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.