All the Small Things: Miracle Mile (Steve de Jarnatt, 1988)

Be Not Afraid is coming to an end. FOC for the sixth and final issue is this Monday, January 19; Issue 5 will be out on Wednesday the 28th. If you're just catching up, you can download the entire series to date on Google Play.

Dead Teenagers, a slasher about getting stuck and growing up, will be out in March of 2026 from Oni Press, with art by Caitlin Yarsky. It's already been named one of Fangoria's horror comics to watch out for.

Finally: DILF: Did I Leave Feminism, my third book of non-fiction, is available wherever books are sold, via Bookshop.org, and (in smell form) at Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab.

On Tuesday, January 27, the DILF World Tour continues with a stop at Literary Arts in Portland, featuring the legendary Katherine Cross. Learn more here.

Miracle Mile is an experience. It felt like a corny little B-movie, for much of the time I was watching it — broad caricatures, too-convenient plot twists, a supremely unsexy scene wherein Anthony “ER Guy” Edwards serenades his lady friend Mare Winningham with jazz clarinet. Yet by the end, I was anxious and upset in ways I could not have anticipated, and the feeling haunted me for weeks afterward. This is a movie that starts with a sexy clarinet solo and ends with a fairly convincing vision of Hell. 

Which is to say: Miracle Mile — like many great horror movies — begins as a rom-com. Anthony Edwards plays an aspiring jazz clarinetist who runs into Mare Winningham at the La Brea Tar Pits, and instantly falls for her, a sentiment he conveys by playing jazz clarinet in an open-air park concert that your parents might have taken you to in the third grade, and which would have seemed dorky even back then. Mare Winningham is instantly smitten with this baggy-shirted, bespectacled, reed-playing sexual dynamo (a sentiment apparently shared by the real Mare Winningham) and invites him to meet up with her after her shift at a local coffee shop. Anthony Edwards sleeps through his alarm, and arrives to the coffee shop several hours late, at around 4 AM. Mare Winningham has gone home. 

Then Miracle Mile becomes a different movie. Outside the coffee shop is a phone booth, and — while trying to contact his lady friend — Anthony Edwards accidentally receives a phone call from a panicked soldier at a military base, telling him that the United States has launched nuclear weapons, and that retaliatory strikes will be hitting the West Coast by dawn.