Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds

Manly W. Wellman & Wade Wellman
Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds (1975)
I suppose someone had to do it, and given the corpulent central cell of this particular Venn diagram, I'm surprised there haven't been more - although Andrew Hickey's The Book of the Enemy is substantially different, should anyone be about to mention it. Ordinarily I might shy away from such crowd pleasing schlock, particularly given that recent developments among certain self-identified fan groups suggest that we can no longer tell the difference between inspiration and quotation; and, of course, I've already found some Goodreads pillock describing this book as steampunk.

The premise is what Conan Doyle's characters were doing during Wells' War of the Worlds - characters in the plural because the authors team Holmes up with Professor Challenger from The Lost World and somehow it actually sort of works. The authors additionally draw on Wells' The Crystal Egg, establishing an association that even Herbert himself left somewhat unresolved; so it embellishes and underscores War of the Worlds, fleshing out certain details even when attempting to contradict them, and as such makes for a surprisingly satisfying read, possibly because it's a Challenger novel more than anything. I hated the character in The Lost World, suspecting Challenger to be a genuine and unrestrained expression of Conan Doyle's misanthropic regard of his contemporaries as intellectual pygmies. The Wellmans, however, allow the character his alleged scientific genius while clearly having fun with his endless declarations of the same; and so we essentially get a version of the Wells novel told from the perspective of those living off the side of the page, and told very well too. I'm sure Holmes obsessives might have something to say about this, not least the detail of Sherlock getting busy with Mrs. Hudson - whom I still picture as played by the significantly older Mary Gordon in the Basil Rathbone movies, so that was odd - but who gives a shit, really? Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds is nothing life changing but it's a lot of fun and at least held my attention for a couple of hundred pages.

Other Lives

Peter Bagge Other Lives (2010)
I really dislike the term graphic novel because it's mostly just a sales pitch, and when we're talking ten consecutive back issues of Web of Spiderman collected in a hardcover edition, the term comic book is fine, because there's nothing wrong with it being a comic book and we shouldn't have to pretend it's in competition with Brideshead Revisited; but occasionally the cap fits, as it does with Peter Bagge's Other Lives.

Other Lives follows the entangled stories of four individuals with supplementary identities - one swears blind that he's working undercover for the government, another still wrestles with the fucknugget he once was, and the remaining two enjoy illicit virtual hook ups in what may as well be Second Life. They have in common the absurd social circle they all inhabit and a desperate need to be other people, and it's about as funny as cancer - which I state as a quantification of its power rather than a criticism. Some of it actually is sort of funny, as you might expect of the man who brought us Girly Girl and the Goon on the Moon; but the laughs are raw and uncomfortable, with the sheer tragedy of Other Lives rendered truly appalling by the contrast with Bagge's elasticated Looney Tunes inspired artwork. So, as with a good novel, a lot of what you pick up from this thing is delivered in the gaps rather than being anything expressed on the actual page. This leaves us with a novel which probably couldn't exist in any other medium, at least not with anything like the same impact. Bagge really is a living legend.

Spring Rain, Summer Heat

Josh Peterson Spring Rain, Summer Heat (2020)
To kick off with a characteristically self-indulgent preamble, some time ago I painted a provisional cover for one of my own efforts. The novel is called Early Morning and features, among other things, a couple of patchwork men made from bits of other people and thus loosely resembling the Universal Pictures version of the Frankenstein monster. The cover painting depicted the two of them posed in arbitrary homage to David Bailey's well known portrait of the Kray twins. Some writer was asking me about Early Morning, so I showed him the painting.

'Duality,' he said. 'Interesting.'

It struck me as one of the most gormless observations which has ever been made about anything I've done; and I have an uncomfortable suspicion that my reaction to Josh Peterson's two previous works may amount to more or less the same thing, words offered in the hope of it seeming as though you've understood something when actually you don't have the first fucking clue.

Duality, my arse.

So I suspect I may be guilty of overthinking my response to Peterson's writing, where it isn't actually anything like so complicated as I apparently believed. Spring Rain, Summer Heat, much like the other two, is a memoir formed from Josh Peterson slicing open his own brain, pressing it against the scanning screen of a photocopier, hitting copy, and the book is what came out of the slot - memories scattered in order of significance - or something non-linear at any rate, mashed up together with their own analysis, then typeset in a sequence which makes emotional sense but specifically as a book, rather than anything subscribing to the usual logic of mind as a movie screen; which is why it's a book, obviously.

As to what the memoir is about - sex, drugs, rock and roll but not in any of the conventionally spectacular senses. It's more to do with communicating the experience than that which is experienced - if that's even an actual fucking sentence.

I've destroyed and deleted so many photographs, pictures and keepsakes as if they were evidence. Gone to a ridiculous length to ensure there were no backups and no trace was left in cases of items being burned et cetera. Not just to suppress those particular narratives, but to prevent myself from living vicariously through the past. And then compensating for this tic by writing about it.

Unless I'm still tipping my head to one side and smarming, duality - interesting, without even realising it, this seems to amount to an unapologetic self-portrait on the part of the author, answering how did I get here? and determinedly reluctant to fall for even his own bullshit. Some of the sex will doubtless trouble the squeamish, but everything here is more or less real by any definition that matters.

For some reason I got a lot more out of this one than Granite City Blues or Missing, although it could be that I've just become acclimated to how Josh Peterson writes, which is nice because he writes beautifully, and certainly more beautiful than you might expect given the drugs, the surgery, the piss, the bodily fluids, and impassive reportage of the same. Spring Rain, Summer Heat hints fairly heavily at the influence of Simon Morris - an association I'd apparently forgotten since the previous book - but, with apologies in advance to anyone who is likely to get the hump here, now does it much better for my money; or at least made me work harder for what has seemed greater reward. Additionally, it's massively refreshing - illuminating  even - to read about gender dysphoria as it occurs out here in the real world without having to wade through the usual rainbow unicorn bullshit and cult jargon; and if it isn't obvious, I'm saying this is a great book and that you need to read it.

The Damned Busters

Matthew Hughes The Damned Busters (2011)
I've been reasonably knocked out by Hughes' pseudo-Rennaissance Raffalon stories in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and enough so as to find his name imprinted on my admittedly short mental list of authors whose work I look out for when in Half Price - Murray Leinster, Katherine MacLean, Moorcock, Robert Moore Williams, and those six A. E. van Vogt novels that I still haven't read; and so it was that I came to The Damned Busters, which is actually the first part of a trilogy in an approximately contemporary setting; so it wasn't quite the Hughes I was looking for, or at least which I expected to find, but it seemed worth a go.

The Damned Busters is, of all things, a superhero novel, sort of, although you could probably call it urban fantasy if you felt so inclined. Our guy acquires his powers when accidentally summoning a demon and inadvertently driving all the minions of hell to industrial action, resulting in a period of nothing bad happening anywhere on Earth, which turns out to be disastrous; and the aforementioned powers come as part of the settlement deal. Thus does he embark upon a career fighting crime, inspired by a favourite comic book - naturally - and thus does his life become greatly more complicated than he could have anticipated.

It's an odd book in that it reads nothing like you would expect from the description, or how you might imagine superhero prose fiction would read for that matter. Our man is a high-functioning autistic and might therefore be described as tightly wound - which hopefully isn't too insulting to anyone - and although the story isn't directly told from his perspective, his somewhat analytical tone informs the narrative, lending everything an unusually even pace. This apparently put some readers off, but I personally found it quite refreshing to read this kind of story without having to wade through the sort of overwritten gothic melodrama which may as well have been Bauhaus lyrics. It also helps that Hughes is witty without feeling the need to crack jokes all the time, so The Damned Busters feels like a distant relative of Pratchett, albeit with aesthetic parallels to certain Vertigo comics from the nineties. Most surprising of all are interludes of philosophical debate on the nature of morality - amongst other ideas pertaining to the field of sin and punishment - with some depth, or what felt like some depth to me - certainly very satisfying and without assuming the reader needs everything spelled out in primary colours. I'm looking at you, John Bunyan.

If I have a complaint, it's probably that the book could have been a little shorter; but The Damned Busters was otherwise highly satisfying, quietly impressive, and I'm now particularly looking forward to the Raffalon book which Mrs. Pamphlets gave me for Christmas.

Desperate

Alexandrine Ogundimu Desperate (2020)
In which, it might be argued, Amphetamine Sulphate somehow slip a title in amongst the yuletide canon inhabited by A Christmas Carol, Frosty the Snowman, A Charlie Brown Christmas and others by virtue of V, the central focus of Desperate, spending the happiest time of year with family and taking entirely non-ironic delight in all its trappings. V is some sort of student of literature resident in New York, just about getting by, drinking more than seems advisable, and occasionally standing upon a subway platform wondering what might happen should he step in front of the next train.

It would probably be lazy to describe Desperate as stream of consciousness, although that's sort of what it is with its long, long paragraph length recursive, rambling sentences following V through the landscape of his own approximately functional existence; but the effect is a kind of sensory overload which works very well in conveying a sense of the territory, the disorientation, and occasional excursions away from the sexual mainstream. It feels somehow like a map of New York and, for my money, does a better job of it than Steve Finbow's Mindshaft - the last Amphetamine Sulphate title I read - not least because it's shorter and sharper, yet not without a certain tender quality; also because the text somehow lends itself to the cadence of Lydia Lunch.

I'm very glad Amphetamine Sulphate hasn't completely turned its back on the chapbook format because this otherwise might not have seen the light of day, and it's a cracker. Once again I'm impressed by how each new addition to the catalogue seems to bring something different to the table.

Time Tolls for Toro

Robert Moore Williams Time Tolls for Toro (2014)
Regular readers may possibly be aware that I've developed a bit of a fascination with Robert Moore Williams, generally overlooked author of an almost uniquely peculiar body of science-fiction writing. He was a populist who churned them out, very much at home in the digests and so easily dismissed as pulp, and while his writing style allows for the occasional poetic flourish, he reads very much as the self-taught enthusiast bashing them out without concessions to literature or even basic literary conventions. His stories tend to follow their own internal logic, probably made up as he went along complete with disorientating dramatic swerves and elements which seem so poorly fitted to the narrative that it's tempting to think of Williams as having been the science-fiction equivalent of Henri Rousseau or L.S. Lowry.

Yet beyond the occasionally tangible influence of Abraham Merritt's hard-boiled adventure, Williams writing always seems to hint at some intense pseudo-spiritual undercurrent, something almost theosophical and doubtless drawn from the author's own idiosyncratic understanding of reality, itself informed by his schizophrenia; so even when he's writing what amounts to a hard-boiled thriller with some minor element which just about tips it over into science-fiction, it feels somehow biblical in essence. As may not come as much of a surprise from the above description, he was approximately living on the same island as A.E. van Vogt, and given van Vogt's significantly having influenced Philip K. Dick, it probably shouldn't raise too many eyebrows that 1950's Danger is My Destiny - one of the eleven short stories in this collection - features a detective on the trail of a suspect who turns out to be himself; and the other ten stories are of equivalent quality - both wonky and startling, or containing startling ideas, at the same time.

After six novels by this guy, I've anticipated a degree of burn out, as can often occur with the work of those taking what may seem like an exclusively intuitive approach, but it hasn't happened yet; and while some of these are clearly the work of someone who wasn't playing with quite the same deck as the rest of us, there's always something new and unexpected thrown up by the sparkly, crackly energy of Williams' narrative.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Archie Goodwin, Walt Simonson & Klaus Janson
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978)
Having been obsessed with science-fiction and flying saucers as a kid, I'd pretty much already decided Close Encounters was the greatest movie of all time before I even bought this adaptation at my local newsagent, let alone seen the thing - partially based on my sincerely held belief that it revealed the truth and was probably made so as to get us all accustomed to the idea of extraterrestrial life, meaning we wouldn't shit ourselves when the big day came - as it definitely would. Unfortunately, as I eventually came to realise, once you subtract this emotional upswell of belief from the equation, Close Encounters barely even counts as a story, the plot being bloke sees flying saucer and believes they are real, which they are. Much as I loved the movie as a kid, probably mostly thanks to Doug Trumbull, by the time Spielberg issued the remix with an extra ten minutes of Richard Dreyfuss crying, even I'd begun to doubt.

So what am I to make of a comic book impersonating something which was never as amazing as I maybe thought it was, and which doesn't even have the advantage of all which Mr. Trumbull wrought with squeezy bottles and bits of Airfix kits, and which I bought entirely because I remember having it as a kid?

Well, a lot of memory sherbert went off, as you might expect, but it's additionally interesting for the reason that I had no idea who Walt Simonson or Klaus Janson were at the age of thirteen; and if they would go on to draw better, even here you can feel the formative greatness emanating from the page. The double page splash of the mothership near the end is not only fucking gorgeous but an entirely acceptable substitute for Doug Trumbull. It helps that Archie Goodwin always knew his way around a typewriter, and was particularly a master at the sort of chatty narrative which Alan Moore had banned because comic book panels which pretend to be a fancy foreign film will always be much cooler, so what story there is to be had, is told well, and - crucially - is told in about thirty minutes as distinct from a patience testing couple of screen hours. It was a decent film for the most part, but a decent film mainly because it distracts you from its own massively sappy message about what happens when you wish upon a star; and somehow I prefer the comic book.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Jon Ronson So You've Been Publicly Shamed (2016)
It's a coincidence that I read this immediately following something by Andrea Dworkin, herself significantly publicly shamed for being the wrong sort of lesbian, but I suppose this kind of thing has been on my mind of late. Here Ronson unpacks the mechanics of media outrage, both social and tabloid, revealing the whole thing to be more complicated than one might imagine from a quick glance at whoever last described you as worse than Hitler. Indeed, the complexity is such as to seem comparable to Dworkin's arguments in Intercourse in terms of how the subject seems to inform the entire dynamic of our society, and to additionally provide pointers as to much that is wrong with it. It's shocking, mostly depressing, but argued with a lively wit and where Ronson finds anything positive to be had from his investigation, he makes sure we know about it.

As with Intercourse, here we find pointers as to means by which we might actually make the world a less shittier place, but as usual we probably won't take any notice, instead preferring to carry on in the same stupid direction as before, not one lesson learned; but at least Ronson has given it his best shot.

I've never been entirely convinced by this guy, I must admit, having initially taken him for a slightly more weasely Louis Theroux. I liked the Goats book, but disliked that reimagined Frank Sidebottom movie quite profoundly. So You've Been Publicly Shamed on the other hand feels substantial and unusually nourishing given the subject, with none of the slightly prurient taint which I perhaps imagined informed his previous undertakings.