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Shadow Unit
Jul. 2nd, 2014 12:28 pm I am currently in love with Shadow Unit.* It is brilliant and wonderful and I think everyone should read it. It is about the people who are the Shadow Unit, a secret division of the FBI that finds and contains gammas based on unusual cases. It is a procedural, but it is a paranormal procedural that focuses on the character development of the agents. I keep trying to find things to compare it to, and I can't think of anything. It is clever, occasionally humorous, dark, and a weird genre. It is a series of short stories, but the short stories are like television episodes, and there are four seasons of episodes which develop the characters and the overall plot. The episodes are written by several authors, and each episode is a complete story in itself that also advances the overall plot.
It is about finding gammas, who are people with an anomaly in their brains. No one is sure what the anomaly is, but it feeds on pain, and causes the gamma to be unusually strong and eat a ridiculous amount. It manifests in different ways, according to the person's mythology, what they believe about the world, and shows up as hexes or seeing patterns or controlling lightning or any number of things. A lot of gammas look an awful lot like serial killers.
It ripped my heartstrings out. Three times. In the best way possible.
If you are interested in trying it, I suggest starting with Dexterity. It doesn't have major spoilers, is early in the first season, and is quite good. (I thought the first episode was rather a slow start.) So, try Dexterity, but be warned that you may suddenly find yourself reading just one more story, and then will find that you have somehow read them all.**
Trigger warnings: There is some language. There is just about every type of nasty thing that can happen, does, but it mostly happens off screen and is discussed by the agents. But just to warn you, Shadow Unit does involve sexual assault, rape, torture, child abuse, and various forms of nasty murder of people and the family dog. I would recommend skipping Episode 1.04 (A Handful of Dust) if you (like me) generally have a low tolerance for dark, because it involves horrible things from the perspective of the person doing them. It does have events that are later referenced, but I don't think there's anything major.
I do hope that I can addict someone else to it, so that I can have someone else to fangirl about it with. That is my ulterior motive.
*I discovered it because Sarah Monette is involved, and I'm reading all her short stories because I liked Goblin Emperor so much (she wrote it under the pen name Katharine Addison). I galloped through it all in a very short time.
**Start with season one, then continue to season two, etc. The website is slightly odd in how it is set up. There are also additional deleted scenes and such. <edit> I would strongly recommend reading the additional scenes after each season. They aren't what I would consider deleted scenes in a movie sense; scenes that were cut to make the story flow better. They read more like storylets or short stories that didn't fit the five act structure. They also introduce some characters who show up later, and continue character development. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I would suggest after each season reading the scenes for that season and after that season (i.e. after finishing season one, continue to the deleted scenes for season one and then the deleted scenes for after season one before moving on to season two).
It is about finding gammas, who are people with an anomaly in their brains. No one is sure what the anomaly is, but it feeds on pain, and causes the gamma to be unusually strong and eat a ridiculous amount. It manifests in different ways, according to the person's mythology, what they believe about the world, and shows up as hexes or seeing patterns or controlling lightning or any number of things. A lot of gammas look an awful lot like serial killers.
It ripped my heartstrings out. Three times. In the best way possible.
If you are interested in trying it, I suggest starting with Dexterity. It doesn't have major spoilers, is early in the first season, and is quite good. (I thought the first episode was rather a slow start.) So, try Dexterity, but be warned that you may suddenly find yourself reading just one more story, and then will find that you have somehow read them all.**
Trigger warnings: There is some language. There is just about every type of nasty thing that can happen, does, but it mostly happens off screen and is discussed by the agents. But just to warn you, Shadow Unit does involve sexual assault, rape, torture, child abuse, and various forms of nasty murder of people and the family dog. I would recommend skipping Episode 1.04 (A Handful of Dust) if you (like me) generally have a low tolerance for dark, because it involves horrible things from the perspective of the person doing them. It does have events that are later referenced, but I don't think there's anything major.
I do hope that I can addict someone else to it, so that I can have someone else to fangirl about it with. That is my ulterior motive.
*I discovered it because Sarah Monette is involved, and I'm reading all her short stories because I liked Goblin Emperor so much (she wrote it under the pen name Katharine Addison). I galloped through it all in a very short time.
**Start with season one, then continue to season two, etc. The website is slightly odd in how it is set up. There are also additional deleted scenes and such. <edit> I would strongly recommend reading the additional scenes after each season. They aren't what I would consider deleted scenes in a movie sense; scenes that were cut to make the story flow better. They read more like storylets or short stories that didn't fit the five act structure. They also introduce some characters who show up later, and continue character development. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I would suggest after each season reading the scenes for that season and after that season (i.e. after finishing season one, continue to the deleted scenes for season one and then the deleted scenes for after season one before moving on to season two).
