Between the Pages — June 2026
A good month. Books, manga, a graphic novel, a video game, and two screens worth of material that ran the full range from genuinely great to almost-but-not-quite. Here's what I've been into.
On the manga front, I finally got to Gyo by Junji Ito — horrifying and completely captivating in equal measure. The premise is deceptively simple: sea creatures crawling onto land on mechanical legs, trailing a smell of death. But Ito uses it to pull you somewhere far more unsettling than a standard monster story. It's not Uzumaki, which I still consider his masterwork, but it sits comfortably among the better manga a person could read. The bonus story "The Enigma of Amigara Fault" alone is worth the price of admission.
Alex Grecian's Red Rabbit was the literary surprise of the month. Set in post-Civil War Kansas, it follows a ragtag group of hired guns chasing a bounty on a woman accused of witchcraft — but the personal stakes for each character run far deeper than any simple witch hunt. The novel reads like folklore, like a tall tale spun around a campfire where the fire is the only thing keeping something terrible at bay. Comparisons to Stephen Graham Jones and True Grit have been made, and both feel right. A horror western that earns the label on both counts.
Jesse Lonergan's Drome is something else entirely. A creation myth told almost entirely through sequential art — years in the making, and you can feel every one of them in the pages. Lonergan plays with panel logic in ways that feel genuinely new, pushing the boundaries of what the graphic novel format can do structurally and emotionally. The Washington Post called it a miracle of a book. I'm not inclined to argue. If you care at all about what comics are capable of, this is required reading.
I've also been working through Paul Tremblay's Growing Things and want to single out "The Teacher" specifically. It unsettled me in a way that stayed long after I'd finished it — which is exactly what the best short fiction does. Tremblay is operating at a high level throughout this collection, but that story in particular is something special.
On the screen side, The WONDERfools on Netflix is a must watch. Set in 1999 amid Y2K panic, it follows three small-town misfits who accidentally gain superpowers from a toxic waste dump and find themselves mentored by a mysterious city employee with secrets of his own. Yes, it draws comparisons to Stranger Things and The Umbrella Academy — and those comparisons are fair. But in many ways it surpasses both. Where those shows lost their edge over time, The WONDERfools arrives fully formed: chaotic, funny, and unexpectedly moving. A found-family superhero story that earns every emotional beat without losing its sense of humor. Eight episodes. Watch all of them.
I also caught Backrooms — the A24 adaptation of the creepypasta about those endless, fluorescent-lit liminal spaces — with my children. At its best it delivers genuinely unsettling imagery and some legitimately tense sequences. But it tends to run slow, and ultimately the plot doesn't quite hold up under its own weight. Worth a watch at home, but not at movie theater prices.
Finally, on the gaming side — Mixtape from Annapurna Interactive is a narrative adventure following a group of teenage friends through their last day together before high school ends, set squarely in the 1990s. As someone who lived through that decade, the nostalgia factor hits hard. The soundtrack is excellent, the gameplay is simple but enjoyable, and the whole thing feels like playing through a John Hughes movie. If you have Xbox Game Pass, it's a must play.
More next month.
— ATM