The Hamlet by Joanna Corrance (NewCon Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

The Hamlet is a fairly good mosaic novella, telling a series of stories about the people in a small rural community in Scotland, close to a stony beach but not too far away from a city. It used to be quite a nice place to live, but then things got “strange” – that’s the word everyone uses to describe it. There are various theories – the end of the world, a passing comet, a great unravelling – but no one is quite sure what happened.

Whatever it was, it happened in early spring. Everyone was told to get inside their homes and stay there for the indefinite future, very much like the Covid lockdowns. Supermarkets and local shops still deliver food, but in armoured vans, and sometimes the drivers go missing, the vans abandoned. The bins aren’t being collected, the police don’t answer calls, and there are roadblocks everywhere.

There’s still electricity and running water, because at least some essential workers still go out to work, but it’s risky out there. And as we learn in this set of stories, it’s risky indoors too. After a very brief introductory chapter about the day of the lockdown, we move from house to house, to see what strangeness is happening in each.

The stories overlap, with hints in each followed up in others, which was satisfying in some ways, in that mysteries are being solved, but it also meant that by the time we encountered some things first-hand, from the point of view of those directly involved, the shock of the weird had often been dulled by prior exposure.

That might be why the first proper story (or second chapter, if you like) “Down the Drain” was the most effective for me, because after its protagonist Beth leaves her filthy house by way of a newly broken (and strangely expansive) pipe, she dips her head into other houses, giving us a dose of concentrated weirdness. One could easily imagine a Junji Ito adaptation.

After that we learn about Polly, a neglected little girl with a big imagination; wannabe influencer Helen, whose uploads get ever more barmy; Eve, who becomes a lodger in the house she rents out to creepy Matthew; Robyn, a frustrated artist who gets way too into dollhouses; and Jeanie, whose charmed life seems to have run out of luck.

A short final chapter, set much later than the rest, bookends the novella, answers some questions, and provides a final twist or two. By that point, it felt like a good place to stop. Not because it’s a bad book, but because it had played all its cards, some of them too soon. And maybe it was all a bit too random for me: if anything at all can happen at any time, the characters’ decisions count for little. ***

The Creator by Aliya Whiteley (NewCon Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

Phillip Corbus is an artist, a profession which suits him because post-war headaches make it difficult for him to work in a sustained way in other jobs. His father Thomas was a famous adventurer and inventor, and his brother Reynolds became an inventor too. He created the ThinkBulb, which can be built into the structure of rooms – such as his basement laboratory – and supposedly helps people to think better. He’s now working on a new project, Ceredex.

Phillip is very fond of his lonely sister-in-law, Patricia – he tells us that this is her story. She dotes on her husband Reynolds, but he emerges from the lab infrequently, leaving her to raise their son Buckingham (Bucky for short) mostly on her own. In the summer of 1958, when Bucky is just seven years old, Patricia phones Phillip to say that Reynolds has committed suicide. But there’s rather more to the story than that, as the lack of a body suggests.

I think this is essentially a novella about envy, and the grass looking greener through a jaundiced eye. Phillip quietly envies his brother’s marriage, and is frustrated to see it so neglected. Reynolds, despite his own achievements, envies his brother’s artistic creativity, and seeks to artificially unlock similar talents within himself. He lets his frustration at being unable to create great art ruin his life, never understanding the joy of creating a work of art, even if it’s bad.

This novella is the third book I’ve read by Aliya Whiteley, after The Beauty and Three One Eight, and although it couldn’t be more different from them in plot and setting and tone, it’s of a similarly high quality, thoughtful and thematically rich. Cyril Connolly described the pram in the hall as the enemy of good art; The Creator reminds us that there’s a person in the pram, and asks if art is worth sacrificing his or her happiness.

The book is part of the 2025 NP Novella series, and so it is available in paperback and in a signed and numbered hardback direct from the publisher, while the ebook is available to buy on Kindle, and Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read it for free. I recommend that they do. The reader may be unhappy that it leads to such a strange, dark place, but it’s an ending that sticks with you long afterwards, and feels inevitable when you look back. ****

Divine in Essence by Yarrow Paisley (Whiskey Tit) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Psychoanalysts take heed: hints of the divine surface in quagmire of confused children, mentally ill mothers, and strained relationships. 

Writing instructors often cite Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” as the epitome of clear, concise, and concrete prose. The works in Yarrow Paisley’s collection Divine in Essence are, in many ways, the opposite. Place the two works of art side by side and you might cause some kind of cosmic meltdown. This is not to suggest that Paisley’s often baffling yet sometimes transcendent stories are substandard but rather that they make more demands on the reader than the typical story. 

A common complaint of genre stories is that they have no depth. Fair. Conversely, the bizarro/slipstream entries in Divine in Essence undoubtedly have depth, but some of them have a surface so tenuous that it leaves readers longing for a lifeline… something to latch onto so they can come up for answers. 

If you’re looking for a beach read or something to ease your mind after a long day’s work, look elsewhere. If, however, you’ve blocked out uninterrupted time in your book-lined den where a fire blazes, then you might consider this volume. Additionally, be sure you have your thinking cap on and maybe a couple of cups of coffee in you – you’re going to need to be at your most alert when you unpeel Paisley’s many-layered stories filled with strained child-parent relationships, unorthodox-bordering-on-abusive sexual circumstances, and eccentric and perhaps mentally ill mother figures who emasculate their sons. Be prepared for loads of disassembling… of bodies, of words, of relationships, and even of the narrative. Sometimes Paisley’s narrators will even pull the rug out from under the reader by revealing, for instance, they’ve inadvertently been calling a character by the wrong name.

Divine in Essence has garnered a noteworthy amount of critical acclaim, with reviewers tossing out words like “surreal”, “dreamscape” and “uncanny”. Paisley’s writing style, characterised by literary allusions, superlong sentences stuffed with million-dollar words, authorial intrusions, and a sometimes pontificating tone, often gives the book pre-twentieth century feel. 

While some of the stories are too inaccessible for this reviewer’s tastes, the collection does offer several pieces that show a creative mind brimming with novel ideas. Despite his lack of attentiveness to (or perhaps disregard of) the distracted and apathetic modern reader, Paisley knows what he’s doing. 

One of the collection’s strongest works, “I in the Eye”, is told from the perspective of a seven-year-old boy trapped in his sexy stepmother’s glass eye. He not only observes an emotionless and fragile “simulacrum” of himself living on the outside but also looks on as his mother, aware of his residence within her, dances naked in front of a mirror and seduces his father. As the father’s alcoholism worsens, the boy stifles his own emotions to better absorb his reality. The loss of his own mother, the stepmother’s erotic machinations, and the father’s grief and addiction essentially cause the boy to split… so much so that he needs a surrogate viewpoint. 

Mundanity becomes calamity in “Nancy and Her Man”, in which a woman finds a man at a cemetery – he doesn’t remember her, but she remembers him – and takes him for coffee and a walk. As the man begins to shed body parts, we learn that the woman needs to return him whole to the cemetery, or their annual meeting won’t happen the following year. The story not only comments on the difficulties of holding a relationship together but also stresses the importance of holding onto memories to keep loved ones alive. 

“Rocking Horse Traffic”, another complicated entry, introduces a first-person narrator whose parents are literally trying to get inside him and extract things. A jarring shift to second-person perspective near the end underscores the violent and bizarre conclusion. It is a riveting story with a strong focus on obedience versus disobedience, and, similar to the cemetery story, this one involves grieving, going in cycles, and the inability to let go. In this instance, the father is constantly trying to fix his son, but it’s an unfixable situation. The son settles on an extreme way to break that cycle. 

An important consideration in his work is the role of the reader and the writer. If you were trying to convince someone that reading is fun, this would not be the go-to book. But there is no rule that says the writer must be obedient to today’s harried reader. Divine in Essence, with its bulky paragraphs and refusal to spoon-feed readers, challenges us to veer from the contemporary obsession with instant gratification. Douglas J. Ogurek

Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost by Chaz Brenchley (NewCon Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

Rowany Angelica Marten de Vere was born on Mars, and although the gravity on her version of Mars isn’t as light as in our universe, she would be considered unusually tall on Earth. She spent seven happy years at a Martian boarding school, the Crater School, which looks like a castle and features in the author’s novel Three Twins at the Crater School and its sequels. Now, at the age of twenty-three, she is ready for her first mission as a member of the Colonial Service. The mission is Mr Leontov, a Russian chap who spent time on Venus – now Russia’s new Siberia – and is now looking for safety in the Red Raj. Rowany has to scoot him away before Russian agents close in.

Once they set off, the book is basically one long chase, that involves ice skating over the frozen Martian canals, visiting a frost fair, eating hot chestnuts, dodging bullets, riding in steam trains, and being chased by an airship. Mars is a dangerous world, even now that about half its inhabitants live in cities, but it has bred tough, watchful, self-reliant people full of frontier spirit. Having said that, I didn’t get much of a sense of Mars as a different planet: the story (complete with urchins) could have taken place in Victorian England with very few changes. Nor did it feel as action-packed as the description above might make it sound: it’s quite a long way into the book before there is a confirmed contact with the enemy.

I certainly didn’t dislike it, but it didn't do much for me, and to be fair it probably isn't supposed to! In tone I think it’s aimed at a younger readership, or perhaps an older readership who grew up on Malory Towers or the Chalet School books, and would get a double kick of nostalgia from reading a slightly old-fashioned science fiction adventure featuring the type of heroine typical of those novels. My favourite element was probably the interactions with the local urchins, and the use of whistling to communicate with them, and the rules they followed. They seemed surprisingly forgiving of Rowany's decision to mislead them, putting them in danger for her own benefit, but perhaps that plants a seed for future stories.

This is the second in the publisher’s 2025 NP Novella series, and at the time of writing Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read it for free, the ebook can be bought for £3.99, and paperbacks and signed and limited edition hardbacks can be bought directly from the publisher. ***

Rollerball | review by Rafe McGregor

Rollerball, by Norman Jewison (20^th Century Fox) 

Another Golden Anniversary.

While Jaws turned fifty with much hype and fanfare last week, including here at Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, it’s Rollerball’s turn today, albeit without the bells and whistles. I’m not sure how, but in spite of being both a science fiction and James Caan fan and familiarity with the premise, I’d never seen the film. I’ve always had a soft spot for Caan’s onscreen persona, an underrated, understated, effortless tough guy tough guy with a very distinctive style (he reminds me of John Wayne, though where Wayne is always in the Old West no matter what part he’s playing, Caan is in a big city somewhen in the nineteen seventies). Caan’s performances in all of The Godfather (1972), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Thief (1981), and Misery (1990) are inspired and Rollerball revolves entirely around him as Jonathan E(vans), the first and only superstar of the world’s most dangerous and popular game in 2018 (forty-three years in the future).

Rollerball’s screenplay was written by novelist William Harrison, who developed it from a short story called ‘Roller Ball Murder’, which was first published in Esquire in 1973. The world of 2018 is a utopia rather than dystopia, a planet of plenty where everyone literally has everything they want and nation states have been replaced by multi-national corporations that coexist in a state of avaricious harmony following a little-talked about and possibly even erased event known as the Corporate Wars. The competitiveness essential to unrestrained capitalism is, it seems, channelled into rollerball in an international tournament in which teams from various cities clash in a spectacle of bloody and vicarious violence for the players and audiences respectively. The actual game is a combination of inline speed skating and Basque pelota with a couple of motorbikes thrown in and the rules are changed regularly to make it more brutal. The top-ranked team is Houston, courtesy of Jonathan’s skill and resilience, and the inciting incident occurs when he is told to retire by the chief executive officer of the corporation running the game (if not the world), Mr Bartholomew (played by John Houseman), who is revealed as the narrative’s antagonist.

There are a couple of things that strike one immediately watching Rollerball fifty years later. First, the extent of the explicit critique of global capitalism with the gloves off. The capacity of the Hollywood film industry to make money from apparently resisting a system of which it is such an integral part never ceases to amaze me…and has been at work for a lot longer than I thought. Second, the science fiction trope of a utopia that turns out to be a dystopia as soon as the surface is scraped is becoming rather dated. It is much easier, for example, to imagine the worlds of Mad Max (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Strange Days (1995), and Children of Men (2006) as or in our future than a land of plenty where we all keep ourselves busy with shopping, pill-popping, and rollerball.

Jonathan doesn’t want to retire and one is never sure why. His lavish lifestyle would not change at all, his existential exploration of the conflict between comfort and freedom is somewhat limited, and he must be nearing the end of his shelf-life anyway. The only plausible explanation is an obsession with the adoration of the bloodthirsty crowds, but even this isn’t entirely convincing. The conundrum exposes one of the two flaws in the film, which may have accounted for a critical reception that did not match its commercial success and has left it with a fair 57% on Rotten Tomatoes: Jonathan is simply not a particularly sympathetic character. (This is not one of Caan’s best performances.) The second is just as damaging. Given that the genre of the film is some mix of action, thriller, sports, etc., the representation of rollerball is really poor. The cinematography and stunts fail to convey the speed and danger of the game, which ends up looking quite camp with its players modelling their rollerskates, leather pants, and almost invisible cosmetic scars. I’ve watched ice hockey games on television that look more dangerous and there isn’t a single missing tooth in Rollerball. The film isn’t terrible, but it’s not great entertainment either.

Talking of ‘terrible’… Rollerball was remade by John McTiernan and released in 2002. Coming from the director of Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), and Basic (2003), I was surprised to see the film’s impressive 3% on the Tomatometer. As if that isn’t bad enough, the Los Angeles Times also claimed it was one of the biggest commercial failures of all time. The remake starred Chris Klein, LL Cool Jay, and Jean Reno, all of whose performances I usually enjoy, but Klein was fresh from his role as a lacrosse player in American Pie (1999) and American Pie 2 (2001) so that might be the first clue to avoid it. I’m glad I watched the first Rollerball, but I won’t be wasting seventy-eight minutes of my life on the second.**

Game of Thrones | review by Rafe McGregor

Game of Thrones, HBO, 8 seasons, April 2011-May 2019, £9.99 (monthly subscription rate)

Fantasy at its finest.

I’ve been wanting to write about HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019) for a while now, but kept putting off what seemed like a mammoth task. I came to the series late, somehow insulating myself from all the hype for nearly a decade. Then COVID-19 arrived and (like many people, I later learned) it seemed the perfect time to tackle all 73 episodes (which run to just over 70 hours in total). I watched it on my own during the first lockdown, then with my wife, and then we watched it together again during the second lockdown. I had heard, as one does, that GOT was yet another case of diminishing returns and that fans were particularly outraged at the final season. The former accusation is complete nonsense and the final season was just as good as the rest and even better than some. One of the reasons for its poor reception may have been the slightly longer wait (two years instead of one) creating unreasonable expectations. Another is probably the fact that the television series had overtaken the novels on which it was based, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (five of seven novels published from 1996 to 2011, the rest as yet unpublished), and readers were dissatisfied with the direction it had taken. Which is fine…but no one is forcing you to watch the series and personally I sometimes avoid cinematic or televisual adaptations if I really love a novel or series of novels. The only justified accusation of anticlimax is that there is a Lord of the Rings-like sense in which the biggest and most desperate battle takes place before the final battle, but the final battle is between the protagonists and the antagonist so the narrative is perfectly in keeping with what we expect (and, indeed, desire) as audiences. To stay with LOTR for a moment, I loved both the films and the books, but read and watched them as two separate works rather than expecting the latter to slavishly imitate the former and I recommend the same approach to GOT. (I read Martin’s novels after watching the series and enjoyed them too, but they are very different.) On the point of giving audiences what we desire, two of the great triumphs of GOT are the way in which it both deploys and undermines the mythic mode of storytelling (which has been the Hollywood norm for the last fifty years) and combines that mode with a rich architecture of allegorical meaning.

GOT is an incredibly complex narrative with a multiplicity of interwoven plotlines, all of which revolve around the struggle among the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The plotlines involve hundreds of characters, dozens of main characters, eight great noble houses in addition to the pivotal three (Arryn, Baratheon, Bolton, Frey, Greyjoy, Martell, Tyrell, and Tully), and at least eight leading characters. The leading characters are an older generation of three Lannisters (Cersei, Tyrion, and Jamie), a younger generation of four Starks (Jon, Sansa, Arya, and Bran), and Daenerys Targaryen (played by Emilia Clarke). These leads can be distilled to two protagonists and an antagonist, one from each house, as follows: Jon Snow (played by Kit Harrington) from House Stark, Daenerys, and Cersei Lannister (the antagonist, played by Lena Headey). Each of the 73 episodes runs from 50 to 82 minutes and they are distributed across the seasons as follows: 1-10 (Season 1, 2011), 11-20 (Season 2, 2012), 21-30 (Season 3, 2013), 31-40 (Season 4, 2014), 41-50 (Season 5, 2015), 51-60 (Season 6, 2016), 61-67 (Season 7, 2017), and 68-73 (Season 8, 2019). The series also employs the five-act structure popularised by Shakespeare, although the acts do not follow the series exactly. Having watch it four times now, I’d say the overarching narrative goes something like this: exposition (episodes 1-9), complication (episodes 10-29), climax (episodes 30-50), crisis (episodes 51-67), and resolution (episodes 68-73).

In addition to following this structure, the overarching narrative is structured as what the late Fredric Jameson calls a ‘genuine allegory’, which I first mentioned in TQF when reviewing another television series, Amazon Studios’ Carnival Row (2018; there’s a review of the second and final season here). Genuine allegories have four distinct levels of meaning that combine in interesting and sometimes unique ways to provide audiences with especially memorable and meaningful experiences (and are well-suited to the television series because of the length of the form). The literal level of meaning of GOT is revealed in the title, the deadly game played by the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen – as well as the other eight – for the Iron Throne, which bears the weight of many a different noble bottom as the seasons progress. The symbolic level is the Night King (played by first Richard Brake and then Vladimír Furdík), his army, and his winter as transparently representative of climate change. Significantly, the first episode of the series is titled ‘Winter is Coming’ and it is an oft-repeated phrase used by the inhabitants of Westeros to refer to a particularly lengthy cold season that occurs across the continent on an intermittent basis. At the existential level of meaning, GOT appears to establish a fairly simple moral axis, with Cersei almost completely selfish and vicious, Jon almost completely selfless and virtuous, and Daenerys somewhere in between, for the most part well-intentioned but prone to egotism and hubris. Given that Jon has no desire to rule the Seven Kingdoms, the Kingdom of the North, or even the Night’s Watch, it is Daenerys and Cersei’s constructions of subjectivity that drive the overarching plot, in a particular and peculiar play of difference and identity that draws attention to sexual violence, femicide, and systemic sexism. The anthropic level is primarily concerned with the relationships among the three levels of war that threaten to destroy the Seven Kingdoms. The micro level is the internecine conflicts within individual kingdoms or noble houses, such as Stannis Baratheon’s (played by Stephen Dillane) wars against first his brother and then his nephew. The meso level is the conflict among the Lannisters, Starks, and Targaryens and the macro level the war between the living and the dead, between the armies of Westeros and Essos (the continent to the east of Westeros) and the Army of the Dead. This is the only war worth fighting and quite obviously the most momentous, but it is the war that the noble houses are the most reluctant to fight, content to dismiss the Night King as a legend and to believe that the imminent winter is natural rather than supernatural.

GOT is, as my brief summary suggests, an incredibly complex narrative consisting of layer upon layer of plots, meanings, protagonists, characters, and conflicts, all of which are eventually – and masterfully – tied together in a resolution as rewarding as it seems retrospectively inevitable. While the combination of myth and allegory is, as already mentioned, exemplary, my particular fascination with the series is the way in which it succeeds in replicating rather than representing the experience of living through an – or perhaps the – apocalypse. In his long essay, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2022), Mark Fisher discusses one of the few other narrative fictions to achieve the same end: ‘The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.’ As T.S. Eliot wrote before him (influenced by if not explicitly reflecting on the mass destruction of World War I) in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), ‘This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.’ For all the fire and ice in GOT, deadly dragons and unstoppable undead, humanity is petering out slowly, person by person, most by starvation and disease rather than blade or bow. It is, another words, a world very much like our own, where humanity faces existential threats from multi-polar conflicts, artificial intelligence, and climate change that most of us are able to ignore most of the time. I have only had such an experience twice before, with Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, which consists of the novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) (about which I wrote here) and with Alfonso Cuarón’s feature film, Children of Men (2006). Read and watch them all: I guarantee you won’t be disappointed and you might just find them resonating with you in the same way I did. ****

The Earth No Longer Exists by Ben Fitts (Alien Buddha Press) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Pessimism smothered in absurdity with a dash of hope: short story collection substantiates future bizarro heavyweight

Ben Fitts’s bizarro collection The Earth No Longer Exists is custom-made for the media-weary twenty-first-century reader. The writing is clear, concise, and above all, original. The paragraphs are short. The language is modest. Fitts admirably avoids any writerly pretension, and with each entry not only entertains but also tackles contemporary issues with a jocular pessimism that occasionally leans toward hopefulness. Moreover, despite their simplicity, all his stories leave room for interpretation.  

Although absurdity permeates them, these pieces are not merely weird for weirdness’s sake. Fitts’s characters ¬¬– sometimes foolish, sometimes silly, and often flawed – operate from a viewpoint of misunderstanding. Political leaders think that replacing the world’s dead superheroes with janitors is a smart move. A man decides he’s going to become the world’s third-sexiest matador… so he can get with a woman. An artist born into privilege becomes so obsessed with the idea that a successful artist needs to be destitute that he loses sight of what he’s creating and what art is. In an insightful exploration of empty sexual encounters versus lasting love, a young man discovers something unexpected in the shoebox of his new lover.

“Raspberry Heart,” an indictment against the chauvinism that still permeates corporate America, introduces a raspberry interviewing for a job. The raspberry grows agitated because its would-be employer is focused not on its qualifications but rather on the fact he’s interviewing a raspberry. 

Clearly influenced by COVID and current political conflicts, “On the Back of an Octopus” involves a city on the back of a giant octopus. When a shark supporting another city approaches, the politicians and scientists of Octopolis go into the highest tower and debate an appropriate response. The idea of getting along is, if you’ll pardon the pun, unfathomable to them. Leaders refuse to see somebody else’s perspective… and the public suffers. 

The volume’s only non-bizarro work, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” is strong enough to be in a high-end literary journal. After an antisemitic message is scrawled on her son’s locker, a Jewish mother decides to move her family from the U.S. to Israel. Her teenage son resists, partly because he’s terrified of being forced to fight in the Israeli military. This fear plays out in the role playing and video games the young man plays. The story stirs up emotion on many levels, particularly animosity toward the mother, who steamrolls her son’s concerns. 

Several stories cover romantic relationships – some elicit sadness, while others end on a more positive note. The man who falls in love with “The Cactus” suffers because of their relationship. Perhaps the physical pain the man feels is a stand-in for the emotional pain that comes with bad matches. That’s the negative side. On the positive side, if a spouse sticks beside a spouse no matter how much pain, that shows love. Regardless, the story punctures the reader with one irrefutable message: love is painful.

In “My Winter Lips,” another relationship-based tale, Fitts takes the current fascination with body modification to the next level by skilfully introducing a new world while avoiding expository dialogue. People can, for instance, get jacked arms or replace their fingers with something that looks like snakes. Unlike many of his peers, the first-person narrator goes to the “parts store” merely to replace his chapped lips with another pair of normal lips. The employee reveals the store is out of human lips, and what transpires is a humorous conversation and a resolution the narrator does not anticipate. The new lips aren’t just lips — they symbolize how openness to new ideas and personal change can allow one to see others in a more positive light. 

The treasures in The Earth No Longer Exists confirm an emerging author’s potential to rise as a leading voice in the bizarro subgenre. Fitts’s stories grasp the reader and refuse to let go; he knows how long each entry needs to be before it starts losing its potency, and he never gets preachy or pontificates. Douglas J. Ogurek*****   

Sugar | review by Rafe McGregor

Sugar. Apple TV+, 8 episodes, April 2024, £8.99 (monthly subscription rate)

Genre-bending neo-noir.

John Sugar (played by Colin Farrell) is a man with a mission, a private investigator who is very good at one thing and one thing only: finding missing persons. He is also a film buff and his reflections on the progress (or lack thereof) of his cases are cut with shots from classics of the Golden Age of Film Noir (as far as I could tell, anyway), which must have cost Apple a fair bit (I suppose they can afford it). Sugar loves movies so much, he might almost have used them to teach himself his trade, in a similar manner to that in which his friend Henry (played by Jason Butler Harner) might have taught himself to be an academic by reading campus novels.

For me, Farrell has taken over from Denzel Washington as the archetypal private eye or latter-day (urban) cowboy, a tough guy with a code and perhaps even a heart of gold if you can penetrate the layers of muscle. Like Washington, I never took to Farrell’s onscreen persona (just a little too smug for me), but he is an actor of such versatility that I was soon swayed by his performances in Miami Vice (2006), London Boulevard (2010), and True Detective 2 (2015), just as Washington blew me away in Out of Time (2003), Man on Fire (2004), and Déjà Vu (2006).

Why am I reviewing a neo-noir television series for TQF? Because, like Tony Scott’s wonderful Déjà Vu, Sugar has a genre-bending twist, albeit one that is revealed late in the series. (I won’t say which genre, so as to avoid spoilers, but you can be sure it’s one of science fiction, fantasy, or horror.) There are in fact two twists, an unusual change of category and a more common, but nonetheless delightful, reversal of fortune as the narrative charges to its conclusion. Does the change of category work? I’m not sure. It certainly didn’t ruin what had gone before, but ultimately I found it a little gratuitous. Meaning that the series would have been at least as good without it and perhaps better.

The case itself is standard PI fare, with Sugar hired to find the missing grandchild of movie mogul Jonathan Siegel (played by James Cromwell). Farrell is at his best since HBO’s True Detective 2 and there are outstanding performances by Kirby (formerly Kirby Howell-Baptiste, playing Sugar’s handler, Ruby) and Amy Ryan (playing Melanie Matthews, a retired rock star). The denouement is not at all predictable and even rather tense so in spite of a lost star for squeezing two genres into one narrative, I’d say it’s definitely worth watching. ***

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning | review by Rafe McGregor

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, by Christopher McQuarrie (Paramount Pictures)

Better on the big screen.

The cinematic experience has changed a lot… and I mean since the COVID-19 pandemic, not over my lifetime. Vue, which has been my local ‘provider’ for some time now, recently refurbished all of its cinemas so that every seat is now what would have been called ‘luxury’ pre-pandemic. This must have cut the number of seats that can be squeezed into each theatre significantly, but I suppose it’s good business as fewer and fewer people venture forth from the comfort of their living rooms. At the same time (and probably for the same reasons) it has become increasingly difficult to find a cinema screening what one wants to watch, as my three most recent choices reveal: MI8 (at my local Vue, but only for a single week), Warfare (straight to streaming as far as I can tell), and The Return (apparently released last year, neither screening nor streaming in the UK).

By its eighth and final instalment, the Mission Impossible film franchise is firmly in the science fiction genre, with the antagonist of seven and eight (a single narrative divided into two parts) being a sentient AI program called the Entity that has inspired its own death cult, members of which have infiltrated various levels of America’s (and other nations’) governments and militaries. (Though perhaps the bit about members of a death cult infiltrating the government isn’t quite science fiction if one reads the news at the moment – I digress.) The franchise is of course based on the very successful Mission: Impossible television series, which ran from 1966 to 1973 and was revived for two seasons in the next decade. It was in fact less than a decade after this revival when the film series started as Mission: Impossible (MI1) was released in 1996. Since then, MI has emerged as something of an American version of the James Bond franchise, with Tom Cruise in the leading role of Ethan Hunt. Following a six-year hiatus at the beginning of the century (between MI2 and MI3) there has been an MI film every two to five years, a roll that even the pandemic couldn’t break.

The running time of MI8 is 170 minutes and my only real criticism of the film is that this is about 30 minutes too long and just a little too self-indulgent from Cruise (who is heavily involved in production), director Christopher McQuarrie, or both. For example, there is some very pedestrian exposition at the beginning that could easily have been shaved off. The scene (or sequence, if you’re a filmmaker) is both too lengthy – an attempt to remind audiences of not only the events of MI7, but that this is the culmination of the whole film series (it includes flashbacks to all of the other films) – and pointless. Pointless because the plot is so complex (and implausible, but this is science fiction so I won’t quibble) that I’d completely lost track by the time the explanation ended, in spite of having watched MI7 relatively recently.

Cruise is now 62 and remains determined to show us that with dedication and a few hundred million in the bank one can stay in peak condition in one’s seventh decade, spending much of the film with his shirt off (even in the Bering Sea – look it up on Google Maps). One thing that did strike me, though, was that for all of Cruise’s flexing, the franchise has become very child friendly. It’s always been fun and full of over-the-top stunts, but MI1 and MI2 (the latter in particular) had scenes and themes aimed at an adult audience. There is only one scene with extreme violence in MI8, which all occurs offscreen, and when Cruise does get horizontal with co-star Hayley Attwell (playing Grace, a former thief) it’s for a chaste cuddle in a decompression chamber. Which is fine, but the flashbacks to the earlier instalments reminded me that those films had a little more appeal for grown-ups. Notwithstanding, if you’ve watched one or more of the first seven, I recommend seeing how the story ends and, if you can find one screening it, seeing that ending at the cinema. ***

The Last Days of New Paris | review by Rafe McGregor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haunted House by J.A. Konrath (independently published) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Figging and maniacal ghosts: horror/thriller uses well-developed characters and strong plotting to bring life to haunted house trope.

Everybody knows that you don’t go to Butler House, a supposedly haunted mansion on a former slave plantation in South Carolina. It’s also the perfect setting for a fear experiment conducted by Dr. Forenzi. Haunted House, the sixth twisty instalment in The Konrath Dark Thriller Collective, brings together characters from throughout the country (and from the previous books). Each of them is offered a monetary award plus a bonus in exchange for participating in the experiment: the alcoholic mother will get reunited with her child, the disgraced molecular biologist will get his old research job back and so on. All of it seems a bit shady. 

Konrath effectively delays conflict by building suspense as he delves into characters’ backstories and problems to align the reader with them. The novel also explores the history of Butler House and how its sadistic owners psychologically and physically tortured slaves. Additionally, each fear experiment participant has already faced a hellish ordeal ranging from being locked in a basement with a maniac to being trapped on an island with a cannibal who files his teeth. You’re with these characters, and you want them to escape. 

When the key players arrive at Butler House, they encounter other, more typical horror characters: a skeptical author, a specialist in debunking paranormal phenomena, and of course, a medium. They also meet the boisterous prostitute-turned-dominatrix call girl Moni, a major source of comic relief. Participants are allowed to bring one weapon; Moni brings a plunger full of heroin. She repeatedly refers to something called “figging” that she does with her male clientele. Konrath plays with the reader by withholding the definition of this term – can you resist looking it up until the novel ends?

The participants find themselves in a 13 Ghosts type of environment, with the spirits from the house’s sordid past supposedly rising up to terrorize them. A giggling, bare-chested guy who wears a gas mask, smells like meat and enjoys cutting himself with a cleaver. A slave driver who uses a whip and has a patch over one eye. A vengeful slave with four arms stemming from a Civil War-era experiment. Konrath keeps the reader wondering: is what is happening real, or is it a trick to frighten the subjects? The dangers escalate, and the prospect of escape decreases. All the while, the reader roots for the underdogs. 

The cop Mankowski seems the most grounded of the characters. In one scene, there’s a fascinating interaction with a serial killer in prison. The killer relishes telling Mankowski the awful things he’s done to his victims. 

A group of strangers getting trapped in a threatening environment has been done many times but rarely so entertainingly. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

The Accident Season by Moïra Fowley-Doyle (Kathy Dawson Books) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Young adult novel hides sexual and physical abuse within a bubblegum wrapper of tarot cards, costume parties, kissing and witches.

The Accident Season focuses on a trio of Irish teens: seventeen-year-old narrator Cara Morris, her best friend Bea (a witch – not the supernatural kind), and Cara’s ex-stepbrother Sam whose crush on Cara is abundantly clear.

Every October is “accident season” for the Morrises due to the inordinate number of negative happenings: cuts, broken bones, severed relationships, and worse. This accident season, according to Bea’s tarot cards, is going to be awful. 

The trio undertakes a quest to find classmate Elsie, an outcast who keeps cropping up in Cara’s photos. Elsie has no friends, and yet people know her as the girl who oversees the school library’s “secrets booth”. Here students type out their secrets and give them to Elsie to keep safe. After her father died, Cara was friends with Elsie, who is fading into the shadows – Cara can’t even remember the semi-doppelganger’s last name.

The novel also explores the somewhat forbidden attraction between Cara and Sam – his father Christopher was married to Cara’s artist mother, but he left abruptly. The mother has assumed guardianship of Sam. Then there’s Cara’s sister Alice, dating a handsome and manipulative older vocalist from a band. 

The Accident Season contains lots of talk about masks and hiding one’s true feelings. The Cara/Bea/Sam trio isn’t very popular, but they host the Black Cat and Whiskey Moon Masquerade Ball, the point of which is that attendees will take off their figurative human masks to show what they really are. And they’re gaining popularity because of it.

The tension escalates as things come to the surface near the end, but until then, it’s a rather dull read. One can take only so much hanging out and smoking and drinking and tarot cards and writing poetry.—Douglas J. Ogurek ***

Suckers by J.A. Konrath and Jeff Strand (independently published) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Stupid. Ridiculous. Brilliant.

This collection alternates stories between comedy horror masters J.A. Konrath and Jeff Strand, then culminates with “Suckers,” a cowritten longer piece in which their recurring characters Harry McGlade (Konrath) and Andrew Mayhem (Strand) meet and undertake an absurd caper. 

Though each author’s work is distinctive, what unites them is playfulness with language, an avoidance of pompous prose, a comedian’s recognition of everyday absurdities, and often, a deliberate imbecility. “The pain was painful,” observes Konrath’s detective, while Strand’s protagonist, more of a sharp albeit regular guy playing at detective work, questions “fun size” Halloween candy – if it was fun, it would be enormous. Throughout the collection, the action moves quickly, and the dialogue stays tight and rapid fire. 

McGlade is the ultimate jerk. He’s also highly amusing. He’ll check out a woman’s legs while she’s crying or insult someone at their first meeting. He makes fun of others, whether they’re wearing too much makeup or have a face resembling a percussion instrument. He’s a chauvinist and a womanizer, and he doesn’t pay attention to others. At one point, he even admits to lying to the reader. 

Mayhem, on the other hand, is analytical and talky. He points out contradictions in things people say to make them look foolish. He’s also inventive when it comes to defending himself, whether that means using a hardcover copy of Stephen King’s The Stand or a box of grape juice. And Mayhem is more of a family man… but he’s not beyond showing his young son a movie called Blood Blood Blood. 

The differences between the two authors surface in the first two stories. Konrath’s “Whelp Wanted”, in which McGlade is tasked with finding a missing dog, takes place over multiple days. He does shoddy research and makes several mistakes. “Poor Career Choice” by Strand is a dialogue-heavy but by no means dull exchange between Mayhem and a would-be assassin who shows up at his home. The action takes place in real time.

McGlade gets more entertaining as the collection progresses. “Taken to the Cleaners” introduces another incompetent hitman. An attractive young woman who is the wife of a chicken king wants McGlade to kill the man her husband hired to kill the man she hired to kill him. 

In “A Bit of Halloween Mayhem”, Strand’s protagonist and a friend decide to explore a supposedly haunted house. Strand demonstrates the silliness of two grown men doing something kids are more likely to do. 

Next up is Konrath’s “The Necro File”, a magnum opus of humour, disgustingness, and authorial mischief. Client Norma Cauldridge, to whom McGlade repeatedly refers as “Drawbridge” (not to be funny but rather because he’s sloppy), wants him to follow her necromancer husband. This is Richard Laymon level stuff topped with a hearty portion of urine, barf and poop. Moreover, the story exemplifies that going off on tangents isn’t always ineffective. McGlade, for instance, rambles on about the unappetizing look of hot dogs before eating three of them. 

“The Lost (For a Good Reason) Adventure of Andrew Mayhem” recounts how the protagonist met his friend Roger in school detention at age thirteen. They get into trouble when they discover a naked neighbour thrusting around a butcher knife while talking to himself. 

In “Suckers”, the two characters inadvertently meet when Mayhem, running an errand involving spaghetti sauce and mushrooms, confronts McGlade intent on rooting out some “pires” (aka vampires). The reader gets the best of both worlds with the witty Mayhem and the not-as-smart-but-still-absorbing McGlade, who often bends the truth to make himself seem more heroic than he is. 

The story takes a giddy sidetrack when it introduces email communications between the protagonists and their editor Chad. Mayhem begins commenting on the falsity of McGlade’s version of events. When the story resumes, McGlade mocks his coauthor by engaging Mayhem in over-the-top actions inspired by his email comments.

The book ends with Strand interviewing Jack Kilborn (Konrath’s pen name) via email about a forthcoming novel. The exchange has them poking fun at each other and getting silly.

Both authors brought their A game to this collection, whose adventurousness and friskiness enthral the reader’s inner child. Douglas J. Ogurek *****

McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales | review by Rafe McGregor

McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales by Michael Chabon (editor)

McSweeney’s #10, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, paperback, £4.10 (used), 1 March 2003, ISBN 9781400033393

 

Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is an award-winning American literary journal that was founded by award-winning and bestselling author Dave Eggers in San Francisco in 1998. Eggers has a long and varied bibliography, but is probably best known for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a memoir published in 2000. More important than any of this is the fact that McSweeney’s was Stephen Theaker’s inspiration for TQF, which he launched with John Greenwood in Birmingham in 2004. As regular readers of TQF (but probably not McSweeney’s) will know, Stephen’s secondary goal (after keep it going) was to catch McSweeney’s up, which he achieved in 2011. At the moment, TQF is in the lead – but only just – with seven-seven issues to McSweeney’s seventy-six. The next issue of McSweeney’s, which is due in February, will see a new editor, novelist and academic Rita Bullwinkel, take the helm. One of the features that distinguishes McSweeney’s from other literary journals is Eggers’ novel approach to editing and production:

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern continues to publish on a roughly quarterly schedule, and each issue is markedly different from its predecessors in terms of design and editorial focus. Some are in boxes, others come with a CD, still others are bound with a giant rubber band, and perhaps someday an issue will be made of glass.

Why the hell not!

The inspiration for TQF is not just any old McSweeney’s, but issue ten, McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, which was guest edited by champion of genre fiction Michael Chabon and published in February 2003 (a little over a year before the launch of TQF). It is easy to see why…from a garish cover borrowed from the October 1940 issue of Red Star Mystery Magazine to Chabon himself as editor to four hundred and eighty pages’ worth of twenty stories, some great illustrations, and contributors that include: Michael Crichton, Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Nick Hornby, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, and Michael Moorcock. I’ve no idea how deep McSweeney’s pockets are, but one would be hard-pressed to compile this kind of lineup with literally unlimited resources. Most of the tales don’t disappoint regardless of the stature of their authors and I agree with Stephen that this is one of – if not the – best collections of short fiction ever published for pulp fiction fans.

My favourite tale is the first, Jim Shephard’s ‘Tedford and the Megalodon’. As a shark story enthusiast, I wondered how much of the visual horror and signature suspense would be retained in the short story format (on which note the illustration, by Howard Chaykin, is a perfect accompaniment, breathtaking without being a spoiler). Simply stated, neither the horror nor the suspense are lost and the last sentence is one of the most chilling conclusions to a narrative I’ve ever read, all the more remarkable because it is not unexpected. Honourable mentions above and beyond Shephard’s illustrious peers go to Hornby, for ‘Otherwise Pandemonium’; Kelly Link, one of the pioneers of the New Weird, for ‘Catskin’; and Moorcock, for ‘The Case of the Nazi Canary’. Moorcock’s contribution is an outing for his occult detective, Sir Seaton Begg, AKA the other Baker Street detective, Sexton Blake. King’s contribution, ‘The Tale of Gray Dick’ features Roland Deschain, protagonist of The Dark Tower series, although as I’ve only read the first two books, I’m not sure where it fits chronologically (he is already missing some fingers, if that helps anyone work it out). I was only disappointed twice: Eggers’ contribution is, to my mind, out of sync with the rest, too slow and too long, and I found Ellison’s contribution insubstantial and just not very funny (assuming the aim was comedy). McSweeney’s #10 is now out of print (along with the rest of the first thirteen issues), but used copies remain available from the usual vendors and are, at the time of writing, still relatively cheap (the upper end of the range I saw was £20, postage excluded).

Having set such an incredibly high bar, has TQF ever come close? No doubt I’m biased because it featured one of my Roderick Langham stories, but I don’t think TQF#50, which was published in January 2015, was too far off. Aside from the eleven stories in three hundred and twenty-four pages, which include a few of my personal favourites, I very much enjoyed its showcasing of so many of the magazine’s regular contributors, including several whose collaboration with Stephen and John predates my own (which began with a single and somewhat scant review in TQF#23 in 2008). That said, I have particularly high hopes for TQF#80, which is due shortly. The last page of McSweeney’s #10, the source of my quote above, states that (only) fifty-six issues were planned. When McSweeney’s #56 was published in 2019, the (true) goal was revealed as one hundred and fifty-six. Perhaps when that issue is published, it will be two hundred and fifty-six. Let’s hope that day comes and that, as Stephen puts it, both McSweeney’s and TQF keep going.

The Gingerbread Girl by Stephen King (Simon & Schuster Audio) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Novella mixes grieving mother with giddy maniac and turns up the heat.

Emily, whose relationship with her husband has soured after the loss of a child, travels to her father’s beachside residence on the fictitious island of Vermillion Key, Florida. She takes up running – a near obsession that will play into the story later – with hopes of healing. Soon, however, a murderous brute will engage Em in an extended cat and mouse chase.

Em first learns about villain Jim Pickering from a friend of her father’s. Each year, she is informed, the wealthy tech guy arrives in his red Mercedes and brings a young, attractive “niece” (eyeroll) to his place. At the end of their stay, they leave via boat. 

Because The Gingerbread Girl is a novella, King acts quickly. Thus, this isn’t the typical scenario in which a gullible female falls for a dapper gent who eventually turns on her. Pickering is bad news from the start. Thus, Em gets drawn into the villain’s clutches not through his charm but rather by witnessing something he doesn’t want her to see. The story then sprints along at an exhilarating pace. Survival for Em means leveraging her strengths and her pursuer’s weaknesses. 

Mare Winningham’s audiobook narration endows Pickering with a cheerful bordering on giddy – listen for the yapping laugh – disposition. He finds unpleasant things funny, talks to himself, and has zero concern for Em.

Despite his story’s fairy tale-inspired title and straightforward narrative, King manages to inject depth into the work. Yes, Em is fleeing a madman, but she’s also trying to run away from her pain. Perhaps Pickering is even an embodiment of that pain, a pain that must be confronted to be overcome. Will the Gingerbread Girl crumble? Or will she prove herself a tough cookie? Douglas J. Ogurek ****

Sole Survivor (Bantam) by Dean Koontz

An entertaining read… if you can survive the onslaught of details.

A year after his wife and two daughters are killed in an airplane crash, LA crime reporter Joe Carpenter has all but given up. But then, while visiting the cemetery on the one-year anniversary of their deaths, he encounters a mysterious woman who claims to have survived that flight. She then disappears. 

After a series of strange events, Carpenter sets out to find this Dr Rose Turner, who seems to have some knowledge that will help him (and quite possibly change the course of the world). But others with more malicious intents are after her as well. 

Carpenter begins to question things: Was the crash due to a mechanical error? Or were there deeper, more nefarious forces at work? The danger intensifies as he gets closer to an answer. He will encounter beachfront cultists, a potential suicide craze, a tech geek who’s also a thug, and a powerful tech company. 

Koontz doesn’t skimp on details. The reader must endure ridiculous similes, philosophical ramblings, character descriptions including everything but blood type, and sundry plot deviations. One can take only so much about breezes, flowers, the ocean and the sky. 

When Koontz is on, however, the reader gets some phenomenal stuff. Men betting on a dying roach in a beachside restroom. A boy referring to couple of young ladies in bikinis as “bitches”. A guy with “sensuous lips” and an alcohol-ravaged nose stabbing at pieces of gouda with a switchblade while calmly and relishingly threatening someone’s family members (including an unborn child) with detailed descriptions of physical and psychological torture. Koontz also touches on Carpenter’s backstory, including how something that happened to his father instilled a sense of fight that propels the protagonist as he unrelentingly pursues answers related to the flight.

Koontz also has a knack for jacking up tension, for instance in one scene where a pivotal character is about to reveal something critical while pursuers close in. Douglas J. Ogurek ****