Tuesday 31 December 2019

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #65: UNSPLATTERPUNK! 3: now out in paperback and ebook!

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

GUEST-EDITED BY DOUGLAS J. OGUREK

Vicious parasites, punctured flesh, eyeball trauma, severed limbs, theatrical licking. The TQF UNSPLATTERPUNK! series returns with its third instalment. Six subversive stories, including an all-new tale by unsplatterpunk luminary Drew Tapley, aim to keep the reader entertained and aghast, while delivering a positive message.

A soon-to-be father focuses on helping others amid a Martian base massacre that shows the repercussions of human intrusion. Outraged women unite to stop a high-ranking male oppressor, and in the process, unravel the key to combating male chauvinism and its disastrous effects. A woman, certain of the upstanding life she’s led, learns a lesson that will seal her postmortem fate. Support group bloodshed leads to a scientific breakthrough. Three brothers on an Irish farm dismantle a brutal patriarchy… and chop off body parts. Back-of-theatre make-out sessions plunge to new slimy depths in an exploration of the pressure teens feel to become sexual legends.

So put on your coveralls and jump into the carnage and debauchery… You’re going to get filthy, but you’ll also emerge with a sense of hope.

Also includes reviews of books by Aliette de Bodard, John Llewellyn Probert, Laurie Penny, Pixie Britton and William F. Temple, and of the films Aquaman, Crawl, Every Day, Glass, It Chapter Two, Mary Poppins Returns, Ready or Not, Under the Skin and Us, and of the television series Carnival Row.


Here are the gore-unsplattered contributors to this issue:

Chris Di Placito is a writer living in Fife, Scotland. His work has appeared in magazines such as Litro, BULL, Porridge, Ink In Thirds, STORGY and Structo.

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonym for a writer living somewhere on Earth. Though banned on Mars, his fiction appears in over fifty Earth publications. Douglas’s website can be found at www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com and his Twitter account is at www.twitter.com/unsplatter.

Drew Tapley is a British copywriter, journalist and filmmaker based in Toronto.

Garvan Giltinan is a recovering Irishman with a fascination with the bizarre/grotesque/puerile. His work has appeared in the anthologies New England: Weird, Triggered, and Fatal Fetish. Forthcoming publications include the novel Backdoor Carnivore (JEA Press) and the short story “Titty Kitties” (Thicke and Vaney Books). Giltinan has an MFA in Creative Writing from Pine Manor College, and really weirds out his wife with the subject matter of his stories.

Jacob Edwards also writes 42-word reviews for Derelict Space Sheep. His website is at www.jacobedwards.id.au, his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/JacobEdwardsWriter, and his Twitter account is at www.twitter.com/ToastyVogon.

Joanna Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Author of the novella The Couvade and other short fiction, Joanna has been published in journals and anthologies such as SYNTH #1: An Anthology of Dark SF, Honey & Sulphur and In Darkness, Delight: Masters of Midnight. Joanna is a Contemplative Psychotherapy graduate of Naropa University and lives near Detroit. Follow their monstrous musings at horrorsong.blog.

Rafe McGregor lectures at Edge Hill University. He is the author of two monographs, two novels, six collections of short fiction, and two hundred articles, essays, and reviews. His most recent work of fiction is The Adventures of Roderick Langham, a collection of occult detective stories.

Stephen Theaker is the co-editor of TQF and shares his home with three slightly smaller Theakers, one of whom provided the art for this issue's cover. His reviews, interviews and articles have also appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Prism, BFS Horizons and the BFS Journal.

Manchester, UK-based Tom Over is a writer of dark, speculative strangeness. He grew up loving all things horror and has been suckling on the gnarled teat of weird fiction ever since he was knee high to a Mugwump. He generally divides his time between watching cult movies with his girlfriend and working on his first collection. To date, his work has appeared in CLASH Media, Aphotic Realm, Crystal Lake Publishing and Horror Sleaze Trash amongst others. His first collection is due for release in early 2020 from NihilismRevised.

Zeke Jarvis is a professor of English at Eureka College. His work has appeared in Moon City ReviewPosit and KNOCK, among other places. His books include So Anyway…In A Family WayLifelong Learning and the forthcoming The Three of Them.


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

Monday 9 December 2019

The Man in the High Castle, Season 4 | review by Rafe McGregor


The John Smith Show

In my review of The Man in the High Castle, Season 2 in 2017 I summarised the events of the first two seasons and praised Amazon Studios for the particularly skilful narrative closure employed, a rare artistic achievement in which the series could either have concluded there and then or continued into a third season.  One of the most noticeable changes in popular culture in my lifetime has been the development of television into a serious, artistic mode of representation, which seems to have occurred in tandem with the technological changes related to streaming.  Television series like HBO’s Band of Brothers (2001) and True Detective (2014-2019) were inconceivable in the nineteen eighties. The development of a genuine televisual art was accompanied by a narrative development, which is so obvious and commonplace that it may be regarded as essential to the medium rather than a studio choice for those who didn’t grow up with nineteen eighties television: most series appear to be created for a two-season run. I’ve noticed two consequences of this.  First, if a series doesn’t progress to the second season, it rarely concludes in a satisfying manner. In this respect, Netflix’s Mindhunter (2017) was a rare exception (the series concluded rather than terminated with the last episode of season one, though a second was released in 2019). Second, if there is a third season, it is often disappointing – often, but not always, because the plot is tangential to that of the first two seasons. History’s Vikings (2013) is a particularly good (i.e. bad) case in point. Aside from the potential for literal loss of plot, many third seasons also suffer from a particularly potent combination of production problems: viewer interest typically begins to wane at precisely the same time as actors feel confident enough to demand higher salaries. With respect to The Man in the High Castle, the announcement of a third season was made together with the announcement of a fourth, which would also be the final season. I found season 3 something of a let-down on my initial viewing, although having revisited it since I’m not entirely sure why.  

The season focuses on everyday life in Nazi America (America east of the Rocky Mountains) and the development of Die Nebenwelt, a machine that can transport people between the alternative world of the characters and the real world of the audience (in the nineteen sixties). The fictional Nazis call our world the Alt-World, of course, but I shall call it the real world to avoid confusion. The main difference between the alternative world and ours is that the Axis won the Second World War in the former, dividing the world into two super-states, the Greater Nazi Reich and the Japanese Empire. The shared emphasis between Nazi America and the Japanese Pacific States (America west of the Rocky Mountains) of the first two seasons shifted subtly towards Nazi America, a shift that was exacerbated when Resistance leader Juliana Crane (played by Alexa Davalos) killed Joe Blake (played by Luke Kleintank), a German-American Nazi agent who linked both empires and both protagonists, Crane and John Smith (played by Rufus Sewell), the Reichsmarschall of Nazi America to Himmler’s (played by Kenneth Tigar) Reichsführer of the GNR. This subtle shift is exacerbated by the problem I noted in my previous review, Sewell stealing the show as an unrepentant American Nazi who is fiercely loyal to family and Führer, too shrewd to be outwitted by ambitious Nazis, and too tough to be killed by the Resistance. Notwithstanding its status as an interim conclusion, the last episode of season 3 – “Jahr Null” – was once again a masterful deployment of narrative closure, drawing all the disparate threads of the season together in a thrilling finish. The details most relevant to season 4 are: Helen Smith’s (played by Chelah Horsdal) flight to the Neutral Zone (America between the Reich and the Empire) following her son Thomas ’s (played by Quinn Lord) voluntary euthanasia; the shooting of Himmler by Wyatt Price (played by Jason O’Mara), another Resistance leader; the functional operation of Die Nebenwelt; and Smith learning that two versions of the same person cannot exist in the same world at the same time (i.e. he cannot cross to the real world until the real John Smith dies). The episode and season end with Smith realising that Juliana has found a way to travel between worlds on her own. He shoots her to prevent her escaping from custody, but a moment after the bullet strikes she disappears. My lasting impression of season 4 taken as a whole is that it completes the trend initiated in season 2, turning the series into The John Smith Show. With the decision to make a third and fourth series being taken at the end of 2016, I cannot help but wonder if this greater emphasis on Smith is a reflection of and response to the inauguration of Donald Trump as forty-fifth President of the United States in January 2017 – a question I’ll return to at the end of my review.

Season 4 begins a year after the end of season 3. In the JPS, Trade Minister Tagomi (played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) has been assassinated and Colonel Takeshi Kido (played by Joel de la Fuente) of the dreaded Kenpeitai (the military police responsible for the criminal and security policing functions in the JPS) has been assigned the case. Kido will emerge as the main antagonist in the JPS subplot, working against a new character and protagonist, Bell Mallory (played by Frances Turner).  Bell is head of the San Francisco cell of the Black Communist Rebellion, a resistance movement that has sprung up in the last year.  In the course of Kido’s investigation, he comes to realise that the Empire has overreached itself and is struggling to maintain control of the eastern hemisphere, which stretches from India to the Rocky Mountains. Within the Japanese hierarchy, there is dissent as to whether order should be maintained in the JPS by allowing the colonised greater autonomy or by tightening the already draconian laws in place. The Navy, under Admiral Inokuchi (played by Eijiro Osaki) and the Crown Princess (played by Mayumi Yoshida), who is resident in San Francisco, favour the former and the Army, under General Yamori (played by Bruce Locke), favour the latter. The Kenpeitai is part of the Army, so Kido’s loyalty as well as his sympathies lie with Yamori.  Yamori succeeds in appointing General Masuda (played by Clint Jung), fresh from his genocidal occupation of Manchuria, to lead the counter-insurgency in the JPS. Shortly after his arrival, however, Masuda is assassinated by Price, working with the BCR. Yamori launches a low-key coup d’état, placing the Crown Princess under house arrest and having Kido arrest Inokuchi for high treason. Inokuchi is sentenced to death by firing squad after a cursory court martial, but Kido intervenes at a crucial point, switching sides to the Navy after discovering that Tagomi was murdered by soldiers in consequence of his moderate political position. The BCR then launches an orchestrated series of attacks on the oil infrastructure of the JPS, with devastating results. Forty-eight hours later, the Emperor announces that Japan is withdrawing from the US in order to redeploy its military resources to China, where there seems to be either an insurgency or an open war (the details are never revealed) underway.

Meanwhile, in Nazi America, Smith has been sending agents to the real world, where they have been sabotaging the American space and nuclear programs and keeping his counterpart family (which consists of himself, Helen, and their son, but not their two daughters) under surveillance. Juliana is close to the Smiths in the real world and when alternative-world Smith despatches an assassin to the real world to kill her, real-world Smith intervenes and is himself killed. This frees alternative-world (now, the only) Smith up to visit the real world, a journey he is particularly keen to make because Thomas is still alive. There is a role reversal as Juliana returns to the alternative world to kill Smith and Smith travels to the real world. Smith’s position as Reichsmarshall is becoming increasingly precarious due to his falling from grace with Himmler. Himmler survived the assassination attempt, but his health has been ruined and he bears a grudge against Smith for failing to prevent the attempt and failing to take appropriately destructive action afterwards. Although Helen has returned to New York from the Neutral Zone, her year in voluntary exile is public knowledge among the Nazi hierarchy, which casts further doubt on Smith’s loyalty. Finally, with Josef Mengele (played by John Hans Tester) having explained that there is actually a multiverse rather than a universe (although movement is at present limited to transition between the alternative and real worlds), Himmler is desperate to despatch his legions to conquer this new lebensraum and blames Smith for the slow progress. When Smith returns to the alternative world, he finds that he has been summoned to Berlin to answer charges from two particularly odious historical characters, J. Edgar Hoover (played by William Forsythe) and Adolf Eichmann (played by Timothy V. Murphy), and that the Empire has no objection to a Nazi reunification of America as long as the Reich keeps the oil flowing east (actually west).

As the series reaches its final stage, the focus is firmly on Smith, who seems to have three options available: 
  1. He can take advantage of the instability in Nazi America caused by the withdrawal of the Empire from the JPS and use his considerable influence in the American Armed Forces to launch a coup d’état against Berlin, fighting for an independent and united America.
  2. He can travel to Berlin to answer the charges against him and plead his case to Himmler, who was – up until the assassination attempt – his sponsor.
  3. He can escape to the real world with his two daughters, although he would have to leave Helen in the alternative world.
Being the man of resource, guile, and determination that viewers have come to know and (reluctantly) admire, Smith takes charge of the situation to carve out a fourth option, with the ultimate aim of abducting Thomas from the real world and bringing him to live with the Smiths of the alternative world.  I have praised the conclusions of both season 2 and season 3, but the conclusion to season 4 exceeds both of them – tense, unpredictable, climactic, and tying up all the different threads of the different subplots so as to make the narrative closure appear retrospectively inevitable.  In my review of Carnival Row earlier this year, I offered an interpretation of the occult detective story based on Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson’s fourfold theory of allegory. Jameson argues that sophisticated allegories operate on four levels of meaning simultaneously rather than the traditional two: the literal, the secret, the existential (concerned with the moral psychology of the individual), and the anagogical (concerned with the future of humanity as a whole). The meaning of the literal level in The Man in the High Castle is, naturally, obvious, the creation of a counterfactual world in which the Axis won the war. The existential level is the story of someone who starts down a particular path to save his starving child, continues along that path to protect his family, and ends up committing genocide without remorse (Smith and to a lesser extent Helen). The anagogical meaning is about the consequences of nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism, with perhaps a hint of American exceptionalism thrown in as well. Which leaves the secret level… are we meant to draw parallels between Smith and Trump (something I find difficult given the many virtues mixed in among the former’s vices) or between Nazi America and Trump’s vision for… well, Nazi America? I don’t know, but if it’s an excuse to watch the series again I’m going to say maybe.*****   

Sunday 1 December 2019

World of Water by James Lovegrove | review by Stephen Theaker

Dev Harmer died at Leather Hill, the worst battle of a terrible decade-long war between humanity and Polis+, AI zealots who see an atheistic humanity as their natural enemy. The war ended in a truce, Harmer's consciousness was saved, and now he is downloaded by Interstellar Security Solutions into one genetically modified host form after another. His job: to foil the plots of spies and saboteurs working for Polis+. This is the second book of his adventures, but like the Dumarest books of E.C. Tubb you could begin with any of them. He was having adventures well before the first book began, and he'll have many more after this one ends, unless he earns enough credit at last to buy himself a new copy of his original body.

Not so fresh from his gruelling adventures on Alighieri in World of Fire, Harmer now continues his fight against the "digimentalists" on Robinson D in the Ophiuchus constellation, also known as Triton. His previous body was that of a miner suited to work on an extreme thermoplanet: short, heavyset, muscular and stumpy, with nocturnal vision and the face of a boxer who had gone a few too many rounds. This time he has high cheekbones, protective eye membranes, webbed fingers, gills on either side of his neck, and a face that can flash bioluminescent messages to those that can understand them. This is his first time as an amphibian – but the body has been compromised. It'll be dead in three days.

He needs an amphibious body because Triton is an ocean planet. It was an ice giant until a small shift in axial rotation warmed things up. That event persists in the legends the indigenous Tritonians tell of the Ice King, who sleeps in the ice at the heart of the world and will awaken when the time is right. None of the indigenous people are happy to have forty thousand humans building habitats on the ocean surface, and those angry enough to fight in the name of the Ice King are able to find plenty of support, and, predictably enough, Dev soon finds that the colonists are less than innocent.

It's his job to bring peace to this world, and in the process uncover any Polis+ activity. In three days. Before he can get started, he'll need to get his gills working, and that means a merciless swimming lesson, where his ISS liaison pushes him fifteen metres down into the ocean. Just when he's about to black out, he breathes in the cold seawater, and feels it rush down his throat, and out through his neck, giving him oxygen as it passes through – even after just two books, it's clear that a big pleasure of this series will be the way Harmer adjusts to the quirks of each body, and works with the skill set of each. This is not a body built for brawls in bars, for example, and Dev almost comes a cropper when he gets drawn into one. But at least it gives him a lead… And in the water it's a different matter, as we see when he encounters a seven-metre long thalassoraptor and all its teeth.

Harmer is absolutely the star of the show here (at least until the story's ultimate – and extremely epic – enemy is revealed), but he has a strong supporting cast. He forms an alliance with a Tritonian who has no love for humans but wants a peaceful resolution to it all. Her true name is a complex configuration of geometric patterns, an emotional autograph designed to convey an attitude of determination, resolve and desire for justice, and she more than lives up to that in the course of the book. On the human side, he is teamed up with First Lieutenant Sigursdottir and her band of brave and heroic female Marines. Dev takes an instant liking to her, but it'll take some work to earn her trust.

This is a book (Solaris ebook, 384pp, £5.99) for anyone who thinks they don't make 'em like that any more. Well, they do, and to all the action and thrills you could possibly want James Lovegrove adds a good deal of intelligence, tackling post-colonial issues head-on while showing us a fascinating alien culture, all in chapters that end in cliffhangers and are short enough to entice the most reluctant adult reader. The series has a great premise, but it's not a formula: this book offers a completely different experience to the first. The ebook is clever too: switch to publisher fonts to see how they are used to distinguish between different types of non-verbal speech. A brainy blockbuster. ****

This review originally appeared in Interzone #265.

Tuesday 12 November 2019

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Maleficent’s coming to dinner! Elegant antihero meets regal villain.

One can’t help but be drawn in when Maleficent’s (Angelina Jolie) vampiric face fills the screen. It is impassive, cadaverous. Shockingly prominent cheekbones frame snakelike eyes. And the lips… they’re red enough to stop traffic. Unlike the physically expressive Joker (her top box office competitor), Maleficent is perfectly poised… even, it seems, when she’s angry.

In Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, directed by Joachim Rønning, the unfairy-like fairy has met her match: Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer), duplicitous queen of Alstead. Queen Ingrith’s words and actions are as cold and calculated as her colorless wardrobe.

Prince Philip (Harris Dickinson) of Alstead proposes to a gleeful Aurora (Elle Fanning), whom Maleficent has raised and installed as queen of the Moors, home of all kinds of fantastical creatures. Philip’s parents King John (Robert Lindsay) and Queen Ingrid applaud the union, albeit for different reasons. Maleficent, wary of humans, is reluctant – rumours labelling her and her kind as killers of men have spread amongst the inhabitants of Alstead.

When the parents meet for dinner at Alstead Castle, tension reaches an apex: Queen Ingrid knows just what to say to try Maleficent’s patience. Philip and Aurora attempt to de-escalate the situation. A debacle ensues. Maleficent finds herself amid the exiled dark fey. Back at Castle Alstead, plans for the wedding move forward… as do other, more nefarious plans.

Disney’s beautifully rendered fantasy settings share the stage with the leading ladies. Examples include the vibrant moors, the pristine gardens of Castle Alstead, and a stunning cave setting. Then there are the creatures that populate this world: colourful fairies, giant tree creatures, and pixies galore.

The film’s biggest drawback is the way that the dark fey are portrayed. They are one-dimensional and theatrical – one gets the impression of high school students using exaggerated movements to compensate for a lack of meaningful dialogue. Moreover, the group’s two leaders who externalize an angel/devil battle within Maleficent are weakly drawn.

This film pulls out all the typical stops to induce emotion. Admittedly, it worked on me. Positive messages abound: forgiveness, the mother/daughter bond, self-sacrifice, cultural integration, and, perhaps most prominently, peace between the natural and human worlds.—Douglas J. Ogurek ****

Read Douglas’s review of Maleficent (2014).

Monday 28 October 2019

Joker | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Other comic book-based movies laughable in comparison to masterpiece that emphasizes character, explores social stigma on mental illness

A Joker movie poster depicts the villain dressed in his full regalia and leaning back triumphantly at the top of an outdoor staircase. However, near the film’s beginning, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), depressed, tired and undernourished, sluggishly ascends that same staircase. Thus, director Todd Phillips establishes a pact with the viewer: I will show you, he implies, the transformation of this struggling nobody into Batman’s vibrant archenemy.

Gotham is a crime-ridden, depressing city in the midst of a garbage strike. Clown-for-hire Arthur lives in a rundown apartment building with his shut-in mother Penny (Frances Conroy). Arthur gets beat up, lied to, made fun of, taken advantage of… and on top of all that, he suffers from severe mental illness, including a “condition” that causes him to laugh uncontrollably, even in circumstances that he doesn’t necessarily find funny.

Abandoned by society, Arthur fights back against his oppressors and begins to embrace his mental illness. Phoenix’s masterful performance renders a character with mesmerizing unpredictability. Arthur’s individuality manifests in everything from his unorthodox humour and extended bouts of laughter to his clownish run and the ever-shifting expressions on his gaunt face. When Arthur laughs hysterically after he discovers tragic news about himself, the viewer feels competing emotions – it’s funny, but it’s intensely sad. Throughout Joker, the viewer experiences something rare in today’s films: empathy with the bad guy.

Historically, Joker has been portrayed as a criminal mastermind. Phoenix’s deranged version seems incapable of such elaborate planning. Arthur, his sights set on becoming a stand-up comedian, has no grand philosophy or goal – he just wants to be noticed. Thus, it’s fascinating to watch as Gotham’s underprivileged citizens misinterpret his actions and establish him as the symbol of a movement against the rich and powerful.

During the film, Arthur does a great deal of ascending and descending of staircases. Fitting, since his journey involves a descent from the “higher ground” of how the world wants him to act down to the pandemonium of the streets, where he will be king. As a film, Joker also steps down from Hollywood’s comic book pedestal dominated by one-dimensional characters, silly banter, clichés, and overblown special effects. Batman and Iron Man have their expensive technologies. Captain America and Wolverine have their strength. Spider-Man has his acrobatics. But Joker has the most potent power of all: his eccentricity.—Douglas J. Ogurek *****

Tuesday 22 October 2019

Lone Wolf 30: Dead in the Deep | review by Rafe McGregor

Lone Wolf 30: Dead in the Deep by Vincent Lazzari and Ben Dever
Holmgard Press, hardback, £19.99, June 2019, ISBN 9781527240797

Given the many trials and tribulations experienced by Joe Dever in securing a reliable publisher for the New Order series (21 onwards) of his Lone Wolf gamebooks from the mid-nineties, my main concerns whenever a new book is released are whether I will receive it and what kind of production values it will have. The details of the first two decades of Joe’s struggle can be found in my review of Lone Wolf 21: TheVoyage of the Moonstone and the last two years in my review of Lone Wolf 29: The Storms of Chai. While I was writing the latter in November 2016, the series and its considerable fan base suffered the ultimate setback in Joe’s untimely death and it seemed like his Holmgard Press would close after less than a year in operation. The press has, however, been relaunched at www.magnamund.com and appears to be run by his son, Ben, who is jointly responsible for the completion of the series (books 30 to 32) with Vincent Lazzari. The ordering process from the website is simple with safe if not speedy delivery following. Dead in the Deep is a hefty tome (there are no page numbers in consequence of the sections used for gameplay, but it is over two inches thick) and although the paper used is of lower quality than the Collector’s Editions published by Mongoose and Mantikore, the finished product makes for a neat fit with the rest. In keeping with almost all of the series to date, Dead in the Keep consists of three hundred and fifty sections and you can perhaps imagine my disappointment when I discovered sections 319 to 330 were absent from my copy, a repeat of sections 233 to 251 appearing in their place. I contacted Holmgard about the problem and received a very quick response to the effect that a replacement would be sent to me without any extra charge or a requirement to return the defective copy (I always resent either of these inconveniences if the fault lies with the publisher or the supplier). I received the replacement in due course and I only relate the complication as evidence of why I am confident in recommending Holmgard Press to any and all potential readers. At present, they also offer the Collector’s Edition of Lone Wolf 23: Mydnight’s Hero (£16.99) and twenty-five very attractive art prints that look like alternative book covers. The Collector’s Edition of Lone Wolf 24: Rune War (also £16.99) is the next book due for release (no date given).

I mentioned my intense emotional (and, once or twice, extravagant financial) investment in the franchise in previous reviews and this investment is at its greatest now when it looks like the cycle, which Joe originally envisaged as consisting of thirty-two books, might actually be completed. I reproduce the first two paragraphs of Ben’s short foreword here:

Two weeks before my dad passed away he asked Vincent and myself to complete the Lone Wolf series. It’s a huge honour to finally be able to share with you the first part of the epic conclusion to his unique saga.

A life’s work underpins this book, and the details of the story were dictated in the palliative care ward at Whipps Cross Hospital. And so, although the first draft was produced by Vincent, and the final draft by myself, we both feel that this book is as much a creation of my dad’s imagination as any other Lone Wolf story. This is his book.

Bearing in mind the outstanding calibre of The Storms of Chai (which really was worth the seventeen year wait), the stakes for someone who has followed the series for as long as I have, and such a touching and tasteful tribute from Ben, it is very difficult to approach this gamebook with any kind of critical objectivity. So, let me cut to the chase… in summary, Dead in the Deep does not live up to the promise of its prequel. I saw my options as to either explain my evaluation in a mixed review or to stop reviewing the cycle. I decided on the latter for the Autumn Snow series following my for the most part negative review of Autumn Snow 2: TheWildlands Hunt last year. Obviously, I decided on the former for the Lone Wolf series – on the basis that, with only two books left to go, I shall buy and play them no matter what and because while Lone Wolf is partly for lifelong enthusiasts like me, it is also for a younger generation of players who deserve an honest review.

The Storms of Chai began in the early spring of MS 5102, seventeen years after the conclusion of Lone Wolf 28: The Hunger of Sejanoz, with Lone Wolf holding a council in which he revealed that Magnamund was under a coordinated attack by an unknown force. There were six armies attacking six different locations and the six Kai Grand Masters were despatched accordingly. Mine, True Friend (whose deadly Kai powers are only exceeded by the silliness of his randomly-generated Kai name), proceeded to the remote Bhanarian city of Bakhasa with the intention of recovering the new Claw of Naar before the Nadziranim sorcerer Zashnor could use it to create a weapon of mass destruction. There was a real sense of urgency in The Storms of Chai, the feeling that the Kai were fighting to save the whole of Magnamund rather than just Sommerlund (as was the case in the consecutive Kai and Magnakai series, books 1 to 12). This urgency and import created the expectation of a rapidly-paced push to the conclusion of the whole cycle in the last four books and the expectation was exceeded to the extent that my only criticism of The Storms of Chai was that it took several attempts before True Friend survived to the very end.

The first indication that Dead in the Deep will not continue to meet these expectations is in “The Story So Far...” section, which is quite simply not as well-written as in previous books. This is not a major flaw in a gamebook aimed at a young adult audience, but it makes for a disappointing beginning.  Lone Wolf’s Grand Masters have been reduced in number from six to three (including True Friend) and the survivors are all sent on missions whose goals are deliberately withheld from one another. True Friend is despatched on a rescue mission, to find missing Grand Master Steel Hand. Unfortunately, this plot has already been used thrice in the cycle (in Lone Wolf 14: The Captives of Kaag, the graphic novel The Skull of Agarash, and Lone Wolf 25: Trail of the Wolf) and takes him to the Maakengorge, a location that has already been used twice (in Lone Wolf 4: The Chasm of Doom and Lone Wolf 16: The Legacy of Vashna). The combination of these factors put me in a pessimistic mood for play, pre-primed for sensitivity to a lowering of quality and lack of originality. My pessimism was exacerbated by the fact that the adventure has a slow start, with very little action and a largely linear narrative.

Dead in the Deep nonetheless grows on one as the game becomes progressively more exciting and challenging. As such, it is very much a narrative of three parts. The first, which is slow in comparison to The Storms of Chai, involves the journey to Emolryia. The second involves the exploration of Emolryia, the Hidden Citadel, the Maakengorge, the Lake of Blood, the Underworld, and the Chaos Prison. As soon as True Friend descended beneath the lake to the Underworld, I felt I was back in the midst of the an original, complex, tense, and exciting game that might reach at least some of the promise of The Storms of Chai. The third and final part involves the escape from Emolryia, which returns to the frenetic pace of its predecessor and has obviously been crafted with great style and skill. In this part the pace literally never lets up, continuing right to the final section of the adventure. Dead in the Deep cannot compare to The Storms of Chai, but in retrospect it is entertaining, satisfying, and well worth the cost in both money and time when judged on its own merits.

Regarding gameplay as opposed to the literary or narrative elements of the volume, Dead in the Deep is much easier to survive than The Storms of Chai, with combat less frequent and for the most part less challenging. There are nonetheless several other ways to fail the mission – too many, in my opinion. Where a tedious opening can be forgiven and forgotten in the heat of a climactic dénouement and resolution, gameplay problems are of greater concern. With the gaming pleasure of future players in mind, I thus offer the following advice:

1.      You cannot gain access to the Hidden Citadel without an Amulet of Fealty, but by the time you arrive in Emolryia it is too late to secure one.

2.      You must hang on to the Platinum Amulet at all costs.

3.      You must give Steel Hand your Nyaxator armour when presented with the opportunity to do so.

4.      The New Order Kai Grand Master Disciplines of Assimilation and Kai-Alchemy are very important for successful completion of the mission.

I noted my reservations about writing this review above and I hope that neither Ben nor Vincent will feel that my criticisms have been unfair should they read it. No, Dead in the Deep is not nearly as good as The Storms of Chai, but when one considers the tragic circumstances of its conception and publication, it is a truly remarkable achievement by the two authors.

As with all the other Collector’s Editions, there is a bonus adventure, “Kaum Before the Storm”, written by Vincent and long-time Lone Wolf collaborator August Hahn. I was hoping that the supplement would pick up where the previous bonus adventure left off, with Lord Elkamo Doko, a Vakeros warrior-mage, but the player adopts a new persona here, that of Kai Grand Master Blazer. I cannot comment on the game as the publication of Dead in the Deep found me in the middle of my first house move in nearly fifteen years and I only had time to play the main game before bubble-wrapping the book. The penultimate adventure in the cycle is Lone Wolf 31: The Dusk of the Eternal Night, which will be published by Holmgard, but for which no publication date has yet been announced. With Ben and Vincent at the helm, I’m cautiously optimistic that True Friend’s next mission won’t be too long in coming. In the meantime, my next mission is to work out which box I put Dead in the Deep in…

Sunday 20 October 2019

British Fantasy Awards 2019: the Winners!

The British Fantasy Awards have just been announced, at FantasyCon 2019 in Glasgow. I had a go at reading this year's nominees and failed abysmally, only finishing three categories. All the other half-finished blog posts will be repurposed into reviews for a future issue!

The British Fantasy Awards are decided by juries, who before reading the nominees have the option of adding up to two additional items to those placed on the shortlist by the votes of British Fantasy Society members (including me) and FantasyCon attendees (not me this time).

Note that the jurors given below are those that were originally announced to BFS members. I haven't seen any announcements that anyone dropped out or was replaced, but it does happen sometimes, when people realise that there's a conflict of interest. (12/12/20 update: The minutes of the 2019 BFS AGM, released today, disclosed that two jurors did in fact leave, one due to illness, one due to disagreements with the rest of the jury.)

Here are the winners:

Anthology: Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 5, ed. Robert Shearman & Michael Kelly (Undertow Publications)

The jurors were Roz Clarke, Ian Hunter, Susan Oke, Steve J. Shaw and Joni Walker. Always a bit disappointing when year's best volumes win this award, after cherry picking the best of work that was already eligible the previous year, but despite much debate they are still eligible and so you can't blame the jurors, who have to pick the best of what's on the shortlist.

Artist: Vince Haig

The jurors were Astra Crompton, Alexandra Gushurst-Moore, Kaia Lichtarska, Catherine Sullivan and Paul Yates.

Audio: Breaking the Glass Slipper (www.breakingtheglassslipper.com)

The jurors were Alicia Fitton, Thomas Moules, Susie Pritchard-Casey, Abigail Shaw and Neil Williamson. I only got around to listening to one of the nominees in this category, Blood on Satan's Claw, based on the film. It had terrific sound design.

Collection: All the Fabulous Beasts, by Priya Sharma (Undertow Publications)

The jurors were Ben Appleby-Dean, Amy Chevis-Bruce, Marc Gascoigne, Laura Newsholme and Chloë Yates. The only book I managed to read in this category was Lost Objects by Marian Womack, which was excellent. Looking forward to reading the winner and other nominees.

Comic/Graphic Novel: Widdershins, Vol. 7, by Kate Ashwin

The jurors were Kate Barton, Emily Hayes, Steven Poore, Alasdair Stuart and Kiwi Tokoeka. I read everything in this category and this is an utterly baffling decision. How could anyone possibly conclude that this nice enough book was better than Hellboy: The Complete Short Stories, Vol. 1? Suppose it could have been worse: one of the other nominees in this category was a prose novella.

Fantasy Novel (the Robert Holdstock Award): The Bitter Twins, by Jen Williams (Headline)

The jurors were Sarah Carter, Shona Kinsella, Devin Martin, Pauline Morgan and Andrew White. (13/12/20 update: it would appear that Sarah Carter and Pauline Morgan were the jurors who stepped down; they don't appear on a later version of the list of jurors.) I only read Empire of Sand in this category.

Film/Television Production: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman

The jurors were Rebecca Davis, Pat Hawkes-Reed, Rachelle Hunt, Robert S. Malan and Sammy Smith. My pick for this one, having watched them all, would have been Annihilation, but my guess was that Into the Spider-Verse would win. And for once I was right!

Horror Novel (the August Derleth Award): Little Eve, by Catriona Ward (W&N)

The jurors were Charlotte Bond, Emeline Morin, Gareth Spark, Mark West and Zoe Wible. Little Eve would have been my pick of the three I read in this category. I listened to the audiobook and Carolyn Bonnyman's reading of the audiobook added immensely to the atmosphere. The Way of the Worm is the one I haven't finished yet, but I'm enjoying it very much so far.

Independent Press: Unsung Stories

The jurors were Helen Armfield (chair of the BFS), Andrew Freudenberg, Daniel Godfrey, Elaine Hillson and Georgina Kamsika. I'm currently reading a new book from this publisher, Always North, by Vicki Jarrett.

Magazine/Periodical: Uncanny Magazine

The jurors were Jenny Barber, Peter Blanchard, Theresa Derwin, James T. Harding and Rym Kechacha.

Newcomer (the Sydney J. Bounds Award): Tasha Suri, for Empire of Sand (Orbit)

The jurors were Colleen Anderson, Rosie Claverton, Lee Fletcher, D Franklin and Peter Sutton. I'm stunned by this result: it's one of the most tedious, bloviated books I've ever read. My pick of the four books I read in this category would have been Marian Womack for Lost Objects, but my guess was that Tomi Adeyemi would win for Children of Blood and Bone, which was a lot of fun and packed solid with adventure. The books I hadn't read yet were Lost Gods and The Traitor Gods.

Non-fiction: Noise and Sparks, by Ruth E.J. Booth (Shoreline of Infinity)

The jurors were Laura Carroll, Megan Graieg, Katherine Inskip, Kev McVeigh and Graeme K. Talboys.

Novella: The Tea Master and the Detective, by Aliette de Bodard (Subterranean Press)

The jurors were Ruth E.J. Booth, Elloise Hopkins, Stewart Hotston, Steve Howarth and Laura Mauro. Unusual to have something I voted for actually win the award! And I guessed correctly that it would win, although my pick, after reading the other nominees too, would have been The Land of Somewhere Safe, by Hal Duncan. I'm glad the award didn't go to either of the ineligible nominees; that would have been awkward.

Short Fiction: "Down Where Sound Comes Blunt", by G.V. Anderson (F&SFMarch/April 2018)

The jurors were Donna Bond, Amy Brennan, Andrew Hook, Richard Webb and Mairi White.

The Special Award (the Karl Edward Wagner Award): Ian Whates

The jury for this award is the BFS committee (currently: Katherine Fowler, James Barclay, Andy Marsden, Lee Harris, Shona Kinsella, Tim Major, Helen Armfield, Karen Fishwick, Allen Ashley, Sean Wilcock and Christopher Teague; though not everyone necessarily participates and the decision could have been taken at any point in the course of the year). For the third year running, the BFS membership wasn't invited to make suggestions, contrary to the rules of this award, putting a question mark over its validity, but Ian Whates would be a deserving winner.

There was no mention on Twitter of a Legends of FantasyCon being awarded: I'm told the announcement was delayed as the recipient did not attend the convention.

The physical award has changed this year: rather than the handmade bookends used from 2014 to 2018, the new award, also handmade, looks like this. They were created by Morag Hickman, who describes them as "a bolted sandwich of laser-cut acrylic, containing the archway and rocks in birch plywood and layers of hand-cut green vellum ivy leaves".

Congratulations to all the winners, and all the nominees, and as a BFS member, thank you to the jurors who devoted so much of their summers to helping out with our society's awards, and also to Katherine Fowler, the British Fantasy Awards Administrator, for doing a fine job again.

I don't think I will try to read all the nominees again next year. It was interesting to do once, but it was quite expensive and took a lot of time. Next time I think I will just pick out a few nominees that look good and review those as normal.

BFA Shadow Juror: Film and Television Productions

One last post in this failed series before the actual awards are announced!

An odd thing about this category is that it is an all-male shortlist, meaning that the jury was presented with an all-male preliminary shortlist, and despite the idea of egregious omissions being to rectify such situations, they decided to add two more items written by men. Perhaps they felt that the items they added were just so good that they had to be considered egregious omissions, regardless of the creators’ sex. Anyway, here's what I thought of the nominees:

Inside No. 9, series 4. This is such a great show. Innovative in its structure and storytelling, and telling a wide variety of stories. There's a wonderfully-observed story about a former comedy duo that went bad. Another about a house full of dead bodies, told in reverse. The problem with regard to this award, though, is that only one of the six is a fantasy story, and this is a fantasy award. A Halloween special out in 2018 was a supernatural story (and a very good one too), but isn't part of series four. Even if included, that would still only be two episodes out of seven: a typical example of the tendency of BFS and FantasyCon members to treat these as awards for things and people they like, regardless of genre. My rating: five stars. To-win rating: 1/10

The Haunting of Hill House, season 1. I started watching this when it came out but stopped after a couple of episodes, not at all grabbed. Watching it now for this project, it was definitely better than I had thought at first. Watching on my own late at night gave the scares quite a boost, but also it all become more meaningful once I had a handle on which kids were which adults. It had some extremely effective scares, both jump scares and slow creeping terror scares. Episode six, with what gives the impression of being one long shot for its first half, is an absolute tour de force. Some of the ghostly appearances are made even more frightening by being so subtle and unnoticed by the protagonists. But the ending isn't great: it gets quite soapy, there isn’t much of a pay-off for some things, and by the end the house starts to feel rather like a retirement home. My rating: three stars. To-win rating: 5/10

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I thought this was very good fun, though it felt like the Superior Spider-Man was missing – it might have been hard to work him into the film, but the tension he created in the original comic was one of the best things about it. Maybe they’re saving him for the future. And where were the monsters eating spider-people? As a comics fan, it did feel a bit like this was praised to the heavens for doing things that actual comics have been doing for decades. It was a nifty film, though, and all the spider-people in it were a lot of fun. My children have watched it lots of times and still want to watch it again. My rating: three stars. To-win rating: 6/10

Avengers: Infinity War. Most of you have probably seen it. It’s a stunning achievement in film-making. It’s the culmination of a decade of big budget storytelling on a scale that cinema has never seen before. And it’s fine. I enjoyed watching it a lot. It made me laugh lots of times. It had lots of my favourite characters. It had that astonishing ending, the kind of ending you can only have when you know that there’s going to be a sequel. I appreciate that it showed me things no other film could have managed. But Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Thor: Ragnarok were just that bit better. My rating: three stars. To-win rating: 7/10

Black Panther. After watching this, I said to my family that what Jack Kirby was to comics in the twentieth century, he might well be for cinema in the twenty-first. Now we also have New Gods, Eternals and one hopes a real Fantastic Four film on the way. I thought this was by far the most Kirby-esque of Marvel’s films I had seen at that point, in look and feel and kineticism, and as well as all that it was a good adventure with an excellent villain and supporting cast. Black Panther himself was maybe a bit overshadowed. My rating: three stars. To-win rating: 7/10

Annihilation. I loved this film. It was beautiful and strange, with a tremendous cast doing brilliant work. More than any of the other nominees it addressed our future, and the likelihood that there will come a point where we’ll lose control of our environment and be faced with the necessity of adaptation. I really would love this to win. My rating: four stars. To-win rating: 8/10

Will that win? I’m guessing it probably won’t. It’s been a bit of a marmite film, and some people really don’t like the last bit. It would be barmy for Inside No. 9 to win, and I don’t think Hill House was quite good enough to win, but I think it could go to any of the three Marvel films. I’ll guess Spider-Verse, because the people who love it really, really love it.

My children (having seen everything but Hill House and Annihilation) reckon that Spider-Verse should win, but that She-Ra and the Princesses of Power should have been on the shortlist and it is better than any of them. ("Obviously!")

Saturday 5 October 2019

Hunters & Collectors by M. Suddain | review by Stephen Theaker

The mother of Jonathan Tamberlain threatened to kill him if he ever squandered his gifts on criticism, and she wasn't just speaking metaphorically, he tells us, she told him exactly how she would do it. She was an art collector, his father a poet; the two of them met at a boxing match. Sparring with his father left Tamberlain in a coma, and he woke up with an amazing nose, one that can catch the scent of a wine from half a mile away.

So he did exactly what his mother didn't want: he became a food critic, though that's not what he calls himself. He follows the example of his hero, Eliö Lebaubátain, in claiming the title of "forensic gastronomer". It's not entirely clear why, since there's no legal aspect to his work – or at least there wouldn't be, if he didn't always get himself into so much trouble.

The book (Jonathan Cape pb, 506pp, £14.99) begins with snatches of writing from and about his early career, showing his rise to fame, but by the time the narrative settles down to its main adventure, he's had the time to develop a long and intense relationship with his bodyguard, the marvellously formidable Gladys. To her he's "like a grandpa you spend time with out of guilt", and for him she's like the annoying cousin your family takes on day trips, but they share an utter dedication to their respective jobs that is one of the novel's most interesting features.

Unfortunately, Gladys wasn't there the day he went to the Fair.

While Tamberlain grew up in the Western Hemisphere with a pair of liberal parents, the Eastern Hemisphere lived under the absolute control of Vlada Yinknokov, the Great Butcher. She had a billion people murdered during her revolution, including thousands of architects and doctors. She outlawed hospitals, declaring that from then on diseases would be cured by the will of the people. And she came to the Fair too.

Tamberlain only attended to make amends to an old friend. In that he failed miserably, and after a contretemps involving a bomb threat he didn't mean to make he was taken away to the Great Butcher's yacht, waking up to find a gas mask on his face and everyone including the dictator dead, following a nerve gas attack. Arrested and taken to the Eastern Hemisphere for interrogation, he fell into another coma, and it's when he wakes up that the story proper begins.

Dr Rubin Difflaydermaus is a batty psychiatrist with a habit of showing up in Tamberlain's head. He also has his book (Infinity Remastered: Engineering the Post-Human Species (and Why Our Great-Grandchildren Might Not Even Need Bodies)) delivered wherever Tamberlain is sleeping. The copy waiting after the critic's latest coma contains a clue: a laundry ticket from the legendary Hotel Grand Skies.

Tamberlain has long dreamt of eating at its famous restaurant, the Undersea. Nothing will stop him getting to the hotel, and once he gets there, nothing will stop him eating that meal. He'll literally wade through blood to get it, and he'll need to, because the staff have completely lost their minds and every interaction brings with it the threat of ultraviolence. Ace literary agent Daniel Woodbine and bodyguard Gladys will do their best to keep him alive as the severed heads pile up, but he won't make it easy for them.

Hunters & Collectors is quite reminiscent of Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, and may appeal to the same people. Instead of political writer Spider Jerusalem and his filthy assistants we have here a food critic, but he adopts a similarly misanthropic worldview ("To me the greatest possible horror is not that humanity might end, but that our Empire of Stupidity might last forever") to protect a heart similarly sensitive to the horrors of his world. Like that comic, this is not an entirely serious book, but it does have moments that are truly shocking, and others that feel surprisingly sincere.

The sf ideas at its heart, on the other hand, may not come as great surprises, at least not to people who have a holodeck episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the book is after all being sold as modern contemporary fiction rather than sf, and it uses its rusty tools to tell quite a sharp story. Equally, what seems at first to be quite an experimental novel, beginning with a hundred-page flutter of notes, letters, fragments and diagrams, settles down after that to provide quite a conventional first-person narrative that nevertheless does the job.

That's the book in a nutshell: a bit less ambitious than it looks, but still quite good, and rather well executed. Just like the guests at the Hotel Grand Skies. ***

This review originally appeared in Interzone #265.

Wednesday 25 September 2019

It Chapter Two | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Blockbuster horror soars when it clowns around, stumbles when it gets serious

Any horror aficionado worth his salt will scoff at a horror film that shows adults holding hands and chanting or, even worse, partaking in a group hug… unless, of course, those things are meant to be humorous. Unfortunately, both handholding and a group hug appear in It Chapter Two (directed by Andy Muschietti), and it’s this reviewer’s opinion that neither of them is meant to be funny. These two more glaring horror faux pas encapsulate the key shortcoming of the film: sacrificing silliness, the film’s strength, for touchy-feely posturing.

Twenty-seven years have passed since Pennywise the Dancing Clown (aka It) wreaked havoc on a group of friends in Stephen King’s fictitious town of Derry, Maine. Now they’ve gone their separate ways and become successful adults. Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa), the only one who has remained in Derry, convinces the others to return and defeat Pennywise – they did, after all, make a blood pact when they were kids.

On the positive side, It Chapter Two retains and intensifies one of the first film’s greatest assets: creepy, yet funny manifestations of Pennywise. This time around, the viewer gets treated to a large statue that comes to life, a crazed fiend that makes fun of one character’s sappy poem, a bodiless pair of legs, and much more.

Alas, the film takes a nosedive when the friends revisit a setting from the first film in a climactic scene that goes on for far too long. There is a shift from playfulness to melodrama. A voice-over offers a message about friendship. First, these “friends” haven’t seen each other in 27 years, so how close can they be? Second, this is a film about a supernatural clown. Let’s not get too deep.

The film’s saving grace is Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård). The monster has a complete lack of compassion for characters who are discriminated against or bullied. As in the first film, the best scene involves Pennywise manipulating an unsuspecting child. This time, it’s underneath the bleachers at a baseball game. However, It Chapter Two eventually squanders Skarsgård’s acting talents by heaping special effects upon the clown.

I didn’t go to see It Chapter Two to get some grand gesture about friendship among a group of “losers”; I went to see Pennywise’s antics. I got a healthy dose of the latter, but the former got shoved down my throat.—Douglas J. Ogurek ***

Read Douglas’s review of It.

Thursday 12 September 2019

Carnival Row, Season 1 | review by Rafe McGregor

Detection on Different Levels?

In his latest book, Allegory and Ideology (2019), Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson describes the patristic allegory as a system composed of four levels. The idea is that there is a single story that operates at four levels of meaning simultaneously. The first level is the literal, which in the Scriptures referred to an historical event and in the case with which I am concerned here is the steampunk world represented in Carnival Row. The second, secret, level is the hidden meaning concealed within the literal level, requiring either a mystical revelation or imaginative deciphering (or, in Carnival Rows case, perhaps a little more enciphering). The third, moral, level is concerned with individual salvation or existential experience and the fourth, anagogical, level with the Last Judgement or the future of humanity as a whole. Taking the philosophical rather than religious route we have the literal, secret, moral, and collective meanings of an allegory. At the literal level, Carnival Row is a narrative about the consequences of the battle for Tirnanoc (from the Gaelic Tír na nÓg), the land of the Fae, fought between two human powers, the covetous Burgue and the genocidal Pact. As the war progresses, the Fae begin fleeing to the Burgue for safety and the stream of refugees increases when the Burgue are defeated and withdraw from Tirnanoc. When the series opens, many of citizens of the Burgue, spanning all social strata, are displeased by the influx of “Critch”, a derisive term used to describe all Fae regardless of their species, and pursue some combination of making their lives as miserable as possible, proposing anti-immigration legislation, and using all available means to keep them offshore. In the age of Trump’s wall and Johnson’s Brexit it is very easy – perhaps a little too easy, as the didacticism is sometimes rather heavy-handed – to read the second level of meaning as being about the Coalition Forces invasion of Iraq, the subsequent destabilisation of the Middle East, and the consequent Syrian refugee crisis. The parallels between London or New York and the Burgue on the one hand and Islamic State and the Pact on the other are almost exact. The question I am interested in is not whether the secret meaning of the allegory is too obvious, but whether the simplistic similarities preclude it from reaching the moral and collective levels of meaning.

Carnival Row takes its name from a street in the Burgue that is the centre of what has become a Fae inner city, populated by faeries, fauns, centaurs, trolls, kobolds, and other refugees from Tirnanoc. There are two main plots, each of which follows the two protagonists, and two subplots involving the governance and elite society of the Burgue respectively. The protagonists are Vignette Stonemoss (played by Cara Delevingne), a faerie refugee, and Inspector Rycroft Philostrate (played by Orlando Bloom), a detective who is investigating a serial killer that preys exclusively on Fae. The two were lovers in Tirnanoc during the war and their respective tales intersect, diverge, and intertwine as the narrative progresses. Vignette made her living in Tirnanoc by selling the Fae into indentured labour, a practice that is now recognised as a form of modern slavery, but was employed by many colonial powers up until the early twentieth century. When she fears falling victim to Pact atrocities, she sells herself in order to pay for her passage to the Burgue and is placed in the home of idly wealthy siblings Ezra and Imogen Spurnrose (played by Andrew Gower and Tamzin Merchant) as a lady’s maid. When Vignette is sexually assaulted by Spurnrose, she escapes to Carnival Row. Faced with only two options for survival, sex work or crime, she joins the Black Raven, a Fae organised crime group. Vignette’s decision is to at least some extent a moral one – as the head of the Black Raven confirms by stating, ‘The law of this city does not protect us’ – but it nonetheless pits her against her police officer ex-lover.

Philo is the only police officer in the Burgue that cares about the serial slaying of the Fae. He narrows the field of suspects down to sailors, on the basis that the crimes have coincided with the return of navy vessels to the docks, and quickly finds a suspect. After an exciting chase across the rooftops of the city, the sailor warns Philo of the coming of ‘some dark god’ before jumping to his death. Shortly after, another Fae is murdered, her torso ripped open by a giant creature that emerges from the sewers, and Philo is set on his second and much more complex case. It is quickly revealed that Philo’s idiosyncratic concern for the welfare of the Fae is due to his own ancestry: he is a half-blood faerie who had his wings cut off at birth before being abandoned at an orphanage. This is one of the aspects of the series where the didacticism becomes somewhat strained, with the only police officer who cares about the Fae only caring about them because he is himself half Fae. Seriously flawed though our own world is, there are plenty of people on the right side of inequality in metropolises like London, Los Angeles, Rio de Janiero, and Johannesburg that take a moral interest in those on the wrong side.

The two subplots concern two Burgue families, the Breakspears and the Spurnroses. Absalom Breakspear (played by Jared Harris) is Chancellor of the Republic of the Burgue and the political storyline is initiated when his son is kidnapped while visiting a Fae brothel in Carnival Row. Unbeknownst to Breakspear, the crime has been committed by his wife, Piety (played by Indira Varma), for reasons that are unclear. She subsequently manipulates Breakspear into detaining and torturing the Leader of the Opposition without charge and then both murders and frames the suspect herself. Meanwhile, despite their desirable address and the many trappings of opulence they enjoy, the Spurnroses are in dire financial straits. Imogen, whose existence revolves around climbing the social ladder and finding a husband with the right mix of social, economic, and cultural capital, is initially disgusted when a faun moves into their square, one of the most exclusive enclaves in the city. She soon realises that she can take advantage of the combination of Agreus Astrayon’s (played by David Gyasi) extreme wealth and the speciesism he faces from the Burgue’s elite, however, proposing to sponsor his admittance to that elite in exchange for an investment in her brother’s failing business enterprises. In the world of Carnival Row, just like our own, money can buy respectability and social acceptance, even if one has horns on one’s head and hooves instead of feet.

I have mentioned an example of the way in which Carnival Row both achieves and fails to achieve meaning at the moral level and there are several more examples of the former, which I shall not mention so as to avoid spoilers. In fact, the first three allegorical levels are tied together rather neatly by means of a succession of plot twists in the second half of the season. My main interest is in the fourth, collective, level and whether the series so far has anything to say about the future of humanity. In In the Dust of This Planet (2011), the first volume in his Horror of Philosophy Trilogy, Eugene Thacker proposes three ways of conceiving of meaning and value. His inquiry follows the tradition of Immanuel Kant, who distinguished between the noumenal world (objective reality) and the phenomenal world (subjective experience of objective reality). In Kant’s philosophy, human beings could never gain access to the noumenal and were restricted to negotiating it indirectly, through the phenomenal. For Thacker, whose concern is with meaning rather than existence, the world-for-us is ‘the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feeling alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also separate from the human’.  The world-for-us does not exhaust meaning on the planet, however, and we become aware of the world-in-itself when that planet ‘resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us’, most dramatically and dangerously in the occurrence of natural disasters. In other words, when faced with events such as natural disasters, human beings realise that there is a very strong sense in which this world is not for-us at all. The third and most significant conception of meaning and value is the world-without-us. The world-without-us is an attempt to conceptualise the coexistence of the world-for-us and the world-in-itself without either accepting that there is an insurmountable Kantian barrier between the two or immediately collapsing the latter into the former when we, for example, grasp natural disasters from the perspective of humanity. In Thacker’s terms, ‘the world-without-us is the subtraction of the human from the world’.  In my understanding of Thacker, the world-without-us is a world in which there is meaning and value in spite of the absence (actually subtraction) of human meaning and human values. Thacker’s aim in his Trilogy is to extrapolate and explain the world-without-us and his central thesis is that supernatural horror and science fiction succeed in this aim where philosophy has failed.

If Thacker is right and such a world exists, the crucial question is if and how the world-for-us and world-without-us can coexist without one system of meaning and value eradicating the other. Early into the twenty-first century it seems unsurprising that we have such difficulty conceiving of the world-without-us, so competent have we become at destroying the world-in-itself. We find the world-for-us at its most conspicuous and most arrogant in the city, where the natural environment has been replaced rather than adapted by the human population and where ecology has been reconfigured to sustain human life alone. In Carnival Row, Philo assumes the role of an occult detective attempting to solve a mystery set in the metropolis of the Burgue and the combination of protagonist and setting provides an opportunity to chart the relation between the world-for-us and the world-without-us. Despite his faerie blood, Philo appears as human and serves as an agent of social control, preserving the metropolitan world-for-us in all its biological, cultural, and economic complexity. The detective, both a symbol and an implement of human values, is pitted against an antagonist that is neither human nor Fae, but some dark god, an apparently unfathomable and inconceivable creature that dwells and kills in the city, where everything – alive or lifeless – is supposed to serve only human ends. Significantly, the creature’s lair is in the sewers, the foundation upon which the city is built, in the same way that the world-without-us underpins – and sometimes undermines – the world-for-us. As the story of an occult detective solving a series of murders in a metropolis, Carnival Row stages the world-without-us, setting up a narrative framework firmly grounded in the world-for-us – the detective as an agent of social control seeking to restore the anthropocentric status quo the murders have disrupted – and then using that framework to investigate a nature that refuses to be tamed and resists conception in human terms. The creature, called a Darkasher, is disclosed as having a closer connection to humanity than initially suspected and the potential for exploring the world-without-us is to some extent sacrificed for less problematic meaning-making at the fourth and final allegorical level. Notwithstanding, the pitting of the two worlds of meaning and value represented by the detective and the Darkasher respectively gestures towards some kind of mutual recognition between the world-for-us and the world-without-us. My hope is that the tension created by this pairing will be developed in more detail season 2, although as the occult detective mystery is solved by Philo season 1 this may well not be the case. Given that season 2 was commissioned prior to the release of season 1, Legendary Television and Amazon Studios must both be congratulated for bringing that season to a conclusive (and compelling) end in the final episode. *****  

Tuesday 10 September 2019

Ready or Not | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Think you’ve heard the worst wedding night catastrophe? Think again. 

Ready or Not, with its cozy mansion and eccentric characters, brings to mind the comedy/mystery Clue (1985). However, this time it’s comedy/horror, and directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett dispose of the mystery, escalate the intensity, and align the viewer with one character: young bride Grace (Samara Weaving), who’s brought into the fold of the wealthy Le Domas dynasty or, as one member prefers to call it, “dominion”. The family has built its fortune in games: playing cards, board games, and eventually, the ownership of sports franchises.

Still in her wedding dress, Grace gets thrust into a game of hide-and-seek – she’s the one who’s hiding – on the family estate. The stakes are high: if the Le Domases find Grace, they kill her. Husband Alex (Mark O’Brien) wants to help his new wife; alas, he has seven family members and a butler intent on finding her.

The film takes a bit long to get to the game. However, once it does, it’s a riveting experience, due in large part to Weaving’s performance. The heroine fights back, but still convincingly conveys the terror, shock and pain she undergoes as the sick game unfolds. She’s not too dainty to drop an f-bomb or throw a punch, nor does she entirely shed her womanhood to become Rambo in a dress (despite the movie poster that shows her clutching a rifle and wearing a bullet sash). Listen for Weaving’s animalistic scream – it almost sounds like a goat bleating – when things reach a boiling point.

Much of the film’s beauty lies in its contrasts: wood-panelled walls, candelabras and dumbwaiters merge with crazed screams, corpses and big weapons. No candlesticks and lead pipes here… Instead, it’s axes, crossbows and shotguns.

Some family members are tepid about the game, while others embrace it with a murderous glee. Among Grace’s pursuers are high-strung, drug-abusing sister-in-law Emilie (Melanie Scrofano) and her disinterested husband Fitch Bradley (Kristian Bruun), sarcastic brother-in-law Daniel (Adam Brody) and his gold-digging wife (lightheartedly named) Charity (Elyse Levesque), and exuberant father-in-law Tony (Henry Czerny) and his hard-to-read wife Becky (Andie MacDowell). The two standouts are battle axe-wielding Aunt Helene (Nicky Guadagni), whose heavy black eyeshadow and jerky movements give her a demonic presence, and Stevens (John Ralston), a butler with a passion for Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” Also notable is MacDowell’s performance as matron Becky Le Domas – her dramatically tilting eyebrows convey a mock sympathy.

If there is one theme that permeates Ready or Not it is loyalty… between parents and children, between siblings, and between spouses. The only bond that’s certain is the one between filmmaker and viewer.—Douglas J. Ogurek ****