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