This, in case you haven’t guessed yet, is a book that is not meant to be taken entirely seriously – case in point the hot sauce explanation for the “radicalisation” of kitchen appliances that is almost certainly an allusion to old style horror movies and books where strange brew causes all sorts of nonsense, and it’s exceeded in absurdity only by the remedy our heroine comes up with to deal with the frenzied fridges and omnivorous ovens. Adding to the gonzo feel of the book is the author’s use of story interludes, where she interrupts the action to dispense vital and not so vital background information about the Skyway setting, The Pioneer Press building, Marta’s plan to save the quarterback, and sundry other items, making a neat stylistic quirk out of the “avoid at all costs” evil of the infodump. The undoubted stars of the show are the exuberant Marta and her posse; killer robot Xena, cat Gibley, a sentient toaster christened Gerald, plus assorted human beings and other oddballs. Marta herself is the almost archetypal put upon teenager come Campbellian hero, supremely competent when she’s not drifting off into reveries about the undeserving Clarence, with an acerbic wit that is mediated by a genuine humility. And along the way, as the medicine in this spoonful of sugar, Chase inserts some pertinent insights on stereotypes, both sexual and racial and class. It’s hard to take seriously, even as kaiju fare, but it is an awful lot of fun, and I guarantee after reading it you’ll never look at your fridge freezer in the same way again.

  Next up we have HOME BIRTH (Apokrupha pb, 136pp, $12.99) by Jessica McHugh, and our feisty female heroine this time round is Eibal, a member of an alien race called vella, who exist on Earth. Eibal and her partner Naka are “sympathetic genetics” and earn their living by providing procreation services (i.e. host bodies) for infertile creatures, including humans. They agree that Naka will carry to term the child of the darkog Queen Lux who is desperate to provide her husband with an heir. Darkogs are the most aggressive race in the universe (humanity are #3 with a bullet). The kaiju of this outing, they have the body mass of Godzilla combined with the personality of especially bellicose Klingons. Their propensity for rampaging on other worlds in general and Earth in particular, has not won them any friends. To complete their assignment Eibal and Naka must temporarily relocate to the darkog kingdom of the Southern Ring, but from the very first it’s obvious not everything is how it was stated in the bill of sale, with politics at both the local and galactic level providing numerous plot complications.

  In the abstract this reminded me very much of the milieu in the Men in Black movies but here written as if it had been penned by William Tenn in one of his more sombre periods. There’s a compelling and complicated storyline, with larger than life characters to act out the necessary, and there are the requisite scenes of carnage writ large and monster mayhem, though as these particular monsters are simply aliens the kaiju label might be taking it a bit far, or possibly not. McHugh’s universe is a richly detailed one, with alien races and jump holes to other worlds, if all perhaps a little science lite – think original Trek rather than the complexity of TNG. Most of the credibility concerns for me come courtesy of the darkogs, with their almost feudal society in a thirtieth century universe, but if you’re built like the proverbial brick shithouse with scales I guess you can make your own rules. Humans are very much bit players in this scenario, though as ever we do like to strut and puff up our chests, and pass judgement on everybody else, qualities that McHugh gleefully points out. Central to the story are Eibal and Naka, their way of life and the sacrifices they make, the deep love between them and their willingness to do what they consider correct, present us with worthy heroines. Eibal is a tragic figure on an almost Shakespearian scale, doing the right thing for all the right reasons time after time and always finding that it goes horribly wrong, despite her best intentions. Her presence makes this a very human story, despite all those raging monsters and the fact that she probably wouldn’t find my comment a compliment. This is a book to relish for the exuberance of its inventiveness and the compassion of its characters.

  K.H. Koehler’s GHOST IN THE MACHINE (Apokrupha pb, 124pp. $12.99) has more than a touch of Star Wars about it, but crossed with the monsters of Pacific Rim. The Xirian Empire has spread far and wide throughout the galaxy in its quest for new resources, conquering new worlds through the use of specially bred cybeasts, and now the War Master has planet 2969 in his sights (Earth to some, home to you and me). Bioengineer come weapon designer Xara is given the honour of creating the conqueror cybeast. Xara is a great fan of Earth culture (her last kaiju was based on Cthulhu), but she knows her duty and she likes a challenge, and so she creates the mighty Goliath, against which the Earth military will be defenceless. In a straight fight humans will lose, but Xara’s personal history provides some complications courtesy of her relationship with the soldier Mal.

  In the form of the Xirian Empire Koehler gives us a society that is almost Spartan in its simplicity and devotion to the practice of warfare. And, in parenthesis, that we saw little of how those Xirians not directly connected to the war machine conduct their lives, was the one quibble I had with the novella. That aside it’s an epic story, with the battle between Goliath and the US military mirrored in the personal conflict between Xara and Mal. The shock and awe is rendered on an impressive scale, with Koehler giving us firefights that teeter first one way and then the other, but at the same time they don’t really amount to anything much more than special effects shenanigans and excuses for Independence Day style jingoism. It’s great fun, but would be even more so if stuck on a big screen. As with the other books in this series it’s the human drama that grabs and holds the attention. Mal and Xara are the Romeo and Juliet of their race, soured by time and turned into blinkered adults who, at least in Mal’s case, have lost sight of what connected them and has absolutely no idea of why she no longer loves him, cannot even envisage such a thing. Mal is the embodiment of the society in which they have been raised, and Xara through disillusionment has evolved into its antithesis, the one who values freedom and principles above military might and survival pragmatism. This collision of opposed ideologies provides the book’s solid foundation and informs all of its conflicts, sharpening its focus on the crash of cultures and giving Koehler’s work extra authority and insight.

  Finally we have the most recent in the series, THE THING IN THE ICE (Apokrupha pb, 114pp, $12.99) by E. Catherine Tobler. Flit Navarro is an ice miner, working the caves on Ceres to provide precious water to a dehydrated Earth. When an accident releases a space dragon from the ice, Flit finds herself engaged in a desperate fight for survival, further complicated by the arrival of armed mercenaries on Ceres Station and, of course, treachery in the upper echelons of the company that employs her.

  From a plot viewpoint this is probably the most familiar of these kaiju novellas, with such elements as the mercenaries and the corrupt corporate people all stuff we’ve seen done before, but Tobler takes these elements, bungs in a dragon or two, and adds the ebullient Flit Navarro to the mix to provide a fast paced and highly entertaining tale of space hijinks. Flit carries the story, existing almost in a vacuum, with at times the only other character a voice on the end of a radio connection. She is supremely good at her job, something that is shown both in what we learn of her past and in the competency she demonstrates when dealing with the current crisis. She is also a person who comes over as emotionally detached, slightly afraid of showing her true feelings owing to the tragedy in her past. The backdrop to the story is well drawn too, with Earth the place for which these miners yearn, the home most have never known, their ideal contrasted with the reality of parched landscapes and dwindling resources, while the machinations of CraneCo, akin to feudalism in their employee practises, are yet another indictment of capitalism. And of course then there are the dragons, fierce and elemental beings who tear apart those that oppose them, but who can also come across as rather cute and cuddly, at least when they are young. They are emphatically not the monsters of this story; that is a title we award to human greed and ambition embodied in plutocrat Rita Crane. Finally in helping to make the story special, Tobler has inserted a load of Easter eggs in the text. Some are obvious, such as the individual chapter titles which wittily reference films and song titles. Others are not so obvious, but they can be found with a little effort and add that extra scintilla of delight for those in the know, while not in the slightest detracting from enjoyment of the book for those who want to simply let it all wash over them.

  I should also mention that for those who prefer to take their literary pleasures via electronic means, Apokrupha have all four titles available as eBooks.

  JOYCE CAROL OATES: 13 STORIES IN 2 BOOKS

  Joyce Carol Oates’ career has a breadth and depth that I would expect most authors to be envious of. She has produced more than seventy books in over fifty years, ranging far and wide across the literary and genre landscape, and along the way Oates has been nominated for numerous awards. Among those she has won are the National Book Award, and a Bram Stoker Award for her 1995 novel Zombie.

  The title story of THE DOLLMASTER AND OTHER TALES OF TERROR (Head of Zeus hc, 317pp, £18.99) is the tale of a young boy who prefers toy dolls to action figures, but as he grows into adulthood his obsession seems to take a truly dark turn. The story is an accomplished feat of suspension of disbelief, with the reader lulled throughout so that we can never be sure what is taking place, fearing the worst but hoping that Oates is only teasing us with the possibility of terror. And finally we have the great reveal, with revelations that shock in all their ghastliness and bring to mind the closing scenes of Hitchcock’s Psycho, while underlying all of that is a suggestion that maybe parental breakdown provided the catalyst for what has taken place. It’s an assured and convincingly detailed description of warped psychology, with an understated ending that leaves the reader unsure of what will happen next but filled with dread by the possibilities.

  There’s an unfortunate topicality to ‘Soldier’, depicting the aftermath of a shooting in which a white man killed a young black man. The divisions in society are clearly drawn, with some regarding Brandon as a hero who acted in self-defence and others seeing him as a murderer, pure and simple. The first person account gives us a view of the mind-set of a casual racist, the motives and chain of circumstances that led Brandon to this moment, and the way in which his uncertainty about what happened is transformed into the image of himself as a soldier in an undeclared war. And finally there is the ending, a masterstroke on Oates’ part, one that leaves both character and reader hanging on a knife’s edge. In ‘Gun Accident: An Investigation’ there is a similar blurring of the lines between memory and what actually happened, as a young pupil entrusted with looking after a teacher’s house is confronted by a home invasion. The characters are perfectly drawn, so called white trash trying to rise above their roots in various ways, and underlying the narrative is a powerful subtext on the theme of misogyny, the ways in which women are treated by men and demeaned simply because of their gender.

  In ‘Equatorial’ a wealthy couple are on a luxury cruise to the Galapagos Islands, but along the way wife Audrey feels increasingly distanced from husband Henry, with events in their shared past taking on a new and ominous significance, until she is convinced that he plans to kill her. It’s a plot standard, but done with admirable skill and attention to detail, with environmental concerns woven into the text and given an unexpected pertinence. And once again Oates gives us an ending that leaves everything up in the air, so that the reader has to decide how justified Audrey’s concerns really are. Teenager Violet is continually at odds with her mother in ‘Big Momma’, their relationship fracturing against a backdrop of child abductions, and when she falls in with kindly Mr Clovis and his brood Violet learns more than she is ready to handle regarding these disappearances. The story excels as a picture of teenage angst, with Violet’s troubled life leaving her at the mercy of the first people to show her kindness, even when she is almost certain it will lead to harm. Strip aside the horror genre props including the story’s titular monster, and what we have is a tale of vulnerability and weakness, concluding in a terrible denouement, possibly.

  And finally there is ‘Mystery, Inc.’ in which a man who is looking to expand his chain of crime fiction bookstores through murder finds that he has met his match in the owner of the eponymous store. It is a delicious story, with the feel about it of a cosy crime, but a hard edge that is all its own. Our main protagonist is a thoroughly disagreeable if outwardly charming rogue, and we wait to see if he’ll get his just desserts. Even more appositely, the story contains a wealth of details about books in general and the mystery genre in particular, making the tale a bibliophile’s delight. Like everything else here it demonstrates admirably Oates’ versatility and ability to tell a story through suggestion. I loved it, and the collection as a whole.

  And I have similar feelings about her latest collection (that’s latest at time of writing – as noted above, Oates is outrageously productive, for which we can all be thankful), DIS MEM BER AND OTHER STORIES OF MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE (Head of Zeus hc, 239pp, £18.99). Title story ‘DIS MEM BER’ is an account given by the youngster Jill of her relationship with distant relation Rowan Billiet, who has been implicated in some serious crimes. There’s an air of southern gothic hanging over the tale with Oates capturing perfectly the voice of her young and not especially bright protagonist, with the sense of something old and rotten festering in the warp and weft of the narrative. Much of the piece’s power comes from what is not said, presenting to the reader a disturbing character study of obsession, one that raises questions about the nature of innocence and culpability, evil bubbling away beneath the surface of a true crime episode with an ambiguous ending. It is a strong opener for this collection.

  For widowed Brianna a discovery in ‘The Crawl Space’ of the house in which she once lived brings home all the sacrifices made in her marriage. Beautifully written and keenly felt, it is in a way a tale of closure, of drawing a line under the past, but that line is sketched in blood and tears, with trauma and madness scratching at the boundary. ‘Heartbreak’ is a tale of sibling rivalry that ends in tragedy, the matter of fact tone of the telling underlining how little difference there is between teenage delinquency and a lack of being loved, and the horror of feeling that you are always the one who is unwanted, pushed onto the side lines.

  I suspect ‘The Drowned Girl’ was inspired by the true story of Elisa Lam, who went missing only to turn up dead in a water tank. In the story her name is given as Miri Krim, and the student protagonist who relates the series of events is morbidly fascinated by Krim’s death, the idea that her body was dissolved into the water and drunken by residents of the building. With echoes of Dark Water it’s a powerful and compelling tale of a young woman whose personality is broken down, the lines blurred so that we can never be sure if Miss Lucash’s problems are psychological in nature or symptoms of a genuine haunting, though I suspect the former. ‘The Situations’ consists of three brief vignettes that seem to hint at the power of fate and the ways in which hope and cruelty are inextricably mixed. It’s an intriguing piece, well written and holding the attention with its oblique slant, though ultimately not one I felt I truly understood.

  Next up we have what is to all intents and purposes a were-creature tale, with a put upon widow turned into a ‘Great Blue Heron’ to wreak vengeance on all those who have offended her. Strongly characterised, especially in the case of the calculating brother-in-law, and with an eye for the beauty of the natural landscape, this is a tale that offers us the vicarious pleasure of seeing assorted bad lots get what is coming to them, written with relish and leaving the reader just enough elbow room to believe in a more prosaic or metaphorical resolution.

  Finally there is the biting satire of ‘Welcome to Friendly Skies!’, a tongue in cheek set of instruction given to a group of bird watchers aboard a plane bound for parts unknown. Reading it, I couldn’t help but think of recent customer service problems experienced by a certain US airline and wondering if this might better serve as their staff training manual, but all laughter aside there is something truly sinister lurking at the back of the comedy, making this the perfect end to a collection in which the macabre and the obsessive link hands and skip off into the smoke filled horizon with horror in their hearts and murder on their minds.

  GRAB ’EM WHILE THEY’RE YOUNG

  Described in the press release that accompanied my review copy as “chilling Scandi noir YA horror”, FIR (Stripes Publishing pb, 384pp, £7.99) by Sharon Gosling sounds like a genre of one, or somebody in the publicity department decided to see how many buzz words they could cram in. It’s part of the Red Eye series published by Stripes Publishing (an imprint of Little Tiger Press) and aimed at the segment of the Young Adult audience who, in earlier times would have been grossing out on Point Horror and helping make R.L. Stine a household name, at least in certain households.

  The story is presented as the first person account of a disgruntled teenager, whose name and gender are never revealed, but for the purposes of this review I’ll refer to him/her as Alex and leave you to decide if that’s short for Alexander or Alexandra. Resigning their high powered jobs to instead take up timber farming, at which they have absolutely no experience, the Stromberg family move from Stockholm to an isolated plantation house in a remote corner of Sweden, surrounded by trees on every side. They are warned by environmentalist Tomas to not touch the ancient fir trees that lie on their land, part of the primeval forest that once covered nearly all of northern Europe, but Mr Stromberg is more concerned about his bottom line. The caretaker Dorothea is hostile to the family, even though her livelihood would seem to depend on their goodwill. Stranded by an unexpected and heavy snowfall, the family soon come to realise that something unnatural is going on. Alex’s exploration of the house uncovers documents and photographs that enable Alex to piece together the fate of the plantation’s previous owner, and it’s not encouraging for the Strombergs.

 

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