Article #281798

Don’t be fooled by the lighter tone of Margaret Atwood’s follow-on. June’s daughter is now grown up in Gilead, where daily horrors are still in full swing – and Aunt Lydia is back

I had to give up on the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale quite early on – the mass mock execution scene did for me – because it was too relentlessly bleak, too full of dread, too awful, too true. Margaret Atwood’s future-dystopia tale, published in 1985, drew on nothing that had not already occurred in totalitarian and tyrannical regimes around the world. Translated to the screen, the visceral terror of it all was almost too much from the very beginning.

Now, the sequel Atwood published in 2019, The Testaments, has come for us, created by The Handmaid’s Tale’s showrunner, Bruce Miller. Brace yourselves.