Octavia Butler's Parable of the Trickster

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower was intended to be part of a series of six novels, which was planned as Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay, but only the first two were ever published, in 1993 and 1998 respectively. The first three Parables take their titles from the three biblical parables of the same names, in the Books of Luke and Matthew, and each of the published novels concludes with a quote from the relevant Book. In The Parable of the Sower, the sower is symbolic of God and the seed of God’s message. Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist of the first two Parables, creates a new religion called Earthseed and founds the first Earthseed community in Humboldt County, California. Following the discovery of extrasolar planets that sustain life in 2025, the ultimate aim of Earthseed is to ‘take root among the stars’. The Parables are referred to as Butler’s Earthseed books in order to distinguish them from her other two series and her standalone novels. In The Parable of the Talents, the monetary talents (a unit of weight used as currency) are symbolic of personal talents (God-given abilities and aptitudes), both of which are granted for the purpose of serving their respective masters. Olamina dedicates her life to the service of Earthseed, which becomes one of the most popular religions in the Americas, and launches the first starship in 2090, the final year of her life. In The Parable of the Trickster, which is better known as The Parable of the Dishonest Steward (or the Shrewd Manager), the steward’s alternating incompetence and prowess is symbolic of the inability of human beings to serve both God and money. The Earthseed settlers on the planet Bow (an abbreviation of 'Rainbow') cannot both cling to the form of life they had on Earth and thrive in the extrasolar colony.

Butler began work on Parable of the Trickster in 1989, made numerous false starts from 1999 to 2004, and continued compiling notes and drafts until her death, early in 2006. The premises, outlines, and fragments have been available in The Huntington’s Octavia E. Butler Papers archive since 2013 and I was lucky enough to gain access to these while researching Literary Theory and Criminology in 2022. There are several aspects of Butler’s premises, outlines, and fragments that remain fairly consistent, most of which concern the protagonist and setting of the novel. There is less consistently about the structure of the narrative, but two plotlines can be discerned as well as a third that is only sketched. Butler seemed certain that Trickster would be written in the first person from the perspective of the protagonist and narrator, who would be named either Imara Hope Lucas, Imara Wright Drew, or Imara Dove Holly. Imara is an African American woman who was adopted by Olamina during her teens (between 13 and 17) and is aged between 35 and 45 when the story begins. Imara is an Earthseed therapist in some versions and a sharer (suffering from the organic delusional disorder called hyper-empathy, like Olamina) in others. Some time between 2090 and 2095 she leaves Earth in an Earthseed Instar with between 4700 and 5339 colonists to realise the Earthseed destiny. Given the dates this appears to be the starship fleet led by the Christopher Columbus described at the end of Talents.

After a flight of between 107 and 137 years, during which Imara is placed in DiaPause, a method of suspended animation, she arrives on Bow, which is 11.8 light years away from Earth. Bow can support human life, with plenty of oxygen and water. The planet has no moon, is cooler than Earth, and has days that are just under 20 hours long. The ships have arrived near the equator, where it is warm, wet, and windy and the plan is to build the colony in a river valley. In most versions, Bow has no fauna beyond earthworms and microorganisms and flora that is limited to a slimy moss-like substance. The settlers immediately miss the beauty of Earth, a feeling that is exacerbated by the fact that the colours on Bow are all muted and the atmosphere smelly, varying from being merely unpleasant to smelling like vomit. Two of the three plotlines begin five years after the arrival of the humans, by which time there is a fully functioning settlement and society. The colony is divided into 50 to 60 housing groups of 30 to 100 people each, built in a protective semicircle around their crops and water supply. Each housing group has a communal gathering house at its centre, but the individual houses are inhabited by nuclear families. The aim is to develop the colony by having a new housing group split off from the parental house once a group reaches 100 inhabitants. The minimal governmental functions, including leadership by an Earthseed shaper (clergyperson) and record-keeping by an archivist, are based in a gathering hall, which serves as the community centre. The colony is multinational and multi-ethnic, with each of the colonists being selected for their skill set. By the fifth year, the colony is fully established, with the colonists living off the land. At some time in the future, after Trickster, it will break up, with some housing groups choosing to merge into a town, others developing around industrialised farms, and others adopting pre-industrial gatherer or monastic lifestyles. Once one moves beyond the protagonist and the setting, there is little consistency in the Trickster archive. Three plotlines nonetheless emerge from the notes and fragments, two of which are fairly substantial. I shall consolidate the notes and fragments to produce an account that sacrifices accuracy for coherence.

In the first, which includes a fragment of 47 pages, Imara Lucas Hope is the expedition’s archivist. She was raped by her mother’s partner at the age of 13, became pregnant with his child, was abandoned by the couple, and tried to commit suicide in an orphanage. The unborn baby died, but she survived to be adopted by Olamina. Imara and Olamina became very close as the years progressed and she was appointed ‘Guardian of the Ashes of Lauren Oya Olamina’, which are to be scattered on Bow in an Earthseed funeral on Day 2000 of the arrival of humanity. The narrative begins on that day, in medias res as the community leader, shaper Eric Parnell, appears to lose his mind when he starts shouting nonsense in his opening speech. Imara, waiting to play her part in the ceremony, has a hallucination of the thousands of colonists in the hall panicking, stampeding, and injuring one another in a race to exit. Eric is taken to the clinic and Imara realises that he, she, and the community’s dentist, Luis Huerta, have all had hallucinations. They all seek physical explanations, but none can be found and they have concerns about their sanity, worrying that they may not be able to cope with prolonged exposure to the conditions on Bow (which can support them physically, but perhaps not psychologically). Claire Lawless, Eric’s deputy, and Muir Parnell, Eric’s wife, have also been hallucinating and there is some tension between Claire and Imara. In the following chapter, Imara wakes up the next morning feeling fine, but immediately hallucinates a conversation with Olamina. Seven more people are admitted to the clinic with hallucinations during the day and Imara realises that the community’s psychiatrist, Ross Kuusi, is trying to conceal the fact that he is also hallucinating. Concerns about prolonged exposure to the planet are exacerbated when Imara works out that everyone who has been hallucinating is either part of the last transit crew or the first ground crew, the only people who were awake in the first 100 days of arrival.

In the second plotline, which has more dedicated fragments but of shorter lengths than the first, Imara Wright Drew is the expedition’s psychiatrist. The narrative opens with her awakening from her ‘coffin-sized DiaPause tank’ and gradually recovering her senses and motor control. Imara is part of the first ground crew and the reports from those who have explored Bow are negative: while it can clearly sustain human life everyone has found being on it either disconcerting, unpleasant, or both. Imara finds out that after she was put in her DiaPause tank, her husband, Powell Davidson, changed his mind and decided not to join the Earthseed expedition. She is given a letter from him apologising for his decision and realises that he is now long dead. In the following chapter, Imara begins to regain her strength and other colonists are introduced: Aaron Wen, a shaper; Nissa Swan, an anthropologist; Julian Gamero, a farmer; and others. Imara begins helping other people wake from DiaPause. Three days later, Nissa goes missing. She had previously explored Bow and claimed to have seen an indigenous species. A search party is sent out for her. They find her trail, track her, and quickly locate her corpse at the bottom of a canyon. Imara is asked to attend the scene. As soon as she goes outside she has an hallucination and it will subsequently be suggested that the hallucinations were responsible for both Nissa’s sighting of an indigenous species and her death by falling. Imara starts thinking about adapting to rather than curing the hallucinations, at least in the short term, and this is both the resolution to the plot and the core theme of the narrative.

In the third plotline, which is sketched in the barest detail, Imara Dove Holly is the expedition’s law enforcement agent, the Sheriff of Bow, selected personally by Olamina before the expedition departed. Imara is married to a farmer, Aurio Cruz. When she does not have law enforcement duties to fulfil, she assists both her husband and the colony’s archivist. Five years after the colonist’s arrival someone sets a fire outside the largest greenhouse of the Rose Housing Group, causing considerable damage. When Imara begins her investigation, she has her first hallucination and subsequently learns that many people are hallucinating frequently. There is a second fire, in consequence of which one of the colonists is killed. The ubiquity of the hallucinations make the case almost impossible to solve, but Imara eventually finds a way to make use of the hallucinations to detect the arsonist while the medical professions continue to seek a cure. Strangely, given the amount of relative detail provided, there is no suggestion of a central theme in the archivist’s plot. The strongest suggestion is in the psychiatrist plot, in which the solution to the problem of the hallucinations is not to ‘cure’ or overcome them, but to accept them as one of the features of life on Bow in order to minimise their impact on everyday life. The sheriff’s plot goes even further, suggesting that the hallucinations are not just a phenomenon that human beings can live with, but a phenomenon that can actually be exploited for gains of some sort. There is an allusion to this idea in the archivist’s plot, in which the narrator reflects that ‘two of the most important tenets of Earthseed were foresight and adaptability’ before Parnell addresses the community about their adaptation to life on Bow. In the context of the other plotlines and extracts, the double emphasis on adaptation immediately prior to Parnell’s very public hallucination may well be an instance of foreshadowing the resolution to come: adaptation rather than cure.

The theme of adaptation is developed in Butler’s notes by means of two concepts or metaphors, the xenograft and the trickster. A xenograft is an interspecies transplant and she described the story as one in which people xenograft humanity onto a new world whose immune system tries to expel them. The resistance of Bow to humanity is the sense in which the planet itself is the trickster of the title and parable and the hallucinations suffered by those with prolonged exposure to the planet are the most dangerous means by which it tries to expel them. Butler was explicit as to the planet’s trickery, ‘a world that seems to be one thing (dull, drab, and harmless) and is something else entirely.’ Her planned conclusion to the novel was that the colonists would be forced to make a choice, ‘to try to hold on to what they were as normal human beings on Earth or to allow the change they have both fought and adapted to for years to continue.’ She also wrote that in the end Bow ‘will adopt them and they will be of it.’ As a sequel to both Sower and Talents, this theme is completely consistent consistent with the Earthseed principle of ‘God is change’ and Olamina’s insistence on employing it as a guide to one’s life. To return to the biblical parable, the human beings on Bow cannot retain their human form of life on Bow, but must develop and establish a new form of life that is adapted to the planet on which they have chosen to live. This also provides a neat juxtaposition to the dark note at the end of Talents, in which the starship is revealed to have been named the Christopher Columbus, predicting that the form of life in the extraterrestrial colony will be as unjust and unsustainable as it was in terrestrial colonies. As such, it seems as if Trickster was intended to proceed through conflict and tragedy to a conclusion with life-affirming meaning. As Butler writes: ‘The community will suffer greatly at the hands of the hallucinations, but eventually pull through.’

Butler had little more than premises for the second half of the series. The colony would divide into two in Parable of the Teacher, with one group determined to adapt to the planet and the other determined to conquer it. Parable of Chaos would see the rise of ‘an absolute Stalinesque figure’ whose every word and whim is passed into law by his sycophantic followers. Finally, in Parable of Clay, humanity would not only have adapted to life on the new planet, but actually evolved into a new species or subspecies. The themes the four novels set on Bow would explore would be the roles of creativity and repression in adaptation to the environment and new ways of being human that revealed marginalised aspects of humanity. Butler suffered from high blood pressure in her final years and died following a fall while walking in Lake Forest Park, in Seattle, at the age of 58. She became the first Black woman to be a published science fiction writer when Doubleday released her first novel, Patternmaster, in 1976. Along with Samuel R. Delany, she is recognised as inaugurating Afrofuturism as a literary movement. As far as the continued relevance of her work, Butler’s Earthseed novels are only matched by Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 feature film, Children of Men, and the eight seasons of HBO’s Game of Thrones, released from 2011 to 2019.

The Last Days of New Paris | review by Rafe McGregor

The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville, Picador, paperback, £9.00, 23 February 2017, ISBN 9781447296553

China Miéville has been publishing speculative fiction for the better part of three decades, beginning with King Rat in 1998. In the course of this career, he has become known as the foremost exponent of the New Weird, rivalled only by Jeff VanderMeer, and last year he published The Book of Elsewhere, co-authored with none other than Keanu Reeves. I defined the New Weird as philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounding the alienation within ourselves in Weird Fiction, Old, New, and In-Between, also published last year. It is difficult to avoid appreciating The Last Days of New Paris in one of two misleading contexts. The first is as an Axis victory alternative history along the lines of Philip K. Dick’s 1962 The Man in the High Castle or Len Deighton’s 1978 SS-GB, both of which have been released as popular television series, the former in 2015 and the latter in 2017. Miéville weaves two narratives together – one set in a recognisable France of 1941 and the other in an unrecognisable Paris of 1950 – and populates each with a mix of real and fictional people, but does not invite one to ruminate on the possible consequences of, for example, Franklin Roosevelt’s assassination (Dick) or a Luftwaffe victory in the Battle of Britain (Deighton). Instead, the geopolitics that led up to and followed on from the ‘S-Blast’ (presumably ‘surrealist blast’), the explosion that both created living manifestations of surrealist works of art and opened the gates of hell, are for the most part circumstantial. The second context, which may be related to the first, is to see the novella as a response to the global rise of nationalism, often in extreme forms, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, but it is neither a call for political resistance nor a naïve allegory of art’s revolutionary power.

The Last Days of New Paris consists of nine chapters, with the odd numbers devoted to events in the 1950 present and the even numbers to events in the 1941 past. The story is followed by an afterword and a notes section and my only criticism concerns the inclusion of this supplementary material. The afterword is subtitled ‘On Coming to Write The Last Days of New Paris’ and constitutes a curious conceit in which Miéville claims to have met Thibaut, the fictional protagonist of 1950, and to have merely edited the manuscript passed to him. This was a common device in Victorian fiction, but contemporary readers require no such faux guarantees and the superfluity is exacerbated by Miéville’s reference to non-existent sketches he has (not) included. The notes are explanations of the artworks referred to in the narrative and feel gratuitous in an age where reader research is almost effortless. Miéville’s textual representations of these works are a seamless merging of the realistic with the oneiric and his expert evocation of the pervasive sense of the strange that is New Paris equips the reader with all he or she requires to experience the intense pleasure afforded by the novella.

New Paris is Paris after the S-Blast, which occurred in 1941. In Miéville’s alternative Europe, Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) – the German drive to the Channel in May 1940 – was sufficient to cause the collapse of France, making Fall Rot (Case Red, the push west and south the following month) unnecessary. The S-Blast transformed Paris from a city of occupation to a city of resistance, with various French factions rising up against the Germans and the ‘battalions from below’ rising up to join the chaos. The resistance includes the Free French, led by Charles de Gaulle and backed by the United States, and the Main à plume, the surrealist irregulars, some of whom (like Thibaut) have been able to harness the power released by the detonation. The most significant effect of the S-Blast was not the release of hell’s minions (who show only a passing interest in the city), but to create the living manifestations of surrealist artworks, ‘manifs’, that roam the streets either on their own or under the less than perfect command of surrealist or SS handlers. By 1950 the Germans have sealed the ‘city become free-fire zone and hunting grounds for the impossible’ and are attempting to destroy the resisters by all available means, including the control of manifs and devils and the creation of manifs of their own, using the work of Nazi artists like Arno Breker. The S-Blast has of course given literal meaning to metaphors such as art coming to life, having a life of its own, and being a form of life.

The Last Days of New Paris is an extraordinarily original work that underscores Miéville’s considerable ingenuity and innovation. The opening scene is wildly fantastic, a suicidal charge by the Vélo – the manifestation of Leonora Carrington’s I am an Amateur of Velocipedes (1941), a bicycle-woman centaur – at the German lines. There is also a satisfyingly overdetermined symmetry in the work’s design as the onset is bookended by the appearance of Fall Rot, a Panzer III-giant man centaur, in the first stage of the story’s tripartite climax. The symmetry is superbly complex: in the same way that science and the supernatural are the dual interests of Jack Parsons, the real-life protagonist of the 1941 narrative, so Fall Rot has been created by the combination of the biological experimentation of Josef Mengele and the perverted faith of Robert Alesch, a Catholic priest who collaborated with the Nazis. In a further parallel, both of the plots begin with the arrival of an American on the scene, Parsons in Vichy Marseilles in 1941 and an American photojournalist named Sam in the free part of Paris in 1950. Sam is researching her own book, The Last Days of New Paris, a photographic essay-within-a-novella that pays homage to Dick’s The Grasshopper Lies Heavy novel-within-a-novel.

Miéville is too sophisticated a writer to promote a conception of art as essentially opposed to oppression and his mention of Breker and the second part of the climax (which I shall not reveal) shows that he is well aware of the variety of ends art can serve. While Breton’s surrealism provided a Marxist opposition to European fascism and American Fordism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s futurism provided active and enthusiastic support for Mussolini and the fascist sympathies of many prominent modernists are well documented. Miéville is concerned with surrealism in particular over and above art more generally because movements like surrealism (and now New Weird) resist nationalism and elitism in virtue of being politico-artistic movements in the first instance. Surrealism is not an artistic movement in the service of Marxism, but a Marxist artistic movement. As such, The Last Days of New Paris calls for a revolt in art rather than a revolt in politics, for integrating politics into art rather than employing art as a means to political ends. The link from New Paris to the contemporary world comes in the perfectly pitched anti-climax with which the narrative concludes, as Thibaut takes it upon himself to write his own book, to start ‘from scratch, redo history, make it mine.’ In Thibaut’s return to the fray to write his revolution, Miéville urges readers to their own artistic revolt, to the reconception of art as essentially rather than circumstantially political and the New Weird as essentially rather than circumstantially resistant to nationalism, elitism, and related mass harms.

Apologies and scheduling: TQF in 2025

A quick note to apologise to everyone who has sent in submissions for issues 78 to 81 and is waiting for me to do my bit. The magazine isn't dead, don't worry, work is progressing, albeit slowly, on them all, but my daytime work has been keeping me busy in the evenings too, so I've been struggling to finish things off.

I'm past the worst of that now, though, and I'll be cracking on with all the outstanding work needed on TQF. Most of the next three issues are already typeset and waiting to be proofread, while my co-editor John and my co-habitee Mrs Theaker have been assiduously reading new submissions, and Douglas Ogurek has been hard at work at the next Unsplatterpunk! special.

It seems sensible to close submissions for regular issues until October, since there's no point adding more to the queue just yet. But submissions to Unsplatterpunk! 8 are open till the end of April.

So, my plan for the year is now to put out an issue of TQF monthly until I am all caught up, working through the issues already in hand, and slotting Unsplatterpunk! 8 in when it's ready.

My apologies again to everyone. Each time I said I was hoping to have the next issue ready at the weekend or by the end of the month, I genuinely did mean it, but I ended up having to put other things first. Don't get me wrong, I've been loving my work this year, but by the end of the day I was too worn out to do much more than read manga and play a bit of Monster Train. I haven't finished a single novel yet this year!

Finally, I have to express my gratitude to Douglas Ogurek and Rafe McGregor, who have kept the lights on here with reviews and articles while I've been slacking off.

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.