misericordiae

Absolutely agreed. The narrative makes choices in a few places, and some of the second half seems kind of muddled.

That's about where I started to lose interest, too. So much of the interesting world-building is in that first part, before it decides to turn into a heist novel.

I'm desperately trying to finish Neuromancer by William Gibson so I can move on to spooky season books. It's not bad at all, I'm just not really clicking with it, so it's been slow going.

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Finished Death in the Spires by K.J. Charles, a two-timeline mystery focusing on the unsolved murder of a member of a group of friends at Oxford. The author normally writes steamy romances, but this tastefully cut to black before anything got explicit. Something about the writing or story made it a very enjoyable, fast read; I haven't devoured anything so quickly in ages.

Bingo squares: New Release; Disability Representation (hard); LGBTQIA+ Lead (hard); It's About Time (hard); Mashup; Institutional; (alt) A Change in Perspective

Only adult one I can think of is Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams (cats). There's a ton of these for kids, though; here's a few I've read:

• Redwall series by Brian Jacques (forest critters; I found it repetitive after the first few, but ymmv)
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien (rats)
• Stewart Little by E.B. White (mouse)
• Charlotte's Web by by E.B. White (pig)

Edit: Sorry, I derped on the scifi/fantasy/action aspect of the request; the E.B. White books don't fall into that category.

Yeah, it definitely looks a bit low budget, but I can forgive that if it gets everything else right enough.

[email protected] is excellent.

I think it's still worth seeing if you like Caveat, especially since it seems to be a shared universe (the bunny has a brief cameo). I maybe just set my expectations too high going in.

I wanted to see this thing in motion, so I tried to search up the youtube video, but no dice. Every article on it is just copy-pasted from the original on the Express site, and I can't get the embedded video attached to it to work. I did find an article on NIWA's site about a species of sea pig, which looks similar.

I think my parents have a copy of this (or something that looks very similar)! Not sure anyone's actually made anything from it, though. Really unique design.

Watched Oddity most recently. The writer/director's previous movie, Caveat, had a super ridiculous premise, but some excellent tension at the end, so I was hoping Oddity would be a good evolution of that. Turned out to be kind of a mixed bag, imo, but I didn't dislike it.

I thought the bones of the plot of Longlegs were cool, but found some of the execution (Longlegs himself, and the uh... method) to be jarringly goofy. Liked the first half and the atmosphere, though.

they added an element of authenticity and sheer terror

1. Longlegs - Longlegs (2024)

I can only assume the writer either has very different taste in horror from me/us, or we've been (not so) cunningly been sucked into engagement bait. Include the movie on a list of modern horror? Sure. I had some issues with it, but whatever. Longlegs himself, though? Oof.