The Odyssey | review by Rafe McGregor

Faithful but flawed.

Very little is known about Homer other than that he was Greek, probably born in the eighth century BCE, and inaugurated European literary heritage with the Iliad and its sequel, the Odyssey, a pair of epic poems about the Trojan War. The war itself, which has been dated to the collapse of the Bronze Age in the twelfth century BCE, and Homer’s authorship are disputed, the latter a result of the poems being the product or an oral rather than written tradition. Like the Iliad, which I discussed in my review of Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), the Odyssey consists of twenty-four divisions (later, ‘books’ or chapters) composed in dactylic hexameter. Where the Iliad tells the story of the fall of Troy, of the Achaean (Greek) victory in the Trojan War courtesy of King Odysseus of Ithaca’s cunning ploy with the Trojan horse, the Odyssey, literally ‘the story of Odysseus’, tells the tale of Odysseus’ homecoming which, like the war itself, takes ten years. The journey turns into an odyssey due to the combination of the god Poseidon’s wrath, the recklessness of Odysseus’ men, and his own vices and while he is away his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus, must deal with a host of parasitical ‘suitors’ who want to instal themselves as King of Ithaca by marrying Penelope. Where the Iliad is a very different type of narrative to those with which we are now familiar, the Odyssey has many recognisable literary features, including the use of flashbacks and changes in narration. Although the gods play an important role, there is also a sense in which Odysseus is clearly the protagonist, with his agency driving the sequence of events that unfolds. Similarly, the diffusion of narrative focus among Odysseus, Telemachus, and Penelope is much more modern than the Iliad’s emphasis on heroes and kings and it is not difficult to discern a prototypical contemporary novel in the poem. This is probably why I enjoyed it so much when I first read it, unlike the Iliad, and why it is usually evaluated as superior to the Iliad by literary scholars.

The main problem with filming the Odyssey is, of course, the decade long sequence of events represented. If one counts only live action films that retain the original setting, there have been four cinematic adaptations to date. The first was The Odyssey (L’Odissea, 1911), a short, silent Italian film directed by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro and released seven months after the first cinematic adaptation of the Iliad. The second, Ulysses (Ulisse, 1954), and third, Nostos: The Return (Nostos: Il ritorno, 1989) were also Italian and were directed by Mario Camerini and Franco Piavoli respectively, with Kirk Douglas playing the lead in the former. There must be something about Homer’s epics and Italy, perhaps a throwback to the popularity of the ‘sword and sandal’ genre in the country in the nineteen fifties and sixties, because the fourth is a joint Italian, Greek, and British production. The Return (2024) was directed by Uberto Pasolini and starred Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in the lead roles. I liked The Return a lot, though I was disappointed when I realised that the film was going to focus exclusively on the events following Odysseus’ arrival in Ithaca. When I heard that Christopher Nolan would be directing The Odyssey, I must admit my heart sank. Nolan is famous or, perhaps more accurately, notorious for experimenting with chronology and temporality and has produced masterpieces like Memento (2000) by tinkering with time in ingenious ways. More recently, his experimentation has either been pointless (I’m thinking of Dunkirk in 2017 and Oppenheimer in 2023, both of which are historical) or entirely over the top (whatever it was Tenet was supposed to be in 2020). The fact that Nolan would be adapting a narrative that was itself achronological did not bode well and seemed like it might be a recipe for disaster.

I’m pleased to say that my fears were entirely unfounded, with Nolan creating a largely faithful adaptation of Homer’s original that includes most of all twenty-four parts in roughly the same order. The only major characters missing, as far as I can tell on a single viewing, are Nestor, Nausicaa, and Laertes, none of whose absence detracts from the storytelling. On the note of character, while the casting is not as good as Troy’s, it works much better than I anticipated, although the best acting is by Samantha Morton (playing Circe) and Charlize Theron (playing Calypso) rather than any of the three leads. My only quibble in this regard is the retention of American accents and contemporary American vernacular. Telemachus (played by Tom Holland) calling Odysseus (played by Matt Damon) ‘dad’ did not assist my suspension of disbelief and made me feel like I was watching a sitcom rather than one of the oldest stories ever. Remaining faithful to the original brings challenges of its own, however, the first and most obvious being running time and the film is just under three hours long. No one left the theatre nor did I get the feeling that the audience was restless by the end so Nolan appears to have succeeded here, combatting decreasing attention spans with compelling cinematic art in which both cinematography and sound reward viewing on the big screen. Second, the number of books included means that some scenes are very compressed and the following suffer for it: the Laestrygonians, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and the cattle of Helios. Two other scenes are badly handled without screen time being the issue. The first, near the beginning, is the strangely sexless Cyclops (played by Bill Irwin), who is more funny than frightening, and the second and most disappointing, the slaughter of the suitors in the hall, which is represented with considerably less skill than in The Return (and is, unfortunately, the climax of the narrative for both Homer and Nolan).

Such is The Odyssey for those who are familiar with the original. How, then, has Nolan made it his own? While he doesn’t play with Homer’s chronology (at least to any significant extent), he does include one of his trademark twists in the tale, albeit indirectly related to time in this instance. The repeated mention of raiders from the sea is a leitmotif that feeds very nicely into the theme of this adaptation. Where one might regard Homer’s poem as being primarily about homecoming and family, Nolan’s film is about a great warrior who comes to realise the folly of war and regret the role he has played in destroying a city, a civilisation, and a culture (there are repeated flashbacks to the fall of Troy). Odysseus’ odyssey is as much psychological as physical, the recognition that he does not want to return to Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway) as the same man who left her. With this in mind, Nolan’s new conclusion to the story works particularly well, providing a very satisfying narrative closure following the disappointing struggle with the suitors. Can Nolan’s The Odyssey be watched as a sequel to Petersen’s Troy? Yes, I think so. Nolan makes various nods to Petersen in his adaptation and while The Odyssey is a tale with more gods, more grit, and less glamour than Troy, the originals are themselves very different and the films provide a complementary contrast to one another as the respective stories of Achilles and Odysseus, of setting out for martial glory and coming back to live with its consequences.***

Troy | review by Rafe McGregor

Much more than sword and sandal.

The literal meaning of Iliad is ‘poem about a lion’, where the lion is Troy, an ancient city in what is now Çanakkale, a province in northwestern Turkey. The work is attributed to Homer, about whom very little is known except that he was Greek, probably born in the eighth century BCE, and inaugurated European literary heritage with the Iliad and its sequel, the Odyssey, a pair of epic poems about the Trojan War. Bearing in mind that the Iliad comes from an oral rather than written tradition, it was performed in twenty-four divisions of dactylic hexameter, which became twenty-four ‘books’ when it was translated from the Ancient Greek original and written down. There are multiple English translations, some of which are prose and others poems, and multiple adaptations of the narrative into a wide variety of art forms from plays to operettas to graphic novels. Given its epic scope, dramatic intensity, and historical significance, there is a sense in which it is very surprising that there have been only six cinematic adaptations (excluding three television series). The most notable of these are the first, The Fall of Troy (La caduta di Troia, 1911), a short, silent Italian film directed by Giovanni Pastrone and Luigi Romano Borgnettoof; The Fury of Achilles (L’ira di Achille, 1962), an Italian feature film directed by Marino Girolami; and Troy (2004), a Hollywood blockbuster directed by Wolfgang Petersen.

In another sense, however, the lack of cinematic adaptations compared to, for example, films about the Romans, is not so surprising. The Iliad is nearly three thousand years old, narrates events that may or may not have happened four to five hundred years before it was first performed, and depicts a culture that is not only remote from modern Europe but from Classical Greece itself (dated to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE). I remember my bitter disappointment on first reading it, which must have been about thirty years ago: every time there was a bit of excitement (or ‘peril’ as the British Board of Film Classification calls it), one of the gods stepped in and saved the hero from injury or death. In this respect, I found it very similar to contemporary superhero films, where everyone knows none of the protagonists are ever going to die (because Hollywood couldn’t afford it). I was expecting a recognisable narrative in an unrecognisable setting from a remote culture, but the agential element that is so crucial to story as we know it now is almost entirely absent. The actions of the heroes and other characters make almost no difference to the outcome, which is predetermined by the gods and by fate. Petersen, who is best known for The Boat (Das Boot, 1981) and The Never Ending Story (1984), made several very shrewd creative decisions before he began filming.

First, he removed all the divine interventions and all the supernatural elements. Strictly speaking this is a war film set three thousand years ago rather than a fantasy film, like Clash of the Titans (1981, 2010). The gods are, in fact, mocked, by Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) in particular, because although most people have absolute faith in them, they never intervene and battles are won by soldiers rather than priests. Various characters make various prophecies, but they are hit and miss, just like in reality. Petersen also ignored features of Ancient Greek culture that would be confusing for many contemporary audiences (and, sadly, offensive to some), such as bisexuality being the norm and Achilles being both Patroclus’ (played by Garrett Hedlund) lover and the junior partner in the relationship (in spite of his superior skill at arms). The removal of the supernatural elements and the cultural changes mean the film is not very true to the original poem, but it also opens the oldest surviving literary work in Europe to a broad audience and makes for a genuinely epic narrative that is as gripping as it is moving.

I’m not going to say much about the sequence of events of the film here because it follows the Iliad (which takes place in the last few weeks of a ten-year siege) and its precursors quite closely: Agamemnon, the Achaean (Greek) king, is set on conquering as much of the Mediterranean as he can and uses the elopement of Helen (played by Diane Kruger) with Paris (played by Orlando Bloom) as an excuse to invade Troy. The cinematic narrative condenses Helen’s elopement and the decade-long war into a few weeks or months, which is another shrewd choice by Petersen because very little happens in the first nine years of the war in the legend (the reason the Iliad takes place at its end). His version of the Iliad is very much the story of Achilles, who is the world’s greatest warrior but prone to vanity, rage, and an existential ennui that comes with having killed so many men without remorse or regret. There are at least two great aspects of this film as cinematic art, the first of which is casting. Pitt is perfect for the role of Achilles and so is almost everyone else for their own respective roles, from Eric Bana as Hector to Sean Bean as Odysseus, Rose Byrne as Briseis, Peter O’Toole as Priam, and even minor characters, such as Julie Christie as Thetis (Achilles’ mother). The second aspect is the action sequences. From the opening duel between Achilles and Boagrius (played by Nathan Jones) to a Saving-Private-Ryan-style amphibious landing to several large-scale battles and single combats that are either part of those battles or discrete duels, every scene with a sword or a bow is perfectly filmed.

I’d normally worry about over-egging the pudding after writing something like that, but it’s hard to find fault with either the cast or the action, even if you don’t enjoy the film as a whole. Troy is also unique in my experience in that I preferred the theatrical cut to the director’s cut, which was released in 2007 with an extra thirty-three minutes of footage. The Director’s Cut is still a very good film, but I thought the extra half hour slowed the pace too much and part of what I love about Troy is that it is such a lean, lithe narrative, with no scene or even shot wasted. Why the interest now, twenty-two years later? The Odyssey, which is directed by Christopher Nolan, is due for release next month. I must admit to having all sorts of reservations about it, including the casting, particularly but not exclusively Matt Damon as Odysseus. Bean was perfect as the wily warrior whose brain matches Achilles’ brawn, who can fight when he needs to, but prefers to win by guile rather than by strength. I just can’t see Damon bringing this subtlety to the role and what I’ve seen in the trailers hasn’t allayed any fears. Time, and Nolan’s predilection for playing with it, will tell.****           

Lone Wolf 32: Light of the Kai: Volume One | review by Rafe McGregor

Lone Wolf 32: Light of the Kai: Volume One by Vincent Lazzari & Ben Dever

Holmgard Press, hardback, £30.00, May 2026, ISBN 9781915586759

The story of the completion of the Lone Wolf cycle of gamebooks, which began with the publication of Lone Wolf 1: Flight from the Dark in 1984, is almost as compelling and harrowing as the epic fantasy itself and included the death of its creator and author, Joe Dever, in 2016, shortly after publishing Lone Wolf 29: The Storms of Chai. I told the story of the story – or, in Lone Wolf terms, ‘The Story So Far…’ – from a very personal perspective in my reviews of Lone Wolf 21: Voyage of the Moonstone and The Storms of Chai. Dever’s goal was always to publish thirty-two adventures, the first twenty of which would tell the story of Kai warrior (a Ranger in AD&D terms) Kor-Skarn (Lone Wolf) defeating the demonic Darklords of Helgedad and restoring the Kai to their rightful place as defenders of the world of Magnamund from all enemies foreign and domestic. In the next twelve, the player would adopt the persona of a New Order Kai Grand Master and undertake missions for and occasionally with Lone Wolf, and the game mechanics are such that the more adventures you complete, the higher your Grand Master rank and abilities (resembling D&D and AD&D, of which Dever was a great fan and skilled player). You determine your persona by means of the Random Number Table (on which gameplay is based, though many will find a ten-sided die more convenient) and my New Order warrior ended up as True Friend. A bit of a wimpy name, but he can kill you with his bare hands, live off the land indefinitely, and move small objects by looking at them, so don’t make fun of him.

After Dever’s death, his son, Ben, and long-term collaborator, Vincent Lazzari, undertook to complete and publish the remaining three books in the cycle, based on their final conversations with him and the detailed notes he had left. Ben relaunched the now highly successful Holmgard Press for the purpose, publishing Lone Wolf 30: Dead in the Deep in 2019 and Lone Wolf 31: The Dusk of Eternal Night in 2020, and dividing the cycle as a whole into five series: Kai (books 1–5), Magnakai (books 6–12), and Grand Master (books 13–20), featuring Lone Wolf; and New Order (books 21–28) and End Game (books 29–32), featuring True Friend (or, generically, the ‘Lorn Commander’). As I’ve mentioned several times in my previous reviews of the New Order and End Game series, I have far too much invested in what is now the Lone Wolf ‘franchise’ (though I hate to use that term) to even pretend to voice an unbiased opinion. Not only am I in my fifth decade of playing the gamebooks, but they are one of my fondest childhood memories and one of the reasons I continued to read so much and try my hand at my own imaginative fictions. With that in mind, after The Storms of Chai, which was the highlight of the cycle to date, I was a little disappointed with Dead in the Deep because it didn’t quite live up to the expectation created by its predecessor, for an even greater epic struggle than Magnamund had ever seen. The Dusk of Eternal Night was, unfortunately, the first of all thirty-one gamebooks that I didn’t actually enjoy playing. My main criticisms were twofold and contradictory: that it is, first, too inventive and innovative and, second, derivative and even unoriginal.

The first referred to the new format, which retained the traditional three hundred and fifty gameplay sections, but replaced many of the player choices and actions with long descriptive sections to create a hybrid gamebook-novel. This experiment was just too different to what I’d enjoyed so much and had two consequences that didn’t work for me: the narrative was both much longer (as my photograph of Lone Wolf 31, 1, and 32 below shows) and more linear than the previous adventures. The second criticism was to the revelation of the primary antagonists of the End Game, which involves the reprisal of old enemies. While the latter had only a minor impact on my enjoyment, the former was much more serious and I was very concerned to read that Lone Wolf 32: Light of the Kai had been divided into two volumes, each of which includes four hundred gameplay sections. I wondered why. Dever wanted thirty-two adventures and each of the twenty-nine he authored had three hundred and fifty sections so it seemed unlikely that this was in honour of his memory. And, as the old adage goes, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ It definitely wasn’t broke, even if Dead in the Deep wasn’t one of the best. The only reason I could think of was that the extra volume and extra sections were to continue the hybridisation of the End Game series that appeared to have begun in The Dusk of Eternal Night. (As an aside, books 1 to 12 were fully novelised, in the The Legends of Lone Wolf series, which was published from 1989 to 1994 and only marginally successful.) I mention all this to disclose that my expectations for Light of the Kai were not very high and that had I not been waiting for the end of the saga for so many decades, I probably wouldn’t have bought it.

Light of the Kai: Volume One was released at 17:00 BST on Tuesday 12 May (very much an ‘event’ for the fanbase) in three editions, Definitive (£30), Limited (£40), and Collector’s (£30). The reasons for these multiple editions are to do with Dever’s heroic attempts to keep Lone Wolf in print when interest in gamebooks tailed off at the turn of the century and I decided on the Definitive because I didn’t want to wait for the Collector’s (pre-order only, with delivery expected in July) and don’t have any great interest in signed copies (though it is nice to have Dever’s signature in my copy of The Storms of Chai as a keepsake). In addition to the fifty extra sections of gameplay, which – my reservations notwithstanding – will no doubt appeal to most buyers, the gamebook is also illustrated by the brilliant Gary Chalk (amongst others), the first to which he has contributed since Lone Wolf 8: The Jungle of Horrors (1987). The volume also includes thirty-two pages of supplementary material, ‘The Magnamund Archives’, which will also no doubt appeal to most buyers. (I did enjoy reading this, though I buy the books primarily for play.) I ordered promptly at 17:02 on 12 May, paying a very reasonable £4.99 for postage and packaging, and my purchase arrived exactly two weeks later. That’s quite a long time to wait, even by Royal Mail’s well-publicised declining standards, but the delay may well be shorter in future, now that the book is officially ‘in print’ (if that term is relevant anymore).

In consequence of the Lone Wolf cycle being distinguished from similar gamebooks (such as the Fighting Fantasy series, several of which I also enjoyed, especially The Warlock of Firetop Mountain) by using a serial player character who advances in rank and abilities, there is always a ‘The Story So Far…’ section between the rules and the first section of gameplay. One of the strengths of The Dusk of Eternal Night was that it seemed to pick up where The Storms of Chai left off, reestablishing the sense of looming cataclysm and climax by, amongst other things, gathering together companions and allies from the previous New Order books, The World of Lone Wolf miniseries, and the various Bonus Adventures published in some editions of the gamebooks. The final assault by the servants of the Dark God Naar to rule Magnamund began in the year MS 5101. Naar’s victory is dependent on his destruction of all three of the New Order of the Kai, the Brotherhood of the Crystal Star (a magic-user’s guild in D&D and AD&D terms), and the Elder Magi (also magic-users, as the name implies). Thanks to the efforts of True Friend, Lone Wolf, and the other Kai Grand Masters, Naar’s agent Zashnor was defeated in Chai (The Storms of Chai) and his Shadow Gate in Zekgazad destroyed (Dead in the Deep), preventing him from unleashing an army from the Realm of Paradox. Naar has, however, freed Demonlord Agarash from his pocket dimension prison and resurrected Archlord Vashna, with True Friend defeating an undead army of the former at the Battle of Lorn in MS 5103 (The Dusk of Eternal Night).

As True Friend has successfully completed eleven adventures, he has now mastered all sixteen of the Kai Grand Master Disciplines and reached the highest rank possible, Kai Supreme Master, in theory if not in practice Lone Wolf’s equal (more on this below). In the battle for Magnamund, he has been assigned command of Southern Magnamund, where he will continue the fight against Agarash while Lone Wolf does the same against Vashna on Northern Magnamund. I liked this premise as it expands True Friend’s exploration of the south, in contrast to Lone Wolf’s focus on the north, which means that players who complete all the series within the larger cycle experience the full range of settings across Magnamund. With all this personal history (like many, if not most, of the fanbase, I imagine) and nervous anticipation in mind, the first few pages of the volume exceeded my expectations: this is a game that promises to integrate the excitement of the first thirty episodes with the originality of the thirty-first. ‘The Story so Far…’ is succinct and gripping, a perfect introduction to the whole cycle and the cataclysmic end to which it is coming. Then comes the big reveal in ‘The Game Rules’, which answers all of the questions and concerns I posed above: in this game (and perhaps the next), I can choose to continue with True Friend as my persona or return to Lone Wolf. Not only can I either be one or the other, but I can mix and match within the game.

This is ideal because Lone Wolf and True Friend are the same rank (‘level’ in D&D and AD&D terms), both have demigod-like powers, and are each in command of half of the forces of good…so why not play either/or or both/and? The instructions are that one can begin with either character and then choose to either stay with that character throughout the adventure or switch between the two when the characters meet (and given the option in the text). Of course, what this also means is that there are actually two distinct adventures in Volume One: Lone Wolf’s (the first two hundred sections) and True Friend’s (the second two hundred sections). This, in turn, explains why the final adventure has been divided into two. Lazzari and Ben have remained true to Joe’s initial conception of thirty-two adventures, but offered us the opportunity to play it twice. Brilliant. The experiment with the gamebook form is also reminiscent of another of Joe’s short series, Combat Heroes, (two pairs of books, one pair published in 1986 and the other in 1987) where players could either play a short solo adventure or play against another player, who would be using the other gamebook. The options for playing Volume One are not, however, merely twofold because one can begin as either Lone Wolf or True Friend and then switch (or not) at two different points in the game, providing eight permutations in total. That must have involved some very clever and creative planning and writing by Lazarri and Ben and I found the switches between personas perfectly seamless.

I decided to start as True Friend to retain continuity with the New Order and End Game series, which I’ve been replaying and reviewing for the last decade. My initial plan was then to switch at each point I was given the opportunity. I’m not sure why, but I thought there would only be one chance to change so I envisaged beginning the game as True Friend and finishing it as Lone Wolf (which was in fact what happened, but for a different reason). One thing I realised as I recovered my notes on True Friend from The Dusk of Eternal Night and used the information in the rules to arm and equip Lone Wolf as best as I could remember – from when I played Lone Wolf 20: The Curse of Naar (1993), which was probably twenty years ago – was that the game has become pretty complicated by this stage. Not only have both Supreme Masters acquired multiple sets of disciplines, abilities, and powers over the years (conveniently summarised in the last few pages of Volume One), there are also a new set of abilities called Supreme Master Gifts. But don’t get too excited… what Lazarri and Ben give with one hand they take away with another because Lone Wolf and True Friend are also cursed, by Vashna and Agarash respectively, meaning that one must balance all of the previous abilities with the gifts and the curses in order to determine Combat Skill and Endurance (the two core game mechanics) in different situations. This is not a criticism, merely an observation that Light of the Kai is not an entry level game. The Storms of Chai would be a better place to begin and Voyage of the Moonstone even better (though the best place of all to begin is with Flight from the Dark).

True Friend’s adventure starts when he is summoned to a war council with Lone Wolf and their allies in Toran, in Sommerlund, and Northern Magnamund is the setting of Volume One (I am hoping Volume Two will shift to Southern Magnamund, for the reasons mentioned above). I liked the ecological theme that is raised very early, of Magnamund’s inhabitants being destroyed by the declining capacity of the planet to support existing species rather than being annihilated by Naar’s various minions (later referred to as its inability to sustain its ‘World-power’). I think this will resonate very well with younger players in particular. True Friend finds himself and Lady Assiliah, who is a student of the Shianti and a guardian of the Isle of Lorn, in the Ironwoods, in the Durncrag Mountains, the range that separates Sommerlund from the Darklands. The opening reminded me of playing Flight from the Dark all those years ago and at this early juncture I was really looking forward to whatever came next. In the first part (of four), True Friend and Assiliah must find Tower Ironar, an abandoned Sommlending settlement, infiltrate it, explore the dungeons beneath, and enter the Crystal Forge. The second part begins when they return to Sommerlund to find that an enormous cyclone is engulfing Toran while a comet descends on Northern Magnamund from above. True Friend must then defeat the Demon-king Suula, who has taken Kai Grand Master Swift Sword as his host, in a sequence that is surprisingly short and frustratingly deadly. Once Suula is defeated, there is an opportunity to switch characters and I began the next part as Lone Wolf, in search of the Rings of Judgement (the book uses US spelling, which I’ve replaced here) in the Danarg, a jungle to the southwest of Sommerlund that was the setting for The Jungle of Horrors. Lone Wolf must explore some or all of the four ruined towers of the Elder Magi to recover the rings and defeat, amongst many other denizens, a hive of Krywiz, powerful zombies that can infect all they wound, even Supreme Masters with their demigod-like resistances. The final part starts with Lone Wolf’s skyship receiving an unexpected visitor and a second opportunity to switch characters. I decided to remain with Lone Wolf this time and continue my search for a cure for the failing World-power. This takes Lone Wolf to the city of Ankor, in the Hardlands, in search of the Death Shard, and a climactic battle in his skyship with The Shog’aash, the last of the Sea Dragons of Naar. As such, the narrative that underpins the game, the ‘book’ in gamebook, is entertaining, engrossing, and exciting, unquestionably the best End Game instalment since The Storms of Chai. There are several sections that have long descriptions or more than two pages of text and occasionally there are two of these in a row, but the balance is much better than in The Dusk of Eternal Night and this is a very good game indeed.

If I concluded my review here it would be exclusively positive. I’d be very happy with that and many players may not agree with what I have to say next, but I've reviewed all of these gamebooks honestly and have no intention of changing my approach at the eleventh hour. Simply put, True Friend is, as his wimpy name might have suggested, not tough enough for this adventure. Almost all combats were very hard, against adversaries of a similar strength (which stretched credibility at times), and the addition of the curse made many very hard combats fatal or even impossible. I’d already been killed twice (once in combat and once by a poor decision) by the time I met Teakkro, last seen in Dead in the Deep, at the end of the first part. She would have been enough of a challenge on her own, but she had brought some friends along to make killing me much quicker and by this point I was the proud bearer of the Red Plague in addition to the Darkness Curse. For the first time in thirty-two games, I had to ‘cheat’, meaning that I had to pretend I’d won an impossible combat rather than simply replay the combat until I won or reboot my game at an earlier section to increase my odds of success. I didn’t feel great about this, but I did feel great about scurrying back to Lone Wolf to let him to take over and decided that I would finish the rest of the game as Lone Wolf whatever the options were. Unfortunately, before I could pass the baton – or, more accurately, beg for big brother’s help – I had to fight the Demon-king Suula, which was another impossible combat (even if I hadn’t been so battered and bruised) and ended up cheating for the second time. Once I was Lone Wolf, I was hoping I’d fare better. I did, at first, but almost immediately added a Krywiz plague to my Blood Curse, which proved fatal later on and caused me to cheat for the third time. I was killed twice before I reached the relative safety of the skyship at the end of the third part of the narrative and dare not revert to True Friend when offered the option because by this time he was basically what the military call ‘combat ineffective’. The final fight against The Shog’aash was probably not impossible, though I would have had to go back to my start as Lone Wolf and have a lot more luck with everything in order to be in significantly better shape when the time came. Without giving away any spoilers, the end of Volume One suggests that the fate of Magnamund is now entirely in the hands of True Friend… if so, then I recommend that all the good folk either immediately convert to the worship of Naar or find a convenient Krywiz to infect them.

With respect to the gameplay, I think the full combination of adversaries that are so tough, the curses, and the various other opportunities to have permanent or long-term reductions to Combat Skill, Endurance, or both are – literally – overkill. I could have done without the curses or the reductions, or perhaps even both, and still been killed a few times and had a fun-filled and nail-biting experience. Alternatively, maybe I’m not as good a player as I was when I played The Storms of Chai, but that wasn’t very long ago and although True Friend was killed at least once then and perhaps more than once, none of the adversaries were impossible to defeat. I just needed better luck with the Random Number Table or better decisions before the combat began. Or maybe I need to take my own advice, go back to Voyage of the Moonstone, play the New Order series with a little more skill, and make sure that True Friend is more robust by the time he sets foot in the Ironwoods. The fault may well be mine, but I didn’t like having to cheat and have never needed to before. My verdict is that while Volume One didn’t quite match its very promising beginning, it is an excellent gamebook and is bringing the cycle to a captivating and convincing conclusion. I’ve not seen any reliable information on when Volume Two will be released yet. Wikipedia states 2030, which seems too long. My sense from the inspired and ingenious crafting of Volume One, with its eight permutations (seven of which I still have left to play), is that the whole of Light of the Kai has already been planned in detail, if not drafted. My guess is that it’s almost finished or finished and awaiting playtesting. If there are another four years to wait, I hope I’m in better shape than True Friend when it’s released…

The Wish List by Eoin Colfer (Penguin) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Battle for a soul: reluctant perpetrator reunited with victim in touching young adult novel that examines resentment, vengeance, friendship, and the relationship between young and old.

A teen fantasy tale bursting with creativity, The Wish List introduces a world in which Satan commands his number two, Beelzebub – or “Bub” as the dark lord calls him – to capture the soul of 14-year-old Meg Finn after she dies following a botched robbery. Meg’s mother is dead, and the devil is particularly interested in Meg because of something awful she did to her ne’er-do-well stepfather. 

In this domain, dead people have auras: blue if they’re good and red if they’re bad. Meg’s happens to be purple. 

After the explosion, Meg’s unsavoury co-conspirator Belch gets merged with his pit bull and goes straight to hell. Meg, however, gets another chance on Earth, where she decides to help Lowrie McCall (the pensioner they tried to rob) fulfil four long-held wishes ranging from reclaiming lost opportunities to seeking vengeance on those who’ve wronged him. 

Beelzebub enlists the now-dead 16-year-old Belch to stop Meg from helping Lowrie (and therefore doing good). A computer whizz named Myishi uses an often-annoying holographic demon to accompany and advise Belch. If Beelzebub and Belch stop Meg from doing good, she goes to hell; if they don’t, they’re going to be in hot water. 

While the structure of the novel is familiar, the creativity of the setting and the coming together of two flawed and initially antagonistic protagonists earn the reader’s buy-in. Eoin Colfer’s version of hell and its denizens is entertaining. Satan and Beelzebub nonchalantly dole out punishments. The latter even has a direct line to Saint Peter, from whom he attempts to extract information about Meg. Interestingly, whereas the bad guys are pursuing Meg, the good guys are mostly detached and letting her do her own thing.

Additionally, the omniscient point of view in which the author flips between characters’ thoughts in the same scene works. Meg’s ability to get into Lowrie’s head to see his past or invite him into hers paves the way for extended backstory scenes that help the protagonists sympathise with one another because they’ve both been through some difficult times. 

The Wish List offers an experience where reinvented biblical characters engage in captivating contemporary dialogue, technology has made its way into hell, an act of love can embody God and banish evil from the room, and old and young can learn from each other. And it all leads to a poignant ending that uses an unexpected sensory impression to tug at the heartstrings. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

Notes I Never Wrote – Rafe McGregor

 

A Note on Notes

When I realised I’d published twenty books in twenty years (or, more accurately, will have twenty published or ‘in press’ by the time the anniversary arrives in a few weeks), my next goal was to have all twenty available in one form or another. Thanks to a belated and reluctant engagement with Kindle, I’ve now done that, with the five books that were published as large print paperbacks from 2008 to 2011 available on Amazon as of last month. They are all short and belong to two trilogies of short books. The Captain Jackson crime and espionage thrillers were all published in 2008 (ignoring my two amateurish attempts at self-publishing): The Secret Policeman (a novella), The Secret Agent (a collection of six short stories, originally published from 2007 to 2008), and The Secret Service (another novella). The two Forgotten Stories short horror collections form a trilogy with John Hall’s Five Forgotten Stories (published by Theaker’s Paperback Library in March 2010): Eight Weird Tales (September 2010, tales originally published from 2007 to 2010) and Six Strange Cases (February 2011, two of the cases originally published in 2009). These have been available on Kindle since 2024.

As I was putting the finishing touches on The Secret Agent, I realised that the three short story collections were published before a habit I subsequently adopted in imitation of Stephen King, including notes as a postscript. I prefer this to a foreword as there’s no need to avoid spoilers and I love reading other writer’s notes because they often mention the inspiration or origin of the stories – something about which most writers (and many readers) are curious. I wrote a short introduction to Eight Weird Tales, where I identified Conan Doyle, M.R. James, Anthony Hope, and H.P. Lovecraft as my inspirations, but it was so dull that I left it out of the Kindle edition. Instead, I thought I’d present the notes I never wrote here, excluding those on the two Roderick Langham stories, which were collected in The Adventures of Roderick Langham (published by Theaker’s Paperback Library in 2017, complete with notes). That leaves all six stories from The Secret Agent, seven from Eight Weird Tales, and five from Six Strange Cases. 

The Secret Agent

Two: The Captain Jackson stories were all written in a two-year period from 2004 to 2006 and professionally published from 2007 to 2008. As such, they are my oldest work, fiction and nonfiction included, and full of the usual mistakes one associates with a novice author. ‘Two’ was my first published short story, appearing in Hardluck Stories at the beginning of 2007 and is the only one in this collection not to feature Jackson (though I made a weak attempt to frame it as what might now be called a spinoff). It was never intended to be part of the collection, but I needed a sixth story to include and the one I was working on, which would have seen Jackson in Boston, was taking too long to write. I started another one, set in Geneva, but didn’t finish that either and decided to use what I already had, i.e. ‘Two’. The inspiration for the story was something that nearly happened, didn’t, and made me think about what might have happened.

Clock Work: At the core of each of the stories in The Secret Agent is a single action scene and, in retrospect, I was very naïve to assume that writing these well would be enough to sell them for professional rates. The scene at the centre of this story was inspired by the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by two Special Operations Executive agents, in Prague-Libeň in June 1942. I learned about it from a military history magazine that would inspire several short stories and articles, which I first read in a Starbucks in Oxford, which explains the setting. Heydrich was probably the most dangerous of all of Hitler’s inner circle and would later be the subject of a Roderick Langham memoir, The Naval Cadet. The story was also published as ‘Murder by Numbers’.

Contre Temps: Many of the locations in The Secret Agent (and The Secret Service) were places that my wife and I visited while on holiday in our first few years of living together. (We lived near an airport in the days of the 99p ticket.) This narrative was inspired by a disappointing trip to Quebec. (In fairness, Quebec was fine; it was Quebec City that was a disappointment.) ‘Contre Temps’ was the first time I tried something different with the Jackson short stories because the action scene at its core never happens: Megan misses Jackson in consequence of her monolingualism, which almost certainly works out better for both her and Ashley (yes, this is the spinoff connection). While I don’t think it’s the best, it is the most widely read of all the Jackson stories courtesy of its appearance in a trade paperback collection of crime fiction.

Fall Guy: I think it’s fair to say that most inspiration for stories, whether they end up being long or short, requires a minimum of two sources, a literal coincidence of some sort. In this case, the combination was a misadventure while skiing and reading Tess Gerritsen’s The Apprentice (2002), the second novel in her Rizzoli & Isles series. I can’t remember which came first, but it doesn’t matter because the second event resonated with the first and I had enough to start writing. Subsequently, I was lucky enough to meet Dr Gerritsen briefly. A clever, kind, charming woman who is very generous with her time and was treated appallingly by Alfonso Cuarón and Hollywood with regard to the blockbuster feature film, Gravity (2013). Her chapter in Hollywood vs. the Author (2018) is quite harrowing.

The Secret Agent: This is the longest Jackson short story at eight and a half thousand words and might be more accurately categorised as a novelette, i.e. somewhere in between a short story and a novella. ‘The Secret Agent’ is the first and only time I’ve set out to write a narrative of that length and it was also the first of all eight of the Jackson stories to be professionally published (The Secret Policeman and The Secret Service were both initially self-published, in 2005 and 2006 respectively). The scene at its core is a story told to me by a colleague some years before the writing and to this day I’m still not sure if he made it up or not. The coincidence that turned a scene into a story was the 7/7 bombings, during which my wife and I were in London (albeit very far from harm).

Hit and Miss: The last Jackson story to be written and published and the last in the chronology, which is: The Secret Policeman, ‘Clock Work’, ‘Contre Temps’, ‘Fall Guy’, ‘The Secret Agent’, and The Secret Service. The inspiration is the most banal of any of these notes. While possessed of many virtues, not the least of which is putting up with me for so long, my wife is indeed messy. She left a hammer outside the garage one day. I picked it up with thoughts of how it could have been used to break into the garage or house and then reversed direction, thinking how fortuitous it would have been if it had been left on the other side of a break-in. By the time this happened, I’d already been considering how many of Jackson’s enemies might want to interrupt his retirement and how they would go about it.

Eight Weird Tales

The Letters of Reverend Dyer: As will be apparent from both The Adventures of Roderick Langham and The Memoirs of Roderick Langham (forthcoming from Theaker’s Paperback Library), I’ve been fascinated by Whitby, the Yorkshire Coast, and North-East Yorkshire in its entirety for a long time. This story was inspired by Whitby, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu cycle, and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s ‘The Drowned Geologist (1898)’, which was first published in Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! in 2003. I spent a very enjoyable day researching it at the Whitby Museum, which was then and is still run by the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society. ‘The Letters of Reverend Dyer’ was my first attempt at writing speculative fiction.

Fleet: The inspiration was a curious combination of unrelated things: my return to university as a mature student, James’ ghost stories, a comment I’d read about one of his stories (I can’t remember either which story or where I read the comment), and an interest in medieval military orders. Though I visited the location of the final scene, I couldn’t see any sign of the Templar priory at all and remain unsure as to whether I was in exactly the right place. After my wife and I moved to the East Riding of Yorkshire, I spent some time exploring the surrounds, but many of these excursions were conducted in haste and at a time when information on the internet was relatively limited and smartphones restricted to the rich.

The Signal Station: One of the locations I did manage to find and visited several times over many years of days and occasionally nights spent in Scarborough. Not the least of the fascinations of North-East Yorkshire for me is the Roman occupation, although very little evidence of it remains. The inspirations are Lovecraft again, the series of comics and graphic novels that feature the Irish hero Sláine MacRoth and were first published in 2000 AD in 1983 and in Warrior’s Dawn in 2005, and the first year of my postgraduate studies. I did attempt to visit all of the signal station sights in my travels, but – once again – can’t be certain if I wasn't in the wrong place for one or two of them. The story was also published as ‘The Chapel on the Headland’ and is revisited in ‘The Screaming Man’.

Devil’s Own: Another location I visited, though my tour of the Towton battlefield was very haphazard and probably missed at least one important site. While the UK’s most brutal battle can hardly be called banal, the coincidence that inspired the story was, simply, that either shortly before or shortly after my excursion, I saw a military history book with ‘blood-soaked soil’ in the title. (I can’t remember which title and I’m sure there are many anyway.) A more insightful observation might be that another of my fascinations with North-East Yorkshire is the way in which there is so much under the soil – foundations, fossils, gemstones, and…bones. The story was also published as ‘Black Mac Sween’ and is revisited in ‘The Red Trees’.

Spurn: The geography and history of Spurn (the Spurn peninsular) and Spurn Point (Spurn Head) are both intriguing and I won’t bore readers with either here. Like Towton, I know I found the right place but am less certain that I saw everything I came for. The location aside, the inspiration was a combination of several things: a pamphlet I picked up somewhere in the East Riding about the drowned city of Ravenser Odd, Mark Valentine’s notes on one of his Connoisseur short stories (I can’t remember where the notes were published), and some very shoddy historical research on my part. In 2022, the precise location of Ravenser Odd was discovered and there was an exhibition at the Hull History Centre in 2024. Unfortunately, by that time I was living on the other side of the country and wasn’t able to visit. The story was also published as ‘The Stones at Spurn Point’.

Murder in the Minster: This is a Ruritanian pastiche and its inspirations are: Hope’s originals, The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), Rupert of Hentzau (1895), and the lesser known The Heart of Princess Osra (1896); the various homages that have followed, including John Haythorne’s The Strelsau Dimension (1981) and John Spurling’s After Zenda (1995); and a website called The Ruritanian Resistance. If anyone notices a correspondence between Rassendyll and Bauer on the one hand and Forrester and Jackson on the other, it’s because this story could – and perhaps should – have been another Jackson outing. At the time of writing, I was disappointed with the lack of commercial success I was having and thought I’d try something different. The location is based on a visit to Howden Minster, which also appears in ‘Spurn’.

Letter from the Helmand: This is the most unlikely source of inspiration I can imagine and also the most shameful. I went through a brief stage of reading the autobiographies of retired generals, which were usually disappointing as most had prioritised promotion over action and most toed the party line in their narratives because they had too much to lose. One of my selections was It Doesn't Take a Hero: The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (1992), which I read shortly before or after reading about the first combat death of a British soldier during the War in Afghanistan (in 2006). Schwarzkopf mentions a story he wrote while at West Point, in which he deliberately and cleverly conflated two wars nearly two millennia apart. I pretty much plagiarised the whole thing, compounding my crime by plagiarising Doyle, who begins his most famous series with a military doctor returning from…Afghanistan.

Six Strange Cases 

The Short Spoon: This was originally intended to be the first in a mystery series that would feature a retired police detective and have more of a commercial appeal than the Jackson short stories. The problem was that even in its leanest version the story was a novelette, significantly limiting the paying markets to which it could be submitted. At about the same time, I started what was intended to be a noir novel, one that might end up as either a crime thriller with an occult atmosphere or an occult thriller with a detective protagonist. The retired detective mystery was absorbed into the Titus Farrow novel, which gave me about sixteen thousand words of work-in-progress. When my literary agent couldn’t sell Bloody Reckoning (eventually published by Lume Books in 2017), I suggested The Short Spoon, but she wasn’t interested in anything that crossed genres. I didn’t want to waste all that writing, however, and thought it could be published in a collection rather than a magazine, which was how Six Strange Cases was conceived.

Meet El Presidente: ‘The Facts of the Demon Barber’s Demise’ aside, ‘Meet El Presidente’ is probably my worst short story and its origin is at least partly responsible for that. In contrast, there is nothing wrong with the inspiration: over a decade, I kept coming across the phrase ‘el presidente’ in unusual and incompatible contexts (unusual if you don’t speak Spanish, which I don’t) and started thinking about whether there was a thematic link. I could have made a respectable narrative out of that idea given enough time, but I was in a rush to publish Six Strange Cases. So I combined the offcuts of The Short Spoon that I hadn’t used in ‘The Short Spoon’ with parts of an unfinished story that was called ‘Knight of the Black Cross’ and threw it all into something that was more pot than plot. All unfortunate because the inspiration was promising and ‘Knight of the Black Cross’ was shaping up to be one of my better tales.

The Month of the Wolf: Very obviously inspired by my many visits to and stays in Whitby and my longstanding interest in the Black Dog phenomenon. Less obviously, the story has its origins in a cycle of stories that begins with Lovecraft’s ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (first published in Weird Tales in 1936), continues with Robert Bloch’s ‘The Shadow from the Steeple’ (first published in Weird Tales in 1950), and concludes (for now) with Hall’s Five Forgotten Stories. Like almost everything in this collection and much of what I was writing at the time, this was rushed to publication and I felt I’d once again wasted a promising premise. I was thus very pleased to have a revised and improved version, ‘The Barghest’, published several years later. I have a third version planned, though I doubt I’ll ever write it.

Blue Mail: Notwithstanding the Roderick Langham adventure in Six Strange Cases, this is the only story that was previously published. Notwithstanding a different Roderick Langham adventure, ‘Blue Mail’ is also the best short fiction I have written. That surprises me for at least two reasons. First, I’ve already explained the dubious origins of Farrow in my notes on ‘The Short Spoon’ and ‘Meet El Presidente’. He was my attempt to write noir, which is not my forte, and the first and third narratives in which he appeared were bits and pieces cobbled together from unfinished work. What were the chances this outing would be any better? Second, I have absolutely no idea what inspired ‘Blue Mail’ other than several pleasant visits to Cornwall and St Ives. What turns another pedestrian outing for Farrow into something that I hope is quite good is the ‘twist’ in the middle, who is blackmailing whom, and I just can’t remember how or why it came to me.

The Facts of the Demon Barber’s Demise: I’m pretty sure this is my worst short story. It was rejected everywhere I sent it, including by a publication that was specifically seeking absurd, nonsense, bizarre, or surreal stories (whose title escapes me now). It is also my only attempt to write flash fiction and that’s probably for the best. Having said all that it hardly seems to matter what my inspiration was, but I may as well finish the full set of notes. Once again, there was a coincidence and this particular combination was learning about Russell’s paradox (sets that are not sets of themselves) in a logic class shortly after watching Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), which my wife enjoyed but I didn’t. No, I didn’t force her to read the story as payback and no, I still don’t understand Russell’s paradox.

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.

The Strigun's Cartography Workshop | review by Rafe McGregor

The Strigun's Cartography Workshop: Maps for Novels, Board Games, D&D Campaigns, or Decoration

In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s alter ego, Charles Marlow, describes himself as being fascinated by maps from an early age – particularly maps with blank spaces – and such fascination has probably accounted for a great deal of harm over the centuries. It certainly seems to have been shared by many people across multiple generations. My own interest in maps was much more limited and less consequential and I only ever saw them as a tool for orienting myself until I came across what I later realised were world famous: J.R.R. Tolkien’s maps for first The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings. This must have been sometime in the late seventies and the latter were tucked into the dustjackets of the editions my parents kept at home (probably from the nineteen sixties). There were two different maps and I can’t remember which map was in which part of the trilogy, but I reproduce the better-known one here (above).

Later, I discovered Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, and Dungeons & Dragons and began to appreciate the artistic qualities of maps a little more. They nonetheless remained first and foremost a way of orienting myself, to the wonders of an unexplored fantasy world, even though I recognised that Lone Wolf and the AD&D Greyhawk campaign maps in particular had an aesthetic appeal beyond the practical. When I replaced the editions of The Lord of the Rings, I kept the maps from the originals. I’m not entirely sure why, but I still have them. 

Earlier this year, I visited friends in Croatia and met Endi, the proprietor of The Strigun’s Cartography Workshop, in Trsat in Rijeka. I had been told that he created maps to order, but didn’t think too much about it and, if I remember correctly, most of our conversation was about film, one of several shared interests. He was, however, kind enough to give me two of his maps as a memento of my visit, one of Trsat Castle, which looms over Rijeka like an eagle on its perch, and the other of the province of Istria, where I visited Pula, which boasts an almost entirely intact Roman amphitheatre.

I didn’t get the chance to look at them properly until I returned home, when I was awed by their beauty. The photographs (above and right) do not do them justice and they are as pleasing as artifacts to hold and touch as they are works of visual art. Had I greater expertise in the visual arts, I could describe them more eloquently, but one does not need to be an afficionado to recognise their quality. I was, of course, struck by the similarity in style to Tolkien, though when one compares and contrasts the two, Endi is clearly the superior artist. In addition, he will make maps to order and his website is well worth browsing, whether for a commission or just for pleasure. The maps are divided among regions, cities, and battles and there is a separate page for the work he has had published to date. As the website reveals, the Strigun’s maps come in both two-tone and full colour and there is even a map for Game of Thrones…how could there not be!