Bev Vincent

Where the hell did February go? We even got an extra day this year and still…gone. Finito.

So, what’s new? Well, on September, 2024 I’ll have a new book on shelves…bookstore shelves and library shelves, if all goes according to plan. We have produced a new edition of my latest book that is aimed at young adult readers. So many teens begin their adult reading journeys with authors like King. It seemed like a good idea to create an edition specifically for them. My publisher hired an editor who has worked in the young adult field for a number of years to refine the text and to focus the book on teens.

For many young readers, when the last page of Goosebumps is turned, the first chapter of Pet Sematary begins, and a world of terror crafted by Stephen King is revealed. His novels are as fascinating as his life, and in this ultimate illustrated guidebook, young readers explore the cultural phenomenon and legacy of the King of Horror.

From scare-seeking child to impoverished university student to struggling schoolteacher to one of the best-selling—and most recognizable—authors of all time, this engrossing book reveals the evolution and influences of Stephen King’s body of work over his nearly 50-year career, and how the themes of his writing reflect the changing times and events within his life. With tons of photos, approachable bite-size sections, and gripping details to captivate young readers. Young adults will covet this comprehensive yet accessible reference to their favorite horror author.

They asked me if I could find a librarian or someone similar to write a foreword for this edition. In a moment of inspiration, I remembered Sarah-Jane Smith, the Sussex (New Brunswick) high school teacher who was part of a year-long (and ultimately successful) campaign to get Stephen King to visit their school in 2012. (You can read more about that here.) She’s no longer at Sussex Regional High School but I was able to track her down and ask if she’d be interested in writing something for the book. She was! I haven’t yet read her foreword, but I’m very much looking forward to seeing what she wrote.

Pre-orders are available everywhere books are sold. You can find all the links here.

In the fiction department, I’m off to a decent start to 2024:

• Somebody’s Watching, (I Just) Died In Your Arms: Crime Fiction Inspired by One-Hit Wonders, Volume I, January 2024
• Payback, The Killing Rain, April 2024
• Houston, We Have a Problem, Private Dicks and Disco Balls, May 6, 2024

I’ve done a few interviews this year, one of which almost didn’t happen. The initial request from ABC Overnights in Australia went into the spam folder on my hotmail account, which I never look at because I have my messages autoforwarded to gmail. But I was having trouble getting a 2factor authorization email for my antivirus software, so I looked in that folder and…voila! It had arrived the previous day. It was really fun to do a live radio interview (with someone who was on the other side of the world). You can listen to that one here. Two haven’t yet appeared—one will be in print in a magazine written in English for Spanish-speakers who want to learn English, which is a very cool concept. Speaking of Spanish, I was interviewed for Restaurant de la Mente: El mundo de Stephen King, which you can watch here.

We’ve seen some excellent movies already this year. Maestro was the first, a fantastic performance by Carey Mulligan, who is really the focus of the film. We enjoyed Oppenheimer and wouldn’t have cut a moment from it. Barbie was fun, but perhaps not as impactful as I’d hoped. The Holdovers was terrific and we also enjoyed the musical remake of The Color Purple.

The best TV series I’ve watched so far this year is season 5 of Fargo, perhaps the best season of the show. Just terrific. Recently saw the first season of The Tourist, which I’m calling Fargo Down Under. It’s quite unsentimental about its characters. A lot of them die in shocking ways. I binged all three seasons of Slow Horses and can’t wait for the next. Criminal Record was worth watching if only to see Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi go head-to-head. I liked the Spanish series Bitter Daisies (where I learned the word “margarita” means “daisy”), two seasons of the French series Black Spot, and Monsieur Spade, which puts Sam Spade in southern France many years after the events of The Maltese Falcon. I’m currently watching the Swedish series Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes, which is an interesting take on a popular trope.

Recently finished: Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay. Currently reading Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly, Owning Up by George Pelecanos, Trust by Hernan Diaz and Carrie by Stephen King.

The interview that almost wasn’t: Beyond Horror: The Enduring Impact of Stephen King. I was interviewed by Tim Webster for the Overnights show on Australian public radio. Webster is a self-avowed fan of King’s work and was a knowledgeable interviewer. We spent a pleasant half hour chatting about all things King at 3:30 am local time. Apparently people are awake at that hour, as the producer reported they received a number of texts during the live broadcast. The interview almost didn’t happen because the initial email from the producer went into my hotmail spam folder. I have message autoforwarding set up on that account so I never, ever look at the account. Never. Except I was having trouble receiving a two-factor authorization email from my antivirus software account, so I checked there. Sure enough, there was the 2FA email and, lo and behold, from the previous day, the invitation to be interviewed. So thanks, McAfee!

We’ve seen a couple of good movies this week. Two nights ago we watched The Holdovers, with Paul Giamatti as a bitter teacher of ancient history at an all-boy’s prep school, where he himself was a student. His boss is a former student. that’s how long he’s been there. He has high expectations of the students, which means he’s harsh and uncompromising. He’s hated by students and fellow faculty alike. As punishment for his unwillingness to bend, he’s assigned to stay on campus for the two-week winter vacation with a group of students who have no place to go for the holidays. No one wants to be there, and shenanigans ensue. It’s one of those heartwarming movies where everyone discovers that if you find out things about other people, you might reconsider how you treat them…and how you behave in general. That’s not a bad thing. Carrie Preston (The Good Wife/Fight) has a nice small role as a possible love interest. Well worth watching.

Last night, we hunkered down for three hours with Oppenheimer. We’d had a chance to watch it with our daughter and son-in-law over the holidays, but they didn’t start until 9 pm, intending to spread it over two nights. We decided to skip it then—and they couldn’t find a good stopping place, so they watched the whole thing through midnight. I can’t remember the last time I was up at midnight. We even celebrated east-coast New Years at 9 pm in California! We got a much earlier start last night. It’s an intense film—we probably wouldn’t have wanted to stop halfway through, either. I know a lot of the characters from my years studying chemistry, including Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, and Edward Teller, but I only knew the Trinity project in broad strokes. It’s not a heavy science movie (although knowing about enriched uranium and heavy water adds a little to the understanding)…mostly about all the security issues Oppenheimer had because of his left-wing views and the people he associated with in the thirties and forties. Robert Downey, Jr. is the surprise “villain” of the piece, a man with thin skin and high political aspirations who takes umbrage over a perceived slight that had nothing to do with him at all. Definitely worth watching.

I watched 49 movies in 2023, either with my wife or by myself. None were in a theater—we haven’t ventured to the cinema since 1917 or, rather, 1917, the Mendes war film. Here is the complete list, if you’re interested. Here, in the order in which we watched them, are my top ten:

• She Said (Peacock)
• The Menu (HBO Max)
• Living (Amazon)
• Flamin’ Hot (Hulu)
• No One Will Save You (Hulu)
• Flora and Son (Apple TV+)
• The Burial (Amazon)
• Past Lives (Amazon)
• Nyad (Netflix)
• A Million Miles Away (Amazon)

As usual, I watched a lot of TV series last year. I binged Death in Paradise S8-12, Columbo S6-10, Lupin S1-3, Annika S1-2, The Bay S1-4, Wisting S1-3, Wilder S1-2, Above Suspicion S1-4, The Gulf S1-2, Dark Winds S1-2, Succession S1-4, Enemi Public S1-2, One Lane Bridge S1-3 and Haven S1-5. My wife and I watched all the episodes of The Prisoner and are on a complete rewatch of M*A*S*H in sequence, currently in season 6.

Regular shows I/we watched included All Creatures Great and Small, Survivor, The Amazing Race, Call the Midwife, Doctor Who and Great British Baking Show. I rewatched season one of Yellowjackets before watching the second season, which was a good decision. I also revisited the first season of True Detective, which will probably be a good primer for the upcoming fourth season. That season remains brilliant and I think binge-ing makes a lot of things clearer to me that were fuzzy the first time around.

Caught the most recent (and occasionally final) seasons of After Life, Picard, Perry Mason, Staged, Grace, The Mandalorian, The Tower, From, Beef, Barry, Manifest, Happy Valley, Ted Lasso, The Bear, Family Law, Good Omens, The Morning Show and Shetland.

Of the new series I/we watched last year, these are my favorites, in no particular order.:

• Deadloch (Amazon)
• Daisy Jones and The Six (Amazon)
• The Rig (Amazon)
• The Last of Us (HBO Max)
• Poker Face (Peacock)
• Dear Edward (Apple TV+)
• Shrinking (Apple TV+)
• The Diplomat (Netflix)
• Black Butterflies (Netflix)
• Rabbit Hole (Amazon)
• The Night Agent (Netflix)
• Silo (Apple TV+)
• Hijack (Apple TV+)
• The Changeling (Apple TV+)

I’m trying to get back in the swing of things after a two-week vacation visiting family in northern California. That’s the longest I’ve been away from home in a long, long time. It’d been a year and a half since the last time we took a flight and I was a little anxious about flying during the holidays, but everything went pretty smoothly. Our outbound journey got us in to SFO early, our bag was among the first down the chute, we caught the inter-terminal train to the BART station, and our train arrived just as we got there, so it was nice.

On the return flight, we were delayed a bit. Our plane was parked at the airport overnight, but someone forgot to clean and service it, so it was late being tugged to the gate. Then they had a hard time finding cleaners, and the catering was under-serviced (according to the grumbling staff). Still, we didn’t have a connection to worry about, unlike many others on the flight, so we weren’t all that put out. When we landed, the crew asked for people to remain seated so passengers at the back of the plane with a close connection could deplane and make their next flight. Did everyone comply? No, of course not. If anything, it was the slowest deplaning process I’ve ever seen.

People.

I stumbled upon an interesting TV series on the flights. Six episodes of a show called Full Circle on Max, starring Claire Danes and Timothy Olyphant as married parents living in style in Manhattan because her dad has become a celebrity chef. There’s a kidnapping plot orchestrated by a Guianian syndicate led by a woman (CCH Pounder) who thinks she needs to lift a curse on her family. The kidnapping goes sideways but, in the process, it exposes some long-held secrets by both parents. Directed by Steven Soderbergh with Randy Quaid as the celeb chef and William Sadler as his brother. I liked it. Watched three episodes on each flight.

We did so. many. jigsaw puzzles! My three-year-old grandson had spilled a stack of puzzles, so some of the pieces got intermingled. We had to assemble them to figure out which pieces went with which puzzle, which was a bit of a challenge. One puzzle had unique pieces (matted front, distinctive backside color), so it was easy to sort them out, but for the others we just had to put them together. We had as many as three going at once! At the end, we had one complete puzzle, one missing a single piece and another missing a few pieces. My daughter advertised in a group on Facebook and was able to borrow some other puzzles, so we always had one going.

I thought I’d get some reading done while on vacation, but that didn’t work out. I received a couple of novels for Christmas (the latest from Grisham and Connelly) but they’re still unopened. The grandkids kept us busy and entertained. We watched a lot of Muppet movies and a couple of Diary of a Wimpy Kid films. My daughter rented the Taylor Swift concert movie, too—she and our granddaughter went to one of the California shows.

We also watched some football games. My son-in-law comes from a Michigan family, so there was intense interest in the Rose Bowl. He flew down to L.A. and attended the game with his parents. It was a real nail-biter. The championship game is tonight in Houston. He’s not here for that one, but I’m sure he’s nervously watching it on TV.

Despite not reading anything during the final two weeks of the year, it was a pretty good year for reading. In 2022, I read 37 books but last year I managed 57. Several were books I read to my wife, including a batch of King novels. If you’re interested, you can see the full list here.

Here are my top ten titles in no particular order:

• The Deluge by Stephen Markley
• Holly by Stephen King
• All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby
• The Ferryman by Justin Cronin
• A Better World by Sarah Langan
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
• An Honest Man by Michael Koryta
• Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
• Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott
• Where I End by Sophie White

It’s quite a diverse batch. I only finished the Garmus book a couple of days ago so it became the first title on the 2024 list, too.

Of the books I read, I reviewed ten:

• City on Fire by Don Winslow
• Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott
• City of Dreams by Don Winslow
• The Deluge by Stephen Markley
• The Golden Spoon by Jessa Maxwell
• Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane
• Forever Home by Graham Norton
• Where I End by Sophie White
• The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder by Lawrence Block
• The Longmire Defense by Craig Johnson

I’m already into my third book for 2024 (only one of them complete thus far). Time, too, to start another jigsaw puzzle!

The year 2023 is almost at an end and we’re staring down the barrel of 2024, which looks like it may be an “interesting” one, in the Chinese curse sense of the word. I find it instructive to listen to or read interviews from decades in the past (even stand-up comic routines) in which people talk about how terrible things are at the moment and I have to wonder When Will There Be Good News? (to purloin the title of a fine novel by Kate Atkinson. It’s all relative, isn’t it?

Didn’t go very far this year. We had a couple of vacations at our favorite rental house in Surfside Beach, once for each of our birthdays. The latter was a working vacation—we didn’t take time off from work and were at our respective computers during the daytime, but with the sound of the surf and the beautiful vistas in the background. I could do that again! While I was there, I reread The Stand for the first time in years and established a detailed timeline of the book for the short story I’d been invited to write for the Stand-inspired anthology edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keen. We prepared most of our meals—although we had a few at the nearby beach-front restaurant—did a jigsaw puzzle (there were a dozen pieces missing from it!), and watched old shows on MeTV in the evenings.

I do have plans for a couple of trips in the coming days, including attending Chris Golden’s House of Last Resort Weekend in January. I don’t look forward to the travel part of these events, but I am looking forward to seeing people I haven’t been with in over four years.

I’m still writing every day, although my day job has been encroaching on my weekends this past month or so. I also decided to learn some Spanish and now have a 75-day streak on Duolingo. After living in Texas for over 30 years, I figured it was time.

Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life and Influences is now or soon will be available in eight languages (other than English): Croatian, Italian, Czech, German, Polish, Spanish, Hungarian and Japanese. It’s been a lot of fun seeing the book get some press in other languages. For example, the Czech edition is featured in the December issue of Pevnost magazine. Maybe I’ll be able to read the Spanish edition one day.

The English edition is still a #1 bestseller in the category of Horror & Supernatural Literary Criticism. It was also nominated for a Locus Award. There’s a “discount” edition available if you have an Ollie’s Bargain Outlet in your area—it has a different cover, which is kinda cool. Be on the lookout for news concerning a new edition that should be available in late 2024.

This was a good year for short story publications, with an even dozen appearing in anthologies and magazines. They run the gamut from crime to horror to science fiction to fantasy.

1. Life Saver, Still of Winter, February 2023
2. A Girl and Her Dog, Shortwave Magazine, Feb 8, 2023
3. Chapter 2, Sunny Pines (round robin novella), Cemetery Dance Publications, March 2023
4. The River Heights Ripper, Black Cat Weekly #84, April 2023
5. Crocodile Tears, More Groovy Gumshoes, Down and Out Books, April 2023
6. His Father’s Son, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2023
7. Freya Goes Viral, Mirrors Reflecting Shadows, July 29, 2023
8. Grand-Père’s Last Transmission, Rhapsody of the Spheres, Third Flatiron Publishing, August 15, 2023
9. Jurisdiction, The Perfectly Fine Neighborhood, September 2023
10. Turning to Stone, Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, Vol. 8, Hellbound Books, 2023
11. Gemini, Mickey Finn Volume 4, December 11, 2023
12. Helen Wheels, The Binge-Watching Cure III, Claren Books, December 16, 2023

I have several more in the queue for 2024 already as well (plus nearly another dozen in submission). I may taper off writing stories to concentrate on longer fiction next year. I have a very rough draft of “The Dead of Night” for Dissonant Harmonies II with Brian Keene and notes and a couple of chapters for a novel that I want to tackle starting in January.

In addition to a couple of columns and reviews at News from the Dead Zone, I published three essays this year:

• Graham Joyce’s The Tooth Fairy, The Stephen Kingdom BOO!k Club, October 30, 2023
• Facing Reality, Something is Going to Happen, EQMM, June 8, 2023
• The Long Walk: An Introduction in Three Parts, The Long Walk, Centipede Press, 2023

I did my regular year-end roundup for the next Stephen King Catalog/Annual from the Overlook Connection, too.

I also took part in several podcasts/interviews:

• Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla Palaver – Dark Tower Radio Episode 138 (November 20, 2023)
• Happy Goat Horror (October 8, 2023)
• The Cemetery Dance Interview: Bev Vincent Revisited (March 17, 2023)
• Constant Writers (February 22, 2023)
• Dark Bites (January 20, 2023)

Brian Keene and Christopher Golden announced (finally!) the anthology they are co-editing: The End of the World as We Know it – Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand. Brian has been hinting about this project for some time, under the code name Operation Walkabout. The list of invited contributors is quite impressive: Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Richard Chizmar, S. A. Cosby, Tananarive Due, Alma Katsu, Caroline Kepnes, Michael Koryta, Scott Ian, Joe R. Lansdale, Maurice Broaddus and Wayne Brady, Bryan Smith, Somer Canon, Hailey Piper, Jonathan Janz and others, including yours truly.

Last month, when my wife and I were on a working vacation at Surfside Beach, I reread The Stand for the first time in a number of years. While doing so, I prepared a detailed, day-by-day chronology of the events in that book. King does a really good job of keeping track of the passage of time. I wanted to make sure my story blended in with the known timeline. My tale has been written and is now in the hands of the editors, awaiting their feedback. I had to pitch them my idea and they seemed quite happy with it. Hopefully they are equally happy with the end result.

King isn’t contributing a story to the anthology—nor are the two editors—but there will be an introduction from King. For those who’ve asked, this is going to be released by one of the big publishers, probably late in 2024. I haven’t heard that there will be any special editions, but it’s early days, so stay tuned!

On October 1, I pulled out a new moleskine journal and began writing “The Dead of Night,” the follow-up novella to “The Dead of Winter,” which appears in Dissonant Harmonies, a two-story collection from Brian Keene and me. I’ve added to it every day—some days more than others—and I’m up to 75 hand-written pages, which means I should probably think about wrapping it up fairly soon. I can only guess the word count. I figure it’s somewhere around 20,000 words. True to my mandate, I have been listening exclusively to the playlist Brian prepared for me, which you can find here. I have to say, the story has taken me in some surprising directions. I’m just thankful that each day, when I sit down to write, more of the story rolls out from wherever these things come from.

Other publication news:

My story “Turning to Stone” appears in the new anthology Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, Vol. 8. It’s a monstrous mosh of fallen angels, prepubescent prescience, tempestuous incest, intergalactic blues, a Gulliverian massacre, cynophile racists, murderous rodents, a prehistoric Devil Head, the return of Bram Stoker’s forgotten hero, and so much more…featuring stories from Joe R. Lansdale, Emma E. Murray, Jae Mazer, Bret McCormick, Madison Estes, Chris Miller, James H. Longmore, Jonathan Louis Duckworth, Robert Stahl, Matt Micheli, Elford Alley, Iphigenia Strangeworth, Jacob Austin, R. L. Olvitt, Lawrence Buentello, Tom Bont, and E. R. Bills. And me.

I was interviewed by Kayleigh Dobbs in conjunction with the publication of The Perfectly Fine Neighborhood anthology, which contains my story “Jurisdiction.”

Recent TV series: Dear Child, a German series on Netflix that reminded me a bit of the Brie Larson movie Room, but only a bit. I watched Rose Red, which I don’t think I’ve seen since it first aired. Some really fine performances, although the square aspect ratio really makes it seem creaky and old. I’ve been enjoying the French crime series Lupin on Netflix, too. My wife and I have been watching old M*A*S*H episodes. We’re up to season 3 now.

I almost passed on The Boogeyman, but now that it’s on Hulu I checked it out and I quite enjoyed it. I don’t know why it took such a critical drubbing. I couldn’t get into the Pet Sematary prequel, though. It just didn’t work for me at all. My wife and I watched Flora and Son (Apple TV+) and The Burial (Amazon) with Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx, both quite good. I took a trip down nostalgia lane to watch Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe (Amazon). He, Casey and Finnegan were omnipresent in my youth.

I finished A Better World by Sarah Langan and Thirteen At Dinner by Agatha Christie, and we’re almost to the end of The Longmire Defense by Craig Johnson. I’m also reading The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie, which I remember much better than the other Christies I’ve read lately.

Months go by in the blink of an eye. I could blog more. I should blog more. And yet there never seems enough time. It’s not like I don’t have news to share—there’s always something going on that I might consider newsworthy. And yet. And yet.

Like the fact that the German edition of my latest book, Stephen King: Sein Werk, sein Leben, seine Inspiration, published earlier this month, has already gone into a second printing. I have frequently heard from German fans of King’s work that books about King are rarely translated into German. This edition was done by a Swiss publisher and it is apparently selling quite well. The Czech, Polish, Spanish and Hungarian editions also came out recently, with the Japanese translation pending. I have the eight editions currently available lined up on a shelf and they make a handsome set, it must be said. I find it interesting that certain publishers have decided to put the title one way on the spine and others go for the reverse.

Some recent short story publications:

• “His Father’s Son” appeared in the July/August issue of EQMM.
• “Freya Goes Viral” is now available in the charity anthology Mirrors Reflecting Shadows
• “Grand-Père’s Last Transmission” was published in the anthology Rhapsody of the Spheres
• “Jurisdiction” is in the anthology A Perfectly Fine Neighborhood, out now.

My 2022 story “Death Sentence,” published in Black Cat Weekly #51 was one of the “Other Distinguished Mystery and Suspense” stories mentioned in the 2022 anthology The Best American Mystery and Suspense, edited by Jess Walter and Steph Cha.

My essay “Living in a Web of Mystery,” which appeared in the limited edition hardcover Reading Stephen King (2017) is becoming available again in a new value-priced trade paperback edition that will be out in November.

What else have I been working on lately? I turned in a draft of a short story to an anthology to which I was invited to submit. The anthology hasn’t been announced yet, but it’s really cool and I hope the editors like what I sent them. I currently have about a dozen other stories in submission, which is about the norm. I have a couple more I’d like to try to write before I turn my attention back to a novel I started a few months ago but have neglected in the interim. I’d also like to carve out some time to write a novella for Dissonant Harmonies II. Then, when I was working on an essay for a project that also hasn’t yet been announced, I stumbled upon a phrase that seems ideal as a short story title…all I have to do is figure out what the story is that goes with it!

We got our COVID shots on Friday afternoon, along with our flu shots. It was quite a mis-adventure. The closest pharmacy that had the Moderna vaccine was six miles away. That probably doesn’t sound far, but we’re used to going to the one that’s less than a mile away. We had a reservation for 4:15 pm but when we got there it seemed obvious that things weren’t going according to plan. There were a lot of people sitting around and standing around waiting. For some reason, my wife’s flu shot wasn’t in their system, so that required a lot of fussing around. Then, because of the unexpectedly high demand, they ran short of the Moderna vaccine and had to get more out of the fridge, which meant a long wait for it to come to room temperature. We finally got our shots done by 5:45.

It was a little difficult to sleep that night because both arms were sore at the injection sites, which made it hard to pick a side to sleep on. The flu shot arm recovered quickly, but the Moderna side remained quite sore all the following day. Now, about 36 hours after the shot, it’s only a little tender. My wife tends to react worse to these shots and felt achy most of yesterday.

We haven’t watched a lot of movies lately—mostly TV—but yesterday was a three-movie day as we lounged about in our post-vaccination malaise. First, I watched No One Will Save You on Hulu (my wife doesn’t care for scary movies). This one is an alien invasion film starring Kaitlyn Dever, who I first knew from Justified. She plays a young woman living alone in the family house, ostracized by her community for reasons. Then, one night, the aliens come and she has to fight for her life while some of her neighbors are possessed by X-Files-esque grays with awesome powers. The kind of aliens that Whitley Streiber wrote about. The film’s gimmick is that there is virtually no dialog, even in places where it would make sense for the character to say something, even to herself. I’m not sure that was necessary—the movie would have been just fine if people said things. Her character is feisty, ingenious and resilient. The ending has sparked some controversy and discussions—it took me a while to figure out exactly what it meant and whether or not I liked it. Ultimately, I think I do, but it sure does go in an oddball direction. All-in-all, definitely worth checking out.

Then we watched Moving On (also on Hulu) starring a virtually unrecognizable (to me, at least) Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Malcolm McDowell and Richard Roundtree. Fonda plays a woman who’s longtime friend has just passed away. At the viewing, she announces to the new widow that she’s going to kill him. She then tries to get her other friend (Tomlin) in on the plan. Tomlin, playing her usual pithy, sarcastic character, has most of the best lines. Roundtree plays Fonda’s first ex-husband. Of course, things don’t go as planned, and decades-old secrets are revealed. The humor is dark, but it’s always fun to see these legends on the screen.

Finally, we watched Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which was every bit as fun as I hoped it would be. I’d avoided most of the spoilers (except for the cameo at the very end). I absolutely did not recognize Antonio Banderas. At all. But I did pick out Boyd Holbrook from the new Justified series. Raiders of the Lost Ark was one of the first movies I purchased on VHS when it became available in late ’83. It cost something like $40, if I recall.

I took a one-month subscription to AMC+ which also got me Sundance/Now and access to a batch of interesting crime series, many of which I’d never heard of before. Dark Winds, based on the Tony Hillerman novels, was what got me there in the first place. A very good interpretation of his Leaphorn/Chee stories, set in the seventies. Glad to hear it’s been renewed. Then I stumbled on Wisting, a Finnish crime series that I quite liked. I knew about Des, starring David Tenant as a real-life serial killer, but this was the first time I got to see it. Also quite good. I found a couple of New Zealand crime series with multiple seasons: The Gulf, set on an island, and One Lane Bridge, which features a Maori cop who has special skills and a seemingly cursed bridge. The Light in the Hall is a good Welsh crime series about a decades-old murder, and The Cry, starring Jenna Colman, has plenty of twists and turns. I almost quit Deadloch after fifteen minutes because it was so crude and over-the-top, but I’m glad I stuck with it, as the characters grew on me and the story is well conceived.

I liked Hijack on Apple TV+ (hard to go wrong with Idris Elba). I rewatched season 1 of Yellowjackets as a preamble to the second season. It helped me eliminate a lot of my confusion about who was who in the different eras. Justified: City Primeval was a different creature from its predecessor and I think it suffered from the lack of those old, familiar faces, but I enjoyed it, and was amused to learn that the actress who played Raylan’s daughter was Olyphant’s daughter.

Currently watching: The Changeling on Apple TV+ and random episodes of early M*A*S*H.

Currently reading The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning by Peter J. Hotez and a forthcoming novel by Sarah Langan. Also reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin to my wife. Just finished Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie because the new Kenneth Branagh Poirot film is loosely based on it. Very loosely, it seems, based on the trailer. It’s not one of Christie’s finest, I have to say. It has an interesting germ of a story (a young girl announces to a large group of people that she once saw a murder, only she didn’t realize that’s what it was at the time. A few hours later, the girl is murdered) but it’s quite repetitive and Christie shoehorns in a lot of Greek mythology that seems forced. I do look forward to seeing A Haunting in Venice, though.