I spent a lot of this year curled up with 1930s detective novels, a safe and cosy world in which the worst thing that can happen is that you get stabbed with a jewelled antique dagger because someone is after your inheritance. I get it: this has been a weird one for literally everyone in the world. Sometimes though you need something better than a comfort read, which for me is where these books come in: a bracing breath of fresh air, a jolt to the nerves and to the thinking brain, a reminder that you need more than consolation in your life.
These books are all scary in their own way, but what they also have in common is absolutely blistering pacing, combined with a creeping tension that cranks higher and higher as you turn the pages. They’re all brilliantly entertaining, ultimately humane, and stuck with me for weeks after reading.
Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh
A group of desperately ambitious teenagers go to a horrible space academy hoping to be selected for a decades-long mission to a distant planet! This one is remarkably tense even before they go into space, and Oh’s outstanding characterisation lifts it into one of the most memorable SF books I’ve read in years. This wasn’t marketed as a horror book, but the sheer claustrophobia and fragility of life aboard the spaceship is as nail-biting as it gets: you absolutely know something is going to go wrong, it’s just a question of how…
Bonus points: excruciatingly accurate details of the British millennial experience. Baby astronauts reflecting on how they’ll never again go to Costa brought a nostalgic tear to my eye.
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
Sorting out your terrible grandmother’s weird house after she dies: sure, what could go wrong. Also, it’s in the middle of the woods far away from anyone? Why not! And there’s a hill behind the house that really shouldn’t be there, and mysterious bone effigies have started appearing hanging from the trees? UHHH. I’m an absolute sucker for folk-horror, and this book also contains a lot of my absolute favourite thing: bad old evil carven rocks that may or may not exist. Just call me the obelisk admirer.
Bonus points: you learn on page one that the dog survives.
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
I actually don’t want to tell you too much about this one. It’s better to go in with no idea of what’s going to happen, because the way the mystery unfolds—constantly opening up a grander and more terrifying world—is just a delight. But to give you an idea: it’s about a book dealer and a librarian who have a baby son. She commits an incomprehensible crime and disappears. He goes looking for her and finds that the shape of his world is far larger and stranger than he thought. The horror here is multilayered, running the whole range from intimate and psychological to outright, phantasmagorically monstrous.
Bonus points: it’s also very funny.
The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling
Cave-diving is the worst thing I can imagine voluntarily doing so GOOD NEWS this book is about cave-diving solo on an alien planet where you may be attacked by monsters at any time. And also, ghosts??? In fact, for me the scariest part of this book was the slipperiness of both the main character and her handler: both of them are lying to you at one time or another and there is a pervasive sense that either of them will do just about anything to achieve their goals. The whole book is about two characters having a series of remote conversations while one of them is down in a cave, and on this restricted canvas Starling manages to pull off some rich SF worldbuilding, a properly thorny, weird, tense f/f relationship, a wonderful monster, and some truly gruesome and terrifying moments.
Bonus points: you will never feel the same way again about your phone battery running out.
Rosewater by Tade Thompson
The city of Rosewater has grown up around an alien dome which appeared unexpectedly in Nigeria. The dome’s curious healing powers have drawn pilgrims from far and wide, but some of its effects are more insidious… I was sold from the first scene of this book, which involves a group of bank employees reading literature aloud in shifts in an attempt to jam telepathic hacking attempts. Both sweeping and intricate, creepingly unsettling, vibrantly original, with sinister government agencies, a decaying mind palace built of meat, and one of the most understatedly appalling alien invasions I’ve ever read.
Bonus points: there are two more in the same setting, so if you enjoyed the first one there is plenty more to get your teeth into.
A.K. Larkwood studied English at St John’s College, Cambridge, and now lives in Oxford with her wife and a cat. The Unspoken Name is her debut novel. Its sequel, The Thousand Eyes, publishes August 2021.
(neat trick, since they’re in Manhattan, and there’s very little by way of elevated trains in Manhattan, not to mention that none of them end as abruptly as this track does)
New Yorkers, man. Always bitching about getting city details wrong.
(I kid, I kid. As Keith knows I’m also a New Yorker. And New York is very much a character in these movies, as witness last time and the “you mess with New York” sequence.)
Wow. This might be the first negative review I’ve ever seen for this movie. Spider-Man 2 is usually hailed as the gold standard of comic book movies.
Interesting – I remember loving this when it came out, although I was also upset by the ‘leaving at the altar’ trope. Like you, I get that it’s always played as this grand, empowering, romantic gesture (and obviously it’s right for MJ to be true to herself, and to tell Peter that she can take the risk if she wants) but it’s also an enormously selfish and hurtful one, and usually such usages of the trope don’t really explore the wreckage they leave behind for the others (since we have no reason to believe that her intended was abusive or coercive in any way).
But other than that, I enjoyed Peter’s struggles, but I was kind of into mopey/sensitive guys back then, lol. I also liked Molina a lot, but I agree you never quite got enough about his motivations (I basically accepted for the sake of suspension of disbelief that the AI in the arms was influencing him in the wake of his injuries/trauma) and Rosalie was wasted. But I also had no previous knowledge of the character.
Austin: I never liked this movie, and never understood the love it always got. The funny thing is, I actually enjoyed it more this time than when I first saw in 14 years ago.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’ve seen this twice and both times I walk away wondering why the NYPD doesn’t do its job and have a sniper on the SWAT team take the shot. Ock has no superpowers and no armor.
Spider-Man 2 was very probably the best superhero movie I’d ever seen up to that point, and the “very probably” is just me being cautious. Almost everything works if not downright delights, from the opening Alex Ross paintings recapping the first film (brilliant idea, the best “Previously on…” ever) to that last sweet saxophone riff at the end of the closing titles.
It was a classic Spidey-type story, showing the everyday hardships of being a superhero, like laundry hassles and itchy spandex. (I bet we’ve never seen Superman mix up his whites and colors.) Of course the story of Peter trying to walk away from the superhero life is another classic trope. While it was kind of predictable in a way — everything in Peter’s life falling apart one after another, with his life as Spidey responsible (or at least blamed) for all of it — Raimi and the writers handled it with sensitivity and strong dramatic effect. And whatever my opinion about Maguire not being right for Peter Parker, he can always be counted on to deliver a sensitive performance. The moment where he “told” Uncle Ben that he was walking away was potent, and the scene where he confessed his guilt to May was captivating.
The origin story they gave Octavius here was also quite effective. Giving him a loving marriage and taking it away from him was wrenching — I had to look away when that shard of glass came at Rosie. The one problem is that they didn’t really follow up on Octavius’s loss. Aside from a momentary cry of grief, they focussed more on the control the arms had over Octavius, driving him to finish his work. Maybe on some level that was him hiding from his guilt at Rosie’s death, denying that his experiment had failed. But if so, I didn’t really get the sense that Rosie’s death had very much impact on the story, as potent as it was at the time.
Still, Doc Ock was a really effective villain here, even more so than Gobby was in the first film. He came off as far more powerful and menacing than he’s ever seemed in any other version, thanks to the brilliant design of his tentacles and Alfred Molina’s commanding performance. And unlike Keith, I thought the way the writers approached the character was intriguing — the arms as entities with minds of their own, taking him over, holding him prisoner to their programmed imperative to finish his work, making him pursue it with ruthless, machinelike efficiency, and with the cold, predatory malevolence of the serpents they resemble. Another idea that’s been done before, but handled very effectively.
I was also glad that they allowed Octavius to redeem himself, to become a hero at the end. It tied in nicely with what May said earlier, about there being a hero in all of us — which was really the theme of this movie. We saw it in May when she proved herself a pluckier hostage than Ock had bargained with. We saw it in that little girl in the burning building who helped pull Peter up when he fell. We saw it in the brilliant, moving scene with the subway passengers, a sequence that made me cry. We implicitly saw it in Harry — for a moment, anyway — when he accepted Peter’s statement that there were bigger things at stake, and told him where to find Octavius. And we saw it in MJ at the end, when she chose to accept the risk of doing the right thing, and choosing to be with Peter. The movie shows that heroism isn’t the sole province of a superpowered elite, but something we all have the potential for. (Even Stan Lee got to be a hero again.)
This film made up for the first film’s underuse of Jameson, and J. K. Simmons did a better job of playing him. The one misfire was his overly broad turnaround when he confessed to being wrong about Spidey and then did an instant 180 when Spidey took his costume back. I didn’t buy it — JJJ might grudgingly admit that Spidey was the only one who could take on Doc Ock, but he wouldn’t admit Spidey was a hero. Meanwhile, Rosemary Harris was still absolutely the perfect Aunt May, and pretty much stole the show. But what were the odds that of all the people in that crowd, Ock would just happen to grab Spider-Man’s aunt?
I did feel there were just too many unmaskings in this film. Each one worked in its own way — although Peter unmasking himself to Octavius seemed a bit too casual — but cumulatively they were a bit much.
And this Spidey isn’t as creative with his webbing as the comics’ Spidey. When he was trying to stop the train, I wondered why he didn’t try gumming up the wheels with webbing, or spraying it on the tracks to make them sticky. He could also have spun his webbing into a large drag chute.
But I do like how populist these movies are. The citizens aren’t just an undifferentiated mass standing around waiting for rescue or blindly buying what the Daily Bugle tells them; they’re individuals with minds and wills of their own, and they play a part in the story.
Overall, this was a very effective film. It worked as action, it worked as comedy, it worked as drama. It was well-directed on a technical level and on a human level, and its misfires were few.
Oh, by the way, Mageina Tovah, who played the landlord’s sweet daughter Ursula, now has a recurring role on Syfy’s The Magicians as the Head Librarian.
While I agree with everything said about the “Leaving him at the altar,” trope, I will forgive its use in this movie because it let JK Jameson whisper to his wife, “Call the caterer. Tell her not to open the caviar.”
So my favorite pop culture reference to Spider-Man #50 is this song by the Dexateens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxNTnetoSjI
It wasn’t until I read this article that it occurred to me they also have a runaway bride song on that record: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfj6cRqHP64
Coincidence? Probably. But maybe not. If I get to see them again any time soon–missed ’em by that much a week or so ago–I’ll ask. I’m curious now.
I’ll always remember being just as offended as a teenage science nerd can be that they put out a tiny nuclear reaction with a river.
I thought this one was as good as its predecessor. Which is no mean trick, because sequels almost never stand up well. I thought Molina did a good job as Ock, and that is one of the reasons I liked it so well.