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."

Jackal, Jackal, by Tobi Ogundiran

Jackal, Jackal is a collection of some eighteen stories ("tales of the dark and fantastic" according to the book's subtitle) by Nigerian physician and writer Tobi Ogundiran, who wrote his first two stories (both collected herein) as recently as 2017. There is a welcome variety of types of stories in this collection, which mixes African cultural aspects with a wide range of Western literary tropes. Stephen King is evoked in a number of stories, while others play with fairy tales or fairy tale characters (e.g., Hansel and Gretel, or Baba Yaga). and one (the final story, "The Goatkeeper's Harvest") is Lovecraftian without mentioning silly Mythos names. All are well-written, and engaging. This is Ogundiran's first book (a fantasy novella is due out in July 2024), making for a strong debut. 

Triggered Literature, by John Sutherland

This is an odd book, covering some aspects of the cancellation and censorship that some would impose upon literature, of which trigger warnings (about potentially uncomfortable content) is amongst the worst. John Sutherland writes from the bemused position of an old literary man, taking various examples from the daily newspapers and recounting them, putting (needed) context around the texts, but never really taking a stand for denouncing the busybodies who want to erect barriers or put up prohibitions between people and the books they might want to read. Which is not to say this is a bad book per se. There is a lot of interesting context on various challenged books. But Sutherland's overall attitude seems like that of someone who doesn't want to stir the pot. Too bad.

The Imagination Chamber, by Philip Pullman

In addition to Philip Pullman's substantial fantasies, His Dark Materials (three volumes) and The Book of Dust (two volumes published, the third, at present, forthcoming), Pullman has published some short companion volumes to the series. These are small illustrated books--Lyra's Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, Serpentine, and The Collectors-- basically short stories published on their own. Now comes The Imagination Chamber: Cosmic Rays from Lyra's Universe, which is pure commercial product. The publisher claims that "this is a book like no other"--that much is true--and "it contains untold riches"--the emphasis should be on "untold" for nothing told here contains any riches.  Furthermore, the publisher boasts: "Every page will give you an exciting glimpse into Lyra's world. Every page will give you an astonishing insight into the storytelling mind of Philip Pullman."  Well, the book is 87 pages, but (with one exception in the short foreword) all left-hand pages are completely blank, and the right-hand pages have usually one small paragraph of text (at most four paragraphs) that seem to be passages pulled out of Pullman's various drafts of the manuscripts of the books he has already published. The text is unburdened by illustrations. Very disappointing overall, and the only insight I found is to wonder why Pullman should have seen fit to publish such a blatant rip-off of his readers. Haven't his other books sold enough copies? Is he really in need of more money?