The Last Mimzy | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in TQF17 (June 2007).

I didn’t really enjoy The X-Files until the second season (though later I went back and enjoyed that first one as well). It was because the first episode treated alien contact very seriously, and so I took that to be the premise of the show: there has been alien contact. But then, in following weeks, we found that everything else that anyone ever imagined on a dark and stormy night also existed – telepathy, bigfoot, ghosts, vampires – but with no linking rationale, other than that they always existed, which I found intensely frustrating, both as a science fiction fan and as a rationalist. Soon, though, I came to see the program had much more to do with horror than science fiction, and was able to enjoy it again, and enjoy it thoroughly. Different rules apply in horror: its goal is not to help us make sense of the world around us, or speculate about the future, but just to frighten our socks off, and The X-Files did that in spades.

The Book of Iod: Ten Cthulhu Stories by Henry Kuttner | review by Stephen Theaker

What a surprise: if I ever knew that Henry Kuttner had written Cthulhu mythos stories, I had forgotten it long before seeing this book. What mad nightmares could spring from the imagination that brought us “The Last Mimzy”? Unfortunately, Book of Iod: Ten Cthulhu Stories (Diversion Books, ebook, 2187ll) is slightly mistitled, since Cthulhu (bless his name!) is only mentioned in passing twice. “The Invaders” is the most traditional mythos story, about a writer whose drug-assisted time-travelling for inspiration has opened the way for things that shouldn’t be here. Kuttner’s stories differ from Lovecraft’s, though: Cthulhu here is almost the hero of Earth, having fought off these things before, a bit like Godzilla. Not many mythos stories end with a human saying, “I felt a wave of reassurance. Suddenly all fear left me.”