Kindle Scribe (2024 Release, 64GB) | review by Stephen Theaker

I always regretted not buying the Kindle DX, for its big e-ink screen, so when the Kindle Scribe came out I was tempted. But I already had a Boox Note 2 (“BN2”), which does all the same things and much more besides, being an Android e-ink tablet rather than just an ereader. So I didn’t buy a Scribe until its second edition came along, it was on sale, and I was offered a substantial discount in return for trading in my Kindle Oasis. The Oasis was nice to read on in summer, but it got too cold on winter nights, so off it went.

The most important aspect of any ereader is the screen, and the clarity of text, and on the Scribe text looks pristine at larger sizes, backlight on or off, and also at smaller sizes in two columns to create a more bookish reading experience. Comics look terrific too, especially if you pick out a black-and-white book with nice square panels, or with a small enough page size to be readable a page at a time. I’ve read dozens of manga books this year as a direct result (the highlights have been Nina the Starry Bride, Witch Hat Atelier and Space Brothers).

Megalopolis | review by Rafe McGregor

Self-reflexive or self-indulgent?

Like many Anglophone readers of my generation, I suppose, I first came across ‘megalopolis’ in one of the many Judge Dredd comics published in 2000 AD magazine during the 1980s. The word was used to describe Dredd’s beat, ‘Mega-City One’, a gargantuan city covering the Eastern Seaboard of North America from Miami to Quebec City. I assumed both ‘megalopolis’ and ‘mega-city’ were science fiction inventions, but the Oxford English Dictionary taught me otherwise. ‘Megalopolis’ was used as far back as 1828, as a synonym for ‘metropolis’, and is now more commonly used to describe the contiguous built-up area formed when metropolises expand into one another (beginning with Los Angeles in the 1960s). ‘Megacity’ came much later, in 1967, and identifies a metropolis with more than 5 million residents (beginning with the Dallas-Fort Worth conurbation). In case anyone is interested, the biggest megacity in the world is currently Tokyo, with a population of approximately 39 million, and the biggest megacity in the US, New York, with 19 million. The setting of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is ‘New Rome’, an alternative, future New York, and the title also alludes to megalon, a material or mineral with magical properties that can regenerate and restore both cities and the people that live in them. When the narrative opens, protagonist Cesar Catalina (played by Adam Driver) has recently been awarded a Nobel Prize for his creation of megalon.

I first heard about Megalopolis long before it was released in September 2024 – not because of any especially effective marketing strategy, but because of the conditions of its conception and production. Coppola began thinking about it in the late 1970s and began work on it in the early 1980s. The original idea seems to have been something like a cinematic Ulysses (1922), James Joyce’s monumental reimagining of Homer’s Odyssey in 1904 Dublin (which is, in my opinion, the greatest novel ever published and ever likely to be published). Joyce’s source material was the most celebrated story ever told in the Western canon (or the second most celebrated, if you prefer the Iliad, which most scholars don’t), but Coppola’s was a curious choice. He had already tried something similar with Apocalypse Now (1979), a magnificent reimagining of Joseph Conrad’s brilliant novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), in South-East Asia during the Vietnam War. Megalopolis would, in contrast to both Apocalypse Now and Ulysses, reimagine a historical event, the Catilinarian conspiracy in the Roman Republic of 63 BCE, in a faintly futuristic New York. The conspiracy was an attempted coup d’état by Catilina, aimed at seizing power from consuls Cicero and Hybrida, and never passed into popular culture. (Though I consider myself an amateur historian, I had to look it up). Perhaps more problematic, where the monstrous complexity of Ulysses is to at least some extent clarified by knowledge of the Odyssey, knowledge of the historical conspiracy actually complicates the film: the fictional Catalina is called ‘Cesar’, but (Julius) Caesar (who is absent from the film) played a historical part; the attempted insurrection is by Clodio Pulcher (played by Shia LaBoeuf) whereas Clodius Pulcher opposed the coup; Hybrida and Cato have no fictional counterparts and there are several major characters without historical counterparts. Notwithstanding, Megalopolis is a reimagining, of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), one of the first feature length science fiction films and one of the greatest films ever screened.

By the turn of the century, Coppola had decided he would fund his ‘passion’ (or perhaps ‘vanity’) project himself and began shooting cityscapes of New York. At the turn of the next decade, he started writing the script. Eight years later, on the day before his 80^th birthday, he announced that he’d finished the script, raised $120 million for a budget, and was ready to start interviewing actors. Filming began in 2022 and rumours of Coppola’s erratic behaviour soon spread, followed by allegations that he was under the influence of cannabis for lengthy periods, had sexually assaulted extras, and exceeded the budget by $16 million. It’s difficult to know how much of this to take seriously, but when I read about it, the whole enterprise reminded me of Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), a documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unsuccessful attempt to film Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune (1965), in the 1970s. Jodorowsky’s venture was hubristic to the point of insanity, ethically dubious, and doomed to failure, although the documentary acquired both critical acclaim and a cult following. Immediately after watching Megalopolis, I discovered that Coppola commissioned director Mike Figgis to make a documentary of the making of his film, which was released this month as Megadoc (2025). I wonder if Coppola’s motivation for the documentary was vanity or finances? Probably a bit of both.

Megalopolis begins with truly masterful exposition: we are shown almost everything we need to know about what will follow in the first 12 minutes (of 133 from opening to closing credits). One is simultaneously struck by the film’s idiosyncratic yet impressive style, a unique combination of filmed theatre, tasteful CGI, breathtaking cinematography, and beautiful mise-en-scène. Very quickly, we learn that Catalina has a utopian vision for New Rome at odds with Mayor Franklyn Cicero (played by Giancarlo Esposito) and the ability to stop time, which works on everyone except for Cicero’s wayward daughter, Julia (played by Nathalie Emmanuel). The plot is briskly set in motion when Catalina’s ambitious girlfriend, television presenter Wow Platinum (played by Aubrey Plaza), realises he is still in love with his dead wife and seduces his aged uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (played by Jon Voight), the wealthiest man in New Rome. Meanwhile, Crassus’ son, Pulcher, a spoiled wastrel jealous of the success of everyone around him, is desperate to make a name for himself. The ingredients are all simmering in the pot and our appetites whetted for making a meal of what follows. Shortly over half an hour in, the stakes are established as the question of whether or not Catalina will succeed in realising his architectural and humanitarian dream and all of Cicero, Wow, Pulcher, and Catalina’s self-destructive guilt about his wife’s death framed as antagonists or obstacles. Later, Wow Crassus and Pulcher will emerge as the villains of the piece. Later still, they join forces and become an apparently unstoppable dystopian threat that raises the stakes and heightens the tension in an altogether satisfying way. So, what goes wrong?

I noted that the reimagined history was confusing. The pseudo-Roman setting constitutes part of Coppola’s distinctive style, which is pleasing on both the eye and the ear, but otherwise pointless. The same is true of the very limited advanced technology that seems to have been responsible for the film being classed as science fiction. While megalon is the means by which Catalina intends to realise his vision, that means could just as easily have been an imagined but mundane mineral or a fictional but plausible construction method. Similarly, the sole purpose of Catalina’s ability to stop time as far as the plot is concerned is to show that there is a genuine connection between him and Julia once they fall in love. If I appear overly critical of the film’s retrofuturism, the categorisation as science fiction in particular brings with it certain expectations, for example that the film will to at least some extent be about advanced technology or about the psychological or political impact (or both) of that technology. Futuristic megalon is as incidental as Catalina’s superpower and, like the Roman retrospection, serves a stylistic function, providing Coppola with the opportunity to present some (once again) aesthetically pleasing CGI. To remain with the plot a little longer, the story is very much that of Catalina’s ambition and the film a vehicle for Driver as Catalina. In that part, he either lacks the charisma or does not bring enough of it to this performance to engage and enthral the audience for the quantity and quality of his screen time. I found myself much more interested in Julia and Wow, watching the narrative as a tug of war between two powerful women with Catalina relegated to the role of the rope. As a final criticism of the plot, once all is lost for Catalina and Julia, the tables are turned by Crassus in a scene that is absolutely ridiculous. I think it’s meant to be amusing rather than dramatic, a deliberate parody of itself, but it’s neither tense nor funny and falls flat.

If Megalopolis is not about the Catilinarian conspiracy and/or its contemporary counterparts or the impact of advanced technology such as megalon, then what is it about? I mentioned Metropolis earlier and while there are several references to Lang’s masterpiece (and no doubt some that I missed), Megalopolis does not share its themes. Aside from a few superficial mentions of immigrants being unwelcome and some gratuitous police brutality, Coppola fails to offer a perspective on social justice and does not represent class conflict or even class consciousness. With politics, technology, and justice stripped away, there isn’t very much left. A theme that emerges with admirable speed in the expert exposition is some elaboration of the relationship between time and creation, the latter in the sense of artistic creativity. As the narrative progresses, a link is established with first utopian desire and then romantic love, all bound up within a temporal horizon. Early in the second half of the film, Catalina tells Julia, ‘I can’t create anything without you next to me’ and one is inevitably reminded of Coppola’s wife of six decades, Eleanor, to whom the film is dedicated and who died shortly before its release. The tyranny of time, the inspiration and perspiration of creation, dreams of a better way of life, loving as a way of living…Megalopolis is a film about itself, about the trials and tribulations of its own creation. Coppola has fictionalised his creative process from conception to production, creating an almost entirely self-reflexive epic. And while that doesn’t make it a poor film, it does mean that it doesn’t have very much to say to its audience, not much more than we could find in Megadoc anyway.

The critical response was initially described as ‘polarised’, but reviews have been largely negative, the only notable exception being Sight and Sound magazine, who placed Megalopolis 17^th on their list of the best 50 films of 2024. To me, ‘polarised’ suggests something broad in scope and rich in depth, a work of boldness and ambition that will either flop or be recognised as a work of genius but could never be mediocre. I just don’t see this kind of greatness in it. There are plenty of highlights – Coppola’s style, the slick start, Emmanuel and Plaza’s performances – but more lowlights and Megalopolis is neither a magnum opus nor a nadir. The film has 45% on the Tomatometer, which is not unfair, though I do wonder if critics would have been more generous if they didn’t know that it was the product of 50 years of work. Unfortunately for Coppola, it was also a major commercial failure, only recouping £14.3 million at the box office and costing him $75.5 million by May 2025. At the time of writing, Coppola is 86, which suggests that this is his last film. While it’s a shame to see a career end this way, we should not forget that he is the genius who brought us all three Godfathers, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders (1983), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), among many others. I hope he doesn’t forget either.**

The Ploopy Knob | review by Stephen Theaker

When I tell people that I love my Ploopy Knob, and I can’t stop touching it while I work, they sometimes get the wrong idea. To be fair, when I first heard of it (a science fiction writer was joking about it), I wasn’t even sure the Ploopy Knob was a real device, or if it was an April Fool’s joke. But after I had finished laughing, I looked at the device’s website (https://ploopy.co/knob/), laughed some more (“with a smooth feel and great finish, it’s a Knob you’ll want to touch all day long”), and realised I might actually find it very useful to have a Ploopy Knob. And if it turned out to be a dud, it would be worth the money just for the jokes.

So what is it? Simply a knob that you can turn, an accessory for your Windows or Linux computer (it works less well on Mac), about 5 cm in diameter – which is much smaller than I expected, but turns out to be perfect. Built around a tiny Raspberry Pi, many of its other parts are 3D-printed, and the plans are available for users to print replacements if necessary. It’s not wireless: it needs to be plugged into the computer via USB. You don’t grasp the sides of it, usually, the surface is ridged, so that a finger resting on the top of the Ploopy Knob can easily turn it, without losing grip.

Power users can apparently reprogram the device to do different tasks, but that’s not me, I just use it for scrolling through documents while I read them, and yet I am utterly delighted with it. I’ve bought many similar devices over the years – a number pad to which I could assign macros, a rollerball, a mouse pen, and at one point I even had an Xbox controller hooked up to the PC for scrolling around documents – but none of them were ever so much better than the mouse and keyboard that they earned a permanent spot on my desk.

The Ploopy Knob is different. For one thing it's hilarious. Every time I mention it I laugh. This is not something to be underestimated when working. A chuckle a day adds up to a lot of chuckles over a lifetime. But it also fits onto the desk very neatly: I'm right-handed, so my keyboard (a clicky Das Keyboard) is in the middle, the mouse on the right, and the Ploopy Knob sits on the left, taking up very little space and always ready to use. It feels very nicely balanced. There are keyboards that have similar knobs, but that means hovering over the keyboard, whereas the Ploopy Knob can be placed in more pleasurable locations, so reading becomes much more pleasant.

It is also much more precise and sensitive than using a mouse wheel for the same job. So even if all I ever use it for is scrolling through Word files I’m editing and PDFs I’m checking, it was well worth the money I paid (about fifty quid). The only problem is that it's made me so keen to keep reading on the PC that I've tired my eyes out a bit. If I had a job interview now, I would be obliged to ask whether I would be allowed to use my Ploopy Knob in the workplace. Now I'm accustomed to having a Ploopy Knob, working without one would feel like a needless frustration. Stephen Theaker *****

Dead Scalp by Jasper Bark (Crystal Lake Publishing) | review by Stephen Theaker

James Briggs is on the lam, with most of Arizona on his tail, and Mexico is out of reach. But he’s heard about a portal to a magical place where the law can’t reach. So he slices up a rabbit, takes a running jump at a portal, and after a bit of argy-bargy hands over the price of entry to a pair of bearded thugs: Clem and Bart. Clem has been in Dead Scalp forty years, though he looks about thirty. No one ages here, and they don’t get sick, but they can be killed, and the only thing that grows here is hair.

To make up for bashing Bart, James has to do some work for Bill Baldwin, the boss of Dead Scalp. He’s a real villain, a slave-owner who has had children murdered, and women kidnapped from the outside world to be raped in the town brothel. He is brutal with his punishments for those who step out of line, and the worst of these punishments is called “ingrowing”. There’s a reason all the men in town have beards: something terrible happens when they shave, or when Bill shaves them.

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay (William Morrow Paperbacks) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Questioning possession: inventive novel swerves horror trope in new direction. 

While getting accustomed to Paul Tremblay’s Bram Stoker Award-winning A Head Full of Ghosts, I kept asking myself: do I like this, or don’t I? The more I read, though, the more I moved towards the “like this” option. 

Like many Tremblay novels, this one takes a common horror subject – this time it’s possession – and gives it a twist. A Head Full of Ghosts swerves from the expected, steps back, and, in a way, explores what a possession story is. It starts silly with young sisters Meredith (Merry) and Marjorie telling each other stories about molasses floods or things growing in their house, but the book gradually reels the reader in as things start to go wrong in the Barrett family’s Massachusetts home. 

The story hinges on the question of whether Marjorie is possessed or mentally ill. When the girls’ father John loses his job and has trouble finding another, he turns to prayer and becomes a religious zealot. To alleviate their growing financial difficulties, the Barretts become the subjects of a reality show called The Possession. A film documents the family and especially Marjorie, the one who claims to have the ghosts in her head. 

As the novel builds towards an exorcism event, Tremblay plays with opposites (e.g. cold and hot, fiction and nonfiction) to suspend the uncertainty. Father Waverly, the aptly named priest involved with the family, talks about the financial gain coming from the TV show. And fourteen-year-old Marjorie seems to enjoy the limelight. Perhaps this is all a moneymaking and/or an attention-getting scheme. But then again, how is Marjorie accessing the knowledge that she confidently spews at the priest? What are these strange things happening in her room? She could just be a precocious kid, or maybe there’s something else going on. 

Tremblay also flips around in time and narrative format. While much of the story plays out through the perspective of eight-year-old Merry, the novel also contains passages in which a woman planning to write a tell-all book interviews a twenty-three-year-old Merry to get her side of what happened on the show. Additionally, excerpts from The Final Last Girl blog reinforce the ambiguity of the situation. Blogger Karen Brissette, writing fifteen years after the show, rips it apart, commenting on its amateur cast, lewd imagery and clichés. She references everything from The Exorcist and Lolita to more recent works like The Ring and a “lukewarm parade of possession movies” from the 2000s. The blog is most interesting when its chatty author breaks down scenes from the show. Some readers might not like getting pulled out of the story for this deconstruction. I happened to enjoy it. 

Beyond a possession novel, A Head Full of Ghosts comments on contemporary media and art and their ability to manipulate actors and yes, even readers and viewers. Typically, revisiting worn-out horror tropes would be anathema to good storytelling, but in Tremblay’s hands, everything you’ve come to expect moves in a new direction. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

Millionaires Day by Kit Power (French Press Publishing) | review by Stephen Theaker

We cannot be sure if the phenomenon extends beyond Milton Keynes – there is a news blackout – but it seems that everyone in that city who was asleep at 8.04 am on 22 December 2019 woke up with a suitcase containing a million pounds beneath them. You might wonder why, but this novella isn’t very interested in that. Instead, it concerns itself with how various ne’er-do-wells try to get their hands on other people’s suitcases, and how those others try to escape them.

At first we follow three main characters, each of whom hands us off at various points to other people. Henry is a homeless man sleeping in an underpass. He tries to get a first class train to Glasgow but is spotted by police officer Luke, who has been falling out of love with his husband for a while now, ever since their attempt to use a woman as a surrogate fell through. The mother kept her daughter, and the court hasn’t ordered contact despite Luke being the biological father.

The God of Wanking by Peter Caffrey | review by Stephen Theaker

In August 2024 I attended a free one-day convention organised by Indie Horror Chapter in Birmingham, a gathering of self-published authors getting together to sell books, do readings and make friends. One of the most eye-catching tables was that of Peter Caffrey, whose books stood out thanks to their bright colours, striking designs and memorable titles. Here was an author clearly doing his own thing, not trying to mimic mainstream horror, carving out a very specific niche. You probably won’t see Whores Versus Sex Robots and Other Sordid Tales of Erotic Automatons on sale in Waterstones.

The God of Wanking – and titles don’t come much more attention-grabbing than that! – is a short novel first published in 2021. Our protagonist is Diego, who attends a strict catholic school in a village that would seem to be in Central or South America. It wasn’t clear which, but the power of the Catholic church there appears to be totally unbridled – we see them snatching people off the street. When the book takes place was also unclear, but the villagers have televisions and don’t have mobile phones, which gives some idea.

Dangerous Animals | review by Rafe McGregor

Dangerous Animals, by Sean Byrne (Independent Film Company)

Tucker's shark experience!

In my birthday wishes to Jaws' (1975) Bruce, I mentioned the host of terrible Sharksploitation movies I've watched since reviewing The Meg (2018), listed the lowlights, and noted two films of which I was sceptical in spite of the advance praise they had received. I've now watched both Fear Below (2025) and Dangerous Animals and can attest to the accuracy of my preconceptions about the former, which is indeed similar to Into the Deep (2025), with its well-deserved 27% on the Tomatometer. I won't say much about it here, except that I didn't think the shark very realistic and that sharks in rivers just aren't as frightening as sharks in the ocean, a pair of problems plaguing Under Paris (2024), entirely undeserving of its 66% on the Tomatometer. My reservations about Dangerous Animals were based on the trailer, which I summarised rather meanly (albeit, again, accurately) as an eye-rolling 'shark plus serial killer'. My point being… surely one is enough for a ninety-eight-minute film? Whenever I watch what is essentially a monster movie, I'm reminded of The Ghost and The Darkness (1996), a fictionalised account of the 'Tsavo man-eaters' in colonial Kenya in 1898. While the film is yet another example of the tired old trope of (hu)man versus nature, director Stephen Hopkins is surprisingly successful in making two 'normal' lions a source of suspense and fear – as Sherlock Holmes might have said, 'no dinosaurs need apply' (the first two instalments of the Jurassic Park franchise were released in 1993 and 1997 respectively).

The dangerous animal of this title is of course the serial killer, Tucker (played by Jai Courtney), not the shark(s) and what redeems it from being yet more chum to the maw (with apologies to Mark Bould) of Sharksploitation enthusiasts like me is that we don't see sharks very often and when we do, they are all real (as far as I can tell, anyway) until the last ten minutes. When a CGI shark does appear, it is convincing rather than cartoonish, which may well be because of the speed with which it disappears. We don't have to see sharks all the time to be scared and less is often more (as we know from M.R. James, among many other masters of the craft of horror fiction). So, yes, in its finest moments the film reminded me of Jaws, where the only flaw is when Bruce is revealed as a creature of fibreglass and steel rather than flesh and bone. Unlike Jaws, Dangerous Animals lacks sympathetic characters. Tucker himself is probably the most charismatic, but he does like to kidnap pairs of bikini-clad beauties and videotape one being fed to sharks in front of the other. (Actual VHS, not digital – no wonder he has issues!) It is also rather predictable. Very early on, I guessed that Tucker would be eaten by sharks and that the love interest, Moses (played by Josh Heuston), would not rescue the protagonist, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), at least one of which came to pass. Notwithstanding, the film was much better than expected and one of the best Sharksploitation films I've seen. But if Zephyr thinks that Australia's Gold Coast is 'as far away from America as possible' she really needs to install Google Maps or ChatGPT on her smartphone (it's Mauritius or Madagascar, in case you're wondering). ***

Envy by Ash Ericmore | review by Stephen Theaker

Envy is a 45-page, eight-chapter novella, the first in a series of seven about the deadly sins, self-published by the author (with a nod to his Patreon supporters) over the summer of 2025. The Amazon blurb tells us each novella will focus on a different female lead. I don’t think we ever learn the name of this book’s lead character, and if it weren’t for the Amazon description I don’t think we would know her sex for certain either, but I’ll assume for the purposes of this review that the description doesn’t lead us astray.

She lives in a tall, lonely tower block, obsessed with the local drug dealer and his gym-built muscles. He’s called Tony, and she knows that because her neighbour Miriam shouts it several times a night, in the throes of passion. Our protagonist gets in the lift with him at one point, and hopes to be propositioned if not ravished, but he just asks if she wants to buy some drugs. She seems to assume that any man looking at her does so with sexual interest, and perhaps her sleazy anime fan boss is, but he’s not what she’s after.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Short film quartet relies on shifting views, restrained performances and subtle humour to encourage reflection and underscore the complexity of fiction writing.

If you stare at something long enough and focus exclusively on that one thing, suggests Wes Anderson's Oscar-winning short film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, you can develop the skills of seeing with your eyes closed and seeing through things. These concepts of intense concentration and observation propel the viewer’s experience of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More, a quartet of films not only based on but also infused by the writings of Roald Dahl. One would need to immerse oneself in these labyrinthine films (and by extension the stories) for years to unravel them. And yet, a single viewing is enough to entertain.

It is not difficult to follow what is happening in the films: a cheater finds fulfilment in altruism, a man relates a childhood bullying experience, a rat catcher comes to town to eliminate an infestation, and a bedridden man must remain motionless to avoid death. The challenge, rather, comes in unearthing the films’ extensive subtext and discerning the techniques Anderson calls upon to reinforce subject matter. 

What unites the works is a sense of playfulness and an admiration for the magic of storytelling. In each film, a composed character looks at the camera and recites Dahl’s stories (right down to the dialogue tags) but also partially participates in them. Initially, one might consider this an esoteric move no better than a one-act play at a community college theatre. Further viewings, however, prove these are brilliant contemporary works of art that sharply deviate from typical shallow films and force viewers to reconsider story and point of view. 

Originality suffuses the films: Opening credits fabricate their origins. Characters pretend to hold things (animals and guns, for example) that other characters pretend to see. Actors reappear as different characters among and within the four films. Stage crew members wearing coveralls enter the frame to assemble, disassemble and manipulate settings (and sometimes even pause to look at the camera). Dahl (Ralph Fiennes) also appears as a character who introduces and concludes each story. These techniques strip away the artifice, reveal the author’s presence in the story and draw attention to the mechanics of storytelling. 

Additionally, the camera’s constantly shifting viewpoint – level with the ground, straight up, straight down – underscores the films’ beckoning watchers to consider them from different angles. At one point, a character looks straight up at the camera and speaks to the viewer while he walks.

Although everything is presented soberly and perhaps even stiffly, humour permeates the films. In the main offering, an ultra-serious doctor/narrator and his colleague quickly walk down a corridor. The narrator explains to the viewer that his colleague’s face was rigid with disbelief. The other doctor then turns to show the viewer the rigidity of his face. Another example: for much of The Swan, the boy version of the narrator stands behind him and stares at the camera. Also, the narrator shows the viewer a photo of a boy, but it is too small and too far from the camera for the viewer to see. Now that’s funny. Throughout the films, when a narrator converses with another character, he will turn to the camera and say, “I said” – the viewer never forgets his role as consumer of story.

Multiple viewings are sure to elicit more questions. Why, for instance, does the narrator in The Swan keep looking at the camera and speaking to the viewer but stop moving his lips just before the camera cuts to a different view of the same character now moving his lips? Why are the backgrounds deliberately fake? Why do lights shine in characters’ eyes at certain points? 

While the end credits roll, Fiennes-as-Dahl comments on the gruelling process of writing fiction, clearly a parallel to the meditation practice in the opening episode and an attempt to give a taste of what it feels like to be in his shoes. Kudos to Anderson for challenging the viewer to be still… to interpret… to imagine… to THINK. Douglas J. Ogurek *****

The Blood-Drenched Honeycomb by Leo X. Robertson (Close to the Bone) | reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Liam Munhoz is an insanely attractive young man, twenty years old, from Maywood, the third smallest city in LA County. Reserved in some ways, only showing his real self to people he considers authentic, he is expansive in others, having participated in bisexual college orgies to the very best of his ability. He was brought from LA to Palo Alto in a bullet train, an entire business class carriage hired out for him.

The man waiting for him is Ryan Hobbes, an extremely rich and extremely weird older guy, obsessed with his health, who sleeps all day and stays up all night, to avoid the sun’s harmful rays. He’s also extremely famous, to the point that you can buy Halloween costumes spoofing him, labelled “non-binary vampire tech billionaire with an eating disorder”. He’s a riff on Bryan Johnson, Elon Musk, and chaps like that.

Human Capital, by Moro Rogers (Nakra Press) | reviewed by Stephen Theaker

In the early 21st century, automation went into high gear and robots took over the menial jobs. Then they took over all the other jobs as well, and almost everyone became unemployed: this was known as the “indescribable allusion disaster”. Universal basic income and free housing softened the blow, but if people don’t find a way to make themselves useful the robots encourage them to exist a little bit less. The three most popular options for the survivors are to become artists, swamis or heirs.

Nttl was born a few years after the disaster, and chose the life of an artist. He used to be part of the Poisonous Plant Collective (hence his name, pronounced “nettle”). Since they disbanded, Nttl has struggled on with his painting, Manchineel is extremely successful, Jessamine is part of the Meconium Group, entrusted by the robots with the power to decide the human race’s future, and Upas became an art terrorist: he just blew himself up in an aquarium with a William Morris-patterned artisanal bomb, killing several fish and two humans besides himself.

Jurassic World: Rebirth | review by Rafe McGregor

Jurassic World: Rebirth, by Gareth Edwards (Universal Pictures)

Three times three?

Jurassic World Rebirth is the seventh instalment in the Jurassic Park/World franchise that was launched by Steven Spielberg twenty-two years ago (excluding animated and short films). The previous instalments can be divided into two trilogies, with the second being a continuation of the first and the fictional chronology following the years in which each film was released (as far as I can tell). I shall recap the events of the franchise so far as Jurassic World: Rebirth plunges us directly into them and may well be the first of a third trilogy that is a further continuation (rather than remake, reboot, or retcon), though it is (of course) advertised as a “standalone” story.

The premise of Jurassic Park (1993) is that dinosaurs have been de-extincted by means of cloning and a theme park (“safari park” would be more accurate for UK readers) established on a fictional island called Isla Nublar, off the coast of Costa Rica. What could possibly go wrong? Lots… and everything that could go wrong does, in consequence of which the island is abandoned by its human visitors. In The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) dinosaurs are discovered on the neighbouring island of Isla Sorna, which was where the original cloning was done before it was abandoned following a hurricane. (We now have two abandoned islands full of dinosaurs.) An ill-considered plan to transport a Tyrannosaurus rex to a zoo in San Diego goes wrong (who would’ve guessed) and after rampaging around the city it is returned to the island, which is declared a protected nature reserve. Jurassic Park III (2001) is essentially a rescue mission: ignoring national and international law (as they do), some rich folk undertake an illegal air safari of Isla Sorna, crash, and get bailed out by mum, dad, and some hired hands.

Jurassic World (2015) has exactly the same plot as Jurassic Park: a new multinational corporation acquires the rights to build a safari park on Isla Nublar, but have “improved” on the original by creating a new and very nasty dinosaur called an Indominus rex by means of transgenesis. What could possibly go wrong? Everything that did in the first film and this one ends in the same way, with humanity abandoning the same island for the second time. In between Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), a mercenary unit arrives on the island and succeeds in collecting an Indominus rex DNA sample (I wonder where this is going). The fifth film begins with the island about to be destroyed by a volcanic eruption and the protagonists are hired by the antagonist to launch a private rescue attempt, not realising that the relocated dinosaurs are going to be sold at an auction (those rich folk don’t get that rich by being nice). The rescued dinosaurs escape from their cages, enter the Northern California wilderness, and usher in a new era in which humans, animals, and dinosaurs are all going to have to coexist. Jurassic World: Dominion (2022) has a broadly similar plot to Jurassic Park III, being in essence a rescue mission, this time rescuing the first and only cloned human child from another multinational corporation and the dinosaurs it keeps in the Dolomite Mountains. As far as the fictional world of the franchise goes, little has changed as dinosaurs are still roaming, swimming and flying around the place like any other animal, fish, or bird.

I didn’t come to Jurassic World Rebirth with any great expectations. As I mentioned in my birthday wishes to Jaws’ (1975) Bruce, the sheer number of animals slaughtered onscreen in my lifetime is wearing me down and Scarlett Johanssen’s offscreen persona hasn’t exactly endeared itself to me (as Hollywood’s highest-grossing star my news feed is unfortunately full of her). I was also surprised to see that none of the previous casts were reappearing. The protagonists of the first trilogy were palaeontologist Alan Grant (played by Sam Neill) and mathematician Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum), who appeared in five of the first six films between them. The second trilogy introduced the on-and-off couple Owen Grady (played by Chris Pratt), an ethologist (aka Velociraptor-wrangler), and Claire Dearing (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), a corporate slavedriver turned dinosaur activist. The protagonists of Jurassic World Rebirth are Zora Bennett (played by Johansson), a mercenary action hero, and… well, just Zora Bennett (because you don’t get to be Hollywood’s best-paid star by sharing the limelight).

Following a prelude where another mutated dinosaur (Distortus rex) wreaks havoc on another fictional island (Île Saint-Hubert, in the Atlantic Ocean) that (also) has to be abandoned, the narrative opens with the Earth’s climate threatening to return the dinosaurs to extinction, in consequence of which they have all migrated to the equatorial regions of the globe. For once, somebody has done something sensible and designated these no-travel areas. The antagonist, Martin Krebs (played by Rupert Friend) hires Bennett and her team to take DNA samples from the three largest living dinosaurs – Mosasaurus (sea), Titanosaurus (land) and Quetzalcoatlus (air) – for the purposes of making trillions of dollars from a cure for heart disease. The first indication that the film might be a pleasant surprise was that the DNA has to be retrieved from live dinosaurs and, indeed, the mercenary team very quickly loses all of its weapons, making most of the blood spilled in the story human. At the same time as Bennett, Krebs and their entourage begin their mission, an idiotic father of two, Reuben Delgado (played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Netflix’s Lincoln Lawyer), is sailing his daughters and one of their boyfriends across the Atlantic in his yacht (an Atlantic swarming with literal sea monsters, I should add)… and everyone ends up on Île Saint-Hubert.

In addition to limiting the lizard slaughter, the three-part mission to acquire DNA over sea, land and air works very well, providing the narrative with a neat structure, broad scope, and organic signposting. The story also pays homage to the original Jurassic Park in at least two scenes, a Tyrannosaurus rex river chase and the final climatic battle at the abandoned laboratory complex, one of which works well and the other of which doesn’t. Segue to my only two criticisms, the opening and that climactic battle. In the former, the entire complex’s security system is destroyed by an empty Snickers wrapper. A complex that is not only containing dinosaurs, but creating nastier ones for human entertainment… I hope somebody somewhere got sued. The other let down is the Distortus rex itself. It inspires pity rather than fear and is so stupid and so slow that its survival on the island before the arrival of Bennett, Delgado and the rest seems highly unlikely. Having said that, while Jurassic Park: Rebirth may not reach the heights of the original film – perhaps even the first two films – it’s definitely as good or better than the rest. It’s also already well on the way to grossing a billion dollars so I guess we might just see Bennett back for two more instalments. ***

The Hamlet by Joanna Corrance (NewCon Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

The Hamlet is a fairly good mosaic novella, telling a series of stories about the people in a small rural community in Scotland, close to a stony beach but not too far away from a city. It used to be quite a nice place to live, but then things got “strange” – that’s the word everyone uses to describe it. There are various theories – the end of the world, a passing comet, a great unravelling – but no one is quite sure what happened.

Whatever it was, it happened in early spring. Everyone was told to get inside their homes and stay there for the indefinite future, very much like the Covid lockdowns. Supermarkets and local shops still deliver food, but in armoured vans, and sometimes the drivers go missing, the vans abandoned. The bins aren’t being collected, the police don’t answer calls, and there are roadblocks everywhere.

There’s still electricity and running water, because at least some essential workers still go out to work, but it’s risky out there. And as we learn in this set of stories, it’s risky indoors too. After a very brief introductory chapter about the day of the lockdown, we move from house to house, to see what strangeness is happening in each.

The stories overlap, with hints in each followed up in others, which was satisfying in some ways, in that mysteries are being solved, but it also meant that by the time we encountered some things first-hand, from the point of view of those directly involved, the shock of the weird had often been dulled by prior exposure.

That might be why the first proper story (or second chapter, if you like) “Down the Drain” was the most effective for me, because after its protagonist Beth leaves her filthy house by way of a newly broken (and strangely expansive) pipe, she dips her head into other houses, giving us a dose of concentrated weirdness. One could easily imagine a Junji Ito adaptation.

After that we learn about Polly, a neglected little girl with a big imagination; wannabe influencer Helen, whose uploads get ever more barmy; Eve, who becomes a lodger in the house she rents out to creepy Matthew; Robyn, a frustrated artist who gets way too into dollhouses; and Jeanie, whose charmed life seems to have run out of luck.

A short final chapter, set much later than the rest, bookends the novella, answers some questions, and provides a final twist or two. By that point, it felt like a good place to stop. Not because it’s a bad book, but because it had played all its cards, some of them too soon. And maybe it was all a bit too random for me: if anything at all can happen at any time, the characters’ decisions count for little. ***

Finding Pulp Fiction – Rafe McGregor

Last week I reviewed (and recommended) two of Mark Valentine’s essay collections, Borderlands & Otherworlds and Sphinxes & Obelisks. Several of the essays in the former, which was published by Tartarus Press in June, began as posts for Wormwoodiana, a fantasy, supernatural, and decadent literature blog he runs with Douglas A. Anderson (also highly recommended). A few of Mark’s recent posts have been about the changing landscape of the second-hand book market, focusing on the perceived decline of the brick-and-mortar bookshop and the role of charity shops in either accelerating or ameliorating that decline. In The Golden Age of Second-Hand Bookshops (11 April), he argues that there has been no such decline and that we are in fact in the middle of a Golden Age of second-hand book shopping, even if one discounts (no pun intended) charity shops that have sizable book sections. I should say straightaway that Mark has a great deal of expertise in the subject, the product of not only decades of finding books in unusual places, writing about forgotten books that deserve to be remembered, and writing about forgotten books found in unusual places, but also contributing to The Book Guide, which is (I believe) the UK’s most reliable and most up to date directory of brick-and-mortar second-hand bookshops. I also agree with Mark’s claim that the rise of charity shop bookselling has neither caused nor contributed to the perceived decline of the second-hand bookshop. What I am not so sure about is whether this is a Golden Age for book collectors – that has certainly not been my experience. Let me explain.

For a decade and a half one of my great pleasures was browsing the shelves of chain, independent, and second-hand bookshops…then one day I realised I’d stopped and had no desire to return to the pastime, in spite of highlights such as: Waterstones (Glasgow), Leakey’s (Inverness), Murder One (London), what I think might have been Alan Moore’s basement (Northampton), St Mary’s (Stamford), Foyles (London), Blackwell’s (Oxford), Richard Booth’s (Hay-on-Wye), Bookbarn (Midsomer Norton, in Somerset), Borders (York), Barter Books (Alnwick), and Broadhurst (Southport). The reason I stopped frequenting bookshops was no doubt a combination of multiple factors, some of which were: a belated competence with both Amazon and ABE; an increased amount of reading and writing at my day job, which was wonderful but meant that I shifted most of reading for pleasure to audiobooks; and perhaps just being spoilt for choice – my wife and I lived in York for much of this time, which had the highest concentration of bookshops in England outside of London (or at least the highest within easy walking distance of one another). After a hiatus of about another decade, for reasons that were probably also related to life changes, I slowly picked up where I’d left off, beginning with Hay-on-Wye and moving on to London and then back to York.

In York, the magnificent (and labyrinthine) Borders on Parliament Street was long gone (having closed several years before we left) and so were at least two each in Walmgate and Micklegate. This proved to be a repeat of my experience in Hay-on-Wye, which had thirty-three bookshops when I last visited (the interval was about two decades) and now has twenty-five. The same is also true of Charing Cross Road and Stamford (in Lincolnshire), which both have significantly less bookshops (of all varieties) now than they did a decade or more ago. From my list of favourites, Murder One, Bookbarn, and Broadhursts have all closed. It may not be book Armageddon, but every place I’ve associated with a plethora of bookshops seems to have fewer than before. Mark attributes the widespread failure to acknowledge the present as a Golden Age to nostalgia, to mostly middle-aged people remembering their early book browsing days with a fondness that has more to do with its circumstances (typically, being at university or exploring new places with friends instead of family for the first time) than the actual number of bookshops. I take his point, but it doesn’t apply in my case as my book browsing only began in earnest in my late twenties, a period for which I have no nostalgia whatsoever. Which is why I have yet to be completely convinced.

Perhaps neither Mark nor I are in error and it’s a case of more second-hand bookshops overall, but more widely spread with fewer and/or smaller clusters like those I mentioned. Mark also draws attention to the wider variety of book vendors – beyond second-hand and charity shops – as part of the Golden Age, which brought my local train station to mind. For the last few years (since the end of the pandemic, if I remember correctly), the ticket office has boasted a mini-library of about two hundred and fifty books (pictured top). They aren’t sold, but the idea is that you bring one and take one and you’re free to keep the one you took as long as you replace it with something else…which makes it a source for the book collector as much as any of the others Mark lists. I recently picked up a copy of Jim Butcher’s Storm Front (2000), the first of his Dresden Files, which I’d been meaning to read for years. (I replaced it with another occult detective title, fresh from Theaker’s Paperback Library.) Now this is a nostalgic experience because it reminds me of the first second-hand bookshop I ever patronised. The place was tiny and the science fiction titles so popular that the owner wouldn’t allow you to buy one unless you brought one in to sell to her first. (And no, I’m not making that up.) The idea of a railway library seems to be relatively new because when I searched online, the only related result was in Hartlepool, where a local author donated books to the station in February. In America, I’m reliably informed, some people have taken to doing the same in their gardens (pictured above). If that trend is ever imported, I might have to revise my opinion on the Golden Age…

The Creator by Aliya Whiteley (NewCon Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

Phillip Corbus is an artist, a profession which suits him because post-war headaches make it difficult for him to work in a sustained way in other jobs. His father Thomas was a famous adventurer and inventor, and his brother Reynolds became an inventor too. He created the ThinkBulb, which can be built into the structure of rooms – such as his basement laboratory – and supposedly helps people to think better. He’s now working on a new project, Ceredex.

Phillip is very fond of his lonely sister-in-law, Patricia – he tells us that this is her story. She dotes on her husband Reynolds, but he emerges from the lab infrequently, leaving her to raise their son Buckingham (Bucky for short) mostly on her own. In the summer of 1958, when Bucky is just seven years old, Patricia phones Phillip to say that Reynolds has committed suicide. But there’s rather more to the story than that, as the lack of a body suggests.

I think this is essentially a novella about envy, and the grass looking greener through a jaundiced eye. Phillip quietly envies his brother’s marriage, and is frustrated to see it so neglected. Reynolds, despite his own achievements, envies his brother’s artistic creativity, and seeks to artificially unlock similar talents within himself. He lets his frustration at being unable to create great art ruin his life, never understanding the joy of creating a work of art, even if it’s bad.

This novella is the third book I’ve read by Aliya Whiteley, after The Beauty and Three One Eight, and although it couldn’t be more different from them in plot and setting and tone, it’s of a similarly high quality, thoughtful and thematically rich. Cyril Connolly described the pram in the hall as the enemy of good art; The Creator reminds us that there’s a person in the pram, and asks if art is worth sacrificing his or her happiness.

The book is part of the 2025 NP Novella series, and so it is available in paperback and in a signed and numbered hardback direct from the publisher, while the ebook is available to buy on Kindle, and Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read it for free. I recommend that they do. The reader may be unhappy that it leads to such a strange, dark place, but it’s an ending that sticks with you long afterwards, and feels inevitable when you look back. ****

Divine in Essence by Yarrow Paisley (Whiskey Tit) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Psychoanalysts take heed: hints of the divine surface in quagmire of confused children, mentally ill mothers, and strained relationships. 

Writing instructors often cite Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” as the epitome of clear, concise, and concrete prose. The works in Yarrow Paisley’s collection Divine in Essence are, in many ways, the opposite. Place the two works of art side by side and you might cause some kind of cosmic meltdown. This is not to suggest that Paisley’s often baffling yet sometimes transcendent stories are substandard but rather that they make more demands on the reader than the typical story. 

A common complaint of genre stories is that they have no depth. Fair. Conversely, the bizarro/slipstream entries in Divine in Essence undoubtedly have depth, but some of them have a surface so tenuous that it leaves readers longing for a lifeline… something to latch onto so they can come up for answers. 

If you’re looking for a beach read or something to ease your mind after a long day’s work, look elsewhere. If, however, you’ve blocked out uninterrupted time in your book-lined den where a fire blazes, then you might consider this volume. Additionally, be sure you have your thinking cap on and maybe a couple of cups of coffee in you – you’re going to need to be at your most alert when you unpeel Paisley’s many-layered stories filled with strained child-parent relationships, unorthodox-bordering-on-abusive sexual circumstances, and eccentric and perhaps mentally ill mother figures who emasculate their sons. Be prepared for loads of disassembling… of bodies, of words, of relationships, and even of the narrative. Sometimes Paisley’s narrators will even pull the rug out from under the reader by revealing, for instance, they’ve inadvertently been calling a character by the wrong name.

Divine in Essence has garnered a noteworthy amount of critical acclaim, with reviewers tossing out words like “surreal”, “dreamscape” and “uncanny”. Paisley’s writing style, characterised by literary allusions, superlong sentences stuffed with million-dollar words, authorial intrusions, and a sometimes pontificating tone, often gives the book pre-twentieth century feel. 

While some of the stories are too inaccessible for this reviewer’s tastes, the collection does offer several pieces that show a creative mind brimming with novel ideas. Despite his lack of attentiveness to (or perhaps disregard of) the distracted and apathetic modern reader, Paisley knows what he’s doing. 

One of the collection’s strongest works, “I in the Eye”, is told from the perspective of a seven-year-old boy trapped in his sexy stepmother’s glass eye. He not only observes an emotionless and fragile “simulacrum” of himself living on the outside but also looks on as his mother, aware of his residence within her, dances naked in front of a mirror and seduces his father. As the father’s alcoholism worsens, the boy stifles his own emotions to better absorb his reality. The loss of his own mother, the stepmother’s erotic machinations, and the father’s grief and addiction essentially cause the boy to split… so much so that he needs a surrogate viewpoint. 

Mundanity becomes calamity in “Nancy and Her Man”, in which a woman finds a man at a cemetery – he doesn’t remember her, but she remembers him – and takes him for coffee and a walk. As the man begins to shed body parts, we learn that the woman needs to return him whole to the cemetery, or their annual meeting won’t happen the following year. The story not only comments on the difficulties of holding a relationship together but also stresses the importance of holding onto memories to keep loved ones alive. 

“Rocking Horse Traffic”, another complicated entry, introduces a first-person narrator whose parents are literally trying to get inside him and extract things. A jarring shift to second-person perspective near the end underscores the violent and bizarre conclusion. It is a riveting story with a strong focus on obedience versus disobedience, and, similar to the cemetery story, this one involves grieving, going in cycles, and the inability to let go. In this instance, the father is constantly trying to fix his son, but it’s an unfixable situation. The son settles on an extreme way to break that cycle. 

An important consideration in his work is the role of the reader and the writer. If you were trying to convince someone that reading is fun, this would not be the go-to book. But there is no rule that says the writer must be obedient to today’s harried reader. Divine in Essence, with its bulky paragraphs and refusal to spoon-feed readers, challenges us to veer from the contemporary obsession with instant gratification. Douglas J. Ogurek

Borderlands and Otherworlds & Sphinxes and Obelisks | review by Rafe McGregor

Borderlands and Otherworlds by Mark Valentine, Tartarus Press, limited edition hardback, £45.00, 17 June 2025, ISBN 9781912586684

Sphinxes and Obelisks by Mark Valentine, Tartarus Press, paperback, £17.95, 12 November 2021, ISBN 9798764096322

I’ve been meaning to write a review of one of Mark Valentine’s collections of essays for some time now, but when the previous one was released, I was right in the middle of my own six-part essay, “Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between” (which you can find here, if you’re interested). That was less than a year ago and the next one is already available so I decided I’d better get on with it before I have to admit that he can write essay collections faster than I can read and review them. While ordering the recently released Borderlands and Otherworlds, I realised I’d somehow managed to miss Sphinxes and Obelisks and ordered it in paperback at the same time. This is review of both volumes.

Valentine is best known as a short story author, an editor and an essayist, but is also a biographer and poet. He has been publishing short stories and essays for more than four decades, although these have only relatively recently been collected in book form (In Violet Veils, in 1999, is – I think – the first) and more recently still (with – again, I think – The Collected Connoisseur, in 2010) made more widely available in paperback. Much, perhaps even most, of Valentine’s output has been published by Tartarus Press, a highly successful independent publisher famous for their limited edition sewn hardbacks (usually 350 and signed, if publication is not posthumous) with distinctive yellow dust wrappers and silk ribbon markers. If you are a collector as well as a reader, these are well worth the price at £45, with free postage and packaging in the UK. While I’m on the subject, Tartarus paperbacks have similar production values, but are probably overpriced at £17.95 (their Kindle editions appear to go for between £7 and £9; I prefer paper or audio books so I have no idea whether this is reasonable). Although I enjoyed Valentine’s The Collected Connoisseur, co-authored with his long term collaborator John Howard, a great deal, I have always preferred his work as an essayist and editor to his short fiction (my review of The Black Veil and Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths, which he edited in 2008, was published in TQF24).

As an essayist, most websites list Valentine as specialising in book collecting, but his scope is much wider than that and includes undistinguished, forgotten and obscure authors from the first half of the twentieth century and before, many of whom were writers of speculative fiction. Borderlands and Otherworlds is his sixth collection of essays published by Tartarus, the first five of which are all available in paperback: Haunted By Books (2015), A Country Still All Mystery (2017), A Wild Tumultory Library (2019), Sphinxes and Obelisks (2021), and The Thunderstorm Collectors (2024). I’d be exaggerating if I said every essay in every collection is worth reading or that one or more of the collections shouldn’t be missed by speculative fiction fans, but I don’t regret the time or money spent on any of them. Rather than browsing their often diverse and always idiosyncratic tables of contents, I recommend watching this interview with Valentine, which gives a very good sense of the man, his interests, and even his prose style.

Sphinxes and Obelisks consists of 32 essays, 10 of which have been previously published, and a substantive introduction. It is worth noting, for both volumes, that the periodicals in which the essays previously appeared have often either ceased publishing or were privately issued, meaning that many readers are, like me, unlikely to have encountered them before and that they are simply no longer available anywhere else (both of which makes these collections all the more valuable). A summary of each essay would not only be tedious to compile, but almost certainly fail to do the collection justice and my intention is to expand Valentine’s readership, not reduce it, so I shall restrict commentary to those I enjoyed the most. The one on my shortlist that will probably appeal the most widely is “‘The Wonder Unlimited’: Hope Hodgson’s Tales of Captain Gault” (9 pages). William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) is now recognised as one of the original pioneers of the weird as a distinct genre within speculative fiction more generally and is possibly best known for his serial occult detective, Thomas Carnacki (first collected in Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder in 1913), though he was also the author of The House on the Borderland (1908), The Night Land (1912), and various tales of the sea. Valentine discusses a group of the latter, which featured the serial character Captain Gault and were some of Hodgson’s most commercially successful work, while reflecting on the curious decline of the nautical tale as a genre of its own. For me, the other highlights of the collection are: “‘Change Here for the Dark Age’: Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins” (12 pages), about a precursor to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973); “Sombre Gloom: The Macabre Thrillers of Riccardo Stephens” (8 pages), about an early mummy novel; “Cricket in Babylon”, about the (surprisingly many) varieties of what I’m going to call armchair cricket (6 pages); “Three Literary Mysteries of the 1930s” (6 pages), about three talented authors – Robert Stuart Christie, Petronella Elphinstone, and Seton Peacey – for whom almost no biographical information exists; and “Passages in the West” (8 pages), an autobiographical account of a book hunting expedition in the West Country.

Borderlands and Otherworlds also consists of 32 essays, 8 of which have been previously published. My favourites are the first and last. In the former, “Borderlands and Otherworlds: Some Supernatural Fiction of the Early 1920s” (17 pages), from which the collection takes its title, Valentine discusses the uncanny fiction of Edward Frederic (E.F.) Benson (1867–1940), Mary Amelia St Clair (May Sinclair, 1863-1946), Forrest Reid (1875–1947), Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), Lesley Garth (who was probably Lesley West Garth: born in 1900, married to William Ball in 1927, died in 1988), and George Oliver Onions (1873–1961). This is Valentine at his most typical and at his best, unearthing hidden – or, more accurately, forgotten – treasures. I am assuming, of course, that, like me, most TQF readers will be familiar with no more than half of these authors (Benson, De la Mare, and Onions in my case, although I have yet to read Benson). The last essay, “In the Attic” (5 pages) is, as the title suggests, an (all-too-brief) rummage through Valentine’s attic, which is full of all the forgotten treasures his regular readers will expect. My other highlights are: “At the House of Magic: Mary Butts’ Modernist Novels of the Occult” (6 pages), about Mary Franeis Butts (1890–1937), a collaborator of Aleister Crowley who was praised by T.S. Eliot; “Priestess of the Inner Light: The Magical Novels of Dion Fortune” (11 pages), about Violet Mary Firth (1890-1946), founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light; “The Last, Lost Novel of Phyllis Paul” (4 pages), about a novelist who retains a cult following in spite of next to nothing being known about her life (1903–1973); and “The Serpent at Ashford Carbonell” (3 pages), about a mystery encountered during a book hunting expedition in the Welsh Marches.

So far, The Thunderstorm Collectors is my first choice of the six – I don’t recall a single essay where my attention drifted for even a moment – but Borderlands and Otherworlds is a close second. Regardless of precise preference, the same can be said of all the volumes: Valentine’s essays are simultaneously fun and fascinating, clever and chimerical, enlightening and exquisite.

Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost by Chaz Brenchley (NewCon Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

Rowany Angelica Marten de Vere was born on Mars, and although the gravity on her version of Mars isn’t as light as in our universe, she would be considered unusually tall on Earth. She spent seven happy years at a Martian boarding school, the Crater School, which looks like a castle and features in the author’s novel Three Twins at the Crater School and its sequels. Now, at the age of twenty-three, she is ready for her first mission as a member of the Colonial Service. The mission is Mr Leontov, a Russian chap who spent time on Venus – now Russia’s new Siberia – and is now looking for safety in the Red Raj. Rowany has to scoot him away before Russian agents close in.

Once they set off, the book is basically one long chase, that involves ice skating over the frozen Martian canals, visiting a frost fair, eating hot chestnuts, dodging bullets, riding in steam trains, and being chased by an airship. Mars is a dangerous world, even now that about half its inhabitants live in cities, but it has bred tough, watchful, self-reliant people full of frontier spirit. Having said that, I didn’t get much of a sense of Mars as a different planet: the story (complete with urchins) could have taken place in Victorian England with very few changes. Nor did it feel as action-packed as the description above might make it sound: it’s quite a long way into the book before there is a confirmed contact with the enemy.

I certainly didn’t dislike it, but it didn't do much for me, and to be fair it probably isn't supposed to! In tone I think it’s aimed at a younger readership, or perhaps an older readership who grew up on Malory Towers or the Chalet School books, and would get a double kick of nostalgia from reading a slightly old-fashioned science fiction adventure featuring the type of heroine typical of those novels. My favourite element was probably the interactions with the local urchins, and the use of whistling to communicate with them, and the rules they followed. They seemed surprisingly forgiving of Rowany's decision to mislead them, putting them in danger for her own benefit, but perhaps that plants a seed for future stories.

This is the second in the publisher’s 2025 NP Novella series, and at the time of writing Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read it for free, the ebook can be bought for £3.99, and paperbacks and signed and limited edition hardbacks can be bought directly from the publisher. ***

Rollerball | review by Rafe McGregor

Rollerball, by Norman Jewison (20^th Century Fox) 

Another Golden Anniversary.

While Jaws turned fifty with much hype and fanfare last week, including here at Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, it’s Rollerball’s turn today, albeit without the bells and whistles. I’m not sure how, but in spite of being both a science fiction and James Caan fan and familiarity with the premise, I’d never seen the film. I’ve always had a soft spot for Caan’s onscreen persona, an underrated, understated, effortless tough guy tough guy with a very distinctive style (he reminds me of John Wayne, though where Wayne is always in the Old West no matter what part he’s playing, Caan is in a big city somewhen in the nineteen seventies). Caan’s performances in all of The Godfather (1972), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Thief (1981), and Misery (1990) are inspired and Rollerball revolves entirely around him as Jonathan E(vans), the first and only superstar of the world’s most dangerous and popular game in 2018 (forty-three years in the future).

Rollerball’s screenplay was written by novelist William Harrison, who developed it from a short story called ‘Roller Ball Murder’, which was first published in Esquire in 1973. The world of 2018 is a utopia rather than dystopia, a planet of plenty where everyone literally has everything they want and nation states have been replaced by multi-national corporations that coexist in a state of avaricious harmony following a little-talked about and possibly even erased event known as the Corporate Wars. The competitiveness essential to unrestrained capitalism is, it seems, channelled into rollerball in an international tournament in which teams from various cities clash in a spectacle of bloody and vicarious violence for the players and audiences respectively. The actual game is a combination of inline speed skating and Basque pelota with a couple of motorbikes thrown in and the rules are changed regularly to make it more brutal. The top-ranked team is Houston, courtesy of Jonathan’s skill and resilience, and the inciting incident occurs when he is told to retire by the chief executive officer of the corporation running the game (if not the world), Mr Bartholomew (played by John Houseman), who is revealed as the narrative’s antagonist.

There are a couple of things that strike one immediately watching Rollerball fifty years later. First, the extent of the explicit critique of global capitalism with the gloves off. The capacity of the Hollywood film industry to make money from apparently resisting a system of which it is such an integral part never ceases to amaze me…and has been at work for a lot longer than I thought. Second, the science fiction trope of a utopia that turns out to be a dystopia as soon as the surface is scraped is becoming rather dated. It is much easier, for example, to imagine the worlds of Mad Max (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Strange Days (1995), and Children of Men (2006) as or in our future than a land of plenty where we all keep ourselves busy with shopping, pill-popping, and rollerball.

Jonathan doesn’t want to retire and one is never sure why. His lavish lifestyle would not change at all, his existential exploration of the conflict between comfort and freedom is somewhat limited, and he must be nearing the end of his shelf-life anyway. The only plausible explanation is an obsession with the adoration of the bloodthirsty crowds, but even this isn’t entirely convincing. The conundrum exposes one of the two flaws in the film, which may have accounted for a critical reception that did not match its commercial success and has left it with a fair 57% on Rotten Tomatoes: Jonathan is simply not a particularly sympathetic character. (This is not one of Caan’s best performances.) The second is just as damaging. Given that the genre of the film is some mix of action, thriller, sports, etc., the representation of rollerball is really poor. The cinematography and stunts fail to convey the speed and danger of the game, which ends up looking quite camp with its players modelling their rollerskates, leather pants, and almost invisible cosmetic scars. I’ve watched ice hockey games on television that look more dangerous and there isn’t a single missing tooth in Rollerball. The film isn’t terrible, but it’s not great entertainment either.

Talking of ‘terrible’… Rollerball was remade by John McTiernan and released in 2002. Coming from the director of Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), and Basic (2003), I was surprised to see the film’s impressive 3% on the Tomatometer. As if that isn’t bad enough, the Los Angeles Times also claimed it was one of the biggest commercial failures of all time. The remake starred Chris Klein, LL Cool Jay, and Jean Reno, all of whose performances I usually enjoy, but Klein was fresh from his role as a lacrosse player in American Pie (1999) and American Pie 2 (2001) so that might be the first clue to avoid it. I’m glad I watched the first Rollerball, but I won’t be wasting seventy-eight minutes of my life on the second.**