We are Otherland - and we're frolicking through the countryside!
"... She let her thoughts drift beyond today and tomorrow, into the distant future, when Jamie was established with his writing and she had given up her job, into the golden house-in-the-country future."
As beautiful as this sentence may seem, it comes from the pen of the "Empress of Horror" Shirley Jackson, in a story called "The Demon Lover". It is obvious that this cannot end well. Now that the thermometer is slowly crawling into the red zone and the heatwaves in the city are potentially becoming unbearable due to all the concrete, many Berliners are packing a picnic basket at the weekend and heading out into the countryside. Rumor has it that at least ninety percent of them develop the thought that a house by the lake might be a nicer alternative to the shoeboxes we cram into in the city....but is that really a good idea? As a former village child, I can only raise a warning finger here, because it has been clear to everyone since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that hillbillies might sometimes be up to no good.
Country life is hard....and dangerous. Do you remember the strange sect in Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives? That's because they lure their unsuspecting victims with golden promises of country life. In Rumaan Alam's thrilling science fiction In the Middle of the Night, a pleasant vacation in a rented country house suddenly takes a dark twist when the owners turn up. And it's not for nothing that The Wicker Man has been a cult classic since the 70s, as it directly shaped an entire genre: "folk horror". This deals solely with the horror that awaits you in the countryside. It includes everything from pagan rituals and plants with a demonic life of their own to Satan himself, who wreaks havoc in the forest. Outstanding genre gems here are Brom's Slewfoot, Ted Klein's The Ceremonies and, last but not least, the fantastic anthology Damnable Tales, featuring pleasantly creepy illustrations. Haunted houses are not usually located in the middle of the city, but are hidden from everyone's view way off the beaten path. Two prominent examples are Shirley Jackson's Hill House and The Spite House by Johnny Compton. The trinity of mansions in McDowell's The Elementals includes some nasty inhabitants and to reach the country house in Kill Creek by Scott Thomas you almost have to get the Land Rover out.. And dangerous country life doesn't only fascinate horror authors! In Neil Gaiman's Ocean at the End of the Lane, the adult narrator returns to his childhood home and suddenly remembers a story that couldn't be more fantastic. Highly recommended, I love this book! And if Neil Gaiman is mentioned, Terry Pratchett must of course be mentioned in the same breath! In The Fifth Elephant someone is drawn to the countryside and hey, the whole of Überwald counts as dangerous country life, doesn't it?
Perhaps, dear reader, you will pack not only the rubber mattress but also a GPS device, astronaut food for two weeks, a damn good book and nunchucks for the weekend... after all, you never know what to expect ;)
P.s. If you discover any strange signs and/or skull formations in the forest that can't be accidental, head back to the rusty gate as quickly as possible and close it firmly behind you.
Sincerly yours, Esther on behalf of the Otherland
Science Fiction
Floating Hotel
Hodder & Stoughton: €21
(Audiobook from libro.fm)
Carl has been on the intergalactic space-hotel The Grand Abeona for forty years, ever since he smiled his way aboard as a 12-year-old stowaway. Now he is manager of a colorful crew.
There‘s Sasha, the chief technician with a mouth like a sailor; Uwade, the former child-star who now runs the show as the Abeona‘s unshakable receptionist; and Dunk, an über-friendly sous-chef with a gangland past. Carl truly has a big happy family – or at least a big family. But the Grand Abeona has more secrets than its faded glory lets on. The whole place is a hive of mysteries. Like, who is sending love letters over the staff messaging pipes? Why are the organizers of the annual Problem Solvers‘ Conference packing guns? Why has the underworld been warned to stay away from the hotel? And – perhaps strangest of all – who is actually driving the ship?
Life on the Grand Abeona is all fun and games. Until someone pushes you out of an airlock...
Grace Curtis is really good at building in intrigue, dropping little hints here and there, making the whole hotel a network of mysteries. In each chapter we jump from one character to another, gradually building up this patchwork of colorful cameos – much like how we get to know the crew in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Along the way the author comments on everything from class inequality, typical gender roles, authoritarian governments, and the costs of environmental destruction.
There‘s something of a decadent escapism about this one. It reminds me of some of my earliest forays into sci-fi – these superbly improbable spaceships like the great Heart of Gold from Adams‘ hitchhiking galactic comedy or the beleaguered Space Hotel U.S.A. from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Curtis‘ second book (she also wrote Frontier, a queer space western about climate change) has been described as The Grand Budapest Hotel in space, and recommended for fans of new alternative sci-fi along the lines of Becky Chambers or Martha Wells. The Chambers link is definitely there. I can picture it as a Firefly-esque series in the not too distant future: visually gorgeous, poetic, fun, with cool characters and a racing plot. The 29th century in all its glitzy detail.
[Tom]
Three Eight One
Rebellion Publishing Ltd.: €25,50
*The Quest is as follows:
Press the button that sits atop every Chain Device in this land.
You will be given three Cha. Use them wisely.
You will be followed by the Breathing Man.
You will find the way hard and long.
And you will know your place when you are done.*
The year is 2314 and Rowena Savalas is a historian interested in the Age of Riches – a mysterious time in the Earth’s past between the 20th and 21st centuries when there was a sudden global expansion of information technology. Scrolling through the seemingly endless detritus of our digital landfill, Rowena comes across a book, The Dance of the Horned Road, written 23rd July 2024. The book follows the young girl Fairly who sets out on an unclear quest, followed by the sinister Breathing Man. It seems meaningless. But the further Rowena reads, the more she becomes convinced there is another cryptic meaning hidden in the book, one with a connection to her own life…
Skyward Inn-writer Aliya Whiteley flexes her BA degree (and her MSc) in a meta-novel with an important question to readers: How much of value is going to stay hidden under the glut of digital material we are currently putting out into the universe? Three Eight One follows a long tradition of edited book narratives, from Nabakov’s Pale Fire to Jose Carlos Somoza’s The Athenian Murders. From an Otherland perspective, there are obvious creeping King in Yellow vibes here, too, and ambiguous language games that recall Vandermeer’s Area X. In the central tale’s purposefully-generic quest narrative we have strong echoes of A Wizard of Earthsea, Fellowship of the Ring, The Dark Tower, and pretty much every other classic under the sun. You’d have trouble not spotting them.
There’s a great Tom Gauld cartoon where a hobbit and an elf are traversing a fantasy landscape. The hobbit, nose-deep in a book, remarks: “We’ve had our ‘inciting incident’ and we’re on the ‘journey’ so it seems like we’ll be having a ‘crisis’ any minute now...” The elf replies, “This quest was a lot more fun before you got that book on story structure.” I know how the elf feels. At times with Eight Three One it feels a little like you are reading the spark notes from Save the Cat, or the author’s attempt to rewrite their unsubmitted undergrad literary theory essays into a novel. The footnotes lay it on thick with the spoon-feeding – I would have liked a bit more room for the readers to make their own connections – but even after you clock what’s going on with the set-up it is a very enjoyable experience. I am certain this will be a prime choice for book groups and university courses. And rightly, too. There are some really interesting discussions to be had here on value, history, communication, and storytelling. And Whiteley makes damn sure you have the notes for them.
[Tom]
This Perfect Day
Little, Brown Book Group: €14.5
(Audiobook from libro.fm)
Chip is unusual, abhorrent, just plain sick, some would say. It is not just his miscolored eye. It is the way he thinks about free will, feels guilty whenever he does the brotherly thing of reporting Family-members to his supervisor, or hangs unrealistic artworks on his walls. But Chip’s actions have come to the attention of a group of incurables – men and women who don’t appreciate all the wonders UniCorp have bestowed on them…
It is far in the Earth’s future, an age of genetic engineering. The human race has been modified to remove aggression, control sex-drive, and instil helpfulness, docility, and gratitude. It is a world of true peace, to the benefit of all people. The payoff? The population, through a process of social training and drugging not unlike that in Brave New World or 1984, is kept in a harmless torpor, their every decision made for them by a supercomputer buried deep below the mountains in Switzerland, somewhere near the modern-day CERN.
I am a big fan of all of Levin’s work – whether the classic horrors such as Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives or thrillers like The Boys from Brazil. This Perfect Day is a genuine head-scratcher of a dystopian novel – less of a horror than Levin’s other works but somehow more disturbing for all its happy, loving, drug-addled brothers and sisters. Part of the unease comes from asking whether or not it is a dystopia at all. On paper, it is not a “bad” world. There is no war, no poverty, no hunger, no crime, no racism, no sexism, nor any form of inequality. It is merely one without choice, without freedom. And that makes for some very interesting comparisons with our own. Like all good dystopian fiction this one properly racks up the tension for the protagonist, just as with Guy Montag or Julia. You spend the whole time looking over Chip's shoulder for him, just waiting for the inevitable slip that will see the greater community come down on him with a creepily friendly hand.
I’ll be honest. It is not an easy read. There are aspects here not for the squeamish, and as a trigger warning I will say there a lot of misogyny in non-UniCorp rebels, including a very stark rape scene which is central to the plot. But it is fascinating, and there is a lot to mull over. And it has a great ending. For fans of dystopian fiction, deep philosophical omphaloskepsis (i.e. naval gazing), and the A-grade B-movie Equilibrium. Tread softly…
[Tom]
Fantasy
The Book of Love
Bloomsbury Trade: €21
(Audiobook from libro.fm)
"He might be a magician. But he was also the worlds biggest sucker."
A book review about “the book of love” should have been done with loving eyes, especially as Kelly Link is an author, which usually touches my heart. With her latest release, however, this was put to the test. Let's start with the positive:
Kelly Link loves her troubled characters and takes a lot of time to look into the minds of teenagers. As a matter of fact, this book should be read as an in-depth character study rather than a fantasy novel. The characters are reasonably complex, the setting interesting, the main antagonist pleasantly nasty and when Kelly Link starts to unleash her imagination, she conjures up some really magical images. But honestly, it would have been enough to pack it into a short story. As it was, it was 17 hours (I listened to the audiobook) of repetitive meandering with a deep dive into teenage angst. As a reader, I don't need to have every single mundane thought presented to me, and if even a minor character who just happens to drive past somewhere in a car is given a page-long background story, it leads to me developing the same emotions as looking at a slice of salami. Namely none, except a mild nausea. And one last thing: at some point I couldn't stand Laura any longer. Rarely have I met a book protagonist who was as patronizing, patronizing, rude and annoying as she was. Her character arc didn't really achieve anything and at some point my eyes started to hurt because of all the eye rolling. But maybe that was also due to the audiobook narrator, who gave her the precise tone of a 15-year-old who has to go on a long road trip with her family.
Anyway, the book wasn't all bad and hey, it's a bit sexy in places too ;)
If you liked Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez this book is calling for you!
[Esther]
Horror
Patricia Wants to Cuddle
Faber & Faber: €13
(Audiobook from libro.fm)
Renee has made it to the final four girls of reality TV phenomenon The Catch, vying for the attention, bedroom, and possibly wedding ring of Silicon Valley playboy Jeremy. Going by the other girls’ reactions, she should be over the moon.
Vanessa, Amanda and Lilah-Mae seem desperate to win. But as the final location is revealed to be a remote wooded island on the Canadian border, Renee starts feeling uneasy. The island and its contestants may be picturesque but it feels like there are some deep secrets under the make-up. Is the mass social media coverage really worth this? Now bloody body parts are turning up near their luxury glamping yurts. The elimination stage just got deadly.
Samantha Allen cut her teeth as a journalist, and Patricia Wants to Cuddle is actually her debut novel, although you wouldn’t guess that from how streamlined it is. The characters are a ball. Renee is a damn fine protagonist – initially out of her depth and really unsure why she is there at all, she grows into a gnarly final girl by the end of it. The mash-up of horror and reality TV suits both sets of genre stereotypes really well. So we have the four main girls, all recognisable tropes from both horror and reality TV: the Christian pageant-queen, the fiery, foul-mouthed vixen, the ditsy social-media star, and Renee, the overlooked token diversity hire. Allen also channels every great eco-horror and woodland slasher under the sun, and the whole work is bursting with nods to the classics of late-1900s bloodfests. There are strange noises in the darkness, ominous backstories, characters inadvisedly going off by themselves, and of course an ever-dwindling cast of frantic, snappy people. That said, Allen plays with our expectations, slowly giving hints of depth while revelling in the sheer comedy of the caricatures – all in between the severed limbs, crushed rib-cages, and tastefully removed heads. Fans of Dead Set or some of the queerer Black Mirror episodes will enjoy this one. That or the comic folk-horror of films like Troll Hunter. Pure escapism. The Bachelor plus Predator. If you have an afternoon to spare, dismount from your literary high-horse and take a walk in the woods.
[Tom]
Twenty Days of Turin
WW Norton & Co: €30.5
"...why do you insist on searching where human reason could never find anything but shadows."
Across the shady backstreets of Turin, an unnamed scholar searches for material for his next book. His subject is the Library – a student-founded collective where citizens were encouraged to share their true thoughts, unburdened by the ethics of social taboos or legal constraints – a form of pre-internet blogging. Through anonymity (which could be wavered for a fee) the system would forge intellectual and emotional bonds among the city‘s overlooked. In reality the group‘s writings quickly spiraled into hate-speech, extremism, inanity, and perversion (sound familiar? Just add cat photos) and climaxed in bouts of mass insomnia and gruesome deaths. Now, ten years on, the city appears to have forgotten the troubles of the „Twenty Days“. Or hidden them. Yet something is once again moving in the shadows. Plans are underway. And our young researcher, poking his nose in the wrong places, might have picked the wrong book topic.
What a cauldron of ideas. Written in the late 1970s in response to almost daily neo-fascist terror attacks, left-wing assassination attempts, and police-state crackdowns, Giorgio de Maria‘s The Twenty Days of Turin acquired cult status on publication in its original Italian, but didn‘t get an English translation until 2017. The main character of the piece is truly Turin itself: first capital of Italy and so-called „City of Black Magic“. At time of writing, de Maria‘s hometown was host to some of Italy‘s finest minds; his local Stammtisch boasted Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco. (I am incredibly jealous.) De Maria‘s contribution to the literary front is a deeply satisfying and radically jarring ghost story, blending imagination and the otherworldly with contemporary societal worries. It is quite bizarre to read this in the age of „Alt-truth“, X, and Mr Zuckerberg – it really prefigures the concerns of cyberpunk – a pre-de-construction of online dialogue. More satisfying than Lovecraft and better written.
The volume also contains two short texts: a brilliant (fictional) ecclesiastical tract on the villainies of the poet Byron and his dalliances with Pagan otherlands; and a (non-fictional) peek into the world of Screamers – not terrifying beings from beyond the veil but popular rock musicians (urlatori) in northern Italy in the 1960s. The pair might seem a little unrelated, but do read them. They give a great insight into the mind behind Twenty Days. Like his nameless protagonist, De Maria was training to be a classical musician before he picked up a copy of Kafka‘s „The Trial“ and immediately knew he had to be a writer. I‘m sure he was a great flutist, but thank goodness he did.
[Tom]
Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories
Ingram: €22
There are books on this Earth, which can take you away - not so much into another world than rather into another reality. You know that place exists, only it is different from where you are, they do things differently, the history is another, and the horrors, though similar in nature, are different there too.
In ten stories from various Latin American countries, "Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories" takes you into such a different reality where it’s nothing astounding to have a vulture as neighbor, where you can see the ghost of a serial killer, where supernatural, extraterrestrial beings are among us, in our houses, in our gardens, and where the haunting remnants of Nazism brought here from far away mesh with cults and communes and reign in terror.
The arrangement of stories within an anthology is just as significant as the selection of stories themselves. Interestingly, it can be anticlimactic to read the right story at the wrong time or wrong order and a mediocre story might have a striking effect on the reader if its placement is right. Collections often tend to start with flashy stories to get you hooked, but can fail to keep up that umph later into the book. Sometimes you have a build-up and sometimes a strong middle streak. In my experience, whether in the Best Horror of the Year Anthology or in other thematically sorted anthologies, this middle streak has offered me some of the best short stories I have read, and I read a lot of them. Luckily, editor Sarah Coolidge did a great job in Through the Night Like a Snake, as it is one of those anthologies which does not lose, but on the contrary mightily gains steam and I was lucky to have found some of the strongest stories in the middle;
Soroche by Mónica Ojeda shows the horrors of aging in the time of social media and amateur filming from the point of view of five women who take a trip into the mountains as a consolation for one of them who goes through separation and revenge porn.
This story describes images which will never ever leave my mind. It is horrifying, disgusting, yet so tragic, so sad and so comical all at the same time, so much so you want to take off your hat and bow before the author.
The Third Transformation by Maximiliano Barrientos – cosmic horror in a Latin American setting is something else entirely. Delicious. I would absolutely love to read this short story about two metalheads breaking into the house of an old European Nazi expat and finding themselves pulled into a circle of transformation and instrumentalizing for violence in book length, this story absolutely needs to be longer. I have been searching other works by the author but unluckily couldn’t find any English translations.
Visitor by Julián Isaza. Though written in a lighter tone, this story describes an incident from such an unusual angle that you won’t know whether to laugh or to cry when you’re finished. One of the finest psychological horror writings, mixing the paranormal with sorrow. Just wow.
The collection ends with a tour de force, The House of Compassion by Camilla Sosa Villada in which a sex worker ends up in a sort of psychedelic monastery. Having dragged you through so much powerful feelings, so much pain, terror, sadness and tragedy, the anthology closes by putting a smile on your face. On a final note, I’d like to highlight the absolute beauty of the physical book – the cover art, the small format, the illustrations separating the stories – an absolutely gorgeous addition to any personal library.
[Inci]
Edenville
Titan Books Ltd: €14.5
(Audiobook from libro.fm)
So starting to read Edenville I wasn't very optimistic – a horror author (of all professions) and his girlfriend moving into a creepy town, spooky things happening connected to his book, being a horror fan she seeing warning signs everywhere and wanting to move back, an urban legend, yada yada yada...
I was ready to give this book the verdict of a perfectly standard, ordinary horror story, but then started the passages from the book in the book, aka of The Shattered Man, which are... quite something. A quasi science fantasy saga where the mind and intellect holds the highest rank, a quirky protagonist, a cruel deity, a seriously weird universe... This element and the gradual dovetailing of it into the main plot brought the oomph necessary to give this story an interesting touch, elevating it from being a checklist of tropes.
To be fair, the writing is somewhat hectic and multiple points of view merging may confuse some readers. Still, the creativeness of it all and the increasing complexity of the storyline makes this a worthwhile read.
[Inci]
The Lake Witch Trilogy#3
The Angel of Indian Lake
Titan Books: €14
(Audiobook from libro.fm)
Well, as all things come to an end, so does every horror reader's favorite trilogy India Lake. Yap. It's over, folks. We now need to take in and accept the fact that we'll never read a main character as unique, horror-nerdy, lovable and loathable as JD again, and move on. As hard as this goodbye feels, Jones makes it easier on us to give us for one last time JD in all her glory. A ticking bomb which waited to go off from the first book, Rexall, finally explodes in this final installment and thanks to some supernatural enforcement he hits where it hurts. Meanwhile, JD, having come to her own quirky, nerdy self she was trying to hide in the part two, shines for a final time and ties together all loose ends and question marks that might have been left.
Having said that, the book is not more spectacular or better by any means than its predecessors, Jones – in terms of style, mystery, humor (well, JD's sarcasm might be maybe just a little bit funnier), complexity, Jones continues the same line throughout all three books. Is that a bad thing? Not at all. The reader has come to know and love the folks in Proofrock with all its facets and quirks and that's what we get. I just don't know if it is saying goodbye to JD or what happens in the last fifty pages, but there's added sadness and emotions here. Worthy for an ending. On a personal note, as a former smoker who used to live on Fugazi, I never felt more represented than when JD starts quoting “Life and Limb”. That made my day and thank you for that too. I dug out the old albums that I'm relistening to now.
Thank you Stephen, for the ride.
[Inci]
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Vintage Classics: €14,5
On Valentine’s Day 1900 a party of twenty schoolgirls and their two governesses go on a fieldtrip into the Australian outback. Their goal is simple: to picnic at the base of Hanging Rock, a local uncharted geological landmark. Over a sultry, soporific afternoon, three of the senior girls climb up to explore the rocks – and disappear without a trace.
Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is an absolute classic – based on her own experiences of life at a girls’ boarding school and the basis for Peter Weir’s iconic 1975 film of the same name. I was familiar with Weir’s film, but had never realised there was a book before I came across it in a second-hand shelf. (Shout out to the Old Fox bookstore in Annapolis, your selection rocks!) Like the film, it simultaneously recalls some of the classics while being undisputably unique. I remember enjoying the film (and the later TV adaption with Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer) but I was struck at how early on the disappearance happens, and how the book then becomes the equivalent of a police camera blankly recording the unravelling of the suspects. The whole thing is like watching a thrown stone that causes a rockslide. Like ripples on water. It is very slow-paced, even though the “main action” of the disappearance all happens in the first quarter of the book. It is also weirdly sleepy. Like the characters, you end up in a hypnotic state while reading. It is a creeping sort of horror: odd, without any clear notion of why it is odd.
It really reminded me of some of Shirley Jackson’s works. It has that unsettling, all-pervasive dread of “The Demon Lover” and the sense of things unsaid from We Have Always Lived in the Castle or “The Lottery”. It also has a lot of Gothic blood to it: I kept thinking of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, or some of the stranger folk tales of Andersen and the brothers Grimm. Like many of the best subtle, psychological horrors, Picnic at Hanging Rock keeps all cards close to the chest. The reader never really knows what is actually going on – is it kidnap? Murder? Paranormal abduction? Who (if anyone) is to blame? Is this a supernatural tale or is there a perfectly logical explanation? Is this a true story or entirely fictitious? Lindsay offers no easy answers. And the ending – just like James’ The Turn of the Screw or Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House – is equally devastating regardless of how you read it. This is a book that plays with realism and the unexplained and does an amazing job of showing a web of connected events which may or may not have entirely logical explanations to them.
This is a strong recommendation from me: deep characters; female author; timeless Gothic style; must-read for Jackson fans; a slow, intangible, Australian classic.
[Tom]
RPG
Pawel Klimczak
Slav Borg
Slavdom Studio: €42
A post-Soviet semi-fantasy RPG
It would almost be weird if we did not get a new Mörk Borg hack in store this year. After Stockholm Kartells own CY-BORG, Limithrons Pirate Borg, and the ever-elusive Frontier Scum by Games Omnivorous (that we could NOT get our hands on unfortunately) comes Slavdom Studios first game Slav Borg.
Set in a fictional, fantastic and lawless realm called Zgol, the game is inspired by the authors own experiences in the Polish-German-Czech borderlands around the 1990s-2000's. In real Mörk Borg fashion the book keeps the setting vague and mysterious while still being inspiring, and provides countless ideas for adventure hooks and twists.
These adventures most likely will revolve around lost hope, fast cars, greedy goblins and the concrete dungeons that make up the inner cities, probably with the end goal of defeating the evil necromancer that has been behind the regions downfall since the beginning. The game offers three different approaches to handling a series of sessions:
Other than providing the material for a full-on campaign as well as tables to generate dungeons and racetracks for one-shots, Slav Borg offers a novel way of tackling the setting: a Rogue-like Mode that has you play multiple runs of generated adventures, escalating in scope and difficulty from session to session, and with your characters probably dying off left and right.
So, what are you waiting for? Jump into your retro-fitted Lada and make Speed checks 'til Zgol!
[Nortey]
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