Ex Machina Book One, by Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris (Vertigo) | review by Stephen Theaker

The mayor of New York isn’t a Republican or a Democrat. He was a superhero, and before that an engineer, sent to investigate something weird and green glowing underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Whatever it was blew up in his face, and he gained the ability to talk to machines and (perhaps more usefully, since we can all do that) have them follow his instructions. He grew up reading Justice League of America comics, so naturally, with the addition of a rocket pack, helmet and alien blaster, he became the Great Machine. It didn’t go very well, and after his secret identity was blown he decided to run for mayor, to put himself in a position where he could effect real change. He won, though not for reasons he would ever have wanted, and now he’s trying to run a city where psychos want to kill him, the commissioner of police and the state governor both hate him, and a publicly-subsidised gallery is about to display a painting of Abraham Lincoln with a racist word scrawled across his chest. His powers are only going to help with some of those problems. This 273pp book collects the first eleven issues of the original comic, and it got off to a terrifically confident start. The narrative bounces around the mayor’s timeline without ever confusing, and mixes ongoing plots with shorter self-contained stories with an apparent ease that must have required a good deal of work. The artwork is striking and unusual, looking almost as if photographs of actors have been rotoscoped to produce it. However it was produced, the result can be peculiar, but only because it has led to such a surprisingly varied range of expressions, faces and poses. I’d read parts of this book before, out of order, borrowed from the library, but it’s a real treat to start from the beginning, knowing I have books two to five waiting to be read in my Comixology library. The entire set cost me just £15 in a sale. I won’t often get the chance to spend my money more wisely. ****

The Devil’s Detective, by Simon Kurt Unsworth (Del Rey) | review by Rafe McGregor

Back in issue twenty-four, I reviewed Mark Valentine’s The Black Veil and Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths (2008), an anthology that has since come to define the specific area of overlap between crime fiction and speculative fiction known as either the supernatural sleuth or the occult detective. In his introduction, Valentine explains how the magazine contributors of the late nineteenth century began to explore different ways in which the relatively new and incredibly popular figure of the private detective could be merged with the much older but still entertaining milieu of the ghost story. This combination of detective protagonist and ghostly setting saw the initial blossoming of the subgenre, which included such greats as Arthur Machen’s Mr Dyson, Robert Eustace and L.T. Meade’s John Bell, E. and H. Heron’s Flaxman Low (the Herons were actually the Prichards, a mother and son team), Algernon Blackwood’s Dr John Silence, and William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki.

Don’t Breathe | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

So tense it doesn’t need a true protagonist.

Don’t Breathe, a turn-the-tables tale about three burglars who become their blind victim’s prey, offers no superb dialogue, no complicated internal struggles, and no computer-generated imagery-heavy superhero battles.

Days Missing, by Phil Hester, Frazer Irving and chums (Archaia) | review by Stephen Theaker

The Steward is a white-haired guy who fights like Neo and (theoretically) exists outside of time in a colossal library, watching our world go by. When a particularly disastrous day comes around, he steps in, to inspire people, to fight them, to cover up his own existence, and presumably sometimes just to relieve the boredom of spending eternity on his own. If he can fix things before the day is done, smashing, but more often he has to rewind time by twenty-four hours and reshape events. It’s as if Bill Murray in Groundhog Day learnt to activate his time-looping ability on demand. The day lost in the loop may echo in the feelings and dreams of those that live on – for example, Mary Shelley in one story, whose encounter with a reanimated corpse inspires Frankenstein – but otherwise the only record of that lost day is in the books that line the Steward’s library. He was alive before humanity existed, and seems likely to long outlive us, but he’ll do his best to keep us going. Do you have any idea how long he spent trying to talk to dinosaurs before we came along?

Alien: Out of the Shadows, by Tim Lebbon and Dirk Maggs (Audible Originals) | review by Stephen Theaker

This full cast audio interquel places itself between two of the greatest science fiction films of all time, Alien and Aliens. That takes a good deal of ambition, but, then, it is adapted from Tim Lebbon’s novel by Dirk Maggs, whose CV, taking in everyone from Superman to Arthur Dent, shows he is not afraid of a challenge. We join Ellen Ripley (played here by Laurel Lefkow), sole human survivor of the Nostromo, as she records a message for her daughter and settles down for hypersleep. What she, and we, didn’t realise at the end of Alien was that murderous company android Ash had uploaded his consciousness to the escape pod’s computer. He hasn’t given up on his mission, and what’s worse he now sounds just like Rutger Hauer, having scraped together a new voice from what’s available in the computer system. He changes their course, taking them to LV178, a mining planet where he suspects the alien xenomorphs might be found. And he’s right. The miners disturbed something on that planet, and now, like Dracula coming to Whitby, it’s on its way up to the orbiting Marion in a shuttle. Chief engineer Chris Hooper (played by Corey Johnson) and the other surviving miners will need the help of Ripley if any of them are to survive, but the presence of Ash is just going to make things worse.

Ant-Man, by Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish and others (Marvel Films) | review

Scott Lang (played with great charm by Paul Rudd) used to have principles, but he became a cat burglar to expose corporate corruption, and found he was good at it. He’s been in prison a while, and after getting out tries to go straight, but it’s tough to get or keep a job with his record, and soon he’s back with his group of criminal friends (you can’t blame him, they’re a funny bunch of fellows) and planning a new job. They’re going to break into the house of Hank Pym. Yes, that Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, but here he is older and played by Michael Douglas. (Who has, may I say, left it way too late in his career to change his mind about acting in fantasy films. Just imagine the films he could have got made in his prime.) It’s easy to understand why the film-makers decided to skip over Pym, given his unwholesome history in the comics, and especially in The Ultimates, such an influence on the Avengers films, but at least they give him a history as Ant-Man – albeit a secret one, as a covert operative. Anyway, one thing leads to another and before you know it Scott is wearing the Ant-Man suit he stole and Hank is training him to use it. It lets him shrink to the size of an ant, and talk to them too. Also helping with the training is Janet van Dyne, Pym’s daughter, played by Evangeline Lilly, so good in Lost and the Hobbit films, and equally good here. There’s a bad guy working on the same technology, who has taken over Pym’s company, and he’s happy to kill lots of sheep to get it working. Can Scott pull himself together and save the day when he’s under more pressure than ever?

Brightest Day, Vol. 1, by Geoff Johns, Peter Tomasi and chums (DC Comics) | review by Stephen Theaker

At the conclusion of the Blackest Night, where Black Lanterns had laid siege to Earth, several dead heroes and villains were brought back to life by a blinding white light. Among them were Hawkman and Hawkwoman, Hawk (of Hawk and Dove), Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, Captain Boomerang, the Reverse Flash, Osiris, Jade (the original Green Lantern’s daughter), Firestorm and Maxwell Lord, the psychic who once brought together the Justice League International. It also brought back one character who had been dead since his debut, Deadman, who will presumably need to change his name now. This book follows them all as they adjust to being back in the world, and in the case of Hawkman and Hawkwoman, out of it in what seems to be another dimension. I’m not a particularly huge fan of any of these characters, and I wasn’t even aware that half of them were dead, so their return to life didn’t get me all that excited, but it was very good fun to read a DC comic that followed a bunch of characters in its universe without jamming them together into an ad hoc group. It’s a network drama of the DC universe, letting their stories unfold and bringing other guest stars in as the story demands it. There’s a connection, the light that brought them back having coalesced into a white lantern, which sends Deadman off to check in on each of the others, but each storyline gets its own room to breathe. The art does its job well. It’s very gory at times, with people being stabbed and skinned, and one incident (on a ship) is very unpleasant in a different way (even if Aquaman and Mera do come to the rescue), so this isn’t a book for children. People who have read quite a lot of DC comics are likely to get the most out of it. Stephen Theaker ***

King Wolf, by Steven Savile (Fox Spirit Books) | review by Stephen Theaker

A collection of three short stories, written years apart from each other, but sharing a common link. “The Fragrance of You” is about an illustrator, Jon Sieber, who falls in love with the daughter of the writer Hoke Berglund, author of such strange works as Princess Scapegoat, The Forgetting Wood and Angel Home, after meeting her at the old man’s funeral. As his feelings for her deepens, he becomes increasingly bothered by her habit of sneaking out in the middle of the night. Eventually he makes the mistake of following her… “All That Remains Is You” then takes us back to meet the writer Hoke Berglund when he was still alive, and preparing to pitch his second book to a publisher. It’s a book that deals with the loss of his wife, the birth of his daughter, and his own institutionalisation – not exactly the stuff of a licensing extravaganza, but the hype machine is up and running before Hoke even steps into his publisher’s office. On his way in he is stopped by an older man who begs him not to publish the book, for the sake of his daughter. But in the meeting he “signed what they wanted him to sign and walked out feeling uncomfortably like Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus”. The third story, “Remembering You, Forgetting Me”, was written a decade later and appears for the first time in this book. We return to Jon Sieber, attending something like an alcoholics anonymous meeting, having drunk himself silly for seven years after the events of “The Fragrance of You”. He tells them what he found hidden in the last seven interviews of Hoke Berglund: a terrible accusation… The book ends with an afterword placing the stories in the context of the actual author’s own life, not normally something I enjoy, but it seems appropriate in this case, after reading a set of stories that are, in my view, all about the relationship between the author, and his or her characters, and the reader. The book shows us Mr. Self Affliction, a disgusting creature who pours his words into others so that they can speak as if human; a self-lacerating view of a writer’s job, though perhaps balanced by the in-joke of having a character wonder if their story was being “written around me by the master storyteller”. Writers create fake people, and by the magic of literature we fall in love with them, or at least feel for them, as Savile makes us do here so brilliantly. ****

Under the Dome, Season 1, by Brian K. Vaughan and chums (Amazon Instant Video) | review

An invisible force field materialises around and over a small town, trapping everyone inside its dome, and keeping everyone else out. There are immediate tragedies as trucks, cars and aircraft smash into it, and one poor cow gets sliced in two. (And oh how sick you get of seeing it get bisected, since the shot is included in every subsequent “Previously…”) Some of the town’s most prominent citizens have been up to no good, albeit in a way that leaves it with enough propane to keep the lights on, and that makes it necessary for strong-arm debt collector Barbie to get more involved in keeping the town safe than he’d like. That’s made all the more awkward by him getting into a relationship with the wife of one of his previous customers. Others trapped inside include a pair of teenagers who begin to have dome-given visions, another girl with a dangerously obsessive boyfriend, and that boyfriend’s father, Big Jim, the rock on which the town relies. Can the people of this town survive each other long enough to survive the dome? Possibly not, given the townsfolks’ peculiar habit of declaring their intentions to go to the police to the very people they suspect of foul play. The viewer’s hands will frequently be thrown in the air in disbelief. Overall, this was a disappointment. I hadn’t read the Stephen King novel on which it is based, but there are few adaptations of his work I haven’t enjoyed – this comes in at the lower end of those. The mysteries of the dome provide a few jaw-dropping moments, but they’re wedded to crime and corruption stories from a third-rate Justified imitation. If this hadn’t been renewed, the ending of the season would have been an incredible letdown. (Spoiler: the dome changes colour. Well, there’s more to it that that, you find out in season two, but not a lot.) It’s at its best showing how fragile our grip on life can be, especially for those who need medical support, at its worst when it forgets that its better-hearted characters would be sure to tell each what they know about the killers and maniacs hiding in plain sight. It’s not awful, but there is lots of room in the dome for improvement. Stephen Theaker ***

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #56: now out, in print and ebook

free pdf | free epub | free mobi | print UK | print US | Kindle UK | Kindle US | review | review

Issue fifty-six of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction is two hundred and forty pages long, and features six stories of fantasy, horror and science fiction: “Concerning Strange Events at the Manor of Sir Hugh de Villiers, Valiant Knight” David Penn (transcribed from the Middle English), “Three Bodies” by Cam Rhys Lay, “The Christmas Cracker” by Rafe McGregor, “Mr Kitchell Says Thank You” by Charles Wilkinson, “The Cutting Room” by Chuck Von Nordheim, and “Gliese and the Walking Man” by Howard Watts. They are arranged roughly in chronological order, so fantasy fans should start at the beginning, and science fiction fans should start at the end.

The spectacularly superheroic cover is by Howard Watts, and the emergency editorial by Howard Phillips. The issue also includes over sixty pages of reviews, and some sneaky interior art from John Greenwood.

Writers, artists and other creators whose work is reviewed in this issue include: Adam Cozad, Alberto Giolitti, Angelica Gorodischer, Charles Dixon, Chip Proser, Christian Højgaard, Christopher Markus, Craig Brewer, Craig Mazin, Dennis-Pierre Filippi, Dick Wood, Dirk Maggs, Ernie Chan, Evan Spiliotopoulos, Gabriel Rodriguez, Gary Kwapisz, Guy Davis, Jean-Florian Tello, Jeffrey Boam, Jerry Frissen, Joe Hill, Joe Phillips, John Connolly, Mateus Santolouco, Michael Alan Nelson, Mike Johnson, Naimi Mitchison, Nevio Zeccara, Nick Mamatas, Nicolas Wright, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Philippe Thirault, Simon Kinberg, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Stephen McFeely, Stephen Molnar, Steven Savile, Thomas Ligotti, and Tim Lebbon.

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Here are the delightful contributors to this issue:

Prior to returning to school to pursue his MFA in Fiction, Cam Rhys Lay worked for a decade doing online marketing and publishing pretentious (but beautiful) leatherbound books. His fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Eclectica, The Society for Misfit Stories, and No Extra Words. He is currently finishing his first novel. To learn more about Cam and his writing you can visit his website at http://www.camrhyslay.com.

Charles Wilkinson’s publications include The Pain Tree and Other Stories (London Magazine Editions) and Ag & Au (Flarestack), a pamphlet of his poems. His stories have appeared in Best Short Stories 1990 (Heinemann), Best English Short Stories 2 (W.W. Norton, USA), Unthology (Unthank Books), Best British Short Stories 2015 (Salt), London Magazine, Under the Radar, Prole, Able Muse Review (USA), Ninth Letter (USA), The Sea in Birmingham (TSFG) and in genre magazines/anthologies such as Supernatural Tales, Horror Without Victims (Megazanthus Press), Rustblind and Silverbright (Eibonvale Press), Phantom Drift, Bourbon Penn, Shadows & Tall Trees, Prole, Nightscript and Best Weird Fiction 2015 (Undertow Books, Canada). He lives in Powys, Wales, where he is heavily outnumbered by members of the ovine community. A Twist in the Eye, his collection of strange tales and weird fiction, is now out from Egaeus Press, including stories that first appeared here in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction.

Chuck Von Nordheim lives in northeastern Los Angeles country at the geo-biological point where chapparal merges into pure desert. Currently, he poses as an MFA fiction candidate at CSU San Bernardino on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The rest of the week, he scours Mojave Desert garage sales and antique shops for Highway 66 memorabilia that he can sell on eBay to pay his tuition. His other magreal/surreal works have appeared in Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Ealain, Twisted Tongue, and Daily Science Fiction.

David Penn has previously published fiction in the magazines Midnight Street and Whispers of Wickedness, and poetry in the magazines Magma and Smith’s Knoll. He lives in London where he also works, as a librarian.

Douglas J. Ogurek’s work has appeared in the BFS Journal, The Literary Review, Morpheus Tales, Gone Lawn, and several anthologies. He lives in a Chicago suburb with the woman whose husband he is and their pit bull Phlegmpus Bilesnot. Douglas’s website can be found at: http://www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com.

Howard Phillips contributes the must-read editorial.

Howard Watts is a writer, artist and composer living in Seaford who also provides the wraparound cover art for this issue. His artwork can be seen in its native resolution on his deviantart page: http://hswatts.deviantart.com. His novel The Master of Clouds is now available on Kindle.

Jacob Edwards also writes 42-word reviews for Derelict Space Sheep. This writer, poet and recovering lexiphanicist’s website is at www.jacobedwards.id.au. He has a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/JacobEdwardsWriter, where he posts poems and the occasional oddity, and he can now be found on Twitter too: https://twitter.com/ToastyVogon.

Rafe McGregor has published over one hundred and twenty short stories, novellas, magazine articles, journal papers, and review essays. His work includes crime fiction, weird tales, military history, literary criticism, and academic philosophy.

Stephen Theaker’s reviews have appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Prism and the BFS Journal, as well as clogging up our pages. He shares his home with three slightly smaller Theakers, runs the British Fantasy Awards (for the rest of this month), and works in legal and medical publishing.

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

It Follows: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, by Disasterpeace (Milan Records) | review

This eighteen-track album collects the score from the film It Follows, directed by David Robert Mitchell, about a young woman infected by a supernatural curse. As with the film, there are strong echoes of John Carpenter’s early work in this electronic music, especially in tracks like “Title” and “Playpen”, while moody tracks like “Anyone” and “Detritus” will appeal to those who enjoyed the eeriness of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume 2, but it’s an imaginative work of electronic music in its own right. I bought the album before seeing the film, and it stands alone very well. Watching the film makes it even better. On screen the music is used to create an uncanny sense of derangement in the viewer, its jarring strangeness accentuating the horror, and delicious echoes of that carry across to subsequent listens to the soundtrack. Stephen Theaker ****

Zenith: Phase Two, by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell (Rebellion) | review by Stephen Theaker

Zenith’s parents were a couple of superheroes, White Heat and Doctor Beat, murdered in the late sixties. In 1983 he revealed himself to the public, and after becoming popular in the tabloids “he did what all the soap stars and the page three girls were doing”. He released a pop record, and then some more, his soaraway success only interrupted by the re-emergence in the previous book of a mad Nazi super-villain. This volume, collecting stories from 2000AD Progs 589 to 606 and a winter special from 1988, shows us a Zenith who has grown up an infinitesimal amount. He still doesn’t want to miss Neighbours, he’s obsessed with Beatrice Dalle, and he’ll hook up with women two at a time in the most dangerous of situations, but he doesn’t need all that much convincing to tag along with a CIA operative on her investigation of a Richard Branson type in his mysterious Scottish headquarters. She promises he’ll learn something about his family there, and by gum he does. It’s great to finally read one of the lost touchstones of 1980s comics. While V for Vendetta and The Dark Knight Returns are by now in their three millionth and one print runs, this one was unavailable for a fair old while. It’s classic Grant Morrison, its edges overlapping with so much he’s done since, from Doom Patrol to The Invisibles to Batman, with its shadowy manipulators, interdimensional invaders and pop culture heroics. Comparing Steve Yeowell’s art to that in The Crimson Seas, I can see that it’s improved over time and become more consistent, but I love it here just as much. Essential reading. ****