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Chelsea Sutton’s debut novella, Krackle’s Last Movie, begins soon after the disappearance of the titular character. Minerva Krackle, a documentary filmmaker on a mission, wanted to show the world the real face of those affected by the CMS (Curious Monster Syndrome), a mysterious event which caused an “evolution or growth or degeneration” that left some people forever changed (p. 25). Following Krackle’s disappearance, her assistant, Harper, scrambles through recorded interviews and notes that her boss and mentor left behind, attempting to finish the film in time for a festival submission. Dipped in glittery melancholy, incisive, and indulgent in its aesthetic, this novella is an accomplished debut which interrogates the experience of being marginalized and stereotyped.

As Harper tries to tie up loose ends, she grapples with the implications of the recordings, re-watching and sometimes re-living her encounters with eccentric subjects the world deems monstrous: joyful yet sharp-humoured mermaids, a desert-dwelling sea creature, a grieving werewolf, an invisible dancer. Harper sees herself as a witness, a reluctant interviewer, and as one of the outcasts. She hides her dwarfed wings under baggy shirts, and struggles to come to terms with her own story. When curating the material and deciding what to cut and what to keep, she weighs the importance of her self-perception against Krackle’s legacy—striving to stay faithful to her mentor’s original vision while relating to, admiring, and recoiling from the interviewees who mirror her own difference.

Sutton engages in an ambitious reflection on monsters and their symbolism, giving each CMS-affected character a layered metaphorical meaning. She uses fiction to analyse monstrosity as a concept, referencing its various representations—from schlocky films to classics—and questioning the “othering” involved in its construction. In cultural criticism, monsters are “harbingers of category crisis,” figures that exist in between states: neither dead nor alive, human nor animal. [1] They are hybrids whose propensity to resist classification unsettles individuals and societies even more than their presumed capacity for violence. In the novella, “monstrosity” serves as shorthand for any existence that doesn’t align with social norms and expectations.

Sutton’s broad and inclusive definition of difference encompasses not only race, sexuality, and illness, but also loss, or even random events and accidents that set the characters apart—suggesting both the universality of the experience, and the oppressiveness of the categories they straddle. For example, upon hearing Harper describe her wings as “not natural” Krackle asks her what “natural” means. Harper replies, “you know, normal”—and, when asked what normal means, she adds “the thing that keeps you invisible” (p. 52). Sutton shows the psychological cost of suppressing all that makes us “visible.” As Harper describes it: “It’s like we hold our breaths until our lives are over” (p. 25).

The novella posits each “monstrous” character as a voice and a face of various responses to difference. Most characters share the weary I’ve-seen-it-all attitude of those who naturally inhabit a life that seems alien to others. When Harper asks the mermaids if their culinary preference for fish makes them cannibals, they counter by asking if she considers herself a monkey (p. 12). The mermaids are accustomed to being exotified, met with a mix of repulsion and fascination that marks them as special, however mundane they might appear to themselves. This constant negotiation with the judgement of others produces a hard-won resilience, making some of Sutton’s “monsters” appear heroic—capable of sharp insights, but also of compassion and understanding rarely afforded to them. When the (second) Great Merlan, a magician celebrated for her extraordinary abilities, tells her audience, “You have been amazing. Remember that,” the statement is not a platitude. It emphasises that being “othered” means needing to defend and treasure one’s beauty, knowing the high stakes of self-condemnation. She captures the fleeting moment when difference holds value and dazzles, instead of hurting, and poses the questions: When is something “special” treated as a talent and admired, and when is it considered an aberration and abhorred? Is it a matter of framing, social attitudes, context, self-presentation? It’s difficult to tell, but Sutton persists in asking.

In another scene, the interpretation of an invisible dancer’s performance depends on whether it is perceived from an internal or external perspective. What makes Isabel special on a superficial level (her invisibility) renders what really makes her special (her talent) invisible. Her vision splits in two: what she sees (the craft she worked on and developed), and what’s being perceived by others (her difference). Yet she manages to unite both in a dance so beautiful that it renders Krackle speechless. There’s something profound about Isabel then asking, “You get it?” (p. 55). Sutton, however, refuses to settle on a single perspective. She also represents those who exploit their difference, selling it for other people’s entertainment. The novella considers the role of fetishisation, with some finding the monstrous irresistible, arousing—enthralled by the oddity, their response becomes reductive to the point of total objectification. Sutton’s approach remains morally ambiguous—never didactic, always prodding. Her metaphors juxtapose surface aesthetics with psychological depth and encourage multiple readings. Each moment asks to be dissected. Each scene invites attentive deliberation that mirrors the novella’s wider concern with complexity of judgement and perception.

The novella is at its most harrowing when it focuses on the pathologisation of “otherness.” Sutton traces the institutional frameworks through which difference is managed and punished: medicalisation, which seeks to “cure” it, and religion, which tries either to exorcise or reframe it as meaningful within its own ideology. These discourses intersect with older ideas of social impurity, by which outsiders are treated as human-shaped contaminations to be contained, expelled, and morally condemned. The logic dates back to early Christianity, which treated illnesses as God’s punishment for sin, and evolved into multiple overlapping justifications that enabled violence while presenting it as care, necessity, or moral duty. Harper, whose childhood reproduces this dynamic, internalizes the bigotry of her parents, and disfigures herself to hide—literally cutting her wings as they once did, and “disposing” of herself (p. 34). Even when let go, her wings grow back warped and distorted, exemplifying development stunted by abuse.

The story of Meggie, whose transformation into a modern-day mummy functions as a metaphor for cancer, is in dialogue with Harper’s. Meggie’s relationship with her sister Liz explores the devaluation of those perceived as already lost. Harper blames Liz for cutting off Meggie’s hands, calling it “extreme” to cut a piece of someone “just to keep her where she needs to be” (p. 49). Both narratives share the realisation that cruelty can be a desperate response to situations that exceed comprehension and capacity. “I didn't know what else to do,” Liz insists, and Harper echoes the sentiment when reflecting on her parents: “What else were they supposed to do?” (pp. 49, 34). Sutton refuses to resolve this tension, exposing the moral impasse that arises when love, control, and harm collide.

Sutton also embeds this thoughtful approach to representation on a meta-level. As Harper edits Krackle’s film, she reflects not only on her responsibility towards her subjects but also on the fate of Krackle’s earlier work, which the studio reshaped until her original intention was erased. Here Sutton draws on her experience as a filmmaker, highlighting the pressures of the market, the risks of censorship, and the ethical challenges of telling somebody else’s story. Commercial media, which prioritises profit and broad appeal, strips Krackle’s documentary of its depth, and rebrands it as a fictional comedy, making difference digestible through mockery and suppression. A film made “for everyone” excludes minority perspectives by default, producing distortions that arise when a marginalized group is defined by the majority. Sutton’s familiarity with film history also means she understands the cultural legacy of the creatures she explores. She plays with audience expectations and familiarity with the monsters, restaging the process of imposing interpretations and assumptions on people to then challenge and dismantle them. The monsters are so clearly defined that even they experience a kind of sadness at not embodying the ideal, which captures something insightful about living alongside one's imaginary self, having to share space with a vivid vision of oneself that others have created. Taken together, these strands of the novella not only represent difference, but also analyse the conditions under which representations are seen, constructed, and consumed.

The novella also echoes classical film theory. Siegfried Kracauer argued that film has a unique affinity with the material world, and that the camera can extend human perception beyond its natural limits, making visible what is “inaccessible to the naked eye.” [2] Capable of overcoming the constraints of time and distance, a recording can break reality and use it as its material. Sutton draws from those ideas, treating time as one of her subjects and using recording as both a storytelling tool—the novella is a collage of various types of recordings: camera, audio, and journal—and a lens that shapes the readers’ view. Mr. Danger’s worry about Krackle shows in him anxiously rubbing his hat (p. 15). Krackle has nervous tics for every occasion. These types of well-observed, humanising details rely on heightened attention that comes with viewing the same recorded behaviour multiple times—the enhanced familiarity that comes with transgressing the limitations of everyday interactions. Moments fade, yet also coexist with recorded permanence.

Krackle is at the epicentre of this approach—not a woman at a particular stage of her life, but a holistic image of a person, a collection of all her experiences, features, and ticks: ageless, inhabiting all spaces she ever visited, possessing all characteristics she ever embodied. Untethered from reality and chronology, she loses fragments of herself and tries to preserve continuity through constant recording. That overlap between the meta-analysis of storytelling and Krackle’s self-understanding is thought-provoking and clever: It hints at the relationship between memory and history, narrative and identity. By editing the film, Harper decides Krackle’s legacy. The act of editing mirrors Harper’s own self-mutilation: She can cut the film as she cuts her wings, removing whatever she wishes—including herself—from the story (p. 63). In the end, Sutton suggests that the shaping of narratives is inseparable from the shaping of selves—and that to control one is always, in some measure, to control the other.

In its aesthetics, the novella calls back to the cabinet of curiosities—a collection of objects which once lacked clear categorisations and evoked wonderment and awe. Sutton updates this tradition using a contemporary sensibility reminiscent of the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities in London, where extravagant historical taxidermy, unsettling artworks, and pop cultural artefacts co-exist at the intersection of horror and whimsy. This layered visual language extends to the novella’s characters, whose enchanted realism both recalls and resists mid-century monster iconography. And finally, there’s a stylistic splash of theatrical excess and circus showiness which clashes productively with the shaky quality of a cheap handheld camera.

The outcome is magical and difficult to pinpoint. The novella’s imagery remains recognisable and distinctive despite sparse descriptions, relying on shared cultural associations to fill in the detail. Even here, the design operates like a stereotype: The subject matter invites a set of aesthetic expectations, much as the characters’ looks are subject to presuppositions and assumptions. The style naturally emerges, which Harper comments on: “I do my best to keep the camera steady, but everything can’t help but look like a low-budget horror movie” (p. 51). Sutton continually questions the relationship between subject and form. Krackle’s attempt to document a minority group becomes reframed as horror due to genre expectations and common social perceptions, shifting from non-fiction to fiction because of how it is received. Representation cannot be neutral: Interpretation distorts the message, style influences meaning, and reality is lost in translation.

Sutton’s writing shares a lineage with emotionally intense, female-centered, compact storytelling, which is clear from her choice of short story writers she lists as her influences: Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Aimee Bender. Like them, she excels in compressed, high-impact scenes that are then open to interpretation—striking bursts followed by slow-spreading reflections. The novella allows Sutton to interconnect those moments, building a dense network of meaning through repetition, variation, and contrast, each part enriching the whole. At times, though, she doesn’t utilise the potential of this format to the full: The impact of individual scenes overshadows gradual development. For instance, Harper’s struggles with her identity are vivid and rendered with psychological precision in the moment, yet her movement towards self-acceptance, which happens over the course of the entire story, seems underdeveloped in comparison. Characters’ responses to Krackle’s final fate lack the veracity and sharpness of the vignette-like interviews. The plot, at times, intervenes, unsettling the philosophical depth of the novella, playing to the requirements of the genre, which is unnecessary in a work that is so successful at proving its worth as a unique, non-standard piece of fiction.

None of this, however, diminishes the overall achievement. Sutton takes on challenging, sensitive topics and handles them with subtlety and nuance. She resists moralising, refuses straight answers, and shows the multidimensionality of problems, always balancing conflicting perspectives. Drawing on her strengths as a short story writer, playwright, and filmmaker, she brings formal control and conceptual ambition into alignment. The result is an assured and distinctive debut: a reflection on the horror and the glory of otherness refracted through a distorted, carnival mirror.

Endnotes

[1] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 6-7.  [return]

[2] Kracauer, Siegfried (1960) Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford University Press 1960). [return]

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/krackles-last-movie-by-chelsea-sutton/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59232