Thompson, Ultrameta (2009)

Douglas Thompson, Ultrameta. Eibonvale Press, 2009. Pp. 336. ISBN 9780956214713. £10.75.

Reviewed by Hugh Cayless

Ultrameta is hard to categorize. Part scifi, part detective story, part extended meditation on the human condition and the modern world. Its “hero” is Alexander Stark, a University professor, who goes missing, apparently amnesiac, and reappears after a decade, then kills himself. Or he and his wife, Charlotte, may have died in a car crash, and the novel’s entire setting may be fiction written by Stark. Or (again) they may both have flitted off to another plane of existence. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the hero is a consciousness that has existed throughout history. This consciousness was somehow tapped into by Stark, now (apparently) dead, and he wrote about his experiences from its point of view, moving from subject to subject, leaving that subject when he or she commits suicide and awakening the next day in a new body, often unaware of its history or what to do next. It/he/she is guided and aided by a mysterious group of “Keepers” who provide clothing, instructions, etc..

The book is structured as a series of short vignettes, which vary in coherence from straightforward narrative to poetic stream-of-consciousness. The many vignettes form a multifaceted view into this fragmented world consciousness, which some perceive more clearly than others. They are interspersed with scenes of the investigation into Stark’s disappearance by a detective inspector, Walter Dundas, and a reporter, Martha Lucy, as they find connections between Stark’s stories and events in the real world. As an example of how the book turns in on itself, these inserts were found on Stark’s body after his suicide. So he has been telling their story as much as they have been reading into his.

The tone of the book is melancholic. Decay and alienation are constant themes. Humans and the structures they build decaying together and becoming one is recurring trope. Terrorism (especially 9/11), imagined as a confrontation between ancient and modern worldviews, casts its shadow as well, as do class and inequality.

Ultrameta wears its classical influences on its sleeve: stories include settings like Roman Britain and Greek myth; the organization recalls Dante’s inferno, even with Vergil-like guides on the journey; chapter names are often Latin or Greek(ish) words. It also buys into the Ancient Greek notion (found in Hesiod, for example), that humankind is in decline from an ancient ideal (in which this collective (un)conscious was known and understood). This decline has evidently been going on for a long time—we get an extensive lecture from a Druid to a Roman centurion on the subject in one story. It doesn’t always get things quite right when it strays into ancient stuff: the plural of necropolis is necropoleis, not necropoli; Antonine is an adjective meaning “of Antoninus”, so Antonine’s wall is wrong; similarly, miles, not milite, and Picti, not Pictii.

The book is many-layered and challenging. Sometimes too clever for its own good. For example, I found the stories that imagine an ancient mind confronting the modern world rather unconvincing (too much of a modern consciousness projecting itself outside and looking back), and the shifting focus tends to bog the reader down a little. Lots of it hangs together well, though, and it’s fun to go back from the finish and re-read, seeing connections where they weren’t apparent before. On the whole, the book is an interesting, if not always successful experiment.

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Butler (ed.) Triangulation: Dark Glass (2009)

Pete Butler (ed.), Triangulation: Dark Glass. PARSEC Ink, 2009. Pp. 156. ISBN 9780578031033. $12.00 h/c; $1.99 PDF.

Reviewed by Louisa Thompson

Triangulation: Dark Glass is PARSEC Ink’s latest anthology of short speculative fiction based around the collective theme of ‘dark glass’. This core theme is loose enough to allow a broad range of style and ability but tight enough to ensure a cohesive body of work within sixteen distinct tales. The collection’s front cover artwork by Vincent Chong is well-suited to the subject matter and the inner pages are pleasingly printed with an absolute minimum of errors.

However, things don’t start well. Please don’t go thinking I didn’t try, because I did—three times over—but our opening story, ‘The Milton Feinhoff Problem’, utterly baffles me. The back of the book picks out this Milton business as a highlight, but the disappointing reality is a few pages of oddly arch facts about a multiplying man called Milton Feinhoff. And why should I care about Milton Feinhoff? I know nothing about him except his preferred pizza toppings. We never find out why new Miltons appear or why they eventually die out, and we most certainly never get a reason to care. As a reader I need more than the facts to give me that emotional connection with a short story. I need a visceral, immediate hook on which to hang an idea if it’s to be recognised by my own frame of reference. The words in front of me have to become my story, with my cast and my horizon otherwise they’re nothing more than the prose version of someone else’s dream; enormously important to them but pointless to anyone else. This tale reads like a synopsis of the story we never see. The facts are all in place but the intrigue and the heart are missing. It’s a nice idea and one worth exploring but unless I’ve entirely missed the point this is a dig still waiting to be excavated. Forster urges us to ‘always connect’, and I agree. Please help us. Let us in.

Miltons aside now. Let’s move on to happier thoughts. ‘Saint Darwin’s Spirituals’ is a fascinating gallop through a ghostly London of corsets and cobblestones shrouded in spectral shadows. Here, in stark contrast to the blank presentation of Milton Feinhoff, love and pain hide in every shadow. D K Thompson’s ‘ghostgasms’ (“all the pleasures of intimacy without the messy clean-up”) are a tremendous concept full of phantasmal potential surrounded by a provocative cast of unusual characters. His writing flows with an easy confidence that inspires trust in the story and the rich descriptions draw the reader straight into the heart of things, keeping us locked and sharing Lucy’s agonizing search for lost love until the last line. ‘Saint Darwin’s Spirituals’ has the mark of a great tale: and leaving it behind was a wrench.

The wrench feels even keener as I launch into ‘Imaginal Friend’. This is a perfectly fine, if slightly insipid SF tale of humans trying to solve clues of vengeance and battle left behind by a long-extinct alien race. It gets a ‘could do better’ for its blinkered, us-against-the-aliens focus, so please beware of the following spoiler of sorts. There’s a pantomime quality surrounding the plot, rather to the exclusion of all other literary possibilities. We’re carefully led by the hand through every page to ensure we don’t miss the supposed dénouement, but have been shouting ‘HE’S the alien! It’s behind you!’ for so many pages that Chiacchia’s final taa-daa is nothing but a whimper. This makes for gently absorbing reading but I fear you’ll finish the last page sitting exactly where you were when you began. The journey is slight, the emotional impact imperceptible.

I offer this same criticism of ‘Souls on Display’, which tells of fake souls being forged out of glass to replace those broken by careless owners or, in this case, rowdy road-hockey kids. Perhaps I’m too cold and jaded to appreciate the subtlety of the sentiment but I was struggling to suspend my disbelief for Kurt Kirchmeier’s story. Too many questions were clouding my enjoyment. When does this physical manifestation of someone’s soul appear? Is it full-size at birth which raises other, more biological issues, or is a baby born holding a tiny speck of glass? I didn’t sense much ‘story’ behind the words, except the mental image of a writer sucking on the end of a pen and thinking to himself ‘what if our souls existed for all to see?’—which is a great idea. But this story reads like the first attempt to answer that pondering thought rather than a literary pleasure honed and worked for a reader’s mind to tumble over.

However, David Seigler’s ‘One Touch To Remember’ very clearly meets the collection’s brief. Jennifer finds a gallery where Roy is storing memories of powerful emotions behind dark glass and proclaiming it as art of a sensory nature. “Sight is the crudest of the senses. I deal in emotion.” But Roy’s own memories are soon to make a devastating reappearance. This is polished fiction with everything in its proper place—full background check on our main characters, a clearly defined arc in the plot—but the polish has slightly rubbed off any sheen of freshness or sharp surprise. The story is strong and colourful but somehow not the absorbing barn-burner it could have been with a few more risks taken.

‘Audition For Evil’ is a unique and thought-provoking tableau, well-constructed and satisfying in its pace. The darkness is again within the mirrored glass but also reflected in the wickedness of its mistress. And ‘Broken Things’ is one of those stories that makes me glad this collection found me. Ellen is trying to save her dead mother’s genie, Vimm, from the horrors of impending mortality after accidentally smashing his bottle. Dark glass indeed. The story is warm and honest and occasionally heart-breaking with a rare (and welcome) focus on the subtleties of a mother/daughter relationship. It brings human fears into play and touches delicately on pain, loneliness and the complexities of grief without too much lazy drear. The ending is touching and unexpected to the point of chills.

Triangulation: Dark Glass is a nicely paced adventure with lesser works sitting patiently amongst some true beauties. Others worthy of mention here include the scorching, soul-searching of ‘Deadglass’, and ‘On The Path’s soul-powered plow fraught with ancestral angst and moral dilemma. But the collection saves its finest two for last. The anthology’s penultimate adventure finds the sorcerer DuHarren unhappily passing the cursed moniker of Devil’s Disciple down the line in Loretta Sylvestre’s ‘A More Beautiful Monster’. This full, lush tale reaches maximum thrill in a matter of paragraphs, its potent language of blood, sweetness and fear exposing the duality of a priest and the razor-sharp line between the seductive longings of good and evil. Sylvestre writes through the darkness with a quiet grace and a careful touch, never letting this moving tale flop into the cliches of fiery damnation and screaming vicars.

‘Seeing Is’ renders a polaroid snapshot of hot summer childhood with precision and poetry as our final story. The imaginative detail is superb and confidently veers off-plot far enough to offer those little extras that make it truly sing. Our hero, Jody, is the sort of kid who scratches his initials in wet cement with a twig. He’s a kid we understand, even if he’s also a kid who finds a talking eye in the pavement. Craig Wolf’s writing has strong SF credentials but hasn’t forgotten what makes a human heart beat faster. He follows an untrodden path to illuminate some well-worn truths about those difficult tricklings of adult consciousness into childish naivety. Those awful moments when the grown-ups first reveal themselves to be fallible—and decisions must be faced as to whether you choose to accept and see or push it all away and remain in the blind bubble of childish simplicity. Jody makes his own choice and it’s not without pain.

This is a nicely balanced, thoughtful collection of short stories presenting an intriguingly varied translation of the ‘dark glass’ theme. The diversity of these interpretations adds a layer of interest above and beyond the sixteen actual plots and I found myself occasionally contemplating the nature of individuality and personal discrimination. Triangulation’s contributor guidelines for entry called for ‘entertaining and literate stories’, and these winning picks have, on the whole, met the brief brilliantly.

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Harvey, Winter Song (2009)

Colin Harvey, Winter Song. Angry Robot Books, 2009. Pp. 409. ISBN 9780007321018. $10.20 / €5.80.

Reviewed by Djibril al-Ayad

Colin Harvey's Winter Song is one of the first books to appear in the new genre imprint from HarperCollins, the promising-looking Angry Robot Books, promotional copies of which have been circulated by the BSFA and elsewhere. The story is both a hard science fiction adventure with cultural details that should please historical fiction enthusiasts, and a study of convincing and sympathetic, while complex and sometimes infuriating human characters, in all their tragic and comic aspects, their familiarity and their alienness. The world-building is proficient, detailed and explicit, as the ice planet Isheimur batters the cast of characters with an impressive array of dangers. But behind this is the more subtle Universe-building, with details hinted at and a whole never quite glimpsed, while characters are the products of their environment, and can be seen to grow and as they adapt to their settings.

The narration shifts abruptly from character to character in the early stages of the book, with a close focus third-person voice for each of the three protagonists, plus a disorienting second-person narration for the most autistic and solipsistic character. With no omniscient narrator to give the book its moral compass, this is a subtle and intelligent novel full of social observation and characterization. We see from close-up the functioning of a "degenerated" society, the repression, especially of women, in a hierarchical and patriarchal culture; the women are indeed repressed by their social positions, not only by the men around them, and the men are no more free to chose their own fates (although they are, inevitably, less constrained and brutalized). Harvey's novel does a good job of undermining the romance and idealization of Viking culture, while simultaneously showing a certain admiration for the Germanic warrior's code of honour. It is to his credit that he explores these repressive, primitive, conservative and reactionary cultural features without using Muslim imagery as so many science fiction writers today seem to.

Karl is the pilot and solo crew-member of a sentient spaceship that is attacked by radical Traditionals while on a long-haul journey through an apparently unsettled system. He ejects just before his ship is destroyed, and falls into the atmosphere of the winter planet Isheimur with only his healing nanophytes and micrometre-thick lifegel to protect him. Crash-landing on the icy surface of the world he is terribly injured and mentally scarred by the ordeal. Karl is rescued by Ragnar, the tyrant and respected gothi of a wealthy but desperate farmstead on the surface of this isolated planet, who saves the mysterious spaceman's life but demands a dire debt of service in return for his hospitality. The raving and schizoid off-worlder is nursed back to health by the tragic Bera, a grieving, shamed and bullied young woman who is being punished by her adoptive family for having—and losing—a child out of wedlock.

The icy planet Isheimur, which orbits a binary star and is in a period of almost perpetual winter and thin atmosphere, is populated by inedible beasts, monsters named after figures from Icelandic mythology, and devolved humanoid "trolls". This freezing world—I wonder if the horror of its description would have been as intense had I not read it during one of the coldest Januaries for many years—is the setting for a story in three acts. In the first part, beautifully observed and written, we see life on the struggling farmstead under a tyrannical gothi, with a varied cast of characters and a sometimes claustrophobic atmosphere. The second part is a journey across the wilderness, a thrilling adventure, pursued by Norsemen and facing dangers every step, the protagonists learning the limits of their human (even enhanced human) abilities. The third part—in my view the weakest, with perhaps the most contrived plot-twists and morally problematic decisions—is a space journey on a doomed ship.

Winter Song is a very competent book by an author with several novels to his name already. It is nicely packaged by Angry Robot Books, with an unmistakably scifi but not tasteless cover, and generally good production quality. (There are a few avoidable mistakes in the text, such as a couple of partially edited sentences, with what seem to be rewritten clauses with the original accidentally not deleted, and trivial inconsistencies such as the statement that when they first left the farm the fugitives travelled "a hundred kilometers per day" but later only half that, and a few pages later, that they had started out covering "over fifty kilometers a day" but later only half that. On the whole proofreading and editing are excellent.) That the characters, social interactions and cultures are so nicely constructed and observed is no detraction from this novel's claim to be a hard science fiction adventure, and it is the stronger book for it.

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Whates, The Gift of Joy (2009)

Ian Whates, The Gift of Joy. NewCon Press, 2009. Pp. 254. ISBN 9781907069017. £9.99.

Reviewed by Terry Grimwood

Joy is the best word to describe The Gift of Joy, a collection of mostly (but not only) science fiction stories from Ian Whates, because that is what comes across from start to finish, a sense of sheer enjoyment, a feeling that writing is nothing but pleasure. Here is someone, you think, who loves writing. Even its striking Vincent Chong cover crackles with energy, there is light and dazzle, technology and menace, a perfect representation of what is inside.

Take the opener, and title story, for example. Here we have the ultimate gigolo, the consummate tribute act, someone who can literally turn themselves into their client’s fantasy. Then there is the breathless, not-a-word-wasted, time-running-out thriller ‘The Final Hour’ in which there are only 60 minutes to save the universe. War, the real meaning of heroism and its consequences are examined in ‘The Battle for Paradise’, which is a vivid, visceral epic in which men fight and die but for a cause, which like all causes, is seldom really one that is worth such a monstrous loss of life. ‘Flesh and Metal’ is yet another fast and furious thriller, man on a mission verses killing machine, cross and double-cross, threat on every side, who do you trust? Another loner manoeuvres his way through deceit and danger in ‘One Night in London’, an enjoyable and imaginative package-to-be-delivered yarn.

On a more thoughtful note there is ‘Fear of Fog’ which is a tricky, elusive tale about a couple caught out in a fog that reeks of malevolence and oncoming menace. The woman seems to know what is going to happen, and there are other things that seem wrong, atmospheric this one. Another slower and darker piece is ‘Ghosts in the Machine’, the haunters of the foul and shadowed underground of the city; lost souls or something more vital?

For light relief there is ‘Glitch in the System’, set in a village battered by a stream of lorries taking a short cut through the lanes, and ‘Hint of Mystery’ set in the competitive world of Asian food.

Tel’s Favourite is ‘The Sum of the Past’, once again an examination of identity, of why we are what we are, told by a space hero who is, or perhaps isn’t such a hero after all. A clever story laced with subtlety beneath its portrayal of the brash and bold.

There is more, a lot more, each one filled with that same energy and vitality that sets this collection apart from so many I have read. It is not completely devoid of cynicism, yet even the darker stories hold some element of the upbeat. Is it the style of writing, the pace, it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what it is, but nothing in here left me beaten and bruised and in need of fresh air.

This joy is not shallow however. Okay there are out-and-out adventure stories, but there are difficult questions asked, examinations of the human condition carried out in the extreme laboratories of fantastical fiction. There is mood and shade among the bright colours. ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ for example is a powerful allegory of rich and poor, of the privileged, blind to the grinding, oil-covered machinery that maintains their bright and smooth running world. There is consideration of the true nature of heroism, of the indescribably waste of life wrought by war. Political folly and national ambitions are dissected in ‘The Laughter of Ghosts’.

The book is not without blemish of course. For me, the weakest link is ‘It’s About Time!’, a chronological romp inspired by the time travel tales of Isaac Asimov. I just don’t like this type of story and, sadly, this one did nothing to change my mind. Also a lot of the stories are set in the type of dark, deadly and noirish underbelly of the futuristic city which readers find themselves visiting more and more in the pages of the SF story. That said, however, Whates does zap those much-used places with a much-needed lick of fresh paint and so can be forgiven for leading us into such familiar dens and dives yet again. The short afterward to each story was, I think, unnecessary. For me the stories were very strong and able to stand up without explanation as to their origins and also these potted autobiographies brought me back to earth too quickly, I wanted to carry on believing that I had been to a real Universe of Wonder for just a little longer.

Ian Whates’ writing is smooth and immensely readable. There is no pretentiousness, words are well chosen and the narrative straight to the point, but at the same time able to connect the reader emotionally to the cast of these stories and that, along with an electric imagination is his strong point, is what keeps the pages turning and the bedside lamp glowing far beyond its normal switch-off time.

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Fry, Mindful of Phantoms (2009)

Gary Fry, Mindful of Phantoms. Gray Friar Press, 2009. Pp. 276. ISBN 9781906331078. $26.00 / £14.99.

Reviewed by Terry Grimwood

Supernatural fiction tends to be gathered together into a general, rather messy pile made up of vampires, monsters, blood-stained fang and claw, crazed, demon-possessed killers etc. In some bookshops it is even dumped into the same out-of-the-way dark corner as science fiction and fantasy. Okay, there are overlaps, and long may they lap over, but for me the ghost story is a separate entity, a sub-genre replete with its own mores and tropes. The ghost story is rooted deeply in human emotion. Ghosts themselves often wander the earth because of unfinished business, unresolved love, justice to be done. Ghosts are seldom demon-possessed killers or in need of flesh, blood and souls to feed on. Ghosts are that part of us that cannot be fed or touched, our souls I suppose, the intensely emotional part of our makeup that has somehow survived and needs to fulfil one final purpose before rest can be found.

Gary Fry’s Mindful of Phantoms fits this definition perfectly. Here you will find the lingering and often dangerous remains of human emotion made manifest and explored classically through the medium (no pun intended but it is a neat one don’t you think?) of the ghost story. Fry himself is an author who fascinates me. I often feel that there is a lot more going on in his work than meets the eye, that there are layers to be peeled away before the real text can be laid bare. It is in the ghost story, therefore, that Fry’s explorations of the human condition find a good home.

So, to the book itself. Mindful of Phantoms, a clever title, another neat pun. The cover art, suitably dark and unsettling, is the work of the author himself. The edition I read, a handy sized and pleasant-to-handle hardback.

There are 18 stories in all, none of them overstays its welcome but all are long enough to fully develop character and theme. These characters are realistic, people you could meet on your way through life, builders, teachers, newlyweds, the old and the young. They live in this world, in houses like ours, in streets like ours. And, importantly, their motives and pressures, their emotional souls are like ours. What they want are the normal, the mundane and necessary things that make life work. Indeed, it is these everyday needs and desires that form the foundation on which the supernatural element is built, giving the stories three solid dimensions and delivering a hefty emotional jolt to the reader. None of the of the protagonists are tiresome ghost hunters or mindless gun-carriers and, importantly, none of them are the standard angry, alienated small press loner-loser. Something I found refreshing about the collection because more and more I want to grab Mr Small Press Hero, tell him to pull himself together, get a job and make up with his long-suffering girlfriend.

The opener, ‘School of Fought’ sets the tone nicely. Acted out in a private boarding school it has all the elements of the classic ghost story, an old building, a dark secret seldom spoken about but buried in the shallowest of graves and justice still to be done. It also reveals an M R Jamesian ambiguity that permeates most of these tales and one that, for the most part, works well because the glimpsed, the imagined monster is always more frightening than the full-on horror.

‘Black Dogs’ takes us into more subtle ground where the ghosts may be real, or they may be imagined. Whichever they are, they are certainly no less unsettling. Yes, it is a tale of shadows and lurking menace but it is also an examination of family politics, of father-and-son love and this is what gives it its strength. ‘The Tree House’, ostensibly a tale of possession, also considers family tension as seen through the eyes of a young boy who is given the gift of a tree house by a shadowy benefactor. In ‘On the Wings’ a young lad struggles for acceptance in that most terrifying of all jungles, the school playground. He chooses his friends badly, and his own talents and strengths suffer as a result, he finds cruelty coiled in himself, and all the while something dark and monstrous is circling about him. A real monster, or a manifestation of his own guilt and frustration? Or both? Again, questions and no comfortable answers, one of the great strengths of this book.

Among the longer stories is ‘Unfriendly Fire’ which features an aging and recently widowed academic who is seeking some peace by the sea. He is an affable character, and, in the end, an unlikely detective, because a chance encounter leads him into yet another of Fry’s simple-yet-complex mysteries. It represents the slightly lighter side of the collection, a side that includes ‘The Price to Pay’, the tale of an unpleasant Estate Agent who finds more to a property than its prime location and suitability for the DIY enthusiast. A gang of builders take centre stage for another entertaining slice of darkness in ‘Figure of Fun’. Having spent the first twenty years of my own working life on building sites I found this bunch realistic and engaging, and the ghost/spirit/evil force original and truly menacing.

I have a pair of favourites; I know normally I go for one but I can’t decide between the two. The first is ‘Man’s Best Friend’ in which a woman who has fled from an abusive relationship discovers that escape is not as easy as she would have liked to believe. There is a tightness to this story and, again, that out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye M R James ambiguity, which heightens the sense of dread and arouses the got-to-finish-this curiosity of the reader.

‘Index of an Enigma’ is the other Tel’s Favourite. The tension between husband and wife, suspicion, self-pity and a vivid I've-been-there descriptions of the dreaded professional conference gives this tale its edge. I was quickly connected to the protagonist, and, even though I didn’t like him, was along for the ride and not willing to get off until I’d seen it through.

On the down-side, some of the prose was a little clumsy and clunky, but this was a small price to pay for the journey. When he is flying, Fry’s style is individual and interesting. He is able to engage the emotion, he takes you with him and there is enough unpredictability to keep you once he has you. Also, there is a tendency for the ghosts (real or imagined) to be glimpsed in a similar way, a face at a window or a figure lurking among the trees and so on. I know this is gives a phantom its menace, its shivery, half-seen fearfulness, but I would have liked a little variety in the manifestation department.

Having said that, it in no way detracts from the excellence of this book. Mindful of Phantoms does what a collection of ghost stories should do. It removes the soul, the glowing, indefinable part of ourselves we call our emotions, our needs, and gives it form. It is sadness and loss and danger. It is uncertainty.

It is good.

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2012, dir. Emmerich (2009)

2012, dir. Roland Emmerich, Columbia Pictures. Starring John Cusack, Amanda Peek, Chiwetel Ejiofor (2009).

Reviewed by The Exploding Boy

2012 is directed by Roland Emmerich, the same guy who brought us Stargate, Godzilla, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. All monumentally successful movies, bringing high-tech effects and epic storylines to the silver screen—but nothing that compares to the monstrous overkill that is 2012, a movie that has already cleaned up at the US box office. Internationally, reviews have ranged from mixed to negative.

Grimwood, Exaggerated Man (2008)

Terry Grimwood, The Exaggerated Man and other stories. Exaggerated Press, 2008. Pp. 237. 9780955852206. £6.95 / $12.61.

Reviewed by Louisa Thomson

Terry Grimwood’s self-published, powerful collection of nineteen short stories (all previously published elsewhere) blazes with confidence. Guilt, retribution, sex and money are all magnified under Grimwood’s lens and evil—both ancient and new—glints in his darkness. A wallet holds the key to our soul’s secrets, a pastor’s journey to heaven becomes the gory reality of life after death and a nightmarish ruling, mired in political correctness finds Death Doctors stealing bodies from the LiveScum so the immortal dead can feast on the vulnerable living. These are dystopian predictions and cautionary tales of moral and social ineptitude where technological advancements have forgotten the innate instincts of human nature and money has become a currency of greed and fear rather than pounds, shillings and pence.

A thread of perceived weakness links Grimwood’s main cast; often unable to speak their truth before it’s too late, incapable of stepping up to their responsibilities honestly, and powerless to resist the women of their downfall. But they provide strong foils for the underlying messages even if they themselves don’t always feel sustainable as stand-alone characters. The language is taut, generally well-edited and captures a variety of colloquial accent—from New Yawk drawl (in ‘The Friends of Mike Santini’) to the extraordinary half Dickens, half Alex DeLarge diction of London’s Bull Poor in ‘Nobody Walks In London’.

‘Breathe’ is a gem of a tale, calling to mind shades of Zamyatin’s We. The relentless march of progress over nature is removing all human biological functions and prostitutes are earning their crust by breathing into artificially modified clients. Social divide is represented by the choice to be a Breather (to live the old-fashioned way, sucking oxygen into human lungs) or a FullPerson (artificially respiring)—and the choice presented to Marko Denna is blurred by love, pressure and instinct. I defy anyone to read ‘Breathe’ and not find themselves dragging in delicious gulps of lovely, polluted air with a secret pang of relief. But oh, I wanted a novel of this, not a short story! There’s so much juice to unearth, so many interesting layers to investigate.

And beauty shines out of the titular story, ‘The Exaggerated Man’ (although I don’t want to tell you about it, I want you to read it for yourself). Something in the easy flow of Grimwood’s language, the clarity of his descriptions and the strong emotional tug suggest a vision closer to the author than fiction. I kept wondering what it could have been… a dream, or maybe shades of a private truth? This and ‘The Lowestoft Monster’ are two stories that, despite the pain of their subjects, truly stir the heart. ‘The Lowestoft Monster’ infers an ambiguous evil of our own choosing, never defined beyond recollections of words and moments and thus inflated to even more terrifying proportions when you realize the narrator himself is too scared to directly verbalize the image. We’re left to draw our conclusions, thus ensuring we’ll employ our own, individual perception of horror to fill the shoes of the dreaded Uncle Sidney with his seemingly innocuous stance and words.

Sadly, a couple of the shorter pieces failed to catch my imagination with the same force of ‘Breathe’. In contrast to the depth and texture elsewhere, ‘Dirty Stop-Out’ reads as no more than a wisp of an idea based on a punchline. I was left similarly cold by ‘Freedom’.

The disparate locations in both time and place across the breadth of the collection should feel unsettling but are saved by the consistency of Grimwood’s themes. Greed, suffocation and loss provide a strong heart beat. Suffocation comes in the form of mounting debts, social pressure and the more literal inability to breathe naturally. Men are confronting the systems that control them but losing out every time to the monster wielding ultimate power. These monsters are often lurking on the breeze or far off in dark shadows. They’re hiding beneath a veneer of public respectability or perhaps in the minds of their victim.

While I never tired of the book I would suggest a careful approach. Grimwood chivvies us from Mars to London, the seaside and back like a demented sight-seeing bus behind schedule. Such pulls are occasionally jarring—mental leaping requires a flexible imagination—so these are stories to be taken as individual treats. Lose yourself in the torment of the youth-slaughtering flu in ‘Coffin Road’ or the horrific bargain on offer in ‘Atoner’, but then step away, enjoy the lingering sensation for as long as your imagination will sustain the trip, then dive back in for a totally different experience.

My enjoyment of The Exaggerated Man and Other Stories urges me to leave the review at that—enjoyment. But Terry Grimwood doesn’t write stories without a sting in the tail so I must also be tempered by my less-pleasing thoughts...

Grimwood’s boundless imagination paints future worlds with prescient, disturbing skill but the most disturbing element is his inability to see women as much more than sirens, whores or weaklings. And this lazy gender stereotyping of the SF audience is as out of date as the ‘geeky’ perception of the genre as a whole.

The representation of women within this collection reveals an embarrassingly simplistic view of the roles of the sexes. Prostitutes are girls, winos are men. Men fall for foxy young mistresses with husky voices and beer-drinking ways while their dry, sneering wives read dull novels, and keep the house too clean. Women need trinkets to make them happy and men have to provide, even if that means selling their souls in the bargain.

In ‘The Exaggerated Man’, having touched death, Atwood begins to see life in horrifying, exaggerated detail. But it’s the women he encounters that become the most grotesque: ‘She was...dirty. Scraps of make-up clung to her face, her pores leaked fluids, her flesh was ingrained with muck of all kinds. She stank of sweat, semen, of other juices and excretions.’

Then it’s Avril’s intoxicating lure that leads Paul Wilde into trouble with the tough and demonic Mike Santini. In ‘Coffin Dream’ it’s Sarah’s breakdown that drags Tony into his life-threatening debts. In ‘Breathe’, Marko Denna endures the effects of surgical reformation to appease his nagging, violent wife, Karryann. In ‘John’, Cathy can’t resist the charms of her now-dead husband despite his violent and abusive history. In fact, she’s so weak-willed, even the realization that he’s become the devil isn’t enough: ‘She felt her selfsame pussy grow warm, despite the numbing shock. Despite disappointment which bordered on despair.’

Fat women are outcasts (Melissa) or cackling clowns (Diana), wives nag their long-suffering husbands, and beauty wreaks hellish, murderous havoc when a woman’s jealousy comes to town. Bosses’ daughters can be handy tickets to promotion and, in the rare case of being a ‘very powerful Erasman lady’ this lady in question is represented by the black mass of an enormous, hideous spider living for nothing but to breed and kill.

This veiled misogyny didn’t stop me enjoying the book but I certainly felt a tinge of detachment. It’s hard to engage when you’re clearly not the chosen audience—and that’s a shame. I’m not looking for a PC whitewash—just a writer as willing to flex his muscles against stereotypes as he is against the laws of earthly physics.

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Denyer, The Edge of the Country (2009)

Trevor Denyer, The Edge of the Country and Other Stories. Immediate Direction Publications, 2009. Pp. 112. £5.40/$10.15.

Reviewed by Terry Grimwood

The small press world owes a great deal to Trevor Denyer. Though starting off as a writer of some note back in the 1990s, he is better known these days as a magazine publisher, first with Roadworks in the latter years of the last century, then Legend and finally the much acclaimed Midnight Street. All are of the highest quality and placing a story in the pages of a Trevor Denyer magazine brings its fair share of kudos to any small press writer. Because of this, it has been easy to forget that initial chapter of Denyer’s career. As a result, his first, and long overdue, collection, The Edge of the Country, is a very welcome reminder of his talent as an author in his own right. The title of Allen Ashley’s introduction says it all: 'About Time Too'.

Harvey, Convent of the Pure (2009)

Sarah M. Harvey, The Convent of the Pure. Lexington: Apex Publishing, 2009. Pp. 138. ISBN 9780981639093. $13.95.

Reviewed by PostMorbid

Girl with big cleavage, burning stake to be fired from a crossbow, naked woman half-covered in runes, magic flowing from her hands. Every fantasy geek's dreams seem to be embodied in the cheesecake cover of Sarah Harvey's The Convent of the Pure. Let's have a look inside this 'steampunk novella.'

The main character of the book, Portia Gyony, is a lesbian demon hunter, supported by the ghost of her dead lover Imogen. Both are Nephilim, descendants of angels, raised by a secret group of watchers who through the ages have fought off evil spirits. Just think a crossover of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Nephilim fantasy roleplaying game and a hint of steampunk.

Gardner, The Sour Aftertaste of Olive Lemon (2009)

Catherine J Gardner, The Sour Aftertaste of Olive Lemon. Bucket O’ Guts Press, 2009. Pp. 23. $6.00 US/$7.50 International.

Reviewed by Steven Pirie

This is the ‘first chapbook’ from the wonderfully named Bucket O’ Guts press; a short tale at twenty-three pages start to finish, Gardner's tale is the perfect length to while away a short commute or pass a lunch break. Folded and stapled, it’s unashamed in claiming to be ‘Designed and Printed in a Garage Somewhere in the USA.’ And why shouldn’t it be? The cover artwork by Stephen Blundell is as good as any, and the print within decently sized and legible. I’ve seen supposedly professionally produced works that don’t look half as good.

The publisher’s website states: “We want fiction that cannot be classified or pigeonholed. The only contingency is that your story must leave us all scratching our heads.” So, not being a fan of “bizarro” fiction, which is what I assumed the publishers are hinting at above, I wondered what to expect from The Sour Aftertaste of Olive Lemon. I needn’t have worried. The story is conventional in that it has a beginning, middle and end, and there’s an adherence to logic and cause and effect throughout. The result is a delightfully off-kilter dark fantasy that's a pleasure to read.

In many ways I’m reluctant to summarise the tale. The fact that the story is so short makes it almost impossible not to add spoilers should I do so. I’ll say only that the tale is a journey through Olive Lemon’s dark and troubled mind. Her world is a town populated with colourful neighbourhoods and strange characters; with a mayor, for example, who imposes some odd rules indeed: "The use of ladders was restricted…" and "Puzzles were banned—both cryptic and Jigsaw". But, of course, infringing such restriction is normal behaviour for Olive Lemon.

The story is a good one. Gardner skilfully weaves the narrative along at a sidestep to reality. And she’s careful to provide enough subtle foreshadowing to keep the reader guessing what’s going on yet still lead that reader to a believable conclusion. It makes for a satisfying read indeed.

My only criticism is that The Sour Aftertaste of Olive Lemon was over too quickly; I'd have liked another couple of stories from Gardner thrown in to follow, to beef it out a little. Still, it left me wanting to read more from this author. I’ll watch out for her, and for Bucket O’ Guts press, with interest.

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Rix, What the Giants are Saying (2009)

David Rix, What the Giants are Saying. Eibonvale Press, 2008. Pp. 200. ISBN 9780955526862. £9.95.

Reviewed by Terry Grimwood

When on a weekend break in Yorkshire a year or so ago I took a walk through a valley filled with giants. They were impassive, impressive, inscrutable and very intimidating. They were, of course, those love-'em or hate-'em wind turbines. I am one of those who finds the things graceful. They are strange beasts, there is a near-life feel about them and, as David Rix shows us in his novella, What The Giants Are Saying, they are far from silent. Their song is, indeed, the voice of giants.

In the novella, Rix introduces us to Don, a landscape painter, disillusioned by the mediocrity of his work and in the process of splitting up with a girlfriend he blames for the dissolution of his artistic inspiration. He is depressed, angry and self-destructive. Dangerous enough, in fact, to crash his car out on a lonely moor watched over by countless, whispering wind turbines.

That’s where he meets an enigmatic woman named Feather. Otherworldly and seemingly impervious to the bitter cold, she first haunts his thoughts then draws him into a bizarre, destructive relationship. She too is an artist, but the landscapes Feather creates are far more physical and bloody than anything Don has so far dreamed of. And watching over it all, their whispering song a haunting soundtrack, are the giants, hallucinatory and thrumming with a strange and threatening life of their own.

Following the novella is a short story called 'Red Fire', a prequel where we first meet Feather, this time the relationship reversed, she the canvas, her lover Cal, the artist. The result is just as brutal and unsettling.

What the Giants Are Saying is an unnerving, edgy work. It asks the inevitable question, what is art? And then explores the issue in a supremely visceral and unflinching manner. Yes, it has become acceptable (though controversial still) to manipulate inanimate tissue, such as Damian Hurst’s sharks and sheep, or Dr. Gunther von Hagens’ corpse sculptures, but to carve and stitch your art onto living flesh, to mutilate the breathing, that is another matter, or is it? After all, who owns our flesh? We accept the tattoo, the piercing, gender change (whether medically necessary or simply a need), even genital mutilation—weren’t the Castratos of a bygone age mutilated in the name of musical art—so who is to say where it ends, what is acceptable and what is extreme, if not even criminal?

Don’s ex-girlfriend sees Don’s new and bloody art as somehow a personal affront, it repulses her, is, in her mind, a crime. The irony of her role in the story is that she is seen by Don as the destructive influence in his life, the reason for his breakdown because she is “normal”, conventional, actually cares about his health and physical well-being But what right has she to judge? Whose body is it anyway? What are our responsibilities, to ourselves and to those around us, those who depend on us?

Don is a typical independent press character, self-centred, self-obsessed and far from easy to get on with. It makes a change from the taciturn square-jawed hero of course and is much more realistic, but it can be annoying, there are times you want to shout at him, shake him, tell him to pull himself together, but he is an artist, and, traditionally, the artist stands outside the mainstream, so much art flows out of suffering. These outsiders exist, have given us so much music and writing. .

What the Giants Are Saying is a bold work, it eschews story-telling conventions, it is readable, but difficult. It gives no easy answers or comfortable conclusions. It asks mote questions than it answers. It is horror, and then it isn’t, not in the conventional sense anyway, it is that rare and wonderful thing, an unclassifiable work. Even the beautiful, striking and disturbing cover is ostensibly horror, but then, on closer examination probably not. In fact the cover art has the same edgy, bold and savage imagery examined in the story itself.

David Rix is, as I understand it, the man behind the remarkable and adventurous Eibonvale Press, publishers of the off-beat and different. With his own book he has certainly flown the Eibonvale flag and all power to him for stepping off the main road into wilder, more difficult country.
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Hughes, The Smell of Telescopes (2008)

Rhys Hughes, The Smell of Telescopes. Eibonvale Press, 2008. Pp. 464. £22.99.

Reviewed by Sarah Ann Watts

‘I arched an eyebrow. It remained arched for the rest of the day – I was determined to anticipate any more impossibilities. Sighing, I made an appeal: “Has anyone got any bright ideas? Wan ones will suffice.”’

So speaks Giovanni Ciao, narrator of ‘The Hush of Falling Houses’ and citizen of Lladloh in just one of the twenty six interlaced stories that make up The Smell of Telescopes. It isn’t easy to read 460 pages with an arched eyebrow but it might be prudent. However I defy anyone to anticipate the trove of ‘impossibilities’ that this collection contains and that Rhys Hughes lays out so generously for our delectation and delight. Wan ideas may suffice for Giovanni but his creator is unlikely to settle for anything so mundane – these stories are all amusing, inventive and absurd.