Cracked Spines

It's all bad cannibalism puns from here on out, folks. This week your hosts read The Hunger by Alma Katsu, a supernatural retelling of the ill-fated Donner Party expedition. Amelia speaks of cannibalism with a tremor of excitement in her voice, and Sarah kinkshames her by necessity.

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This week, Sarah and Amelia fantasize about the perks of being (mostly) alone on an entire planet as they read Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population. Featuring discussions of gender, ageism, and alien oral sex. Amelia says "self-actualization" at one point and it makes her feel very smart and cool.

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This week on Cracked Spines, your hosts decided to spice up their Jurassic Park viewing experience by eating some (legal!) marijuana chocolate. Sarah proceeded to be trapped within a dying prison of flesh for the remainder of the two hour movie, and Amelia was a two dimensional shape. Here are our hot takes on that, and also dinosaurs. Also featuring oily mannequin baby birth, Steven Spielberg the orgasm denial wizard, and of course, bad dinosaur name pronunciation.

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Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park is a template for a beautiful socialist lesbian love colony, and this week on Cracked Spines, we uncork Amelia’s lifelong dinosaur fetish to explore why the capitalist fools of this novel couldn’t see it. Amelia slanders Ernest Shackleton, Sarah tries and fails to name a single correct dinosaur fact, and together we discover that this novel is a stealth fanfic of Frankenstein that dares to ask the question: what if Dr. Frankenstein was a shitty grad student with a budget who made three hundred dinosaurs in 15 minutes? There is a scenario with only good outcomes, surely.

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In what may be the final episode in our polar exploration kick, Sarah watches the Broadway musical "Ernest Shackleton Loves Me," featuring Ernest Shackleton skype-calling a single mom in the 21st century, crawling out of her refrigerator, and talking about his dick size. So basically, Sarah's ideal musical. Also featuring bad passwords, Critical Role, and yes, as always, The Terror.

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Ernest Shackleton has big dick energy, and Sarah is here to prove it. With his 69 dogs and his salty seamen, our boy Ernest proved that it is in fact possible to get famous for how badly you almost fucked up. Amelia reads Shackleton's memoir, while Sarah reads a selection of other Shackleton-related books, including children's stories and a manual on how to run your business like you got shipwrecked in Antarctica.

Note: we ran into some technical issues with Sarah's mic near the end of the episode, which is why it suddenly starts sounding like she recorded her audio by phonograph.

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In keeping with our ongoing theme of polar horror, Sarah and Amelia watch John Carpenter's gooey vore masterpiece "The Thing." Yes, that is its official description. Featuring the raw erotic energy of MacReady's perpetual cowboy hat, discussions of practical effects vs CGI, and a brief digression on what opiods do to your poop. It's mostly relevant.

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Bet ya'll thought we were done with the Arctic, huh. This week we read Who Goes There by John W. Campbell, the novella which inspired three different movie spinoffs including John Carpenter's The Thing. We talk about the pros and cons of classic sci-fi, which Jane Austen character would die first in the Arctic, and the expansive isolation of polar horror as a genre. Most importantly, we pitch our own movie adaptation of this novella: a tentacle jetpack erotica romp as written by Isaac Asimov.

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This week, Sarah and Amelia read The Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi; and shocker of shockers, actually manage to have a semi-intelligent discussion on subverting versus embracing tropes, the nature of YA lit, and the importance of representation. Also, a serious question masquerading as a bit about whether or not you're allowed to keep a person's necrotic toe if it falls off in your presence. Like if they don't want it or whatever. Or if they don't call dibs. Seems like you should be able to get the toe if you call dibs.

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Listen, we say “don’t go to the Arctic” a fair amount on this podcast, but we just can’t help ourselves. This week we revisit our first book to discuss the AMC series The Terror which Sarah has not seen and has no interest to, and Amelia has watched twice, sobbing the entire time. Featuring things they changed from the book (including a welcome tweak to the backstory of our favorite little cannibal god king), sweet and sick facts about lead poisoning (like the fact that everyone in 19th century Britain had it), and our pitch for season two, starring the HMS “Dying of Scurvy.”

WARNING: this episode contains mega-spoilers for the entirety of the show and the book.

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