The Devil's Looking-Glass, by Simon Rees

This book looked interesting. Two college associates secretly experiment with extra-sensory perception, and one encounters some old mirrors of obsidian of a type associated with Dr. Dee, Edward Kelly and ancient Aztec worship. But any interest is quickly ruined by the style. The book has three main characters, the conniving and mysterious Doctor Wiston, and the researcher Gwyn Thomas, who is doing some kind of sensory deprivation experiments on John Born, who then has visions and becomes obsessed with mirrors. The setting, per the blurb, is the University of Cambridge, but no location is specified in the novel. Within the first few pages we learn that Born is already dead, and the novel plays out as a kind of unnatural compendium of mixed perspectives that shift all too quickly between characters (and the dead Born's very descriptive letters he wrote to his mother). As a technique this might be made workable, but the real problem lies in the unfathomable motivations of the characters. Wiston, who is not directly involved in the experiments, happens to be a collector of antique mirrors (and a gourmand--all food is lovingly described at length), and manipulates the other two without the reader ever being let in on what he is up to--which on its own seems to change through the book. So it all comes across as a bunch of unfortunate and cryptic scenes without causal logic that add up to nothing other than boredom.

The Modern Fairies, by Clare Pollard

The idea of a novel set in and around the late 17th century Paris salon meetings of Madame d'Aulnoy, where modern fairy tales came to life, seems like a good idea. Or at least an interesting one. What Clare Pollard presents is more of a kaleidoscopic documentary than a novel. And it's filled with twenty-first century diction, and various contemporary "isms": feminism, sexism, lesbianism, etc., along with the author's sharp take on free speech and authoritarian rule,  and her poised comparisons of what are to us well known fairy tales with the people and activities of the era. The result is not bad, but far from satisfying, for the reader is never pulled into the novel or the numerous characters (some are so much alike as to be confusing--and I referred many times to the two-page cast of characters at the beginning of the book in an attempt to recall who was who), and occasionally the author breaks the fourth wall to comment on the evolving story. The endless descriptions of clothing and makeup are tedious. Angela Carter did stuff like this decades ago, and rather better.

The Wood at Midwinter, by Susanna Clarke

I liked Clarke's previous novel, Piranesi (I reviewed it here on Jan. 12, 2022), so the idea of a new book by her attracted my attention. Disappointment after disappointment followed. First, I learned the book is only sixty-three pages: so, a novella at best. But then I got a copy. Nineteen of those pages are publishing matter, or illustrations without text. Eleven pages have only a small amount of text, and in the rest of the book, the text is generously double-spaced. What remains is a mere short story, bloated by many illustrations, and further bloated by a nine page afterword by the author which is primarily a why-I-wrote-this-story-and-why-I-like-Kate-Bush confession. Yawn. The story was written as a Christmas 2022 radio broadcast. Though nowhere evident in the tale, Clarke claims in her afterword that it is set in the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. This means nothing. What's left is a short quasi-fairy-tale about a young nineteen year old girl who ventures into a wood at snowy midwinter with her talking animals (two dogs and a pig), and she has conversations with other animals and the wood itself. She tells them she wants a child of her own, and something mysterious happens. That's all. Shame on the publisher for putting out this money-grubbing contrivance.

Charnel Glamour, by Mark Samuels

A collection of nine stories by Mark Samuels, who passed away suddenly in December 2023, after this collection had been put together. Seven of the stories are arranged as "The Gallows Langley Sequence of Tales," as they are all set in and around fictional places in Hertfordshire, including the town Gallows Langley and the valley of Thool--a setting used previously by Samuels, most notably in the novel Witch-Cult Abbey (which I reviewed previously on this blog on February 14, 2021). Six of the seven of these stories are excellent--the final one "A Letter from Jack" is made somewhat lesser by the bringing in of Jack the Ripper, which was just too trite for me. The rest of the sequence develops an attractively bizarre and decadently otherworldly fictional setting. The two uncollected stories reprinted in the section "Other Tales" begin with some imminent or ongoing eschatological catastrophe, but disappointingly don't carry on with the repercussions of it, evolving into smaller and less interesting character studies. Overall this still a pretty good collection, beautifully produced, but it is bittersweet in that it is the last work of Samuels, whose voice will be missed.

Michigan Basement, by Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz

Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz have written two screenplays, both unproduced, and both now published by Chiroptera Press. The first was Crampton, a 2000 reworking of a 1998 proposed X-Files episode into an original full length feature. It appeared in print in 2002, and was reprinted by Chiroptera Press in early 2024. (I reviewed this edition in this blog on March 17, 2024.) The second, Michigan Basement, was written soon after Crampton, and it is now published for the first time. Its breezy introduction by Brandon Trenz notes that it was begun as an attempt to adapt Ligotti’s Lovecraftian short story “The Last Feast of Harlequin” into a film, and the filmscript retains the basic idea of an academic encountering a very weird town festival, but it adds much to it, and cannot in the end really be considered an adaptation of Ligotti’s story. Michigan Basement follows Jeffrey Haller, haunted as a boy by Nightwatchers, who becomes an anthropology student (and later instructor), mentored by one Dr. A. Rekalde. Some years after Haller has broken with Rekalde, Haller receives enigmatic communications that lead him to a bizarre winter carnival in the small decayed town of Skinner, Michigan, which includes clowns and which reunites Haller, Rekalde, and the Nightwatchers. It’s not a terrible read, but it over-utilizes filmic cliches while it under-utilizes the elements of Ligotti’s prose that makes his stories so interesting. Admittedly, those qualities would perhaps be impossible to translate into a visual medium. In the end, if produced, Michigan Basement would have ended up as a offtrail B-movie that promised more than it could ever have delivered.

Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story, by Richard Balls

This is the definitive book on the zany eccentric London record label Stiff Records, which was founded in 1976 and lasted through 1986, promoting punk, ska, jazzy rock, the new wave, and traditional rock. Acts that got their start at Stiff include The Damned, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Wreckless Eric, Rachel Sweet, Lene Lovich, Madness, and the Pogues, among many others. The narrative is typical of rock histories: the story comes from what got represented in the contemporary music press, bolstered by interviews with some of the people involved --at least, those who were still alive around 2014. If I knew that Stiff had released in the US, back in late 1980, a publicity stunt of an EP entitled "The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan" comprising 40 minutes of complete silence, then I had completely forgotten it. Those were the days! One wishes for some entity like Stiff Records to exist today.

Impossible Creatures, by Katherine Rundell

Katherine Rundell is not a stupid person. She is an Oxford-educated academic, and after holding similar fellowships, she is now a Quondam Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.  As a side-gig she has published some ten or so books, including novels and books actually aimed at children, and an award-winning  biography of John Donne, the subject of her thesis. So why, then, is Impossible Creatures such a bad book?  It has no literary quality beyond superficial imitation. It is a slapdash amalgam of tropes, characters, scenes, etc., lifted from other (better) fantasies, thrown together with minimal thought to make a plot-driven result that doesn't bother to make its causal progressions of scene-to-scene have necessary internal sense. Set in the Archipelago (a pale version of Le Guin's Earthsea), where a young girl obtains a casapasaran (e.g. like Pullman's alethiometer) and a Glamry Blade (like Pullman's Subtle Knife), it also adds various echoes of Tolkien--the Glimourie Tree, a singular version of his Two Trees; a riddle match with a Sphinx, far less interesting than that of Bilbo and Gollum--among other authors, and even from various movies (e.g., Indiana Jones), etcetera, etcetera. This is second-rate commercial product at best. Why would an intelligent person do something like this?  My only guess is the readership is aimed at the producers and directors of various streaming services, which is where the bigger money lies. Impossible Creatures would make a typical vapid mini-series (which may or may not be improved by insidious directors or screenwriters), with all the emotional wallop of a superhero movie aimed at pre-teens. (Of course the ending would need to be changed.) Even the lovely map by Tomiskav Tomic, reproduced in color on the endpapers, doesn't allow the reader to follow the travels of the main characters. And the prose is occasionally laughable. Witness these clunkers: "He looked like a crime scene on legs." ""She walked with the look of a moveable battleground."  "His heart was an iron spike."