The Writing Life – Rafe McGregor

For the last twenty years, I’ve been fascinated by what is called ‘the literary life’, ‘the writing life’, being ‘bound up with books’, being a ‘bookman’ (or bookwoman), and various other more oblique or less elegant phrases. Regarding terminology, I’m not keen on either of the last two because they imply an emphasis on reading (or collecting) books rather than writing them and while one cannot write without reading, I know plenty of people who love reading but have no desire to write anything beyond an email or shopping list. Calling a life literary seems pretentious to me, though perhaps that’s just because I never aspired to be the next Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Douglas Coupland, J.M. Coetzee, Cormac McCarthy, or David Peace (I’m just not clever or creative enough.) Which leaves me with the writing life. What is it and have I been living it?

One of the best descriptions I’ve ever read is by Octavia Butler, from the archive of letters, diaries, journals, commonplace books, and datebooks that has recently been made available by The Huntington Library in San Merino, California. She gets straight to the heart of the matter: ‘Will always write, no matter what. This is a fact of my life. Thus I must always leave time in my day for writing.’ The writing life is nothing more and nothing less than a life spent writing; writing, typing, or recording one word after another until one has a paragraph, a stanza, a draft, a manuscript or something else someone somewhere might read. And that remains the case even when writing doesn’t earn any money or when there might be very little time for it. Here is Gareth L. Powell in About Writing: The Authorised Field Guide for Aspiring Authors (2022), picking up where Butler leaves off: ‘However you decide to organise your life, remember why you’re doing it. The goal is to get everything else under control, so you can be wild and free in your creative endeavours.’ For me, the writing life has had several characteristics that seem to have been shared by better known writers of speculative fiction and I want to draw attention to five.

First – and I place this first for good reason – is notetaking. In Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir (2023), M. John Harrison writes: ‘But notes make good source material, and when you keep notebooks they eventually begin to suggest something.’ Like many writers (and researchers), I’m a compulsive notetaker. And happy with it. Where I could and should do better is that I often throw my handwritten notes away or delete my digital ones and…of course…sometimes find I could’ve used them later. Here is Butler, once again cutting straight to the core, describing exactly why I make so many notes: ‘Writing things down a little might help untangle them – answers in a flash of insight or something.’ My creative process is very unimaginative in that whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction I usually start with notes rather than with an exposition or introduction. My writing is labour-intensive, perspiration not inspiration, proceeding slowly from rough notes to detailed notes to a first draft to up to a dozen more before something someone somewhere might enjoy reading emerges from the mess.

The second characteristic is collecting. I know few people who live the writing life without loving and collecting books (including in digital form, whether listened to or read onscreen). I listen to as many books as I read, to save my eyes and maximise my reading time, but I still love the look, feel, and smell of actual books. I’m with Ursula Le Guin when she wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 2008: ‘The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.’ I’ve been collecting on and off for forty-five years and probably have about four thousand books and magazines on my shelves, which is a little disappointing as it isn’t much of an advance on what I had ten years ago, but probably for the best until someone donates me a bigger house. Harrison has a depressing take on collections like mine for writers like me, i.e. those in the latter part of their lives: ‘You imagine someone saying, “They meant so much to him, choose anything you like,” then, when everyone has gone, looking around at all the books still left and wondering what on earth to do with them because even the charity shops aren’t interested.’

Third, drafting – as distinct from notetaking, revising, editing, or proving. In my short-lived career as a creative writing tutor, I used to call this 3FD: finish the f— first draft. (You might be surprised at how sensitive many creative writing students are, which is what the silly em dash is doing there.) I later realised that many if not most fiction writers recommend the same thing when it comes to writing a novel. Here’s Joanne Harris in Ten Things About Writing: Build Your Story…One Word at a Time (2020): ‘It’s tempting to tinker about with your first draft as you go along, but, barring a small amount of day-to-day line-work, which might help you get into the mood for writing, it’s nearly always better to just get your draft down. Even a dirty first draft is easier to work with than a clean first chapter.’ I’m not sure how useful the advice is in general, but given my own practice (described above), it’s exactly what I need. Once I have a completed first draft instead of detailed notes, the rest is relatively easy, whether it’s another three or ten drafts. In Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (1998), Le Guin explains precisely how one gets that first draft down: ‘The chief duty of a narrative sentence is to lead to the next sentence – to keep the story going. Forward movement, pace, and rhythm are words that are going to return often in this book.’

The fourth characteristic is walking. Powell reminds us that, ‘Spending all day in a chair, hunched over a keyboard, can be desperately bad for your long-term health. In order to perform to the best of your abilities, you have to make time for a little exercise, even if it’s just a stroll around the block.’ Harrison takes a much more robust approach, which is why one of his chapters is titled ‘write all night, walk all day’. He replaced walking with running and then rock climbing when he moved to the Peak District, both of which I enjoyed when I was younger, but neither of which have the same value for me as walking. I couldn’t find a fiction author who captures what I get from walking and what it means to me so I’ve resorted to my favourite book on the subject, A Philosophy of Walking (published in 2011 and translated to English in 2023), by the French philosopher Frédéric Gros: ‘Walking is something other than a way of relaxing after a hard day’s work, something other than a remedy for ennui, a health regimen, a social ritual, or even a source of inspiration.’ He is absolutely right, but it is also all of those things he lists…at least to me.

The fifth and final characteristic is what I’m going to call judging, which is a poor description of what I’m trying to communicate. Let me try another approach: if I could go back in time, give myself one piece of advice, and insist to myself that I follow it, what would it be? (I had to add the third part because I often fail to follow good advice, regardless of its source.) Without doubt: find a way of determining when to persevere and when to give up. Obviously, that advice is useful beyond writing. Less obviously, I’m not talking about persevering with or giving up the writing life. What I mean is judging when to persevere with a project and when to give up on it – because I’ve wasted hours, days, weeks, months, and perhaps even years rewriting and revising work I should have just left (but not thrown away or deleted) in draft. Harris says it best: ‘Don’t throw valuable time at a dead project. Yes, giving up can be painful. But sometimes you have to plough over your crop in order to plant something else.’ But how does one know when the project is dead? While I have a better sense now than I did when I began, I’m still not sure and if someone had told me how important deciding whether to cultivate or plough was twenty years ago, I might have eventually worked it out. In Steering the Craft, Le Guin doesn’t provide an answer, but she does show where and how it can – must, even – be found: ‘Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work.’ Judging what has potential and what doesn’t remains one of the most difficult things for me.

Writing Above the Curve? – Rafe McGregor

I first watched F1, Joseph Kosinski’s 2025 Hollywood blockbuster, at home rather than on the big screen, had mixed feelings about it, and did what I usually do in such cases – read a few reviews the next morning. The most pithy (I’ve forgotten where it was) stated: ‘this is not the film you want it to be.’ True on many levels, including the most fundamental. This is a story about a never-has-been fifty-something racing driver, Sonny Hayes (played by Brad Pitt), whose Formula One career was cut short by his youthful recklessness but is given one last shot to compete by his friend, a former-teammate-turned-owner. Spoiler alert, Sonny achieves what he couldn’t manage thirty years ago, winning the final race of the season, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The problem from a narrative point of view is that Sonny’s character is as static as his driving is dynamic. The most basic story human beings tell is about someone who went somewhere or did something and was changed by the going or doing. At the end of the film, however, Sonny is not only the same man he was at beginning, but the same reckless, fearless, and rootless man he was in his twenties. And in case this isn’t disappointing enough, the film rubs its flaw in our faces in the closing scene. In the eighth minute (of one hundred and forty-eight), Sonny is heading for the Baja 1000 when his friend catches up with him and makes him the offer he can’t refuse. What does he do immediately after victory in Abu Dhabi? Leaves without saying goodbye and signs up for the Baja 1000. The places he went and the things he did changed nothing. It wasn’t the film I wanted it to be.

So why write about it at all, never mind in a zine dedicated to speculative fiction? About two-thirds of the way through the narrative, there is a scene where Kate McKenna (played by Kerry Condon), Sonny’s love-interest in what is for the most part a sausage-fest, asks him why he has come back to Formula One at his age. With typical masculine reticence, he declines to answer. Then, after a suitable amount of encouragement and a single manly tear, he says something very interesting: ‘It’s rare, but sometimes there’s…this moment in the car where everything goes quiet. My heartbeat slows…it’s peaceful and I can see everything and no one, no one, can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t know when I’ll find it again, but man, I want to, I want to…cos in that moment, I’m flying.’ The moment about which Sonny is talking is difficult to describe, but is something like what the philosopher (and Nobel laureate in Literature) Jean-Paul Sartre called being-in-itself, a kind of purity of being that we, as conscious and self-conscious living things, can rarely, if ever, reach. (In Sartre’s taxonomy, we are being-for-itself). It is pure consciousness, meaning consciousness of nothing or just nothingness itself (Sartre’s magnum opus was called Being and Nothingness), the breaking down of the barrier between subject and object, selfhood and worldhood, and perhaps even mind and body. That moment has frequently and fraudulently been sold to us as ‘flow’ and ‘mindfulness’, the latter as a snake oil remedy for exploitation by our employers or Big Tech. I wondered what the equivalent moment in writing might be.

Once again, I did what I usually do (when I have a question about writing), turned to my three favourite books on writing, all of which I have read or listened to multiple times and all of which I will no doubt read or listen to many more times in the future. In order of precedence, these are: Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), Chuck Wendig’s The Kick-Ass Writer: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, and Earn Your Audience (2013), and Brian Dillon’s Essayism (2017). Stephen King needs no introduction and I’ve written about him many times in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction and elsewhere. Chuck Wendig is an American speculative fiction author best known for his Star Wars: Aftermath Trilogy (2015-2017), three novels that connect the original trilogy of films to the sequel trilogy in what is now known as the Skywalker Saga. Brian Dillon is an Irish author best known for his nonfiction, especially his essays, and is also a highly respected art curator. As the title suggests, Essayism is about Dillon’s forté rather than fiction writing so I shall replace it with a recent find, Gareth L.Powell’s About Writing: The Authorised Field Guide for Aspiring Authors (2022). Powell is a prolific English science fiction author who has been publishing short stories, novellas, and novels since 2002. I want to call Powell and Wendig ‘mid-list’ authors, but I’m not sure if I should because, first, I’m not sure if a mid-list of professional novelists still exists and, second, it sounds disrespectful…which is not my intention: as much as I love On Writing, I never aspired to be a bestseller so there is a sense in which Powell’s and Wendig’s books are much more relevant to my experience as an author.

King describes something very similar to Sonny’s moment and even uses ‘moment’ to introduce it. This passage appears during his description of the problems he had writing The Stand (1978), his fifth novel and one of the half-dozen for which he is most famous: ‘At one moment I had none of this; at the next I had all of it. If there is any one thing I love about writing more than the rest, it’s that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects. I have heard it called “thinking above the curve,” and it’s that; I’ve heard it called “the over-logic,” and it’s that, too…The rest of the book ran itself off in nine weeks.’ Wendig prefers ‘momentum’ to moment and focuses on its significance in completing a first draft rather than on the experience of writing with (or in a state of) momentum: ‘Momentum is everything. Cut the brake lines. Careen wildly and unsteadily toward your goal. I hate to bludgeon you about the head and neck with a hammer forged in the volcanic fires of Mount Obvious, but the only way you can finish something is by not stopping.’ Powell is concerned with something similar to the ever-elusive moment when he writes: ‘I think you find your voice when you give yourself permission to stop trying to write like anyone else and just put the words down on the page as they occur to you. And you find your groove when you’re writing in the right way for you.’

None of these are describing Sonny’s moment, although King comes very close. King is actually discussing two separate but related experiences: the first is thinking above the curve, the moment when the solution to his narrative problem came to him; and the second what we might call writing above the curve, finishing what many consider his best book in nine weeks. It is the writing above the curve in which I’m interested. Comparing Sonny’s dialogue with King’s passage, I have a bone to pick with the F1’s script. Sonny says, ‘I want to…cos in that moment, I’m flying.’ Flying is just a version of driving, with much more speed and freedom and I imagine many pilots who fly professionally or for pleasure don’t experience the breakdown of subject and object, selfhood and worldhood, and all the rest to which Sonny is referring. When he says driving in the moment is like flying, it’s akin to an author saying that writing in the moment with a pen is like writing on a keyboard. It’s not that the moment makes one experience like a similar experience that is more intense, but that in the moment, all experiences are intense, regardless of whether one is driving, flying, writing, typing, or practising zazen. While King writes about thinking above the curve rather than writing above the curve, it seems likely he had some (or perhaps a great deal of) experience of the latter in those nine weeks he mentions.

Describing the moment in writing is very difficult, which may be why so few people have tried and why I should cut the screenwriters of F1 some slack. For me, writing above the curve is when I cease being conscious of what I’m writing – the genre, the structure, the audience, the publisher, all of that – and simply write (the story, novel, essay, monograph, whatever it is). It feels like writing without any rules or restrictions. It’s not, of course, because the rules and restrictions are all there, but I’m no longer aware of them and am just typing one word after another. At such times, I often touch-type too, which is something I can’t do when I’m aware that I’m typing. It seems like the manuscript is writing itself (which it’s obviously not either). I don’t have much more to say about the experience except that while it’s not the only or even main reason I write, it probably is comparable to racing (or zazen, or whatever). I first felt it when I was writing my first (and, in retrospect, best) novel and the last thing I will say is that, for me, it only happens when I’m working on a manuscript that takes multiple sittings, like a novel, monograph, novelette, or long essay. I’m not sure why, but the sustained attention required for these medium-to-large projects seems to facilitate writing above the curve in a way that short stories, blog posts, and reviews don’t. I’ve sketched a poor picture of the experience, but if you’ve felt it (in writing or elsewhere), then I think you’ll understand precisely what I’ve failed to articulate.

Mad Max: Fury Road | review by Rafe McGregor

Heavy with metal, heavy with meaning

Douglas J. Ogurek’s excellent review of George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) reminded me that I’d been planning to review its sequel, Fury Road, ever since using it as an example in my short essay, The World Ecology of Climate Change Cinema, in 2023. So here it is, three (or eleven) years late…Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) is the fourth instalment in the Mad Max film franchise, following Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 (1981), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). All four of the films are directed by George Miller (the third in partnership with George Ogilvie), set in Australia, and follow the eponymous protagonist, Max Rockatansky (played by Mel Gibson in the first three and Tom Hardy in the fourth).

Mad Max introduces Max as a police officer in Victoria’s Main Force Patrol in a dystopian future ‘A FEW YEARS FROM NOW’ and pits him against a particularly vicious motorcycle gang. Mad Max 2, which was released as The Road Warrior in the US (after Max’s nom de guerre), opens with a narrated introduction that establishes the context of the original as the collapse of global civilisation in the aftermath of a Third World War in which nuclear weaponry was deployed. The sequel is set in a post-apocalyptic Australia in which isolated communities and marauding gangs compete for the remaining fossil fuel, the production of which was destroyed in the war. Although the police no longer exist, Max fulfils a similar function in Mad Max 2 and Beyond Thunderdome, highway patrol replaced by cross-country driving as he protects the weak from death and slavery at the hands of the marauders.

Fury Road also opens with a voiceover, which concludes with Max stating: ‘Once, I was a cop, a road warrior searching for a righteous cause. As the world fell, each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy…me or everyone else.’ The voices interrupting Max suggest that the Earth can no longer support human life and that human life has become half-life, i.e. subject to radioactive decay, which is evinced by the majority of the characters in the narrative, who appear diseased, deformed, or disabled. The global ecological collapse is mirrored in Max as an individual, his psychological breakdown involving a paradoxical combination of obsession with those he failed to save and paranoia that everyone intends him harm. He is thus no longer the road warrior defending prey from predator, but a solitary scavenger haunted by failure.

Fury Road is 113 minutes from opening to closing credits and has the five-act structure characteristic of Hollywood blockbusters: exposition, complication, climax, crisis, and resolution. The exposition and resolution are brief (seventeen and seven minutes respectively) and the three acts that constitute the bulk of the film all involve an extended motor vehicle chase across the Wasteland, putting Fury Road very firmly in the action thriller genre. The exposition introduces Max, the despot Immortan Joe (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne), and Joe’s War Boys, the most capable of whom is Imperator Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron). The complication begins when Joe realises that Furiosa has rescued his Five Wives from sexual slavery in the Citadel and sets off in pursuit, with Max (who was captured earlier) being used as a living blood bag for Nux (played by Nicholas Hoult), an ailing War Boy. Furiosa and Max meet and flee together while remaining mutually hostile. The climax begins when the two join forces (48 minutes in to the film) and ends with Max convincing Furiosa that she must reverse the chase, charge the War Boys and their allies, and take control of the Citadel. The crisis is a prolonged battle between the two groups and the resolution depicts…well, I won’t spoil the ending just in case anyone reading this hasn’t seen it yet.

As such, the plot of Fury Road seems straightforward, moving from an inaugural condition in which Furiosa flees from the Citadel to her acceptance of Max as an ally to a retrospectively inevitable condition in which she and Max fight Joe and the War Boys. The superficial narrative is, however, enriched by an alternating focus on the two protagonists. The title of the film and its place in the Mad Max franchise suggest that it is primarily about Max, like the three prequels, and the exposition follows suit, concentrating on his capture, attempted escape, and enslavement as Nux’s blood bag. The complication changes direction, however, suggesting that the narrative’s exploration of women’s emancipation in the face of hegemonic masculinity is of much more significance. The clash between female liberation and male supremacism – represented by the conflict between Furiosa and the Wives on the one hand and Joe and the War Boys on the other – leaves little room for Max, who is neither female nor a War Boy. This exploration continues to take centre stage through the climax and it is not until the crisis, when Max leads a motley band of women against the combined forces of the Citadel, Gas Town, and the Bullet Farm, that his importance once again rivals Furiosa’s.

The narrative tension between Max and Furiosa, the question of whose story matters the most, is successfully resolved in the conclusion. Fury Road – or Furiosa’s road – is really about Furiosa and her struggle to free the oppressed in the Citadel. While Max’s role in the represented sequence of events is less significant than Furiosa’s, the role of those events in the franchise is crucial to Max in that it restores him to his former status of road warrior and, in so doing, facilitates a future continuation of the franchise. Screenwriter Nick Lathouris describes this development in thematic terms, as Fury Road being ‘about a man running away from his better self, and his better self catches up to him’. He’s right, of course, but only in part because if Furiosa is the first Mad Max film without Max (cameo appearance excepted), then Fury Road is the first Mad Max film where he is displaced as the protagonist. This is her story and that story is a perfect blend of high-speed action and abundant allegorical depth.****

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Basic plot, basic tech, sophisticated filmmaking 

A girl gets kidnapped by desert-dwelling motorcycle thugs. They kill a loved one. The girl sets out to exact vengeance on their leader without revealing her utopian homeland. There’s the plot of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the 2024 prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). We’ll leave the rest of the details to the film nerds.

Furiosa reveals the protagonist’s early ingenuity, how she gets involved with Immortan Joe (a villain from previous installations), and even how she lost her arm – it makes sense given the tenacity of her character. 

The guzzoline that drives the film is the beautifully choreographed action sequences. Most memorable is the scene during which Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) joins part father figure/part potential lover Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) on a “war rig” – it looks like a giant gasoline truck – headed to Bullet Town to collect ammunition. The “war boys” stationed throughout the vehicle use a variety of weaponry (including their own bodies) to fight off a motorcycle hoodlum cavalcade. Thanks to the giant fans attached to their backs, some of the enemy can take flight and attack from above while still connected via cords to the cyclists on the ground. Attackers enter the fray in sequence, like dancers coming onto a stage.

With its desert setting, accelerated movements, distinctive vocabulary, and unrestrained characters – Immortan Joe’s bumbling and adrenaline-fueled sons Rictus Erectus and Scabrous Scrotus are prime examples – the film stays true to the Mad Max brand. Moreover, it retains the visual splendour of its predecessor. Hit the pause button at any point and there’s a good chance you’re looking at an image iconic enough to decorate a movie poster. And for evidence of writer/director George Miller’s focus on details, look to the scenes embossed in the metal of the war rig. 

While casting Taylor-Joy as Furiosa is like using a Lamborghini to deliver pizzas — the heroine does not have much of an emotional range — placing Chris Hemsworth in the role of Dementus proves a strong choice. From his big movements to his vocalizations, Hemsworth delivers as a chatty (but not annoying) and power-hungry villain who all but steals the show. When the dirty-faced antagonist, with his teddy bear, tarp-like cape, and unHemsworthian teeth and nose, comes onto the scene, the viewer tunes in. 

Another fascinating aspect of Furiosa is the creative use of basic technologies. Dementus’s chariot, for instance, is drawn by a pair of driverless motorcycles that he controls with attached ropes. And when he addresses an elevated Immortan Joe and comrades from the desert floor, Dementus uses a grimy microphone. Well worth the watch. Douglas J. Ogurek****

Fear Across the Mersey XXV: A Chill off the River | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

I’m partial to an afterword (or notes or a postface) in an edited collection, as they often shed light on either the sources of inspiration, creative process, or both (unlike introductions or prefaces, which are often redundant) – Stephen King’s notes are exemplary in this regard. In ‘A Chill off the River’, Campbell takes his readers on a tour of all of his Liverpool based fiction, both the short stories that appear here and the novels set in Merseyside. He includes some autobiographical comments and occasional self-assessments as well as some general reflections on what King calls ‘the craft’. Several of the latter are particularly interesting, such as the attempts of his publishers to dissuade him from setting stories in the North of England and concerns by the same that horror fiction had been consigned to history. A brief but fascinating read.

I enjoyed writing the rolling review and learned a lot about the geography of Merseyside, proving Samuel Johnson’s point about fiction ‘instructing by pleasing’ (he was actually referring to poetry). I had an idea that Campbell and King were two of the – probably the two – greatest horror writers of the last fifty years and thought they made an interesting pair for comparison. While they are the same age (Campbell is a year older) and both prolific writers of short and long fiction, King is a household name and Campbell a ‘fan favourite’. I think the difference in success is consequent on King being better known for his novels, which is itself a consequence of their early success as Hollywood adaptations, beginning with his first, Carrie (1974). In contrast, only three of Campbell’s novels have been filmed, all in Spanish. Like many others, I seem to have underestimated and underappreciated Campbell…Fear Across the Mersey has instructed me on the error of my ways.

Fear Across the Mersey XXIV: Wherever You Look | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

Maurice Lavater is a midlist genre fiction writer, with his Victorian supernatural thriller series about to reach its seventh instalment. He is hosting a reading of his work at a library when one of the attendees accuses him of plagiarism. I imagine this is a regular occurrence for those who have achieved commercial success, but what is especially interesting – and authentic – is Lavater’s reaction. After an initial denial, he begins to worry that he read something, forgot about it, and when it came back to him thought it was his own invention. This is, I think, a fear all writers share regardless of the extent of their success. Lavater begins searching for the text he was accused of plagiarising and discovers it is an obscure short story, which was only published once, in a similarly obscure anthology, and never reprinted. When he eventually finds it…I won’t ruin the twist in the tale!

Fear Across the Mersey XXIII: Still Hungry | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

The third masterpiece in a row from Campbell, following ‘The Rounds’ (the twenty-first in the collection) and ‘On the Tour’ (the twenty-second), this is a prose paeon to the thankless, demoralising, alienating, and at times dangerous work of security guards and to the impact that work has on one’s social and personal lives. If that sounds like faint praise, it really isn’t and it takes real skill to turn such a job into a compelling narrative and to deploy fiction as a means to the end of saying something meaningful about a job which is widely regarded as wholly uninteresting and either ignoble, distasteful, or both. Bertram is a security guard in a city centre department store...he stops a woman who is using her child as an accomplice from stealing clothes, then thinks he sees them committing suicide on a railway line and is haunted by the part he has played.

Fear Across the Mersey XXII: On the Tour | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

The second in a row after ‘The Rounds’ (the twenty-first in the collection) that I enjoyed without reservation. Stu was the drummer in Scotty and the Scousers, a one-hit-wonder band in the nineteen sixties that released a single album and once – just once – featured The Beatles as a supporting act. He claims Ringo Starr called him his favourite drummer at some point and has never moved on from his brief and superficial brush with fame, living alone after two divorces and working in his indulgent friend’s record shop. When The Beatles bus tour suddenly passes his house, with the guide pointing it out to tourists, Stu revels in this rather pathetic rekindling of his flicker of success and becomes increasingly obsessed with, first, being at his window to wave and, second, hearing exactly what is being said about him. The real horror here is not nostalgia, but failure.

Fear Across the Mersey XXI: The Rounds | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

This story is narrated in the first person and present tense – a difficult combination to do well and achieved with admirable ease by Campbell (few authors can sustain the present tense for long without it becoming either jarring or distracting). It is also set entirely on Merseyrail’s inner loop (for want of a better term) and begins with a compelling hook: the narrator sees a woman leave her briefcase on the train, picks it up, and hurries to return it to her. But the woman is a practising Muslim and this is 2010 so perhaps he should be more careful…or perhaps Campbell is playing with the implicit (and explicit) biases and prejudices of his readers…which he seems to be doing when she receives the briefcase with gratitude. But then she leaves it on the next train. A real cracker of a narrative that never lets either the pace or the suspense flag.

Fear Across the Mersey XX: Chucky Comes to Liverpool | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

Few British people a couple of generations either side of me can see ‘Chucky’ and ‘Liverpool’ in the same sentence without thinking of one of the most shocking crimes in recent history, the planned abduction, torture, and murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys. Both perpetrators were released after only eight years and one has since been in and out of prison with paedophilia-related convictions. At the time of the murder, tabloid newspapers did what they usually do, milking the misery by exploiting what criminologists call a ‘moral panic’ about ‘video nasties’, claiming that Child’s Play 3 (1991), which featured Chucky as its antagonist, motivated the killers. This story seems to be an indictment of both the media and the moral crusaders it inspires, suggesting that the obsession with censorship is as dangerous as the obsession with violence it claims to counter. Disturbing, but perhaps not in the way Campbell intended.

Fear Across the Mersey XIX: Peep | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

One of the best stories in the collection so far, a slow burner whose real meaning and value are only revealed on reflection or repeated reading. ‘Peep’ is another word for ‘peek-a-boo’, the game most of us played with our parents and others as infants. The anonymous narrator had a frightful and frightening aunt who turned it into a source of surveillance, stalking, and shame and whose memory haunts him as he spends time with his daughter, her husband, and their young children, a pair of dizygotic twins. While Campbell paints a bleak but accurate picture of the simmering violence of much of Britain’s seaside and the predictable regularity of antisocial behaviour on public transport, the real horror here is the fragility of the family as a source of unconditional positive regard and safety and security. The narrator’s familiar relations are familiarly tense as he both looks forward to and dreads their departure.

Fear Across the Mersey XVIII: Watch the Birdie | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

This story is narrated by Campbell himself rather than an author surrogate or alter ego and begins and ends with what one might call an explicit authorial intrusion, two short passages in italics which, taken together, suggest that it is nonfiction rather than fiction. The narrative is set entirely in The Baltic Fleet, a popular pub and Victorian tourist attraction on the dockside and concerns the landlord, his parrot, and a foreign language curse scrawled on the wall in the toilets. I must admit to being confused by Campbell’s repeated use of ‘Slavonic’ instead of ‘Slavic’ to describe that language and wondered if it was a typo or an error. The former is, apparently, simply an older term for the latter, but its presence interfered with my suspension of disbelief, as anomalies often do. A laconic and lively yarn, though I’m not sure what the bookends added to it.

Fear Across the Mersey XVII: Calling Card | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

Along with the next story, ‘Watch the Birdie’ (the eighteenth), this is the shortest in the collection, a second ghost story for Christmas following ‘The Christmas Present’ (the third). The protagonist, Dorothy, is not enjoying the festive season, after receiving a threatening card on Christmas Eve and having rubbish dumped on her doorstep on Boxing Day. Her son-in-law points out that in addition to the addressee of the card being illegible, it was posted sixty years ago. On New Year’s Eve, she learns that the previous occupant of her home had a violent mentally ill son who drowned himself in the Mersey. His body was, however, never recovered…which adds a mundane threat to the supernatural. The tale reminded me of ‘The Ferries’ (the fourteenth in the collection) with its multiplicity of memorable and menacing images of water and the threats it poses. A good choice to share with friends and family around the fireplace.

Fear Across the Mersey XVI: This Time | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

The story starts with Crosby, a moderately successful artist, leaving the dentist while under the influence of anaesthetic, creating the expectation of reality blending and bending along the lines of ‘Concussion’ (the second in the collection). There seems to be something like this in play as he has recurring thoughts about and encounters with an image of a blank face and something that scrambles on all fours (which may or may not belong to the same creature). Crosby visits his girlfriend, takes part in a game show on television, and hosts an exhibition of his work as the haunting continues. The narrative is elegant in style, with very fine description in places, and carefully constructed, but if there is an internal logic it escaped me entirely. As such, the conclusion was less a surprise than a non sequitur and I still think I must have missed something somewhere.

Best of Luck by Jason Mott (Amazon Original Stories) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Strong pacing and redundancy collide in creature feature story exploring friendship and power structures.

“Best of Luck”, the fifth offering in Amazon’s six-story creature feature series written by bestselling authors, revolves around two friends. Will holds Barry at gunpoint for a reason that author Jason Mott gradually reveals. 

The story tends to prolong philosophical arguments and repeat the same ideas ad nauseum. Another shortcoming: conceptually, it’s not all that memorable. 

On a more positive note, “Best of Luck” builds tension by dropping key information at an impressively patient pace. Initially, the story refrains from divulging the source of the confrontation. It plops in nuggets about Will’s backstory and this mysterious Henry that he keeps mentioning until an ineffective plot twist provides answers. 

“Best of Luck”, a commentary on societal power structures, explores the concepts of passing privilege on to the next generation and gaining and maintaining power at the expense of others. Douglas J. Ogurek ***

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #79: Unsplatterpunk! 8: out now!

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

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #79: Unsplatterpunk! 8 is now out in paperback and ebook, edited by Douglas J. Ogurek!

Steel your guts!

The UNSPLATTERPUNK! slaughterscape expands its grisly reach with more tales that blend a positive message into a cesspit of gore and grossness. In this eighth issue, four heroines bash and slice their way to illumination.

A status-seeking it girl takes self-injury to throbbing new heights in a commentary on the allure of attention via victimhood. The Bachelor unites with Squid Game when a hand model joins a reality TV competition and learns that beauty goes beyond designer stilettos and jewellery. Bullied high schoolers achieve vicarious vengeance in an allegorical tale that explores the power of camaraderie. Kung Fu Sue, returning for her third UNSPLATTERPUNK! performance, gives fans another fix of her fighting virtuosity and nonchalance as she takes on a drug cartel with pachydermatous power.

The moral of the gory

If you’re looking for a splatterpunk anthology that wrings some positivity out of the carnage and nastiness, then this is the anthology for you. Mind you, you’ll still get the cracked bones, exploded heads, and ruptured organs… but you’ll get it with a ray of hope.

Contents

• Star Struck – Kevin Brown
• The BTB Royale – DW Milton
• Schoolyard Saints – Alistair Rey
• Kung Fu Sue and the Drug Lord’s Elephant – Harris Coverley
• The Quarterly Review – Stephen Theaker and Douglas J. Ogurek review The Blood-Drenched Honeycomb by Leo X. Robertson, Dating After the End of the World by Jeneva Rose, Dead Scalp by Jasper Bark, Envy by Ash Ericmore, The God of Wanking by Peter Caffrey, A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay, Millionaires Day by Kit Power and the Ploopy Knob.

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Here are the blood-spattered contributors to this issue.

Alistair Rey is the author of the fiction collection The Art of Ghost Writing. His work has been featured in the Berkeley Fiction Review, Weirdbook, Juked magazine and Lowestoft Chronicle, among other publications. Rey’s fiction also appears in anthologies alongside such authors as Stephen Graham Jones, Philip Fracassi, Jonathan Sims and Gemma Files.

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonymous and sophomoric founder of the unsplatterpunk subgenre, which uses splatterpunk conventions (i.e. transgressive/gory/gross 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. His novella Stone Ovaries and Bowling Balls Trapped in Beautiful Prodigy World (Planet Bizarro) offers a minefield of immaturity filled with bodily expulsions, princesses, deranged mothers, malapropisms and guacamole.

DW Milton is a pen name. The author has a day job but would rather be writing speculative fiction.

Harris Coverley has had more than a hundred short stories published in Penumbra, Crimeucopia, JOURN-E and The Black Beacon Book of Horror (Black Beacon Books), amongst many others. He has also had over two hundred poems published in journals around the world. He lives in Manchester, England.

Kevin Brown has two published short story collections, Death Roll and Ink on Wood. His fiction, nonfiction and poetry have been published in over 200 literary journals, magazines and anthologies. He has won numerous writing competitions and was nominated for multiple prizes and awards, including four Pushcart Prizes.

Stephen Theaker’s reviews, interviews and articles have appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Prism, Dark Horizons and the BFS Journal. His story “The Reader-Queens of Tranck” appeared in the BFS anthology Emerging Horizons, edited by Allen Ashley. He has written many novels, none of them well-regarded.

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

Fear Across the Mersey XV: The Depths | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

Like its immediate predecessor, this story is also set in Neston and London (as well as a couple of other locations). Jonathan Miles is a famous crime fiction writer facing every author’s greatest fear: he has run out of ideas and has nothing left to say. Desperate for inspiration, he rents a house where a particularly violent crime took place. It doesn’t seem to help, but it does give him nightmares about even more violent crimes which, if he doesn’t immediately write them down, seem to come true. I read this immediately after finishing Joel Lane’s This Spectacular Darkness: Critical Essays, which includes three essays on Campbell and although I don’t rate ‘The Depths’ quite as highly as Lane, it is definitely one of the best in the first two-thirds of this collection. The real horror is, of course, the death of creativity and the desperation to recover it, not the nightmares.

Fear Across the Mersey XIV: The Ferries | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

James Berry works in publishing in London and his uncle, a retired sailor, lives in Neston, on the western side of the Wirral Peninsula, which sits between the Mersey and Dee estuaries. Like much of the coast north of Liverpool, most famously Southport, the sea has retreated from Neston, leaving an inhospitable, in-between wetland. Berry’s uncle disappears while he is visiting, apparently sucked into the saltmarsh, and Berry is haunted by a ship in a bottle he finds there. Campbell makes very good use of the uncanniness of a location that is neither earth nor ocean and describes the collapse of the border between the dry and the wet that follows Berry when he returns to London with inventive imagery. Aside from an internal logic that would have benefitted from more scaffolding, this is another compelling tale of terror that demonstrates Campbell’s mastery of the short story as a literary form.    

Fear Across the Mersey XIII: The Show Goes On | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

A well-placed title as the collection moves on to its second half. Lee inherited what we call a corner shop in the UK (regardless of its location – the US ‘convenience store’ seems more appropriate) in central Liverpool. He is, quite rightly, worried about being broken into or robbed and this is another one of Campbell’s tales where the casual violence and everyday brutality of city life is never far from the foreground. Lee discovers that part of the wall between his shop and the derelict cinema next door has collapsed, can’t get anyone to repair it, and decides to stand guard overnight to deter burglars. He hears noises in the cinema and makes a brave foray into the darkness, but what he finds there isn’t nearly as bad as what’s waiting for him when he returns. Not only well-placed, but well-paced and well-written with one of Campbell’s best conclusions so far.

This Spectacular Darkness: Critical Essays by Joel Lane | review by Rafe McGregor

This Spectacular Darkness: Critical Essays by Joel Lane, Tartarus Press, paperback, £14.95, 29 August 2018, ISBN 9781719848800

 

Joel Lane (1963-2013) was an English author from Birmingham who was best known as a short story writer and poet, but was also a novelist, critic, and editor. He won two British Fantasy Awards and one World Fantasy Award for his short fiction and the Eric Gregory Award for his poetry. Most of Lane’s fiction was in the speculative genre, at the intersection of horror and crime (which was his first love as an essayist), and published by small or independent presses. In the two decades before his death at the age of fifty, he published five short story collections, four collections of poetry, two novels, and a novella and two more short story collections were published posthumously. This Spectacular Darkness is another posthumous collection, first published as one of Tartarus Press’ elegant limited edition sewn hardbacks in 2016. The volume is edited by Tartarus regulars Mark Valentine and John Howard and includes a foreword by Valentine, seventeen of Lane’s critical essays, and reflections on his essays, short stories, poetry, and novels by Howard, Valentine, Mat Joiner, and Nina Allan respectively. As such, it is divided into four parts: the eponymous essay, which was first published in Supernatural Tales in 2002; eight essays published in Wormwood, the Tartarus journal that was also edited by Valentine (from its first issue in 2003 to its last in 2022) from 2004 to 2013; eight essays published in other magazines and collections from 1981 to 2009; and the commentaries on Lane’s work, only one of which (Allan’s critique of his novels) is previously published, also in 2016. My sole criticism is that with exception of Allan’s, which includes a fascinating discussion of Lane’s unpublished novel, The Missing Tracks, I found the commentaries somewhat gratuitous, adding little to Valentine’s excellent foreword.

Lane’s essays themselves are all excellent, achieving exactly what I look for when I read writing of this kind and in this form: eloquent and succinct, presenting precisely the right amount of the content of the work under scrutiny, and original and interesting enough to prompt me to both seek out new authors and revisit familiar ones. Both Valentine and Allan mention that Lane had been working on a nonfiction volume that was never completed and would have been either a monograph or a series of themed essays on the subject of horror fiction in the twentieth century. The first essay in this volume, ‘This Spectacular Darkness’, is a manifesto for that book and would likely have been an early draft of its introduction had it been completed. It is the most accomplished and thought-provoking – even inspiring – of the entire collection and I return to it below. Lane is particularly compelling when it comes to his own area of expertise, the very specific overlap of weird and noir within the broader intersection of horror and crime. For Lane, it is a literal overlap in that some (but not all) noir narratives actually are exemplary (rather than marginal) weird fiction. ‘The Dark Houses of Cornell Woolrich’, which was first published in Wormwood in 2004 and focuses on Woolrich’s (1903-1968) ‘Black’ novels, makes an especially good case for this claim. In a similar vein, ‘Hell is Other People: Robert Bloch and the Pathologies of the Family’, which was first published in The Man Who Collected Psychos: Critical Essays on Robert Bloch in 2009 and takes Bloch’s (1917-1994) entire oeuvre as its subject, is equally engaging, presenting his most famous work, Psycho (1959), in an entirely new light (for me, anyway). On a different note, in ‘No Secret Place: The Haunted Cities of Fritz Leiber’, first published in Wormwood in 2008, Lane offers the best appreciation of Leiber (1910-1992), about whose work I am ambivalent, that I’ve ever read. His discussion of Leiber’s flawed but nonetheless brilliant Our Lady of Darkness (1977) is simply exceptional. 

One of my main interests as a critic and author of weird fiction has been the question of the genre itself: can weird fiction be defined or delineated in any meaningful way, how does it relate to similar genres such as Gothic, horror, and supernatural fiction, and if it is in someway distinctive from these broader categories, what is the best way to approach it? All of these and others, I tried to set out in a manner that was both comprehensive and concise in Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between, which was published in seven parts on the TQF blog and is available as a single document here. Lane’s approach is different to and – I’m going to admit it – more convincing than mine, dividing supernatural horror into two distinct forms or strands in the twentieth century. The first, which he calls ‘existential’ or ‘humanistic’ horror, had its origins in Judaeo-Christian belief, is anthropocentric, and was exemplified by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) and Stephen King (b.1947). The second, which he calls ‘ontological’ or ‘anti-humanistic’ horror, had its origins in literary-critical modernism, is biocentric or cosmocentric, and was exemplified by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and M. John Harrison (b. 1945). Lane’s main reference to the two strands is to existential and ontological horror, which I found confusing given the close relation between the two adjectives in twentieth century philosophy, but the latter is similar to what I attempted to articulate with my conception of the ecological weird and to what many others before me have called cosmic horror or indifferentism (usually in reference to Lovecraft). Like all engrossing essays, Lane’s was a provocation, challenging me to first rethink the relation between the ecological and the cosmic and then the relation between ontological and existential horror…is absolute horror not when the existential is supervenient on or collapses into the ontological and, if so, are there narratives that combine both strands? Although Lane mentions Ramsey Campbell (b. 1946) in this connection, he doesn’t answer the question in full, but the wonder and triumph of the essay is simply in raising it (and so many others). This is a genuinely unmissable collection for weird fiction enthusiasts.