Troy | review by Rafe McGregor

Much more than sword and sandal.

The literal meaning of Iliad is ‘poem about a lion’, where the lion is Troy, an ancient city in what is now Çanakkale, a province in northwestern Turkey. The work is attributed to Homer, about whom very little is known except that he was Greek, probably born in the eighth century BCE, and inaugurated European literary heritage with the Iliad and its sequel, the Odyssey, a pair of epic poems about the Trojan War. Bearing in mind that the Iliad comes from an oral rather than written tradition, it was performed in twenty-four divisions of dactylic hexameter, which became twenty-four ‘books’ when it was translated from the Ancient Greek original and written down. There are multiple English translations, some of which are prose and others poems, and multiple adaptations of the narrative into a wide variety of art forms from plays to operettas to graphic novels. Given its epic scope, dramatic intensity, and historical significance, there is a sense in which it is very surprising that there have been only six cinematic adaptations (excluding three television series). The most notable of these are the first, The Fall of Troy (La caduta di Troia, 1911), a short, silent Italian film directed by Giovanni Pastrone and Luigi Romano Borgnettoof; The Fury of Achilles (L’ira di Achille, 1962), an Italian feature film directed by Marino Girolami; and Troy (2004), a Hollywood blockbuster directed by Wolfgang Petersen.

In another sense, however, the lack of cinematic adaptations compared to, for example, films about the Romans, is not so surprising. The Iliad is nearly three thousand years old, narrates events that may or may not have happened four to five hundred years before it was first performed, and depicts a culture that is not only remote from modern Europe but from Classical Greece itself (dated to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE). I remember my bitter disappointment on first reading it, which must have been about thirty years ago: every time there was a bit of excitement (or ‘peril’ as the British Board of Film Classification calls it), one of the gods stepped in and saved the hero from injury or death. In this respect, I found it very similar to contemporary superhero films, where everyone knows none of the protagonists are ever going to die (because Hollywood couldn’t afford it). I was expecting a recognisable narrative in an unrecognisable setting from a remote culture, but the agential element that is so crucial to story as we know it now is almost entirely absent. The actions of the heroes and other characters make almost no difference to the outcome, which is predetermined by the gods and by fate. Petersen, who is best known for The Boat (Das Boot, 1981) and The Never Ending Story (1984), made several very shrewd creative decisions before he began filming.

First, he removed all the divine interventions and all the supernatural elements. Strictly speaking this is a war film set three thousand years ago rather than a fantasy film, like Clash of the Titans (1981, 2010). The gods are, in fact, mocked, by Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) in particular, because although most people have absolute faith in them, they never intervene and battles are won by soldiers rather than priests. Various characters make various prophecies, but they are hit and miss, just like in reality. Petersen also ignored features of Ancient Greek culture that would be confusing for many contemporary audiences (and, sadly, offensive to some), such as bisexuality being the norm and Achilles being both Patroclus’ (played by Garrett Hedlund) lover and the junior partner in the relationship (in spite of his superior skill at arms). The removal of the supernatural elements and the cultural changes mean the film is not very true to the original poem, but it also opens the oldest surviving literary work in Europe to a broad audience and makes for a genuinely epic narrative that is as gripping as it is moving.

I’m not going to say much about the sequence of events of the film here because it follows the Iliad (which takes place in the last few weeks of a ten-year siege) and its precursors quite closely: Agamemnon, the Achaean (Greek) king, is set on conquering as much of the Mediterranean as he can and uses the elopement of Helen (played by Diane Kruger) with Paris (played by Orlando Bloom) as an excuse to invade Troy. The cinematic narrative condenses Helen’s elopement and the decade-long war into a few weeks or months, which is another shrewd choice by Petersen because very little happens in the first nine years of the war in the legend (the reason the Iliad takes place at its end). His version of the Iliad is very much the story of Achilles, who is the world’s greatest warrior but prone to vanity, rage, and an existential ennui that comes with having killed so many men without remorse or regret. There are at least two great aspects of this film as cinematic art, the first of which is casting. Pitt is perfect for the role of Achilles and so is almost everyone else for their own respective roles, from Eric Bana as Hector to Sean Bean as Odysseus, Rose Byrne as Briseis, Peter O’Toole as Priam, and even minor characters, such as Julie Christie as Thetis (Achilles’ mother). The second aspect is the action sequences. From the opening duel between Achilles and Boagrius (played by Nathan Jones) to a Saving-Private-Ryan-style amphibious landing to several large-scale battles and single combats that are either part of those battles or discrete duels, every scene with a sword or a bow is perfectly filmed.

I’d normally worry about over-egging the pudding after writing something like that, but it’s hard to find fault with either the cast or the action, even if you don’t enjoy the film as a whole. Troy is also unique in my experience in that I preferred the theatrical cut to the director’s cut, which was released in 2007 with an extra thirty-three minutes of footage. The Director’s Cut is still a very good film, but I thought the extra half hour slowed the pace too much and part of what I love about Troy is that it is such a lean, lithe narrative, with no scene or even shot wasted. Why the interest now, twenty-two years later? The Odyssey, which is directed by Christopher Nolan, is due for release next month. I must admit to having all sorts of reservations about it, including the casting, particularly but not exclusively Matt Damon as Odysseus. Bean was perfect as the wily warrior whose brain matches Achilles’ brawn, who can fight when he needs to, but prefers to win by guile rather than by strength. I just can’t see Damon bringing this subtlety to the role and what I’ve seen in the trailers hasn’t allayed any fears. Time, and Nolan’s predilection for playing with it, will tell.****           

J.G. Ballard's World Versus U.S. – Rafe McGregor

The Worlds of J.G. Ballard

J(ames) G(raham) Ballard (1930-2009) was an English author of avant-garde fiction who published nineteen novels and novellas and one hundred short stories, many of which were controversial, prescient, or both. Very broadly, his career can be divided into two stages, science fiction and literature. The first began with the publication of ‘Escapement’ in New Worlds in 1956 and the second with the publication of Empire of the Sun, his eleventh novel, in 1984. Along with Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss (1925-2017), Ballard was one of the founders of the New Wave of science fiction, which originated in New Worlds magazine in the mid-nineteen-sixties and reconstituted the genre as an extension of literary modernism focused on the psychological rather than physical impact of technology. Ballard’s science fiction can itself be divided into two stages. His first four novels (or novellas, depending on one’s preferred definition) pioneered Anglophone climate fiction. The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966) constitute an elemental quartet in which civilisation is threatened or destroyed by air, water, fire, and earth respectively. Ballard’s next six novels were much more experimental, putting his ideas about the relationship between the content of science fiction and formal innovation into practice, and include The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973). The critical and commercial success of Empire of the Sun elevated Ballard to the literary canon and it was released as a Hollywood film directed by Steven Spielberg in 1987. Like his science fiction, Ballard’s literature can also be divided into two stages, with Cocaine Nights (1996) and his last three novels usually referred to as satire.

The last book Ballard published before his death from prostate cancer was Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (2008), an autobiography written after his terminal diagnosis. It’s not very often that anyone, let alone a great novelist, has the opportunity to write an autobiography that will include (almost) their entire life story, but I found it for the most part disappointing. Ballard always valued his privacy and the autobiography is strangely unenlightening. The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J.G. Ballard (2026), a biography that was begun by Christopher Priest (1943-2024) and completed by his wife, Nina Allan, when he died of prostate cancer in 2024, is much more revealing. In his review of Priest and Allan’s book in The Guardian, Adam Sisman concurs with my criticism of Miracles of Life by calling it ‘curiously flat’. There are certainly no insights into Ballard’s creative process or literary practice, which was what I had most hoped to find. When I discovered that his archive had been acquired by the British Library in 2010 and was now available to the public, I thought I’d try there instead, but Ballard’s reticence extended to the private sphere and his habit was apparently to destroy his notes for his fiction as soon as it was published. While the archive contains multiple drafts of multiple novels, including those of three of his four early climate fictions, much of both his process and practice remains opaque.

The J.G. Ballard Papers

In the ‘Works’ section of the archive only three of the one hundred and sixty-two files are described as projects for a new novel or working notes. The first of these is a set of four text collages that were published in New Worlds in 1978, the second a set of five spiral-bound notepads (one of which has only two pages of notes) that were probably used from 2005 to 2008, and the third five typed A4 pages, also likely dated 2005 to 2008. One of the pages, Notepad A, most of Notepad B, and a few pages each in Notepads C and D are notes for a novel that was never written, provisionally titled An Immodest Proposal or How the World Declared War on America and abbreviated as ‘VUS’ ([World] versus US). Allan recounts her visit to the archive in 2024 and discusses these notes and other materials in The Illuminated Man and it was pure chance that I visited less than a month after reading it. Something that comes across very strongly in the biography and was very useful in providing a context for the notes was the extent to which Ballard was affected by the September 11 attacks and what is now known as GWOT, the Global War on Terror.

Ballard’s notes for VUS include everything one might expect to find, from the premise at its most basic to alternative ideas for plot and character, considerations of form and content, and reflections on whether and how he could meet its particular challenges. The proposed narrative is typical of Ballard in being located in an unspecified but imminent future, taking the present rather than the future as its subject, and providing commentary on current social mores and norms. The present with which he is concerned is the increase of the US’ military footprint in response to 9/11, specifically the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Ballard does not connect these to either Panama in 1989, Grenada in 1983, or the US’ military deployments during the Cold War and seems to have regarded GWOT as an unprecedented phenomenon. He is also well aware of the symbolic significance of 9/11 and the care with which both the targets and the date of the four coordinated attacks were planned. I’ll begin my discussion of the novel by setting out the fictional sequence of events on which the narrative would be based. Unlike more precise questions of form and content, on which Ballard is often undecided, the sequence is fairly comprehensive and consistent.

VUS

The setting of VUS is a world in which the US has established an empire reminiscent of the European colonies of an earlier age. America controls all of the Middle East, including Israel, and most of the world’s oil supply. Many countries across the globe are either occupied by the US, have puppet regimes, or are sympathetic to the US. In those countries that are occupied or have puppet regimes, ‘American values are relentless enforced.’ The same values are relentlessly promoted in the countries with sympathetic governments, such as the UK and Germany. The US exerts a global hegemony by the combination of military threat and economic pressure and insists on preferential trade agreements for all of its goods, including oil. France is one of the few countries to remain openly anti-American and tries to import oil from an alternative supplier (Venezuela is mentioned at least twice). In response, the US initiates a naval blockade, which causes skirmishes at sea and anti-American civil unrest globally. There is a naval battle between the US and France, which the US wins, and the United Nations Security Council authorises military action if the US fails to abandon both its preferential trade agreements and foreign military bases. Predictably, the US refuses and the world declares war on the US, led by either the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation nations or by a combined NATO-Russia alliance.

The war that follows has three stages. In the first, which is a conventional, high-intensity conflict, the US achieves a rapid victory over NATO, using weapons of mass destruction to destroy military and civilian targets and occupying all the nations who have taken up arms against it. US global hegemony is transformed into a global empire. No Pax Americana materialises, however, as multiple insurgencies begin, starting in Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia and then spreading to other countries. This second, unconventional, stage culminates in a series of coordinated attacks aimed at destroying nine icons within the US homeland. The US responds in a similar manner to its response to the declaration of war, causing mass casualties among insurgents and civilians at home and abroad. In the homeland, Black and Muslim communities are targeted, which initiates the third and final stage. Black, Muslim, and other soldiers in the US Army mutiny, violence in the homeland spirals, and America descends into a second civil war. Ballard doesn’t describe the impact of this civil war on the empire, but the implication is that it crumbles and that the world is consequently victorious against the US.

The subject of the novel at its most basic is simply ‘US imperialism’, but Ballard’s concern extended beyond military expansion to America’s dominance of global popular culture, from Hollywood to McDonald’s to Elvis and so much else. He was especially interested in the way in which this cultural hegemony was causing people to see themselves through an American lens and how this succeeded in turning other nations into ‘subservient colonies’ (without the need for puppet regimes or invasion). Ballard has various ideas about how to turn this subject into a theme, the most consistent of which is that the US would be ‘treated as Nazi Germany in 1939-45’ with no characters in the novel permitted to adopt a neutral stance. He was more certain about the characters that would drive the narrative. His initial idea was to use three ‘principle [sic]’ characters and three ‘secondary’ characters. He later refers to these six as an ‘inner core’. The characters would all be of different nationalities and the protagonist, who would be British, and three others would be men. The protagonist is an English university lecturer who teaches American Studies at a university in the Middle East and has an American wife (which is significant because it will allow him to gain entry to the homeland later on). A second principal character, also a man, would be French. The nationalities of the others would be drawn from Japan, Russia, Australia, Germany, an unspecified Muslim country, and possibly Israel. Ballard then thought that one of the women should also be British, which may have been why he expanded his central characters to seven, four men and three women. The characters would either be in professions that would bring them into direct contact with the war, such as the military, media, or medicine, or foreign workers, such as those in oil, education, or diplomacy.

Ballard started to delineate the French protagonist, couldn’t think of anything interesting, and wrote: ‘All need to be thoughtful + of heroic potential.’ He was also convinced that all ‘should have suffrered [sic] in some way from the US — —’ and these two ideas taken together suggest that a major part of the narrative would be the planning, recruitment, and execution of the coordinated attacks on American icons, some or all of which would be suicidal. He wanted to break the stereotype for people that were prepared to sacrifice themselves in this way and noted that the insurgents should be ‘educated, intellectual, even unwilling.’ Whether or not the insurgency would be led by a Muslim cadre was unclear, although his sequence of events identifies it as beginning in Middle Eastern nations. Ballard made several lists of the insurgent targets, which included a wide range from the Empire State Building to the Capitol to Las Vegas and Disneyland. Each of these would be attacked or destroyed using a different tactic, although his list of options for these only ran to eight. At one point, he refers to these as ‘psycho-targets’, drawing attention to their symbolic significance to the US and to the psychological impact of their destruction. The novel would open outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square in London during the heightened tensions of the naval blockade. After a protest turns violent, US troops open fire on the crowd, who scatter and destroy a nearby McDonald’s in retaliation. The event would either be described in the form of a news report (assuming Ballard’s original idea for his British protagonist) or in the first person by his (alternative) British protagonist. Ballard did not state when the novel would conclude and the options appear to be either the mutiny, the civil war, or the dissolution of the US empire.

Ballard seems to have had much less of a vision as to how he would tell the story of VUS than what the story was. He planned to switch point of view among his principal characters and mix these different points of view with reportage from different media channels. He was not, however, sure whether the novel would be narrated in the first person, by the different principal (or principal and secondary) characters, and whether these narrations would be presented as individual testimonies, oral histories, or diary entries. He also toyed with the idea of opening with an academic-style introduction to the collected testimonies and reports, rather than in medias res. Beyond that, he had very little to say about specific aspects of framework, function, structure, or symbolism. Notwithstanding, his reflections on the genre of the novel are fascinating: ‘Very important Must not allow this to become s-f. That would lower its credibility & impact.’ He was similarly worried that the novel doesn’t become ‘a familiar kind of s-f story.’ Ballard’s approach to science fiction was, as already mentioned, to prioritise the present over the future for the purpose of social commentary, which he often achieved by exploring the impact of either the broader public and political world or the immediate physical environment in which each person lives on their inner, psychological world. These New Wave commitments are completely compatible with what he was trying to achieve with and in VUS so it is curious that he was so determined to avoid the novel ‘becoming’ a work of science fiction. I wonder if the clue to this apparent anomaly isn’t the dating of the notebooks, some thirty years after the decline of the New Wave. What he probably means by ‘becoming’ is ‘being labelled/sold as’ science fiction, which had become a genre very much dominated by series and franchises by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. I think that what he didn’t want was VUS being sold and read as an alternative history or a dystopian or apocalyptic narrative and I’ll return to the question of genre in my conclusion.

The Illuminated Man

Ballard was both confident that his premise was strong and worried about his ability to do it justice. I find this particularly interesting coming from someone who practically invented climate fiction, had established himself as one of Britain’s greatest living authors, and already published eighteen novels and novellas. Although his belief in his ability to develop the premise into a rich and rewarding theme appeared to grow as he built up his body of notes, his modesty and diffidence are evident throughout. For example, he writes: ‘Need to add a specific spin of some kind?’; ‘Need a deeper dimension!’; ‘too depressing & reminiscent of 1984?’. More specifically, he was concerned that the novel would be too long (presumably because of its temporal and spatial scope) and with his competence in writing first person narratives from the point of view of characters from cultures distinct from his own, such as the proposed Middle Eastern, Japanese, and Russian principal or secondary characters. Both of these problems were related to the question of how to present a ‘global sense of the battle against the US?’ Ballard was also concerned about the credibly of what he called ‘The fight back’, i.e. the success of the insurgency: ‘But is it all credible if its [sic] realistically portrayed?’ I ruminated on this myself, the dichotomy between the ease with which the US wins a conventional war against the rest of the world and the speed with which the insurgency leads to the dissolution of the US empire. But I also have no doubt that Ballard would have solved this literary problem as skilfully as he had solved others in his previous novels, novellas, and short stories. He makes a quick reference to a potential solution when he writes: ‘Perhaps visualise it as a film script.’ The process of both writing the notes down and returning to read them later seem to have helped because although there is no way to be certain of the chronological order of either the notepads or notes within them, there is definitely a sense of progress, of the crystallisation of a constellation of ideas as a premise and a sequence of events become a theme and a narrative.

It’s impossible to say know whether Ballard would have proceeded with the project had he not been diagnosed with terminal cancer, but if I had to guess one way or the other I’d say yes, given the escalation of GWOT from 2005 to 2009 and beyond. VUS would definitely have been one of his most controversial novels, perhaps even more so than The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, and I imagine he would have been accused of both glorifying 9/11 and promoting political violence. I am fairly certain that VUS would have been banned in many US states. Assuming it had been released early in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when Big Tech was achieving its own hegemony, I wonder if the publishers would have actively courted controversy to increase sales or insisted that the novel stay on the science fiction shelf. Like The Drowned World, The Drought, and many of Ballard’s other long and short stories, there is also a sense in which VUS is prescient. Mark Blacklock beat me to that point in his essay in The New Statesman, which refers to the regime change in Venezuela in January 2026 and what is currently being called the 2026 Iran war, although Ballard did not anticipate how divided the (rest of the) ‘world’ would be in the era of VUS. What I can perhaps add to Blacklock and where Ballard and I would disagree, is that this military muscle-flexing is nothing new, just part of an imperial imperative that stretches back to at least the US invasion of Grenada. That was in 1983, the year before Ballard was catapulted into the limelight with Empire of the Sun, a novel about a different empire. As the sun sets on one, it rises on another…

Lone Wolf 32: Light of the Kai: Volume One | review by Rafe McGregor

Lone Wolf 32: Light of the Kai: Volume One by Vincent Lazzari & Ben Dever

Holmgard Press, hardback, £30.00, May 2026, ISBN 9781915586759

The story of the completion of the Lone Wolf cycle of gamebooks, which began with the publication of Lone Wolf 1: Flight from the Dark in 1984, is almost as compelling and harrowing as the epic fantasy itself and included the death of its creator and author, Joe Dever, in 2016, shortly after publishing Lone Wolf 29: The Storms of Chai. I told the story of the story – or, in Lone Wolf terms, ‘The Story So Far…’ – from a very personal perspective in my reviews of Lone Wolf 21: Voyage of the Moonstone and The Storms of Chai. Dever’s goal was always to publish thirty-two adventures, the first twenty of which would tell the story of Kai warrior (a Ranger in AD&D terms) Kor-Skarn (Lone Wolf) defeating the demonic Darklords of Helgedad and restoring the Kai to their rightful place as defenders of the world of Magnamund from all enemies foreign and domestic. In the next twelve, the player would adopt the persona of a New Order Kai Grand Master and undertake missions for and occasionally with Lone Wolf, and the game mechanics are such that the more adventures you complete, the higher your Grand Master rank and abilities (resembling D&D and AD&D, of which Dever was a great fan and skilled player). You determine your persona by means of the Random Number Table (on which gameplay is based, though many will find a ten-sided die more convenient) and my New Order warrior ended up as True Friend. A bit of a wimpy name, but he can kill you with his bare hands, live off the land indefinitely, and move small objects by looking at them, so don’t make fun of him.

After Dever’s death, his son, Ben, and long-term collaborator, Vincent Lazzari, undertook to complete and publish the remaining three books in the cycle, based on their final conversations with him and the detailed notes he had left. Ben relaunched the now highly successful Holmgard Press for the purpose, publishing Lone Wolf 30: Dead in the Deep in 2019 and Lone Wolf 31: The Dusk of Eternal Night in 2020, and dividing the cycle as a whole into five series: Kai (books 1–5), Magnakai (books 6–12), and Grand Master (books 13–20), featuring Lone Wolf; and New Order (books 21–28) and End Game (books 29–32), featuring True Friend (or, generically, the ‘Lorn Commander’). As I’ve mentioned several times in my previous reviews of the New Order and End Game series, I have far too much invested in what is now the Lone Wolf ‘franchise’ (though I hate to use that term) to even pretend to voice an unbiased opinion. Not only am I in my fifth decade of playing the gamebooks, but they are one of my fondest childhood memories and one of the reasons I continued to read so much and try my hand at my own imaginative fictions. With that in mind, after The Storms of Chai, which was the highlight of the cycle to date, I was a little disappointed with Dead in the Deep because it didn’t quite live up to the expectation created by its predecessor, for an even greater epic struggle than Magnamund had ever seen. The Dusk of Eternal Night was, unfortunately, the first of all thirty-one gamebooks that I didn’t actually enjoy playing. My main criticisms were twofold and contradictory: that it is, first, too inventive and innovative and, second, derivative and even unoriginal.

The first referred to the new format, which retained the traditional three hundred and fifty gameplay sections, but replaced many of the player choices and actions with long descriptive sections to create a hybrid gamebook-novel. This experiment was just too different to what I’d enjoyed so much and had two consequences that didn’t work for me: the narrative was both much longer (as my photograph of Lone Wolf 31, 1, and 32 below shows) and more linear than the previous adventures. The second criticism was to the revelation of the primary antagonists of the End Game, which involves the reprisal of old enemies. While the latter had only a minor impact on my enjoyment, the former was much more serious and I was very concerned to read that Lone Wolf 32: Light of the Kai had been divided into two volumes, each of which includes four hundred gameplay sections. I wondered why. Dever wanted thirty-two adventures and each of the twenty-nine he authored had three hundred and fifty sections so it seemed unlikely that this was in honour of his memory. And, as the old adage goes, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ It definitely wasn’t broke, even if Dead in the Deep wasn’t one of the best. The only reason I could think of was that the extra volume and extra sections were to continue the hybridisation of the End Game series that appeared to have begun in The Dusk of Eternal Night. (As an aside, books 1 to 12 were fully novelised, in the The Legends of Lone Wolf series, which was published from 1989 to 1994 and only marginally successful.) I mention all this to disclose that my expectations for Light of the Kai were not very high and that had I not been waiting for the end of the saga for so many decades, I probably wouldn’t have bought it.

Light of the Kai: Volume One was released at 17:00 BST on Tuesday 12 May (very much an ‘event’ for the fanbase) in three editions, Definitive (£30), Limited (£40), and Collector’s (£30). The reasons for these multiple editions are to do with Dever’s heroic attempts to keep Lone Wolf in print when interest in gamebooks tailed off at the turn of the century and I decided on the Definitive because I didn’t want to wait for the Collector’s (pre-order only, with delivery expected in July) and don’t have any great interest in signed copies (though it is nice to have Dever’s signature in my copy of The Storms of Chai as a keepsake). In addition to the fifty extra sections of gameplay, which – my reservations notwithstanding – will no doubt appeal to most buyers, the gamebook is also illustrated by the brilliant Gary Chalk (amongst others), the first to which he has contributed since Lone Wolf 8: The Jungle of Horrors (1987). The volume also includes thirty-two pages of supplementary material, ‘The Magnamund Archives’, which will also no doubt appeal to most buyers. (I did enjoy reading this, though I buy the books primarily for play.) I ordered promptly at 17:02 on 12 May, paying a very reasonable £4.99 for postage and packaging, and my purchase arrived exactly two weeks later. That’s quite a long time to wait, even by Royal Mail’s well-publicised declining standards, but the delay may well be shorter in future, now that the book is officially ‘in print’ (if that term is relevant anymore).

In consequence of the Lone Wolf cycle being distinguished from similar gamebooks (such as the Fighting Fantasy series, several of which I also enjoyed, especially The Warlock of Firetop Mountain) by using a serial player character who advances in rank and abilities, there is always a ‘The Story So Far…’ section between the rules and the first section of gameplay. One of the strengths of The Dusk of Eternal Night was that it seemed to pick up where The Storms of Chai left off, reestablishing the sense of looming cataclysm and climax by, amongst other things, gathering together companions and allies from the previous New Order books, The World of Lone Wolf miniseries, and the various Bonus Adventures published in some editions of the gamebooks. The final assault by the servants of the Dark God Naar to rule Magnamund began in the year MS 5101. Naar’s victory is dependent on his destruction of all three of the New Order of the Kai, the Brotherhood of the Crystal Star (a magic-user’s guild in D&D and AD&D terms), and the Elder Magi (also magic-users, as the name implies). Thanks to the efforts of True Friend, Lone Wolf, and the other Kai Grand Masters, Naar’s agent Zashnor was defeated in Chai (The Storms of Chai) and his Shadow Gate in Zekgazad destroyed (Dead in the Deep), preventing him from unleashing an army from the Realm of Paradox. Naar has, however, freed Demonlord Agarash from his pocket dimension prison and resurrected Archlord Vashna, with True Friend defeating an undead army of the former at the Battle of Lorn in MS 5103 (The Dusk of Eternal Night).

As True Friend has successfully completed eleven adventures, he has now mastered all sixteen of the Kai Grand Master Disciplines and reached the highest rank possible, Kai Supreme Master, in theory if not in practice Lone Wolf’s equal (more on this below). In the battle for Magnamund, he has been assigned command of Southern Magnamund, where he will continue the fight against Agarash while Lone Wolf does the same against Vashna on Northern Magnamund. I liked this premise as it expands True Friend’s exploration of the south, in contrast to Lone Wolf’s focus on the north, which means that players who complete all the series within the larger cycle experience the full range of settings across Magnamund. With all this personal history (like many, if not most, of the fanbase, I imagine) and nervous anticipation in mind, the first few pages of the volume exceeded my expectations: this is a game that promises to integrate the excitement of the first thirty episodes with the originality of the thirty-first. ‘The Story so Far…’ is succinct and gripping, a perfect introduction to the whole cycle and the cataclysmic end to which it is coming. Then comes the big reveal in ‘The Game Rules’, which answers all of the questions and concerns I posed above: in this game (and perhaps the next), I can choose to continue with True Friend as my persona or return to Lone Wolf. Not only can I either be one or the other, but I can mix and match within the game.

This is ideal because Lone Wolf and True Friend are the same rank (‘level’ in D&D and AD&D terms), both have demigod-like powers, and are each in command of half of the forces of good…so why not play either/or or both/and? The instructions are that one can begin with either character and then choose to either stay with that character throughout the adventure or switch between the two when the characters meet (and given the option in the text). Of course, what this also means is that there are actually two distinct adventures in Volume One: Lone Wolf’s (the first two hundred sections) and True Friend’s (the second two hundred sections). This, in turn, explains why the final adventure has been divided into two. Lazzari and Ben have remained true to Joe’s initial conception of thirty-two adventures, but offered us the opportunity to play it twice. Brilliant. The experiment with the gamebook form is also reminiscent of another of Joe’s short series, Combat Heroes, (two pairs of books, one pair published in 1986 and the other in 1987) where players could either play a short solo adventure or play against another player, who would be using the other gamebook. The options for playing Volume One are not, however, merely twofold because one can begin as either Lone Wolf or True Friend and then switch (or not) at two different points in the game, providing eight permutations in total. That must have involved some very clever and creative planning and writing by Lazarri and Ben and I found the switches between personas perfectly seamless.

I decided to start as True Friend to retain continuity with the New Order and End Game series, which I’ve been replaying and reviewing for the last decade. My initial plan was then to switch at each point I was given the opportunity. I’m not sure why, but I thought there would only be one chance to change so I envisaged beginning the game as True Friend and finishing it as Lone Wolf (which was in fact what happened, but for a different reason). One thing I realised as I recovered my notes on True Friend from The Dusk of Eternal Night and used the information in the rules to arm and equip Lone Wolf as best as I could remember – from when I played Lone Wolf 20: The Curse of Naar (1993), which was probably twenty years ago – was that the game has become pretty complicated by this stage. Not only have both Supreme Masters acquired multiple sets of disciplines, abilities, and powers over the years (conveniently summarised in the last few pages of Volume One), there are also a new set of abilities called Supreme Master Gifts. But don’t get too excited… what Lazarri and Ben give with one hand they take away with another because Lone Wolf and True Friend are also cursed, by Vashna and Agarash respectively, meaning that one must balance all of the previous abilities with the gifts and the curses in order to determine Combat Skill and Endurance (the two core game mechanics) in different situations. This is not a criticism, merely an observation that Light of the Kai is not an entry level game. The Storms of Chai would be a better place to begin and Voyage of the Moonstone even better (though the best place of all to begin is with Flight from the Dark).

True Friend’s adventure starts when he is summoned to a war council with Lone Wolf and their allies in Toran, in Sommerlund, and Northern Magnamund is the setting of Volume One (I am hoping Volume Two will shift to Southern Magnamund, for the reasons mentioned above). I liked the ecological theme that is raised very early, of Magnamund’s inhabitants being destroyed by the declining capacity of the planet to support existing species rather than being annihilated by Naar’s various minions (later referred to as its inability to sustain its ‘World-power’). I think this will resonate very well with younger players in particular. True Friend finds himself and Lady Assiliah, who is a student of the Shianti and a guardian of the Isle of Lorn, in the Ironwoods, in the Durncrag Mountains, the range that separates Sommerlund from the Darklands. The opening reminded me of playing Flight from the Dark all those years ago and at this early juncture I was really looking forward to whatever came next. In the first part (of four), True Friend and Assiliah must find Tower Ironar, an abandoned Sommlending settlement, infiltrate it, explore the dungeons beneath, and enter the Crystal Forge. The second part begins when they return to Sommerlund to find that an enormous cyclone is engulfing Toran while a comet descends on Northern Magnamund from above. True Friend must then defeat the Demon-king Suula, who has taken Kai Grand Master Swift Sword as his host, in a sequence that is surprisingly short and frustratingly deadly. Once Suula is defeated, there is an opportunity to switch characters and I began the next part as Lone Wolf, in search of the Rings of Judgement (the book uses US spelling, which I’ve replaced here) in the Danarg, a jungle to the southwest of Sommerlund that was the setting for The Jungle of Horrors. Lone Wolf must explore some or all of the four ruined towers of the Elder Magi to recover the rings and defeat, amongst many other denizens, a hive of Krywiz, powerful zombies that can infect all they wound, even Supreme Masters with their demigod-like resistances. The final part starts with Lone Wolf’s skyship receiving an unexpected visitor and a second opportunity to switch characters. I decided to remain with Lone Wolf this time and continue my search for a cure for the failing World-power. This takes Lone Wolf to the city of Ankor, in the Hardlands, in search of the Death Shard, and a climactic battle in his skyship with The Shog’aash, the last of the Sea Dragons of Naar. As such, the narrative that underpins the game, the ‘book’ in gamebook, is entertaining, engrossing, and exciting, unquestionably the best End Game instalment since The Storms of Chai. There are several sections that have long descriptions or more than two pages of text and occasionally there are two of these in a row, but the balance is much better than in The Dusk of Eternal Night and this is a very good game indeed.

If I concluded my review here it would be exclusively positive. I’d be very happy with that and many players may not agree with what I have to say next, but I've reviewed all of these gamebooks honestly and have no intention of changing my approach at the eleventh hour. Simply put, True Friend is, as his wimpy name might have suggested, not tough enough for this adventure. Almost all combats were very hard, against adversaries of a similar strength (which stretched credibility at times), and the addition of the curse made many very hard combats fatal or even impossible. I’d already been killed twice (once in combat and once by a poor decision) by the time I met Teakkro, last seen in Dead in the Deep, at the end of the first part. She would have been enough of a challenge on her own, but she had brought some friends along to make killing me much quicker and by this point I was the proud bearer of the Red Plague in addition to the Darkness Curse. For the first time in thirty-two games, I had to ‘cheat’, meaning that I had to pretend I’d won an impossible combat rather than simply replay the combat until I won or reboot my game at an earlier section to increase my odds of success. I didn’t feel great about this, but I did feel great about scurrying back to Lone Wolf to let him to take over and decided that I would finish the rest of the game as Lone Wolf whatever the options were. Unfortunately, before I could pass the baton – or, more accurately, beg for big brother’s help – I had to fight the Demon-king Suula, which was another impossible combat (even if I hadn’t been so battered and bruised) and ended up cheating for the second time. Once I was Lone Wolf, I was hoping I’d fare better. I did, at first, but almost immediately added a Krywiz plague to my Blood Curse, which proved fatal later on and caused me to cheat for the third time. I was killed twice before I reached the relative safety of the skyship at the end of the third part of the narrative and dare not revert to True Friend when offered the option because by this time he was basically what the military call ‘combat ineffective’. The final fight against The Shog’aash was probably not impossible, though I would have had to go back to my start as Lone Wolf and have a lot more luck with everything in order to be in significantly better shape when the time came. Without giving away any spoilers, the end of Volume One suggests that the fate of Magnamund is now entirely in the hands of True Friend… if so, then I recommend that all the good folk either immediately convert to the worship of Naar or find a convenient Krywiz to infect them.

With respect to the gameplay, I think the full combination of adversaries that are so tough, the curses, and the various other opportunities to have permanent or long-term reductions to Combat Skill, Endurance, or both are – literally – overkill. I could have done without the curses or the reductions, or perhaps even both, and still been killed a few times and had a fun-filled and nail-biting experience. Alternatively, maybe I’m not as good a player as I was when I played The Storms of Chai, but that wasn’t very long ago and although True Friend was killed at least once then and perhaps more than once, none of the adversaries were impossible to defeat. I just needed better luck with the Random Number Table or better decisions before the combat began. Or maybe I need to take my own advice, go back to Voyage of the Moonstone, play the New Order series with a little more skill, and make sure that True Friend is more robust by the time he sets foot in the Ironwoods. The fault may well be mine, but I didn’t like having to cheat and have never needed to before. My verdict is that while Volume One didn’t quite match its very promising beginning, it is an excellent gamebook and is bringing the cycle to a captivating and convincing conclusion. I’ve not seen any reliable information on when Volume Two will be released yet. Wikipedia states 2030, which seems too long. My sense from the inspired and ingenious crafting of Volume One, with its eight permutations (seven of which I still have left to play), is that the whole of Light of the Kai has already been planned in detail, if not drafted. My guess is that it’s almost finished or finished and awaiting playtesting. If there are another four years to wait, I hope I’m in better shape than True Friend when it’s released…

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu | review by Stephen Theaker

When I came out of The Mandalorian and Grogu, I said to Mrs Theaker that it was the perfect film for little boys – which is not to say little girls won't enjoy it too. And according to the Hollywood Reporter this was exactly what the exit polling showed – boys under 13 rated it more highly than anyone else. I said that in part for the obvious reasons – the blasters, monsters, spaceships, etc – but also because it's a film about a little boy (albeit a little boy in his fifties) travelling with a man he admires, and learning about honour, duty, ethics and (when needed) fighting.

Some have suggested that the film will baffle those who haven't seen the tv show and its spin-offs (The Book of Boba Fett and Ahsoka) but I think that's an unfounded fear. The only confusion might come from people thinking the Mandalorian is Boba Fett, since they wear very similar armour. He's not, he's a new character, Din Djarin. The film tells you all you need to know – a bounty hunter is hunting bad guys – and in fact it would work very well as a direct sequel to Return of the Jedi.

This film is set shortly after Jedi. The New Republic is a scrappy little upstart, struggling to prevent a resurgence of the Empire. The Mandalorian (voiced and at times played by Pedro Pascal) has been tasked with capturing (ideally) or killing (more likely) former Empire officers who are now setting themselves up as local warlords. It's work that he enjoys and he is good at it, and his orders come directly from Sigourney Weaver (playing a new character, Colonel Ward of the New Republic).

The first part of the film shows how this typically goes: the Mandalorian tracks down his target, then starts killing people and blowing things up until the target is dead. This time it involves running down a hill in a scout trooper and taking on three AT-ATs at once. It's a thrill-a-minute stuff, closer to George Lucas's dream of resurrecting the spirit of the old film serials than Star Wars (the original one) itself.

The rest of the film sees the duo take on a second mission. This one doesn't go quite so smoothly, and isn't as ethically clear-cut. To learn the identity and location of an Imperial bigwig, the New Republic has agreed to help two Hutts, huge slug-like crime lords, to find and rescue Rotta (Jeremy Allen White), their nephew, and the son of Jabba the Hutt. But what if Rotta doesn't want to be found by them – is the intel so important that his feelings don't matter?

One complaint has been that the film is essentially the same as the tv show, which seems unfair, since the show was so cinematic, each episode reportedly having a budget big enough to pay for an entire season of Doctor Who. Like the tv show, The Mandalorian and Grogu is full of spectacle, weird landscapes and alien creatures, and balances that with lots of character moments, not least during a memorable sequence when the Mandalorian is incapacitated and the camera comes down to Grogu's level.

If there's any criticism to be made, it's perhaps that there isn't much progression in the stories of our main duo – we don't learn any more about their origins. Also, it might have been nice to see more of their old allies, like Cara Dune (Gina Carano) and Migs Mayfeld (Bill Burr) – season three was also poorer for their absence. But other old friends make little cameos, and I can't really complain about a Mandalorian and Grogu film focusing on the Mandalorian and Grogu.

An enthusiastic four stars from me. To put it in movie-poster terms, it's a rip-roaring outer-space adventure, fun for all the family. Stephen Theaker ****

The Wish List by Eoin Colfer (Penguin) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Battle for a soul: reluctant perpetrator reunited with victim in touching young adult novel that examines resentment, vengeance, friendship, and the relationship between young and old.

A teen fantasy tale bursting with creativity, The Wish List introduces a world in which Satan commands his number two, Beelzebub – or “Bub” as the dark lord calls him – to capture the soul of 14-year-old Meg Finn after she dies following a botched robbery. Meg’s mother is dead, and the devil is particularly interested in Meg because of something awful she did to her ne’er-do-well stepfather. 

In this domain, dead people have auras: blue if they’re good and red if they’re bad. Meg’s happens to be purple. 

After the explosion, Meg’s unsavoury co-conspirator Belch gets merged with his pit bull and goes straight to hell. Meg, however, gets another chance on Earth, where she decides to help Lowrie McCall (the pensioner they tried to rob) fulfil four long-held wishes ranging from reclaiming lost opportunities to seeking vengeance on those who’ve wronged him. 

Beelzebub enlists the now-dead 16-year-old Belch to stop Meg from helping Lowrie (and therefore doing good). A computer whizz named Myishi uses an often-annoying holographic demon to accompany and advise Belch. If Beelzebub and Belch stop Meg from doing good, she goes to hell; if they don’t, they’re going to be in hot water. 

While the structure of the novel is familiar, the creativity of the setting and the coming together of two flawed and initially antagonistic protagonists earn the reader’s buy-in. Eoin Colfer’s version of hell and its denizens is entertaining. Satan and Beelzebub nonchalantly dole out punishments. The latter even has a direct line to Saint Peter, from whom he attempts to extract information about Meg. Interestingly, whereas the bad guys are pursuing Meg, the good guys are mostly detached and letting her do her own thing.

Additionally, the omniscient point of view in which the author flips between characters’ thoughts in the same scene works. Meg’s ability to get into Lowrie’s head to see his past or invite him into hers paves the way for extended backstory scenes that help the protagonists sympathise with one another because they’ve both been through some difficult times. 

The Wish List offers an experience where reinvented biblical characters engage in captivating contemporary dialogue, technology has made its way into hell, an act of love can embody God and banish evil from the room, and old and young can learn from each other. And it all leads to a poignant ending that uses an unexpected sensory impression to tug at the heartstrings. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

Notes on Ballard's Notes from Nowhere – Rafe McGregor

J(ames) G(raham) Ballard (1930-2009) was an English author of avant-garde fiction who published nineteen novels and novellas and one hundred short stories, many of which were controversial, prescient, or both. He started his career as a science fiction writer in 1956, was instrumental in the transformation of the genre, and was admitted to the literary canon after the publication of Empire of the Sun (1984), a critically and commercially successful fictionalisation of his childhood experiences in a Japanese internment camp. His first novella, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), was part of a quartet that saw civilisation threatened or destroyed by air, water, fire, and earth and inaugurated Anglophone climate fiction. Along with Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss, Ballard was one of the founders of the New Wave of science fiction, which originated in the mid-nineteen-sixties and reconstituted the genre as an extension of literary modernism that was focused on the psychological rather than physical impact of technology. Ballard typically locates his narratives in the present rather than the future, explores the impact of the outer world on the inner, and provides subtle but startling commentary on social mores and norms. Although it spread across the Atlantic, the New Wave was UK-based and primarily driven by the combination of Moorcock’s editing and Ballard’s writing in New Worlds, which began as a fanzine in 1946, was taken over by Moorcock in 1964, became an anthology series in 1971, reverted to a fanzine in 1978, reverted to an anthology series in 1991, and was most recently published by PS in 2021.

The October 1966 issue of the magazine includes a short article from Ballard, ‘Notes From Nowhere: Comments on Work in Progress’, a numbered list of twenty-four notes ranging from a few words to a few sentences each. Moorcock introduced them as follows: ‘Reader interest in J.G. Ballard’s work has been high. We invited Mr Ballard to produce these notes explaining some of his current ideas.’ The level of explanation is, as one might expect from Ballard, limited, but other authors and anyone who is passionate about the creative process or science fiction as a genre is likely to find them as interesting as I did. I was lucky enough to read them in their original form, thanks to Dr Tom Dillon at the University of Liverpool’s Science Fiction Hub, which is the only dedicated science fiction archive in the UK, Europe’s largest catalogued collection of science fiction, and boasts a complete run of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction courtesy of an anonymous donor. Tom is also the author of a cultural history of New Worlds and has an enviably rich knowledge of magazines, fanzines, and speculative fiction more broadly.

I’m not going to reproduce Ballard’s full list, which you can find on a Canadian archive of his work here, or comment on each point he makes (or sometimes fails to make), but offer five notes of my own instead. His first and longest (along with #16) is about the form of science fiction. Ballard introduces the genre with a delineation of its concern with ‘the immediate present in terms of the future rather than the past’ and claims that because of this thematic content, the standard narrative form of beginning and end, cause and effect, and exposition and resolution is inappropriate. Science fiction should be an arena for formal innovation and he comments on his attempts to play with sequentiality in The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966), apparently ambivalent about the extent to which he succeeded in replacing temporality with spatiality in each case. This formal experimentation would come to fruition with and in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which included the contentious short story, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968).

The tenth note is something of a counterpart to the first, expanding his description of science fiction’s thematic content. Ballard identifies three ‘planes’: the broader public or political world, the immediate physical environment in which each person lives their life, and the inner, psychological world of each person as they live that life. He suggests that these three coordinates provide a starting point for the clarification of contemporary reality and given what he also writes about neurology, I suspect he is referring to clarification in terms of both thought and attempts to communicate thought to others through description or depiction. In combination, notes nine and fourteen establish a close but vague relation between fiction or narrative on the one hand and neurology and what is now called neuroscience on the other. I found this fascinating due to the prioritisation of narrative as a way of thinking over narrative as a mode of communication in recent research. Philosophers, literary theorists, and cognitive scientists such as Peter Goldie, Jonathan Gottschall, and Fritz Breithaupt seem to be showing that the behavioural sciences’ lack of success in evaluating the insights of literary studies is a failure of the former rather than the latter, which is surprisingly compatible with direct scrutiny of the brain’s neural networks.

Notes twenty to twenty-three are all about the failure of science fiction authors to shed light on the concept of outer space. At first glance, this may seem arrogant or flippant, but Ballard is referring to the kind of illumination he described in #10, writing about outer space in a meaningful manner, i.e. one in which the political, physical, and psychological intersect. He mentions a current work in progress about a ‘disaster in space’, which appears to be a reference to ‘The Death Module’, published in New Worlds in July 1967. The eighteenth note is a brief and obscure farewell to The Crystal World, which is probably my favourite Ballard novel and which I used as evidence for including him as a significant contributor to the tradition of weird fiction. The novel (or novella, depending on your preferred definition) was published five months before the publication of his notes, which implies that the notes themselves were submitted to Moorcock several months in advance. In summary, Ballard’s list is an excellent place to begin with his oeuvre and I’m very grateful to have had them drawn to my attention and to have been able to see them in their original form.

Why A Pulp Memoir? – Rafe McGregor

This year marks the emerald anniversary of my first professional sale and publication as an author. I’m not sure why, but I’ve never taken stock of my whole writing ‘career’ (if that’s the right word), which began in earnest four years before that sale, and two decades seems an appropriate (if extremely tardy) time to ask myself whether I’ve succeeded or failed at it. If nothing else, the answer might determine what I do with the next two decades (or, more realistically, whatever part thereof is left).

From one point of view, it’s been a success. By this summer, I’ll have authored twenty books (divided evenly between academic monographs on culture, crime, and politics and small press pulp fiction novels and collections) and three hundred shorter works (including several as editor). While I’d be lying if I said I was proud of every single long and short piece published, I’d defend one of the monographs and one of the short story collections as being right up there with the best. Though two good or better books and a few good articles and short stories isn’t much in twenty years, I’m happy with it. A slight change of perspective, however, tells a very different tale. None of my long or short works have ever been published by the Big Four or elite university presses such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, or Stanford or in periodicals with more than a few thousand readers so I may well be overrating the quality of my oeuvre. A quantitative evaluation is nigh mortifying: none of all those publications made me more than £1,000 and most of them didn’t earn anything at all. Forgetting about the money for a minute, which no professional writer can afford to do, with a mere two exceptions, my estimated readership has been in four figures (or less) for each. If the lack of quantity reflects a lack of quality, then I have indeed overrated myself.

Put like that, I’d have to say I failed, but it’s all too easy to compare oneself to the best-known writers – Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, James Ellroy, China Miéville, etc. – when the reality is that they constitute a tiny percentage of the profession. Let me try a different tack: what was my goal when I set out? To earn a ‘modest’ living from writing fiction and nonfiction which, for reasons I can’t remember, I set at £30,000 per annum in 2006. Given the various financial and cost of living crises since, that would probably be £50,000 now. The latest statistics suggest I set the bar outrageously high. At present, more than four in five novelists in the UK support themselves with other jobs, their median annual income from writing is £7,000 (less than a third of minimum wage), and the income of the top 10% is disproportionally high compared to the rest. I haven’t made £30,000 from writing in twenty years, let alone each year, which simply confirms my failure. In mitigation, in 2006 there was still a ‘mid-list’ of novelists, a host of magazines accepting article or story submissions from unknown authors, and readerships were expanding rather than shrinking, meaning my goal wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounds in hindsight. All that has of course changed several times over, courtesy of the digitisation of everyday life, shifts away from reading novels and watching films to online gaming, and the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence. Perhaps, after all, there is some success in still being able to publish and still getting read, even if by only a few hundred people each time?

Or perhaps I’m asking the wrong question and the issue at stake isn’t success or failure but why I started writing for publication in the first place and why I’m still doing it two decades later? I didn’t start in 2006 to earn £30,000 (I was already making slightly more than that) – I started to earn a modest living by writing. Notwithstanding the failure of that goal, I managed to keep up a steady rate of publication (a book each year and a short work each month) in spite of never having more than 50% of my working week to write, edit, and research. Let me change tack one last time. If, as seems highly likely at the moment, that 50% drops to 0%, what will I do? I’ll do what I did from 2002 to 2006, write on weekends, holidays, nights…whenever time permits…which implies I’m doing it for pleasure. Call me naïve, but when Stephen King writes ‘I did it for the pure joy of the thing’ in On Writing, I believe him and I don’t begrudge a single cent of the many millions he was talented and lucky enough to earn while he was enjoying himself. If the ‘right’ question to ask is why I have spent so much time writing for the last twenty years, then the answer is for the pure joy. And spending that much time doing something enjoyable, something whose product a few thousand other people have enjoyed, is worth doing for as long as time permits.

All of which is why I collected seventy-five of my short nonfiction works in A Pulp Memoir: Essays, Reviews, Interviews 2006-2026. Is it a memoir? Not really, but it does include both my first and most recent publication, spanning the full range of the two decades. There are also autobiographical reflections on my experiences as a writer in the introduction and conclusion, in the three interviews (one from 2009 and two from 2024), and in the essays about my two novels (published in 2009 and 2017). Perhaps I should have called the collection ‘A False Memoir’, except that Jim Harrison beat me to that title fifty-five years ago with Wolf: A False Memoir (which, if anyone is interested, has absolutely nothing to do with the film Wolf, whose screenplay he wrote twenty years later). If it isn’t really a memoir, is it pulp? Most definitely. The essays, reviews, and interviews are divided into four parts, one each on crime, fantasy, weird, and climate fiction. While I don’t regard the popular distinction between artistic and genre fiction as either accurate or useful, as I mention more than once in the collection, much of what I’ve written about would be classified as pulp fiction by most critics, including: Sherlock Holmes across the centuries, the Lone Wolf gamebooks, H.P. Lovecraft’s legacy, and Sharksploitation movies. The earliest pulp fiction character I discuss is H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, who first appeared in King Solomon’s Mines in 1885 and the latest is Ice Cube’s Will Radford, the protagonist of the 2025 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which might just be the worst film I’ve ever seen. And if that doesn’t convince you to take a look, I’m not sure what will…

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Seventeen edited by Ellen Datlow | review by Rafe McGregor

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Seventeen edited by Ellen Datlow

Night Shade Books, paperback, £15.99, February 2026, ISBN 9781949102789

 

Ellen Datlow will be a household name to many if not most readers of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction as one of the world’s leading editors of speculative fiction. She began her career with a publisher that is now one of the Big Five, moved on to magazines, webzines, and independent publishers, and is best-known for her horror anthologies. Datlow’s reputation was established with the Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy, which was published by St. Martin’s Press for twenty-one years, from 1988 to 2007. After a year’s hiatus, she began editing The Best Horror of the Year for Night Shade Books in 2009 and the series has now reached its seventeenth instalment, which was published in February and collects short fiction and poetry originally published in 2024. Datlow has edited about eighty other anthologies and won numerous awards across a period of four decades and my first taste of her work was Lovecraft Unbound, which was published in 2009 and includes what might be the most impressive coterie of authors I’ve ever seen between two covers: Michael Chabon, Brian Evenson, Nick Mamatas, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Joyce Carol Oates.

As a reader and writer of short fiction, I have mixed feelings about The Best Horror of the Year. Not just this series, but all ‘best of’s, including those in crime fiction, my other genre of choice. On the one hand, I love them – what’s not to love – and have read as many of this series as I can since discovering Volume Two in 2010. On the other hand, I question whether the selected stories really are the best of each year’s batch. Setting aside the definition of ‘best’, the volumes often seem like a parade of the ‘usual suspects’. Why does this bother me? Two reasons. First, most of the big names in twenty-first century genre fiction have become big because of their (usually well-deserved) success with novels. But, of all bibliophiles, horror enthusiasts know better than most that being a great novelist and being a great short story writer do not always coincide (for example: E.A. Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, T. Ligotti). Being a great novelist is no guarantee of being a great short story writer, even if the mere presence of a story by one of the former is likely to make an anthology sell so much better. Second, speculative fiction has always been closely associated with amateur magazines, webzines, and whatever the latest name for online-only or print-on-demand publications is. Most of what is published in these venues probably doesn’t come close to a longlist of the year’s best, but there are many exceptions that prove the rule and I wonder how it’s possible to read anything more than a small percentage of the overall output. To put it in social scientific terms, the population (every horror story published in English in 2024) from which the various samples (longlist, shortlist, list) are drawn is self-selected before the selection ostensibly starts.

With that in mind, it’s particularly commendable that Datlow begins Volume Seventeen with ‘Summation of the Year 2024’, a forty-page introduction that attempts to summarise this population, beginning with award-winning titles and novels, covering the full range of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and concluding with ‘Odds and Ends’. Again, in social scientific terms, this is akin to setting out one’s methodology and highlights both the scope and the rigour of Datlow’s editorial efforts. As if to put sceptics like me in their place, she begins her summary by noting that thirteen of the twenty-three contributors have not appeared in previous instalments of this series and, indeed, the only authors with whom I was already familiar were Charles Wilkinson (a fellow TQF contributor), Stephen Volk, and Paul Tremblay. Datlow also summarises the contents in terms of the word count range of the twenty-two short stories and one poem, which I always find interesting as a writer and is 2,000 to 8,300. This raised another question for me, however, about an important part of the selection process. Given that the anthology includes poetry, I assume there is no lower end of word count, but what about the upper end? Genre magazines tend to use 7,500 words as the watershed between short stories and novelettes, which clearly puts the longer stories in the anthology in the latter category. Were all novelettes considered or was there a limit within that category – perhaps 9,000 or 10,000 words? It won’t matter to most readers, but because the summation was so thorough, I would like to have seen a brief discussion – list, even – of the selection criteria.

Instead of introducing each story, I’ll begin by saying that there were very few I didn’t enjoy and mention what, for me, were the highlights. My favourite was ‘Summer Bonus’ by Lee Murray, which was first published in another anthology, Beyond and Within Folk Horror. I’m wary of ‘folk horror’ because it seems to have become a fad, a catch-all-category buzzword used to increase sales as if it’s a new phenomenon, when the subgenre has been around for centuries and popular since, at least, the release of Robin Hardy’s tour de force, The Wicker Man, in 1973. Whatever one chooses to call ‘Summer Bonus’, it is an exemplary short story, one of those that lingers with you long after you’ve finished it. There was a tie for my second place, between David Nickle’s ‘Fancy Dad’ and Steve Kilby’s ‘Pages From a Diary’, both also first published anthologies (Northern Lights and Nosferatu Unbound respectively). I’m assuming that the latter, which is the diary of a vampire, is the poem to which Datlow refers because of its lineation. I’m not sure what term most accurately describes the work. If a ‘prose poem’ has the appearance of prose but is poetic in form, then Kilby’s text is the opposite, having the appearance of poetry but the formal qualities of narrative without being a narrative poem. That may sound like faint praise, but it’s compelling, consequential, and highly original. In the order they appear in the anthology, my other favourites were James Cooper’s ‘An Act of Sorrow’, Wilkinson’s ‘Davidson’s Son’, and ‘Robert Shearman’s ‘I Love the Very Flesh Off You’. These were first published in Glass Shatters Fist (a collection of Cooper’s fiction), Cthonic Matter Quarterly 5, and Skin: An Anthology of Dark Fiction. I’m tempted to comment on the fact that five of my six were all published in other anthologies or collections rather than magazines, but my own sample isn’t representative of the full contents of the volume.

I’ll conclude with a different reflection. Volume Seventeen is a superb anthology of horror fiction, well worth reading, and testimony to both Datlow’s editorial skills and dedication to the genre. I look forward to Volume Eighteen (which will cover 2025 and, I assume, be published in 2027) and hope that the series continues even longer than its predecessor. I read Volume Seventeen at the same time as Best Crime Stories of the Year Volume 4 (2024), edited by Anthony Horowitz, with the intention of alternating between the two. While I love Horowitz’s own fiction and have great respect for him as an author, I found the anthology (which I haven’t managed to finish yet) a little disappointing, with few stories standing out from the rest and only one whose plot and characters I can still remember. I wonder whether this is just idiosyncrasy on my part, a coincidence caused by my choice of anthologies, or an indication that, as far as short fiction goes, horror is in a far healthier state than crime. If short horror is more inventive, intricate, and intriguing than short crime at present, that is perhaps unsurprising given the distinct directions the two genres have taken in the last fifty years.

A Pulp Memoir: Essays, Reviews, Interviews 2006–2026 by Rafe McGregor: now out, in print and ebook!

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

Nine years ago we published our most succesful ever book, The Adventures of Roderick Langham, which sold over 1500 copies, and now its author, Rafe McGregor is back with an extensive collection of his essays, reviews and interviews: A Pulp Memoir.

Who really killed Sir Charles Baskerville? What are weird tales? When did Octavia Butler complete her parables? Where did Allan Quatermain retire? Why were the last two Bond movies so strange? How did Sharksploitation get so big? Why is it so hard to film the collapse of the world as we know it? What happened to gamebooks? Who is Thomas Ligotti? These and many other questions about detective, fantastic, weird, and climate fiction are answered in Rafe McGregor’s selection of his best short nonfiction from the past twenty years. The collection also includes a new essay on one of the most provocative and irreverent manifestos of the twenty-first century and reflections on writing as a practice, writing as a discipline, and writing as a career.

Some of the writing will be familiar to readers of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction, but much of it will be new to you, having appeared in venues as diverse as Dalesman, The London Magazine, Crime Always Pays, Shots Crime and Thriller Ezine, Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy: The Footprints of a Gigantic Mind, CADS (Crime and Detective Stories), The Millions, Crime Factory, the Crime Readers’ Association, Crime Fiction Lover, the Arthur Conan Doyle Society, the British Society of Criminology, and the British Fantasy Society.

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Rafe McGregor is a critical theorist and author of twenty books, divided evenly between monographs on culture, crime, and politics and pulp fiction. He has published over three hundred essays, reviews, and short stories, many of which have appeared in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, the UK’s second-longest-running amateur speculative fiction magazine.

Cover by Reece Burns.

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Buy now to save money! For the first six months of release, the paperback will be exclusive to Amazon, so that you can buy it for just £7.99. After that, we will choose expanded distribution, but the minimum price will be higher.

Mr. Tilling’s Basement & Other Stories by Edward Lee (Deadite Press) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Old pervs collide with young floozies in extreme horror collection that considers aging and self-perception amid gratuitous sex and violence

Holding back? Not here. Subtlety? Nah. Leaving sexual encounters or violence to the reader’s imagination? Read something else!

One of the four tales in Edward Lee’s Mr. Tilling’s Basement & Other Stories describes a painting that depicts spectator benches surrounding a hellish landscape where people are being tortured in the most gruesome ways. This collection gives readers a seat on one of those benches. 

Several stories involve nubile young women who are not only willing but also eager to have intercourse with an older, and in some cases, physically unattractive man. What distinguishes this from pornography is that Lee provides a reason why these women are so aggressive. And it’s usually a duplicitous one.  

In the titular story, college professor Herman Tilling takes over the dilapidated home of a man suffering from dementia. A potty-mouthed albeit beautiful Native American woman shows up and reveals that there is some secret associated with the basement — it involves cryptic text, smoking herbs, and an incantation. Throughout, Tilling remains focused on the woman’s physical endowments such as her thin stomach (and other traits). 

At one point, Lee throws plot out the window and moves from one brutal scene to the next, but with its inventive torture scenes and wordplay, the story entertains. Moreover, the work explores aging: an academic past his prime questions his self-worth and his authority as a bearer of knowledge when this young woman (whom he can’t help but sexualize) suggests his entire way of thinking is flawed. 

The reclusive older male protagonist in “The Night-Sitter” also encounters a sexually aggressive young woman. This time, it’s a webcammer who is staying up at night to keep an eye and ear out for any oddities. Seeing him as a cash cow, she’s more than willing to indulge his fantasies, but he doesn’t want that. Once again, we’re taken to a place where horrific things are described in vivid detail. 

Part history book and part slasher, “An American Tourist in Poland” is about a horny, overweight man. The unnamed narrator, an acquaintance of Mr. Foster Morley (also referred to as “our protagonist”) recounts the horrific thing that happened to Morley during his second trip to Poland, a trip fuelled by both cultural curiosity and lust. One fascinating aspect of this story is its strange juxtapositions. The style and vocabulary, for instance, feel like it was written a hundred years ago. Old-fashioned words such as “balderdash” and “gads” mingle with vulgarities. Geographic landmarks and historic events coexist with graphic depictions of violence in everything from tapestries to snuff films. Morley’s appreciation of Poland’s architectural highlights competes with his focus on women’s breasts and genitals. 

The final and much shorter story, “The Statement of Sgt. Justin Jessop of the Innsmouth Police Department”, is clearly influenced by H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. Somebody is interviewing a police sergeant about the horrific incident that he experienced. It has to do with cosmic creatures and because this is Lee, there’s a sexual component. It all started when the sergeant saw a legless guy dragging himself across a field… 

I once heard Lee, the godfather of extreme horror, state that extreme horror stories, with their over-the-top violence and debauchery, are supposed to be humorous. And in this case, they are. 

Sometimes, when the Kindle shows I have an hour left in a story, I dread it and just want to get it over with. In the case of Mr. Tilling’s Basement & Other Stories, I was glad when I had an hour left. 

What makes Lee’s work so compelling is his ability to keep the reader wondering: what hellscape awaits within that closet… or in that basement… or on that SD card? Whatever it is, it’s going to be grisly and imaginative, for there is no hellscape like that depicted by Edward Lee. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

Notes I Never Wrote – Rafe McGregor

 

A Note on Notes

When I realised I’d published twenty books in twenty years (or, more accurately, will have twenty published or ‘in press’ by the time the anniversary arrives in a few weeks), my next goal was to have all twenty available in one form or another. Thanks to a belated and reluctant engagement with Kindle, I’ve now done that, with the five books that were published as large print paperbacks from 2008 to 2011 available on Amazon as of last month. They are all short and belong to two trilogies of short books. The Captain Jackson crime and espionage thrillers were all published in 2008 (ignoring my two amateurish attempts at self-publishing): The Secret Policeman (a novella), The Secret Agent (a collection of six short stories, originally published from 2007 to 2008), and The Secret Service (another novella). The two Forgotten Stories short horror collections form a trilogy with John Hall’s Five Forgotten Stories (published by Theaker’s Paperback Library in March 2010): Eight Weird Tales (September 2010, tales originally published from 2007 to 2010) and Six Strange Cases (February 2011, two of the cases originally published in 2009). These have been available on Kindle since 2024.

As I was putting the finishing touches on The Secret Agent, I realised that the three short story collections were published before a habit I subsequently adopted in imitation of Stephen King, including notes as a postscript. I prefer this to a foreword as there’s no need to avoid spoilers and I love reading other writer’s notes because they often mention the inspiration or origin of the stories – something about which most writers (and many readers) are curious. I wrote a short introduction to Eight Weird Tales, where I identified Conan Doyle, M.R. James, Anthony Hope, and H.P. Lovecraft as my inspirations, but it was so dull that I left it out of the Kindle edition. Instead, I thought I’d present the notes I never wrote here, excluding those on the two Roderick Langham stories, which were collected in The Adventures of Roderick Langham (published by Theaker’s Paperback Library in 2017, complete with notes). That leaves all six stories from The Secret Agent, seven from Eight Weird Tales, and five from Six Strange Cases. 

The Secret Agent

Two: The Captain Jackson stories were all written in a two-year period from 2004 to 2006 and professionally published from 2007 to 2008. As such, they are my oldest work, fiction and nonfiction included, and full of the usual mistakes one associates with a novice author. ‘Two’ was my first published short story, appearing in Hardluck Stories at the beginning of 2007 and is the only one in this collection not to feature Jackson (though I made a weak attempt to frame it as what might now be called a spinoff). It was never intended to be part of the collection, but I needed a sixth story to include and the one I was working on, which would have seen Jackson in Boston, was taking too long to write. I started another one, set in Geneva, but didn’t finish that either and decided to use what I already had, i.e. ‘Two’. The inspiration for the story was something that nearly happened, didn’t, and made me think about what might have happened.

Clock Work: At the core of each of the stories in The Secret Agent is a single action scene and, in retrospect, I was very naïve to assume that writing these well would be enough to sell them for professional rates. The scene at the centre of this story was inspired by the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by two Special Operations Executive agents, in Prague-Libeň in June 1942. I learned about it from a military history magazine that would inspire several short stories and articles, which I first read in a Starbucks in Oxford, which explains the setting. Heydrich was probably the most dangerous of all of Hitler’s inner circle and would later be the subject of a Roderick Langham memoir, The Naval Cadet. The story was also published as ‘Murder by Numbers’.

Contre Temps: Many of the locations in The Secret Agent (and The Secret Service) were places that my wife and I visited while on holiday in our first few years of living together. (We lived near an airport in the days of the 99p ticket.) This narrative was inspired by a disappointing trip to Quebec. (In fairness, Quebec was fine; it was Quebec City that was a disappointment.) ‘Contre Temps’ was the first time I tried something different with the Jackson short stories because the action scene at its core never happens: Megan misses Jackson in consequence of her monolingualism, which almost certainly works out better for both her and Ashley (yes, this is the spinoff connection). While I don’t think it’s the best, it is the most widely read of all the Jackson stories courtesy of its appearance in a trade paperback collection of crime fiction.

Fall Guy: I think it’s fair to say that most inspiration for stories, whether they end up being long or short, requires a minimum of two sources, a literal coincidence of some sort. In this case, the combination was a misadventure while skiing and reading Tess Gerritsen’s The Apprentice (2002), the second novel in her Rizzoli & Isles series. I can’t remember which came first, but it doesn’t matter because the second event resonated with the first and I had enough to start writing. Subsequently, I was lucky enough to meet Dr Gerritsen briefly. A clever, kind, charming woman who is very generous with her time and was treated appallingly by Alfonso Cuarón and Hollywood with regard to the blockbuster feature film, Gravity (2013). Her chapter in Hollywood vs. the Author (2018) is quite harrowing.

The Secret Agent: This is the longest Jackson short story at eight and a half thousand words and might be more accurately categorised as a novelette, i.e. somewhere in between a short story and a novella. ‘The Secret Agent’ is the first and only time I’ve set out to write a narrative of that length and it was also the first of all eight of the Jackson stories to be professionally published (The Secret Policeman and The Secret Service were both initially self-published, in 2005 and 2006 respectively). The scene at its core is a story told to me by a colleague some years before the writing and to this day I’m still not sure if he made it up or not. The coincidence that turned a scene into a story was the 7/7 bombings, during which my wife and I were in London (albeit very far from harm).

Hit and Miss: The last Jackson story to be written and published and the last in the chronology, which is: The Secret Policeman, ‘Clock Work’, ‘Contre Temps’, ‘Fall Guy’, ‘The Secret Agent’, and The Secret Service. The inspiration is the most banal of any of these notes. While possessed of many virtues, not the least of which is putting up with me for so long, my wife is indeed messy. She left a hammer outside the garage one day. I picked it up with thoughts of how it could have been used to break into the garage or house and then reversed direction, thinking how fortuitous it would have been if it had been left on the other side of a break-in. By the time this happened, I’d already been considering how many of Jackson’s enemies might want to interrupt his retirement and how they would go about it.

Eight Weird Tales

The Letters of Reverend Dyer: As will be apparent from both The Adventures of Roderick Langham and The Memoirs of Roderick Langham (forthcoming from Theaker’s Paperback Library), I’ve been fascinated by Whitby, the Yorkshire Coast, and North-East Yorkshire in its entirety for a long time. This story was inspired by Whitby, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu cycle, and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s ‘The Drowned Geologist (1898)’, which was first published in Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! in 2003. I spent a very enjoyable day researching it at the Whitby Museum, which was then and is still run by the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society. ‘The Letters of Reverend Dyer’ was my first attempt at writing speculative fiction.

Fleet: The inspiration was a curious combination of unrelated things: my return to university as a mature student, James’ ghost stories, a comment I’d read about one of his stories (I can’t remember either which story or where I read the comment), and an interest in medieval military orders. Though I visited the location of the final scene, I couldn’t see any sign of the Templar priory at all and remain unsure as to whether I was in exactly the right place. After my wife and I moved to the East Riding of Yorkshire, I spent some time exploring the surrounds, but many of these excursions were conducted in haste and at a time when information on the internet was relatively limited and smartphones restricted to the rich.

The Signal Station: One of the locations I did manage to find and visited several times over many years of days and occasionally nights spent in Scarborough. Not the least of the fascinations of North-East Yorkshire for me is the Roman occupation, although very little evidence of it remains. The inspirations are Lovecraft again, the series of comics and graphic novels that feature the Irish hero Sláine MacRoth and were first published in 2000 AD in 1983 and in Warrior’s Dawn in 2005, and the first year of my postgraduate studies. I did attempt to visit all of the signal station sights in my travels, but – once again – can’t be certain if I wasn't in the wrong place for one or two of them. The story was also published as ‘The Chapel on the Headland’ and is revisited in ‘The Screaming Man’.

Devil’s Own: Another location I visited, though my tour of the Towton battlefield was very haphazard and probably missed at least one important site. While the UK’s most brutal battle can hardly be called banal, the coincidence that inspired the story was, simply, that either shortly before or shortly after my excursion, I saw a military history book with ‘blood-soaked soil’ in the title. (I can’t remember which title and I’m sure there are many anyway.) A more insightful observation might be that another of my fascinations with North-East Yorkshire is the way in which there is so much under the soil – foundations, fossils, gemstones, and…bones. The story was also published as ‘Black Mac Sween’ and is revisited in ‘The Red Trees’.

Spurn: The geography and history of Spurn (the Spurn peninsular) and Spurn Point (Spurn Head) are both intriguing and I won’t bore readers with either here. Like Towton, I know I found the right place but am less certain that I saw everything I came for. The location aside, the inspiration was a combination of several things: a pamphlet I picked up somewhere in the East Riding about the drowned city of Ravenser Odd, Mark Valentine’s notes on one of his Connoisseur short stories (I can’t remember where the notes were published), and some very shoddy historical research on my part. In 2022, the precise location of Ravenser Odd was discovered and there was an exhibition at the Hull History Centre in 2024. Unfortunately, by that time I was living on the other side of the country and wasn’t able to visit. The story was also published as ‘The Stones at Spurn Point’.

Murder in the Minster: This is a Ruritanian pastiche and its inspirations are: Hope’s originals, The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), Rupert of Hentzau (1895), and the lesser known The Heart of Princess Osra (1896); the various homages that have followed, including John Haythorne’s The Strelsau Dimension (1981) and John Spurling’s After Zenda (1995); and a website called The Ruritanian Resistance. If anyone notices a correspondence between Rassendyll and Bauer on the one hand and Forrester and Jackson on the other, it’s because this story could – and perhaps should – have been another Jackson outing. At the time of writing, I was disappointed with the lack of commercial success I was having and thought I’d try something different. The location is based on a visit to Howden Minster, which also appears in ‘Spurn’.

Letter from the Helmand: This is the most unlikely source of inspiration I can imagine and also the most shameful. I went through a brief stage of reading the autobiographies of retired generals, which were usually disappointing as most had prioritised promotion over action and most toed the party line in their narratives because they had too much to lose. One of my selections was It Doesn't Take a Hero: The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (1992), which I read shortly before or after reading about the first combat death of a British soldier during the War in Afghanistan (in 2006). Schwarzkopf mentions a story he wrote while at West Point, in which he deliberately and cleverly conflated two wars nearly two millennia apart. I pretty much plagiarised the whole thing, compounding my crime by plagiarising Doyle, who begins his most famous series with a military doctor returning from…Afghanistan.

Six Strange Cases 

The Short Spoon: This was originally intended to be the first in a mystery series that would feature a retired police detective and have more of a commercial appeal than the Jackson short stories. The problem was that even in its leanest version the story was a novelette, significantly limiting the paying markets to which it could be submitted. At about the same time, I started what was intended to be a noir novel, one that might end up as either a crime thriller with an occult atmosphere or an occult thriller with a detective protagonist. The retired detective mystery was absorbed into the Titus Farrow novel, which gave me about sixteen thousand words of work-in-progress. When my literary agent couldn’t sell Bloody Reckoning (eventually published by Lume Books in 2017), I suggested The Short Spoon, but she wasn’t interested in anything that crossed genres. I didn’t want to waste all that writing, however, and thought it could be published in a collection rather than a magazine, which was how Six Strange Cases was conceived.

Meet El Presidente: ‘The Facts of the Demon Barber’s Demise’ aside, ‘Meet El Presidente’ is probably my worst short story and its origin is at least partly responsible for that. In contrast, there is nothing wrong with the inspiration: over a decade, I kept coming across the phrase ‘el presidente’ in unusual and incompatible contexts (unusual if you don’t speak Spanish, which I don’t) and started thinking about whether there was a thematic link. I could have made a respectable narrative out of that idea given enough time, but I was in a rush to publish Six Strange Cases. So I combined the offcuts of The Short Spoon that I hadn’t used in ‘The Short Spoon’ with parts of an unfinished story that was called ‘Knight of the Black Cross’ and threw it all into something that was more pot than plot. All unfortunate because the inspiration was promising and ‘Knight of the Black Cross’ was shaping up to be one of my better tales.

The Month of the Wolf: Very obviously inspired by my many visits to and stays in Whitby and my longstanding interest in the Black Dog phenomenon. Less obviously, the story has its origins in a cycle of stories that begins with Lovecraft’s ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (first published in Weird Tales in 1936), continues with Robert Bloch’s ‘The Shadow from the Steeple’ (first published in Weird Tales in 1950), and concludes (for now) with Hall’s Five Forgotten Stories. Like almost everything in this collection and much of what I was writing at the time, this was rushed to publication and I felt I’d once again wasted a promising premise. I was thus very pleased to have a revised and improved version, ‘The Barghest’, published several years later. I have a third version planned, though I doubt I’ll ever write it.

Blue Mail: Notwithstanding the Roderick Langham adventure in Six Strange Cases, this is the only story that was previously published. Notwithstanding a different Roderick Langham adventure, ‘Blue Mail’ is also the best short fiction I have written. That surprises me for at least two reasons. First, I’ve already explained the dubious origins of Farrow in my notes on ‘The Short Spoon’ and ‘Meet El Presidente’. He was my attempt to write noir, which is not my forte, and the first and third narratives in which he appeared were bits and pieces cobbled together from unfinished work. What were the chances this outing would be any better? Second, I have absolutely no idea what inspired ‘Blue Mail’ other than several pleasant visits to Cornwall and St Ives. What turns another pedestrian outing for Farrow into something that I hope is quite good is the ‘twist’ in the middle, who is blackmailing whom, and I just can’t remember how or why it came to me.

The Facts of the Demon Barber’s Demise: I’m pretty sure this is my worst short story. It was rejected everywhere I sent it, including by a publication that was specifically seeking absurd, nonsense, bizarre, or surreal stories (whose title escapes me now). It is also my only attempt to write flash fiction and that’s probably for the best. Having said all that it hardly seems to matter what my inspiration was, but I may as well finish the full set of notes. Once again, there was a coincidence and this particular combination was learning about Russell’s paradox (sets that are not sets of themselves) in a logic class shortly after watching Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), which my wife enjoyed but I didn’t. No, I didn’t force her to read the story as payback and no, I still don’t understand Russell’s paradox.