Weirdtongue by D.F. Lewis – reviewed by John Greenwood

Weirdtongue is never going to be an easy read, even for the most adventurous. That in itself shouldn't imply any criticism. Watching performance art isn't the same thing as going to the cinema to watch a Hollywood blockbuster. Some books are necessarily challenging and disturbing. The question that recurs while reading Weirdtongue is whether it will be worth the effort. The novella is only 122 pages long, but reading it still requires a certain amount of endurance. To give an example, about halfway through this novella, the author's voice pops up, not for the first or last time:

"As the writer of Weirdtongue, I cannot help having a thrill of anticipation in following through the various characters as they either develop or decay, grow fat or thin, famous or infamous, tragic or comic, humble or proud. The fact that they are beyond my control, beyond the control of anyone, makes the prospect of the passions, the sadnesses, the joys, the neutralities, the crazinesses of those pink-parcels-with-motive-force (not just pink, but beige, brown, grey or black) far more possible to set me crying for real than the traditional approach to fiction characters and their fate which the writer's or reader's inevitable knowledge of artful control behind those characters causes to be so bland and unpithy, however skilfully written or read."

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #28

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This is one of our most interesting and varied issues yet. It starts in the best possible way with "Quadrant Five" – a bunch of people on a spaceship going who knows where. That's followed by the next riveting instalment of Newton Braddell and a short-short from Josie Gowler, "Soldier", before things get rather literary with the double-barrelled strangeness of "Breaking Out of Sleep" and "Anatomy of a Wounded House", from Barry Pomeroy and Douglas Thompson respectively. Then John Hall wonders whether you dare descend "The Stairs in the Crypt", and Jason Hinchcliffe tells the saga of the "Bloodbegotten". I round out the issue with a bunch of my famously perspicacious reviews – what have I decreed to be "well-written", "brilliant" and "superb" this time around?

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In Love Again

When I first saw the Sony Reader in Waterstones I was really impressed by the e-paper screen, the way the text looked as if it was printed on the surface – it looked really easy to read. But I wasn’t impressed by how sluggish it was – it took ages to move from one option to another. And I made myself look a bit stupid by trying to choose options by touching them with my finger (the Rocket eBook has a touchscreen).

I decided to wait for the Kindle. And wait… And wait…

Eventually my patience ran out and I spent some money I don’t really have on a Sony Reader. It’s turned out to be the best money I shouldn’t have spent since I got a TiVo!

I absolutely love it. What makes all the difference is that where the Rocket eBook was heavier and more cumbersome than most books, the Sony Reader is lighter and less cumbersome than most of them.

The bundled software from Sony is pretty much unusable, and gave me a few early jitters of buyer’s remorse, but once I downloaded Calibre the love affair was on. It’s now stuffed to the gills with classics from the free CD from Sony, creative commons and out-of-copyright sf from Feedbooks, newspapers created from The Guardian and BBC websites via Feedbooks, epub files from Project Gutenberg, submissions and proofs for TQF and Dark Horizons, pdf review copies from PS Publishing and Eibonvale, ebooks from Fictionwise, not to mention a bunch of music and photos.

I’m stunned at how brilliantly it handles pdf files – I wouldn’t have thought it possible. At the smallest magnification setting it shows the pdf as is, and then at medium and large it blows up the main text, doing a marvellous job of ignoring white space and page numbers. It even manages to deal pretty well with a multi-column layout like the one in Dark Horizons.

One of the other brilliant features is the ability to have collections, dividing up the files by keywords so you can quickly find any of them. The Sony software doesn’t work well with them, but with Calibre you can just edit the keywords of the files on the Reader itself to sort them out directly.

Very happy with it indeed…

And then I found the Baen Books free library! Well over a hundred books (many of them omnibuses and gigantic collections) for free download. It left me in tears of joy. I ended up downloading half a dozen books I already own, just because it’ll be so much easier reading them this way.

If I’d found those same books going cheap in a bookshop, I admit that I would still have bought them. But I would have had a problem finding somewhere for them to go. I long ago reached the point where I had no more room for books in the house. I’ve got (checks Goodreads) 1,131 paper books to read, and another thousand or two that I’ve already read. There’s nowhere to put any new books, and any time I do put a book down, chances are I’ll lose it. For example, I’ve got a review copy of Conrad Williams’ One to read, but I’ve lost it half a dozen times already… On the other hand, I can find any ebooks on the Sony Reader in about ten seconds, and store unlimited numbers of books on the computer.

I’m now free to buy and collect books again without worrying about where to put them. I can donate a lot of the classics I own to charity shops, since they’re all on Gutenberg. It’s really nice, too, to be able to request review copies and not worry about what it costs someone.

I wrote a bit about this in my editorial for the new Dark Horizons – before I got my Reader – and I do still agree with what I said there, that for most people this’ll be a solution to a problem they don’t have. But for me personally, it’s a huge improvement in my life – a lifehack as big as getting TiVo or buying my first PC.

The other day I went over to my wife’s parents’ house with it, and started reading a book. Then two kids jumped in my lap and I switched to Little Wizard Tales of Oz from Gutenberg and read that to them. Then my father-in-law came in, so I let him read the BBC news on it. Eventually the room was empty apart from me so I could concentrate properly and I got started on reading some submissions. It’s every book I need it to be…

I’ve even got the perfect bag to put it in – the Bagbase mini reporter. It’s like I’m wearing a tricorder…

Some people talk about the feel and smell of paper books. I can understand that to some extent, but that isn’t a love of the literature within those pages: it’s fetishism for the way they are presented. The story counts more than the format. The question about the format is how much of a barrier it puts between me and the story, how much it gets in the way, how it holds up my reading. We’re used to the inconveniences associated with paper books, but, really, they are anything but comfortable and relaxing. Think of all that bother holding the thing open, for starters, especially when reading in bed… Trying to find the right angle to catch the light properly… Keeping your place in the book… Peering at the words sinking into the spine…

After using ebooks for a while even turning the page seems like a time-consuming chore! Reading an ebook (on the right device) can be much more immersive and quite a bit quicker than reading it on paper – it’s just you and the story, with no hassle. I’ve found I read things about 20% faster on the Sony Reader, and it’s not because I’m rushing, it’s because there are fewer distractions from the actual reading.

I doubt anyone would really find reading a 500pp+ paperback, let alone hardback, more comfortable than reading the same thing on a Sony Reader. Look at it this way: anytime you find yourself needing two hands to read a book, that’s a hand more than you need for the Sony Reader!

Another point is that books, just like music, tv, films and photographs, are so much more accessible as files. Then think about the ease of actually buying the books that you want to read. Within a year or two buying any book ever published could take just minutes, instead of years spending trawling second-hand bookshops and eBay.

As far as cost goes, taking into account things like Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg and Google Books – plus initiatives like the Baen Books free library – the average cost of an ebook is much lower than paper books, since anything published more than a hundred years ago is totally free.

The one thing I miss is being able to add notes to what I’m reading (which I could do on the Rocket eBook), but apparently you can get some special accessories for the Sony Reader – a “pen” and “paper”. I’ll report back on these novelties in a future editorial, though at first glance they seem much more awkward than using a keyboard…

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Editorial

• In Love Again, by Stephen Theaker

News & Comment

• China Mieville at Forbidden Planet
• The Very Best of Gene Wolfe
• The Tombs of Telos Are Opened Once More
• Iris Wildthyme to the Rescue!

Science Fiction

• Quadrant Five, by Anne Marie Gomez
• Newton Braddell: a Constant, Gnawing Hunger, by John Greenwood
• Soldier, by Josie Gowler
• Breaking Out of Sleep, by Barry Pomeroy

Horror

• Anatomy of a Wounded House, by Douglas Thompson
• The Stairs in the Crypt, by John Hall

Fantasy

• Bloodbegotten, by Jason Hinchcliffe

The Quarterly Review

Books

• The Babylonian Trilogy
• Gunpowder
• The Kill Crew
• The Best of D.F. Lewis
• Curious Men
• Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale
• First and Last
• The Forbidden Tower
• The Airlords of Han
• The Oz Suite
• Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country: Kids’ Letters to President Obama
• The Time Traders
• The Witnesses Are Gone

Comics

• Aliens Vs. Predator Omnibus, Vol. 1
• Powers: Definitive Collection, Vol. 1
• Showcase Presents: Legion of Super-Heroes, Vol. 2
• Showcase Presents: Supergirl, Vol. 1

Television

• Who Wants to Be a Superhero?
• Being Human
• The Quest of Dick & Dom
• Demons

Also Received

• But Not Yet Reviewed

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Here are the people who made this issue so enjoyable to put together…

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Anne Marie Gomez owns a business that designs custom gardens for people’s homes. She also raises a variety of flowers from seed and enjoys sharing the seedlings with other home gardeners. Her free time is devoted to writing, writing, and then more writing.

Josie Gowler has had short stories published in Delivered and Linkway magazines. Her specialties are weird tales set in the East Anglian Fens and science fiction short stories; sometimes the two overlap.
She’s currently working on a trashy coming-of-age space opera. To pay the bills, Josie works as an accountant in the Civil Service, but please don’t hold that against her, she asks.

John Greenwood propped TQF up for many years, keeping the magazine going with his generous contributions until it was ready to take its first steps into wider world. His stories can be found in most previous issues.

John Hall is best known as a Sherlockian scholar, and a member of the International Pipe Smokers’ Hall of Fame. His numerous literary interests include Raffles, Sexton Blake, H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. He is the author of Special Commission, a medieval murder mystery. Previous stories by John appeared in TQF23 (TQF#23) (“Shaggai”), TQF25 (TQF#25)(“In the Vale of Pnath”) and TQF26 (TQF#26) (“The Burrower Beneath”).

Ever since Jason Hinchcliffe was a kid growing up in the middle of a forest in Cayuga, Ontario, he’s had dreams of becoming a writer. Not much has changed since then, except instead of being a geeky and funny-looking child, he’s blossomed into a geeky and funny-looking adult. To support himself, Jason works as an editor at a legal publisher in Markham. If it wasn’t for the Bank and all their pesky rules (pay the loans, pay the mortgage), he’d spend his time reading Dickens novels, writing, and watching all the movies that having a job tends to prevent a person from watching. This year has been an incredible writing-year so far – stories are forthcoming in Kaleidotrope, 580 Split, the Nashwaak Review, and also Candlelight, a Dark Anthology of Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. Jason owns two cats that sleep way too much.

Barry Pomeroy is an itinerant English professor, boat designer and builder, traveller, carver, sometime mechanic, carpenter, and web designer. As a writer he is responsible for Multiple Personality Disorder, a long poem in dialogue, and the novel Naked in the Road, and his shorter work has been or will be published in magazines such as Cosmetica, Bards and Sages, Insolent Rudder, Tart, Tiny Globule, Writing Shift, Ulterior, Oddville Press and Word Catalyst. “Breaking out of Sleep” is from the short story collection Isolates and Survivors.

Douglas Thompson won the Grolsch/Herald New Writing Award in 1989, and second prize in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition in 2007. His stories have been widely published in magazines and anthologies, most recently Ambit, New Writing Scotland, Subtle Edens and Dark Horizons. “Anatomy of a Wounded House” is from his first novel/collection Ultrameta which will be published in August 2009 by Eibonvale (see www.glasgowsurrealist.com/douglas).

Stephen Theaker is the eponymous editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. He wrote all of this issue’s reviews, which explains their reliance on words such as superb, exciting and well-written. He is also the editor of Dark Horizons, the journal of the British Fantasy Society.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #20

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The Big Two-Oh: Celebrations and Apologies!

So this is it for another year – our fourth year of issues (even if it’s only been three and a bit years since the first came out). I’d love to say that this has been a great year for Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, because in many ways it has. Our downloads have increased immensely and even our print sales have gone up a bit. People are starting to hear about what we’re doing. Listings on places like www.duotrope.com, www.ralan.com and the AA Independent Press Guide have brought dozens of submissions to our inbox, and the stories which we have accepted have enriched the magazine in every way. But I can’t bring myself to say it’s been a great year when it was the year our best friend died, leaving us utterly shaken. He’d spent Christmas with my family for something like the last six years, and while that sadly reflects the fact that he never managed to find someone special to create his own Christmases with, they were always good times, and it’s hard to face this one without him around. Apart from anything else, he nearly always bought superb presents for me. (Last year it was The Lurker in the Lobby, a fascinating overview of Lovecraftian cinema.)

I won’t spend the whole editorial being sad, though. It is Christmas, after all, and however much I miss my friend, I’m in ecstatic anticipation of the new Doctor Who Christmas special, and the Marks & Spencers pre-cooked turkey crown in the fridge looks as delicious as it does every year!

In this issue we have the first portion of a new novel by my co-editor, John Greenwood. I made him co-editor in recognition of the fact that he was writing half the magazine at the time – it would be unfair to reject his work now to avoid accusations of bias! And why avoid those accusations? I am biased, no doubt about it. I have a sneaking suspicion that with this novel, as perhaps with his Newton Braddell series, John is pandering to me somewhat, since he packs into each of them everything I want to read whenever I pick up a book (rare as that tends to be nowadays). It’s as if he has made a careful study of my literary tastes and preferences and custom-written a novel to entertain me. The Hatchling is his paciest, most thrilling and most atmospheric piece of writing to date, and if I could get away with reprinting it in every issue from now to eternity I would.

Next, Bruce Hesselbach regales us with a Tale of Yxning, "Contrarieties". Like The Hatchling, this is a story that hits the nail of my tastes so squarely on the head that it is almost uncanny. And the last story of the issue is the concluding part of Michael Wyndham Thomas’s serial, After All, "A River. It Had to Be." It’s been a privilege to publish this fine serial in these unworthy pages.

To both authors I owe an apology (in addition to the one I owe Bruce for the appalling illustration of a plant pot falling on Yren Higbe’s head that marred the publication of his story in TQF#19). Michael Thomas’s serial appeared in all six issues this year, while Bruce Hesselbach’s Tales of Yxning appeared in three, and yet neither author has had the cover devoted to them. The first cover was a portmanteau covering all the stories in the issue (just one postage stamp-sized illustration related to After All), and the next two were devoted to Howard Phillips’ The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta. The fourth cover of the year featured a creature from the fabulous "Ananke" by Jeff Crook, and the fifth concerned "The Walled Garden", by Wayne Summers, not that anyone would have been able to tell, thanks to my lack of drawing ability. Then this sixth issue has a cover relating to The Hatchling. So that’s four out of six covers given over to our in-house writers, and that’s not at all fair.

The reason is that we knew way in advance what in-house material we had in hand, and once draft covers were drawn up, even though other material came in, I didn’t want to start over on the covers, out of sheer laziness!

In 2008 I’ll make much more of an effort in this regard: I’ve made a vow that none of the covers will be devoted to anything written by myself, John Greenwood or Howard Phillips (unless there is nothing else in the issue).

That brings me to something else that I don’t feel we’ve done particularly well this year: reviews of the books people have sent us. If you look at page 72 of this issue you’ll see my review of Test Drive by DJ Burnham, a book I did not finish reading. As a one-off that wouldn’t be too bad, but it follows similar non-reviews of DF Lewis’s Weirdmonger and Nemonymous #7 (aka Zencore!) in previous issues. For that matter I didn’t get very far through Apex #10 before writing a short review, and Apex #11 stands on my desk now, just as an interesting book by the name of Triangulations stands on my co-editor’s desk. It’s a bit of an embarrassing pattern. We just don’t get around to reading them. In the case of some books that are sent to us on spec, or that we’ve bought ourselves, I don’t feel too guilty, but in the case of something like Apex or Nemonymous where the author has offered review copies and we have specifically requested them, it’s very poor of us.

I can’t promise that we’ll do better next year. For one thing, what really interests me about other small press publications is their methods, philosophies and goals, rather than the stories within. I’m fascinated to see what people are doing, and love to think about the reasons they are doing it. But (and I doubt anyone will disagree) a reviewer should really read the book too! Another issue is that reading an entire book for review takes about as much work as proofreading an entire issue of TQF, and for me it often comes down to doing one or the other.

So while I can’t promise to write better reviews, I won’t ask people specifically to send us review copies, and I apologise to anyone I’ve asked to send us a review copy in the past. If you do send us review copies of your work, I think you’ve had fair warning of the poor quality reviewing you can expect! (For really good reviewing, visit the website of the excellent Whispers of Wickedness.)

So here’s to the end of a very exciting year for this flawed but good-hearted and tenacious magazine! Twenty issues down, but the next will be the best yet – because every issue is! – SWT

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Editorial

The Big Two-Oh: Celebrations and Apologies!

The Hatchling: Post-Natal Paranoia

John Greenwood

An Inconvenient Inheritance * Tangling with Grunewald * The Subterranean Ministry * Abroad, Unarmed and Incommunicado * Another Road to Juliaca * An Audience with El Alcalde * The Prison Under the Lake * Night of the Lakemother

Tales of Yxning

Contrarieties

Bruce Hesselbach

After All

A River. It Had to Be.

Michael Wyndham Thomas

The Quarterly Review

Halo 3 * Test Drive

Helen and Her Magic Cat

Steven Gilligan