Modern science fiction authors, realising that they have yet to receive their flying cars and that their electric cars are distributed by a libellous megalomanic Bond villain, have set their sights on the most vaguely obtainable goal: Mars. In No Way, the sequel to One Way, S.J. Morden revisits Frank Kittridge moments after he became the last man standing on the red planet. One Way is a damning indictment of capitalism's propensity to ruin everything, so it's no surprise that a corporation would be so bold as to try to get the jump on our second nearest neighbour.

There was a time when George RR Martin was a somewhat prolific writer. Before he was sitting on a large pile of money and an even larger writer's block, Martin wrote a little bit of everything: short stories about psychic rats; novels about Southern vampires long before Sookie Stackhouse; a fantasy history of a fake band. Nightflyers is his psychic science fantasy horror novella. 

It's a wonder that there aren't more fake oral histories in the world. For the enterprising author, it's an excuse to not have to write prose sentences. Taylor Jenkins Reid's Daisy Jones & the Six is not lazy, but its format makes it zippy enough to destroy almost immediately upon opening its covers.

This entry does not contain spoilers for the content of Pet Sematary, but it does address the overall tone of the piece, which, to some people, amounts to the same thing. You have been warned about this 36 year old terror.

Stephen King has that weird sort of luck: terrible things happen to him but they're not as bad as they could have been, or terrible things almost happen to him and they turn into one of his bestsellers, even though he doesn't like the finished product. Though King's personal life is now largely defined by his car accident, back in 1979 young Owen King almost got killed by a truck while the King family lived between a busy road and a Pet Sematary. It did a number on King's psyche, and thus Pet Sematary was born — a book that is too dark and too real for him to enjoy, published largely out of a contractual obligation. Where your standard King novel up to this point (and, admittedly, a few were skipped by this reader to get to Pet Sematary in time for the movie adaptation) offers some degree of hope, regardless of how many terrible events occur between their pages, Pet Sematary is largely a black hole. Abandon all hope ye who inter here.

Happy Death Day was one of the best genre subversions of 2016, and it did so well at the box office that it took less than 18 months for a sequel to come out. Far from being a rush job, Happy Death Day 2 U is a fresh new movie that makes one of the best moves a sequel can: the total genre shift.

A quantum murder comedy with a great promotion of a bit character from the first, Happy Death Day 2 U is fresh, funny, and wild as heck.

Read the full review of Happy Death Day 2 U on Trespass.

The Vietnam War, Watergate, the existence of Richard M. Nixon, the Cold War and basically anything overtly political in the wake of World War II bred a healthy distrust of the US Government. Whenever something even vaguely good or hopeful eventuated, like a fresh faced Kennedy with an impenetrably thick accent, it got shot down. It is through all of this that Stephen King brought us Firestarter at the turn of the eighties, just before Ronald Reagan came along to Make America Great Again for the first time, a legacy being paid for … with interest … in the modern era.

Firestarter is the sort of novel that, were it not presented in the traditional King "bestseller with depth” format, is both written and read under the safety of a tinfoil hat. In the world of Firestarter, and our own Keystone Earth, governments are capable of great evil. But in King's world, evil produces tangible results.

Stephen King's fifth novel was published eleven months after The Stand, which towered even in its original abridged form. The Dead Zone is a mere half the length, but it takes longer to get somewhere. Some King novels you're under the spell of at the time, and others you receive in retrospect. The Dead Zone is a novel that exists on the periphery — in its own Dead Zone — and defies expectations. It runs with some themes that are already recurring in King's work, and introduces the embryos of ideas that will bear such fruit as one could scarcely imagine.