Babbling Into The Void

 Ambiguity is everywhere in Prince of Darkness . The thing that the religious and scientific characters can agree on is that there are places where the common-sense, intuitive rules do not apply, whether that's the level of quantum physics, or within the human heart. While Carpenter does juxtapose the scientific and religious viewpoints, they are not at odds with one another. Victor Wong's physicist and Donald Pleasance's priest are friends, not opponents, trying to work together to puzzle out the mystery. There is debate between the two positions, but, crucially, both recognise that they don't hold all the answers, that there are points where their certainties break down. Instead, they are both attempts to explain the universe from a human perspective - attempts that, it is increasingly clear, fall woefully short. This is cosmic horror, expressed not through the vast, but the minuscule. Just as humanity is humbled when looking outwards, into the boundless universe, so ...

 The two novellas and one short story that make up this collection are simultaneously very different in theme, and yet unified. The eponymous novella tells the story, through emails and IM chat logs, of two women who meet on a LGBT forum and begin an online relationship that - as we are informed from the off, these records apparently being considered as evidence relating to the death of one of the women - careers towards something very dark. The second novella, The Enchantment , follows two people grieving in a world in which the afterlife has apparently been scientifically disproved. The final story is about a man who, worried about impropriety and social norms, is pressured into making increasingly strange bets with a neighbour. So: as LaRocca themself discusses in the afterword, these works deal with themes like the need for human connection, even when it is unhealthy or destructive; the search for meaning in religion and outside it; the ways that social expectations contort our...

A teenage girl is forced into marriage. The director of a weapons project tries desperately to prepare a bioweapon that may defeat the wave of mass insanity spreading across the globe under a strange Yellow Sign. And an entity begins to hatch, to develop, and to prepare for battle. Three storylines, reverberating with one another through time and through realities, entwine to form this masterful novella from Joe Koch. This was one I was excited to read even before I realised it fit into the 'mythos' originating with Robert Chambers' King in Yellow stories, one I've always found evocative and fascinating. But rest assured that this novella doesn't just retread familiar ground - instead taking the familiar imagery of the Yellow Sign, the King (or sometimes Queen) in Yellow, and Carcosa as inspiration for something as unique as it is powerful. The strength of Koch's work is in recognising that a horror based on dreams and nightmares is at its strongest when manifes...

 At the start of July, Boris Johnson was revealed to be looking into a policy to create 50-year mortgages intended to be paid back by the applicants' children. So that's what came to mind as I began reading Andrew J. Stone's All Hail the House Gods , a novella in which the inhabitants of a tent city are forced to constantly produce children to sacrifice to hungry houses. From the off this concept is both inventive and timely (somehow even more the latter than it was four years ago) and it's one that allows the author to blend moral drama with some truly memorable imagery. Yet this firm foundation doesn't mean the structure proper is without cracks. The narrative follows two strands. Punctuated by glimpses into a scene in which our protagonist stands on the bridge sacrifices must cross to be consumed by the House Gods, the main story follows the steps that led him to that point. As both he and his wife, Katie, begin to seek ways to break out of the cycle of endless r...

"What we're doing to them... It's the same shit men did to us before" "They are men" "No. They're not, and I think you know it" I know, as a cis man, I'm not exactly the person that Manhunt  is for. Still, I want to get my thoughts on it out here because, well, I have a lot of them, and I've also seen the brigading this book has faced from people who haven't read it and I want to add a voice to the chorus of people talking about how incredible it is. Gretchen-Felker Martin's Manhunt  was one of my most anticipated reads in recent times and my only regret is that I didn't get to it sooner. Let's set the stage: in the near future, a virus nicknamed 't-rex' (and not, as I frequently had to remind myself, 'the t-virus') has ripped across the world, turning anyone with a sufficient level of testosterone into a slavering monster. Trans women, like our heroines Beth and Fran, are able to survive this post-apocal...

 An army is a horror. It's a horrible thing. They say you might change your mind about that when the country is invaded and your people are suffering wrong, but for me this is all just more horror, more army-horror.  Cisco wastes no time in getting to the punch with this novel, and this searing and clear-eyed voice drives the reader like a vengeful officer on a harrowing march through a landscape of nightmare, brutality and absurdity. Low, our protagonist - and (perhaps) the eponymous figure - is a student in a fantastical, dreamlike realm, called up to serve both as soldier and narrator in a convoluted war. Low's position as a 'military narrator' doesn't just serve as an introduction to the alien culture of its world - this is from the off a story about stories, about who gets to tell them and which we hear, and how they shape reality. This theme manifests in many forms, both more direct - such as Low's encounter with an enemy narrator later in the novel, or th...

     A few weeks ago my partner and I finished playing Parasite Eve , a game close to her heart but one I'd never tried. I had a vague idea of what it was like - a survival horror game with RPG elements - and the basics of the plot - an outbreak of 'intelligent' mitochondria taking over the humans that carry them. I admit that the latter was a thing that had put me off the game previously; 'but that's just not how mitochondria work', I had scoffed, essentially. But that simplistic dismissal of the game had kept me from a horror experience that I'm still thinking about now.     Parasite Eve  is the story of Aya, a NYPD officer who, in the game's dramatic opening sequence, is attending the opera on a date. At the crescendo of the performance, a singer who calls herself 'Eve' - a reference to the famed mitochondrial Eve that the game later makes explicit - causes the spontaneous combustion first of the rest of the cast, and then nearly the entire au...