Fear Across the Mersey III: The Christmas Present | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

The first story in the collection narrated in the first person, with all the challenges and opportunities that brings, and the first where I was familiar with much of the geography (though I’m sure it’s changed considerably in fifty years). ‘The Christmas Present’ is indeed about Christmas in terms of its thematic content and succeeds in exploring the meaning of the holiday in an intellectual and even philosophical way without ever becoming either didactic or dull. This is a signal achievement, given the story’s brevity, and the change of pace in the last two pages creates a rising crescendo with a sudden sense of urgency as Christmas (and who knows what else) approaches at breakneck speed. The conclusion is particularly satisfying, presenting a neat rather than contrived twist, a twist that is both expected and not quite what one was expecting, bringing closure in spite of ending in medias res.

Fear Across the Mersey II: Concussion | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

Like so many of the best short stories, ‘Concussion’ begins with a classic and consummate ‘hook’, a device whose purpose is to grab our attention immediately and then drag us through the narrative at breakneck pace until our efforts are rewarded with and in a rich resolution. The hook is the first paragraph, consisting of only two sentences, the second of which is an even bigger barb than the first. Campbell withholds his dénouement until the very last (much longer) paragraph and although it is perfectly plausible, it doesn’t quite fulfil the promise of the preface. What is remarkable, however, is his representation of the surreal or oneiric, sustained with great skill through all the intervening paragraphs. Campbell’s effortless switches between flashbacks and flashforwards are not only completely coherent, but provide a continual reminder that what we are reading is one or more of a hallucination, illusion, fantasy, or daydream.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #78 is now out in paperback and ebook!

free epub | free pdf | print UK | print USA | Kindle UK | Kindle US

Welcome to Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #78: Returns, edited by Stephen Theaker and John Greenwood! It's here at last! A year late but ready to rock!

This issue contains four pulse-pounding short stories:

• "Two Copyrights Don’t Make a Wrong" by Dan Muenzer
• "Drawermongers" by William Foulke
• "Any Other Way" by Michael Hart
• "The Red Trees" by Rafe McGregor.

In the Quarterly Review, Stephen Theaker, Douglas J. Ogurek and Rafe McGregor review books by Ian Bain and chums, Matthew Hughes, Rachel Harrison, Christina Dalcher, Joe Dever, Camilla Sten and Kristi DeMeester, as well as the films All of Us Strangers, Badland Hunters, Hanu-Man, Lisa Frankenstein, Madame Web, The Parades and Poor Things, and season 4 of the television programme For All Mankind.

Here are the extremely patient contributors to this issue.

Dan Muenzer is an educator from Honolulu, Hawai’i. He dreams of one day writing a page-for-page duplication of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonymous and sophomoric founder of the unsplatterpunk subgenre, which uses splatterpunk conventions (transgressive/gory/gross/violent subject matter) to deliver a positive message. His short story collection I Will Change the World … One Intestine at a Time (Plumfukt Press), a juvenile stew of horror and bizarro, aims to make readers lose their lunch while learning a lesson. Ogurek also guest-edits the wildly unpopular UNSPLATTERPUNK! “smearies”, published by Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. These anthologies are unavailable at your library and despised by your mother. Ogurek reviews films and fiction for that same magazine.

Michael Hart writes stories that blend fantasy, science fiction and horror genres. His stories have appeared in Dark Tales, Frost Zone and Mythic Circle, to name a few. He is a copywriter, an electronic waste recycler and a father of two young children, with whom he spends hours building the most fantastical worlds of all.

Rafe McGregor is a critical theorist publishing on Anglophone culture, political violence, and policing. He is the author of twenty books, including Reducing Political Violence: Narrative Accounts of Crime and Harm (2026), Anthropocide: An Essay in Green Cultural Criminology (2025) and The Adventures of Roderick Langham (2017).

William Foulke is the MFA graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts who aims to become the next Master of Horror. When he’s not exploring the curious and the terrifying at his keyboard, he enjoys traveling to unique destinations. He resides in Pennsylvania where he’s working on his first novel. See www.williamfoulke.com for more information.

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As ever, all back issues of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction are available for free download.

Fear Across the Mersey I: The Cellars | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

 

A few years ago, my wife and I moved to Merseyside, but I never settled in properly. It doesn’t help that I dislike football and don’t worship the Beatles. Or that we spent much of the first two years either locked down or socially distanced. I have a similarly ambivalent attitude towards Britain’s greatest living horror author, lifelong Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell. While I recognise his talent, I’ve never been bowled over by his most critically acclaimed work. When I saw that PS Publishing had released a collection of his locally based short stories last year, I thought it the perfect opportunity to rekindle my enthusiasm for Campbell and the city in which I will probably spend the rest of my life. I also thought I’d try my hand at a rolling review, reviewing each of the twenty-five short stories as I read them. They are all previously published, from 1967 to 2021, and presented in a loosely chronological order. Fear Across the Mersey has an afterword, but no introduction so I’ll dive straight in…The first half or so of ‘The Cellars’ is overwritten, with too many adjectives, too much imagery, and some idiosyncratic combinations of verb and noun. Notwithstanding, the story improves as soon as the protagonist, Julie, enters Liverpool’s catacombs, where Campbell succeeds in making ordinary fungi genuinely sinister. Very quickly after the visit, he creates an exquisite tension that builds to a climax both inevitable and not quite what one was expecting. Though I’ve not read a great deal of Campbell, he seems to have a real knack for portraying compelling characters who are unsympathetic, which is Julie in a nutshell. She is interesting enough to for us to want to know her fate and disagreeable enough for us not to care what it is. A slow-starter, but also a slow-burner. 

The Wolf of Whindale: A Tale of Northalbion | review by Rafe McGregor

 

The Wolf of Whindale: A Tale of Northalbion by Jacob Kerr

Serpent’s Tail, hardback, £16.99, October 2025, ISBN 9781800811522

 

It’s difficult to pinpoint The Wolf of Whindale in terms of genre. I’ve seen it advertised as both ‘folk horror’ and ‘gothic horror’. I can see why publicists or reviewers would choose one or both of these classifications, but neither is accurate. Is the novel even a horror story? Probably, but there are also elements of fantasy, especially if one takes the evocation of wonder as definitive of that genre. This difficulty should have been my first clue that it is in fact – and by my own definition – a weird tale, i.e. a fictional narrative that is philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounding the difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. Does it have a worldview? Yes, definitely, albeit one that is admirably subtle, rising to the surface on rare occasions so as entangle the reader in a distinctly perspectival frame of reference. The antagonist, you see, is not just a medieval monster, but a modern one, a vampiric exploiter of the oppressed who might have leapt straight out of the pages of Karl Marx’s Capital (a Marxist pamphlet called First Principles of Political Economy also makes an appearance). Like many weird tales from the previous century, the story is also occult detective fiction and the horror and mystery elements are integrated effectively and efficiently.

The Wolf of Whindale is Jacob Kerr’s second novel, following The Green Man of Eshwood Hall (published in 2022, also by Serpent’s Tail), and is set in the same universe, an alternative Northumbria (the northeast of England, close to the Scottish border) called Northalbion. This is, I think, the purpose of the subtitle, which is otherwise superfluous. Where The Green Man of Eshwood Hall is set in Northalbion in 1962, the main narrative of The Wolf of Whindale takes place a century before, in 1845. There are seventeen chapters, including the prologue, which – along with three other chapters – are excerpts from a lecture on Mithras, a Roman deity popular with the soldiers occupying Britannia, delivered by Dr Erasmus Wintergreen in 1916. The rest of the chapters are narrated in the first person by Caleb Malarkey, a twenty-four-year-old lead miner and autodidact who suffers from seizures that might be epilepsy…or something more sinister. Caleb’s chapters, which constitute most of the novel, are written in a vernacular (or, perhaps more accurately, in the representation of a vernacular) that is perfectly pitched, with Kerr avoiding distracting punctuation and idiosyncratic diction. (For those that do get a little lost, though I can’t imagine many will, there is a glossary located between the final chapter and the acknowledgements.) Caleb plunges his audience into a world where hard manual labour is the norm, promoted and perpetuated by the austerity of ubiquitous Christianity, and there is a rigid social division between workers and owners, also with the church’s agreement and approval. 

Caleb’s narrative is set in motion very quickly, when the union steward in Caleb’s gang of miners is found dead on Windy Top, his body mutilated and head severed. His death follows the disappearance of another local union official three months before and both incidents have been connected to the eponymous wolf, which may or may not be anything more than a legend. Caleb’s sceptical reflection on the two incidents is one of Kerr’s first revelations of the novel’s worldview: ‘The illogic of it all overwhelmed me, and, though still light-headed from my seizure, I sat up and found myself holding forth on how the deaths of two such fellows, both leaders of combinations of miners, was an almighty coincidence, and that this wolf’s palate was certainly a dainty one in preferring flavours that secured the interests of the status quo.’ When the miners go on strike, they are beaten up by ex-soldiers and replaced with Welshmen. Caleb proves the accuracy of his self-description as a contrary and cantankerous chap by crossing the picket line and joining the ‘blacklegs’. The narrative presses forward into its complication when Caleb’s colleagues punish him for his disloyalty. Disowned by his mother and sister and despised by his neighbours, he leaves The Uplands for the Sill. The Sill, which is to the west of Northalbion, is a vast mine owned by a man named Master Siskin, who seems happy to employ anyone and everyone on an indefinite basis and has no shortage of work to offer. Once Caleb reaches the Sill, he finds out that it is an excavation rather than a mine and that the labourers have been hunting for a Mithraic artefact called the Knack. He meets the Welsh miners, who moved on after the strike, joins the dig, and eventually finds the Knack, after which he is taken to Siskin’s stately home, Brink House.

Before Caleb leaves The Uplands, there is mention of the Laidly Worm (of Spindleston Heugh or Bamborough), a Northumbrian shapeshifter in which I have a particular interest, and it made me think about Kerr’s options in terms of the wolf as one of England’s black dog legends, a subject on which I’ve written for nearly twenty years now. Essentially, there are only three choices: either the dog/wolf is corporeal (a particularly large and savage specimen of its species, as in Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles) or it is a ghost that can only scare people to death (the case with the Barghest and Black Shuck, England’s most famous black dogs) or it is a werewolf (my favourite example of which is Stephen King’s novella, Cycle of the Werewolf). Kerr plays with these different options very cleverly, teasing his readers with different takes on each – including whether there is any dog/wolf at all – before disclosing the truth, which is both complex and satisfying. This disclosure, however, is my sole criticism of the novel. There is a full chapter of retrospective exposition fairly late (chapter 10, the eleventh of seventeen), while Caleb is a guest and prisoner in Brink House and in spite of being fascinating, it almost grinds the tale to a premature halt. Notwithstanding, Kerr compensates with both a neat twist concerning Caleb’s work at the Sill and a heightening of the stakes when the Prince of Wales and his entourage arrive. The resolution is masterful, drawing together all of the murder mystery, the confrontation with the monster, and the relationship between Caleb’s narrative and Dr Wintergreen’s lecture. Overall, The Wolf of Whindale is a complete success, a rare example of a contemporary weird tale well-told and an exemplar for other tellers of weird tales to follow. 

Rainforest | review by Rafe McGregor

 

Rainforest by Michelle Paver

Orion Books, hardback, £20.00, October 2025, ISBN 9781398723207 

 

Michelle Paver is an Oxford educated British author best known for her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, a children’s fantasy series of nine books that began with Wolf Brother in 2004 and concluded with Wolfbane in 2022. The novels are aimed at children from the ages of nine to thirteen, have been translated into thirty languages, and have sold over two and a half million copies. Paver has also published Daughters of Eden, an historical trilogy; Gods and Warriors, an historical series for children; and five standalone novels. All of her published work is historical in setting, albeit varying dramatically, from six thousand to one hundred years in the past. Among her standalone novels, three are horror stories: Dark Matter (2010), which is set in the Arctic in 1928; Thin Air (2016), set in the Himalayas in 1935; and Wakenhyrst (2019), set in the fens of Edwardian Suffolk. Dark Matter and Thin Air are two of the best horror novels (or, more accurately, novellas) I have ever read. Until reading Dark Matter shortly after it was published, I’d considered James Buchan’s The Gate of Air: A Ghost Story (2008) my favourite contemporary horror story, but unlike the latter, Dark Matter and Thin Air have rewarded repeated readings. Wakenhyrst is longer than its predecessors and of a similar quality, although I found it harder going, which is because of my indifference to the haunted house trope rather than because of any flaws. (I must confess that even Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Richard Matheson’s Hell House leave me cold…and I’m not referring to my spine.)

Rainforest is Paver’s twenty-third novel, sixth standalone novel, and fourth horror novel. It also completes an informal trilogy with Dark Matter and Thin Air, all of whom are about and narrated by well educated, old fashioned British men who have difficulty socialising and lead conflicted inner lives. Writing with and in the voice of another gender is, I think, very difficult and Paver is one of the few authors to succeed completely. All three novellas (Rainforest is longer than the other two, but still a novella) read exactly as if they’d been written by the protagonists Paver has presented with such and competence and conviction and all three are men we wouldn’t want to spend much time with, but whose lives are nonetheless captivating and compelling. The three novellas also demonstrate an enviable expertise in representing the experiences of living and working in inhospitable environments – whether icy in temperature, high in altitude, or crushing in humidity – without resorting to lengthy exposition. Rainforest is, as the title suggests, set in the Mexican rainforest, very likely the Lacandon Jungle, which was part of the Maya civilisation in the preclassic period, in 1973. Dr Simon Corbett is a forty-two-year-old entomologist from Cambridge who specialises in the predation of mantids or Mantidae (praying mantises). When we meet him, he is recovering from a mental health crisis connected to the death of a woman named Penelope and en route to an archaeological dig in the jungle, where he hopes to both recover his equilibrium and resurrect a stalled academic career.

Corbett has been advised to keep a journal by his doctor and that journal is what constitutes the majority of the novella. Penelope was, it appears, Corbett’s first girlfriend, which is the first suggestion of how much of a misfit he is (their relationship and her death both being recent). He also disapproves of the cultural, social, and political changes of the preceding decade, dislikes the Indigenous People of Mexico (a typically baseless and irrational racism), and is frightened and disgusted by their ancient and contemporary rituals of self-mutilation. Paver is often compared to M.R. James and while there is definitely a ‘Jamesian’ atmosphere to and in her horror, there is also a ‘Lovecraftian’ scope and more accurate description is that she combines the virtues of both masters of the weird tale with a contemporary sensibility and sensitivity in a way that may well be unique. The plot of Rainforest is driven by the subtle integration of two narratives. The first is in the present and follows Corbett’s journey to the camp, tensions with both his British and Mexican coworkers, and his unsuccessful search for mantids. While these events are unfolding, he also becomes more open about his past with Penelope, revisiting and revising what he has previously revealed. Penelope, it turns out, was an acquaintance not a lover and her death in a car crash occurred in the course of her flight from Corbett. He is, indeed, a stalker, who became obsessed with her after a single, short dinner date and who was the recipient of a lawyer’s letter and a police caution. The pull and push between present and past, effect and cause, representation and reality retrospectively infuses previous passages with new (and sinister) meaning while heightening the narrative tension. To take just three examples, the novella opens with Corbett fondling something he calls his ‘talisman’. I’ll avoid spoilers by not revealing precisely what it is, suffice to say that the object seems to be a bizarre but harmless keepsake. Similarly, his entomology seems to be a relatively insignificant part of his personality, perhaps even a narrative device to bring him to the jungle, but his expertise in mantid predation is no contingency. Finally, Corbett's reaction to an illustration in a book seems either absurd, tangential to the plot, or both, but is a crucial component of the narrative crisis.

While Rainforest is neither didactic nor even a case of the ‘instructing by pleasing’ tradition of literature, it does explore a theme that is relevant to and resonates with everyday life in the twenty-first century. The novella explores this theme in a singular and inventive way and simultaneously reinvents the ghost story as an aesthetic form. First, Paver asks us to reconceive or at least reconsider ghosts as stalkers. Not stalkers in terms of the denotation of the word, the hunting of humans or animals by other humans or animals, but in the legal connotation of men stalking women with whom they have become obsessed. Regardless of whether they were perpetrators or victims, ghosts are dead things that are obsessed with an aspect of their animate lives – either with the places where they lived or died or with people whom they despised or loved. Like the stalker, the ghost is an unwelcome and uninvited presence that disturbs and disrupts the mental (and sometimes physical) wellbeing of the person it haunts or of the people who enter the place it haunts. Aside from and in addition to the richness of this thematic exploration of what ghosts are, Paver reverses or inverts the traditional ghost story in and with Rainforest, presenting her readers with a (living) person stalking a (dead) ghost. Where one might expect Penelope to stalk Corbett from beyond the grave in revenge, it is Corbett’s pathological fixation that fails to recognise death as an impediment. As he stalked her in life, so he continues to stalk her in death, deluding himself that he is driven by guilt rather than accepting his predatory desire to possess her against her will. I can’t recommend this book enough. If you haven’t yet discovered the pleasures of Paver, follow up with Thin Air, Dark Matter…and Wakenhyrst too.

The Strigun's Cartography Workshop | review by Rafe McGregor

The Strigun's Cartography Workshop: Maps for Novels, Board Games, D&D Campaigns, or Decoration

In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s alter ego, Charles Marlow, describes himself as being fascinated by maps from an early age – particularly maps with blank spaces – and such fascination has probably accounted for a great deal of harm over the centuries. It certainly seems to have been shared by many people across multiple generations. My own interest in maps was much more limited and less consequential and I only ever saw them as a tool for orienting myself until I came across what I later realised were world famous: J.R.R. Tolkien’s maps for first The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings. This must have been sometime in the late seventies and the latter were tucked into the dustjackets of the editions my parents kept at home (probably from the nineteen sixties). There were two different maps and I can’t remember which map was in which part of the trilogy, but I reproduce the better-known one here (above).

Later, I discovered Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, and Dungeons & Dragons and began to appreciate the artistic qualities of maps a little more. They nonetheless remained first and foremost a way of orienting myself, to the wonders of an unexplored fantasy world, even though I recognised that Lone Wolf and the AD&D Greyhawk campaign maps in particular had an aesthetic appeal beyond the practical. When I replaced the editions of The Lord of the Rings, I kept the maps from the originals. I’m not entirely sure why, but I still have them. 

Earlier this year, I visited friends in Croatia and met Endi, the proprietor of The Strigun’s Cartography Workshop, in Trsat in Rijeka. I had been told that he created maps to order, but didn’t think too much about it and, if I remember correctly, most of our conversation was about film, one of several shared interests. He was, however, kind enough to give me two of his maps as a memento of my visit, one of Trsat Castle, which looms over Rijeka like an eagle on its perch, and the other of the province of Istria, where I visited Pula, which boasts an almost entirely intact Roman amphitheatre.

I didn’t get the chance to look at them properly until I returned home, when I was awed by their beauty. The photographs (above and right) do not do them justice and they are as pleasing as artifacts to hold and touch as they are works of visual art. Had I greater expertise in the visual arts, I could describe them more eloquently, but one does not need to be an afficionado to recognise their quality. I was, of course, struck by the similarity in style to Tolkien, though when one compares and contrasts the two, Endi is clearly the superior artist. In addition, he will make maps to order and his website is well worth browsing, whether for a commission or just for pleasure. The maps are divided among regions, cities, and battles and there is a separate page for the work he has had published to date. As the website reveals, the Strigun’s maps come in both two-tone and full colour and there is even a map for Game of Thrones…how could there not be!

Dating After the End of the World by Jeneva Rose (Montlake) | review by Stephen Theaker

Amazon Prime subscribers currently get at least one book free to own each month, sometimes two. I tended to claim but not read them, but they have started to include more novellas and short stories, and that has led me to read outside my usual genres, which I appreciate. One thing immediately obvious to anyone looking at Amazon First Reads is that the books on offer are virtually all by female writers, and aimed at female readers, with female protagonists. One can only assume Amazon follows the data in that respect, which is interesting.

This book fits that pattern, but that’s not to say male readers can’t enjoy it too. I did, to a certain extent. It begins with a scene in September 2009, when our Wisconsinite protagonist was thirteen years old and getting fed up with her doomsday prepper dad. They are building a perimeter fence but Casey would rather be having fun. She’s getting bullied at school by kids who think her dad is weird – and you know what, she thinks he’s weird too. Skip forward to 2025 and Casey is Dr Warner, working in a hospital, and not talking to her dad very often.

Kindle Scribe (2024 Release, 64GB) | review by Stephen Theaker

I always regretted not buying the Kindle DX, for its big e-ink screen, so when the Kindle Scribe came out I was tempted. But I already had a Boox Note 2 (“BN2”), which does all the same things and much more besides, being an Android e-ink tablet rather than just an ereader. So I didn’t buy a Scribe until its second edition came along, it was on sale, and I was offered a substantial discount in return for trading in my Kindle Oasis. The Oasis was nice to read on in summer, but it got too cold on winter nights, so off it went.

The most important aspect of any ereader is the screen, and the clarity of text, and on the Scribe text looks pristine at larger sizes, backlight on or off, and also at smaller sizes in two columns to create a more bookish reading experience. Comics look terrific too, especially if you pick out a black-and-white book with nice square panels, or with a small enough page size to be readable a page at a time. I’ve read dozens of manga books this year as a direct result (the highlights have been Nina the Starry Bride, Witch Hat Atelier and Space Brothers).

Megalopolis | review by Rafe McGregor

Self-reflexive or self-indulgent?

Like many Anglophone readers of my generation, I suppose, I first came across ‘megalopolis’ in one of the many Judge Dredd comics published in 2000 AD magazine during the 1980s. The word was used to describe Dredd’s beat, ‘Mega-City One’, a gargantuan city covering the Eastern Seaboard of North America from Miami to Quebec City. I assumed both ‘megalopolis’ and ‘mega-city’ were science fiction inventions, but the Oxford English Dictionary taught me otherwise. ‘Megalopolis’ was used as far back as 1828, as a synonym for ‘metropolis’, and is now more commonly used to describe the contiguous built-up area formed when metropolises expand into one another (beginning with Los Angeles in the 1960s). ‘Megacity’ came much later, in 1967, and identifies a metropolis with more than 5 million residents (beginning with the Dallas-Fort Worth conurbation). In case anyone is interested, the biggest megacity in the world is currently Tokyo, with a population of approximately 39 million, and the biggest megacity in the US, New York, with 19 million. The setting of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is ‘New Rome’, an alternative, future New York, and the title also alludes to megalon, a material or mineral with magical properties that can regenerate and restore both cities and the people that live in them. When the narrative opens, protagonist Cesar Catalina (played by Adam Driver) has recently been awarded a Nobel Prize for his creation of megalon.

I first heard about Megalopolis long before it was released in September 2024 – not because of any especially effective marketing strategy, but because of the conditions of its conception and production. Coppola began thinking about it in the late 1970s and began work on it in the early 1980s. The original idea seems to have been something like a cinematic Ulysses (1922), James Joyce’s monumental reimagining of Homer’s Odyssey in 1904 Dublin (which is, in my opinion, the greatest novel ever published and ever likely to be published). Joyce’s source material was the most celebrated story ever told in the Western canon (or the second most celebrated, if you prefer the Iliad, which most scholars don’t), but Coppola’s was a curious choice. He had already tried something similar with Apocalypse Now (1979), a magnificent reimagining of Joseph Conrad’s brilliant novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), in South-East Asia during the Vietnam War. Megalopolis would, in contrast to both Apocalypse Now and Ulysses, reimagine a historical event, the Catilinarian conspiracy in the Roman Republic of 63 BCE, in a faintly futuristic New York. The conspiracy was an attempted coup d’état by Catilina, aimed at seizing power from consuls Cicero and Hybrida, and never passed into popular culture. (Though I consider myself an amateur historian, I had to look it up). Perhaps more problematic, where the monstrous complexity of Ulysses is to at least some extent clarified by knowledge of the Odyssey, knowledge of the historical conspiracy actually complicates the film: the fictional Catalina is called ‘Cesar’, but (Julius) Caesar (who is absent from the film) played a historical part; the attempted insurrection is by Clodio Pulcher (played by Shia LaBoeuf) whereas Clodius Pulcher opposed the coup; Hybrida and Cato have no fictional counterparts and there are several major characters without historical counterparts. Notwithstanding, Megalopolis is a reimagining, of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), one of the first feature length science fiction films and one of the greatest films ever screened.

By the turn of the century, Coppola had decided he would fund his ‘passion’ (or perhaps ‘vanity’) project himself and began shooting cityscapes of New York. At the turn of the next decade, he started writing the script. Eight years later, on the day before his 80^th birthday, he announced that he’d finished the script, raised $120 million for a budget, and was ready to start interviewing actors. Filming began in 2022 and rumours of Coppola’s erratic behaviour soon spread, followed by allegations that he was under the influence of cannabis for lengthy periods, had sexually assaulted extras, and exceeded the budget by $16 million. It’s difficult to know how much of this to take seriously, but when I read about it, the whole enterprise reminded me of Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), a documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unsuccessful attempt to film Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune (1965), in the 1970s. Jodorowsky’s venture was hubristic to the point of insanity, ethically dubious, and doomed to failure, although the documentary acquired both critical acclaim and a cult following. Immediately after watching Megalopolis, I discovered that Coppola commissioned director Mike Figgis to make a documentary of the making of his film, which was released this month as Megadoc (2025). I wonder if Coppola’s motivation for the documentary was vanity or finances? Probably a bit of both.

Megalopolis begins with truly masterful exposition: we are shown almost everything we need to know about what will follow in the first 12 minutes (of 133 from opening to closing credits). One is simultaneously struck by the film’s idiosyncratic yet impressive style, a unique combination of filmed theatre, tasteful CGI, breathtaking cinematography, and beautiful mise-en-scène. Very quickly, we learn that Catalina has a utopian vision for New Rome at odds with Mayor Franklyn Cicero (played by Giancarlo Esposito) and the ability to stop time, which works on everyone except for Cicero’s wayward daughter, Julia (played by Nathalie Emmanuel). The plot is briskly set in motion when Catalina’s ambitious girlfriend, television presenter Wow Platinum (played by Aubrey Plaza), realises he is still in love with his dead wife and seduces his aged uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (played by Jon Voight), the wealthiest man in New Rome. Meanwhile, Crassus’ son, Pulcher, a spoiled wastrel jealous of the success of everyone around him, is desperate to make a name for himself. The ingredients are all simmering in the pot and our appetites whetted for making a meal of what follows. Shortly over half an hour in, the stakes are established as the question of whether or not Catalina will succeed in realising his architectural and humanitarian dream and all of Cicero, Wow, Pulcher, and Catalina’s self-destructive guilt about his wife’s death framed as antagonists or obstacles. Later, Wow Crassus and Pulcher will emerge as the villains of the piece. Later still, they join forces and become an apparently unstoppable dystopian threat that raises the stakes and heightens the tension in an altogether satisfying way. So, what goes wrong?

I noted that the reimagined history was confusing. The pseudo-Roman setting constitutes part of Coppola’s distinctive style, which is pleasing on both the eye and the ear, but otherwise pointless. The same is true of the very limited advanced technology that seems to have been responsible for the film being classed as science fiction. While megalon is the means by which Catalina intends to realise his vision, that means could just as easily have been an imagined but mundane mineral or a fictional but plausible construction method. Similarly, the sole purpose of Catalina’s ability to stop time as far as the plot is concerned is to show that there is a genuine connection between him and Julia once they fall in love. If I appear overly critical of the film’s retrofuturism, the categorisation as science fiction in particular brings with it certain expectations, for example that the film will to at least some extent be about advanced technology or about the psychological or political impact (or both) of that technology. Futuristic megalon is as incidental as Catalina’s superpower and, like the Roman retrospection, serves a stylistic function, providing Coppola with the opportunity to present some (once again) aesthetically pleasing CGI. To remain with the plot a little longer, the story is very much that of Catalina’s ambition and the film a vehicle for Driver as Catalina. In that part, he either lacks the charisma or does not bring enough of it to this performance to engage and enthral the audience for the quantity and quality of his screen time. I found myself much more interested in Julia and Wow, watching the narrative as a tug of war between two powerful women with Catalina relegated to the role of the rope. As a final criticism of the plot, once all is lost for Catalina and Julia, the tables are turned by Crassus in a scene that is absolutely ridiculous. I think it’s meant to be amusing rather than dramatic, a deliberate parody of itself, but it’s neither tense nor funny and falls flat.

If Megalopolis is not about the Catilinarian conspiracy and/or its contemporary counterparts or the impact of advanced technology such as megalon, then what is it about? I mentioned Metropolis earlier and while there are several references to Lang’s masterpiece (and no doubt some that I missed), Megalopolis does not share its themes. Aside from a few superficial mentions of immigrants being unwelcome and some gratuitous police brutality, Coppola fails to offer a perspective on social justice and does not represent class conflict or even class consciousness. With politics, technology, and justice stripped away, there isn’t very much left. A theme that emerges with admirable speed in the expert exposition is some elaboration of the relationship between time and creation, the latter in the sense of artistic creativity. As the narrative progresses, a link is established with first utopian desire and then romantic love, all bound up within a temporal horizon. Early in the second half of the film, Catalina tells Julia, ‘I can’t create anything without you next to me’ and one is inevitably reminded of Coppola’s wife of six decades, Eleanor, to whom the film is dedicated and who died shortly before its release. The tyranny of time, the inspiration and perspiration of creation, dreams of a better way of life, loving as a way of living…Megalopolis is a film about itself, about the trials and tribulations of its own creation. Coppola has fictionalised his creative process from conception to production, creating an almost entirely self-reflexive epic. And while that doesn’t make it a poor film, it does mean that it doesn’t have very much to say to its audience, not much more than we could find in Megadoc anyway.

The critical response was initially described as ‘polarised’, but reviews have been largely negative, the only notable exception being Sight and Sound magazine, who placed Megalopolis 17^th on their list of the best 50 films of 2024. To me, ‘polarised’ suggests something broad in scope and rich in depth, a work of boldness and ambition that will either flop or be recognised as a work of genius but could never be mediocre. I just don’t see this kind of greatness in it. There are plenty of highlights – Coppola’s style, the slick start, Emmanuel and Plaza’s performances – but more lowlights and Megalopolis is neither a magnum opus nor a nadir. The film has 45% on the Tomatometer, which is not unfair, though I do wonder if critics would have been more generous if they didn’t know that it was the product of 50 years of work. Unfortunately for Coppola, it was also a major commercial failure, only recouping £14.3 million at the box office and costing him $75.5 million by May 2025. At the time of writing, Coppola is 86, which suggests that this is his last film. While it’s a shame to see a career end this way, we should not forget that he is the genius who brought us all three Godfathers, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders (1983), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), among many others. I hope he doesn’t forget either.**

The Ploopy Knob | review by Stephen Theaker

When I tell people that I love my Ploopy Knob, and I can’t stop touching it while I work, they sometimes get the wrong idea. To be fair, when I first heard of it (a science fiction writer was joking about it), I wasn’t even sure the Ploopy Knob was a real device, or if it was an April Fool’s joke. But after I had finished laughing, I looked at the device’s website (https://ploopy.co/knob/), laughed some more (“with a smooth feel and great finish, it’s a Knob you’ll want to touch all day long”), and realised I might actually find it very useful to have a Ploopy Knob. And if it turned out to be a dud, it would be worth the money just for the jokes.

So what is it? Simply a knob that you can turn, an accessory for your Windows or Linux computer (it works less well on Mac), about 5 cm in diameter – which is much smaller than I expected, but turns out to be perfect. Built around a tiny Raspberry Pi, many of its other parts are 3D-printed, and the plans are available for users to print replacements if necessary. It’s not wireless: it needs to be plugged into the computer via USB. You don’t grasp the sides of it, usually, the surface is ridged, so that a finger resting on the top of the Ploopy Knob can easily turn it, without losing grip.

Power users can apparently reprogram the device to do different tasks, but that’s not me, I just use it for scrolling through documents while I read them, and yet I am utterly delighted with it. I’ve bought many similar devices over the years – a number pad to which I could assign macros, a rollerball, a mouse pen, and at one point I even had an Xbox controller hooked up to the PC for scrolling around documents – but none of them were ever so much better than the mouse and keyboard that they earned a permanent spot on my desk.

The Ploopy Knob is different. For one thing it's hilarious. Every time I mention it I laugh. This is not something to be underestimated when working. A chuckle a day adds up to a lot of chuckles over a lifetime. But it also fits onto the desk very neatly: I'm right-handed, so my keyboard (a clicky Das Keyboard) is in the middle, the mouse on the right, and the Ploopy Knob sits on the left, taking up very little space and always ready to use. It feels very nicely balanced. There are keyboards that have similar knobs, but that means hovering over the keyboard, whereas the Ploopy Knob can be placed in more pleasurable locations, so reading becomes much more pleasant.

It is also much more precise and sensitive than using a mouse wheel for the same job. So even if all I ever use it for is scrolling through Word files I’m editing and PDFs I’m checking, it was well worth the money I paid (about fifty quid). The only problem is that it's made me so keen to keep reading on the PC that I've tired my eyes out a bit. If I had a job interview now, I would be obliged to ask whether I would be allowed to use my Ploopy Knob in the workplace. Now I'm accustomed to having a Ploopy Knob, working without one would feel like a needless frustration. Stephen Theaker *****

Dead Scalp by Jasper Bark (Crystal Lake Publishing) | review by Stephen Theaker

James Briggs is on the lam, with most of Arizona on his tail, and Mexico is out of reach. But he’s heard about a portal to a magical place where the law can’t reach. So he slices up a rabbit, takes a running jump at a portal, and after a bit of argy-bargy hands over the price of entry to a pair of bearded thugs: Clem and Bart. Clem has been in Dead Scalp forty years, though he looks about thirty. No one ages here, and they don’t get sick, but they can be killed, and the only thing that grows here is hair.

To make up for bashing Bart, James has to do some work for Bill Baldwin, the boss of Dead Scalp. He’s a real villain, a slave-owner who has had children murdered, and women kidnapped from the outside world to be raped in the town brothel. He is brutal with his punishments for those who step out of line, and the worst of these punishments is called “ingrowing”. There’s a reason all the men in town have beards: something terrible happens when they shave, or when Bill shaves them.

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay (William Morrow Paperbacks) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Questioning possession: inventive novel swerves horror trope in new direction. 

While getting accustomed to Paul Tremblay’s Bram Stoker Award-winning A Head Full of Ghosts, I kept asking myself: do I like this, or don’t I? The more I read, though, the more I moved towards the “like this” option. 

Like many Tremblay novels, this one takes a common horror subject – this time it’s possession – and gives it a twist. A Head Full of Ghosts swerves from the expected, steps back, and, in a way, explores what a possession story is. It starts silly with young sisters Meredith (Merry) and Marjorie telling each other stories about molasses floods or things growing in their house, but the book gradually reels the reader in as things start to go wrong in the Barrett family’s Massachusetts home. 

The story hinges on the question of whether Marjorie is possessed or mentally ill. When the girls’ father John loses his job and has trouble finding another, he turns to prayer and becomes a religious zealot. To alleviate their growing financial difficulties, the Barretts become the subjects of a reality show called The Possession. A film documents the family and especially Marjorie, the one who claims to have the ghosts in her head. 

As the novel builds towards an exorcism event, Tremblay plays with opposites (e.g. cold and hot, fiction and nonfiction) to suspend the uncertainty. Father Waverly, the aptly named priest involved with the family, talks about the financial gain coming from the TV show. And fourteen-year-old Marjorie seems to enjoy the limelight. Perhaps this is all a moneymaking and/or an attention-getting scheme. But then again, how is Marjorie accessing the knowledge that she confidently spews at the priest? What are these strange things happening in her room? She could just be a precocious kid, or maybe there’s something else going on. 

Tremblay also flips around in time and narrative format. While much of the story plays out through the perspective of eight-year-old Merry, the novel also contains passages in which a woman planning to write a tell-all book interviews a twenty-three-year-old Merry to get her side of what happened on the show. Additionally, excerpts from The Final Last Girl blog reinforce the ambiguity of the situation. Blogger Karen Brissette, writing fifteen years after the show, rips it apart, commenting on its amateur cast, lewd imagery and clichés. She references everything from The Exorcist and Lolita to more recent works like The Ring and a “lukewarm parade of possession movies” from the 2000s. The blog is most interesting when its chatty author breaks down scenes from the show. Some readers might not like getting pulled out of the story for this deconstruction. I happened to enjoy it. 

Beyond a possession novel, A Head Full of Ghosts comments on contemporary media and art and their ability to manipulate actors and yes, even readers and viewers. Typically, revisiting worn-out horror tropes would be anathema to good storytelling, but in Tremblay’s hands, everything you’ve come to expect moves in a new direction. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

Millionaires Day by Kit Power (French Press Publishing) | review by Stephen Theaker

We cannot be sure if the phenomenon extends beyond Milton Keynes – there is a news blackout – but it seems that everyone in that city who was asleep at 8.04 am on 22 December 2019 woke up with a suitcase containing a million pounds beneath them. You might wonder why, but this novella isn’t very interested in that. Instead, it concerns itself with how various ne’er-do-wells try to get their hands on other people’s suitcases, and how those others try to escape them.

At first we follow three main characters, each of whom hands us off at various points to other people. Henry is a homeless man sleeping in an underpass. He tries to get a first class train to Glasgow but is spotted by police officer Luke, who has been falling out of love with his husband for a while now, ever since their attempt to use a woman as a surrogate fell through. The mother kept her daughter, and the court hasn’t ordered contact despite Luke being the biological father.

The God of Wanking by Peter Caffrey | review by Stephen Theaker

In August 2024 I attended a free one-day convention organised by Indie Horror Chapter in Birmingham, a gathering of self-published authors getting together to sell books, do readings and make friends. One of the most eye-catching tables was that of Peter Caffrey, whose books stood out thanks to their bright colours, striking designs and memorable titles. Here was an author clearly doing his own thing, not trying to mimic mainstream horror, carving out a very specific niche. You probably won’t see Whores Versus Sex Robots and Other Sordid Tales of Erotic Automatons on sale in Waterstones.

The God of Wanking – and titles don’t come much more attention-grabbing than that! – is a short novel first published in 2021. Our protagonist is Diego, who attends a strict catholic school in a village that would seem to be in Central or South America. It wasn’t clear which, but the power of the Catholic church there appears to be totally unbridled – we see them snatching people off the street. When the book takes place was also unclear, but the villagers have televisions and don’t have mobile phones, which gives some idea.

Dangerous Animals | review by Rafe McGregor

Dangerous Animals, by Sean Byrne (Independent Film Company)

Tucker's shark experience!

In my birthday wishes to Jaws' (1975) Bruce, I mentioned the host of terrible Sharksploitation movies I've watched since reviewing The Meg (2018), listed the lowlights, and noted two films of which I was sceptical in spite of the advance praise they had received. I've now watched both Fear Below (2025) and Dangerous Animals and can attest to the accuracy of my preconceptions about the former, which is indeed similar to Into the Deep (2025), with its well-deserved 27% on the Tomatometer. I won't say much about it here, except that I didn't think the shark very realistic and that sharks in rivers just aren't as frightening as sharks in the ocean, a pair of problems plaguing Under Paris (2024), entirely undeserving of its 66% on the Tomatometer. My reservations about Dangerous Animals were based on the trailer, which I summarised rather meanly (albeit, again, accurately) as an eye-rolling 'shark plus serial killer'. My point being… surely one is enough for a ninety-eight-minute film? Whenever I watch what is essentially a monster movie, I'm reminded of The Ghost and The Darkness (1996), a fictionalised account of the 'Tsavo man-eaters' in colonial Kenya in 1898. While the film is yet another example of the tired old trope of (hu)man versus nature, director Stephen Hopkins is surprisingly successful in making two 'normal' lions a source of suspense and fear – as Sherlock Holmes might have said, 'no dinosaurs need apply' (the first two instalments of the Jurassic Park franchise were released in 1993 and 1997 respectively).

The dangerous animal of this title is of course the serial killer, Tucker (played by Jai Courtney), not the shark(s) and what redeems it from being yet more chum to the maw (with apologies to Mark Bould) of Sharksploitation enthusiasts like me is that we don't see sharks very often and when we do, they are all real (as far as I can tell, anyway) until the last ten minutes. When a CGI shark does appear, it is convincing rather than cartoonish, which may well be because of the speed with which it disappears. We don't have to see sharks all the time to be scared and less is often more (as we know from M.R. James, among many other masters of the craft of horror fiction). So, yes, in its finest moments the film reminded me of Jaws, where the only flaw is when Bruce is revealed as a creature of fibreglass and steel rather than flesh and bone. Unlike Jaws, Dangerous Animals lacks sympathetic characters. Tucker himself is probably the most charismatic, but he does like to kidnap pairs of bikini-clad beauties and videotape one being fed to sharks in front of the other. (Actual VHS, not digital – no wonder he has issues!) It is also rather predictable. Very early on, I guessed that Tucker would be eaten by sharks and that the love interest, Moses (played by Josh Heuston), would not rescue the protagonist, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), at least one of which came to pass. Notwithstanding, the film was much better than expected and one of the best Sharksploitation films I've seen. But if Zephyr thinks that Australia's Gold Coast is 'as far away from America as possible' she really needs to install Google Maps or ChatGPT on her smartphone (it's Mauritius or Madagascar, in case you're wondering). ***

Envy by Ash Ericmore | review by Stephen Theaker

Envy is a 45-page, eight-chapter novella, the first in a series of seven about the deadly sins, self-published by the author (with a nod to his Patreon supporters) over the summer of 2025. The Amazon blurb tells us each novella will focus on a different female lead. I don’t think we ever learn the name of this book’s lead character, and if it weren’t for the Amazon description I don’t think we would know her sex for certain either, but I’ll assume for the purposes of this review that the description doesn’t lead us astray.

She lives in a tall, lonely tower block, obsessed with the local drug dealer and his gym-built muscles. He’s called Tony, and she knows that because her neighbour Miriam shouts it several times a night, in the throes of passion. Our protagonist gets in the lift with him at one point, and hopes to be propositioned if not ravished, but he just asks if she wants to buy some drugs. She seems to assume that any man looking at her does so with sexual interest, and perhaps her sleazy anime fan boss is, but he’s not what she’s after.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Short film quartet relies on shifting views, restrained performances and subtle humour to encourage reflection and underscore the complexity of fiction writing.

If you stare at something long enough and focus exclusively on that one thing, suggests Wes Anderson's Oscar-winning short film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, you can develop the skills of seeing with your eyes closed and seeing through things. These concepts of intense concentration and observation propel the viewer’s experience of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More, a quartet of films not only based on but also infused by the writings of Roald Dahl. One would need to immerse oneself in these labyrinthine films (and by extension the stories) for years to unravel them. And yet, a single viewing is enough to entertain.

It is not difficult to follow what is happening in the films: a cheater finds fulfilment in altruism, a man relates a childhood bullying experience, a rat catcher comes to town to eliminate an infestation, and a bedridden man must remain motionless to avoid death. The challenge, rather, comes in unearthing the films’ extensive subtext and discerning the techniques Anderson calls upon to reinforce subject matter. 

What unites the works is a sense of playfulness and an admiration for the magic of storytelling. In each film, a composed character looks at the camera and recites Dahl’s stories (right down to the dialogue tags) but also partially participates in them. Initially, one might consider this an esoteric move no better than a one-act play at a community college theatre. Further viewings, however, prove these are brilliant contemporary works of art that sharply deviate from typical shallow films and force viewers to reconsider story and point of view. 

Originality suffuses the films: Opening credits fabricate their origins. Characters pretend to hold things (animals and guns, for example) that other characters pretend to see. Actors reappear as different characters among and within the four films. Stage crew members wearing coveralls enter the frame to assemble, disassemble and manipulate settings (and sometimes even pause to look at the camera). Dahl (Ralph Fiennes) also appears as a character who introduces and concludes each story. These techniques strip away the artifice, reveal the author’s presence in the story and draw attention to the mechanics of storytelling. 

Additionally, the camera’s constantly shifting viewpoint – level with the ground, straight up, straight down – underscores the films’ beckoning watchers to consider them from different angles. At one point, a character looks straight up at the camera and speaks to the viewer while he walks.

Although everything is presented soberly and perhaps even stiffly, humour permeates the films. In the main offering, an ultra-serious doctor/narrator and his colleague quickly walk down a corridor. The narrator explains to the viewer that his colleague’s face was rigid with disbelief. The other doctor then turns to show the viewer the rigidity of his face. Another example: for much of The Swan, the boy version of the narrator stands behind him and stares at the camera. Also, the narrator shows the viewer a photo of a boy, but it is too small and too far from the camera for the viewer to see. Now that’s funny. Throughout the films, when a narrator converses with another character, he will turn to the camera and say, “I said” – the viewer never forgets his role as consumer of story.

Multiple viewings are sure to elicit more questions. Why, for instance, does the narrator in The Swan keep looking at the camera and speaking to the viewer but stop moving his lips just before the camera cuts to a different view of the same character now moving his lips? Why are the backgrounds deliberately fake? Why do lights shine in characters’ eyes at certain points? 

While the end credits roll, Fiennes-as-Dahl comments on the gruelling process of writing fiction, clearly a parallel to the meditation practice in the opening episode and an attempt to give a taste of what it feels like to be in his shoes. Kudos to Anderson for challenging the viewer to be still… to interpret… to imagine… to THINK. Douglas J. Ogurek *****

The Blood-Drenched Honeycomb by Leo X. Robertson (Close to the Bone) | reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Liam Munhoz is an insanely attractive young man, twenty years old, from Maywood, the third smallest city in LA County. Reserved in some ways, only showing his real self to people he considers authentic, he is expansive in others, having participated in bisexual college orgies to the very best of his ability. He was brought from LA to Palo Alto in a bullet train, an entire business class carriage hired out for him.

The man waiting for him is Ryan Hobbes, an extremely rich and extremely weird older guy, obsessed with his health, who sleeps all day and stays up all night, to avoid the sun’s harmful rays. He’s also extremely famous, to the point that you can buy Halloween costumes spoofing him, labelled “non-binary vampire tech billionaire with an eating disorder”. He’s a riff on Bryan Johnson, Elon Musk, and chaps like that.

Human Capital, by Moro Rogers (Nakra Press) | reviewed by Stephen Theaker

In the early 21st century, automation went into high gear and robots took over the menial jobs. Then they took over all the other jobs as well, and almost everyone became unemployed: this was known as the “indescribable allusion disaster”. Universal basic income and free housing softened the blow, but if people don’t find a way to make themselves useful the robots encourage them to exist a little bit less. The three most popular options for the survivors are to become artists, swamis or heirs.

Nttl was born a few years after the disaster, and chose the life of an artist. He used to be part of the Poisonous Plant Collective (hence his name, pronounced “nettle”). Since they disbanded, Nttl has struggled on with his painting, Manchineel is extremely successful, Jessamine is part of the Meconium Group, entrusted by the robots with the power to decide the human race’s future, and Upas became an art terrorist: he just blew himself up in an aquarium with a William Morris-patterned artisanal bomb, killing several fish and two humans besides himself.