Recent releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.

I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones is something of an expert on slashers. The author has tackled the genre in a slew of his novels (most notably in the Indian Lake Trilogy, with its slasher-movie-obsessed main character) and has an ongoing column in Fangoria dedicated to its impact, so it’s not really a surprise to see he’s churned out another entry for the canon. But this time around, we’re getting a different perspective: the slasher’s point of view.

I Was a Teenage Slasher is the fictional memoir of Tolly Driver, who in 1989 reluctantly became Lamesa, Texas’ very own Michael Meyers at the age of 17 — a transformation that’s seemingly driven by powers beyond Tolly’s control. It takes the classic slasher formula and injects a whole lot of heart.

The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth was released in the spring, but it just popped onto my radar and I was immediately drawn in by both the premise and Schlanger’s easy-to-digest writing style. The Light Eaters explores the long-debated concept of plant “intelligence” through conversations with scientists and deep dives into the complex processes that underlie plants’ survival.

There’s a fair amount of anthropomorphizing, but The Light Eaters provides a really fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of plants that’s accessible to non-scientists and at the very least could inspire you to look at the natural world a little differently.

Paranoid Gardens by Gerard Way, Shaun Simon, Chris Weston

The digital first issue of Paranoid Gardens, a new six-issue series from Gerard Way and Shaun Simon, dropped this week and it’s wonderfully bizarre. We’re introduced right away to Loo, a nurse with memory loss and a tragic (but as yet unexplained) backstory who works at a care facility for aliens and paranormal beings. And it’s not just the patients that are out of the ordinary — there’s something unusual about the building itself, too. Drama quickly unfolds, and Loo “must fight her way through corrupt staff members, powerful theme park cults, and her own personal demons and trauma” to understand her role in all of it “and discover what secrets the gardens hold.”

Paranoid Gardens is written by Way (yes, of My Chemical Romance fame but also The Umbrella Academy) and Simon (The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, written with Way), and features art by Chris Weston, colors by Dave Stewart and letters by Nate Piekos.

The horde is relentless. Every time I naively get overconfident in the timing of my laser sweeps and think I finally have the advantage over my enemies, the next wave comes in tenfold just to put me back in my place. I flatten them, they come back stronger and overtake me, and our little dance starts all over again.

In Laser Sphere, a Playdate game made by Pulp creator Shaun Inman, it’s just you and your prone-to-overheating space laser against the world. From the game’s description:

The lights in the sky are fading. A massive shell around an ailing star is the last bastion of a civilization witness to a cosmic extinction level event. But at the edge of the gloom lurks a horde driven mad by darkness, bent on snuffing out the last of the light.

Your job is to defend the Sphere from the incoming attackers, using the crank to control the direction of the laser beam and ‘A’ to fire. You can hold ‘A’ for a continuous blast of the laser, but this is a time-limited action — after a few seconds, your laser will overheat and be unusable until it cools down, leaving you completely vulnerable. To prevent that, you can instead shoot in short bursts to conserve power. But when tiny, high-speed enemies are coming at you in droves, good luck trying to snipe them each individually. When all else fails, you can deploy a bomb to take out a large number of enemies at once.

Shaun Inman

There are ways to improve the Sphere that'll give you a better shot at holding off the swarm. After destroying the ships, you can collect their materials and use the currency from this at the end of each level to purchase upgrades and make repairs. One add-on will reduce the laser’s cooldown time, while another fortifies your shield.

Thanks to the overheating/cooldown element, every decision feels high-stakes, and Laser Sphere as a result is an extremely engaging little action game. (The music by Mike Freuden is pretty solid too). There are enemies of different sizes, each type moving at a different speed, and you really have to stay on your toes to make sure you’re making the best use of your laser for whichever threat is most pressing at the moment. Otherwise, you’ll end up without a weapon when a couple dozen attackers are right on top of you. You can get Laser Sphere on the Playdate Catalog for $6.