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.
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.
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.
Land of the Headless is the tale of the poet Jon Cavala. An amorous youth, he forms a tryst with an aristocrat's daughter over the course of a summer. They willingly share a bed outside of marriage, but only to be found out. The daughter and her family betray Cavala, and he is punished for his impatient penis. For in Cavala's draconian society, murder, blasphemy, and in this case “rape”, are cause for capitol punishment. And so the story kicks off with Cavala's beheading. A device attached to the spine prior captures Cavala's mind state—consciousness more or less—so that even after his noggin is lopped off he goes on living. He buys a cheap pair of electronic eyes and ears with what little money he has left and so sets off to live a new life. The headless are shunned and the going is tough. Cavala falls in with a trio of other headless, and together they agree to travel to a nearby city by foot. What Cavala does not tell his comrades is that he goes to meet the daughter who betrayed him.
People much more famous than me have stated that the internet is the democratization of worldviews. What I take this to mean is that popular opinion holds sway. How much? Hard to say. But what can be said with certainty is that the voice of critics with the clout to proclaim acclaim has dwindled in power due to the internet. Anybody with a youtube account or Reddit login can be a critic these days and get as many if not more eyes. I lament that much of this content, if not the majority of it, does not have the background, experience, or objective mindset that being a book critic requires. The bell curve of quality has been flattened.
Where the Baroque Cycle looked into the dawn of the enlightenment, Newtonian physics, early computing, and the birth of the stock market, Polostan digs into primitive nuclear physics, early communism, and global 1930s industrialization. Stephenson happily wallows in this historical period through the bright eyes of a young woman caught between East and West named Dawn/Avrora (depending which hemisphere she is in). Though born Avrora in the wild steppe of Russia in the early 20th century, as a child she ends up as Dawn in the wild west of the US after her mother runs away from Stalin's brand of utopia to start a new life. A rough life, Dawn has many an adventure in Montana, in the labor strikes of Washington D.C., in the Chicago World's Fair, and in the backwoods of the midwest after getting caught by a gang of rednecks who care more for her paycheck than her wellbeing. But it's physics, particularly nuclear physics, which Dawn's life seems to return to time and again. Capitalists pulling her one way and communists the other, Dawn must eventually decide how to best play one side against the other.
The Mercy of Gods begins on Azean. An extra-terrestrial planet, humanity has nevertheless terraformed it by finding ways of conflating local gene structures with the plants and animals that humans require to exist. The story follows the crack team of researchers who accomplished this major gene-splicing feat. A (figurative and literal) alarm goes off when one of the researchers discovers an anomaly in their work that can only be extra-extraterrestrial—truly alien in nature. It isn't long after the Carryx and their slave species invade Azean and take humanity captive. The research team's adaptation, or not, to captivity is the story that follows.
White Light tells the anything-but-mundane story of mathematics professor Felix Rayman. Facing a dead-end job and marriage headed to divorce, Rayman attempts to spice things up by trying lucid dreaming. Though successful, his sense of reality begins to slip. When he should be preparing a lecture, visions appear. While he's trying to research Cantor's continuum hypothesis, gods and devils do, too. Rayman eventually calls upon Jesus for help, and is promptly tasked with taking a ghost named Kathy to Cimon, which is a place/existence permeated with the forms of infinity. Oh, Rayman fulfills Jesus' task. But that is just the tip of the boot that kicks the reader in the ass, sending them into the bizarreness of Cimon. Don't hang on for the ride; spread your wings and soar.
If The Salmon Who Dared to Leap Higher is a book for children, then I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Though it is (awkwardly) framed by an adult trying to deal with feedback to something they have created, it quickly switches into the life cycle story of a salmon. It tells of a young, unnamed silver salmon who is learning about life in the ocean. He meets other salmon in his shoal, falls in love, and eventually makes the freshwater trek upriver to the shoal's spawning grounds. This journey is peppered with metaphors and allegories that link the salmon's circumstances to the basics of human life—growing up, starting a family, making difficult decisions, trying to find your way in a group, etc. It's presented with a strong degree of simplicity so that even the 'birds and the bees' have an aura of innocence. Though the title is a spoiler for the climactic moment, most kids won't connect the dots. <smile> In terms of delivering perennial philosophy on the basic building blocks of human existence, social to biological, this short book covers it in sweet, charming fashion for kids.
Suprise, Kill, Vanish is a combination of content. A historical overview, the book is structured to cover the phases of the CIA's existence. Jacobsen highlights the changes in president, American culture, presidential policy, and world events which directed the moral compass of the CIA, from underhanded to overhanded, justified to quasi-justified, and its growth, development, and evolution as an organization. From its inception in WWII to its iteration under Barrack Obama, that's the period the book covers.
Why exactly The Chalk Giants is an odd duck starts with the wikipedia quote describing what the book is: 'a linked collection of short stories'. Is it a collection or novel? I would argue it's a loose concept album. The songs are individual pieces of music, but they fit a broader motif.
The first story, “The Sun Over a Low Hill”, describes Stan Pott's frantic escape from a city under curfew circa the mid-1900s. Draconian control measures in place, Potts escapes near apocalyptic urban conditions. Smashing through barriers, he drives a car stuffed with supplies to a lonely house by the sea which houses a small group of people. Throughout this escape Potts' strained sense of identity has a definitive Weirdness to it, in turn leading down dark psychological roads and to even darker decisions. “Fragments” is set at the same lonely house, but tells the story from the other characters' points of view. The Weirdness only gets Weirder, but doesn't lose its humanity.
As a novel, The Solar War is what's written on the tin. A massive, end-to-end battle stretching the length of the solar system. Rogal Dorn sets the defenses, while the White Scars stand by, at the ready. And Peturabo does not disappoint, attacking Pluto with his Iron Warriors. Together with remnants of the Sons of Horus, they start pushing Sol-ward. With echoes of Horus Rising, Garviel Loken and a Remembrancer get caught in the battle. Witness to unearthly events, the battle for Terra will prove to be more than Space Marine vs. Space Marine.
Engine Summer is the story of Rush-that-Speaks. Teen member of a river tribe, he lives and works building simple homes, collecting food for winter, and ensuring rituals and traditions are carried out. A pastoral, peaceful existence, they do not worry about attacks or violence. Rush-that-Speaks befriends a young woman named Once-a-Day, but when she chooses to leave the tribe to go on a walkabout, he decides to follow his own heart too and see what's out there in the big, wide world.
The collection kicks off with two interrelated stories. First is “The Cage of Sand”. Set in Cape Canaveral decades in the future, a once thriving community of shopping malls and homes now scarcely pulls itself together. Sands brought from Mars now pollute their backyards and dead astronauts orbit the Earth in abandoned space capsules. Not an optimistic view of NASA's chances in the void beyond, Ballard nevertheless captures a certain yearning in a manner that feels Bradbury-esque—not something you often say about Ballard. Focusing on one aspect of that setting, “The Dead Astronaut” tells of a grieving widow's desire to get the corpse of her astronaut husband out of orbit and back to Earth. By concluding the story the way he does, Ballard emphasizes the futility of mammals beyond the stratosphere while stirring a few conspiracy pots.
The Book of Elsewhere tells of an immortal superhero trying to gain mortality. Echoing Neo's character arc from Matrix, our man BRZRKR has punched, kicked, ripped, and torn his way through history, sometimes winning, sometimes, sometimes, losing, sometimes dying, but always coming back to life—no matter how hard he tries to stay dead. Also ignoring time and mortality is a pig, yes, a pig, who uses every chance he gets to stick his tusks in BRZRKR. But there is alight at the end of the tunnel. BRZRKR meets a scientist who begins examining the immortal man, and may be able to uncover the key to his mortality.
Jonathan Lethem has written a wide spectrum of novels, from science fiction fevre dreams to modern Manhattan noir, subtle satire to rural Maine dystopias. The Feral Detective may very well be Lethem's lightest fare. Its mold is classic. A quirky woman hires an esoteric private eye to track down a runaway teen in the bizarre outskirts of Los Angeles. From there, things resolve in unexpected but not unexpected fashion. There are clues, people to be interviewed, a twist or two,ingredients you know will likely be present.
Redline: Tactical Card Combat has done things the right way. Rather than spend significant time and energy dumping a large quantity of unknown content onto the market and see how it goes, they've started practically and scaled slowly. The core set, released in 2021, consisted of two starter decks and the tokens, dials, dice, etc. needed to play. The follow up release was another pair of starter decks which could be mixed and matched with the core. Bringing us here, the third expansion: “Battle of Neom”. With two new starter decks for the current factions, things just keep getting better.
“Battle for Neom” introduces a couple new core mechanisms applicable to both existing factions. First is the keyword Scorched Earth, which is found on the three new missions included in the set. Missions with the keyword can be damage and destroyed, i.e. flipped over and their capture cost set to five. Also, if a player had control of that mission, they lose it. Such missions coming alive, players can feel the battlefield change underfoot. The second is Entrenchment. The equivalent of being dug in, entrenchment counters act as shields, absorbing individual points of damage and a new dynamic to the efreets which feature it.
Cahokia Jazz is set in an alternate 1920s-ish America in which Aztec culture still survives and Manifest Destiny didn't quite capture all the land it intended. Cahokia city is set dead smack in the middle of the country, and as a result forms a meeting grounds of cultures and religions—European, indigenous, and beyond. These peoples playing nice until they don't, the book opens on a classic murder mystery scene: a dead body has been found on the roof of one of Cahokia's buildings, the man's heart torn from his chest.
King of Morning, Queen of Day is technically an Irish generational novel. Split into three distinct sections, from late 19th century, through the early 20th, and onto the present day (at least as of 1991), the novel offers windows into the lives of three successive women: the great-grandmother, grandmother, and the grand-daughter. (The mother forms an interlude.) Emily sees faeries and photographs them while Edward, her father, thinks he has observed extra-terrestrials in the cosmos through his telescope. Emily's daughter Jessica is a youth in Ireland at the time the IRA was forming and starting to sow violence. And lastly is the great-grandaughter, Enye. A graphic designer by day, she destroys mythic beings on the streets of Dublin by night with her digitized katana. Yes, digitized katana. Anything but a fairy Batman, however, her fight is her own. She struggles to integrate with society, much to the chagrin of her prospective boyfriends.
It was announced in 2023 that MJ Newman, original and long-time designer of Arkham Horror: The Card Game, would be handing over the reins of the game to two new designers, Duke Harrist and Nicholas Kory. A major waypoint in the game's history, there were multiple directions the game could have been taken, and fans waited with bated breath how the new design team would handle one of the greatest cooperative games ever made. In February 2024 these questions were answered with “The Feast of Hemlock Vale” Investigator and Campaign expansions.
You can breathe. Carrying the pun forward (in poor style), Harrist and Kory in fact bring a breath of fresh air to Arkham Horror. Zero sleight to MJ Newman and all that she accomplished in seven years, but you can tell a new set of eyes looked at the game and knew how to offer players something classic yet evolutionary.
If you have a bildungsroman, then you need a young person to grow, and in the case of number9dream that person is nineteen-year old Eiji Miyake. Alone in Tokyo on a mission, he seeks his long estranged father. But sub-consciously, of course, he is seeking direction, purpose in life. Through a swirl of bizarre blue-collar jobs, cafe run-ins, immutable strangers, as well as a healthy dose of youthful imagination, Eiji does eventually find what he's looking for. The journey, as they say however, is what matters.
Slaves to Darkness picks up in the direct aftermath of Wolfsbane. Horus lies wounded following Leman Rus' spear attack. In the void of leadership, Malaghurst attempts to keep the Sons of Horus ship upright, and like it or not, is faced with the task of getting the traitor forces organized. This includes coralling the wild primarchs Angron and Fulgrim. But Malaghurst's task becomes all the more complicated as the forces of Chaos rear their head(s). The assembly of forces anything but certain, the traitor forces may devour themselves before ever setting foot on Terra.
South is the story of an unnamed journalist who heads to an unnamed part of the world, ostensibly in the southern hemisphere, to investigate what happened to his deceased father, and in the process research and write a book about him. At first things seem normal at the places he visits. The man is able to write, he is helped by those around him, and he generates pages of manuscript. But slowly things start to crumble. Little bits of freedom are taken away here and there, and he becomes aware he is being monitored. What follows is a downward spiral of understanding and circumstance.
Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone centers on a man named Ethan, who at the start of the story is on a pilgrimage in the remote parts of Japan, hoping to find direction in life. Ethan is in possession of fracters, a technology more advanced than subliminal messages, which has the possibility of subconsciously altering people's minds. Fracters are a highly sought after technology, naturally. In what Ethan describes as a previous life, government agencies and organized crime were doing the seeking—not always with the best of intentions, his life in danger. It's in trying to reconcile this past life that Ethan struggles with his current one. Throwing a spanner into these spinning works is the fact Ethan is not entirely sure he himself hasn't been affected by fracters.
Cryptozoic is the story of Bush, an artist living circa 2090. But at the start of the novel he is deep in mind travel in the Jurassic past. Mind travel a form of time travel, it allows people to cast their consciousness deep into the depths of time. Physical contact not possible, people can nevertheless go back and observe, and if they happen to meet other minds, interact. People spend years embedded in mind travel, it's thus happens that Bush has a Rip van Winkle meets George Orwell moment when he awakes. And it's not good.
The anthology kicks off with one of the best in the bunch, “Dark Compliance” by John French. A frame story, it tells of Horus' general Argonis ordering a planet to bend the knee. When the planet's leader refuses, Argonis proceeds to tell the story of the last time a planet failed to capitulate. Giving the planet's leader a taste of things to come, it is dark compliance, indeed. While overall a straightforward story, the frame gives the story appreciable nuance. Another John French piece, “Now Peals Midnight” is more symbol than story. It exists to portray one moment, and for that I wish it had been located at the end of the anthology, but so be it.
Electric Forest is the story of Magdala. Born poor, ugly, and deformed, she jumps at the chance a suave stranger offers her for a new body. In the days that follow, he transfers her consciousness into the android body of a goddess. Capable of functioning like a human, for all its pride and pleasure, Magdala's only drawback is that she cannot stray far from her biological body, which is kept in a chamber. She enjoys her new body initially, but the deeper Magdala goes into her journey of selfhood, the more nuanced her views become.
I would (and will in a moment) argue that Altered has a truly unique edge. But at its absolute core, Altered does not upset the collectible card game apple cart. Two players bring pre-prepared decks comprised of units, spells, and permanents to battle it out in a head-to-head duel. These central concepts of CCGs remain the same. What lies beyond, however, is where things get special.
The Buried Dagger is comprised of two primary storylines that oscillate as the book progresses. The first is centered on the Death Guard. In the opening pages, Mortarion ravages an Imperial planet but is pulled away from the action by one of his captains with direct orders from Horus himself: time to attack Terra. Slipping occasionally into Mortarion's childhood, this storyline forms the largest proportion of the book. In the second storyline, a secret operative traverses the labyrinths beneath Terra. He is approached by Malcador the Sigillite and given a special mission. Garro and the Grey Knights pulled into the action in the aftermath, Terra may fall before Horus arrives if they don't take care of business.
The collection begins with “The Mountain Without a Name”. Something akin to Dubai in space, it tells of an Earth construction company terraforming a planet for human use, which includes converting their version of Mt. Everest into a sea. But bad luck seems to tail them, wrecking the crew's best made plans. Things eventually come to a head, and the men are left with the most dire (as intended) of choices. In “The Accountant”, Sheckley must have been having a bad day with bureaucracy. A throwaway story, it tells of parents pressuring their child to become a magician when all he wants is to be an accountant. Though structured like a bar joke, the punchline is more dark humor than knee-slapping.
Stolen Faces is the tragic story of Lucian Yeardance. After a personal conflict with a commanding officer, Yeardance is exiled to Tezactl and assigned the title of Commissar of the planet's leper colony. A difficult situation, Yeardance has only a small group of assistants to help manage the colony and supplies are limited, often not being delivered to their remote outpost on time. Exacerbating the situation is the fact the colony has devolved into near animalhood. The younger, healthier lepers torment and steal from the older, more debilitated ones, and a bizarre system of beliefs induce the people into sadomasochistic behavior. Getting to the bottom of the situation proves to be the opposite of what Yeardance expects.
Black Helicopters is a difficult story to encapsulate in just a couple of sentences. I will provide only the shell. Two rival agencies, operating invisibly yet in plain sight, have their sights set on one another. Butterfly effect in full effect, they tweak a social knob here, twist an event there, all in the hopes of manipulating the global dance in their subtle favor. At the beginning of the tale, one agent recruits two agents from the other side—knowing they are from the other side. And so too do the two other agents. Cat, mouse, and back again, they tango and samba around one another, getting at their secrets, bits of black magic and Weird just some of their tools of the job. Black helicopters—the proverbial variety—hover menacingly on the horizon.
The Tainted Cup is an agent Mulder-and-Scully murder mystery in a fantasy land. Hill-sized leviathans seasonally come ashore, wrecking havoc on the cities and fields, and magical concoctions and brews allow people to augment themselves in various ways—strength, speed, analytical capability, and memory among them. Seven years ago a savage blight was accidentally unleashed upon the land, and it is still looking to recover.
Of the three dozen Horus Heresy books I've read, Titandeath is the one which feels most perfunctory. It fills a gap in the HH timeline: what have the Adeptus Mechanicus (light and dark) been doing since Graham McNeill's Mechanicus? It also answers the question: why did reduced numbers of titans take part in the Siege of Terra? The first question more interesting than the second, it remains, however, that Haley doesn't give the reader much reason to invest themselves in the story beyond that answer. The forces build up, a big battle occurs, and the book ends. While the same can be said of some HH books, it's with Titandeath the reader most strongly feels the sentiment: things happened as I expected.
A Different Kingdom is the story of Michael, a ten-year old boy growing up on an Irish farm in the early 20th century. Raised by elderly grandparents, Michael finds himself especially close to his aunt, a teen closer in age named Rose. The pair work the farm, and in their free time cavort in the nearby woods and streams, sometimes in transgressive fashion. The streams and forests likewise hold a certain unease for Michael. He sees strange animals and shadows moving where they shouldn't, and occasionally has bizarre encounters with a forest girl. Things come to a head when Rose is forced from the farm by Michael's grandparents, leaving him to fend for himself from the wilds of the woods.
Out of the gate, “The Crimson King” by John French looks to answer the question: what were Rogal Dorn and the Imperial Fists doing in the aftermath of Istvann III? The answer is: being massively ambushed and forced into a difficult strategic situation, a situation that sees real heroism emerge. What makes this story a bit better than most of the other space-battle stories is the foundation of meaning French lays. More than just present-tense fighting, to the spoils go the victor, there is an additional character layer that has purpose in the context of the Heresy as a whole. Good story (and not about Magnus, as you may have thought based on the title—at least I did).
Part satire, part imaginative play, and part thought experiment, The Star Diaries is a collection of stories—voyages to be precise—telling of the space man Ijon Tichy's adventures and encounters across the universe and through time. Tongue in cheek throughout, it's only a question of how much the cheek bulges in each.
A quick re-cap, Redline is a two-player expandable card game in which players build battlemechs (called efreets) to capture missions. First player to capture all five missions on the redline, or raze their opponents HQ (deck) to zero, wins. Chewy fun with a couple layers of depth, it mixes Battletech CCG, Warhammer: Conquest, and X-Wing Miniatures to become its own, satisfying game (no minis required). The core set released in 2021 included two playable 60-card starter decks, along with all the tokens, dials, dice, etc. needed to play. The expansion reviewed here, Redline: Siege, is the first expansion. (Core set required to play.)
“Redline: Siege” is sold in two parts: “Siegecraft” and “Sapper”. Each is a 60-card pre-con deck that adds numerous new efreets and upgrades, as well as a handful of interesting new mechanisms. The core set had a lot of interesting concepts for players to game with, “Siege” almost doubles it.
Catchpenny is the story of one Sid Catchpenny. A former singer turned thief, in the opening pages he is looking for something genuine to do with his pathetic, plastic life; his doppelganger murdered his wife years ago and his career as a performer was traded away in a deal with a devil, meaning he spends his days wallowing in cheap self-pity. That is, until one day when a taxi-driving friend asks Sid to pay a visit to someone and get some information, some character information that will help the driver sort out a little domestic trouble he's having. And down the rabbit hole Sid unwittingly goes. Gangsters, mojo, influencers, mannequins, D&D, cults, and weird video games form a carousel, a carousel that spins ever faster with each new encounter. Trouble is, how to stop the ride?
Covering the spectrum of story length, Tallarn contains four pieces: one bit of flash fiction, one short story, one novella, and one novel. Presented chronologically, they describe the Iron Warriors surprise attack, the locals' resistance, and Peturabo's ultimate purpose taking the planet. Like Corax, the stories form a chain telling an overarching story. A more interesting mix, however, it proves to be one of the better collections/anthologies in the Horus Heresy.
