The Honeys

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Get Gooped!

In this episode we discussed the 2022 novel The Honeys by Ryan La Sala.

Our email address is [e-mail] and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Wybray. Today we're talking about the young adult novel The Honeys by Ryan La Sala. Enjoy!

Ren Good evening, Adam.

Adam Good evening, Ren. You know, one of these days we're going to do our countdown and we're going to say those numbers at the same time.

Ren I thought we were quite close this time.

Adam I think we got closer. I was thinking that is closer. So maybe by the time we get to episode 100, we'll be able to do our our countdown together and we'll be totally In Sync.

Ren Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a process. You can't rush it.

Adam No, no, that's a fair point, yeah.

Ren So—

Adam Oh so, I watched — the possession, no the violation, um, the package?

Ren The Substance?

Adam Yes, The Substance! I watched the substance.

Ren Oh, it's horrible, isn't it?

Adam Oh, it's so horrible I was air-punching with glee by the end of it. Yeah, yeah. That last half an hour was exquisite.

Ren Yeah, I loved it.

Adam When she goes all starfish face at the end.

Ren I thought you'd enjoy the paper cut-out just slammed on her face —

Adam — and the fact that this disguise works perfectly, it made me howl with laughter. So it's really funny because quite a lot of reviewers are like: “Oh, it's a bit long, You know, that last half an hour—“ And I was like, no, why? I wanted more like the last half hour, I was just like, yeah, keep going, keep going. It found its groove!

Ren Yeah. Can she do it again?!

Adam Yeah, yeah. Keep transforming! Break through to the other side.

Ren I went to the cinema to see it. I didn't really know what it was about, I’d just seen a brief synopsis and I was like, I need a distraction. I was kind of having a hard time and being in the cinema watching this and just all the noises of the audience — there’s just something really beautiful about a whole audience going: “Euuurgghhh”.

Adam Oh yeah. By the end of it, I was totally on board and thoroughly enjoyed it. So yeah, recommended for those with a strong constitution. And stomach.

Ren Yes, seriously, heed that warning.

Adam Yeah, don't watch it if you're feeling a little queasy.

Ren But speaking of goopy horror, we’re here today to talk about The Honeys by Ryan La Sala, which on the the e-book I had it was like: “The Honeys: The hottest new queer YA horror book”, as its title. From 2022, I believe.

Adam Yeah. So we're probably coming in after any discourse now, which is good. You know presumably Goodreads, has settled down and we can come in, you know, see the damage that's been done, inspect the bodies and do a cool and calculated assessment.

Ren Yeah. This is another one that I found in the YA horror section of my library app and was like: “That sounds good.” So I read it last year and it was good, so I suggested it for the podcast.

Adam Yeah. I think you're quite a rambling reader. I like the fact that you take things that take your fancy. I was trying to work through a few years back that “1001 books you MUST read before you die”. And those books tend to have a terrible hold on me. You know, it's like effort grades when I was a child. You must work as hard as you can at all times. If the list says you mustread all these books, like, well, I mean, I really don't want to read American Psycho, but I guess if I must —

Ren I guess you must.

Adam I guess I must. So yeah, I'm trying to actually read things I enjoy these days, so that's nice. I think this is pretty strong. It has a really startling and quite horrific opening. And then I think it gets a bit vibes-y in the middle, the vibes are — not Immaculate — but the vibes are are pretty delectable. But it does meander a little I think, and then the ending is really strong again. So I think it could have done with a little bit of an edit, but overall I recommend it.

Ren A little prune in the middle maybe, but yeah. So yeah, this beginning. It starts with protagonist Mars, short for Marshall, being viciously attacked by their twin sister Caroline, crawling through their bedroom window.

Mars is a gender fluid character so uses variously he, she or they pronouns. So Caroline crushes Mars's hand with a big vintage calculator.

Adam Not an abacus, it's not like crushed between the beads of an abacus.

Ren No, it's heavier than you would think for a calculator. She slashes them across the ear, there’s a massive tussle and both of them end up falling through the bannister and through the chandelier.

Adam As happened in the 1950s Nicholas Ray melodrama Bigger than Life. So a real deep cut for you melodrama heads there.

Ren So yeah, they fall through a bannister and through a chandelier and Caroline lands underneath Mars and dies. And in this opening sequence, we learn that they previously been very close and had drifted apart and that Caroline has just come back from Aspen, which is this summer camp. And in the aftermath of her death, we learn that there are the children of of a state senator and part of a wealthy family who are devoted to keeping up appearances.

And so no sooner has Caroline died than her body is whisked away and the bannister’s repaired and a new chandelier is delivered. And the word gets out that she died of a brain tumour. But Mars is made to hide their injuries and kind of pull their hair over their ear at the funeral and nothing about the attack gets out.

Adam You know, maybe this just shows a limited imagination when it comes to American politics, but I did just imagine the parents as Hillary and Bill Clinton.

Ren Yeah, I don't have a huge grasp on state senators. It's like Nancy Pelosi is that who I am imagining here? The mother well known, you know, there's a scene later where some waitresses are like, “Oh, it was her in, in the diner.”

Adam Yeah, that iconic senator.

Ren Yeah, so maybe imagining Hillary and Bill Clinton isn't too bad an idea.

Adam But yes, they treat Mars with noticeable coldness. And I think it becomes quickly apparent that Mars felt like the less-favoured twin.

And this might be related to some mysterious incident that occurred at the summer camp, of which more details are revealed gradually. But I think we're told early on that Mars had gone to Aspen when a young child or a younger child and then has not returned since.

Ren And then three beautiful girls from Aspen come to the funeral. And in this kind of trio of femininity, they ask Mars if they would ever come back to Aspen. And we learn a little bit about the mystery of Cabin H, which is the part of the camp that these girls are from and where Caroline was as well, and it’s set across from a wildflower field, and they're responsible for the apiaries and the bees.

And as they come to look at Caroline's body, Mars sees a bee crawl out of her ear. So this is the first indication of something — well, Caroline had been acting strange.

Adam Has she been stuffed full of bees?

Ren Has she been stuffed full of bees?

Adam Is she just puppeteered like the Oogie Boogie man? Not by bugs, but by bees.

(Clip from Arrested Development: Lindesay: Beads Gob: Bees?! Lindesay: Beads! Gob: Bzzzzz. We'll see who brings in more honey!)

So Mars decides they need to go back to Aspen to find out what happened. Like, why did Caroline attack them? Why had she been acting so distant? Why did a bee crawl out of her ear?

Adam Yeah, why bees?

Ren Why bees? What's with these girls? So yeah, as you said, we have a sense that last time Mars was at Aspen, something happened and some boys ended up getting kicked out as a result and. So one of the dynamics of Mars and Aspen is that they’re gender fluid and they’re entering, entering this very gendered world of the camp. Where there’s a lot of girls versus boys rivalry and gendered cabins and Mars, in order to get in there and to be able to try and find out what's happened, they're just like, no, just put me in with the boys. You know, I'll do the boy thing. They cut their hair.

And this is one of the dynamics of the book, the gender fluid character in this gendered world and this upper-class gendered world, because Aspen is this kind of wealthy facsimile of ruggedness where Mars turns up and realises that the water in the huts is filtered, because there's all these touches of luxury even in this fantasy of wilderness.

Adam A bit like, I guess, trying to live out in the woods, but in Centre Parcs.

Well, probably more exclusive than Centre Parcs. That's quite middle class and these are very upper middle class. So I wouldn't know, I don't know what these exclusive resorts are, but I'm sure they exist. I mean, it's not Butlins, that's for sure.

Ren It's not Butlins, no. So what we get is Mars trying to assimilate into the camp and also trying to investigate the honeys, which is the the name of the group of girls who who stay in Cabin H and have this. sort of spell over them.

Adam They're very talked about and they clearly have some high status within Aspen, but it's quite enigmatic exactly what their role is. At times they seem like a kind of sorority and some of the boys speak quite nastily about them, but we don't necessarily get the sense from Mars’ experience with them that they’re necessarily stereotypical Mean Girls. You know, they seem like in some ways they can be quite welcoming and have genuine concern for Mars.

So I like the fact that it's not clear as readers how to feel about them. You know, they're intriguing, but I think it's kept very open for a long time, arguably until the end of the book, really, exactly what to make of them. And I like that a lot. I think it would have been far easier to just go down one side or the other to be like: “OK, the honeys are just this sinister hive of evil heteronormativity and they represent everything that's wrong with the dominant paradigm", or that they're wholly sinned against and they're this powerful matriarchal force and actually maybe it's doing both.

There are things to like and admire about the honeys and there are things to side-eye and I think that's very deliberate.

Ren Yeah, it's very subtle. I really enjoy how the magic of their realm is set up. Because their cabin is quite far away from the rest of the camp and they've got this meadow with the beehives and it's on the other side of the lake, which is full of lily pads. One of Mars’s early interactions with them is kayaking over, and they're sort of entering this feminine land.

Adam Yeah, it’s sort of like a fairy or a fae realm. I liked the curious game they play.

Ren Yeah. So I was highlighting passages and then I ended up losing most of my highlights, but I do have a bit about the game. So this is later in the novel, but Mars is over in the realm of the honeys, and there it says:

“The game they’re playing is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Between Bria and Mimi is a system of circular coasters and saucers made of thick ceramic and painted in bright, radial designs. Upon each is a cluster of tiles, all different shapes, like piles of candy. There’s some system to their placement, I sense, but that’s it. The objective of the game is unclear. There doesn’t even appear to be a board.

“Resume,” Bria says. A girl off to the side lifts one willowy arm into the air, holding up a faceted crystal cup. She moves it from side to side until it catches the sun just right, projecting a flurry of rainbows onto the blanket. They skim over the saucers and tiles. Slowly, she twists the etched glass, and the rainbows resolve into warping shapes. Ovals and arcs that overlap in abstract patterns. It’s a board for their game, I realize.”

Yeah. And Mars plays this game, the honeys won't tell them how to play it they have to intuit the placement of stones and tiles and the shapes of light and shadow. It's quite interesting.

Adam It’s one of my favourite bits of the book. I want more intuitive games, like walking along the other day I was playing an intuitive word game to myself, just trying to link words partly through the sound of their endings, like barbarossa… now I just want to say skibbidi! These darned children have colonised my mind with skibbidi toilet! Dear me. Well, anyway, I like the idea of this intuitive game with these half-formed rules that you have to fill out, and it's it's really crisply but enigmatically described. It's just the play of light and shadow and reflections through the glass.

Ren Do you think there's a resonance there with Interstellar Pig?

Adam Oh, maybe, actually! Yeah, I mean, there's definitely something appealing about a kind of game that's evocatively but only half-described and so you have this sort of strange half-formed image in your mind imagining the game. I don't know, there's something really cool about that.

Ren Yeah, that's a much earlier episode we did, Interstellar Pig by William Sleator which also had an obscure but atmospheric game, but much more central to the plot than in this.

Adam Yeah, I mean shall we do Texture of the Week?

(Distorted gargling: Texture of the week)

Beak, beak, beak like a bird beak! Yeah, so, mine is from the honey's realm and it's reading a hive as if twere a book. I really like the idea of a beehive being readable like a book is readable and taking out part of the honeycomb and that being a page which is then readable like a page of a book. I thought that was a really pleasing texture, a honeycomb book.

Ren It is beautifully written I should just say. There is some lovely descriptions in this book, lots of textures actually.

Adam So yeah, my texture is divinatory honeycomb book.

Ren Excellent. Yeah, I did have one, which was a sort of description of this hazy summer atmosphere of the honey's Meadow. But I've lost that. Imagine that. But I don't have the quote anymore.

Adam So my understanding is you borrowed this? Like did you borrow a digital copy from the library?

Ren Yeah, I had a digital copy from the library and I was making highlights in it and then my loan lapsed and I was like, “Oh, it's OK, I can just re-borrow it and finish this book”, but then someone else borrowed the book, which I didn't anticipate.

Adam Presumably they don't get access to your highlighting, no? OK.

Ren So, I lost those highlights and I could have anticipated that, but I didn't.

Adam So do you have a replacement texture?

Ren I mean, there is an obvious texture.

Adam What, the really horrible one later?

Ren Yeah…

Adam I mean, it's really horrible.

Ren So I don't know if we should just cut to the chase or… you’ll know it when we get to the horrible one. This book is like, a lot of the time it's not horror. And then when it's horror, it is horror.

Adam Yeah. No, I really agree with that. Like there are times where I don't know if we should be doing this one, oh, this is more of a mystery. And then when it, gets to the body horror sections it really earns it.

Ren Yeah. So I'll just pause my texture for a little bit. So there's these struggles between Mars and the boys going on, Mars wins a fencing match against this boy, Callum, and then there's this midnight game called Manhunt where Callum comes back for revenge and assaults Mars.

Adam They do the kind of games that terrified me when I was in the scouts. I think they were called wide games or field games. Like having to get to a base or something, while running the risk of being tackled.

Ren Yeah, there's a lot of semi-illicit games that happen at Aspen, Wendy, who's the camp director, talks to Mars when they first arrive and is like: “You know, we have this very hands-off approach here at Aspen. You have to work out your problems amongst yourselves”. So there's a lot of room for people just being each other up in the night in the woods.

And that's what happens. But but Callum is beaten up in return by the honeys, who then purge the memories of Mars and Callum.

Adam Yeah, like the Men in Black.

Ren Yeah, and Mars has this dual consciousness where they're sort of aware that this happened and they're sort of not. And they come back to this mantra of “Earth to Mars”, which is what Caroline used to say to them. And they use this to ground themselves, when reality is slipping.

Adam I like the fogginess, actually. Because I've complained before about how modern young adult writing is often slightly too clear to me in characters always knowing what they're doing. And it's very directed, almost like an action film. I tend to feel like that's the influence of The Hunger Games, particularly on dystopian teenage literature.

But one thing I really liked is the fogginess of some of the sections, there are bits which do become really odd and hallucinogenic and there will be these shifts in space and time, which are quite disorienting at times in the book, and which I really liked.

Ren Yeah. And Mars zones out a lot. They go on a three day hiking trip and Mars zones out on the trail, thinking of bees and death and kind of ends up way off the path. Wyatt, who’s one of the supervisors —

Adam Is Wyatt related to Wendy?

Ren Ye-es, Wyatt’s Wendy’s son.

Adam Or something like that. There’s definitely a lot of tension as to whether Mars should trust Wyatt or not.

Ren Yes. But he's definitely the more sympathetic of the slightly older, I guess early 20s guys who kind of supervises the The Hut of Boys. Brayden is the other one and he’s very on board with any, I don't know, insults? Assaults?

Adam Insults and Assults, yep.

Ren So Wyatt is the closest thing that Mars has to an ally among the boys. Another weird thing that happens on this hike is that Mars has another showdown with Callum and ends up punching him and hurting their their own hand in the process. But they find a small jar of honey at the bottom of their pack and they eat it with Wyatt, 'cause they're like, oh, this will attract bears, we can't have this. And they share this moment of eating this honey in the forest and find that the honey has healed their hand.

Adam There isn't any moment after this where he says to any of the boys, “Killing me won't give you back your goddamn honey!” But you know I did think of Nicolas Cage shouting that.

(Clip from The Wicker Man: Nicholas Cage: Ahhh not the bees! Not the bees!!!)

I mean, you just sent me a nice Nicolas Cage Wicker man drag performance.

Ren Yeah, it's an Australian drag king called — I need to credit this because I love this so much — Randy Roy, who posted an Instagram reel of clips of them doing a drag act inspired by Nicolas Cage in The Wicker Man remake, including Not the Bees to the tune of Let It Be and it's very good, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Adam Do you think there was more room for bee puns in in this novel?

Ren I mean, I don't think there were any bee puns.

Adam No, I think there weren’t.

Ren That was not the the vibe, really.

Adam When they go to a kind of dance, like the formal dance party no-one says, “Oh, is this going to be like a Buzz-bee Berkeley dance?” for instance, because they could have done!

Ren Bee my, bee my baby.

Adam Yeah yeah. None of the characters made bee puns, despite ample opportunities to be honest.

Ren We did read another bee thing, didn't we, though? The Roald Dahl one —

Adam — with the royal jelly!

Ren It was the royal Jelly. Yeah, yeah. It’s not the first appearance of bees.

Adam Bee horror. I mean, we're not going to do a spin off podcast because, you know, we struggle enough getting episodes out of this one. But there could be a bee-based horror podcast. If any listeners want to start one, I think that's a good idea.

Ren So yeah, there's another sort of midnight ritual thing —

Adam They don't get much sleep in this book, do they? They're always up at night doing secret dangerous games and I did think, oh God, these poor teenagers, they are sleep deprived.

Ren Yeah. And Mars hears Carolines screams from a Bluetooth speaker in the woods, but no one will admit to doing it so. Mars tells Wendy about it and she's very dismissive but they end up threatening her with legal action over over what happened four years ago. Which we eventually learn is that the boys tied Mars to the victory board, there’s the Victory Cup which is this big tournament that was previously called Battle of the Sexes and is renamed to the Victory Cup after this incident, when the boys tied Mars to the Victory board and set fire to it. There were no consequences of this —

Adam Well, it’s just banter, isn't it. Harmless banter.

Ren But Mars does bring this up to Wendy.

Adam Quite reasonably, I think.

Ren Quite reasonably, yeah. And Mars is getting closer to the honeys, they swap clothes with them and are invited into their circle at the party.

Adam Yeah, it's quite a heartwarming scene that, it's not a book with many heartwarming scenes, but that is quite sweet.

Ren And there's this anecdote about how Caroline and Mars used to swap clothes at parties when they were little and dance together. And this was their little childhood protest against the stuffy atmosphere of their home and having to be nice and proper little children for their parents.

Adam Death to the heteronormative paradigm, as as our mutual friend Ali had inscribed on their iPod. Which I always remember because Ali then had to describe this to a police officer after their iPod was nicked, who said “Hetero what now?”

Ren As I'm sure Mars's parents would.

Adam Yes. Yes indeed.

Ren Mars is allowed to to major in apiculture, i.e. bees. And so they go to the Meadow, but it turns out that no one knows who Sierra is anymore. She's one of the honeys, one of the ones at the funeral, and when when Mars first kayaks over through the lily pads, she takes them up to to her bedroom and paints their nails with this blue colour that was Caroline's favourite nail polish colour. So they've had this quite tender moment, but now no one knows who Sierra is anymore.

And, and this is where this strange psychedelic game comes in. They play this game with Mimi and Bria and the others and through this game, it uncovers the truth about Sierra. She's dead in the woods and Mars sees this vision of her, and then they wipe Mars’s memories again.

So there's quite a lot of this back and forth and push and pull of Mars slowly figuring things out and then un-figuring them a lot of fuzziness.

Adam Yeah, I liked it. I've not really experienced that quite in that way in a book before. It made me think of some video games where you have to re-do the same sequence get it right. Like Adam Cadre’s Varicella for instance, which is a game where you have to get the sequence right to kill off various characters, you have to keep replaying it to get it right.

Old Sierra games could be like that too, like the Colonel’s Behest, which is a murder mystery one which you would end up reloading and reloading to get it right. It just made me think a bit of a video game, almost like a reloading basically.

Ren Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it does mean that the middle section of the book has this quite meandering structure.

Adam Yeah, which I feel divided on because I do think it works atmospherically. Overall, I do like this book. Sometimes I guess it feels in the middle section like it's more focused on the mystery than the horror, and it does feel like there's not much being uncovered.

Or maybe it's just not working as mysteries tend to work, like there aren't that many clues in a traditional sense and. I mean, there are characters who reveal things, but Mars doesn't go about things in the way that a detective would, right?

It'd be interesting to see if this was adapted, and you can totally imagine it adapted for Netflix, very easily as a six episode or eight episode series, it would be interesting to see how they would manage the middle section.

Ren I enjoyed the journey of the book, I enjoyed all the atmospheric meandering. But there is quite a long section in the middle where you don't really feel like you've gained a lot more information about what's going on. Just like, OK, there's something weird with the honeys and the bees.

But as we get towards the the end section things do start picking up quite rapidly. We get the Victory Cup, with all these tournaments and Mars's memories have been wiped, so they're quite happily joining in with the tournament —

Adam — Happily playing Ultimate Frisbee.

Ren Yeah. Until at the end of the cup, a bunch of them dive into the lake at night and they’re splashing about in the silvery moonlight and the honeys ask Mars to swim back with them to Cabin H, and they do and stay the night on the porch and they all share stories about Caroline in this very sweet moment.

But after that, Mars remembers Sierra again, and again goes on another midnight mission, steals Wyatt's keys and breaks into a computer lab and starts doing research on missing people. They find that there have been people going missing around the woods for years, in summer, in this area and they think, “Oh, Cabin H has something to do with this”. And the next morning they find out Brayden's missing.

So. Mars is determined to find out what's happening now and Wyatt follows them like out to some derelict hotel on the edge of the camp. The ceiling’s caved in and the carpet is mushy with mould and the wall is swelling and they go down into the basement and the whole basement has become a hive, it's just filled with honeycomb. And this is where my texture comes back in.

Adam Oh, this is where your delicious texture comes.

Ren My delicious texture comes back in. As is that. They find Braden OK.

“Wyatt flicks the flashlight into the corners, back and forth, until it snags on something moving along the honeycomb near us. A fluid twist, like many small bodies crawling over one another. But under the glare it’s just honeycomb. Until it opens its eyes.

“Help me,” it says. “Please help me.” It twists again, something huge beneath the comb. Encased in it. A mouth, a nose, a strangely bent arm, a crumpled hand. A person. “Brayden,” Wyatt whispers. “Please. I feel—” Brayden shudders, and the honeycomb creaks. “Please,” he begs. I hack at the comb with my hive tool and Wyatt just uses his hands. The light whips around us as we pull down the delicate, sticky structure, digging until we find the naked body below. Brayden whimpers. He’s badly hurt, though I can’t see where. But I can smell the hurt. Blood and a darker odor. Sweet and rotten and thickening as we pry him out.

I hear the bees and know they’re angry. Their drone rises into an undulating siren, then a crackling threat. I drive my hands into the sticky shards, desperate now. Honey fills my nail beds, webs between my fingers, drips to my elbows. But Brayden is nearly free. Just another chunk and . . . Brayden’s weight does the rest. He slides from the comb, falling into Wyatt and blotting out the flashlight. I go to help but then freeze. The flashlight has become a harsh glare caught between them. For a moment it appears to pass right through Brayden, taking on the golden- scarlet hue of his flesh, embryonic and quivering as he clings to Wyatt. Within him I see a squiggly network of veins twisting together into a mass that, quite clearly, pulses. His heart.

“Wyatt,” I say. “Help me with him,” Wyatt snaps, and I rush forward. I grab Brayden’s arm, and when I pull, his flesh slides right off the bone. I scream until I get the flopping sleeve unstuck from my hands. Brayden has crumpled between us, golden threads strung between him and Wyatt. Wyatt fumbles until he recovers the flashlight, aiming it at Brayden. Holes. Everywhere, Brayden’s flesh is pocked in holes, clean and precise and weeping with honey. He cradles the bones of his hand with his remaining arm. His bones are soft, too, like warm rubber. He looks at us and his eyes are scoops of yellow jelly in his skull.

“I don’t feel—” He jolts and gags. A tooth drips from his lips and lands without a sound in the honey pooling around him. “I don’t feel so good. I don’t—” “We’re gonna get you to a doctor!” Wyatt yells. He has to yell. The drone from the hives is loud now. Furious. I feel a prick, then a needling pain in my neck. I’ve been stung. Another one gets my knee. I pull at Wyatt’s back. “Wyatt, we need to—” “DON’T LEAVE ME!” Brayden leaps at us but his legs buckle beneath him and he falls. His skeletal hand drags over Wyatt’s chest, catching on the keys, tearing them off. The flashlight thuds into the honey, aimed upward into Brayden. The light passes through him. Like a jack- o’- lantern, he glows an eerie gold, his bones black and twisting below his viscous, dotted flesh. Brayden screams again, his lower jaw yawning wide until it falls to the floor. Brayden implodes with it, smothering the flashlight. The light flickers beneath the quivering mass, flickers again, then goes out.”

Ahhh.

Adam Eurgghhabbuuhh. It didn't even make me want to enjoy a nice, delicious pot of honey.

Ren No? You don't want to enjoy a delicious pot of man honey?

Adam Of which there's plenty! That's the revelation that follows from this, right? Is that everyone's hooked on man honey.

Ren Yeah, this is this is one of their most holy rituals, what they did to Brayden, to fortify the hive. And it produces this deep red honey. And you know Mars asks the honeys: “What did you do?” And they're like, well, it’s very Little Shop of Horrors: “The guy sure looks like plant food to me.” The guy sure looks like bee food to me. This is a bit of a revelation, is that he deserved it, right. He was sexually harassing one of the honeys over the last year. And, you know, getting her to send him photos — ,

Adam Thoroughly dirtbag, basically.

Ren Yeah. And this is why he's become bee food. The honeys get Mars to eat the cannibal honeycomb and they have this cannibal honey feast of these shapes of honeycomb. It says: “But my eyes are stuck on the edge of the closest platter, where within the comb I can see the clear impression of a nose. I follow the slope up to a brow bone. The socket is empty, the eye melted away.”

They have this cannibal honey feast. It's very similar to, or very reminiscent of a memorable scene in Yellowjackets.

Adam Oh, OK. I still haven't seen that.

Ren You'll know the one, if you've seen it. Very similar atmosphere there. So they draw Mars into this, interconnected honey network called the lace. And that's where Mars sees the girl that Brayden was tormenting and interconnects with everything.

Adam Yeah. So the honeys are like the Tralfamadorians, the aliens in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. In that that they can see all of the past and all of the future and all of the present simultaneously.

And so they're being used by the deep state, for prophecies to help the economy? possibly? So it was Bill and Hillary all along!

Ren Yeah, it was! So Mars escapes, when they realise that the hive wants them to be its next queen. And Wyatt and Mars have had this romantic tension, and they escaped to an abandoned barn and they're kissing, but then Wyatt is taken over by the bees!

Adam It was funny. It was like, “Oh, you're going to get some tender young adult romance stuff” and then it’s like, no, more bee horror! The last quarter, maybe fifth of this book just goes into all-out unhinged horror. It becomes really wild.

Ren Yeah, so, the honeys rescue Mars from Wyatt and they're about to kill Wyatt, because they realised that he killed Sierra. But then Mars tells them that Wyatt’s a drone and it turns out it's a rogue swarm led by Mimi, who was mad about Caroline being made queen of the hive and about Mars being let in at all because they're gender fluid. So Mimi gets incinerated by bees.

Adam cackles

Ren Mars runs away to to the Applebee's —

Adam Ah, Applebee’s! I get it now! Applebee's like a bee! Amazing.

Ren Oh, it's all coming together! And she calls their parents to come and get them, they're like, “Please, Bill and Hillary, come and get me.” But when the parents turn up it turns out they have Caroline's mummified corpse in the trunk of the car!

Adam (gleefully) Yes they do!

Ren And Mars is kidnapped and wakes up in the honey basement. Or, they're in honey anyhow. They are encased in honey. And there are a cult of adults in the building, all in their robes and veils, who have grown rich from the predictions of the honeys.

Some of which include like winning the lottery, I think, they can't all be the lottery, right? That would get suspicious.

Adam Yeah, that would be a bit suspicious to be honest.

Ren But various financial predictions have ensured the wealth of the baby boomers. And so, only right at the end we finally learn the true position of the honeys in all of this, which is that they're being used by the adults.

Adam The evil baby boomers, yeah.

Ren And Wendy and Mars's parents are talking about how Caroline wasn't a fit vessel for the Queen of the Hive and her reign failed, but that Mars is is going to be the next vessel and so the Queendom passes from Caroline to Mars. And Carolin and Mars meet in the honey realm.

Adam Yeah, it all gets really astral at this point.

Ren And she explains what happens that her reign failed and her parents were putting all this pressure on her to keep the honey confederacy going. And what happened on the night that started the book is that they bought her back from Aspen and locked her in a room in the basement and told her to kill herself, basically. But don't hurt your body too much because we need it for Mars to be the next queen, all right, see you kid.

Adam It's really grim!

Ren Yeah, but instead she managed to crawl out the window and up the side of the house and through Mars's bedroom window because she wanted to save them from from all of this.

Adam Yeah, but it's a happy ending because Mars gets to be the new queen, queen of the bees, and that sounds pretty cool.

Ren It is pretty cool! Mars's first task as the Queen is to kill Bria, but instead they fling the hive tool at one of the veiled figures which turns out to be Wendy. And the last chapter is them in their Meadow with the bees and the honeys and some police come and tell them that unfortunately their parents houses burned down and incinerated their parents and we know from the narration that this was Mars’s doing somehow. And Mars and the honeys are ready to fight against the baby boomers and the Honey Confederacy. So yes, it's a cracking ending!

Adam It's funny because obviously you mentioned the substance at the start of this episode. And actually it's kind of similar in that I was enjoying it well enough, but then the last quarter or so I was like, “Yeah, now this is the good stuff!” And it just became more wild and strange.

Ren I appreciated how much it went for it with the honey horror. The yawning honey jaw.

Adam And, you know, I've seen jaws drop off before in films, but never with strands of honey so that's good. It's good stuff.

Ren So, thanks for thanks for coming along with me on this honey journey.

Adam Thank you, it was delicious.

Ren As ever, don't know what we're doing next time.

Adam Oh well I was thinking, have you watched or read any of the Promised Neverland?

Ren No…

Adam Okay, because it's pretty popular with the kids and it's a manga and and anime. Although apparently the second season is atrocious so I've only watched the first season, which is brilliant. And read the equivalent manga volumes. It's about kids in an orphanage that isn’t what it seems, and it's definitely horror for teenagers.

Ren Oh yeah. OK, maybe we could do that then!

Adam Yeah, it's good,I’m pretty keen. And it has obvious similarities with The Drifting Classroom, which we've done before and I'm confident is an influence.

Ren Excellent. I mean, I do love it when we can make connections between things.

Do you have a sign-off for us Adam?

Adam Yeah, I’ll just say Let it Bee, creepy kids!

Ren Let it bee! See you next time, creepy kids. See you next time.