FULL BLEED: NOW NOTHING’S SACRED ANYMORE

Copies of Shadow and Silence have arrived here at Hazeland Central. It’s a big one. 680 or so pages of everything in the setting that’s already been published. I didn’t try to soak you all by including another story and asking you to pay thirty-five bucks for it. What do you think this is? Comics? I at least have a heart. Only thing new is the introduction which I’ll run here. Oh, a nice new cover, if you can find me at a show sometime I’d be happy to give you a cart with that cover art on it. It’s pretty.

Shadow and Silence is likely to be an at-show-only thing. Sure, you can order it from Amazon, but who even will? Nobody. That’s who. But folks who are new into things might want it all between two covers. Sure, I’ll roll those dice.

I’ll likely be at Bloodstone Books in Sacramento on the 6th of September at an event for a local art show, and the cover from Shadow and Silence will be one of the featured pieces. I hope. Print has to get here in time and I gotta find an appropriate frame for it. Or a mounting, something. So if you’re in the area, come on by. I’ll have more details once I get them.

That’s the big work news. Started typing on The Missing Pieces again. Maybe I’ll go from typing to words to sentences to pages eventually, like a primordial slime growing hands and inventing language. I’d like to finish the draft by the end of the year. Was supposed to be end of the summer. Whoops.

Saw Weapons last week. I’d like to say that I’m wrestling with it still, trying to carefully weigh my reaction to it and place it firmly and squarely in the contemporary canon. But that’s really not my job, is it? I mean, I can make my own canon (in that case, 28 Years Later is the best horror film of 2025, Sinners behind that, assuming those are actually horror films – sure, horror on the surface, but didn’t hit quite like horror, particularly 28 Years.) I see online that lots of folks loved Weapons. There was stuff in it I liked, but I don’t think I loved it. And if that’s even a question then you know the answer is “I didn’t love it.”

SPOILERS FOR WEAPONS FOLLOW

I said online that the film wanted to have its cake and eat it too. I’ll expand on that. It wanted to set the action of the film in a place not unlike our place in America. A place where a horrible and heart-wrenching thing happened to 27 families (or was it 17) and by extension, it happened to most of the people in the town. And in reality, it would have happened to the nation. An event as the one described in the film would have caused not just consternation and abnormal focus on said event, but a full-blown moral panic. And we’re treated to a little of that in the opening of the film where the Event happens, then there’s an investigation that goes nowhere because it’s such a mysterious event, then there’s an attempt at closure that goes bad. Got it.

There’s the heart-wrenching thing that happened in reality, a reality we recognize. And it’s over in three weeks or so. Life has to go on. Okay, got it. Only a brave father decides to look over the Ring camera footage of his son’s disappearance. Then he gets that from another family, their Ring camera footage, those perpetual snitches on suburban doors. And from that, he biangulates (tri needing three, naturally) a location where these kids could have gone to. And therein the horror lies.

Only. Only. Only, we’re supposed to believe that not only would these two sources of intelligence on the Event would have been seen then discarded. We’re also supposed to believe that the entire unconscious surveillance mechanism of the small suburban town wouldn’t have been requisitioned into an all-resources-exhausted investigation. The time was there to do it.

I’ve seen Weapons praised for its unconventional structure. Only said structure wasn’t just to give different perspectives on the Event (which it does mostly well, to be clear, so long as you don’t look at the foundation of these events too closely.) The structure was there to hide the fact that the timeline really doesn’t work at all. Not if you want to set this kind of story in 2025 America with Ring cameras on everyone’s doors. However, it’s real good at hiding the fact that any police investigation of the one kid who was somehow not disappeared in the Event, the one kid in that classroom who has parents who would have been interrogated but couldn’t have been because they were vegetables under a spell cast by magic evil granny Pennyworth. Yeah, that shifting structure is good at that.

It’s good at hiding the fact of the principal of the school suddenly killing his husband and running alllllll the way across suburbia to try and kill another central figure in the (should have been) investigation, only to die a grisly death. No, that thread wouldn’t have been pulled on immediately. Nope. Uh uh. We don’t live in that world.

I get it. Without these things happening, there’s not much movie as it was presented. It simply couldn’t happen. You can’t dip into the anguished trauma of the town and get the unwinding horror right at the end because it wouldn’t have held up. I know, bummer.

So what am I to do? Look, in horror and fantasy film, I already am handing out mulligans for “this is magic and couldn’t happen.” That’s the fun part. In my own work I’m all into that. I know the physics of this world and the one we more or less share aren’t compatible. That’s the fun of fiction. Hell, I’ve even baked in things like why the police don’t really go after these events and how they’re just there to wallpaper reality when it’s been broken.

But in Weapons we’re meant to accept this crazy magic from Pennyworth Grandma. That’s fine. Okay, there’s your one. You don’t even have to explain it. I get it. Magic sticks and hair, fetishes, standard sympathetic magic. I know, you’re not going to tell me or show me that Pennyworth Grandma is actually siphoning energy from her thralls, not even just make her more vital and energetic, just it’s her thing. Just like it’s her thing to appear in zero-stakes dream sequences of people with whom she’s had zero contact. She’s Pennyworth Grandma. Okay, she’s a weird magical being. I’ll even let that go.

But when you go out of the way to establish the setting as, Our World Only With Pennyworth Grandma (and I will not get tired of typing that), then, well, I’m going to expect the setting to respond as I know the setting would, with an absolute moral panic around an event like this. With the survivor’s zombie parents being uncovered and Pennyworth Grandma being cornered in some other way. A very different kind of movie.

This isn’t to say Weapons is bad. It’s not. There’s lots of genuinely creepy stuff going on. The end sequence is amazing, frenetic, visceral. The end saves it from me being actually angry with it. As it stands, I just treat it like another overworked piece whose sleight-of-hand actually got in the way of things, or rather, couldn’t deliver what it promised. Had it gone for “this is taking place in the immediate aftermath,” that’s another thing and might’ve worked better.

I know. I shouldn’t pick on plot holes, or even plot sinkholes. But if I’m given time and opportunity to think of them (while, I’ll add, the movie is actually running before me for the first time), then something fell short. Just missed. It didn’t work. I didn’t love it. Because maybe the hole wasn’t a hole so much as a major structural issue. I dunno.

I know. Let people enjoy things.

The film still has some interesting things to say, but you gotta work at it. There’s a lot of characters making just really dumbass decisions, and that includes Pennyworth Grandma, at least in terms of keeping her own hide out of trouble. But hey, she’s a magical being and not just a weird family relative. She’s a psychic cuckoo or something. I guess we’ll find out in the prequel. Yay.

So, color me a hater, or at least not wowed by the formalist trickery at work. But then I’ve always been kind of a caveman and plot and execute stuff mostly in a linear fashion because it by the Maker better work or it will be fucking obvious and there is not any place to hide it. None. Zero. It’s like nigiri sushi. It’s fish on rice. It better all be great. There nothing else to distract you from it not being great.

But hey, it bothered me far less than an article I saw with a lede about “player complicity in videogames” which sounds like a really smart, I mean just super-smart thing to talk about. That’s some poststructuralist critique right there! Brilliant! Complicity in events that aren’t real. A fiction. In a setting where player agency is a… troubling subject. I mean, sure, you can opt not to shoot any of the zombies in that zombie-shooting game. Not much of a game then, and you’re not going to find a way to reverse things. That’s a different game, sign out front etc etc.

Okay, right. That’s enough of all that. Discourse is. It’s its own reward and purpose. Just like clapback videos between critics on YouTube. None of that makes anyone smarter or more edified. Just racks up more clicks and likes and subscribes. Only YouTube profits. YouTube is.

Until next time, folks.