Intercourse

Andrea Dworkin Intercourse (1987)
Intercourse is the tract wherein Andrea Dworkin famously stated that all men are rapists and that heterosexual sex is rape, just like the joyless dungaree wearing dyke she was. However, bothering to read the book reveals that she never said anything of the sort, and that her argument as set forth herein is not actually unreasonable. That being said, it's no walk in the park either. Dworkin is not an easy read. She's absolutely uncompromising and unwilling to soft soap, prettify or simplify her argument. The reader is expected to shut the fuck up, pay attention, and no fidgeting if they know what's good for them; and actually, it is good for them, certainly potentially educational.

Essentially it's nothing less than the history of sexual politics mapped out in our changing, evolving attitudes, at least for the last five-hundred or so years, as revealed in the fiction of Tolstoy, Lawrence, Hemingway and others. Dworkin pulls apart established models of human intercourse, social and sexual, with surprising deference reflecting her genuine appreciation of at least a few of these authors, but she pulls no punches and is very good at revealing that which has been staring us in the face all along and which suggests we, as the testicular half of a species, might like to think about growing the fuck up.

To be specific, Dworkin doesn't say anything as blunt or stupid as all sex between men and women is rape, but rather that it can't be anything but rape within the context of the patriarchal structures which inform society; and she's unfortunately right. The revelation is just how much is tied in with those structures, in which respect she's also very thorough, extending her analysis to the extremes of the Nazi death camps and how even there we find echoes of the man sticking his thingie in because he believes it to be his due. It's a solid argument, but one of such composition that there's not much point trying to break it down. Intercourse is, by some definition, an academic narrative, but the dialogue by which it sets forth its argument seems partially intuitive and therefore possibly of such complexity as to defeat being broken down into anything bite-sized.

Intercourse is intense but incredibly rewarding, and if you haven't read it, there seems a reasonable chance that it probably isn't what you think it is. If you're not already on board, it may be time to get over whatever has been holding you back and listen to what the woman had to say.

Also - for what it may be worth - I found Dworkin's filleting of Bram Stoker's thoroughly mediocre Dracula highly satisfying because I was beginning to think it was just me.

Lord of the Flies

William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
I was approaching the point at which it had begun to feel almost embarrassing to admit I'd never read Lord of the Flies. I recall my mother owning a copy with a severed pig's head on the cover but it wasn't among those few titles half-heartedly shunted in our direction at school, and I never saw the movie either; so it seemed like time.

As I'm sure you all know, it's about a bunch of kids getting marooned on an island and acting like wankers - which I believe was actually Golding's original title. Published in 1954 and without bothering to check, it strikes me as likely that it may have been inspired by the populist politics which brought about the second world war, and more specifically how so many people fell hook, line and sinker for all that rabble-rousing tribal bullshit. Lord of the Flies also therefore works fairly well as a commentary upon our own times, and so much so that I'm surprised no point-missing edgelord twat has yet claimed it for a warning against the perils of socialism, as has happened with Orwell's 1984 on a couple of bewildering occasions. It does approximately the same thing as Conrad's Heart of Darkness - positing that we are all capable of acting like wankers - and has the sort of unambiguously direct impact which justifies its reputation as a classic.

All the same, I really didn't enjoy it like I thought I would. Golding's prose is mostly tight and functional with an occasional flourish of admittedly dark poetry, but unfortunately spattered with slightly clumsy passages which cause the narrative to stumble somewhat, such as when Ralph allows the swollen flap of his cheek to close his eye again at the beginning of chapter eleven. He's been in a fight, so I assume he's been punched in the face - although it isn't specifically mentioned so far as I can see - but a flap?

Simon was speaking almost in his ear. Ralph, found that he had rock painfully gripped in both hands, found his body arched, the muscles of his neck stiff, his mouth strained open.

'You'll get back to where you came from.'

Simon nodded as he spoke. He was kneeling on one knee, looking down from a higher rock, which he held with both hands; his other leg stretched down to Ralph's level.

'It's so big, I mean—'

Simon nodded.

What's so big? I can't even tell who has spoken, and although this particular game of Twister is occurring as the lads circumnavigate a cliff face, the activity is implied rather than stated; so from time to time the novel does that thing of omitting some vital piece of information from a sentence, disorientating readers by obliging us to figure it out; so it's a little like reading A.E. van Vogt in places, except Alfred Elton did it on purpose for the sake of atmosphere.

So it's good, and the reputation is probably deserved, but I thought it would be better somehow.

The Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion

Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá
The Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion (2019)
Some time has passed since the first two instalments of the story, so I hope to God there'll be more to follow - as I seem to recall being the promise - and that this isn't the end of the saga, called back into publication by the popularity of its own television adaptation; and I hope to God specifically because it's wonderful, and also because it ends on a truly peculiar note which only raises further questions.

The first series of the television adaptation was sort of decent - albeit as a haphazard mash up of the first two books leaving the second series without much to do, hence the application of creative license, but the creative license of corporate telly imagineers which left the thing looking a bit of a dog's dinner and another one for the Tim Burton skip of mannered eccentricity. Picking up this volume and reminding oneself of what the source material does really brings home what a poor second the television adaptation was, even during its better moments. Its true - as has been said - that Gerard Way tends to expect his audience to pay attention, so we don't get anything spelled out and the reader is required to either remember who everyone is, or at least skip back to remind themselves every once in a while; but the effort we put in is rewarded. As with - off the top of my head - Pat Mills' Marshall Law, this isn't quite a superhero book in the traditional sense because the caped types are mostly extras, part of the landscape more than anything - something weird half-seen around a corner rather than pinned out in the glare of yet another headachey origin story; and it works because, aside from anything, the artwork is fucking gorgeous - sort of like Jack Kirby if he'd been born in France or summink.

Hotel Oblivion is grade one Surrealism in the truest sense - as distinct from what usually passes for the same these days - and feels very much like a graphic equivalent to Cocteau's Orphée and its type what with half of its narrative spent somewhere which feels very much like a modern take on some underworld from classical mythology; and it has themes, mostly pertaining to abandonment, shitty parenting and so on. There's a lot to get your teeth into if you're prepared to put in the work. I just hope this isn't the end of it.

Junk Mail

Will Self Junk Mail (2006)
I'm still not quite able to process some of the opprobrium levelled at this guy, much of which seemingly amounts to he ain't one of us, he's from a posh school and he uses all those big words to look clever but he ain't. The most coherent version of this argument, at least that I've found, seems to be something about how we've all been conned into buying the idea of Will Self as a dangerous anti-establishment figure when actually he writes for the Observer and once consumed heroin on the Prime Minister's jet; ergo what mugs we are! I suppose it's an argument of sorts, although it prompts the question of just who you do regard as a dangerous anti-establishment figure - Alan Moore? Stewart Home? Doctor Who? Some guy in a fucking band? Do you even know what the fuck you're talking about? One might just as well argue that we've all been conned into buying the idea of Will Self as Batman's nemesis and the scourge of Gotham City for all the sense it makes.

Failure to creep into the Houses of Parliament clutching a large sphere of black metal with a fuse and BOMB printed on the side notwithstanding, Self's writing, even with all of those long, difficult to understand words, is rarely less than astonishing, illuminating whatever subject he's chosen to pick apart with such high definition focus of intent and meaning as to make the journalistic norm appear somewhat impressionist; which is what makes him such a delight to read, almost regardless of subject. It's rare to come across arguments so well defined. Junk Mail assembles journalistic pieces from newspapers, magazines, exhibition catalogues, and even British Airways' slightly ludicrous High Life freebie, but the themes benefit from a similar focus to that which informs Self's fiction, or at least his satire given that it doesn't seem entirely fair to call it fiction considering the escapist connotations of the term. The only major difference is that the writing in Junk Mail is less one layer of allegory compared to My Idea of Fun, How the Dead Live and so on, and here we actually get to meet Traci Emin, Morrissey, Andrea Dworkin and others in person, and get to understand them a little better than we might have done otherwise. He even somehow manages to make Liam Gallagher and Damien Hirst seem marginally less twatty.

Anyway, while it's debatable whether or not Self cuts a dangerous anti-establishment figure - pretending for the sake of argument that it's even a meaningful term - he nevertheless succeeds in seeing through the bullshit of modern existence, and communicating what he's seen in a form which reaches a wide audience, even if it's maybe not quite so wide an audience as dangerous anti-establishment rebel leader Luke Skywalker in all those Star Wars samizdat movies. Even if you have to look up a few long-haired words here and there, Self's writing will always reward anyone making the effort, and for something vaguely amounting to cuttings swept up from the studio floor, this may even be one of his best. Additionally there's the bewildering accusation of arrogance, presumably once again founded on the use of words we might have to look up in a dictionary; and it's bewildering because Junk Mail is nothing if not self-effacing - literally, come to think of it - and the fact of the man's writing having personality is never allowed to obscure whatever he's writing about. Even where dark and harrowing, the clarity of this man's testimony is, as always, a joy to read.

3 in 1

 

Leo Margulies (editor) 3 in 1 (1963)
The idea was to collect novella length stories from the digests which weren't long enough to reprint as novels in their own right, and yet which weren't sufficiently breezy as to justify inclusion in a short story anthology. I'm not sure what the highest available page count would have been for a paperback produced in the early sixties, but I'm guessing not much more than a couple of hundred, hence this volume. I'm also guessing the potential page count may have risen somewhat soon after this was published, which is why we haven't seen a load of these things all washed up in second hand book stores.

Anyway, this one seemed like an essential purchase given the presence of both Simak and Leinster. Theodore Sturgeon's There is No Defense sags a bit towards the end, although is worth reading just for the first half which pretty much beats James S.A. Corey to everything which made The Expanse interesting - at least on the box - but did it all back in 1948. Simak's Galactic Chest is characteristically wonderful, and is actually hard to read without one's inner film director giving the lead role to James Stewart. Finally, there's Murray Leinster's West Wind which isn't one of his best, but is nevertheless worth reading at least once because it's Leinster and as such goes everywhere but the places you might expect it to go. Truthfully, the only points deducted are for how much it reminds me of one of Algis Budrys' slightly twitchy cold war fables, and there are probably worse things to be reminded of.

The Spider's Web

 

Philip Purser-Hallard The Spider's Web (2020)
I'm really beginning to suspect that Holmes may simply not be my thing. Actually, if I'm honest with myself, I know full well that he never really was, but it seemed worth making the effort here because it's Philip Purser-Hallard who seems more or less incapable of dull or otherwise merely workmanlike prose. Here, he introduces Holmes and Watson to an adjacent fictional landscape inhabited by persons from The Importance of Being Earnest and others, placing me at an additional disadvantage through my being more or less completely ignorant regarding the work of Oscar Wilde.

So I'm not absolutely comfortable with the form - page after page of exposition following the process of deduction, concerning which, objections would probably seem churlish given that The Spider's Web is detective fiction, and I went into this with both eyes open; and I experienced occasional difficulties keeping track of all the various deductive threads and the persons to whom they were referring, which probably wouldn't have happened were I more familiar with Wilde's people.

Nevertheless, it still just about worked for me, being beautifully written, as ever, and while I'm obviously in no position to weigh in on how well Purser-Hallard has captured the voices of Ernest, Algernon and the rest, I sort of suspect that he has because they're a delight to read, and his portrayal of Lady Bracknell is magnificent, uproarious, duly terrifying, and has convinced me that I really need to familiarise myself with Earnest as soon as possible. Even when writing at some distance outside one's comfort zone, Philip Purser-Hallard's work is always a pleasure to read.

Doom Patrol: Weight of the Worlds

 

Gerard Way & others Doom Patrol: Weight of the Worlds (2020)
Weight of the Worlds turned out to be the grand finale and I believe the Young Animal imprint ceased to be soon after - which seems a telling indictment given that, despite poor sales killing off the comic book, there's an expensive looking TV adaptation which has lasted two series at the time of writing. I haven't seen it because it resembles a million other grunting caped shows if the trailer is any indication.

Way's version of the Doom Patrol was quite heavily populated by this point, so there was a lot going on and most of it thoroughly peculiar; but it never becomes a problem, unless you're unable to read without having every last secret origin spelled out for you. The story, based on what sense I could make of it, tells of the gang's adventures in both outer space and within the internal reality of Danny the Ambulance. It's mostly completely illogical and makes a point of tripping itself up every few pages, apparently for the sake of keeping readers on their toes, but it works beautifully if you just hang on and make an effort to enjoy the ride without worrying too much about the sort of shit that comic book twats habitually worry about. For what it may be worth, I particularly enjoyed Flex Mentallo's battle with a pair of sentient alien swimming trunks - so that's one to look out for.

The art is absolutely gorgeous even with a different artist for each original issue, which otherwise doesn't always work but makes perfect sense here given the narrative shifts from one episode to the next. Also worth noting is that with Weight of the Worlds, Way's Doom Patrol no longer felt quite so much like an homage to Grant Morrison and had really become its own thing, which you apparently didn't bother to buy so now it's dead. Nice going, fuckers.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 752

 

C.C. Finlay (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 752 (2020)
The Fantasy & Science Fiction Twitter account has taken to bestowing hearts upon the links I've posted to my reviews of previous issues, which is nice, but has additionally fostered a certain sense of dread regarding this issue, the current one. I picked it up because I saw Matthew Hughes' name on the cover, then immediately realised that I would now feel obliged to say nice things about the magazine, which would be awkward if it turned out to be awful.

Thankfully it isn't. There were a couple of stories which weren't to my liking to greater or lesser degrees, but the general standard is exceptionally high, and enough so for the quality of the good stuff to fully eclipse that of material which wasn't to my taste. For the sake of balance, I'll get my objections out of the way first.

How to Burn Down the Hinterlands by Lyndsie Manusos is probably the only contribution I didn't really enjoy on any level. It has dramatic potential, although I found the author's claim of there being a lot of nods to fantasy worlds, tropes and video games that I love in it massively off-putting, particularly once we encounter entire paragraphs of faux-dramatic non-sentences impersonating a portentous voice-over of the kind usually describing the sort of exhausting CGI overload you get in superhero movies wherein Fatso the Human Flying Saucer breaks open the eternity stone and becomes as one with the reality interface of an entire universe; and usually describing this because Hinterlands seems to do just two things - that being one, the other being the scene where the music swells and we zoom in upon a craggy frown vowing to do this not just for its children, but also for its children's children, so mote it be.

Everything paused, stood still. My vision was speckled with glinting metal, shards and liquid drops of shine. The sword's essence waited there. It was not a person. It was an intangible thing, indescribable. Waiting for me.

You see, waiting for me doesn't really work as a sentence in isolation. They're just three words staring forlornly at the space just ahead where the comma should have been. Then there are plenty of other similarly inert constructions effecting to resemble portentous expectorations which work better as titles than as sentences. It's as though someone has devised a written equivalent of the art of Jim Lee - an endless swirl of ninja daggers, cinematic bodies in billowing togas, and grimacing faces with far too much cross-hatching.

I had fewer problems with Nick DiChario's beautifully written La Regina Ratto, but something nevertheless didn't sit right with me and this urban fable. Possibly it's that our main character shagging a human-sized female rodent sails a little too close to furry territory for my liking, although the parallel seems most likely unintentional

Then somewhat on the cusp we have Sarina Dorie's A Civilised and Orderly Zombie Apocalypse per School Regulations. Dorie is introduced as author of something called Womby's School for Wayward Witches - a series, naturally - which seemed ominous; and this story begins as an apparent response to the question, what if we combined Harry Potter with zombies? As a proposal, it was never going to score bigly in this house, and makes me think of Who fanfic types who list Douglas Adams as their greatest inspiration; and then about halfway through, we come to this:

In the news, they had reported that a newly developed serum could arrest the side effects of becoming infected. I just had to keep these students safe long enough for the police and paramedics to arrive and deliver the antidote.

Right. Thanks for that. My expectations weren't great, but this reads like the sort of heavy handed improvised exposition one finds in stories written by persons still in school, and while Dorie is herself a school teacher, I'm thinking ninth grade here.

Yet, despite such objections, a trace of Joyce Grenfell politely failing to keep her class from anarchy creeps in towards the end, perhaps revealing that for which Dorie had been gunning all along, and the last few pages deliver a very satisfying if admittedly gruesome conclusion. Consider me impressed.

Elsewhere, I have Gregor Hartmann's, On Vapour, Which the Night Condenses down as generally decent; and Nadia Afifi's The Bahrain Underground Bazaar and Cylin Busby's The Homestake Project are both powerfully evocative, although you can somehow tell that Busby also writes children's books.

Theodore McCombs' The Silent Partner is wonderful and reminds me a little of Ray Bradbury. A Tale of Two Witches by Albert E. Cowdrey is exceptionally good, with horror employed as an aspect of the story rather than the whole point, which I really appreciate. It's the third I've read by Cowdrey and I'm yet to be disappointed.

Amman Sabet's, Skipping Stones in the Dark is likewise wonderful. My only criticism would be that through being narrated by an artificial intelligence which observes from a distance, much of what occurs reads like a synopsis, albeit a synopsis for something I would quite happily read if expanded to novella or even novel length with all of the details filled in.

Coming at last to the main attraction, at least for me, Matthew Hughes, The Glooms, is worth the admission price alone. This is the second of his short stories that I've read, and the second to inspire me to the realisation that I really need to buy his books, which is unusual because it isn't ordinarily the sort of thing which would appeal to me - a pseudo mediaeval world of wizards and castles. Hughes writes fantasy like no-one else I've read, with a wit which really draws the reader in; and with genuinely unexpected narrative twists and turns making for a story which defies expectations; and without resorting to the clichés which often make the genre such a chore; and all occupying a plausible magical reality which feels very much as though it works as well under its own steam even after we've finished reading. Oddly, Hughes writing with the texture of daily experience combined with the clarity of what he writes - no easy magical solutions here - reminds me of Stephen Baxter albeit in a very different genre and without Baxter's occasionally overpowering pessimism.

So thankfully, it hasn't been at all difficult finding nice things to say about this issue, given that pleasing most of the people most of the time is nothing to be sniffed at; and additional praise is due for Jerry Oltion's brain-strangling essay, Is Math Real? and the poetry of Beth Cato and Mary Soon Lee, which I say as someone who very rarely connects with poetry.

Dwellers in the Mirage

 

Abraham Merritt Dwellers in the Mirage (1932)
This is my third Merritt, and possibly my last depending upon how charitable I'm feeling should I happen across any of the remaining five in a used book store. While there's much to recommend Abe, of those I've read, this is the third of his novels to feature what is more or less the same story which, in case you can't be arsed to skip back to September, I've already summarised thus:

...belonging very much to the genre inhabited by Conan Doyle's Lost World, much of what was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and particularly H. Rider Haggard's She, which I gather substantially influenced Merritt; thus we have scientific blokes who venture forth and discover a lost civilisation of some description, consequently resulting in thrills, scrapes, and at least one of their number copping off with a lady in a metallic bra.

 

As with both The Moon Pool and The Face in the Abyss, Dwellers in the Mirage gets off to a frankly astonishing start before settling into a hundred or so pages of people running around with swords, and people who seem to have crept into the book while you weren't looking so it's anyone's guess who the hell they're supposed to be.

Merritt writes beautifully, like a grown man version of that to which Lovecraft aspired but never really quite achieved. His characters are fascinating and the set ups and situations into which they stumble are genuinely bizarre, and additionally spiced by the author pulling off some fairly detailed and hence plausible scientific explanations for the weirder aspects of his tale. Here we have a man who finds himself sharing a body with the personality of some mythic warrior from antiquity, and who then discovers a lost civilisation of pygmies living beneath a remote lake, except what appears to be a lake is actually some peculiar atmospheric effect concealing a Carboniferous landscape. The first half reads a little like Asimov turning his hand to sword and what may resemble sorcery but is actually a perfectly logical scientific phenomenon.

And I reflected, now, that science and religion are really blood brothers, which is largely why they hate each other so, that scientists and religionists are quite alike in their dogmatism, their intolerance, and that every bitter battle of religion over some interpretation of creed or cult has its parallel in battles of science over a bone or rock.

Unfortunately, the second half seems to be grunting fights, and I lost track of who was fighting who or how it started. In fact our man seems to have switched sides at some point, and I still have no idea why, or who Dara was supposed to be, so it became quickly exhausting. This is a shame because Merritt's Khalk'ru is essentially Lovecraft's Cthulhu written by a man with a solid understanding of physics and who isn't crippled by a pathological fear of foreigners.

Bugger. There's so much that's good about this one that maybe I should give him another chance. I guess we'll have to see.

Doom Patrol

Gerard Way & Nick Derington Doom Patrol (2018)
It came back and it was mostly wonderful, and then it was cancelled because no-one bought it. This isn't one of those graphic novels you're always hearing about - which are actually just a bunch of comic books stuck together with selotape - but the twelve issues of the thing which came out one at a time before it went tits up. Having given up on comic books many, many years ago, then cautiously returned to the form more recently, it seemed like time to do the right thing, to support my local comic book store, to support the comic book industry, and to loyally buy the fucker right from the stands each month rather than wait a couple of years for the graphic novel.

It turns out that one aspect of getting old is that new things often tend to look shit, and this is how it has been for me and the comic book industry, generally speaking. I liked comics when they were a bit crap, when they were kind of cheap and wouldn't seem out of place mixed up with issues of Take-a-Break magazine in a dentist's waiting room. I liked comics before half the store came to resemble Chinese cartoons or European cinema, when they were printed on crappy paper, and when they were read by people who bought them because they liked to read comic books rather than through a desire to belong to some larger community of sad fucking wankers. These days - as I should probably get used to saying - the comic book seems to be the least important part of the store which is otherwise filled with memorabilia and box upon box of grotesque collectible bobble-headed caricatures which must surely have been designed with children under the age of two in mind. Assuming this is what the younger generation actually want, this is why I sometimes have difficulty not regarding the whole fucking lot of them as essentially ridiculous.

Anyway, I tried to buy Doom Patrol each month just like I would have done in the good old days when everything was much better than it is now, but half the time it was delayed, or it was sold out because they hadn't bothered to set a copy aside for me as they had said they would; or at the other extreme, I accidentally bought the same issue twice because a few of them had eight or nine variant covers - keeping the investors and collectors happy no doubt. I even tried buying a couple of other Young Animal titles just to be a sport but gave up because they just didn't seem like anything special. Thus did I accumulate a collection of about eight of the twelve issues of Way's Doom Patrol which came out before it got cancelled because no-one was reading, and which I didn't bother reading because I obviously only had two thirds of a story and was saving myself for when I'd found the missing issues; except the back issues weren't even turning up at my usual online comic book retailer, begging the question of what the full fucking print run had even been - fifty copies?

Anyway, I finally filled in the gaps so here we are at last.

This was mostly a great run. The influence of Grant Morrison is difficult to miss, but this Doom Patrol was more than just a well-played cover version, possibly equating to the stranger excesses of pop art in relation to Morrison's free form Dada, given Way's greater investment in disposable consumer culture and action figures. That said, it's a shame he seems to have ignored Rachel Pollack's run on the book given its spiritual compatibility with what we have here; and it's nothing like so shocking in 2018, or at least 2020, as was Morrison's Doom Patrol back in the nineties, possibly because for all the superior artwork, quality paper, and CGI effects, it's difficult to get past the variant covers, the collectibility, and the possibility of it having been bankrolled as something in which you invest rather than actually read, or enjoy, or which fuels your running around the back yard with your little pals with towels around your shoulders. Where this sort of comic book was once punctuated with adverts for chewing gum or model kits or Hostess Twinkies, now it's shaving products, graphic novels (mostly Batman) and bingeworthy television shows (also mostly Batman).

This was a great comic, and the fact of it falling on its arse probably tells you everything you need to know about mainstream comic book publishing as it stands in 2020.

I saw some knacker slagging this off as incomprehensible on Goodreads, illustrating his point - whatever it may have been - with references to something called Rick & Morty, which is apparently a cartoon like you see on the telly, one of those things beloved of all the really important YouTube people.

Prosecution rests, m'lud.

Wide Sargasso Sea

 

Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
One day we will have all become so fucking stupid that somebody will describe this as Jane Eyre fanfic, but thankfully that day remains some way ahead, at least in this house. Older boys and girls will doubtless remember that Jane Eyre is about a woman called Jane Eyre who sort of fancies her boss, Mr. Rochester. He kind of fancies her back too, but is unfortunately already married and keeps his crazy wife locked away in the attic so as to keep her from setting things on fire. It might be observed that the aforementioned crazy wife gets something of a raw deal in Jane Eyre, although in literary terms she's not much more than a piece of scary scenery provided so as to throw her husband's twattery into sharp relief. All the same, I guess Jean Rhys felt that the first Mrs. Rochester got something of a raw deal, hence this prequel telling her side of the story.

Antoinette Cosway is the approximately white daughter of a nineteenth century Caribbean plantation owner and heiress to a fortune, which is why she attracts the attention of the aforementioned Rochester, although he isn't specifically identified here. While I'm not convinced Charlotte Brontë's novel is quite the expression of patriarchy it might seem - her mad woman in the attic playing a more or less gothic and hence symbolic role rather than being ancestral to Bernard Manning jokes - it's hard not to be left a little uncomfortable by the first Mrs. Rochester, which was almost certainly the point; and Brontë was writing from a very much colonial perspective, which seems worth addressing

Rhys' Antoinette is a victim of her environment more than anything. Her life begins to fall apart in the wake of the abolition of slavery, leaving her and her dwindling family marooned - interred within a Caribbean existence which is itself mostly hostile to them. By the time Rochester turns up in hope of marrying her bank account, the psychological damage is mostly done, and the novel maps her falling apart over time, not so much for the sake of turning a victim into a martyr to any particular cause, but to render Antoinette as a rounded human being rather than just a one-dimensional reason why some better known English guy is a bit of a dick. No-one comes out of this looking good.

'Then I will have the police up, I warn you. There must be some law and order even in this Godforsaken island.'

'No police here,' she said. 'No chain gang, no tread machine, no dark jail either. This is free country and I am free woman.'

Additionally, to Rhys' credit, Wide Sargasso Sea makes no attempt to impersonate Brontë's novel, but rather is formed from dreamlike impressions with viewpoints shifting from one individual to another and keeping the reader guessing for much of the time. Thus we are afforded wildly variable sides of the same story obliging us to draw our own conclusions regarding Antoinette's state of mind and the ominous nature of her environment.

I suppose someone must have adapted it for screen with Hugh Grant or one of that bunch goshing and crikeying his way through a completely unrelated script in period costume, but it doesn't read like anything which would lend itself to that sort of distillation into lace, milkmaids and pretty pictures, so I hope not and I'm not going to look, just in case. Some things only really work as books, or work significantly better as books than in any other medium, and I suspect this may be one of them.

Genocide

 

Paul Leonard Genocide (1997)
I know I'm only going to end up writing the same review I always write of underwhelming Doctor Who tie-in novels, but what the fuck, why not? Maybe something nice will happen.

As I've stated on several occasions, I used to be addicted to these things. There were two published each month for a while and I bought and read every single one of them without fail, not quite to the exclusion of anything else, but with hindsight I really wish my focus had been a little wider. My subsequent tendency to sneer is therefore derived from my eventually having realised that quite a few of these books were pretty poor, which is massively embarrassing given how amazing I once believed them to be. This possibly informs my tendency to overreact when writing reviews of Who novels. I additionally tend to throw babies out with whatever bathwater happens to be available because I dislike almost anything which calls itself fandom, and I'm disappointed with anyone who can claim such a fervent degree of allegiance to bland, button-pushing generic entertainment product; and I'm disappointed with them because that was me a couple of decades ago.

Nevertheless, given the tonnage of eighties X-Men comics I've purchased over the last couple of years, I'm not really in any position to disparage the Doctor Who novel on the grounds of it being either juvenile or mass produced, because - aside from anything else - I still fucking love some of this shit even if I don't necessarily want to hang around with anyone dressed as one of the characters; so I'm going to try to break it down a little further.

Mark Hodder has observed that the once considerable popularity of the fictional detective Sexton Blake seems to have waned roughly correspondent to the rise in popularity of Doctor Who, prompting Hodder to further speculate upon their similarities, and how it could be argued that the two characters have occupied more or less the same cultural niche at different ends of the century*. Blake was initially a response to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, an arguably more egalitarian interpretation freed from the limitations of single authorship, and even if Blake was more product than Holmes, he benefits from being born to an era prior to the full mechanisation of the production line, figuratively speaking, meaning even serials such as those featuring Blake, Doc Savage, Perry Rhodan or whoever else, might showcase the singular vision of an individual author rather than a committee or a fucking focus group. In writing terms, we're talking craft more than art but this isn't to say that we're talking artless, and for my money, the best Sexton Blake has been equal to or superior to Conan Doyle's antecedent. In other words, pulp - as is generally applied willy-nilly by persons who rarely seem to understand quite where the term came from - doesn't have to mean low quality.

I see something of this as being applicable to Who, and to how Who has evolved over the years into something which is more or less all product. Of course, it's always been a mass produced and undeniably populist deal, and anyone who ever mistook Who for handwritten Kafka manuscripts unpublished during the author's lifetime is a fucking idiot; but mass production tends to be corporate, and the nature of the corporation has changed from something which may once have supported stables of semi-domesticated creative weirdos to what it is now, wherein marketing has become so invasive as to infest every stage of the allegedly creative process to a degree which seems almost comparable to ideology. In terms of Who, both televised and written, this means we've gone from slightly cranky but occasionally inspired outsiders who drew their influences from across the board, to persons who are usually fans with all the brand loyalty implied by the term, whose inspiration is mostly self-referential, and who have been hired to fill a quota and tick certain boxes. Doctor Who went off the air in 1989 when it was discovered that only seven people were still watching. It returned as a one-off special in 1996, which - for me - approximately represents the corporate singularity, the point beyond which the whole enterprise became more akin to product than anything derived from even a diluted artistic vision. It was specifically designed to capture an audience, to corner a market, and creative considerations were subservient to this goal.

Going back a couple of years, Virgin Books took it upon themselves to publish novels continuing the series in print alone once the TV show went tits up. The series was called the New Adventures and they were mostly pretty good, or at least that's how I remember them. Having been pitched at what was by definition a dwindling audience, none of whom were children - at least not physically - the authors were free to go wild, to come up with all manner of crazy shite which we never would have seen on the screen. So even those who might be deemed slavering continuity obsessed fans occasionally shone brightly, and as a result, many of the New Adventures worked as science-fiction novels in their own right.

Then someone presumably noticed the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and figured it might be worth giving the Who goose another squeeze just in case there were a few more golden eggs still to be popped out; and so it came back, as described above, and because we didn't want to take any chances, we got all of our best people on the job, the award winners, the proven sellers, the stars of the marketing department. We held meetings and asked the kids what they wanted, then pulled our findings apart so as to work out what they really wanted even if they didn't know it. We published our conclusions. We talked to the shareholders. We got a great deal.

So where the Virgin books had been mostly decent, occasionally exceptional, and at least aspiring to something other than text which asks us to imagine we're watching a TV show, the BBC novels which supplanted them were patchier, with occasional flashes of inspiration arising apparently in spite of the general thrust rather than as part of the strategy; and Genocide seems sadly illustrative of this.

I remember liking it a lot but seem to have outgrown the form, I suppose you might say; and it's not even a bad book. Paul Leonard wrote a lot of these things and was generally competent, able to string a sentence together and good for just the sort of weird, screwy ideas upon which Who first built its reputation. Here we have time trees - and you can probably guess what they do from the name - which facilitate the unfortunate extinction of the entire human race thanks to a species of four-eyed horses - all of which seems to hint at the influence of Larry Niven, at least from where I'm standing. His prose is mostly workmanlike and efficient without being truly dull, and he occasionally slips into clipped cinematic non-sentences for the sake of drama or pacing without ending up looking like a wanker, as so many others often do.

This was enough for me back in 1997 but this time around, I can't quite get past those elements which seem to betray the overbearing hand of editorial direction. We're clearly reading something aimed at a younger age group, and someone at head office doubtless thought we'd identify with Sam and all of her modular teenage concerns; and we're reading something which quite clearly aspires to viewing as an imaginary television show on our mind's inner screen, right down to entire alien races represented by just three actors in funny costumes.

Paul Leonard does as good a job as he can within the limitations of the revised form, and it starts well and doesn't read like fan fiction - as was often the case; but once the big ideas have been delivered, there's not actually a lot of story to be had. It certainly didn't need three-hundred pages and sags horribly after the first hundred or so, descending into inconsequential scrapes and running around until it's time for The Generation Game. It really feels as though these BBC novels were the last good thing, or at least the last with any potential beyond mere sales figures and pushing that consumer loyalty button. Genocide had potential, but time was running out.

*: Unfortunately I can't remember where he made these speculations, so it was probably some private correspondence or other.

The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid

Octavio Paz The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid (1972)
I've had this since 2003, as suggested by a couple of bus tickets preserved between the pages - a return to Tottenham Court Road on Saturday the 2nd of August of that year, so I'm assuming that's when and approximately where I bought the thing. I've been under the impression of this being a book I never got around to reading - which is why I took it from the shelf on this occasion; except I find handwritten footnotes within, and obviously mine, suggesting that I've read it but have no memory of doing so.

Complete crap is probably an overstatement given that it doubtless depends on the source to which Paz was referring. Back in 2003, I tended towards overcompensation when it came to Mesoamerica; plus I'd bought this book because there was a pyramid on the cover and was most likely bewildered by much of it - which probably explains my being unable to remember it.

Now that I'm older, marginally wiser, and living significantly much closer to Mexico, it makes more sense than it probably would have done on the number forty from Tottenham Court Road. Additionally, I'm living fairly close to the border so Mexico's relationship with the United States has become part of the wallpaper of my daily existence, and while this is arguably peripheral to what Paz writes about, it's nevertheless applicable and his insight is astonishing - at least now that I have some frame of reference.

The United States, smiling or angry, its hand open or clenched, neither sees nor hears us but keeps striding on, and as it does so, enters our lands and crushes us. It is impossible to hold back a giant; it is possible, though far from easy, to make him listen to others; if he listens, that opens the possibility of coexistence. Because of their origins (the Puritan speaks only with God and himself, not with others), and above all because of their power, the North Americans are outstanding in the art of monologue: they are eloquent and they also know the value of silence. But conversation is not their forte: they do not know how to listen or to reply.

However, The Other Mexico is principally about how Mexico relates to itself rather than to its neighbours, and attempts to reconcile the apparent contradictions of a national politic which abhors the horrors of the conquest while nevertheless celebrating that which was born from the same. We begin with the Tlatelolco massacre of October, 1968 where government troops slaughtered several hundred unarmed student protestors, compared by Paz to something like a mass sacrifice of the kind for which Ahuizotl was famed in the days before the Spaniards turned up. Given the improbability of ever fully explaining anything so horrific as the Tlatelolco massacre, Paz makes as much sense as anyone and he expands his argument with what feels like a certain sort of poetic truth.

Speaking of poetic truths, as I read about the Tlatelolco massacre it dawned on me that it had occurred fifty years ago to the day, and that I was reading about it on the anniversary of its occurrence, by uncanny coincidence; except, of course, I immediately realised my error because the anniversary would have been in 2018, so I was reading about events which had occurred exactly fifty-two years before, and the figure struck me as more significant, being the length of a Xiuhmolpilli by the Mexica calendar; and significant because The Other Pyramid is quite specifically about pre-Colombian systems mapped onto post-conquest reality.

Paz identifies Mexico's colonial and revolutionary systems of government as a continuation of that which the conquest attempted to eradicate and replace - namely what is essentially a one-party state with rulers picked by the governing body rather than the people. It's a convincing argument, and one that seems to go some way towards explaining the Mexican government's peculiar relationship with the drug cartels who, in this model, might be deemed more like a rival tribal group than necessarily criminal or enemies of the state. It's coincidental that I should choose to have read this directly following The Medium is the Massage, but seems fitting given McLuhan's observation that the medium - in this case, Mexico itself - seems to dictate the general thrust of that which is transmitted.

Additionally, it seems fitting that I should find myself reading this on the eve of yet another American Presidential election, given America's apparent descent into what has begun to feel a little like a one-party state policed by what amounts to just another gang; also regarding which:

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

As my younger, more defensive self noted, Paz was misinformed regarding the prestige, or lack thereof, of Chichimec origins in Mexica society, but pretty much everything else he had bang to rights. This time I'll try to keep it all in mind.

The Medium is the Massage

Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore The Medium is the Massage (1967)
I've found McLuhan a little impenetrable in the past, or perhaps not so much impenetrable as so information rich that it can be difficult to process what he's saying. The Medium is the Massage seems to represent a loosely populist concession, representing a few of his core ideas in a more accessible form - almost a pop art translation with heavy emphasis on the pictures, not least because the pictures carry part of the argument. McLuhan's argument seems to be that the electronic communications revolution of the twentieth century influenced the nature of the messages which passed between different parts of society, favouring non-linear narratives and thus allowing for greater spontaneity within society as a whole, hence the revolutionary or reforming tendencies of sixties culture. If it helps make sense of the suggestion, a linear narrative might be, for example, the nineteenth century notion of progress as something moving forward with clear and coherent purpose. McLuhan suggests that the switch to a non-linear narrative has created something like a global village, as distinct, I suppose, from a global corporation or corporations. McLuhan's conclusion additionally seems to account in part for the rise of postmodernism and is essentially optimistic in proposing that a better, more developed society should result.

Weirdly, it's fairly easy to see how human society in 2020 seems to represent a continuation of McLuhan's model, despite our being in an arguably quite different, even devolved place to that which he foresaw, possibly because the last half century of technological progress has comprised revision and development of existing forms rather than innovation on the scale of the printing press being an innovation. Also because postmodernism seems to have proven unusually conducive to the investiture of naked emperors.

That's what I've taken from it anyway. I could be wrong.

Busted Synapses

Erica L. Satifka Busted Synapses (2020)
I don't really keep any sort of finger on the pulse of contemporary science-fiction and don't have much of an idea of whether it genuinely exists or what it is - and obviously I'm talking about the written word here, having significantly less interest in the more corporate forms. This means that, from where I'm standing, Erica L. Satifka is either one of the best authors we have right now, or I simply haven't noticed the good stuff because the shelves at Barnes & Noble seem to be chock full of things which would really, really like to be on telly when they grow up. Stay Crazy was great, if you remember that one, and Busted Synapses may be better, or is at least as good.

Certain parts of the publicityplex have been mumbling about cyberpunk, which sort of works, but nevertheless feels to me like an appeal to persons who wear aviator goggles at fan events. True enough, here we have the notion of many tentacled corporations as inherently evil combined with something resembling virtual reality, neither of which were invented by William Gibson, and frankly this is a damn sight better than most of his body of work with the possible exception of Pattern Recognition. Busted Synapses isn't an adventure, isn't the cool new flavour, shifts no paradigm, and inhabits the regular unskilled existence of people I immediately recognise from the real world; which is nice because I'd argue that we don't need either Star Captains or plucky day-saving teenagers in 2020. Busted Synapses grabs that familiar, thoroughly depressing reality outside the window by the sack and gives it a goodly twist, just like proper science-fiction should. The call centers, screen addiction, and human populace reduced to economic resource will be known to most of us. The rest is extrapolated from where we are right now, but not by a whole lot, and not enough to leave us cosily reflecting on how at least things aren't yet this bad because they sort of are but for the small print.

There's a chance Erica L. Satifka may eventually tire of comparisons with Philip K. Dick, because she's certainly no copyist and comparisons made with himself usually refer to something blandly cinematic from an adaptation rather than his actual novels; but Busted Synapses is inhabited by those same doomed outsiders we met on Mars fiddling about with their Perky Pat layouts in Palmer Eldritch - or possibly their relatives - and the company is just as faceless, just as lacking in basic humanity as in both Dick's oeuvre and Trump's America. Additionally, Satifka's focus is sharp and without distracting diversions down mystical or otherwise psychological side roads. My only complaint is that this focus means for a short, snappy novel where I could have stood to spend more time reading, although I suppose that's barely even a complaint.

Publishers need to start throwing money at Erica Satifka because on the strength of what I've read, what the world needs right now is more of her work, or work of equivalent quality. Popular and intelligent don't have to be mutually exclusive, and this sort of thing - which aims resolutely higher than the usual bingeworthy consumer product - makes the world a better place.

Wolverine

 

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Larry Hama etc. etc. Wolverine (1991)
Not a graphic novel, not a collected edition, just a big stack of comic books like you would read when in bed with the measles, or a hangover if you're a little bit older. The story, as I've definitely already mentioned on more than one occasion, is that I was once a massive sucker for caped comic books, then sold my entire collection during a sudden fit of what I imagined to be maturity. It's a decision I've always regretted and have finally set right, having spent the last couple of years buying them all back - mainly thanks to the fact that none of them ever ended up quite so collectible - and by association, expensive - as we were told would be the case.

When it finally happened, Wolverine as a regularly monthly title didn't make much of an impression on me, as is possibly indicated by my having re-bought entire runs of X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants* before I even remembered that there had ever been a regular Wolverine title, and one to which I subscribed and presumably read. Anyway, I picked up a few and realised that yes, I actually had enjoyed the thing well enough, thereby justifying another couple of hundred dollars spunked away at Lone Star Comics in the name of nostalgia, albeit an admittedly vague form of nostalgia.

Anyway, Wolverine was essentially everything Charles Schulz had warned us about in his Peanuts strip back in 1952.

Unfortunately, a homicidal nutcase whose superpower is stabbing people proved somewhat limited in terms of what kind of stories might be told, and so Wolverine was written as a man wrestling with inner demons, which at least allowed for bit more wiggle room. Frank Miller and Chris Claremont had already done a lot to flesh out the character both in the main X-Men comics and in related spin-offs, and Claremont got the regular book off to a fairly decent start, essentially turning Wolverine into a hard-boiled detective and letting him run loose in an old Terry and the Pirates strip. It worked well, and was at least more engaging than the endless cycle of growling and stabbing which it could have been, and which a few of the readers had seemingly expected.

That said, a few of Claremont's plot points were somewhat bewildering - possibly due to this being just one of fifty other books he was writing to a monthly schedule, and the whole thing came across as kind of dry at times what with the rigorous adherence to Wolverine as film noir. Peter David and then Archie Goodwin took over from Claremont after ten issues, roughly maintaining the same mood and general standard, even allowing for bursts of humour. Considering the vigour with which Marvel had been milking the X-cow at least since the second half of the eighties, the actual quality of Wolverine is surprising and impressive, although I suppose if they were throwing money at any title, it was going to be this one; and so the art is likewise mostly exceptional as one would expect of John Buscema, John Byrne, Klaus Janson, Marc Silvestri and others. However, I couldn't help but notice that this stuff reads a lot better when you sit down with a big stack of comics and binge the lot in just a couple of sittings. It played its cards just a little too close to its chest for a monthly schedule - as I vaguely seem to recall - which is probably why I'd forgotten so much of it, including even the point at which I gave up and stopped buying the thing.

Having no idea of where I'd originally jumped ship, and being reluctant to buy a run of back issues where the cut-off point might leave me hanging in the middle of an unfinished story, I re-bought the book up to and including issue fifty on the grounds of it being a round number and not too deep into the period beyond which these comics had mostly turned to shite in a grimacing cross-hatched effort to tap into some of that old Rob Liefeld magic. Now, having actually read the things, it seems I've made the right decision, both in drawing the line at issue fifty and in dumping the book when I did first time round. Larry Hama's run on the last twenty or so of these restores a lot of the humour and peculiar novelty which had either been missing or else was stood in the corner pretending to be Mickey Spillane during previous episodes. On one level, Hama turned Wolverine into sixties telly Batman, having Logan fight his own android double while trying to save the life of a bomb disguised as a cute little girl with pigtails and a lisp programmed to blow him into pieces; but for all Hama's wit and invention, it becomes obvious that all those letter-writing twerps complaining about the lack of stabbings have had their way. Various X-Men begin to turn up as crowd pleasing guests with increasing frequency, and by now it's the grimacing nineties X-Men in those bondage costumes covered in pockets, utility belts and holsters and all the women with massive tits and no waist; and inker Dan Green seemed to be doing his best to make Silvestri's pencils resemble something from the Image stable.

Wolvey's secret origin, you won't fucking believe it, deffo the real thing this time, not a dream, grimace grimace, black ops, even more fucking cross-hatching and random pockets, more black ops, clandestine government organisation, foil stamped edition also available blah blah blah…

Wolverine was never really in competition with The Taming of the Shrew, in case anyone missed that particular memo, but this was a decent, even classy book for a while, regardless of having sprung from Marvel's increasingly rabid attempts to take its readership for every last penny - although I gather much worse was to come, and a mere fifty new X-titles hitting the racks each week now seemingly represents a model of restraint by comparison. Inevitably there were lapses, notably the bewilderingly shit Lazarus Project issues featuring art by Barry Kitson whom I seem to recall as having contributed to my giving up on 2000AD back in the eighties; but these were exceptions rather than the rule. Otherwise, for my money, these issues belonged to the final flowering of the American superhero comic before it grew up and became an absolute fucking bore, having mistakenly assumed a massive body count and increasingly baroque forms of slaughter to be pretty much tantamount to adulthood. Those vicious little letter page gorehounds got their way, effectively killing off the thing they purportedly loved, then themselves most likely grew up to be cops, security guards and right-wing politicians, so I'd guess.

Still, it was nice while it lasted.

*: Well, entire runs of the readable stuff, my cut-off point being around 1991, beyond which most of them had turned to shite.
 

Don't Hide the Madness

 

Steven Taylor (editor) Don't Hide the Madness (2018)
...or William S. Burroughs in conversation with Allen Ginsberg as the subheading promises, which began life as an article for the Observer vaguely intended to promote Cronenberg's attempt to film Naked Lunch. The idea was that the editor would hang around with Burroughs and Ginsberg for a couple of days, recording their conversation on tape in the hope of a written piece being mined from this wealth of source material. Handily, Taylor already knew Ginsberg well, and Burroughs as a friend of Ginsberg, and there were a few others hanging around and chipping in - James Grauerholz, various friends and neighbours and so on. Don't Hide the Madness is three-hundred pages of transcript whittled down from eleven cassette tapes of the gang yacking away without any obvious attempts to steer the conversation.

Taylor claims to have edited out the really inane stuff, so we don't get to hear Ginsberg spotting an apparently discarded shoelace in the corner of the room, then pick it up to discover that it's actually string, then spend the next twenty pages talking about how it really, really, really looked like a shoelace. We do, on the other hand, get to sit in on them talking about guns, which is mystifying, being mostly a series of numbers presumably describing what type of gun someone is waving around.

Yet, as with real life, attention wanders and certain points keep swinging back around, restoring our focus; which keeps the emphasis fairly light, conveys a touching sense of moment which might have been otherwise lost, and even communicates the more intensive subjects by allowing for nuance, and which might not have been quite so engaging had it been pared down to just Cronenberg, Naked Lunch, and the stuff directly relating to Burroughs as author.

I don't remember particularly liking the Cronenberg movie on the one occasion of my seeing it - although I don't think his work is really my thing - but Burroughs' take on it, which is generally positive, is fascinating; not least because it all seems to tie into wider discussion of the ugly spirit, to which Burroughs attributes blame for his having shot his wife all those years ago. This comes up because at the time of recording, and of the release of Naked Lunch, Burroughs was looking into exorcism, and had been subject to some sort of spiritual cleansing by a local shaman. It's the kind of discussion which might inspire the rolling of eyes and general grumbling about new age bollocks under other, more formal circumstances, but here it's revealed as simply the easiest way to discuss and deal with something which otherwise resists analysis in more coldly analytical terms. The pay off, should we need it, is that Don't Hide the Madness actually explains pretty much everything you ever needed to know about Burroughs and his writing, but delivers the information as low-key conversational dialogue which communicates a hell of a lot more than the traditional lists of names, dates and places. As a particularly weird consequence, it very much separates the author from his work in revealing Burroughs as a genuinely nice guy, someone who would be fun to hang around with, or at least I thought so.

He loved his cats, so he's fine by me.

A Planet for Texans

 

H. Beam Piper & John J. McGuire A Planet for Texans (1958)
I picked this one up out of curiosity for the same reason I picked up Fritz Leiber's A Spectre is Haunting Texas - because that's where I live. Also, it was the only science-fiction novel in the bookshop of the Texas State History Museum in Austin and I vaguely remember enjoying Piper's Little Fuzzy. A Planet for Texans was originally published as half of an Ace Double and later won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, whatever that is.

The premise is something about Texans being so ornery that the entire state secedes from planet Earth, and I gather the novel strives to examine some political point along vaguely libertarian lines, something inspired by H.L. Mencken proposing a political system incorporating the occasional assassination of candidates as a legitimate part of the governmental process. At least this is what it says on Wikipedia.

Considering that I was half expecting something ghastly about a planet of rootin' tootin' racist fatties, it could have been worse; but it also could have been better. Texas here is invoked by desert, cows, barbecue, and the sort of Texans it's fairly easy to avoid, even in Texas - namely ranch dwelling shitheads with too much money; so there wasn't much I recognised from my daily existence and I've been here for a whole decade. The only problem with Little Fuzzy, so far as I recall, is that about half the book was spent in a court room. Unfortunately this time it feels like it's almost the whole thing, although maybe something different happened during the pages where I was asleep. Unless I've read it wrong, it seems to be a conversation about libertarian stuff for 126 pages, with a few mentions of cows and barbecue thrown in here and there for the sake of local colour.

A Spectre is Haunting Texas isn't without its problems, from what I remember, but it was at least a lot more fun than this.

The Hawkline Monster

 

Richard Brautigan The Hawkline Monster (1974)
This was the first Brautigan I ever read, mainly because Reuben - with whom I was sharing a house at the time - shoved it at me and said, you must read this because it's amazing. This would have been 1984, possibly the first half of '85, and while I did indeed think it was amazing, it has somehow taken me thirty-five years to follow up on its promise with others by the guy; but I think I now understand why.

The Hawkline Monster bills itself as a gothic western, although as with Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar, it borders on science-fiction, or at least hangs out in the same part of town. Its cast comprises fairly typical Brautigan types, freewheeling and easily distracted as they deal with something which is probably almost magic realism with the inevitable interludes for shagging. The monster of the title is an accumulation of powerful and sentient light living in the basement, which comes with its own similarly sentient but long-suffering shadow. As often seems to be the case with Brautigan, the symbolism is positively pregnant with possibilities which the author leaves pretty much to the reader, not least of these being some slightly screwy parallel with the Biblical creation myth in which God says, let there be light, and so there is and the light brings shadow into being - which would probably be the devil; although this light is a complete cunt while its shadow seems to be a fairly sympathetic character. For what it's worth, as a reformed Who obsessive, I also couldn't help but notice some fairly solid parallels with Marc Platt's Ghostlight, although I've no idea if Brautigan served as inspiration. Along vaguely related lines, The Hawkline Monster might also be considered one of those novels which foreshadows the whole Faction Paradox thing without too much squinting.

It's a genuinely wonderful book - tight, witty, and truly peculiar without feeling the need to pull funny faces - and is in all sense a masterpiece; except for some reason it doesn't feel anything like so personal as a few of his other works. It's unmistakably Brautigan but it feels as though the conversation he's having is with himself more than the reader. This is an observation rather than a criticism, but I guess it at least explains my thirty-five year gap as much as anything does.

Robo-Hunter: Day of the Droids

 

John Wagner, Alan Grant & Ian Gibson
Robo-Hunter: Day of the Droids (1982)
While Verdus seemed like an essential purchase, this collects material which I vaguely remembered reading as a kid, and there it was in the store next to the first volume so it seemed worth a punt. Day of the Droids didn't make quite such an impression on me first time round, and I can see why. It does a job and it has its moments, but it reads somewhat like an attempt to repeat the formula - our man Sam on a one-man mission to put down an entire robot revolution, albeit this time back home on Earth. The sheer absurdity which made Verdus work is still in evidence, but here it feels a little as though Wagner was scrabbling around for things to send up. The cheery stupidity of Hoagy, Sam's assistant, is sufficiently chucklesome, but the robot version of Woody Allen's version of the Mafia feels a bit of a stretch, or at least it did to me and still does. As a whole, Day of the Droids is entertaining as fuck, yet falls some way short of the surrealist riot which was Verdus. I don't quite follow why anyone would have built pinstriped robot hoodlums, and Ian Gibson had apparently reached the point by which he couldn't be arsed to make them look even vaguely mechanical so we may as well be looking at extras from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Also we have Carlos Sanchez Stogie, a robot cigar created because IPC had adopted an anti-smoking policy, so Wagner came up with a robotic alternative to Sam's usual cigar based - it says here - on Carlos Ezquerra. Although Stogie is a lot of fun and it could be argued that Wagner here predicted e-cigarettes, I can't help but feel a little sorry for Ezquerra. I never met the man but I'm sure there was more to him than pronounceeng everytheeng like thees with occasional references to tacos.

I've seen it suggested that Alan Grant's run on Robo-Hunter was where it all went downhill, and yet his Beast of Blackheart Manor - the second strip in the collection - avoids the pitfalls of Droids for all that it's more or less Scooby Doo with robots. Grant actually manages to do something slightly different with Sam Slade and Gibson's art is clean, tight, and more dramatic. It's hard not to wonder whether somebody complained about Day of the Droids' gradual slide into sketchy panels full of wavy lines resembling a sort of amalgamation of Monet and Carl Barks.

Beyond this I have no coherent recollection of later Robo-Hunter strips beyond something headachey drawn by that bloke who drew everyone as massive pairs of eyes surrounded by cross-hatching, so if it was Alan Grant's fault, Blackheart Manor thankfully wasn't necessarily any indication of what was to come.

More "Things"

 

Ivan T. Sanderson More "Things" (1969)
This is the follow up to Sanderson's "Things", incredible though that may seem, which I haven't read and am now unlikely to read, having read this one. Sanderson's name stood out from the shelves in the book store because I've noticed him mentioned in a few other cranky paranormal tracts as some sort of authority, which seemingly translates to overwritten prose and the founding of various clubs and societies catering to the interests of those who wouldst know the truth of that which conventional science has been unable or unwilling to explain. As a rule I'm sympathetic towards this sort of thing because it's entertaining, depending on the writer, and very occasionally it makes you think dunnit?

Some of that which Sanderson reports is fairly interesting because just maybe there's something in it, and he writes well up to a point, beyond which he unfortunately invokes a retired colonel droning on at the fireside, endlessly amused by his own testimony. He knows doctors, dentists, professional people, so these accounts of African dinosaurs, sasquatch, and persons who live under the sea must be considered serious business, presumably unlike the same accounts when delivered by nutters and airy-fairy types.

This is all well and good until one notices the considered pondering attended upon Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin's 1967 encounter with bigfoot, as captured on a minute or so of film which probably everyone in the world has seen by this point. The two sides of the argument are clearly presented and evidence weighed, leading to conclude that it's probably real because we can't absolutely confirm that it's some guy in a suit, particularly as more recent testimony from the guy who was commissioned to make the suit and from the one who got to wear it in the film might be just some stuff they made up for a laugh. Having recently re-watched the footage, it looks a lot like a guy in a suit to me. In fact, if you remember the episode of Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge where a disgruntled Alan walks back and forth across a stage to demonstrate a dignified gait to Rebecca Front's amusing impersonation of Vivienne Westwood, well that's how the Patterson-Gimlin sasquatch walks.

In the wake of this, it becomes difficult to take the rest of the book seriously, and Sanderson's blowhard persona becomes increasingly aggravating regardless of how many doctors and dentists he's had the pleasure of knowing as personal friends, and no matter how often he attempts to distance himself from the crackpots like some Fortean equivalent of Uncle Tom. Brad Steiger, for one example, would probably count as a crackpot on the Sanderson scale, not least because he writes in pulpier and more populist spirit, and if Steiger's books cheerfully encompass absolutely anything and everything weird regardless of how potty the source, they make for a better, even more thought provoking read where Steiger's angle is usually an amiable and free-wheeling what the fuck? - as distinct from stuff which is probably bullshit bolstered up on a blustering display of authority.