#OcTBRChallenge 2024: a second A to Z of books and audiobooks

I'm taking part in OcTBRChallenge again this month, and this time I'm trying to finish off as many of my short books and audiobooks as I can, in A to Z order. It's been very good fun. My first A to Z of the month is here.

A is for Abominable, a novella by William Meikle. A lost journal of George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine from 1924 is offered for sale. It records their final, fatal ascent of Mount Everest, when they encountered something abominable! With a mouth full of long yellow teeth!

B is for Broken Glass, an audiobook of Arthur Miller's play about a Brooklyn woman in 1938 who, terrified by news of Jewish businesses being smashed up in Berlin, loses the ability to walk. Wonder what she'd make of the same thing happening now in New York. Stars JoBeth Williams. It was staged by LA Theatre Works in 1996. Included in Audible Plus for free.

C is for Creepy Comics, Vol. 1, by various writers and artists, Dark Horse's resurrection of the old horror anthology comic. Found this a trudge, to be honest, with inconsequential, simplistic stories and muddy artwork that was often hard to parse.

D is for The Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child, by Frank Miller and Rafael Grampa. Bit weird this, originally published as issue 1, but no other issues materialised so now it's published as a book in itself. Batman Cassie Kelly and Superman's kids get into a fight with Darkseid.

E is for Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin, the first thing I've read by her, and a Hugo winner, apparently. An agent sent from a colony expects to find Earth in ruins, but in fact it became a utopia after the nasty capitalists fled. A bit cringey, but how they treat him is sweet.

F is Fabius Bile: Repairer of Ruin by Josh Reynolds. I know I'm trying to finish my shortest books and audiobooks, but at only twenty minutes this audiobook is an extreme example! It recounts a skirmish on a demon world in the Warhammer 40K universe. Great sound effects and performances!

G is for Gallifrey 1.2: Square One, by Stephen Cole, starring Lalla Ward, Louise Jameson and John Leesons. I'd forgotten that I bought over a dozen of these audios a couple of years ago and they are quite a treat. This one concerns time trickery at a temporal summit, at which Leela goes undercover as an exotic dancer.

H is for Hellblazer: Rise and Fall, written by Tom Taylor with art by Darick Robertson. Ouch, painful. Makes the New 52 issues look good. I suppose English police officers might carry guns in the DC universe, but I think Hellblazer writers from outside the British Isles do best when setting their stories in their own countries.

I is for Is Kichijoji the Only Place to Live? by Makihirochi, a gentle manga about twins who took over their parents' estate agency, and run it in an unconventional manner, which always seems to involve persuading their clients not to live in Kichijoji, but elsewhere in Tokyo.

J is for The Judge's House by Georges Simenon. Maigret is present during a judge's attempt to dispose of a body. Typical Maigret tale full of grub and grubbiness. Modern-day readers may be surprised at how one chap gets away with what would now be considered a serious crime. We're supposed to feel sorry for him, if anything!

K is for Ka-Zar, Vol. 1, a Tarzan in Marvel's version of New York story by Mark Waid, with art by Andy Kubert and others. I remember this being well-regarded at the time, but it's not easy to see why now. The art is wildly dynamic, but not always to the storytelling's benefit.

L is for The Lover by Silvia Morena-Garcia, a short ebook/audiobook about Judith, a young woman treated as a servant by her more beautiful sister. She dallies with a pair of men, one who gives her books in return for sexual favours, the other her sister's husband.

M is for Melody James by Stephen Gallagher, an intriguing novella about a clever, resourceful fortune-teller recruited in 1919 to vet a journalist, a potential spy for the British secret service in Soviet Russia. Spin-off from a novel, The Authentic William James.

N is for November, Vol. 1: The Girl on the Roof, by Matt Fraction and Elsa Charretier. A stylish and mysterious graphic novel about a dissolute young puzzle fanatic who is paid $500 a day to solve a puzzle in the paper and broadcast the solution from a radio set on her roof.

O is for O Maidens in Your Savage Season, Vol. 1, written by Mari Okada, trans. Sawa Savage, with art by Nao Emoto, a manga book about romantic tension and teenage hormones boiling over in the school book club. It's funny and sweet but gets a bit ruder than expected in places.

P is for Put to Silence by Rose Biggin, a short, tart ebook published by Jurassic London in 2014 about a murder attempt during a performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The target's Brutus, the client's playing Julius Caesar, the killer's in the chorus.

(I decided not to count it for my A to Z in the end, but for P I also read an excellent novella that will hopefully appear in our twentieth anniversary issue of our magazine. It's the latest story in a long-running series. My favourite thing I've read this month, honest!)

Q is for Queen Crab, a short graphic novel by Jimmy Palmiotti and Artiz Eiguren. On my TBR list since January, when I got it in a Humble Bundle. The tale of a woman betrayed – after a scoundrel tries to drown her on a cruise, she mysteriously gains a pair of powerful crab claws!

R is for The Roman Empire, a Very Short Introduction, by Christopher Kelly, read by Richard Davidson. Explains how the Roman Empire was built, and banishes many illusions about it. Weird to learn that present-day Britain has a higher population than the entire Roman Empire. It looks like these are all leaving Audible Plus this month so I want to listen to a few of them for free while I still can.

S is for Stag by Karen Russell, read by Adam Berger. A lone wolf type of guy attends a divorce party with a one-night stand, and as things take a more serious turn at the previously silly party, he becomes rather obsessed with the divorcing couple's pet tortoise.

T is for Trigger Girl 6, thus named because she's the sixth mysterious super-powered assassin sent to kill the President of the USA. Written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, with very nice art by Phil Noto. Feels more like a French BD album than a traditional American comic.

U is for Ushers by Joe Hill, one of my Amazon First Reads picks this month. Two police officers chat with a young man in a bookshop (where he buys 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman) because he went home before a school shooting happened and got off a train that subsequently crashed.

V is for Venom by Donny Cates, Vol. 1: Rex, with pencils by Ryan Stegman. Eddie Brock learns about the symbiote's cosmic origins. The reason given for Venom's vulnerability to sound and fire was very silly, but there was some cool stuff too; overall the best Venom book I've read.

W is for Wild With Happy, the audiobook of a superb play from writer, director and star Colman Domingo, who plays Gil Hawkins, dealing (or not) with his mother's death by getting off with the funeral director and foregoing any ritual, much to the dismay of his hilarious aunt.

X is for X-Men Grand Design: Second Genesis by Ed Piskor, which pulls together a decade's worth of X-Men issues into one indie-style graphic novel. My 50th book or audiobook of the month! Jamming all these stories – not to mention all the fantastic TQF submissions I've been reading! – into my head at once is making me a little dizzy.

Y is for Yee-Haw: Weirdly Western Poems by Rhys Hughes. Of poetry I know not much, but what my mother said / "Books by that wacky Welshman, must not be left unread!" My favourite bit was a short Samuel Beckett-ish play, "Uneasy Rider", featuring author Max Brand.

Z is for Zero Gravity by Woody Allen, his fifth book of comedic essays and stories. The ideas, writing and jokes are as strong as ever, but the audiobook sounds like it was recorded at the kitchen table! It's almost unlistenable at first, but gets better later on.

Second A to Z complete!

Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between VI: Exploring the Ecology Within – Rafe McGregor

The sixth of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by first exploring the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the register of the Real.

 

Hearts of Darkness

Notwithstanding very fine examples by China Miéville, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and M. John Harrison, the most critically and commercially acclaimed novel in what is usually called the new weird and I am calling the ecological weird is almost certainly Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), which is the first of his Southern Reach Trilogy (which will be a quartet later this month) and was successfully adapted to a feature film of the same name by Alex Garland in 2018 (poster pictured). I do not intend to summarise or review either Annihilation or the Trilogy here, because excellent reviews and review essays have already been published in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Textual Practice, and elsewhere. Instead, I want to sketch a literary (and cinematic) lineage for Annihilation in order to shed light on the definition of ecological weird fiction with which I closed part V. The ecological weird, like occult detective fiction, shares the primary features of weird fiction by exploring the limitations of language, the inaccessibility of the world, and the alienation within ourselves. The last of these is particularly important for and to the ecological weird (to the extent that it does or does not constitute a subgenre or subcategory of the weird) and is a development of the inaccessibility of the world (which I explained in terms of the world-without-us in part IV). In ecological (and other) weird fiction, we not only encounter the alien, but recognise it within ourselves and either resist or accept it (it is no coincidence that the third part of the Southern Reach is titled Acceptance).

I have, in consequence, represented what I take to be the lineage from which Annihilation emerged in a schematic (pictured). The link to J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966) and, by extension, to ‘The Illuminated Man’ (published in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1964), H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Color Out of Space’ (published in Weird Tales in 1927), and Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’ (published in his collection, The Listener and Other Stories, in 1907) is uncontroversial. The Crystal World is a revision and expansion of ‘The Illuminated Man’ and Ballard appears to have deployed formal (and substantive) elements of Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece, Heart of Darkness (1899), in the course of adapting his own work. There are two points to note about this lineage. First, the inclusion of ‘The Willows’, which is – as I noted in part I – widely acknowledged as the single best weird tale ever written, demonstrates that the themes explored by the ecological weird are not new to the genre, merely developed in a different format (typically the novel rather than the short story). Second, Heart of Darkness draws attention to the crux of the ecological weird: it is not only about the (encounter with the) alien and (our) alienation, but self-alienation. Though criticised for its use of language and adoption of attitudes that are now, with complete justification, regarded as offensive, the novella provides a critique of colonialism so robust that it would keep plenty of social media trolls busy for a long time (assuming they had the intelligence and patience to read it). Conrad’s insight is that colonialism is not only bad for the colonised, who suffer what we would now call genocide, but also for colonisers, for whom the remoteness and expansiveness of the colonies facilitates the flourishing of all that is vicious within them. Despite VanderMeer’s repeated and vehement denials that Andrei Tarkovsky’s feature film, Сталкер (1979, translated as Stalker), had any influence on Annihilation, I made a tenuous link in my sketch on the basis of both narratives being concerned not only with a place that is utterly alien to humanity, but with the effects of that place on the minds of the people who enter it. The latter is essential to the ecological weird, the recognition of the alien within ourselves to which we respond with either resistance or acceptance.

 

The Weird Within

Psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan (1901-1981, pictured) is an even more controversial figure than Jacques Derrida (whom I discussed in part II) because he is regarded by many as a cynical (rather than sincere) charlatan and because there remains no consensus on the value of the vast body of work he produced over a career of five decades. In contrast to Derrida (and Eugene Thacker, discussed in part IV), I make no pretence to understanding Lacan’s overall project or even his individual publications and seminars, but I do think that what is known as his register theory is useful for grasping the self-alienation typically explored by and in ecological weird fiction. Register theory is an account of the modes of human existence and, hence, an ontology (a study of what exists, the way in which existing things exist, and how best to classify and codify existing things). As an ontology, register theory identifies three distinct but intervolved modes of human experience or orders: reality that can be perceived, reality that is socially constructed by language, and reality that remains inaccessible. The Imaginary refers to the world that human beings understand perceptively and non-reflectively and to the way in which human beings understand both that world and themselves as infants, i.e. before they develop the capacity for language. The Imaginary is therefore an innocent and naïve mode of human experience in which human beings are reduced to their perceptual capacities.

The Symbolic refers to the socially constructed world, which human beings access by means of language. The rules of the Symbolic order are revealed by the investigation of the way in which both language and social relations function and Lacan draws on the classic structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, whom I introduced in my discussion of Derrida in part II, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist. The Symbolic cannot be grasped in its entirety, with the result that human beings remain unaware of structures, contexts, and exchanges which have a profound influence on their lives. The Real refers to the ineffable world, which is detectable by human beings indirectly through the unconscious. The ineffable transcends expression and exceeds language, making it very difficult to discuss and impossible to apprehend. The Real can nonetheless be conceived as an objective reality that is inaccessible to subjective and intersubjective perception and cognition, a kind of Kantian noumenon or thing-in-itself (see part IV). The primary means of conceiving the Real is the unconscious, which is why register theory is a significant component in Lacan’s metapsychology. What makes the three orders or registers useful for understanding the ecological weird is that they are not only a taxonomy of the types of thing that exist but also structure the psyche, i.e. human subjectivity. The structure of subjectivity thus consists of all three of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real and the Real is the alien – or weird – within, the part of ourselves that is impossible to apprehend and can only be conceived partially and indirectly. 

Future Weird

Weird fiction is thriving. Perhaps not quite as much as in its heyday, almost exactly a century ago, but probably in a healthier condition given that it is no longer tied to and dependent on a single format (the short story) or the success of a particular outlet (Weird Tales). I want to close this series with a couple of observations that draw on my short-lived but very enlightening (for me, if not my students) stint as a creative writing tutor. In part V, I discussed the importance of the development of the weird novel to the survival of the genre in the twenty-first century, citing S.T. Joshi’s discussion of the trend in what he terms the modern weird tale. Joshi identifies three ways in which authors have attempted to match literary intention with commercial demand by extending the tale to the novel:

1. Writing a fantastic narrative that has a real-world setting.

2. Writing a mystery narrative with supernatural element.

3. Writing a narrative that is structured around a complex supernatural situation.

He regards the first of these as difficult, although Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) shows how it can be achieved. The second is cheating in Joshi’s opinion and while I might agree if the supernatural element is superficial or gratuitous, I think the greater concern is that crime fiction itself is better suited to the novella format (as mentioned in part V). Nevertheless, Miéville and VanderMeer both show how this can be achieved (without cheating) with The City & the City and Finch: A Novel, both published in 2009. The third is Joshi’s recommended approach and assuming that Absolution doesn’t completely change the series’ narrative trajectory, it seems precisely what VanderMeer has done in the Southern Reach.

While I was researching The Conan Doyle Weirdbook (2012), likely in 2009 or 2010, I came across a short guide to writing new weird fiction and scribbled some notes in the inside cover of one of the key texts I keep on my writing desk. In spite of many hours – probably one or two days even – of searching, I’ve never been able to find the guide again. (I assume it was part of an introduction to an anthology, but I really should have found it by now.) There are three recommendations and I think they present a nice complement to Joshi’s list, albeit one focused on reinventing rather than transforming the genre. Based on my notes in the absence of the original, the recommendations are:

1. Extrapolating the internal logic of a speculative (or other) narrative.

2. Rewriting a particular narrative in a different genre.

3. Deconstructing a speculative (or other) narrative.

The first might be said to have been used by Kiernan in her extrapolation of her fascination with the figure of the selkie in The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (2012). I have heard Miéville’s King Rat (1998) described as a retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (c.1300), which is both accurate and an example of the second. I have already provided an example of the third in part III, with Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016), although I suspect this method would be difficult to sustain to novel length. (I am also fairly sure that the guide was for writing new weird tales not new weird novels). Whatever form the future of weird fiction takes, I look forward to reading and watching more of it in TQF and beyond!

 

Recommended Reading

Fiction

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2014).

M. John Harrison, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, Gollancz (2020).

China Miéville, The City & the City, Macmillan (2009).

Nonfiction

Jeff VanderMeer, Caitlín R. Kiernan on Weird Fiction, Weird Fiction Review (2012).

China Miéville, M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or? Collapse IV (2008).

Robert Weinberg, The Weird Tales Story (2^nd ed.), Pulp Hero Press (2021).

UNSPLATTERPUNK! 8 opens to fiction and art submissions!

Muck with a purpose: somewhat respected ezine challenges authors and artists to submit gore-saturated works with a positive message   

Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, allegedly the UK’s second-longest running sci-fi/fantasy/horror ezine, has opened its portal for art and fiction submissions for the eighth chapter in the UNSPLATTERPUNK! series. The possibly talented but more likely self-deluded Douglas J. Ogurek will once again assume editorial duties. 

Unsplatterpunk, horror’s most contradictory subgenre, pummels readers with all the grossness, violence and debauchery of splatterpunk while embedding a positive message. It’s kind of like putting a vitamin in a milkshake… a milkshake consisting of bodily expulsions and innards. 

Send us your morally enlightening filth of up to 10,000 words by April 30, 2025. We’re also looking for cover art submissions that support the unsplatterpunk concept. Note: this is a nonpaying market, but all contributors (and everyone) will have access to free PDF and EPUB versions of the anthology as well as the option to purchase paper copies at the lowest possible price. 

Forget the squeamish fans of mainstream horror, the instructors who told you not to write with a theme in mind, and even the splatterpunk writers mired in nihilism and gore for gore’s sake. We’re open to any genre, from vile fantasy and gruesome sci-fi to backwoods perversion and raw realism, provided that your tale exaggerates the ultraviolence and subversive content of the splatterpunk genre plus conveys a virtuous message. It’s all disgusting… and it’s all enlightening.

Dig into the first seven anthologies, all available for free: 

• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2 
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 3 
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 4 
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 5 
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 6 
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 7 

The UNSPLATTERPUNK! anthologies amplify the distasteful content of the typical splatterpunk story while adding a lesson in virtue. The message can be straightforward or subtle — we’ve even used allegories. 

Why Are Stories Rejected?

Following are common reasons why UNSPLATTERPUNK! submissions don’t pass muster:

• Too tame. You’ve just written a story full of decapitations, amputations and eviscerations? We can get that by turning on the TV. How will you take it to the next level? We want something so disgusting and/or violent that it will knock the socks off the most desensitized reader.
• No positive message. You’ve completed a transgressive piece that will shock and disgust even the most dedicated splatterpunk enthusiast? Great. But if it doesn’t have some positive message – that’s where the UN in unsplatterpunk fits in – we’re not interested. 
• Purple prose. When authors fall in love with their writing, they fixate on how they’re writing and lose focus on what they’re writing. We don’t care about what the sky is doing, how smoke drifts or what colour a character’s hair or eyes are… unless the descriptions contribute to the story. Don’t impress us with your language and vocabulary; impress us with your story.
• AI-generated stories. Don’t even try.

Tips on Achieving the Almost Impossible

“Unsplatterpunk is an exceptionally demanding genre in which to write, requiring an almost impossible balancing act between the disgusting and the morally uplifting,” states author, criminologist, philosopher and aesthetic commentator Dr Rafe McGregor. 

Having gone through this process seven times, we offer potential submitters the following tips:

• Approach your subject matter with a thirteen-year-old boy’s “gross is great” mentality and your writing with the technical skills of a seasoned fiction writer.
• Make the story as attention-seizing as a T-rex at a butterfly garden. 
• Develop content so revolting that readers think to themselves, Why am I reading this?
• Don’t forget humour. The over-the-top nature of these stories means there’s an element of humour in them. When authors take their subject matter too seriously, their work often devolves into dramatic hogwash.
• Imagine a man with a violin standing next to you as you write. Each time your writing gets dramatic, he starts playing. Don’t let him play! Fewer big words, abstractions and philosophical concepts – more story.
• Avoid standard revenge tales, which most often fail to deliver a positive message. It’s a cop-out, and it’s an overused concept in extreme horror.
• Don’t tack a moral lesson onto your conclusion; embed it into your story. 
• This isn’t a cologne commercial or a performing arts student’s one-act play. Don’t end your story in a quagmire of esoteric nonsense.
• Our thoughts on classic creatures: Vampires brooding around a castle? Cliché. Zombies wandering deserted city streets? Dumb. Werewolves at a sexual harassment prevention training seminar? You have our attention.
• Read everything you can get your hands on, especially splatterpunk. You need a baseline from which to launch.
• Read previous entries in the UNSPLATTERPUNK! series. Why not? They’re free.
• Please, for the love of all that is holy, don’t write your story in a chatty style full of colloquialisms. You’re writing to your reader, not your bestie.  

The Gory Details

Send stories (no poetry, please) and artwork to TQFunsplatterpunk@gmail.com. Put “UNSPLATTERPUNK! 8 submission” in the subject line. In your cover letter, include a bio and tell us about the positive message your story conveys.

• Deadline: 30 April 2025
• Max word count: 10,000
• Reprints: No
• Multiple submissions: Yes
• Simultaneous submissions: No. We’ll get back to you within a couple of weeks.
• File type: DOC (preferred) or DOCX files for stories; PDF or JPG files for artwork
• Payment: This is a nonpaying zine. However, free PDF and EPUB files will be available to everyone.

After publication, you are free to reprint your story elsewhere, but please credit Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction for original publication. See the TQF standard guidelines for additional information on rights and legal matters.

A Note on No Payment

Because our contributors do not receive monetary payment, some have accused us of using authors’ “slave labour” to get rich. The UNSPLATTERPUNK! series (and the TQF ezine in general) is not a moneymaking venture. Rather, it’s a group of dedicated hobbyists trying to have some fun and maybe just make the world a better place. That’s why we make PDF and ebook versions of all UNSPLATTERPUNK! anthologies available for free (with an option to purchase a hard copy on Amazon). Over the course of the UNSPLATTERPUNK! series, we have collected next to nothing from hard copy sales, and all of this nothing has gone right back into the publication of the anthology. 

Nevertheless, if writing is your job – or one day you want it to be your job – then of course you won’t want to do it for free. Submit your stories to a paying journal or anthology, or save them for your collection. And if you’ve been inspired to write something unsplatterpunkish, let us know so we can send readers your way! (And one thing we do offer contributors are free advertisements in the magazine for future projects relevant to our readers.)

Also, keep in mind that while some anthologists select contributors from a tiny pool of acquaintances, we take a different approach here. First, our sole criterion for acceptance is a good story that follows the parameters. Thus, everyone who submits has an equal chance of getting a story selected. Second, we read every submission from beginning to end. If we reject it, we tell you why. If we find promise in a story, we work closely with the contributor to make it as tight, violent, nauseating and illuminating as possible.

Earn the UNSPLATTERPUNK! badge. Submit stories and artwork by 30 April 2025.

Go Ahead: Yuck It Up

Readers who want to be disgusted and shocked by the content they consume continue to multiply. What appeals to them? Story, clarity, originality and above all, yuckiness. 

Help us revolt against pointless splatterpunk by giving readers what they want and infusing the story with an uplifting takeaway. Join the growing ranks of the UNSPLATTERPUNK! army including such luminaries as Hugh Alsin, Antonella Coriander, Harris Coverley, Garvan Giltinan, Chisto Healy, Joe Koch, Eric Raglin, Triffooper Saxelbax and Drew Tapley.

What triggers your moral compass? Environmental destruction? Intolerance? Poverty? Inequality? Speciesism? Write us a story that shows us how to deal with it.

Now is the time to give splatterpunk readers a kick in the crotch. Make them cringe. Make them gag. Make them squeal. Dump all the barbarity, carnage and vileness you can into your milkshake, but don’t forget to mix in that virtue vitamin.

You have until 30 April 2025. 

Shock us. Nauseate us. Edify us.

Pegging the President by Michael Moorcock (PS Publishing) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in TQF64 (March 2019).

Like other Jerry Cornelius stories, this brand new novella is a collage of in-jokes, allusions and references, and I doubt I caught more than one in ten of them. Your taste for that kind of thing will have a big effect on how much you enjoy the book. When I first read the Cornelius books, I found all of that funny because it seemed so random, cool and quirky. And even though I’m more used to the techniques being used, I still appreciate it. But I’m not going to pretend that I had a particularly good idea of what was going on in the story. What I did gather was that Jerry Cornelius, his friends, his family and his enemies, seemed to be slipping around in time, through different future and alternate history wars. All the favourites from the books show up: his sister Catherine Cornelius, Una Persson, Miss Brunner, Colonel Pyat, Shakey Mo, Jerry’s mum and dad, Cuban heels, Derry & Tom’s Famous Roof Garden. Even the famous needle gun makes an appearance. Jerry is still young, even though fifty years have (perhaps) passed, and he is able to do things like materialising in the seat of a car that someone else is driving. “The difference between fact and fiction”, Jerry comes to understand at one point, “[was] irretrievably blurred.” Each chapter begins with an extract: there are news items about the war in Syria, for example, and an extensive amount of It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, which has obvious relevance to present-day events in the USA: a capricious president who longs for the absolute power of a dictator, and a significant portion of the population also wishes he had it. It does break up the story a lot, though, and it feels as if you spend more time on the extracts than the adventure. It doesn’t help that a few of the extracts appear more than once, although that does reinforce the message. We thought we had set the ball rolling, thinks Jerry, but “all we’d done is start the pendulum”. Fans are likely to enjoy it very much, and I think it makes a pretty good entry point for those new to Jerry Cornelius – it’s no easier than the others, but it does give you a good idea of what they are like. Stephen Theaker ****

#OcTBRChallenge 2024: an A to Z of books and audiobooks

I always look forward to #OcTBRChallenge, where the idea is to clear as many books from your TBR list as possible in a month. I like to slice my collection a different way each year, and this time I'm reading as many of my short books as I can in A to Z order. The first one I finished was Ankle Snatcher by Grady Hendrix, about a family plagued by an actual monster under the bed.

B is for Bad Machinery, Vol. 10: The Case of the Severed Alliance, by John Allison. Her friendship with Shauna on the rocks, Lottie volunteers to work at a local newspaper. She discovers that the Chamber of Commerce is making blood sacrifices! Smashing, but sadly the last volume.

C is for Claudine à Paris by Colette, beautifully read by Isabelle Carré. Finished this, but have to admit I didn't follow it. I've been trying to improve my ear for French, and listening to this definitely helped, but I'm still picking out words and phrases rather than following the story. I listened to some of it with Android captions on, but it defeated the point since I just started reading instead of listening. If I listen to another French audiobook, I'll read a plot summary beforehand, so that I have some kind of framework to drop the bits I understand into, or maybe listen to a book I already know well.

D is for Doctor Who: UNIT Dominion by Nicholas Briggs and Jason Arnopp. As UNIT fends off more interdimensional incursions than the Evangelions, two Doctors turn up to help. One is a Scottish chap with an umbrella, the other is a haughty future Doctor, played by Alex McQueen…

E is for Earthdivers: Kill Columbus, volume 1 in a series written by horror author Stephen Graham Jones, art by Davide Gianfelice. In 2112, the native American survivors of an apocalypse try to fix things with time travel, by murdering Columbus before he reached their continent.

F is for Forager, a short graphic novel by Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray and Steven Cummings. A couple on the rocks take their daughter on a spaceship to Mars, where she makes contact with something alien! Feels like a slightly more rushed version of ace Leo books like Betelgeuse or Aldebaran.

G is for Gallifrey: Weapon of Choice, an entertaining Big Finish Doctor Who spin-off by Alan Barnes, starring four of Tom Baker's companions: the second Romana, the first and second K9s, and the one and only Leela. In this story Romana, now President of Gallifrey, gives Leela a mission.

H is for How It Unfolds by James S.A. Corey, both of him: a short ebook with more ideas than most books ten times the size. It's about Roy, who takes part in an audacious colonisation project. Given how much I loved this, I should probably read the Expanse books.

I is for I'm Standing on a Million Lives, Vol. 1, a manga book by Naoki Yamakawa, with art by Akinari Nao, translated by Christine Dashiell. Stories of Japanese teenagers transported to an RPG game world are ten a penny, but its exploration of the game's mechanics is quite fun.

J is for Jeremiah Bourne in Time, a fun four-part Big Finish audio drama written by Nigel Planer. Jerry time-travels like Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time, by focusing on the details. His first accidental trip is to 1910, where he encounters various oddballs played by a splendid cast.

K is for Kounodori: Dr Stork, Vol. 1, by You Suzunoki, a genuinely moving manga book about a doctor who moonlights as an acclaimed and mysterious concert pianist. He cuts performances short when his patients go into labour. I got about 200 of these Kodansha books in a free giveaway.

L is for Lovers at the Museum by Isabel Allende, about a young couple found curled up asleep on the floor of a supposedly secure museum, first thing in the morning. I like how Amazon First Reads now includes some shorter ebooks – this fab fantasy story was a March 2024 selection.

M is for The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, by Christopher Hitchens, where he puts the reputation of this holiest of scammers under the microscope and takes a scalpel to it. Really is shocking to read of her heartless treatment of the sick and dying.

N is for Nameless by Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham, in which a psychic fights god, who turns out to be an otherdimensional alien imprisoned in an asteroid that's hurtling our way. The art is fantastic throughout, but it felt like the writer's magical beliefs rather swamped the story.

O is for One, Vol. 1: Just One Breath, by Sylvain Cordurie and Zivorad Radivojevic, also about a psychic, this time a "bloodcog" called on to investigate why the world is suddenly at peace. I read a lot of this book while the adverts were on during Rings of Power!

P is for Pay the Ghost by Tim Lebbon. A little girl goes missing and a year later her mum returns, sick and wasted away to nothing, ruined by a year of searching in supernatural territory, needing dad's help. I haven't seen the film, but it sounds like it left out some of the best stuff from the book.

Q is for Quarry's Cut by Max Allan Collins. When a former colleague kills a friend, the erstwhile hitman hunts him to an adult film shoot at a ski lodge. I adored Stefan Rudnicki's readings of other Quarry books, but Christopher Kipiniak's grimmer version here is great too.

R is for The River and the World Remade by E. Lily Yu. In a world of permanent flooding, some moved inland, others have floating homes woven from plastic bags and styrofoam; in this ace story a house-weaver battles a storm to save a young rascal from his own folly.

S is for Stone Ovaries and Bowling Balls Trapped in Beautiful Prodigy World, a title that left little room for much else in my tweet about it! An outrageous, hilarious unsplatterpunk tale by Douglas J. Ogurek, full of unhinged, profane wordplay, like Oscar Wilde writing for Rik Mayall. And it's hilariously read by J James – a handful of glitches can be forgiven on what must have been a very challenging production. I'm biased, obviously – Douglas has probably contributed to more TQF issues than me at this point! – but I was laughing out loud throughout.

T is for Taproot, collecting and expanding a webcomic by Keezy Young. A gay ghost has a crush on a bisexual gardener, whose efforts to keep his plants alive unwittingly cross the line into necromancy! The odd pacing reflects its webcomic origins, but it's sweet and the art is lovely.

U is for Undercover by Tamsyn Muir, a twisty-turny urban fantasy story about a tough woman hired to bodyguard a gangster's ghoul, read by Susan Dalian. One of those nice books where if you borrow the ebook in Prime Reading, you can claim the audiobook to keep for good in Audible.

V is for Vampire Dormitory, Vol. 1, by Ema Tōyama, a gay vampire romance manga book very much aimed at female readers, to the point that one of the boys is secretly female and binding her breasts. Has the cute idea that vampires seduce humans because love makes our blood sweeter.

W is for Walking to Aldebaran, the audiobook jauntily read by the author, Adrian Tchaikovsky. British astronaut Gary Rendell is lost in the Crypts, a mysterious interplanetary nexus where various aliens try to survive among the detritus of each other's failed expeditions, and time gets weird.

X is for XIII Mystery, Vol. 6: Billy Stockton, by S. Cuzor and L.F. Bollee, the life story of a supporting character from volume 3 of the main XIII series. It's misery on top of misery as a child who loses his parents in a plane crash grows up to inflict misery on others in turn.

Y is for The Year of Magical Thinking, the audiobook version of a one-woman play by Joan Didion, based on her memoir of the year that followed her husband's death, and led up to her daughter's death, performed by Vanessa Redgrave. I gave the littler Theakers a big hug after this.

Z is for Zodiac Starforce, Vol. 2: Cries of the Fire Prince, written by Kevin Panetta, art by Paulina Ganucheau. A defeated enemy is so desperate for revenge on Zodiac Starforce that she tries to summon a demon goddess, but gets instead the goddess's pet dancer.

A to Z complete!

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Head of Zeus) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in Interzone #272 (September–October 2017).

It is the year 2454, and the Seven-Ten lists are about to be published. Produced by the most significant newspaper of each hive, these lists rank the ten most important people in the world. But the list of the Black Sakura has been stolen and taken to the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’house, apparently with the help of the so-called Canner device, which conceals a traveller's identity. Whoever did this seems to have several purposes in mind, and knows exactly what secrets they want brought into the light.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #77: Unsplatterpunk! 7 is now out in paperback and ebook!

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

Welcome to Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #77: Unsplatterpunk! 7, edited by Douglas J. Ogurek.

The Good News According to Gore

Get ready to gag, cringe and squirm. Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction erupts with yet another geyser of violence and grossness in this seventh instalment in the UNSPLATTERPUNK! smearies. These six tales, covering everything from a nightclub basement’s revolting contents to bone-crushing brawls atop a mesa, inject a positive message into the characteristic splatterpunk barbarity and filth.

A girl with aspirations of escaping her farming town gives a dilapidated scarecrow a makeover. Alternative music brings comfort to a young woman undergoing cruel experiments. The meaning of a phrase inspired by a nineteenth century event mutates from enigmatic to vile to hopeful. In a disgusting retelling of the mice falling into cream parable, two men find themselves stuck in fluid. Hint: it’s not milk. An ancient stranger unleashes debauchery among the self-absorbed patrons at an upscale bar. Kung Fu Sue returns from her last adventure to break, chop, snap and tear her way through the most unsavoury adversaries.

The stories that follow deliver a heaping portion of broken spines, bashed in skulls and severed flesh steeped in a revolting soup of bodily expulsions. When you emerge from it… if you emerge from it… expect to feel besmirched and enlightened.

The cover art is by Edward Villanova. In the Quarterly Review, Douglas Ogurek and Stephen Theaker look at Bludgeon Tools: Splatterpunk Anthology, edited by K. Trap Jones, Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas, 47 by Walter Mosley, Hell to Pay by Matthew Hughes, The Night Parade by Ronald Malfi, Positive by David Wellington, Stitches by Hirokatsu Kihara and Junji Ito, and Stray Pilot by Douglas Thompson, plus, in the film and television sections, Boy Kills World, Civil War, Geethanjali Malli Vachindi, Halloween Ends, IF, Immaculate and Twisted Metal, Series 1.

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Here are the virtuous contributors to this issue.

Brett Petersen is the author of The Parasite From Proto Space & Other Stories, drummer for alt-rock group The Dionysus Effect and copyeditor for CLASH Books. He is also a competent visual artist and tarot reader and is proudly autistic. He enjoys Japanese role-playing video games such as Xenoblade and the Trails series, and he lives just outside of Albany, New York. Everything he does can be found at linktr.ee/brettpetersen.

Bryan Miller is a writer and performer based out of Minnesota. His fiction has appeared in The Drabblecast, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Shadowy Natures: Stories of Psychological Horror, The Monsters We Forgot Part 1, and more than a dozen other journals and anthologies. His work has been featured on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, SiriusXM, the comedy special Panic Room, and two comedy albums: 2020 and All the New Ugly People.

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonymous and sophomoric founder of the unsplatterpunk subgenre, which uses splatterpunk conventions (transgressive/gory/gross/violent subject matter) to deliver a positive message. His short story collection I Will Change the World … One Intestine at a Time (Plumfukt Press), a juvenile stew of horror and bizarro, aims to make readers lose their lunch while learning a lesson. Ogurek also guest-edits the wildly unpopular UNSPLATTERPUNK! “smearies”, published by Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. These anthologies are unavailable at your library and despised by your mother. Ogurek reviews films and fiction for that same magazine.

Edward Villanova is a horror author, podcaster and content creator who dabbles in horror-themed visual art, and provides the cover art for this issue. He is inspired by the works of Zdzisław Beksiński and Junji Ito, preferring to focus on the implications of a scene depicted more so than the subject of the artwork. He currently resides in Dallas, Texas and is an active member of the Sicilian community there.

Harris Coverley, a returning UNSPLATTERPUNK! contributor, has had more than a hundred short stories appear in publications such as Penumbra, Hypnos, JOURN-E and The Black Beacon Book of Horror (Black Beacon Books). He has also had over two hundred poems published in journals around the world. He lives in Manchester, England.

Pip Pinkerton was born and raised in Oakdale, Minnesota. Pip is a wanderer and a dreamer. He loves writing short stories, poetry and screenplays. A former theatre student and current guitar player, Pip co-manages a record shop. When he is not writing or jamming, he is spending time with his trusty rottweiler, Shrimp. Pip’s work appears in Monstrous Femme, and he has a story forthcoming on HorrorAddicts.net.

v.f. thompson is just compost in training. She can be found clowning around Kalamazoo, Michigan. She is the editor of Trans Rites: An Anthology of Genderfucked Horror, and her work may also be found in Monster Lairs from Dark Matter Ink, The Crawling Moon from Neon Hemlock Press, The Hard Times, and a smattering of other publications. Her play, Taproot, is set to be performed as part of Queer Theatre Kalamazoo’s upcoming 2024–25 season.

While Dafydd Rhys Hopcyn-Kitchener’s day job is in accountancy, writing is his real passion. He is a fan of short, sharp page-turners, and he writes to entertain. Check out his Westerns (published by The Crowood Press), his romantic novel Stranger from the Sea (published by DC Thomson) and his self-published horrors.

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

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Submissions are open for UNSPLATTERPUNK! 8 from October 2024 to April 2025. Give it your worst shot!

Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between V: The Ecological Weird – Rafe McGregor

The fifth of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by first exploring the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the ecological weird.

 

New Weird? 

When I introduced the weird tale as originating in Gothic Romanticism in part I, I acknowledged that it was a contested claim and there is a similar dispute about the relationship between the new weird and the weird tale (or old weird). ‘New Weird’ was coined by M. John Harrison (b.1945), an author, editor, and critic associated with the New Wave of science fiction in the nineteen sixties and seventies. There are claims that the coinage first appeared in Harrison’s introduction to China Miéville’s (b.1972, pictured) The Tain (2002) and in an internet forum (where the date is usually given as 2003), but regardless of its precise source, Benjamin Noys and Timothy Murphy note that the term was initially used to refer exclusively to the work of Miéville (who rejected the label). Those who take Miéville to have inaugurated the new weird tale usually identify his Perdido Street Station (2000) as the first in the genre, which was established with the publication of the rest of the Bas-lag Trilogy, The Scar (2002) and Iron Council (2004). Literary critic S.T. Joshi, who has been almost single-handedly responsible for contemporary critical and academic interest in both H.P. Lovecraft and weird fiction also rejects the term, preferring ‘modern weird tale’. Joshi argues that there was no break between the old and new (and no in-between, as I suggest throughout this series), but that later authors simply breathed new life into the genre perfected by Lovecraft.

Part of the process of revitalisation described by Joshi involved the publication of successful weird novels. Lovecraft’s longest narrative was At the Mountains of Madness (serialised in Astounding Stories in February, March, and April 1936), which is approximately forty thousand words long, and his next longest The Shadow over Innsmouth (first published as a novella with a print run of two hundred in 1936 and then posthumously abridged for the January 1942 issue of Weird Tales), which is approximately twenty-seven thousand words long, placing both at the short end of the novella format. Joshi maintains that the weird tale is essentially a tale – i.e., a short story – and I agree that horror fiction in general is much better suited to the short format (and crime fiction to the novella format). The reinvigoration of the weird tale after 1940 saw the publication of novel-length weird tales such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), Ramsay Campbell’s Incarnate (1983), T.E.D. Klein’s The Ceremonies (1984), and Clive Barker’s Weaveworld (1987). Crucially for Joshi, these exemplary weird novels have nothing in common (beyond, presumably, meeting the criteria for his definition of weird fiction), which is why he is reluctant to admit the birth of a new genre or even a transformation of the original genre. Roger Luckhurst prefers the idea of a Lovecraftian revival rather than a new weird, drawing particular attention to the work of Caitlín R. Kiernan (whom I discussed in part II).

Tales of the City?

Jeff VanderMeer (b.1968, pictured), who is one of the three authors most often associated with the new weird – along with Miéville and Kelly Link (b.1969, pictured) – favours the term and refers to Perdido Street Station as the first ‘commercially acceptable’ new weird tale (in virtue of its length). VanderMeer defines the new weird as urban speculative fiction that is based on complex real-world models, employs elements of the surreal or transgressive, and is acutely (if not overtly) aware of the politics of the modern world. In this sense, it is both a continuation and transformation of the weird tale’s pursuit of an abstruse and possibly even unattainable understanding of the supra-natural and the un-rational. Noys and Murphy regard the new weird as indicative of precisely such a transformation, although they trace it beyond Miéville to the nineteen eighties, locating its origin in the work of Thomas Ligotti, Barker, and Brian Evenson. Like me (see part II), they foreground Ligotti’s contribution, claiming that he ‘formulated a new and desolate conception of a fundamentally chaotic universe’. James Machin also supports the classification, but pushes the origins back further still, to New Wave science fiction, which began in the nineteen sixties, was characterised by a self-conscious appropriation of literary modernism, and was associated with the work of Michael Moorcock, Harrison, Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard (1930-2009), Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delany, and Roger Zelazny.

Where, then, does this leave us…new or not, urban or not, Miéville or more? My view is that Noys, Murphy, VanderMeer, and Joshi are right to foreground the relatively recent development of the novel format in weird fiction. Without it, the genre is unlikely to survive much longer in the twenty-first century and there are unlikely to be repeats of 2018, for example, when three contemporary weird tales appeared on the big and small screen (discussed in my review of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water). Which is not to belittle the wonderful short stories of authors like Link and Sarah Monette – the genre needs both formats. With that in mind, however, there has been an overemphasis on Miéville’s work in discussions of the new weird because he prefers the novel format and often writes very long novels – as opposed to VanderMeer’s, which are much shorter, and Link, who remains faithful to the short story. The focus on Miéville at the expense of others has also created the overemphasis on the urban to which VanderMeer falls foul in defining the new weird. Miéville’s predilection for the urban – in King Rat (1998), the Bas-lag Trilogy (2000-2004), Un Lun Dun (2007), The City & the City (2009), The Last Days of New Paris (2016), and other stories – has produced a misleading association of genre and setting. The urban is more closely aligned with the steampunk genre and the Bas-lag Trilogy more exemplary of that genre than of weird fiction (although the two are quite obviously related), perhaps even its most accomplished novels after William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990). 

Weird Ecology?

Miéville is nonetheless rightly identified as one of the best authors of weird fiction in the twenty-first century, with his initial contribution being King Rat rather than Perdido Street Station. There is of course some irony in VanderMeer defining the new weird in terms of urban settings and themes because it was precisely his work – specifically, his Southern Reach Trilogy – which demonstrated that whether or not the new weird was new, it could function as well if not better in rural settings and with biological themes. Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance were all published in 2014, the cinematic adaptation of Annihilation (directed by Alex Garland) was released by Paramount Pictures and Netflix in 2018, and (as with so many successful trilogies) the Southern Reach will become a quartet with the publication of Absolution next month. VanderMeer’s well-deserved success has, in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century, shifted the initial emphasis on the urban to the rural and highlighted links to what is variously called eco-fiction, cli-fi, or climate change fiction, a category of science fiction (and, perhaps, literature) that probably began with Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous (1889, translated as The Purchase of the North Pole). VanderMeer’s bridging of the divide between eco-fiction and weird fiction has led critics to speak of his ecologically minded weird fiction and ‘weird ecology’, to describe him as the weird Thoreau, and to associate his work with global weirding.

Although I shall discuss the precursors to and origins of the Southern Reach Trilogy in more detail in part VI, I want to recommend two things here that will conclude my answers to the questions raised earlier. First, that the ‘new weird’ and its affiliation with Miéville and the urban be retired in favour of the ecological weird. If weird fiction (and, indeed, literature) is to, in VanderMeer’s words, remain acutely aware of the politics of the modern world, then it must reflect on the conditions of its own production in the Anthropocene and on the kind of issues I discussed in my essay on climate change culture, published in TQF76 in April. This does not restrict the category to stories with a rural setting or biological themes and reinforces the value of Miéville’s King Rat, which is outstanding ecological weird fiction. Replacing ‘new weird’ with ‘ecological weird’ also reveals what seems to me to be a clearer origin of the transformation of the weird tale, which I locate in Ballard’s four prototypical climate fiction novellas: The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World. Ballard was dismissive of The Wind from Nowhere, but aside from being his first published novella, Kate Marshall makes a convincing case for it anticipating what I am calling the ecological weird and what she calls novels by aliens. Second, as with occult detective fiction, the ecological weird is a category within weird fiction and, as such, requires only a minor revision of my previous definition: the ecological weird is philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounds the alienation within ourselves. It is to this (self-)alienation that I turn in part VI.

 

Recommended Reading

Fiction

China Miéville, King Rat, Macmillan (1998).

Kelly Link, Get in Trouble: Stories, Canongate Books (2015).

Jeff VanderMeer, Finch: A Novel, Underland Press (2009).

Nonfiction

Jeff VanderMeer, The New Weird: ‘It’s Alive?’, The New Weird, Tachyon Publications (2008).

S.T. Joshi, The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction, McFarland & Company (2001).

M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir, Serpent’s Tail (2023).

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells (Tordotcom) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in TQF64 (March 2019).

A rogue security bot believes itself to have been responsible for a massacre, and is determined to find out the truth of the matter. Like Dumarest’s search for Earth, this seems to be an efficient way of thrusting the protagonist into a series of otherwise unrelated adventures. In this book, having barely survived its experiences in All Systems Red and left the comfort of its armour behind, the rather neurotic SecUnit hops on an unmanned research vessel heading the right way. The vessel’s piloting construct is much more intelligent than expected, but the ART, as the SecUnit calls it (short for Asshole Research Transport), comes to share the SecUnit’s love of trashy serials like Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, and then takes an active interest in the SecUnit’s mission. They work together on both the cover mission (a contract to protect a group of polyamorous techs whose research has been stolen) and the covert mission (visiting the scene of the massacre). Their friendship is very sweet, and their combined abilities mean that they meet every challenge in an interesting and novel way. The novella leaves plenty of mysteries in the air, about the SecUnit and its new, surprisingly powerful buddy, so there’s more to look forward to, but it tells a good self-contained story. We’re used to utterly competent heroes in science fiction, and the SecUnit is definitely that when it comes to a fight, very enjoyably so, but it is also intensely anxious in social situations: every great hero must have a weakness. It’s all very entertaining. Stephen Theaker ****

The Super Mario Bros. Movie | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Beloved brothers and unconventional stars: animated film bridges generations of gamers and gives second fiddle a chance to shine.

Poor Luigi – he’s not as brave, smart or popular as his brother Mario. After all, it’s always been Super Mario Bros… not Super Luigi Bros. Initially, the 2023 animated film The Super Mario Bros. Movie, directed by Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic and others, continues the disparity. Luigi totes the heavy plumbing equipment behind Mario. A flashback shows a boy Mario coming to Luigi’s defence when the latter gets picked on. However, this film also tantalises the viewer with the prospect of Mario’s tall, awkward, skinny green shadow coming into his own.

Against the advice of family members, the brothers have given up a cushy demolition job to pursue their dream by opening a plumbing business in Brooklyn. When they inadvertently get sucked into a different universe, Mario (Chris Pratt) gets transported to a vibrant kingdom with giant mushrooms, toad figures and the beautiful Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy). Luigi (Charlie Day) ends up in a dark wasteland full of threats. And of course, Luigi doesn’t have nearly as much screen time as Mario. 

Mario and Princess Peach set out to save Luigi and stop Bowser (Jack Black) from taking over this universe. This brutish, fire-breathing turtle thinks the princess will marry him because he stole a magical star that gives him power. It’s a reasonable assumption, but this is a children’s movie – the princess has zero interest in Bowser. Despite his spikes, horns and heavy-metal headquarters, Bowser comes out of his shell when alone. This is best exemplified in a melodramatic albeit entertaining piano-accompanied ballad (highlighted by Blackesque vocal antics) in which huge images of the princess’s head float in the background. 

The film makes up for its rudimentary plot (i.e. stop the bad guy and save Luigi) with stunning animation (including a chase scene that takes place on a rainbow and a reckless first-person POV ride), contemporary dialogue, humour and plenty of action. Despite her princessy wardrobe replete with pink dress and tiara, Princess Peach surprises with un-princesslike behaviour. She is a woman of action, and her conversations with Mario are rapid and unsentimental. 

Mario also encounters another classic video game character: Donkey Kong. Though the two have an adversarial relationship, they learn that they have a similar motivation. A favourite minor character is an imprisoned star whose hopeless statements contrast with its echoing, high-pitched vocals, joyous movements and bright blue light.

Perhaps the film’s greatest asset is its use of the Super Mario Bros. imagery that links generations of video game players: green pipe portals, colourful spotted mushrooms, floating platforms, lava and many others. 

Mario’s biggest strength (or is it a weakness?) is that he doesn’t know when to quit. Much of the film involves him and his allies taking a beating, then hitting the power-up squares and eating the mushrooms they provide to obtain a temporary special power: getting bigger and stronger, transforming into some kind of animal hybrid, and sometimes mutating into something less desirable. It’s the underdog turned powerhouse that kids have enjoyed since Popeye popped his first can of spinach. And surely there’s a part of us as adults that love it as well. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

Everything Belongs to the Future, by Laurie Penny (Tordotcom) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in TQF65 (December 2019).

Close to the end of the twenty-first century, things don’t seem to have changed a great deal in the UK. The seventeenth Halo game is out, the Mercury Music Prize is still running, and economic inequality is still a serious problem. The one big difference is that those with the necessary wealth or privilege can “fix”: take drugs to stop the progression of ageing.

Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between IV: Detecting the World-Without-Us – Rafe McGregor

 

The fourth of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by first exploring the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the world-without-us.

 

Search and Solve

In part III, I defined occult detective fiction as subgenre of weird fiction and suggested that the easiest way to understand it was as stories that place a detective character in a supernatural setting. The detective can be identical to a crime fiction detective, such as Detective John Hobbes (played by Denzel Washington) in Gregory Hoblit’s Fallen, or a crime fiction detective with esoteric knowledge, heightened sensitivity to the supernatural, or both, such as Sarah Monette’s (b.1974 and also writes under the penname Katherine Addison, pictured) Kyle Murchison Booth. The detective may have some supernatural powers himself, such as Mike Carey’s Felix Castor, or be a supernatural being, such as Cassandra Khaw’s John Persons. The setting can similarly be almost – but never actually – identical to the real world, as in Mark Valentine and John Howard’s Connoisseur, or one in which the illusion of the everyday conceals a supernatural reality, as in ABC and Showtime’s Twin Peaks (1990-2017). Alternatively, the setting can be one in which the supernatural is a ubiquitous to the real world, as in David Tallerman’s Detective Fièvre, or a different world entirely, itself a speculative fiction, as in Simon Kurt Unsworth’s Hell in his Thomas Fool series. The combination of a more or less realistic detective with a less or more supernatural setting provides the subgenre with its great variety, from Kat Richardson’s Greywalker (2006-2022) to the Millers’ Philosopher Rex (2010) to Fox’s Sleepy Hollow (2013-2017) to Brian Taylor’s Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024). Regardless of the variations in detective protagonist and occult world employed by authors, studios, and directors, occult detective stories usually follow the plot structure associated with detective fiction, which involves that protagonist either searching for a murderer or searching for a missing person (one of the reasons Monette’s Kyle Murchison Booth stories are so striking is that she rarely deploys either).

In explaining the difficulty of creating compelling occult detective fiction in part III, I noted that detective fiction stages the tension between the sequence of events that underpin the narrative and the story that we read or watch. Cultural critic Fredric Jameson (b.1934) takes this tension further, describing the structure of detective stories in terms of two complementary formal devices: the first, which he refers to as temporal or objective, is the solution to the murder or disappearance; the second, which he refers to as spatial or subjective, is the search itself. For Jameson, the search is more significant than the solution and is the focal point for authors because they need to delay the solution as long as plausibly possible (otherwise all murder mysteries would be short stories or television episodes). In combining sequence of events and story, solution and search, the creators of occult detective fiction have a little more flexibility than their crime fiction counterparts and the protagonist-driven-plot can take one of three forms. Detectives are standardly employed to investigate someone else, which is also true of occult detectives. In Paul Crilley’s Poison City (2016), for example, Lieutenant Gideon Tau of the South African Police Service’s Delphic Division is called to investigate the murder of a ramanga, a low-level vampire. The first variation is two detectives investigating one another, which is not necessarily restricted to the work of the occult detective, but easier to achieve with an occult element. In the first season of Amazon Prime Video’s Carnival Row (2019), Inspector Rycroft Philostrate (played by Orlando Bloom) and Piety Breakspear (played by Indira Varma), the Chancellor’s wife, investigate a murder and missing person’s case respectively. Unbeknown to one another, Breakspear is the murderer Philostrate is seeking and Philostrate the missing person Breakspear is seeking (‘missing’ because of his identity as the Chancellor’s natural son). The second variation is the detective investigating herself, a paradox which is almost impossible to represent without an occult element. Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987) is a rare and rich success: private investigator Harry Angel (played by Mickey Rourke) is hired to find a missing person, only to discover that he himself is that person (though the plot is considerably more complex, the starting point is that Angel has amnesia following a war injury).

Horror of Philosophy

If the occult detective story stages a series of tensions – rationality and extra rationality, sequence and story, solution and search – but is also, in virtue of being first and foremost a weird tale, essentially rather than accidentally philosophical, the obvious question is the purpose to which all of these carefully curated tensions are put. My definition of weird fiction in part II and, by extension, of occult detective fiction in part III, was that it typically foregrounds the difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. Occult detective fiction explores this difference in its search and grapples with what philosopher Eugene Thacker (year of birth unavailable, but appointed to his first academic position in 2000, pictured) calls the world-without-us in the Horror of Philosophy, a trilogy of short nonfiction. His overarching aim is to first introduce the concept of the world-without-us and then demonstrate that supernatural horror is better equipped to explore that concept than traditional philosophy. As such, In the Dust of This Planet (2011) is primarily focused on conceptualising the world-without-us, which is an articulation of human limitations and contrasted with two related concepts, the world-for-us and the world-in-itself. Starry Speculative Corpse (2014) focuses on reading works of philosophy as if they were horror fiction, which reveals philosophy as a self-defeating activity, undermining its own foundations and paralysing its own thinking. Tentacles Longer Than Night (2015) reverses direction, focusing on reading horror fiction as if it was philosophy. Thacker refines his concern with supernatural horror to the cosmic horror that H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937, pictured) popularised, analysing his apparent futilitarianism to identify the indifferentism at the core of his weird tales. Indifferentism provides the best possible approximation and appropriation of the world-without-us and horror thus succeeds where philosophy fails.

The best way to approach the world-without-us, which will also be of use in explaining Jacques Lacan’s metapsychology in part VI, is to start with philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) transcendental idealism. Kant differentiates between appearances on the one hand and things in themselves on the other. Appearances constitute subjective reality (the reality of the perceiver) and things in themselves objective reality. Transcendental idealism is an epistemological position maintaining that humans only ever gain access to the phenomenal world of appearances (the world of human experience) and that the noumenal world (the world as it is) remains necessarily inaccessible. What is important to recognise is that Kant’s epistemology is neither pessimistic nor nihilistic. The technological advances made by humanity evince a significant overlap between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds (much like that mentioned in part II), but no scientist (or priest or artist) can make a claim to truth beyond the phenomenal. Thacker begins with the world-for-us, abbreviated to World, which is ‘the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feel alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also separate from the human.’ When the World ‘resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us’, we conceive of it as the world-in-itself or Earth and the parallels between World and phenomena and Earth and noumena are obvious. Like noumena, Earth is a paradoxical concept – because as soon as we conceptualise it, we transform it into the world-for-us.

 

World, Earth, and Planet

Thacker’s third and most significant concept is the world-without-us, or Planet, an attempt to articulate human limitations while avoiding the paradox of trying to comprehend the Earth from a human perspective (and thus transforming it into World). He describes it as ‘the subtraction of the human from the world.’ The Planet and the Earth are both inaccessible to humanity, but where the Earth coexists with the World, the Planet does not. Thacker’s idea is that the Planet is a way of conceiving of the Earth without collapsing it into the World. What Thacker is not doing is extending Kant’s epistemology from two parts to three, from phenomena and noumena to World, Earth, and Planet. He is, rather, replacing the original dichotomy with a novel one, World and Planet. The Planet is a negative concept – the subtraction of the human – and will remain after the human, although it has also preceded and been contemporaneous to and with the human. In the Anthropocene, the age of humanity, the Planet is a more useful concept than noumena and Thacker describes his taxonomy as conceptualising humanity’s home in an era where global climate change has raised the possibility of our extinction. The overarching thesis of his trilogy is that horror fiction (and weird fiction in particular) provides the best exploration of the world-without-us (or at least a much better one than philosophy does).

Drawing on the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976, mentioned in part I in connection with the unhomely), Jameson regards the tension between the solution and the search in detective fiction as staging, enacting, or dramatizing the rift between World and Earth (Thacker’s terminology is a development of Heidegger’s). I think a good way of understanding the philosophical element of occult detective fiction is as staging, enacting, or dramatizing of the rift between World and Planet. In one sense this is problematic because Thacker’s whole effort in replacing noumena with Planet is directed at articulating the fact that the latter cannot co-exist with the World and can never be apprehended or appropriated by humanity – whether by science, religion, philosophy, or art. On the other hand, approaching occult detective fiction in this way draws attention to its own limits, to the essential incompatibility of the detective as the instrument of reason and the supernatural as defiant of reason. The World does not, in Heidegger’s terms, ground itself on the Planet nor does the Planet jut through the World. Planet is a thingness of things (noumena) that resists assimilation, remains opaque, and can only be grasped as an absence of World. As opposed to the relation between World and Earth, the absence of a relation between World and Planet means that the glimpse of irreconcilability is a glimpse of nothingness, subtraction, and absence. It is this glimpse – of what is essentially rather than accidentally unknown – that fuels a fear more compelling than frightening objects, as Lovecraft was well aware, opening his tour de force, Supernatural Horror in Literature (first published in The Recluse in 1927) with: ‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’

 

Recommended Reading & Viewing

Fiction

Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom, Tor.com (2016).

Carnival Row, Season 1, Amazon Prime Video (2019).

Angel Heart, directed by Alan Parker, Tri-Star Pictures (1987).

Nonfiction

Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of this Planet, Zer0 Books (2011).

Rafe McGregor, The Complex Art of Murder, Journal of Aesthetic Education (2022).

Robert H. Waugh, Lovecraft’s Rats and Doyle’s Hound: A Study in Reason and Madness, Lovecraft Annual 7 (2013).