How a Chinese billionaire’s dream of making an underwater fantasy blockbuster turned into a legendary movie fiasco.

Check out Atavist’s featured archive story, SUNK:

As Jiang imagined it, Empires of the Deep would tell the story of Atlas, the son of the sea god Poseidon. Atlas is depicted as a pure-hearted young man who is restless and unsure of his own destiny. He has an alter ego, the swashbuckling Silver Eye (think Batman vis à vis Bruce Wayne), who appears during moments of peril. During a celebration in Atlas’s village in ancient Greece, an invading army of mermen knights riding on the backs of giant crabs captures Atlas’s adoptive father, General Damos. A 90-foot-tall lobster absconds with a holy temple—the Temple of Poseidon—in its claws.

Atlas and his drunken, lusty sidekick, Trajin, then embark on a quest across the sea to find Damos and retrieve the temple. On the way they stumble onto Crab Island, where in a mysterious palace they encounter bewitching women, including the beautiful princess Aka, who lure men into bed and kill them after making love.

“I discovered a plausible myth, a trove of red herrings, and, finally, what appeared to be the truth.” 

Who killed the Fudge King? For our sister publication The Atavist Magazine, Tom Donaghy investigated—and possibly solved—a decades-old cold case about the murder of Harry Anglemyer, the beloved owner of a fudge shop empire. 

 Read an excerpt, “True Crime, Jersey Shore Style,” on Longreads.

Alys Tomlinson: Gli Isolani (The Islanders)

your boyfriend fell for the youtube bear trap. yeah. he’s stuck there and there’s nothing we can do to get him out. yes. he’s gonna keep appearing on your dashboard every 5-6 seconds

A-tur reveals itself to the party's Atavist.

Knight of Swords

Champion of Ghaznavid Elisu

The Primal

I think it's funny when promoters don't know how to tag things on tumblr

Like sweetie you need to put a comma not a space to make multiple hashtags

Raziel, my D&D character for Out of the Abyss, is going through a lot of changes.

Raziel has recently discovered his possible dragon ancestry, related to his use of blood magic. There’s a lot of unanswered questions I’m waiting to discover and we’re only half way through the campaign so I’m excited to see where this goes.

Neither Turpin nor Lejeune believed John Langdon Down's original hypothesis that victims of the condition were throwbacks to some atavistic Mongolian "race".

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

Copper Kettle sold the best fudge on the Jersey Shore—and after its owner's body was found stuffed in a car, his murder went unsolved for decades. Things change, though. Atavist issue no. 143, WHO KILLED THE FUDGE KING?, is now available.

But a cohort of Ocean City residents insisted that the answers were right there for anyone who bothered to look. They believed that a toxic brew of prejudice, rage, and power had doomed the Fudge King.

I agreed, and thought that the story might make a great screenplay—a kind of South Jersey noir or David Lynch fantasia, where the flowers are pretty above the surface but gnarly worms lurk just below. Yet, soon I was hooked more deeply by the story of a fellow gay man living a relatively out life in the town where my family had spent our summer vacations. Someone whose reward for trying to yank Ocean City into the future was to become a target of hate and hypocrisy.

Love longform storytelling? Learn from the best. Here’s Seyward Darby of The Atavist Magazine on structure:

“When I’m working with writers we always start with those fundamentals — the bones — and figuring out how they fit together so that the story stands. Then you create muscle and flesh through character, scene, and dialogue. You start to make something whole and presentable. But at the end of the day, if you were to strip all of that away, the bones would still be there, and the story itself would still be strong.”

“When I’m talking to folks, sometimes they’re lost in thinking about the muscle — some detail here or there — and it’s about putting that stuff aside to figure out what the bones are underneath that part of the story.”

“You need to go from this bone to that bone for the thing to hold together. And once the skeleton is there, the other stuff starts to feel so much more organic.”

Read more from Seyward, and writer Jana Meisenholder, on Longreads.

Inside my mind Hidden beasts run wild Until the prey subsides The hunger will remain

An Atavist, they are offshoots of Feral mutants.