All I'd heard about Sinners is that it was a great movie, and that halfway through, it turned into a horror movie. There's someone to call every movie a great movie, and I'm not super into horror movies, and I planned to give it a pass.
But. People kept talking about it, talking about how much it meant to them, how it was special. More than a horror movie, more than a Dawn to Dusk homage. They were right.
Smoke and Stack Moore are twin gangsters (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who'd left their small Alabama plantation to make their fortune in Chicago by joining the Capone organization. They've come back, having set the Irish and Italian mobs against each other and absconding with a small fortune. Their plan: open a Chicago-style juke joint at an old abandoned sawmill and bring Black-only entertainment to bring joy to the sharecroppers and plantation workers. They recruit their cousin Sammie "Preacher Boy" Moore and a blues harpist named Slim to provide the music. Liberally spreading twenties around, they get the place up and jumping in a day.
Meanwhile, a Klan couple has given refuge to a suspiciously smoldering Irishman on the run from a Choctaw posse. Having run off the Indians, the wife returns to find that the Irishman has already killed her husband, and is coming for her. Fade back to the bar.
These two stories are about to collide. But here's the thing: this movie is a vampire movie, yup. It's also a movie about assimilation. The Irish were assimilated into White culture. The Whites want to assimilate the Black blues. Two musical centerpieces to the movie, one a time threading exploration of the history and future of Black music, the other an Irish song bemoaning the world the vampire left behind. And then stuff gets bloody.
Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros
This third book of the Empyrean series is bigger than the previous two books combined. The mysterious dark-magic wielding wyvern-riding venin are winning the war against the dragon and griffin riders. Worse, protagonist Violet's lover Xaden is becoming one of them, quite against his will. Even worse, the ward stone that newly protects an outlying region is failing, and they require help from a kind of dragon that might not even exist.
Yarros is still trying to have the structure of dragon rider school provide a framework on which to build a story, but it's hard to study for exams when every other day brings a new disaster. Violet soon skips school to take her dragons and her renegade friends on a trip to distant islands to recruit allies and look for the vanished seventh dragon breed.
This is where it turns Star Trek for awhile. Each island they visit has a monoculture, each gives them a test to see if they deserve help, every couple of days they beam down to a new island where they worship a different god in their own way.
Things get worse from there.
I'd thought that this third book might tie up the major threads and start a new plot. While the book does answer a lot of questions, the characters at the end, those who survive, are very much at the end of their tether and things look more gloomy than ever.
I didn't find this book as easy to read as the prior two, but I felt an obligation to work through it. It's not a bad book by any means; it's definitely treating Violet with rougher gloves, and Yarros gives us chapters telling the story from other points of view, Game of Thrones-style.
The book ends with a pair of giant cliffhangers. It might be best to wait for the remaining two books to come out before starting the series, if you haven't already done so.
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