scioscribe

Thank you so much for writing for me! I've included some specific prompts in case that's helpful for inspiration, but please feel free to go your own way. I'm just delighted to have 10k (!) to look forward to.

I'm scioscribe on AO3 and scioscribe on Tumblr. All requests this year are for fic.

And thank you again! I hope you have a great exchange.

( Likes )

( General Sex Likes/Kinks )

( DNW )

( Dark Tower - Stephen King )

( Agent Carter )

( The Defenders )

( MASH )

( Star Trek: The Original Series )

( Starsky & Hutch )

( Thoroughbreds )

His Magical Pet and Her Magical Pet, two anthologies to benefit OutRight Action International, are now live! I helped a little with assembling these and therefore had a sneak peek, and they're both utterly delightful. His Magical Pet is an m/m anthology and Her Magical Pet is f/f, and they both feature romances blended with, as you may have guessed, magical pets. Teleporting cats! Bunny monsters from an eldritch dimension! Watercats! Magical figurines! And more!

All proceeds will go to OutRight Action International. All adorable magical pets will be coveted by me.

( Story blurbs for both anthologies below the cut. )

I'm home and have power, which means this is the perfect time to catch up on reccing my gifts from recent exchanges, all of which have been glorious.

Hurt/Comfort Exchange

Black Honey, 3.8k, MCU. A post-Infinity War AU where Tony and Nebula bum around the universe for a while, having trouble coming up with money, here zeroing in on Tony having to do some sex work to come up with some cash. The friendship between Tony and Nebula is lovely and tender.

But Never Broken, 9.1k, Iron Fist. Set between S1 and S2--Ward, Danny, and Colleen are all at a formal Rand reception when Harold manages to fuck with Ward from beyond the grave by getting him stuck with a poisoned needle. Wonderful h/c and friendship, with great relationship development in an in-between period for the characters.

stumble in my footsteps, 3.3k, Iron Fist. A dark-but-hopeful post-S2 story where Ward is blackmailed with footage from Harold's penthouse--that shows past, devastatingly creepy Harold/Ward noncon. Ward's trauma is handled perfectly, and Danny's protectiveness is top-notch.

Femslash Kink

our love is a fistfight, 2.2k, Guardians of the Galaxy, Gamora/Nebula. Scorching hot pre-canon sex pollen, where Gamora and Nebula wind up needing to "test" a mist that induces "frenzy." Terrific sense of their relationship in all its complexity, and again: incredibly hot.

Eat, Drink, and Make Merry

A Hole in the World, 4.1k, Dark Tower. Roland gets separated from the rest of the ka-tet, and his best chance of reunion is hunkering down and waiting--but he's in the middle of a desert, with no supplies. Luckily, a portal gives him temporary access to some Earth junk food. Perfectly captures the original series feeling of Roland drinking the Pepsi, with terrific food porn, and has lovely ka-tet feelings as well.

The Cartography of Feeling, 20.8k, Torchwood. Long, unbelievably iddy story of Ianto and Owen getting abducted and technologically soulbonded (well, given a device that lets them share sensations and emotions) and forced to fight as gladiators. Makes excellent use of Owen's undead status, as it complicates both the h/c of the gladiator fights and allows him to experience sensation (including eating) afresh through Ianto. Beautiful closeness, too.

Just Married

New Skies, New Stars, 9k, Thor. Amazing, perfectly characterized post-Ragnarok fic where it turns out that Loki's been under a magical chastity spell this whole time, and he needs a marriage to break it--if Val is willing to oblige. She is, but it brings up a lot of things she's tried to block out over the years. Tender, hot, and sweet, with a beautiful slow build.

Thank you so much for writing for me! I'm so delighted by the epic King tagset and really looking forward to what this exchange will bring.

I'm scioscribe on AO3 and scioscribe on Tumblr. All requests this year are for fic.

If you're feeling a crossover impulse that's not covered here, I'm always happy to see characters/situations from Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, The Long Walk, The Dark Tower, Pet Sematary, The Eyes of the Dragon, Misery, It, The Talisman, Gerald's Game, Insomnia, Rose Madder, Bag of Bones, Storm of the Century, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Hearts in Atlantis, Duma Key, The Colorado Kid, and Joyland.

( Likes )

( General Sex Likes/Kinks )

( DNW )

( Carrie )

( Dark Tower )

( Misery )

( The Stand )

( The Talisman )

( Crossover Fandom )

Thank you so much for writing for me! I've added additional prompts where they would seem like they might be helpful, but I’d really be delighted to get anything for any of these relationship/tag combinations regardless of whether or not I could think of any extra context/prompts to add on.

I'm scioscribe on AO3 and scioscribe on Tumblr. All requests this year are for fic.

And thank you again! I hope you have a great exchange.

( Likes )

( General Sex Likes/Kinks )

( DNW )

( Dark Tower - Stephen King )

( Black Panther )

( Marvel Cinematic Universe )

( The Lighthouse )

( Buffy the Vampire Slayer )

( Marvel TV )

This proved a surprisingly apt book to read during a pandemic. Here, the dangers of leaving the house are made vivid in present in the form of grizzly bears that will maul and eat you. And, less facetiously, this is a book about the way an impending crisis is spectacularly mismanaged to the point of brutal disaster affecting total innocents.

Night of the Grizzlies is a nonfiction account of August 13, 1967, when two nineteen-year-old women were attacked and killed by two separate grizzly bears in Glacier National Park--after decades of absolutely no fatalities and very, very few attacks period. While that night seems from the outside like a total aberration, Olsen notes that it kicked off an overall escalation in grizzly attacks, and that it didn't come out of nowhere at all. The tragedy was essentially manmade, a clusterfuck of a Park Service that refused to pay any real attention to dozens of reports about an unusually aggressive bear, somehow thought it was a good idea to set up a campground in the middle of a grizzly bear feeding ground, tacitly allowed/encouraged employees to regularly feed the grizzlies, and permitted park overcrowding that steadily reduced the bears' habitat and frayed at their nerves. The end result was the horrible, fatal mauling of two girls, a shitstorm of media attention that partly blamed them for their own demise, and a lot of dead bears--all of which could have been avoided if people had not decided, as people usually do, that they should have unfettered access to everything all the time. When you insist on owning nature, nature will eat you. Or, more accurately, eat the people who naively believed that the situation was under control.

Olsen is a journalist--the book began as a series of articles for Sports Illustrated--and a true crime writer, and Night of the Grizzlies feels, in essence, a bit like a true crime book: a careful assemblage of the facts and statements surrounding a tragedy, with particular attention paid to who is to blame for all this. It's very earnest--empathetic towards both animals and people, though justly angry at and impatient with some parts of the Park Service--and I found that appealing. The writing is extremely readable but also often clumsy, with way too many epithets and comparisons like "silence pressed down on the place like a giant bowl of mushroom soup." (The epithets are basically at their worst when we're constantly referring to someone as "the Indian." Usually they're just awkward or inadvertently funny.)

Olsen's nature writing is clearly done with a lot of love, and he really evokes the beauty of the park and shows a great affection for (and knowledge of) bears--there's a lot of great, endearing info about their habits and characteristics. He juggles his large cast aptly, and in addition to parceling out blame and indicting complacency, he also make sure to record instances of heroism and people rising to the occasion. Parts of this are enraging--it probably won't surprise anyone to learn that women, in particular, tended to get ignored or dismissed when they pointed out the increased bear aggression, nor that some people blamed the dead girls for having possibly incited the bears by wearing cosmetics (my wife, on hearing this: "So even when a woman gets eaten by a bear, it's because of what she was wearing?")--but it's not reported in an enraging way. He basically just relays the events and opinions of the people involved, with his own judgments mostly reserved for the summing up the book does at the end.

Here's a sample of irritating park rangers:

A few days later, a ranger executive arrived in Kelly's Camp on a routine visit, and Joan Berry, who had been away from the camp on the bear's most recent intrusion, took him to one side and said, "We've got a sick bear, a crazy-acting bear around, and I wish you'd do something about it."

The official asked for a description of the animal, and Mrs. Berry told him that it was a dark grizzly with a big, emaciated frame and a thin, elongated head. "I'm sure that he's dangerous and somebody's going to get hurt," the schoolteacher said.

The ranger executive chuckled at the remark. "Oh, Joan," he said casually, "is it really that bad?"

Mrs. Berry was annoyed and repeated emphatically that the bear was acting abnormally and must be considered a menace.

The ranger official said, "Well, when his illness makes him go berserk, we'll do something about him, and made it plain that the matter was closed. His attitude made Mrs. Berry seethe inside. In all the decades since her family had homesteaded on the north shore of Lake McDonald, they had almost never reported a troublesome bear; they preferred taking their chances on coexistence. Kellys and grizzlies had been living together amicably since the 1800s, and Mrs. Berry felt that the ranger official ought to know that and ought to have taken her complaint more seriously.

and

[He] wound up telling his story to a ranger who seemed almost bored by the news. "That bear's been chasing people all summer," the ranger said, "and a little last summer."

"What are you gonna do when it catches somebody?" Price asked.

"Well, I don't know," the ranger said bemusedly. "He hasn't caught anybody yet."

It's a sad and infuriating story, but it's told well. Even when his writing is weak, Olsen is mostly a strong storyteller, and it doesn't surprise me that Wikipedia noted this as surprisingly influential for a lot of action-fueled horror fiction. If you don't mind your nature writing mixed with some real life horror, or if you're interested in how mismanagement creates tragedies, or if you just like seeing how people respond to problems and crises, and the stylistic flaws are forgivable to you, I'd definitely recommend this.

Warnings: gore, medical procedures, various instances of sexism and mild racism, dead people, dead bears, a badly injured bear cub. A puppy is endangered but lives.

Attica Locke's second novel, The Cutting Season, is so fascinatingly layered that I keep turning it over and over in my mind and considering it from different angles. It's a complex, ambitious mystery that's also a detailed, multifaceted, and messy portrait of the South (particularly rural Louisiana) and its past and present.

The book's protagonist is Caren Gray, the general manager of Belle Vie, a former Southern plantation that's since been turned into a cultural exhibit, offering tours, employing historical reenactors, staging plays, and hosting weddings and other large-scale events. Caren is black, and she has a tangled, intense relationship with Belle Vie, which has been not only her workplace but her home. Not only was she raised there--her mother was the cook for the Clancy family, who own Belle Vie--but her whole known family history stems from there, with one of her ancestors, Jason, having been held in slavery at Belle Vie and worked there after the war as paid labor. (Locke neatly skewers the very popular white narrative of slaves who refused to leave their "masters"--one such sentimental, cringey proclamation of loyalty concludes the Gone With the Wind-style play routinely staged at Belle Vie. Jason's reasons were much more complex: he waited at Belle Vie because it was the last place his wife, sold away by the then-owners of the plantation, would know to look for him.) Belle Vie is, all at the same time, a beautiful place, the site of historical atrocities, a landmark romanticized by a racist culture, a valued piece of black communal history, Caren's past and present home, her livelihood, her family lineage.

It was during the Thompson-Delacroix wedding, Caren's first week on the job, that a cottonmouth, measuring the length of a Cadillac, fell some twenty feet from a live oak on the front lawn, landing like a coil of rope in the lap of the bride's future mother-in-law. It only briefly stopped the ceremony, this being Louisiana after all. Within minutes, an off-duty sheriff's deputy on the groom's side found a 12-gauge in the groundskeeper's shed and shot the thing dead, and after, one of the cater-waiters was kind enough to hose down the grass. The bride and groom moved on to their vows, staying on schedule for a planned kiss at sunset, the mighty Mississippi blowing a breeze through the line of stately, hundred-year-old trees. The uninvited guest certainly made for lively dinner conversation at the reception in the main hall. By the time the servers made their fourth round with bottles of imported champagne, several men, including prim little Father Haliwell, were lining up to have their pictures taken with the viper, before somebody from parish services finally came to haul the carcass away.

Still, she took it as a sign.

A reminder, really, that Belle Vie, its beauty, was not to be trusted.

It's a phenomenally rich location, both symbolically and in terms of the varied lives, stories, and interpretations that intersect there, and Locke absolutely makes the most of it. I would have read an entire novel just about Caren awkwardly trying to negotiate a life that involves preserving her own history at the cost of routinely prettying it up for outside (white) consumption. She's a terrific character, sympathetic even when she's not always likable, and she's constantly being forced to make high-pressure decisions with huge stakes.

Old Belle Vie was a sugar plantation, farming cane, and there's still a cane field on the property, leased out to a company called Groveland; just outside of the usual tourist view, there are migrant workers cutting cane, living out the history Belle Vie only acknowledges. One of the migrant workers, Inés Avalo, is found murdered on the Belle Vie grounds, killed with a cane knife stolen from one of Belle Vie's preserved slave cabins. Her death serves as a catalyst for Locke's examination of character, history, and politics in action, but I think Locke does a reasonably good job of imbuing Inés with personhood and history in her own right. We see a number of people who mourn her, find out some of her own complicated personal history, see her ethical concerns and her fears. Her death, once we understand the full story, ultimately comes as a cruelly unfair interruption of her life story, and that makes her feel all the more real.

However, the actual solving of the mystery doesn't generally feel like the novel's focus. Instead, Locke is interested in the way crimes can crack communities open and bring up surprises. Caren suddenly has to grapple up-close with her ambiguous relationship as "management," neither fully confided in by her superiors nor fully accepted by her staff. She becomes more involved with the investigation than she intends to, and that's partly because she discovers a loyalty she has to her employee Donovan, whom she's never particularly liked; Donovan winds up targeted early on by the police, who are happy to wrestle a plea bargain out of him and call it a day. Caren, who was almost a lawyer, finds she can't let that go--even when her defense of Donovan, or even her accuracy in interviews, is construed by the police as obstruction, something that threatens her directly. And then there's the lingering specter of Jason's death, which turns out to have more mystery attached to it than Caren ever knew. (Locke is definitely interested in which stories get told, who tells them, and what winds up vanishing into little-known historical records vs. what gets popularized; the theme shows up repeatedly in interesting ways that I won't spoil.)

In the midst of all this, we also learn that Raymond Clancy, Caren's boss, is gearing up to move into politics, and he may sacrifice Belle Vie in the process. He certainly intends to run on his family's good reputation with the local black community, profiting directly off his father's genuine--but not uncomplicated--antiracist efforts, particularly in fostering school integration; Raymond himself never really does anything in that area beyond, of course, frequently reminding Caren what his family has done for hers. There are a lot of ways of grappling with history, Locke seems to imply, but Raymond's is the worst: he wants the glory without the guilt, the credit without the responsibility, and above all else, he doesn't want to have to think about it. He sees only the present and future--or, more specifically, only his present and future.

Caren serves as his opposite number, a woman inextricably tied up in history and responsibility. (To the point where part of her answer might be cutting a few cords.) She's not innocent where other people are guilty; rather, she's not invested in claiming innocence, where other characters in the novel often are. She does not inconsiderable harm, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for selfish ones, but she's aware of it and works to deal with it, internally and externally, and her ideas about how to best do that change gradually as the novel goes on.

All in all, this is a really fascinating novel, full of complex characterization, beautiful prose, resonant themes, and a well-evoked sense of place (spatial and temporal) that affects everything and everyone. I keep coming up with additional bits I want to mention (Caren's complicated relationship with her ex and daughter, for example), but this review is already unwieldy enough. In short: highly recommended. Locke is one of the best and most interesting contemporary crime authors.

A wild book review appears!

Edge of Infinity is a SF anthology that aims to tackle the exploration of the solar system that we now know we actually have, one sadly short of Martian canals and Venusian jungles. This is harder science fiction than I generally read, with the science taking more of a starring role, so while not all of these stories were exactly to my tastes, they were all worth reading and seemed like good examples of a subgenre I don't explore very much. And a lot of them were purely enjoyable even for a humanities person like me.

Pat Cadigan starts the anthology off with the brilliant "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi," which was possibly my favorite--it's immensely clever, multifaceted, and playful in its prose. Set on a mining enterprise orbiting Jupiter, it's about, in essence, the layered conflicts between humans (a.k.a. dirtsiders, two-steppers, and featherless bipeds) and "sushi," who are humans who have been surgically and genetically altered into a variety of transhuman oceanic forms more fitting for the environment--octopi, cephalopods, etc. The narrator, Arkae, an octopus, relates what happens when Fry, the one human "girl-thing" on the crew, finally decides to "go out for sushi," a decision complicated by the fact that she's a former Earth beauty queen whose image and life are licensed and tied up in various ways. Cadigan gets into politics, cultural differences, and interpersonal relationships, and all with a light hand.

"The Deeps of the Sky," by Elizabeth Bear, shows a system of cloud-mining on a gas planet, and the male alien who hopes to get rich enough from it to buy his way into a marriage with the most prestigious "Mother"--a marriage which will mean him attaching himself to her physically and withering away--and what happens when his quest is complicated by first contact with humans.

There are a couple of very traditional, meat-and-potatoes SF stories, all of which I liked because I have a taste for straightforward, no-frills storytelling. "Drive," by James S. A. Corey, is set in the Expanse universe, and gives a combination of a relationship story and the invention of a new spaceship drive. I've only read the first two Expanse books, and this stood alone well enough that I didn't feel like I was missing anything. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, always reliable, turns up with the DMV-in-space story "Safety Tests," about one of the people who has to make sure starship pilots are as good as they're supposed to be--a very dangerous job. Rusch just gives us one day on the job, and while it has some drama, it's mostly just interesting for the value of people doing work in space, and I'm a sucker for stories about people just doing their jobs. "The Road to NPS" is a kind of riff on "The Cold Equations," a much kinder variation where the stowaway turns out to actually be useful to the man attempting a risky endeavor--in this case, a drive across the icy surface of Europa, in which speed is key.

Then there's a duo of stories that I'll group together as the "what price glory?" tales. Stephen Baxter's "Obelisk" is about a risky engineering project on Mars, one with a usefulness that's mostly tied up in how it can stimulate hope and industry. The construction of the enormous obelisk is spurred on by a captain who feels like he's fallen from glory and a kind of disgraced-but-genuinely-innovative huckster from Earth; the two of them wind up in a kind of decades-long tragic entanglement that has a horrible effect on the young girl (and later woman) who is played back and forth between them like a trump card. There's kind of a point at the end about how the men have never genuinely taken her into account as a person, but I feel, perhaps mean-spiritedly, that this is partly to cover for her near-total lack of characterization. I think there would have been more moving ways to invoke this particular tragedy. Alistair Reynolds's "Vainglory" involves a kind of art project gone horribly wrong/right, as a PI tracks down a sculptor, now in her eighties, who once crafted the head of Michelangelo's David out of an asteroid, only to have it meet with a surprise--and tragic--end. There's kind of a moral dilemma here, but I didn't find the emotional stakes as high as I'd like.

There's also a handful of more ambitious, unusual stories, all of which I liked. I always feel like I've only understood about a quarter of any given Hannu Rajaniemi story, but I understood maybe a whole half of "Tyche and the Ants," about a little girl on the moon, living a life that is half-storybook and half-aftermath-of-galactic-conflict; this has some good ideas in it. An Owomoyela's "Water Rights" looks at the political and personal questions raised by a seemingly catastrophic loss of a space station's water supply from Earth, in terms of everything from how it will affect the protagonist's attempt to mend fences with her sister to how it will have huge ramifications for future colonial independence and Earth-station relationships. This has a nice, refreshingly optimistic ending, too. "Bricks, Sticks, Straw," by Gwyneth Jones, deals with what--immensely weird--things happen when three AI/software copies of real people are stranded in the orbital machinery they're operating when a solar storm divorces them from their handlers. The systems face data rot (acting as a form of insanity, with varying results), and one AI in particular remains loyal to her human origins and fights to get a connection restored. An interesting story with real stakes that could only be told as SF.

John Barnes's “Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh” continues the ambitious streak, although it's more awkwardly constructed. Set in a future where AI psychologists are so sophisticated that they can run through hundreds of books' worth of text and dozens of projected future outcomes in between questions to their clients, this, like "Obelisk," is a kind of tragedy, exploring what happens when an AI gives all-too-calculated advice to a couple struggling to decide if they want to stay together. The couples' fight is caused when the man gets irate at being manipulated by a robotic ant who has learned to play on his emotions, and I think part of my problem is that we spend too much time with the ants when the story isn't actually about that. And also that I don't think being pissed at a robot ant for manipulating you automatically means you'll be a bad parent, which is the idea here. The moral crux of the story--should the AI lead the couple to reunite despite thinking they're a bad match, given that humanity is in need of repopulation? What responsibility does it have when that marriage has consequences for the child that results?--is a real and good one, but it develops too rapidly and on too big of a scale. This would actually be a shade better if it were less ambitious.

And a side-note: what the hell is with all the ants? There are two separate stories in this collection with robot ants.

Paul McAuley's “Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler's Green, the Potter's Garden” is set in his Quiet War universe, which I am totally unfamiliar with--but I didn't need to know it in order to enjoy this story, which is a lovely, quiet, elegiac look at a woman traveling to effectively scatter the ashes of her estranged father. On the way, she learns more about him and the colony on which he made his home, with all its particular local legends, and the whole thing has a beautiful sense of place.

The anthology closes with Bruce Sterling's "The Peak of Eternal Light," which is about a married couple on a Mercury colony that has always maintained strict gender segregation. This sounds like exactly my kind of thing, but I feel like somehow this went completely over my head, leaving me understanding all the details of the story without really getting the "why" of it. Which is a shame, because I really do love fiction about planned societies with strict social mores.

Overall, interesting and enjoyable, especially as a way to stretch the boundaries of my fiction tastes. And since I tend to like Strahan as an editor, I'm going to continue trying out various volumes of this Infinity series.

Both the stories for the horror film Us are great--Do You Remember That Birthday Cake? is an excellent look at Adelaide's mother and the various other ways we can treat someone as a disposable duplicate, realizing the horror of it all only too late; Dance for Two is sharp little piece about Adelaide and Red's dancing. (You would definitely need canon familiarity for both of these.)

cacio e pepe is a buoyant, amazingly well-wrought Some Like it Hot post-canon OT4 fic--a configuration I'd never thought of for this film but which is worked out brilliantly here, and with a lovely amount of emotion. Plus bonus historical grappling with sexuality and gender.

Discipulae is a lovely post-book fic for A Little Princess, following Sara and Becky as they begin establishing their new lives, particularly as they begin tackling the question of what they're going to learn (and who that's going to help them become). This does one of my favorite historical fiction things: it understands the world in which it's set, including the believable limitations of it, and still manages to find hope and happiness there anyway. And Sara and Becky's friendship is just perfect.

good boys do fine always is a searing futurefic for Lord of the Flies, with Ralph and Jack meeting up in their nearly-apocalyptic-but-not-quite world and contending with everything that's between them and everything that's behind them--soaked in violence and ambivalence and trauma and worldbuilding.

To See a World in a Grain of Sand (The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick) recreates the novel's fantastic, hyper-inventive worldbuilding and hard-earned hope in miniature. It's about Jane, in college, discovering a tribe of meryons in the student lounge, and it's filled with vivid "tiny people making a tiny world" details and weird Faerie details. Feels perfectly like the book.

a burning coal of kindness is for the Goblin Emperor, and it's Maia & Beshelar hurt/comfort with kidnapping and questions of honor, loyalty, responsibility, and friendship, and it's so exactly my id that I'm taking it as a secret present for me. Beautiful.

Rocks in His Pocket is futurefic for Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," in which little Davy Hutchinson grows up and takes his place in a world that hasn't left the lottery's savageries behind quite as well as it thinks. Terrific, with spare prose and a lingering impact.

The Rock Star Reunion Irrelevancy is brisk, funny, beautifully canon-toned Middleman fic, with Wendy and the Middleman investigating a mysteriously packed performance of a has-been band. The banter is a total delight.

A Tomorrow at the End of the World and upside down from the moon are both beautiful fix-its for Stephen King's The Long Walk, with Garraty/McVries and hurt/comfort. "Tomorrow" is a little more bittersweet, about escape rather than rescue; "upside down" is tad more hopeful, while still being thoroughly grounded in the novel's practicalities of food and sore bodies. They're both lovely.

I'm finally home and ready to immerse myself in Yuletide! So far, I've only had time/internet to read my own gifts, but they're stellar:

A Heart That Yearns (Twin Peaks) is a delicately wrought post-S2 AU where Cooper comes back to Twin Peaks to settle his mind and finds himself reunited with Audrey, who definitely knows what she wants. Great voices.

Sharing is Caring (Society) is exactly the kind of emotional, weird, funny xeno threesome that I wanted for Clarissa/Bill/Milo after the movie--incredibly sexy, totally in tune with its delightfully bonkers canon, and really well-characterized.

An Explorer of Delirium (Sandman) is my terrific Madness treat (appropriately), and it's a snapshot look at an explorer whose malaria gives him a brief look at Delirium's realm. Delirium is charmed by him. Pitch-perfect canon style, funny and playful and with one hell of a stinger.