Author: Alex Doenau

Kameron Hurley's heart belongs to novels. Meet Me in the Future's introduction tells the reader as much instantly. And yet this is her second collection (third, depending on whether you believe the book itself or Hurley's Wikipedia). To that end, some parts of Meet Me in the Future are considerably stronger than others. These stories represent Hurley's particular fascinations: womens' place in society, the impermanence of bodies; plague and pathology. Some she communicates well in sparkling stories, but others collapse under their own weight.

There have been enough Stephen King adaptations in recent years that the man doesn't need to be introduced anymore. It, the second longest of his 61 novels to date, performed remarkably well in its secretly titled Chapter One instalment of 2017. Two years later, the Loser kids are back, they've brought their adult counterparts with them, their film is 34 whole minutes longer, and everything is like a well worn pair of slippers.

Nathan Hill's decade-in-the-writing debut The Nix is a densely packed novel, to the point that some might call it overstuffed. At 640 pages, cut down from the original (longhand!) 1,200 page version, Hill has a lot to say … and he says much of it very well.

Graham Norton's first novel is small town soft crime, which some may argue is the best sort of crime (they would be wrong: the best sort of crime is the sort solved by cats). Norton's chat show experience did not merely prepare him for a life of showing tired memes to bemused celebrities; it reveals the deep humanity that pervades Holding.

The cat and mouse genre requires delicate calibration to work. If a reader is going to have two opposing forces driving a book's narrative, it is often better to know one intimately and the other only in passing. Ran Will Come, the pseudonymous debut of screenwriter Thomas Holgate, gives near equal footing to its leads. It's a bold move, and it pays off in places and confounds in others.

In 1994, the animators working on The Lion King thought that they were toiling in obscurity on a movie that no one was going to see. They lived in jealousy of the Pocahontas crew, who they thought were on to the big thing. The Lion King, of course, went on to become a massive hit, breaking VHS sales records and making literally billions of dollars through ancillary properties. Pocahontas was considerably less successful, although at least two of its songs are all time greats in the Disney canon.

It is hard to conceive that Spider-Man, one of the biggest heroes in the world, was once not a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Now that Peter Parker is an integral member of the pantheon and the MCU is one of the most lucrative franchises at the global box office, it feels natural. Spider-Man: Far From Home officially closes out the third phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, serving as a sort of epilogue. It's a fun movie, but most importantly it understands what makes its hero work.