Ariadne's Thread

  The Last Englishman – A. S. Salinas “You’re not who you think you are. You never were. Your real name is Horatio, and you’re the world’s greatest secret agent.” Thank God, he thought. For a minute there, he was convinced he was just some writer nobody had ever heard of. From bloodthirsty dogfights between Spitfires and Messerschmitts to decadent garden parties at the end of the world, the life (or lives, or un-life) of Horatio Welington is truly remarkable. To his metatemporal nemesis John Constant, he is the wretched Englishman who both thwarts his schemes and enacts his own with elegant menace; to his transdimensional lover Melissa Prophet, he is both glorious champion and pathetic cuckold – but who or what truly is Horatio Wellington? World War II flying ace? International man of mystery? A hapless teenager in way over his head? Or something far more complex? For those who love the works of Michael Moorcock (especially his Eternal Champion books and the Jerry Cornelius Quarte...

Netflix’s 'Love and Monsters,' a Review: ‘You don’t have to settle, even at the end of the world.’ Lucy Nield @lucy_nield1 Netflix’s Love and Monsters (2020), promises the viewer a post-apocalyptic adventure, with lashings of romance, community spirit and heroic determination to survive. A comet called Agatha 6-1-6 was heading towards Earth, threatening to kill every living thing on the planet. So in true and predictable human fashion, those in power responded to this threat by launching rockets, nuclear weapons and missiles to prevent the pending collision. Unfortunately, they failed to consider the aftermath of blowing up Agatha, which included a ‘Monsterpocalypse.’   The chemical compounds and radiation form the weapons used to obliterate the comet, rained down over the world, infecting insects a various nonhuman animals, causing mutations and exponential growth in size. The mutated creatures displace humans at the top of the food chain, devouring cities and and ruining ...

So far, I’ve spent all of 2021 in the exact same way I spent 2020: nestled up in a comfortable bubble of books, anime, and video games. Here’s a collection of some of my stand-outs so far.  READ  Dream Fossil - Satoshi Kon In my endeavour to consume all things Kon, I was gifted his collection of short manga stories by my partner. Dream Fossil lays the foundations for Kon’s later work, complete with mind-twisting, dreamlike narratives that really show just how much his style and mind progressed over the years. I was particularly drawn to “Picnic”, written as part of a tribute to Akira , about an alternate version of Neo-Tokyo that partly exists underwater, and the collection’s final story, “Toriko”, which I desperately wish would have been adapted. Many of the stories bridge the gap between Kon’s heavier work, such as Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress , and what would have been his most ‘lighthearted’ project, Dreaming Machine . Just as with all of his works, Dream Fossil l...

“But what if someone died wearing it?”              This refrain is familiar to anyone who has a penchant for vintage or pre-loved clothes, usually uttered by a friend whose expression contorts in distaste at the thought of wearing clothes that another person has lived, loved and potentially perished in.  Admittedly, this sort or sartorial squeamishness is becoming less common, as environmental awareness increases and secondhand clothes become items of sustainability, rather than eccentricity.           And yet it’s a concern that is located at the heart of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric (2018), a peculiar film that can be found at the point where the Italian giallo horror genre and David Lynch meet.  The plot, if you will excuse the pun, is threadbare.  There is no comforting three act construction that audiences have gotten used to in their films; no conclusions, no resolution.  Instead, there is...

Dark Constellations – Pola Oloixarac (trans. Roy Kesey) In 2024, through the efforts of the Argentinian Ministry of Genetics, privacy is dead. Technology capable of tracking the entire experiential histories of individuals and their ancestors via their genetic code is now in the hands of the powers that be, and the powers that be may do with it as they will. With this deeply unsettling premise as a starting point, Oloixarac weaves a byzantine and Borgesian narrative which stretches from the 1880s to the near future and reveals the dark heart of contemporary surveillance culture to the reader. While the manner in which the narrative has been divided up and presented may be initially confusing for some readers, the path that the author has developed slowly becomes more intuitive to follow and readers will quickly find themselves subconsciously synchronising with the slow but steady rhythm of the text. Caveat lector: this is not a light read. Expect some explicit sexual content and some p...

 A woman must save her lover from becoming the Fairy Queen’s tithe to hell. A schoolboy is challenged by the devil to a battle of riddles. A woman leaves her husband and child to be with her lover, only to discover he is the devil taking her to hell. These are all the plots from traditional folk songs that feature prominently on albums by folk rock bands Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and Pentangle. The folk rock movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s may not seem like the most obvious place to look for the Weird, but by drawing on what Robert MacFarlane would later call “The English eerie”, the British folk rock bands engaged with a tradition of British Weird that stretches back to the Child Ballads, filters through pioneering Weird fiction writers like M. R. James and Arthur Machen, and has a lingering influence today on books, films and music broadly categorised under the folk horror revival. For this reason, I argue that the classic folk rock albums of this era deserve ...

An introductory note: my reading this year has been taken up with submissions for the Arthur C. Clarke Award—for which I am serving as a judge for 2021—and I type this wearing a formidable Cone of Silence which prevents me from talking (and typing?) about novels specifically. Thus, the following list will be free of long-form prose. Weird comes in many aspects, however…   Attack on Titan   Attack on Titan is a visceral, disturbing anime series about giant humanoids who all but decimate human society. The survivors shelter within a walled city, and desperately try to repel the giants and find out what, exactly, they are. Twists and turns ensue. The first series is a little slow-paced—at least, for a show about bone-chomping gigants—but stick with it and Attack on Titan will deliver some of the most memorable images that will ever haunt your dreams.   Devilman Crybaby Speaking of chomping, Devilman Crybaby is another anime that centers around a group of students who become...