Crack the WIP

Trad Wife (2026) by Saratoga Schaefer. A would-be tradwife influencer wants a baby for both personal and professional reasons, but her husband won't have sex with her (because he's clearly cheating on her), so instead she has sex with the shadow creature in the well on edge of the property. This plan obviously has no flaws whatsoever. AKA: the trad wife novel that ISN'T about time travel.

This was fun and a quick read. It leaned harder on the monsterfucker element than I expected, and where I was expecting mostly psychological horror with elements of the supernatural, no, the supernatural stuff was front and center. I appreciated how our tradwife has depths that she is progessively less able to keep hidden, and I was just as mad at the past and present men in her life as the book wanted me to be. Her husband is just the woooooorst.

That said, ( spoilers )

I also felt that the degree to which she's consciously, actively deceiving herself about what's happening with her pregnancy was just kind of silly. I would have liked subtler writing there.

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Roadside Picnic (1972) by the Strugatsky Brothers. A man makes a living sneaking into the "Zone," a restricted area full of dangers and treasure left by a one-time visit by aliens.

I completely coincidentally got interested in this and the adaptation Stalker almost simultaneously, without realizing they were related. In both cases I went in with, it turned out, unfounded (but different!) expectations of what I was going to get. Stalker isn't really a cosmic horror movie, alas, although the bones of one are there, and meanwhile this isn't very interested in the Zone at all, at least not as a setting, which if nothing else is a big contrast from the movie! I can see why people say it's a very loose adaptation.

This novel is actually about the daily life of a guy trying to steal forbidden alien artifacts and sell them to the black market, his dealings with various shady characters, and how hard this all is on his family. There are a lot of themes of hopelessness and corruption. It feels very 70s in its mundane focus with Big SF Ideas relegated to the background.

Unfortunately I was super uninterested in most of this. The grimy details of social corruption as seen through our lead's gross sexist lens: not what I came for! I came here for the weird horror shit, the "hell slime" that disintegrates your bones and turns your limbs into rubber, the gravity traps that crush you flat, and the various other hazards of the Zone, which we get only at the very beginning and very end.

I can definitely see why it's a classic: it generally accomplishes what it's trying to do, and it treats its characters and their reality with total unironic seriousness. But it was not what I wanted, alas.

* I finished that Gallaghercest fic at the beginning of April, wrote 100 words for my drabble assignment, and otherwise wrote nothing all month. I keep getting the vague urge to write but without any concrete inspiration.

* Probably doesn't help that I started a new Stardew farm. A week and a half later, I'm most of the way through fall of Year 1, so clearly that's where my time and brain have gone. Oops.

* OTOH I'm so impatient for summerofhorrorexchange, which doesn't even open noms for almost two weeks, that I might start my letter tonight. Current plans include Ready or Not, maybe The Housemaid, maybe Re-Animator.

* The other day I moved over 100 drables and ficlets to a separate AO3 account. The idea was to make me feel a little less overwhelmed by the number of works on my main, but I'm not sure how well that's going to work, given there are still over 300. But in case you're like "where did Snick put all her drabbles?!?" they're here.

* I've been dealing with the existential horrors by buying books. There are worst vices. In the past month or so I've bought more books, mostly used, than in the last year combined. Specifically:
Frisson - museum art exhibition book
A God in the Shed - JF Dubeau
In the Forest of Serre - Patricia McKillip (have now read)
The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington
My Death - Lisa Tuttle (had already read)
Black Light - Elizabeth Hand
Silk - Caitlin Kiernan
Anathem - Neal Stephenson (already read)
Flyaway - Katherine Jennings (already read)
Knock Knock Open Wide - Neil Sharpson (already read)

At some point I was like, shoot, I need to start reading again to justify all these new books. And then I did... and so far it's been nearly all library reading. LOL oh well, that still beats not reading.

I've been to the theater a bunch recently!

(BTW, the reason I see so much in the theater these days is because I have a monthly subscription to one of the big theater chains, which means I get to see basically any movie I want for free. This works out to be worth the cost if I see at least two non-matinee movies a month, which is pretty easy when there's a new horror movie pretty much every weekend.

And between my local chain theater, which has an outsized number of screens for its location and therefore shows a lot of weird indie stuff just to fill space, and the slightly further away indie theater that also by definition shows a lot of weird indie stuff, it turns out I'm able to see just about anything with a 100+ US theater release.)

Over Your Dead Body (2026). Samara Weaving and Jason Segel star as a married couple who go for a weekend at their secluded cabin, each with the intention of killing the other, and are interrupted by the some escaped convicts (including Timothy Olyphant) and their equally unhinged former prison guard (Juliette Lewis).

This particular brand of "people hate each other, comedically" is not really my thing, but a friend wanted to go because the director was involved with Lonely Island, and in fact I had a good time. Samara Weaving is always delightful, and it was fun here to have her using more or less her natural Aussie accent. There were a lot of funny bits, both lines and slapstick. Things get quite gory at the end, in a fun way if you're into that sort of thing. The movie also did some things with nonlinear storytelling that were fun without feeling overly clever.

I will say I could really have done without the extended comedic scene of one of the convicts attempting to rape Segel's character. I also was both unpersuaded by the couple's motivations for wanting to kill each other and not entirely sold how things ended between them.

Still, it wasn't hard to just ride along with where the movie wanted to take me. If you're in the mood for a frothy, kind of mean-spirited comedy with occasional attempts at being heartwarming, you could do worse.

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Hokum (2026). Writer Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is a writer haunted by his mother's death who takes his parents' ashes to the inn in Ireland where they honeymooned, which might be haunted.

This was directed by Damien McCarthy, whose previous movie Oddity I thought was just okay, mostly because I found it overly linear with no surprises. This, on the other hand, has enough moving pieces that it sometimes felt to me like it didn't leave itself enough room to be scary. There are for sure some jump scares and creepy bits, but overall my main interest was in how various plot obstacles would be solved, which, combined with the writer main character, made it all feel a bit Stephen Kingian.

I will say ( spoilers )

Overall I had a good time. The plot is engaging, Scott is great, and McCarthy does a good job of spooling out his plot at just the right pace. I just didn't ever feel a strong emotional connection to it.

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Mother Mary (2026). Troubled pop star Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) goes to her bitter former collaborator and fashion designer Sam (Michaela Coel) for a dress for her first performance in years.

On one level, this movie is absolutely magnetic. Sam is chockful of vitriol, and Coel acts her ass off. Even when other characters are present (all of which are women; I don't think there's a single man with lines), it feels like Sam and Mary are the only characters in the scene. Everything is filmed tight and close and claustrophobic, with dim lighting and lots of shadows. The psychological tension basically doesen't let up for the whole two hours.

All of which is good, because on another level, very little happens in this movie, lol. If you're game for toxic psychological drama between two women, this is For You. If you're not, boy are you going to be bored. The A24 experience!

The movie also has a lot of visual interest. We get to see a ton of Mother Mary's pseudo-religious costumes, some only for a shot or two. There are clips of her concert performances and an extended a capella modern dance sequence. As the movie goes in, the line between flashback and present, between reality and dream, gets thinner and thinner, and the imagery gets ever more surrealistic and dramatic.

On paper, all of this should be my jam. I think the main problem I have with the film is that Sam is borderline unhinged in her fury and resentment, and meanwhile Mary feels so defeated the whole movie, a bedraggled, exhausted person struggling for purpose. The huge difference in their energy makes the whole movie feel unbalanced. This isn't helped by how the source of Sam's all-consuming resentment is basically that Mary stopped answering her texts, or by how despite Mary's dramatic iconography, her actual music that we hear is the most basic, generic, nearly hookless pop music imaginable. (Also I thought it was super funny that when someone quotes the attendance figures at one of Mary's concerts, it turns out she's just playing arenas, not the stadiums one would expect from her supposed stature an artist.)

I think in writing this review, I've talked myself around to liking it more. I'm definitely not mad I watched it, and I really respect the director's ambition, even if it didn't all quite land.