Armoured Siberian trains, Portuguese madmen, and depressed American academics — today we review three new books to hit a range of audiences — two novels and a novella by Rhys Hughes, John Guy Collick, and Polly Schattel respectively.
As Banjo and Alexandra bicker, Perceval gets borne along by the tides, and Hetta grows resentful, we find intriguing protagonists, but, well, perhaps not exactly heroes. Not always, anyway…
The Star Tsar
First of all, here’s a novel which may surprise you. The Star Tsar appears, at first, to be offering an ‘alternate history’ tale involving the defeat of the White Russians in the far east of Russia, 1923, intermingled with the sort of folk-horror found around such figures as Baba Yaga and Koschei the Deathless. Monstrous factories, looming woods, freezing terrain, brutality and gigantic trains-of-war on endless rails; Banjo, a British soldier abandoned by the retreating forces, and two Red Russian women, Alexandra and Ekaterina, on the hunt for an unfaithful lover — one out of duty, one with both malice and romance in mind.
However, weaving in and out of the story are references to the only book the British chap has with him — Edgar Rice Burroughs ‘Princess of Mars’ — which is his sole comfort. And this battered volume proves to be both a clue and a wry nod to the larger plot of John Guy Collick’s novel. It’s a little hard to review the work without spoilers, but the planet Mars does eventually play a part in what turns out to be a helter skelter struggle to survive for Banjo and the two Russians. Ekaterina is a drug-addicted singer and a touch lunatic; Alexandra is an earnest politico-scientist who believes in the Red cause:
“Once we educate the people in the liberating ideals of Soviet science they’ll break the chains of ignorance by themselves,” she said.
The fractious, adversarial relationship between the cynical, plebeian Banjo and the idealistic Katerina forms the core of the narrative, as they face weary treks, monstrosities, betrayal, horrendous conditions beneath and inside forbidding mountains, and science beyond anything either of them could have dreamed of:
The glass-sided cabinet stood on three rubber tired wheels with thin steel spokes. Articulated arms like parts of a dentist’s drill stuck out at random intervals from the lower half of the case, which looked as if it was moulded out of Bakelite reinforced with copper strips. Alexandra read the number 339 in faded script on the plastic. Oily liquid filled the inside of the iron-framed tank, staining the corpse a greasy yellow. The corpse was bald and thankfully her eyes were closed, turning her into the grotesque echo of a sleeping baby. Her forearms ended in metal and canvas sheaths curving into the bottom of the artefact. More tubes snaked from the side of her skull, neck and from underneath her breasts. Shreds of skin, peeled loose by time, decay or mishandling, floated in the preservative.
As Banjo struggles simply to survive and Alexandra has many of her ideals stripped away, we are teased with the vaster implications of what they encounter. Collick’s descriptive powers, his attention to historical detail, and his interweaving of bizarre and diverse elements all stand the reader in good stead. An intelligent speculative romp with an unusual setting, this is Book One of a planned series. We look forward to Book Two…
We interviewed the author a while back, here:
http://greydogtales.com/blog/a-colossus-of-mars-john-guy-collick/
The Star Tsar is available for pre-order and will be released in Kindle format on 31st March:
The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm
Rhys Hughes is a curious beast. Hugely inventive, he straddles lines of magical realism, classicism, parody, and whimsy, and we confess we’re not always sure what to make of his work. The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm is a fine example of his non-genre explorations — a book-length meditation on the nature of saudade (Portuguese: “an emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent something or someone”), a satisfactorily bizarre adventure novel, and a complex construct of unlikelihoods, which also weaves a few true histories into its web.
Perceval Pitthelm, its ‘hero’, is an English adventure novelist who moves to Portugal to provide the tranquillity he needs for his work — and there encounters a rather peculiar house. Everything pretty much springs from that, and involves continent-hopping (literally) and various ‘Arabian Nights’ sub-tales, all of which have bearing on Pitthelm’s progress. In Portugal he meets the house’s owner, Old Rogerio, who tells him of certain incidents in colonial Eastern Africa…
“It goes without saying (remarked Old Rogerio) that our situation had an adverse psychological effect on the inhabitants of Kionga. People began to argue, to fall in love inappropriately, to cheat at cards, to wear clothes made from dried cod or fruit skins, to part their hair differently, to shave under their arms, to mix white and red wines, to learn foreign languages.”
The protagonist’s name may itself be a complex joke. Wagner chose a discredited origin for the name Parsifal (the title of his 1882 opera) as being from Persian for ‘pure fool’; in the Twelfth Century, Chrétien de Troyes had Perceval (‘Vale-piercer?’) as a hero of the Arthurian search for the Holy Grail, a hero who has to prove his worthiness. And ‘Pitthelm’ immediately brings to mind the pith helmet of classic ‘Empire’ adventure stories.
The book is also in the grand tradition of the absurd. Hughes’s style is part of the book’s charm — both wise and naive. You feel that if horse-drawn carriages carrying the notebooks of Rabelais, Cervantes, Jerome K Jerome, Borges, and Flann O’Brien were to have collided in some crowded market town, the resultant flutter of papers might have inspired this piece. With a touch of the unreliable travel writing of Sir John Mandeville and a few others. And the absurdity of the main story is reflected in a ‘review’ of the other books of Perceval Pitthelm at the end of the book, a review which seems laced with Hughes’ own autobiographical murmurings on life, writing, reviews and critics. To make matters worse, we kept being reminded of Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
With a beautiful Fado singer who has artificial organs, a vengeful Muslim inventor, cheek trees, and a rogue Brazilian submarine along the lines of the Nautilus, The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm is an at times wise, at times ludicrous, book, which is basically… immensely readable, and enjoyable. We have no idea where it would be shelved in a bookshop though. None at all.
The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm is available for pre-order and will be released in Kindle format on 23rd March:
8:59:29
Finally, quick mention of a new novella by Polly Schattel, author of the novel The Occultists and Shadowdays. 8:59:29 is an entirely different piece of work from those, a contemporary horror story set in a small college, where a struggling adjunct professor in Film Studies decides to seek an unexpected way out of her problems. Hetta, the academic in question, is not without her flaws, and not even always a totally sympathetic character, though she is very human; rather than do something constructive about her tenuous career, she decides to focus her various resentments on her superior.
And so, when a disaffected ex-student, Tanner, comes up with a novel way to create a short video which could make a difference, she takes it on board with the confused enthusiasm of a woman who can’t think of what the heck else to do. Of course, after going through many options, they decide to make a horror movie…
Becoming absorbed in their film project, which is either utterly pointless or highly dangerous, Hetta eventually finds that — as with all classic deals — you rarely get what you wish for in the way you wanted it. Especially if you rely on obscure rituals from the Internet. A quick, crisply-written read for the horror enthusiasts, with some intriguing film-making lore along the way.
8:59:29 is available now in Kindle format and paperback:
All today’s reviews were written by an unreliable old man and his dog, so can be taken either as wise gospel or the ramblings of mad folk. The old man’s latest collection (with very little dog in it) is here:
AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH AMAZON UK & US, AND THROUGH THE PUBLISHER, JOURNALSTONE
Amazon US: Where All is Night, and Starless
Amazon UK: Where All is Night, and Starless