Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder X: The Find: review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

Where ‘The Hog’ is the longest Carnacki case by far, ‘The Find’ is significantly shorter than the rest and, in my opinion, the most underrated. Much of the commentary I’ve read begins by saying that this is the only case where there is no hint of the supernatural. I don’t think that’s true. There is no haunting, but the mystery – the appearance of a second copy of a unique book, Dumpley’s Acrostics, which was presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1573 – may have either a natural or supernatural solution, just like all of Carnacki’s other cases. The story appears to have begun life as ‘The Dumpley Acrostics: An Incident in the Career of Sackwell Dank, Mental Analyst’. The peculiarly named Sackwell Dank was another investigator and we will never know whether he was occult or ordinary in orientation as he never reappeared in Hodgson’s oeuvre. When he was unsuccessful in selling the story, Hodgson rewrote it as a Carnacki investigation, which also failed to interest any editors. It seems that neither Betty nor Derleth thought it worth resubmitting posthumously, though Derleth decided to include it in his edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. Carnacki himself calls it a “very simple case” and I wasn’t sure whether or not it met the criteria for an armchair mystery, a category of crime fiction of which I’m very fond and which is also very difficult to write in an engaging way. While Carnacki does conduct an investigation that takes him out of his chair and out of 472 Cheyne Walk, he reaches his solution by means of rigorous thinking rather than the discovery of clues, much in the manner of the armchair specialist. The story is in fact a little logical puzzle, clever and pleasing in its own right if distinct from Carnacki’s other cases. Personally, I found it a fitting conclusion to the series and urge readers who are interested in occult detection to read it with an open mind.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder IX: The Hog | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

There is speculation that this was the last Carnacki story written by Hodgson, very likely during the war, and that his death interrupted either its completion or submission. The fact that Betty submitted ‘The Haunted Jarvee’ posthumously suggests that ‘The Hog’ may have been incomplete. Publication in Weird Tales was due to the efforts of Derleth, who would publish it a second time in the same year, in his edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. Given Derleth’s reputation for robust ‘editing’, I wonder if the story wasn’t actually completed by him or at least revised extensively. It is the longest Carnacki case by far, well into the novelette or novella range (depending on your preferred definitions) at about seventeen thousand words, and the only one divided into numbered parts (seven). It is also crafted with skill and with considerable attention to pace and rhythm, which makes the length entertaining instead of onerous. The investigation takes place at 472 Cheyne Walk, in Carnacki’s rather sinister sounding ‘experimenting room’, when one of his friends, a doctor, refers a patient called Bains to him. Bains is, it seems, haunted by a giant pig (the ‘HOG’), who comes to him in his dreams, which, in turn, plague his waking life. Carnacki puts his room to good use, conducting a variety of dangerous experiments on him as he attempts to understand what the ghost is and how he can free Bains from it. The hog is indeed supernatural and what is particularly interesting about this case is that it includes the most detailed discussion of the worldview underpinning the stories, as I mentioned in my comments on ‘The Thing Invisible’. In essence, Carnacki’s ‘Outer Monsters’ are both physical and psychic, living in the ‘Outer Circle’, a belt of outer space five million or more miles thick. This region creates psychic phenomena on Earth in the same way that flesh and blood produces consciousness in (some) living things on the same planet. Is this a fully-fledged worldview? Certainly not as much as in other pioneers of weird fiction or even in Hodgson’s other work, such as The House on the Borderland and The Night Land, but it does replace the less convincing recourses to Judeo-Christian and Celtic mythology in several of the previous stories. Carnacki mentions “the ‘Gateway’ case” (‘The Gateway of the Monster’) twice and “the Black Veil Case” yet again.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder VIII: The Haunted Jarvee | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

As far as I can tell from various online sources, this story was completed by Hodgson before his death, found among his papers by Betty, and submitted to The Premier Magazine by her in 1919. She declined a request to revise it by the editor, David Whitelaw, but he published it anyway ten years later. The reasons for his tardiness remain unknown and I wonder if the decision to publish wasn’t either part of or a precursor to the revival of interest in Hodgson in the nineteen thirties. The Jarvee is a haunted sailing ship, aboard which Carnacki travels at the bidding of its owner, Captain Thompson, for the purposes of explaining the strange weather phenomena that seem to accompany its every voyage. The vessel is beset by shadows, squalls, the death of two sailors, more shadows, mist, lightning, silence, more shadows still, and near-capsizing, all of which Hodgson depicts in a compelling and captivating way and no doubt with great authenticity. While ‘The Haunted Jarvee’ seems to be the most popular of the posthumous cases, I found it disappointing in consequence of a pervasive vagueness and opacity. We have no idea of the voyage’s location beyond ‘the Atlantic’, explanation of both the cause of the weather and Carnacki’s attempts to counter it are restricted to ‘attractive vibrations’ and ‘repellent vibrations’ respectively, and the supernatural rationale for the haunting is dismissed with, “The vast unknown it is vain to speculate upon”. One would have hoped that, as an occult detective, such speculation was precisely Carnacki’s job. There is nonetheless an often-ignored point of interest worth mentioning. Referring to his ‘Saaamaaa Ritual’, Carnacki suggests that Arkright, one of his dinner guests, has a better knowledge of magic than he does, a casual aside that raises a host of possibilities…

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder VII: The Thing Invisible | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

The first story in this edition, the only one published in The New Magazine, and the last published before Hodgson’s death. The haunted premises is a chapel, in the fictional village of Burtontree in South Kent, where Carancki is summoned by a client. This is one of Carnacki’s natural rather than supernatural cases and has at least two points of interest. The first is further evidence of the candour and eloquence Hodgson affords Carnacki in describing the fear he experiences in his ghost-finding. There is a particularly effective passage in the middle of the narrative of which the following sentence is representative: “I tell you, that no one who has not been through these kinds of experiences, has any idea of the sheer, actual physical pain attendant upon, and resulting from, the intense nerve strain that ghostly fright sets up in the human system.” The same is true of non-ghostly fright and Hodgson was clearly no stranger to both fear and the courage required to overcome it. Second, there is more worldbuilding here, the connection between the ‘ab-human’ and ‘ab-normal’ on the one hand and the ‘Outer World’ and ‘Force from the Outside’ fleshed out in a little more detail, as a precursor to ‘The Hog’, where it will be explained in full. Carnacki puts his expertise in “Lightless Photography’ to work in his investigation and responds to Dodgson’s interrogation with an especially comprehensive and convincing set of answers. The weakest element of the tale is probably its title, which is not only unenlightening but has already been used in part.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder VI: The Searcher of the End House | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

The last of the first batch of the stories, which were all published in The Idler in the first five issues of 1910, finds Carnacki himself the victim of a haunting, while living with his mother near the fictional village of Appledorn on the south coast of England. Hodgson shows some innovation here, as the first appearance of the ghost is olfactory, “a faint, peculiar, disagreeable odour”, followed by a rapping on the banister he initially ascribes to his mother. When the smells and sounds continue, Carnacki packs her off to safety and interviews his landlord, who admits that there have been reports of something strange in the house and agrees to keep a nocturnal vigil with him to discover what it is. During this vigil, Carnacki sees the ghost of a child running away from someone and the landlord sees the ghost of a woman searching for someone or something. They decide to involve the police in their next vigil and uncover a natural explanation for their experiences. Where ‘The Whistling Room’ exploited the order of the series, ‘The Searcher of the End House’ falls foul of it, concluding with a solution that is too similar to ‘The Horse of the Invisible’. I’m not sure if the order is the only problem either and I wondered if this wasn’t like Agatha Christie trying to use the same plot device she used in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) twice. In summary, the case has a very promising beginning that ultimately fails to deliver on that promise. Carnacki mentions several other investigations, including “the Three Straw Platters”, “the Dark Light Case”, and “that trouble of Matheson’s”.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder V: The Horse of the Invisible | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

The ‘cover story’ of the Wordsworth Editions edition, which is a good choice in being one of Carnacki’s best adventures and a poor one for an illustration as the horse is, mostly anyway, invisible. There is another small variation on the familiar formula here as the narrative begins with Carnacki showing Dodgson a series of photographs before dinner and before the arrival of his other guests. The haunting is of a house somewhere in East Lancashire, but Carnacki quickly establishes that the ghost is tied to a person rather than a place. There is a legend that if the first-born child of a Hisgins generation is a girl, she will be persecuted by a huge horse from the time she reaches womanhood to the day of her marriage and this family curse has already put paid to five young women in a variety of ways. The tale is fast-paced, the ghost appearing before Carnacki is even briefed, and, unlike its predecessors, written in the style of a thriller rather than a mystery. Hodgson demonstrates his expertise as an author by alternating foreshadowing with gripping action set pieces. What also emerges here is that while Carnacki is a typically reticent English gentleman, he is very candid and very eloquent in describing the fear that he experiences during his investigations and Hodgson’s representation of fear across the Carnacki series is one of their literary strengths. ‘The Horse of the Invisible’ is capped with an ingenious conclusion in which Hodgson subverts the expectations he has created in the first three cases by presenting a solution that is both natural and supernatural. The “Black Veil” investigation is mentioned again as well as a potential competitor or rival of Carnacki’s, “Harford”.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder IV: The Whistling Room | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

Carnacki’s third case takes him back to the West of Ireland, to the fictional Iastrae Castle, near Galway. This time, the stately home has been purchased by a wealthy American named Sid K. Tassoc, who is engaged to a local lass, and one of the rooms in its East Wing is beleaguered by a demonic whistling (as indicated by the title). There is a slight variation on what is by now a familiar formula in that there are two dinners at 472 Cheyne Walk and two tales by Carnacki. When he tells the first, he has failed to solve the mystery despite spending many weeks at the scene and making use of his full repertoire of methods and equipment. The second dinner is much shorter and includes the most substantial q&a session thus far, with Carnacki’s guests putting him to the test, as well as a detailed explanation of the manifestation, which draws on Celtic legend and lore. What I liked about this instalment were the false clues set up early on, the hints that the local lads were trying to scare the rich foreigner off so that one of them could marry his fiancée. Hodgson makes good use of the series order, too, having just shown that the rural Irish are precisely the sort of folk capable of procuring supernatural shenanigans when it suits them in ‘The House Among the Laurels’. There is also the first suggestion that ab-human creatures hail from some distance away with “Outer Monstrosities”. My sole complaint is perhaps idiosyncratic: there are too many references to other investigations, at least six. Carnacki mentions the “Buzzing”, “Grey Dog”, “Yellow Finger”, “Silent Garden”, “Grunting Man”, and “Nodding Door” cases. Sometimes less is more.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder III: The House Among the Laurels | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

This is a somewhat disappointing second case and not because it is the first to have a natural rather than supernatural dénouement. The apparent haunting is of the hall of Gannington Manor, which is near the fictional village of Korunton, in the West of Ireland, and Hodgson’s attempts to reproduce the local dialect are amateurish, falling flat. There is also a slight variation in Carnacki’s yarn-spinning in that the first part describes the investigations of his friend, Wentworth, on inheriting the manor house so that what one reads is Dodgson’s report of Carnacki’s report of the sequence of events that happened to Wentworth, who seems very far-removed indeed. There have been two deaths in the hall in seven years and Wentworth does what Carnacki usually does, spends the night in the chamber, albeit with a host of locals and a big bull mastiff. When blood drips from the ceiling and the dog is killed (animal companions seem to have a tough time of it in Carnacki’s adventures), all forty-odd men flee the scene and Wentworth calls for Carnacki’s expertise. The ‘ab-human’ is used for the second time and the distinction between human and ab-human will form the foundation of the worldview embedded in the Carnacki oeuvre. Manuscripts, signs, and rituals are deployed, but, as always, Carnacki comes equipped with his revolver, camera, and flashlight. Two more dogs fare no better than the first and the case is solved by means of the camera, which exposes the device being used to create the haunting. There is a reference to another of Carnacki’s investigations, the “Steeple Monster case”.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder II: The Gateway of the Monster | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

The Carnacki narratives all have a similar structure or what one might less charitably call a formula. Each begins with a dinner for five at Carnacki’s home, 472 Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, which is the precursor to the story itself, represented as his post-prandial yarn-spinning. Once Carnacki has told his tale, there is time for one or more questions from his guests before he dismisses them with what is obviously meant to be a quirky, “Out you go!” Within this schema, Hodgson uses a device that appears contrived or even superfluous a century later: the cases are narrated in the first person, not by Carnacki or Hodgson, but an authorial surrogate, with the all too familiar name of ‘Dodgson’, so that what one reads is a report (by Dodgson) of a report (by Carnacki), which can make the sequence of events described feel remote and even lacklustre. The convention harks back to the origin of novels in histories and travelogues and was used to inaugurate literary modernism by authors such as Jospeh Conrad so Hodgson can hardly be blamed for what, in retrospect, is a poor artistic choice. ‘The Gateway of the Monster’ is one of Carnacki’s supernatural cases and an excellent introduction to the methods and equipment he employs, combining science and superstition with a camera, an electric pentacle, a water circle, and a cat. Less so, the case introduces the worldview that was so important to Hodgson and the other pioneers of weird fiction and also makes tantalising references to the “Black Veil” and “Moving Fur” investigations.

Carnacki, The Ghost-Finder I: Introduction | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

David Stuart Davies’ introduction to the Wordsworth Editions edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder contains several errors and insists on examining Hodgson as a contemporary of and counterpart to Conan Doyle so I shall replace it with my own here. As editor, Davies also presents the cases out of chronological order without any rationale and this rolling review will discuss each of the nine in the order in which they were originally published. William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an English author who was one of the pioneers of weird fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century and created one of the most famous occult detectives in literature, Thomas Carnacki. Hodgson was a prolific writer, who published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and is probably best known for two of his supernatural horror novels, The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912). He wrote dozens of short stories, across several series that included the Sargasso Sea, Carnacki, and Captain Gault. Hodgson went to sea at the age of fourteen, as a cabin boy, and was a third mate when he left the Merchant Marine in 1899. He used his time as a sailor to become a skilled photographer and his experiences provided material for many of his narratives. Hodgson was also an early bodybuilder and personal trainer, opening the School of Physical Culture in Blackburn on his return to England. In 1913, he married Betty Farnworth (1877-1943), another author, and the couple moved to Sanary-sur-Mer, in France, where the cost of living was cheaper.

Hodgson’s first short story, ‘The Goddess of Death’, was published in The Royal Magazine in April 1904 and is something of a precursor to Carnacki in combining elements of both the horror and crime genres. His first novel, The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907), is usually classified as horror, although there is no explicit supernatural element and it might just as accurately be described as a tale of survival at sea. Its significance to the speculative fiction canon was recognised when it was reprinted in 1971, as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. While Carnacki was not the first occult detective to appear in print, he was one of the most popular, following Arthur Machen’s (1863-1947) Mr Dyson and Algernon Blackwood’s (1869-1951) Dr John Silence when he first appeared in ‘The Gateway of the Monster’ in 1910. Hodgson’s motivation for Carnacki was apparently exclusively financial and his inspiration Blackwood’s Silence, but there is evidence of a philosophical worldview that is reminiscent of Hodgson’s novels and supports my claim that occult detective fiction is, or was initially, a subgenre of weird fiction. When war broke out, Hodgson and Betty, who, unusually for the time, had no children, returned to England. He was commissioned as second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in 1915, but was seriously injured when he was thrown from a horse and medically discharged the next year. Hodgson volunteered for a second time in 1917, was re-commissioned, and served on the Western Front. He was killed in action at the Fourth Battle of Ypres in April 2018, aged forty. I think it is fair to say that although he was not a great writer, he was a writer with great ideas.

Hodgson published six Carnacki stories during his lifetime, the first five in The Idler from January to May 1910. The sixth, ‘The Thing Invisible’ was published in The New Magazine in January 1912 and collected with the others in the first edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, published by Eveleigh Nash in 1913. Despite Hodgson’s oeuvre being largely forgotten after his death, a seventh Carnacki story, ‘The Haunted Jarvee’ (a ship, not to be confused with ‘jarvey’, a coach), was published in The Premier Magazine in March 1929. There was a revival of interest in him in the nineteen thirties, when he was brought to H.P. Lovecraft’s (1890-1937) attention and praised by him in the second edition of ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ (serialised in The Fantasy Fan from 1933 to 1935). Hodgson became a favourite of fans of weird fiction and an eighth Carnacki story, ‘The Hog’, was published in Weird Tales in January 1947, the same year that all nine of the stories, including the previously unpublished ‘The Find’, were collected in a second edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, edited by August Derleth and issued by Arkham House. Interestingly, Lovecraft was unimpressed with Carnacki, whose cases he regarded as Hodgson’s worst work. Like the rest of Hodgson’s fiction, Carnacki did not make the transition to other media well and there were only two adaptations of his cases for television, a single episode each in the Pepsi-Cola Playhouse in the US in 1954 and The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes in the UK in 1971.

There was, however, a revival of interest in Carnacki at the end of the century. Several continuations and pastiches were published, in a similar fashion to those of Sherlock Holmes, the most successful of which was No. 472 Cheyne Walk: Carnacki, the Untold Stories (1992) by A.F. Kidd and Rick Kennett. William Miekle is the most prolific contemporary Carnacki author and has published four collections to date, the first of which was Carnacki: Heaven and Hell (2010). There have also been two anthologies devoted to Carnacki, Carnacki: The New Adventures (2013) and Carnacki: The Lost Cases (2016), both edited by Sam Gafford, numerous crossovers (including encounters with William Gravel, Doctor Who, Wilhelmina Murray, Sherlock Holmes, and the Lovecraft Mythos), and at least three parodies. Of these later offerings, only Kidd and Kennett’s cases have received consistent praise, with reviewers noting their faithfulness to the original. Unfortunately, interest has declined again and this edition, which was first published in 2006 as part of the Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series, is now out of print, as is No. 472 Cheyne Walk. There are, in fact, no editions of the collected Carnacki from traditional publishers available in print, although several, including this one (and No. 472 Cheyne Walk), are available as ebooks.

Notes on Ballard's Notes from Nowhere – Rafe McGregor

J(ames) G(raham) Ballard (1930-2009) was an English author of avant-garde fiction who published nineteen novels and novellas and one hundred short stories, many of which were controversial, prescient, or both. He started his career as a science fiction writer in 1956, was instrumental in the transformation of the genre, and was admitted to the literary canon after the publication of Empire of the Sun (1984), a critically and commercially successful fictionalisation of his childhood experiences in a Japanese internment camp. His first novella, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), was part of a quartet that saw civilisation threatened or destroyed by air, water, fire, and earth and inaugurated Anglophone climate fiction. Along with Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss, Ballard was one of the founders of the New Wave of science fiction, which originated in the mid-nineteen-sixties and reconstituted the genre as an extension of literary modernism that was focused on the psychological rather than physical impact of technology. Ballard typically locates his narratives in the present rather than the future, explores the impact of the outer world on the inner, and provides subtle but startling commentary on social mores and norms. Although it spread across the Atlantic, the New Wave was UK-based and primarily driven by the combination of Moorcock’s editing and Ballard’s writing in New Worlds, which began as a fanzine in 1946, was taken over by Moorcock in 1964, became an anthology series in 1971, reverted to a fanzine in 1978, reverted to an anthology series in 1991, and was most recently published by PS in 2021.

The October 1966 issue of the magazine includes a short article from Ballard, ‘Notes From Nowhere: Comments on Work in Progress’, a numbered list of twenty-four notes ranging from a few words to a few sentences each. Moorcock introduced them as follows: ‘Reader interest in J.G. Ballard’s work has been high. We invited Mr Ballard to produce these notes explaining some of his current ideas.’ The level of explanation is, as one might expect from Ballard, limited, but other authors and anyone who is passionate about the creative process or science fiction as a genre is likely to find them as interesting as I did. I was lucky enough to read them in their original form, thanks to Dr Tom Dillon at the University of Liverpool’s Science Fiction Hub, which is the only dedicated science fiction archive in the UK, Europe’s largest catalogued collection of science fiction, and boasts a complete run of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction courtesy of an anonymous donor. Tom is also the author of a cultural history of New Worlds and has an enviably rich knowledge of magazines, fanzines, and speculative fiction more broadly.

I’m not going to reproduce Ballard’s full list, which you can find on a Canadian archive of his work here, or comment on each point he makes (or sometimes fails to make), but offer five notes of my own instead. His first and longest (along with #16) is about the form of science fiction. Ballard introduces the genre with a delineation of its concern with ‘the immediate present in terms of the future rather than the past’ and claims that because of this thematic content, the standard narrative form of beginning and end, cause and effect, and exposition and resolution is inappropriate. Science fiction should be an arena for formal innovation and he comments on his attempts to play with sequentiality in The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966), apparently ambivalent about the extent to which he succeeded in replacing temporality with spatiality in each case. This formal experimentation would come to fruition with and in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which included the contentious short story, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968).

The tenth note is something of a counterpart to the first, expanding his description of science fiction’s thematic content. Ballard identifies three ‘planes’: the broader public or political world, the immediate physical environment in which each person lives their life, and the inner, psychological world of each person as they live that life. He suggests that these three coordinates provide a starting point for the clarification of contemporary reality and given what he also writes about neurology, I suspect he is referring to clarification in terms of both thought and attempts to communicate thought to others through description or depiction. In combination, notes nine and fourteen establish a close but vague relation between fiction or narrative on the one hand and neurology and what is now called neuroscience on the other. I found this fascinating due to the prioritisation of narrative as a way of thinking over narrative as a mode of communication in recent research. Philosophers, literary theorists, and cognitive scientists such as Peter Goldie, Jonathan Gottschall, and Fritz Breithaupt seem to be showing that the behavioural sciences’ lack of success in evaluating the insights of literary studies is a failure of the former rather than the latter, which is surprisingly compatible with direct scrutiny of the brain’s neural networks.

Notes twenty to twenty-three are all about the failure of science fiction authors to shed light on the concept of outer space. At first glance, this may seem arrogant or flippant, but Ballard is referring to the kind of illumination he described in #10, writing about outer space in a meaningful manner, i.e. one in which the political, physical, and psychological intersect. He mentions a current work in progress about a ‘disaster in space’, which appears to be a reference to ‘The Death Module’, published in New Worlds in July 1967. The eighteenth note is a brief and obscure farewell to The Crystal World, which is probably my favourite Ballard novel and which I used as evidence for including him as a significant contributor to the tradition of weird fiction. The novel (or novella, depending on your preferred definition) was published five months before the publication of his notes, which implies that the notes themselves were submitted to Moorcock several months in advance. In summary, Ballard’s list is an excellent place to begin with his oeuvre and I’m very grateful to have had them drawn to my attention and to have been able to see them in their original form.

Why A Pulp Memoir? – Rafe McGregor

This year marks the emerald anniversary of my first professional sale and publication as an author. I’m not sure why, but I’ve never taken stock of my whole writing ‘career’ (if that’s the right word), which began in earnest four years before that sale, and two decades seems an appropriate (if extremely tardy) time to ask myself whether I’ve succeeded or failed at it. If nothing else, the answer might determine what I do with the next two decades (or, more realistically, whatever part thereof is left).

From one point of view, it’s been a success. By this summer, I’ll have authored twenty books (divided evenly between academic monographs on culture, crime, and politics and small press pulp fiction novels and collections) and three hundred shorter works (including several as editor). While I’d be lying if I said I was proud of every single long and short piece published, I’d defend one of the monographs and one of the short story collections as being right up there with the best. Though two good or better books and a few good articles and short stories isn’t much in twenty years, I’m happy with it. A slight change of perspective, however, tells a very different tale. None of my long or short works have ever been published by the Big Four or elite university presses such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, or Stanford or in periodicals with more than a few thousand readers so I may well be overrating the quality of my oeuvre. A quantitative evaluation is nigh mortifying: none of all those publications made me more than £1,000 and most of them didn’t earn anything at all. Forgetting about the money for a minute, which no professional writer can afford to do, with a mere two exceptions, my estimated readership has been in four figures (or less) for each. If the lack of quantity reflects a lack of quality, then I have indeed overrated myself.

Put like that, I’d have to say I failed, but it’s all too easy to compare oneself to the best-known writers – Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, James Ellroy, China Miéville, etc. – when the reality is that they constitute a tiny percentage of the profession. Let me try a different tack: what was my goal when I set out? To earn a ‘modest’ living from writing fiction and nonfiction which, for reasons I can’t remember, I set at £30,000 per annum in 2006. Given the various financial and cost of living crises since, that would probably be £50,000 now. The latest statistics suggest I set the bar outrageously high. At present, more than four in five novelists in the UK support themselves with other jobs, their median annual income from writing is £7,000 (less than a third of minimum wage), and the income of the top 10% is disproportionally high compared to the rest. I haven’t made £30,000 from writing in twenty years, let alone each year, which simply confirms my failure. In mitigation, in 2006 there was still a ‘mid-list’ of novelists, a host of magazines accepting article or story submissions from unknown authors, and readerships were expanding rather than shrinking, meaning my goal wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounds in hindsight. All that has of course changed several times over, courtesy of the digitisation of everyday life, shifts away from reading novels and watching films to online gaming, and the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence. Perhaps, after all, there is some success in still being able to publish and still getting read, even if by only a few hundred people each time?

Or perhaps I’m asking the wrong question and the issue at stake isn’t success or failure but why I started writing for publication in the first place and why I’m still doing it two decades later? I didn’t start in 2006 to earn £30,000 (I was already making slightly more than that) – I started to earn a modest living by writing. Notwithstanding the failure of that goal, I managed to keep up a steady rate of publication (a book each year and a short work each month) in spite of never having more than 50% of my working week to write, edit, and research. Let me change tack one last time. If, as seems highly likely at the moment, that 50% drops to 0%, what will I do? I’ll do what I did from 2002 to 2006, write on weekends, holidays, nights…whenever time permits…which implies I’m doing it for pleasure. Call me naïve, but when Stephen King writes ‘I did it for the pure joy of the thing’ in On Writing, I believe him and I don’t begrudge a single cent of the many millions he was talented and lucky enough to earn while he was enjoying himself. If the ‘right’ question to ask is why I have spent so much time writing for the last twenty years, then the answer is for the pure joy. And spending that much time doing something enjoyable, something whose product a few thousand other people have enjoyed, is worth doing for as long as time permits.

All of which is why I collected seventy-five of my short nonfiction works in A Pulp Memoir: Essays, Reviews, Interviews 2006-2026. Is it a memoir? Not really, but it does include both my first and most recent publication, spanning the full range of the two decades. There are also autobiographical reflections on my experiences as a writer in the introduction and conclusion, in the three interviews (one from 2009 and two from 2024), and in the essays about my two novels (published in 2009 and 2017). Perhaps I should have called the collection ‘A False Memoir’, except that Jim Harrison beat me to that title fifty-five years ago with Wolf: A False Memoir (which, if anyone is interested, has absolutely nothing to do with the film Wolf, whose screenplay he wrote twenty years later). If it isn’t really a memoir, is it pulp? Most definitely. The essays, reviews, and interviews are divided into four parts, one each on crime, fantasy, weird, and climate fiction. While I don’t regard the popular distinction between artistic and genre fiction as either accurate or useful, as I mention more than once in the collection, much of what I’ve written about would be classified as pulp fiction by most critics, including: Sherlock Holmes across the centuries, the Lone Wolf gamebooks, H.P. Lovecraft’s legacy, and Sharksploitation movies. The earliest pulp fiction character I discuss is H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, who first appeared in King Solomon’s Mines in 1885 and the latest is Ice Cube’s Will Radford, the protagonist of the 2025 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which might just be the worst film I’ve ever seen. And if that doesn’t convince you to take a look, I’m not sure what will…

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris | review by Rafe McGregor

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

Hutchinson, hardback, £20.09, September 2019, ISBN 9781786331373

Robert Harris is an English novelist best known for his historical fiction, much of which has been adapted for the big screen. He began his writing career as a highly successful journalist and published several nonfiction books, including  Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries (1986), which is interesting not just for the hoax itself, but the role played by Rupert Murdoch, who was a powerful and sinister force even then, in the early nineteen eighties. Harris’ breakout novel was also his first, Fatherland (1992), published off the back of Selling Hitler, and he has authored seventeen to date, five of which are about the Roman Empire and four of which are about the Second World War. As I mentioned in my review of Prime Video’s The Man in the High Castle (2015–2019), Fatherland is actually alternative history rather than history and there is a strong speculative element running through Harris’ oeuvre.

Archangel (1998) and The Ghost (2007) are also alternative histories and the latter foregrounds a technique Harris has perfected and for which he really should be better known, the twist in the tail of the tale. His trademark twists are not only convincing, but retrospectively imbue his narratives with fresh meaning (or, perhaps more accurately, reveal a hidden meaning that was there all along). Conclave (2016) is another example of the master at work, with a revelation so powerful that it switches the novel from a contemporary thriller to an(other) alternative history. The Fear Index (2011) combines alternative history (in this case, the Flash Crash of 6 May 2010) with both science fiction and horror and I’d classify it as science fiction in consequence of the role of AI (though, as far as I can remember, Harris does not use the term). And then there is The Second Sleep, which seems to be a more straightforward instantiation of science fiction.

The novel takes its name from the concept of biphasic, diphasic, or segmented sleep, what we would now think of as getting up in the middle of the night for one to two hours before going back to sleep. There is significant evidence for this practice in pre-Industrial Europe, when people typically went to sleep shortly after dusk and rose with the dawn. Activities in the middle, which was sometimes called ‘the watch’, typically included one or more of: prayer, reading, chores, sex, or visits to neighbours. The second sleep is thus, literally, the second round of sleep between dusk and dawn, following the hour or two of pottering around. There is less evidence that this practice continued into the nineteenth century, which makes sense given that it seems tied to natural patterns and rhythms, and the closest one gets to it now is the Southern European siesta, where there might be an hour’s nap during the day and then less sleep at night. The Second Sleep opens in England in 1468 and the first thing anyone with an interest in history will notice is that the content is filled with anachronisms and inaccuracies. (I was lucky in that, very unusually, I started the book without knowing anything at all about it, other than the authorship, and dived straight in without reading the blurb.) How, one wonders, is this possible in the work of such a critically acclaimed historical novelist?

Given my acquaintance with Harris’ work, I suspected the apparent errors were clues to a mystery and the suspicion was quickly confirmed when an Apple logo turns up after a few chapters. The 1468 is not Gregorian, but an alternative calendar that is being used in a post-apocalyptic England, which has reverted to a cultural and technological state that mixes the Medieval with the Romantic. The protagonist, Father Christopher Fairfax, and his supporting cast in Addicott St George are in fact living in humanity’s second sleep, a second Dark Age that followed a catastrophic collapse of civilisation as we know it in 2025. Let me get my criticisms out of the way first. The story has a slow pace and rather rambling plot, which is loosely underpinned by a series of related mysteries: the mystery of 1468, the mystery of Fairfax’s predecessor’s sudden death, the mystery of the apocalypse itself (discussion of which is punishable by a brutal and backward legal system), and the mystery of what happened in between the apocalypse and the narrative present. In contrast to what I’ve just written about Harris’ mastery of the twist in the tail, the resolution is also underwhelming, reminiscent of both Fatherland and Enigma (1995) albeit lacking their substance.

Where Harris shines, more so than in, for example, The Fear Index, is in his sketch of why civilisation collapsed and the inevitability of certain consequences of that collapse. The former is very much related to one of my own interests, the almost complete change to everyday life in the UK (and elsewhere) from 1995, when most people had no access to the internet, to 2015, when most of us spent nearly three and a half hours of each day glued to our phones, let alone on the internet. Smartphone enabled social media transformed almost everything we do and completed that transformation in less than twenty years – which is too much too soon, even if everything about the technology is beneficial (which it clearly isn’t). Harris is particularly concerned with the deeply problematic combination of the exponentially enhanced complexity of twenty-first century everydayness with the inherent vulnerability of coupled systems that rely on the coordination of a multiplicity of interconnected parts. While he does not dwell on the point, he makes an exceptionally chilling observation about the way in which the human species is currently setting itself up for the second sleep by outsourcing both its reasoning processes and social interactions to Big Tech. This is one of the rare cases where the transparency of the novel’s message, something along the lines of think about what the technology was designed for before you embrace it, does not undermine the pleasure of the medium in which it is delivered. Though far from Harris’ best novel, The Second Sleep is his best science fiction to date and definitely worth reading.

Forty Years of Stephen King – Rafe McGregor

Stephen King is one of a mere handful of authors to have sold hundreds of millions of books. Though he has written across multiple genres, he is best known for his horror fiction and more specifically as the author of: The Shining (1977), Carrie (1974), ’Salem’s Lot (1975), Misery (1987), Pet Sematary (1983), and his apocalyptic masterpiece, The Stand (1978, republished in 1990). King was born in Portland (Maine), in 1947, and will be turning eighty next year. He began writing fiction at a very young age and made his first professional sale, a short story called ‘The Glass Floor’, to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967, nearly sixty years ago. He is currently completing Other Worlds Than These, which is the final instalment of a trilogy that began with The Talisman in 1984, continued with Black House in 2001 (both of which were co-authored with the late Peter Straub), and is due for publication in October. My mother was a great fan of King so the house was full of his novels when I was growing up and I’ve been reading his work for about forty years now. I’ve also become an unreserved and unashamed fan…why?

Lots of reasons. First, I must give my mother credit for never forcing King on me. Unfortunately, she didn’t live long enough for me to thank her, but she clearly knew my teenage self very well; that my curiosity would be more of a motivation than any recommendation. Second, King seems like a really (and rarely) decent human being. At least from his public persona and autobiographical writing. His to-and-fro with Trump on Twitter was particularly entertaining. So are his responses to book burners. I could go on. Also, King doesn’t have to be that way – he has sufficient celebrity to be as obnoxious as he wants without losing his fanbase. Third, he has written the best book on writing that I’ve ever read and am ever going to read, titled, simply, On Writing (2000). As such, I regard him as a writer’s writer (whatever, precisely, that may mean). Fourth, in spite of all the money and fame, he’s an underdog, ignored and even despised by the literary establishment and academia until very recently and then recognised with reluctance. Even champions of genre fiction like S.T. Joshi seem to have taken great pleasure in deriding almost everything about his writing. I almost always agree with Joshi, but he tears King to pieces in The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction (2001), setting him up as a kind of anti-Ramsey-Campbell, who is represented as the second coming of Lovecraft. (I don’t object to the comparison between Campbell and Lovecraft, but to King as an inferior binary opposite.) While I’m not going to pretend that I’ve loved every word of his that I’ve read (on which, more below), given that, at the latest count, he’s published sixty-seven long and two hundred short works of fiction, there are bound to be at least some mediocre or subpar offerings. There are also, however, many great offerings and perhaps even a work of two of genius.

In spite of my lengthy acquaintance with and enjoyment of King’s oeuvre I’ve only very recently completed all six of the novels for which he is famous. Misery is my favourite, a great narrative that succeeds on multiple levels and is essential reading for anyone who enjoys books about writing and the writing life, whether fiction or nonfiction. The Shining is excellent, especially the effortless changes of perspective from father to mother to child and back again. This is King doing what he does best, exploring either the traditional or nuclear family in all its complexity of love, hate, joy, sorrow, comfort, and anxiety. At its most basic, The Shining is the tale of a haunted house, the house being a giant hotel isolated in the winter snows. I’ve seen the novel criticised for its lack of internal logic (a recurring complaint from King’s detractors), but as someone who pays a great deal of – probably too much – attention to such things, I don’t see the problem. The supernatural elements make sense, they move the plot along…what’s not to like? Carrie and Pet Sematary are competent and maybe even original outings in the horror genre, with King playing to another strength of his, the representation of the worlds of children and teenagers, but neither are favourites of mine. Salem’s Lot and The Stand were, regrettably, too long for me, which was a shame regarding the latter because I really wanted to like it. There just wasn’t enough story to sustain either novel all the way to the end and with respect to the former, I thought the short story ‘Jerusalem’s Lot’ (which was first published in Night Shift in 1978) far superior. It is probably not surprising that the two of the six I like the most are about writers and, more specifically, writers with addictions, as King reveals in his discussion of his own struggles with addiction in the autobiographical part of On Writing.

Surely this is faint praise if I’m recommending no more than two of King’s six most successful novels? I’m not alone in this assessment because in an interview in Far Out magazine in 2022, he listed his favourite five stories, only one of which is from the six: ‘Survivor Type’ (1982), Misery, Lisey’s Story (2006), ‘The Body’ (1982), and Billy Summers (2021). What is particularly interesting about this list is that only one of his favourites has a supernatural element (Lisey’s Story), much of which is presented with great subtlety. I think King is at his best without the supernatural and in his shorter work, albeit with several exceptions that prove the rule. My own list of favourites also includes only one of the six (mimicking King’s choice) and one other from his list: ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ (1982), Misery, ‘Survivor Type’, ‘N.’ (2008), and Cycle of the Werewolf (1983). One novel, two novellas, and two short stories, in the first three of which the supernatural is absent. I was lucky enough to read ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ before I saw the film (which I also enjoyed, but is not as good) and without any spoilers, both of which contributed significantly to my reading experience.

I think I’ve already justified my enthusiasm for both King and his work, but let me say one more thing to make this a genuine appreciation. His own list of favourites covers forty years of writing and mine twenty-five. Since his big break with Carrie in 1974, the quality of King’s work has remained consistent, in spite of the life-changing injuries he sustained when he was run over by a reckless minivan driver in 1999. Since then he has published, among others, Lisey’s Story, Just After Sunset (2008), The Outsider (2018), and Billy Summers. The first of these is an epic love letter to his wife, the second one of his best short story collections to date, the third an excellent occult detective story, and the fourth a great crime thriller. I hope there are more to come and I hope we’re both around for his eightieth birthday…

This Spectacular Darkness: Critical Essays by Joel Lane | review by Rafe McGregor

This Spectacular Darkness: Critical Essays by Joel Lane, Tartarus Press, paperback, £14.95, 29 August 2018, ISBN 9781719848800

 

Joel Lane (1963-2013) was an English author from Birmingham who was best known as a short story writer and poet, but was also a novelist, critic, and editor. He won two British Fantasy Awards and one World Fantasy Award for his short fiction and the Eric Gregory Award for his poetry. Most of Lane’s fiction was in the speculative genre, at the intersection of horror and crime (which was his first love as an essayist), and published by small or independent presses. In the two decades before his death at the age of fifty, he published five short story collections, four collections of poetry, two novels, and a novella and two more short story collections were published posthumously. This Spectacular Darkness is another posthumous collection, first published as one of Tartarus Press’ elegant limited edition sewn hardbacks in 2016. The volume is edited by Tartarus regulars Mark Valentine and John Howard and includes a foreword by Valentine, seventeen of Lane’s critical essays, and reflections on his essays, short stories, poetry, and novels by Howard, Valentine, Mat Joiner, and Nina Allan respectively. As such, it is divided into four parts: the eponymous essay, which was first published in Supernatural Tales in 2002; eight essays published in Wormwood, the Tartarus journal that was also edited by Valentine (from its first issue in 2003 to its last in 2022) from 2004 to 2013; eight essays published in other magazines and collections from 1981 to 2009; and the commentaries on Lane’s work, only one of which (Allan’s critique of his novels) is previously published, also in 2016. My sole criticism is that with exception of Allan’s, which includes a fascinating discussion of Lane’s unpublished novel, The Missing Tracks, I found the commentaries somewhat gratuitous, adding little to Valentine’s excellent foreword.

Lane’s essays themselves are all excellent, achieving exactly what I look for when I read writing of this kind and in this form: eloquent and succinct, presenting precisely the right amount of the content of the work under scrutiny, and original and interesting enough to prompt me to both seek out new authors and revisit familiar ones. Both Valentine and Allan mention that Lane had been working on a nonfiction volume that was never completed and would have been either a monograph or a series of themed essays on the subject of horror fiction in the twentieth century. The first essay in this volume, ‘This Spectacular Darkness’, is a manifesto for that book and would likely have been an early draft of its introduction had it been completed. It is the most accomplished and thought-provoking – even inspiring – of the entire collection and I return to it below. Lane is particularly compelling when it comes to his own area of expertise, the very specific overlap of weird and noir within the broader intersection of horror and crime. For Lane, it is a literal overlap in that some (but not all) noir narratives actually are exemplary (rather than marginal) weird fiction. ‘The Dark Houses of Cornell Woolrich’, which was first published in Wormwood in 2004 and focuses on Woolrich’s (1903-1968) ‘Black’ novels, makes an especially good case for this claim. In a similar vein, ‘Hell is Other People: Robert Bloch and the Pathologies of the Family’, which was first published in The Man Who Collected Psychos: Critical Essays on Robert Bloch in 2009 and takes Bloch’s (1917-1994) entire oeuvre as its subject, is equally engaging, presenting his most famous work, Psycho (1959), in an entirely new light (for me, anyway). On a different note, in ‘No Secret Place: The Haunted Cities of Fritz Leiber’, first published in Wormwood in 2008, Lane offers the best appreciation of Leiber (1910-1992), about whose work I am ambivalent, that I’ve ever read. His discussion of Leiber’s flawed but nonetheless brilliant Our Lady of Darkness (1977) is simply exceptional. 

One of my main interests as a critic and author of weird fiction has been the question of the genre itself: can weird fiction be defined or delineated in any meaningful way, how does it relate to similar genres such as Gothic, horror, and supernatural fiction, and if it is in someway distinctive from these broader categories, what is the best way to approach it? All of these and others, I tried to set out in a manner that was both comprehensive and concise in Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between, which was published in seven parts on the TQF blog and is available as a single document here. Lane’s approach is different to and – I’m going to admit it – more convincing than mine, dividing supernatural horror into two distinct forms or strands in the twentieth century. The first, which he calls ‘existential’ or ‘humanistic’ horror, had its origins in Judaeo-Christian belief, is anthropocentric, and was exemplified by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) and Stephen King (b.1947). The second, which he calls ‘ontological’ or ‘anti-humanistic’ horror, had its origins in literary-critical modernism, is biocentric or cosmocentric, and was exemplified by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and M. John Harrison (b. 1945). Lane’s main reference to the two strands is to existential and ontological horror, which I found confusing given the close relation between the two adjectives in twentieth century philosophy, but the latter is similar to what I attempted to articulate with my conception of the ecological weird and to what many others before me have called cosmic horror or indifferentism (usually in reference to Lovecraft). Like all engrossing essays, Lane’s was a provocation, challenging me to first rethink the relation between the ecological and the cosmic and then the relation between ontological and existential horror…is absolute horror not when the existential is supervenient on or collapses into the ontological and, if so, are there narratives that combine both strands? Although Lane mentions Ramsey Campbell (b. 1946) in this connection, he doesn’t answer the question in full, but the wonder and triumph of the essay is simply in raising it (and so many others). This is a genuinely unmissable collection for weird fiction enthusiasts.

Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring | review by Rafe McGregor

Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring by Patrick Zircher

Titan Books, paperback, £14.99, November 2025, ISBN 9781787746428

 

Robert E. Howard is best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian (who first appeared in ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’, in Weird Tales in 1932). Together with Fritz Leiber, the creator of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (who first appeared in ‘Two Sought Adventure’, in Unknown in 1939), he established the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy fiction. When J.R.R. Tolkien popularised epic fantasy, which was pioneered by E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922), with The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), the map of the fantasy landscape for the rest of the twentieth century was drawn. Howard and Leiber were both correspondents of H.P. Lovecraft, contributed to what Ramsey Campbell describes as the Lovecraft Mythos, and benefitted from their correspondent’s inspiration in their original work. Like Lovecraft, Howard was a prolific writer, publishing three hundred short stories and novellas by the time of his premature death at the age of thirty and leaving an archive of double that, much of which was published posthumously. Along with Conan, Solomon Kane was one of several of Howard’s serial characters to appear in narratives that combined fantasy with history, but he published across a wide variety of genres, including: boxing stories, tales of the sea, crime fiction, horror, comedy, and what we would now call erotica and narrative nonfiction. He was also one of the two founders of the Weird Western (along with Oliver La Farge), which was popularised on television in the nineteen sixties and in comics in the nineteen seventies.

Kane is a Puritan English swordsman who wanders the world righting wrongs at the turn of the seventeenth century, following his service in the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). Howard published seven Kane short stories in his lifetime, all in Weird Tales, beginning with ‘Red Shadows’ (1928) and ending with ‘Wings in the Night’ (1932). He left two unpublished stories, three poems, and four fragments and the complete Kane was first published as Red Shadows (1968) and then The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane (2004), with the fragments completed by Campbell. The Kane stories not only mix history with fantasy in Howard’s trademark style, but include elements of the weird that bear testimony to Lovecraft’s influence (in much the same way as it can be seen in Leiber’s Fafhrd and Mouser). Five of the seven original stories are set in Africa, however, which makes Howard’s racism impossible to ignore. Like Lovecraft, Howard was also a White supremacist, subscribing to the pseudoscientific theory that humanity is divided into biologically distinct taxa which coexist in an intellectual and moral hierarchy loosely based on lightness of skin. He also had what one might charitably call an unconventional relationship with his mother, committing suicide when she became comatose from tuberculosis and preceding her death by a day. There seems to have been a concerted campaign to sanitise Howard’s reputation posthumously, but Victor LaValle provides what I think is an accurate portrayal of the author when he fictionalises him as a pathologically racist private investigator in The Ballad of Black Tom (2016).

Though I've read only a fraction of Howard’s oeuvre, his racism seems both more pronounced in and more intrinsic to his narratives than Lovecraft’s. In the latter, racism is always an ethical flaw but rarely an aesthetic one, by which I mean constitutive of the worldview that underpins the narrative and configures one’s engagement with it. It is no defence of Lovecraft to point out that his cosmic horror is founded on a fear of all that is unknown, of interplanetary and international aliens alike (or in collaboration). In contrast, Howard’s racism is constitutive of his worldview and, in consequence, an aesthetic as well as ethical flaw, creating an imaginative resistance for all but the most insensitive of readers. Notwithstanding, the African Kane stories are, in my opinion, the best, reminiscent of H. Rider Haggard at his best, albeit at times similarly offensive, jarring, or both. What makes this bitter pill a little easier for me, personally, to swallow is that Kane’s attitudes are completely compatible with what would have been considered an enlightened disposition towards people of different ethnicities and nationalities in the early seventeenth century. History is replete with racism, sexism, and elitism and Kane is a historical character from a past increasingly alien to our present.

Half a century after Howard’s death, Kane enjoyed an afterlife in comics with a serialisation by Marvel that ran from 1973 to 1994. In anticipation of the feature film, Solomon Kane (2009), Dark Horse revived Kane in 2008. Aside from the selection of James Purefoy for the title role, I have nothing positive to say about it and wasn’t surprised by the box office failure. Plans for a trilogy were abandoned, Campbell’s 2010 novelisation was as poor as his source material, and the comic series concluded in 2011. Fourteen years later, Titan launched another revival, releasing Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring in March and collecting all four issues as a graphic novel in November. The latest adaptation is largely the work of Patrick Zircher, a veteran artist for DC and Marvel, who is also the writer. His artistic style is mimetic and cinematic, with clearly defined and cleanly outlined figures, and a seamless integration of dynamism and narrativity in his use of panels. All of these features are evident in The Serpent Ring and the first extended action sequence, the boarding of a Portuguese caravel by an English letter of marque, is nothing short of breathtaking, as close to watching a well-choreographed action sequence on screen as is possible on the page. Zircher’s use of colour is also striking, his art here at its best when depicting the natural rather than supernatural, with a stunning African elephant and an awe-inspiring giant serpent particularly memorable.

The eponymous ring is the Serpent Ring of Thoth-Amon, a magic jewel of great power, and the narrative concerns two attempts to acquire it: a preliminary one that fails but brings Kane into contact with Rolando Zarza, a renegade Knight Hospitaller, and Abramo Bensaid, a Jewish archivist and scholar; and sets the scene for the second, which takes the three men and their entourage to the Kingdom of Ndongo, on the banks of the Kwanza River (more commonly known as the Cuanza, in northern Angola). Various clues suggest a dating of 1590, one of Kane’s earlier adventures, immediately after his service with the suicidally courageous Richard Grenville (who died at the Battle of Flores, in 1591). The origin of the ring draws on the legend of Lilith, who started off as Adam’s first wife, coupled with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and ended up a demon...which brings me to my main criticism. The artwork is excellent and the story for the most part compelling, but the mythological context – perhaps even internal logic – is an incoherent motley of Egyptian, Semitic, and sub-Saharan African, with what appears to be a touch of the Aztec thrown in. There are simply too many myths and legends involved and their abundance detracts from the suspension of disbelief. A less significant problem is the cast of characters. While Kane is indisputably the protagonist, there is no obvious antagonist and half a dozen or more point of view players seem to vary between central and supporting roles. As with the mythologies, less might have been more. Overall, the graphic novel is a disappointment, despite its many highlights and flashes of finesse. The revival is nonetheless worth continuing and I hope Zircher is given a second shot at Kane.

The Wolf of Whindale: A Tale of Northalbion | review by Rafe McGregor

 

The Wolf of Whindale: A Tale of Northalbion by Jacob Kerr

Serpent’s Tail, hardback, £16.99, October 2025, ISBN 9781800811522

 

It’s difficult to pinpoint The Wolf of Whindale in terms of genre. I’ve seen it advertised as both ‘folk horror’ and ‘gothic horror’. I can see why publicists or reviewers would choose one or both of these classifications, but neither is accurate. Is the novel even a horror story? Probably, but there are also elements of fantasy, especially if one takes the evocation of wonder as definitive of that genre. This difficulty should have been my first clue that it is in fact – and by my own definition – a weird tale, i.e. a fictional narrative that is philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounding the difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. Does it have a worldview? Yes, definitely, albeit one that is admirably subtle, rising to the surface on rare occasions so as entangle the reader in a distinctly perspectival frame of reference. The antagonist, you see, is not just a medieval monster, but a modern one, a vampiric exploiter of the oppressed who might have leapt straight out of the pages of Karl Marx’s Capital (a Marxist pamphlet called First Principles of Political Economy also makes an appearance). Like many weird tales from the previous century, the story is also occult detective fiction and the horror and mystery elements are integrated effectively and efficiently.

The Wolf of Whindale is Jacob Kerr’s second novel, following The Green Man of Eshwood Hall (published in 2022, also by Serpent’s Tail), and is set in the same universe, an alternative Northumbria (the northeast of England, close to the Scottish border) called Northalbion. This is, I think, the purpose of the subtitle, which is otherwise superfluous. Where The Green Man of Eshwood Hall is set in Northalbion in 1962, the main narrative of The Wolf of Whindale takes place a century before, in 1845. There are seventeen chapters, including the prologue, which – along with three other chapters – are excerpts from a lecture on Mithras, a Roman deity popular with the soldiers occupying Britannia, delivered by Dr Erasmus Wintergreen in 1916. The rest of the chapters are narrated in the first person by Caleb Malarkey, a twenty-four-year-old lead miner and autodidact who suffers from seizures that might be epilepsy…or something more sinister. Caleb’s chapters, which constitute most of the novel, are written in a vernacular (or, perhaps more accurately, in the representation of a vernacular) that is perfectly pitched, with Kerr avoiding distracting punctuation and idiosyncratic diction. (For those that do get a little lost, though I can’t imagine many will, there is a glossary located between the final chapter and the acknowledgements.) Caleb plunges his audience into a world where hard manual labour is the norm, promoted and perpetuated by the austerity of ubiquitous Christianity, and there is a rigid social division between workers and owners, also with the church’s agreement and approval. 

Caleb’s narrative is set in motion very quickly, when the union steward in Caleb’s gang of miners is found dead on Windy Top, his body mutilated and head severed. His death follows the disappearance of another local union official three months before and both incidents have been connected to the eponymous wolf, which may or may not be anything more than a legend. Caleb’s sceptical reflection on the two incidents is one of Kerr’s first revelations of the novel’s worldview: ‘The illogic of it all overwhelmed me, and, though still light-headed from my seizure, I sat up and found myself holding forth on how the deaths of two such fellows, both leaders of combinations of miners, was an almighty coincidence, and that this wolf’s palate was certainly a dainty one in preferring flavours that secured the interests of the status quo.’ When the miners go on strike, they are beaten up by ex-soldiers and replaced with Welshmen. Caleb proves the accuracy of his self-description as a contrary and cantankerous chap by crossing the picket line and joining the ‘blacklegs’. The narrative presses forward into its complication when Caleb’s colleagues punish him for his disloyalty. Disowned by his mother and sister and despised by his neighbours, he leaves The Uplands for the Sill. The Sill, which is to the west of Northalbion, is a vast mine owned by a man named Master Siskin, who seems happy to employ anyone and everyone on an indefinite basis and has no shortage of work to offer. Once Caleb reaches the Sill, he finds out that it is an excavation rather than a mine and that the labourers have been hunting for a Mithraic artefact called the Knack. He meets the Welsh miners, who moved on after the strike, joins the dig, and eventually finds the Knack, after which he is taken to Siskin’s stately home, Brink House.

Before Caleb leaves The Uplands, there is mention of the Laidly Worm (of Spindleston Heugh or Bamborough), a Northumbrian shapeshifter in which I have a particular interest, and it made me think about Kerr’s options in terms of the wolf as one of England’s black dog legends, a subject on which I’ve written for nearly twenty years now. Essentially, there are only three choices: either the dog/wolf is corporeal (a particularly large and savage specimen of its species, as in Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles) or it is a ghost that can only scare people to death (the case with the Barghest and Black Shuck, England’s most famous black dogs) or it is a werewolf (my favourite example of which is Stephen King’s novella, Cycle of the Werewolf). Kerr plays with these different options very cleverly, teasing his readers with different takes on each – including whether there is any dog/wolf at all – before disclosing the truth, which is both complex and satisfying. This disclosure, however, is my sole criticism of the novel. There is a full chapter of retrospective exposition fairly late (chapter 10, the eleventh of seventeen), while Caleb is a guest and prisoner in Brink House and in spite of being fascinating, it almost grinds the tale to a premature halt. Notwithstanding, Kerr compensates with both a neat twist concerning Caleb’s work at the Sill and a heightening of the stakes when the Prince of Wales and his entourage arrive. The resolution is masterful, drawing together all of the murder mystery, the confrontation with the monster, and the relationship between Caleb’s narrative and Dr Wintergreen’s lecture. Overall, The Wolf of Whindale is a complete success, a rare example of a contemporary weird tale well-told and an exemplar for other tellers of weird tales to follow. 

Rainforest | review by Rafe McGregor

 

Rainforest by Michelle Paver

Orion Books, hardback, £20.00, October 2025, ISBN 9781398723207 

 

Michelle Paver is an Oxford educated British author best known for her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, a children’s fantasy series of nine books that began with Wolf Brother in 2004 and concluded with Wolfbane in 2022. The novels are aimed at children from the ages of nine to thirteen, have been translated into thirty languages, and have sold over two and a half million copies. Paver has also published Daughters of Eden, an historical trilogy; Gods and Warriors, an historical series for children; and five standalone novels. All of her published work is historical in setting, albeit varying dramatically, from six thousand to one hundred years in the past. Among her standalone novels, three are horror stories: Dark Matter (2010), which is set in the Arctic in 1928; Thin Air (2016), set in the Himalayas in 1935; and Wakenhyrst (2019), set in the fens of Edwardian Suffolk. Dark Matter and Thin Air are two of the best horror novels (or, more accurately, novellas) I have ever read. Until reading Dark Matter shortly after it was published, I’d considered James Buchan’s The Gate of Air: A Ghost Story (2008) my favourite contemporary horror story, but unlike the latter, Dark Matter and Thin Air have rewarded repeated readings. Wakenhyrst is longer than its predecessors and of a similar quality, although I found it harder going, which is because of my indifference to the haunted house trope rather than because of any flaws. (I must confess that even Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Richard Matheson’s Hell House leave me cold…and I’m not referring to my spine.)

Rainforest is Paver’s twenty-third novel, sixth standalone novel, and fourth horror novel. It also completes an informal trilogy with Dark Matter and Thin Air, all of whom are about and narrated by well educated, old fashioned British men who have difficulty socialising and lead conflicted inner lives. Writing with and in the voice of another gender is, I think, very difficult and Paver is one of the few authors to succeed completely. All three novellas (Rainforest is longer than the other two, but still a novella) read exactly as if they’d been written by the protagonists Paver has presented with such and competence and conviction and all three are men we wouldn’t want to spend much time with, but whose lives are nonetheless captivating and compelling. The three novellas also demonstrate an enviable expertise in representing the experiences of living and working in inhospitable environments – whether icy in temperature, high in altitude, or crushing in humidity – without resorting to lengthy exposition. Rainforest is, as the title suggests, set in the Mexican rainforest, very likely the Lacandon Jungle, which was part of the Maya civilisation in the preclassic period, in 1973. Dr Simon Corbett is a forty-two-year-old entomologist from Cambridge who specialises in the predation of mantids or Mantidae (praying mantises). When we meet him, he is recovering from a mental health crisis connected to the death of a woman named Penelope and en route to an archaeological dig in the jungle, where he hopes to both recover his equilibrium and resurrect a stalled academic career.

Corbett has been advised to keep a journal by his doctor and that journal is what constitutes the majority of the novella. Penelope was, it appears, Corbett’s first girlfriend, which is the first suggestion of how much of a misfit he is (their relationship and her death both being recent). He also disapproves of the cultural, social, and political changes of the preceding decade, dislikes the Indigenous People of Mexico (a typically baseless and irrational racism), and is frightened and disgusted by their ancient and contemporary rituals of self-mutilation. Paver is often compared to M.R. James and while there is definitely a ‘Jamesian’ atmosphere to and in her horror, there is also a ‘Lovecraftian’ scope and more accurate description is that she combines the virtues of both masters of the weird tale with a contemporary sensibility and sensitivity in a way that may well be unique. The plot of Rainforest is driven by the subtle integration of two narratives. The first is in the present and follows Corbett’s journey to the camp, tensions with both his British and Mexican coworkers, and his unsuccessful search for mantids. While these events are unfolding, he also becomes more open about his past with Penelope, revisiting and revising what he has previously revealed. Penelope, it turns out, was an acquaintance not a lover and her death in a car crash occurred in the course of her flight from Corbett. He is, indeed, a stalker, who became obsessed with her after a single, short dinner date and who was the recipient of a lawyer’s letter and a police caution. The pull and push between present and past, effect and cause, representation and reality retrospectively infuses previous passages with new (and sinister) meaning while heightening the narrative tension. To take just three examples, the novella opens with Corbett fondling something he calls his ‘talisman’. I’ll avoid spoilers by not revealing precisely what it is, suffice to say that the object seems to be a bizarre but harmless keepsake. Similarly, his entomology seems to be a relatively insignificant part of his personality, perhaps even a narrative device to bring him to the jungle, but his expertise in mantid predation is no contingency. Finally, Corbett's reaction to an illustration in a book seems either absurd, tangential to the plot, or both, but is a crucial component of the narrative crisis.

While Rainforest is neither didactic nor even a case of the ‘instructing by pleasing’ tradition of literature, it does explore a theme that is relevant to and resonates with everyday life in the twenty-first century. The novella explores this theme in a singular and inventive way and simultaneously reinvents the ghost story as an aesthetic form. First, Paver asks us to reconceive or at least reconsider ghosts as stalkers. Not stalkers in terms of the denotation of the word, the hunting of humans or animals by other humans or animals, but in the legal connotation of men stalking women with whom they have become obsessed. Regardless of whether they were perpetrators or victims, ghosts are dead things that are obsessed with an aspect of their animate lives – either with the places where they lived or died or with people whom they despised or loved. Like the stalker, the ghost is an unwelcome and uninvited presence that disturbs and disrupts the mental (and sometimes physical) wellbeing of the person it haunts or of the people who enter the place it haunts. Aside from and in addition to the richness of this thematic exploration of what ghosts are, Paver reverses or inverts the traditional ghost story in and with Rainforest, presenting her readers with a (living) person stalking a (dead) ghost. Where one might expect Penelope to stalk Corbett from beyond the grave in revenge, it is Corbett’s pathological fixation that fails to recognise death as an impediment. As he stalked her in life, so he continues to stalk her in death, deluding himself that he is driven by guilt rather than accepting his predatory desire to possess her against her will. I can’t recommend this book enough. If you haven’t yet discovered the pleasures of Paver, follow up with Thin Air, Dark Matter…and Wakenhyrst too.