Lone Wolf 24: Rune War | review by Rafe McGregor

Lone Wolf 24: Rune War (Collector’s Edition) by Joe Dever
Holmgard Press, hardback, £16.99, December 2019, ISBN 9781916268005

In addition to completing the late Joe Dever’s vision of a thirty-two book cycle comprising four different series, Holmgard Press is intent on completing the Collector’s Edition release initially begun by Mongoose Publishing in 2010 (for details, see my review of Lone Wolf 21: The Voyage of the Moonstone). I must confess that for a combination of reasons (and despite the user-friendly formatting of Project Aon), I had never actually played books 24 to 26, in consequence of which I was very pleased to see Lone Wolf 24: Rune War released at the end of 2019.  The game begins with True Friend (my Kai Grand Master of randomly-generated-name-fame) returning to the Kai Monastery from his successful mission in the Kingdom of Siyen (Lone Wolf 23: Mydnight’s Hero) to be invited to a private audience with Lone Wolf.  The evil Lord Vandyan has usurped the throne of the former Principality of Eldenora and invaded the neighbouring countries of Delden, Magador, and Salony in Northern Magnamund.  Vandyan’s imperial ambitions are currently stalled in Lyris, where he is besieging Varetta (the Stornlands setting of Lone Wolf 6: The Kingdoms of Terror) with his Vorka horde.  The Vorka are Agarashi (spawn of Agarash the Damned, an archdemon that serves at the right hand of the God of Darkness) and were believed extinct before their appearance in Vandyan’s army.  The Vorka horde is being continually replenished from Duadon, the capital of Eldenora, where it appears that the creatures are being created by means of the Runes of Agarash. While Lone Wolf leads a crusade of New Order Kai, allies, and mercenaries to raise the siege of Varetta, True Friend is tasked with infiltrating Skull-Tor, Duadon’s fortress, to destroy the runes and cut off the supply of Vorka at its source.  This mission brief suggests a game of at least three parts: a wilderness adventure beginning with a river journey and ending in a forest, an urban exploration of the streets of Duadon, and finally a dungeon crawl in the fortress.

The game begins well, with immediate action, although anyone who has played previous Lone Wolf games will not find the journey to Hulsta’s cooperage in Duadon too onerous (with the possible exception of the Grochod Forest section). The method of entry selected for Skull-Tor is the underground tunnels constructed in case of the need for escape by the original occupant. The plan is soon scuppered, however, and the infiltration (in my gameplay) was by means of the underground river, habitat to some very nasty local fauna. Once inside Skull-Tor, True Friend discovers the full extent of Vanyan’s megalomania, a three-step strategy for world domination, the first two steps of which have already been set in motion. This is followed by an exciting and multi-staged climax that includes a skirmish with the deadly Zorkaan the Soultaker. The game is in fact in four parts: a wilderness adventure to reach Duadon, an urban exploration on and below the streets of Duadon, a dungeon crawl in Skull-Tor, and then a two-stage escape from stronghold and city. As is so often the case, the escape is a little anticlimactic, becoming progressively easier from the stronghold to the city to the countryside. Rune War nonetheless has a gripping – shocking, even – ending, which I shall reveal seeing as Lone Wolf 25: Trail of the Wolf has been available in one form or another since 1997. After being extracted by Banedon, Guildmaster of the Brotherhood of the Crystal Star, in his skyship, True Friend returns to the Kai Monastery to receive the news that Lone Wolf, still at the head of the crusade, has been abducted by a black shadow that fell from the sky on the outskirts of Ruanon and is thought to be Zorkaan the Soultaker. Lone Wolf’s soul has, literally, been taken and True Friend’s next mission will be to bring it back.

I have little to say about the mechanics of play – as a game, Rune War is highly enjoyable, albeit not particularly demanding, and the Grand Master Discipline of Kai-screen is very useful (though not essential). As with all the other Collector’s Editions, there is a bonus adventure, “The Traitor’s Reward”, which is written by Gavyn F. Duthie. The player takes on the persona of Kalen of Salony, a Stornlander sellsword leading a band of mercenaries in service of the Salonese. My verdict is that the game is something of a mixed bag. On the upside, the adventure makes a nice counterpoint to the main feature and the idea of beginning with Kalen and his whole band is original. “The Traitor’s Reward” is also satisfyingly long for a bonus adventure (270 sections as opposed to the 350 of the feature). On the downside, there is a noticeable difference in authorial quality between the two adventures, particularly with respect to the descriptions (some of which are a little unclear) and turns of phrase (which are occasionally awkward) in the bonus adventure. More importantly, the attempt to turn the skills of a veteran mercenary into Kai-like special abilities falls flat and detracts from the internal logic of the cycle – the Kai are unique precisely in virtue of their exceptional skills and (as they progress) supra-human abilities, which are achieved by the combination of dedication, devotion, and divine intervention. Having said that, other players may well not be as distracted as I was by this question and will probably enjoy the bonus adventure much more than I did. Not only have I still not played books 25 and 26, but 25, 26, and 28 are the only three missing from my collection of various editions of the rest of the thirty books… so I really do hope Holmgard Press is here to stay.

Lone Wolf 23: Mydnight's Hero | review by Rafe McGregor

Lone Wolf 23: Mydnight’s Hero (Collector’s Edition) by Joe Dever
Holmgard Press, hardback, £16.99, April 2019, ISBN 9781527237728

Now that I’m cautiously confident Holmgard Press is here to stay – to see the Lone Wolf series through to its conclusion, at least – I’ve been spending more time on the website at www.magnamund.com. On the About page there is a history of the series by the renowned Jonathan Green, author of YOU Are The Hero: A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks (parts 1 and 2, published in 2014 and 2017 respectively). I was struck by how much more upbeat it was than my own history of the series, with which I began my review of Lone Wolf 21: The Voyage of the Moonstone in 2016 (and updated in my review of Lone Wolf 29: The Storms of Chai in 2017). I hope my intention to be supportive of the late Joe Dever and my admiration for the innovative ways in which he overcame the obstacles presented by publishers were both clear, but I suppose Green’s history is written for a different purpose (promoting the series) to mine (providing some sort of critical appreciation). I nonetheless thought it would be interesting to compare the two, by which I mean fill in the copious gaps in my account using Green.

Green’s history begins before mine, in 1977, with a twenty-one-year-old Dever switching from tabletop wargaming to role-playing gaming, creating the world of Magnamund as a campaign setting for his Dungeons & Dragons game. As has been well-publicised, Dever became the first British winner of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Championship of America in 1982. Less well-publicised is the fact that he received a job offer from Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone (the creators of the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks) at Games Workshop. Interestingly, given my commentary on his business acumen, Dever decided that Lone Wolf would reach a wider audience as a gamebook on the basis that there were more bookshops than game stores. Three decades later, there are precious few bookstores left, but more importantly from a financial point of view, the gamebook has been replaced by videogames in a way that role-playing games haven’t (not yet, anyway). By this time, however, Dever had long switched to the online platform offered by Project Aon, in a sense pioneering what we would now called Open Access Publishing. Hutchinson, which is now part of Penguin Random House, commissioned four books from Dever and the first two were published in 1984, with Lone Wolf 1: Flight from the Dark selling into six figures in the first month.

Dever’s original plan was a series of twenty books – what would subsequently become the Kai, Magnakai, and Grand Master series – where players adopted the persona of Kor-Skarn (Lone Wolf) throughout. Green mentions the change of illustrators in 1987 and that Brian Williams illustrated the series until his death in 2010. Following the publication of all twenty books, Dever set to work on the New Order series, which he envisaged as consisting of twelve books following the adventures of a new protagonist (reproducing the Kai and Magnakai series, which are actually two parts of a single campaign in gaming terms or a single narrative in literary ones). Green mentions Red Fox cancelling the series in 1998 and concurs with my assessment about the wisdom of allowing Project Aon to distribute the books online (again, looking back, these were early ebooks). At the same time as Dever was having problems with Mongoose Publishing (who had taken over from Red Fox in 2007), he began publishing maps of Magnamund, drawn by Francesco Mattioli. Apparently Dever was prevented from setting up Holmgard Press before 2016 because of the need to wait for the rights to revert to him and, as I mentioned in my review of Lone Wolf 30: Dead in the Deep, the reversion came almost too late, with Dever dying in November of that year. His son, Ben, who has taken over Holmgard Press and the completion of the series, is also a writer – of scripts and screenplays – which is why the series is co-written with Vincent Lazzari, who had been assisting Dever with the Lone Wolf Role Playing Game (by Mongoose) since 2010.

Having integrated my history with Green’s, I’ll pick up where I left off in Lone Wolf 22: The Buccaneers of Shadaki, which concluded with True Friend (my Kai Grand Master of randomly-generated-name-fame) completing the mission given to him by Lone Wolf at the beginning of the previous gamebook, returning the Moonstone (one of the greatest artifacts of Magnamund) to its Shianti creators on the distant Isle of Lorn. After enjoying their thanks and hospitality, True Friend returns to the Port of Suhn and book 23 begins with him receiving a message from Lone Wolf in the Dessi consulate, courtesy of a magical seeing stone, about an emergency in the nearby Kingdom of Siyen. King Oridon of Siyen has been assassinated and the throne of the kingdom will shortly be claimed by Baron Sadanzo, an evil sorcerer. True Friend is the closest Kai Master to hand and his mission is to find the heir, Prince Karvas (who has been living in exile on the Isle of Sheasu for a decade), and convince him to return to the land of his birth within fifty days – before Harvestmas Day – after which his claim will be forfeit according to the Constitution of Siyen. Lone Wolf has despatched Wizard Acraban of the Magicians’ Guild of Toran to assist and True Friend must rendezvous with him in the city of Mydnight in Sheasu in twenty days.

The game is divided into three parts, which become longer, more exciting, and more difficult to play as one progresses. The narrative takes the form of a race against time, to reach Seroa, the capital of Siyen, before noon on Harvestmas Day. In the first part, which is relatively undemanding, travel is by ship – sailing ship to the Island of Sheasu and then skyship from Sheasu to Seroa – but the journey is interrupted when the skyship crash-lands in the Great Forest of Kelderwood. Part two is a journey on foot to the city of Bakhasa, ruled by the dreaded Autarch Sejanoz (who will play a significant role later on in the New Order Series), ending with the escape of True Friend and Karvas from the city on horseback. The final chapter begins with the flight from Bakhasa, involves a substantial amount of time in the saddle, and ends – all being well – with Karvas crowned King and True Friend invested as a Knight of Siyen. What works particularly well in this race against time plot, with True Friend and Karvas the target of several pursuits along the way, is that the pace of the game never flags, in addition to which one is never sure of what will come next, maintaining the sense of suspense throughout. One of the features of the Lone Wolf series that has elevated it above its many competitors (in the eighties at least) is the lack of linearity of the narratives and this lack is especially evident here, where – as the player – all one can be sure of is that the conclusion will be in Seroa. How one gets there – the route, the means, and the obstacles – is all entirely up for grabs.

The mechanics of the game work very well. I found only one (typographical) error: illustration XVII matches section 295, not section 294 (as the gamebook states), which caused little confusion as the sections are right next to one another. There is only one section where I feel compelled to offer walkthrough-type advice. When you arrive at the South Gate of Seroa (and I’m not sure whether there are any other options) you must enter the city inconspicuously, i.e. risk the delay of the long queue, otherwise you will lose the opportunity to separate Baron Sadanzo from his Gem of Naar, which makes him indestructible for a lowly Kai Grand Sentinel. I also found the possession and mastery of a bow particularly useful in this adventure (which is not always the case in the series). As with all the other Collector’s Editions, there is a bonus adventure: “Lost in the Kelderwastes”, written by Florent Haro and Vincent Lazarri. The player adopts the persona of Acraban, left with his downed skyship Starstrider in the Great Kelderwood Forest, and involves the hunt for a lost patrol of his crewmen. As regular readers of my Lone Wolf reviews will recognise, the adventure meets both of my criteria for a bonus game: the plot dovetails neatly with the main adventure (literally beginning where True Friend left Acraban) and provides a contrast of player character, a magic-user as opposed to a ranger to use Advanced Dungeons & Dragons terminology. The adventure is short (150 sections as opposed to the 350 of the main adventure), but original, interesting, and well worth playing.

The Rise of Skywalker | review by Rafe McGregor

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, by J.J. Abrams (Walt Disney Studios) 

A conclusion four decades in the making. 

The release of the final instalment of the Skywalker Saga over Christmas in the UK provided me with the first opportunity to visit my fellow film nerd and former employer since moving house, in consequence of which I was very much looking forward to the whole day. The pleasant sense of anticipation offset a phenomenon that I’ve never experienced before in forty years of watching Star Wars: despite having seen both The Force Awakens (released in 2015 and directed by J.J. Abrams) and The Last Jedi (released in 2017 and directed by Rian Johnson) on the big screen, I had no recollection of where the narrative of the Sequel Trilogy had paused when the latter concluded. To make matters worse, I’d confused what little I did recall with Solo: A Star Wars Story (released in 2018 and directed by Ron Howard), which I’d also seen on the big screen (and thoroughly enjoyed) in the interim. This literal loss of plot on my part was unprecedented – unthinkable in not only the Original Trilogy so adored by my generation but even the Prequel Trilogy that proved such a palpable disappointment to so many of us. Even in The Phantom Menace (released in 1999 and directed by George Lucas) at its silliest and most spurious, there was always a clear sense of the narrative direction – working towards the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker, the destruction of the Jedi, and the beginning of A New Hope (released in 1977 and also directed by George Lucas).

In my review of The Last Jedi, I characterised Johnson as having tread a fine line between revisiting and rebooting, following Abrams in The Force Awakens by reproducing the plot, characters, and setting of the Original Trilogy. Looking back over the full saga, the overarching narrative seems to move in a series of circular cycles. The Jedi, given their military prowess, prescient wisdom, and communion with the Force, have a perverse predilection for getting wiped out (in George Lucas’ 2005 Revenge of the Sith and the interim between the Original and Sequel Trilogies) and the Empire keeps bouncing back no matter how many devastating defeats it suffers (in George Lucas’s 2002 Attack of the Clones and Richard Marquand’s 1983 Return of the Jedi). The problem with this is that if the Skywalker Saga ends – as the title of the final episode suggests – with the rise of the Jedi (for at least the third time) and/or the defeat of the First Order (AKA deep state Republic, Empire, Last Order), then it seems unlikely that this status quo will last for longer than a few decades before the next cycle of rise and fall. And if this is the case, the three trilogies become somewhat interchangeable and the risk is that both The Rise of Skywalker and the Sequel Trilogy as a whole will bring the Skywalker Saga to an anticlimactic conclusion – one that could rival what is probably the most famous anti-climax in speculative fiction, “The Scouring of the Shire” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Return of the King (from The Lord of the Rings).

Abrams appears to be well aware of this problem and deals with it by very quickly revealing that Darth Sidious (AKA Senator Palpatine, the Emperor and played by Ian McDiarmid) not only survived the Original Trilogy, but has been manipulating events from the very beginning of the saga and is, on consequence, the antagonist of all three trilogies as well as the saga as a whole.  His role simply varies, one might say, from being the power behind the throne to the power on the throne (and back again). The mission of General Leia Organa (played by the late Carrie Fisher, courtesy of some very clever CGI) and the Resistance is thus to thwart Sidious’s machinations and, in defeating him once and for all, bring the threat he has posed to the galaxy to an end. In my review of The Last Jedi I mentioned the development of a dramatic tension between Rey (played by Daisy Ridley) and Ren (AKA Ben Solo, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren and played by Adam Driver) and this is intensified in The Rise of Skywalker, becoming the axis around which the plot of the film revolves. Once Sidious is set up as the villain, two questions emerge. First, whether Rey and Ren will unite forces and second, if they do, whether it will be in service of the Sith or in service of the Jedi. Where I previously lamented the lack of a love triangle in both the Prequel and Sequel trilogies I think the increased focus on the relationship between the two worked very well because the raised stakes (and increased screen time) presented not only the two questions noted above, but further questions such as whether a galaxy without the Sith needs the Jedi at all. I am pleased to say that these and many other questions are all answered.

Having mentioned The Lord of the Rings books in the context of anti-climaxes, I should add that Abrams employs several filmic quotes or draws upon the imagery of (I am not sure which) Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptations of Tolkien: the Knights of Ren reflect the Uruk-hai, Finn and Jannah’s charge recalls Faramir’s ill-fated attempt to recapture Osgiliath, and the Sith homeland of Exegol resembles Mordor. This is not, however, to detract from The Rise of Skywalker and, having reached the end of Lucas’s three stories of three acts each, it seems entirely appropriate to reach beyond the genre of science fiction to fantasy, reminding the audience of the many similarities between the two. If I have one complaint it is that while all the questions are indeed answered in a satisfactory manner, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures could not resist a final few minutes in which the foundation for another saga is established – a literal investment for the future, in case the company directors decide that their net worth of $130 billion (according to Business Insider) isn’t enough. ****               

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #65: UNSPLATTERPUNK! 3: now out in paperback and ebook!

free epub | free mobi | free pdf | print UK | print USA | Kindle UK | Kindle US

GUEST-EDITED BY DOUGLAS J. OGUREK

Vicious parasites, punctured flesh, eyeball trauma, severed limbs, theatrical licking. The TQF UNSPLATTERPUNK! series returns with its third instalment. Six subversive stories, including an all-new tale by unsplatterpunk luminary Drew Tapley, aim to keep the reader entertained and aghast, while delivering a positive message.

A soon-to-be father focuses on helping others amid a Martian base massacre that shows the repercussions of human intrusion. Outraged women unite to stop a high-ranking male oppressor, and in the process, unravel the key to combating male chauvinism and its disastrous effects. A woman, certain of the upstanding life she’s led, learns a lesson that will seal her postmortem fate. Support group bloodshed leads to a scientific breakthrough. Three brothers on an Irish farm dismantle a brutal patriarchy… and chop off body parts. Back-of-theatre make-out sessions plunge to new slimy depths in an exploration of the pressure teens feel to become sexual legends.

So put on your coveralls and jump into the carnage and debauchery… You’re going to get filthy, but you’ll also emerge with a sense of hope.

Also includes reviews of books by Aliette de Bodard, John Llewellyn Probert, Laurie Penny, Pixie Britton and William F. Temple, and of the films Aquaman, Crawl, Every Day, Glass, It Chapter Two, Mary Poppins Returns, Ready or Not, Under the Skin and Us, and of the television series Carnival Row.

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Here are the gore-unsplattered contributors to this issue:

Chris Di Placito is a writer living in Fife, Scotland. His work has appeared in magazines such as Litro, BULL, Porridge, Ink In Thirds, STORGY and Structo.

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonym for a writer living somewhere on Earth. Though banned on Mars, his fiction appears in over fifty Earth publications. Douglas’s website can be found at www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com and his Twitter account is at www.twitter.com/unsplatter.

Drew Tapley is a British copywriter, journalist and filmmaker based in Toronto.

Garvan Giltinan is a recovering Irishman with a fascination with the bizarre/grotesque/puerile. His work has appeared in the anthologies New England: Weird, Triggered, and Fatal Fetish. Forthcoming publications include the novel Backdoor Carnivore (JEA Press) and the short story “Titty Kitties” (Thicke and Vaney Books). Giltinan has an MFA in Creative Writing from Pine Manor College, and really weirds out his wife with the subject matter of his stories.

Jacob Edwards also writes 42-word reviews for Derelict Space Sheep. His website is at www.jacobedwards.id.au, his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/JacobEdwardsWriter, and his Twitter account is at www.twitter.com/ToastyVogon.

Joanna Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Author of the novella The Couvade and other short fiction, Joanna has been published in journals and anthologies such as SYNTH #1: An Anthology of Dark SF, Honey & Sulphur and In Darkness, Delight: Masters of Midnight. Joanna is a Contemplative Psychotherapy graduate of Naropa University and lives near Detroit. Follow their monstrous musings at horrorsong.blog.

Rafe McGregor lectures at Edge Hill University. He is the author of two monographs, two novels, six collections of short fiction, and two hundred articles, essays, and reviews. His most recent work of fiction is The Adventures of Roderick Langham, a collection of occult detective stories.

Stephen Theaker is the co-editor of TQF and shares his home with three slightly smaller Theakers, one of whom provided the art for this issue's cover. His reviews, interviews and articles have also appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Prism, BFS Horizons and the BFS Journal.

Manchester, UK-based Tom Over is a writer of dark, speculative strangeness. He grew up loving all things horror and has been suckling on the gnarled teat of weird fiction ever since he was knee high to a Mugwump. He generally divides his time between watching cult movies with his girlfriend and working on his first collection. To date, his work has appeared in CLASH Media, Aphotic Realm, Crystal Lake Publishing and Horror Sleaze Trash amongst others. His first collection is due for release in early 2020 from NihilismRevised.

Zeke Jarvis is a professor of English at Eureka College. His work has appeared in Moon City Review, Posit and KNOCK, among other places. His books include So Anyway…, In A Family Way, Lifelong Learning and the forthcoming The Three of Them.

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

The Man in the High Castle, Season 4 | review by Rafe McGregor

The John Smith Show

In my review of The Man in the High Castle, Season 2 in 2017 I summarised the events of the first two seasons and praised Amazon Studios for the particularly skilful narrative closure employed, a rare artistic achievement in which the series could either have concluded there and then or continued into a third season.  One of the most noticeable changes in popular culture in my lifetime has been the development of television into a serious, artistic mode of representation, which seems to have occurred in tandem with the technological changes related to streaming.  Television series like HBO’s Band of Brothers (2001) and True Detective (2014-2019) were inconceivable in the nineteen eighties. The development of a genuine televisual art was accompanied by a narrative development, which is so obvious and commonplace that it may be regarded as essential to the medium rather than a studio choice for those who didn’t grow up with nineteen eighties television: most series appear to be created for a two-season run. I’ve noticed two consequences of this.  First, if a series doesn’t progress to the second season, it rarely concludes in a satisfying manner. In this respect, Netflix’s Mindhunter (2017) was a rare exception (the series concluded rather than terminated with the last episode of season one, though a second was released in 2019). Second, if there is a third season, it is often disappointing – often, but not always, because the plot is tangential to that of the first two seasons. History’s Vikings (2013) is a particularly good (i.e. bad) case in point. Aside from the potential for literal loss of plot, many third seasons also suffer from a particularly potent combination of production problems: viewer interest typically begins to wane at precisely the same time as actors feel confident enough to demand higher salaries. With respect to The Man in the High Castle, the announcement of a third season was made together with the announcement of a fourth, which would also be the final season. I found season 3 something of a let-down on my initial viewing, although having revisited it since I’m not entirely sure why.  

The season focuses on everyday life in Nazi America (America east of the Rocky Mountains) and the development of Die Nebenwelt, a machine that can transport people between the alternative world of the characters and the real world of the audience (in the nineteen sixties). The fictional Nazis call our world the Alt-World, of course, but I shall call it the real world to avoid confusion. The main difference between the alternative world and ours is that the Axis won the Second World War in the former, dividing the world into two super-states, the Greater Nazi Reich and the Japanese Empire. The shared emphasis between Nazi America and the Japanese Pacific States (America west of the Rocky Mountains) of the first two seasons shifted subtly towards Nazi America, a shift that was exacerbated when Resistance leader Juliana Crane (played by Alexa Davalos) killed Joe Blake (played by Luke Kleintank), a German-American Nazi agent who linked both empires and both protagonists, Crane and John Smith (played by Rufus Sewell), the Reichsmarschall of Nazi America to Himmler’s (played by Kenneth Tigar) Reichsführer of the GNR. This subtle shift is exacerbated by the problem I noted in my previous review, Sewell stealing the show as an unrepentant American Nazi who is fiercely loyal to family and Führer, too shrewd to be outwitted by ambitious Nazis, and too tough to be killed by the Resistance. Notwithstanding its status as an interim conclusion, the last episode of season 3 – “Jahr Null” – was once again a masterful deployment of narrative closure, drawing all the disparate threads of the season together in a thrilling finish. The details most relevant to season 4 are: Helen Smith’s (played by Chelah Horsdal) flight to the Neutral Zone (America between the Reich and the Empire) following her son Thomas ’s (played by Quinn Lord) voluntary euthanasia; the shooting of Himmler by Wyatt Price (played by Jason O’Mara), another Resistance leader; the functional operation of Die Nebenwelt; and Smith learning that two versions of the same person cannot exist in the same world at the same time (i.e. he cannot cross to the real world until the real John Smith dies). The episode and season end with Smith realising that Juliana has found a way to travel between worlds on her own. He shoots her to prevent her escaping from custody, but a moment after the bullet strikes she disappears. My lasting impression of season 4 taken as a whole is that it completes the trend initiated in season 2, turning the series into The John Smith Show. With the decision to make a third and fourth series being taken at the end of 2016, I cannot help but wonder if this greater emphasis on Smith is a reflection of and response to the inauguration of Donald Trump as forty-fifth President of the United States in January 2017 – a question I’ll return to at the end of my review.

Season 4 begins a year after the end of season 3. In the JPS, Trade Minister Tagomi (played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) has been assassinated and Colonel Takeshi Kido (played by Joel de la Fuente) of the dreaded Kenpeitai (the military police responsible for the criminal and security policing functions in the JPS) has been assigned the case. Kido will emerge as the main antagonist in the JPS subplot, working against a new character and protagonist, Bell Mallory (played by Frances Turner).  Bell is head of the San Francisco cell of the Black Communist Rebellion, a resistance movement that has sprung up in the last year.  In the course of Kido’s investigation, he comes to realise that the Empire has overreached itself and is struggling to maintain control of the eastern hemisphere, which stretches from India to the Rocky Mountains. Within the Japanese hierarchy, there is dissent as to whether order should be maintained in the JPS by allowing the colonised greater autonomy or by tightening the already draconian laws in place. The Navy, under Admiral Inokuchi (played by Eijiro Osaki) and the Crown Princess (played by Mayumi Yoshida), who is resident in San Francisco, favour the former and the Army, under General Yamori (played by Bruce Locke), favour the latter. The Kenpeitai is part of the Army, so Kido’s loyalty as well as his sympathies lie with Yamori.  Yamori succeeds in appointing General Masuda (played by Clint Jung), fresh from his genocidal occupation of Manchuria, to lead the counter-insurgency in the JPS. Shortly after his arrival, however, Masuda is assassinated by Price, working with the BCR. Yamori launches a low-key coup d’état, placing the Crown Princess under house arrest and having Kido arrest Inokuchi for high treason. Inokuchi is sentenced to death by firing squad after a cursory court martial, but Kido intervenes at a crucial point, switching sides to the Navy after discovering that Tagomi was murdered by soldiers in consequence of his moderate political position. The BCR then launches an orchestrated series of attacks on the oil infrastructure of the JPS, with devastating results. Forty-eight hours later, the Emperor announces that Japan is withdrawing from the US in order to redeploy its military resources to China, where there seems to be either an insurgency or an open war (the details are never revealed) underway.

Meanwhile, in Nazi America, Smith has been sending agents to the real world, where they have been sabotaging the American space and nuclear programs and keeping his counterpart family (which consists of himself, Helen, and their son, but not their two daughters) under surveillance. Juliana is close to the Smiths in the real world and when alternative-world Smith despatches an assassin to the real world to kill her, real-world Smith intervenes and is himself killed. This frees alternative-world (now, the only) Smith up to visit the real world, a journey he is particularly keen to make because Thomas is still alive. There is a role reversal as Juliana returns to the alternative world to kill Smith and Smith travels to the real world. Smith’s position as Reichsmarshall is becoming increasingly precarious due to his falling from grace with Himmler. Himmler survived the assassination attempt, but his health has been ruined and he bears a grudge against Smith for failing to prevent the attempt and failing to take appropriately destructive action afterwards. Although Helen has returned to New York from the Neutral Zone, her year in voluntary exile is public knowledge among the Nazi hierarchy, which casts further doubt on Smith’s loyalty. Finally, with Josef Mengele (played by John Hans Tester) having explained that there is actually a multiverse rather than a universe (although movement is at present limited to transition between the alternative and real worlds), Himmler is desperate to despatch his legions to conquer this new lebensraum and blames Smith for the slow progress. When Smith returns to the alternative world, he finds that he has been summoned to Berlin to answer charges from two particularly odious historical characters, J. Edgar Hoover (played by William Forsythe) and Adolf Eichmann (played by Timothy V. Murphy), and that the Empire has no objection to a Nazi reunification of America as long as the Reich keeps the oil flowing east (actually west).

As the series reaches its final stage, the focus is firmly on Smith, who seems to have three options available: 

1. He can take advantage of the instability in Nazi America caused by the withdrawal of the Empire from the JPS and use his considerable influence in the American Armed Forces to launch a coup d’état against Berlin, fighting for an independent and united America.
2. He can travel to Berlin to answer the charges against him and plead his case to Himmler, who was – up until the assassination attempt – his sponsor.
3. He can escape to the real world with his two daughters, although he would have to leave Helen in the alternative world.

Being the man of resource, guile, and determination that viewers have come to know and (reluctantly) admire, Smith takes charge of the situation to carve out a fourth option, with the ultimate aim of abducting Thomas from the real world and bringing him to live with the Smiths of the alternative world.  I have praised the conclusions of both season 2 and season 3, but the conclusion to season 4 exceeds both of them – tense, unpredictable, climactic, and tying up all the different threads of the different subplots so as to make the narrative closure appear retrospectively inevitable.  In my review of Carnival Row earlier this year, I offered an interpretation of the occult detective story based on Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson’s fourfold theory of allegory. Jameson argues that sophisticated allegories operate on four levels of meaning simultaneously rather than the traditional two: the literal, the secret, the existential (concerned with the moral psychology of the individual), and the anagogical (concerned with the future of humanity as a whole). The meaning of the literal level in The Man in the High Castle is, naturally, obvious, the creation of a counterfactual world in which the Axis won the war. The existential level is the story of someone who starts down a particular path to save his starving child, continues along that path to protect his family, and ends up committing genocide without remorse (Smith and to a lesser extent Helen). The anagogical meaning is about the consequences of nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism, with perhaps a hint of American exceptionalism thrown in as well. Which leaves the secret level… are we meant to draw parallels between Smith and Trump (something I find difficult given the many virtues mixed in among the former’s vices) or between Nazi America and Trump’s vision for… well, Nazi America? I don’t know, but if it’s an excuse to watch the series again I’m going to say maybe.*****   

Lone Wolf 30: Dead in the Deep | review by Rafe McGregor

Lone Wolf 30: Dead in the Deep by Vincent Lazzari and Ben Dever
Holmgard Press, hardback, £19.99, June 2019, ISBN 9781527240797

Given the many trials and tribulations experienced by Joe Dever in securing a reliable publisher for the New Order series (21 onwards) of his Lone Wolf gamebooks from the mid-nineties, my main concerns whenever a new book is released are whether I will receive it and what kind of production values it will have. The details of the first two decades of Joe’s struggle can be found in my review of Lone Wolf 21: TheVoyage of the Moonstone and the last two years in my review of Lone Wolf 29: The Storms of Chai. While I was writing the latter in November 2016, the series and its considerable fan base suffered the ultimate setback in Joe’s untimely death and it seemed like his Holmgard Press would close after less than a year in operation. The press has, however, been relaunched at www.magnamund.com and appears to be run by his son, Ben, who is jointly responsible for the completion of the series (books 30 to 32) with Vincent Lazzari. The ordering process from the website is simple with safe if not speedy delivery following. Dead in the Deep is a hefty tome (there are no page numbers in consequence of the sections used for gameplay, but it is over two inches thick) and although the paper used is of lower quality than the Collector’s Editions published by Mongoose and Mantikore, the finished product makes for a neat fit with the rest. In keeping with almost all of the series to date, Dead in the Keep consists of three hundred and fifty sections and you can perhaps imagine my disappointment when I discovered sections 319 to 330 were absent from my copy, a repeat of sections 233 to 251 appearing in their place. I contacted Holmgard about the problem and received a very quick response to the effect that a replacement would be sent to me without any extra charge or a requirement to return the defective copy (I always resent either of these inconveniences if the fault lies with the publisher or the supplier). I received the replacement in due course and I only relate the complication as evidence of why I am confident in recommending Holmgard Press to any and all potential readers. At present, they also offer the Collector’s Edition of Lone Wolf 23: Mydnight’s Hero (£16.99) and twenty-five very attractive art prints that look like alternative book covers. The Collector’s Edition of Lone Wolf 24: Rune War (also £16.99) is the next book due for release (no date given).

I mentioned my intense emotional (and, once or twice, extravagant financial) investment in the franchise in previous reviews and this investment is at its greatest now when it looks like the cycle, which Joe originally envisaged as consisting of thirty-two books, might actually be completed. I reproduce the first two paragraphs of Ben’s short foreword here:

Two weeks before my dad passed away he asked Vincent and myself to complete the Lone Wolf series. It’s a huge honour to finally be able to share with you the first part of the epic conclusion to his unique saga.

A life’s work underpins this book, and the details of the story were dictated in the palliative care ward at Whipps Cross Hospital. And so, although the first draft was produced by Vincent, and the final draft by myself, we both feel that this book is as much a creation of my dad’s imagination as any other Lone Wolf story. This is his book.

Bearing in mind the outstanding calibre of The Storms of Chai (which really was worth the seventeen year wait), the stakes for someone who has followed the series for as long as I have, and such a touching and tasteful tribute from Ben, it is very difficult to approach this gamebook with any kind of critical objectivity. So, let me cut to the chase… in summary, Dead in the Deep does not live up to the promise of its prequel. I saw my options as to either explain my evaluation in a mixed review or to stop reviewing the cycle. I decided on the latter for the Autumn Snow series following my for the most part negative review of Autumn Snow 2: TheWildlands Hunt last year. Obviously, I decided on the former for the Lone Wolf series – on the basis that, with only two books left to go, I shall buy and play them no matter what and because while Lone Wolf is partly for lifelong enthusiasts like me, it is also for a younger generation of players who deserve an honest review.

The Storms of Chai began in the early spring of MS 5102, seventeen years after the conclusion of Lone Wolf 28: The Hunger of Sejanoz, with Lone Wolf holding a council in which he revealed that Magnamund was under a coordinated attack by an unknown force. There were six armies attacking six different locations and the six Kai Grand Masters were despatched accordingly. Mine, True Friend (whose deadly Kai powers are only exceeded by the silliness of his randomly-generated Kai name), proceeded to the remote Bhanarian city of Bakhasa with the intention of recovering the new Claw of Naar before the Nadziranim sorcerer Zashnor could use it to create a weapon of mass destruction. There was a real sense of urgency in The Storms of Chai, the feeling that the Kai were fighting to save the whole of Magnamund rather than just Sommerlund (as was the case in the consecutive Kai and Magnakai series, books 1 to 12). This urgency and import created the expectation of a rapidly-paced push to the conclusion of the whole cycle in the last four books and the expectation was exceeded to the extent that my only criticism of The Storms of Chai was that it took several attempts before True Friend survived to the very end.

The first indication that Dead in the Deep will not continue to meet these expectations is in “The Story So Far...” section, which is quite simply not as well-written as in previous books. This is not a major flaw in a gamebook aimed at a young adult audience, but it makes for a disappointing beginning.  Lone Wolf’s Grand Masters have been reduced in number from six to three (including True Friend) and the survivors are all sent on missions whose goals are deliberately withheld from one another. True Friend is despatched on a rescue mission, to find missing Grand Master Steel Hand. Unfortunately, this plot has already been used thrice in the cycle (in Lone Wolf 14: The Captives of Kaag, the graphic novel The Skull of Agarash, and Lone Wolf 25: Trail of the Wolf) and takes him to the Maakengorge, a location that has already been used twice (in Lone Wolf 4: The Chasm of Doom and Lone Wolf 16: The Legacy of Vashna). The combination of these factors put me in a pessimistic mood for play, pre-primed for sensitivity to a lowering of quality and lack of originality. My pessimism was exacerbated by the fact that the adventure has a slow start, with very little action and a largely linear narrative.

Dead in the Deep nonetheless grows on one as the game becomes progressively more exciting and challenging. As such, it is very much a narrative of three parts. The first, which is slow in comparison to The Storms of Chai, involves the journey to Emolryia. The second involves the exploration of Emolryia, the Hidden Citadel, the Maakengorge, the Lake of Blood, the Underworld, and the Chaos Prison. As soon as True Friend descended beneath the lake to the Underworld, I felt I was back in the midst of the an original, complex, tense, and exciting game that might reach at least some of the promise of The Storms of Chai. The third and final part involves the escape from Emolryia, which returns to the frenetic pace of its predecessor and has obviously been crafted with great style and skill. In this part the pace literally never lets up, continuing right to the final section of the adventure. Dead in the Deep cannot compare to The Storms of Chai, but in retrospect it is entertaining, satisfying, and well worth the cost in both money and time when judged on its own merits.

Regarding gameplay as opposed to the literary or narrative elements of the volume, Dead in the Deep is much easier to survive than The Storms of Chai, with combat less frequent and for the most part less challenging. There are nonetheless several other ways to fail the mission – too many, in my opinion. Where a tedious opening can be forgiven and forgotten in the heat of a climactic dénouement and resolution, gameplay problems are of greater concern. With the gaming pleasure of future players in mind, I thus offer the following advice:

1.      You cannot gain access to the Hidden Citadel without an Amulet of Fealty, but by the time you arrive in Emolryia it is too late to secure one.

2.      You must hang on to the Platinum Amulet at all costs.

3.      You must give Steel Hand your Nyaxator armour when presented with the opportunity to do so.

4.      The New Order Kai Grand Master Disciplines of Assimilation and Kai-Alchemy are very important for successful completion of the mission.

I noted my reservations about writing this review above and I hope that neither Ben nor Vincent will feel that my criticisms have been unfair should they read it. No, Dead in the Deep is not nearly as good as The Storms of Chai, but when one considers the tragic circumstances of its conception and publication, it is a truly remarkable achievement by the two authors.

As with all the other Collector’s Editions, there is a bonus adventure, “Kaum Before the Storm”, written by Vincent and long-time Lone Wolf collaborator August Hahn. I was hoping that the supplement would pick up where the previous bonus adventure left off, with Lord Elkamo Doko, a Vakeros warrior-mage, but the player adopts a new persona here, that of Kai Grand Master Blazer. I cannot comment on the game as the publication of Dead in the Deep found me in the middle of my first house move in nearly fifteen years and I only had time to play the main game before bubble-wrapping the book. The penultimate adventure in the cycle is Lone Wolf 31: The Dusk of the Eternal Night, which will be published by Holmgard, but for which no publication date has yet been announced. With Ben and Vincent at the helm, I’m cautiously optimistic that True Friend’s next mission won’t be too long in coming. In the meantime, my next mission is to work out which box I put Dead in the Deep in…

Carnival Row, Season 1 | review by Rafe McGregor

Detection on Different Levels?

In his latest book, Allegory and Ideology (2019), Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson describes the patristic allegory as a system composed of four levels. The idea is that there is a single story that operates at four levels of meaning simultaneously. The first level is the literal, which in the Scriptures referred to an historical event and in the case with which I am concerned here is the steampunk world represented in Carnival Row. The second, secret, level is the hidden meaning concealed within the literal level, requiring either a mystical revelation or imaginative deciphering (or, in Carnival Row’s case, perhaps a little more enciphering). The third, moral, level is concerned with individual salvation or existential experience and the fourth, anagogical, level with the Last Judgement or the future of humanity as a whole. Taking the philosophical rather than religious route we have the literal, secret, moral, and collective meanings of an allegory. At the literal level, Carnival Row is a narrative about the consequences of the battle for Tirnanoc (from the Gaelic Tír na nÓg), the land of the Fae, fought between two human powers, the covetous Burgue and the genocidal Pact. As the war progresses, the Fae begin fleeing to the Burgue for safety and the stream of refugees increases when the Burgue are defeated and withdraw from Tirnanoc. When the series opens, many of citizens of the Burgue, spanning all social strata, are displeased by the influx of “Critch”, a derisive term used to describe all Fae regardless of their species, and pursue some combination of making their lives as miserable as possible, proposing anti-immigration legislation, and using all available means to keep them offshore. In the age of Trump’s wall and Johnson’s Brexit it is very easy – perhaps a little too easy, as the didacticism is sometimes rather heavy-handed – to read the second level of meaning as being about the Coalition Forces invasion of Iraq, the subsequent destabilisation of the Middle East, and the consequent Syrian refugee crisis. The parallels between London or New York and the Burgue on the one hand and Islamic State and the Pact on the other are almost exact. The question I am interested in is not whether the secret meaning of the allegory is too obvious, but whether the simplistic similarities preclude it from reaching the moral and collective levels of meaning.

Carnival Row takes its name from a street in the Burgue that is the centre of what has become a Fae inner city, populated by faeries, fauns, centaurs, trolls, kobolds, and other refugees from Tirnanoc. There are two main plots, each of which follows the two protagonists, and two subplots involving the governance and elite society of the Burgue respectively. The protagonists are Vignette Stonemoss (played by Cara Delevingne), a faerie refugee, and Inspector Rycroft Philostrate (played by Orlando Bloom), a detective who is investigating a serial killer that preys exclusively on Fae. The two were lovers in Tirnanoc during the war and their respective tales intersect, diverge, and intertwine as the narrative progresses. Vignette made her living in Tirnanoc by selling the Fae into indentured labour, a practice that is now recognised as a form of modern slavery, but was employed by many colonial powers up until the early twentieth century. When she fears falling victim to Pact atrocities, she sells herself in order to pay for her passage to the Burgue and is placed in the home of idly wealthy siblings Ezra and Imogen Spurnrose (played by Andrew Gower and Tamzin Merchant) as a lady’s maid. When Vignette is sexually assaulted by Spurnrose, she escapes to Carnival Row. Faced with only two options for survival, sex work or crime, she joins the Black Raven, a Fae organised crime group. Vignette’s decision is to at least some extent a moral one – as the head of the Black Raven confirms by stating, ‘The law of this city does not protect us’ – but it nonetheless pits her against her police officer ex-lover.

Philo is the only police officer in the Burgue that cares about the serial slaying of the Fae. He narrows the field of suspects down to sailors, on the basis that the crimes have coincided with the return of navy vessels to the docks, and quickly finds a suspect. After an exciting chase across the rooftops of the city, the sailor warns Philo of the coming of ‘some dark god’ before jumping to his death. Shortly after, another Fae is murdered, her torso ripped open by a giant creature that emerges from the sewers, and Philo is set on his second and much more complex case. It is quickly revealed that Philo’s idiosyncratic concern for the welfare of the Fae is due to his own ancestry: he is a half-blood faerie who had his wings cut off at birth before being abandoned at an orphanage. This is one of the aspects of the series where the didacticism becomes somewhat strained, with the only police officer who cares about the Fae only caring about them because he is himself half Fae. Seriously flawed though our own world is, there are plenty of people on the right side of inequality in metropolises like London, Los Angeles, Rio de Janiero, and Johannesburg that take a moral interest in those on the wrong side.

The two subplots concern two Burgue families, the Breakspears and the Spurnroses. Absalom Breakspear (played by Jared Harris) is Chancellor of the Republic of the Burgue and the political storyline is initiated when his son is kidnapped while visiting a Fae brothel in Carnival Row. Unbeknownst to Breakspear, the crime has been committed by his wife, Piety (played by Indira Varma), for reasons that are unclear. She subsequently manipulates Breakspear into detaining and torturing the Leader of the Opposition without charge and then both murders and frames the suspect herself. Meanwhile, despite their desirable address and the many trappings of opulence they enjoy, the Spurnroses are in dire financial straits. Imogen, whose existence revolves around climbing the social ladder and finding a husband with the right mix of social, economic, and cultural capital, is initially disgusted when a faun moves into their square, one of the most exclusive enclaves in the city. She soon realises that she can take advantage of the combination of Agreus Astrayon’s (played by David Gyasi) extreme wealth and the speciesism he faces from the Burgue’s elite, however, proposing to sponsor his admittance to that elite in exchange for an investment in her brother’s failing business enterprises. In the world of Carnival Row, just like our own, money can buy respectability and social acceptance, even if one has horns on one’s head and hooves instead of feet.

I have mentioned an example of the way in which Carnival Row both achieves and fails to achieve meaning at the moral level and there are several more examples of the former, which I shall not mention so as to avoid spoilers. In fact, the first three allegorical levels are tied together rather neatly by means of a succession of plot twists in the second half of the season. My main interest is in the fourth, collective, level and whether the series so far has anything to say about the future of humanity. In In the Dust of This Planet (2011), the first volume in his Horror of Philosophy Trilogy, Eugene Thacker proposes three ways of conceiving of meaning and value. His inquiry follows the tradition of Immanuel Kant, who distinguished between the noumenal world (objective reality) and the phenomenal world (subjective experience of objective reality). In Kant’s philosophy, human beings could never gain access to the noumenal and were restricted to negotiating it indirectly, through the phenomenal. For Thacker, whose concern is with meaning rather than existence, the world-for-us is ‘the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feeling alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also separate from the human’.  The world-for-us does not exhaust meaning on the planet, however, and we become aware of the world-in-itself when that planet ‘resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us’, most dramatically and dangerously in the occurrence of natural disasters. In other words, when faced with events such as natural disasters, human beings realise that there is a very strong sense in which this world is not for-us at all. The third and most significant conception of meaning and value is the world-without-us. The world-without-us is an attempt to conceptualise the coexistence of the world-for-us and the world-in-itself without either accepting that there is an insurmountable Kantian barrier between the two or immediately collapsing the latter into the former when we, for example, grasp natural disasters from the perspective of humanity. In Thacker’s terms, ‘the world-without-us is the subtraction of the human from the world’.  In my understanding of Thacker, the world-without-us is a world in which there is meaning and value in spite of the absence (actually subtraction) of human meaning and human values. Thacker’s aim in his Trilogy is to extrapolate and explain the world-without-us and his central thesis is that supernatural horror and science fiction succeed in this aim where philosophy has failed.

If Thacker is right and such a world exists, the crucial question is if and how the world-for-us and world-without-us can coexist without one system of meaning and value eradicating the other. Early into the twenty-first century it seems unsurprising that we have such difficulty conceiving of the world-without-us, so competent have we become at destroying the world-in-itself. We find the world-for-us at its most conspicuous and most arrogant in the city, where the natural environment has been replaced rather than adapted by the human population and where ecology has been reconfigured to sustain human life alone. In Carnival Row, Philo assumes the role of an occult detective attempting to solve a mystery set in the metropolis of the Burgue and the combination of protagonist and setting provides an opportunity to chart the relation between the world-for-us and the world-without-us. Despite his faerie blood, Philo appears as human and serves as an agent of social control, preserving the metropolitan world-for-us in all its biological, cultural, and economic complexity. The detective, both a symbol and an implement of human values, is pitted against an antagonist that is neither human nor Fae, but some dark god, an apparently unfathomable and inconceivable creature that dwells and kills in the city, where everything – alive or lifeless – is supposed to serve only human ends. Significantly, the creature’s lair is in the sewers, the foundation upon which the city is built, in the same way that the world-without-us underpins – and sometimes undermines – the world-for-us. As the story of an occult detective solving a series of murders in a metropolis, Carnival Row stages the world-without-us, setting up a narrative framework firmly grounded in the world-for-us – the detective as an agent of social control seeking to restore the anthropocentric status quo the murders have disrupted – and then using that framework to investigate a nature that refuses to be tamed and resists conception in human terms. The creature, called a Darkasher, is disclosed as having a closer connection to humanity than initially suspected and the potential for exploring the world-without-us is to some extent sacrificed for less problematic meaning-making at the fourth and final allegorical level. Notwithstanding, the pitting of the two worlds of meaning and value represented by the detective and the Darkasher respectively gestures towards some kind of mutual recognition between the world-for-us and the world-without-us. My hope is that the tension created by this pairing will be developed in more detail season 2, although as the occult detective mystery is solved by Philo season 1 this may well not be the case. Given that season 2 was commissioned prior to the release of season 1, Legendary Television and Amazon Studios must both be congratulated for bringing that season to a conclusive (and compelling) end in the final episode. *****  

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #64: now out, at last!

free epub | free mobi | free pdf | print UK | print US | Kindle UK | Kindle US

Sorry for making you all wait so long for this issue, especially the contributors, who have been so patient while I've been kept busy by freelance work. Rather than keep anyone waiting longer, we're going to put out the pdf now and return later to add extra formats.

This issue contains four stories: “September Gathering” by Charles Wilkinson, “Disappearer” by Matthew Amundsen, “The Haunted Brick” by Walt Brunston, and “Chemicalia” by me, plus twelve reviews, by Rafe McGregor, Douglas J. Ogurek, Jacob Edwards and me. One hundred and thirty-eight pages of fabulous fiction and rollicking reviews!

In this issue our team reviews Artificial Condition by Martha Wells, Autumn Snow: The Wildlands Hunt by Martin Charbonneau and Gary Chalk, BFS Journal #18 edited by Allen Stroud, Hounds of the Underworld by Dan Rabarts and Lee Murray, Pegging the President by Michael Moorcock and Kaijumax, Season Two by Zander Cannon, plus the films Spectre, Venom, The Meg and The Predator, and the television shows Agents of Shield, Season 5 and Westworld, Season 2.

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Here are the splendid contributors to this issue:

Charles Wilkinson’s publications include The Pain Tree and Other Stories (London Magazine Editions, 2000), while 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) and in genre magazines/anthologies such as Black Static, The Dark Lane Anthology, Supernatural Tales, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, Phantom Drift (USA), Bourbon Penn (USA), Shadows & Tall Trees (Canada), Nightscript (USA) and Best Weird Fiction 2015 (Undertow Books, Canada). His anthology of strange tales and weird fiction, A Twist in the Eye, is now out from Egaeus Press and his second collection from the same publisher Splendid in Ash is available to order. A full-length collection of his poetry is forthcoming from Eyewear. He lives in Wales.

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonym for a writer living somewhere on Earth. Though banned on Mars, his fiction appears in over forty Earth publications. Ogurek founded the controversial literary subgenre known as unsplatterpunk, which uses splatterpunk conventions (e.g. extreme violence, gore, taboo subject matter) to deliver a positive message. He guest-edited Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #58: UNSPLATTERPUNK!, the first ever unsplatterpunk anthology, and then its follow-up, UNSPLATTERPPUNK! 2. He also reviews films for us. Recent longer works include the young adult novel Branch Turner vs the Currants (World Castle Publishing) and the horror/suspense novella Encounter at an Abandoned Church (Scarlet Leaf Publishing). More at www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com. Twitter: www.twitter.com/unsplatter.

Jacob Edwards also writes 42-word reviews for Derelict Space Sheep. His website is at www.jacobedwards.id.au, his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/JacobEdwardsWriter, and his Twitter account is at www.twitter.com/ToastyVogon.

Matthew Amundsen has published novellas previously in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #35 (“House of Nowhere”) and #50 (“A Murder in Heaven”) and short stories in such magazines as Cemetery Moon, Jersey Devil Press, Millennium SF & F and Starsong.  In addition, he has written literary and music criticism for alternative weeklies in Athens, Georgia, and brainwashed.com. When not writing, he is a sound engineer and musician in Minneapolis.

Rafe McGregor lectures at Leeds Trinity University and the University of York. He is the author of The Value of Literature, two novels, six collections of short fiction, and two hundred articles, essays, and reviews. His most recent book is The Adventures of Roderick Langham, a collection of occult detective stories.

Stephen Theaker is the co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. His reviews, interviews and articles have appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Prism and the BFS Journal.

Walt Brunston’s adaptation of the classic television story, Space University Trent: Hyperparasite, is now available on Kindle.

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

The Wildlands Hunt by Martin Charbonneau and Gary Chalk | review by Rafe McGregor

The Wildlands Hunt is the second instalment of the new Lone Wolf gamebook series, which began with The Pit of Darkness in 2017, and follows the adventures of New Order Kai Konor Autumn Snow. Like its predecessor, The Wildlands Hunt is crowdfunded, with progression from funding to delivery proceeding much quicker and smoother the second time around. The project was launched on 28 January 2017, received the required initial funding of €4000 the following day, received €15,000 within a fortnight, and the volume was published in October 2018. Megara Entertainment was founded in 2007 and director Mikaël Louys appears to have been transparent about the company’s financial situation throughout. In March this year, for example, Megara published a hardback collector’s edition of Grey Star the Wizard. This was the first in a short spin-off series – The World of Lone Wolf – that followed the adventures of Grey Star, a Shianti wizard. The four books were written by Ian Page, illustrated by Paul Bonner, and edited by Joe Dever, creator of Lone Wolf and Lone Wolf’s world, Magnamund. Grey Star the Wizard (1985) was succeeded by The Forbidden City (1985), Beyond the Nightmare Gate (1985) and War of the Wizards (1986), making 1985 the most prolific year for the franchise, with The World of Lone Wolf 1–3 published alongside Lone Wolf 4–6 (The Chasm of Doom, Shadow on the Sand and The Kingdoms of Terror). On the Kickstarter updates, Louys reveals that Megara published Grey Star the Wizard at a loss, selling a disappointing two hundred copies. He seems undeterred, however, and after revision of the production model, launched The Forbidden City project as Grey Star the Wizard was released. The campaign has reached €11,845, exceeding its €8000 goal, although the stated delivery date of December 2018 is likely overambitious. For those who have followed the vicissitudes of Lone Wolf publication (which I related in my reviews of Lone Wolf 21: Voyage of the Moonstone and Lone Wolf 29: The Storms of Chai), it will come as no surprise to hear that Megara are currently in the midst of financial problems. The Wildlands Hunt is printed in the same format as The Pit of Darkness (medium octavo hardback), retails at €40 (delivery included), and is only available from the Megara website (www.megara-entertainment.com).  I ordered my copy on 12 October (the transaction cost me a total of just under £37, but no doubt this will rise in direct proportion to Brexit chaos). On 12 November, I received an email from Louys stating that there had been a delay caused by issues with investors. The book arrived on 24 November, along with a free copy of the collector’s edition of Fabled Lands 1: The War-Torn Kingdom by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson (first published in 1996; published by Megara in 2014). My assessment is that Megara are scrupulously honest, but that until the publishing uncertainty is resolved, buyers should be wary. On a related note, I must admit to not contributing to either Autumn Snow Kickstarter project – as much as I long for more Lone Wolf gamebooks, past experience has made me wary of paying any small presses upfront.

Like The Pit of Darkness, The Wildlands Hunt has been released in French and English and combines the literary expertise of Martin Charbonneau with the artistic expertise of Gary Chalk. The volume is a perfect companion to The Pit of Darkness, with another wonderful colour cover by Chalk, twenty new full-page black and white illustrations, and several smaller ones that I didn’t recognise from previous publications.  Chalk’s artwork is widely-praised for an instantly-recognisable style that foregrounds clear lines, the use of negative space, and deliberately disproportionate figures. His drawings are also incredibly expressive, as a quick comparison of the illustrations for sections 65, 140 and 318 reveals. The first depicts the Ragadorn city guard, three men oozing so much menace and hostility that the picture alone motivated my decision to avoid the encounter. The Red Mask slaver in 140 looks just as deadly and dangerous, but Chalk’s representation provides a subtle invitation to the player to take up combat. Finally, the stagecoach ticket-seller is depicted with consummate pathos, imprisoned behind the bars of his counter, lending a melancholy mood to what purports to be an occasion for celebration. In keeping with The Pit of Darkness, there is no colour map in The Wildlands Hunt (these have been a mainstay of the Lone Wolf series to date), but my parcel arrived with a separate map (in colour) of the city of Ragadorn (where the second part of the adventure takes place). While I appreciate the gesture from Megara, I thought it detracted from the high production values of the gamebook, a laminated A4 sheet (too big to be slipped inside the book) that is functional rather than artistic and also superfluous to play (I didn’t use it at all). My review of The Pit of Darkness was critical of the number of typos and formatting errors, but there are much fewer of the former and none of the latter in the second instalment of the series (in my gameplay, anyway). There are, however, occasionally unusual turns of phrase and I wonder if this is a consequence of translation from the original French. At times these can simply read a little awkwardly, but one instance seems to make a racial slur against a particular character – which, permissible though it might be in a fantasy world is unnecessarily provocative in the context of publication and incongruous with the humanism that pervades the franchise. (I have not read the French version, though, so it may well be the result of a loss in translation.)

I gave The Pit of Darkness high praise for its balance in terms of gaming: difficult but not impossible; solving the perennial problem of healing and endurance point recovery; and presenting progressively more challenging encounters. The second and third of these hold for The Wildlands Hunt, which adds two more welcome elements. First, the use of the Kai disciplines is perfectly pitched – they all prove useful somewhere and no one in particular is essential for completing the gamebook. Second, there is a clear game (although not narrative) structure: the adventure begins with Autumn Snow held prisoner on a pirate ship; she must then navigate the trials and tribulations of Ragadorn; finally, she ventures out into the Wildlands that separate Ragadorn from her homeland of Sommerlund. My only complaint with respect to the game is that I found it too easy. Granted, my version of Autumn Snow is now an Aspirant, able to use six rather than five Kai disciplines, but as she failed to accrue anything of great value in The Pit of Darkness, she isn’t particularly powerful. I have always equipped my various Kai characters – Lone Wolf, True Friend (in the New Order series), and now Autumn Snow – with a bow and this was especially useful in The Wildlands Hunt. On reflection, I wonder if it was too useful and that without it the Wildlands would have proved much more dangerous than they were in my gameplay. My main criticism of the gamebook is its narrative. Despite the exemplary game structure, the story itself fails to fit the overarching narrative initiated by The Pit of Darkness and to match the internal rigour of the various Lone Wolf series so far. The Pit of Darkness concluded with Autumn Snow losing her Kai mentor and discovering a Nadziranim (evil sorcerer) plot set to unfold in the Maakenmire swamp. The final section saw Autumn Snow on the island of Kirlu, headed for Misty Bay and thence to Sommerlund, where she would report to her Kai superiors in the hope of being dispatched on the mission to the Maakenmire. The title of the second adventure was revealed as Slaves of the Mire, which appeared to reference this mission. When the title was changed to The Wildlands Hunt, I assumed this would chart the journey of the mission from Sommerlund to the Maakenmire through the Wildlands. When I began playing The Wildlands Hunt, it seemed as if the slings and arrows of fortune had taken Autumn Snow off course and the hunt of the Wildlands would feature her as the hunted, attempting to reach Sommerlund by land rather than by sea, fleeing from enemies in Ragadorn. Instead, Autumn Snow is the hunter in the Wildlands, having teamed up with an new ally – Athania, captain of the Valkharim (personal guard to the Overlord of Ragadorn) – and pursuing an exciting but irresponsible digression from her duty to report to her Kai superiors. While in the Wildlands there is a further twist setting the whole campaign in a different direction, although the title of book three is (once again) Slaves of the Mire… so perhaps the overarching plot has not been lost after all. This sense of meandering over mission is replicated internally and while the whole game is fast-paced, much of the action seems incidental or supplementary. This is the first gamebook set in Dever’s Magnamund that has, in consequence of his untimely death in November 2016, been published without his guiding hand. Dever’s influence as a master gamer and accomplished storyteller defied detection, but is revealed in its absence – the lack of the economy, artifice and vision that have underpinned all of the previous gamebooks, including The Pit of Darkness. I concluded my review of the latter by stating that the series could be the best addition to Magnamund since the Magnakai campaign ended in 1988, but I fear that it has, like Autumn Snow herself, lost direction.