Review of The Great When by Alan Moore

Post-war London, the occult, alternate worlds, serial killers, blah, blah, blah... Acknowledging the keywords of a contemporary novel is uninspiring, to say the least. They push a book deeper into the milieu of modern publishing rather than distinguish it. But, what if I tell you Alan Moore's 2024 The Great When likewise possesses a superb authorial voice, characters with character, and a twisty story that constantly surprises? Hopefully sounds a bit more intriguing. Let's set the hook deeper.

The Great When follows one Dennis Knuckleyard, used bookshop assistant, in the post-WWII years of London. But it's not the London you know. Superficially it looks like your London, but there are doors, entryways to another, darker, surreal London. Dennis gets himself into a spot of trouble one day in Soho picking up a box of vintage Arthur Machen books. One of the books in the box exists only in fiction, but there it sits in Dennis' hands. The young man's world turned sideways in the aftermath, he is forced to explore the London you don't know to get rid of the book, meeting all manner of gangsters and artists, harlots and killers along the way.

Console Corner: Review of Dredge

For those who know the Myers-Briggs personality matrix, I am an INTJ. One thing this means is my brain is constantly looking to extrapolate patterns and trends to form a concept, a whole. In our modern flood of media, this can be a difficult personality type to have; there is so much—too much to digest and form a coherent idea. But one game did stick out of 2023's matrix of content: Dredge. Let's take a look at why possibly.

Dredge is a cosmic horror fishing game, or perhaps more precisely, a Lovecraftian trawling game. Players take on the role of a fishing boat captain who pilots around an odd archipelago of islands, catching a wide variety of fish and collecting ancient items. You collect the fish to pay your way, and you collect the items are for a strange recluse with an occult backstory that wants telling. Look no deeper (har har).

Review of The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria is one of those unique novels that will forever be on my list of overlooked gems. It received the recognition it deserved upon release (2014), but has since faded—the unfortunate fate of so many good novels released in our contemporary deluge of publishing. Samatar uses a quasi-high fantasy mode to tell of one young man's examination of the value of reading, writing, personal legacy, and ambition in a fictional African land. Atypical if anything, it's worth a read. Shifting gears, Samatar's 2024 novella The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain looks to go quasi-generation starship.

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (hereafter PH&C) is the story of two characters, one called “the boy” and the other “the woman”. Both were previously members of the their ship's Hold, a place where people are kept incarcerated, chained to walls. At some time in the past, the woman was released from the Hold and moved higher in the ship to do research at a university. She still wears, however, a security anklet, an anklet that her university overseers can use, if they desire, to take physical control of her body. The woman is doing research on the behaviors and social practices of child's play in the Hold when she receives a welcome gift: the boy as a research subject. Unlocking things inside herself she never knew possible, the lives of the boy and the woman take on new trajectories in the aftermath.

Review of The Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud

Nathan Ballingrud was, hands down, my biggest discovery as a reader in 2023. Seeing the release of his novella The Crypt of the Moon Spider in 2024, I was on it like white on rice. Turns out writing to a deadline (?) means something...

The Crypt of the Moon Spider follows the classic horror storyline of: woman is committed to a sanitarium as madness slowly creeps in. Her story is ostensibly set on the moon, and its secrets, particularly those of an underground cult, are slowly revealed as she undergoes therapy. A mad doctor, his Igor-esque assistant, and the cult culminate in a splashy ending.

Review of Calypso by Oliver Langmead

Oliver Langmead's 2015 Dark Star was a breath of glittering cyberpunk air. Story was edgy and visual, its elements flowing nicely in and out of one another toward a dramatic, personal climax. But the fact the book was written in epic verse is what truly set it apart. Langmead has gone on to write several other novels—all in prose, however. That is, until 2024. With Calypso, Langmead returns to the epic verse of Dark Star, but puts aside cyberpunk in favor of colonizing the stars for substance.

Calypso is both the name of the book and the name of the generation starship at its heart. When the ship arrives at its destination planet, a woman named Rochelle awakes from cryostasis to take on her role as leader once again. But everything is not as it was when the ship departed. In her absence, a war was fought onboard the ship between two factions: the engineers and the botanists (Sterling's Shapers and Mechanists?). It becomes Rochelle's job to choose sides and settle the dispute.

Review of The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

I generally do not go in for Arthurian legend. While I recognize it's a critical piece of England's history and lore, and therefore of my own as an American, I subconsciously, and apparently consciously, don't jump with excitement seeing a book appear with an overt Arthurian theme. But descriptions of Lev Grossman's 2024 The Bright Sword, particularly the fact it seemed to brim with adventure and was in fact set in a time post-Arthur's passing, seemed to lend hope it might be more. Let's see how bright.

The Bright Sword follows the meta-quest of one Ser Collum to become a knight of the round table. Growing up parent-less in the northern isles, he eventually steals a set of armor and sword and sets off on a journey to Camelot. Now that Arthur is dead and gone, Collum finds only rough camaraderie among the motley crew of knights who are now at loose ends around the round table. But when a green knight shows up one day with tidings that one of the knight's of Arthur's table yet lives, the group sets off on a quest to find said knight. Adventure, as they say, ensues.

Review of Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is quietly the most original science fiction writer of the past two decades. From societies with headless people to salt planet anarchies, domiciles in Earth's stratosphere to people who feed on light, secret Stalin science fiction projects to democratic armies (think about it), even to uncategorizable books like The This, Purgatory Mount, or The Thing Itself, Roberts has ensured that each of his books is radically different than anything else he's written, and if nothing else, will at least be an obtuse take on something the market takes for granted. Roberts latest offering Lake of Darkness (2024) is no different. Black holes, psychosis, AI, and human power hierarchies have never before been ingredients in such a stew.

The plot of Lake of Darkness is difficult to summarize in a neat paragraph. Structurally, it's the same story told twice in a row. For the first go around (the very short go around) the reader hears the tale of Raine, member of a nine-person, two-ship excursion to the edge of a black hole. Upon arriving at the event horizon, Raine does a most astonishing thing: he brutally murders all other crew members onboard. And when members of the other ship come board to investigate—after much philosophizing on the relative merits of such an attempt, he does the same. Mass murder virtually extinct in the story's utopian setting, the event is significant. It falls to a scholar of 20th century mass murder, a woman named Saccade, to get to the bottom of Raine's actions. In doing so, her story forms the second tale (the unpacked go around) of how Raine came to his actions.

Why the Excitement?: Hollywood's Adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale's The Thicket

My ears perk up when I hear that a novel I enjoyed will be adapted to the big screen. Not sure why. Fool me once, your fault. Fool me a hundred times, my fault. Maybe I get excited because the few films which do capture a book's character are so good? Regardless, I went into Elliot Lester's adaptation of Joe Lansdale's The Thicket with hope. With the right actors and script, they could do justice to Lansdale's twisting, irreverent Western. Alas, the only justice is this blog post.

At cloud level, the Hollywood adaptation follows the formula and journey of Lansdale's The Thicket. A gang kidnaps a sister, triggering the brother to hunt them down. On their trail he forms an unlikley posse: a dwarf, black man, and prostitute. Things get hairier and hairier, leading to a showdown at the titular thicket. At the ground level, however, the film departs from Lansdale's story at a couple key points, points critical to the film's success.

Review of The Unsleeping Eye (alt. title The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe) by D.G. Compton

Note: this book was published under two titles: The Unsleeping Eye in the US and The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe in the UK. To keep this review simple, I will refer to the book by the title of the version I own: The Unsleeping Eye.

It's worthwhile taking a step back to consider how quietly and quickly cameras have become an everyday part of private life. How many photos do you take of quotidian, personal things—per day? More broadly, what percentage of online content is based around private lives published in the public space? Regardless the actual percent, the underlying message seems: intentional voyeurism sells. There is something that wants to both present and consume private lives—the more dramatic the better, we animals us. Riffing off this atavistic aspect of human nature is D.G. Compton's quiet masterpiece The Unsleeping Eye (1974).

The Unsleeping Eye predominantly rotates around two characters. First is Katherine Mortenhoe. What would in modern parlance be called a romance AI prompter, Katherine uses computer algorithms to generate romance fiction, and is one of the most well known and popular for it. At the start of the novel she learns she is terminally ill, with only 4 weeks to live. The other main character is Roddie. He is an NTV television reporter who, unbeknownst to everyone save his producer, has had an invisible camera installed in his eye that records everything he sees. Terminal illness a thing of the past in the book's future, Roddie's producer has the brilliant idea of inserting Roddie into Katherine's life and creating a documentary of her final days—the sadness, grief, drama, and all. Thing is, Katherine is not interested in signing the agreements which would give NTV the rights to film and broadcast, meaning NTV need to find alternate ways of getting the footage.

Review of Gogmagog by Steve Beard & Jeff Noon

Johnny, where's that soapbox? Get it out. We've got an important message needs repeating. Seems it's not getting through. Little to the left... Ok there, good. <umph> Listen up, readers out there. Style matters! Where so much fantastika these days gets filtered through Clarion workshops or MFA writing programs before arriving at our eyeball-tips, we're losing sight of how voice, tone, style, mood, verve and other aspects of technique matter to story. Like a fingerprint, a reader used to be able to pick out a writer by their style. These days it's rice vanilla soup. Style matters! Thank you, that's all. Time to get down now, back to my hearth and quilt...

Speculiction does indeed harp on about the importance of style. As we get closer to AI novels on bookshelves, style is the one thing that humans can cling to as their own. Dear ChapGPT: please write a book in the style of David Mitchell. I'm not sure that (today) it could. But it could 100% write a book in the style of Martha Wells, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and many, many others. I don't discredit these writers' imaginations or success, only that their writing lacks a certain spark, an intimation the writer knows that you know that they know this word is being used because... This is all a long winded way of saying, Jeff Noon and Steve Beard's 2024 novel Gogmagog will likely not show up on bestseller lists, but if mood and style are as important to you as imagination and story, read on.

Gogmagog is the cantankerous tale of cantankerous Cady Mead. A tough old bat, she is an irascible, foul-mouthed, pipe-smoking sloop captain with a mysterious past. Though retired and in her cups, she is one day convinced to help transport two strangers downriver to the city of Ludwich. The river alive with creatures both real and ethereal, Cady knows it's only her knowledge and experience which can get the boat through the toughest spots and avoid the most dangerous hazards. What she doesn't count on, however, is the unexpected appearance of one of her oldest enemies haunting the river.