Check out what premium Episodes subscribers were reading in September!
A little taste of what Episodes published last month!
Hello, beloved free subscribers! We've closed the book on September, and with it another busy month of publishing for Episodes. We published seventeen pieces this month, with new writing from us every single Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
Premium Episodes subscribers got all those pieces right in their inboxes, along with Discord access, the ability to ask questions for the Mailbag, and other fun extras. Free subscribers, though, only got a handful of open-to-all Monday and Wednesday newsletters. We think those pieces were neat, too! But we thought you might want a sneak peek of some of the ones you missed out on.
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Episodes Book Club: Infinite Jest, Week 9 | Emily St. James and Lily Osler, Sept 24 2026
Emily St. James
Emily: Indeed, these are the pages where I most felt the supposedly triangular structure of the book. Events are happening, but they're often either frustratingly opaque or just off the page somewhere. I found a lot of the Gately stuff frightfully boring in the moment, but then by the time I got to, say, the section where Joelle comes to visit him, a lot of what the earlier passages were doing snapped into focus in retrospect. The closer we get to the end of the book, the more I understand why it's a novel so many people return to because once you know the entirety of the book's world, there's a pleasure to sinking into its esoterica. In a way, it's very similar to Lord of the Rings in that regard.
Yet even though I was bored, I was always compelled. The Gately sections come extremely close to the experience that is lying very still in a hospital bed, looking about for something – anything – to occupy your mind that's not the pain you're feeling. Gately's fantasias into his past and present and especially his long ruminations on the nature of Norm (or, rather, "Nom") from Cheers reminded me of the lengthy hospital stay I had last year, when I just sort of watched whatever because I had the time and lacked energy for anything other than familiar comforts. The sheer inertia of those pages-long paragraphs that the reader feels so precisely mimics the inertia of Gately's existence in that bed that whatever boredom I felt ends up being the point. The form becomes the content.
On Twin Peaks, the world ended long ago. Now, we live in the ashes. | Emily St. James, Sept 30 2026
Emily St. James
The truth is that it's very rare for any TV show to begin its life most popular among suburban or even rural audiences, then get coastal elites to pay attention consistently. In my time working as a critic, it really only happened thrice with Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and Justified, all of which hit with rural audiences before gradually winning over the coasts. We will gladly write mountains of articles about Mad Men or Succession, despite anemic ratings, because they reflect the world we and our readers live in, while Yellowstone gets written about as a curio at best.
Yet this phenomenon has a much rarer flip side: The cultural object in a popular medium whose aspirations are so obviously high-brow or even experimental that arts journalism isn't entirely sure what to do with it. And in my experience, the sorts of people who will insist that it is high time we write about Ella Langley will react with anger or even scorn to something more boundary-pushing.
Indeed, at one TCA press tour, I remember an older journalist telling me, in a frustrated rant, "I don't know why we keep nominating that show [for the TCA Heritage Award]. It's all just random bullshit. Those guys have never known what they were doing."
Of course, the show he was talking about was Twin Peaks, a show that attained a massive amount of cultural cachet most series would only dream of, before (in this man's opinion) pissing it away.
And it's my favorite TV show of all time
September mailbag! | Emily St. James and Lily Osler, Sept 18 2026
Emily St. James
You have five minutes in the Criterion Closet. What are you putting in your tote?
Emily: Does this presume that I'm being filmed for online content? Because it's a very different answer if I'm just grabbing shit. If I'm just grabbing shit, I'm taking as much as I can carry -slash- as much as they will let me, and I'm being awfully non-discriminatory about it. I'd love the Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick sets, but something tells me that they're not going to just be hanging out in the closet. And they won't fit well in a tote anyway.
(It is here I admit I have never once watched a Criterion Closet video, despite consuming large amounts of Letterboxd YouTube content. Am I just built different? It is hard to say. So anything could be happening in those videos for all I know. Francis Ford Coppola could be opening his mouth wide enough to consume the entire Godzilla set, and I would have no idea!)
Resident Evil's world doesn't care about you | Lily Osler, Sept 25 2026
Lily Osler
Going into Zach Cregger's Resident Evil, I'll admit that I was a bit afraid that it would follow the same pattern. I doubted it would move with the same lugubrious slowness as Iron Lung — say what you will about Cregger's prior horror films, Weapons and Barbarian, but they're never boring. Still, I knew that the Resident Evil games on which the movie was based were supposed to be pretty lore-dense, with a handful of protagonists all bound together in ways that make my brain hurt if I try to look at the fan wiki for too long. How much would I need to know about the franchise going in? And how much of the movie was going to be sacrificed for the sake of fan service?
If you've seen Resident Evil, you'll know that the answer to both of those questions is, somehow, "nothing." I'm not about to call Resident Evil a great work of art — while it's probably my favorite Cregger movie, it's also the least thematically dense. Still, it changed the way I see video game horror movies. It's proof that horror movies based on games can adapt the experience of playing those games for a mainstream audience. It's a movie that not only doesn't lore-dump most of the time, but also manages to make the times it does vomit proper nouns at you actually interesting.
And, despite long odds, it may have changed my mind about the value of cosmic horror.
Angel Down, Whalefall, and the phantasmagoria of manhood | Lily Osler, Sept 11 2026
Lily Osler
Kraus, a speculative-fiction writer with dozens of novels to his name, is by no means a newcomer to the literary world. But his ascendance this year still seemed to come out of nowhere. First, in a huge upset, Kraus won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel Angel Down, a World War I-set horror story about an inhuman entity that gets tangled in concertina wire in the middle of No Man's Land. A month later, the trailer for the film adaptation of his 2023 novel Whalefall had the internet — including Episodes! — abuzz, largely due to the weirdness of its premise (a guy gets eaten by a whale, and the whale is kind of his dad). Every bookstore I've been to in the last few months, both the ones with well-stocked horror shelves and the ones that only put out the obligatory row of Stephen King paperbacks, has had these two Kraus novels displayed prominently near the front of the shop; every few weeks, I'll have another friend tell me I just have to read Angel Down.
Kraus's rise to glory was long in the making, to be sure. But at least part of his status as the new hotness is certainly due to the way he writes about masculinity. In a literary landscape where (to borrow Olivia's phrase) wan little nothings tend to win praise for merely depicting masculinity, Kraus's lush, nightmarish approach to the subject stands alone. His prose, his themes, his characters, and his plots all push back against the Hemingwayesque idea that to write about men's issues is to mirror the stream-of-consciousness of a disconnected dude. To Kraus, masculinity is not an abstract concept, a habit of mind that needs to be reconsidered or analyzed. It is a monster, a beast of flesh and gore, and the only way to save yourself is to claw your way out of its gullet.
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