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 2007-2008), 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 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 (published by Theaker’s Paperback Library in April 2017) 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. One 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), 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 his second 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.

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

He’s wealthy, attentive, protective, and attractive. Cha-ching!

I’m tired of vampires and werewolves. I’m not big on first-person narration. I’m not even in the right audience for this one. But I had to do it. I had to go back and read the books that inspired a cultural phenomenon thanks to the 2008 film Twilight and its offspring. 

It all started with Stephenie Meyer’s 2005 novel of the same name that sank its teeth into the YA market. Alongside narrator Isabella “Bella” Swan, we travel to Forks, Washington, where we meet the mysterious vampire Edward Cullen and bear witness as they fall in love. 

When Bella inadvertently crosses paths with another vampire with no compunctions about cracking open a nice human neck, she becomes the target of an unrelenting hunter. And Edward and his family will do everything within their formidable power to protect her.

The novel also introduces Jacob Black, whose Native American tribe in nearby La Push has a severe distrust of the Cullens. Thus begins the series-long rivalry between Jacob and Edward. They’re both strong. They’re both attractive. And they both want to protect an aimless young lady. For many, that’s an irresistible combination. 

One of Meyer’s most potent strengths is on display early in the novel. She plays up Edward’s peculiarity, compounded by his initial revulsion towards Bella. Beyond that, the Cullen family’s sharp contrast from their fellow Forks High students is something to behold. 

Unfortunately, however, Edward needs to be fleshed out as the novel progresses. A hefty chunk of the book details Edward and Bella getting to know each other. They talk at school, at her house, at his house, in cars, in a field. All this “I’ll love you forever” talk even after being together for a week or so starts to grow wearisome for some audiences. 

Again, I understand the fascination with the competition for Bella and with Edward: his godlike presence (even a waitress rouses Bella’s jealousy), his speed and strength, his multiple talents, and the attention he showers on Bella. Nevertheless, there came a point at which I thought to myself, If I have to read about another young man pushing a stray lock of hair behind Bella’s ear or how good Edward smells, I’m going to throw up. 

Here’s the big secret about the entire Twilight series and its heroine: despite the excitement of everything happening around her, Bella is rather average (with some exceptions). And maybe that makes sense – maybe it helps more people identify with her. Douglas J. Ogurek ***

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris | review by Rafe McGregor

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

Hutchinson, hardback, £20.09, September 2019, ISBN 9781786331373

Robert Harris is an English novelist best known for his historical fiction, much of which has been adapted for the big screen. He began his writing career as a highly successful journalist and published several nonfiction books, including  Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries (1986), which is interesting not just for the hoax itself, but the role played by Rupert Murdoch, who was a powerful and sinister force even then, in the early nineteen eighties. Harris’ breakout novel was also his first, Fatherland (1992), published off the back of Selling Hitler, and he has authored seventeen to date, five of which are about the Roman Empire and four of which are about the Second World War. As I mentioned in my review of Prime Video’s The Man in the High Castle (2015-2019), Fatherland is actually alternative history rather than history and there is a strong speculative element running through Harris’ oeuvre.

Archangel (1998) and The Ghost (2007) are also alternative histories and the latter foregrounds a technique Harris has perfected and for which he really should be better known, the twist in the tail of the tale. His trademark twists are not only convincing, but retrospectively imbue his narratives with fresh meaning (or, perhaps more accurately, reveal a hidden meaning that was there all along). Conclave (2016) is another example of the master at work, with a revelation so powerful that it switches the novel from a contemporary thriller to an(other) alternative history. The Fear Index (2011) combines alternative history (in this case, the Flash Crash of 6 May 2010) with both science fiction and horror and I’d classify it as science fiction in consequence of the role of AI (though, as far as I can remember, Harris does not use the term). And then there is The Second Sleep, which seems to be a more straightforward instantiation of science fiction.

The novel takes its name from the concept of biphasic, diphasic, or segmented sleep, what we would now think of as getting up in the middle of the night for one to two hours before going back to sleep. There is significant evidence for this practice in pre-Industrial Europe, when people typically went to sleep shortly after dusk and rose with the dawn. Activities in the middle, which was sometimes called ‘the watch’, typically included one or more of: prayer, reading, chores, sex, or visits to neighbours. The second sleep is thus, literally, the second round of sleep between dusk and dawn, following the hour or two of pottering around. There is less evidence that this practice continued into the nineteenth century, which makes sense given that it seems tied to natural patterns and rhythms, and the closest one gets to it now is the Southern European siesta, where there might be an hour’s nap during the day and then less sleep at night. The Second Sleep opens in England in 1468 and the first thing anyone with an interest in history will notice is that the content is filled with anachronisms and inaccuracies. (I was lucky in that, very unusually, I started the book without knowing anything at all about it, other than the authorship, and dived straight in without reading the blurb.) How, one wonders, is this possible in the work of such a critically acclaimed historical novelist?

Given my acquaintance with Harris’ work, I suspected the apparent errors were clues to a mystery and the suspicion was quickly confirmed when an Apple logo turns up after a few chapters. The 1468 is not Gregorian, but an alternative calendar that is being used in a post-apocalyptic England, which has reverted to a cultural and technological state that mixes the Medieval with the Romantic. The protagonist, Father Christopher Fairfax, and his supporting cast in Addicott St George are in fact living in humanity’s second sleep, a second Dark Age that followed a catastrophic collapse of civilisation as we know it in 2025. Let me get my criticisms out of the way first. The story has a slow pace and rather rambling plot, which is loosely underpinned by a series of related mysteries: the mystery of 1468, the mystery of Fairfax’s predecessor’s sudden death, the mystery of the apocalypse itself (discussion of which is punishable by a brutal and backward legal system), and the mystery of what happened in between the apocalypse and the narrative present. In contrast to what I’ve just written about Harris’ mastery of the twist in the tail, the resolution is also underwhelming, reminiscent of both Fatherland and Enigma (1995) albeit lacking their substance.

Where Harris shines, more so than in, for example, The Fear Index, is in his sketch of why civilisation collapsed and the inevitability of certain consequences of that collapse. The former is very much related to one of my own interests, the almost complete change to everyday life in the UK (and elsewhere) from 1995, when most people had no access to the internet, to 2015, when most of us spent nearly three and a half hours of each day glued to our phones, let alone on the internet. Smartphone enabled social media transformed almost everything we do and completed that transformation in less than twenty years – which is too much too soon, even if everything about the technology is beneficial (which it clearly isn’t). Harris is particularly concerned with the deeply problematic combination of the exponentially enhanced complexity of twenty-first century everydayness with the inherent vulnerability of coupled systems that rely on the coordination of a multiplicity of interconnected parts. While he does not dwell on the point, he makes an exceptionally chilling observation about the way in which the human species is currently setting itself up for the second sleep by outsourcing both its reasoning processes and social interactions to Big Tech. This is one of the rare cases where the transparency of the novel’s message, something along the lines of think about what the technology was designed for before you embrace it, does not undermine the pleasure of the medium in which it is delivered. Though far from Harris’ best novel, The Second Sleep is his best science fiction to date and definitely worth reading.

It Waits in the Woods by Josh Malerman (Amazon Original Stories) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

There’s a line between suspense and annoyance – this story crosses it. 

Josh Malerman’s It Waits in the Woods is the third instalment in Amazon’s creature feature series of short stories written by high-profile horror writers. 

The story’s first problem is inherent in its title. Haven’t we seen enough of these monster in the woods stories? This time, the threat is a faceless creature – Malerman calls it an “imp” – that lures people and takes their faces. Add a bridge. Add a mirror. Insert enough of these tropes and hopefully the reader will assume some symbolic significance.

When her sister and another girl go missing, aspiring filmmaker Brenda travels into the woods and films her quest to find her sister. Her aim is to go where police and parents haven’t gone.

The story repeatedly reminds the reader that during a television broadcast, Brenda’s parents partly blamed her for her sister’s disappearance. All right already, I thought to myself, I get it! 

There comes a point when hammering the reader over the head with the same information knocks you out of the story. 

Despite these shortcomings, It Waits in the Woods gets more suspenseful as the climax approaches, thanks to Malerman’s strong storytelling abilities. His cinematic writing style makes it difficult to turn away. Alas, this strength is only exhibited for a brief portion of an otherwise banal story. Douglas J. Ogurek **

UNSPLATTERPUNK! 9 opens for short story and art submissions

Wanted: outrageous gore and grossness with a moral twist!

“No excessive gore.” Are you tired of this frequent restriction in calls for fiction submissions? Here’s your opportunity to run amok with the most grisly and vile stuff you can imagine. There’s just one catch: your revolting creations must deliver a positive message. 

Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (TQF), supposedly the UK’s second-longest-running sci-fi/horror/fantasy ’zine (and the birthplace of the unsplatterpunk subgenre), has opened to short stories for the ninth chapter in its often criticized yet never silenced UNSPLATTERPUNK! series. Failed novelist and second-rate humourist Douglas J. Ogurek returns as editor to unearth and intensify the most outrageous submissions.  

Send us your morally enlightening filth of up to 10,000 words by 30 September, 2026. We’re also looking for attention-getting cover art that reinforces the unsplatterpunk theme. Note: this is a nonpaying market (more on this below). 

A Vat Full of Barbarity

Stories in the UNSPLATTERPUNK! series range from cringe-worthy sci-fi and fantasy to gag-inducing realism and bizarro. Just make it disgusting… and enlightening.

Explore the previous anthologies, downloadable for free or available for purchase in paper format: 

• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2 
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 3 
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 4 
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 5 
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 6 
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 7
• UNSPLATTERPUNK! 8

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

You’d Bloody Well Follow These Tips

Following are a few suggestions for crafting your story:

• Create content as intrusive as a death metal band at a baby shower. 
• Try to make readers think to themselves, Why am I reading this? And why can’t I stop? 
• Avoid revenge stories: the market is saturated with them, and they rarely convey a positive message.
• If you want to philosophize or pontificate, submit elsewhere. 
• Imagine a violinist standing over you and starting to play each time your work gets the least bit dramatic. Don’t let him play! 
• Don’t impress us with your writing style – impress us with your story.
• Read previous entries in the UNSPLATTERPUNK! series. Why not? They’re free.
• Read as many splatterpunk stories as possible so you can understand what has already been done… and outdo it.
• Conflict reigns. Show us conflict and don’t stop till the end. 
• Don’t forget humour. The over-the-top nature of these stories means there’s an element of humour in them. When authors take their subject matter too seriously, their work often devolves into dramatic hogwash.
• Don’t tack a moral lesson onto your conclusion. Embed it into your story. 
• Please, for the love of all that is holy, don’t write your story in a chatty style full of colloquialisms. You’re writing to your reader, not your bestie.  

The Gory Details

Send stories (no poetry, please) and artwork to TQFunsplatterpunk@gmail.com. Put “UNSPLATTERPUNK! 9 submission” in the subject line. Include a bio and tell us about the positive message your story conveys.

• Deadline: 30 September 2026
• Max word count: 10,000
• Reprints: No
• Multiple submissions: Yes
• Simultaneous submissions: No. We’ll get back to you within a couple of weeks.
• File type: DOC (preferred) or DOCX files for stories; PDF or JPG files for artwork

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

A Word on No Payment

We do not offer contributor payment. However, all authors and artists (and everyone, for that matter) will receive a free PDF. Paperback versions of the anthology are also available for purchase via Amazon. 

The UNSPLATTERPUNK! series (and the TQF ezine in general) is not a moneymaking venture. Those who think we’re “getting rich off writer slave labour” are completely off base. Rather, we’re a group of hobbyists trying to have some fun and maybe just make the world a better place. Over the course of the UNSPLATTERPUNK! series, we have collected next to nothing from hard copy sales, and all of this nothing has gone right back into the publication of the anthology. 

Nevertheless, if you believe your short story or artwork is destined for the best-seller list and you deserve payment for your masterpiece, we encourage you to submit elsewhere. And if you’ve been inspired to write something unsplatterpunkish elsewhere, let us know so we can send readers your way!

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

Join the unsplatterpunk movement by blending the grisly and the gross to achieve a positive message.

Frolic in the Contumaciousness 

Thanks to the many talented contributors, TQF has thrown a tantrum in the splatterpunk classroom eight times. The gore-slingers who’ve screamed and writhed within our pages include Hugh Alsin, Joe Koch, DW Milton, Tom Over, Garvan Giltinan, Triffooper Saxelbax, Drew Tapley, and many others. 

What triggers your moral compass? Environmental destruction? Intolerance? Poverty? Inequality? Speciesism? Write us a story that shows us how to deal with it. Dump all the brutality, carnage and vileness you can into your creation, but don’t forget to sprinkle in the virtue.

So get ready to hurl your juice box, fall to the floor, and get some attention – it’s time for UNSPLATTERPUNK! 9. Remember: sometimes to teach a lesson through writing, you have to snap a femur, suck out an eyeball and chew it, or lick a crusty foot covered in rotten yogurt. 

You have until 30 September 2026. 

Go ahead. Give us your worst.

Forty Years of Stephen King – Rafe McGregor

Stephen King is one of a mere handful of authors to have sold hundreds of millions of books. Though he has written across multiple genres, he is best known for his horror fiction and more specifically as the author of: The Shining (1977), Carrie (1974), ’Salem’s Lot (1975), Misery (1987), Pet Sematary (1983), and his apocalyptic masterpiece, The Stand (1978, republished in 1990). King was born in Portland (Maine), in 1947, and will be turning eighty next year. He began writing fiction at a very young age and made his first professional sale, a short story called ‘The Glass Floor’, to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967, nearly sixty years ago. He is currently completing Other Worlds Than These, which is the final instalment of a trilogy that began with The Talisman in 1984, continued with Black House in 2001 (both of which were co-authored with the late Peter Straub), and is due for publication in October. My mother was a great fan of King so the house was full of his novels when I was growing up and I’ve been reading his work for about forty years now. I’ve also become an unreserved and unashamed fan…why?

Lots of reasons. First, I must give my mother credit for never forcing King on me. Unfortunately, she didn’t live long enough for me to thank her, but she clearly knew my teenage self very well; that my curiosity would be more of a motivation than any recommendation. Second, King seems like a really (and rarely) decent human being. At least from his public persona and autobiographical writing. His to-and-fro with Trump on Twitter was particularly entertaining. So are his responses to book burners. I could go on. Also, King doesn’t have to be that way – he has sufficient celebrity to be as obnoxious as he wants without losing his fanbase. Third, he has written the best book on writing that I’ve ever read and am ever going to read, titled, simply, On Writing (2000). As such, I regard him as a writer’s writer (whatever, precisely, that may mean). Fourth, in spite of all the money and fame, he’s an underdog, ignored and even despised by the literary establishment and academia until very recently and then recognised with reluctance. Even champions of genre fiction like S.T. Joshi seem to have taken great pleasure in deriding almost everything about his writing. I almost always agree with Joshi, but he tears King to pieces in The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction (2001), setting him up as a kind of anti-Ramsey-Campbell, who is represented as the second coming of Lovecraft. (I don’t object to the comparison between Campbell and Lovecraft, but to King as an inferior binary opposite.) While I’m not going to pretend that I’ve loved every word of his that I’ve read (on which, more below), given that, at the latest count, he’s published sixty-seven long and two hundred short works of fiction, there are bound to be at least some mediocre or subpar offerings. There are also, however, many great offerings and perhaps even a work of two of genius.

In spite of my lengthy acquaintance with and enjoyment of King’s oeuvre I’ve only very recently completed all six of the novels for which he is famous. Misery is my favourite, a great narrative that succeeds on multiple levels and is essential reading for anyone who enjoys books about writing and the writing life, whether fiction or nonfiction. The Shining is excellent, especially the effortless changes of perspective from father to mother to child and back again. This is King doing what he does best, exploring either the traditional or nuclear family in all its complexity of love, hate, joy, sorrow, comfort, and anxiety. At its most basic, The Shining is the tale of a haunted house, the house being a giant hotel isolated in the winter snows. I’ve seen the novel criticised for its lack of internal logic (a recurring complaint from King’s detractors), but as someone who pays a great deal of – probably too much – attention to such things, I don’t see the problem. The supernatural elements make sense, they move the plot along…what’s not to like? Carrie and Pet Sematary are competent and maybe even original outings in the horror genre, with King playing to another strength of his, the representation of the worlds of children and teenagers, but neither are favourites of mine. Salem’s Lot and The Stand were, regrettably, too long for me, which was a shame regarding the latter because I really wanted to like it. There just wasn’t enough story to sustain either novel all the way to the end and with respect to the former, I thought the short story ‘Jerusalem’s Lot’ (which was first published in Night Shift in 1978) far superior. It is probably not surprising that the two of the six I like the most are about writers and, more specifically, writers with addictions, as King reveals in his discussion of his own struggles with addiction in the autobiographical part of On Writing.

Surely this is faint praise if I’m recommending no more than two of King’s six most successful novels? I’m not alone in this assessment because in an interview in Far Out magazine in 2022, he listed his favourite five stories, only one of which is from the six: ‘Survivor Type’ (1982), Misery, Lisey’s Story (2006), ‘The Body’ (1982), and Billy Summers (2021). What is particularly interesting about this list is that only one of his favourites has a supernatural element (Lisey’s Story), much of which is presented with great subtlety. I think King is at his best without the supernatural and in his shorter work, albeit with several exceptions that prove the rule. My own list of favourites also includes only one of the six (mimicking King’s choice) and one other from his list: ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ (1982), Misery, ‘Survivor Type’, ‘N.’ (2008), and Cycle of the Werewolf (1983). One novel, two novellas, and two short stories, in the first three of which the supernatural is absent. I was lucky enough to read ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ before I saw the film (which I also enjoyed, but is not as good) and without any spoilers, both of which contributed significantly to my reading experience.

I think I’ve already justified my enthusiasm for both King and his work, but let me say one more thing to make this a genuine appreciation. His own list of favourites covers forty years of writing and mine twenty-five. Since his big break with Carrie in 1974, the quality of King’s work has remained consistent, in spite of the life-changing injuries he sustained when he was run over by a reckless minivan driver in 1999. Since then he has published, among others, Lisey’s Story, Just After Sunset (2008), The Outsider (2018), and Billy Summers. The first of these is an epic love letter to his wife, the second one of his best short story collections to date, the third an excellent occult detective story, and the fourth a great crime thriller. I hope there are more to come and I hope we’re both around for his eightieth birthday…

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #80: now out in paperback and ebook!

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

Welcome to Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #80: Station, edited by Stephen Theaker and John Greenwood. Our third issue in five months!

The stories begin with “The Naval Cadet: A Case of Identity” by Rafe McGregor, another in his series of mind-bending mysteries. “Great Central Station”, by Harris Coverley – his longest published story to date, in any venue – will appeal to anyone who enjoyed Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom by Sylvia Plath. “A Beckoning Star” is by Michael W. Thomas, who I think was the first ever external contributor to our magazine and “The Green Perplexity”, by Charles Wilkinson is perhaps the best story yet by one of our most consistently excellent contributors. “Across the Ages” by Soramimi Hanarejima is a time travel story with a difference.

In The Quarterly Review, Douglas J. Ogurek and Stephen Theaker review books by Paul Tremblay, Aron Beauregard, Zoraida Córdova, Martin Munks, and the films Kalki 2898 AD, M3GAN, Renfield and The Super Mario Bros Movie.

The cover art adapts Shantum Singh’s “Abandoned Railway Station in Delhi, India”, used under licence via Pexels.

I hope you’ll enjoy this issue as much as I did.

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Here are the exceptionally patient contributors to this issue.

Charles Wilkinson’s publications include The Pain Tree and Other Stories (London Magazine Editions, 2000). His stories have appeared in Best Short Stories 1990 (Heinemann), Best English Short Stories 2 (W.W. Norton, USA), Best British Short Stories 2015 (Salt), Confingo, and London Magazine, and in genre magazines/anthologies such as Black Static, Interzone, The Dark Lane Anthology, Supernatural Tales, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, Phantom Drift, Bourbon Penn, Shadows & Tall Trees, Nightscript and Best Weird Fiction 2015 (Undertow Books). His collections of strange tales and weird fiction, A Twist in the Eye (2016), Splendid in Ash (2018), Mills of Silence (2021) and The Harmony of the Stares (2022), appeared from Egaeus Press. Eibonvale Press published his chapbook of weird stories, The January Estate, in 2022. He lives in Wales. His stories have previously appeared in TQF41 (“Notes on the Bone”), TQF44 (“A Lesson from the Undergrowth”), TQF46 (“Petrol-Saved”), TQF48 (“A Thousand Eyes See All I Do”), TQF54 (“Septs”), TQF56 (“Mr Kitchell Says Thank You”), TQF59 (“The Constant Providers”), TQF60 (“Evening at the Aubergine Café”), TQF64 (“September Gathering”), TQF70 (“July Job Offer”), TQF73 (“The Arrival of an Acquaintance”) and TQF76 (“Controlling the Lights from Above”).

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

Harris Coverley has had more than a hundred short stories published in Penumbra, Hypnos, JOURN-E and The Black Beacon Book of Horror (Black Beacon Books), amongst many others. He has also had over two hundred poems published in journals around the world. He lives in Manchester, England. His stories have previously appeared in TQF70 (“See How They Run! See How They Run!”), TQF72 (“Father Figure”), TQF73 (“The Scorpion”), TQF74 (“Kung Fu Sue: Origins”), TQF75 (“Kleptobiblia”), TQF76 (“The White Body”), TQF77 (“Kung Fu Sue and the Circle of Broken Bones”) and TQF79 (“Kung Fu Sue and the Drug Lord’s Elephant”).

Michael W. Thomas’s latest poetry collection is Nothing Louche or Bohemian, a collaboration with poet Tina Cole (Black Pear Press). His most recent solo poetry collection is A Time for Such a Word (Black Pear Press). His latest novel is The Erkeley Shadows (Swan Village Reporter). His work has appeared in, among others, The Antioch Review, Critical Survey, The London Magazine and The TLS. He is on the editorial board of Crossroads: A Journal of English Studies (University of Bialystok, Poland). Website: www.michaelwthomas.co.uk. Blog: http://swansreport.blogspot.co.uk/. Socials: @thomasmichaelw. Instagram: michaelwthomas5. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=549139910. His most recent appearance in these pages was in TQF68, with “The Erkeley Shadows”.

Rafe McGregor is a critical theorist publishing on Anglophone culture, political violence, and policing. He is the author of twenty books, including Reducing Political Violence: Narrative Accounts of Crime and Harm (2026), Anthropocide: An Essay in Green Cultural Criminology (2025) and The Adventures of Roderick Langham (2017).

Ever yearning to be spellbound by ideas of a certain fanciful persuasion, Soramimi Hanarejima often meanders into the euphoric trance of lyrical daydreams, some of which are chronicled in the neuropunk story collection Literary Devices for Coping.

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

The Writing Life – Rafe McGregor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing Above the Curve? – Rafe McGregor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mad Max: Fury Road | review by Rafe McGregor

Heavy with metal, heavy with meaning

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

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

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

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

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

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