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Hildur Knútsdóttir’s debut, The Night Guest, is the kind of cagey thriller that begs you to read it in a single sitting. That’s how I read the book, and Knútsdóttir rewards antsy readers who are rushing toward the story’s climax with plenty of stub-short chapters and blank pages that play up the drama of the plot.

It’s a story about an Icelandic woman who always wakes up feeling even more tired than she did when she went to sleep. There’s no medical reason for her weariness, or for the bruises and cuts that she wakes up with occasionally. As she explores her bizarre condition, the city of Reykjavik becomes the setting for a cat-and-mouse chase that could be nothing more than a cat chasing its own tail.

I whipped through this book, and if you’ve been having trouble focusing on a novel I’d easily recommend The Night Guest. It’s one of those thrillers that’s almost more difficult to not read—a dirty, messy little thriller that leaves plenty of its gory details to the reader’s imagination.

Like Love and Happiness, Angel Down is a novel told in one long gallumphing run-on of a narrative. Love and Happiness is a single paragraph, and Angel Down is a single breathless sentence, chopped up into paragraphs.

I’d already read Daniel Kraus’s thriller Whalefall, about a man who is swallowed by a whale, so I’m familiar with his particular style of Biblical obsessions. But Angel Down is even more baroque than Whalefall, as you might expect from a World War I novel about some troops finding an angel in no man’s land.

Unfortunately, the premise of the book interested me more than the execution. Between the over-the-top constraints and Kraus’s seeming intent to really Hammer Home the Point, the novel felt more like an essay about a great book than a great book itself.

The whole time I read Angel Down, I couldn’t stop thinking about another overambitious, under-satisfying war novel with a fantasy twist—Chris Adrian’s debut novel, Gob’s Grief, which was about a main character who wanted to build a device to bring all those killed in the Civil War back to life. Ultimately I wonder if it’s possible to satisfactorily blend the unrelenting reality of war with the suspension of disbelief required from big genre ideas.

After the debacle that was Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern movie, I never thought I’d be excited about another Green Lantern adaptation again. It doesn’t help that the comics have long since fallen into the modern superhero maximalist tropes of a massive cast of super-powered characters that never take off their costumes or have human problems or explore any ideas other than the comic’s own convoluted decades of lore. When Geoff Johns added a rainbow of colored rings to the Green Lantern comics, all based on emotion—even though will power, which has always powered the green rings at the center of the story, isn’t an emotion—he pretty much killed my interest in the character. Ryan Reynolds and his smirk were just the tombstone on top of the grave.

So it’s surprising that I’ve enjoyed the Lanterns show on HBO enough that I’ve watched a few of the episodes multiple times already, even though the season isn’t over yet. The writing is clever, the budgetary constraints feel somehow liberating, and the actors are all stellar. Kyle Chandler makes Hal Jordan, a character I’ve never liked, into a sad-sack braggart who is way more likable than he should be.

But the real reason Lanterns is so watchable, and re-watchable, is Aaron Pierre, an actor who blew me away in the excellent Netflix movie Rebel Ridge. (Yes, it’s hard to recall now but Netflix used to make excellent movies.)

Pierre is the most uniquely watchable new star that I’ve encountered in a long time, in part because he’s got a presence that is so unlike most actors. It’s his silence and restraint that make him so compelling.

On screen, he’s a placid pool that you gaze into, hoping to see a hint of the ferocious currents that you know are flowing just under the surface. He somehow made Rebel Ridge into an action film in which you’re grateful when he avoids a big action set piece. It’s so much fun to watch him coil in preparation that you almost don’t need to watch him strike.

Lanterns and Rebel Ridge both offer roles in a similar register for Pierre—the highly capable quiet guy who feels coiled and ready for action at a moment’s notice. But in Lanterns he’s getting a chance to allow the viewer in and see a little bit of the humanity. He occasionally makes mistakes, he sometimes indulges his worst instincts, and we love him all the more for it.

All my life, I’ve been waiting for the second coming of Lee Marvin, the tough-guy actor who always delivered more menace than his film’s scripts ever actually called for. I thought for a while that Jason Statham was that guy, but he proved to have a little too much self-knowing charm to fit the bill. It’s possible that Pierre could be the heir to Marvin’s throne, or at least he’s certainly mastered the scornful silence that made Marvin so fun to watch.

It all comes down to this: It is somehow more entertaining to watch Pierre not punch an idiot in the mouth than it is to watch him haul off and take a swing. That’s star material if I ever saw it.

Fairy tale retellings aren’t typically my bag. They often topple over into cutesy-poo productions that wind up being nothing but stories about stories. So ordinarily, I would have left the YA graphic novel

Wolf’s Belly on the shelf. After all, I have seen, read, and heard more variations of the Little Red Riding Hood story than I can count.

But I took Wolf’s Belly out from the Seattle Public Library because it’s written by screenwriter John August, who co-hosts the Scriptnotes podcast that is a regular part of my Saturday walking practice. I was interested to see how his lifetime of screenwriting would translate into a first-time graphic novel project.

The answer to that question is, pretty darn well. Wolf’s Belly is a little heavy on the dialogue, but it’s nothing like the flood of molasses that usually escapes captivity when a novelist writes their first comic book. Simon Estrada, the artist, has plenty of room to charm readers with his character designs and painterly color palette.

On the whole, I liked Wolf’s Belly a lot. The story proposes to tell the true story of Little Red Riding Hood—one of the least original propositions in all of literature—but it also mashes up a bunch of fairy tales about wolves and experiments with various children’s storytelling formats in intriguing ways. It is a story about storytelling, but it actually has something to say.

My biggest complaint about the technical artistry of Wolf’s Belly is the lettering. The word balloons are presented as rectangles, and the text is all the exact same weight, which gives the sense of an audiobook being read by a monotonous narrator. Good lettering accompanies and enhances comics art. The lettering in Wolf’s Belly is more or less just slapped onto the art.

But I’m pleasantly surprised to report that I really dug Wolf’s Belly overall and I’m planning to buy multiple copies for the kids in my life who like fairy tales and/or comics.