Coffinmaker’s Blues: Collected Writings on Terror by Stephen Volk
(Electric Dreamhouse, 2019)
Reviewed by Geoff Ryman
I was sent this book to review by the publishers at the author’s request.
When I was 12, like Stephen King, I graduated from Famous Monsters of Filmland to another newsstand journal, Castle of Frankenstein. The photos may not have been as good, and the text looked like it had been typed not typeset, but it was a satisfying read. Contributors like Lin Carter or Richard Lupoff wrote like horror films and fiction had value.
Coffinmaker’s Blues by Stephen Volk may feel for some like a collection of good blogposts. For me, the collection re-created the sensation of reading my favourite mag—respectful writing about something people disrespect.
Continue reading…
Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.
The Book of the Baku by R.L. Boyle
(Titan Books, 2021)
Reviewed by Steven Doran
R.L. Boyle was born in Leeds. She studied there (Classical Civilisation), sang, played football, and today still lives in Yorkshire where she enjoys genre fiction, 80s movies and countryside comforts. Her debut novel mixes dark, social realism with YA horror, written in the great tradition of children going to live with estranged family and discovering something supernatural.
Sean is the book’s young hero. He leaves behind a children’s home and the poor estate he grew up on to live in with his wealthy grandfather. Years earlier Sean’s mother died in circumstances we’re left to wonder about, and which left him unable to speak. Yet his grandfather’s home—carpeted, smelling of home-cooked lasagne and stocked with books and art supplies—promises safety and comfort, and a chance to recover from trauma in his past.
Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
(Jo Fletcher Books, 2021)
Reviewed by John Dodd
Vampires are real.
They’ve been around for a very long time, but the humans of the world only came to realise they were there in the latter half of the twentieth century. Unlike the classic vampires, these get older with time, instead of being frozen perfectly in the state they were when they were turned, and depending on the type of vampire they are, they can’t actually turn humans into more vampires themselves.
Mage of Fools by Eugen Bacon
(Meercat Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Jamie Mollart
Firstly, I’m ashamed to admit that before picking up this novel I didn’t really know much about Afrofuturism. Wikipedia defines it as “a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science and philosophy of history that explores the developing intersection of African diaspora culture with technology.”
The term was first defined by American critic, Mark Dery, in his 1993 essay ‘Black to the future’ and (according to Barnes and Noble) includes novels such as The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, and The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead.
Mage of Fools has made me want to delve further into the genre, because put simply, it’s a brilliant book.
Something More Than Night by Kim Newman
Reviewed by Estelle Roberts
Set in a gloriously insane late 1930’s Los Angeles, this latest addition to the Newmanverse is an extremely entertaining horror/noir piece of fiction. No vampires here, and only a very oblique reference to Drearcliff Grange, his Malory Towers for unusually gifted young women. There are monsters, though, fictional, human and real.
The two main protagonists are hard drinking writer of detective fiction, Raymond Chandler and William Pratt, better known as Boris Karloff. Drawn together because of, among other reasons, their British connections, the pair begin investigating strange occurrences in the city. Chandler actually has a private detective’s licence. They are eventually hired by Joh Devlin, an investigator for the DA’s office, to work on a case that appears to go to the sleazy heart of Hollywood.
Velvet Was The Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Reviewed by Anne F. Wilson
This novel is set in Mexico City during the early 70s, in the aftermath of the Corpus Christi Massacre of June 1971, seen through the eyes of two bit-players. The CIA-supported government is being challenged by left-wing students. Elvis is a member of the Hawks, a group of thugs whose aim is to harass and hinder journalists reporting on the protests. Maite is a secretary, asked to cat-sit by a neighbour who has disappeared. The narrative teases us as the two almost meet several times but are whirled apart by events.
Maite is turning 30, bored by her job, unconfident in her appearance, and easily bullied by her co-workers. She makes up stories about her love-life to avoid their pity. Dumped by her last serious boyfriend, she finds solace in romance comics, and practises a small-scale kleptomania whereby she steals trivial items from acquaintances that she admires, hoping magically to absorb the owners’ capabilities.
A World of Women by J.D. Beresford
(MIT, 2022)
Reviewed by Dan Hartland
There is something odd about reading this new edition of J.D. Beresford’s 1913 novel, A World of Women (originally published in Great Britain as Goslings). In it, a zoonotic virus travels the world from an apparent source in China, is met at first with denial and then incredulity, wrecks economies in the process, until finally techno futurists announce its potency is waning and the survivors look queasily towards an uncertain future. This is an experience described in Astra Taylor’s introduction to this MIT Press volume: she has read the novel twice, once while sheltering-in-place during Hurricane Sandy and once during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 era. This shapes her experience of the novel.
The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination by Maxine Lavon Montgomery
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)
Reviewed by Arike Oke
This slim volume is the latest in Professor Maxine Montgomery’s decades-long and seminal investigation into Black women’s apocalyptic writing. Here Montgomery addresses the scope of the imagined post-apocalyptic world, from the Burn that destroys Toronto in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in The Ring, to the layers of visioning forwards and backwards in Beyonce’s Lemonade.
The apocalypse is conceptually ever in front of us, but speculative and near-future apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction operates at a level of understanding that the apocalypse has already happened, multiple times. For people of the African diaspora one of the most significant real history apocalyptic events was the Transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. For many of the adults and children trafficked in this trade, history stopped. Society stopped. Family stopped. Language stopped, and the world was made anew for them in a hellscape of abuse, dislocation and enslavement. Just as in the mainstream, white-cultured, fictional visions of a post-apocalyptic world elements of the culture pre-Fall persist (see A Canticle for Leibowitz, Planet of the Apes’ denouement, the longing towards the half-forgotten in the Mad Max series), so too the Black female post-apocalyptic vision features a yearning towards the pre-apocalypse society from which the post Slave Trade African diaspora were forced onto a new stony future.
Back to the Future—the Musical directed by John Rando
(Adelphi, 2021)
Reviewed by Roy Gray
‘Back to the Future—the Musical’ played to packed houses and cheering crowds, or did when I saw it, in November 2021 at the Adelphi in The Strand. There’s almost no need to worry about spoilers here as the audience know exactly what to expect and cheer when it happens. There is a big potential audience in those who have seen the movie and so, to a great extent, this seems to be aimed directly at them.
To achieve this aim the actors look like their movie counterparts (the clothes, the wigs) so no one needs to be introduced, though of course the dialogue does ensure we know Marty McFly and Doc Brown. It remains set in 1985 and there is a DeLorean and plenty of special effects to make its jaunts realistic.
Exposure by Louis Greenberg
In 2019, I visited the ‘Beyond The Road’ exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. A collaboration between musician James Lavelle, and a number of artists, the exhibition remixed his albums, The Road Part I and II, into an immersive experience of sound, smell, film, visuals and sculpture. It was designed to create a multi-disciplinary experience you were free to explore, interact and lose yourself in. I wandered around it for 2 hours and left feeling as if I had been rewired. It took me the rest of the day to get back to myself and I still think about it regularly.
The reason I bring this up is because this is the world in which Exposure plays. It is set in a parallel England, similar to ours in many ways, but in which the corporations have control of healthcare and everyday life to an even greater degree than they do in our version.
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