Possibly the UK's second longest-running sf/f fiction zine.
At the time of writing we are thirty-eight days away from the date on which Britain will currently, as David Allen Green puts it, leave the European Union "by automatic operation of law". An interesting time, then, to be reading and reviewing a novel that portrays how calamitous and corrosive this could end up being – economically, socially and personally. That my adopted home city of Birmingham gets the worst of things in this book only increased its impact for me.
What do you get when you cross an actor renowned for stagy performances and a classic movie monster typically portrayed with restrained elegance and economy of movement? In the case of Renfield, you get a character who commands your attention. Nicholas Cage’s trademark theatricality spawns a Count Dracula who delights in displaying not just incisors but a mouth full of sharp choppers. He exaggerates his facial expressions, body movements, and vocal style to trounce on our conception of the Dark One. It’s all over the top, and it’s all great.
For nearly a century, the unageing titular character (Nicholas Hoult), inspired by a character of the same name in Bram Stocker’s novel Dracula, has been the count’s “familiar” (aka slave) responsible for corralling victims for the blood-drinking fiend. Now Renfield is attending a therapy group whose members are victims of toxic relationships so he can bring his convalescing boss the bad people he learns about. Alas, what Dracula craves is morally upstanding innocents.
Initially, Renfield appears as a brooding, Tim Burtonesque character. The viewer soon learns, however, that Renfield’s master has endowed him with superhuman strength and reflexes… provided that he eats bugs. This brings us to the film’s second big draw (beyond Cage’s performance): the ultraviolent fight scenes. Renfield doesn’t just throw punches – he tears off arms, cuts people in half, stomps on heads, and uses limbs as weapons. If Renfield does throw a punch, his target’s head explodes. And with all of this comes a torrent of blood.
By the film’s end, all the kicking, jumping, and throwing starts to grow a bit tedious. Each fight, however, highlights at least one ridiculously violent fatality. In one gloriously unnecessary scene, the screen shifts to an x-ray view to show how Renfield’s attack impacts his target’s organs and bones.
Another interesting facet of the film is the relationship that the protagonist develops with straightlaced cop Rebecca (Awkwafina). Renfield admires her because she isn’t afraid to die (like he is) and she refuses to let the powers that be corrupt her mission to avenge her father’s death by bringing down the Lobos gang responsible for his death.
Awkwafina commendably avoids the hackneyed female cop, often portrayed as either a know-it-all trying to be cool or a pottymouthed loose cannon trying too hard to be funny. There is no pretension with Rebecca — she tells it how it is while showcasing Awkwafina’s patented dry sense of humour.
The trailer for Renfield slowly builds up to introducing Cage as the infamous count. Conversely, within the first couple of minutes of the actual film, his whole face, replete with toothy grin, dominates the screen. The contrast pierces the jugular – Nicholas Cage has injected some life into the undead and pulled Count Dracula from the shadows. Douglas J. Ogurek ****
Inspired in part by Enid Blyton's child adventurers, a Finnish five had adventures of their own in the Tourula district of Jyväskylä, back in the 1970s: Olli, Leo, Riku, Anna and Karri. They had a dog, too, Timi, though no one can remember what happened to him. They caught a burglar and appeared in the newspaper. Decades later, Olli Suominen has gone on to be a reasonably well-off publisher. But he's disaffected with his life, loses a remarkable number of umbrellas, and struggles to sleep because the angles in his house aren't quite right.
The second of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by first exploring the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the mismatch between conception and reality.
Weird Tales
I concluded part I by endorsing literary critic S.T. Joshi’s definition of the weird tale as essentially rather than superficially philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview and identifying the canon of weird fiction as the work of: Arthur Machen (1863-1947), Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951), William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918), Edward Plunkett (1878-1957, writing under his aristocratic title Lord Dunsany), and H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Joshi’s definition also restricts the weird tale to fiction published within a sixty-year period that begins in 1880 and ends in 1940 and he deals with subsequent publications in The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction. The ‘modern’ or ‘new’ weird and its relation to the ‘ecological’ weird will be discussed in part V. Benjamin Noys and Timothy Murphy concur with Joshi’s dating and identify the source of the name of the genre as the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Before introducing this magazine, I want to mention three of Lovecraft’s less-talented contemporaries. Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950, writing under the penname Norman Bean) is best known for Tarzan of the Apes (serialised in The All-Story in 1912), but also authored the John Carter series, which began with Under the Moons of Mars (serialised in The All-Story in 1911). Similarly, Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) is best known for Conan the Barbarian (short stories published in Weird Tales from 1932), but is also the creator of Solomon Kane (short stories published in Weird Tales from 1928). Finally, Fritz Leiber (1910-1992), is best known for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (short stories published in Unknown from 1939), but published some outstanding weird fiction, beginning with the collection Night’s Black Agents (1947).
Weird Tales was founded in 1922, during the peak of the pulp era and two years after its famous crime fiction counterpart, Black Mask (which launched the career of Raymond Chandler). Its first issue (pictured) was published in March 1923 and within a decade the magazine was publishing the Lovecraft Mythos, Solomon Kane, Conan, and Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin, an occult detective series that would run to nearly one hundred instalments. The first Lovecraft Mythos story published was ‘The Hound’, in February 1924. Aside from the significance of the magazine in naming and consolidating the type of narrative we now refer to as the weird tale, it is also significant in indicating the need for a supplement to Joshi’s definition. Weird fiction not only explores, expresses, and experiments with the worldviews of its authors, but is also essentially rather than superficially hybrid in character, crossing, slipping, and bending between and among genres. The Carter, Kane, and Fafhrd and Mouser series are all weird fiction, but Fredric Jameson regards Carter as the origin of American science fiction, Fafhrd and the Mouser are (along with Conan) acknowledged as inaugurating fantasy fiction, and Kane is as much history as fantasy. The pulp era died a slow death after the Second World War, initiated by first a wartime paper shortage and then the rise of television as the dominant medium of light entertainment in the nineteen fifties. Weird Tales published its final issue in September 1954.
In-Between Old and New
The five decades between the folding of Weird Tales and the coining of the label ‘New Weird’ (by John M. Harrison in 2002 or 2003) are complex when it comes to the development of weird fiction and I make no pretence to insider knowledge or even of being able to produce convincing evidence of my take on this period. That take has two key features: the influence of August Derleth and a second division of the genre into US and UK traditions. Derleth was a pulp fiction author and correspondent of Lovecraft who, along with Donald Wandrei (another pulp fiction author and Lovecraft correspondent), founded Arkham House in 1939 in order to publish Lovecraft’s work posthumously and self-publish their own work. Joshi is particularly critical of Derleth, who invented the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, and his misrepresentation of Lovecraft’s work and worldview. I am once again largely in agreement, but we must also accept that if Derleth had not appropriated Lovecraft’s legacy he would be as unknown now as, for example, Quinn is. While Lovecraft imitators thrived on both sides of the Atlantic following the Weird Tales era, I think it helpful to identify two traditions of canonical weird fiction, understood as having unquestionable literary merit (however one chooses to define that quality).
In the UK, a tradition influenced less by Lovecraft and more by Machen and Blackwood – as well as Walter de la Mare – emerged in the work of John William Wall (1910-1989, writing under the penname Sarban) and Robert Aickman (1914-1981). Wall published very little and is best known for his novella, The Sound of His Horn (1952). Aickman is best known for the forty-eight stories he referred to as ‘strange’ tales, the first three of which were published in We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories (1951, the other three in the collection were by the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard). To these two, I shall add J.G. Ballard (1930-2009). Although Ballard, to whom I shall return in part V, is usually considered to be a literary rather than popular fiction author (a dichotomy I regard as not only erroneous, but malicious), he began his career as a science fiction writer, part of the ‘New Wave’ of experimental and political science fiction in the nineteen sixties and seventies. The novella The Wind from Nowhere (1961) and the collection The Terminal Beach (1964) are exemplary weird fiction.
In the US, a tradition more obviously influenced by Lovecraft and either
explicitly part of his mythos or self-consciously an extension or revision
thereof emerged in the work of Thomas Ligotti (b.1953), Caitlín R. Kiernan
(b.1964, pictured), and Victor LaValle (b.1972). Ligotti has published
relatively little and I return to his work in the next section. In contrast,
Kiernan has published a vast oeuvre since 1995, including more than ten novels
and over two hundred and fifty works of shorter fiction. Their Tinfoil
Dossier (2017-2020) trilogy of novellas is my favourite at the time of
writing, but The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (2012) demonstrates an
all-too-rare ability to extend the weird tale to novel length without
stretching either quality or credibility. LaValle has published a dozen or so
novels, novellas, graphic novels, and short story collections since 1999. His
novella, The Ballad of Black Tom (2016), is a magnificent reimagining
of Lovecraft’s ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ (first published in Weird Tales
in January 1927) and, in my opinion, far superior to Matt Ruff’s
similarly-themed Lovecraft Country, published in the same year.
Conception and Reality
In my review of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (2016), I described Ligotti as exploring, expressing, and experimenting with a worldview that could be called deconstructive, after the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004, pictured). There has been a great deal of nonsense written about (and some would say by) Derrida, who developed the approach in the nineteen sixties and was a global public intellectual by the time of his death, but the basic idea behind deconstruction is simple: human beings (subjective experience) can only gain access to the real world (objective reality) through concepts, which are articulated through language. The worry, which stems from curiosities such as the fact that languages not only use different words for the same concept, but have different concepts that cannot be translated in their entirety, is that no human language and therefore no human conception maps perfectly onto reality. There is obviously plenty of overlap – otherwise we would not be able to build bridges, cure diseases, invent the internet, and fly to the moon – but there is no identity relation between concept and reality. This insight about the limitations of language, the way in which words fail to make the concrete and abstract objects they identify present, originated with the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Derrida’s innovation was to demonstrate that the system of signs constituting a particular language (such as Modern English) is unstable because that system is inconsistent over both space (such as the differences between contemporary UK and US English) and time (such as the difference between Shakespeare’s early Modern English and contemporary Modern English in the UK).
The upshot of this is that there is a difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it really is, where aspects of the latter remain permanently inaccessible to us. I shall have more to say about this inaccessibility in part IV. In consequence of language failing to provide direct access to reality, the world in which we live is co-constructed by human intelligibility and inaccessible reality, a dichotomy very roughly equivalent to the distinction between culture and nature. This space between the world we create for ourselves and the real world is both frightening and liberating. If much more of our reality than commonsense suggests is a question of culture rather than nature, then much more of our reality can be changed for the better. I emphasised this emancipatory potential in my own introduction to literary theory, but Ligotti focuses on the fear and disgust the mismatch between conception and reality evokes. He scrapes away at the difference between subjective perception and objective reality to make it larger and more frightening and this is the worldview that emerges in Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror (2002), Teatro Grottesco (2006), The Spectral Link (2014), and his other work. Ligotti’s short stories are not only the most disturbing I have ever read, but distil and hone something was present to a lesser extent in Machen, Blackwood, Hodgson, Plunkett, and Lovecraft. With Ligotti in mind, I propose a further amendment to define weird fiction as: 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. This latter quality is precisely what the references to the uncanny or unhomely mentioned in part I are trying to convey, but ‘weird’ seems a much more accurate description to me.
Recommended Reading
Fiction
Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco, Durtro Press (2006).
Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, Roc Books (2012).
J.G. Ballard, The Crystal World, Jonathan Cape (1966).
Nonfiction
H.P. Lovecraft, Notes on Writing Weird
Fiction, Amateur
Correspondent (1937).
Alan Moore, Preface, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The
Folio Society (2017).
Mark Bould & Steven Shaviro (eds.), This is Not a Science Fiction
Textbook, Goldsmiths Press (2024).
Earth was abandoned long ago, as we learn from a series of interesting and all too plausible essays by Lydia Heliosmith, aged 17, for her Terrestrial Anthropology class. In 2387, the eruption of a supervolcano in the Phlegraean Fields annihilated Italy, Greece, Slovenia and Western Turkey, darkened the skies worldwide, brought the Holocene to an end, and saw the glaciers return, but the population of Earth had been in long-term decline ever since the Corporate Age. Half a million lucky people escaped to the ringstations, while the population of Earth continued to dwindle, from a peak of eleven billion down to ten thousand.
In this third and final instalment in her Brooklyn Brujas series, Zoraida Córdova transposes the typical teen identity struggle onto a fantasy setting. Latina bruja (witch) Rose Mortiz is unhappy at her sixteenth birthday, which is also her Deathday, when her magical powers are bound to her. Rose is also, the author would have us know, a size 18. This detail seems random and unnecessary; rarely does it surface, and arguably, it does not shape Rose’s worldview.
Rose and her long-absent father get transported from Brooklyn to the Kingdom of Adas, on a colourful yet dangerous magical Caribbean island that tends to make people forget who they are. Will Rose remember who she is?
Rose discovers she’s one of six young Guardians with special powers. There are squabbles among them, but Rose aligns herself with a gender-fluid Guardian. Accompanied by islander siblings Iris and Arco, the Guardians go on a quest to stop a black substance called the Rot from turning rainforests into deserts. If they don’t stop this Rot, it not only destroys Adas but also impacts Rose’s world.
Though Wayward Witch exploits common themes found in young adult literature, the originality of the setting is enough to keep the reader engaged. During her journey, Rose will encounter everything from flowers that eliminate sores and walking mermaids who drink rivers to translucent frogs whose poison causes people to express their fears, but she’ll also discover something even more important: self-confidence via an understanding of her powers and their usefulness. Wayward Witch also endorses cooperation and environmental preservation – these young people want to save the fantasy world, and they eventually work toward that goal together.
Rose is known as Lady Siphon because of her special power: the ability to hack others’ powers, weaken them, and use those powers against them. Alas, she considers this a substandard power, and the nicknames – hacker, leech, devourer – don’t help. She must learn to accept and control this power, which could translate to any skill a young woman has.
Iris and Arco, whose father king supposedly seized the throne from his corrupt father, offer a diverting side story. Though Rose has a crush on the latter (an attractive horned scribe), it’s Iris, with her freckles, pink hair, pointed ears, and eyes like pink jewels, who’s the more absorbing sibling. Initially, Iris appears harsh, but Rose gradually discovers more about the warrior princess and why she seems so angry at her father and brother. Douglas J. Ogurek ***
The third in a series of graphic novels adapting Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods. An old god has been murdered. Shadow has been invited to meet the new gods at the putative centre of the USA, to take possession of the body. Once that is done, he will serve a vigil, tied to a tree next to the body, for nine days and nine nights without water. Meanwhile, the old gods and the new are massing for battle, to fight over a country that hardly cares about any of them.
The first of six blog posts exploring the literary and
philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the
ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize
humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by framing first the
limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the
alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the weird tale.
Wyrd, Weyrd, Weird
‘Weyrd’ came to Middle English in the fifteenth century from the Old
Norse urðr via the Anglo-Saxon wurd and Old English ‘wyrd’. Its
meaning in the ancient languages was twofold, denoting both personal destiny and the
personification of personal destiny in the three deities that tended Yggdrasil
(the Norse tree of life), who were known as the Norns. A thinly-disguised
version of the Norns appears in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (first performed
in 1606), where they are called the ‘weyrd’ or ‘weyward’ sisters, i.e. witches
(like his contemporaries, Shakespeare had little interest in consistent
spelling, including the writing of his own name). The Oxford English
Dictionary identifies four distinct but related meanings of ‘weird’ in
Modern English:
1. Having or claiming to have
the power to control the fate or the destiny of human beings.
2. Suggestive of unearthly
character or strangeness that is unaccountable or uncomfortable.
3. Having a strange or unusual
appearance.
4. Out of the ordinary, odd,
fantastic.
We can summarise these by conceiving of ‘the weird’ as supernatural
rather than natural and uncommon rather than common, but this isn’t
particularly helpful when it comes to identifying a category or genre of
fiction. Almost all speculative fiction, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune series
(2021, 2024), could be described as supernatural and/or uncommon.
A popular route out of this impasse is to identify the weird with the uncanny. Writing for The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman compares King, Lovecraft, and Kafka: ‘Still, when you’re in the presence of the genuine, uncanny article, you know. Stephen King is tremendously imaginative, but H.P. Lovecraft is weird; Kafka is probably the ultimate weird writer.’ The concept of the uncanny as it is commonly used today, particularly with respect to literary criticism, is a translation of Sigmund Freud’s Das Unheimliche, which was introduced in an essay published in 1919. Directly translated, ‘unheimlich’ means ‘not from the home’ and some critics prefer to use the more direct ‘unhomely’. In Freud’s essay, the uncanny is the return of the repressed and he explains it by means of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story, ‘The Sandman’ (1817), and Otto Rank’s The Double (published in 1925, but written in 1914), a psychoanalytic exploration of the doppelgänger. The core of Freud’s conception of the unhomely is that something can be simultaneously familiar and alien. In his authoritative The Uncanny (2003), Nicholas Royle identifies Martin Heidegger as providing the most intense philosophical exploration of the concept. The very premise of Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), is that what we take to be ordinary is in fact extra-ordinary and uncanny. Dasein (which can be translated as ‘being-here’ or, to use less abstruse terminology, ‘agency’ or ‘selfhood’) is fundamentally ‘not-at-home’ in the world and Dasein itself is thus uncanny, in consequence of which we experience Angst (anxiety). Like China Miéville and Mark Fisher, however, I don’t think that the uncanny gives us the answer to what weird fiction is.
Romanticism to Modernism
Unlike Miéville, I do think that the origins of weird fiction can be
found in Gothic Romanticism. In medieval art, Gothic style was distinguished
from Classical style by its abandonment of restraint and subtlety, deploying
caricature and exaggeration to evoke strong emotions and created with the
intention of expressing the artist’s emotion rather than representing the reality
in which the artist lived. As an artistic movement, the Gothic survived the
transition from the medieval to the modern in the form of architecture,
specifically the Gothic Revival or Neo-Gothic that became popular in the
seventeenth century. The Gothic focus on emotion, expression, and evocation meant
that interest was revived once again with the development of Romanticism a
century later. The Romantic movement elevated the significance of emotion,
expression, and individualism and prioritised the natural over the industrial
and the medieval over the modern. Unsurprisingly, the Romantic movement saw the
development of the English novel from an experimental to an established art
form and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is regarded as
the first work of Gothic fiction. The genre reached its apotheosis with
Shelley’s Frankenstein which, in turn, influenced two distinct sets of
nineteenth century precursors to weird fiction, one on each side of the
Atlantic. I should mention at this point that this series will focus
exclusively on the Anglophone weird, in consequence of the combination of my
own ignominious monolingualism, the consolidation of the genre in America’s
pulp magazines in the first half of the twentieth century, and the continued
dominance of English as the preferred language of its authors. This restriction
means that I exclude at least one exemplary author of weird fiction, Franz
Kafka (1883-1924). As one of the leading lights of Modernist literature, Kafka
is rarely linked to pulp, popular, or genre fiction, but I agree completely
with Rothman’s characterisation.
In the US, the crucial link between Gothic Romanticism and weird fiction is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849, pictured). Poe was one of the first masters of the short story and I regard his ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (published in Graham’s Magazine in 1841) as the origin of both crime fiction and weird fiction. Poe was succeeded by Ambrose Bierce (1842-c.1914), Madeline Yale Wynne (1847-1918), and Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933). The tradition in the UK (actually Ireland, which was part of the UK at the time) emerged with the work of Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), who retains a reputation as one of the greatest ghost story writers in English. Le Fanu was succeeded by Violet Paget (1854-1933, writing under the penname Vernon Lee, pictured), Conan Doyle (1859-1930), and M.R. James (1862-1936). Doyle is often underrated as a writer of horror and I have attempted to redress this imbalance in The Conan Doyle Weirdbook (2012). Ramsey Campbell claims that H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) united and advanced the traditions in which Poe and Le Fanu were working and Lovecraft acknowledged his debt to both traditions in his literary criticism. Campbell regards Lovecraft’s Mythos (which he prefers to call the Lovecraft rather than Cthulhu Mythos) as evidence of his lifelong attempt to perfect the weird tale, which involved an experimentation with prose comparable to his more lauded contemporaries in Modernist literature, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Kafka. If not a part of Modernism, the weird tale is, at the very least, an epiphenomenon of it.
Weird Worldviews
I still haven’t answered the question of what weird fiction is or what it was Lovecraft spent his life trying to perfect. There was little critical or academic interest in the weird until the turn of the century and that interest is largely the result of the efforts of literary critic S.T. Joshi, who spent the last decade of the twentieth century pioneering the field of weird fiction criticism. In 1990, he published The Weird Tale, which was the first of his many monographs on the genre and remains the most authoritative critical study published to date. Joshi identifies the weird tale as a retrospective category of speculative fiction that was published from 1880 to 1940 and is essentially rather than superficially philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview. Although alternative definitions of the weird in terms of the sublime, the uncanny, and the disgusting have been proposed, Joshi’s remains the most compelling. Lovecraft was a prolific – perhaps even compulsive – letter writer and defined his own oeuvre as cosmic horror, in which ‘common human laws and interests are emotions that have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large’. What distinguishes Lovecraft from his contemporaries, such as Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951, pictured) and Edward Plunkett (1878-1957, writing under his aristocratic title Lord Dunsany), is thus the absence of the supernatural. Lovecraft’s monsters are not werewolves, vampires, or ghosts, but aliens (although humanity is unable to distinguish the two). In his out-of-print biography of Lovecraft, L. Spraque de Camp referred to the worldview on which Joshi places so much emphasis as ‘futilitarianism’. Lovecraft denied that he was a pessimist in another of his letters: ‘I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist – that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process.’
With the exception of James, Joshi argues that each of the six exemplars of the weird tale – Bierce, James, Arthur Machen (1863-1947), Blackwood, Plunkett, and Lovecraft – had their own worldview, which was explored, expressed, and experimented with in their weird tales. I have already suggested that Bierce and James are more accurately considered as precursors to the weird and I think Joshi errs in omitting William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) from his list. My adjustment thus presents the canonical weird tale as being the work of: Machen, Plunkett, Blackwood, Hodgson, and Lovecraft. Although the prototypical weird tale and the genre of weird fiction more generally are almost always associated with Lovecraft above all others, the best weird tale itself is widely acknowledged to be Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’, which was first published in his collection of short stories, The Listener and Other Stories (1907, Alfred A. Knopf). I came to Lovecraft much later than most – in my thirties – and have read his work in three cycles in the last two decades. In the first, I was amazed, enthralled, and even shocked by his singularity, innovativeness, and complexity. My second reading was much more critical, identifying flaws in both his form (structure and dialogue) and content (pathological racism and casual sexism) and wondering how and why he remains so popular. More recently, I’ve come to see him as a genius for all his moral and artistic flaws, a literary equivalent of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: two awkward, unhappy, and rather unpleasant men whose talent was unrecognised while they were alive, but whose posthumous influence is too great to calculate with any accuracy.
Recommended Reading
Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Graham’ s Magazine (1848).
Algernon Blackwood, The
Willows, The Listener and Other Stories (1907).
H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of
Cthulhu, Weird Tales (1928).
Nonfiction
S.T. Joshi, The Weird
Tale, Hippocampus Press (1990).
Kate Marshall, Novels by
Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century, The University of Chicago
Press (2023).
Michael Dirda, Introduction,
Weird Tales, The Folio Society (2024).
Found guilty on seven counts of Treason-Speech and Questioning of Authority, school valedictorian and Patriot Scholar Adriane Strohl has been sentenced to four years in Exile. She counts herself lucky. She could have been deleted, or exiled forever, or her family could have been arrested as collaborators. Instead, she has been sent to the past, to study at the University of Wisconsin. The USA of 1963, with its sexism, secondhand smoking, girdles and no internet, is almost as bad a place to be a clever woman as her twenty-first century, and by implication our present is dystopic too, in so far as it reflects them.
Keanu Reeves in Jurassic Park. Now wait a minute – that’s not Keanu Reeves, nor is it Jurassic Park. That’s Adam Driver, and he plays Mills, an earthling-like non-earthling who crash-lands on Earth when his spaceship gets hit by an asteroid 65 million years ago… when dinosaurs ruled.
When the words “Prior to the advent of humanity” appeared superimposed on a space backdrop when 65 began, I knew that the filmmakers of this man (or whatever Mills is) vs. nature story would be taking their schoolboy subject matter too seriously.
Certainly, the film has its faults, starting with a basic and cliched plot: an underdeveloped hero goes on a two-year mission to earn enough to pay for his ailing daughter’s medication. He crashes and then undertakes a journey to find a vessel that will get him home.
Then there’s this fact (in case the reader hasn’t caught on): for an individual traveling to Earth from a planet 65 million years ago, Mills acts remarkably like a modern-day American. You’d think he’d have unfamiliar emotions and ways of approaching things.
After the crash, Mills discovers one survivor among the cryogenically preserved passengers on his craft. Unfortunately, the girl Koa doesn’t speak English. He tells her that her dead parents are still alive and tricks her into attempting to climb a mountain to get to the escape craft.
The film’s greatest strength is the rapport that Mills and Koa build as they navigate the dangerous terrain. There are even moments of levity between the two. As a father, Mills knows how to build trust, and this knowledge will pay off for him more than once. Also impressive are the prehistoric threats that keep one-upping each other: just as creature A closes in, creature B storms onto the scene and attempts to tear apart Mills and/or Koa.
Near the film’s conclusion, Mills discovers a threat much more menacing than dinosaurs. I won’t give away the threat, but I will state that the threat would have caused more tension had it been more apparent to the viewer from the film’s beginning.
Although the filmmakers could have made the same film with a less talented actor than Driver, I enjoyed seeing him repeatedly sustain painful injuries only to rise and continue pursuing his objective. Douglas J. Ogurek ***
This is a charming novel set in a slightly fantastical presentish day, telling a story of sexism, betrayal, family and creative ethics. The best enchanted dolls you can buy are those of Kendricks Workshop, an Oxford family business founded in 1820 which guards its secrets so carefully that they don’t even let the female members of the family learn them all. “The women do interiors. They’ve a knack for that, because they tidy homes in real life.” Only the men may practice sorcery, imbuing their dolls with the ability to inspire specific feelings, such as Heady Optimism or Bucolic Bliss. This is a particular bother to Persephone Kendrick, stuck working in their shop and desperate to do more. Larkin is a floppy-haired young man who arrives on their eyot, a 1.6 km-long river island lying between the Thames and the Cherwell, on which a hundred families live in cottages and toil in workrooms. He claims to be descended from a long-lost branch of the family. Despite doubts as to whether this is true, the head of the family gives Larkin a job, the job Persephone always wanted, and the novel explores the consequences of this decision. I enjoyed this book very much – it reminded me of Diana Wynne Jones, albeit without the bits that make your head spin, and with a rather rude bit here and there. Persephone was an appealingly grumpy hero, and I was rooting for her throughout. I did wonder why their world was so similar to ours, with such magic in it, but perhaps the effects of the dolls were not always so strong. With luck a sequel will be forthcoming and such questions might be answered. Stephen Theaker ****
In a nation traumatised by a series of terrorist attacks on primary schools, people just can’t cope. So an experiment is going on in Newark-by-the-Sea. When a crime is committed, both criminal and victim have their minds wiped of the incident, the goal being to lessen the criminality of the former and the fear of the latter.
In “It Won’t Go Away”, one of the more impressive entries in Paul Tremblay’s sometimes brilliant and sometimes baffling Growing Things and Other Stories, the protagonist discovers strange dark areas on photos of a horror writer friend who recently committed suicide. This protagonist, also a writer, begins to extract and rearrange these black spots.
Similarly, Tremblay’s inaugural short story collection gives readers odd, difficult-to-interpret dark spots. It challenges the reader to pull out excerpts, to twist them, to place them next to others. Sometimes, the beginnings of a picture emerge. Other times, the reader is left with a bunch of dark areas.
In his story notes at the back of the volume, Tremblay doesn’t offer much in terms of interpretation but rather reveals what inspired the stories. This reminds one of the irritating creative writing student who says, “It means whatever you think it means.”
These stories refuse to give clear-cut answers – the author even refers to himself as Mr Ambiguity in one story. This strategy leads to entries that vacillate from refreshing and thought-provoking to rambling and annoying. Often, Tremblay leads readers to think the story is going one way but then pulls the carpet from under them.
Without its forerunner The Cabin at the End of the World, this collection would barely make it through the front door of William Morrow. Some stories, reading like commercials for men’s cologne, leave the reader completely in the dark. Others are pontificating and cumbersome. “Notes from the Dog Walkers”, for instance, is written as a series of notes left by dog walkers at a man’s house. What starts as cute reports devolves into hulking paragraphs of self-indulgent, meandering rants that stitch together random thoughts.
The concluding story, “The Thirteenth Temple”, which resurrects sisters Merry and Marjorie from Tremblay’s innovative 2016 possession novel A Head Full of Ghosts, gets lost in a miasma of repetition and vagueness.
Despite striking out in some cases, the collection does offer some winners – several stories were so intriguing that I read them twice. One of the best entries, the Hell Boy-inspired “Her Red Right Hand,” is a beautiful exploration of the grieving process. When Gemma’s mother dies, her father turns into a sulking, drunken mess. He often retreats to his bedroom, and he says things out of anger. The girl spends time near a well, where she confronts a goblin who degrades her and, interestingly, has her father’s voice. The girl’s drawings start to create a new reality at the well. This story exemplifies the power of art in overcoming inner demons, expressed in this case as an outer goblin.
Another engrossing offering is “The Teacher,” in which a beloved high school history teacher exposes his students to “special lessons”, one of which is a paused video of a preschool boy sailing through the air toward a wall after being thrown by his teacher. As the weeks progress, the teacher slightly advances the frame, causing the suspended boy to get closer to the wall. The image captures what Tremblay is doing with most of these stories – showing people on the brink of disaster and encouraging several possible interpretations.
“The Getaway”, ostensibly about four men gradually disappearing while fleeing a crime scene, turns out to be a commentary on the repercussions of neglectful parenting.
In “Nineteen Snapshots of Dennisport”, a man reflects on photographs from a boyhood family vacation in Dennisport, Massachusetts. Most of the photos are innocuous, but the narrator gradually reveals more about his mysterious father until the story ends with a surprising revelation.
“Our Town’s Monster”, one of the entries I read twice, intrigues despite its lack of clarity. A realtor showing a home to a dull, yet attractive couple nonchalantly reveals that a monster lives in a nearby swamp. A centenarian who is supposed to be (but isn’t really) the last teacher at a one-room schoolhouse is perceived as a kind of monster. A boy attempts to frighten his ultra-philosophical younger brother at a graveyard. The brother, immersed in his extremely violent video games, isn’t having it. Tremblay seems to be commenting on the human tendency to be so wrapped up in our own issues that we don’t see the monsters right in front of us.
When I was in elementary school, I did an experiment in which I placed the same kinds of seeds in separate pots and fed each one a different liquid (e.g. water, milk, coffee, tea). While some plants rose quicker than I expected, others never even broke through the soil. In Growing Things and Other Stories, Paul Tremblay feeds each horror story with a different elixir to inspire several questions: What is a monster? When, if ever, will it surface? Or has it already surfaced? Unfortunately, all that experimentation suffers from a fair amount of muddiness.—Douglas J. Ogurek ****
Bookish boy Gideon and his parents John and Clare are forced by reduced circumstances to leave Bath and return to the family sheep farm. Bath, in Gideon’s view, had been a city of graceful townhouses, where children played with hoops and oil lamps hung like magic lanterns. The children of Ormeshadow, on the other hand, stare at him in baleful silence. The village gets its name from the legend that it was built atop a dragon, but don’t read this expecting The Dragon Griaule. It’s a historical drama, tinged by the possibility of fantasy towards the end. The family farm is run by John’s resentful brother, who is far from happy that his private secretary of a brother has returned, and his children are just as aggressive: they attack Gideon the first time they are left alone with him. Tragedy will result from these wildly different families sharing a single home. I thought this was a well-written book, and the family drama rang true, though a more overtly fantastical story would have been more to my taste. I liked that the chapters had proper titles, which seems to be quite rare in fiction these days, and fellow Richard Herring fans will be interested to learn that a certain amount of stone-clearing is involved. Stephen Theaker ****
An animated title sequence then sweeps us through all the cruelties of our history and into a ruined, drought-stricken future. The rest of the world is dead and the last drop of water in the Ganges will soon be gone. Padukone’s character has no name at first, just a serial number: SUM-80. At the end of the world, few women are fertile, and those with potential are taken to a lab for implantation. If they were being used for breeding, that would be bad enough, but the women and babies are being juiced mid-pregnancy to produce a life-extending serum for a wizened dictator, the Baron Harkonnen-ish Supreme Yaskin (Kamal Haasan). SUM-80 is hiding her pregnancy, not knowing her baby might be the reincarnation of Vishnu predicted six thousand years before.
The third main protagonist and his robot were introduced in a fun little computer-animated prequel on Amazon Prime, B&B: Bujji and Bhairava, which was my first clue that the film wouldn’t be as dour as it looked from the trailer. Bhairava, played by Telugu star Prabhas of Baahubali fame, is a beefy, cheeky Han Solo type, if Han didn’t have Chewbacca to act as his conscience. Living in Kasi, formerly Varanasi, the world’s last and first city, he is a bounty hunter, desperate to earn his way into the floating Complex, where the rich live in luxury. A flashback shows him sneaking in for the film’s one song and dance number before being caught and kicked out. In the cartoon and film, we see Bhairava do a bit of bounty hunting and fighting, before eventually getting dragged against his will into the main storyline. (He’s not on screen anywhere near as much as one might expect.)
I was looking forward very much to this film, ever since I saw the trailer, and it was just as enjoyable as I expected, especially after the interval, when it took off the handbrake and slammed down hard on the pedal. Like some other Indian blockbusters I’ve watched recently (for example the brilliant Leo, heavily inspired by History of Violence), it feels like a patchwork of earlier movies: Dune, Mad Max: Fury Road, Flash Gordon, The Matrix, etc. It looks like a Zack Snyder film but in its plot and sense of humour reminded me more of The Fifth Element. When the twelve foot tall Ashwatthama went into battle to protect SUM-80, it was like seeing Gandalf fight against a mech! Which is to say, it may be a patchwork, but it’s a patchwork of things I love, and highly imaginative in its own right too.
The audience I was with enjoyed it even more than I did. The cinema was packed, and they frequently applauded, whistled and cheered, sometimes for cameos, for example by the directors Ram Gopal Varma and S.S. Rajamouli, and at other times for revelations of characters having returned from the Mahabharata. It was like being back in the cinema for the “No sir, all thirteen!” moment in The Day of the Doctor, over and over again. I wish I had waited forty minutes or so to watch the Telugu version, though, rather than watching a Hindi showing. Although some scenes were reportedly reshot in Hindi, it was pointless losing the original voice performances for no benefit to my understanding. Even with subtitles I may have missed a lot, given that the English subtitles were sometimes inaccurate even for the English-language dialogue.
For such a long film – after an 8pm screening I left the cinema at ten to midnight – it leaves a lot undone, rather like the first two Rebel Moon films, but it’s hard to complain when it ends with a series of spectacular battle sequences. It’s full of fun supporting characters, my favourite being feisty rebel Kyra (Anna Ben). The special effects are superb. We’ve come a long way from the days when Indian films were renowned for being filmed on a shoestring in a rush. Kalki 2898 AD puts down a real marker, showing that the subcontinent, and specifically this talented director Nag Ashwin and his team, can produce science fiction blockbusters every bit as spectacular as those made in Hollywood. Maybe it isn’t an absolute classic, but it’s great fun and it strongly suggests a classic is on its way. I’ll be first in line for the sequel, albeit at a daytime screening. Stephen Theaker ****
Quite a difficult book to review without spoilers, since it's as slow as its protagonist to trust the reader with any information, Sea Change begins with a self-driving house holding up the traffic, and only gets more mysterious from there. Renata knows what the teal paint on its window sill means: the house belongs to a member of the Org. She uses her electronic key to gain access, and investigates. There's no one inside, not even a corpse, though she suspects foul play. She nabs a toothbrush for DNA testing and bluffs her way out past the police.
A pair of female friends, a Polish designer and a formerly East German bookkeeper, are living in London shortly after the UK voted to leave the European Union. Over the course of twenty-eight pages we see the impact of our collective decision on their lives: harassment from yobs on buses, work drying up, and fears about the future, though we also hear about people who stand up for them, and who help a shopkeeper after an arson attack. It’s all getting to Gosia, and Ilona thinks she might benefit from seeing a therapist. The therapist suggests expressing her feelings through art, with peculiar consequences.
This splatterpunk anthology features stories of extreme violence enacted by tools. It’s mostly the usual suspects like hammers and saws, but there are also a few surprises. Characters range from cavemen wielding primitive weapons (“Sticks and Stones” by Christine Morgan) to students learning about torture techniques through remote instruction (“Online Learning” by Vic Kerry). Several stories involve women using phallus-like tools to exact revenge on men.
Some entries by lesser-known authors enticed me to purchase more of their work. Conversely, I researched other authors in this anthology to avoid ever attempting to read something by them again. Their stories, limited in conflict and conversation, come across as amateur. The book also suffers from spelling mistakes and typos – at times, it’s enough to pull the reader out of a story.
Well-known splatterpunk authors Kristopher Triana and Matt Shaw bookend the anthology with equally gruesome stories. In Triana’s “Hammer Time”, call girl Cassie visits a wealthy artist with piercings and tattoos covering his body. A tool aficionado (and a masochist), he has an idea for his ultimate work of art. It’s hard to write a story like this with the intent of being serious, but Triana pulls it off concisely and brutally.
Despite its problems with typos and tense, Matt Shaw’s “Smash It” offers a highly original, graphic depiction of violence that makes the reader cringe and laugh. After a bad experience with acid, the protagonist thinks his penis is encouraging him to violate and kill women. He decides he needs to take care of the problem.
Stephen Kozeniewski’s “Tool Story”, the anthology’s most original entry, is written from the perspective of three tools used by a man who tortures people for information. Typically, anthropomorphic stories are intended for children, but Kozeniewski’s ultraviolent take results in humour and cleverness.
In Vic Kerry’s “Online Learning”, an instructor delivers a remote course on torture as if he’s delivering a biology lesson about root systems. His clinical presentation of the subject matter combined with the students’ enthusiasm about using their “volunteers” to do heinous things makes for an amusing read.
Ola, the protagonist of Jonathan Butcher’s “Drilldo”, decides to take her fetishes into her own hands after she has a bad experience with a dominant who calls himself Dr Surly. She does so after inserting a power drill (handle first) into a tight place. The story appears to be headed down the typical extreme horror path of abusing women, but it twists like a drill bit.
The concept of a musician killing people on stage has been done before, but maybe not as funnily as in Antoine Cancer’s “Jesus of Jim Beam”. The story reflects the punk rock mentality by saying “f-- you” to the whole tool theme. There really aren’t any tools... or maybe the musician is the tool. Notable is the audience members’ response to the killing spree – they’re not overly impressed. It’s a commentary on being desensitised.
Bludgeon Tools reinforces a theory about splatterpunk stories: although humour is not a requirement for such fiction, considering the over-the-top nature of the stories, humour often proves to be the best route. Douglas J. Ogurek ***
When asked about the lack of diversity in their books, English anthology editors all too frequently declare that the quality of the individual stories is all that matters. But if every story had the same plot and the same theme their individual quality would do nothing to stop the anthology from being very dull. Excellent books like We See a Different Frontier and The Apex Books of World SF have shown how diversity of contributors contributes to the quality of an anthology, not least because it tends to contribute to variety in the stories.
This Hellboy spin-off, a graphic novel written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, focuses on Koshchei the Deathless. He is a character from Eastern European folklore who appeared briefly in Hellboy as the servant of Baba Yaga, the Russian witch who lives in a house with chicken legs.
