The Second Read
The Company We Keep With the Dead
LaRocca's most ambitious structure yet, at war with its own beautiful voice. When Wretch works, it is among the year's most upsetting horror.
The Second Read
Reviews, essays, and interviews.
The Second Read
The Kitchen, the Cellar, the Coat of Many Colors
Yah Yah Scholfield's debut is a haunted house that turns out to be about how a person becomes a home. Grotesque, lush, and in its last movement almost unbearably tender.
The Second Read
“Death of the Author” in the Age of Social Media
It doesn’t matter what an author intended - only what they’ve done. As a writer or creator this is a terrifying prospect:
The Second Read
What the House Keeps
Osgood Perkins spent two films becoming bankable. Keeper is what he makes when no one hands him a hook. Keeper and the Osgood Perkins Filmography.
The Second Read
You Will Feel the Sun
Andrew Joseph White's adult debut is the cruelest book I've read this year, and underneath, unbearably gentle about who deserves to be wanted.
The Second Read
What the Hunger Was For
Emma Osborne's Grief Eater wears a zombie apocalypse, but its real hunger is for proof of having been loved. A debut that reads like a fifth book.
The Second Read
Believe What You Want
Hokum is a gorgeous, intelligently made haunted-house film that mistakes its evasiveness for depth, and nearly gets away with it on craft alone.
The Second Read
Two Ways to Lose Yourself
Two horror films seen a week apart. Obsession takes your will; Backrooms takes your bearings. Only one of them followed me home.