What to read this week: An astronaut’s journey and queer horror that bites back at cliché
What to read this weekend: Sharing Space, Bury Your Gays and Precious Metal
An astronaut’s journey, sci-fi dystopia, and queer horror that bites back at cliché.
Recent releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
Chuck Tingle may be best known for his oft-memed erotica titles, but the author has also been making a name for himself in mainstream horror in recent years. Tingle’s second full-length horror novel, Bury Your Gays, was released this week, and if the title didn’t make it abundantly clear, it calls out one of Hollywood’s tiredest tropes: queer storylines that inevitably end in tragedy or erasure.
In Bury Your Gays, bizarre circumstances befall the book’s protagonist, an Oscar-nominated scriptwriter named Misha, after he refuses studio executives’ orders to either kill off two lesbian characters “in a blaze of gay glory” or make them straight. It’s got monsters (not just the corporate kind), gore and basically all the ingredients for a great summer read. And, for anyone who prefers audiobooks, the narrated version of Bury Your Gays has a particularly stacked cast, including Mara Wilson and authors Stephen Graham Jones and T. Kingfisher.
Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change by Cady Coleman
If you’d asked me a few days ago how I thought astronauts sleep on the International Space Station — something I’ve never really given much thought to — I probably would have made a little joke about them floating around in sleeping bag cocoons, occasionally bumping into walls and furniture over the course of the night. Just one page into the first chapter of Sharing Space, former NASA astronaut Cady Coleman confirms this isn’t actually that far off from the truth, at least for some ISS dwellers:
Many astronauts hook their sleeping bags securely to the wall and slither inside each night, but I like to sleep with my bag untethered. I tuck my knees to my chest, zip the sleeping bag up so it holds me in a ball, and float off to sleep, literally. So when I wake up, adrift, it takes a minute to figure out where I am.
Spoiler: she wakes up under her desk. Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change is a glimpse into the life of an astronaut who’s traveled to space, and what it takes to get there. Coleman writes in a way that is instantly engaging, and this should be a fun read for anyone who is space-curious and seeking a bit of inspiration.
Precious Metal by Darcy Van Poelgeest and Ian Bertram
This recommendation is kind of a two-fer. Precious Metal, from Image Comics, is a new sci-fi miniseries set in a future, (more) dystopian version of North America. It’s the much-awaited prequel to Little Bird, a critically acclaimed series about resistance under an oppressive regime that was published across five issues in 2019. While you could probably get away with reading Precious Metal without having first read Little Bird, you’d be doing yourself a disservice by skipping over an impactful work of art, so make sure you check that out at some point too.
Precious Metal takes place 35 years before Little Bird’s story begins and follows a mod-tracker — a bounty hunter of sorts — named Max Weaver whose mission is derailed after he realizes his latest target, a child with special abilities, may be able to help him recover lost memories. It has hints of Blade Runner and the art is seriously breathtaking, with striking color work by Matt Hollingsworth. The first issue of Precious Metal, which is nearly 60 pages long, dropped in June, and the latest was released this week. The full run will have six issues in all.
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