Happy Birthday, Bruce: Jaws @ 50!

Fifty years ago today, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) was released into the wild, into the world, and into the film industry and its golden anniversary is being celebrated globally with much hype and fanfare, including here, at Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (which, as we all know, is possibly the UK’s second longest-running sf/f fiction zine and approaching its own silver anniversary). I wrote about the film’s impact on me, on Hollywood, and on sharks in the wild (none of which were particularly good) in my review of Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg (2018) so I won’t say much about any of that here. I will say that for all that harm the film may have done, it is in my opinion – and quite literally – almost perfect as a work of cinema and entirely deserving of its 97% on the Tomatometer. If it were up to me, I’d push that to 99%, deducting 1% for Bruce, the mechanical shark named after Spielberg’s lawyer. The problem is that Bruce moves like a wind-up toy (which is essentially what he is) rather than whipping through the sea like a fish in…well, water. It turns out I’m not the only one to have problems with Bruce and Jon Harvey’s recent article in the Guardian reveals that the decision to show very little of the shark until the end was motivated by practical rather than artistic considerations. Let me say one thing in Bruce’s defence (it being his birthday): what he lacks in speed and suppleness, he almost makes up in menace and mass. One more thing about Jaws before I move on to thoughts about recent imitations and the Sharksploitation genre more broadly. A few months ago I read Peter Benchley’s much-maligned 1974 novel, on which the film is closely based, for the first time. I thought it was good – very good, actually. Where the film is let down a little by Bruce’s performance, the novel suffers a little more from Benchley’s inability to write convincing women but is otherwise a compelling and chilling read.

Since reviewing The Meg, I’ve watched a host of terrible shark movies I haven’t bothered to write about. Lowlights include John Pogue’s Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020), Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2: The Trench (2023), and Andrew Traucki’s The Reef: Stalked (2024), all of which provide ample evidence for the law of diminishing returns in film franchises. Meg doesn’t even deserve its 27% on the Tomatometer; how The Reef and Deep Blue Sea achieved 71% and 79% respectively is completely beyond me. (Perhaps the Tomatometer isn’t as reliable as I thought.) I have yet to see Matthew Holmes’ Fear Below or Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals, both of which were released this year and come highly recommended, but both of which raise immediate reservations. Fear Below looks very similar to Christian Sesma’s Into the Deep (2025, 27%), which deserves dishonourable mention with the three franchise films, and Dangerous Animals is being marketed as ‘shark plus serial killer’ (eye roll). I’ve also watched Martin Wilson’s Great White (2021), which can consider its 44% on the Tomatometer generous; Justin Lee’s Maneater (2024), a well-earned 17%; and Joachim Heden’s The Last Breath (2024, AKA Escape from the Deep), with a very generous 30%. Yes, filmmakers keep churning (chumming?) them out and I keep lapping them up. I blame Jaws. (For both the churning and the lapping).

One thing that has become tiresome over decades of watching movies in what is now called the Sharksploitation genre, much more so than the appalling use of CGI in most, is the way in which they all replicate and reinforce the (hu)man versus nature trope. I’d have hoped that by now, with nature collapsing all around us, this might seem a little too twentieth (or even nineteenth) century to continue to appeal to audiences. This doesn’t just apply to Sharksploitation, but to many other contemporary films and franchises, such as, for example, Baltasar Kormákur’s Beast (2022) and the Jurassic Park (now Jurassic World) media moneymaker. Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh film, is due next month and will no doubt involve plenty of land, sea, and air lizard mincemeat. Though I won’t be around to witness it, I also wonder if by the time Jaws’ centenary comes around, the orca won’t have replaced the shark as our favourite cinematic sea monster. Orcas are much bigger and much clever than sharks, hunt in pods, and are increasingly encroaching on human-infested waters as ocean temperatures rise. They do look like they’re smiling rather than snarling when they open their (immensely strong) mouths though, which probably doesn’t make a lot of difference if you’re in the water with one but might make them less likely film fodder. I leave that for the future...in the present, it’s time to revisit the past with (yet) another viewing of what might just be Spielberg’s best.

Game of Thrones | review by Rafe McGregor

Game of Thrones, HBO, 8 seasons, April 2011-May 2019, £9.99 (monthly subscription rate)

Fantasy at its finest.

I’ve been wanting to write about HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019) for a while now, but kept putting off what seemed like a mammoth task. I came to the series late, somehow insulating myself from all the hype for nearly a decade. Then COVID-19 arrived and (like many people, I later learned) it seemed the perfect time to tackle all 73 episodes (which run to just over 70 hours in total). I watched it on my own during the first lockdown, then with my wife, and then we watched it together again during the second lockdown. I had heard, as one does, that GOT was yet another case of diminishing returns and that fans were particularly outraged at the final season. The former accusation is complete nonsense and the final season was just as good as the rest and even better than some. One of the reasons for its poor reception may have been the slightly longer wait (two years instead of one) creating unreasonable expectations. Another is probably the fact that the television series had overtaken the novels on which it was based, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (five of seven novels published from 1996 to 2011, the rest as yet unpublished), and readers were dissatisfied with the direction it had taken. Which is fine…but no one is forcing you to watch the series and personally I sometimes avoid cinematic or televisual adaptations if I really love a novel or series of novels. The only justified accusation of anticlimax is that there is a Lord of the Rings-like sense in which the biggest and most desperate battle takes place before the final battle, but the final battle is between the protagonists and the antagonist so the narrative is perfectly in keeping with what we expect (and, indeed, desire) as audiences. To stay with LOTR for a moment, I loved both the films and the books, but read and watched them as two separate works rather than expecting the latter to slavishly imitate the former and I recommend the same approach to GOT. (I read Martin’s novels after watching the series and enjoyed them too, but they are very different.) On the point of giving audiences what we desire, two of the great triumphs of GOT are the way in which it both deploys and undermines the mythic mode of storytelling (which has been the Hollywood norm for the last fifty years) and combines that mode with a rich architecture of allegorical meaning.

GOT is an incredibly complex narrative with a multiplicity of interwoven plotlines, all of which revolve around the struggle among the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The plotlines involve hundreds of characters, dozens of main characters, eight great noble houses in addition to the pivotal three (Arryn, Baratheon, Bolton, Frey, Greyjoy, Martell, Tyrell, and Tully), and at least eight leading characters. The leading characters are an older generation of three Lannisters (Cersei, Tyrion, and Jamie), a younger generation of four Starks (Jon, Sansa, Arya, and Bran), and Daenerys Targaryen (played by Emilia Clarke). These leads can be distilled to two protagonists and an antagonist, one from each house, as follows: Jon Snow (played by Kit Harrington) from House Stark, Daenerys, and Cersei Lannister (the antagonist, played by Lena Headey). Each of the 73 episodes runs from 50 to 82 minutes and they are distributed across the seasons as follows: 1-10 (Season 1, 2011), 11-20 (Season 2, 2012), 21-30 (Season 3, 2013), 31-40 (Season 4, 2014), 41-50 (Season 5, 2015), 51-60 (Season 6, 2016), 61-67 (Season 7, 2017), and 68-73 (Season 8, 2019). The series also employs the five-act structure popularised by Shakespeare, although the acts do not follow the series exactly. Having watch it four times now, I’d say the overarching narrative goes something like this: exposition (episodes 1-9), complication (episodes 10-29), climax (episodes 30-50), crisis (episodes 51-67), and resolution (episodes 68-73).

In addition to following this structure, the overarching narrative is structured as what the late Fredric Jameson calls a ‘genuine allegory’, which I first mentioned in TQF when reviewing another television series, Amazon Studios’ Carnival Row (2018; there’s a review of the second and final season here). Genuine allegories have four distinct levels of meaning that combine in interesting and sometimes unique ways to provide audiences with especially memorable and meaningful experiences (and are well-suited to the television series because of the length of the form). The literal level of meaning of GOT is revealed in the title, the deadly game played by the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen – as well as the other eight – for the Iron Throne, which bears the weight of many a different noble bottom as the seasons progress. The symbolic level is the Night King (played by first Richard Brake and then Vladimír Furdík), his army, and his winter as transparently representative of climate change. Significantly, the first episode of the series is titled ‘Winter is Coming’ and it is an oft-repeated phrase used by the inhabitants of Westeros to refer to a particularly lengthy cold season that occurs across the continent on an intermittent basis. At the existential level of meaning, GOT appears to establish a fairly simple moral axis, with Cersei almost completely selfish and vicious, Jon almost completely selfless and virtuous, and Daenerys somewhere in between, for the most part well-intentioned but prone to egotism and hubris. Given that Jon has no desire to rule the Seven Kingdoms, the Kingdom of the North, or even the Night’s Watch, it is Daenerys and Cersei’s constructions of subjectivity that drive the overarching plot, in a particular and peculiar play of difference and identity that draws attention to sexual violence, femicide, and systemic sexism. The anthropic level is primarily concerned with the relationships among the three levels of war that threaten to destroy the Seven Kingdoms. The micro level is the internecine conflicts within individual kingdoms or noble houses, such as Stannis Baratheon’s (played by Stephen Dillane) wars against first his brother and then his nephew. The meso level is the conflict among the Lannisters, Starks, and Targaryens and the macro level the war between the living and the dead, between the armies of Westeros and Essos (the continent to the east of Westeros) and the Army of the Dead. This is the only war worth fighting and quite obviously the most momentous, but it is the war that the noble houses are the most reluctant to fight, content to dismiss the Night King as a legend and to believe that the imminent winter is natural rather than supernatural.

GOT is, as my brief summary suggests, an incredibly complex narrative consisting of layer upon layer of plots, meanings, protagonists, characters, and conflicts, all of which are eventually – and masterfully – tied together in a resolution as rewarding as it seems retrospectively inevitable. While the combination of myth and allegory is, as already mentioned, exemplary, my particular fascination with the series is the way in which it succeeds in replicating rather than representing the experience of living through an – or perhaps the – apocalypse. In his long essay, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2022), Mark Fisher discusses one of the few other narrative fictions to achieve the same end: ‘The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.’ As T.S. Eliot wrote before him (influenced by if not explicitly reflecting on the mass destruction of World War I) in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), ‘This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.’ For all the fire and ice in GOT, deadly dragons and unstoppable undead, humanity is petering out slowly, person by person, most by starvation and disease rather than blade or bow. It is, another words, a world very much like our own, where humanity faces existential threats from multi-polar conflicts, artificial intelligence, and climate change that most of us are able to ignore most of the time. I have only had such an experience twice before, with Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, which consists of the novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) (about which I wrote here) and with Alfonso Cuarón’s feature film, Children of Men (2006). Read and watch them all: I guarantee you won’t be disappointed and you might just find them resonating with you in the same way I did. ****

The Spectral Link | review by Rafe McGregor

The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti

Subterranean Press, 94pp, £11.80, June 2014, ISBN 9781596066502

 

This review was first published in November 2014, in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 49, following what I hope will be my longest ever absence from the magazine (a three-year hiatus).

If Thomas Ligotti is not the only contemporary practitioner of weird fiction, the genre that emerged as an epiphenomenon of literary modernism, then he is certainly the most accomplished. This slim volume comprises a two-page preface and a pair of short stories which, like his entire oeuvre to date, resist interpretation and exemplify the recondite. Ligotti’s acquaintance with the perennial problems of the disciplines constituting the Western tradition of philosophy – logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics – is striking and his work exploits the failure of repeated attempts to answer crucial questions about existence, knowledge, and morality. The suicidal narrator of “Metaphysica Morum” might be speaking for the author when he registers his ‘scorn for the saved and their smug sense of how perfectly right things were in the universe’ because Ligotti appears convinced that all is not right in the universe and continually revisits the fearful consequences of this conviction in his strange, singular, uncanny stories. There is a strong impression, for example, that “Metaphysica Morum” is nothing more than a slow, sustained unravelling of the meaning of the word ‘demoralization’, which is exposed as having implications beyond personal concerns with the terminal.

Despite its innocuous title “The Small People” is perhaps the more philosophical of the two tales, exploring one of the most pervasive questions in metaphysics, the difference – if any – between things as they really are and things as we perceive them; or, alternately, the extent to which human concepts reflect the reality of the natural world. Here, the narrator finds disturbing evidence of a mismatch and realises that he is one of the few possessed of ‘a type of instinct that actually forced me to see things as they were and not as I was supposed to see them so that I could get by in life.’  He experiences a systematic disintegration of reality when the ‘small country’ he perceives is contrasted first with the ‘normal country’ and then the ‘big country’ until the border between small and big is breached by ‘halfers’. If neither “small” nor “big” map on to the world, do “self” and “other”?  As the narrator penetrates deeper into the mystery of small and half-small people, he is less and less able to “get by” and runs the risk of that ultimate undoing…demoralization. Ligotti is a writer of weird tales and these two will not be to everyone’s taste: their weirdness overflows and unsettles.

 

The Spectral Link sold out almost immediately on publication and is unfortunately now only available at exorbitant prices on the used books market ($99 and £189 respectively on Amazon US and UK at the time of writing).

Mr Mercedes | review by Rafe McGregor

Mr Mercedes by Stephen King

Hodder & Stoughton, 416pp, £20.00, June 2014, ISBN 9781444788624

 

This review was first published in November 2014, in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 49, following what I hope will be my longest ever absence from the magazine (a three-year hiatus).

 

In June 1999 Stephen King was run over by a Dodge minivan while on his daily four-mile walk. Three years later, he was still unable to sit down for long periods without severe pain and announced his intention to stop writing. Eight years later, he wrote that ‘the force of my invention has slowed down a lot’, a tragic admission for a prolific author whose work has ranged across the horror, science fiction, fantasy, crime, and thriller genres. Mr Mercedes is King’s sixth full-length novel since his accident. Like some of his best work – Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982) and Misery (1987) to name but two – there is no supernatural element at play and the narrative follows a retired detective’s attempt to catch a spree killer before he strikes again. Like Duma Key (2008), the novel is subdivided into very short numbered sections and the eight named parts are really chapters, varying from one to forty-three sub-sections each, which (a few excepted) tell the tale from either the protagonist or antagonist’s point of view.

Mr Mercedes does not plumb the existential depths of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, nor is it likely to have the popular appeal of The Stand (1978) or The Shining (1977), but it isn’t the work of a writer whose inventive force is flagging either. From the dramatic yet restrained opening, in which a grey Mercedes emerges from the fog in as frightening a manner as any mythical monster, to the plausible handling of the various plot twists, there is no evidence that King’s creativity is on the wane. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Mr Mercedes is its intra-textuality, King’s explicit and implicit references to works previous and forthcoming, with recurring symbols and motifs from his extensive oeuvre. The murder weapon recalls, of course, both Christine (1983) and From a Buick 8 (2002) and the killer’s disguises as a clown and ice cream vendor, It (1986). The final stage of the story, which places the detective in an unlikely trio of crime-fighters, is reminiscent of The Dark Tower series (eight books published from 1982 to 2012). There are also at least two allusions Revival, King’s next novel, which is due for publication in November. Mr Mercedes is, to some extent, a homage to King’s own work, but with such an illustrious career upon which to draw, the gesture is long overdue rather than self-indulgent.

 

Mr Mercedes features the first appearance of Holly Gibney, who subsequently became a serial character and is the protagonist of King’s latest novel, Never Flinch, which was published last month.

The Earth No Longer Exists by Ben Fitts (Alien Buddha Press) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Pessimism smothered in absurdity with a dash of hope: short story collection substantiates future bizarro heavyweight

Ben Fitts’s bizarro collection The Earth No Longer Exists is custom-made for the media-weary twenty-first-century reader. The writing is clear, concise, and above all, original. The paragraphs are short. The language is modest. Fitts admirably avoids any writerly pretension, and with each entry not only entertains but also tackles contemporary issues with a jocular pessimism that occasionally leans toward hopefulness. Moreover, despite their simplicity, all his stories leave room for interpretation.  

Although absurdity permeates them, these pieces are not merely weird for weirdness’s sake. Fitts’s characters ¬¬– sometimes foolish, sometimes silly, and often flawed – operate from a viewpoint of misunderstanding. Political leaders think that replacing the world’s dead superheroes with janitors is a smart move. A man decides he’s going to become the world’s third-sexiest matador… so he can get with a woman. An artist born into privilege becomes so obsessed with the idea that a successful artist needs to be destitute that he loses sight of what he’s creating and what art is. In an insightful exploration of empty sexual encounters versus lasting love, a young man discovers something unexpected in the shoebox of his new lover.

“Raspberry Heart,” an indictment against the chauvinism that still permeates corporate America, introduces a raspberry interviewing for a job. The raspberry grows agitated because its would-be employer is focused not on its qualifications but rather on the fact he’s interviewing a raspberry. 

Clearly influenced by COVID and current political conflicts, “On the Back of an Octopus” involves a city on the back of a giant octopus. When a shark supporting another city approaches, the politicians and scientists of Octopolis go into the highest tower and debate an appropriate response. The idea of getting along is, if you’ll pardon the pun, unfathomable to them. Leaders refuse to see somebody else’s perspective… and the public suffers. 

The volume’s only non-bizarro work, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” is strong enough to be in a high-end literary journal. After an antisemitic message is scrawled on her son’s locker, a Jewish mother decides to move her family from the U.S. to Israel. Her teenage son resists, partly because he’s terrified of being forced to fight in the Israeli military. This fear plays out in the role playing and video games the young man plays. The story stirs up emotion on many levels, particularly animosity toward the mother, who steamrolls her son’s concerns. 

Several stories cover romantic relationships – some elicit sadness, while others end on a more positive note. The man who falls in love with “The Cactus” suffers because of their relationship. Perhaps the physical pain the man feels is a stand-in for the emotional pain that comes with bad matches. That’s the negative side. On the positive side, if a spouse sticks beside a spouse no matter how much pain, that shows love. Regardless, the story punctures the reader with one irrefutable message: love is painful.

In “My Winter Lips,” another relationship-based tale, Fitts takes the current fascination with body modification to the next level by skilfully introducing a new world while avoiding expository dialogue. People can, for instance, get jacked arms or replace their fingers with something that looks like snakes. Unlike many of his peers, the first-person narrator goes to the “parts store” merely to replace his chapped lips with another pair of normal lips. The employee reveals the store is out of human lips, and what transpires is a humorous conversation and a resolution the narrator does not anticipate. The new lips aren’t just lips — they symbolize how openness to new ideas and personal change can allow one to see others in a more positive light. 

The treasures in The Earth No Longer Exists confirm an emerging author’s potential to rise as a leading voice in the bizarro subgenre. Fitts’s stories grasp the reader and refuse to let go; he knows how long each entry needs to be before it starts losing its potency, and he never gets preachy or pontificates. Douglas J. Ogurek*****   

Sugar | review by Rafe McGregor

Sugar. Apple TV+, 8 episodes, April 2024, £8.99 (monthly subscription rate)

Genre-bending neo-noir.

John Sugar (played by Colin Farrell) is a man with a mission, a private investigator who is very good at one thing and one thing only: finding missing persons. He is also a film buff and his reflections on the progress (or lack thereof) of his cases are cut with shots from classics of the Golden Age of Film Noir (as far as I could tell, anyway), which must have cost Apple a fair bit (I suppose they can afford it). Sugar loves movies so much, he might almost have used them to teach himself his trade, in a similar manner to that in which his friend Henry (played by Jason Butler Harner) might have taught himself to be an academic by reading campus novels.

For me, Farrell has taken over from Denzel Washington as the archetypal private eye or latter-day (urban) cowboy, a tough guy with a code and perhaps even a heart of gold if you can penetrate the layers of muscle. Like Washington, I never took to Farrell’s onscreen persona (just a little too smug for me), but he is an actor of such versatility that I was soon swayed by his performances in Miami Vice (2006), London Boulevard (2010), and True Detective 2 (2015), just as Washington blew me away in Out of Time (2003), Man on Fire (2004), and Déjà Vu (2006).

Why am I reviewing a neo-noir television series for TQF? Because, like Tony Scott’s wonderful Déjà Vu, Sugar has a genre-bending twist, albeit one that is revealed late in the series. (I won’t say which genre, so as to avoid spoilers, but you can be sure it’s one of science fiction, fantasy, or horror.) There are in fact two twists, an unusual change of category and a more common, but nonetheless delightful, reversal of fortune as the narrative charges to its conclusion. Does the change of category work? I’m not sure. It certainly didn’t ruin what had gone before, but ultimately I found it a little gratuitous. Meaning that the series would have been at least as good without it and perhaps better.

The case itself is standard PI fare, with Sugar hired to find the missing grandchild of movie mogul Jonathan Siegel (played by James Cromwell). Farrell is at his best since HBO’s True Detective 2 and there are outstanding performances by Kirby (formerly Kirby Howell-Baptiste, playing Sugar’s handler, Ruby) and Amy Ryan (playing Melanie Matthews, a retired rock star). The denouement is not at all predictable and even rather tense so in spite of a lost star for squeezing two genres into one narrative, I’d say it’s definitely worth watching. ***

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning | review by Rafe McGregor

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, by Christopher McQuarrie (Paramount Pictures)

Better on the big screen.

The cinematic experience has changed a lot… and I mean since the COVID-19 pandemic, not over my lifetime. Vue, which has been my local ‘provider’ for some time now, recently refurbished all of its cinemas so that every seat is now what would have been called ‘luxury’ pre-pandemic. This must have cut the number of seats that can be squeezed into each theatre significantly, but I suppose it’s good business as fewer and fewer people venture forth from the comfort of their living rooms. At the same time (and probably for the same reasons) it has become increasingly difficult to find a cinema screening what one wants to watch, as my three most recent choices reveal: MI8 (at my local Vue, but only for a single week), Warfare (straight to streaming as far as I can tell), and The Return (apparently released last year, neither screening nor streaming in the UK).

By its eighth and final instalment, the Mission Impossible film franchise is firmly in the science fiction genre, with the antagonist of seven and eight (a single narrative divided into two parts) being a sentient AI program called the Entity that has inspired its own death cult, members of which have infiltrated various levels of America’s (and other nations’) governments and militaries. (Though perhaps the bit about members of a death cult infiltrating the government isn’t quite science fiction if one reads the news at the moment – I digress.) The franchise is of course based on the very successful Mission: Impossible television series, which ran from 1966 to 1973 and was revived for two seasons in the next decade. It was in fact less than a decade after this revival when the film series started as Mission: Impossible (MI1) was released in 1996. Since then, MI has emerged as something of an American version of the James Bond franchise, with Tom Cruise in the leading role of Ethan Hunt. Following a six-year hiatus at the beginning of the century (between MI2 and MI3) there has been an MI film every two to five years, a roll that even the pandemic couldn’t break.

The running time of MI8 is 170 minutes and my only real criticism of the film is that this is about 30 minutes too long and just a little too self-indulgent from Cruise (who is heavily involved in production), director Christopher McQuarrie, or both. For example, there is some very pedestrian exposition at the beginning that could easily have been shaved off. The scene (or sequence, if you’re a filmmaker) is both too lengthy – an attempt to remind audiences of not only the events of MI7, but that this is the culmination of the whole film series (it includes flashbacks to all of the other films) – and pointless. Pointless because the plot is so complex (and implausible, but this is science fiction so I won’t quibble) that I’d completely lost track by the time the explanation ended, in spite of having watched MI7 relatively recently.

Cruise is now 62 and remains determined to show us that with dedication and a few hundred million in the bank one can stay in peak condition in one’s seventh decade, spending much of the film with his shirt off (even in the Bering Sea – look it up on Google Maps). One thing that did strike me, though, was that for all of Cruise’s flexing, the franchise has become very child friendly. It’s always been fun and full of over-the-top stunts, but MI1 and MI2 (the latter in particular) had scenes and themes aimed at an adult audience. There is only one scene with extreme violence in MI8, which all occurs offscreen, and when Cruise does get horizontal with co-star Hayley Attwell (playing Grace, a former thief) it’s for a chaste cuddle in a decompression chamber. Which is fine, but the flashbacks to the earlier instalments reminded me that those films had a little more appeal for grown-ups. Notwithstanding, if you’ve watched one or more of the first seven, I recommend seeing how the story ends and, if you can find one screening it, seeing that ending at the cinema. ***

Rediscovered! Lost tales by Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker | review by Rafe McGregor

Rediscovered! Lost tales by Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, Newell & Newell, paperback (saddle stitch binding), £13.99, 6 April 2025

Newell & Newell is a small press run by husband and wife Adam and Sharon Newell in Penrith in Cumbria. The press is located in their secondhand bookshop, Withnail Books, which I found via The Book Guide, a website I cannot recommend highly enough for anyone who still enjoys the experiences of travel, old-fashioned browsing, and being able to hold books in your hands before you buy them. As far as I can tell (because I’ve not had the opportunity to visit yet), Newell & Newell publishes limited editions of 250 chapbooks every few months, which can only be ordered via the Withnail Books website and which sell out very quickly. Rediscovered! is my second purchase, following The Croglin Vampire: England’s Earliest Vampire Legend? in November last year. I think The Croglin Vampire sold out before its publication, but at the time of writing there are still a few dozen copies of Rediscovered! available. Rediscovered! is a pair of chapbooks from two of the three (or four, depending on whom one asks) masters of Gothic fiction in general and Victorian horror more specifically: Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and Bram Stoker, author of Dracula (1897). Along with Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), these two novels complete the trilogy of quintessential Gothic horror, with either Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) or Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895) sometimes expanding the trilogy to a quartet.

With such a pedigree, there is bound to be a great deal of interest in anything and everything Shelley and Stoker wrote and Stoker’s short stories, several of which I reviewed way back in TQF24, have aged surprisingly well. Stoker published about 50 in total and ‘Gibbett Hill’ is not available anywhere else either in print or online. It was published in the Dublin edition of the Daily Express on 17 December 1890 and is 11 pages long in its chapbook form, accompanied by a print of J.M.W. Turner’s ‘Hind Head Hill’ (1811), the etching that inspired the story. ‘Gibbett Hill’ describes the unnamed narrator’s three encounters with a trio of sinister children on the road between London and Portsmouth and is a beautifully written weird tale, albeit not one of Stoker’s best. My main interest was the extent to which it anticipates The Lair of the White Worm (1911), which I regard as his unfinished masterpiece and has fascinated me for many years. ‘Gibbett Hill’ shares several of the flaws of the novel, including Orientalism and a lack of internal logic, but is nonetheless well worth reading.

Shelley published about half as many short stories as Stoker, most of which appeared in The Keepsake, The London Magazine, and The Liberal. ‘The Ghost of the Private Theatricals: A True Story’ was published in The Keepsake at the end of 1843 and remained unavailable to the public until it was released by Newell & Newell in a limited edition of 100 in 2019. The chapbook, which includes the 23-page short story and an afterword by Adam Newell, is accompanied by a print of ‘Heidelberg’ (1845), an engraving after Turner that may have been Shelley’s source of inspiration. ‘The Ghost of the Private Theatricals’ is narrated by the aristocratic Ida Edelstein and set in Schloss Trübenstern, a fictional castle in Germany. Ida travels to the castle with her brother to attend the wedding of her sister and the story evinces all the typical and much-loved Gothic Romantic preoccupations with tortured family relationships, brooding ancestral homes, and unexplained deaths. The private theatrical of the title is an unnamed play that the characters agree to stage, a ghostly tale within a ghostly tale which serves as the engine of what is ultimately a delightful and suspenseful exemplar of its genre.

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Trickster

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower was intended to be part of a series of six novels, which was planned as Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay, but only the first two were ever published, in 1993 and 1998 respectively. The first three Parables take their titles from the three biblical parables of the same names, in the Books of Luke and Matthew, and each of the published novels concludes with a quote from the relevant Book. In The Parable of the Sower, the sower is symbolic of God and the seed of God’s message. Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist of the first two Parables, creates a new religion called Earthseed and founds the first Earthseed community in Humboldt County, California. Following the discovery of extrasolar planets that sustain life in 2025, the ultimate aim of Earthseed is to ‘take root among the stars’. The Parables are referred to as Butler’s Earthseed books in order to distinguish them from her other two series and her standalone novels. In The Parable of the Talents, the monetary talents (a unit of weight used as currency) are symbolic of personal talents (God-given abilities and aptitudes), both of which are granted for the purpose of serving their respective masters. Olamina dedicates her life to the service of Earthseed, which becomes one of the most popular religions in the Americas, and launches the first starship in 2090, the final year of her life. In The Parable of the Trickster, which is better known as The Parable of the Dishonest Steward (or the Shrewd Manager), the steward’s alternating incompetence and prowess is symbolic of the inability of human beings to serve both God and money. The Earthseed settlers on the planet Bow (an abbreviation of 'Rainbow') cannot both cling to the form of life they had on Earth and thrive in the extrasolar colony.

Butler began work on Parable of the Trickster in 1989, made numerous false starts from 1999 to 2004, and continued compiling notes and drafts until her death, early in 2006. The premises, outlines, and fragments have been available in The Huntington’s Octavia E. Butler Papers archive since 2013 and I was lucky enough to gain access to these while researching Literary Theory and Criminology in 2022. There are several aspects of Butler’s premises, outlines, and fragments that remain fairly consistent, most of which concern the protagonist and setting of the novel. There is less consistently about the structure of the narrative, but two plotlines can be discerned as well as a third that is only sketched. Butler seemed certain that Trickster would be written in the first person from the perspective of the protagonist and narrator, who would be named either Imara Hope Lucas, Imara Wright Drew, or Imara Dove Holly. Imara is an African American woman who was adopted by Olamina during her teens (between 13 and 17) and is aged between 35 and 45 when the story begins. Imara is an Earthseed therapist in some versions and a sharer (suffering from the organic delusional disorder called hyper-empathy, like Olamina) in others. Some time between 2090 and 2095 she leaves Earth in an Earthseed Instar with between 4700 and 5339 colonists to realise the Earthseed destiny. Given the dates this appears to be the starship fleet led by the Christopher Columbus described at the end of Talents.

After a flight of between 107 and 137 years, during which Imara is placed in DiaPause, a method of suspended animation, she arrives on Bow, which is 11.8 light years away from Earth. Bow can support human life, with plenty of oxygen and water. The planet has no moon, is cooler than Earth, and has days that are just under 20 hours long. The ships have arrived near the equator, where it is warm, wet, and windy and the plan is to build the colony in a river valley. In most versions, Bow has no fauna beyond earthworms and microorganisms and flora that is limited to a slimy moss-like substance. The settlers immediately miss the beauty of Earth, a feeling that is exacerbated by the fact that the colours on Bow are all muted and the atmosphere smelly, varying from being merely unpleasant to smelling like vomit. Two of the three plotlines begin five years after the arrival of the humans, by which time there is a fully functioning settlement and society. The colony is divided into 50 to 60 housing groups of 30 to 100 people each, built in a protective semicircle around their crops and water supply. Each housing group has a communal gathering house at its centre, but the individual houses are inhabited by nuclear families. The aim is to develop the colony by having a new housing group split off from the parental house once a group reaches 100 inhabitants. The minimal governmental functions, including leadership by an Earthseed shaper (clergyperson) and record-keeping by an archivist, are based in a gathering hall, which serves as the community centre. The colony is multinational and multi-ethnic, with each of the colonists being selected for their skill set. By the fifth year, the colony is fully established, with the colonists living off the land. At some time in the future, after Trickster, it will break up, with some housing groups choosing to merge into a town, others developing around industrialised farms, and others adopting pre-industrial gatherer or monastic lifestyles. Once one moves beyond the protagonist and the setting, there is little consistency in the Trickster archive. Three plotlines nonetheless emerge from the notes and fragments, two of which are fairly substantial. I shall consolidate the notes and fragments to produce an account that sacrifices accuracy for coherence.

In the first, which includes a fragment of 47 pages, Imara Lucas Hope is the expedition’s archivist. She was raped by her mother’s partner at the age of 13, became pregnant with his child, was abandoned by the couple, and tried to commit suicide in an orphanage. The unborn baby died, but she survived to be adopted by Olamina. Imara and Olamina became very close as the years progressed and she was appointed ‘Guardian of the Ashes of Lauren Oya Olamina’, which are to be scattered on Bow in an Earthseed funeral on Day 2000 of the arrival of humanity. The narrative begins on that day, in medias res as the community leader, shaper Eric Parnell, appears to lose his mind when he starts shouting nonsense in his opening speech. Imara, waiting to play her part in the ceremony, has a hallucination of the thousands of colonists in the hall panicking, stampeding, and injuring one another in a race to exit. Eric is taken to the clinic and Imara realises that he, she, and the community’s dentist, Luis Huerta, have all had hallucinations. They all seek physical explanations, but none can be found and they have concerns about their sanity, worrying that they may not be able to cope with prolonged exposure to the conditions on Bow (which can support them physically, but perhaps not psychologically). Claire Lawless, Eric’s deputy, and Muir Parnell, Eric’s wife, have also been hallucinating and there is some tension between Claire and Imara. In the following chapter, Imara wakes up the next morning feeling fine, but immediately hallucinates a conversation with Olamina. Seven more people are admitted to the clinic with hallucinations during the day and Imara realises that the community’s psychiatrist, Ross Kuusi, is trying to conceal the fact that he is also hallucinating. Concerns about prolonged exposure to the planet are exacerbated when Imara works out that everyone who has been hallucinating is either part of the last transit crew or the first ground crew, the only people who were awake in the first 100 days of arrival.

In the second plotline, which has more dedicated fragments but of shorter lengths than the first, Imara Wright Drew is the expedition’s psychiatrist. The narrative opens with her awakening from her ‘coffin-sized DiaPause tank’ and gradually recovering her senses and motor control. Imara is part of the first ground crew and the reports from those who have explored Bow are negative: while it can clearly sustain human life everyone has found being on it either disconcerting, unpleasant, or both. Imara finds out that after she was put in her DiaPause tank, her husband, Powell Davidson, changed his mind and decided not to join the Earthseed expedition. She is given a letter from him apologising for his decision and realises that he is now long dead. In the following chapter, Imara begins to regain her strength and other colonists are introduced: Aaron Wen, a shaper; Nissa Swan, an anthropologist; Julian Gamero, a farmer; and others. Imara begins helping other people wake from DiaPause. Three days later, Nissa goes missing. She had previously explored Bow and claimed to have seen an indigenous species. A search party is sent out for her. They find her trail, track her, and quickly locate her corpse at the bottom of a canyon. Imara is asked to attend the scene. As soon as she goes outside she has an hallucination and it will subsequently be suggested that the hallucinations were responsible for both Nissa’s sighting of an indigenous species and her death by falling. Imara starts thinking about adapting to rather than curing the hallucinations, at least in the short term, and this is both the resolution to the plot and the core theme of the narrative.

In the third plotline, which is sketched in the barest detail, Imara Dove Holly is the expedition’s law enforcement agent, the Sheriff of Bow, selected personally by Olamina before the expedition departed. Imara is married to a farmer, Aurio Cruz. When she does not have law enforcement duties to fulfil, she assists both her husband and the colony’s archivist. Five years after the colonist’s arrival someone sets a fire outside the largest greenhouse of the Rose Housing Group, causing considerable damage. When Imara begins her investigation, she has her first hallucination and subsequently learns that many people are hallucinating frequently. There is a second fire, in consequence of which one of the colonists is killed. The ubiquity of the hallucinations make the case almost impossible to solve, but Imara eventually finds a way to make use of the hallucinations to detect the arsonist while the medical professions continue to seek a cure. Strangely, given the amount of relative detail provided, there is no suggestion of a central theme in the archivist’s plot. The strongest suggestion is in the psychiatrist plot, in which the solution to the problem of the hallucinations is not to ‘cure’ or overcome them, but to accept them as one of the features of life on Bow in order to minimise their impact on everyday life. The sheriff’s plot goes even further, suggesting that the hallucinations are not just a phenomenon that human beings can live with, but a phenomenon that can actually be exploited for gains of some sort. There is an allusion to this idea in the archivist’s plot, in which the narrator reflects that ‘two of the most important tenets of Earthseed were foresight and adaptability’ before Parnell addresses the community about their adaptation to life on Bow. In the context of the other plotlines and extracts, the double emphasis on adaptation immediately prior to Parnell’s very public hallucination may well be an instance of foreshadowing the resolution to come: adaptation rather than cure.

The theme of adaptation is developed in Butler’s notes by means of two concepts or metaphors, the xenograft and the trickster. A xenograft is an interspecies transplant and she described the story as one in which people xenograft humanity onto a new world whose immune system tries to expel them. The resistance of Bow to humanity is the sense in which the planet itself is the trickster of the title and parable and the hallucinations suffered by those with prolonged exposure to the planet are the most dangerous means by which it tries to expel them. Butler was explicit as to the planet’s trickery, ‘a world that seems to be one thing (dull, drab, and harmless) and is something else entirely.’ Her planned conclusion to the novel was that the colonists would be forced to make a choice, ‘to try to hold on to what they were as normal human beings on Earth or to allow the change they have both fought and adapted to for years to continue.’ She also wrote that in the end Bow ‘will adopt them and they will be of it.’ As a sequel to both Sower and Talents, this theme is completely consistent consistent with the Earthseed principle of ‘God is change’ and Olamina’s insistence on employing it as a guide to one’s life. To return to the biblical parable, the human beings on Bow cannot retain their human form of life on Bow, but must develop and establish a new form of life that is adapted to the planet on which they have chosen to live. This also provides a neat juxtaposition to the dark note at the end of Talents, in which the starship is revealed to have been named the Christopher Columbus, predicting that the form of life in the extraterrestrial colony will be as unjust and unsustainable as it was in terrestrial colonies. As such, it seems as if Trickster was intended to proceed through conflict and tragedy to a conclusion with life-affirming meaning. As Butler writes: ‘The community will suffer greatly at the hands of the hallucinations, but eventually pull through.’

Butler had little more than premises for the second half of the series. The colony would divide into two in Parable of the Teacher, with one group determined to adapt to the planet and the other determined to conquer it. Parable of Chaos would see the rise of ‘an absolute Stalinesque figure’ whose every word and whim is passed into law by his sycophantic followers. Finally, in Parable of Clay, humanity would not only have adapted to life on the new planet, but actually evolved into a new species or subspecies. The themes the four novels set on Bow would explore would be the roles of creativity and repression in adaptation to the environment and new ways of being human that revealed marginalised aspects of humanity. Butler suffered from high blood pressure in her final years and died following a fall while walking in Lake Forest Park, in Seattle, at the age of 58. She became the first Black woman to be a published science fiction writer when Doubleday released her first novel, Patternmaster, in 1976. Along with Samuel R. Delany, she is recognised as inaugurating Afrofuturism as a literary movement. As far as the continued relevance of her work, Butler’s Earthseed novels are only matched by Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 feature film, Children of Men, and the eight seasons of HBO’s Game of Thrones, released from 2011 to 2019.

The Last Days of New Paris | review by Rafe McGregor

The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville, Picador, paperback, £9.00, 23 February 2017, ISBN 9781447296553

China Miéville has been publishing speculative fiction for the better part of three decades, beginning with King Rat in 1998. In the course of this career, he has become known as the foremost exponent of the New Weird, rivalled only by Jeff VanderMeer, and last year he published The Book of Elsewhere, co-authored with none other than Keanu Reeves. I defined the New Weird as philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounding the alienation within ourselves in Weird Fiction, Old, New, and In-Between, also published last year. It is difficult to avoid appreciating The Last Days of New Paris in one of two misleading contexts. The first is as an Axis victory alternative history along the lines of Philip K. Dick’s 1962 The Man in the High Castle or Len Deighton’s 1978 SS-GB, both of which have been released as popular television series, the former in 2015 and the latter in 2017. Miéville weaves two narratives together – one set in a recognisable France of 1941 and the other in an unrecognisable Paris of 1950 – and populates each with a mix of real and fictional people, but does not invite one to ruminate on the possible consequences of, for example, Franklin Roosevelt’s assassination (Dick) or a Luftwaffe victory in the Battle of Britain (Deighton). Instead, the geopolitics that led up to and followed on from the ‘S-Blast’ (presumably ‘surrealist blast’), the explosion that both created living manifestations of surrealist works of art and opened the gates of hell, are for the most part circumstantial. The second context, which may be related to the first, is to see the novella as a response to the global rise of nationalism, often in extreme forms, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, but it is neither a call for political resistance nor a naïve allegory of art’s revolutionary power.

The Last Days of New Paris consists of nine chapters, with the odd numbers devoted to events in the 1950 present and the even numbers to events in the 1941 past. The story is followed by an afterword and a notes section and my only criticism concerns the inclusion of this supplementary material. The afterword is subtitled ‘On Coming to Write The Last Days of New Paris’ and constitutes a curious conceit in which Miéville claims to have met Thibaut, the fictional protagonist of 1950, and to have merely edited the manuscript passed to him. This was a common device in Victorian fiction, but contemporary readers require no such faux guarantees and the superfluity is exacerbated by Miéville’s reference to non-existent sketches he has (not) included. The notes are explanations of the artworks referred to in the narrative and feel gratuitous in an age where reader research is almost effortless. Miéville’s textual representations of these works are a seamless merging of the realistic with the oneiric and his expert evocation of the pervasive sense of the strange that is New Paris equips the reader with all he or she requires to experience the intense pleasure afforded by the novella.

New Paris is Paris after the S-Blast, which occurred in 1941. In Miéville’s alternative Europe, Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) – the German drive to the Channel in May 1940 – was sufficient to cause the collapse of France, making Fall Rot (Case Red, the push west and south the following month) unnecessary. The S-Blast transformed Paris from a city of occupation to a city of resistance, with various French factions rising up against the Germans and the ‘battalions from below’ rising up to join the chaos. The resistance includes the Free French, led by Charles de Gaulle and backed by the United States, and the Main à plume, the surrealist irregulars, some of whom (like Thibaut) have been able to harness the power released by the detonation. The most significant effect of the S-Blast was not the release of hell’s minions (who show only a passing interest in the city), but to create the living manifestations of surrealist artworks, ‘manifs’, that roam the streets either on their own or under the less than perfect command of surrealist or SS handlers. By 1950 the Germans have sealed the ‘city become free-fire zone and hunting grounds for the impossible’ and are attempting to destroy the resisters by all available means, including the control of manifs and devils and the creation of manifs of their own, using the work of Nazi artists like Arno Breker. The S-Blast has of course given literal meaning to metaphors such as art coming to life, having a life of its own, and being a form of life.

The Last Days of New Paris is an extraordinarily original work that underscores Miéville’s considerable ingenuity and innovation. The opening scene is wildly fantastic, a suicidal charge by the Vélo – the manifestation of Leonora Carrington’s I am an Amateur of Velocipedes (1941), a bicycle-woman centaur – at the German lines. There is also a satisfyingly overdetermined symmetry in the work’s design as the onset is bookended by the appearance of Fall Rot, a Panzer III-giant man centaur, in the first stage of the story’s tripartite climax. The symmetry is superbly complex: in the same way that science and the supernatural are the dual interests of Jack Parsons, the real-life protagonist of the 1941 narrative, so Fall Rot has been created by the combination of the biological experimentation of Josef Mengele and the perverted faith of Robert Alesch, a Catholic priest who collaborated with the Nazis. In a further parallel, both of the plots begin with the arrival of an American on the scene, Parsons in Vichy Marseilles in 1941 and an American photojournalist named Sam in the free part of Paris in 1950. Sam is researching her own book, The Last Days of New Paris, a photographic essay-within-a-novella that pays homage to Dick’s The Grasshopper Lies Heavy novel-within-a-novel.

Miéville is too sophisticated a writer to promote a conception of art as essentially opposed to oppression and his mention of Breker and the second part of the climax (which I shall not reveal) shows that he is well aware of the variety of ends art can serve. While Breton’s surrealism provided a Marxist opposition to European fascism and American Fordism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s futurism provided active and enthusiastic support for Mussolini and the fascist sympathies of many prominent modernists are well documented. Miéville is concerned with surrealism in particular over and above art more generally because movements like surrealism (and now New Weird) resist nationalism and elitism in virtue of being politico-artistic movements in the first instance. Surrealism is not an artistic movement in the service of Marxism, but a Marxist artistic movement. As such, The Last Days of New Paris calls for a revolt in art rather than a revolt in politics, for integrating politics into art rather than employing art as a means to political ends. The link from New Paris to the contemporary world comes in the perfectly pitched anti-climax with which the narrative concludes, as Thibaut takes it upon himself to write his own book, to start ‘from scratch, redo history, make it mine.’ In Thibaut’s return to the fray to write his revolution, Miéville urges readers to their own artistic revolt, to the reconception of art as essentially rather than circumstantially political and the New Weird as essentially rather than circumstantially resistant to nationalism, elitism, and related mass harms.

Apologies and scheduling: TQF in 2025

A quick note to apologise to everyone who has sent in submissions for issues 78 to 81 and is waiting for me to do my bit. The magazine isn't dead, don't worry, work is progressing, albeit slowly, on them all, but my daytime work has been keeping me busy in the evenings too, so I've been struggling to finish things off.

I'm past the worst of that now, though, and I'll be cracking on with all the outstanding work needed on TQF. Most of the next three issues are already typeset and waiting to be proofread, while my co-editor John and my co-habitee Mrs Theaker have been assiduously reading new submissions, and Douglas Ogurek has been hard at work at the next Unsplatterpunk! special.

It seems sensible to close submissions for regular issues until October, since there's no point adding more to the queue just yet. But submissions to Unsplatterpunk! 8 are open till the end of April.

So, my plan for the year is now to put out an issue of TQF monthly until I am all caught up, working through the issues already in hand, and slotting Unsplatterpunk! 8 in when it's ready.

My apologies again to everyone. Each time I said I was hoping to have the next issue ready at the weekend or by the end of the month, I genuinely did mean it, but I ended up having to put other things first. Don't get me wrong, I've been loving my work this year, but by the end of the day I was too worn out to do much more than read manga and play a bit of Monster Train. I haven't finished a single novel yet this year!

Finally, I have to express my gratitude to Douglas Ogurek and Rafe McGregor, who have kept the lights on here with reviews and articles while I've been slacking off.

Midnight, Water City | review by Rafe McGregor

Midnight, Water City by Chris McKinney, Soho Press, paperback, £13.79, 15 July 2021, ISBN 9781641293686

 

Chris McKinney’s career as an author began with The Tattoo in 2000 and Midnight, Water City is his seventh novel. The science fiction mystery is his first work of genre fiction, the first not set in his home state of Hawaii, and the first instalment of the Water City Trilogy, which continues with Eventide, Water City and concludes with Sunset, Water City, both published in 2023. Midnight, Water City is narrated in the first person by an anonymous narrator and in the present tense. It took me some time to realise both, which is a mark of the author’s literary skill. While use of the present tense can make for a more immediate, engrossing reading experience, it is difficult to do well and can have the opposite effect when it fails, undermining the suspension of disbelief. The narrative opens in 2142, with the murder of Akira Kimura, forty years after she saved the planet from an extinction event. Kimura was initially despised for being the bearer of bad news when she identified Sessho-seki (Japanese for ‘The Killing Rock’), the asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and then because of her undisguised misanthropy when interviewed about it. Although she thought that only a tiny proportion of humanity was worth saving, she turned her genius to the creation of Ascalon, a cosmic ray powerful enough to alter the path of the asteroid before it destroyed Earth. The weapon worked and Kimura was propelled to unprecedented celebrity status, revered as a saint for the next four decades.

The narrator was recruited as Kimura’s head of security when she was receiving death threats and has been her right-hand man ever since, switching between the roles of bodyguard and assassin as required. Once protecting her was no longer a full-time job, he returned to his police duties, but received a call asking for his services again immediately before the novel begins. The narrator arrives too late, discovering Kimura dead in her home, literally cut to pieces in a hibernation chamber that extends the lifespans of 'The Money' (the socioeconomic elite) in the 22^nd century. (It is not difficult to imagine Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg working on something like this in the near future, if they aren’t already). Later, he receives a posthumous message from Kimura, asking him to find her daughter, also named Ascalon, in order to apologise to her on Kimura’s behalf. He is shocked at the revelation as he has no knowledge of the child and realises that he did not know Kimura nearly as well as he thought. The story is set in motion very quickly, in the first four pages, and by the end of the first third of the narrative the narrator has resigned from the police and accepted his twofold mission, to detect Kimura’s killer and to find her daughter. Despite being advertised as a ‘neo-noir procedural’ – an appeal to the many fans of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and its sequel – the novel is very much in the hardboiled detective genre, with the protagonist driven by both rather than just one of the two standard plot devices, the murder mystery and the missing person, reminding me of both Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) and Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987). In keeping with the finest traditions of hardboiled detective fiction, the narrator is a complex character with a tainted past and hidden depths, in addition to an idiosyncratic type of synaesthesia that gives him a head start against other detectives.

McKinney not only sets the plot in motion with ease and expertise, but handles the exposition effectively and economically. By the seventh page one already has a good grasp of his 22^nd century, including Kimura’s unique status, the preference for living in submarine high rises, the existence of suits that control one’s environment completely, the ability to prolong the human lifespan artificially, and much more. Again, it is a testament to McKinney’s literary skill that he is able to communicate so much so quickly without committing the creative writing sin of ‘information dumping’. My sole criticism of the novel is that while the worldbuilding is for the most part conducted with a light touch, it never stops (chapter 21 of 27 is, for example, mostly exposition) and the cumulative effect is a little like wading through water: unusual and pleasing at first, but becoming gradually more exhausting as one continues. Notwithstanding, Midnight, Water City is a seamless blend of crime, science fiction, and social commentary that can be read as either the first in the trilogy or as a standalone mystery. The novel has been widely and generously reviewed since publication and received as much – if not more – praise from crime fiction critics as science fiction critics.

 

Haunted House by J.A. Konrath (independently published) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Figging and maniacal ghosts: horror/thriller uses well-developed characters and strong plotting to bring life to haunted house trope.

Everybody knows that you don’t go to Butler House, a supposedly haunted mansion on a former slave plantation in South Carolina. It’s also the perfect setting for a fear experiment conducted by Dr. Forenzi. Haunted House, the sixth twisty instalment in The Konrath Dark Thriller Collective, brings together characters from throughout the country (and from the previous books). Each of them is offered a monetary award plus a bonus in exchange for participating in the experiment: the alcoholic mother will get reunited with her child, the disgraced molecular biologist will get his old research job back and so on. All of it seems a bit shady. 

Konrath effectively delays conflict by building suspense as he delves into characters’ backstories and problems to align the reader with them. The novel also explores the history of Butler House and how its sadistic owners psychologically and physically tortured slaves. Additionally, each fear experiment participant has already faced a hellish ordeal ranging from being locked in a basement with a maniac to being trapped on an island with a cannibal who files his teeth. You’re with these characters, and you want them to escape. 

When the key players arrive at Butler House, they encounter other, more typical horror characters: a skeptical author, a specialist in debunking paranormal phenomena, and of course, a medium. They also meet the boisterous prostitute-turned-dominatrix call girl Moni, a major source of comic relief. Participants are allowed to bring one weapon; Moni brings a plunger full of heroin. She repeatedly refers to something called “figging” that she does with her male clientele. Konrath plays with the reader by withholding the definition of this term – can you resist looking it up until the novel ends?

The participants find themselves in a 13 Ghosts type of environment, with the spirits from the house’s sordid past supposedly rising up to terrorize them. A giggling, bare-chested guy who wears a gas mask, smells like meat and enjoys cutting himself with a cleaver. A slave driver who uses a whip and has a patch over one eye. A vengeful slave with four arms stemming from a Civil War-era experiment. Konrath keeps the reader wondering: is what is happening real, or is it a trick to frighten the subjects? The dangers escalate, and the prospect of escape decreases. All the while, the reader roots for the underdogs. 

The cop Mankowski seems the most grounded of the characters. In one scene, there’s a fascinating interaction with a serial killer in prison. The killer relishes telling Mankowski the awful things he’s done to his victims. 

A group of strangers getting trapped in a threatening environment has been done many times but rarely so entertainingly. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

The Terror of Blue John Gap | review by Rafe McGregor

‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ by Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Conan Doyle Weirdbook: Five Novelettes Comprising Doyle’s Essential Horror edited by Rafe McGregor
Theaker’s Paperback Library, 148pp, £7.54, July 2010, ISBN 9780956153326

 

The Victorians were obsessed with doubles, whether the literal evil twin brother of the doppelgänger popularised by E.TA. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde or the figural pairing of the civilised and the savage in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Edward Prendick and Dr Moreau, and Charles Marlow and Mr Kurtz. Conan Doyle was no exception to the rule. Doubles appear in two of his Sherlock Holmes stories, ‘The Final Problem’ (1893) and ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ (1923), in the pairing of Holmes and Professor Moriarty and Professor Presbury and Presbury-on-serum respectively, and the fact that Dr Watson never sees Moriarty raises the intriguing possibility that he is actually a doppelgänger. Doyle also deployed doubling in his horror fiction, most notably in ‘A Pastoral Horror’ (1890) – Father Verhagen and diseased-Verhagen – and ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ (1910), both of which I selected for Theaker’s Paperback Library’s The Conan Doyle Weirdbook.

‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ is an epistolary novelette of just over seven thousand words, which is divided into seven diary entries by Dr James Hardcastle, from 17 April 1907 to 10 June 1907, bookended by a foreword and a single-sentence conclusion by an implied author. Although Hardcastle is introduced as a man of science, he was terminally ill with tuberculosis at the time of the events chronicled and the story is replete with suggestions that he is an unreliable narrator. The repeated reflections, allusions, and intimations of mental illness are matched by a carefully constructed undermining of the possibility of corroboration. Hardcastle thinks he hears, sees, and shoots a blind, ‘bear-like’ beast taller and broader than an elephant and ten times the size of the biggest bear, but all the reader knows for certain is that he entered Blue John Gap mine, fell, and lost consciousness. Hardcastle first hears about the beast from a young man named Armitage on 17 April, when he favours prosaic explanations of missing sheep and a damaged wall. By 3 May, Armitage has himself disappeared and Hardcastle leaps to the completely baseless conclusion that the beast is responsible. Hardcastle’s shot either misses or fails to draw blood and his vague description of his own wounds – concussion, a broken arm, and two broken ribs – is ambiguous as to whether they were caused by a swat from a gargantuan mole or a fall down a mine shaft. Finally, the locals are quick to dissuade ‘adventurous gentlemen’ from descending on their peaceful haven in the Derbyshire Dales and repair the gap to prevent any further exploration.

I’m increasingly convinced that Doyle’s achievement is similar if not identical to that of Henry James in The Turn of the Screw (1898), where the interpretations of psychological and supernatural horror are equally valid to the extent that the ambiguity is constitutive of the work’s literary value. If the beast is an overgrown figment of Hardcastle’s imagination, then it is likely the product of his unconscious and ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ a psychological horror story. Hardcastle is exemplary of the Victorian gentleman, a well-educated and well-mannered man of reason with a steadfast moral compass, a propensity for bold action when provoked, and the gender, class, and ecological prejudices of his time. As he narrates the majority of the narrative, the reader becomes acquainted with both his actions and his thoughts. The beast, in contrast, remains entirely enigmatic, with much of its appearance left to the reader’s imagination and scant explanation of its evolution, habitat, or behaviour. It is, in short, wholly Other to humanity in general and Hardcastle in particular. If the beast is real, then the narrative recalls the novels of one of Doyle’s contemporaries, H. Rider Haggard, whose serial protagonist Allan Quartermain is the archetypal Great White Hunter. For Haggard and the majority of Victorians, nature was simply a resource to be mastered, adapted, and exploited for humanity’s benefit, notwithstanding the widespread acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Yet Doyle’s perspective on the relation between Hardcastle and the beast, whether mental or material, is much more sophisticated and explored with a calculated literary artifice that employs two converging configurations.

First, he distances his readers from Hardcastle as the narrative progresses, a cumulative effect achieved by the combination of repeated references to his unreliability with an escalation of his obsession to uncover the mystery of the mine, an investigation he is patently unfit to undertake. Hardcastle is most unsympathetic in his determination that Armitage has fallen victim to the beast, convincing himself that the beast has taken Armitage in order to justify the satisfaction of his own desire to hunt and kill it. Second, Doyle invites readers to empathise with the beast by means of the late revelation of its vulnerability (blindness) and the even later speculation as to its origin (earthly not infernal). The epistemic ambiguity is thus extended to the ethical and the story closes with the question of whether our sympathies should lie with the beast or with Hardcastle. The beast is the most complex of Doyle’s doubles because in spite of representing the brutish, savage, and untamed aspects of humanity, it is not presented as meriting approbation – like diseased-Verhagen, Moriarty, and Presbury-on-serum. As such, the doubling of Hardcastle and the beast is an instantiation of what Mark Bould refers to as the environmental uncanny in The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (2021): the recognition by human beings that they are in the presence of nonhuman agency, which draws attention to the play of identity and difference between human and nonhuman. Whether produced by Hardcastle’s unconscious or by natural selection, the beast sheds light on the relation between the human and the natural worlds.

It would be stretching credulity to categorise ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ as eco-fiction – fiction that takes the integration and interdependence of humanity and the environment as its subject – but Doyle’s deployment of doubling in the novelette is distinct from the other three examples I cited. Diseased-Verhagen is a serial killer, Moriarty an evil genius, and Presbury-on-serum a rapist-in-waiting. The beast is neither homicidal nor evil nor rapacious. While the zoocidal Hardcastle’s agency is impaired by his obsession, the beast has sufficient control of its instincts to refrain from making a meal of his unconscious body. That ‘awful moment when we were face to face’ is likely to have been awful for each of the doubles, the pair of which provide a reminder of the invisible ties among all living species.

The Accident Season by Moïra Fowley-Doyle (Kathy Dawson Books) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Young adult novel hides sexual and physical abuse within a bubble gum wrapper of tarot cards, costume parties, kissing and witches.

The Accident Season focuses on a trio of Irish teens: seventeen-year-old narrator Cara Morris, her best friend Bea (a witch — not the supernatural kind), and Cara’s ex-stepbrother Sam whose crush on Cara is abundantly clear.

Every October is “accident season” for the Morrises due to the inordinate number of negative happenings: cuts, broken bones, severed relationships, and worse. This accident season, according to Bea’s tarot cards, is going to be awful. 

The trio undertakes a quest to find classmate Elsie, an outcast who keeps cropping up in Cara’s photos. Elsie has no friends, and yet people know her as the girl who oversees the school library’s “secrets booth.” Here students type out their secrets and give them to Elsie to keep safe. After her father died, Cara was friends with Elsie, who is fading into the shadows – Cara can’t even remember the semi-doppelganger’s last name.

The novel also explores the somewhat forbidden attraction between Cara and Sam – his father Christopher was married to Cara’s artist mother, but he left abruptly. The mother has assumed guardianship of Sam. Then there’s Cara’s sister Alice, dating a handsome and manipulative older vocalist from a band. 

The Accident Season contains lots of talk about masks and hiding one’s true feelings. The Cara/Bea/Sam trio isn’t very popular, but it hosts the Black Cat and Whiskey Moon Masquerade Ball, the point of which is that attendees will take off their figurative human masks to show what they really are. And they’re gaining popularity because of it.

The tension escalates as things come to the surface near the end, but until then, it’s a rather dull read. One can take only so much hanging out and smoking and drinking and tarot cards and writing poetry.—Douglas J. Ogurek***