The Young Dictator (Pillar International Publishing) by Rhys Hughes | mini-review

Jenny Khan is a young English girl who decides to stand for MP of her town, and with the help of her nefarious gran rises to become dictator of Britain, then the galaxy, and even hell itself. It’s a book packed with the usual Rhys Hughes goofiness, invention and humour. To pick one non-spoilery example, the glossary at the end explains that the astronauts who landed on the moon discovered it has no atmosphere, “because they forgot to take beer and cakes and music”. Fun for all ages. The ebook lets the novel down a bit, though: there is a line space between each paragraph, the chapters aren’t set up properly, and there’s a stingy limit on the number of devices you can read it on. Stephen Theaker ***

The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Gibbon Moon, ebook, 1736ll. In years gone by one of the principle pleasures of the gentleman on a Sunday afternoon was to read Maurice Richardson’s reports of the sporting activities of this nation’s greatest sportsman, Engelbrecht, the Dwarf Surrealist Boxer, “Sportsman of the Millennium”. Or at least to imagine doing so, since no Sunday newspapers saw fit to publish those reports, choosing instead to stick to quotidian sports such as football, cricket, rugby and badminton. That they could find no room for such estimable activities as clock-boxing, man-hunting and witch-shooting beggars belief.

Undeterred, Richardson submitted his reports to the chronicles of the Surrealist Sportman’s Club, the highlights being collected in this book, whose publication was never entirely confirmed, so infrequently were copies sighted by the public. Now, by way of his own small press, Rhys Hughes has performed the duty so lamentably neglected by the fourth estate, and made the book available to all, at an entirely reasonable price, in ebook form, with an effusive introduction by his own hand. It is easy to see why that rambunctious Welshman, so famous for his love of surrealism and physical exertion, felt such an affinity with Richardson’s careful accounts.

Though these are to some extent relics of a bygone time, the terrors of Health and Safety and Risk Assessment having long since put paid to the Grand Cosmological steeplechase, mixed electioneering and round-the-world golf, good sports writing never goes out of date. The articles are short, but Richardson never fails to fully explore each activity, allowing the present-day reader a gentle entrée to that long-lost world, poking into its every corner and revealing the quirks and humour within. Some features even stray from the usual brief to explore other aspects of Engelbrecht’s social circle, such as plant theatre and a Season of Song performed by dogs.

Recommended on one hand to those fond of sports, on the other hand to those amused by humour, and on the third hand to those who like books.

Ten reviews that didn't sprout

Not all acorns grow into oak trees, and some notes never resolve themselves into proper reviews. Sometimes it might be a lack of time, sometimes a lack of anything interesting to say, and sometimes it's just that by the time I come to write the review I've forgotten most of what happened!

So: I've taken ten of those bits mouldering at the back of my reviews closet and put them up on Goodreads. Don't expect much and you won't be disappointed!

• Star Trek: The Next Generation / Doctor Who Assimilation2, Vol. 1, which unusually for me I read as single issues as they were published, got three stars, mainly for "including a team-up between two of the greatest ever hosts of Have I Got News for You".
• Witch Doctor: Under the Knife also gets three stars: "the first story is very derivative of the Necroscope series"
• Strontium Dog: Search/Destroy Agency Files, Vol. 1 is another enjoyable three-star comic: "I adored Wagner and Grant’s stories for Doctor Who Weekly; I wish I’d known back then that there was practically an entire comic of their work over at 2000AD every week."
• The Sticky Situations of Zwicky Fingers by Rhys Hughes: "Full of ideas and imagination."
  
• I didn't get far into or get on with Isis Unbound by Allyson Bird, though "there were some good things in the parts I read".
  
• Saga, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, another one I read as single issues, got four stars from me: "I'm happy this exists."
• Red Sonja Digital Omnibus, Vol. 1 by Mike Carey and lots of others got three stars: "Quite good fun, despite Sonja’s occasional tendency to talk out of her bum".
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 2009: "Anyone could put Emma Peel and Mina Harker together in a comic, but only Alan Moore could make it so worthwhile."
  
• The Boys, Vol. 8: Highland Laddie: "Best use of a tapeworm since Simon Louvish’s Your Monkey's Schmuck."
  
• The Boys, Vol. 9: The Big Ride: "I’m slowly being driven mad by 'discreet' being spelt 'discrete' in all of these books."
  

NB: none of these books and comics were submitted to us for review – these were all things I bought. Once we've read something submitted for review, it gets a proper review, even if it takes us years and we do have to read the whole blinkin' thing again!

What contributors did next #2

Last April I interviewed Rhys Hughes for the British Fantasy Society’s journal. Due to production problems the journal wasn’t published until September, and Rhys finally received his contributor copy this month. All a bit frustrating, but the interview turned out well and Rhys blogs about it here.

Ace reviewer Jacob Edwards takes a turn as Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine editor with #55, and includes fiction from Tom Holt, Stephen Gallagher, Deborah Kalin and Lisa A. Koosis, among others, as well as an interview with Glen Duncan and a “musical interlude” with Richard O’Brien. More details here.

David Tallerman’s novel Crown Thief is now out, a sequel to the very enjoyable Giant Thief (reviewed by me here), and a third in the series will follow soon. He’s written an interesting article on his late realisation that the first two books failed the Bechdel test: read it here.

(I realised a while ago that there was a similar problem with my Howard Phillips novels, and became quite maudlin till I realised it gave me an excellent plot for the fifth book. Well, I say excellent – excellent by the standards of my Howard Phillips novels..!)

Richard Ford, who contributed “Dead Gods” to Dark Horizons #55, has a new novel Herald of the Storm coming from Headline. It’ll be out in April this year. For more info see his blog: www.richard4ord.wordpress.com.

Our cover artist extraordinaire Howard Watts has set up a DeviantArt page, including some TQF cover pieces. Prints available! Here’s the link: http://hswatts.deviantart.com/

Rhysop’s Fables by Rhys Hughes – reviewed (sort of) by Stephen Theaker

Having just finished reading Rhysop’s Fables by Rhys Hughes (Gloomy Seahorse Press, ebook, 2593ll), a squirrel decided to visit his friend the blue whale. He rode on a train, jumped a few fences, and climbed a few trees, and in the time it takes to say as much he was looking his immense friend in the face.

“Good morning,” said the whale.

“Good morning,” said the squirrel.

“Good morning,” said the hundreds of thousands of krill that were trying without success to escape the whale’s baleen plates.

The whale shook his head sadly. (The squirrel gripped the sides of his little sailing nut as it was buffeted by the resulting waves.) “I’m so tired of krill, so tired of water sloshing around my mouth all day. I envy you, squirrel, with your diet of nice dry nuts, I really do.”

“Come stay with me a while then,” said the squirrel. “I’ve plenty of nuts stored away.”

“That sounds wonderful,” said the whale. “A change would be as good as a vest.”

“A vest? Don’t you mean a rest?”

“Have you been in the ocean lately? A good set of thermals is what I really need, but since they aren’t available in my size, a change will have to do.”

The squirrel nodded, and the two of them climbed a few trees, jumped a few fences, and rode on a train. In the time it takes to say as much they were sitting on a branch outside the squirrel’s hole.

The branch immediately broke. The whale fell to the ground and bruised his tail. The squirrel, however, managed to grab onto another branch and saved himself.

¶ The high life isn’t for everyone, especially not blue whales!

The squirrel placed a cold compress upon his friend’s tail.

“You wait here,” he said, “and I’ll go and get the key to my nutty cupboard.”

He scampered up to his little hole, went to his little bed, and slipped a golden key out from under his fluffy little pillow. He carried it down the tree and unlocked the little red door to his nutty cupboard.

The blue whale gasped in amazement. Inside there were one hundred and fifty gorgeous, golden nuts. Some were tiny, some were medium-sized, but all looked blinking delicious.

“Nice, eh?” said the squirrel. “Would you like to try one?”

“Would I?” said the whale. “Of course! Just poke a hole in my baleen and push it in!”

It was the most delicious thing the whale had ever tasted. The squirrel had one too, and then closed and locked the little red door.

For the rest of the day the two of them chatted as old friends will, their conversation covering such topics as politics, the environment, gossip about their mutual friends and enemies, films they had seen and books they had read.

The blue whale liked the sound of Rhysop’s Fables and decided to buy himself a copy, but, that aside, his mind was on just one thing: to eat more of those nuts.

Before long his friend went to bed, and once the whale could hear happy little snores drifting down from the tree top he climbed the tree himself, squeezed into the squirrel’s hole, sneaked over to the squirrel’s little bed, and slipped his hand under the squirrel’s fluffy little pillow.

The golden key! He had it!

When the squirrel awoke he climbed down the tree to see the red door to his nuts wide open, the store obviously depleted, and his friend the whale gingerly holding his tummy. The squirrel was sad.

“I’m sorry,” said the whale. “I ate seventy-four of your nuts, one after the other. I just couldn’t stop pushing your nuts into my mouth. Consuming each one made me want another just like it, and now here we are, our friendship betrayed by my whale-sized greed. I’m so sorry. Will you still be my friend?”

“All you had to do was ask,” said the squirrel. “I should have realised that while one nut was enough for me, it couldn’t possibly be enough for a big fellow like you. As long as you enjoyed them all, that’s the main thing.”

“I did, I did,” said the whale. “Although after fifty or sixty the fun went out of it. It began to feel rather mechanical. Maybe the nuts toward the back of your store aren’t as tasty as those at the front.”

The squirrel took one of the remaining nuts and tried it. “No,” he said. “As lovely as the rest. You just let your palate get jaded, and forgot to take the time to enjoy each individual nut. Having said that, I’ve never eaten so many in one go, and now I’m wondering what it would be like.”

And with that the squirrel and the whale ate the remaining seventy-three nuts, and thoroughly enjoyed them. When the store was empty the whale thrashed his tail a bit, causing eight large nuts to fall from the trees. They enjoyed these as much as the others, but took their time with them.

¶ If you squirrel everything away, you’ll never have a whale of a time. And though nuts, like jokes, wisdom and fables, can be most effective when taken in small quantities, let yourself have the pleasure of gorging on them once in a while.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #40 – now available for free download!

It's springtime! Don't you deserve to be happy? Then download issue forty of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction – or buy a print copy if you're so inclined!

This issue features our last seven micro-fictions from Rhys Hughes in  “The Delusions and Tangents of Thornton Excelsior”, Lewis Gesner's strange little fable “The Journey of Toil Ling; a Folkish Tale”, a man coping with memories of off-world troubles in “Homecoming” by Mitchell Edgeworth, and thirty-odd pages of reviews by Stephen Theaker, Howard Watts, Jacob Edwards, John Greenwood and Douglas J. Ogurek. Cover art is by Howard Watts and interior art is by Ben Ludlam.

I've been extraordinarily busy with work this month, so (a) I'm really sorry for this issue being a month late and (b) additional apologies if my tired eyes missed anything while proofreading it last thing at night. I'll be giving it another read next month and will hasten to correct any mistakes I find.

Hope you like the new cover design!

This 102pp issue is available in all the usual formats, all free except the print edition, which we’ve priced as cheaply as possible:

Paperback from Lulu
PDF of the paperback version (ideal for iPad – click on File and then Download Original)
Kindle (free)
Epub (ideal for Sony Reader)
TQF40 on Feedbooks

More about the fluffy bunnies who have shared their crunchy carrots with us this time…

BEN LUDLAM is an artist from the wastelands of County Durham. See http://banthafodder.deviantart.com for more of his work. To this issue he contributes the stunning illustration for Rhys Hughes’ sub-story “The Juice of Days”.

DOUGLAS J. OGUREK’s work has appeared in the British Fantasy Society Journal, The Literary Review and Dark Things V (Pill Hill Press). He has also written over fifty articles about architectural planning and design. He contributes a review of Chronicle to this issue. He lives in Illinois with his wife and their six pets.

HOWARD WATTS is an artist from Seaford who provides the celebratory cover to this issue, as well as an in-depth review of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which has rather been taking over his life. (I learnt my lessons from games three and four in that series, and now stick to safely non-addictive games like The Adventures of Tintin and NCIS: the Game.) He has previously provided covers for Pantechnicon, Dark Horizons and TQF. He has also provided the first cover for Fantasy Short Stories. Check out his page on Deviantart.

JACOB EDWARDS is currently indentured to Australia’s speculative fiction flagship Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, as Jack of all Necessities (Deckchairs and Bendy Straws). The website of this writer, poet and recovering lexiphanicist: www.jacobedwards.id.au.

JOHN GREENWOOD is among us. In this issue he reviews Crimewave Eleven: Ghosts.

LEWIS GESNER is an American writer and artist, living in Taiwan. He publishes, exhibits and performs internationally, and is a member of Mobius artist group in Boston, MA, USA, currently on leave. His book In the Shadow of the Still Hosts is now available from White Sky Books.

MITCHELL EDGEWORTH is a 23-year old writer living in the western suburbs of Melbourne, for his sins. His first short story, “The City”, was published in the Autumn 2011 edition of the Battered Suitcase. Find more of his writing here: www.grubstreethack.wordpress.com.

RHYS HUGHES is a writer of absurdist fantasy that is sometimes serious and realistic but mostly isn’t. His three best books are due out sometime in 2012 and are called The Truth Spinner, The Impossible Inferno and The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange. (And I've just interviewed him for a future issue of the BFS Journal, so look out for that.)

STEPHEN THEAKER is the eponymous co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and writes many of its reviews. His work has also appeared in respectable publications like Interzone, Prism, Black Static and the BFS Journal.

All thirty-nine previous previous issues of our magazine are available for free download, and in print, from here.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #39 – now available for free download!

Merry Christmas and a happy new year! In this issue we have six more stories of Thornton Excelsior from the magnificent Rhys Hughes, mutant ultraviolence from Mike Sauve, and a science fiction tale from our dear friend Douglas Thompson. Ben Ludlam illustrates a Thornton adventure, and there are lots of reviews, from Jacob Edwards, Douglas Ogurek and me. Also, a mention for two people without whom I would have struggled to keep the magazine going these last two years: Howard Watts, who with his wonderful cover art has saved me from the quarterly hell of trying to create covers myself (TQF21’s awful, awful artwork still makes me shudder), and my co-editor John Greenwood, who has read virtually all the submissions this year.

In this issue we also have our very first interview! I found the interviews I did for the BFS’s Dark Horizons (with Brian Stableford, Lev Grossman and Allen Ashley) to be a fascinating challenge, and had wanted to initiate something similar here. I was in the middle of reading three brilliant books by Matthew Hughes (see Majestrum, Hespira and The Spiral Labyrinth in this issue’s review section) and so he seemed like the perfect choice. I hope such interviews will become a regular part of the magazine, but I will try to restrict myself to people for whom I can formulate at least semi-intelligent questions.

I made one big mistake with this issue, letting unfinished reviews build up and then trying to finish them all at the last minute. It’s delayed this issue by about a week, so to avoid that in future I’ve introduced a new Theaker rule: no starting a new book till I’ve finished a first draft review of the last one. (The most important Theaker rule is that having offered a cup of tea, you must make it.) A pile of yellow Silvine exercise books will assist in this plan.

But although it made us late, we did end up with lots of reviews: of books from Matthew Hughes and E.C. Tubb, audio adventures for Dick Barton and Doctor Who, and comics featuring Atomic Robo, Conan the Barbarian, Frank Miller's Holy Terror, Ian Churchill’s Marineman, the Incredible Change-Bots, Stan Nicholls' Orcs and many more. In games we look at Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition and Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. In film and television we review Melancholia, Paranormal Activity 3, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.

One previous reading rule came a bit of a cropper this quarter: Even Stephens, my plan to review books by male and female writers alternately. It worked pretty well at first, but then got quite confusing when I read some books by male writers, but not for review, and then reviewed them anyway, and then had to hold them back while I tried to get some books by female writers reviewed to catch up. What a mess! But I’ll try to do better next time, perhaps by tweaking the rule so that instead of reviewing books by men and women alternately, I read books by men and women alternately. That’ll stop me getting into a muddle.

In 2012 we have to bring you more fantastic fiction, more reviews, more artwork, more features and interviews, and if we can persuade our ducks into a line, more books. We’ll continue to be quarterly—seems to be working well—with weekly (if not twice-weekly) reviews appearing on the blog, along with comment pieces and flagrant hit-bait. Let us know if there’s anything you think we should be doing, because, to be frank, your ideas are probably better than ours!

This 96pp issue is available in all the usual formats, all free except the print edition, which we’ve priced as cheaply as possible:

Paperback from Lulu
PDF of the paperback version (ideal for iPad – click on File and then Download Original)
Kindle (free)
Epub (ideal for Sony Reader)
TQF39 on Feedbooks

More about the sweet-toothed elves who have let us steal their candy sticks this Christmas…

Ben Ludlam is an artist from the wastelands of County Durham. See http://banthafodder.deviantart.com for more of his work.

Douglas J. Ogurek’s work has appeared in the British Fantasy Society Journal, The Literary Review and Dark Things V (Pill Hill Press). He has also written over fifty articles about architectural planning and design. He contributes reviews of Paranormal Activity 3 and Breaking Dawn to this issue. He lives in Illinois with his wife and their six pets.

Howard Watts is an artist from Brighton who provides the Christmassy cover to this issue. He has previously provided covers for Pantechnicon, Dark Horizons and TQF.

Jacob Edwards is currently indentured to Australia’s speculative fiction flagship Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, as Jack of all Necessities (Deckchairs and Bendy Straws). To this issue he contributes a review of the film Melancholia. The website of this writer, poet and recovering lexiphanicist is here: www.jacobedwards.id.au.

Mike Sauve has written non-fiction for The National Post, The Toronto International Film Festival Group, Exclaim Magazine and other publications. His online fiction has appeared everywhere from Feathertale, Frost Writing and Rivets to university journals of moderate renown. Stories have also appeared in print in M-Brane, Black and White Journal, The Coe Review, Palimpsest 2010, and elsewhere.

Rhys Hughes has been a published writer for almost twenty years and in that time he has written six hundred stories, published twenty books and been translated into ten different languages. The Tellmenow Isitsöornot, a bumper ebook collection of one hundred stories, is available from Smashwords here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/88734.

Stephen Theaker is the eponymous co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and writes many of its reviews. His work has also appeared in otherwise respectable publications such as Prism, Black Static, Spark (a long, long time ago) and the BFS Journal.

All thirty-eight previous previous issues of our magazine are available for free download, and in print, from here.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #38 – now available for free download!

Wow! I love the artwork for this issue of TQF! Once again it's by Howard Watts, although fans of Rhys Hughes won't be surprised to learn that it doesn't actually reflect the contents of “The Lives and Spacetimes of Thornton Excelsior”! That's because I decided on the artwork before I had the story!

The issue features four other magnificent stories. “The Daylight Witch” is by Jim Steel, one of my very favourite contributors to Dark Horizons, each of his stories being completely unique.

Alison Littlewood, another Dark Horizons regular, is off to the major leagues now, having sold a novel to Jo Fletcher Books! “Off and On Again” is an odd one, in that it was previously used by dodgy geezer David Boyer without her permission, so she was keen to see it published somewhere respectable. She settled for us!

“Better than Llandudno, eh?” is an extract from Michael W. Thomas's forthcoming novel, Pilgrims of the White Horizon, a sequel to The Mercury Annual. We'll be publishing it!

“Old Preach’s Gods” is by Z.J. Woods, the one writer in this issue who is new to me, but I hope this won't be the last time his work appears in our pages.

On the editorial front, after the controversy of last issue we're back on frothy territory with “Taking a Break with TQF!”, where I discuss the profound effect that taking a break from posting on Facebook has had on my life. (I've read a lot more comics, basically.)

There are reviews of books from Paul Magrs, Reggie Oliver, Anne and Todd McCaffrey, Nathalie Henneberg, Glen Duncan, Vendela Vida, Wil Wheaton, Johnny Mains, Guy Haley, Ian Cameron Esslemont, and Catherynne M. Valente, plus seven comics, six audio adventures, five films and one game. Contributing reviewers this time include Jacob Edwards, Regina Edwards, Michael W. Thomas and Douglas J. Ogurek.

This 108pp issue is available in all the usual formats, all free except the print edition, which we’ve priced as cheaply as possible:

Paperback from Lulu
PDF of the paperback version (ideal for iPad – click on File and then Download Original)
Kindle (free)
Epub (ideal for Sony Reader)
TQF38 on Feedbooks

More about the merry folk who have let us sow the teeth of their literary dragons…

Alison Littlewood lives in West Yorkshire, England, where she hoards books, dreams dreams and writes fiction – mainly in the dark fantasy and horror genres. Alison has contributed to Black Static, Dark Horizons, Not One Of Us and the charity anthology Never Again. Her debut novel, A Cold Season, will be out early in 2012 from Jo Fletcher Books, an imprint of Quercus. Visit her at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk.

Douglas J. Ogurek’s work appears in or is forthcoming in the BFS Journal, The Literary Review, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and Dark Things V (Pill Hill Press). Ogurek has also written over 50 articles about architectural planning and design. To this issue he contributes reviews of Cowboys & Aliens and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. He contributed “NON” to TQF33. He lives in Gurnee, Illinois with his wife and their six pets.

Howard Watts is an artist from Brighton who provides the marvellous cover to this issue. He has previously provided covers for Pantechnicon, Dark Horizons and TQF. His story “Totem” appeared in TQF36.

Jacob Edwards is currently indentured to Australia’s speculative fiction flagship Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, as Jack of all Necessities (Deckchairs and Bendy Straws). To this issue he contributes a review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Jim Steel grew up in the countryside where, apparently, a witch had lived at one of the neighbouring farms in the sixteenth century. To get to her house you had to cross the railway where a previous occupant had committed suicide, go past the ruined church with its crypt and gravestones, skirt around the pool where yet another occupant had drowned himself, and then go through the woods where a madman had murdered a small child. So he wasn’t really worried about the witch when he was a young boy. No; Jim was much more worried about her lover who had lived in the ruined castle next to his own house. He had been a warlock.

Michael Wyndham Thomas’s work is regularly published in the UK, the US and Europe. His latest poetry collection, Port Winston Mulberry, is published by Littlejohn and Bray; a new collection is forthcoming in 2012. His most recent novel is The Mercury Annual, published in Theaker’s Paperback Library (2009). The sequel, Pilgrims at the White Horizon, is also forthcoming. Michael also reviews for TQF, The American Journal of Haiku, Other Poetry and Under the Radar. He is poet-in-residence at the annual Robert Frost Festival in Key West, Florida. His website can be found at: www.michaelwthomas.co.uk.

Regina Edwards wandered into a bookstore, during a brief stint in London, thinking idly how serendipitous it would be if she were to run into Glen Duncan signing his latest book, I Lucifer. As it happened, he was there… up until five minutes before she arrived. When not lamenting fate’s bungled intervention, Regina writes short stories and teaches maths and physics. She lives in Brisbane with her husband and son.

Rhys Hughes has been a published writer for almost twenty years and in that time he has written six hundred stories, published twenty books and been translated into ten different languages. “The Lives and Spacetimes of Thornton Excelsior” is exactly the sort of fiction he most enjoys writing; but the market for this kind of absurdist fantasy seems to be rather limited these days. If you enjoyed it, why not consider purchasing his latest ebook, a bumper collection of one hundred stories called The Tellmenow Isitsöornot, available from Smashwords here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/88734.

Stephen Theaker is the eponymous co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and writes many of its reviews. His reviews have also appeared in otherwise respectable publications such as Prism, Black Static and the BFS Journal. He has used the word “whom” twice in this issue but isn’t entirely confident that he used it correctly.

Z.J. Woods writes and otherwise wastes time in Virginia. His strange little digressions can be found in several ezines and at his website, http://zjwoods.com.

All thirty-seven previous previous issues of our magazine are available for free download, and in print, from here.

Protean Dimensions: The Worlds of Philip José Farmer, Volume 1 – reviewed

When I was about ten or eleven my dad gave me a box of books. They weren’t fancy – most were library rejects. Years later I counted up how many books I had read by my favourite authors; almost all but Terrance Dicks and Philip K. Dick were in that box: Moorcock, Asimov, Heinlein, Van Vogt, Aldiss and so on.

One of those books, and one of the first that I read, was The Stone God Awakens, in which a long-petrified human wakes up to find himself in a world where some animals have evolved into humanoid forms. It was a long time ago now, so I don’t remember much, but one thing stands out: the hero has sex with a cat lady.

As the moment approached, I remember thinking, “He won’t surely?” But he did: Philip José Farmer was a writer who always did!

This diverting book follows on from Farmerphile, a magazine that ran for fifteen issues. You might think that would leave little for a book, and it’s true that Farmer’s contributions are not extensive, but editor Michael Croteau has built a very good book around them.

The first half is given over to non-fiction and Farmer’s own work. Much of this is fascinating, for example seeing him roll an idea around in the inchoate “Newly Born, Newly Dead” to see what sticks. “The Bite of the Asp” is Randall Garrett’s account of a story’s mutilation at the hands of Hugo Gernsback. “It Could Make a Great Fantasy” is an essay by Laura Wilkes Carey about an idea Farmer had for a fantasy set in a Book of Mormon universe. One guesses the reason it was not pursued might not have been unrelated to the problem of dealing with the idea that brown skin is a punishment for one’s evil ancestors!

An article by Jack Mertes on Farmer’s brushes with Hollywood was the first thing I read; I knew the ending already, but I was keen to discover why things worked out that way. But maybe that story isn’t quite over: Farmer’s big concepts are perfect for Hollywood, and it’s only a matter of time before someone notices. The odd thing is that even his books of forty years ago might still be too controversial for the big screen.

A previously unpublished Danny Adams interview with Farmer from 1997 provides lots to think about, such as his advice to would-be writers: “My main suggestion is to have a profession or a job, or a spouse, man or woman, who’s got a job and will support you while you’re writing.”

For me the highlight of the first half was the section Classic Worlds, which offers the story “Sail On! Sail On!”, an excellent essay by James Gunn analysing the codes and signifiers embedded in the story for SF readers, and a comment on the story by Farmer himself, explaining why he didn’t follow it up with a sequel: he couldn’t work out the science of the world. But watching him try is an education.

The rest of the book, the larger part, is given over to original fiction inspired by the work of Philip José Farmer, or by the man himself. I expected to be a little lost here: I’ve read a lot of Farmer’s books, but quite a while ago now, and the books being riffed on here weren’t always the ones I’ve read; there are no Riverworld or Dayworld stories. But I needn’t have worried. Most of the stories stand alone, and are enhanced by knowing the originals rather than spoilt by not knowing them.

“Infamy” by Edward Morris and “Le Maréchal” by Paul Spiteri both feature Farmer as a character. In the first he is a young man interviewing William Burroughs, currently working on his novel Tar-z’n of the Apes, in the second a time traveller adventuring in the thirteenth century. Two very different tales, both very good. “A Kick in the Side” by Christopher Paul Carey is a brief but entertaining and clever spin-off from Flight to Opar.

“Is He in Hell?” by Win Scott Eckert is a story of the Scarlet Pimpernel, designed to explain how the progenitors of the Wold Newton family tree came to be gathered in one place where the meteor struck. Interest in the story and its accompanying family tree is likely to be largely limited to fans of Wold-Newtonry, in the same way that All-Star Squadron finds its readers among fans of DC continuity, but it wasn’t a bad story.

“No Trees of Earth” by David Bischoff presents an episode from the gap between The Maker of Universes and The Gates of Creation. Robert Wolff is coming to terms with his rediscovered memories of his life as Lord Jadawin, but loses lover Chryseis to the secrets of his newly recovered mansion. Exciting, mysterious, and with a few tweaks to the plot wouldn’t have been out of place in the recent Jack Vance tribute, Songs of the Dying Earth.

“The Final Flight of Greatheart Silver” by Chris Roberson takes an old airship pilot back into the skies for one last time, centralisation having led to a monopoly on the skyways for a big corporation. The story’s villains are chillingly bad, but it suffers from a lack of subtlety: the liners that dominate the sky are called The Da Vinci, The Potter, The Twilight: “the conglomerate makes enough money off of them that it doesn’t even want to bother with anything else”. The “heroic” conclusion has rather uncomfortable real-world resonances.

In “Flesh Endures” Dennis E. Power combines two stories, neither of which I’ve read. Hozay plays in a great tournament, the Great Series being to baseball what the Mean Arena is to basketball. The MVP (Most Virile Player) wins the chance to make hay with Miss Liberty in the Great Rites, but a challenge throws Hozay into a one-on-one fight with Jamdar Zhulayn, who makes no secret of his plans for the priestesses should he win. An exciting, brutal post-apocalyptic adventure with a fine ending.

My favourite story in the collection, despite strong competition, was “The Pollinators” by Rhys Hughes, a relatively restrained story by his standards, set in the world of “The Lovers”. A chat with Hal Yarrow stimulates a change in the life of Nosy Sam, leading him eventually to the jungles of the Malay Federation and an unusual branch of evolution. It’s not perhaps a story Farmer would have written himself, but it shares his spark and imagination.

Your enjoyment of this book is likely to be in proportion to the number of Farmer’s books you’ve read – and how much you enjoyed them – but there is plenty here, both non-fiction and fiction, that would be of interest to any science fiction fan. The variety of its contents bears witness to the astonishing variety of Farmer’s own work. For Farmerphiles, it’s quite essential.

Protean Dimensions: The Worlds of Philip José Farmer, Volume 1, ed. Michael Croteau. Meteor House, pb, 264pp.

Blind Swimmer: An Eibonvale Press Anthology

Offered the theme “creativity in isolation”, it is perhaps not surprising that many of the authors in this anthology have imagined solitary beachfront or wilderness retreats for their writer protagonists to escape to. One of the most interesting stories here, Nina Allen’s “Bellony”, tells the story of an aspiring writer’s growing obsession with the work of a children’s author. Allis Bennett had escaped Nazi Poland as a child, and then spent her life in seclusion in a dowdy seaside town, producing a series of peculiar books before disappearing without trace. Fond of these books from childhood, the young woman moves into the missing writer’s empty house to discover that Bennett’s official biography is riddled with omissions and deceptions.

It’s the sort of literary and metaphysical detective story that reminded me of Paul Auster. It doesn’t operate on the same level as a book like Oracle Nights: for one thing there is a tendency for minor characters to provide their life stories replete with the next piece in the story’s puzzle, and the author is a bit too keen on interpreting the story for us, rather than simply telling it. However, she gets the ramshackle, sun-bleached atmosphere of her seaside town just right, and the unravelling of the mystery is genuinely gripping. I did begin to think of Allis Bennett as a real author, and could almost visualise the faded paperback covers of her strange children’s novels.

Douglas Thompson also conjures a beachfront retreat, but his writer protagonist is already an enfant terrible whose first novel caused such ructions in society, and made him so much money, that he decides to live as a recluse for the next thirty years, to write more of his scabrous masterpieces and avoid the polluting touch of the book business and the fawning world of fans and critics. It’s a premise that raises interesting questions and gets to the heart of the book’s question: how far can any artist remove herself from the rest of the world and continue to produce relevant art? Is it necessarily the case that the further one withdraws into a shell of work and solitary reflection, the more navel-gazing the output? What kind of crazy stories would really get written (if any) by a novelist who spent thirty years without communicating with the rest of humanity, and would there be any point in reading them?

Coincidentally, on the 26th September on Radio 4’s “Americana” programme, the crime writer James Ellroy claimed:

I don’t read books. I fear stimulation: going to motion pictures … I ignore the world as it is today. I do not follow politics contemporaneously at all. I have no opinions. I am not on the internet. I do not watch television, have a cell phone or read newspapers. I feel no social obligation to keep up with the world today.

But is there a point when retreating from distractions means cutting oneself off from any source of real subject matter, or are the contents of a genius’s head enough to keep him going for a lifetime of masterpieces?
Frustratingly, having stated the question in the premise of “The Flowers of Uncertainty”, and set the thought experiment in motion, Douglas Thompson doesn’t seem too interested in answering it. Instead we have a clever recursive series of nested narratives, a range of alternate universes that the author might have found on his return to society.

Starting in a languid, poised style, the story becomes steadily more bombastic at each layer of the story, until the characters are waving guns and throwing silly Hollywood action-movie put-downs around. It’s an entertaining ride as the carpet is repeatedly pulled out from under the reader’s feet, but it feels like an opportunity wasted.

Somewhere further down the coast, in “The Book of Tides”, David Rix’s writer is using his beachcombing finds as inspiration for his magnum opus, a linked series of stories based on his “readings” of the tides. Like Derek Jarman’s garden, his beach hut is surrounded by driftwood sculptures that protect him from the world. He makes tentative connections between his found objects, like a tarot reader hoping that the vaguer his interpretation, the more likely it will contain some grain of truth. The arrival of a more unfathomable bit of jetsam in the shape of a fugitive girl complicates his meditative existence.

There is something tentative about the tone of the whole story that I found frustrating. A particular lump of driftwood is described as “Barkless and cracked, it seemed to reach out, though he wasn’t sure whether it was in agony or exultation. Maybe both”. There’s a reluctance to assert anything definite, to engage with the world, to make a simple decision. When the two characters find five human corpses washed up on the beach, there is no mention of alerting the authorities, or even of burying the dead. The writer is so caught up in his creative monologue that his response is to assemble another piece of sculpture on the beach.

There are problems with the pace of the dialogue: it lurches from stammering sentence fragments into unexpected outbursts of emotional anguish. Here and there the conversations had a lumpy quality that reminded me of soap operas where people invariably show their anger or distress by straightforward shouting. But the awkward, disjointed relationship between the two lonely characters is sensitively portrayed, and the whole story is attentive to the small, subtle clues in the way two strangers might relate to one another. It’s a serious piece of work, perhaps taking itself just a little too seriously.

Thankfully Rhys Hughes is on hand to provide a welcome slice of levity in “The Talkative Star”, a flurry of terse microfictions about the sun and his oblique conversations with various characters including the author himself. This is, I fancy, the same sun who appears in Aesop’s fable, although he is more eccentric and whimsical here, a less gormless cousin to the Mighty Boosh’s moon.

Like Nina Allen’s writer, Gerard Houarner’s Vietnam Vet in “The Flea Market” finds redemption by rummaging through crates of other people’s stuff, in this case, a stack of pretend, cardboard records drawn by school children which have the power to induce hallucinations and visions of his dead family. It’s a unique conceit, and the story undoubtedly creates a heavy, drugged atmosphere. But there are some bits of stylistic trickery that grated on my nerves, in as much as Houarner tries to wedge large chunks of backstory into a single metaphor:

“The sense of dislocation was as bad as coming home from war nursing a wound, a habit, and the title ‘baby-killer’ from a rich kid in poor drag at the airport.”

Andrew Coulthard’s “Lussi Natt” is an overlong supernatural horror in which the by now familiar solitary writer (this time in the Swedish wilderness) is alternately seduced and terrorised by a trio of birch-tree sprites among other evil presences. I think I could see what the author was aiming at here, and all the necessary ingredients to make a genuinely frightening story were in the mix. The author tries repeatedly to escape his predicament, but apparently mundane circumstances frustrate him over and again. There’s always the possibility that his weird experiences are merely the side-effect of forgetting to medicate for his bipolar disorder. One could imagine this as an effective and subtle psychological horror movie, but there is no snap to the storytelling. Every phone call home is laboriously played out in full, and rather than building to a crescendo of unease, the plot meanders back and forth between apparently unrelated encounters with the evil spirits of the woods.

Underworld clichés abound again in Terry Grimwood’s “The Higgins Technique”, this time about the porn industry, and a desperate writer who tries to resurrect her flagging career by immersing herself in the dark world of rape fantasy porn, in order to write about it. The director is a sweaty, booze and cigarette soaked has-been, the male porn star is a vacuous puppet, and the money men are Eastern European and sinister. Of course the writer has her epiphany, where the hastily sketched backstory of her baby’s cot-death can be brought to closure. The story is almost saved by a disturbingly ambiguous ending – I wasn’t sure whether the protagonist was really going to survive to write her confession.

The story is told from several viewpoints, including that of the lonely, masturbating porn consumer, and I could see what slant Grimwood has taken on the “creativity in isolation” theme. All the characters are isolated from one another by an abusive industry, and all are struggling to create something: the director is still dreaming of being a real film-maker, the actress is trying to find a unmarketed niche to write herself into, even the porn addict is using his imagination. But the characters are for the most part so two-dimensional, and their motivations and hang-ups so off-the-peg that this potentially interesting take on the given theme doesn’t catch fire.

Then there is Alexander Zelenyj’s amusingly dreadful tale of sexual obsession that shouldn’t have been allowed to share the same binding as decent stories like Nina Allen’s “Bellony”. “Far Beneath Incomplete Constellations” is the grandiloquent tale of a university lecturer’s controlling, abusive sexual relationship with one of his female Japanese students. It’s a story that never uses one word when half a dozen will do, preferably Latinate and eldritch ones. Whenever the main character realises anything, he has “an epiphany”. There are absurdities such as “it had birthed anger in him” when something makes the protagonist angry.

The central motif, that of the protagonist riding his lover, who has transformed into a crimson (not red!) winged beast, as a metaphor for sex, reminded me of the animated sex scene in the movie “Anchorman”, when Ron Burgundy and his lover ride pink winged unicorns, and I found that reading the story was a lot less onerous when I imagined the protagonist’s dialogue read out in Burgundy’s voice. Later on my hunch was confirmed when I learned that lecturer’s office smelled of “rich mahogany”, which is of course, one of Burgundy’s least successful chat-up lines (“I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.”)

Besides being at times laughable, the protagonist’s insane notion that his Japanese lover is inhuman, a lust-making shell designed to entrance him, is not seriously questioned anywhere in the story. The Japanese student is herself made too timid, pliable and inarticulate to effectively counter this violent dehumanizing idea. The story ends with the man riding an asteroid accompanied by one last injudicious metaphor: he fishes a drowned bluebird from a pond full of semen.

Despite editorial oversights such as “Far Beneath Incomplete Constellations”, a lot of care has gone into putting “Blind Swimmer” together. There’s a thought-provoking foreword by Joel Lane, who discusses withdrawal and engagement as two equally necessary modes for any writer, even one who professes to reject “the mainstream” (whatever that is). “How can this loneliness be shared and learned from without falsifying it?” he asks, concisely summing up the problem that seems to haunt many of the writer-protagonists in this collection.

“Radical and counter-cultural writers in the UK are branded irrelevant” he writes, and “any writer who does not buy into the ‘affirmative culture’ of forced optimism and competitive individualism is isolated by the indifference of the ‘market’ (a prescriptive myth shared by commercial publishers and booksellers).” I take issue with this: I don’t believe that there is a dominant ‘affirmative culture’ operating in the literary mainstream, and I can think of few recent successful novels that have celebrated competitive individualism or any kind of simplistic optimism. There is a danger of small-press and “genre” writers creating an insular victim culture: uncritically reading one another’s books and believing themselves an oppressed minority. To compare the small press market to “shanty towns…crowded with literary refugees” buys into this myth.

Lane wisely warns writers not to “withdraw into a narcissistic inner world of perpetual wound-licking”, but I can’t help wondering whether the term “weird fiction” panders to that very same adolescent instinct (“we’re different and special and nobody understands us”). Writers might fool themselves that they’re not getting published because they’re just too “out there” for the mainstream publishers, but it’s hardly a recipe for constructive self-criticism. “Nobody likes my writing but that’s just because they can’t handle it!” Possibly, but the more likely explanation is that it’s not good enough. And one doesn’t have to explore the mainstream canon of literature very far to discover that it has always been packed to the rafters with outcasts and misfits who never saw themselves as part of a separate, parallel tradition of “weird” literature. Joel Lane mentions Jean Genet, and there are of course dozens more canonized Great Authors who did not write “horror”, “fantasy” or “speculative” fiction, but who expressed horrifying, fantastical and speculative ideas that could invigorate and widen the scope of so-called “genre” fiction.

Blind Swimmer – An Eibonvale Press Anthology edited by David Rix. Eibonvale Press 2010. ISBN 978-0956214751 (paperback), 978-0956214744 (hardback).

Theaker Peculiar!

Rhys Hughes has blogged about his habit of including real people in his novels and stories, and I was indeed "glad and amused" to find a Theaker on the list!

A free copy of Five Forgotten Stories (now available on Amazon) to the first person (other than Rhys himself!) to identify the story in which the character Theaker Peculiar appears…

There was also a (John) Theaker in Mike Chinn's Sailors of the Skies, a Damian Paladin story in Dark Horizons #55.

Add those to my cameo appearances in those terrible Howard Phillips novels we used to publish in TQF and my place in literary history would seem to be assured...

Twisthorn Bellow by Rhys Hughes

As its subtitle explains, Twisthorn Bellow concerns itself with "the unusual escapades of a self-exploding golem with a twisted horn and attitude somewhere on the astral plane and also on foot right here". Hopefully that's clear! He's a powerful golem created to protect England and annihilate evil. The book's dedicated in part to the memory of Philip José Farmer, and though there aren't many stylistic echoes here of his work, it's easy to see why Farmer would attract Hughes' admiration. Both writers delight in high concepts, intertextuality, puns, and following nutty ideas right through to the end.

In this book the idea is a Doom Patrol or B.P.R.D. devoted to the promotion of British interests, assembled by Shylock Cherlomsky, a madman with an obsessive hatred of the French. It's at its best when the monster squad gets out and about – early episodes take place largely within the base, giving the book a more claustrophobic feel than is usual for Rhys Hughes' work. The action scenes, though sketched with a raised eyebrow, are vivid and dynamic, Twisthorn's kpinga and its "madly sprouting blades" being put to devastating use on all manner of ne'er-do-wells, including "ghouls, banshees, centaurs, abominable snowmen, warlocks, mandrakes, perytons, lamias, musicians, elves, harpies, robots, moths and sundry French things".

It's not quite as commercial as I expected – it's not at all a book where Hughes has reined himself in or tried to conform to the expectations of a wider readership – and I'm not entirely sure why that disappointed me, since I enjoyed the book all the same. This is good monster fun, with some surprising cameos, including Philip José Farmer himself and a big red fellow who has no time for Twisthorn's nonsense. I read this at about the same time as Maurice Renard's Doctor Lerne, Subgod – the first book I've read that was narrated by a table! – and how funny then to find this book narrated by... well, I won't spoil it. Though I have stood on it.

Twisthorn Bellow, Rhys Hughes. Published by Atomic Fez.

Mister Gum, by Rhys Hughes

Mister Gum is a creative writing tutor who illustrates the rules of good writing – beginning of course with “Show, don’t tell” – with a series of extended anecdotes that may or may not be from his own life. Eventually he loses his position, but his adventures in sex and language continue, including a spell working at the inflatable headquarters of Scrofula Yard with Detective Ynch Short.

This is a book drenched in gentlemanly emissions from start to finish, and if it isn’t the filthiest thing I’ve ever read (that would have to be Les onze mille verges by Apollinaire, which I expect to be arrested for reading any day now) it’s in the top ten, somewhere near Miller’s Under the Roofs of Paris. But for all the semen being flung around in these pages, it’s really very genteel and polite. This isn’t Rhys Hughes does porn, or Rhys Hughes sets out to shock; it’s the same Rhys Hughes, just with oceans of semen, talking hymens and characters like Fellatio Nelson, a pirate with a prehensile penis, and, erm, Lynne Truss, punctuation fanatic.

This is the third book by Rhys Hughes I’ve read in as many months, following The Smell of Telescopes (Eibonvale) and The Postmodern Mariner (Screaming Dreams). Mister Gum comes to us from Dog Horn Publishing, publishers of Polluto magazine. This multiplicity of publishers suggests that Hughes is something of a wanderer (either that or no single publisher can cope with his prodigious output). And so it goes with his stories (after three books I’m now an expert!), many of which feature journeys of one kind or another. His stories are like extended “a man walks into the bar” jokes; their conclusions share the unforeseeable inevitability of a punchline.

What I like so much about Hughes’ work is (egocentrically enough) exactly what I like in the novels I’ve written myself. It’s the freedom he gives himself, to follow his nose, to be deliberately silly, to extend jokes as far as he fancies. The difference of course is that mine are rubbish, lazily written nonsense, whereas his stories are carefully-constructed, detailed nonsense! He’s sometimes accused of being self-indulgent, but there are more than enough books out there that indulge their readers. How great to have a writer working for himself, to create more of the kind of art that he appreciates.

And anyway, as Frank Black sang about the Three Stooges, “Some nonsense, it is so serious.” Here, in a very, very silly book, I think Hughes is making very serious points about the near-total irrelevance of externally-imposed rules when it comes to creating art; they’re useful when it comes to selling it; and working within self-imposed rules can create interesting results (viz. the Oulipo work he admires); but if you want to write a story that is all tell and no show then don’t let a silly rule stop you.

I can’t imagine trying to edit or translate his work. Translating it, how to adapt the puns to another language, how to even spot them all? Editing it, how to know what’s a mistake, when almost any apparent mistake could be another joke? (Well, you would just ask on the proofs, but I’m coming over all rhetorical.) Reviewers face similar difficulties. For example, my pre-release version contains several mentions of prostrate glands. Should those be prostate glands, or is it another joke? Maybe they are prostrate, as a result of all their hard work! If it was a mistake, I hereby claim my no-prize! But if it was a joke, I’ve shown myself to be a complete dullard!

Anyway, to sum up: fantastically filthy, fantastically entertaining! But I think Lynne Truss will be on the phone to her lawyers…

Mister Gum, by Rhys Hughes, Dog Horn Publishing, pb, 108pp

The Postmodern Mariner, by Rhys Hughes

I went from The Smell of Telescopes, one of Rhys Hughes’ earliest books, to this, one of his most recent. The decade or so that separates them is immediately obvious (or at least it seems to be – perhaps these stories date from the same period and I’m just imagining a difference!): the lines are cleaner, the twists less superfluous, the jokes funnier. There are three distinct sections. (I rather wish The Smell of Telescopes had been divided up in the same way to save me a bit of brainache!)

Part One features seven amazing adventures of Castor Jenkins, the Baron Munchausen of Porthcawl, of which more below. Part Two is “The Lip Service”, a tale of a man who posts himself to his girlfriend and ends up in a far-off magical lost parcels depot. It’s funny, silly and rather sadder than the other stories, being all about the steady disappearance of love from the world.

Part Three is a novella about the Postmodern Mariner in person, “Rommel Cobra’s Swimming Carnival”, in which the Mariner (a blogger) goes in search of adventure with pirates in a gigantic cup of tea – adventure on the high teas, one might say! Astonishingly, in a novella filled to the brim with groan-worthy puns, Hughes neglects to make that one, the most obvious of all. I can only guess it’s a deliberately open goal, left by way of invitation to the reader to join the game!

[In this, as in so many things, I was wrong. The author, reading the original draft of this review on Goodreads, noted that such a pun could be found on page 118, about halfway down. Said Rhys: “I was mildly shocked at the thought that I might have missed a pun! I went mildly pale, began mildly shaking, nearly collapsed with a mild heart attack!”]

Two marvellous opening paragraphs from the Castor Jenkins stories should serve to give a taste of the pleasures of this book. “The Plucked Plant” begins thus: “Castor Jenkins has a bad habit of advocating outlandish ideas and even his mildest beliefs are routinely uncommon. If you ask him about the Primeval Soup he’ll insist it was leek and potato. He denies the existence of the colour purple, the number seven and the note G#.”

And “Interstellar Domestic” opens with: “Nobody outside Porthcawl, and hardly anyone inside it, can remember that Wales once had a space program that enjoyed greater success than the combined efforts of the Americans, Russians and Chinese. … What’s more, it was done on the cheap, without even the need to build a spaceship.”

If you like those extracts, you’ll enjoy this book immensely. The book reviews itself! But I should try to contribute; what I like about these stories is that they are all about extrapolation. I like stories where one thing follows on from another, where premises are built upon, notions are followed through. For example the way the apocalyptic ending of Joe Hill’s Gunpowder follows logically from its small beginnings, or Racine’s protagonists are propelled to their doom, or Superman shaves his beard with his heat vision.

The speciality of the stories in this book is taking a silly (and sometimes not-so-silly) premise and following it through to an apparently logical but ludicrous conclusion – and that’s why I loved them so much. A review of the same author’s The Crystal Cosmos dismissed it briefly: “It begins, beautifully. Alas, from here on out it descends into a nonsensical mess.” Not having read that book of course I can’t argue with the conclusion, but it’s worth noting that not all nonsense is a mess, and nonsense isn’t necessarily something into which a story descends: sometimes it’s something to which a story carefully builds, and that’s certainly the case in this collection.

The book’s one flaw for me is that it groups together three chunks of storytelling that have little in common. Each section is individually quite fantastic, but they don’t quite add up to a pleasing whole. A complete collection of Castor Jenkins stories would have been even better, or a set of three novellas, but as it stands the novella feels like an unnecessary adjunct to the Jenkins stories, or vice versa. Certainly, the unique and very admirable Castor Jenkins stories deserve to be in a book with his name on the cover.

And while we’re talking of covers, a note of praise for Steve Upham’s marvellous giant octopus! Certainly, the design of this book does it proud, as does the quality of its production.

The Postmodern Mariner, by Rhys Hughes, Screaming Dreams, pb, 160pp.

The Smell of Telescopes, by Rhys Hughes

This is a new edition from Eibonvale Press from 2007 of a collection of short stories first published by the highly respected small press, Tartarus Books, in 2000. I don’t have the original version for comparison, but this one has a couple of oddities: like the other Eibonvale books so far, each paragraph begins with a gigantic indent, creating hundreds of unintentional ellipses, and full stops are followed by two spaces instead of one, which gets annoying over the course of a whole book. Also, the space between each story includes two to four blank pages: providing time to decompress, perhaps, but adding up to about sixty blank pages in total. On the other hand, this edition adds striking illustrated title pages to each story, and the author has said that this is his preferred version of the text.

Though each of the stories works alone, there are connections between them. Largely they fall into four categories.

One set deals with Captain Morgan’s retired pirates, scoundrels such as Spermaceti Whiskers, Thanatology Spleen, Muscovado Lashes, Lanolin Brows and Omophagia Ankles. These were the stories I had most trouble with – the first couple I found almost entirely impenetrable – I had to nail my eyes to the page to stop them running away. “Lanolin Brows”, though, was brilliant: a pirate makes himself a suit of armour from wood, and goes on to create an entire city from the stuff. “Omophagia Ankles” ties together many of the book’s threads for a very satisfying conclusion.
Four stories tell of two troubled lovers, Myfanwy and Owain, and their travails with pies, imps, trousers and souls: “The Blue Dwarf”, “The Orange Goat”, “The Yellow Imp” and “The Purple Pastor”. The first was almost painfully quirky, but the last was superb, leaving the hero in a most unusual position.

Five stories concern the strange town of Ladloh, its inhabitants and politics: “Ten Grim Bottles”, “The Purloined Liver”, “A Person Not in the Story”, “Burke and Rabbit” and “The Hush of Falling Houses”. These were my favourites in the volume, in particular “The Hush of Falling Houses”, in which Ladlow must face its final fate – again.

Twelve stories are more or less standalones, including “The Banker of Ingolstadt”, “The Squonk Laughed”, “Telegraph Ma’am”, “The Tell-Tale Nose”, “A Girl Like a Doric Column”, “Nothing More Common”, “Bridge Over Troubled Blood”, “The Haunted Womb”, “There Was a Ghoul Dwelt by a Mosque” and “The Sickness of Satan”. All of these were very good, and are the most accessible. My favourites from this group were “Depressurised Ghost Story” and “Mr Humphrey’s Clock’s Inheritance”, a story on the perils of licking furniture.

This was a very challenging book to read. Every line is so dense, so filled with allusions, in-jokes and puns that I halted and stuttered in my reading, reminding me of when I began to read novels in French for the first time. Every line needed to be decoded, sifted for meaning before I could understand it or move on to the next. But the more of it I read, the more I settled into it, the more I enjoyed it. I started to pick up on the internal connections, stopped worrying so much about catching every nuance, and stopped looking up the words I didn’t know in a dictionary. By the time I finished Le Comte de Monte Cristo I was reading French very well; by the end of this book I wouldn’t say I was fluent in Hughes, but I was making my way with more confidence, and looking forward to the next volume.

When you read a book of short stories, it’s easy to assume the stories appear in chronological order. I don’t know if that’s the case here, but even allowing for my steady acclimatization to Rhys Hughes’ writing, my impression was that as the book went on the puns became less laboured, the twists became more natural, and the stories were better. The first edition of this book dates back to 2000, the stories I imagine are even older: I’m very much looking forward to reading the author’s subsequent work, especially the forthcoming Twisthorn Bellow from Atomic Fez.

The Smell of Telescopes, Rhys Hughes, Eibonvale Press, hb, 464pp