“’The fish rots from the head.’ Fish rotted all over, cell corruption being nonhierarchical and not caste-driven, but point taken.” – Jeff VanderMeer, ‘Authority’
Second week of October—how spooked are you? Watch any good movies? It’s been a big week over here. On Tuesday, September’s episode of The Line Break came out (Apple | Spotty). On Wednesday, Lazy & Entitled had our second reading of year—I’m still proud of calling it Scary Stories To Tell In Rogers Park—featuring Lauren Bolger and Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr. Hopefully we’ll have some video up soon, but in the meantime? We got a video of June’s reading, featuring me, Micah Mabey, Sandra Marchetti, Adrian Sobol, and Bob Sykora up on YouTube. Also, Chloe N. Clark was nice enough to join me on the Lazy & Entitled Podcast to talk get scared while reading and ways writers can scare readers (Apple | Spotty). Lastly, chapter 6, chapter 7, chapter 8, chapter 9, and chapter 10 of Behind With Knife are out now. What a week! October!
What I’ve Been Reading Lately:
A book that changed the way I think about spy novels. A book that answers the question can you do cosmic horror in government offices? Let’s not tease it, here’s part one of this series if you missed it, I’m on to book two in the Southern Reach Series, Authority.
Last week, I said that Annihilation was wildly different from the movie. But let’s say that movie and book end up similar places. Authority isn’t about cleaning up the mess of that expedition, exactly, but does focus on the aftermath. The Southern Reach, it turns out, is a division of the CIA. Rather than be a robustly-staffed, best-of-the-best type place, it’s become a backwater agency. Nothing has really changed in the government’s understanding of Area X in the last few decades, and budgets and staff have dried up. The new director, Control (real name: John Rodriguez), is the son of a sculptor father and spy mother, it’s not unfair to call him a CIA nepobaby. Control is here to do the job, though: he seems to actually want to figure out what’s going on with Area X, with the returned-from-Area-X biologist. Still, he’s been run not just by his mother, but by another mysterious CIA overlord named the Voice. The assistant director of the Southern Reach is standoffish. Then, there’s the problem of Area X, which, even if you’ve seen the movie once, you know is not the kind of entity that makes people more sane. Things are, y’know, not easy for our man Control.
It feels silly to hash out too much plot, this is the second book of a trilogy. What’s interesting is the overlap between cosmic horror and a spy novel. The CIA wants to understand Area X—okay, maybe that’s a possible goal. The CIA wants to contain Area X—let’s just say that by Act III or so, it begins to feel silly that the CIA was even near Area X at all. Whatever this entity is, wherever it came from, it is not a controllable thing. And it might not want anything from us, it might not even care that we exist, but the logical endpoint is the world as we know it forever changing.
This is a type of horror that really gets me quaking in my Chuck Taylors. I had to put down Dawn by Octavia Butler. With the might of Silicon Valley trained on LLMs, I think about the world fundamentally altering beneath my feet a lot. Literally, with all the data centers destroying the environment, for one. On a more societal level, which people’s brains atrophying and AI psychosis becoming more common. How did people handle the building of the highway system? The knowledge that nuclear weapons had come into the world? The continent-altering carnage of World War I? What did Indigenous Americans during the first few years of first contact really think about? How do you deal with this scale of change, especially when you had no say in it? When the forces behind the change are completely indifferent to you? It’s terrifying to contemplate. I won’t say this book is as scary as the first one—it seems to be creeping towards even greater terror (and terroir, IYKYK) in Acceptance. But it’s pretty damn unsettling. Definitely changed the way I think of spy novels.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Listen, it’s bad out here, with the federal government declaring war on Chicago and launching an invasion. The violent, unfeeling demons of ICE are out here shooting people and pepper-spraying peaceful protesters and detaining journalists and killing single fathers. There is absolutely no forgiveness for what is happening. I believe this country is already in civil war, and maybe has been since the mass shooting boom of the 2010s, although the homie LJ Pemberton said maybe a better start date is the Oklahoma City Bombing. The freaks who cheered that on, or would have if they were alive then? They are now invading Chicago. So let’s listen to, I don’t know, a good fucking song, at least. Here’s “Against The Fall Of Night” by Sungazer, a song that always puts me in a good mood.
- The Editorial Board of South Side Weekly isn’t mincing words: this is an invasion, and no branches of the government will save us. It’s Up To Us To Protect One Another.
- ICE is pepper-spraying religious leaders for the crime of praying. Here’s Jack Jenkins at Religion News with the story.
- Don’t worry, while ICE is pretty explicit that they’re trying to hunt down as many Latine people as possible, and that they are specifically targeting people for the way that they look, anti-Black racism remains undefeated in the U.S. Here’s Tonia Hill and Corli Jaw at The Triibe with the story about the Feds choking a Black man after a car accident.
- Don’t worry, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (?) and the Department Of Homeland Security (?) are also here to pick on people who couldn’t pay their rent a few times. Katie Prout and Shawn Mulcahy at Chicago Reader with the story of ICE brutalized unhoused people.
- Will the courts help? Who knows, I’ll believe it when I see it. Here’s Dave Byrnes at The Triibe with the latest on court cases to stop Trump’s invasion and occupation of USian cities.
What’re you still doing here? Go read Behind With Knife!
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Look, unlike most characters in the Southern Reach series, I know what reality is. Still, after reading this book? Let’s all be glad we don’t work for the CIA. Our lives are better, our souls in better shape, for the fact that we do not give our time and talents to the surveillance state.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris