Ariadne's Thread

  'They know that they are monsters, but I believe they do not really understand what that means to humans.' Lucy Nield reviews 1997 novel Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis.                  @lucy_nield1 Shockingly I have not come across Bakis before, and I am certainly glad that fellow PhD student (David Tierney) leant me his twentieth-anniversary edition for me to read. This edition also includes an extremely valid and thought-provoking introduction from Jeff Vandermeer, which makes you confront thoughts and themes present throughout the text. A Preface introduces us to Cleo, who is going to tell us the tale of the monster dogs. Cleo informs the reader that it has been 6 years since the events of the novel took place, when was 21 the dogs arrived. Suffering from heartbreak she was walking in New York on the West Side when the helicopter landed and the first dog had arrived. What she saw stood on hind legs, wore clothes an...

‘They did find footprints. And they weren’t human.’ The Sideways Award Winner: The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A Review by Lucy Nield @lucy_nield1 The Doors of Eden, is one of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2020 publications, alongside Firewalkers. As an admirer of Tchaikovsky’s previous novels such as Arthur C. Clarke winning Children of Time and internationally loved Dogs of War, I was excited to be submerged into another speculative world, with eager anticipation of what many legged creatures we may, or may not, meet. I was not disappointed. Whilst the Blurb might suggest a novel overwhelmed by conspiracy theories and cryptozoological mysteries, this text moves far beyond what you can possibly expect or imagine with the mention of ‘monster hunting’ as a starting point. I will be the first to admit that I lost touch with reality whilst reading. You do not feel a sense of existentialism with this text, more of an acceptance, that there could be something more. However tenuous,...