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), 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