A Meal of Thorns

By The Ancillary Review of BooksArts Books Fiction Science Fiction

A Meal of Thorns episodes

January 12A Meal of Thorns 41- THE BEETLE with Marisa Mercurio
If you read Dracula and thought: “I like the ancient shapeshifting nemesis and the homoerotic subtext, but I don’t like how subtle the sexual and national anxieties are,” you’re in luck! Editor, reviewer, and scholar Marisa Mercurio is here to talk about not-so-subtle horrors in Richard Marsh’s 1897 novel The Beetle.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Marisa Mercurio
Title: The Beetle by Richard Marsh
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
Chopin's "Minute Waltz" performed by Alfred Cortot
Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Artur Rodzinski
References:
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr
Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca & Don't Look Now
Alex Woodroe's The Night Ship
Tenebrous Press
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot
E.R. Eddison's Zimianvian trilogy
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes
Kate Beaton’s “The Horror Of The New Woman”
H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau
Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis
The Fly films (Kurt Neumann 1958; David Cronenberg 1986)
Phase IV directed by Saul Bass
Robert Repino's Mort(e)
The Nest by Gregory A. Douglas, and the “Valancourt Paperbacks from Hell”
Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
The Female Detective by Andrew Forrester
Wilkie Collins
The However Improbable podcast
Marisa’s bluesky
1 hr 7 min
December 29, 2025A Meal of Thorns 40- 2025 Wrap-Up with Dan Hartland
We’re closing out this strange year with a “big-picture” episode: editor & critic Dan Hartland is on to talk about trends and directions—or lack thereof—in recent speculative fiction. We talk about the interesting spread of books & awards this year, do some armchair speculating about genre shifts & their accompanying arguments, and have some very insider-baseball discussion of what gets reviewed (or not) and why. And, of course, Dan and Casella talk about their favorite reads from 2025.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Dan Hartland
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson
References:
Critical Friends podcast
Gautam Bhatia's The Sentence
Vajra Chandrasekera's Rakesfall
Award spread this year- see for instance SFADB
Article on UK romantasy sales numbers
Romantasy, LitRPG, Progression Fantasy, Baen Books
Locus
SFT= Speculative Fiction in Translation
Strange Horizons issue on the NEA cuts and SFT
Richard K. Morgan
Orbus by Neal Asher
Jenny Hamilton’s work at Reactor
AO3= Archive Of Our Own
When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift
Metal from Heaven by August Clarke
Niall Harrison’s review of Swift
William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy
Hugboxing vs Scab-Picking
H.G. Wells
Sylvia Park's Luminous
Eva Meijer’s Sea Now, tr. Anne Thompson Melo
The Booker Prize
“Prestige TV in the Time of Climate Change” by Sarah Miller
The Sopranos & Breaking Bad
The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien
Hannah Arendt & Baruch Spinoza
John Wyndham & J.G. Ballard
The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, tr. Sarah Moses
Becky Chambers
Colourfields by Paul Kincaid
Margaret Killjoy's A Country of Ghosts
The Expansion Project by Ben Pester
The Goldsmiths Prize
Olga Ravn's The Employees
Jeff VanderMeer's Area X
Ned Beauman
BSFA short SF in translation award
Translated Hugo Initiative
Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, tr. Rahul Berry
Isaac Fellman's Notes from a Regicide
Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors
Christopher Priest
Debbie Urbanski's Portalmania
Thomas Ha's Uncertain Sons
Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others
Leyna Krow's Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids
Ed Park's An Oral History of Atlantis
Kelly Link, George Saunders, T.C. Boyle, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Elwin Cotman
Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, edited by Indrapramit Das
Countess by Suzan Palumbo
Annie Bot by Sierra Grier
Erika Swyler's We Lived On The Horizon
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Premee Mohamed
Lincoln Michel's Metallic Realms
Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams
1 hr 11 min
December 15, 2025A Meal of Thorns 39- THE SECRET HISTORY with Roseanna Pendlebury
We’re tracking down the wellspring of “dark academia” in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and plucking on threads that stretch out to current fantasy and science fiction literature, with reviewer Roseanna Pendlebury as our guide. Casella manages to throw some shade at Arrival, somehow, and also references Dumb & Dumber.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Roseanna Pendlebury
Title: The Secret History
Host: Jake Casella Brookins
Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork by Rob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson
References:
Isaac Fellman’s Notes from a Regicide
E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again
Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker
Rebecca Campbell's Arboreality
Simon Roy's Griz Grobus & A Star Called The Sun
Ursula Whitcher's North Continent Ribbon
Tartt’s The Goldfinch
Euripides’ The Bacchae
Jane Alison's Meander Spiral Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative
Roger Ebert's review of Roger Avary’s film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction (which, we didn’t get into this in the episode, is sort of in the Expanded Secret History Universe)
Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian
Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey
J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter
Sofia Samatar's The Practice The Horizon and the Chain
R.F. Kuang's Katabasis & Babel
Fellman's The Two Doctors Górski
Marina & Sergei Dyachenko's Vita Nostra, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey
Ceaușescu's bathroom
Peter Farrelly’s film Dumb and Dumber
Sir Arthur Conan Doyles’ Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet
Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" vs. Denis Villeneuve's film Arrival
Becky Chamber’s To Be Taught if Fortunate
Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent
Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch
"All art is perfectly useless"
C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces
Samatar's A Stranger In Olondria and The Winged Histories
Fellman's The Breath of the Sun
Katherin Addison's The Goblin Emperor & sequels
Dungeons & Dragons
Roseanna’s Small Press Dispatch series at ARB
Roseanna's blog
Tolkien's Beowulf & The Tolkien Reader
Lina Palera’s Seikilos Epitaph with the Lyre of Apollo, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0*
*Note that ARB & AMOT are generally distributed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, but will match the CC of any incorporated material for particular posts/episodes.
1 hr 26 min
December 01, 2025A Meal of Thorns 38- VENOMOUS LUMPSUCKER with Cameron Kunzelman
Academic, critic, and prolific podcaster Cameron Kunzelman joins for a far-ranging discussion about how climate fiction, science fiction, and personal and political connections to the environment intersect. Bonus hog sighting.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Cameron Kunzelman
Title: Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson
References:
Ranged Touch podcasts
The World is Born From Zero & Everything is Permitted
Sean McTiernan’s SFUltra (Sean was the guest for our Dreams of Amputation episode)
From Hell by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
Steve Moore's Somnium
Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism
Christopher Brown's A Natural History of Empty Lots
Bill Bryson
Abigail Nussbaum
Vajra Chandrasekera's Rakesfall
Michael Crichton
Donna J. Haraway’s Staying With The Trouble
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future & Aurora (episode on the latter with Hilary Strang)
Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock, Seveneves, & Anathem
Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
Nicholas Meyer’s film The Day After
Nevil Shute's On the Beach
Adam McKay’s film Don't Look Up
Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects
Trinitite
Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang
Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan
“30-50 Feral Hogs”
Clock of the Long Now
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
John Christopher’s The Death of Grass / No Blade of Grass
Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa
Describe World
Flannery O'Connor
Deep ecology
Arne Næss
Ted Kaczynski
#NoDAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline)
Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net
Patrick Wright’s The Village That Died For England
Centralia coal-seam fire in Pennsylvania
Keiichiro Toyama’s Silent Hill & Christophe Gans’ film adaptation
Cameron's Bluesky
The Assassin's Creed franchise
Immanuel Velikovsky
Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods
1 hr 24 min
November 17, 2025A Meal of Thorns 37 – THE HISTORIAN with Sean Guynes
Vampire scholar, science fiction studies editor, and ARB co-founder Sean Guynes joins to discuss Kostova’s 2005 historical vampire thriller. We both have fairly negative opinions of the book, but it did lead us to talk about what historical thrillers are (or are not) theorizing, vampire novels we like more, and much else besides.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Sean Guynes
Title: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Host: Jake Casella Brookins
Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork by Rob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson
References:
David Linday’s Voyage to Arcturus
Sean's series on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy books
Thomas Burnett Swann
E.R. Eddison
Gibson's Bridge trilogy
Stephen Norrington’s film Blade
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code
R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis
Sarah Perry's Melmoth and our episode with Jon Greenaway about it
Ilana Masad’s “Holocaust Beach Reads”
Machiavelli's The Prince
Radu Florescu & Raymond McNally's In Search of Dracula
The Turkey City Lexicon
Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, including Memnoch the Devil
Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s St. Germaine cycle
E. Elias Merhige’s film Shadow of the Vampire
Claire Kohda's Woman, Eating
Indrapramit Das's The Devourers
Stephen Graham Jones' The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Peter S. Beagle's A Fine and Private Place
Eddison's the The Mezentian Gate
And be sure to check out Sean’s essay on The Historian!
1 hr 28 min
November 03, 2025A Meal of Thorns 36 – UNDER THE EYE OF THE BIG BIRD with Eleanor McAdam
Writer, scholar, and academic organizer E.F. McAdam joins to talk about human evolution & extinction, AI, pseudo-science, and much more in Kawakami’s very strange and really quite funny far-future novel.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Eleanor McAdam
Title: Under The Eye Of The Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda
Host: Jake Casella Brookins
Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork by Rob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson
References:
Current Research in Science Fiction
Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
Annie Bot by Sierra Greer
Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent and Some Desperate Glory
Niall Harrison’s Locus review of Under The Eye Of The Big Bird
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model
J.G. Ballard
Stephen Baxter's Evolution
William Hope Hogdson's The Night Land
X-Men
Isaac Asimov's Foundation
Margaret Atwood MaddAddam Trilogy
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Cat's Cradle
Erika Swyler's We Lived On The Horizon
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun & Never Let Me Go
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time

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1 hr 5 min
October 20, 2025A Meal of Thorns 35 – 60 Stories with Timothy Moore
Barthelme’s surreal, post-modern writing was massively influential for the short story market and for evolving conceptions of literary realism and irrealism, but he’s not often discussed in speculative circles. Author & teacher Timothy Moore is on to help rectify that: we dig into some of our favorites from this landmark connection, with lots of spitballing about the limits of interpretation.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Timothy Moore
Title: 60 Stories by Donald Barthelme
Host: Jake Casella Brookins
Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork by Rob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson
References:
Timothy Moore’s I Will Teach You Retribution
Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock & Peter Weir’s film adaptation
Molly Templeton’s Bluesky request for Australian Gothic
“Intermittent Anhedonia”
Ethan Rutherford's North Sun
Evening House Books
"The School"
Close Reading for the 21st Century edited by Dan Sinykin & Johanna Winant
Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World
"The Lottery"
"Me and Miss Mandible"
"A Shower of Gold"
"Eugénie Grandet"
Sidney Lumet’s Network
"The Balloon"
"The Great Hug"
We somehow completely failed to reference E.E. Cumming’s “In Just – spring” for balloon-man reasons
Keita Takahashi's Katamari Damacy
Ub Iwerk’s Balloon Land
Will McMahon
“A Manual for Sons”
Barthelme’s The Dead Father
Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic
"The Policeman's Ball"
Vercingetorix
"The King of Jazz"
Julio Cortázar
Ishmael Reed
Kelly Link
Ed Park
Elwin Cotman
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Aimee Bender's Girl in the Flammable Skirt
George Saunders
Garielle Lutz
Dalkey Archives
Small Beer Press
Zachary Gillan & our Authority episode
“Reading Weird Fiction in a Time of Fascism”
Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid, translated by Sean Cotter
Liliana Costanzi’s You Glow in the Dark
Thomas Ha's Uncertain Sons
Ed Park's An Oral History of Atlantis
Brian Evenson
“Lonely Rolling Star” by Saki Kabata and Yoshihito Yano off the first Katamari game
Billy Bletcher as the Pincushion Man in Ub Iwerks’ Balloon Land, music by Carl Staling
“You’re the Cream in My Coffee” recorded by Miff Mole and His Little Molers
“Perdido Street Blues” by Louis Armstrong and Sydney Bechet
Charlie Parker’s “Billie’s Bounce”
1 hr 25 min
October 06, 2025A Meal of Thorns 34 – BURNING BRIGHT with Ursula Whitcher
Combining cyberpunk, space opera, and a strong interest in artistic creation and gaming, Burning Bright is an unusual SF novel from a very specific era. Author Ursula Whitcher joins us to talk about the novel’s many strange facets, its fascination with endings, and its connections to developments elsewhere in gaming and science fiction.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Ursula Whitcher
Title: Burning Bright by Melissa Scott
Host: Jake Casella Brookins
Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork by Rob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson
References:
North Continent Ribbon
Indra Das’s The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar
Fonda Lee's Green Bone books & game thereof w/ James Mendez Hodes
Bruce Coville's Aliens Ate My Homework & Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher
Thomas Ha's Uncertain Sons
Scott’s Trouble And Her Friends & Astreiant series, most recently Point of Hearts
C.S. Lewis's Perelandra
Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance novels
Don Daglow’s Neverwinter Nights
Commedia dell'arte
The Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise
LAN parties
C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner books
Arkardy Martine's Teixcalaan books
Iain M. Banks' Player of Games
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
Cameron Reed's Fortunate Fall
Iain Softley’s Hackers
William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy
Charlie Jane Anders
Bruce Sterling
Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide
Ursula's website & Bluesky
54 min
September 23, 2025A Meal of Thorns 33 – THE FIFTH SEASON with Joy Sanchez-Taylor
Fresh off the release of her book Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Author of Color, Joy Sanchez-Taylor joins the podcast to discuss Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, a landmark book in SFF. Lots to talk about here: in terms of how the entire trilogy is tackling ideas about race and oppression, Jemisin’s approach to structure and genre categories, and The Fifth Season’s significance and ongoing legacy.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Joy Sanchez-Taylor
Title: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Host: Jake Casella Brookins
Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork by Rob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson
References:
Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Author of Color
Routledge Handbook of Co-Futurisms
Dispelling Fantasies: Author of Color Re-Imagine a Genre
Ibi Zoboi's Skin
Examples of YA novels in verse from the Boston Public Library
Liliana Colanzi You Glow in the Dark, translated by Chris Andrews
Center for Fiction Brooklyn
Puppygate
Jemisin’s 2018 Hugo Acceptance Speech
Sylvia Moreno Garcia, Nnedi Okorafor, Nghi Vo
Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy, The City We Became
Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone
Moses Ose Utomi’s The Lies of the Ajungo
Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”
Octavia E. Butler’s Parable series
The Elder Scrolls games Morrowind & Skyrim
Jemisin on race in Skyrim
Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf
Latinx Visions Conference, Nov 3-7
Marianna Enriquez
Ananda Lima's Craft
Colson Whitehead, Amal El-Mohtar
Nghi Vo's Singing Hills & The City In Glass
Joy’s Bluesky
Suzan Palumbo, Zig Zag Claybourne
VICFA
World Fantasy Convention
1 hr 4 min
September 08, 2025A Meal of Thorns 32 – AUTHORITY with Zachary Gillan
Picking the second book as an entry point into Area X, weird scholar and normal ARB editor Zachary Gillan is on the pod to talk about Jeff VanderMeer’s work and how the New Weird is more than just ecological anxiety. (Though it might be that, too.)
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Zachary Gillan
Title: Authority by Jeff VanderMeer
Host: Jake Casella Brookins
Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork by Rob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson
References:
Zach’s Profane Illuminations column at ARB
Robert Aickman
Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book-Censor's Library, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman & Sawad Hussain
Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud A Solitude, translated by Michael Henry Heim
Annihilation, Acceptance, and Absolution
VanderMeer’s blog
VanderMeer’s Ambergris: City of Saints and Madmen; Shriek: An Afterword; Finch
Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
MKUltra
Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (from Jean-Michel Jasiensko’s French translation) and Bill Johnston (from the Polish)
Boris & Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, translated by Olena Bormashenko
Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker
Alex Garland's Annihilation
Cormac McCarthy's The Road
Kay Chronister's Desert Creatures
Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow
Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers
Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski’s Batman: the Animated Series
Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology and other work
VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander
Thomas Ha's Uncertain Sons
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain
1 hr 11 min

About A Meal of Thorns

From the publisher's feed

A critical book club from the Ancillary Review of Books. Host Jake Casella Brookins invites writers, scholars, and critics to discuss thorny works of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative…