“… a blazing and brilliant return to form … a taut and tight, suspenseful and spellbinding, witty and wonderful group of eight stories … there isn’t a weak one in the bunch. And while Taylor refracts versions of this story throughout the collection, he does so without overly romanticising it … He is a writer of enormous subtlety and of composure beyond his years.”ģ. ![]() And as a plotter, he doesn’t rely on gasp-inducing reveals … Taylor’s superpower is compressing a lifetime of backstory into a paragraph – sometimes just a sentence … I’ve come to expect, in fiction, the story of the Sad Gay Youth who is rejected by his often religious family and thereafter becomes self-destructive or reckless. He neither rushes a story to its high notes nor drags the pace so that we can admire his voice. In a band of writers, he’d be the drummer who sticks to a steady moderato. In contrast, Taylor presents such earnest moments of vulnerability in Anne of Cleves that my breath hitched … Some writers have the gift of perfect pitch when writing dialogue Taylor’s gift is perfect tempo. “Taylor plays the Lionel-Charles-Sophie storyline for all its awkwardness and resentment, but it can feel like a note held too long to suspend commitment, which is the resolution we’re trained to expect … The violence is neither glamorous nor gratuitous it is senseless without being pointless. “Delicate” might not fully alter that dynamic, but the eerie qualities of the premiere at least establish it as the kind of introduction that spurs curiosity, as Cohen might put it, to watch what happens next.Read an interview with Brandon Taylor here Although she hosted “Saturday Night Live” and has a few acting credits, it’s definitely a step up for the reality star, who delivers credibly enough given the limited demands in the opening hour, perhaps in part because her character is operating in a world she knows quite well.Īfter witches, freak shows and haunted houses, “American Horror Story” gets down to basics by finding horror in a more conventional environment with a protagonist at a vulnerable moment, never mind that Anna leads the kind of fabulous life where she has to plan medical visits around an appearance on Andy Cohen’s talk show, and begins discussing expensive private schools before she’s formally pregnant.įrankly, keeping track of the various incarnations of this series has at times felt like its own kind of ordeal, requiring attention (from critics, anyway) because of its inexplicable popularity despite being as subtle as a blow to the head with a bag of hammers. Murphy’s touch actually proves most evident in the attention-grabbing casting of Kim Kardashian as Anna’s publicist and friend, reflecting the producer’s penchant for placing promotional value over performance. ![]() Kim Kardashian in "American Horror Story: Delicate." Eric Liebowitz/FX That includes a hint of mystery surrounding Dex, whose first wife died, as well as at least one shadowy woman who appears to be stalking Anna. ![]() (Given O’Hare’s association with the “Horror Story” franchise, anyone seeing him as a doctor should really seek out a second opinion.)Īdapting the book “Delicate Condition,” writer-producer Halley Feiffer actually lets the situations breathe a bit – again, not a customary “American Horror Story” hallmark. ![]() Still, strange things begin to happen when Anna gets the chance for another IVF treatment, despite the assurances of her doctor, played by Denis O’Hare, that she has a very good chance at success this time. Producer Ryan Murphy again draws from his “AHS” repertory company, in this case creating a showcase for Emma Roberts as Anna Alcott, a rising movie star whose infertility issues lead her to label herself “broken,” a reference her husband, Dex (Matt Czuchry), quickly corrects. Yet working from a novel with a different writer appears to have imposed some welcome discipline on the 12th edition of the FX series, “Delicate,” which owes a tonal debt to “Rosemary’s Baby.” “Restraint” is a seldom-used word in connection with “American Horror Story,” where the emphasis often tilts more toward gory images and sadism than genuine scares.
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