Hey there Horror Fans, I’m Jessica Avery and I’ll be delivering your weekly brief of all that’s ghastly and grim in the world of Horror. Whether you’re looking for a backlist book that will give you the willies, a terrifying new release, or the latest in horror community news, you’ll find it here in The Fright Stuff.
Fact: I am obsessed with the Alien franchise. Generally, I need very little excuse to start enthusiastically sharing my love for this series. It’s getting me to stop that’s the issue. This week, however, I promise I have a very good excuse, because Alex White’s epic second Alien book, Alien: Into Charybdis, came out last week (Feb 23) and I have Thoughts. Into Charybdis is a fast-paced, sci-fi horror dream of a book that any Alien fan would love. But it’s also a gripping look at the the real horrors of the Alien franchise, which run much deeper than the the shiny black exoskeleton of your friendly neighborhood xenomorph.
Here’s my unpopular Alien opinion. Ready? With a very few notable exceptions, I don’t really like the Colonial Marines. Maybe years of witnessing gun-toting hyper-nationalism in the real world have soured me on the yee-haw-god-bless-the-core space cowboy persona that is the Colonial Marines, and I’m just being a grouch? But Into Charybdis certainly made me feel validated in being wary of the franchise’s star-hopping military elite. White does acknowledge that – as with the real world military – there are honorable, well-intentioned people in the Colonial Marines. But there are also fanatics. And in Into Charybdis they introduce us to a particularly repugnant squadron known as the Midnighters.
Even among the Midnighters there are a few true hearts, who want to defend the galaxy against the hostile alien threat. But their nobility is no match for the virulent zealotry of their commanding officer and her loyal seconds. Because Captain Duncan and her men were designed to make your skin crawl. Their cruel, careless commentary, their racism, their sexism, their easy violence is meant to raise your hackles. They perpetrate war crimes with a joy that borders on religious ecstasy in short: they are meant to be the biggest monsters in Into Charybdis and we are meant to recognize them as such.
As Captain Duncan so proudly says: “We’re the Colonial Marines, Becker. Let’s fucking colonize.” (240).
Yee haw.
It’s a well known fact that the true horror of the Alien trilogy isn’t the Xenomorphs, it’s capitalism. Weyland-Yutani’s determination to make a profit from weaponizing a creature that is both a physical threat and a form of parasitic bio-terrorism, has been the instigating factor in almost every Alien plot since the Nostromo landed on LV-426. Facehuggers are creepy, but in the Alien universe it’s the capitalism that will kill you.
However, there’s another force at work in Into Charybdis that takes the franchise’s commentary on capitalism to a new depth: the enmeshing of capitalism and militarism. When your country’s military is used more to generate wealth for those in the defense industry or to protect financial interests than to serve the nation and the people, you have chocolate on your peanut butter, so to speak. But this particular combination isn’t tasty. And it raises serious concerns about who is actually controlling the country’s military. In the case of the Alien franchise, in 2184 the company clutching the military purse strings is Weyland-Yutani, and whether they’re sending the marines into situations to pave the way for company interests, or paying the marines to act outright in the company’s name, there’s no denying that the Colonial Marines aren’t exactly a force of good amidst the chaos of space (though that’s how they might want to be viewed). They’re a force for capitalism, colonizing the universe in the name of potential profit, with Weyland-Yutani following in their wake and planting flags.
And, as you might expect, this use of militarism for capitalist purposes is justified by pushing a narrative of aggressive nationalism: the good of the nation above all else, the superiority of the nation over all others. Us before them. Us over them. Throw in a soupçon of Christian extremism for flavor. (Duncan’s tattoo is going to haunt me forever. Just you wait, you’ll see what I mean.) Which allows Weyland-Yutani, in this case, to manipulate sympathetic mindsets in the Colonial Marines to their purposes, forming them into privileged special ops teams with limited oversight and unlimited expense accounts, united by a common, fervent ideology – like the Midnighters.
At one point Shy, one of the novel’s main characters, observes of the Midnighters that “They couldn’t have sent a more American squadron if they’d come in wielding hot apple pies.” (192), and she’s right. But the Midnighters came in wielding something even more familiar than apple pie, and far more sinister: a distinctly post-9/11, racist, anti-Muslim, good-old-boy attitude that would almost be satirical in its intensity if it weren’t so horrifically recognizable from recent headlines. Seriously, the attitudes and actions of the Midnighters in Alien: Into Charybdis make the Xenomorphs look cuddly by comparison.
There are so many elements of Alien: Into Charybdis that I could point to if I wanted to praise Alex White’s ability to bring the Alien universe to life. But it was their understanding of the true, real world horrors underlying the series’ nightmarish sci-fi plots that really sold me in the end. After all it isn’t the xenomorphs that make the Alien franchise frightening. It’s the people.
Fresh From the Skeleton’s Mouth
Grady Hendrix has a new book coming out in July of this year and I am absolutely in love with the blood-smeared cover of The Final Girl Support Group!
Tor Nightfire sat down with Tonia Ransom, editor, producer, and writer of the Nightlight podcast to talk about her career, the podcast, and celebrating the work of black authors in the horror genre.
Ciannon Smart, author of the highly anticipated Witches Steeped in Gold (April 20 from Harper Teen) has shared a sneak peek at the pre-order campaign for her book!
As always, you can catch me on Twitter at @JtheBookworm, where I try to keep up on all that’s new and frightening.
