Book Review: Bloody 13 by Sarah Langan

 

Bloody 13 by Sarah Langan

128 pages, Paperback
Published at PKD Fest in August, 2026 by Pink Beam Press

Another Pink Beam novella! Here is the deal: I have explained how the Pink Beam novellas happened in the Hard Video reviews.  When we organized the 2026 Philip K. Dick Festival one of the first authors I thought of was Sarah. She is a Dickhead and was coming off two excellent Science fiction novels, Good Neighbors and A Better World. Both were excellent in different ways. 

Most of the attention for Sarah Langan will rightly focus on her groundbreaking horror novel Trad Wife, and the praise it has earned from Stephen King. Her horror gets valid attention; the woman has won three Bram Stoker awards. I started to realize SL is at her caddy best when writing novellas. In April 2025, she published a more directly Dickian novella (more than this pink beam one anyone) called Does Harlan Lattner Dream of Electric Sheep? In Lightspeed magazine this was an overlooked masterpiece. 

Read Harlan Lattner here                                                                                       

Certainly, Bloody 13 is of a piece with Infected Sheep, not just because they are SF, but because they speak to the times they were written * Keep in mind that Bloody 13 was originally published in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 42 was published on November 17, 2020. According to Sarah, it was written before COVID. *

Infected Sheep and the internet crashing and the great Amnesia feels to me like a great message about handing all our knowledge of to a ẗhinking¨ internet. Bloody 13 predates the real-life pandemic; the masks represent something deeper than bipartisan reactions a plague, although the reflection of the story changed, of course. 

Bloody 13 fits well with Trad Wife. A Feminist science fiction and horror masterpiece, great examples of subtle, perfect pieces that make a point without losing the thread of the narrative.  Set in a world where the majority of men were taken out by a disease that adult women carry. Thus when women have their “Bloody 13” party is when they are expected to start wearing masks. This becomes a ritual; it is commercialized; they are stylized. It becomes a metaphor for how women have to “mask up.”

When I say Lagan writes caddy, I mean it. It is a strength: her biting observations of suburban life in Good Neighbors and a Better World, Trad Wife and Pam Kowlaski got the media, and this one gets caddy about teenagers. 

¨Irene Scott and Nenny Mupont were not girls I liked. They were the opposite of cool. If our school had a caste system, the popular girls were the ones with superpowers like from My Hero Academia. They could digest people outside their bodies like frogs, or open portals to new universes or shoot fire balls. Me and Paloma were the normal people without powers. Had Penny Mupont and Irene Scott were something worse than ordinary. Mashed potatoes, maybe. The kind without skins. Just that white crap.¨

The character stuff, and the teenager’s voice at the heart of this first-person narrative (you know I have to be convinced on that device) is one of the things that gives this novel a distinct feeling. 

¨Astoria’s where they cremated all the plague bodies, whispered Lola. Which was true. They'd been sent here from throughout the entire tristate. Y-Plague was deadly, but only for men. Women of child-bearing age didn’t get sick from it. They only carried. But most of the time, they didn’t know they were carrying until the men around them started dying.”

There is something in this novella about the ceremony where the transformation of the Bloody 13 ritual into adulthood is like an entry into a larger, dangerous world. The plague is dangerous for the men, but it is the women who have to mask up. The metaphors in this story are many, and there are many parts of this piece where I marveled at the subtle ways.

Think about how powerful a disease that can actually counter the very real disease of misogyny. What if there was a disease that reversed this dynamic?  

“I sometimes felt like if I wanted, I’d be able to summon Y-Plague and make it hot inside me. Become a beautiful and deadly superhero. Other times, I worried that it was there, waiting to come out when I least expected, to ruin my life. When that happened, my chest got heavy. It was hard to breathe.”

A disease that kills mostly men, a post-men virus or apoclayse is actually enough of a subgenre that goes back to Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree in the 60s to stuff like Y the Last Man. Unintentionally, I read two of these back to back. Langan uses this school drama and mean girls vibe as a lens for the reverberations of this disease, and that makes sense because these Bloody 13 celebrations are like Bat Mitzvahs.

“My dad raised the mask I’d picked. It was simple pink with no jewels. I’d tried at least a hundred, but softer than the rest and lined with a gauze that didn’t chafe, this one had felt right. It had felt the most like me. We have a winner, my mom had said at the store, because if you can’t fight something, if you can’t change it, you may as well try to enjoy it.”

As an author in this first series of Pink Beam novellas, I am proud to have this one in the series. Sarah Langan is an excellent writer; her novels are great, and her novellas are even more impressive. This is a must-read feminist science fiction novella.

 

Book Review: I Who Have Never Known Men Jacqueline Harpman, Ros Schwartz (Translator)

 

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Ros Schwartz (Translator), Sophie Mackintosh (Afterword)

 173 pages, Paperback
Published May, 2022 by Transit Books

 First published January 1, 1995

When this book showed up in my library holds, I was a bit confused. At some point, I put this book on hold, and by the time it got to me, even after I read it, I couldn't remember who suggested it. Eventually I figured out that it was Zoe from the Science Fiction Book Club on Facebook. So shout-out.

Jacqueline Harpman was a famous French Psychoanalyst. She was a Belgian Jew who fled as a child with her family when the Nazis came. She had published a few books and then decided, after doing alright as a writer, that she would become a psychoanalyst, which she was more famous for.  Most of her work is not translated, and she has made a few films with her husband, who is a director, none of which I had ever heard of. That is on me.

Much like Ice by Anna Kavan, this is a weird feminist dystopia that could easily get lost to history. Also like Ice, it seems to be avoiding that fate and becoming popular, and for good reason. 

The story is a strange one; it has more vibes than plot, but it is built off a fascinating concept. A young woman finds herself in a prison underground with a group of women.

“As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker. Is that what they mean by memories? On the few occasions when women were willing to tell me about their past, their stories were full of events, comings and goings, men… but I am reduced to calling a memory the sense of existing in the same place, with the same people and doing the same things; in other words, eating, excreting and sleeping. For a long time the days went by, each one like the day before, and then I began to think, and everything changed before nothing happened other than this repetition of identical gestures; time seemed to stand still, and even if I was vaguely aware that I was growing and time was passing my memory begins with my anger

Obviously, I have no way of knowing how old I was. The others have been adult for a long time, whereas I appear to be pre-adolescent. But my development stopped there I started to get hair under my arms and on my pubes; my breasts grew a little, and then everything came to a halt. I never have my period. The women told me I was lucky, but I wouldn't have had the bother of bleeding in the precautions to be taken as to not stain the mattress…” 

I know this is a long quote, but I think this better sets up the experience than anything I can say.  The nameless narrator expresses quite well the dehumanizing feeling of prison.  That is where it starts, but as you can see, JH is using this narrative to explore what it means to be a woman. By putting the story in this fantastical situation, the nature of the characters' humanity is constantly tested, and the novel can isolate and comment on aspects of being a woman. As a cisgender man, I thought this was a valuable experience for me to read. 

I was reading this as the Cornell rape case was starting to become a national news story, and it certainly was not lost on me that more men need this type of fictional point of view to be a part of their media diet. 

The woman at the center of this story is so divorced from women in our society that she can ask questions from a naive perspective that express POVs that men could use hearing.

“Being beautiful, was that for men?'
'Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful ."

Spoken from the outside, this point of view looks as insane as it should. Beauty is not the source of our value, and it shouldn't be.

“I was the youngest, the only one who had still been a child when we were locked up. The women had always believed I ended up among them by mistake, that in the chaos I had been sent to the wrong side and no one had noticed. Once the cages were locked, they were probably never reopen. Sometimes, the women said the keys must be lost, and that even if the guards wanted to, they wouldn't be able to release us. I think it was a joke, but I had forgotten about it until now, and it was too late to check.”

The dislocation, the immersion of this mental prison, is more intense than the walls of the bunker itself. Once the women walk out, they find a world destroyed, society gone. They didn't know men, and now they never will, but much of the novel they search. As they find that while being locked away the society they were kept is gone and killed most of the planet. 

“It's odd, there aren't any birds. Do the birds shelter when it rains? Asked Greta, who had only ever lived in the city.

But where would they shelter? There isn't a single tree in sight, only a few shrubs.”

“And stones,” said Dorothy you couldn't grow anything here. I've never seen such poor soil”

The misanthrope in me loves that this novel questions all of civilization. Again their position in this underground prison gives these characters a unique position to stand outside and look back at a species  and a civilization and ponder 

“… We must look for civilization”

What civilization?”

Anthea looked at me. ¨What do you mean?¨

I shrugged.

“Just think about it. The planet belongs to them, So what would we find other than the people who held us captive? I have no wish to meet them.”

“Do you think we're on another planet?"

And I also thought that, for a second, my science fiction brain was like, wait, what?

“It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods, I who have never known men.”

In the end, men destroyed the surface, and despite everything, our narrator is killed by a part of her that is uniquely female. 

I Who Have Never Known Men is a radical piece of Science fiction surrealism, and it will probably just be called high literature, but no matter if she had never heard of Joanna Russ, Le Guin, or Octavia Butler, this novel is in their wake and tradition. I could see some readers being bored or feeling that it is slow to go, but I found it thought-provoking. Big Thumbs up!

 

Book Review: Music-Machines: A Transatlantic History of German Electronic Music by Sean Nye

 

Music-Machines: A Transatlantic History of German Electronic Music by Sean Nye

376 pages, Hardcover
Published July 17, 2026: by Oxford University Press

 

I admit I read the chapter on PKD more closely than the rest as it is my focus. Sean is a serious Dickhead and that first chapter is super excellent and taught me a few things about some of PKD's musical taste. The book goes deep with the influence of German music on Man on the High Castle and Martian Time Slip. That MTS stuff was most interesting to me as that is something I never would have noticed or discovered on my own. 

 The majority of the book is about the history of techno music from Germany. Sean is a genius for musical history. GREAT stuff. Short review, but it is an excellent text; stoked to have it on my PKD reference shelf.

Book Review: Hard Video by Keith Giles

 

Hard Video by Keith Giles

140 pages, Paperback
Published At PKD Fest August, 2026 by Pink Beam Press 

Known for his series of non-fiction books on various topics related to Christianity, I came to know Keith through PKD circles. I don't know whether I interviewed him first for the podcast or he asked me to write a foreword for a PKD collection reprint. Keith and I have now worked through Quoir or Pink Beam (an imprint of the larger press.) closely with Keith on many projects, and I find him to be a smart science-fiction mind as a reader, editor, and publisher. Along the way, he told me that he wrote a novella. 

Well, shit I wanted to read it, but at the time he had no plans to publish it. Having not read a word, I trusted that it would be good, so I asked him if he was interested in doing novellas together for release at PKD Fest 2026. So let me first admit to that connection with this book. What started as two novellas turned into 7 for the fest. 

That being said, if I didn't truly think this was a great work of science fiction, then I would just not review it. Hard Video is thoughtful, deep science fiction, and a great debut that only shows one or two tiny areas for growth, but a towering achievement for a writer with his fiction debut. Keith has written more than a few books, and in that sense he honed lots of skills. He is well-read in genre, passionate about creating SF-worlds that make the future a better place.

One of the only nitpicks is out of the author’s hands. Keith has said this idea is decades old; in some ways the world-building shows some age, but I think that is more of a feature than a bug.  If you want to stay spoiler-free, here is your warning. 

Hard Video is about our growing dependence on technology for all aspects of our daily lives, and it could be with existing technology, but the novella exists in a world where the online, and real worlds blur, and people even walk in the real world wearing digital avatars. Thanks to subtle but effective world-building, this novella feels like the work of an old pro instead of a debut. A life of reading sci-fi didn't hurt; it bleeds off every page. The HV addicted future feels real, and we understand on a deep level that it is a hard addiction to break. 

¨I wondered if I could really live without my HV or not. I could always get a new one, but they’d want my identicode to authorize the unit, and then I’d be back on the run again. They were getting closer now. My heart thundered in my chest.

Goodbye, HV.”

The characters are well drawn, and despite the ways they hide from reality, Giles gives enough of them that we can see both the fake and real characters; that push and pull creates a very interesting dynamic that is most clear when they can even conceive of the idea of thinking for themselves. 

¨Absalom had calmed himself enough to force a thin smile at me. You’ve given up trying to escape reality, haven’t you,That’s why you killed that cop. That’s why you ran away when any other person would’ve surrendered. Most people just want to numb themselves to the Truth. The real world is too much for them. Hell, they spend all their money to fill their every waking moment with non-stop chatter. “News, information, entertainment, and distractions, all designed to keep out the real world. All designed, he said, leaning forward, to keep out the Truth.

The Truth.”

 The Truth, or real life, becomes a thing that creates pressure on the system and the characters equally. Rico and Nicotine become fugitives for their crime, rejecting the false reality. It might seem this is setting up a thriller, and a film could do that; KG is interested in the questions of emotions of the story. 

The characters are made weaker and slowly destroyed by dependence. 

 ¨This is killing you, Rico, you've got to stop it.¨ 

¨ It's not killing me. It's the only thing that keeps me from putting a bullet through my own head.

¨Dont you see, Rico you're still a slave to HV. You think you're free of that world out there because you're able to turn it on and off at will; you're kidding yourself.¨

They are kidding themselves because once disconnected, one of the novella’s strongest emotional beats happens. They see each other

“Her HV protection shimmered in the digital half-light, soft auburn curls, moviestar cheekbones, skin like satin.

Beautiful. Untouchable. Unreal”

I tend to look for mission statements in stories, and this one is close enough to the surface it is no mystery, but I think these scenes being the emotional core of the novel is a more important talking point. The human connection is the heart of this story. 

“Not Nicotine, the HV-constructed femme fatale. Not the edgy rebel badass.

Just a girl. Dark hair, still damp from the shower. Eyes too large for her face. A small scar bisecting her left eyebrow. Her lips, chapped. Her skin had texture, warmth, and flaws.

She looked at me like I was a ghost.

öh, she said.

¨What?¨

Ÿou look different.¨

¨Good different or…¨

Hard Video is excellent SF that is thoughtful with a really humane core. That is the mission should you choose to accept it. I loved it