Another book from ParSec, The Black Hunger by Nicholas Pullen has arrived.

Again, Pullen is an author new to me.

From the blurb the book seems to be in the horror genre. Not my favourite, but we’ll see how it goes. Nice cheery reading for Christmas.

The review will be for ParSec 13.

Gollancz, 2020, 360 p

This is a collection of the late author‘s shorter work culled from throughout his career. Each story is prefaced by a ‘Before’ section saying how it came to be written and an ‘After’ section describing how the writing went and where the story was published. Priest’s writing is always controlled and well executed. In general it tends towards a feeling of unease, as if something is lurking below the surface or what has seemed to be reality morphs into something else but here I was surprised by how much of the contents leaned towards horror.

The Head and the Hand. A man who had become famous through allowing himself to be mutilated is persuaded out of retirement for a final cut.

A Dying Fall relates the thoughts that flash through a man’s mind as he is falling in front of a subway train. They are of travelling on a motorway in Belgium and of the training course in parachute jumping/sky diving he took there.

I, Haruspex is, I assume, in the mould of H P Lovecraft. (Priest’s ‘Before’word says it was solicited by a games company wanting something based on that author’s Cthulhu Mythos but he had no familiarity with that at all – similarly I have not. The company, while paying, never used the story and Priest later found a home for it elsewhere.) Effective in its own way it is told in an old-fashioned language of stilted particularity that, for a first person narration, is curiously distanced (not to mention distancing) and overladen with exclamation marks. After consuming his special meals, narrator James Owsley, descendant of a long line of haruspices, can halt or reverse time for a while. Off the Great Hall of his home, Beckon Abbey, lies a hagioscope over a pit which loathsome things are seeking to escape. In a nearby bog a German bomber plane is held in slow suspension as it crashes after being shot down, even though this is 1936. Someone, not a member of its crew, waves to him from the impending wreck and a voice speaks in his head.

Like the author’s novel The Space Machine, written as an hommage to H G Wells, Palely Loitering, a tale of time travel and thwarted love, bears the influence of Edwardian fiction. Despite including space travel (the McGuffin here – called the Flux Channel – was built to help launch a starship on its way,) the story has a resolutely antique feel to it. Its atmosphere of picnics and bandstands, its social and family dynamics were distinctly retro even in the 1979 in which it was first published. After the starship left, three bridges were built across the Flux Channel. The one leading straight across is the ‘Today’ bridge, two others, built at slight angles to the Channel, lead respectively to ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Tomorrow’. Our narrator as a boy one day leapt off the end of the ‘Tomorrow’ bridge and found himself thirty-four years in the future, where a young woman is pointed out to him by a man who says she is waiting for her sweetheart. The reader can from then fill in the gaps but Priest’s execution of the story is impressive.

An Infinite Summer again bears Edwardian hallmarks – but then part of it is set in 1903 where Thomas Lloyd is on the point of proposing to his intended, Sarah, when he is frozen by a camera-like device wielded by someone from the future. The frozen tableaux which result from these capturings can not be seen by contemporary passers-by but only by the unfrozen and the travellers from the future. The effect on Thomas wears off only in 1935 when he is free to move around again but has to wait more years for Sarah to unfreeze. In 1940 he, and Sarah’s image, are caught in the aftermath of the shooting down of a German bomber. The image of one of the bomber’s German crew held in suspension above a river after being captured by a freezer is unforgettable. I note the similarities here between this incident and the one in I Haruspex.

The Ament* is the tale of a man who was once part of a project to film two children, one male and one female, every week, to document changes during their growth and beyond, but who in his adulthood has dreams of committing murder. But are they dreams? The story is told in two alternating voices, his and a third person viewpoint.

The Invisible Men are those (not all men) who are detailed by their USian masters to spy on a British Prime Minister who feels he has to resign due to a financial scandal. (His statement that, “It’s British tradition for a public figure to resign his position if caught in the wrong,” seems altogether quaint now, 50 years after first publication.) His observations of his surroundings on a clandestine meeting on the Norfolk coast with his USian partner – a co-leader of a UK seemingly on the brink of becoming the 51^st State – imbue the tale with a sense of foreboding.

The Stooge is employed by a stage illusionist to fake amazement at his tricks on being ‘randomly’ picked from his audience. The story’s title becomes doubly apposite.

In futouristic.co.uk a man responds to an email offering to sell him a time machine. It doesn’t work. For him.

Shooting an Episode presents the ultimate in reality TV, though it’s more like reality streaming. For its subjects no holds are barred. The trouble comes when our narrator has to go in amongst the participants to clean up their mess.

In The Sorting Out Melvina comes home late one night to find her door lying open having been forced. With increasing fear she moves through all her rooms, wondering if the man she has recently dumped has something to do with it, but a phone call reveals he is an hour away. Yet various of her books have been misplaced, their dust covers placed upside down, their normal, random arrangement systematised. One has been glued to a curtain.

In its ‘After’word Priest describes the gathering of books (which is what most readers do) as a kind of quiet madness. Well, all obsessions are. At least it’s a harmless madness.

*Amentia is the condition of feeble-mindedness or other general mental deficiency.

Pedant’s corner: Méliès’ (Méliès’s – especially since the final ‘s’ of Méliès is unsounded, thus demanding the apostrophe ‘s’ for its possessive,) maws (used for ‘mouth’; a maw is of course a stomach,) interlocuter (interlocutor,) aureole (areola,) Mrs Adams’ (Adams’s,) “more yachts were parked further away” (parked? Can you park a yacht?) “the king” (x 2, the King,) “the sort of problems the bank were concerned with” (the bank was concerned with,) soccer (football.)

NewCon Press, 2023, 228 p.  Reviewed for ParSec 9.

This is the author’s first collection of stories, twenty-one in all, plus one poem. Sixteen of them were culled from appearances in a variety of outlets over the past ten years, five are making their first appearance in print. The contents range in genre over SF, fantasy, myth and horror, with stories sometimes crossing over their borders.

In general, literature deals largely with the themes of love, sex and death. Science Fiction tends to be more restrictive (love for example tends to be bypassed and sex for the most part avoided) but its signature feature is in making its metaphors literal. (The outstanding example of that here is the title story, about the bond between a daughter and her mother.) Fantasy, myth and horror act more as warnings and as stripped-down guides to human relationships.

In the first few stories here the theme of death seems to be a connecting thread but this does not then extend to the collection as a whole.

The poem, Icarus Dreams, opens proceedings and partly sets the tone by inviting Icarus to heed his father and rewrite his story. Smits is more than adequately equipped to provide new shapes to old tales. To that end there are herein updated treatments riffing on the Blackbeard and Theseus stories, while the Baba Yaga of Russian folklore meets an AI.

But the author has further strings to her bow. Elsewhere, moles on the skin are a marker of long, perhaps immortal, life, and carry the threat of incarceration to unravel their genetic secrets. We meet an AI repairman whose encounter with his charge becomes reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. One story (not narrated by Dr Watson) features Sherlock Holmes, but only in a bystanding part as he asks his psychic investigator – and female – cousin to help him. We have tales where a psychological decline follows the break-up of a relationship which had settled into routine, the Green Man appears to rescue a ravaged future Britain, a woman inherits a bookshop with an unusual kind of ghost, AI/human hybrids question each other over their origins – and the nature of God. One story centres on the reliving of bottled memories. There is an African inspired SF/fantasy cross-over. A woman falls in love with her witness protection AI android bodyguard, another tells of the lengths she went to in an attempt to get pregnant, a brother and sister hatch a plot to rescue their twin siblings from VR addiction in a warehouse, a female painter who sells pictures under her brother’s name finds she cannot hide her expertise from J M W Turner (with whom she shares the same reverence for sunlight,) two people celebrate their involvement with the commercial start-up of nuclear fusion at Sellafield, a woman on the point of death remembers incidents from her life while subjectively traversing a fantastical purgatorial maze.

Their telling requires a comprehensive array of authorial registers and Smits handles them all well, with very few infelicities. She is a talent to watch.

Pedant’s corner:- Theseus’ (x 2, Theseus’s,) focussing (x 2, focusing,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech,  Holmes’ (x 2, Holmes’s, which appeared later,) shrunk (shrank,) focussed (x 3, focused,) sunk (sank,) Geena Davis’ (Davis’s,) “legs akimbo” (I doubt it. It’s extremely difficult to put your feet on your hips,) “and laid down again” (lay down again,) data used as a singular noun (that would be datum, data is plural,) Jesus’ (Jesus’s,) “the settings on each gamer’s capsule isn’t” (the settings … aren’t,)  “‘it’s okay to chop down all the forests and poison the soil.’?” (has that question mark in the wrong place. It ought to be where the full stop is,) “him and Kel had looked to the stars” (he and Kel,) James’ (x 3, James’s; annoyingly employed a few pages later.) “A trail of soapy bubbles stream after his fleeing form” (a trail streams.) Plus points, though, for using maw correctly as a stomach.

Harvill Secker, 2019, 234 p, including 2p Contents and 2 p Acknowledgements.

This is Logan’s latest solo collection of stories, her first, The Rental Heart and other fairytales, I reviewed here. I have also read her novels The Gracekeepers and The Gloaming.

The stories here are chiefly burdened with overly long titles eg Birds Fell From the Sky and Each One Spoke in Your Voice or We Can Make Something Between the Mushrooms and the Snow. As the title implies the subject matter tends to be dark. On the whole the collection is tinged with magic realism or outright fantasy and often tips over into horror.

The stories are prefaced and interspersed with what at first appear to be authorial interjections about the circumstances of writing the book and the author’s private life but these short passages soon evolve into what is obviously as much of a fiction as the stories which surround and envelop them.

The book is divided into three sections: The House, The Child and The Past. The first story in each is composed of four short pieces labelled respectively First Fear, Second Fear, Third Fear, and Fourth Fear but most of the stories deal with fear of one sort or another. These fears tend to be female concerns: childbirth and the things attendant on it (apprehensions about what is gestating, what has appeared, is the child safe and well? Am I a good enough mother?) abduction, rape, domestic restriction. One, about seeing a Punch and Judy Show and recognising its hideousness, is told almost entirely by way of footnotes. Another takes the form of a questionnaire – including its rubric. Another alludes to the story of Snow White but takes it in an even darker direction.

From my experience of her writing so far (see links above) Logan presents herself best, as here, at short story length.

Pedant’s corner:- “and fold it on itself” (‘fold in on itself’ makes more sense,) “for heaven’s sakes” (is USian. Britons say ‘for heaven’s sake’,) “into his screeching maw” (stomachs don’t shriek,) “aren’t I?” (Scots say ‘amn’t I?)

It’s not appeared on my sidebar yet but I am at the moment working my way through the first collection of stories by Teika Marija Smits for a review to be published in ParSec.

The book is titled Umbilical and contains twenty-one stories, covering various speculative fiction genres, plus one poem.

The Murders of Molly Southbourne
Tor.com, 2017, 117 p.

Molly Southbourne has been brought up from birth with the mantras:-
If you see a girl who looks like you, run and fight.
Don’t bleed.
If you bleed, blot, burn and bleach.
If you find a hole, find your parents.

She has a genetic condition that means copies of her, described as mollys, will grow – in days, from any source of sustenance to hand – to full sized human replicas. Replicas intent on killing her. Her only recourse will be in killing them first, hence the mantras, and then disposing of the remains. In extremis she has tattooed on her arm a number she can call on for help.

Molly’s story is told by way of a framing device wherein our narrator is being held captive – by Molly herself as we find out when she relates her past to the narrator after making sure she is quiescent.

Albeit laced with an abundance of violence this is an enjoyable mixture of fantasy, horror, paranoid thriller and spy story, given a Science Fictional gloss when it is revealed Molly’s mother was a spy sent behind the Iron Curtain to investigate a secret Soviet project to find a cure for fertility rates falling worldwide, then to steal it. Caught in the act, she instead injected herself with it, hence Molly’s condition.

Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian; spellings such as hemophilia etc (haemophilia, or better, hæmophilia.)

The Survival of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson
Tor.com, 2019, 122 p.

Our narrator calls herself Molly Southbourne but no clones form from her blood when it is shed. She is, though, the same molly whom the original Molly kept captive in the previous book before going off to confront the army of mollys whom we assume did Molly to death. This molly has all of Molly’s memories, of her parents Connor and Mykhaila Southborne, of all the mollys she murdered to prevent herself being killed.

This book, though, is slightly different in that at least to begin with there are interpolations [headed Transcript] of the thoughts of Professor James Down, an academic whom Molly set her cap at in Book One; fatefully as it happens because some of Molly’s blood must have leaked into him and he has what Thompson has dubbed in this book a hemoclone [sic] growing inside him – a molly which will kill him: as one did her previous lover, Leon, for the same reason.

Our viewpoint molly soon finds herself pursued by other women identical to each other; called tamaras after their originator. Tamara is trying to protect our molly as it is her belief that the organisation Molly thought was there to protect her is in fact designed to kill hemoclones.

This all seems to be set during the Cold War, contemporaneously with the Prime Ministership of Margaret Thatcher. Both Molly and Tamara had within them artificial cells, the ones Molly’s mother and presumably others as well as Tamara had been infected with. This renders the concept as fully Science Fictional. We are told these artificial cells act as matter converters. From a drop of blood they can make “a full human duplicate based on the genetic material of the Prime from almost any base material: wood, soil, organic waste, even metals.”

In this strange paranoid world our molly soon comes to trust no-one.

Pedant’s corner:- Again published in USian. “James Dawn” (elsewhere he’s James Down,) “a full human duplicate based on the genetic material of the Prime from almost any base material: wood, soil, organic waste, even metals” (this phrase reads as if a full human duplicate could be made solely from metal; it could not,) hemoclone (haemoclone or, better, hæmoclone,) “the lay of the land” (the lie of the land.)

Isle of Whithorn is not to be confused with Whithorn. It is about three miles further south and is one of the most southerly villages in Scotland. The locals refer to it simply as, “the Isle.” It is said to be the place at which St Ninian first made landfall in Scotland.

Harbour. This is where the Drummullin Burn enters the Solway Firth:-

A chapel dedicated to St Ninian was erected here in the 13th century. Its ruins lie very close to the sea.

The village has a War Memorial to the right of the road entering it. A Celtic Cross on a square plinth. Great War names here:-

Dedications, ‘In honour of the men from the village and district who fell in the Great War 1914-1918. “Lest We Forget.” 1939-1945,’ and World War 2 names:-

Edited to add: I meant to say above that the Isle was where part of the cult horror film The Wicker Man was filmed.

Harper, 2015, 526 p plus 1 p Reading Group Questions, 6 p photos of Detroit taken during Beukes’s research and 7 p author interview.

Detective Gabriella Stirling-Versado becomes OIC of a bizarre murder case (where half the body of a young teenage boy has been joined to half that of a deer) by virtue of being first on the scene. The story is narrated from several viewpoints each rendered in an urgent stripped down present tense. Some tension is lost by the fact that one of these is that of the murderer but there is no doubt throughout that Beukes is in control. All the viewpoints are compelling and Gabi’s relationship with her daughter, Layla is particularly neatly drawn as, in turn, is her friendship with schoolmate Cas. Along the way Beukes addresses issues of the prevalence, and misuse, of social media, and of sexual harassment.

The circumstances of the murder and the hints that chalk outlines of doors drawn on walls presage occult events notwithstanding, this is a straight enough police procedural thriller until the supernatural elements impinge in force at the climax. This for me was where the novel broke down. It is difficult to register my misgivings without spoilers but the details of the way in which those forces manifest and gain power were beyond my ability to sustain suspension of disbelief.

My main complaint, though, is that any hint of the supernatural is a cop-out. History has shown humans are cruel enough to each other. There is no necessity for an external force to make them so. Buekes can write well – brilliantly even – but I would contend that it is a failure of the imagination rather than its triumph to posit influences beyond humanity as causal factors in demented behaviours.

Pedant’s corner:- jerry-rigged (jury-rigged,) “sounds fraught with meaning that don’t have anything to do with her” (with meaning that doesn’t – or; with meanings that don’t,) peering through the grill of an oversized hockey helmet (grille,) “where the skin of the worlds are permeable (the skin is – or; the skins are,) the lay of the land (lie,) a cluster of party people are standing (a cluster is,) the back of his hands are (the back is – or; the backs are,) lay low (lie.) He’s was trying to help. (He was,) and realises her and mistake (realises her mistake,) “she’s terrified that if she opens Gabi’s all her secrets will come flying out,” (opens Gabi’s what?) “A scattering of neon highlighter markers stand out,” (a scattering stands out.)
Plus points for “ten years’ time” though.

I saw in today’s Guardian Tanith Lee’s obituary.

Despite her prolificity, I don’t recall reading much of her work (SF, Fantasy and Horror in the main) but her name was familiar to me. I may have noticed at the time that she wrote two episodes of Blake’s 7 but it wasn’t something I had at my front of my mind.

She was notable as being the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel (for her book Death’s Master.)

Tanith Lee: 19/09/1947 – 24/5/2015. So it goes.

TTA Press, 2014, 159 p. (Novella no. 3 from TTA Press, publishers of Interzone and Black Static.)

I don’t know why I was sent this. I had agreed to read TTA Press Novella no 2 (Nina Alan’s Spin) and review it on my blog but had thought that was a one-off. Yet this too has turned up in the post (though it was actually sent to my old address.) It seemed only polite to accord this book the same courtesy.

I had not realised before starting it that it would count towards the Read Scotland 2014 challenge but the author is a Scot whose blog is here. (She now lives in Essex. I did that for two years.) The first clue was the mention of Fir Park – one I have still to cover in my series on Scottish Football Grounds. (The story is set in a Lanarkshire town.)

Raymond Munroe is a Primary School teacher in Glengower. His mother and father have had gruesome deaths due to smoking. Raym is trying to give up. Again. This time his attempts are accompanied by the sound of a nursery rhyme and memories from his childhood, of the tally van and the grotesque figure of Top Hat – a creature with black tails, “really long ones, like party streamers.” Raym is also losing time. Each cigarette lapsed into eats up an hour in the real world. Johnstone has Raym explicitly acknowledge to himself that he could be suffering hallucinations due to nicotine withdrawal, but some of the children can also see Top Hat and what occurs in the lost hours is not remembered by anybody else.

Raym’s slow decline while trying to maintain his mental equilibrium under this joint barrage is the meat of the story but the other characters are equally well drawn, with Raym’s girlfriend Wendy very acutely observed. Only teaching assistant Caitlin seems too pat, too designed to the purposes of plot.

Despite Cold Turkey being in essence a horror story there are flashes of humour – “You are a fine teacher; even if you did pursue your degree in Dundee.”

Towards the end a drunk he encounters tells Raym that the phrase “cold turkey” is derived from a US saying and means the unvarnished truth. In any novel the truth has to be varnished. Johnstone is good with the brush.

Note to non-Scots readers. At one point Raym is described as “careering along the road like an escapee from Carstairs.” Carstairs is the location of a State Hospital (that is, an institution to house the criminally insane.)

Pedants’ corner. Raym is said to work in a “small rural primary school on one of the worst estates in Lanarkshire.” If the town is big enough to have an estate (which here means housing scheme) then it’s hardly rural. The staff room (I’ve been in a few – though admittedly mostly secondary school ones) seems excessively sweary to me. There is a reference to town meetings. (In Lanarkshire? I’ve lived in Scotland for all but two years of my life and never known of such things here.) The impression is given that primary schools have their day structured by periods and that basic trig is part of their curriculum. (They don’t and it isn’t.) Though “totilly waddy an’ a hauf” is new to me, neither “absolute mince” nor “the old heave-ho” is an obscure catchphrase. There was a shrunk count of 2 and 1 sunk. We had “site” for “cite,” “snuck” for “sneaked,” a “gotten,” “scroat” for “scrote,” starter blocks (starting) and a faux “Macintosh” chair.