The Expanse is back. It may have been delayed four months, but four months is as nothing when you realise that fifty years of story time have passed since Leviathan Wakes was published in 2011. Tiamat's Wrath is the second entry in the third and theoretically final trilogy in the series, but it is not a bridge, it's a ramp: everything is dialled up to eleven in anticipation of book nine, and things are ready to explode. Tiamat's Wrath takes the reader on a wild, crushing journey, and is sure to upset devoted followers for all the right reasons.

If the measure of a movie is how much you think about it afterwards, Us is the finest film of 2019. It’s the sort of movie that rewards repeat viewing, because it is packed with details that you’re guaranteed not to pick up on the first time around.

The following review isn’t entirely accurate: it claims that Us is largely humourless. This was written through the haze of the sheer anxiety and panic that a first run through can provoke in someone (ie me) trying to grasp exactly what is happening. It’s pretty funny at times, and not just because it has Tim Heidecker in it.

More than that, Us is a painstakingly constructed film that contains elements of horror, but realistically it’s a complete experience, drawing from many different sources to become a cohesive and disturbing hole. You can take it at face value, but to give it even a little thought, you’ll be chewing on it for a long time thereafter.

Read the full review of Us on Trespass.

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.