returns</em>, which marked The Rock’s movie debut (he was still The Rock back then; now he’s Dwayne Johnson). A third film, <em>The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor</em>, lacked Weisz and was generally <a href="https://reactormag.com/brendan-fraser-what-went-wrong-with-the-mummy-tomb-of-the-dragon-emperor/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">somewhat less beloved</a>. But this new film is being referred to as the fourth <em>Mummy</em> film, so it’s not like they’re trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>We’ll learn more before <em>The Mummy</em> returns again on May 19, 2028.[end-mark]</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reactormag.com/brendan-fraser-rachel-weisz-the-mummy-2028/">Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz Are Really Truly Returning to <i>The Mummy</i> in 2028</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reactormag.com">Reactor</a>.</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/brendan-fraser-rachel-weisz-the-mummy-2028/">https://reactormag.com/brendan-fraser-rachel-weisz-the-mummy-2028/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=839363">https://reactormag.com/?p=839363</a></p>
The Man Who Fell to Earth: A Provocative Contemplation of Corruption and Despair
Feb. 11th, 2026 04:00 pmreactor_feedThe Man Who Fell to Earth: A Provocative Contemplation of Corruption and Despair
David Bowie stars in a beautifully filmed tale of alienation, misery, and failure.
Published on February 11, 2026
Credit: British Lion Films
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<p class="syndicationauthor">Posted by Sarah</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-a-provocative-contemplation-of-corruption-and-despair/">https://reactormag.com/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-a-provocative-contemplation-of-corruption-and-despair/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=839118">https://reactormag.com/?p=839118</a></p><post-hero class="wp-block-post-hero js-post-hero post-hero post-hero-horizontal">
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<h2 class="post-hero-title text-h1"><i>The Man Who Fell to Earth</i>: A Provocative Contemplation of Corruption and Despair</h2>
<div class="prose post-hero-description prose--post-hero">David Bowie stars in a beautifully filmed tale of alienation, misery, and failure.</div>
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<p class="post-hero-author text-xs font-aktiv uppercase font-medium [&_a]:link-hover">By <a href="https://reactormag.com/author/kali-wallace/" title="Posts by Kali Wallace" class="author url fn" rel="author">Kali Wallace</a></p>
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Published on February 11, 2026
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<div class="post-hero-caption post-hero-caption-vertical [&_a]:link"><p>Credit: British Lion Films</p>
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<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="740" height="423" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-bowie-740x423.jpg" class="w-full object-cover" alt="David Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-bowie-740x423.jpg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-bowie-1100x629.jpg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-bowie-768x439.jpg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-bowie.jpg 1400w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" /> </figure>
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<p><em>The Man Who Fell to Earth </em>(1976) Directed by Nicolas Roeg. Written by Paul Mayersberg based on the novel of the same name by Walter Nevis. Starring David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark, and Buck Henry.</p>
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<p>It was the summer of 1974 in Los Angeles. English music superstar David Bowie was on tour in America. He was promoting <em>Diamond Dogs, </em>the first album he’d released after retiring his alien glam-rock stage persona Ziggy Stardust. Along for part of the tour was BBC producer and director Alan Yentob, who was making a documentary about Bowie for the long-running television series <em>Omnibus</em>. Yentob’s film, <em>Cracked Actor</em>, aired on BBC1 in January, 1975.</p>
<p><em>Cracked Actor</em> has never been officially released in any other format, but you can find the complete film all over the internet. It’s 50 minutes of conversations in cars and hotel rooms interspersed with concert footage, and all of it is implicitly fueled by so much cocaine. Whether that appeals to you depends a great deal, I suspect, on how interested you are in David Bowie in particular and the 1970s rock star life in general.</p>
<p>The documentary caught the attention of a film casting agent by the name of Maggie Abbott, who was looking for somebody to play the lead role in a sci fi film to be directed by Nicolas Roeg. The requirements for the role were a bit unusual: the actor had to look not quite human. Roeg’s first choice for the role hadn’t been an actor at all but author Michael Crichton, who was 6’9”; another choice was Peter O’Toole. Neither of them were available or interested. (They also didn’t look like aliens, but movie magic is a powerful thing.) That’s why Abbott was still searching for the right person, and why she screened <em>Cracked Actor</em> for Roeg and suggested that he consider Bowie for the role.</p>
<p>It wasn’t as wild an idea as it might seem on the surface. Although Bowie had only a few small acting credits to his name, it would not be Roeg’s first time working with a musician in a film. He had already co-directed <em>Performance </em>(1970), a crime film about a gangster who goes into hiding in the home of a rocker played by Mick Jagger.</p>
<p>The casting was almost doomed before it began, because Bowie forgot about their first meeting and assumed, when he realized he would be about an hour late, that Roeg would have given up and left. But Roeg hadn’t left. <a href="https://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/mwfte.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">He waited at Bowie’s house for eight hours</a>. When they finally met, Bowie was so embarrassed he hadn’t read the screenplay that he agreed to do the movie to avoid the awkwardness of a longer conversation, which just might be the most British interaction I’ve ever heard of.</p>
<p>Roeg was a well-respected filmmaker who had started his career in film right after getting out of the army following World War II. He began working at Marylebone Studios in London as a clapper-boy, or the person on set who worked the “clappers” to make a distinctive noise that would allow the film and audio tracks to be synced. He eventually worked his way up to camera operator, and throughout the ’60s he was worked as a cinematographer on such diverse films as David Lean’s <em>Lawrence of Arabia </em>(1962), Roger Corman’s <em>The Masque of the Red Death </em>(1964), and François Truffaut’s <em>Fahrenheit 451 </em>(1966). By the end of the decade he’d shifted into directing; <em>Performance</em>, which he co-directed with screenwriter Donald Cammell, was his first film as director. He followed it up with two movies that earned a lot of acclaim: <em>Walkabout </em>(1971) and <em>Don’t Look Now </em>(1973).</p>
<p><em>The Man Who Fell to Earth</em> is based on the 1963 novel of the same title by Walter Tevis. The story in the book is pretty much what we see in the film, with some variations; screenwriter <a href="https://archive.org/details/Sight_and_Sound_1975_10_BFI_GB/page/n34/mode/1up" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Paul Mayersberg wrote a piece for <em>Sight and Sound</em> in 1975</a> explaining how he went about adapting the novel into the screenplay, as well as a bit about how the story evolved during filming.</p>
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<p>The plot isn’t a complicated one: An alien visitor named Thomas Jerome Newton (played by Bowie) comes to Earth searching for water for his drought-stricken planet. He uses his superior technological knowledge and the help of patent lawyer Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry) to found a major corporation; his goal is to use his great wealth to build a spaceship to get back to his home planet, in order to bring resources and rescue survivors. But as he amasses wealth and power on Earth, Newton become involved with a young woman, named Betty Jo in the book and Mary Lou in the movie (and played by Candy Clark), and begins drinking heavily. His work attracts the attention of curious scientist Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn) as well as the U.S. government; the latter responds by detaining him and performing experiments on him. His mission disrupted, Newton gives up on returning to his home planet, and wastes away on Earth.</p>
<p>It’s a story that spans decades, focuses heavily on a man’s descent into misery and failure, all of which leads to a sad, heavy ending—so honestly, it was perfect for a ’70s director looking to make an artsy, depressing sci fi movie.</p>
<p>Tevis’ first novel, <em>The Hustler</em>, had already been made into an extremely successful 1961 film starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth</em> was his second novel. Even though there was some suggestion at the time of its publication that he was a literary author dabbling in science fiction, Tevis had written several sci fi short stories already and was no stranger to the genre.</p>
<p>In a 1981 interview (<a href="https://brickmag.com/an-interview-with-walter-tevis/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reprinted in <em>Brick</em> in 2003</a>), Tevis said, “Where did <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth </em>fall from? He fell from San Francisco… essentially that book is a very disguised autobiography. It is based upon my own feelings from time to time that I’m from another planet.” He ties the themes in the book to his own childhood, during which he moved from San Francisco to Kentucky, where he spent a long time in a children’s hospital, isolated and unhappy. Tevis is also very frank about the role his own alcoholism played in the story: “Now, <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth </em>is about my becoming an alcoholic, really. That’s my private story about my sense of my own physical weakness and my sense of my not really being human…”</p>
<p>This reminds me of what Eliseo Subiela said about <a href="https://reactormag.com/man-facing-southeast-an-alien-perspective-on-humanitys-madness/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Man Facing Southeast</em> (1986)</a> and his reasons for setting it in a psychiatric hospital. Both stories are at their core about exploring a feeling of alienation from other humans by making that alienation literal, and both use conditions that are largely marginalized and judged harshly, such as mental illness and addiction, to emphasize a sense of isolation within society. When I was reading about that movie, I found writers who mentioned that it followed in the footsteps of <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth</em>, but I have no idea if Subiela ever saw it.</p>
<p>I hadn’t read <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth</em> before I watched the movie and started writing this column, but I borrowed the ebook from my library to read a bit and get a sense for Tevis’ style. I was immediately sucked in, to the point where I wanted to stop research and keep reading. The writing is fantastic and evocative and so engaging, with a sort of mournful, meandering feel. In <a href="https://www.newspapers.com/image/443210804/">a 2004 column in <em>The Boston Globe</em></a>, author James Sallis wrote about Tevis and his work, and he described <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth </em>as, “…one of the most heartbreaking books I know, a threnody on great ambition and terrible failure, and an evocation of man’s absolute, unabridgeable aloneness.”</p>
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<p>Beyond the casting, there really isn’t that much that’s exciting about the production of <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth</em>. Because it stars one of the biggest rock stars of all time, and was made during a period when he was very publicly going through some personal and professional troubles, journalists and critics seem to have expected that there would be some drama on set. There’s an amusing article that was published in the rock music magazine <em>Creem </em>(readable on the Bowie archive page <a href="https://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/press/75-12-00-creem.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bowie Golden Years</a>) in which it sure sounds like the writers went in hoping for something exciting, like maybe a cocaine bender or wild orgies or something.</p>
<p>Alas, it was not to be, because the filming went pretty smoothly. The movie was filmed in New Mexico, and <a href="https://variety.com/2016/film/news/david-bowie-man-who-fell-to-earth-candy-clark-1201677477/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according to Candy Clark</a> as well as <a href="https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-david-bowie-review/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Roeg and others on the production</a>, it was a fairly pleasant experience.</p>
<p>Where we do find some good old-fashioned sex, drugs, and rock & roll was in the making of the film’s soundtrack, which Bowie wasn’t involved with at all. There’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/08/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-soundtrack-bowie-john-phillips" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a 2016 article about the whole ordeal in <em>The Guardian</em></a>, and it would make a pretty good (trashy) Hollywood film in itself.</p>
<p>Bowie was originally supposed to write the soundtrack. He went into the film thinking he was going to provide the music, and it would have come after his <em>Young Americans </em>(1975) album. But after three months of work he had produced nothing usable. That, coupled with what appeared to be some big misunderstandings, left Roeg in the awkward position of having a film that was supposed to premiere in a few months but had no music.</p>
<p>Roeg called up John Phillips, better known as the singer and songwriter for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU6uUEwZ8FM" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Mamas & the Papas</a>. Roeg had met Phillips a few years before when he offered Phillips’ wife at the time, Genevieve Waite, the role of Mary Lou in <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth</em>. Phillps objected, because he wanted to write a sci fi rock musical for Waite to star in, and that led to a physical fight between the two men. People just don’t get into drunken fist fights about sci fi rock musicals anymore, do they?</p>
<p>But their brief enmity didn’t last, because a few years later Roeg offered Phillips the chance to do the soundtrack for <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth</em>. Phillips agreed, even though he, like everybody else, didn’t really understand why Bowie wasn’t doing it. There were some more shenanigans involving fights, cocaine, and, somehow, a tryst with Mick Jagger’s wife during the writing and recording, but Phillips did end up providing much of the soundtrack.</p>
<p>What that <em>Guardian</em> article doesn’t say—possibly because there’s no sex or cocaine involved, but who knows?—is that some of the music in <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth</em> was also composed and performed by Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamash’ta. The weird, cool, sci fi-y, prog rock parts of the score were Yamash’ta’s, while the parts that sound either like twangy Americana or smooth jazz were Phillips, and I think both parts work quite well. It’s an interesting soundtrack. Very ’70s, but not in a bad way. None of it was composed or performed by Bowie, which is a bit sad. I would have loved to hear what Bowie’s version of the soundtrack, if he had ever written it.</p>
<p>I’m not entirely sure how I feel about <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth.</em> I’ve been thinking about it since I watched it, so it definitely wormed its way into my head. Overall, I think it’s a fascinating but flawed movie. The film starts out brilliantly, Bowie is great in the lead role, and it’s undeniably beautiful to look at. But I think it drags a bit too long in the second half, and there are places where I simply wished for <em>more</em>. I wish there was more depth for the characters of Mary Lou and Nathan Bryce; Candy Clark and Rip Torn both do a great job with what they are given, but they could have been given much more…</p>
<p>In that interview published in <em>Brick</em>, Walter Tevis offers thoughts on Roeg’s film version of <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth</em>. Tevis, who was an English teacher for twenty-five years, said, “I give it a C-plus.”</p>
<p>His critique of the film is an interesting one, because it comes down to a fundamental disagreement about how to tell stories that are meant to be understood on many levels. He said of Roeg’s work, “…I think he feels that it isn’t art if you can understand it, and I hate that notion. I really hate it. And I think when you do a parable, which is more or less what I do in science fiction, you have to be up front about what’s going on in the foreground.”</p>
<p>I think, based on the date of that interview, that Tevis was talking about the version of <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth</em> that the distributor shaved by twenty minutes against Roeg’s wishes. But I’m not sure, and I don’t know how the different versions would have affected his opinion. I will say that even with the longer version, I can see where he’s coming from: This is a movie that cares more about the underlying parable of innocence falling to corruption than it does about the flow of the foreground story of a man losing sight of his purpose over decades.</p>
<p>I don’t think that’s a fatal flaw, nor do I agree with him that the foreground plot always has to be crystal clear for a story to work. I have loved films like <a href="https://reactormag.com/stalker-journey-into-the-landscape-of-the-human-soul/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Stalker </em>(1979)</a> or <a href="https://reactormag.com/high-life-you-cant-go-home-again/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>High Life </em>(2018)</a> where the clarity of the foreground plot is nowhere near as important as the underlying emotional and philosophical elements. But I do think that parts of <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth </em>are disjointed in a way that distract from the underlying parable, and I can see why Tevis felt the way he did. <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-1976" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Roger Ebert said in his 1976 review</a>: “…there’s nothing more frustrating than asking logical questions about a movie that insists on being visionary.”</p>
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<p>What do you think of <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth</em> and its take on the alien visitor as a metaphor for part of the human experience?</p>
<p><strong>Next week:</strong> I like to keep things challenging by covering a truly obscure film now and then, so we’re watching Grigori Kromanov’s <em>Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel</em>, which is streaming <a href="https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/dead-mountaineers-hotel" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">in just a couple of places</a>.[end-mark]</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reactormag.com/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-a-provocative-contemplation-of-corruption-and-despair/"><i>The Man Who Fell to Earth</i>: A Provocative Contemplation of Corruption and Despair</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reactormag.com">Reactor</a>.</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-a-provocative-contemplation-of-corruption-and-despair/">https://reactormag.com/the-man-who-fell-to-earth-a-provocative-contemplation-of-corruption-and-despair/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=839118">https://reactormag.com/?p=839118</a></p>
Wednesday is still not sleeping very well
Feb. 11th, 2026 04:04 pmoursinWhat I read
Finished Cakes and Ale, which is partly that early C20th litfic convention of a first-person narrator who just happens be around to hear a lot about the actual protags and the plot or at critical moments of same, but actually complicates it with Ashenden knowing that Rosie is not actually dead as everyone else supposes. Not sure the ending really worked.
I then, having got into an Edwardian/Georgian novelist rhythm, went 'ah! time for some Arnold Bennett! the one about the hotel', except I picked up The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), which is 1900s thriller hijinx mode with European royalty shenanigans, false identities, etc etc (though I was wondering whether it might adapt into a screwball comedy movie?), and wasn't actually the one I'd read many years ago that I was thinking of.
Which was Imperial Palace (1930), which struck me as, although lacking the highspeed thriller plot element, remarkably like D Francis in its fascination for infrastructure (in this case, running a luxury hotel in London) and competence porn. The running-the-hotel bits and the trials posed for the new supervising housekeeper are, perhaps, at least these days, more interesting than the bits involving Hotel Manager and Rich Man's Daughter Gracie. To give her (and actually, Bennett as author) her due, she is not, whereas she would be in a lot of novels by his contemporaries, an unmitigated bitch (Aldous Huxley's Lucy Tantamount) or a tragic bitch (Michael Arlen's Iris Storm), she has some good points and was a competent racing driver, but she is still annoyingly entitled and egocentric.
I took a break from this because I suddenly had a whim to re-read Mary Renault, The King Must Die (1958) for the first time in absolute yonks. You know, Mary, the sexism and misogyny is not entirely just being Accurate for Period, is it, hmmmm? There is some great stuff in there, but.
On the go
Imperial Palace is very long, and still on the go.
Up next
I think I am up for some Agatha Christie, seriously.