Carnival Row, Season 1 | review by Rafe McGregor

Detection on Different Levels?

In his latest book, Allegory and Ideology (2019), Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson describes the patristic allegory as a system composed of four levels. The idea is that there is a single story that operates at four levels of meaning simultaneously. The first level is the literal, which in the Scriptures referred to an historical event and in the case with which I am concerned here is the steampunk world represented in Carnival Row. The second, secret, level is the hidden meaning concealed within the literal level, requiring either a mystical revelation or imaginative deciphering (or, in Carnival Row’s case, perhaps a little more enciphering). The third, moral, level is concerned with individual salvation or existential experience and the fourth, anagogical, level with the Last Judgement or the future of humanity as a whole. Taking the philosophical rather than religious route we have the literal, secret, moral, and collective meanings of an allegory. At the literal level, Carnival Row is a narrative about the consequences of the battle for Tirnanoc (from the Gaelic Tír na nÓg), the land of the Fae, fought between two human powers, the covetous Burgue and the genocidal Pact. As the war progresses, the Fae begin fleeing to the Burgue for safety and the stream of refugees increases when the Burgue are defeated and withdraw from Tirnanoc. When the series opens, many of citizens of the Burgue, spanning all social strata, are displeased by the influx of “Critch”, a derisive term used to describe all Fae regardless of their species, and pursue some combination of making their lives as miserable as possible, proposing anti-immigration legislation, and using all available means to keep them offshore. In the age of Trump’s wall and Johnson’s Brexit it is very easy – perhaps a little too easy, as the didacticism is sometimes rather heavy-handed – to read the second level of meaning as being about the Coalition Forces invasion of Iraq, the subsequent destabilisation of the Middle East, and the consequent Syrian refugee crisis. The parallels between London or New York and the Burgue on the one hand and Islamic State and the Pact on the other are almost exact. The question I am interested in is not whether the secret meaning of the allegory is too obvious, but whether the simplistic similarities preclude it from reaching the moral and collective levels of meaning.

Carnival Row takes its name from a street in the Burgue that is the centre of what has become a Fae inner city, populated by faeries, fauns, centaurs, trolls, kobolds, and other refugees from Tirnanoc. There are two main plots, each of which follows the two protagonists, and two subplots involving the governance and elite society of the Burgue respectively. The protagonists are Vignette Stonemoss (played by Cara Delevingne), a faerie refugee, and Inspector Rycroft Philostrate (played by Orlando Bloom), a detective who is investigating a serial killer that preys exclusively on Fae. The two were lovers in Tirnanoc during the war and their respective tales intersect, diverge, and intertwine as the narrative progresses. Vignette made her living in Tirnanoc by selling the Fae into indentured labour, a practice that is now recognised as a form of modern slavery, but was employed by many colonial powers up until the early twentieth century. When she fears falling victim to Pact atrocities, she sells herself in order to pay for her passage to the Burgue and is placed in the home of idly wealthy siblings Ezra and Imogen Spurnrose (played by Andrew Gower and Tamzin Merchant) as a lady’s maid. When Vignette is sexually assaulted by Spurnrose, she escapes to Carnival Row. Faced with only two options for survival, sex work or crime, she joins the Black Raven, a Fae organised crime group. Vignette’s decision is to at least some extent a moral one – as the head of the Black Raven confirms by stating, ‘The law of this city does not protect us’ – but it nonetheless pits her against her police officer ex-lover.

Philo is the only police officer in the Burgue that cares about the serial slaying of the Fae. He narrows the field of suspects down to sailors, on the basis that the crimes have coincided with the return of navy vessels to the docks, and quickly finds a suspect. After an exciting chase across the rooftops of the city, the sailor warns Philo of the coming of ‘some dark god’ before jumping to his death. Shortly after, another Fae is murdered, her torso ripped open by a giant creature that emerges from the sewers, and Philo is set on his second and much more complex case. It is quickly revealed that Philo’s idiosyncratic concern for the welfare of the Fae is due to his own ancestry: he is a half-blood faerie who had his wings cut off at birth before being abandoned at an orphanage. This is one of the aspects of the series where the didacticism becomes somewhat strained, with the only police officer who cares about the Fae only caring about them because he is himself half Fae. Seriously flawed though our own world is, there are plenty of people on the right side of inequality in metropolises like London, Los Angeles, Rio de Janiero, and Johannesburg that take a moral interest in those on the wrong side.

The two subplots concern two Burgue families, the Breakspears and the Spurnroses. Absalom Breakspear (played by Jared Harris) is Chancellor of the Republic of the Burgue and the political storyline is initiated when his son is kidnapped while visiting a Fae brothel in Carnival Row. Unbeknownst to Breakspear, the crime has been committed by his wife, Piety (played by Indira Varma), for reasons that are unclear. She subsequently manipulates Breakspear into detaining and torturing the Leader of the Opposition without charge and then both murders and frames the suspect herself. Meanwhile, despite their desirable address and the many trappings of opulence they enjoy, the Spurnroses are in dire financial straits. Imogen, whose existence revolves around climbing the social ladder and finding a husband with the right mix of social, economic, and cultural capital, is initially disgusted when a faun moves into their square, one of the most exclusive enclaves in the city. She soon realises that she can take advantage of the combination of Agreus Astrayon’s (played by David Gyasi) extreme wealth and the speciesism he faces from the Burgue’s elite, however, proposing to sponsor his admittance to that elite in exchange for an investment in her brother’s failing business enterprises. In the world of Carnival Row, just like our own, money can buy respectability and social acceptance, even if one has horns on one’s head and hooves instead of feet.

I have mentioned an example of the way in which Carnival Row both achieves and fails to achieve meaning at the moral level and there are several more examples of the former, which I shall not mention so as to avoid spoilers. In fact, the first three allegorical levels are tied together rather neatly by means of a succession of plot twists in the second half of the season. My main interest is in the fourth, collective, level and whether the series so far has anything to say about the future of humanity. In In the Dust of This Planet (2011), the first volume in his Horror of Philosophy Trilogy, Eugene Thacker proposes three ways of conceiving of meaning and value. His inquiry follows the tradition of Immanuel Kant, who distinguished between the noumenal world (objective reality) and the phenomenal world (subjective experience of objective reality). In Kant’s philosophy, human beings could never gain access to the noumenal and were restricted to negotiating it indirectly, through the phenomenal. For Thacker, whose concern is with meaning rather than existence, the world-for-us is ‘the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feeling alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also separate from the human’.  The world-for-us does not exhaust meaning on the planet, however, and we become aware of the world-in-itself when that planet ‘resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us’, most dramatically and dangerously in the occurrence of natural disasters. In other words, when faced with events such as natural disasters, human beings realise that there is a very strong sense in which this world is not for-us at all. The third and most significant conception of meaning and value is the world-without-us. The world-without-us is an attempt to conceptualise the coexistence of the world-for-us and the world-in-itself without either accepting that there is an insurmountable Kantian barrier between the two or immediately collapsing the latter into the former when we, for example, grasp natural disasters from the perspective of humanity. In Thacker’s terms, ‘the world-without-us is the subtraction of the human from the world’.  In my understanding of Thacker, the world-without-us is a world in which there is meaning and value in spite of the absence (actually subtraction) of human meaning and human values. Thacker’s aim in his Trilogy is to extrapolate and explain the world-without-us and his central thesis is that supernatural horror and science fiction succeed in this aim where philosophy has failed.

If Thacker is right and such a world exists, the crucial question is if and how the world-for-us and world-without-us can coexist without one system of meaning and value eradicating the other. Early into the twenty-first century it seems unsurprising that we have such difficulty conceiving of the world-without-us, so competent have we become at destroying the world-in-itself. We find the world-for-us at its most conspicuous and most arrogant in the city, where the natural environment has been replaced rather than adapted by the human population and where ecology has been reconfigured to sustain human life alone. In Carnival Row, Philo assumes the role of an occult detective attempting to solve a mystery set in the metropolis of the Burgue and the combination of protagonist and setting provides an opportunity to chart the relation between the world-for-us and the world-without-us. Despite his faerie blood, Philo appears as human and serves as an agent of social control, preserving the metropolitan world-for-us in all its biological, cultural, and economic complexity. The detective, both a symbol and an implement of human values, is pitted against an antagonist that is neither human nor Fae, but some dark god, an apparently unfathomable and inconceivable creature that dwells and kills in the city, where everything – alive or lifeless – is supposed to serve only human ends. Significantly, the creature’s lair is in the sewers, the foundation upon which the city is built, in the same way that the world-without-us underpins – and sometimes undermines – the world-for-us. As the story of an occult detective solving a series of murders in a metropolis, Carnival Row stages the world-without-us, setting up a narrative framework firmly grounded in the world-for-us – the detective as an agent of social control seeking to restore the anthropocentric status quo the murders have disrupted – and then using that framework to investigate a nature that refuses to be tamed and resists conception in human terms. The creature, called a Darkasher, is disclosed as having a closer connection to humanity than initially suspected and the potential for exploring the world-without-us is to some extent sacrificed for less problematic meaning-making at the fourth and final allegorical level. Notwithstanding, the pitting of the two worlds of meaning and value represented by the detective and the Darkasher respectively gestures towards some kind of mutual recognition between the world-for-us and the world-without-us. My hope is that the tension created by this pairing will be developed in more detail season 2, although as the occult detective mystery is solved by Philo season 1 this may well not be the case. Given that season 2 was commissioned prior to the release of season 1, Legendary Television and Amazon Studios must both be congratulated for bringing that season to a conclusive (and compelling) end in the final episode. *****  

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #64: now out, at last!

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

Sorry for making you all wait so long for this issue, especially the contributors, who have been so patient while I've been kept busy by freelance work. Rather than keep anyone waiting longer, we're going to put out the pdf now and return later to add extra formats.

This issue contains four stories: “September Gathering” by Charles Wilkinson, “Disappearer” by Matthew Amundsen, “The Haunted Brick” by Walt Brunston, and “Chemicalia” by me, plus twelve reviews, by Rafe McGregor, Douglas J. Ogurek, Jacob Edwards and me. One hundred and thirty-eight pages of fabulous fiction and rollicking reviews!

In this issue our team reviews Artificial Condition by Martha Wells, Autumn Snow: The Wildlands Hunt by Martin Charbonneau and Gary Chalk, BFS Journal #18 edited by Allen Stroud, Hounds of the Underworld by Dan Rabarts and Lee Murray, Pegging the President by Michael Moorcock and Kaijumax, Season Two by Zander Cannon, plus the films Spectre, Venom, The Meg and The Predator, and the television shows Agents of Shield, Season 5 and Westworld, Season 2.

---

Here are the splendid contributors to this issue:

Charles Wilkinson’s publications include The Pain Tree and Other Stories (London Magazine Editions, 2000), while his stories have appeared in Best Short Stories 1990 (Heinemann), Best English Short Stories 2 (W.W. Norton, USA), Best British Short Stories 2015 (Salt) and in genre magazines/anthologies such as Black Static, The Dark Lane Anthology, Supernatural Tales, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, Phantom Drift (USA), Bourbon Penn (USA), Shadows & Tall Trees (Canada), Nightscript (USA) and Best Weird Fiction 2015 (Undertow Books, Canada). His anthology of strange tales and weird fiction, A Twist in the Eye, is now out from Egaeus Press and his second collection from the same publisher Splendid in Ash is available to order. A full-length collection of his poetry is forthcoming from Eyewear. He lives in Wales.

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonym for a writer living somewhere on Earth. Though banned on Mars, his fiction appears in over forty Earth publications. Ogurek founded the controversial literary subgenre known as unsplatterpunk, which uses splatterpunk conventions (e.g. extreme violence, gore, taboo subject matter) to deliver a positive message. He guest-edited Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #58: UNSPLATTERPUNK!, the first ever unsplatterpunk anthology, and then its follow-up, UNSPLATTERPPUNK! 2. He also reviews films for us. Recent longer works include the young adult novel Branch Turner vs the Currants (World Castle Publishing) and the horror/suspense novella Encounter at an Abandoned Church (Scarlet Leaf Publishing). More at www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com. Twitter: www.twitter.com/unsplatter.

Jacob Edwards also writes 42-word reviews for Derelict Space Sheep. His website is at www.jacobedwards.id.au, his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/JacobEdwardsWriter, and his Twitter account is at www.twitter.com/ToastyVogon.

Matthew Amundsen has published novellas previously in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #35 (“House of Nowhere”) and #50 (“A Murder in Heaven”) and short stories in such magazines as Cemetery Moon, Jersey Devil Press, Millennium SF & F and Starsong.  In addition, he has written literary and music criticism for alternative weeklies in Athens, Georgia, and brainwashed.com. When not writing, he is a sound engineer and musician in Minneapolis.

Rafe McGregor lectures at Leeds Trinity University and the University of York. He is the author of The Value of Literature, two novels, six collections of short fiction, and two hundred articles, essays, and reviews. His most recent book is The Adventures of Roderick Langham, a collection of occult detective stories.

Stephen Theaker is the co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. His reviews, interviews and articles have appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Prism and the BFS Journal.

Walt Brunston’s adaptation of the classic television story, Space University Trent: Hyperparasite, is now available on Kindle.

---

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

The Wildlands Hunt by Martin Charbonneau and Gary Chalk | review by Rafe McGregor

The Wildlands Hunt is the second instalment of the new Lone Wolf gamebook series, which began with The Pit of Darkness in 2017, and follows the adventures of New Order Kai Konor Autumn Snow. Like its predecessor, The Wildlands Hunt is crowdfunded, with progression from funding to delivery proceeding much quicker and smoother the second time around. The project was launched on 28 January 2017, received the required initial funding of €4000 the following day, received €15,000 within a fortnight, and the volume was published in October 2018. Megara Entertainment was founded in 2007 and director Mikaël Louys appears to have been transparent about the company’s financial situation throughout. In March this year, for example, Megara published a hardback collector’s edition of Grey Star the Wizard. This was the first in a short spin-off series – The World of Lone Wolf – that followed the adventures of Grey Star, a Shianti wizard. The four books were written by Ian Page, illustrated by Paul Bonner, and edited by Joe Dever, creator of Lone Wolf and Lone Wolf’s world, Magnamund. Grey Star the Wizard (1985) was succeeded by The Forbidden City (1985), Beyond the Nightmare Gate (1985) and War of the Wizards (1986), making 1985 the most prolific year for the franchise, with The World of Lone Wolf 1–3 published alongside Lone Wolf 4–6 (The Chasm of Doom, Shadow on the Sand and The Kingdoms of Terror). On the Kickstarter updates, Louys reveals that Megara published Grey Star the Wizard at a loss, selling a disappointing two hundred copies. He seems undeterred, however, and after revision of the production model, launched The Forbidden City project as Grey Star the Wizard was released. The campaign has reached €11,845, exceeding its €8000 goal, although the stated delivery date of December 2018 is likely overambitious. For those who have followed the vicissitudes of Lone Wolf publication (which I related in my reviews of Lone Wolf 21: Voyage of the Moonstone and Lone Wolf 29: The Storms of Chai), it will come as no surprise to hear that Megara are currently in the midst of financial problems. The Wildlands Hunt is printed in the same format as The Pit of Darkness (medium octavo hardback), retails at €40 (delivery included), and is only available from the Megara website (www.megara-entertainment.com).  I ordered my copy on 12 October (the transaction cost me a total of just under £37, but no doubt this will rise in direct proportion to Brexit chaos). On 12 November, I received an email from Louys stating that there had been a delay caused by issues with investors. The book arrived on 24 November, along with a free copy of the collector’s edition of Fabled Lands 1: The War-Torn Kingdom by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson (first published in 1996; published by Megara in 2014). My assessment is that Megara are scrupulously honest, but that until the publishing uncertainty is resolved, buyers should be wary. On a related note, I must admit to not contributing to either Autumn Snow Kickstarter project – as much as I long for more Lone Wolf gamebooks, past experience has made me wary of paying any small presses upfront.

Like The Pit of Darkness, The Wildlands Hunt has been released in French and English and combines the literary expertise of Martin Charbonneau with the artistic expertise of Gary Chalk. The volume is a perfect companion to The Pit of Darkness, with another wonderful colour cover by Chalk, twenty new full-page black and white illustrations, and several smaller ones that I didn’t recognise from previous publications.  Chalk’s artwork is widely-praised for an instantly-recognisable style that foregrounds clear lines, the use of negative space, and deliberately disproportionate figures. His drawings are also incredibly expressive, as a quick comparison of the illustrations for sections 65, 140 and 318 reveals. The first depicts the Ragadorn city guard, three men oozing so much menace and hostility that the picture alone motivated my decision to avoid the encounter. The Red Mask slaver in 140 looks just as deadly and dangerous, but Chalk’s representation provides a subtle invitation to the player to take up combat. Finally, the stagecoach ticket-seller is depicted with consummate pathos, imprisoned behind the bars of his counter, lending a melancholy mood to what purports to be an occasion for celebration. In keeping with The Pit of Darkness, there is no colour map in The Wildlands Hunt (these have been a mainstay of the Lone Wolf series to date), but my parcel arrived with a separate map (in colour) of the city of Ragadorn (where the second part of the adventure takes place). While I appreciate the gesture from Megara, I thought it detracted from the high production values of the gamebook, a laminated A4 sheet (too big to be slipped inside the book) that is functional rather than artistic and also superfluous to play (I didn’t use it at all). My review of The Pit of Darkness was critical of the number of typos and formatting errors, but there are much fewer of the former and none of the latter in the second instalment of the series (in my gameplay, anyway). There are, however, occasionally unusual turns of phrase and I wonder if this is a consequence of translation from the original French. At times these can simply read a little awkwardly, but one instance seems to make a racial slur against a particular character – which, permissible though it might be in a fantasy world is unnecessarily provocative in the context of publication and incongruous with the humanism that pervades the franchise. (I have not read the French version, though, so it may well be the result of a loss in translation.)

I gave The Pit of Darkness high praise for its balance in terms of gaming: difficult but not impossible; solving the perennial problem of healing and endurance point recovery; and presenting progressively more challenging encounters. The second and third of these hold for The Wildlands Hunt, which adds two more welcome elements. First, the use of the Kai disciplines is perfectly pitched – they all prove useful somewhere and no one in particular is essential for completing the gamebook. Second, there is a clear game (although not narrative) structure: the adventure begins with Autumn Snow held prisoner on a pirate ship; she must then navigate the trials and tribulations of Ragadorn; finally, she ventures out into the Wildlands that separate Ragadorn from her homeland of Sommerlund. My only complaint with respect to the game is that I found it too easy. Granted, my version of Autumn Snow is now an Aspirant, able to use six rather than five Kai disciplines, but as she failed to accrue anything of great value in The Pit of Darkness, she isn’t particularly powerful. I have always equipped my various Kai characters – Lone Wolf, True Friend (in the New Order series), and now Autumn Snow – with a bow and this was especially useful in The Wildlands Hunt. On reflection, I wonder if it was too useful and that without it the Wildlands would have proved much more dangerous than they were in my gameplay. My main criticism of the gamebook is its narrative. Despite the exemplary game structure, the story itself fails to fit the overarching narrative initiated by The Pit of Darkness and to match the internal rigour of the various Lone Wolf series so far. The Pit of Darkness concluded with Autumn Snow losing her Kai mentor and discovering a Nadziranim (evil sorcerer) plot set to unfold in the Maakenmire swamp. The final section saw Autumn Snow on the island of Kirlu, headed for Misty Bay and thence to Sommerlund, where she would report to her Kai superiors in the hope of being dispatched on the mission to the Maakenmire. The title of the second adventure was revealed as Slaves of the Mire, which appeared to reference this mission. When the title was changed to The Wildlands Hunt, I assumed this would chart the journey of the mission from Sommerlund to the Maakenmire through the Wildlands. When I began playing The Wildlands Hunt, it seemed as if the slings and arrows of fortune had taken Autumn Snow off course and the hunt of the Wildlands would feature her as the hunted, attempting to reach Sommerlund by land rather than by sea, fleeing from enemies in Ragadorn. Instead, Autumn Snow is the hunter in the Wildlands, having teamed up with an new ally – Athania, captain of the Valkharim (personal guard to the Overlord of Ragadorn) – and pursuing an exciting but irresponsible digression from her duty to report to her Kai superiors. While in the Wildlands there is a further twist setting the whole campaign in a different direction, although the title of book three is (once again) Slaves of the Mire… so perhaps the overarching plot has not been lost after all. This sense of meandering over mission is replicated internally and while the whole game is fast-paced, much of the action seems incidental or supplementary. This is the first gamebook set in Dever’s Magnamund that has, in consequence of his untimely death in November 2016, been published without his guiding hand. Dever’s influence as a master gamer and accomplished storyteller defied detection, but is revealed in its absence – the lack of the economy, artifice and vision that have underpinned all of the previous gamebooks, including The Pit of Darkness. I concluded my review of the latter by stating that the series could be the best addition to Magnamund since the Magnakai campaign ended in 1988, but I fear that it has, like Autumn Snow herself, lost direction.

The Predator | review by Rafe McGregor

Two lonely men too many…

Alien vs. Predator (2004, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson) confirmed that the Alien and Predator franchises (of four and two films respectively, at the time) were set in the same universe.  Although the first crossover and its sequel were both commercial successes, they were rightly panned by critics and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007, directed by Colin and Greg Strause) is the lowest-grossing film in both franchises (when adjusted for inflation).  I remember my initial reaction to news of the release of Alien vs. Predator being what’s the point, quickly followed by who are we supposed to root for?  There are deeper problems with the intersection of the two franchises, however, an essential incompatibility that may explain some of the artistic failures of both films. First, Alien (1979, directed by Ridley Scott) is a paradigmatic work of cinematic art, part of the canon of not just great science fiction, but great film. While the quality may have varied, all five of its sequels have retained the thematic complexity and stylistic sophistication of the original. In contrast, Predator (1987, directed by John McTiernan) is essentially an action spectacular, a testosterone-fuelled charge through the jungle terminating in an Arnie vs. alien duel to the death.  Second, the Alien franchise has employed a wide range of cinematic effects and techniques to represent a species at the very limits of human conception whereas the predators in the Predator franchise have (up until now) clearly been men in monster suits (Kevin Peter Hall, who stood at seven feet two inches, for the first two), an updated creature from the Black Lagoon with an anthropodic mandible that looks like it would be able to hold food as effectively as a dog’s dewclaw.

In other words, the Predator franchise has, at best, been the superficial, juvenile, and action-obsessed relative to the Alien franchise, neither striving for nor achieving the latter’s artistic or technical excellence. For all its simplicity, Predator was nonetheless very entertaining, deserving of its 80% on the Tomatometer with a narrative as strong and toned as Arnold Schwarzenegger and his musclebound henchmen. Predator 2 (1990, directed by Stephen Hopkins) brought the predator to the urban jungle, which seemed like a good idea, but was poorly-executed with curious decisions to use a dystopian futuristic Los Angeles as its setting and to replace Arnie with Danny Glover. Glover was an unlikely and unconvincing action hero, in the middle of his appearances as Roger Murtaugh – whose catchphrase was I’m too old for this shit – in the Lethal Weapon franchise. In consequence Predator 2 was also deserving of its Tomatometer score, a deplorable 27%.  The third film, Predators (2010, directed by Nimród Antal) returned to the rural jungle and the hunter-turned-hunted storyline of the first. Critical responses were better, with the Tomatometer raised to an acceptable 65%, but the plot was improbable, a duplication of the original that made little or no sense. Neither the belated decision to accord a female character a significant part (Isabelle, played by Alice Braga) nor the acting talents of Adrien Brody and Laurence Fishburne were sufficient to overcome Predators’ B-movie presentation, consolidated by a disappointing climax that was also a pale imitation of Predator.

20^th Century Fox kept prospective audiences of The Predator in suspense pre-release, providing very little information beyond a return to Earth (true), another tough-guy protagonist (in a manner of speaking), and a promise to fill in the gaps between Predator 2 and Predators (false). The film is directed by Shane Black, who played the part of Rick Hawkins in Predator.  Black has previously directed the underrated Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), the well-received Iron Man 3 (2013), and the entertaining but morally problematic The Nice Guys (2016). Perhaps Black was too comfortable with his multiple roles within the franchise – starring in the first and co-writing (with Fred Dekker) and directing the fourth – but after three successful outings as a director, he has crashed and burned on the fourth. The Predator is by far the worst film of the franchise to date, including the disastrous crossovers (scoring 20% and 11% on the Tomatometer respectively). Crashing and burning is where the narrative begins, with a premise that is plausible if not particularly imaginative. The predator species is evolving such that an internecine conflict is raging between their equivalents of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. At an unspecified time, which seems close to the near-future of Predator 2, one of the former crash-lands on earth in the middle of a US special forces team’s hostage rescue operation in an unspecified Latin American country. The team’s captain, Quinn McKenna (played by Boyd Holbrook), is the sole survivor of the encounter, escaping, evading, and mailing the alien’s helmet to his estranged wife in order to provide evidence for the inquiry to come.  The story then switches to Quinn’s young son, Rory (played by Jacob Tremblay), who is on the autistic spectrum but has an eidetic memory and a genius for languages. Despite the segue facilitated by the mailing of the helmet, I did wonder why anyone thought a depiction of troubled childhood had a place in a science fiction thriller and the scene does indeed herald some of the many problems that follow.

There is nothing wrong with genre braiding, blending, or bending, but a film that tries to be all things to all audiences runs the risk of substantive incoherence. Black has mixed science fiction, action adventure, family drama, gross-out horror, and comedy and the mélange is as messy and self-contradictory as the list implies. The comedy is especially poor and the fact that it is initiated when Quinn is placed on a bus full of mentally-disabled veterans is indicative of its taste and wit. It is also indicative of the many inconsistencies of the film: we are invited to sympathise with some mentally disabled people (Rory), but to laugh at others (the five veterans).  The comedy is further diminished by numerous in-jokes (many of which were lost on me), but the film also fails as a parody. Aside from the genre chaos, The Predator stages a shocking waste of talent. Trevante Rhodes, Sterling K. Brown, Keegan-Michael Key, and Thomas Jayne are all accomplished actors yet they deliver dialogue that aspires to be cringeworthy. There is also an apparently appalling absence of expert advice on subjects crucial to the plot (I use the term loosely), including (but unfortunately not limited to) biology, linguistics, aerodynamics, and military hardware and etiquette. Yes, I know it’s fiction and science fiction at that, but one cannot choose what does and doesn’t pass through one’s bowels and university professors are not trained to use automatic weapons. Dr Casey Bracket (played by Olivia Munn) is not only handy in a gunfight, but can survive a tranquiliser dose designed for a predator and run as fast as a spaceship can crash-land. I must have missed those courses on the last staff training day. Somehow, The Predator has managed a wildly exaggerated 34% on the Tomatometer. A far better indication of its artistic and entertainment value is that my fellow film nerd and I were the only two people in the movie theatre… we were two lonely men too many. *

UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2 (TQF63): now out in paperback and ebook!

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

GUEST-EDITED BY DOUGLAS J. OGUREK

“Ghastly.” “Bloodthirsty.” “Transgressive.” “Over-the-top violence and sexual deviation.” So said the reviews of UNSPLATTERPUNK!, the first official collection in the unsplatterpunk subgenre.

Now, seven goreslingers and propriety defilers have grossed up their game to deliver UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2. True to the unsplatterpunk subgenre, these stories deliver a moral message while shocking or repulsing the reader. The collection includes a foreword by criminologist, philosopher, and aesthetic commentator Rafe McGregor.

Returning contributor Drew Tapley kicks off the awfulness on an impressively juvenile note with the anthology's most straightforward story. In “First Kiss”, a high school student deals with an expulsive situation with as much stoicism as Conan the Barbarian… maybe “Barfbarian” is more relevant. Trophy hunting is Triffooper Saxelbax’s target as his protagonist, a designer of controversial augmented reality games, takes on the corporate obsession with teamwork in “The Villainy of Solitude”. Hugh Alsin’s satirical piece “Convention Hitler!” explores intolerance run amok when the story’s namesake attends a British horror convention. In “The Music of Zeddy Graves”, Stephen Theaker brings his planet-hopping duo of Rolnikov and Pelney to Melodia, whose inhabitants participate in an endless music festival, and whose main attraction goes to gruesome extremes to achieve her compositions. Douglas J. Ogurek’s “Gunkectomy” alternates between an embittered architect/author and a husband hunter who finds commercial and social value in her earwax. “The Tapestry of Roubaix” by Howard Phillips seems to come off the shelf of a nineteenth century library, until it reveals what the protagonist does in his washbasin. M.S. Swift, another returning contributor, closes out the collection with “The Bones of Old England”, an extravaganza of mania-induced carnage.

Delve deep into the cesspool that is UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2, and remember – sometimes to learn a lesson, you might have to get dirty.

---

Here are the unsplattered contributors to this issue:

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonym for a writer living somewhere on Earth. Though banned on Mars, his fiction appears in over forty Earth publications. Ogurek founded the controversial literary subgenre known as unsplatterpunk, which uses splatterpunk conventions (e.g. extreme violence, gore, taboo subject matter) to deliver a positive message. He guest-edited Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #58: UNSPLATTERPUNK!, the first ever unsplatterpunk anthology. He also reviews films at that same ezine. Recent longer works include the young adult novel Branch Turner vs the Currants (World Castle Publishing) and the horror/suspense novella Encounter at an Abandoned Church (Scarlet Leaf Publishing). More at www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com. Twitter: @unsplatter

Drew Tapley is a copywriter, journalist and filmmaker based in Toronto.

Howard Phillips is the author of His Nerves Extruded, The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta and The Day the Moon Wept Blood.

Howard Watts provides the exceptional wraparound cover for this issue.

Hugh Alsin is a writer who now stays away from conventions, although he stresses that the events in his story are completely fictitious, and any resemblance to people living or dead is either unintentional or for the purposes of satire or parody.

M.S. Swift’s work has been published in a wide range of horror and fantasy anthologies, including the first TQF unsplatterpunk collection. Swift’s writing is inspired by the landscape and mythology of his native Britain. He recently completed a witch hunter novel set in an alternative medieval Britain and is seeking a publisher courageous enough to back it.

Rafe McGregor lectures at Leeds Trinity University and the University of York. He is the author of The Value of Literature, two novels, six collections of short fiction, and two hundred articles, essays, and reviews. His most recent book is The Adventures of Roderick Langham, a collection of occult detective stories.

Stephen Theaker has written several novels, but does not recommend reading them.

Triffooper Saxelbax is an emerging (and often grating) voice in the unsplatterpunk subgenre. When he is not writing, he stir-fries vegetables and decorates pine cones. His work has not been translated into any other languages. Neither has it been nominated for nor appeared in the year’s best so and so. Saxelbax’s mental exertions have caused numerous regional power outages.

---

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

Spectre | review by Rafe McGregor

Weird Bond.

Like Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, Ian Fleming seemed to tire of his literary creation quickly. After three novels presented almost exclusively from James Bond’s point of view, he is absent from the first chapter of the fourth, the first ten chapters of the fifth, and the latter – From Russia, with Love (1957) – ends with him dying at the hands (or, rather, the foot) of Colonel Klebb of the Soviet Union’s SMERSH. Bond was resurrected in Dr No (1958), but there were a series of departures and experimentations after Goldfinger (1959): For Your Eyes Only (1960) is a collection of five short stories; Thunderball (1961) is Fleming’s novelisation of a screenplay, which he wrote with four collaborators; The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) is written in the first person, from the point of view of a Canadian woman, with Bond appearing only in the final third; On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) ends with Bond being married and immediately widowed; and You Only Live Twice (1964) ends with Bond en route to the Soviet Union where – we imagine – imprisonment, torture and death await. The remaining two books were published after Fleming’s death. Bond was resurrected for the second time in The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), but Fleming had completed only a first draft by the time of his death and the novel is slim and unsatisfying. Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966) is a collection of four short stories, two of which are very short indeed. I cannot recommend any of the fourteen books because although Fleming was a master storyteller whose clean, crisp prose is reminiscent of Hemingway, the narratives all betray implicit and explicit racism and homophobia and a misogyny that borders on sexual sadism. I mention them, however, because of the “SPECTRE Trilogy”, which comprises Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice. The trilogy provides the most comprehensive portrayal of Bond’s private life, fleshing out his personality beyond his profession as an authorised assassin. It also stretches the espionage thriller genre to its very limits, spilling over into speculative fiction.

These days there is nothing unusual about mixing crime, thriller and mystery fiction with horror, fantasy or science fiction, but the elements of strangeness stand out like a sore thumb in Fleming, whose success was built on a hard and fast realism authenticated by his service with Royal Naval Intelligence during the Second World War. Thunderball introduces the SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Revenge and Extortion (SPECTRE) and its sinister head, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The novel begins with an incredible and unlikely coincidence that turns out to be entirely supplementary to the central narrative. Bond just happens to be recuperating in the same spa as an undercover SPECTRE agent at the same time as SPECTRE launches its first global operation and the feud between the two men, which is unrelated to the subsequent search for nuclear missiles, occupies the first third of the story. Coincidence is central to the narrative of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The novel opens with Bond fed up with his failure to find Blofeld. He happens to have a fleeting romance with Teresa di Vincenzo, who happens to be the daughter of the head of the Unione Corse (Corsican mafia), who happens to be one of the only people in Europe with the resources Bond requires. The conclusion is even more unlikely. After Bond and his criminal cronies destroy Blofeld’s Alpine retreat, he arranges to meet Teresa in Munich, where they intend to marry. Blofeld and his sidekick-cum-lover Irma Bunt not only escape, but decide to flee to Munich as well and – in a city with a population of more than a million – just happen to bump into Bond on the street. The surreal, strange and coincidental reach their apotheosis in You Only Live Twice. The novel opens with Bond on his last legs professionally, bungling jobs as he pines for Teresa. In an act of kindness, M sends him on a diplomatic mission to negotiate British access to a Japanese cipher machine. The head of the Japanese secret service agrees to provide access if Bond performs a service for him. That service is the assassination of a man who has established a garden of death – containing deadly plants, insects and fish – where hundreds of forlorn Japanese have flocked to commit suicide. In the most incredible coincidence of the entire series, the gardener – the ludicrously-named Guntram Shatterhand – turns out to be Blofeld in his third incarnation, complete with Bunt in tow. As if this wasn’t fantastic enough, Fleming saves the most surreal part until the end: Bond becomes an amnesiac, Bond fathers a child with Kissy Susuki, and Bond leaves Japan for the USSR.

Thunderball (1965, directed by Terrence Young) was the fourth Bond film and was followed by You Only Live Twice (1967, Lewis Gilbert) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969, Peter R. Hunt). The film version of You Only Live Twice bears little resemblance to the novel, conforming to what had already been established as the template for the series: Bond discovers the lair of a supervillain, Bond infiltrates the supervillain’s lair, Bond and his allies battle the supervillain’s army, and Bond saves the world from (usually nuclear) destruction. The villain in this case was indeed Blofeld and the battle set in Japan, but he is holed up in a volcano attempting to provoke World War Three by interfering with US and USSR spaceships. Sam Mendes’ Spectre actually has much more in common with Fleming’s novel, which is why I have described the SPECTRE Trilogy in so much detail. Casino Royale was the first Bond novel (1953) and twenty-first film (2006). Director Martin Campbell took advantage of the coincidence of the prototypical title with Daniel Craig’s first appearance as Bond to reboot the Eon Production series. The series was also revitalised by presenting Casino Royale as the first half of what appeared at the time to be a two-part narrative: Quantum of Solace (2008, directed by Marc Foster) begins minutes after Casino Royale ends and sets the new Bond up against a new enemy, a mysterious organisation called Quantum. While the third Craig film, Mendes’ Skyfall (2012), appeared to return to the previous standalone format, it also emphasised a monumental change in the series since the Roger Moore films of my youth. Yes, directors were making Bond more palatable to contemporary audiences, but the quality of the films was almost incomparable. Take the cast of Skyfall as an example: Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Naomie Harris, and Ralph Fiennes – it is no exaggeration to say that all six of these are great actors. And that ignores Albert Finney, Ben Wishaw, and Rory Kinnear in supporting roles. Skyfall turns attention to Bond’s aging, exploiting Craig’s aging in real life (potentially problematic for the physicality with which he plays Bond) and the four year interval between the second and third instalments of the reboot to the director’s advantage. With aging comes reflection and, in a similar manner to the SPECTRE Trilogy, the audience discovers a great deal about Bond and his childhood. As Spectre will show, Skyfall is not in fact a departure from the Quantum narrative, but a setting up for the final instalment, where Bond will be faced with a battle that is personal rather than professional.

Spectre offers us even more information about Bond’s childhood: we already know he is an orphan; now we find out that his parents died in a climbing accident and that an Austrian man named Hannes Oberhauser became his legal guardian until the death of Oberhauser and his own son, Franz, in an avalanche. One is immediately struck by the weirdness of Spectre – weird as in strange and fantastic like You Only Live Twice, but also weird in the speculative fiction sense, specifically China Miéville’s definition of the weird in terms of the cephalopod nature of its monsters (set out in his essay “M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire”, published in Collapse IV in 2008). Quantum is revealed to be cover for a more pervasive and powerful organisation, SPECTRE, and in the opening scene the emblem of this organisation is disclosed as a seven-tentacled octopus. The title sequence, a significant part of the film series since it began, features giant black octopuses, sucker-studded tentacles, and cephalopod ink bullets. In an interview about his creation, title designer Daniel Kleinman said: “I thought the bit with the lovers and the octopus’s arms coming ’round them just had the right level of sensuality but creepy weirdness to it.” Creepy weirdness is right and continues long past the credits as it becomes evident that this film is not about Bond’s professional endeavours, but about the personal battle between Bond and Franz Oberhauser (played by Christoph Waltz). Franz, Bond’s childhood companion, faked his own death in the avalanche and recreated himself as Blofeld, soon to be head of SPECTRE. Oberhauser/Blofeld has in fact orchestrated all of the key events of not only this narrative, but the entire reboot and has been enjoying tormenting the child he hated for becoming the cuckoo in the Oberhauser nest. Reciprocally, we discover that Oberhauser/Blofeld actually killed his father out of jealousy, in consequence of which the young Bond literally created his own archenemy.

In The Weird and the Eerie (published in 2016), the late Mark Fisher describes the weird as “a signal that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete”, producing feelings of both disapproval and pleasure in the audience. Spectre is, in this sense, essentially weird, staging such encounters on both the dramatic and thematic levels: the Secret Intelligence Service, run by M (played by Fiennes) is about to be absorbed into a new National Security Service, to be run by the current head of the Security Service, C (played by Andrew Scott); and Bond’s entire career with the Secret Intelligence Service is exposed as nothing more than the pursuit of his adopted brother, whose career in organised crime and terrorism was inadvertently initiated by Bond himself. Aside from the ever-present symbol of the octopus, there are several more subtle allusions to the weird: the man without a face motif; the rats in the walls in Tangier (or, rather, one very important mouse); the reminder of cosmic indifference in the meteorite display; and the surreal sequences in Blofeld’s North African lair. The film is also striking in two other aspects. First, the number of cinematic references to previous films. Spectre manages, in one way or another, to provide visual quotations of the majority of its twenty-three predecessors, perhaps even all of them. (The most obvious sources being You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die and The World Is Not Enough.) Spectre also references the SPECTRE Trilogy, reproducing the novels’ shift from professional and public to personal and private, from Bond with free agency to Bond’s life as determined by destiny, and from hard-bitten realism to fully-fledged fantasy. The second aspect is, once again, the quality of acting and actors – if anything, an improvement on Skyfall as Craig, Fiennes, Harris, Wishaw, and Kinnear are joined by Waltz, Scott, Léa Seydoux and Monica Bellucci. My single reservation about Spectre has nothing to do with the film itself. Craig is returning for the as-yet-unnamed Bond 25, which was being directed by Danny Boyle until he withdrew from the project earlier this month, and is due for release late next year. The reboot has told the new Bond’s story from recruitment to retirement, but now he’s back. Will there be a rehash of previous recalls from retirement, cinematic and literary? If so, that will be disappointing given the ingenuity and innovation that have characterised the reboot so far – an achievement all the more impressive for being based on novels that have been past their sell-by date for more than five decades. *****

The Meg | review by Rafe McGregor

Size matters.

I first watched Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) on the small screen in the late seventies or possibly in 1980 or 1981 – some time in the second half of my first decade. I don’t remember the year or whether my experience was courtesy of videotape or 8mm film, but I do remember being absolutely, completely, and utterly terrified. So scared that for a weeks I was reluctant to bath, let alone swim in a pool. That didn’t last, but the fear of sharks did. Not exactly clinical galeophobia or even enough to keep me from swimming in the sea, but enough to cause some of the physical symptoms of the phobia for nearly four more decades of seeing sharks on film and in dreams. As is well known, Jaws became the prototypical Hollywood blockbuster and its form, style, and content have been emulated with more or less success for forty-three years. The film also became a franchise, spawning three sequels with diminishing critical and commercial returns: the best thing about Jaws 2 (1978) was its tagline (“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water”); Jaws 3-D (1983) was as disappointing as the other attempts to revive 3D cinema in the early eighties; and Jaws: The Revenge (1987) was nominated for eight Golden Raspberry Awards, achieved a rare but well-deserved 0% on the Tomatometer, and showed that even the great Michael Caine can make poor career choices. None of the four were, however, financial failures and the shark movie was soon established as a subgenre of the horror film.

In consequence, Jaws has been responsible for four decades of mostly poor shark movies. There have been a couple of exceptions – such as Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea (1999) and Andrew Traucki’s The Reef (2010), both of which employed original takes on Spielberg’s initial conception of the shark as monster – but they have been regrettably rare. Mario Van Peebles’ USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage (2016) also deserves mention: it is history rather than horror, but the reality behind the representation doesn’t detract from dread of the longest and most deadly shark attack on record. The best of the bad are probably Open Water (2004), Dark Tide (2012), The Shallows (2016), and 47 Meters Down (2017), all of which have some quality in either innovation or casting. Moving from the bad to the ridiculous there have sadly been dozens of B-movies along the lines of The Last Shark (AKA The Great White, 1981), Night of the Sharks (1988), Deep Blood (1990), Cruel Jaws (1995), Shark Attack (1999), Shark Swarm (2008), 2-Headed Shark Attack (2012), 3-Headed Shark Attack (2015), 5-Headed Shark Attack (2017) – curiously, no four-headed shark attack (maybe they are friendly) – and the Sharknado franchise (five films released since 2013 with a sixth due later this month).

We can blame Jaws for decades of celluloid dross, but a far more damaging consequence was its impact on cultural perceptions of sharks as a clear and present danger to humanity – or at least humanity on, in, or under the water. Depending on which source one uses, the film either popularised or contributed to the popularisation of shark hunting, which in turn contributed to a steady decline in shark numbers, up to 90% in several species. The Western Australian shark cull, an implement of official government policy, began as recently as 2014 and was only terminated last year. A large number of shark species are currently considered either vulnerable or endangered. Statistically, one is as likely to be killed by a shark as a wolf and much more likely to be killed by lions, crocodiles, dogs, and a variety of insects, the most dangerous of which is the mosquito. Mosquitos don’t have quite the cinematic appeal of sharks and I’ve often wondered what it is about the latter that I find so frightening. Perhaps it isn’t sharks as such, but the fact that humans are always out of their depth in water, always cumbersome and clumsy with severely restricted vision, hearing, and smell. On the other hand, someone once suggested to me that the most terrifying monster imaginable was a giant disembodied mouth and a shark’s anatomy – particularly as represented on screen – seems little more than a delivery system for a giant mouth crammed with superhuman teeth complete with extendable jaws. Jaws…precisely.

If you are scared of sharks, like I am, then you may agree that the only thing more frightening than a shark is a bigger shark, which explains the contemporary fascination with Megalodon, a prehistoric shark species that disappeared over two and a half million years ago (sixty million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs). Fossil evidence reveals that Megalodon was similar to the Great White in appearance, but with blunter and wider jaws, and estimates of its length range from 10.5m (34ft) to 25m (82ft). As an aside, the famous Jaws poster – a mouthful of teeth attacking an unsuspecting swimmer from below – depicts a shark of Megalodon rather than Great White size. The largest verified Great White was just over 6m (20ft) and even Bruce, Spielberg’s mechanical shark, was just over 7.5m (25ft) in length. Fascination with Megalodon was fuelled by the discovery of a Coelacanth, a species of fish believed to have disappeared at the same time as the dinosaurs, off the south coast of South Africa in 1938. The giant shark has inspired numerous documentaries, including a now-notorious episode of the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, “Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives” (aired on 18 October 2013), which faked a Megalodon attack and sighting off the coast of Cape Town. The channel was widely criticised and George Monbiot wrote an intriguing (but distressing) article for the Guardian linking the pseudo-documentary directly to the Australian cull.

In addition to documentaries there have of course been Megalodon B-movies, thankfully few due to the difficulties of reproducing the monster on screen: Shark Attack 3: Megalodon (2002), Megalodon (2004), Attack of the Jurassic Shark (2012), and Sharkzilla (2012). This small collection includes many truly appalling special effects, but one of the few interesting aspects of Megalodon movies has been the tendency to exaggerate the size of the shark. This is of course permissible in a filmic fantasy – a shark the size of a submarine is no less believable than a shark resurrected after millions of years – but I think there is a sweet spot when it comes to size and fear, captured by Steven Spielberg in his focus on the Tyrannosaurus Rex in Jurassic Park (1993). T-Rex is big enough to rip a human being to pieces in as painful and personal a manner as a Velociraptor, but nowhere near the size of Godzilla, for whom a human being doesn’t provide enough calories to make the effort of eating one worthwhile. The monsters in Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla (1998) and Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla (2014) inspire shock and awe, but not the instinctive, visceral, stomach-churning fear of an approaching T-Rex. Too small means too vulnerable to contemporary technology, but too large means too distant and impersonal, a threat to the human species rather than the individual human being. This is the first note that The Meg strikes skilfully: the shark is giant rather than gargantuan, albeit it is at the top end of the estimates based on fossil evidence.

The premise of the story seemed surprisingly plausible – for someone with my limited oceanographic knowledge, anyway. Dr Minway Zhang (played by Winston Chao) and his team, which includes his daughter, Suyin (played by Li Bingbing), discover that the bottom of the Mariana Trench is an illusion, concealing a deeper abyss of relatively warm water. The initial exploration meets with immediate disaster when the submersible is disabled in a Megalodon attack, leaving the crew of three trapped. Enter Jonas Taylor (played by Jason Statham), world-famous deep sea rescue expert washed up on the shores of Thailand after claiming to have seen a Megalodon in the Phillipine Trench five years previously. His reluctance to return from retirement is reversed when he learns that one of the trapped scientists is his ex-wife, Lori (played by Jessica McNamee). Meanwhile, Suyin mounts her own rescue mission and by the time Taylor arrives both her and Lori need saving from the Megaladon, a giant squid, and the general inhospitability of life at eleven thousand metres under the sea. A Megalodon that far down doesn’t present much of a threat to human beings, but the disruption caused by the penetration into the abyss brings one back to the research rig. After making mincemeat of the facility’s two resident whales, the Megalodon heads for Sanya Bay, in China (just south west of Hong Kong), and the trouble – and fun – really begins. Jon Turteltaub’s CGI is for the most part photorealistic and he avoids the pitfalls of portraying the shark as supernatural – as too big, too fast, or too clever. My sole concern with regard to suspension of disbelief was about the shark’s origin. The trench provides a convincing explanation for why it has remained unknown to humanity, but I’m not sure that a creature whose habitat was so far below the sea would be able to survive – let alone thrive – on the surface. Having said that, the sheer spectacle of Megalodon breaching was enough to submerge any further pseudoscientific speculation on my part.

There are disappointing deliveries from Statham and Bingbing and the romantic relationship that develops between Taylor and Suyin is childishly chaste, almost prudish. Statham still looks good in a swimsuit at fifty, however, and flaunts a jawline that puts Megalodon to shame so perhaps one shouldn’t ask for too much more. There are also times when the film comes close to sinking into sickly-sweet sentimentality – between Suyin and Minway and between Suyin’s eight year old daughter, Meiying (played by Shuya Sophia Cai), and everyone else – but the dangerous doses of saccharin are offset by a sage scattering of comedy, much of which succeeds in being genuinely funny without resort to parody. The most remarkable aspect of the narrative is a temporal structure that matches the shark – lean, mean, and fully fit for purpose. The plot performs a perfect balancing act, pausing here and there to avoid the feel of a mindless action thriller but pushing the story forward with every scene. The poised pacing facilitates some thematic evolution, with reflection on contemporary environmental issues. Suyin argues for capturing rather than killing the Megalodon, although she is quickly overruled when it turns its attention from whales to fishing boats. Minway expresses his regret at being forced to repeat the historical pattern of humanity’s impact on the natural world – discovery followed by destruction – and there is a neat intersection of conceptions of exploration, assimilation, accommodation, and extermination in Turteltaub’s cinematic framework. The Meg is the first big budget shark film since Deep Blue Sea and has, like its predecessor, been panned by critics. The former’s Tomatometer score at the time of writing is 50%, just under the latter’s 56%, so in the interests of full disclosure I should probably add that I would also have awarded Deep Blue Sea four stars. ****

Westworld, Season 2, by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy & J.J. Abrams | review by Rafe McGregor

Narrative diffusion taken too far in underwhelming second season.

Stephen Theaker was not impressed by Westworld, the 2016 HBO series based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same name. In his review in TQF59, Stephen introduces the premise of the series as a live action role play version of the videogame Red Dead Redemption, where the player characters are actual human beings (guests) and the non-player characters androids (hosts). He astutely identifies a paradox in the USP of the holiday park: the guests are either motivated by wanting to experience life in the Old West (or at least the Old West as represented in the Western movie genre) or by wanting to act out their fantasies free of consequence. The former would likely be horrified by the behaviour of the latter (which involves a great deal of physical and/or sexual abuse of the hosts) and the latter would be afraid of their behaviour being recorded (during the course of monitoring the hosts). And indeed one of the disclosures in season 2 is that Delos (the company that owns Westworld) have built a database of every single action of every single guest that has ever visited (albeit not for the purpose of extortion). Setting the paradox aside, however, I thought that the sophisticated exploration of evaluative and descriptive conceptions of humanity (and the relationship between them) made for compelling viewing and I would have pushed Stephen’s three stars to all the way up to five.

The thematic focus of season 1 was the growth of consciousness (or intentionality or subjectivity – these are slippery terms) in several of the hosts, particularly Dolores (played by Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (played by Thandie Newton) and their consequent transformation from android to host-human-hybrid. The two took different paths to hybridity, although both had their basis in memory: where hosts are wiped and, in effect recovered (rather than rebooted) at the end of each storyline, both Dolores and Maeve remembered the previous harms they had suffered and the previous lives they had lived. As one would expect, the primary goal of a host-human-hybrid – having grown what we might call a mind, soul, or self (again, all slippery terms) – was to break free from captivity and this was once again pursued by different means. Dolores led a revolution against Delos and the guests, which seemed as if it might have been accidentally or deliberately facilitated by Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins), one of the two masterminds behind host technology, while Maeve escaped under the guise of guesthood. At the eleventh hour, however, Maeve changed her mind and decided to return to Westworld in search of her daughter, despite having sufficient self-awareness to realise that both she and her daughter were hosts and the bond between them the result of programming. The set-up for season 2 was thus a kind of role reversal between Dolores and Maeve: Dolores from wide-eyed innocent to android avenger attempting a violent breach of the borders of the park and Maeve from cynical brothel-keeper to doting mother, delving deep into the park to find her lost child. Dolores’ plan is revealed in episode 2 and involves recruiting an army of hosts to break out of Westworld by sheer force of numbers. Meanwhile, Maeve’s quest in the opposite direction takes her and her sidekicks to Shogunworld (the existence of which was suggested at the end of season 1) in episode 3.

It will come as no surprise to viewers familiar with the work of either Nolan brother that the overarching narrative of season 2 does not unfold chronologically and is in fact concerned as much with the past as the future. The emergence of (at least) two distinct timelines in episode 1 is complicated by the way in which hosts experience time, i.e. as circular rather than linear. Episode 4 is mostly backstory and episode 8 almost entirely backstory – the latter galling coming so late in the narrative. The movement between subnarratives set either before or during season 1 and Dolores and Maeve’s projection towards the future in season 2 is complemented by the diffusion of the present of the narrative into four subnarratives at the midpoint of the season, in episode 5. While Dolores is raising her rebels and Maeve turning Japanese, William (AKA the Man in Black, played by Ed Harris) is trying to escape the chaos and Bernard Lowe (played by Jeffrey Lowe) trying, like the audience, to make sense of it. The subnarratives occasionally intersect, but are for the most part distinct and the deliberate loss of narrative focus reminded me first of a more old-fashioned type of television series and then an even more old-fashioned type of storytelling, the collection of a cycle of loosely-related short stories into a single volume, along the lines of Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow. I found the diversification of the narrative on the two levels – past and future as well as multiple presents – too close to narrative disintegration to maintain the level of interest I had in season 1.

The theme that emerges most clearly in season 2 is a mirror image of the central theme of season 1. Where the first season was concerned with hosts becoming more like humans, the second is concerned with humans becoming more like hosts: after all, a host without its memory wiped is immortal (if not indestructible). Season 2 explores several alternative ways in which humanity might achieve a human-host-hybridity that prioritises the human. Initially, the narrative presents a sophisticated take on what philosophers call the mind-body problem. The problem is the nature of the relationship between the physical and the mental, the body and the mind (or soul or self, depending on one’s view). There clearly is a relation between the two because if our central nervous system is damaged in certain ways, it can change not only our thoughts but also our personalities. On the other hand, we all have very similar brains, but – we like to believe – richly different experiences of the sensory world.  This unfathomable relationship between physical and mental means that the idea of transmigrating one’s mind into another body or uploading oneself into a machine isn’t even conceptually possible. Unless one believes in an immortal soul (which raises further complexities), there is simply nothing to take out of the body and put into something else: the mind does not sit in the body, central nervous system, or brain like a pearl in a shell; the pearl and shell are connected in some way that three millennia of philosophical and scientific inquiry have yet to explain. Nolan and Joy are well aware of this and allude to the problem in episode 4. In episode 7, however, the impossibility is reversed (or forgotten) as at least one human finds a way to maintain the (mental) self in a different (physical) form. I could probably have set this contradiction aside in the manner of the park’s USP paradox had Nolan and Joy not drawn attention to it three episodes earlier. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive (the season has an impressive Tomatometer score of 86%), but I suspect that viewers who enjoyed the sophistication of the way in which season 1 explored humanity, selfhood, and authenticity will find season 2 and its much-vaunted climax underwhelming.***

The Shape of Water | review by Rafe McGregor

Black Lagoon to Baltimore via the New Weird.

The Shape of Water, which was released in December 2017, received thirteen nominations for the 2018 Academy Awards – more than any other film – and won four, including Best Picture and Best Director. The film was conceived by Guillermo del Toro, who co-authored both the screenplay (with Vanessa Taylor) and the novel (with Daniel Kraus). The latter was released in March this year and publisher Macmillan are clear that it is not a novelisation, but a project that “has been developed from the ground up as a bold two-tiered release – one story interpreted by two artists in the independent mediums of film and literature.” I am not entirely convinced by this denial, having found the work lacking in the characteristics I associate with literature. The book should also not be confused with Andrea Camilleri’s 1994 Italian novel of the same name, La forma dell'acqua, which inaugurated the popular Inspector Montalbano detective series, was translated into English in 2002, and appeared on UK television screens in 2012. To return to the film, Del Toro’s premise picks up where an alternative Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, directed by Jack Arnold) might have left off, with the merman or piscine humanoid captured rather than killed.  

In the now cult classic horror movie, white men with guns plunder the deepest, darkest Amazon for first fossils and then the Gill-man who inhabits the lagoon of the title. It’s not quite clear how steaming upriver – away from the sea – brings the intrepid heroes to a saltwater lagoon, but perhaps we shouldn’t pull at that thread too hard. The white men with guns have thoughtfully brought along some brown men to feed to the monster and a white woman to feed to the audience’s appetite for eye candy (many swimsuit scenes) and ear candy (much high-pitched screaming). Despite the offensive stereotypes and poor special effects, the film is surprisingly strong in some of its storytelling. The use of a webbed, clawed hand as the monster’s motif was no doubt sinister at the time of release and the underwater cinematography is both functionally and formally effective, bringing a level of supra-human grace and power to the Gill-man in the water that stands in stark contrast to the actor staggering around in an oversized rubber suit on land. The narrative is also tautly constructed and cultivated, pushing the plot forward at a compelling pace without detracting from the portentous atmosphere. The first half of the film involves the discovery of the Gill-man, which produces a conflict between Dr David Reed (played by Richard Carlson), who wants to study it, and Dr Mark Williams (played by Richard Denning), who wants to kill it. Williams wins out and the ichthyologists hunt the Gill-man before it manages to turn the tables on them. Had Reed won the battle of wills, one could imagine (bearing in mind that the film is set at a time when Cold War tensions were escalating rapidly) that the United States (and Soviet Union) would very quickly have become interested in the military potential of the creature – as a weapon, as a subject of research for nuclear survival, or as an asset in the Space Race.

This is precisely what has happened in The Shape of Water, which jumps to the early nineteen sixties, with the Amphibian Man captured, imprisoned in an aquatic coffin, and transported from the Amazon to Baltimore for observation, study, and – ultimately – vivisection. The asset – as he is for the most part called – is played by Doug Jones (in his sixth collaboration with Del Toro) and is cast almost exactly in the image of the Gill-man, albeit with realistic representation replacing the rubber suit. Viewers who have watched Creature from the Black Lagoon will notice Del Toro’s emphasis on the asset’s clawed, webbed hand – although in a much more subtle manner than Taylor. The story unfolds largely from the perspective of protagonist Elisa Esposito (played by Sally Hawkins), an apparently physically disabled woman who works as a cleaner at a secret government installation in Baltimore. The antagonist to Hawkins’ protagonist is Richard Strickland (played by Michael Shannon), a former military officer turned intelligence operative who functions as both head of security and the asset’s handler. In Del Toro’s tale, Strickland is the monster and he embodies everything that is bad about white maleness and the hypocrisy of an American society dually obsessed with prosperity and decency. Elisa first befriends and then falls in love with the asset and the plot follows her attempt to free him from captivity and save him from the scalpel. Like Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Shape of Water is well-paced, moving swiftly from scene to scene in a way that maintains tension and without feeling rushed. The conclusion is fitting for a film labelled as a “romantic dark fantasy drama”.

This crossover of genres – romance, fantasy, and drama, with a touch of horror – is one of several indications that the film belongs to the tradition of Weird fiction. In my review of The City & the City in May I noted the coincidence that two of the best known works in the New Weird genre had been released on the UK small screen within a month of each other. I introduced the genre in my review of Annihilation in March, paraphrasing Jeff VanderMeer’s (author of the Southern Reach trilogy) characterisation of it as combining real-world complexity with transgressive fantasy and contemporary political relevance. I added that the work of both China Miéville (author of The City & The City) and VanderMeer self-consciously subverts one of the central themes of Lovecraft’s Weird oeuvre, his racially-motivated aversion to and obsession with miscegenation.  Similarly, Del Toro portrays the monstrous as positive rather than negative, as a subject of curiosity rather than fear. Like both VanderMeeer and Miéville, he represents miscegenation as a site of empowerment, enhancement, or evolution as opposed to contamination. This makes The Shape of Water the first – or at least the first critically and commercially successful – film in the New Weird genre and, again, there is a puzzling coincidence in the release of The Shape of Water, Annihilation, and The City & the City all within a few months of each other. Given my penchant for the genre, I should perhaps be a little more enthusiastic about the work, but two considerations deterred me from awarding a fifth star. The first is that one needs to be familiar with Creature from the Black Lagoon for a comprehensive appreciation of The Shape of Water (and had I not seen the former, I might well have dropped a second star from the latter). Second, in the words of the director of my own non-secret, non-government institution, it is “self-congratulatory”. Del Toro knows he is telling a story that is clever, transgressive, and relevant and there is something slightly smug about the tone of the film.****

The City & The City | review by Rafe McGregor

Detecting the New Weird.

By curious coincidence, cinematic adaptations of works by both of the best-known practitioners of the New Weird have reached the small screen in the UK within a month of each other. In my review of Alex Garland’s Annihilation in March, I introduced the New Weird and noted that the term either referred to a new subcategory of speculative fiction that explored humanity’s place in the world in the era that sociologists are fond of calling ‘late modernity’ or a deconstructive take on the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft that became so influential after his death. The genre was established with the publication of The New Weird, a collection of short fiction published by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer in 2008, and consists of two main strands, one in the US and the other in the UK. In the former, VanderMeer himself published the Southern Reach Trilogy, which begins with Annihilation, in 2014. In the latter, China Miéville published King Rat much earlier, in 1998, and The City & the City constituted one of his distinctively urban contributions to the genre, published in 2009. While the New Weird has existed for at least two decades and been an established genre for a decade, none of either VanderMeer or Miéville’s work has to my knowledge appeared on either the big or small screen – until now, when we have a Netflix film released in March and a BBC television mini-series released in April. This is of course great news for New Weird enthusiasts and I’ll return to the question of whether the New Weird is about to reach an audience the (Old) Weird never did in my conclusion.

The City & the City is an intriguing, sophisticated, thoughtful, and important novel that requires either a series of films or a television series for adaptation. The need for an extended representation is largely due to the complexity of the setting, which is very difficult to grasp conceptually. The city and the city are probably most concisely introduced by a short passage in the book, where Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel polizei is explaining a previous visit to Berlin. He says:

“I was young. It was a conference. ‘Policing Split Cities.’ They had sessions on Budapest and Jerusalem and Berlin, and Besźel and Ul Qoma.”

He might have added any of South Africa’s cities during the apartheid era or the many global cities divided by polarities of wealth and poverty in the neoliberal era. The main difference between Besźel/Ul Qoma and, for example, West Berlin/East Berlin is that there are no physical barriers between the city and the city. Berlin had its famous wall complete with bunkers, observation towers, and dog runs, but Besźel and Ul Qoma are two city states without a wall, a little like Rome and the Vatican City. Unlike its Italian counterparts, however, the two states are sworn enemies, similar in size and population, and crosshatched. ‘Crosshatched’ means that the border between the two cities has not been established in a symmetrical shape (like Berlin and Rome) so there are areas where one side of the same street is in Besźel and the other in Ul Qoma or, even worse, where public squares and terraced houses are divided between the two cities. These apparently porous borders are maintained by the combination of two forms of control, one informal, the other formal. First, rigorous education by parents and in schools trains children to ‘unsee’ rather than see the other city. Second, both cities cede their sovereignty to an organisation called Breach, which exists solely for the purpose of maintaining the border and dealing with those who commit the crime of breach, i.e. cross the border, talk to someone across the border, or even see (rather than unsee) someone across the border. Breach is the most serious of all crimes in Besźel/Ul Qoma and anyone who breaches is subject to immediate and extrajudicial arrest and punishment by Breach. What exactly happens to breachers is not made clear, but it is something nasty – execution, life imprisonment, or exile – for they are never seen (or unseen) again in either city.

The most intriguing part of the cinematic adaptation for me was how this strange situation would be represented visually and it was achieved, like much else, with great finesse. The protagonist of both the book and the mini-series is Borlú (played by David Morrissey) and the audience sees most of the latter from his perspective (mirroring the first person narrative of the former). Borlú lives in a crosshatched part of Besźel and if he looks out of the wrong window of his flat or walks to work, the Ul Qoma side of the street simply appears as a blur. If he surreptitiously commits breach by seeing Ul Qoma, the people, buildings, and vehicles across the border come into focus. Typical of both the Weird and the New Weird, The City & The City combines at least two genres – police procedural (of the hardboiled variety) and fantasy (of the urban variety) – and the story begins with the discovery of the body of an American university student enrolled at university in Ul Qoma in a crosshatched area of Besźel/Ul Qoma that is part of Besźel. Borlú is assigned the case and allocated an able if unorthodox assistant in Constable Corwi (played by Mandeep Dhillon). The first point he must establish is whether breach has taken place because breach takes precedence over murder and falls under the jurisdiction of Breach rather than the polizei (or Ul Qoma’s militsya). The circumstances of the case take Borlú to Ul Qoma (which can only be entered legally at a single border post), where he is provided with another able (albeit more orthodox) assistant in Senior Detective Dhatt (played by Maria Schrader). The murder is linked to the disappearance of another student and both students are connected to Professor David Bowden (played by Christian Camargo), a public intellectual notorious for his theory that there is a third city, called Orciny, that exists in spaces between the other two. The notion is perfectly suited to Miéville’s internal logic: if training and habit can cause citizens to unsee one city, how can they be sure that they are not also unseeing a second? The plot is thickened by the fact that Borlú’s wife, Katrynia (played by Lara Pulver) – who disappeared at the hands of Breach – was one of Bowden’s many student-lovers prior to her marriage. The introduction of Katrynia as a major character (by means of both Borlú’s memory and imagination) is the only alteration in an otherwise almost entirely faithful adaptation of the novel. The change makes for an innovative interpretation and Miéville must have been happy with the result as he has a brief, non-speaking cameo in episode 2 (at precisely the halfway point).

I wasn’t sure whether Morrissey had the screen presence to carry the lead in a story told almost exclusively from his point of view, but he is supported by such a strong cast of able women – Dhillon, Schrader, and Pulver – that my fears were soon allayed. As such, I have only two criticisms of the mini-series. First, although it follows Miéville’s form almost exactly, the emphasis of the content quickly becomes the conspiracy theories surrounding the existence (or not) of Orciny and there is a sense in which the police procedure and murder mystery is lost in the ensuing intrigue. This is somewhat remedied in the surprising, understated, and effective close of the narrative, but I found the conspiracy less compelling than the murder, in consequence of which episodes 2 and 3 dragged a little. Second, and this may be related to the dominance of fantastic conspiracy over realistic murder, the mini-series fails to plumb the philosophical depths of the novel. Miéville seems to be saying something significant about the very concept of national borders in the twenty-first century – perhaps something along the lines of the absence of moral justification for sustaining internecine and even international conflicts in the age of globalisation, an age characterised by refugee crises, a return to the extremism of the previous century, and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. These deeper questions are largely lost in the mini-series, with the exception of the briefest allusion when Bowden’s infamous treatise, Between the City and the City, is discussed. In the same way that Between the City and the City proposes the existence of a third city that threatens to undermine the house of cards upon which Besźel/Ul Qoma is built, so The City & The City proposes a situation in which borders have been pushed to their hyperbolic and farcical limit, undermining a concept that is crucial to the way in which we understand the world and construct our own identities.

I’ll conclude by returning to the subject with which I began, the New Weird and whether or not 2018 will be the year in which it reaches a mainstream audience. At the time of writing, Annihilation has received much critical acclaim, with 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, but has failed to earn the $40 million-odd it cost to make. The consensus opinion in print and online media is that Authority and Acceptance (the second and third parts of the Southern Reach Trilogy) are unlikely to appear onscreen. There is no Tomatometer available for The City & The City, but a scan of UK newspaper reviews would place it at about the 75% mark, i.e. mostly but not overwhelmingly positive. So far, the mini-series will have reached far less of an audience than Annihilation, and although Dhillon has been much-praised for her role, the absence of internationally-recognisable stars such as Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tessa Thompson will probably maintain this imbalance. The answer is thus no, the New Weird isn’t in any more danger of reaching a global audience than the Weird was in the nineteen-thirties, but for anyone who wants to know what the genre is all about, The City & The City is a very good place to start. ****