Bev Vincent

In 2008, Hurricane Ike arrived in our neighborhood and did some damage. Trees fell on neighbors’ houses, we lost a few shingles from our roof, but there was nothing like the damage that occurred elsewhere, or like what we’ve seen in Lake Charles and Cameron, Louisiana from Laura. Twenty-four hours after Ike passed through, we lost power, including phone service, and that went on for four or five days.

Laura looked like she might be aiming right at us for a while, but she turned away. It was amazing to look at the radar and see this massive storm sitting right beside us, but just out of reach. We had a brief rain squall on Wednesday afternoon, but after that…nothing. No wind, no rain, nothing. Honestly, we could have used the two or three inches of rain they’d been promising/threatening us with.

Then, yesterday, shortly after noon, the power went out. I scrambled to get an email out to our company’s social media manager and post something on the corporate website, but then cell phone internet service degraded and vanished. I could make phone calls, but I couldn’t even send text messages.

Uh oh, we thought. We’re on the same grid through the same power company as western Louisiana, so we feared we were going to have the same aftermath as with Ike. This time, we had a freezer full of food to worry about losing–last time, we just kept raiding the fridge until we ate everything perishable! So, we rolled our gas grill out of the garage where we’d stored it in advance of the storm and put it on our front porch. We made a quick, strategic dive into the freezer to find a couple of steaks. And did what we always do: made the best of it!

Fortunately the power came back on after five hours. Stuck around for an hour, then went out for another hour. We have a hand-crank radio/flashlight that was sent to me as part of a promo kit for the TV series The Colony back in 2010, so we were able to listen to the radio and I got a good workout turning the crank every five minutes or so to power it up! There were rumors we might see the same power fluctuations today as Entergy worked to shore up and protect the grid from total collapse, but that turned out not to be the case, and things have returned to normal.

Last weekend, I ventured out to my office building for the first time in five months. I went at a time when I was fairly confident no one else would be there, and that proved to be the case. My main goal was to retrieve my “kangaroo“–my adjustable-height desk adapter that lets me stand while I work at the computer. I have one for my writing/home computer, but I’d been sitting a lot at my laptop computer for the day job at my ad hoc work station (positioned at a 90° angle to my writing computer) and I was starting to feel the strain on my back. So now I have two kangaroos in my office, and my back is much happier.

I also retrieved several bags of food from my office–my lunch and snack supplies–that I had abandoned on my last day working there. I’d forgotten how much stuff I’d left behind: soups, crackers, fruit cups, snack bars, etc. It was like going on a shopping trip! (Except everything is at least five months old–I’m not going to look at any expiration dates.)

Still working on the same tank of gas as I had when I came home from the office that day in mid-March. The poor car has only been out six or seven times on short runs since then so, naturally, the battery died. I left it like that for a few days until I remembered I needed to be able to move the car to get at the lawn mower. I contemplated calling AAA, but instead I spent less than $20 on a trickle charger. I let if run for five or six days, but the first time I tried to start the car, it worked. Now I leave the battery plugged in to the trickle charger full time. Best $20 I spent in a while.

What have we been watching lately? I saw season 3 of The Sinner (USA) and S3 of Absentia on Amazon. Both ok, but not terrific. I zipped through the The Woods, a Polish series based on Harlan Coben’s novel, which was pretty good. I’ve been revisiting my youth watching Columbo episodes from time to time. I’ve finished the first three seasons already. Another season 3 was the final season of the Danish series The Rain (Netflix)–only six episodes, but they packed a lot into them. I loved Perry Mason (HBO)–great cast, great look, and an interesting “reboot” of a beloved character.

I’m following along with Lovecraft Country (HBO) as it rolls out. I have no idea what to expect, but I’ve been enjoying it so far. My wife and I have only two episodes left of S4 of The Good Fight before we’ll have to start looking for something else to watch. My current early morning watch while I hit the elliptical is season 1 of the Spanish series Money Heist (Netflix). I always feel like my linguistic skills should be much better than they are after immersing myself in a foreign TV series for days and weeks on end. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to work that way.

Brian Keene and I signed a contract with Cemetery Dance to publish our collaboration Dissonant Harmonies. Some formats of that book stand a decent chance of appearing in 2020. Stay tuned!

Other forthcoming publications:

• The Hound of Bracketville, Places We Fear to Tread, September 2020
• Halloween Funeral, Something Good to Eat, September 28, 2020
• The Fugitive with the Dragon Tattoo, Black  Cat Mystery Magazine, 2020
• Bloody Sunday, The Book of Extraordinary Sherlock Holmes Stories, Mango, November 2020
• Reflections of the Past, Mickey Finn, December 14, 2020

It’s a little hard to tally up my total fiction publications, including reprints and translations and audio versions, etc. but the number now seems to be somewhere in excess of 150 publications of nearly 100 different short stories. That’s a lotta words!

In an ordinary world, I would be in an airplane headed to New England for Necon 40. But it’s far from an ordinary world and I’m not going anywhere farther than the mailbox to pick up the post today. By my reckoning, I’ve been in lockdown for 121 days. I’ve been to the post office several times (twice during opening hours when I had to interact with a human being), that’s pretty much it.

I do regret not being at Necon–it’s a heckuva lotta fun. However, given the current circumstances, I don’t want to be around anyone other than my wife. We’ve been waving at our neighbors on occasion, but haven’t really spoken to them. Social distancing to the max.

When I lived in Howe Hall, the men’s residence at Dalhousie University, I went through a phase of short story writing. I had a few hardcover journals with the university crest on the front, and I filled them with handwritten tales. I never did anything with them beyond reading them to a few friends. About 15 years ago, I got my hands on those journals from the attic at my family home and transcribed them into Word. At least one–maybe two–of them were published subsequently. A number of them will never see the light of day.

When I was looking at submission guidelines recently, I saw a call for a Halloween-themed anthology. I started looking through my digital files and discovered a 1983 story that looked like a good fit. On my first editing pass, I trimmed about 100 extraneous words (out of 2300) and tidied up some awkward wording. Then I went through it four or five times, deleting, adding, shifting, rewording, expanding, contracting. I ended up with a 2700-word story that is essentially the same as the original version, but much more in line with my current style. I found it interesting that none of my edits had to do with the fact that the story was originally written 37 years ago. Nothing about it was tied to that era.

I submitted the story on Tuesday and it was accepted today. Hooray! I suppose there’s a moral here, about stories and timelessness and universality and being patient, but I’m just happy this little story from my early years as a writer has found a home.

The two-day response was gratifying, but it’s not the quickest I’ve had recently. I submitted my story “The Hound of Bracketville” at 10:30 one morning and had it accepted at 1:30 pm the same day! It will appear in the anthology Places We Fear to Tread in September.

Other recent publications: My Benjamin Kane story “Kane and the Candidate” is now available in eBook and paperback in the anthology Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume II, a charitable anthology benefiting the Southern Poverty Law Center. My story “Expiration Date” is now available in the anthology The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths.

If you’re looking for a Stephen King news update, check out my latest post at News from the Dead Zone.

What have we watched lately? Hamilton on Disney+ and Greyhound on Apple TV+. We enjoyed them both. We’re into the final season of The Good Wife (pleasantly surprised to see Lucca Quinn show up! I’m watching I’ll Be Gone in the Dark each week on HBO. I binged through the five-episode BBC series Paradox last weekend and started the Finnish crime series Deadwind (Season 2) this week. I have some issues with the writing on the latter. Some of it is quite lazy and sloppy.

After finishing Season 3 of Dark (excellent show), I went back and did a quick rewatch of the first season. It makes so much more sense now that I have a firmer grasp on who everyone is and the different stages in their lives. An intricate show extremely well executed.

By my reckoning, today marks 100 days since I was last at my day-job office. One hundred days during which I have only been out of the house to pick up take-out (once), go to the post office (half a dozen times, almost always during the off hours), or to pick up something from the township (no human interaction required)…except for the occasional walk around the neighborhood with my wife. I’m a huge advocate for mask wearing, especially in situations where you might be trapped indoors with another person. Texas is not looking very good at the moment, and it threatens to get worse, much worse, before it gets better. So I’m glad that I have the option to work from home…as does my wife. We’re weathering this lockdown just fine.

I found out today that three stories from Por Los Aires, the Spanish translation of Flight or Fright, have been nominated for a 2020 Ignotus Award (described by Locus as the Spanish Hugos) in the “Cuento extranjero” category (“foreign short stories”). The nominees are “El experto en turbulencias” by Stephen King, “Quedan liberados” by Joe Hill and my story, “Zombis en el avión.” This comes as very much of a surprise, but news like this is always welcome!

Flight or Fright (Classe tous risques) was selected by Vogue (France) for their list: Les 5 livres de poche de l’été 2020 à lire sur la plage. Quite an honour!

My story “Expiration Date” appears in The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths: The Best New Original Stories of the Genre edited by Maxim Maxim Jakubowski. It came out last week and is available on Amazon and, presumably, elsewhere.

Forthcoming publication news: My short story “Kane and the Candidate” appears in the anthology Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume II, which comes out on July 4th. The anthology will raise $10,000 for the Southern Poverty Law Center to help fight voter suppression. The eBook edition is available for pre-order on Amazon. We just found out this week that Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent and, more recently, The Last Trial, has contributed an introduction to the anthology.

I have an essay in the July/August issue of Texas Gardener magazine. I’m nobody’s gardener–at least not any more, although I spent many an hour in the vegetable garden when I was growing up–but something happened in our neighborhood that inspired me to write an essay called “Bamboozled” for the regular “Between Neighbors” feature.

Stay tuned for news about Dissonant Harmonies, the collaboration between Brian Keene and me. After many, many years, this project is finally going to see the light of day! My novella, “The Dead of Winter,” is the longest piece of fiction I’ve ever published.

Speaking of long-delayed projects, I hear that we might be getting back to work on Stephen King Revisited before too long!

My wife and I are still working our way through The Good Wife. We’re about halfway through Season 5 right now. We also recently watched the movies Da 5 Bloods (which stars Delroy Lindo from The Good Fight) and The Queen of Katwe, about a female Ugandan chess prodigy (featuring Lupita Nyong’o as her mother and David Oyelowo as her chess teacher), based on a true story. I also watched The Vast of Night, which is a really effective sci-fi film.

For TV series, I recently watched Bordertown S3 (Finland, Netflix), Killing Eve S3 (BBC America), The Valhalla Murders (Iceland, Netflix), and Reckoning (Australia, Netflix), and I’m halfway through Marcella S3 (UK, Netflix).

Several unrelated thoughts that occurred to me while I was mowing the lawn this morning – the longest stretch of time I’ve been outside in at least two months.

• When my daughter was 10, I offered her 25¢ for every pine cone she picked up from the yard. She declined but later realized what a deal she had passed up on. Today she could have made $100 easily. Back then, we had a mechanical push mower and pine cones were my nemeses.
• Now my daughter has a nearly four-year old daughter and, as of yesterday, a newborn son. Where has the time gone?
• I wish I knew as much about the inner lives of squirrels as Jack London did about wolf-dogs. There’s a White Fang to be written from the point of view of these entertaining creatures.
• My wife was upstairs working while I mowed. I stumbled upon three unexpected flowers: a deep-red rose on a bush we’d long thought dead, a single azalea flower on a bush that had fully flowered over six weeks ago, and a hydrangea flower on what was once a house plant that has blossomed into an enormous shrub after we transplanted it outside. I texted her photographs of each of them as I discovered them.
• I haven’t been among people in over two months. I’ve gone to the post office to drop off packages in the early morning hours to avoid encounters, and I picked up a to-go order in my car once. That’s it. However, once it becomes necessary to be among people again, I plan to cultivate the skill of coughing raucously and/or sneezing on demand if those around me are non-compliant with social distancing.

I haven’t made a blog post this year. So what’s been going on, you ask? Oh, not much. Just this pandemic. I’m in the midst of my fourth week working from my home office. The only times I’ve been outside the house, except for our semi-regular walks around the block, has been for a couple of early morning trips to the post office to drop off parcels. Both times I went before the post office was open, so I didn’t encounter more than a couple of people, and we all maintained a very respectful distance.

The grocery store we used to go to the most closed in February, before this mess got started, so we did our part and helped them liquidate stock. Turns out that was a wise decision, as we ended up stocking up on all the sorts of things we need these days. Lots of canned goods and pasta, etc.

Working from home has been fine. Turns out I could have been doing this all along, because I haven’t encountered a single thing that I can’t do here that I could only do at the office. Maybe I’ll try to convince the powers that be to let me do this more, once the world flips right-side-up again. My wife also works from home–has done for quite some time. We each have an office, so we aren’t disturbing each other when we have Zoom and Skype calls. For some reason, though, working from home during this crisis seems more intense. I get more done but I’m more thoroughly exhausted by the end of the week.

I’ve been maintaining the same schedule as before the pandemic. Up at 5, exercise while I watch an installment of something on TV. Writing work until about 7:30, shower, breakfast, then head back to the office at 8:30 for the day job. My wife and I have a ritual where she stands on the bottom step of the stairs for a kiss and a hug before I go to work. We’re keeping this tradition alive, even though I’m going upstairs instead of into the garage to drive to the office.

So, how many weeks to the gallon is your car getting? When’s the last time you paid cash for something? I gave my wife all my cash a few weeks ago for one of her excursions and I haven’t bothered to replenish my supply. Maybe we’ll be a cashless society after all this. I think we’re going to discover that we can do a lot of things differently in the aftermath.

We’ve been cooking lots of terrific meals during lockdown. We always did cook a lot at home, although we enjoyed evenings at local dining establishments, too. The only meal we ordered to have delivered was a pizza about three weeks ago. We wanted to support one of our favorite restaurants. However, I’ve been experimenting with pizza crust recipes using a formula provided by a friend of mine, and we’ve made some amazing pizzas. It takes two days to make the crust, because there’s a starter (sort of like you’d use for sourdough) made on one day and, 24 hours later, you make the dough and let it rest in the fridge for another day to let the gluten relax. On the third day, make the pizza. The crust is so crispy and flavorful. Yum. Counting the days until we have the next one!

We’ve also been drinking a lot of wine! My wife picked up two cases of one of our favorite red blends, along with many other bottles. Every day is wine-down Wednesday these days. It is a little hard to keep track of which day of the week it is, but does it really matter?

I don’t think we’ve been watching as much television as a lot of people are. A couple of episodes of this or that during the evening. We binged through Star Trek: Picard and followed that with Star Trek: Discovery (season 1), which I’d already seen but had forgotten a lot about it. I’ve been watching Season 3 of Wesworld (HBO) and ZeroZeroZero (Amazon) in the mornings. We saw the movie Just Mercy the other night, and went down a rabbit hole of consecutive episodes of What’s My Line? from 1961 one evening. One of the guest panelists on one episode was a very young Betty White!

Have not been reading very much. I have to take another pass through If It Bleeds to get my review ready (publication date has been moved forward to two weeks from today), and we’ve been reading a few chapters of The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson each evening. It’s about Churchill and his family during the blitz of World War II. We always have a jigsaw puzzle going and, as I said, go for the occasional walk, although it feels strange having to be ever-vigilant about maintaining a safe distance from anyone you meet on the path.

One fun thing I did was to read my short story “Game Seven” from Across the Universe for editor Randee Dawn’s “Stories for Shut-Ins” series. I found an appropriate background and put on my old Howe Hall hockey sweater for the reading, which you can find at that link, along with readings by several of my fellow contributors, with more to come in the next week or so. Or you can go straight to it on YouTube here.

Writing is a little strange these days. Whenever I watch something on TV, I find myself thinking–that’s not the way the world is now. Why are there so many people in that room? Why are they shaking hands? And hugging? It’s hard to figure out what the world is going to look like a few months from now–the world in which the fictions we’re creating now will be set. Sure, it would be easy to back up and set everything in 2019, but it’s interesting, too, to try to anticipate what it’s going to be like in late 2020. Challenging, too. Maybe it’s time to write Fantasy or Science Fiction, where you can not only make up the story but also the world!

This year has been quite active in terms of publications. As December comes to a close, I thought I’d wrap up my round-up with a summary of what came out in 2019.

Flight or Fright continues to be my biggest project to date. This year saw the release of the anthology in trade paperback in English from both Scribner and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK. We are currently up to fourteen translated editions under contract: Germany (Heyne), France (Livre de Poche), Brazil (Editora Schwarcz), Poland (Proszynski), Japan (Take Shobo), Korea (Sam and Parkers), Hungary (Europa), Russia (AST), Bulgaria (Pleyada), Italy (Mondadori Libri S.p.A.–Sperling & Kupfer), Spain (Penguin Random House Spain), Greece (Klidarithmos), China (Shanghai 99), Ukraine (Family Leisure Club). Some of them have appeared already; the others are in progress.

Check out my page for the anthology to see covers and the latest additions to the “Inflight Entertainment” section, showcasing all the cool photos people have sent me showing them reading the anthology on airplanes or at airports.

For short fiction (besides “Zombies on a Plane,” which is in Flight or Fright), I had the following stories come out in 2019:

• “Aeliana” in Shining in the Dark in audio (Simon & Schuster; Hodder & Stoughton ) and in English trade (Gallery Books), as well as in Serbian, with more translations to come.
• “The Shrieking Woman” in English in Shivers VIII from Cemetery Dance and in German from Cemetery Dance Germany
• “The Dungarvon Whooper” in Nothing’s Sacred Volume 5
• “The Invisible Man,” in A Time for Violence
• “The Patience of Kane” in The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods
• “Game Seven” in Across the Universe

I already have five new stories cued up for publication in 2020, too.

For essays, I have the following:

• This Essay has no Title (Just Words and a Soundtrack) in Elton John: Fifty Years On: The Complete Guide to the Musical Genius of Elton John and Bernie Taupin
• A Nasty, Dark Piece of Work in the Letterpress edition of Revival
• That Old Gang of Mine in Outside In Gains a Soul
• Doctor Sleep: The World Will Shine Again in Screem #38
• News from the Dead Zone, Cemetery Dance #77

I published two reviews in Dead Reckonings this year:

• That Is Not How the Story Goes (Theodora Goss, Snow White Learns Witchcraft: Stories and Poems) – Issue 25
• “When Blue Meets Yellow in the West”: Stranger Things 3 (with Hank Wagner) – Issue 26

and five reviews at Cemetery Dance online:

• Pet Sematary (movie )
• The Institute by Stephen King
• It Chapter Two (movie)
• Mr. Mercedes Season 3 (TV)
• Doctor Sleep (movie)

in addition to four comprehensive updates at News from the Dead Zone.

I also posted fourteen book reviews at my book blog, Onyx Reviews.

I was a guest of honor at Northern Fancon in British Columbia, attended Necon and KillerCon, as well as my very first Bouchercon. Not sure where I’ll be showing up next year other than Necon.

A number of things are in the works for 2020, including my collaboration with Brian Keene, Dissonant Harmonies, and more, I’m sure!

Have a happy and safe New Year’s Eve, and all the best for the Roaring 20s to come!

I read–or listened to–just over fifty books this year. You can find the full list here. A few were audiobooks that I listened to in the car. Several were books I read to my wife in the evening, part of our regular routine. A few were for research for a project that never came to fruition, some were for essays I had to write, and a couple were for research for a novel I’m currently writing.

I also got to read Gwendy’s Magic Feather by Richard Chizmar a couple of times, and I did some research for him while he was working on this follow-up to Gwendy’s Button Box.

I reviewed fourteen books this year at Onyx Reviews:

• Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré
• Broken Man on a Halifax Pier by Lesley Choyce
• Elevator Pitch by Linwood Barclay
• The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson
• Land of Wolves by Craig Johnson
• The Chain by Adrian McKinty
• From Sea to Stormy Sea: 17 Stories Inspired by Great American Paintings edited by Lawrence Block
• If She Wakes by Michael Koryta
• Just Watch Me by Jeff Lindsay
• Exhalation by Ted Chiang
• The Pandora Room by Christopher Golden
• Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman
• Inspection by Josh Malerman
• Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

I also reviewed The Institute by Stephen King at News from the Dead Zone.

Other works I enjoyed but haven’t yet had a chance to review include Full Throttle by Joe Hill and three forthcoming books: Dead to Her by Sarah Pinborough, All Adults Here by Emma Straub, and The Chill by Scott Carson. The latter is one you’ll be hearing a lot more about, I think. It’s the first supernatural novel by Michael Koryta (writing under a pen name) in a good many years, and it’s a real winner!

I know a lot of people are doing “best of the decade” lists, but I can barely manage “best of the year,” so that’s what you’re gonna get!

I saw something on the order of 80 movies so far this year, with more to come no doubt over the next couple of weeks. Some were in theaters, some OnDemand or streaming and a few were on those tiny little screens on the back of airplane seats. In the latter category, my favorite was Bad Night at the El Royale, which was very entertaining on a flight from Japan to the US.

In the Stephen King Universe, there were three notable cinematic releases in 2019. First, there was Pet Sematary, which I was genuinely looking forward to after I read about the plot change they were making, but which ultimately disappointed me. Then there was It: Chapter Two, which wrapped up the lengthy and impressive adaptation of one of King’s longest and most popular novels. I liked it a lot. And, finally, there was Doctor Sleep, which failed at the box office, but to my mind was one of the best films inspired by a King novel in quite a while. I reviewed all three of these for News from the Dead Zone–that’s where the links above will take you. There was another movie release this year, In the Tall Grass on Netflix, but I haven’t managed to see that one yet.

To my way of thinking, a movie makes my favorite list based on how much I wanted to tell other people about it after I saw it. In no particular order, the movies that did this for me from 2019 were: Us, Rocketman, The Highwaymen, Yesterday, Downton Abbey, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Knives Out and Dolemite Is My Name.

I saw and enjoyed a few Marvel films this year, including Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame. They feel like their in a category by themselves. I finally finished The Irishman after two sittings nearly two weeks apart, and then watched the companion piece on Netflix that had Pacino, De Niro, Pesci and Scorcese discussing the project. I liked the film well enough, but won’t rave about it. It was also good to go back to Deadwood this year, and El Camino, while not absolutely necessary, was a nice throwback to the Breaking Bad years.

In the oddball category, I got a big kick out of Velvet Buzzsaw, although it wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Bird Box was entertaining.

We watched a number of music documentaries this year, not all of them new: Echo in the Canyon, The Quiet (St)One, Rolling Thunder Revue, Now More Than Ever, Can’t Stand Losing You. Haven’t seen the David Crosby movie yet, but it’s on my radar. Also in the documentary category, we enjoyed Knock Down the House and Cold Case Hammarskjöld.

I don’t do Top X lists. As I’ve said before and elsewhere, my mind simply doesn’t function that way. I might be able to present a list of 10 unordered items, but that’s the best I could manage.

When it comes to TV/Streaming, this year, though, I’d be hard pressed to narrow my list of “favorites” down to a simple 10. So I’m just going to mention shows this year that I really enjoyed. There were a lot of them!

In the King universe, there was Season 3 of Mr. Mercedes, which adapted Finders Keepers. A strong season with a terrific cast, enhanced by Bruce Dern and Kate Mulgrew in particular. I’ve been hearing great things about Season 2 of Castle Rock, but I haven’t had the time to see it yet. Maybe before the end of the year. I have seen the first several episodes of HBO’s adaptation of The Outsider, and they’ve done a bang-up job of it. I’ll have a full preview of the series closer to air date, but it is really well done.

There were solid seasons from a number of reliable ongoing series. Luther, True Detective, Game of Thrones (yeah, I know–not everyone loved how it ended, but it was exciting getting there), Bosch, Stranger Things, Orange Is the New Black, Goliath (wasn’t Season 3 a trip?), The Crown. It was also the final run for The Santa Clarita Diet, which got canceled after a big plot event that I wasn’t that fond of, although the season was pretty hilarious.

I added two new series to the rotation this year. First, Stumptown on ABC, starring Cobie Smulders from How I Met Your Mother as a newly minted PI who suffers PTSD, has a brother with Down Syndrome, and a long history of poor life choices. She’s not alone in the latter–all of the characters make bad choices from time to time, making the show gritty and credible. I like it a lot.

The other new series is Morning Show on Apple TV+, starring Jennifer Aniston, Reece Witherspoon and Steve Carell. Who knew there was that much going on behind the scenes of a network morning talk/news show? The characters are fascinating, and the season is firmly rooted in the #MeToo era. It’ll be interesting to see how they wrap it up.

For limited series, we loved Good Omens and Chernobyl. I thought The Spy was very well done, too. We also enjoyed the miniseries adaptation of Catch-22.

For quirky shows, there’s Ricky Gervais’ touching After Life and the second season of Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories, which we enjoy for its insight into aspects of Japanese culture you don’t often see. Another in the strange category: The End of the F***ing World. I’m not quite sure what the attraction is, but I find I can’t look away from it!

On the scarier side of things, I loved the French series Marianne on Netflix. It’s about a writer who has been channeling a witch throughout her career, and now that she’s gone back to her hometown, things really take off in many bad ways. It’s one of the most tense and scary series I’ve seen in recent years, and it’s very well done. Black Summer is a quick watch, a low-budget but effective take on the zombie concept. The Terror: Infamy was a slow-burn, but we were fascinated by the Japanese mythology this season.

Not quite as scary, but equally well done, is the Christina Applegate series Dead to Me. Bad and twisted people doing bad and twisted things, often to hilarious effect. Russian Doll was terrific, with its twisty, turny storyline and a stellar performance by Natasha Lyonne, who also co-created the series. Homecoming, starring Julia Roberts, on Amazon, is another example of how you can do drama in 30-minute installments. I liked the first season of The Kominsky Method, but haven’t gotten around to the new season yet.

On the crime side of things, I was blown away by the German series Babylon Berlin, which has 16 episodes in two “seasons,” but it’s really all one story. It’s set in pre-WWII Germany and–save for a couple of dubious plot choices–tells an amazing story of decadence and corruption in a troubled nation. Season 3 can’t get here fast enough. The Germans also won me over with The Dark, which just finished shooting its third and final season. You need a score card to watch this one, and even then it’s really confusing, but it’s worth the effort.

The second season of Mindhunter was really good. I was intrigued by the Criminal series on Netflix, which consists of four sets of three episodes, each one set in a different country and language. They’re all set in the interrogation room and observation room, they all use the same set (with different decorations, including changes to the food in the vending machines). Season 2 of Tin Star went into Banshee territory. Unbelievable was an interesting look into what happens when someone decides to change their story after reporting a crime.

For science fiction and fantasy, there were strong seasons from Star Trek: Discovery and The Orville. We also liked Another Life, and stumbled upon The Society by accident and enjoyed that ride, too.