Stephen Theaker's Blog, page 3

Divine in Essence by Yarrow Paisley (Whiskey Tit) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Psychoanalysts take heed: hints of the divine surface in quagmire of confused children, mentally ill mothers, and strained relationships. 

Writing instructors often cite Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” as the epitome of clear, concise, and concrete prose. The works in Yarrow Paisley’s collection Divine in Essence are, in many ways, the opposite. Place the two works of art side by side and you might cause some kind of cosmic meltdown. This is not to suggest that Paisley’s often baffling yet sometimes transcendent stories are substandard but rather that they make more demands on the reader than the typical story. 

A common complaint of genre stories is that they have no depth. Fair. Conversely, the bizarro/slipstream entries in Divine in Essence undoubtedly have depth, but some of them have a surface so tenuous that it leaves readers longing for a lifeline… something to latch onto so they can come up for answers. 

If you’re looking for a beach read or something to ease your mind after a long day’s work, look elsewhere. If, however, you’ve blocked out uninterrupted time in your book-lined den where a fire blazes, then you might consider this volume. Additionally, be sure you have your thinking cap on and maybe a couple of cups of coffee in you – you’re going to need to be at your most alert when you unpeel Paisley’s many-layered stories filled with strained child-parent relationships, unorthodox-bordering-on-abusive sexual circumstances, and eccentric and perhaps mentally ill mother figures who emasculate their sons. Be prepared for loads of disassembling… of bodies, of words, of relationships, and even of the narrative. Sometimes Paisley’s narrators will even pull the rug out from under the reader by revealing, for instance, they’ve inadvertently been calling a character by the wrong name.

Divine in Essence has garnered a noteworthy amount of critical acclaim, with reviewers tossing out words like “surreal”, “dreamscape” and “uncanny”. Paisley’s writing style, characterised by literary allusions, superlong sentences stuffed with million-dollar words, authorial intrusions, and a sometimes pontificating tone, often gives the book pre-twentieth century feel. 

While some of the stories are too inaccessible for this reviewer’s tastes, the collection does offer several pieces that show a creative mind brimming with novel ideas. Despite his lack of attentiveness to (or perhaps disregard of) the distracted and apathetic modern reader, Paisley knows what he’s doing. 

One of the collection’s strongest works, “I in the Eye”, is told from the perspective of a seven-year-old boy trapped in his sexy stepmother’s glass eye. He not only observes an emotionless and fragile “simulacrum” of himself living on the outside but also looks on as his mother, aware of his residence within her, dances naked in front of a mirror and seduces his father. As the father’s alcoholism worsens, the boy stifles his own emotions to better absorb his reality. The loss of his own mother, the stepmother’s erotic machinations, and the father’s grief and addiction essentially cause the boy to split… so much so that he needs a surrogate viewpoint. 

Mundanity becomes calamity in “Nancy and Her Man”, in which a woman finds a man at a cemetery – he doesn’t remember her, but she remembers him – and takes him for coffee and a walk. As the man begins to shed body parts, we learn that the woman needs to return him whole to the cemetery, or their annual meeting won’t happen the following year. The story not only comments on the difficulties of holding a relationship together but also stresses the importance of holding onto memories to keep loved ones alive. 

“Rocking Horse Traffic”, another complicated entry, introduces a first-person narrator whose parents are literally trying to get inside him and extract things. A jarring shift to second-person perspective near the end underscores the violent and bizarre conclusion. It is a riveting story with a strong focus on obedience versus disobedience, and, similar to the cemetery story, this one involves grieving, going in cycles, and the inability to let go. In this instance, the father is constantly trying to fix his son, but it’s an unfixable situation. The son settles on an extreme way to break that cycle. 

An important consideration in his work is the role of the reader and the writer. If you were trying to convince someone that reading is fun, this would not be the go-to book. But there is no rule that says the writer must be obedient to today’s harried reader. Divine in Essence, with its bulky paragraphs and refusal to spoon-feed readers, challenges us to veer from the contemporary obsession with instant gratification. Douglas J. Ogurek

Borderlands and Otherworlds & Sphinxes and Obelisks | review by Rafe McGregor

by Mark Valentine, Tartarus Press, limited edition hardback, £45.00, 17June 2025, ISBN 9781912586684

Sphinxes and Obelisks by Mark Valentine,Tartarus Press, paperback, £17.95, 12 November 2021, ISBN 9798764096322

I’ve been meaning to write a review of one of MarkValentine’s collections of essays for some time now, but when the last one wasreleased, I was right in the middle of my own six-part essay, ‘Weird FictionOld, New, and In-Between’ (which you can find here,if you’re interested). That was less than a year ago and the next one isalready available so I decided I’d better get on with it before I have to admitthat he can write essay collections faster than I can read and review them. Whileordering the recently released Borderlands and Otherworlds, I realisedI’d somehow managed to miss Sphinxes and Obelisks and ordered it inpaperback at the same time. This is review of both volumes.

Valentine is best known as a short story author, aneditor, and an essayist, but is also a biographer and poet. He has beenpublishing short stories and essays for more than four decades, although thesehave only relatively recently been collected in book form (In Violet Veils,in 1999, is – I think – the first) and more recently still (with – again, Ithink – The Collected Connoisseur, in 2010) made more widely availablein paperback. Much, perhaps even most, of Valentine’s output has been publishedby Tartarus Press, a highly successful independent publisher famous for theirlimited edition sewn hardbacks (usually 350 and signed, if publicationis not posthumous) with distinctive yellow dust wrappers and silk ribbonmarkers. If you are a collector as well as a reader, these are well worth theprice at £45, with free postage and packaging in the UK. While I’m on thesubject, Tartarus paperbacks have similar production values, but are probablyoverpriced at £17.95 (their Kindle editions appear to go for between £7 and£9; I prefer paper or audio books so I have no idea whether this isreasonable). Although I enjoyed Valentine’s The Collected Connoisseur,co-authored with his long term collaborator John Howard, a great deal, I havealways preferred his work as an essayist and editor to his short fiction (myreview of The Black Veil and Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths, whichhe edited in 2008, was published in TQF24).

As an essayist, most websites list Valentine asspecialising in book collecting, but his scope is much wider than that andincludes undistinguished, forgotten, and obscure authors from the first half ofthe twentieth century and before, many of whom were writers of speculativefiction. Borderlands and Otherworlds is his sixth collection of essays published by Tartarus, thefirst five of which are all available in paperback: Haunted By Books(2015), A Country Still All Mystery (2017), A Wild Tumultory Library(2019), Sphinxes and Obelisks (2021), and The Thunderstorm Collectors(2024). I’d be exaggerating if I said every essay in every collection is worthreading or that one or more of the collections shouldn’t be missed byspeculative fiction fans, but I don’t regret the time or money spent on any ofthem. Rather than browsing their often diverse and always idiosyncratic tables of contents, I recommend watching thisinterview with Valentine, which gives a very good sense of the man, hisinterests, and even his prose style.

Sphinxes and Obelisks consists of 32essays, 10 of which have been previously published, and a substantiveintroduction. It is worth noting, for both volumes, that the periodicals inwhich the essays previously appeared have often either ceased publishing orwere privately issued, meaning that many readers are, like me, unlikely to haveencountered them before and that they are simply no longer available anywhereelse (both of which makes these collections all the more valuable). A summaryof each essay would not only be tedious to compile, but almost certainly fail to do the collection justice and my intention is to expand Valentine’sreadership, not reduce it, so I shall restrict commentary to those I enjoyedthe most. The one on my shortlist thatwill probably appeal the most widely is ‘The “Wonder Unlimited”: Hope Hodgson’sTales of Captain Gault’ (9 pages). William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) is now recognisedas one of the original pioneers of theweird as a distinct genre within speculative fiction more generally and ispossibly best known for his serial occult detective, Thomas Carnacki (firstcollected in Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder in 1913), though he was alsothe author of The House on the Borderland (1908), The Night Land(1912), and various tales of the sea. Valentine discusses a group of thelatter, which featured the serial character Captain Gault and were some of Hodgson’smost commercially successful work, while reflecting on the curious decline ofthe nautical tale as a genre of its own. For me, the other highlights of thecollection are: ‘“Change Here for the Dark Age”: Edward Shanks’ The Peopleof the Ruins’ (12 pages), about a precursor to Robin Hardy’s The WickerMan (1973); ‘Sombre Gloom: The Macabre Thrillers of Riccardo Stephens’ (8pages), about an early mummy novel; ‘Cricket in Babylon’, about the(surprisingly many) varieties of what I’m going to call armchair cricket (6pages); ‘Three Literary Mysteries of the 1930s’ (6 pages), about three talentedauthors – Robert Stuart Christie, Petronella Elphinstone, and Seton Peacey –for whom almost no biographical information exists; and ‘Passages in the West’(8 pages), an autobiographical account of a book hunting expedition in the WestCountry.

Borderlands and Otherworlds also consistsof 32 essays, 8 of which have been previously published. My favourites are thefirst and last. In the former, ‘Borderlands and Otherworlds: Some SupernaturalFiction of the Early 1920s’ (17 pages), from which the collection takes itstitle, Valentine discusses the uncanny fiction of Edward Frederic (E.F.) Benson(1867-1940), Mary Amelia St Clair (May Sinclair, 1863-1946), Forrest Reid(1875-1947), Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), Lesley Garth (who was probablyLesley West Garth: born in 1900, married to William Ball in 1927, died in1988), and George Oliver Onions (1873-1961). This is Valentine at his mosttypical and at his best, unearthing hidden – or, more accurately, forgotten –treasures. I am assuming, of course, that, like me, most TQF readers will befamiliar with no more than half of these authors (Benson, De la Mare, andOnions in my case, although I have yet to read Benson). The last essay, ‘In theAttic’ (5 pages) is, as the title suggests, an (all-too-brief) rummage throughValentine’s attic, which is full of all the forgotten treasures his regularreaders will expect. My other highlights are: ‘At the House of Magic: MaryButts’ Modernist Novels of the Occult’ (6 pages), about Mary Franeis Butts(1890-1937), a collaborator of Aleister Crowley who was praised by T.S. Eliot; ‘Priestessof the Inner Light: The Magical Novels of Dion Fortune’ (11 pages), about VioletMary Firth (1890-1946), founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light; ‘TheLast, Lost Novel of Phyllis Paul’ (4 pages), about a novelist who retains a cultfollowing in spite of next to nothing being known about her life (1903-1973); and‘The Serpent at Ashford Carbonell’ (3 pages), about a mystery encountered duringa book hunting expedition in the Welsh Marches.

So far, The Thunderstorm Collectors is my firstchoice of the six – I don’t recall a single essay where my attentiondrifted for even a moment – but Borderlands and Otherworlds is a closesecond. Regardless of precise preference, the same can be said of all the volumes: Valentine’sessays are simultaneously fun and fascinating, clever and chimerical, enlighteningand exquisite.

Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost by Chaz Brenchley (NewCon Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

Rowany Angelica Marten de Vere was born on Mars, and although the gravity on her version of Mars isn’t as light as in our universe, she would be considered unusually tall on Earth. She spent seven happy years at a Martian boarding school, the Crater School, which looks like a castle and features in the author’s novel Three Twins at the Crater School and its sequels. Now, at the age of twenty-three, she is ready for her first mission as a member of the Colonial Service. The mission is Mr Leontov, a Russian chap who spent time on Venus – now Russia’s new Siberia – and is now looking for safety in the Red Raj. Rowany has to scoot him away before Russian agents close in.

Once they set off, the book is basically one long chase, that involves ice skating over the frozen Martian canals, visiting a frost fair, eating hot chestnuts, dodging bullets, riding in steam trains, and being chased by an airship. Mars is a dangerous world, even now that about half its inhabitants live in cities, but it has bred tough, watchful, self-reliant people full of frontier spirit. Having said that, I didn’t get much of a sense of Mars as a different planet: the story (complete with urchins) could have taken place in Victorian England with very few changes. Nor did it feel as action-packed as the description above might make it sound: it’s quite a long way into the book before there is a confirmed contact with the enemy.

I certainly didn’t dislike it, but it didn't do much for me, and to be fair it probably isn't supposed to! In tone I think it’s aimed at a younger readership, or perhaps an older readership who grew up on Malory Towers or the Chalet School books, and would get a double kick of nostalgia from reading a slightly old-fashioned science fiction adventure featuring the type of heroine typical of those novels. My favourite element was probably the interactions with the local urchins, and the use of whistling to communicate with them, and the rules they followed. They seemed surprisingly forgiving of Rowany's decision to mislead them, putting them in danger for her own benefit, but perhaps that plants a seed for future stories.

This is the second in the publisher’s 2025 NP Novella series, and at the time of writing Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read it for free, the ebook can be bought for £3.99, and paperbacks and signed and limited edition hardbacks can be bought directly from the publisher. ***

Rollerball | review by Rafe McGregor

Rollerball,by Norman Jewison (20th Century Fox)

 

Another Golden Anniversary.

While Jaws turned fifty with much hype andfanfare last week, including hereat Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, it’s Rollerball’s turntoday, albeit without the bells and whistles. I’m not sure how, but inspite of being both a science fiction and James Caan fan and familiarity withthe premise, I’d never seen the film. I’ve always had a soft spot for Caan’sonscreen persona, an underrated, understated, effortless tough guy tough guy witha very distinctive style (he reminds me of John Wayne, though where Wayne isalways in the Old West no matter what part he’s playing, Caan is in a big citysomewhen in the nineteen seventies). Caan’s performances in all of TheGodfather (1972), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Thief (1981), andMisery (1990) are inspired and Rollerball revolvesentirely around him as Jonathan E(vans), the first and only superstar of theworld’s most dangerous and popular game in 2018 (forty-three years in thefuture).

Rollerball’s screenplaywas written by novelist William Harrison, who developed it from a short storycalled ‘Roller Ball Murder’, which was first published in Esquire in 1973. Theworld of 2018 is a utopia rather than dystopia, a planet of plenty whereeveryone literally has everything they want and nation states have beenreplaced by multi-national corporations that coexist in a state of avariciousharmony following a little-talked about and possibly even erased event known asthe Corporate Wars. The competitiveness essential to unrestrained capitalismis, it seems, channelled into rollerball in an international tournament inwhich teams from various cities clash in a spectacle of bloody and vicariousviolence for the players and audiences respectively. The actual game is acombination of inline speed skating and Basque pelota with a couple of motorbikesthrown in and the rules are changed regularly to make it more brutal. Thetop-ranked team is Houston, courtesy of Jonathan’s skill and resilience, andthe inciting incident occurs when he is told to retire by the chief executiveofficer of the corporation running the game (if not the world), Mr Bartholomew(played by John Houseman), who is revealed as the narrative’s antagonist.

There are a couple of things that strike oneimmediately watching Rollerball fifty yearslater. First, the extent of the explicit critique of global capitalism with thegloves off. The capacity of the Hollywood film industry to make money fromapparently resisting a system of which it is such an integral part never ceasesto amaze me…and has been at work for a lot longer than I thought. Second, the sciencefiction trope of a utopia that turns out to be a dystopia as soon as thesurface is scraped is becoming rather dated. It is much easier, for example, toimagine the worlds of Mad Max (1979), BladeRunner (1982), Strange Days (1995), andChildrenof Men (2006) as or in our future than a land of plenty where we all keep ourselvesbusy with shopping, pill-popping, and rollerball.

Jonathan doesn’t want to retire and one is never sure why. His lavish lifestyle would not change at all, his existentialexploration of the conflict between comfort and freedom is somewhat limited, andhe must be nearing the end of his shelf-life anyway. The only plausibleexplanation is an obsession with the adoration of the bloodthirsty crowds, buteven this isn’t entirely convincing. The conundrum exposes one of the two flawsin the film, which may have accounted for a critical reception that did notmatch its commercial success and has left it with a fair 57% on RottenTomatoes: Jonathan is simply not a particularly sympatheticcharacter. (This is not one of Caan’s best performances.) The second is just asdamaging. Given that the genre of the film is some mix of action, thriller,sports, etc., the representation of rollerball is really poor. The cinematographyand stunts fail to convey the speed and danger of the game, which ends uplooking quite camp with its players modelling their rollerskates, leatherpants, and almost invisible cosmetic scars. I’ve watched ice hockey games on televisionthat look more dangerous and there isn’t a single missing tooth in Rollerball. The filmisn’t terrible, but it’s not great entertainment either.

Talking of ‘terrible’…Rollerball was remade byJohn McTiernan and released in 2002. Coming from the director of Predator (1987), DieHard (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), TheThomas Crown Affair (1999), and Basic (2003), Iwas surprised to see the film’s impressive 3% on theTomatometer. As if that isn’t bad enough, the Los Angeles Times also claimed it was one of the biggest commercial failures of all time. The remake starred ChrisKlein, LL Cool Jay, and Jean Reno, all of whose performances I usually enjoy, butKlein was fresh from his role as a lacrosse player in AmericanPie (1999) and American Pie 2 (2001) sothat might be the first clue to avoid it. I’m glad I watched the firstRollerball, but I won’t be wasting seventy-eight minutes of my life on thesecond.**

Happy Birthday, Bruce: Jaws @ 50! – Rafe McGregor

Fifty years ago today, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws(1975) was released into the wild, into the world, and into the film industryand its golden anniversary is being celebrated globally with much hype andfanfare, including here, at Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (which, as weall know, is possibly the UK’s second longest-running sf/f fiction zine andapproaching its own silver anniversary). I wrote about the film’s impact on me,on Hollywood, and on sharks in the wild (none of which were particularly good)in my reviewof Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg (2018) so I won’t say much about any of thathere. I will say that for all that harm the film may have done, it is in myopinion – and quite literally – almost perfect as a work of cinema and entirelydeserving of its 97% on theTomatometer. If it were up to me, I’d push that to 99%, deducting 1% for Bruce,the mechanical shark named after Spielberg’s lawyer. The problem is that Brucemoves like a wind-up toy (which is essentially what he is) rather than whippingthrough the sea like a fish in…well, water. It turns out I’m not the only oneto have problems with Bruce and Jon Harvey’s recent articlein the Guardian reveals that the decision to show very little of theshark until the end was motivated by practical rather than artisticconsiderations. Let me say one thing in Bruce’s defence (it being hisbirthday): what he lacks in speed and suppleness, he almost makes up inmenace and mass. One more thing about Jaws before I move on to thoughtsabout recent imitations and the Sharksploitation genre more broadly. A few monthsago I read Peter Benchley’s much-maligned 1974 novel, on which thefilm is closely based, for the first time. I thought it was good – very good, actually. Where the film is let down a little by Bruce’s performance, the novelsuffers a little more from Benchley’s inability to write convincing women but isotherwise a compelling and chilling read.

Since reviewing The Meg, I’ve watched ahost of terrible shark movies I haven’t bothered to write about. Lowlightsinclude John Pogue’s Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020), Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2:The Trench (2023), and Andrew Traucki’s The Reef: Stalked (2024), allof which provide ample evidence for the law of diminishing returns in filmfranchises. Meg doesn’t even deserve its 27% on theTomatometer; how The Reef and Deep Blue Sea achieved 71% and 79% respectively iscompletely beyond me. (Perhaps the Tomatometer isn’t as reliable as I thought.)I have yet to see Matthew Holmes’ Fear Below or Sean Byrne’s DangerousAnimals, both of which were released this year and come highly recommended,but both of which raise immediate reservations. Fear Below looks very similar toChristian Sesma’s Into the Deep (2025, 27%), which deservesdishonourable mention with the three franchise films, and Dangerous Animalsis being marketed as ‘shark plus serial killer’ (eye roll). I’ve also watched MartinWilson’s Great White (2021), which can consider its 44% on the Tomatometer generous;Justin Lee’s Maneater (2024), a well-earned 17%; and JoachimHeden’s The Last Breath (2024, AKA Escape from the Deep), with avery generous 30%.Yes, filmmakers keep churning (chumming?) them out and I keep lapping them up. Iblame Jaws. (For both the churning and the lapping).

One thing that has become tiresome over decades ofwatching movies in what is now called the Sharksploitation genre, much more sothan the appalling use of CGI in most, is the way in which they all replicate andreinforce the (hu)man versus nature trope. I’d have hoped that by now,with nature collapsing all around us, this might seem a little too twentieth(or even nineteenth) century to continue to appeal to audiences. This doesn’tjust apply to Sharksploitation, but to many other contemporary films and franchises,such as, for example, Baltasar Kormákur’s Beast (2022) and the JurassicPark (now Jurassic World) media moneymaker. Jurassic World Rebirth,the seventh film, is due next month and will no doubt involve plenty of land,sea, and air lizard mincemeat. Though I won’t be around to witness it, I alsowonder if by the time Jaws’ centenary comes around, the orca won’t havereplaced the shark as our favourite cinematic sea monster. Orcas are muchbigger and much clever than sharks, hunt in pods, and are increasingly encroachingon human-infested waters as ocean temperatures rise. They do look like they’resmiling rather than snarling when they open their (immensely strong) mouths though,which probably doesn’t make a lot of difference if you’re in the water with onebut might make them less likely film fodder. I leave that for the future...in the present, it’s time torevisit the past with (yet) another viewing of what might just be Spielberg’sbest.

Happy Birthday, Bruce: Jaws @ 50!

Fifty years ago today, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws(1975) was released into the wild, into the world, and into the film industryand its golden anniversary is being celebrated globally with much hype andfanfare, including here, at Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (which, as weall know, is possibly the UK’s second longest-running sf/f fiction zine andapproaching its own silver anniversary). I wrote about the film’s impact on me,on Hollywood, and on sharks in the wild (none of which were particularly good)in my reviewof Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg (2018) so I won’t say much about any of thathere. I will say that for all that harm the film may have done, it is in myopinion – and quite literally – almost perfect as a work of cinema and entirelydeserving of its 97% on theTomatometer. If it were up to me, I’d push that to 99%, deducting 1% for Bruce,the mechanical shark named after Spielberg’s lawyer. The problem is that Brucemoves like a wind-up toy (which is essentially what he is) rather than whippingthrough the sea like a fish in…well, water. It turns out I’m not the only oneto have problems with Bruce and Jon Harvey’s recent articlein the Guardian reveals that the decision to show very little of theshark until the end was motivated by practical rather than artisticconsiderations. Let me say one thing in Bruce’s defence (it being hisbirthday): what he lacks in speed and suppleness, he almost makes up inmenace and mass. One more thing about Jaws before I move on to thoughtsabout recent imitations and the Sharksploitation genre more broadly. A few monthsago I read Peter Benchley’s much-maligned 1974 novel, on which thefilm is closely based, for the first time. I thought it was good – very good, actually. Where the film is let down a little by Bruce’s performance, the novelsuffers a little more from Benchley’s inability to write convincing women but isotherwise a compelling and chilling read.

Since reviewing The Meg, I’ve watched ahost of terrible shark movies I haven’t bothered to write about. Lowlightsinclude John Pogue’s Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020), Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2:The Trench (2023), and Andrew Traucki’s The Reef: Stalked (2024), allof which provide ample evidence for the law of diminishing returns in filmfranchises. Meg doesn’t even deserve its 27% on theTomatometer; how The Reef and Deep Blue Sea achieved 71% and 79% respectively iscompletely beyond me. (Perhaps the Tomatometer isn’t as reliable as I thought.)I have yet to see Matthew Holmes’ Fear Below or Sean Byrne’s DangerousAnimals, both of which were released this year and come highly recommended,but both of which raise immediate reservations. Fear Below looks very similar toChristian Sesma’s Into the Deep (2025, 27%), which deservesdishonourable mention with the three franchise films, and Dangerous Animalsis being marketed as ‘shark plus serial killer’ (eye roll). I’ve also watched MartinWilson’s Great White (2021), which can consider its 44% on the Tomatometer generous;Justin Lee’s Maneater (2024), a well-earned 17%; and JoachimHeden’s The Last Breath (2024, AKA Escape from the Deep), with avery generous 30%.Yes, filmmakers keep churning (chumming?) them out and I keep lapping them up. Iblame Jaws. (For both the churning and the lapping).

One thing that has become tiresome over decades ofwatching movies in what is now called the Sharksploitation genre, much more sothan the appalling use of CGI in most, is the way in which they all replicate andreinforce the (hu)man versus nature trope. I’d have hoped that by now,with nature collapsing all around us, this might seem a little too twentieth(or even nineteenth) century to continue to appeal to audiences. This doesn’tjust apply to Sharksploitation, but to many other contemporary films and franchises,such as, for example, Baltasar Kormákur’s Beast (2022) and the JurassicPark (now Jurassic World) media moneymaker. Jurassic World Rebirth,the seventh film, is due next month and will no doubt involve plenty of land,sea, and air lizard mincemeat. Though I won’t be around to witness it, I alsowonder if by the time Jaws’ centenary comes around, the orca won’t havereplaced the shark as our favourite cinematic sea monster. Orcas are muchbigger and much clever than sharks, hunt in pods, and are increasingly encroachingon human-infested waters as ocean temperatures rise. They do look like they’resmiling rather than snarling when they open their (immensely strong) mouths though,which probably doesn’t make a lot of difference if you’re in the water with onebut might make them less likely film fodder. I leave that for the future...in the present, it’s time torevisit the past with (yet) another viewing of what might just be Spielberg’sbest.

Game of Thrones | review by Rafe McGregor

Game of Thrones

HBO, 8 seasons, April 2011-May 2019, £9.99(monthly subscription rate)

 

Fantasy at its finest.

 

I’vebeen wanting to write about HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019) for awhile now, but kept putting off what seemed like a mammoth task. I came to theseries late, somehow insulating myself from all the hype for nearly a decade. ThenCOVID-19 arrived and (like many people, I later learned) it seemed the perfecttime to tackle all 73 episodes (which run to just over 70 hours in total). Iwatched it on my own during the first lockdown, then with my wife, and then wewatched it together again during the second lockdown. I had heard, as one does,that GOT was yet another case of diminishing returns and that fans wereparticularly outraged at the final season. The former accusation is completenonsense and the final season was just as good as the rest and even better thansome. One of the reasons for its poor reception may have been the slightly longerwait (two years instead of one) creating unreasonable expectations. Another isprobably the fact that the television series had overtaken the novels on whichit was based, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (five of sevennovels published from 1996 to 2011, the rest as yet unpublished), and readers weredissatisfied with the direction it had taken. Which is fine…but no one isforcing you to watch the series and personally I sometimes avoid cinematic ortelevisual adaptations if I really love a novel or series of novels. The only justifiedaccusation of anticlimax is that there is a Lord of the Rings-like sensein which the biggest and most desperate battle takes place before the finalbattle, but the final battle is between the protagonists and the antagonist so thenarrative is perfectly in keeping with what we expect (and, indeed, desire) as audiences.To stay with LOTR for a moment, I loved both the films andthe books, but read and watched them as two separate works rather thanexpecting the latter to slavishly imitate the former and I recommend the sameapproach to GOT. (I read Martin’s novels after watching the series and enjoyedthem too, but they are very different.) On the point of giving audiences whatwe desire, two of the great triumphs of GOT are the way in which it bothdeploys and undermines the mythic mode of storytelling (which has been theHollywood norm for the last fifty years) and combines that mode with a richarchitecture of allegorical meaning.

GOT is an incredibly complex narrative with a multiplicity of interwoven plotlines, all of which revolve around the struggle among the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The plotlines involve hundreds of characters, dozens of main characters, eight great noble houses in addition to the pivotal three (Arryn, Baratheon, Bolton, Frey, Greyjoy, Martell, Tyrell, and Tully), and at least eight leading characters. The leading characters are an older generation of three Lannisters (Cersei, Tyrion, and Jamie), a younger generation of four Starks (Jon, Sansa, Arya, and Bran), and Daenerys Targaryen (played by Emilia Clarke). These leads can be distilled to two protagonists and an antagonist, one from each house, as follows: Jon Snow (played by Kit Harrington) from House Stark, Daenerys, and Cersei Lannister (the antagonist, played by Lena Headey). Each of the 73 episodes runs from 50 to 82 minutes and they are distributed across the seasons as follows: 1-10 (Season 1, 2011), 11-20 (Season 2, 2012), 21-30 (Season 3, 2013), 31-40 (Season 4, 2014), 41-50 (Season 5, 2015), 51-60 (Season 6, 2016), 61-67 (Season 7, 2017), and 68-73 (Season 8, 2019). The series also employs the five-act structure popularised by Shakespeare, although the acts do not follow the series exactly. Having watch it four times now, I’d say the overarching narrative goes something like this: exposition (episodes 1-9), complication (episodes 10-29), climax (episodes 30-50), crisis (episodes 51-67), and resolution (episodes 68-73).

In addition to following this structure, the overarching narrative is structured as what the late Fredric Jameson calls a ‘genuine allegory’, which I first mentioned in TQF when reviewing another television series, Amazon Studios’ Carnival Row (2018; there’s a review of the second and final season here). Genuine allegories have four distinct levels of meaning that combine in interesting and sometimes unique ways to provide audiences with especially memorable and meaningful experiences (and are well-suited to the television series because of the length of the form). The literal level of meaning of GOT is revealed in the title, the deadly game played by the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen – as well as the other eight – for the Iron Throne, which bears the weight of many a different noble bottom as the seasons progress. The symbolic level is the Night King (played by first Richard Brake and then Vladimír Furdík), his army, and his winter as transparently representative of climate change. Significantly, the first episode of the series is titled ‘Winter is Coming’ and it is an oft-repeated phrase used by the inhabitants of Westeros to refer to a particularly lengthy cold season that occurs across the continent on an intermittent basis. At the existential level of meaning, GOT appears to establish a fairly simple moral axis, with Cersei almost completely selfish and vicious, Jon almost completely selfless and virtuous, and Daenerys somewhere in between, for the most part well-intentioned but prone to egotism and hubris. Given that Jon has no desire to rule the Seven Kingdoms, the Kingdom of the North, or even the Night’s Watch, it is Daenerys and Cersei’s constructions of subjectivity that drive the overarching plot, in a particular and peculiar play of difference and identity that draws attention to sexual violence, femicide, and systemic sexism. The anthropic level is primarily concerned with the relationships among the three levels of war that threaten to destroy the Seven Kingdoms. The micro level is the internecine conflicts within individual kingdoms or noble houses, such as Stannis Baratheon’s (played by Stephen Dillane) wars against first his brother and then his nephew. The meso level is the conflict among the Lannisters, Starks, and Targaryens and the macro level the war between the living and the dead, between the armies of Westeros and Essos (the continent to the east of Westeros) and the Army of the Dead. This is the only war worth fighting and quite obviously the most momentous, but it is the war that the noble houses are the most reluctant to fight, content to dismiss the Night King as a legend and to believe that the imminent winter is natural rather than supernatural.

GOT is, as my brief summary suggests, an incredibly complex narrative consisting of layer upon layer of plots, meanings, protagonists, characters, and conflicts, all of which are eventually – and masterfully – tied together in a resolution as rewarding as it seems retrospectively inevitable. While the combination of myth and allegory is, as already mentioned, exemplary, my particular fascination with the series is the way in which it succeeds in replicating rather than representing the experience of living through an – or perhaps the – apocalypse. In his long essay, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2022), Mark Fisher discusses one of the few other narrative fictions to achieve the same end: ‘The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.’ As T.S. Eliot wrote before him (influenced by if not explicitly reflecting on the mass destruction of World War I) in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), ‘This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.’ For all the fire and ice in GOT, deadly dragons and unstoppable undead, humanity is petering out slowly, person by person, most by starvation and disease rather than blade or bow. It is, another words, a world very much like our own, where humanity faces existential threats from multi-polar conflicts, artificial intelligence, and climate change that most of us are able to ignore most of the time. I have only had such an experience twice before, with Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, which consists of the novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) (about which I wrote here) and with Alfonso Cuarón’s feature film, Children of Men (2006). Read and watch them all: I guarantee you won’t bedisappointed and you might just find them resonating with you in the same way Idid.****           

The Spectral Link | review by Rafe McGregor

The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti

SubterraneanPress, 94pp, £11.80, June 2014, ISBN 9781596066502

 

Thisreview was first published in November 2014, in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 49,following what I hope will be my longest ever absence from the magazine (athree-year hiatus).

IfThomas Ligotti is not the only contemporarypractitioner of weird fiction, the genre that emerged as an epiphenomenon ofliterary modernism, then he is certainly the most accomplished. This slimvolume comprises a two-page preface and a pair of short stories which, like hisentire oeuvre to date, resist interpretation and exemplify the recondite. Ligotti’sacquaintance with the perennial problems of the disciplines constituting theWestern tradition of philosophy – logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics– is striking and his work exploits the failure of repeated attempts to answer crucialquestions about existence, knowledge, and morality. The suicidal narrator of “MetaphysicaMorum” might be speaking for the author when he registers his ‘scorn for thesaved and their smug sense of how perfectly right things were in the universe’because Ligotti appears convinced that all is not right in the universe and continually revisits the fearful consequencesof this conviction in his strange, singular, uncanny stories. There is a strongimpression, for example, that “Metaphysica Morum” is nothing more than a slow,sustained unravelling of the meaning of the word ‘demoralization’, which is exposedas having implications beyond personal concerns with the terminal.

Despiteits innocuous title “The Small People” is perhaps the more philosophical of thetwo tales, exploring one of the most pervasive questions in metaphysics, thedifference – if any – between things as they really are and things as we perceivethem; or, alternately, the extent to which human concepts reflect the realityof the natural world. Here, the narrator finds disturbing evidence of amismatch and realises that he is one of the few possessed of ‘a type ofinstinct that actually forced me tosee things as they were and not as I was supposed to see them so that I couldget by in life.’  He experiences asystematic disintegration of reality when the ‘small country’ he perceives iscontrasted first with the ‘normal country’ and then the ‘big country’ until theborder between small and big is breached by ‘halfers’. If neither “small” nor“big” map on to the world, do “self” and “other”?  As the narrator penetrates deeper into the mysteryof small and half-small people, he is less and less able to “get by” and runsthe risk of that ultimate undoing…demoralization. Ligotti is a writer of weird tales and these two will not be toeveryone’s taste: their weirdness overflows and unsettles.

 

TheSpectral Link sold out almost immediately on publication and is unfortunatelynow only available at exorbitant prices on the used books market ($99 and £189respectively on Amazon US and UK at the time of writing).

Mr Mercedes | review by Rafe McGregor

MrMercedes by Stephen King

Hodder& Stoughton, 416pp, £20.00, June 2014, ISBN 9781444788624

 

Theaker’sQuarterly Fiction 49, following what I hope will be my longest ever absencefrom the magazine (a three-year hiatus).

 

InJune 1999 Stephen King was run over by a Dodge minivan while on his daily four-milewalk. Three years later, he was still unable to sit down for long periodswithout severe pain and announced his intention to stop writing. Eight yearslater, he wrote that ‘the force of my invention has slowed down a lot’, a tragicadmission for a prolific author whose work has ranged across the horror,science fiction, fantasy, crime, and thriller genres. Mr Mercedes is King’s sixth full-length novel since his accident. Likesome of his best work – Rita Hayworth andShawshank Redemption (1982) and Misery(1987) to name but two – there is no supernatural element at play and thenarrative follows a retired detective’s attempt to catch a spree killer beforehe strikes again. Like Duma Key(2008), the novel is subdivided into very short numbered sections and the eightnamed parts are really chapters, varying from one to forty-three sub-sections each,which (a few excepted) tell the tale from either the protagonist orantagonist’s point of view.

Mr Mercedes does not plumb the existential depthsof Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,nor is it likely to have the popular appeal of The Stand (1978) or TheShining (1977), but it isn’t the work of a writer whose inventive force is flaggingeither. From the dramatic yet restrained opening, in which a grey Mercedesemerges from the fog in as frightening a manner as any mythical monster, to theplausible handling of the various plot twists, there is no evidence that King’screativity is on the wane. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Mr Mercedes is its intra-textuality, King’s explicit and implicit references to worksprevious and forthcoming, with recurring symbols and motifs from his extensive oeuvre.The murder weapon recalls, of course, both Christine(1983) and From a Buick 8 (2002) andthe killer’s disguises as a clown and ice cream vendor, It (1986). The final stage of the story, which places the detectivein an unlikely trio of crime-fighters, is reminiscent of The Dark Tower series (eight books published from 1982 to 2012). Thereare also at least two allusions Revival,King’s next novel, which is due for publication in November. Mr Mercedes is, to some extent, a homageto King’s own work, but with such an illustrious career upon which to draw, thegesture is long overdue rather than self-indulgent.

 

MrMercedes features the first appearance of Holly Gibney, who subsequentlybecame a serial character and is the protagonist of King’s latest novel,Never Flinch, which was published last month.

The Earth No Longer Exists by Ben Fitts (Alien Buddha Press) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Pessimism smothered in absurdity with a dash of hope: short story collection substantiates future bizarro heavyweight

Ben Fitts’s bizarro collection The Earth No Longer Exists is custom-made for the media-weary twenty-first-century reader. The writing is clear, concise, and above all, original. The paragraphs are short. The language is modest. Fitts admirably avoids any writerly pretension, and with each entry not only entertains but also tackles contemporary issues with a jocular pessimism that occasionally leans toward hopefulness. Moreover, despite their simplicity, all his stories leave room for interpretation.  

Although absurdity permeates them, these pieces are not merely weird for weirdness’s sake. Fitts’s characters ¬¬– sometimes foolish, sometimes silly, and often flawed – operate from a viewpoint of misunderstanding. Political leaders think that replacing the world’s dead superheroes with janitors is a smart move. A man decides he’s going to become the world’s third-sexiest matador… so he can get with a woman. An artist born into privilege becomes so obsessed with the idea that a successful artist needs to be destitute that he loses sight of what he’s creating and what art is. In an insightful exploration of empty sexual encounters versus lasting love, a young man discovers something unexpected in the shoebox of his new lover.

“Raspberry Heart,” an indictment against the chauvinism that still permeates corporate America, introduces a raspberry interviewing for a job. The raspberry grows agitated because its would-be employer is focused not on its qualifications but rather on the fact he’s interviewing a raspberry. 

Clearly influenced by COVID and current political conflicts, “On the Back of an Octopus” involves a city on the back of a giant octopus. When a shark supporting another city approaches, the politicians and scientists of Octopolis go into the highest tower and debate an appropriate response. The idea of getting along is, if you’ll pardon the pun, unfathomable to them. Leaders refuse to see somebody else’s perspective… and the public suffers. 

The volume’s only non-bizarro work, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” is strong enough to be in a high-end literary journal. After an antisemitic message is scrawled on her son’s locker, a Jewish mother decides to move her family from the U.S. to Israel. Her teenage son resists, partly because he’s terrified of being forced to fight in the Israeli military. This fear plays out in the role playing and video games the young man plays. The story stirs up emotion on many levels, particularly animosity toward the mother, who steamrolls her son’s concerns. 

Several stories cover romantic relationships – some elicit sadness, while others end on a more positive note. The man who falls in love with “The Cactus” suffers because of their relationship. Perhaps the physical pain the man feels is a stand-in for the emotional pain that comes with bad matches. That’s the negative side. On the positive side, if a spouse sticks beside a spouse no matter how much pain, that shows love. Regardless, the story punctures the reader with one irrefutable message: love is painful.

In “My Winter Lips,” another relationship-based tale, Fitts takes the current fascination with body modification to the next level by skilfully introducing a new world while avoiding expository dialogue. People can, for instance, get jacked arms or replace their fingers with something that looks like snakes. Unlike many of his peers, the first-person narrator goes to the “parts store” merely to replace his chapped lips with another pair of normal lips. The employee reveals the store is out of human lips, and what transpires is a humorous conversation and a resolution the narrator does not anticipate. The new lips aren’t just lips — they symbolize how openness to new ideas and personal change can allow one to see others in a more positive light. 

The treasures in The Earth No Longer Exists confirm an emerging author’s potential to rise as a leading voice in the bizarro subgenre. Fitts’s stories grasp the reader and refuse to let go; he knows how long each entry needs to be before it starts losing its potency, and he never gets preachy or pontificates. Douglas J. Ogurek*****