Midnight, Water City | review by Rafe McGregor

Midnight, Water City by Chris McKinney, Soho Press, paperback, £13.79, 15 July 2021, ISBN 9781641293686

 

Chris McKinney’s career as an author began with The Tattoo in 2000 and Midnight, Water City is his seventh novel. The science fiction mystery is his first work of genre fiction, the first not set in his home state of Hawaii, and the first instalment of the Water City Trilogy, which continues with Eventide, Water City and concludes with Sunset, Water City, both published in 2023. Midnight, Water City is narrated in the first person by an anonymous narrator and in the present tense. It took me some time to realise both, which is a mark of the author’s literary skill. While use of the present tense can make for a more immediate, engrossing reading experience, it is difficult to do well and can have the opposite effect when it fails, undermining the suspension of disbelief. The narrative opens in 2142, with the murder of Akira Kimura, forty years after she saved the planet from an extinction event. Kimura was initially despised for being the bearer of bad news when she identified Sessho-seki (Japanese for ‘The Killing Rock’), the asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and then because of her undisguised misanthropy when interviewed about it. Although she thought that only a tiny proportion of humanity was worth saving, she turned her genius to the creation of Ascalon, a cosmic ray powerful enough to alter the path of the asteroid before it destroyed Earth. The weapon worked and Kimura was propelled to unprecedented celebrity status, revered as a saint for the next four decades.

The narrator was recruited as Kimura’s head of security when she was receiving death threats and has been her right-hand man ever since, switching between the roles of bodyguard and assassin as required. Once protecting her was no longer a full-time job, he returned to his police duties, but received a call asking for his services again immediately before the novel begins. The narrator arrives too late, discovering Kimura dead in her home, literally cut to pieces in a hibernation chamber that extends the lifespans of 'The Money' (the socioeconomic elite) in the 22^nd century. (It is not difficult to imagine Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg working on something like this in the near future, if they aren’t already). Later, he receives a posthumous message from Kimura, asking him to find her daughter, also named Ascalon, in order to apologise to her on Kimura’s behalf. He is shocked at the revelation as he has no knowledge of the child and realises that he did not know Kimura nearly as well as he thought. The story is set in motion very quickly, in the first four pages, and by the end of the first third of the narrative the narrator has resigned from the police and accepted his twofold mission, to detect Kimura’s killer and to find her daughter. Despite being advertised as a ‘neo-noir procedural’ – an appeal to the many fans of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and its sequel – the novel is very much in the hardboiled detective genre, with the protagonist driven by both rather than just one of the two standard plot devices, the murder mystery and the missing person, reminding me of both Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) and Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987). In keeping with the finest traditions of hardboiled detective fiction, the narrator is a complex character with a tainted past and hidden depths, in addition to an idiosyncratic type of synaesthesia that gives him a head start against other detectives.

McKinney not only sets the plot in motion with ease and expertise, but handles the exposition effectively and economically. By the seventh page one already has a good grasp of his 22^nd century, including Kimura’s unique status, the preference for living in submarine high rises, the existence of suits that control one’s environment completely, the ability to prolong the human lifespan artificially, and much more. Again, it is a testament to McKinney’s literary skill that he is able to communicate so much so quickly without committing the creative writing sin of ‘information dumping’. My sole criticism of the novel is that while the worldbuilding is for the most part conducted with a light touch, it never stops (chapter 21 of 27 is, for example, mostly exposition) and the cumulative effect is a little like wading through water: unusual and pleasing at first, but becoming gradually more exhausting as one continues. Notwithstanding, Midnight, Water City is a seamless blend of crime, science fiction, and social commentary that can be read as either the first in the trilogy or as a standalone mystery. The novel has been widely and generously reviewed since publication and received as much – if not more – praise from crime fiction critics as science fiction critics.

 

Haunted House by J.A. Konrath (independently published) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Figging and maniacal ghosts: horror/thriller uses well-developed characters and strong plotting to bring life to haunted house trope.

Everybody knows that you don’t go to Butler House, a supposedly haunted mansion on a former slave plantation in South Carolina. It’s also the perfect setting for a fear experiment conducted by Dr. Forenzi. Haunted House, the sixth twisty instalment in The Konrath Dark Thriller Collective, brings together characters from throughout the country (and from the previous books). Each of them is offered a monetary award plus a bonus in exchange for participating in the experiment: the alcoholic mother will get reunited with her child, the disgraced molecular biologist will get his old research job back and so on. All of it seems a bit shady. 

Konrath effectively delays conflict by building suspense as he delves into characters’ backstories and problems to align the reader with them. The novel also explores the history of Butler House and how its sadistic owners psychologically and physically tortured slaves. Additionally, each fear experiment participant has already faced a hellish ordeal ranging from being locked in a basement with a maniac to being trapped on an island with a cannibal who files his teeth. You’re with these characters, and you want them to escape. 

When the key players arrive at Butler House, they encounter other, more typical horror characters: a skeptical author, a specialist in debunking paranormal phenomena, and of course, a medium. They also meet the boisterous prostitute-turned-dominatrix call girl Moni, a major source of comic relief. Participants are allowed to bring one weapon; Moni brings a plunger full of heroin. She repeatedly refers to something called “figging” that she does with her male clientele. Konrath plays with the reader by withholding the definition of this term – can you resist looking it up until the novel ends?

The participants find themselves in a 13 Ghosts type of environment, with the spirits from the house’s sordid past supposedly rising up to terrorize them. A giggling, bare-chested guy who wears a gas mask, smells like meat and enjoys cutting himself with a cleaver. A slave driver who uses a whip and has a patch over one eye. A vengeful slave with four arms stemming from a Civil War-era experiment. Konrath keeps the reader wondering: is what is happening real, or is it a trick to frighten the subjects? The dangers escalate, and the prospect of escape decreases. All the while, the reader roots for the underdogs. 

The cop Mankowski seems the most grounded of the characters. In one scene, there’s a fascinating interaction with a serial killer in prison. The killer relishes telling Mankowski the awful things he’s done to his victims. 

A group of strangers getting trapped in a threatening environment has been done many times but rarely so entertainingly. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

The Terror of Blue John Gap | review by Rafe McGregor

‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ by Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Conan Doyle Weirdbook: Five Novelettes Comprising Doyle’s Essential Horror edited by Rafe McGregor
Theaker’s Paperback Library, 148pp, £7.54, July 2010, ISBN 9780956153326

 

The Victorians were obsessed with doubles, whether the literal evil twin brother of the doppelgänger popularised by E.TA. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde or the figural pairing of the civilised and the savage in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Edward Prendick and Dr Moreau, and Charles Marlow and Mr Kurtz. Conan Doyle was no exception to the rule. Doubles appear in two of his Sherlock Holmes stories, ‘The Final Problem’ (1893) and ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ (1923), in the pairing of Holmes and Professor Moriarty and Professor Presbury and Presbury-on-serum respectively, and the fact that Dr Watson never sees Moriarty raises the intriguing possibility that he is actually a doppelgänger. Doyle also deployed doubling in his horror fiction, most notably in ‘A Pastoral Horror’ (1890) – Father Verhagen and diseased-Verhagen – and ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ (1910), both of which I selected for Theaker’s Paperback Library’s The Conan Doyle Weirdbook.

‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ is an epistolary novelette of just over seven thousand words, which is divided into seven diary entries by Dr James Hardcastle, from 17 April 1907 to 10 June 1907, bookended by a foreword and a single-sentence conclusion by an implied author. Although Hardcastle is introduced as a man of science, he was terminally ill with tuberculosis at the time of the events chronicled and the story is replete with suggestions that he is an unreliable narrator. The repeated reflections, allusions, and intimations of mental illness are matched by a carefully constructed undermining of the possibility of corroboration. Hardcastle thinks he hears, sees, and shoots a blind, ‘bear-like’ beast taller and broader than an elephant and ten times the size of the biggest bear, but all the reader knows for certain is that he entered Blue John Gap mine, fell, and lost consciousness. Hardcastle first hears about the beast from a young man named Armitage on 17 April, when he favours prosaic explanations of missing sheep and a damaged wall. By 3 May, Armitage has himself disappeared and Hardcastle leaps to the completely baseless conclusion that the beast is responsible. Hardcastle’s shot either misses or fails to draw blood and his vague description of his own wounds – concussion, a broken arm, and two broken ribs – is ambiguous as to whether they were caused by a swat from a gargantuan mole or a fall down a mine shaft. Finally, the locals are quick to dissuade ‘adventurous gentlemen’ from descending on their peaceful haven in the Derbyshire Dales and repair the gap to prevent any further exploration.

I’m increasingly convinced that Doyle’s achievement is similar if not identical to that of Henry James in The Turn of the Screw (1898), where the interpretations of psychological and supernatural horror are equally valid to the extent that the ambiguity is constitutive of the work’s literary value. If the beast is an overgrown figment of Hardcastle’s imagination, then it is likely the product of his unconscious and ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ a psychological horror story. Hardcastle is exemplary of the Victorian gentleman, a well-educated and well-mannered man of reason with a steadfast moral compass, a propensity for bold action when provoked, and the gender, class, and ecological prejudices of his time. As he narrates the majority of the narrative, the reader becomes acquainted with both his actions and his thoughts. The beast, in contrast, remains entirely enigmatic, with much of its appearance left to the reader’s imagination and scant explanation of its evolution, habitat, or behaviour. It is, in short, wholly Other to humanity in general and Hardcastle in particular. If the beast is real, then the narrative recalls the novels of one of Doyle’s contemporaries, H. Rider Haggard, whose serial protagonist Allan Quartermain is the archetypal Great White Hunter. For Haggard and the majority of Victorians, nature was simply a resource to be mastered, adapted, and exploited for humanity’s benefit, notwithstanding the widespread acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Yet Doyle’s perspective on the relation between Hardcastle and the beast, whether mental or material, is much more sophisticated and explored with a calculated literary artifice that employs two converging configurations.

First, he distances his readers from Hardcastle as the narrative progresses, a cumulative effect achieved by the combination of repeated references to his unreliability with an escalation of his obsession to uncover the mystery of the mine, an investigation he is patently unfit to undertake. Hardcastle is most unsympathetic in his determination that Armitage has fallen victim to the beast, convincing himself that the beast has taken Armitage in order to justify the satisfaction of his own desire to hunt and kill it. Second, Doyle invites readers to empathise with the beast by means of the late revelation of its vulnerability (blindness) and the even later speculation as to its origin (earthly not infernal). The epistemic ambiguity is thus extended to the ethical and the story closes with the question of whether our sympathies should lie with the beast or with Hardcastle. The beast is the most complex of Doyle’s doubles because in spite of representing the brutish, savage, and untamed aspects of humanity, it is not presented as meriting approbation – like diseased-Verhagen, Moriarty, and Presbury-on-serum. As such, the doubling of Hardcastle and the beast is an instantiation of what Mark Bould refers to as the environmental uncanny in The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (2021): the recognition by human beings that they are in the presence of nonhuman agency, which draws attention to the play of identity and difference between human and nonhuman. Whether produced by Hardcastle’s unconscious or by natural selection, the beast sheds light on the relation between the human and the natural worlds.

It would be stretching credulity to categorise ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ as eco-fiction – fiction that takes the integration and interdependence of humanity and the environment as its subject – but Doyle’s deployment of doubling in the novelette is distinct from the other three examples I cited. Diseased-Verhagen is a serial killer, Moriarty an evil genius, and Presbury-on-serum a rapist-in-waiting. The beast is neither homicidal nor evil nor rapacious. While the zoocidal Hardcastle’s agency is impaired by his obsession, the beast has sufficient control of its instincts to refrain from making a meal of his unconscious body. That ‘awful moment when we were face to face’ is likely to have been awful for each of the doubles, the pair of which provide a reminder of the invisible ties among all living species.

The Accident Season by Moïra Fowley-Doyle (Kathy Dawson Books) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Young adult novel hides sexual and physical abuse within a bubble gum wrapper of tarot cards, costume parties, kissing and witches.

The Accident Season focuses on a trio of Irish teens: seventeen-year-old narrator Cara Morris, her best friend Bea (a witch — not the supernatural kind), and Cara’s ex-stepbrother Sam whose crush on Cara is abundantly clear.

Every October is “accident season” for the Morrises due to the inordinate number of negative happenings: cuts, broken bones, severed relationships, and worse. This accident season, according to Bea’s tarot cards, is going to be awful. 

The trio undertakes a quest to find classmate Elsie, an outcast who keeps cropping up in Cara’s photos. Elsie has no friends, and yet people know her as the girl who oversees the school library’s “secrets booth.” Here students type out their secrets and give them to Elsie to keep safe. After her father died, Cara was friends with Elsie, who is fading into the shadows – Cara can’t even remember the semi-doppelganger’s last name.

The novel also explores the somewhat forbidden attraction between Cara and Sam – his father Christopher was married to Cara’s artist mother, but he left abruptly. The mother has assumed guardianship of Sam. Then there’s Cara’s sister Alice, dating a handsome and manipulative older vocalist from a band. 

The Accident Season contains lots of talk about masks and hiding one’s true feelings. The Cara/Bea/Sam trio isn’t very popular, but it hosts the Black Cat and Whiskey Moon Masquerade Ball, the point of which is that attendees will take off their figurative human masks to show what they really are. And they’re gaining popularity because of it.

The tension escalates as things come to the surface near the end, but until then, it’s a rather dull read. One can take only so much hanging out and smoking and drinking and tarot cards and writing poetry.—Douglas J. Ogurek***

Suckers by J.A. Konrath and Jeff Strand (independently published) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Stupid. Ridiculous. Brilliant.

This collection alternates stories between comedy horror masters J.A. Konrath and Jeff Strand, then culminates with “Suckers,” a cowritten longer piece in which their recurring characters Harry McGlade (Konrath) and Andrew Mayhem (Strand) meet and undertake an absurd caper. 

Though each author’s work is distinctive, what unites them is playfulness with language, an avoidance of pompous prose, a comedian’s recognition of everyday absurdities, and often, a deliberate imbecility. “The pain was painful,” observes Konrath’s detective, while Strand’s protagonist, more of a sharp albeit regular guy playing at detective work, questions “fun size” Halloween candy – if it was fun, it would be enormous. Throughout the collection, the action moves quickly, and the dialogue stays tight and rapid fire. 

McGlade is the ultimate jerk. He’s also highly amusing. He’ll check out a woman’s legs while she’s crying or insult someone at their first meeting. He makes fun of others, whether they’re wearing too much makeup or have a face resembling a percussion instrument. He’s a chauvinist and a womanizer, and he doesn’t pay attention to others. At one point, he even admits to lying to the reader. 

Mayhem, on the other hand, is analytical and talky. He points out contradictions in things people say to make them look foolish. He’s also inventive when it comes to defending himself, whether that means using a hardcover copy of Stephen King’s The Stand or a box of grape juice. And Mayhem is more of a family man… but he’s not beyond showing his young son a movie called Blood Blood Blood. 

The differences between the two authors surface in the first two stories. Konrath’s “Whelp Wanted”, in which McGlade is tasked with finding a missing dog, takes place over multiple days. He does shoddy research and makes several mistakes. “Poor Career Choice” by Strand is a dialogue-heavy but by no means dull exchange between Mayhem and a would-be assassin who shows up at his home. The action takes place in real time.

McGlade gets more entertaining as the collection progresses. “Taken to the Cleaners” introduces another incompetent hitman. An attractive young woman who is the wife of a chicken king wants McGlade to kill the man her husband hired to kill the man she hired to kill him. 

In “A Bit of Halloween Mayhem”, Strand’s protagonist and a friend decide to explore a supposedly haunted house. Strand demonstrates the silliness of two grown men doing something kids are more likely to do. 

Next up is Konrath’s “The Necro File”, a magnum opus of humour, disgustingness, and authorial mischief. Client Norma Cauldridge, to whom McGlade repeatedly refers as “Drawbridge” (not to be funny but rather because he’s sloppy), wants him to follow her necromancer husband. This is Richard Laymon level stuff topped with a hearty portion of urine, barf and poop. Moreover, the story exemplifies that going off on tangents isn’t always ineffective. McGlade, for instance, rambles on about the unappetizing look of hot dogs before eating three of them. 

“The Lost (For a Good Reason) Adventure of Andrew Mayhem” recounts how the protagonist met his friend Roger in school detention at age thirteen. They get into trouble when they discover a naked neighbour thrusting around a butcher knife while talking to himself. 

In “Suckers”, the two characters inadvertently meet when Mayhem, running an errand involving spaghetti sauce and mushrooms, confronts McGlade intent on rooting out some “pires” (aka vampires). The reader gets the best of both worlds with the witty Mayhem and the not-as-smart-but-still-absorbing McGlade, who often bends the truth to make himself seem more heroic than he is. 

The story takes a giddy sidetrack when it introduces email communications between the protagonists and their editor Chad. Mayhem begins commenting on the falsity of McGlade’s version of events. When the story resumes, McGlade mocks his coauthor by engaging Mayhem in over-the-top actions inspired by his email comments.

The book ends with Strand interviewing Jack Kilborn (Konrath’s pen name) via email about a forthcoming novel. The exchange has them poking fun at each other and getting silly.

Both authors brought their A game to this collection, whose adventurousness and friskiness enthral the reader’s inner child. Douglas J. Ogurek *****

McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales | review by Rafe McGregor

McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales by Michael Chabon (editor)

McSweeney’s #10, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, paperback, £4.10 (used), 1 March 2003, ISBN 9781400033393

 

Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is an award-winning American literary journal that was founded by award-winning and bestselling author Dave Eggers in San Francisco in 1998. Eggers has a long and varied bibliography, but is probably best known for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a memoir published in 2000. More important than any of this is the fact that McSweeney’s was Stephen Theaker’s inspiration for TQF, which he launched with John Greenwood in Birmingham in 2004. As regular readers of TQF (but probably not McSweeney’s) will know, Stephen’s secondary goal (after keep it going) was to catch McSweeny’s up, which he achieved in 2011. At the moment, TQF is in the lead – but only just – with seven-seven issues to McSweeney’s seventy-six. The next issue of McSweeney’s, which is due in February, will see a new editor, novelist and academic Rita Bullwinkel, take the helm. One of the features that distinguishes McSweeney’s from other literary journals is Eggers’ novel approach to editing and production:

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern continues to publish on a roughly quarterly schedule, and each issue is markedly different from its predecessors in terms of design and editorial focus. Some are in boxes, others come with a CD, still others are bound with a giant rubber band, and perhaps someday an issue will be made of glass.

Why the hell not!

The inspiration for TQF is not just any old McSweeney’s, but issue ten, McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, which was guest edited by champion of genre fiction Michael Chabon and published in February 2003 (a little over a year before the launch of TQF). It is easy to see why…from a garish cover borrowed from the October 1940 issue of Red Star Mystery Magazine to Chabon himself as editor to four hundred and eighty pages’ worth of twenty stories, some great illustrations, and contributors that include: Michael Crichton, Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Nick Hornby, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, and Michael Moorcock. I’ve no idea how deep McSweeney’s pockets are, but one would be hard-pressed to compile this kind of lineup with literally unlimited resources. Most of the tales don’t disappoint regardless of the stature of their authors and I agree with Stephen that this is one of – if not the – best collections of short fiction ever published for pulp fiction fans.

My favourite tale is the first, Jim Shephard’s ‘Tedford and the Megalodon’. As a shark story enthusiast, I wondered how much of the visual horror and signature suspense would be retained in the short story format (on which note the illustration, by Howard Chaykin, is a perfect accompaniment, breathtaking without being a spoiler). Simply stated, neither the horror nor the suspense are lost and the last sentence is one of the most chilling conclusions to a narrative I’ve ever read, all the more remarkable because it is not unexpected. Honourable mentions above and beyond Shephard’s illustrious peers go to Hornby, for ‘Otherwise Pandemonium’; Kelly Link, one of the pioneers of the New Weird, for ‘Catskin’; and Moorcock, for ‘The Case of the Nazi Canary’. Moorcock’s contribution is an outing for his occult detective, Sir Seaton Begg, AKA the other Baker Street detective, Sexton Blake. King’s contribution, ‘The Tale of Gray Dick’ features Roland Deschain, protagonist of The Dark Tower series, although as I’ve only read the first two books, I’m not sure where it fits chronologically (he is already missing some fingers, if that helps anyone work it out). I was only disappointed twice: Eggers’ contribution is, to my mind, out of sync with the rest, too slow and too long, and I found Ellison’s contribution insubstantial and just not very funny (assuming the aim was comedy). McSweeney’s #10 is now out of print (along with the rest of the first thirteen issues), but used copies remain available from the usual vendors and are, at the time of writing, still relatively cheap (the upper end of the range I saw was £20, postage excluded).

Having set such an incredibly high bar, has TQF ever come close? No doubt I’m biased because it featured one of my Roderick Langham stories, but I don’t think TQF#50, which was published in January 2015, was too far off. Aside from the eleven stories in three hundred and twenty-four pages, which include a few of my personal favourites, I very much enjoyed its showcasing of so many of the magazine’s regular contributors, including several whose collaboration with Stephen and John predates my own (which began with a single and somewhat scant review in TQF#23 in 2008). That said, I have particularly high hopes for TQF#80, which is due shortly. The last page of McSweeney’s #10, the source of my quote above, states that (only) fifty-six issues were planned. When McSweeney’s #56 was published in 2019, the (true) goal was revealed as one hundred and fifty-six. Perhaps when that issue is published, it will be two hundred and fifty-six. Let’s hope that day comes and that, as Stephen puts it, both McSweeney’s and TQF keep going.

The Gingerbread Girl by Stephen King (Simon & Schuster Audio) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Novella mixes grieving mother with giddy maniac and turns up the heat.

Emily, whose relationship with her husband has soured after the loss of a child, travels to her father’s beachside residence on the fictitious island of Vermillion Key, Florida. She takes up running – a near obsession that will play into the story later – with hopes of healing. Soon, however, a murderous brute will engage Em in an extended cat and mouse chase.

Em first learns about villain Jim Pickering from a friend of her father’s. Each year, she is informed, the wealthy tech guy arrives in his red Mercedes and brings a young, attractive “niece” (eyeroll) to his place. At the end of their stay, they leave via boat. 

Because The Gingerbread Girl is a novella, King acts quickly. Thus, this isn’t the typical scenario in which a gullible female falls for a dapper gent who eventually turns on her. Pickering is bad news from the start. Thus, Em gets drawn into the villain’s clutches not through his charm but rather by witnessing something he doesn’t want her to see. The story then sprints along at an exhilarating pace. Survival for Em means leveraging her strengths and her pursuer’s weaknesses. 

Mare Winningham’s audiobook narration endows Pickering with a cheerful bordering on giddy – listen for the yapping laugh – disposition. He finds unpleasant things funny, talks to himself, and has zero concern for Em.

Despite his story’s fairy tale-inspired title and straightforward narrative, King manages to inject depth into the work. Yes, Em is fleeing a madman, but she’s also trying to run away from her pain. Perhaps Pickering is even an embodiment of that pain, a pain that must be confronted to be overcome. Will the Gingerbread Girl crumble? Or will she prove herself a tough cookie? Douglas J. Ogurek****

Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi (DH Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in TQF73 (April 2023).

Far in our future, long after a nuclear apocalypse, the effects of which were leavened by the intercession of vampires (who then ruled us for millennia), a seventeen-year-old girl, Doris, finds herself at the centre of attention. Count Magnus Lee, an ancient vampire, wants to make her his wife, to his own daughter's dismay. The mayor's oafish son also wants to marry Doris. And Rei-Ginsei, the boomerang-wielding leader of a bandit troupe, takes a fancy to Doris too.

Doctor Who: The Eye of Torment, by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, et al. (Panini) | review by Stephen Theaker

This little review originally appeared on Goodreads in February 2023, but is otherwise previously unpublished.

The twelfth Doctor has epic adventures on the sun and on the ice. The story where the Doctor teams up with Nazis had a slightly odd "aren't we all as bad as each other?" vibe, but overall this was good fun. Felt very glamorous and big budget with its bright colours, top-notch artwork and full-bleed printing, plus an actual tv companion. It was nice reading it to know I had another four Capaldi books to go. As ever, the commentary at the back makes working on the strip sound like a fairly miserable experience, all wasted work and impossible deadlines, due to the need to work around the show and not duplicate or anticipate its storylines. It also left me wondering who one chap was talking about here: "There are plenty of men in the media spotlight who are oh-so keen to display their feminist credentials at every possible opportunity, but get them behind closed doors and they're as sexist as Alan Partridge on a stag weekend." Stephen Theaker ***

Watch the Signs! Watch the Signs! by Arthur Chappell (Shoreline of Infinity) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review was originally written in October 2019 for a previous iteration of the British Fantasy Society website.

Subtitled “Pub signs relating to science fiction, fantasy and horror”, this is a book that seeks to inform the reader from the very beginning. It was fascinating to read how the Romans used bushes to indicate the best places to get beer, and how pub signs, when they were introduced in the 14th century, were actually a form of licensing. Pubs would have their beer tested by men who sat in the beer, we are told, to see if it was sticky. If it was, all was well. If it wasn’t, someone was watering it down. Later we learn that the entire Wetherspoons chain was inspired to some extent by George Orwell’s essay “The Moon Under Water”.

Sole Survivor (Bantam) by Dean Koontz

An entertaining read… if you can survive the onslaught of details.

A year after his wife and two daughters are killed in an airplane crash, LA crime reporter Joe Carpenter has all but given up. But then, while visiting the cemetery on the one-year anniversary of their deaths, he encounters a mysterious woman who claims to have survived that flight. She then disappears. 

After a series of strange events, Carpenter sets out to find this Dr Rose Turner, who seems to have some knowledge that will help him (and quite possibly change the course of the world). But others with more malicious intents are after her as well. 

Carpenter begins to question things: Was the crash due to a mechanical error? Or were there deeper, more nefarious forces at work? The danger intensifies as he gets closer to an answer. He will encounter beachfront cultists, a potential suicide craze, a tech geek who’s also a thug, and a powerful tech company. 

Koontz doesn’t skimp on details. The reader must endure ridiculous similes, philosophical ramblings, character descriptions including everything but blood type, and sundry plot deviations. One can take only so much about breezes, flowers, the ocean and the sky. 

When Koontz is on, however, the reader gets some phenomenal stuff. Men betting on a dying roach in a beachside restroom. A boy referring to couple of young ladies in bikinis as “bitches”. A guy with “sensuous lips” and an alcohol-ravaged nose stabbing at pieces of gouda with a switchblade while calmly and relishingly threatening someone’s family members (including an unborn child) with detailed descriptions of physical and psychological torture. Koontz also touches on Carpenter’s backstory, including how something that happened to his father instilled a sense of fight that propels the protagonist as he unrelentingly pursues answers related to the flight.

Koontz also has a knack for jacking up tension, for instance in one scene where a pivotal character is about to reveal something critical while pursuers close in. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

The Last Mimzy | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in TQF17 (June 2007).

I didn’t really enjoy The X-Files until the second season (though later I went back and enjoyed that first one as well). It was because the first episode treated alien contact very seriously, and so I took that to be the premise of the show: there has been alien contact. But then, in following weeks, we found that everything else that anyone ever imagined on a dark and stormy night also existed – telepathy, bigfoot, ghosts, vampires – but with no linking rationale, other than that they always existed, which I found intensely frustrating, both as a science fiction fan and as a rationalist. Soon, though, I came to see the program had much more to do with horror than science fiction, and was able to enjoy it again, and enjoy it thoroughly. Different rules apply in horror: its goal is not to help us make sense of the world around us, or speculate about the future, but just to frighten our socks off, and The X-Files did that in spades.

Harrow County, Vol. 1: Countless Haints, by Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook (Dark Horse) | review by Stephen Theaker

This short review previously appeared in TQF67 (July 2020).

Teenage Emmy lives on a farm, close to the tree where the townsfolk killed a baby-killing witch, eighteen years ago. The newborn calves aren’t right, Emmy has awful dreams of a burning tree, and sometimes thinks she sees ghosts when she wakes up. Her father tries to ignore the signs, but after she meets the skinless boy the truth becomes undeniable. Collecting only the first four issues, this still tells a complete story. Tyler Crook uses watercolours to striking and atmospheric effect. Stephen Theaker ****

M3GAN | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Screen time leads to scream time: AI gone haywire tale zeroes in on impact of technological surrogacy on child development.

A common restaurant scenario: Mom and Dad look at their phones while Timmy or Sally stares at an iPad. The problem of technology encumbering the parent-child dynamic continues to worsen. M3GAN, directed by Gerard Johnstone, reveals how artificial intelligence might compound the difficulty. The film not only explores the potentially catastrophic effects of substituting technology for human interactions but also investigates how AI might stifle the grieving process.   

When Cady’s (Violet McGraw) parents are killed, she moves in with her hitherto child-free (and parentally inept) Aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), a development whiz at a high-tech toy company called Funki. Motivated by her new ward, Gemma overcomes some hiccups to develop the Model 3 Generative Android, or M3GAN (Amie Donald/Jenna Davis), a prototype AI doll that her boss calls the biggest invention since the automobile. The doll is programmed to learn from Cady, educate her, and above all, keep her safe. Gemma, assuming she’s now free of her guardianship duties, hands the doll to Cady and figuratively claps her hands. There. You two go play while I work. 

Two problems emerge. First, M3GAN begins to bend and eventually break rules to meet her primary goal of protecting Cady. That’s the expected part. The more interesting matter, however, is the impact M3GAN has on how Cady mourns the loss of both parents. When something like M3GAN imprints on a grieving child, warns a psychologist, that can be a difficult thing to “untangle”. 

In one poignant scene, Cady explains to Gemma that M3GAN helps her avoid feeling bad about the loss of her parents. Gemma, showing insight that is arguably out of character, explains that Cady is supposed to be having bad feelings. And she’s right.

The film also succeeds on the horror front. M3GAN, with her abnormally large eyes and superhuman physical abilities, keeps the viewer on edge. When Gemma commands the doll to turn off, one cannot be sure the figure is obeying. Moreover, the viewer occasionally gets to see from the doll’s perspective: a digital screen reminiscent of the Terminator’s gauges humans’ emotional states and bodily reactions. M3GAN uses these measurements to make her decisions.

Despite its silly ending, the film is still highly recommended — and it might make you more reluctant to throw an iPad in front of your kid the next time the temptation arises. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

The Girl from the Sea, by Jessica Rydill (Midford Books) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review was originally published in December 2019 on an earlier iteration of the British Fantasy Society's website, and then appeared in TQF67 (July 2020).

Aude d’Iforas, swimming naked in the ocean, encounters Yuste and Yuda, twins with psychic powers, destined to be shamans. Their family are Wanderers, supposedly cursed for the crimes of their ancestors. Her own family of Doxan northerners has been banished, far from their home, after a spell she cast went badly wrong. The three teenagers make friends and the twins tell her of a drowned city that lies beneath the waves, called Savorin. Before they know it, a hooded figure with a face of white bone and hollow eyes has risen from the depths and rides a glistening boat towards them, accompanied by a dangerous storm.

Kill or Cure, by Pixie Britton (Matador) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review was originally written for the previous British Fantasy Society website, and then appeared in TQF65 (December 2019).

The first few chapters of this zombie YA novel are quite run-of-the-mill. Alyx, a seventeen-year-old girl, is desperate to help her poorly younger brother. Back in 2042 or so their parents were eaten by zombies – the Infected – which have successfully taken over the world, leaving humans eking out life in small villages, at risk of being overrun. Alyx has sneaked into the woods to look for medicine. It all feels overfamiliar, as if at every step the decision was made to follow the most obvious route. Then, after his infection is discovered and they are forced to run for their lives, and just when Alyx is ready to send her brother up the stairs to metaphorical Bedfordshire one last time, something unexpected happens. The boy doesn’t turn into a zombie, he morphs...

Wight Christmas: Holiday Horror & Seasonal Subversion, ed. Martin Munks (TDotSpec) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

A solid collection of horror stories to ring in the Christmas season.

A winter slaughter mars a Kentucky swampland. A murder unfolds at Santa’s workshop. Methamphetamines benefit mankind. This anthology, with stories ranging from silly yet entertaining to grim and frightening, offers many manifestations of the figure in red. One is scaly and crude, some are vicious murderers, one is connected to an ancient deity, and some enjoy burning corpses. One even hitches rides on spaceships.

A few stories seem solely spurred on by their surprise ending; everything that builds up to that ending seems weak. Others suffer from an avalanche of details, while a few are as clear as the slush that accumulates on city streets in winter. Some authors appear to be inspired by Lifetime movies, and some try too hard to sound like a writer. Using onomatopoeia to describe the sounds of bells? Dinga-linga-dumb.

Fortunately, there are only a few coal lumps in the anthology. Overall, it makes a great stocking stuffer… provided the recipient likes horror. Most of the stories entertain and several achieve excellence. Editor Martin Munks places the stories in a sensible order, and unlike many horror anthologies, this one has few mistakes. Following are some of my favourites. 

Jude Reid’s “(Everybody’s Waitin’ for) the Man with the Bag” has everything one would want in a horror story: plot twists, people getting their comeuppance, a decorative flair for blood and guts, and much more. 

“All Alone on Christmas” by Chris Campeau stands out as a sanctification of loneliness. A divorced man staying in a chalet and missing his son encounters an ugly, frostbitten, pus-ridden, naked bearded figure (a possible personification of loneliness), but it’s hard to tell whether this somewhat familiar visitor has a malicious intent or would rather just chill. The story comments on the often conflicting values of work and family.

David F. Shultz’s “The Santas” is inventive, funny and, at times, sad. After a botched suicide attempt, a man gets a crass visitor with an unexpected gift. Shultz smatters the story with just enough detail to create an atmosphere. We discover that Santa Claus is just one of many Santas, each of which has a different appearance. The only thing I didn’t like about this story was facing the fact it had to end. 

In “A Christmas Cake” by Kara Race-Moore, the narrator goes all out to bake a traditional Irish christmas cake for her tactless boyfriend, who abruptly breaks up with her and shatters her view of the relationship. He refers to her as “Christmas cake” – an old-fashioned Japanese term for a single woman over 25 – and accuses her of being desperate to get married and have babies. A meeting with a familiar elderly woman leads to a surprise ending that leaves a few loose threads. 

Olin Wish’s “Have a Holly, Jolly Nuclear Winter”, one of the collection’s scariest stories, involves a husband and a wife doing something involving physics, drugs and mirrors. It has a voyeuristic tone, with the bulk of the activity involving them standing at a window. They attempt to avoid drawing attention to themselves as they witness a halcyon European scene transform into a ghastly activity. 

“The Naughtiest” by John Lance is part Christmas cartoon and part cozy mystery. Santa’s elves investigate a murder and kidnapping at the workshop. We learn what’s in Mrs Claus’s kitchen and even get to explore the mines Santa used for coal before he closed them down because of health concerns. The protagonist is Bobkin, an elf with a strong focus on following the rules. It’s a cute story – there’s even a plunger detonator bomb. The story shows how if a child is continually punished and never rewarded, that behaviour may result in long-term problems. 

In Shelly Lyons’s “Ho-Ho-Nooo!”, main character Tony Flores is a meth addict with a gig as a Santa at a Spencer’s Gifts store in the ’90s. Because of something that happened with a ship that crashed, he is determined to save his friend and fellow Santa Mike Cheebers, working at the Sears in the same mall. It’s humorous, it’s light, and it’s nostalgic. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (The Folio Society) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review was written in 2020 for the British Fantasy Society's previous website.

This reads at first like old-school adventure sf, beginning with a sequence on a spaceship launchpad that could have come straight from a Dumarest novel. Sadly, that is no indication of where the book is heading. It is set several hundred years in the future. The Cetians (as humans have labelled the people of the two worlds, and as they have begun to call themselves) know of Earth but we are aliens to them. We have an ambassador on Urras, but no contact at all with the isolated colony founded on its moon, Anarres, two hundred years ago.

Agents of Shield, Season 5 | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in TQF64 (March 2019). Daisy Johnson did not go on to appear in Avengers 4, unfortunately.

Agents of Shield has always been a decent, dependable show, rather than a knockout. Like Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow, we tend to catch up with it during the summer. But it has improved steadily, and looking back through online wikis about the characters, it’s striking how much they’ve been through, how many adventures they’ve had, and how much I enjoyed them. The division of seasons four and five into mini-seasons has re-energised the show. In season four the team met Ghost Rider, dealt with life model decoys and got stuck inside a virtual bubble universe, while in this season they are stranded in a desperate future timeline, and then try to prevent it happening in the present. (The latter storyline takes place contemporaneously with Thanos and his goon squad duking it out with the Avengers.) Regularly changing the premise of the show keeps the show feeling fresh. The main cast – playing Coulson, May, Daisy, Mac, Yoyo, Fitz and Simmons – are by this point very comfortable in their roles, and this season, originally thought to be its last, pays off our investment in those relationships. There are also references back to the previous four seasons throughout, tying the whole saga up in a bow. If this had been the end, it would have been a good one. But it’s been renewed, and though it’ll be a long, long wait till season six in the summer of 2019, it’ll be great to see Coulson back on the big screen in Captain Marvel, and I have my fingers crossed for Daisy Johnson in Avengers 4. Though it’s still not the fully-fledged Marvel Universe programme everyone was hoping for when it was first announced, it does its best. And though it’s still not a show I need to watch at the earliest possible opportunity, that’s only because the competition is so strong these days. The special effects are spectacular, the jokes are funny, the villains are hissable, and the stakes are high. Plus there’s Deke, who seems at first like a stand-in for Starlord and ends up being the breakout star of the season. I like Deke. Stephen Theaker ***

BFS Journal #18, edited by Allen Stroud (The British Fantasy Society) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in TQF64 (March 2019).

The eighteenth issue of the BFS Journal continues its laudable attempt to turn into an academic journal, a process that began when the current editor took over. Unfortunately this issue doesn’t seem to have been copy edited or proofread, which undercuts the lofty aims.

Redundant apostrophes (“the doom of their kingdom’s”), commas in odd places (“author Michael Moorcock, calls”), words missing, full stops used randomly in the references. Some author names and titles appear in all caps, others in title case. A quote ends with “emphasis in original” even though there’s no emphasis. Random formats for sub-headings. The titles of books referenced aren’t consistently italicised, and there are so many unpaired parethentical commas one could write an entire novel with the leftovers. One author likes to “peak behind the curtain of reality”, another is “wiling” away his time, etc. It’s a mess, basically.

The academic articles use the sensible and efficient author–date system, but its usefulness is hampered here by the years appearing at the end of the references, rather than straight after the authors’ names, as is usual, and multiple books by a single author are not always arranged by publication date. Looking up references is also slowed down by them sometimes being divided by type, meaning the reader must check one list for the author’s name, then the next. The references would also benefit from the use of a hanging ident, as is standard elsewhere, so that the authors’ names would stand out. Other references don’t lead anywhere at all (like Scholes, 1975, and Grove, 1879, in the article on Olaf Stapledon).

The articles are a mixed bag. David Sutton’s article about the history of the British Fantasy Society was extremely interesting the first time I read it, in the BFS booklet Silver Rhapsody, but serialising an old article over three issues of the Journal seems odd, especially when it’s already available on the society’s website. Hopefully the series will continue past 1984, where the original article ended. Two articles by Allen Ashley about the summer SF exhibitions are good, though like me he doesn’t seem to have been too impressed.

The more academic essays can make interesting points, but it is a bit like reading someone else’s university essays, and as evidenced by the letter from a long-time member that appears in the journal, they do not always show the deepest understanding of the fantasy genre. Or the world, in some cases – it seems a stretch to say that the world wars of the twentieth century have “snowballed” into the present day, as Shushu Li suggests. The same article’s bibliography suggests that Pelican Books, founded in 1937, published a book in 1905, which is quite a feat.

Another article’s title is “‘You Know Nothing Jon Snow’: Locating the Feminine Voice of Maturity, Motherhood and Marriage in 21st Century Fantasy Fiction”, and yet it talks exclusively about A Game of Thrones, published in 1996. (A publication date of 2011 is given. The journal would benefit throughout from the use of square brackets to indicate the original publication date of a book’s publication.) The same article manages to spell M. Lipshitz’s surname correctly and incorrectly in the same sentence. And it doesn’t mention Jon Snow or Ygritte once: the quote is from A Storm of Swords, not discussed in the article. Similarly, a fairly interesting article is called “Music in the Science Fiction Novels by Olaf Stapledon”, despite being entirely about one book, Sirius.

If the BFS Journal wants to be an academic publication, it has to be more rigorous than this, for the sake of its contributors as much as the society members who pay for it. If it’s peer-reviewed, the peers need to do their job properly. It needs to be copy edited and proofread. As a fan publication, the BFS Journal is admirably ambitious (and the return of issue numbers to the cover is very welcome), but as an academic publication it needs much more work. Stephen Theaker **