Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #80: now out in paperback and ebook!

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Welcome to Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #80: Station, edited by Stephen Theaker and John Greenwood. Our third issue in five months!

The stories begin with “The Naval Cadet: A Case of Identity” by Rafe McGregor, another in his series of mind-bending mysteries. “Great Central Station”, by Harris Coverley – his longest published story to date, in any venue – will appeal to anyone who enjoyed Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom by Sylvia Plath. “A Beckoning Star” is by Michael W. Thomas, who I think was the first ever external contributor to our magazine and “The Green Perplexity”, by Charles Wilkinson is perhaps the best story yet by one of our most consistently excellent contributors. “Across the Ages” by Soramimi Hanarejima is a time travel story with a difference.

In The Quarterly Review, Douglas J. Ogurek and Stephen Theaker review books by Paul Tremblay, Aron Beauregard, Zoraida Córdova, Martin Munks, and the films Kalki 2898 AD, M3GAN, Renfield and The Super Mario Bros Movie.

The cover art adapts Shantum Singh’s “Abandoned Railway Station in Delhi, India”, used under licence via Pexels.

I hope you’ll enjoy this issue as much as I did.

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Here are the exceptionally patient contributors to this issue.

Charles Wilkinson’s publications include The Pain Tree and Other Stories (London Magazine Editions, 2000). His stories have appeared in Best Short Stories 1990 (Heinemann), Best English Short Stories 2 (W.W. Norton, USA), Best British Short Stories 2015 (Salt), Confingo, and London Magazine, and in genre magazines/anthologies such as Black Static, Interzone, The Dark Lane Anthology, Supernatural Tales, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, Phantom Drift, Bourbon Penn, Shadows & Tall Trees, Nightscript and Best Weird Fiction 2015 (Undertow Books). His collections of strange tales and weird fiction, A Twist in the Eye (2016), Splendid in Ash (2018), Mills of Silence (2021) and The Harmony of the Stares (2022), appeared from Egaeus Press. Eibonvale Press published his chapbook of weird stories, The January Estate, in 2022. He lives in Wales. His stories have previously appeared in TQF41 (“Notes on the Bone”), TQF44 (“A Lesson from the Undergrowth”), TQF46 (“Petrol-Saved”), TQF48 (“A Thousand Eyes See All I Do”), TQF54 (“Septs”), TQF56 (“Mr Kitchell Says Thank You”), TQF59 (“The Constant Providers”), TQF60 (“Evening at the Aubergine Café”), TQF64 (“September Gathering”), TQF70 (“July Job Offer”), TQF73 (“The Arrival of an Acquaintance”) and TQF76 (“Controlling the Lights from Above”).

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonymous and sophomoric founder of the unsplatterpunk subgenre, which uses splatterpunk conventions (transgressive/gory/gross/violent subject matter) to deliver a positive message. His short story collection I Will Change the World … One Intestine at a Time (Plumfukt Press), a juvenile stew of horror and bizarro, aims to make readers lose their lunch while learning a lesson. Ogurek also guest-edits the wildly unpopular UNSPLATTERPUNK! “smearies”, published by Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. These anthologies are unavailable at your library and despised by your mother. Ogurek reviews films and fiction for that same magazine.

Harris Coverley has had more than a hundred short stories published in Penumbra, Hypnos, JOURN-E and The Black Beacon Book of Horror (Black Beacon Books), amongst many others. He has also had over two hundred poems published in journals around the world. He lives in Manchester, England. His stories have previously appeared in TQF70 (“See How They Run! See How They Run!”), TQF72 (“Father Figure”), TQF73 (“The Scorpion”), TQF74 (“Kung Fu Sue: Origins”), TQF75 (“Kleptobiblia”), TQF76 (“The White Body”), TQF77 (“Kung Fu Sue and the Circle of Broken Bones”) and TQF79 (“Kung Fu Sue and the Drug Lord’s Elephant”).

Michael W. Thomas’s latest poetry collection is Nothing Louche or Bohemian, a collaboration with poet Tina Cole (Black Pear Press). His most recent solo poetry collection is A Time for Such a Word (Black Pear Press). His latest novel is The Erkeley Shadows (Swan Village Reporter). His work has appeared in, among others, The Antioch Review, Critical Survey, The London Magazine and The TLS. He is on the editorial board of Crossroads: A Journal of English Studies (University of Bialystok, Poland). Website: www.michaelwthomas.co.uk. Blog: http://swansreport.blogspot.co.uk/. Socials: @thomasmichaelw. Instagram: michaelwthomas5. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=549139910. His most recent appearance in these pages was in TQF68, with “The Erkeley Shadows”.

Rafe McGregor is a critical theorist publishing on Anglophone culture, political violence, and policing. He is the author of twenty books, including Reducing Political Violence: Narrative Accounts of Crime and Harm (2026), Anthropocide: An Essay in Green Cultural Criminology (2025) and The Adventures of Roderick Langham (2017).

Ever yearning to be spellbound by ideas of a certain fanciful persuasion, Soramimi Hanarejima often meanders into the euphoric trance of lyrical daydreams, some of which are chronicled in the neuropunk story collection Literary Devices for Coping.

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

The Writing Life – Rafe McGregor

For the last twenty years, I’ve been fascinated by what is called ‘the literary life’, ‘the writing life’, being ‘bound up with books’, being a ‘bookman’ (or bookwoman), and various other more oblique or less elegant phrases. Regarding terminology, I’m not keen on either of the last two because they imply an emphasis on reading (or collecting) books rather than writing them and while one cannot write without reading, I know plenty of people who love reading but have no desire to write anything beyond an email or shopping list. Calling a life literary seems pretentious to me, though perhaps that’s just because I never aspired to be the next Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Douglas Coupland, J.M. Coetzee, Cormac McCarthy, or David Peace (I’m just not clever or creative enough.) Which leaves me with the writing life. What is it and have I been living it?

One of the best descriptions I’ve ever read is by Octavia Butler, from the archive of letters, diaries, journals, commonplace books, and datebooks that has recently been made available by The Huntington Library in San Merino, California. She gets straight to the heart of the matter: ‘Will always write, no matter what. This is a fact of my life. Thus I must always leave time in my day for writing.’ The writing life is nothing more and nothing less than a life spent writing; writing, typing, or recording one word after another until one has a paragraph, a stanza, a draft, a manuscript or something else someone somewhere might read. And that remains the case even when writing doesn’t earn any money or when there might be very little time for it. Here is Gareth L. Powell in About Writing: The Authorised Field Guide for Aspiring Authors (2022), picking up where Butler leaves off: ‘However you decide to organise your life, remember why you’re doing it. The goal is to get everything else under control, so you can be wild and free in your creative endeavours.’ For me, the writing life has had several characteristics that seem to have been shared by better known writers of speculative fiction and I want to draw attention to five.

First – and I place this first for good reason – is notetaking. In Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir (2023), M. John Harrison writes: ‘But notes make good source material, and when you keep notebooks they eventually begin to suggest something.’ Like many writers (and researchers), I’m a compulsive notetaker. And happy with it. Where I could and should do better is that I often throw my handwritten notes away or delete my digital ones and…of course…sometimes find I could’ve used them later. Here is Butler, once again cutting straight to the core, describing exactly why I make so many notes: ‘Writing things down a little might help untangle them – answers in a flash of insight or something.’ My creative process is very unimaginative in that whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction I usually start with notes rather than with an exposition or introduction. My writing is labour-intensive, perspiration not inspiration, proceeding slowly from rough notes to detailed notes to a first draft to up to a dozen more before something someone somewhere might enjoy reading emerges from the mess.

The second characteristic is collecting. I know few people who live the writing life without loving and collecting books (including in digital form, whether listened to or read onscreen). I listen to as many books as I read, to save my eyes and maximise my reading time, but I still love the look, feel, and smell of actual books. I’m with Ursula Le Guin when she wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 2008: ‘The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.’ I’ve been collecting on and off for forty-five years and probably have about four thousand books and magazines on my shelves, which is a little disappointing as it isn’t much of an advance on what I had ten years ago, but probably for the best until someone donates me a bigger house. Harrison has a depressing take on collections like mine for writers like me, i.e. those in the latter part of their lives: ‘You imagine someone saying, “They meant so much to him, choose anything you like,” then, when everyone has gone, looking around at all the books still left and wondering what on earth to do with them because even the charity shops aren’t interested.’

Third, drafting – as distinct from notetaking, revising, editing, or proving. In my short-lived career as a creative writing tutor, I used to call this 3FD: finish the f— first draft. (You might be surprised at how sensitive many creative writing students are, which is what the silly em dash is doing there.) I later realised that many if not most fiction writers recommend the same thing when it comes to writing a novel. Here’s Joanne Harris in Ten Things About Writing: Build Your Story…One Word at a Time (2020): ‘It’s tempting to tinker about with your first draft as you go along, but, barring a small amount of day-to-day line-work, which might help you get into the mood for writing, it’s nearly always better to just get your draft down. Even a dirty first draft is easier to work with than a clean first chapter.’ I’m not sure how useful the advice is in general, but given my own practice (described above), it’s exactly what I need. Once I have a completed first draft instead of detailed notes, the rest is relatively easy, whether it’s another three or ten drafts. In Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (1998), Le Guin explains precisely how one gets that first draft down: ‘The chief duty of a narrative sentence is to lead to the next sentence – to keep the story going. Forward movement, pace, and rhythm are words that are going to return often in this book.’

The fourth characteristic is walking. Powell reminds us that, ‘Spending all day in a chair, hunched over a keyboard, can be desperately bad for your long-term health. In order to perform to the best of your abilities, you have to make time for a little exercise, even if it’s just a stroll around the block.’ Harrison takes a much more robust approach, which is why one of his chapters is titled ‘write all night, walk all day’. He replaced walking with running and then rock climbing when he moved to the Peak District, both of which I enjoyed when I was younger, but neither of which have the same value for me as walking. I couldn’t find a fiction author who captures what I get from walking and what it means to me so I’ve resorted to my favourite book on the subject, A Philosophy of Walking (published in 2011 and translated to English in 2023), by the French philosopher Frédéric Gros: ‘Walking is something other than a way of relaxing after a hard day’s work, something other than a remedy for ennui, a health regimen, a social ritual, or even a source of inspiration.’ He is absolutely right, but it is also all of those things he lists…at least to me.

The fifth and final characteristic is what I’m going to call judging, which is a poor description of what I’m trying to communicate. Let me try another approach: if I could go back in time, give myself one piece of advice, and insist to myself that I follow it, what would it be? (I had to add the third part because I often fail to follow good advice, regardless of its source.) Without doubt: find a way of determining when to persevere and when to give up. Obviously, that advice is useful beyond writing. Less obviously, I’m not talking about persevering with or giving up the writing life. What I mean is judging when to persevere with a project and when to give up on it – because I’ve wasted hours, days, weeks, months, and perhaps even years rewriting and revising work I should have just left (but not thrown away or deleted) in draft. Harris says it best: ‘Don’t throw valuable time at a dead project. Yes, giving up can be painful. But sometimes you have to plough over your crop in order to plant something else.’ But how does one know when the project is dead? While I have a better sense now than I did when I began, I’m still not sure and if someone had told me how important deciding whether to cultivate or plough was twenty years ago, I might have eventually worked it out. In Steering the Craft, Le Guin doesn’t provide an answer, but she does show where and how it can – must, even – be found: ‘Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work.’ Judging what has potential and what doesn’t remains one of the most difficult things for me.

Writing Above the Curve? – Rafe McGregor

I first watched F1, Joseph Kosinski’s 2025 Hollywood blockbuster, at home rather than on the big screen, had mixed feelings about it, and did what I usually do in such cases – read a few reviews the next morning. The most pithy (I’ve forgotten where it was) stated: ‘this is not the film you want it to be.’ True on many levels, including the most fundamental. This is a story about a never-has-been fifty-something racing driver, Sonny Hayes (played by Brad Pitt), whose Formula One career was cut short by his youthful recklessness but is given one last shot to compete by his friend, a former-teammate-turned-owner. Spoiler alert, Sonny achieves what he couldn’t manage thirty years ago, winning the final race of the season, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The problem from a narrative point of view is that Sonny’s character is as static as his driving is dynamic. The most basic story human beings tell is about someone who went somewhere or did something and was changed by the going or doing. At the end of the film, however, Sonny is not only the same man he was at beginning, but the same reckless, fearless, and rootless man he was in his twenties. And in case this isn’t disappointing enough, the film rubs its flaw in our faces in the closing scene. In the eighth minute (of one hundred and forty-eight), Sonny is heading for the Baja 1000 when his friend catches up with him and makes him the offer he can’t refuse. What does he do immediately after victory in Abu Dhabi? Leaves without saying goodbye and signs up for the Baja 1000. The places he went and the things he did changed nothing. It wasn’t the film I wanted it to be.

So why write about it at all, never mind in a zine dedicated to speculative fiction? About two-thirds of the way through the narrative, there is a scene where Kate McKenna (played by Kerry Condon), Sonny’s love-interest in what is for the most part a sausage-fest, asks him why he has come back to Formula One at his age. With typical masculine reticence, he declines to answer. Then, after a suitable amount of encouragement and a single manly tear, he says something very interesting: ‘It’s rare, but sometimes there’s…this moment in the car where everything goes quiet. My heartbeat slows…it’s peaceful and I can see everything and no one, no one, can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t know when I’ll find it again, but man, I want to, I want to…cos in that moment, I’m flying.’ The moment about which Sonny is talking is difficult to describe, but is something like what the philosopher (and Nobel laureate in Literature) Jean-Paul Sartre called being-in-itself, a kind of purity of being that we, as conscious and self-conscious living things, can rarely, if ever, reach. (In Sartre’s taxonomy, we are being-for-itself). It is pure consciousness, meaning consciousness of nothing or just nothingness itself (Sartre’s magnum opus was called Being and Nothingness), the breaking down of the barrier between subject and object, selfhood and worldhood, and perhaps even mind and body. That moment has frequently and fraudulently been sold to us as ‘flow’ and ‘mindfulness’, the latter as a snake oil remedy for exploitation by our employers or Big Tech. I wondered what the equivalent moment in writing might be.

Once again, I did what I usually do (when I have a question about writing), turned to my three favourite books on writing, all of which I have read or listened to multiple times and all of which I will no doubt read or listen to many more times in the future. In order of precedence, these are: Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), Chuck Wendig’s The Kick-Ass Writer: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, and Earn Your Audience (2013), and Brian Dillon’s Essayism (2017). Stephen King needs no introduction and I’ve written about him many times in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction and elsewhere. Chuck Wendig is an American speculative fiction author best known for his Star Wars: Aftermath Trilogy (2015-2017), three novels that connect the original trilogy of films to the sequel trilogy in what is now known as the Skywalker Saga. Brian Dillon is an Irish author best known for his nonfiction, especially his essays, and is also a highly respected art curator. As the title suggests, Essayism is about Dillon’s forté rather than fiction writing so I shall replace it with a recent find, Gareth L.Powell’s About Writing: The Authorised Field Guide for Aspiring Authors (2022). Powell is a prolific English science fiction author who has been publishing short stories, novellas, and novels since 2002. I want to call Powell and Wendig ‘mid-list’ authors, but I’m not sure if I should because, first, I’m not sure if a mid-list of professional novelists still exists and, second, it sounds disrespectful…which is not my intention: as much as I love On Writing, I never aspired to be a bestseller so there is a sense in which Powell’s and Wendig’s books are much more relevant to my experience as an author.

King describes something very similar to Sonny’s moment and even uses ‘moment’ to introduce it. This passage appears during his description of the problems he had writing The Stand (1978), his fifth novel and one of the half-dozen for which he is most famous: ‘At one moment I had none of this; at the next I had all of it. If there is any one thing I love about writing more than the rest, it’s that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects. I have heard it called “thinking above the curve,” and it’s that; I’ve heard it called “the over-logic,” and it’s that, too…The rest of the book ran itself off in nine weeks.’ Wendig prefers ‘momentum’ to moment and focuses on its significance in completing a first draft rather than on the experience of writing with (or in a state of) momentum: ‘Momentum is everything. Cut the brake lines. Careen wildly and unsteadily toward your goal. I hate to bludgeon you about the head and neck with a hammer forged in the volcanic fires of Mount Obvious, but the only way you can finish something is by not stopping.’ Powell is concerned with something similar to the ever-elusive moment when he writes: ‘I think you find your voice when you give yourself permission to stop trying to write like anyone else and just put the words down on the page as they occur to you. And you find your groove when you’re writing in the right way for you.’

None of these are describing Sonny’s moment, although King comes very close. King is actually discussing two separate but related experiences: the first is thinking above the curve, the moment when the solution to his narrative problem came to him; and the second what we might call writing above the curve, finishing what many consider his best book in nine weeks. It is the writing above the curve in which I’m interested. Comparing Sonny’s dialogue with King’s passage, I have a bone to pick with the F1’s script. Sonny says, ‘I want to…cos in that moment, I’m flying.’ Flying is just a version of driving, with much more speed and freedom and I imagine many pilots who fly professionally or for pleasure don’t experience the breakdown of subject and object, selfhood and worldhood, and all the rest to which Sonny is referring. When he says driving in the moment is like flying, it’s akin to an author saying that writing in the moment with a pen is like writing on a keyboard. It’s not that the moment makes one experience like a similar experience that is more intense, but that in the moment, all experiences are intense, regardless of whether one is driving, flying, writing, typing, or practising zazen. While King writes about thinking above the curve rather than writing above the curve, it seems likely he had some (or perhaps a great deal of) experience of the latter in those nine weeks he mentions.

Describing the moment in writing is very difficult, which may be why so few people have tried and why I should cut the screenwriters of F1 some slack. For me, writing above the curve is when I cease being conscious of what I’m writing – the genre, the structure, the audience, the publisher, all of that – and simply write (the story, novel, essay, monograph, whatever it is). It feels like writing without any rules or restrictions. It’s not, of course, because the rules and restrictions are all there, but I’m no longer aware of them and am just typing one word after another. At such times, I often touch-type too, which is something I can’t do when I’m aware that I’m typing. It seems like the manuscript is writing itself (which it’s obviously not either). I don’t have much more to say about the experience except that while it’s not the only or even main reason I write, it probably is comparable to racing (or zazen, or whatever). I first felt it when I was writing my first (and, in retrospect, best) novel and the last thing I will say is that, for me, it only happens when I’m working on a manuscript that takes multiple sittings, like a novel, monograph, novelette, or long essay. I’m not sure why, but the sustained attention required for these medium-to-large projects seems to facilitate writing above the curve in a way that short stories, blog posts, and reviews don’t. I’ve sketched a poor picture of the experience, but if you’ve felt it (in writing or elsewhere), then I think you’ll understand precisely what I’ve failed to articulate.

Mad Max: Fury Road | review by Rafe McGregor

Heavy with metal, heavy with meaning

Douglas J. Ogurek’s excellent review of George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) reminded me that I’d been planning to review its sequel, Fury Road, ever since using it as an example in my short essay, The World Ecology of Climate Change Cinema, in 2023. So here it is, three (or eleven) years late…Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) is the fourth instalment in the Mad Max film franchise, following Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 (1981), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). All four of the films are directed by George Miller (the third in partnership with George Ogilvie), set in Australia, and follow the eponymous protagonist, Max Rockatansky (played by Mel Gibson in the first three and Tom Hardy in the fourth).

Mad Max introduces Max as a police officer in Victoria’s Main Force Patrol in a dystopian future ‘A FEW YEARS FROM NOW’ and pits him against a particularly vicious motorcycle gang. Mad Max 2, which was released as The Road Warrior in the US (after Max’s nom de guerre), opens with a narrated introduction that establishes the context of the original as the collapse of global civilisation in the aftermath of a Third World War in which nuclear weaponry was deployed. The sequel is set in a post-apocalyptic Australia in which isolated communities and marauding gangs compete for the remaining fossil fuel, the production of which was destroyed in the war. Although the police no longer exist, Max fulfils a similar function in Mad Max 2 and Beyond Thunderdome, highway patrol replaced by cross-country driving as he protects the weak from death and slavery at the hands of the marauders.

Fury Road also opens with a voiceover, which concludes with Max stating: ‘Once, I was a cop, a road warrior searching for a righteous cause. As the world fell, each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy…me or everyone else.’ The voices interrupting Max suggest that the Earth can no longer support human life and that human life has become half-life, i.e. subject to radioactive decay, which is evinced by the majority of the characters in the narrative, who appear diseased, deformed, or disabled. The global ecological collapse is mirrored in Max as an individual, his psychological breakdown involving a paradoxical combination of obsession with those he failed to save and paranoia that everyone intends him harm. He is thus no longer the road warrior defending prey from predator, but a solitary scavenger haunted by failure.

Fury Road is 113 minutes from opening to closing credits and has the five-act structure characteristic of Hollywood blockbusters: exposition, complication, climax, crisis, and resolution. The exposition and resolution are brief (seventeen and seven minutes respectively) and the three acts that constitute the bulk of the film all involve an extended motor vehicle chase across the Wasteland, putting Fury Road very firmly in the action thriller genre. The exposition introduces Max, the despot Immortan Joe (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne), and Joe’s War Boys, the most capable of whom is Imperator Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron). The complication begins when Joe realises that Furiosa has rescued his Five Wives from sexual slavery in the Citadel and sets off in pursuit, with Max (who was captured earlier) being used as a living blood bag for Nux (played by Nicholas Hoult), an ailing War Boy. Furiosa and Max meet and flee together while remaining mutually hostile. The climax begins when the two join forces (48 minutes in to the film) and ends with Max convincing Furiosa that she must reverse the chase, charge the War Boys and their allies, and take control of the Citadel. The crisis is a prolonged battle between the two groups and the resolution depicts…well, I won’t spoil the ending just in case anyone reading this hasn’t seen it yet.

As such, the plot of Fury Road seems straightforward, moving from an inaugural condition in which Furiosa flees from the Citadel to her acceptance of Max as an ally to a retrospectively inevitable condition in which she and Max fight Joe and the War Boys. The superficial narrative is, however, enriched by an alternating focus on the two protagonists. The title of the film and its place in the Mad Max franchise suggest that it is primarily about Max, like the three prequels, and the exposition follows suit, concentrating on his capture, attempted escape, and enslavement as Nux’s blood bag. The complication changes direction, however, suggesting that the narrative’s exploration of women’s emancipation in the face of hegemonic masculinity is of much more significance. The clash between female liberation and male supremacism – represented by the conflict between Furiosa and the Wives on the one hand and Joe and the War Boys on the other – leaves little room for Max, who is neither female nor a War Boy. This exploration continues to take centre stage through the climax and it is not until the crisis, when Max leads a motley band of women against the combined forces of the Citadel, Gas Town, and the Bullet Farm, that his importance once again rivals Furiosa’s.

The narrative tension between Max and Furiosa, the question of whose story matters the most, is successfully resolved in the conclusion. Fury Road – or Furiosa’s road – is really about Furiosa and her struggle to free the oppressed in the Citadel. While Max’s role in the represented sequence of events is less significant than Furiosa’s, the role of those events in the franchise is crucial to Max in that it restores him to his former status of road warrior and, in so doing, facilitates a future continuation of the franchise. Screenwriter Nick Lathouris describes this development in thematic terms, as Fury Road being ‘about a man running away from his better self, and his better self catches up to him’. He’s right, of course, but only in part because if Furiosa is the first Mad Max film without Max (cameo appearance excepted), then Fury Road is the first Mad Max film where he is displaced as the protagonist. This is her story and that story is a perfect blend of high-speed action and abundant allegorical depth.****