Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath
(MIT Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Alex Bardy
Here’s a book that was always going to be ‘up my alley’, especially as it comprehensively covers the earliest generation of roleplaying games back when they really began to gain popularity and momentum here in the UK. This is what I’ve always considered ‘my RPG generation’, so to speak, and it’s a time in which magazines like White Dwarf, Imagine, Dragon, The Space Gamer, Different Worlds, Challenge, Travellers’ Digest, and untold fanzines flooded the market and helped inspire a generation of gamers and wordsmiths, myself included.
For those readers wondering just who Stu Horvath is, may I direct you to the www.vintagerpg.com website—it’s an extremely pleasant, tidy little corner of the internet in which Stu regularly talks about his massive collection of historic tabletop RPG goodies, alongside a thorough appreciation of classic comic/RPG art (mostly pre-millennial). It’s also the home of the Vintage RPG Podcast, a weekly podcast Stu hosts with John McGuire, and a great listen, too!
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Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.
Mothtown by Caroline Hardaker
(Angry Robot, 2023)
Reviewed by Niall Harrison
It begins After. The narrator of Mothtown, David Porter, is “a human knot”, falling. He hits his head, lies in the earth awhile, then forces himself upwards. He is looking for “the two shadows”, but they seem to be hiding. He’s running, sliding, scrabbling down a craggy valley that is “coated in dead brown grass like hair on a giant”. The sky is “a dirty chalkboard”. It’s quiet. Michale had told him it hadn’t been that kind of town for thousands of years, but David is still amazed by its emptiness, “its naked hills burning beneath the stars.” And it shouldn’t have taken this long to reach the door. But perhaps—he hopes—he can still get there before the shadows catch him.
The Pale House Devil by Richard Kadrey
(Titan Books, 2023)
Reviewed by Kate Onyett
This novella may be shorter in length, but it is long on heart and has some fantastically revolting moments that drop you right into a very special type of “ick”. Fans of darkly humorous, supernatural, violent urban fantasy will love this story. Hey, that’s not so niche if each type of fan got together and agreed to a movie night, because if this was on screen, they would all have a baller of a time.
This is what I hope is the first in a new series for Kadrey, who earned his dark fantasy/horror chops with the highly enjoyable Sandman Slim series. Likewise, this book is set in a world where magic and monsters are real, and properly applied violence can be a force for good. Well, a force for better. C’mon, you’re reading fantasy horror, morals take a seat at the door (it’s more fun that way).
Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson
Reviewed by Harry Slater
The forbidden basement has always been the horror genre’s most heavy-handed metaphor. Beneath the above-ground facade lurks a horrifying truth that the antagonist is trying to hide; plumb the depths of their psyche and you’ll discover severed limbs, swinging rusty chains, fluids of unspeakable origin.
There are interesting ways to handle this trope, avenues that can be explored that shift the expectation of the reader. Or it can be tossed at them like a lump of heavy flesh, subtle as a cleaver. Bloom, by New York Times bestselling author Delilah S. Dawson, is a twee romance that stumbles towards its inevitable subterranean bloodbath with a lazy gait, never really seeding the horror it intends to unleash, and once it arrives delivering it with an unsatisfying squelch instead of a glorious arterial spray.
The Collector by Laura Kat Young
Reviewed by John Dodds
If there were ever to be a science fictional equivalent to Ken Kesey’s great novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Laura Kat Young’s The Collector fits the bill perfectly.
I can honestly say this is one of the very best science fiction/horror novels I have read for some time. And while I am always a little cautious about over-praising, in my view this novel stands on a par with classics like Orwell’s 1984 and Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Yes, it is that good.
All Hallows by Christopher Golden
Reviewed by Steven French
I started this book just before Halloween but didn’t finish it until Bonfire Night, which is a fair indication of how little it actually gripped me. Which was disappointing, as I’ve been a fan of Golden’s work for some while, not least his comics-based collaboration with Mike Mignola. The story itself has all the ingredients of an atmospheric and creepy yarn: a quiet suburban neighbourhood where the Halloween preparations mask long-kept secrets and lies which finally erupt into the open just as something much, much worse stalks out of the nearby woods. Yet somehow it just couldn’t muster enough of a chilling effect to keep me turning the pages. Partly that’s due to the ‘tell, repeatedly, rather than show’ approach which by spelling everything out leaves little to the imagination and so deflates any tension or sense of mounting horror. And partly it’s because of the structure of the book which, with its chapters cycling through the points of view of different characters, generates a narrative that is just a little too choppy to sustain the scares.
Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle
Chuck Tingle is an internet philosopher and a spirit on the electronic winds, best known, perhaps, for his e-novellas of seminal erotic fiction. You know the ones: “Pounded In The Butt By [human, animal, objects, metaphysical concepts]”. He espouses above all love in all its forms and self-determination.
Camp Damascus is his first ‘serious’ novel, about a demonically successful gay conversion camp run by a conservative Christian sect. It is a journey of revelation for Rose, a devout 20-year-old honestly devoted to the teachings of the sect. A clever, sheltered, fact-curious and mildly autistic woman, Rose’s life is complicated with feelings of attraction for girls. We begin at a wholesome social at a local waterfall with her friends and peers under a warm summer sun, but things quickly get weird. She spots a literal demoness on the cliff opposite and later at home coughs up a load of mayflies.
The Other Shore by Hoa Pham
(Goldsmiths Press, 2023)
The Other Shore, by Hoa Pham, winner of the Viva La Novella prize, deals with some of the biggest questions there are. It’s about life and death and legacy, about power and control, colonisation and oppression, ancestry and the price we pay for the future we want. And it’s all told from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old Vietnamese girl, Kim Nguyen. That makes for some interesting stylistic choices; the prose can sometimes feel stilted, lacking in the emotional clout that an older voice might add. At the same time, though, there’s a visceral naivety at play here, the realisations of the state of the world are ever more compelling because they’re wounds delivered fresh, for the first time. In one way, then, The Other Shore is a coming-of-age story, and at the same time a brutal indictment of human cruelty, an examination of the structures of power that bind Vietnam, and the world, and how they’ve come to be.
The Living Stone: Stories of Uncanny Sculpture, 1858–1948 edited by Henry Bartholomew
(Handheld Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Andy Sawyer
Sculpture is inherently uncanny; the creation of simulacra of human (and other) form, enigmatic and often loaded (says Henry Bartholomew in his introduction) with destabilising fears of otherness. Sabine Baring-Gould’s “Master Sacristan Eberhart” (significantly subtitled “not quite a ghost story”) is an interesting start to this selection. The Sacristan’s reflection, after a statue of a monk has foiled a robbery, warns against what we are so often doing—seeing in these stories and their subjects “reflections of our own selves, our feelings and passions” instead of their artistic truth which might cause us to direct attention away from our selves. It might be argued that Eberhart, in his strange “friendship” with the statue he calls Father Simon, has fallen into precisely that trap!
A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid
(Del Rey, 2023)
Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino
A Study in Drowning, Ava Reid’s new book has a certain air of neo-Victorian feminist gothic along the lines of Elizabeth Bronfen’s argument in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992) about the Victorian fascination with dead (or not so dead) female bodies captured by the male gaze. It reminded me of A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990): both novels are poised between a detective story and a textual analysis exercise and infused with mythology and gender studies written in a stunning poetic prose.
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