Today’s bold assertion – there never was an African vampire. Africa is hardly short of powerful and worrying myths, or tales of blood-drinking, psychic draining and the like, but… vampires? We shall argue not. And if there are such creatures there today, then they are the matter of the new urban myth, the product of colonial-era fears, or adaptations of folklore for modern fantasy and horror stories (see later below).

To put it another way, Africa never held that figure beloved of many horror readers and romanticists – the cursed or afflicted human being who dies, rises from the grave as one of the undead, and goes for the jugular, drinking blood for sustenance. No vampire in the Gothic or Stoker tradition, nor in the mould of Balkan fears; no Varney or Nosferatu or Dracula equivalent.

“(In Africa) there are any number of folkloric or legendary creatures that subsist on the blood of the living, but these are not truly the undead.”

John L. Vellutini, Editor of the Journal of Vampirology, Interview 2016

Those who like to interconnect beliefs from different cultures are often tempted to include the ‘African vampire’, as it makes a nice extra chapter – or serves as a way to tempt people into examining folklore which for once isn’t European-centred. We’re all for that last part, and for respecting African lore, but putting something under a heading doesn’t make it a vampire.

NOTE: This piece is mostly about folklore, not fiction, so we’re not covering the obvious link in Anne Rice’s novel The Queen of the Damned, where the mother of all vampires, Akasha, begins as a queen in Kemet (proto-Egypt), many thousands of years ago. According to Rice, an evil spirit captures the soul of the dying queen and pulls it back into her body, turning her into a vampire. As far as we know, there are no genuine Egyptian vampire myths.

Maybe we’ll talk about the rich and complex history of related Caribbean/Americas legends another time, but for today, let’s round up some of those African tales. These are of folk-beings which have come to be described as ‘vampire-like’ or ‘vampiric in nature’, by later, usually Western, authors already infected with the vampire concept. In addition, many accounts are second and third hand, drawn from long and varied oral traditions, and then percolated through modern sensibilities, but we’ll work with what we have…

The Asasabonsam

Almost twenty years after the publication of Stoker’s Dracula, R. Sutherland Rattray published his Ashanti Proverbs – The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People. These were apparently selected from a collection of Tshi proverbs published by the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society in 1879.

Setting aside any colonial spin and prejudice about Ashanti culture – that title gives quite a lot away (!) – Rattray describes the Asasabonsam, which belongs to the folklore of the Akan of southern Ghana, as well as Côte d’Ivoire and Togo, as:

“a monster of human shape, which living far in the depths of the forest, is only occasionally met by hunters. It sits on tree tops, and its legs dangle down to the ground and have hooks for feet which pick up any one who comes within reach. It has iron teeth. There are female, male, and little sasabonsam.”

Similarly, according to A Dictionary of World Mythology, “the hairy Sasabonsam has large blood-shot eyes, long legs, and feet pointing both ways. Its favourite trick is to sit on the high branches of a tree and dangle its legs so as to entangle the unwary hunter.”

The Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology adds the following:

“During the photography of a sasabonsam sculpture in Ghana, J. B. Danquah was told by an Ashanti youth present in the crowd that a sasabonsam had once been killed by a man named Agya Wuo and brought to his town, where it had been observed by a number of people. According to the youth, Agya Wuo had come across the sasabonsam sleeping in a tree hollow in a dense forest, and fatally injured it after it “emitted a cry like that of a bat but deeper”. He took the body back to his village, where it died after making “ho, ho” noises, then on to the bungalow of District Commissioner L. W. Wood, who supposedly photographed it on 22 February 1928.

“When questioned about the incident by Danquah, Wood “seemed uncertain whether he had indeed photographed such a creature,” and cautiously said that “he may have taken the snap and the film, when developed, may have shown nothing!”. He had not been in Ashanti in February 1928, but he had been there in February 1918, making it possible that the youth had misremembered the date of the incident.”

https://cryptidarchives.fandom.com/wiki/Sasabonsam#cite_note-Danquah-4

Whatever the truth, you will note that the monster in question is neither human in origin nor undead. It is not an African vampire.

The Obayifo

The obayifo is sometimes described as a creature in its own right, and yet more properly the word refers to a broader body of beliefs and practices, often called witchcraft.

Rattray writes of the obayifo:

“(This is) a kind of human vampire whose chief delight is to suck the blood of children, whereby the latter pine and die. Men and women possessed of this power and credited with volitant powers, being able to quit their bodies and travel great distances in the night. Besides sucking the blood of their victims, they are supposed to be able to extract the sap and juices of crops. Cases of coco blight are ascribed to the work of the obayifo.

“These witches are supposed to be very common, and a man never knows but that his friend or even his wife may be one. When prowling at night they are supposed to emit a phosphorescent light. An obayifo in every day life is supposed to be known by having sharp, shifty eyes, that are never at rest, also by showing an undue interest in food, and always talking about it, especially meat, and hanging about when cooking is going on, all of which habits are therefore purposely avoided.”

Ashanti Proverbs (1916)

On the other hand, Modjaben Dowuona, a West African representative at the First International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in 1934 spoke more broadly on the subject of obayifo, and made it clear that obayifo represented a range of activities by certain people, not a folk monster as such:

“There are in the main two forms in which witchcraft is practised. The first takes the form of a power to do harm to other people, especially children, without any physical contact or concrete act of poisoning. Death due to poisoning is considered separate from that believed to be due to witchcraft, though in practice it is not always distinguished from it. The tendency is to ascribe to witchcraft any death which cannot be accounted for on other grounds. It seems that this non-physical way of killing was first directed against children, as is evidenced from the Twi word for witchcraft, ‘Bayi’ meaning literally ‘taking away or removing children.’ It is interesting to find that a corrupt form of the word, namely ‘obeah’ appears in the West Indies, though there it is associated with the worship of various cults.”

Quoted in Psychic Phenomena Of Jamaica by Joseph J. Williams, S.J. (1934)

So this is ‘witch lore’ – the obayifo is a willing, living human being – and not vampire lore as Europeans would know it.

The Adze

The adze is said to be a vampiric being from the folklore of the Ewe people, who are concentrated in the coastal areas of West Africa, especially Togo and Ghana.

See more at https://theillustrationist.com/

Wikipedia’s entry pretty much summarises what most sources have to say about the being:

“In the wild, the adze takes the form of a firefly, though it will transform into human shape upon capture. When in human form, the adze has the power to possess humans. People, male or female, possessed by an adze are viewed as witches (“abasom” in the Ewe language). The adze’s influence would negatively affect the people who lived around their host. A person is suspected of being possessed in a variety of situations, including: women with brothers (especially if their brother’s children fared better than their own), old people (if the young suddenly started dying and the old stayed alive) and the poor (if they envied the rich). The adze’s effects are generally felt by the possessed victim’s family or those of whom the victim is jealous.

“In firefly form, the adze would pass through closed doors at night and suck blood from people as they slept. The victim would fall sick and die. Tales of the creature and its effects were probably an attempt to describe the potentially deadly effects of mosquitoes and malaria. There is no defence against an adze.”

Unfortunately for the African vampire hunter, there is no suggestion that the adze is undead or risen from the grave.

The Ramanga

The Ramanga is not that well recorded, but it is mentioned occasionally as a ‘vampire-like’ being. This belongs to the Betsileo people of Madagascar, who – whilst officially mostly Protestant or Catholic – still draw on indigenous religious beliefs, including belief in the presence of witches and diviners.

Quite what a Ramanga is remains unclear – we’ve so far found no period source material for it. Some say that it represents a person who takes on ritual roles for important tribal figures, such as drinking blood and eating nail clippings; others that it is a creature which does the same thing but for its own appetites. The jury is out, although none of the above require it to be undead – so it has no clear claim to be a African vampire, we fear.

Colonialism and Mythology

Where vampire lore in Africa does turn up again, on the other hand, is in stark reality. At the start of this post, we mentioned new urban myths and colonial-era fears. Following contemporary rumours of vampires in Malawi and nearby countries, you may come across a rather different narrative from ancient folk monsters.

“According to Tim Allen, an expert at the London School of Economics who has written on violence related to vampire stories in Uganda, large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa share broad and ancient—if shifting—beliefs in witchcraft and blood’s esoteric powers. Vampire tales proper seem to be a recent permutation on these beliefs. While Witches are traditionally described as insiders manipulating their neighbors’ lives, vampires are seen as outsiders who would steal from a community.

“Unsurprisingly, these themes gained currency in Africa about a century ago, at the height of European colonialism. Their specifics vary greatly, but such stories reflect lingering anxiety ‘about extraction and harm and uncertainty that is sometimes extremely powerful and sometimes not even mentioned,’ according to Luise White, a University of Florida historian.

“ ‘In colonial Zambia in the 1930, Africans claimed their blood was taken and their bodies left for dead to make cough drops for Europeans,’ she told me. ‘Can you think of a better description of the exploitation for luxuries for white people?’ ”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x4kjg/how-colonialism-fueled-deadly-anti-vampire-hysteria-in-malawi

In her own book, Speaking with Vampires – Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (2000), White says:

“I call this transnational genre of African stories vampire stories, not because I want to insert a lively African oral genre into a European one, but because I want to use a widespread term that adequately conveys the mobility, the internationalism, and the economics of these colonial bloodsuckers. No other term depicts the ease with which bloodsucking beings cross boundaries, violate space, capture vulnerable men and women, and extract a precious bodily fluid from them… Europe’s literary vampires were a separate race, which fed, slept, and reproduced differently from humans.

“Yet I worry, as historians of Africa are prone to do, that an African specificity will be lost when I invoke a dominant European term, worry that all the regional and local history in this book will be submerged into a vision of African vampires congruent with that of European lore.”

The politics of colonial and post-colonial Africa are far darker than any myth or encyclopedia of legends.

In Conclusion

So, we stick to our statement that there never was an African vampire in folklore terms (if you can prove us wrong, we’d be delighted to hear from you!). This is not in itself a problem for writers and readers – much vampire literature is fairly divorced from its Balkans folkloric origins anyway. Moldavian and Transylvanian villagers might have recognised aspects of African witch lore as related to their own striga, but would have been puzzled by dark, romantic figures flitting around siring dynasties, or conning young American women into baring those long necks…

So as far as the African vampire in contemporary fiction is concerned, anything goes. There’s even no particular reason why there can’t be a predatory upper caste Kenyan who is secretly a dracula, wears a cape, and goes out to seduce and exsanguinate the young women of Mombasa – or a Cape Town vampire queen, etc. Nomadic herders and hyenas could even do their bidding, as gypsies and wolves are in short supply down there. Quite whether or not this would read well is beyond us.

Or writers can abandon the term ‘vampire’ altogether when writing African-set stories, and focus on the nature of sickness, psychic draining and post-mortem survival in new ways – perhaps echoing aspects of obayifo and other practices. Remember that Luise White phrase: “(I) worry that all the regional and local history in this book will be submerged into a vision of African vampires congruent with that of European lore.”

Finally, note that the argument against indigenous African vampires has nothing to do with the issue of Black vampires in fiction. If vampirism is contagious, or transmissible by bite, or whatever, then vampires can be of any colour, creed or nation. Maybe science has produced them, through some insane haematological experiment; maybe Balkan legends developed from a nest of Black vampires driven across the seas.

Or maybe a century or more ago, a Black trader, scholar or seaman felt the icy breath of a dracula upon his neck…

NOTE: In that ‘vein’, we’ll be covering both Blacula and Blade the Vampire Killer later this week)

And if you want to pursue the Black vampire, 13^th October 2020 sees the exciting launch of SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire, from Mocha Memoirs Press:

“SLAY aims to be the first anthology of its kind. Few creatures in contemporary horror are as compelling as the vampire, who manages to captivate us in a simultaneous state of fear and desire. Drawing from a variety of cultural and mythological backgrounds, SLAY dares to imagine a world of horror and wonder where Black protagonists take center stage — as vampires, as hunters, as heroes. From immortal African deities to resistance fighters; matriarchal vampire broods to monster hunting fathers; coming of age stories to end of life stories, SLAY is a groundbreaking Afrocentric vampire anthology celebrating the rich cultural heritage of the African Diaspora.”

SLAY, full of some fantastic authors,  is available to pre-order now:

SLAY on Amazon UK

SLAy on Amazon US

(The anthology even contains a brand new Mamma Lucy story, ‘Snake Hill Blues’ by the less fantastic, crumbling John Linwood Grant…)

Today, dear listener, we’re all about dog stuff again. Blimey, a puppy!

As later this week we’ll be talking a bit about African vampires, Black vampires, vampire hunters, and related fun, here’s an update on the pack. Which is now back up to three for the first time since we lost the mighty (if obstinate) Twiglet a couple of years ago, at the age of sixteen.

We’ve always liked having a succession of canine companions, all rescues, and with both longdogs getting older, we felt we’d like an additional companion, maybe for those longer walks and more difficult landscapes. Aha, we thought – we’ll go scour the rescue centres, especially fine places like Lurcher Link in West Yorkshire (through which Django and Chill found us). Perhaps a one or two year old lurcher, eager for a bit of affection and exertion in equal measure…

Oho! said the World. Tough luck. One of your relatives has a friend whose bull terrier came into heat, and unexpectedly got into heavy kissing with a naughty boy doggy. And one of her pups has been returned from its first placement because they couldn’t handle it. It is small, and no one wants it. It needs a home now.

So it was that the family became divided in an instant, with Chilli and I feeling extremely dubious about this move, the two other pink people being rather keen, and Django just wondering how to get into the fridge, as usual. But some of us lost the battle. First it was an overnight stay, and then it was a week’s trial, and then…

We now have a highly annoying 10 week old bull terrier x something pup in permanent residence. He is called Biscuit, and his main characteristics are:

• He runs upstairs constantly, and then shrieks to come down again.
• He steals and seeks to destroy shoes, socks, jumpers and Useful Tools.
• He bites my earlobes (drawing blood), and rips at my beard and ponytail.
• He is obsessed with carrots and cries if he can’t have one.
• He baits the other dogs until they lose their tempers.

In short, he is a Bloody Nuisance. He is also extremely unhelpful to my writing career, especially when he plays ‘sleevies’ whilst I am trying to type, and when he starts shrieking for something just when I’m on a crucial passage.

After two weeks, he is still weeing rather randomly, but pooing almost always on his training pads. He knows his name, when to come, and how to sit for treats. So that’s something.

As for Django and Chilli…

Django is getting on, and has a touch of arthritis and possibly early Cushing’s Disease, which means he’s not quite as mobile as he was. But he’s a relaxed dog, and still fairly active in his pursuit of a comfortable blanket, a modest walk, and as many treats as possible. His main interest in life beyond those is to steal food, so he has a hobby which keeps him busy (this has recently come to include ripping the bottom out of the recycling bag so he can lick out meat trays, tin cans and hummus pots).

He determined with a few hours that Biscuit did not fall into the ‘easy snack’ category, and thus paid the pup little attention, even allowing the tiny bugger to curl up next to him.

Chilli on the other hand, older but fitter, was deeply unimpressed, and avoided this small brown horror completely for the first few days. Dominant and territorial, she then made it clear that Biscuit was not getting on the bed with her. Not getting on the sofa with her. Not coming into her corner. No way. And given Chilli’s bite, we were a bit worried about this (she once gave Django a veterinary-level wound for jumping on her by surprise).

However, in the last few days she has apparently softened, and has condescended to play-fight now and then, including ‘bitey face’ (which given the size of her teeth and the size of the pup is an alarming situation – we supervise in terror). He can come on the sofa sometimes, but only when there is a human barrier firmly in place. It’s progress.

Anyway, today I had the first full pack line up whilst eating my lunch. Three dogs standing quietly in a row by my desk, each waiting for sliced ham, with Biscuit sitting patiently between the other two until he got his tiny token scrap. No fighting or snarling, for once. And so I felt it might just be safe to make this post.

Tomorrow – now that I have committed myself in print – lots of things will probably go wrong. I shall try to be patient, knowing at least that next time we fancy another dog, I will be able to insist on that lurcher I wanted in the first place…

greydogtales.com has had fine experiences with Lurcher Link. You can learn more about them and their dogs below:

https://www.lurcher-link.org/

Crime and consequences! We’re dashing from pillar to post, as they say, so today a mention for something entirely un-supernatural which recently came to our attention – Burn Me Out, a new novel from Vermont writer Brandon Barrows.

Burn Me Out will be published on the third of September, and we were interested because we’ve read a number of his weird or horror works, but hadn’t ventured into his more noir/thriller side until we read an advance copy of this one.

Al Vacarro is a made man, with all the honors and responsibilities that entails. But after a literal lifetime of violence in service to the Castella crime family, Al’s past is catching up with him and neither his present nor any future he can imagine seems to hold any hope for salvation.

For the sake of his family and his very soul, he needs out of ‘the life’. But how does a man escape the only world he’s ever known?

This is a story of blood and desperation, and these are the last twenty-four hours of life as Al knows it.

We read it in one sitting, and we thoroughly enjoyed it (f you can say that about a fairly dark series of life events). Our review:

“A gripping, atmospheric tale of the Italian mobs, of those who slowly destroy both themselves and the people they care for – all in service to a toxic blend of loyalty, ambition and ‘blood’. Barrows effortlessly draws you into forty years of one man’s mistakes, and the price he must pay at each step. Violence and humanity are intertwined with a deft hand, until you have to keep reading.”

We asked the author to say something about Burn Me Out’s background, and he commented:

“BURN ME OUT is a very important and personal novel for me. It is, in large part, about things I’ve been dealing with over the last few years: desperation, depression, hiding the most significant part of yourself from everyone (especially those you love because hurting them is the last thing on earth you want) and a deep, aching desire to matter and be recognized for it.

“I really want people to read this novel and enjoy it, but I also hope readers can empathize with some of the characters and their situations. Few, if anyone, in this novel is a decent person, but I think they’re very human and finding the humanity in bad people is just as important as finding it in the good ones.”

Well worth a look. On Amazon now for pre-order, released officially tomorrow in Kindle and paperback.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08GSTP7S7/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_eC.tFbRKP8FK7

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GSTP7S7/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_bD.tFbG5P1ST3

To get an idea of Barrows’ range, you might also try out some of his other works, such as:

• His short collection, The Castle-Town Tragedy (Dunhams Manor, 2015), which contains an excellent set of three stories concerning Carnacki the Ghost Finder, the occult detective created by William Hope Hodgson.
• A collection of weird fiction, The Altar in the Hills (Raven Warren Studios, 2014) – a range of much shorter pieces which draw strongly on themes from H P Lovecraft.
• His comics series – Mythos: Lovecraft’s Worlds (Calibre Comics) – with artist Hugo Petrus, adapting such HPL stories as ‘Pickman’s Model’, ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’ and ‘The Curse of Yig’ (all four issues are now available as a graphic novel).
• His Marshal Ernie Farrar western mysteries, published in Crimson Streets Magazine. These can be found online here:

“A Hanging Matter” – http://www.crimsonstreets.com/2018/05/27/a-hanging-matter/

“Noose Hungry” – http://www.crimsonstreets.com/2019/02/17/noose-hungry/

And his excellent series concerning the occult quasi-detective character Azuma Kuromori, set in contemporary Japan, has been featured a number of times in Occult Detective Magazine. The most recent was ‘Beyond the Fade Shrine Gates’, in ODM #7, and his next Azuma Kuromori story, ‘Angel Scales’ – concerning both Christian and Japanese mythologies – has been confirmed for a forthcoming issue.

Occult Detective Magazine #7 is also available right now in Kindle and paperback.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1916021220/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_5L50EbECQSZ0D

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1916021220/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_CA-0Eb8WVKPW7

Fireball XL5 vs Alien; Time Team with Sapphire & Steel; Doomwatch and Danger Man! Today we cover The Curse of Fanfic – a charity anthology of mad fan fiction and crossovers which is only available in paperback until 1st September 2020 through pre-order (an ebook may follow). And we have reviews of two Philip José Farmer specials from Meteor House, A Rough Knight for the Queen and the far more serious Up From the Bottomless Pit…

THE CURSE OF FANFIC

Edited by Paul Castle, Obverse Books

Paperback, £12.95

obverse books – curse of fanfic

Reviewed by Dave Brzeski

How exactly does one get away with publishing an anthology of fan fiction, featuring crossovers with assorted characters from TV shows that are very much under copyright? Fanfic, as it is more commonly referred to, is tolerated to some extent, as long as it’s not profited from. The only way a publisher can possibly get away with it is when it’s for charity – which is the case here. None of the writers, the editor, nor the publisher will make a single penny from the proceeds of this book, and they won’t even receive a free copy – if they want one, they have to buy it. They really just did it out of sheer, unadulterated love. Only the printers and postal agencies will be paid for their professional services.

All profits from The Curse of Fanfic go to Parkinson’s UK, a charity that tirelessly researches the possibility of a cure for Parkinson’s Disease, the illness that eventually led to the death of the editor’s father, Donald John Castle, in 2017. It’s a great cause. My grandfather suffered from that disease too. It’s not something you’d wish on anyone.

A quick look at the assorted characters gives the impression that this book is going to be rather silly. This is not unusual as comedy and charities for very serious causes have long gone hand in hand. For my part, I saw “Steve Zodiac and the Alien Facehuggers” in the website description and immediately asked the publisher for an advance copy, so I could help promote it.

Paul Castle writes a brief, but very moving foreword about Parkinson’s and its effect on his father, and thus himself. I’d pretty much decided I would buy a hard copy for myself at this point. An introduction follows in which he talks about how many authors get their start writing fanfic and covering the copyright issues.

There are far too many stories in this collection for me to cover them all, so I will limit myself to the ones that were my personal highlights. However, I feel I would be doing the book a disservice if I didn’t at least list the full contents, so here it is…

1. The Addams Family, The Monkees and The Beatles
2. Basil Brush and Larry Grayson’s Generation Game
3. Cutie Honey vs Mazinger Z
4. Doomwatch and Danger Man
5. Eerie Indiana
6. Fireball XL5 vs Alien
7. The Goodies and Space: 1999
8. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
9. Inspector Gadget
10. Jonathan Creek and Jason King
11. Knight Rider and Airwolf
12. Lost in Space
13. Match of the Day and The Omega Factor
14. The Nanny and Super Mario Bros.
15. Only Fools and Horses and Dynasty
16. The Persuaders!
17. Quick Draw McGraw and Brisco County Jr
18. Red Dwarf in Man Alive
19. Sooty & Co. with Iris Wildthyme
20. Time Team with Sapphire & Steel
21. UFO
22. Van der Valk and Doctor Who
23. Worzel Gummidge and The League of Gentlemen
24. The X-Files and Rentaghost
25. The Young Ones
26. Zorro and The Wild Wild West

As can be seen, most stories involve crossovers of some sort, but not all of them.

I used the word ‘silly’ above advisedly. Anna Maloney proved my point pretty well with her contribution… The Addams Family in ‘Monkees and Beatles and Addamses, Oh My!’ It’s Wednesday Addams’ birthday and her parents have booked two of the most popular musical groups of the sixties to play at her party. The trouble is, they were under the impression that they were bands of performing monkeys and beetles! There’s an inspired mash-up of the lyrics of ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Last Train to Clarksville’, which left me wishing it existed on a disc somewhere. I have to say that, in my head, I saw this more as an episode of the 1973 animated version of The Addams Family.

Basil Brush and Larry Grayson’s Generation Game in ‘The Fox Files’ is very clever. Author Paul Magrs hints at an X-Files crossover in the title, but it isn’t. Mulder and Scully, however, weren’t the only people to have investigated alien incursions. He we see Basil and his manservant Chummers (Chummers and the concept of Basil Brush as a detective of sorts were introduced in the comic strip version, which appeared in the UK weekly, TV Comic) taking on some familiar aliens on behalf of a certain branch of the UK military, devoted to dealing with alien problems. This one is really fun, as I would expect from a writer of Magrs’ calibre.

The thing about fanfic is that it does rather rely on the reader’s familiarity with the characters. Cutie Honey and Mazinger Z are early 1970s Manga comic book creations of Go Nagai, and both made a quick transition to anime television series. Despite Nagai’s tendency to write crossovers with his characters, these two had apparently never enjoyed a significant clash before this. Doesn’t mean a thing to this reader, I’m afraid. Never read the Manga, never saw the anime.

In Cutie Honey vs Mazinger Z in ‘Flash Forward!’, Kara Dennison (an author as unfamiliar to me as the characters she writes about) gives us a useful little introduction that serves well to introduce the characters. As for the story itself… I. Loved. It! Look, I’m not a huge fan of manga, or anime, albeit I do like some of the less cartoony stuff (Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima, Ryoichi Ikegami, Masamune Shirow etc.) but this was gripping.

I note that Kara Dennison has contributed to Paul Magrs’ Iris Wildthyme series, which is something I’ve long wanted to get into.

Having recently read and reviewed The Immortal Seaton Begg, I’m fairly confident that I would have known that Doomwatch and Danger Man in ‘Tomorrow (’s World) the (Roland) Rat’ was by Simon Bucher-Jones, even had I not seen his name on it. There are a handful of authors I know, who simply can’t resist throwing in a few oblique crossover references in their work that don’t really affect the story, but provide an added level of interest for those who get it. Win Scott Eckert and Frank Schildiner immediately come to mind. Bucher-Jones is definitely of this ilk, and names like Bernard Quatermass and ‘Q’ (of James Bond fame) are casually name-dropped here. Others are more subtle and not everyone will pick up on them. I’m pretty sure I missed at least one myself.

Tobias Wren is at the Tomorrow’s World studio, investigating a suspicion that not all of the super-intelligent rats from the Doomwatch episode, ‘Tomorrow, the Rat’ have been destroyed. Dangerman, John Drake is sent to assist. If we are to believe Bucher-Jones, we finally have definitive proof that John Drake is not the same man who ended up incarcerated in The Village… or do we? A chat I had with the author revealed that he had to cut a section which folded in The Prisoner, due to his having had to work to a strict word count. Now I really want to read the uncut version!

Fireball XL5 vs Alien in ‘Alien Encounter’ is the story that hooked me in the first place. As such, author John Peel was well-placed to disappoint me. I shouldn’t have worried. Peel did an excellent job of rationalising some of the dodgy science in the original Supermarionation puppet show, giving them force fields to go along with the oxygen pills they took to allow them to breath without an atmosphere. If I had one small complaint it’s that he pretty much ignored the acid blood aspect of the Xenomorphs. We all know that Robert the Robot was made of a very hardy plastic, otherwise his outer skin wouldn’t have been transparent, but I would have expected some mention of the fact that the facehugger’s blood was dissolving the metal spar Robert used to defend Venus from them. Even so, I still loved it. It’ll obviously never happen, but I’d love to see this story adapted for television by the folks responsible for the Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet revivals.

Knight Rider and Airwolf in ‘Knight and Hawke’ is one of the longer stories. I was more familiar with Knight Rider, having never actually watched Airwolf. However it was one of my favourites in this collection. Genuinely exciting, albeit we’re left at the point where the newly teamed-up heroes go off in search of the bad guy – leaving me wanting more.

Most of this book is dedicated to that most popular area of fanfic, that of crossovers between two properties whose copyright owners are unrelated. In the case of John S. Drew’s Lost in Space fanfic, in ‘The Times they are a-Changin’, we have another trope of the form – that of a story written specifically to address an unexplained detail in the original series. This time it’s why exactly Preplanus, the Robinson’s adoptive home of the first series, disintegrates, forcing them to relocate. I will risk a spoiler by revealing that it was Doctor Zachary Smith’s fault.

There are no crossovers in Liz Evershed’s Red Dwarf in ‘Man Alive’, other than the use of the title of Man Alive, which was a documentary show, presented by Esther Rantzen amongst others, which ran in the UK from 1965 to 1982. It is, however, one of the better stories in the book.

It makes a refreshing change when the good guys, who take on the task of fixing inter-temporal/dimensional screw-ups actually seem to know what they’re doing! I very much enjoyed Time Team with Sapphire & Steel in ‘A Matter of Time’ by Jenny Shirt. One could complain that Tony Robinson accepted what was going on rather too easily, but this, I suspect, was simply down to word-count limits.

UFO in ‘The Other 1980s’ by Adrian Sherlock has Ed Straker, Commander of the Supreme Headquarters, Alien Defence Organisation, transported to an alternate universe by a UFO – our universe! He is horrified with the England of this alternate 80s, especially the ‘Big Brother Sister’ like woman who appeared to be in charge of a nation that had seriously lost his way. He is thankful to escape back to a world under siege from alien invaders. This is not going to appeal to staunch Tories (or Republicans in the USA for that matter). I loved it!

Worzel Gummidge and The League of Gentlemen in ‘The Story of Worzel of Scatterbrook Farm and how he came to make the Golden Journey to Royston Vasey’ certainly looked set to be one of my favourite stories in this collection. Author Dan Barratt didn’t let me down – it’s every bit as terrifyingly insane as I’d hoped.

As I said, those were my personal favourites. The others were good, but if I had any criticism, it’s that many were simply shorter than I would have liked. I suspect this was down to space restrictions and possibly limitations set by the copyright owners.

I can not review The Curse of Fanfic  without mentioning the fabulous artwork by Paul Cooke on the covers plus a few internal illustrations.

In conclusion, this is a fun book, featuring so many mash-ups between popular characters that it’s unlikely that anyone wouldn’t find most of it of interest.

It’s for a great cause, so I encourage everyone to go pre-order it now, as once pre-orders close on September 1st, you won’t be able to get a copy.

Get it here: the curse of fanfic

UP FROM THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

Philip José Farmer, Meteor House

Paperback $20.00

meteor house – bottomless pit

Reviewed by Dave Brzeski

It’s that time of year again. Under normal circumstances, Meteor House would be launching their new books for 2020 at Farmercon. For obvious reasons, this is now not happening; albeit a virtual version of Farmercon is now planned – just search on Virtual Farmercon XV (2020) for details.

Up From the Bottomless Pit has been previously published, initially as a serial in the first ten issues of the Farmerphile fanzine, published by Meteor House’s Michael Croteau, and then in the huge hardcover collection from Subterranean Press, Up From the Bottomless Pit and Other Stories, which is also now available as an ebook in the USA (sadly, not in the UK for copyright reasons). This, however, is the first ever affordable trade paperback edition.

After a brief foreword by Christopher Paul Carey on the context and publishing history, we get an introduction – subtitled ‘The Ides of March’ – by Sharman Apt Russell. She writes of the prophetic nature of Farmer’s book and that “Most of us feel that we are living at the beginning of an apocalyptic novel, in a state of foreshadow and suspense.” Russell states that the reader will know much more about what has happened in the World since she wrote this introduction on March 15, 2020 – literally the Ides of March.

Up From the Bottomless Pit is not about a global pandemic, neither is it about the erosion of human rights. Before those things became the huge issues they are now, we were seeing evidence of an environmental catastrophe that may well already be beyond any hope of averting, even if all the nations of the World would accept it and agree to work together to save the planet. Sadly, that sort of cooperation is a pipe dream. Our leaders appear to be far more concerned with increasing their personal power and wealth than looking after the people who have to try to survive after they’re all gone.

I, of course, refer to the ever-present – and much denied by those who refuse to open their eyes – threat of global warming. In Up From the Bottomless Pit, however, Farmer brings things to a head even faster in the form of something easy to believe could happen – a catastrophic oil industry accident, which threatens all life on Earth.

America needs oil, and they need to be free from the yoke of dealing with those who have it. Despite the protestations of environmental agencies, they plan on drilling with their new lasers off the shore of Los Angeles. There’s no cause for alarm. After all, the problems caused by the previous minor earthquake were easily enough dealt with, and they had new equipment which could handle 50% higher blowout pressure than ever before. Far more than they could ever envision needing.

They were so very wrong! That’s no spoiler. Had that not been the case, there’s be no book. It’s in the meticulously researched details of just how overwhelmingly, horrifically wrong they were that Farmer scores here. That this is all well within the bounds of possibility, is truly terrifying.

James Cable is an engineer for Cal-Pax, a California based oil company. He’s a conservative Republican, and to a great extent, he shares some responsibility for the disaster. On the other hand, he’s a beacon of common sense in the battle to halt the momentum of an unimaginable shitstorm, which could destroy all life on the planet. Farmer makes much depressing use of politics and religion to put obstacles in his way. At the time it was written, some may have thought he was exaggerating the stupidity of people. In recent years it’s become pretty plain that he actually toned it down somewhat.

There’s a long sequence, which follows Cable and others as they try to evacuate the city while hurricanes & firestorms rage toward them. It’s one of the most gripping, edge of the seat pieces of writing I’ve ever read. Eventually, Cable returns to his new position as head engineer of the Bureau of Crises, and takes charge of Project Glory Hole. They battle to cap the huge gusher, all the while having to deal with interference from the money men and sabotage from crazy religious groups. There’s no happy ending. We leave the story at the end of one battle in a crisis that will take much, much longer to reverse. If, indeed, it can be reversed.

That Farmer managed to create such an entertaining thriller story out of a situation made more depressing by events that have occurred since he wrote it, is testament to how great a writer he was.

A ROUGH KNIGHT FOR THE QUEEN

Philip José Farmer, Meteor House

Hardcover $40.00, Paperback $15.00

meteor house – rough knight

The excellent cover and frontispiece are by Charles Berlin. The fact that we have this book at all is apparently down to Craig Kimber, who owned the only copy of the manuscript and was not obliged to share it with the world. We should all be truly grateful.

I’ve read non-fiction by Philip José Farmer before, that is to say I’ve read fictional non-fiction if you like, in his fictional biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage. There are also many interesting essays, convention speeches etc. amongst Farmer’s published canon. This, however, is his only full-length non-fiction work, although at only 100 pages or so it’s not especially long.

The book opens with ‘Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Erudite Adventurer’, in which Michael Walton (author of Sir Richard Burton and his Circle) gives us a useful overview of Burton’s relationship with fantasy, and how he appealed to Farmer. I, in common with (I suspect) many readers, have long been aware of Burton, but have never really taken the time to actually read his works. Indeed, my introduction to Burton was as a character in Farmer’s acclaimed Riverworld series. This introduction alone goes some way toward making me wish to redress that oversight.

Mark Hodder – another author who employed Burton to great effect as a character in his excellent Burton and Swinburne series – supplies the next introductory piece in ‘Philip José Farmer: The Liminal Writer’. Here we are shown how Burton’s ‘liminal’ nature, that of ever being between two worlds, never quite belonging to either, made him an ideal fit for Farmer’s (and Hodder’s) fiction.

Editor, Paul Spiteri brings both threads together in the final introductory piece – ‘Burton and Farmer: Incredible Adventures and Eternal Writings’. Here we discover the history of ‘A Rough Knight For the Queen’, originally written for a men’s magazine. The first book publication was in the collection of Farmer rarities, entitled Pearls From Peoria (Subterranean Press 2006). This is the first separate book publication, re-edited (Farmer never had a chance to proof the original) and with additional footnotes by Paul Spiteri.

As with Up From the Bottomless Pit, I had some concerns as to how entertaining a read this might be. With the former, it was the ‘too close to reality’ nature of the story which could have led to it being too depressing. Here it’s the fact that it’s a biography of an historical figure. Would it turn out to be a bit dry? On the other hand, I was aware that Richard Burton led, to say the least, an interesting life, and it’s written by Farmer. I’m pleased to say that it reads like a short novel, and a very entertaining one at that, all the while being as informative and well researched as a biography should be.

In fact, it occurred to me while reading that it would have just needed the addition of some dialogue, the fleshing out (fictionalising) of certain aspects of the story that are sparse of detail, due to there being little documented proof of events, and this could easily have been expanded to an adventure novel, which could have even stretched to more than a single book.

Other, earlier posts on Philip José Farmer can be found elsewhere on greydogtales, such as here:

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER