#Demian Cipher

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Lonely Leitner Reading List

The full list of submissions for the Lonely Leitner bracket. Bold titles are ones which were accepted to appear in the bracket. Synopses and propaganda can be found below the cut. Be warned, however, that these may contain spoilers!

Andersen, Hans Christian: The Snow Queen

Barnes, Jennifer Lynn: Nobody Basye, Dale E.: Snivel Borges, Jorge Luis: The House of Astarion Bradbury, Ray: There Will Come Soft Rains

Dazai, Osamu: No Longer Human Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations

Ellis, Bret Easton: Less Than Zero

Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby Freeman, Megan E.: Alone

Glass, Merrill: But You Didn't Goss, James: Dead of Winter

Harlow, Harry F.: The Nature of Love Hesse, Herman: Demian Hopkins, David: Thebe and the Angry Red Eye

Jackson, Shirley: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Koenig, John: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Lem, Stanisław: Solaris Lewis, Sinclair: Main Street

Márquez, Gabriel García: One Hundred Years of Solitude Melville, Herman: Bartleby, the Scrivener Moorcock, Michael: The Black Corridor

Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Paver, Michelle: Dark Matter: A Ghost Story Penning, Michael: Solitude Plath, Sylvia: The Bell-Jar Poe, Edgar Allan: The Light-House Poe, Edgar Allan: The Raven Poe, Edgar Allan: Alone

Rosenfeld, Morris: My Boy Rudnick, Elizabeth: A Frozen Heart Ryan, A.J.: Red River Seven

Satrapi, Marjane: Chicken with Plums Schwab, Victoria: The Invisible Life of Addie Larue Shelley, Mary: The Last Man Sigsgaard, Jens: Palle Alone in the World Sims, Jonathan: Family Business

Tchaikovsky, Adrian: Children of Ruin Thoreau, Henry David: Walden Todhunter, Jean Mizer: Cipher in the Snow

Venable, Lynn: Time Enough At Last von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: The Sorrows of Young Werther

Weir, Andrew: The Martian Wells, H.G.: The Invisible Man

Andersen, Hans Christian: The Snow Queen

Magic ice gets into a boy's heart and makes him incapable of caring for others.

Barnes, Jennifer Lynn: Nobody

There are people in this world who are Nobody. No one sees them. No one notices them. They live their lives under the radar, forgotten as soon as you turn away.

That’s why they make the perfect assassins.

The Institute finds these people when they’re young and takes them away for training. But an untrained Nobody is a threat to their organization. And threats must be eliminated.

Sixteen-year-old Claire has been invisible her whole life, missed by the Institute’s monitoring. But now they’ve ID’ed her and send seventeen-year-old Nix to remove her. Yet the moment he lays eyes on her, he can’t make the hit. It’s as if Claire and Nix are the only people in the world for each other. And they are—because no one else ever notices them.

Basye, Dale E.: Snivel

Dale E. Basye sends Milton and Marlo to Snivel, the circle reserved for crybabies, for their latest hilarious escapade in Heck. Snivel is a camp—a bummer camp—a dismal place where it's always raining, and Unhappy Campers are besieged by swarms of strange mosquitoes that suck the color right out of them. Soon the Fausters discover that some Unhappy Campers have been disappearing. So after Marlo gets chosen for a special project and never comes back, Milton makes up his mind to find her and all the missing children.

Borges, Jorge Luis: The House of Astarion

A rewrite of the myth of the Minotaur. The son of the King lives alone in a labrynth, lost and forsaken, waiting for someone to save him. He leaves the corpses of the sacrifices as a way to find his way out. When someone finally finds him, it will be his executioner.

Bradbury, Ray: There Will Come Soft Rains

This a short story that has been adapted many times, including into a graphic novel. It takes place post nuclear apocalypse, where a futuristic home does its daily routine, despite the devastation outside. At some point, the family dog, riddled with tumors, crawls into the house and dies. It's very depressing. It implies the house would have continued doing this routine forever, except it catches on fire. With no one to stop it, it burns down.

Dazai, Osamu: No Longer Human

Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.

***

It is a novel that delves into the dark and introspective journey of a young man named Yozo. Through a series of confessional notes, Yozo reveals his struggles with alienation, self-destructive behavior, and the inability to connect with others. The original title translates as "Disqualified as a human being" or "A failed human". The book was published one month after Dazai's suicide at the age of 38.

***

“Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.”

“For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.”

Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations

Miss Havisham is a Lonely avatar working to disconnect Pip from his family with the goal of maximizing his heartbreak at the end.

Ellis, Bret Easton: Less Than Zero

When Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college, he re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.

You know how canonically, one of the Lonely's manifestations is becoming alone in a crowd full of faceless people? This is that, but in book form.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby

The story of a guy who is simultaneously so desperate for love that he transformed himself into a whole new person just to be worthy of the woman he loves, and also so self conscious about it that he can't even approach her, only dwell on the memories of how they used to be. There's so much longing and disconnection, it's nuts.

Freeman, Megan E.: Alone

When twelve-year-old Maddie hatches a scheme for a secret sleepover with her two best friends, she ends up waking up to a nightmare. She’s alone—left behind in a town that has been mysteriously evacuated and abandoned. With no one to rely on, no power, and no working phone lines or internet access, Maddie slowly learns to survive on her own. Her only companions are a Rottweiler named George and all the books she can read. After a rough start, Maddie learns to trust her own ingenuity and invents clever ways to survive in a place that has been deserted and forgotten. As months pass, she escapes natural disasters, looters, and wild animals. But Maddie’s most formidable enemy is the crushing loneliness she faces every day.

Glass, Merrill: But You Didn't

While the original version is more focused on grief, it has been reworked several times over the years. This version appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul, and is more in line with the themes of the Lonely. This version of the poem has the narrator repeatedly ask one of his parents to play with him, ending each request with the words "but you didn't." It ends, "My country called me to war; you asked me to come home safely... but I didn't!"

Goss, James: Dead of Winter

Synopsis: ""The Dead are not alone. There is something in the mist and it talks to them."

In Dr Bloom's clinic at a remote spot on the Italian coast, at the end of the 18th century, nothing is ever quite what it seems. Maria is a lonely little girl with no one to play with. She writes letters to her mother from the isolated resort where she is staying. She tells of the pale English aristocrats and the mysterious Russian nobles and their attentive servants. She tells of intrigue and secrets, and she tells of strange faceless figures that rise from the sea. She writes about the enigmatic Mrs Pond who arrives with her husband and her physician, and who will change everything.

What she doesn't tell her mother is the truth that everyone knows and no one says – that the only people who come here do so to die."

Why it's Lonely: Well, there's mist over the sea, hallucinatory images of missing loved ones that lure you into the mist to drown you, mist in the characters' memories, and did I mention the mist?

Harlow, Harry F.: The Nature of Love

A research report on the results of the author's (highly controversial) maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys. If you have ever read or heard the words "Cloth Mother and Wire Mother" or "the Pit of Despair": Yes, this is that guy. Yes, this is THAT study. Some researchers cite these experiments as a factor in the rise of the animal liberation movement in the United States. Paradoxically, his darkest experiments may have the brightest legacy, for by studying "neglect" and its life-altering consequences, Harlow confirmed love's central role in shaping not only how we feel but also how we think, and how devastating the effects of isolation are on the brain.

Hesse, Herman: Demian

A brilliant psychological portrait of a troubled young man's quest for self-awareness, this coming-of-age novel achieved instant critical and popular acclaim upon its 1919 publication. A landmark in the history of 20th-century literature, it reflects the author's preoccupation with the duality of human nature and the pursuit of spiritual fullfillment.

Hopkins, David: Thebe and the Angry Red Eye

A furry sci-fi novella originally published in chapters on Hopkins' page at Fur Affinity in 2014; in 2015, it also appeared in The Furry Future, a compilation of Science Fiction stories curated by the late Fred Patten that feature anthro animals.

In a future where furries have replaced humans, the Hildebrand Corporation initiates an ambitious plan to send a starship called the Hildebrand One on a ten-year expedition to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, in search of extraterrestrial life. A crew of seven is chosen, and their voyage goes well until the ship actually reaches the Gas Giant, where it is damaged by an unpredictable radiation surge. This causes a series of disasters that culminates with the ship crashing on another Jovian moon, Thebe. By the time it's all over, most of the characters are dead; the only survivors are a feline crew member named Thomas and a tomato plant called Oscar. Most of the story is about Thomas trying to cope with his terrible loneliness and learning that living is about more than survival.

Jackson, Shirley: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

The novel is written in the voice of eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood, who lives with her agoraphobic sister and ailing uncle on an estate. Six years before the events of the novel, the Blackwood family experienced a tragedy that left the three survivors isolated from their small village.

***

sisters constance and merricat blackwood are ostracized from the village because of the dark event in their past. they prefer the isolated life and even stay to live in their house after it burns down leaving only two rooms intact. merricat has intricate rituals to ensure that their isolated lifestyle remains undisturbed, including burying talismans and nailing them to trees, checking the fence, building additional hiding spots. at the end of the book they stop contacting the villagers at all, hide if someone is trying to visit them, and as time goes on the village starts treating them like witches or spirits - kids tell creepy tales and dare each other to try touching their front porch, adults leave food and supplies as offerings

Koenig, John: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realizing that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living a life as vivid and complex as your own? That feeling has a name: “sonder.” Or maybe you’ve watched a thunderstorm roll in and felt a primal hunger for disaster, hoping it would shake up your life. That’s called “lachesism.” Or you were looking through old photos and felt a pang of nostalgia for a time you’ve never actually experienced. That’s “anemoia.” If you’ve never heard of these terms before, that’s because they didn’t exist until John Koenig wrote this book. It's a dictionary of made-up words for emotions that we all feel but don't have the words to express.

Lem, Stanisław: Solaris

This book is soaked in loneliness. It follows three men who avoid each other’s company on a dilapidated research station on a distant titular planet - Solaris. It is covered by an ocean of gelatinous substance with no solid land in sight, and is later revealed to be an alien. A single alien, a vast extraterrestrial intelligence the size of a planet. Lem wrote 'the peculiarity of those phenomena seems to suggest that we observe a kind of rational activity, but the meaning of this seemingly rational activity of the Solarian Ocean is beyond the reach of human beings' and I just cannot help myself but think what a lonely existence that must be. A planet-sized being, unable to communicate with probably the first other living beings it has ever encountered. It creates landscapes and people out of white seafoam from the memories of the research crew, if their flying cars get too close to the dark viscous surface. It reaches into the minds and pulls up the most emotional of memories to awkwardly reconstruct them into a haunt that will follow a person until destroyed. This quote also got me thinking about the communication between different life forms, and that even if humanity ever makes contact with aliens they might be too incomprehensible for us to grasp. Are we alone in the universe? And does it even matter if we are alone or not, if communication and understanding is impossible?

Lewis, Sinclair: Main Street

Sort of a literary forebear to the TMA episode Cul-de-Sac in its brutal portrayal of small town American life as the narrators attempts to connect with her neighbors and revitalize her town are met with failure and scorn.

Márquez, Gabriel García: One Hundred Years of Solitude

It tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the fictitious town of Macondo. Alongside the story of the Buendía family, there are an abundance of vignettes recounting both the everyday and the supernatural occurrences that shape the lives of the inhabitants of Macondo.

To be honest, it could be argued that there's a little of every entity here, from the Slaughter to the Flesh (The baby born with a pig's tail comes to mind...), but the word Solitude isn't in the title for nothing, it is the most dominant theme in the book. Macondo gets founded in the remote jungles of the Colombian rainforest. Isolated from the rest of the world, the Buendías grow to be increasingly solitary and selfish. Throughout the novel it seems as if no character can find true love or escape the destructiveness of their own egocentricity, and even if they find one it will end in tragedy in one way or another.

Many characters end up isolated from the rest of the world and each other in several different ways. There are several examples that I think would fit the Lonely, like Rebeca, who starts as a semi-feral child who's unable to comunicate with her adoptive family because of a language barrier and ends as a bitter old woman who ends her days self-isolating from everything and everyone by choosing to live in seclusion on her mansion after the untimely death of her husband, keeping her family outside at gunpoint when they try to reconnect with her. There's also how the patriach of the family goes insane and is tied to a chestnut tree like a dog until his death. There's Coronel Aureliano Buendía, who shuts himself in his room making gold fish out of coins that he then sells for more coins to make into more gold fish. And just... so many more examples of characters living and dying in sheer loneliness either because of tragic circumstances or by their own choice. And then there's the ending.

"(...)because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

***

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad and alive with unforgettable men and women—brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul—this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.

***

"The book follows the story of the Buendía family and the town they create, Macondo, from its foundation to its end. Of course, it is told in a non-linear fashion with every generation having the same few names, as well as the same basic attributes (except for a pair of twins whose names are thought to have been accidentally switched at some point)."

It's a story about a family that have terrible trouble connecting and communicating with other people. Like unlucky, unintentional Lukases.

Melville, Herman: Bartleby, the Scrivener

A man who lives on his own terms, disconnected from society. Opportunities are laid before him -- work, friendship, life -- but he denies them all. If he cannot live by his own terms, he refuses to live at all. This cautionary tale warns readers against too much independence from the people around them. Vote for Bartleby! Unless, of course, you would prefer not to.

Moorcock, Michael: The Black Corridor

Space isolation horror! A man is released from cryosleep to take his solo shift making sure the ship runs properly. For 25 years.

Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four

"The book is set in London, the chief city of Airstrip One and part of the superpower of Oceania. Life sucks. Oceania is ruled by the totalitarian regime of "the Party", personified by the omnipresent figure of "Big Brother". Standards of living are low due to the Forever War Oceania is engaged in alongside their ally Eurasia against Eastasia (or is it the other way around?). Sex is banned for all Party members except for procreation, and only between state-approved couplings.(...)"

The party loves destroying human relations. Everybody should be suspicious of everybody else. There should be no romantic love no friendship no nothing. And to get out of the harshest punishment you need to sell out somebody in your place. This is a lonely Leithner.

Paver, Michelle: Dark Matter: A Ghost Story

January 1937. Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely, and desperate to change his life, so when he's offered the chance to join an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year, Gruhuken, but the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice: stay or go. Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return--when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible. Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone. Something walks there in the dark...

Penning, Michael: Solitude

The forest has never been more deadly...

Megan Danforth thought she knew the dangers of the wilderness, but she was wrong. When a little girl goes missing deep in the woods, the young forest ranger must put her own demons aside and turn to an infamous hermit for help. But as secrets are revealed and the clock ticks down, Megan realizes the man she's relying on to save the girl's life may have ties to her own troubled past. He wasn't alone out there in forest. Something evil was with him, and it may have driven him to kill.

Can Megan uncover the truth and bring the lost child home before it's too late, or will the darkness haunting the forest consume them all?

Plath, Sylvia: The Bell-Jar

The book describes a depressed young woman who feels alienated from the misogynistic world and expectations it puts on her. She cannot understand the motivations of people to live, and in turn people do not understand (or acknowledge) her struggle with mental health and sexism.

Poe, Edgar Allan: The Light-House

The title of this short story is unofficial, as Poe did not finish writing it before his death. A diary of a lighthouse keeper with descriptions of sea, weather, and the worrying state of the structure. In the entry for the third day he remarks that the foundation seems to be chalk. The next entry has a date but no text.

Poe, Edgar Allan: The Raven

It tells of a distraught lover who is paid a mysterious visit by a talking raven. The lover, often identified as a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. Sitting on a bust of Pallas, the raven seems to further antagonize the protagonist with its constant repetition of the word "Nevermore".

Poe, Edgar Allan: Alone

From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring— From the same source I have not taken My sorrow—I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone— And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone— Then—in my childhood—in the dawn Of a most stormy life—was drawn From ev’ry depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still— From the torrent, or the fountain— From the red cliff of the mountain— From the sun that ’round me roll’d In its autumn tint of gold— From the lightning in the sky As it pass’d me flying by— From the thunder, and the storm— And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view—

Rosenfeld, Morris: My Boy

A brief poem narrated by a father who has to work so much that he never sees his little son awake.

Rudnick, Elizabeth: A Frozen Heart

A novel adaptation of Disney's 'Frozen' which reveals and unpacks Prince Hans' backstory as he changes from a decent young man who abhors his family's violence, manipulations, and abuse, to the villain who uses all of those tactics to take advantage of Princess Anna, as in the film. He realizes that his behavior is abhorrent, but his need to be loved and accepted by his father and brothers outweighs his sense of decency, and he does whatever he feels is necessary to take the throne of Arendelle.

Ryan, A.J.: Red River Seven

Seven strangers. One mission. Infinite horror.

A man awakes on a boat at sea with no memory of who or where he is. He's not alone - there are six others, each with a unique set of skills. None of them can remember their names. All of them possess a gun.

When a message appears on the onboard computer - Proceeding to Point A - the group agrees to work together to survive whatever is coming. But as the boat moves through the mist-shrouded waters, divisions begin to form. Who is directing them and to what purpose? Why can't they remember anything?

And what are the screams they can hear beyond the mist?

Satrapi, Marjane: Chicken with Plums

"In November 1955, Nasser Ali Khan, one of Iran's most celebrated tar players, is in search of a new instrument. His beloved tar has been broken. But no matter what tar he tries, none of them sound right. Brokenhearted, Nasser Ali Khan decides that life is no longer worth living. He takes to his bed, renouncing the world and all of its pleasures. This is the story of the eight days he spends preparing to surrender his soul."

Nasser is lonely and disconnected from most of the people in his life and stuck in a loveless marriage. There is also the real reason he decides to die.

Spoilers: Nasser got his whole creative drive from unfulfilled love to a woman he was not allowed to marry. Yet when he meets her on the street after many years she pretends not to recognize him. This breaks his heart completely and makes him unable to play his instrument leading to his decision to die. So he decides to die due to lack of love i.e. loneliness.

Schwab, Victoria: The Invisible Life of Addie Larue

France, 1714: In a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever - and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.

Shelley, Mary: The Last Man

At the novel's climax, The Black Death has killed off all humans but the main protagonist, Lionel, plus Adrian, Clara and Evelyn. Evelyn, Lionel's son, dies of an illness (not the Plague, but typhus), then Adrian and Clara drown when a storm in the Adriatic wrecks the three's boat. Returning to shore and making his way to the deserted city of Rome, Lionel realises he is likely the last human left alive, and after another year passes without the evidence of any other humans, he resolves to live the rest of his life as a wanderer, motivated by the prospect of someone, or anyone, for that matter, still being alive on the now-decimated Earth.

Sigsgaard, Jens: Palle Alone in the World

This picture book is so famous in Denmark that "being/feeling Palle" is a very common and casual term for feeling alone. The book is essentially just about a young boy named Palle who wakes up and finds the entirety of Copenhagen completely void of people no matter where he goes. While he has fun at first, eating all the candy he wants, driving trains, he eventually despairs that he has no one to share these experiences with.

Sims, Jonathan: Family Business

“When Diya Burman's best friend Angie dies, it feels like her own life is falling apart. Wanting a fresh start, she joins Slough & Sons - a family firm that cleans up after the recently deceased.

Old love letters. Porcelain dolls. Broken trinkets. Clearing away the remnants of other people's lives, Diya begins to see things. Horrible things. Things that get harder and harder to write off as merely her grieving imagination. All is not as it seems with the Slough family. Why won't they speak about their own recent loss? And who is the strange man that keeps turning up at their jobs?

If Diya's not careful, she might just end up getting buried under the family tree.”

A book all about memory, grief, forgetting, and the forgotten.

Tchaikovsky, Adrian: Children of Ruin

Thirty-one light years from Earth, a fraction of humanity's terraforming project survives the collapse of civilisation. When the universe falls silent, the five remaining scientists turn their attention to the planets below. Disra Senkovi continues the mission, isolated from his crewmates as his engineered aquatic life grows increasingly erratic, while the others study the planet Nod's seemingly harmless fauna, gathering data for no one to read. Their research abruptly halts when a native parasite jumps the gap between alien and human, devouring the minds of its hosts in an attempt to understand them. Senkovi, the mission's sole survivor, spends the last century of his life protecting the mutated denizens of his terraformed planet, whose civilisation he can no longer comprehend.

It's a book about isolation, literal and metaphorical; about incompatibility, inter- and intraspecific. It's about the fear that communication barriers can never be broken, about suffering that arises not from malice but misunderstanding. It's about the aching solitude we inflict on ourselves.

Thoreau, Henry David: Walden

Let's get this straight -- the whole Walden trip was kind of a farce. Thoreau was close enough to his home the whole time for his mom to bring his meals and do his laundry. Nevertheless, the book has inspired many readers to try and similarly divorce themselves from society and 'live off the land', creating situations of isolation and solitude.

Todhunter, Jean Mizer: Cipher in the Snow

It's a short story about a boy who asks to get off the school bus and keels over dead in the snow for no discernible reason; it then follows the teacher who has been asked to write the obituary because apparently he was the kid's favorite teacher despite having practically no idea who he is. He can't find ten people who know the kid well enough to go to the funeral and it's implied that his death was just because of loneliness. The story was later made into a short film in 1973 and, despite the main conflict/emphasis of the film being on the neglect of his parents and teachers, it wound up being used as an anti-bullying PSA for many students because apparently nothing says "be nice to your peers" like "if your parents don't love you enough you might just spontaneously kick the bucket".

Venable, Lynn: Time Enough At Last

The short story that formed the basis for the classic segment in The Twilight Zone. Henry Bemis wants to be left alone so he can fulfil his wish to read a book from cover to cover, and does so by shutting himself in a bank vault. When he leaves, he finds that an atomic bomb has struck, wiping out everyone he knew and possibly the rest of the world. He plans to take advantage of the solitude by reading everything he can in the remains of the library, but his glasses (bespoke due to his complicated prescription) fall off and break, forcing him to confront what it truly means to be entirely alone.

von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: The Sorrows of Young Werther

The story unfolds through a series of letters penned by the eponymous protagonist, Werther, and mainly chronicles his experiences in the small town of Wahlheim. After he falls madly in love with an young woman named Lotte, who is engaged to someone else, Werther gradually becomes more emotional and less mentally stable, not only because of said unrequited love (He in fact spends part of the novel willingly far away from her) but because he feels increasingly withdrawn from a world and a society he has grown to deeply resent.

The novel was one of the earliest works of literature to generate a recognizable fandom, creating a dress fashion. It was also one of the first to be blamed, not without cause, to have a negative effect on some of its readers; psychologists therefore continue to debate about the "Werther effect", meaning a work of art encouraging consumers to commit suicide. The "wave of suicides" following the novel was somewhat exaggerated, more recent studies indicate that there may only be about a dozen verifiable cases where the novel played a part. However, one of them was a friend of Goethe's, which probably was the reason why he published the revised edition of 1787.

Weir, Andrew: The Martian

Mark Watney is an astronaut who is part of the third manned mission to Mars. Soon after they land, the Martian weather gets too rough and the mission has to be abandoned. In the escape, Watney is struck down by a piece of debris and presumed dead, and left on the planet. However, he survives. With no obvious way to communicate with mission control, he has to use the limited resources on hand to survive until the next mission — which is years away.

Wells, H.G.: The Invisible Man

Griffin's invisibility resulted in increasingly strained relations with the people around him and society at large. Eventually, his isolation drove him beyond the constraints of social norms, leading him to murderous outbursts and destructive impulses.

[vergilnelosparda]

Blaze: Hey sis

Frost: Who?

Blaze: It’s me Blaze your older brother

Frost: B-blaze! If you was really Blaze prove it

Blaze: Would I have this then. *Pulls out an blue amulet*. Only I have this Frost and you know it

Frost: Where were you *sniff*. Where were you when Mom and Dad decided to throw me in the Demon World. Father left me in a forest for days all I had was my creations getting me food and water so I’ll survive. Then the demons attacked Father and Mother watched and so did are siblings. They did nothing to help me, all they did was watch. While I was there defending myself. I was 4 Blaze now tell me where were you.

Blaze: I had a child that day Frost. I wanted you to meet him but when I asked Father and Mother where you were at. They told me you were gone. That was it I didn’t get a further explanation until Nathan told me what happened. I was angry at them for doing it but she said you were a monster and they needed to get rid of you-

Frost: She was right. I did become a monster. Do you know what I did to people? What I have done. I slaughtered innocents because of one man, demon I should say. He made me something I didn’t want to be. He forced me into his guard. A perfect one, I had a name that every demon feared. Nova Angelo is what they called me. What he called me. I was a champion in the tournaments he put me in. I won every one of them. Never lost. He forced me to learn the piano. That was fun at the time until he forced me to play it every time he got bored. I’m a monster. Blaze mother and father were right.

Blaze: That’s not true Frost. You are not a monster. Father and mother regret their decision of putting you in the demon world. Are siblings love you. Snow was too young at the time to understand what was going on since he’s a year older than you. So he didn’t know much of what was going on but I do know he was heart broken. His best friend is gone because of our parents. The same parents that thought one of their children is a monster but the truth is we are all monsters. All of us are the same but different. We all have different powers but yours was unique. You could create any animal, demon, human, etc. Without any effort, the first one you created is Estarossa. You created him by a book are parents read to you. Are parents thought it was an abomination. I thought it was the coolest thing. So did are siblings. Nathan, Demain, and Snow thought it was cool.

Frost: What about Crystal?

Blaze: She thought it was unique

Frost: Well I can’t really hate are siblings but are parents

Blaze: You can hate are parents all you want but not are siblings. They did nothing wrong. Yes they did watch it happen but they could do nothing out of fear of are father

*Crying*

Frost: What was that!? Blaze what’s in that blanket your holding

Blaze: You’ll know soon

Frost: What’s that supposed to mean?

Blaze: This *hands Frost the blanket and amulet*

Frost: What are you doing?!

Blaze: *opens a portal*

Frost: Blaze, what are you doing? I can’t leave the tower

Blaze: I’m aware that’s why I’m taking your place

Frost: Huh?

Blaze: *pushing her through the portal* Goodbye sis take care of him

Frost: BLAZE!!!

[aion-rsa]

Chaos Walking Review: Run Away from This Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley Movie

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It was more than three and a half years ago when cameras began rolling on Chaos Walking, the sci-fi adventure movie starring Tom Holland (Spider-Man: No Way Home) and Daisy Ridley (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker). It’s finally seeing the light of day this week. Although production wrapped in late 2017, this film ended up destined to run the same gauntlet that most movies helmed by director Doug Liman do: reshoots, re-edits and rethinking, all in service of cobbling together something that its studio, Lionsgate this time, could call “releasable.”

In the end, however, the behind-the-scenes story of the making of Chaos Walking is probably far more interesting than what was produced. Based on a novel called The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (the first in a trilogy), Chaos Walking is a bland, inert, and deadly dull affair that fails to translate its central concept to the screen. Instead it lays out a bunch of moral and narrative questions that go nowhere and assembles its contrived plot only to set up sequels that will almost certainly never see the light of day.

Holland plays Todd Hewitt, the youngest member of a colony of settlers on a planet dubbed New World. The settlers arrived there from an increasingly unlivable Earth decades earlier, only to discover that something in the planet’s atmosphere creates “the Noise,” a condition in which all the thoughts of males can be heard–and seen, sort of–by everyone else. Females are immune and their thoughts unreadable, which is a moot point anyway since all the women of the colony were killed off years ago in a brutal war with the planet’s native inhabitants, a species called the Spackle.

The first problem with the movie is the Noise itself, which is conceptualized as a kind of running stream-of-consciousness voiceover that confusingly fights for the viewer’s attention with the actual spoken dialogue. Its visual component is a colorful CG smoke that puffs around everyone’s heads like little clouds of the same dust that no doubt gathered around this picture as it sat on the shelf. In one unintentionally hilarious offshoot, an unhinged preacher played by David Oyelowo (who needs to fire his agent after this) manifests his Noise as literal bursts of fire and brimstone.

Todd, whose mother was among the Spackle casualties, does his best to control his Noise by inwardly repeating his name or phrases like “be a man” over and over again, a technique learned from his two daddies (Demian Bichir and Kurt Sutter) and their leader, Mayor Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen). The latter, in Trump-like fashion, has dubbed their settlement Prentisstown. Todd will need to exercise all the self-control he can muster around his mental chatter when he stumbles across Viola (Ridley), the only survivor of an advance scout team from a larger starship bearing a second, long-delayed wave of colonists.

For reasons left unclear, Prentiss sees the arrival of Viola and her starship as some kind of threat, especially since her thoughts are unreadable. At least some of the rest of the settlers view her in a more lascivious sense, which makes her position doubly dangerous. So it falls upon Todd to help her escape from Prentisstown and guide her to another colony called Farbranch, staying ahead of both Prentiss’ men and the Spackle while figuring out a way to contact Viola’s ship.

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All of this is played out in such rote fashion, with dispirited work from what should on paper be a fine cast, that it just becomes (pardon the expression) a bunch of noise. But I was at least bored enough to ponder a series of questions.

Why, for example, is the arrival of a new ship seen as a menace when the colonists have clearly been struggling to survive? Why does Viola act nearly feral after she lands? Why does the planet look like the woods of Canada and Georgia (where it was filmed) with nary a suggestion that it’s a distant alien world? And even if the planet is meant to be exactly Earthlike, how did the Spackle–a clearly alien race–evolve and survive there? (We only meet one member of this race in Chaos Walking and its presence is rather pointless.)

The puzzlements pile up in what is clearly a sloppy, lazily written attempt at both world-building and romance-brewing. But Holland and Ridley have zero chemistry together, their characters are largely ciphers, and other aspects of life on the planet go unexplained or unexplored. The Noise seems to change depending on what the plot requires, with Prentiss and Todd seemingly able to manifest illusions Wanda Maximoff-style. Other potentially interesting threads are dropped: for example, it’s implied yet never directly addressed that Bichir and Sutter are a couple, but what that means for the larger body of men living together in Prentisstown without women for years is ignored entirely.

The trope of space colonists being left alone on a distant planet and rediscovered years later (or sometimes longer) is well-worn in sci-fi–Star Trek deployed it a number of times–and can still be the backdrop for a provocative story. But Chaos Walking instead settles for a standard chase and Y/A meet-cute, with even the expected reveals late in the story about what really happened to the women of Prentisstown both predictable and, at that point, utterly without impact.

Even the late arrival of Cynthia Erivo (The Outsider) in what should be a welcome appearance can’t enliven a movie that just sits on the screen with all the energy of a melting block of ice. But any help that she or the other cast members might provide for Liman (and Fede Alvarez, who reportedly directed an extensive series of reshoots) is not enough. Whether Ness’ novel was just too difficult to translate in cinematic terms, or whether the filmmakers just lacked the imagination to develop the story’s themes and setting in a way that made sense, Chaos Walking staggers out of the gate and never finds its footing.

Chaos Walking is out in theaters Friday, March 5.

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