New Post Series: First Scare

We'll valiantly face the terrors we've been lucky to avoid

Carve your pumpkins and don your trashiest costumes! It's the season of vampires and witches, of demons and werewolves, of haunted houses and walking corpses. It's the season when a strange impulse leads otherwise reasonable people to willingly pay for a ticket so they can sit in a dark room full of strangers to watch two hours of entrails being ripped and/or slashed and/or devoured. Come and make yourself comfortable. The dead will rise, blood will spurt like a fire hose, heads will roll.

A few months ago, Nerds of a Feather ran the First Contact series, where our team caught up with a few of the prominent classics that for whatever reason we hadn't had a chance to get to know. This time, we're repeating the experiment, but with Halloween classics: those ugly, scary, big bad monsters with which we've so far had the good fortune of not crossing paths.

Even as I prepare to push play on this rich history of frightening stories, I keep wondering why I'm doing this to myself. I'm a complete chicken when it comes to horror. To this day I still tremble at the memory of that puppet cyclops bird from the 1986 remake of Babes in Toyland, and that scene in V where the alien ate a whole mouse left permanent scars. My generation spent its budget of screams on Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers; I simply have no stomach for whatever happens in Saw or The Conjuring. In theory, I ought to be the last person to want to go through a crash course in horror.

In pragmatic terms, my main reason for doing the First Scare series is the same reason why I did First Contact: the desire to broaden my knowledge of what is out there. But also, my lifelong aversion to horror could use some challenging. Of course, I'll be doing it under controlled conditions, in the safety of my living room, preferably not at midnight. The popularity of horror has always been a mystery to me, so maybe it's time to test for myself what draws people to want to experience fear for fun.

What with taste being subjective and all, it's a possible outcome that I don't succeed at learning why so many enjoy the self-torture of watching expertly filmed stabbings and slashings and curses and exorcisms. It may very well be the case that there's a certain incommunicable something that naturally gifts you with a high tolerance for the sight of blood and rotting guts. Or the taste may be an acquired one. Hoping that it's the latter, I'm going to start at a prudent pace. I don't want to regret the experiment. The family member who without warning introduced me to Cannibal Holocaust certainly didn't have my sensibilities in mind.

Instead, I'll be watching selections from among the early classics, those that form the baseline education of the average horror fan. My fellow reviewers at Nerds of a Feather will surely be at other positions in that ladder, so they're choosing their own starting points. This is also part of the learning process; I expect horror directors to have very different things to say on the same topic before versus after the Satanic Panic, for example.

I'll also be paying attention to which specific elements of the horror aesthetic are those that frighten us. I love the Doctor Who episode "Blink," but I don't find it particularly spooky. Many years ago, I attended a public showing of a slasher movie at a community center. I went with a blind friend, and as I was narrating the movie to him, I realized how boring it was. "The killer runs after her. She runs away. She falls. She stands up. The killer runs after her. She runs away. She falls. She stands up. The killer runs after her..." On the other hand, I have a friend who tells me that the absolute most terrifying movie I've ever shown him was Idiocracy.

So... who knows. This is the rare kind of experiment where the interesting result is the one that's not replicable. As a kid, I had lots of fun with The Twilight Zone, but one episode of The Pink Panther gave me nightmares, and I waited until adulthood to watch Aliens. Now, from here to Halloween, we'll be subjecting ourselves to all forms of monstrosity and evil. I literally don't know what I'm getting into or what I should expect or what the risks are. I suppose that's the right mood for an innocent newcomer entering the horror realm.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: The Runes of Engagement, by Tobias Buckell and Dave Klecha

An intriguing deconstruction of the “modern military vs. fantasy creatures” sub-sub-genre

You’ve probably seen the trope before, as it is a not uncommon theme in military fantasy novels. A military unit from our world has to suddenly deal with supernatural creatures, sometimes in our world, sometimes in another dimension. AR-15 rifles versus dragons. Mortars versus orc fortifications. Cavalry charges against entrenched army units. You know the drill. While it is more common in straight-up military SF, there is a burgeoning military sub-sub-genre in fantasy environments as well.

The authors of The Runes of Engagement tackle this theme in an evolving and even deconstructive way. We layer up the background of the story in the opening and throughout the book to get a sense of how and why and what the scenario is. A picture emerges of a world like ours which suddenly was attacked from another realm. There clearly is an Evil Overlord who decided to expand their domain by opening a front onto our world through magical portals. While the Overlord has been beaten back into his original realm, the costs were high enough that America and other forces have gone across to the other world themselves. Modern military forces on the ground in another dimension, with all the problems that implies.A firebase in a hostile environment, surrounded by enemies, is something armed forces know all about, even if it is in another dimension and the hostiles can do magic.

The actual plot spurs from this point on. Various world governments have forces in the alternate dimension and have been seeking allies and connections to help control the portals to Earth and to take the fight to the Overlord. Our focus is on the members of a Marine unit led by one Staff Sergeant Cale. Cale and his forces have been tasked with bringing an important diplomatic asset, Lady Wiela, a Princess in fact, to the portal to Earth. The goal is to get her to negotiate a treaty to gain her and her Elven realm as an important ally against the mutual Dark Overlord enemy. Needless to say, what seems like a complicated but doable trip in helicopters across a short distance to the portal turns into a much more complicated situation. And as always, it is the ground troops, in this case Cale's soldiers, who have to deal when things go sidewise. And they go so very sidewise, as the Marines have to deal with a radically changed mission, dwindling resources, and fearsome opponents.

Where the authors differ from many books in this subgenre, and make the book more open and more interesting to more mainstream SFF readers, is primarily in the tone, as well as the characters and composition of the army, its allies and associates. These are Marines of a modern mindset and era, rather than the more retrograde armed forces of earlier eras which seem to wrongly display themselves as the default mode of military SF and fantasy.

It’s not only that this is a military more in line with modern sensibilities, but the characters are also genre-aware and the authors make excellent use of that. A major throughline across the book is that the Marines, having grown up with (and in some cases been “forced fed”) fantasy books and movies, are most definitely tuned into genre stereotypes and ideas. No one needs to be explained who Tom Bombadil is, they know a 20 on a roll in D&D is a critical hit, and don’t need to be told that orcs are dangerous.

The fun that the authors have with this is that the fantasy realm that the characters are in only sometimes conforms to Tolkienian stereotypes, and sometimes those stereotypes are thrown right out the window. Trolls, for instance, are very much in the mode of Tolkien: dangerous, potent, but vulnerable to sunlight. On the other hand, Ents are not the friendly Treebeard types you find in The Two Towers. Time and again, the characters, genre-aware as they are, comment on what they are experiencing, especially when they are behind the eight ball.

This places The Runes of Engagement in a recent crop of books that is engaging with, deconstructing, commenting on and thinking on the rise of a general consciousness of epic fantasy tropes, ideas, characters and worldbuilding that has infused the mainstream. It’s coming at that consciousness from a different, military-focused angle (and in a real sense trying to drag that subgenre into the more general flow of SFF), but books such as How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler, or Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan, among others, are part of this bit of genre conversation. The context of that conversation between these books is still being worked out.

However, it is clear that there is a meta-moment of epic fantasy and fantasy in general inside of the genre, and The Runes of Engagement, with its Marines dumped into the deep end of a situation and a world that only sometimes conforms to their expectations (and is deadly dangerous when it does NOT) is part of that meta-moment. Buckell and Klecha, along with Wexler, Brennan and others, have grown up in a world where genre fantasy is a completely and utterly mainstream mode, and thus can reflect on what that means when perceptions of fantasy for characters or a society run up against an actual fantasy world. This is seen both in the large and small details; the latter, for example, as code phrases are lifted from lines of fantasy books; as well as the characters wondering and speculating why this realm aligns, however imperfectly, with Tolkien and other fantasy works.

Beyond this question of metafiction and the novel’s place in that part of the genre conversation, the book is a highly entertaining narrative of a small unit of soldiers put under stricture and having to work their way through it when things go wrong. The research and getting into the mindset of soldiers is a key to really making this novel feel authentic and relatable. As an example, early in the book, as air support for the Marines, a set of A-10 Warthogs show up to help push back the enemy. Any reader of Mil-SF, or more importantly, anyone who has experience with modern combat in the last 50 years on a battlefield can appreciate the presence of the “infantry’s friend” (and then showing how vulnerable they can be on a modern battlefield when not supported properly). The authenticity of the details of the military experience both big and small is presented for fantasy readers as a piece of worldbuilding that is rendered accessible for anyone who has puzzled through a chunky SF or fantasy novel, rather than incomprehensibility meant only for fans of the subgenre.

And it is a relatively lighthearted, at points funny, novel, and intended to be. Sure, Cale and his Marines are in tight spot after tight spot, but the authors leaven their predicaments and their encounters with good doses of humor, sometimes very dry. After all, the title itself is a pun.

The Runes of Engagement works very well for readers who are not immersed in the tropes and expectations of its subgenre, but are cognizant and immersed in the fantasy tropes that have infused popular culture. The novel stems from a short story and comes to a satisfactory conclusion (with some interesting questions raised). I’d read another novel set in this universe.

Highlights:

• Excellent narrative that speaks to the pervasiveness of modern fantasy in culture.
• Good use of military tropes and feel to give authenticity to the soldiers and their plight.
• How useful is a Panzerfaust against a troll, anyway?

Reference: Buckell, Tobias S and Klecha, Dave. The Runes of Engagement [Tachyon, 2024].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Review: Salem's Lot (2024)

This movie rushes through its vampire-infested, small Maine town, eschewing exposition in favor of trying desperately to come off as a Mike Flanagan project

Spooky season is upon us! And Max has finally released its modern retelling of Stephen King's classic vampire novel. Interestingly, this movie was shot in 2021, but it's only just now being released. Something definitely happened in the interim, as there are glaringly huge holes in the storytelling—release the 3-hour director's cut now, cowards! After all, the novel on which Salem's Lot is based is incredibly dense, and the 1979 TV-movie version (directed by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre) was 2 episodes long and 183 total minutes.

The plot

Ben Sears, a famous writer, has returned to his hometown in Maine to get inspiration for a new book—specifically the old spooky Marsten House. Vampires start showing up, however, and quickly the locals all begin to get turned into bloodsucking, ghoulish creatures of the night. Ben teams up with a shockingly competent child, a local woman, a doctor, and a high school teacher, and together they battle the undead and try to convince the cops to do something.

What works

This movie is slick, and it definitely has some very cool practical effects re: vampire faces. The overall vibe is fun and spooky, and the way crosses light up when vampires are near is very cool. Lewis Pullman—most recognizable as Bob from Top Gun: Maverick—anchors the film very well. Fun note: While watching, I was like, "Man, he looks like Bill Pullman! Wait...Pullman..." then I checked Wikipedia and sure enough, Lewis is his son!

What doesn't

Unfortunately, this new retelling is almost all style and no substance. It wants desperately to be as engaging as any one of the recent Mike Flanagan Netflix shows—think Haunting of Hill House, Bly Manor, and Fall of the House of Usher—but it doesn't quite hit the mark.

The main issue with this movie is that when you adapt a Stephen King novel, you have to spend some time with characters. King creates characters not out of thin air, but out of pages upon pages of fully realized backstory. Either you love it or hate it, of course, but you'll never be able to say that he doesn't make a fully lived-in feeling in his worlds. The parts they do keep tend to be King's rather dated, somewhat clunky dialogue. They should have updated that, too, since they changed other parts.

Salem's Lot (2024) doesn't do this. The film sacrifices tons of much-needed exposition for basically just spooky vampire moments. And even though I hadn't read the book in a few years, I could tell that missing links between characters were just glossed over. Ben and his romantic interest, Susan, have maybe one date and then they're just together. (Interestingly, I was transfixed by the actress who played her, Makenzie Leigh, because she has the most intense case of iPhone Face I've ever seen. (What's iPhone Face, you ask? It's when a modern actor looks a little too modern—as if you're unable to believe they've never not seen a smartphone and are thus out of place in films set in more analog times. The exact of opposite of iPhone Face? Jon Hamm, Eva Green, Keira Knightly).

Reader, even national treasure Alfre Woodard (with a Maine accent) couldn't save this movie.

It's not horrible—you'll have fun on a cool October night if you just want some spooky vibes. But don't expect a lot of backstory or depth. Think surface-level vampire frights that won't keep you up at night.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Review: The Principle of Moments, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

A joyous, enthusiastic time-travelling galactic-sized saga that is just not very good

Have you ever been to a 6-year-old’s dance recital? A 10-year-old’s orchestra concert? A 16-year-old’s theater show? Young artists in the making tend to lack skills but not enthusiasm, and they throw themselves into their performances with a wholehearted earnestness that can be incredibly endearing. But for all that, they are not (yet) good dancers, violinists, or actors, and it shows.

This book is that. The author describes in her author’s notes how she started writing it as a 16-year-old, and that alone explains so, so much about this book. It explains the sprawling, ambitious plot, in which tropes are evoked with such an ardent embrace that they almost feel fresh and new. A Chosen One? Yes, please—in fact, how about three Chosen Ones? No—wait—make it nine! And reincarnation! And cyclical prophecies, and the fate of the galaxy and an evil empire and time travel and found family and teleportation and secret libraries and queer love and coming of age and fighting back against oppression and and and and and and...! I don’t want to say that only a teenager could be responsible for such a bursting profusion of familiar tropes played so fervently straight, but the fact that a teenager was originally responsible for this bursting profusion explains a lot.

It explains the odd technical details, like robots which apparently have retinas, because they need to get past retinal scans. It explains the writing style, in which a teenage Chosen One who has only ever known a life of oppression laments never having an opportunity to feel ‘normal’—as if she can know any meaning of normality that is different from her entire life hitherto. It explains why characters from 1812 talk about being each other’s ‘boyfriends’—a word whose usage to mean ‘male lover’ was not attested until 1906. (A more accurate term would have been sweeting, or paramour, or lovemate, or honeybird, or sprunny. Yes, you read that right, sprunny.) It explains the extremely odd understanding of history, in which an ailing King George III laments the loss of the American colonies as evidence of the decline of the British Empire, when in 1812 it was only just getting started. Although perhaps we’re in an alternative timeline, since there’s another George—George V??—floating around the joint, son of the regent George IV; and this George, as far as I can tell, never existed. And speaking of monarchy, it explains an odd conversation, in which a king, hearing of unrest among his people, muses that perhaps this is simply the moment when the people rise up and decide to govern themselves, and is that really so bad a thing? This king would not be so blithe, I imagine, if he had heard of what typically happens to monarchs when the people decide they’re ready to rise up and govern themselves. But because he’s a Good Guy he must necessarily despise all things monarchical and be willing to see it go away, because Monarchy Is Bad and 16-year-olds struggle with complexity.

Here’s the plot. In the future, the year 6066, a teenage girl, Asha, has lived her whole life on a planet that is crushed under the rule of an evil galactic emperor. Through cleverness and persistence she works out a plan to steal a spaceship and escape the planet. This plan is put into action when a mysterious visitor arrives, tells her that she is a Chosen One, and that she must find her sister, who was also kind of a Chosen One, but maybe not. It’s all very cryptic for reasons that are never explained except that you can’t explain everything on page 25.

Narratively meanwhile, in 1812 London, Obi is a time traveller who has fallen in love with Prince George. We know that they are in love with each other because they have a very long, tedious conversation about that fact, which serves no purpose beyond establishing their fraught relationship. Oh, and also that George doesn’t like being a prince, because Monarchy is Bad and George is a Good Guy and therefore cannot possibly think otherwise. Then Obi, who has difficulties controlling his time travel, accidentally time travels to the future, landing in the midst of Asha’s escape attempt, where he helps her avoid capture, and they fly away together.

(Oh, and speaking of the spaceships! If the galactic empire is so huge that your spaceships need to be hyperspace-capable to get anywhere, then I have difficulty imagining someone ‘gently steering’ the ship in normal space. Steering around what? A stray hydrogen atom? And why does the hyperspace-capable spaceship need wings?)

An incredible amount of not-terribly-functional plot occurs afterwards. Daring, cinematic escapes, betrayals, chases, rescues. We eventually learn the whole story of the various Chosen Ones—including a kind of cool moment when one previous Chosen One decides he’s not okay with having a role forced upon him, and decides to make trouble. This could be an outstanding opportunity to engage with the Chosen One trope and explore the effect of cosmic determinism on the psychology of the pawns of fate, but remember that 16-year-olds don’t do well with complexity, so instead we get a pretty dull antagonist. We learn through document fragments that the whole story of various Chosen Ones is bound up in a kind of reincarnation thing, so that legends of the previous instantiations of the Chosen Ones portray versions of the same adventures that Obi and Asha experience in the pages of the book. This is rather neat, until eventually it gets repetitive and tedious, and finally culminates in a huge revelation scene, in which Asha discovers how it all works and marvels at something that we, the reader, have known for a few hundred pages already.

Now, to be fair, there were some excellent touches in this book, hints of the kind of writer that Jikiemi-Pearson might become. The resentful Chosen One and the reincarnation of story events I’ve mentioned, but there was also a lovely moment between Obi and Asha, in which they have been rescued from some Bad Guys and have a quiet moment together. Obi braids Asha’s hair for her, in a way that she can’t quite manage herself, and explains that this hairstyle is not meant to be done by oneself. The expectation is that you have someone to help you. I was very touched by this scene—a reaction immediately undone by Obi going off to the bathroom to give himself a face mask, leaving me wondering at what point he managed to find himself travel-sized spa kits in the midst of escaping from prison ships.

There’s a truism floating around SFF writer circles that you have to be a bad writer before you can become a good one. Brandon Sanderson describes on his Writing Excuses podcast that he had to write 7 or 11 or some very large number of novels before he managed to sell his first published one, Elantris. You have to write a million bad words before the good ones start flowing, he says.

I can see the good words getting ready to flow in Jikiemi-Pearson’s writing. But I think there’s still a few hundred thousand bad ones that have to be flushed out first. And fortunately, given her eager, sincere, wildly ambitious approach, she’s well on her way there. But this book is not there yet.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10, problematic, but has redeeming qualities.

Highlights:

•     Tropes played earnestly straight
•     Black teenagers saving the world
•     Many, many Chosen Ones

Reference: Jikiemi-Pearson, Esmie. The Principle of Moments [Gollancz, 2024].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

Book Review: Glamour Ghoul by Sandra Niemi

A compelling, moving chronicle that over-performs on every level

Do you know Vampira? If so, maybe you know her, like me, from Tim Burton's 1994 film Ed Wood, in which she is never referred to by her actual name—Maila Nurmi. Or maybe you know her from the Misfits song. Or maybe you know of her only vaguely, from the gauzy way in which her name has been attached to that of Elvira.

It is hard to overstate just how famous Vampira was for one vanishingly brief window of time in 1954. The creation of an essentially unknown actress, Maila Nurmi, Vampira was the host of a late-night program on Los Angeles' local ABC affiliate ABC 7, in which she showed public domain horror films starring the likes of Bela Lugosi and offered innuendo-laced commentary. From the launching pad of local late-night television, she wound up on live, nationally broadcast variety shows, and was featured in national magazines and papers across the country. And then a contract wasn't renewed, and... poof. Later, in the 1980s, there was a new spark of interest in the name, but soon it was attached dismissively to a failed lawsuit against Elvira, and the connotation was that some has-been was trying to cash in cynically on a new performer's success.

Maila in Vampira garb in a famous 1954 photo from Life magazine

I have written on this site many times about the impact watching (and re-watching ad infinitum) Ed Wood had on me and the direction of my professional and creative life. So I feel like going into this book I knew maybe as much about Vampira as anybody who didn't know Maila Nurmi personally. She was the actual character model for Disney's Maleficent, in addition to her TV show. But after the limelight of the 1950s faded, she was reduced to dire poverty, living by herself in an apartment that sometimes didn't have basic utilities. In her later years, Maila sold jewelry on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, made friends with a few people, like the comedian Dana Gould, who both helped her as her physical ailments overwhelmed her, and also were sometimes on the receiving end of her mercurial and curmudgeonly temperament. When she passed, there were online fundraisers, in the days when MySpace still stalked the Earth, for her interment and headstone, in which I participated. About ten years ago, an excellent documentary called Vampira and Me came out, which includes the only surviving kinescope footage from her TV show. I knew all of this going into Glamour Ghoul, but friends, I was not prepared.

This book was written by Maila's niece, Sandra Niemi, the daughter of Maila's estranged and never-reconciled brother. She and Maila only met once, when Sandra took a sightseeing trip to Los Angeles. Sandra is neither a writer, historian, nor researcher, so I have to admit, my expectations going into the book were pretty low. As it happens, Maila had been working off-and-on at an autobiography for many years. She kept stacks of notes and diaries, and some cassettes on which she'd recorded aspects of her story. Sandra worked through all of this material to tell a profoundly engaging story with a final emotional punch that I won't spoil, but recounts a circumstance that simply wouldn't have ever happened if the author had not undertaken the writing of this book.

Maila Nurmi grew up in a Finnish immigrant community where her most likely prospect for the future was working in a fish canning factory. So in 1941, at age 18, she got on a bus for Hollywood. A stunning beauty, it didn't take her long to catch the attention of people like Orson Welles, who impregnated her and then vanished from her life. In interviews in later years, Maila would discuss being seduced by Welles, and claim that he gave her the clap. This book reveals that instead, this was Maila's little personal code for "child," and a way to throw shade at Welles without revealing the true nature of their relationship, and the pain involved in giving her child up for adoption.

Maila Nurmi, 1947

As the decade rolled over into the 1950s, Maila became a fixture of Googie's diner, which was both a social scene and the inspiration for an architectural style. She became close friends with Marlon Brando (the book does not discuss whether or not their relationship exceeded the bounds of friendship, but given Brando's reputation, it seems like a reasonable conclusion), and was perhaps closer to James Dean than anyone else. His death destroyed Maila, and left her feeling completely unmoored, coming in close proximity to the loss of her show. Brando seems to have done all he could to help—paying for her to go to therapy and paying her phone bill for years so the two of them could stay connected and Maila could stay connected to the outside world, from which she was withdrawing.

After sliding deeper and deeper into poverty, the book discusses the afternoon where four weird-looking guys showed up at her apartment and peered through her window. When Maila went to chase them off, she discovered they were... The Misfits. They adored Vampira, and asked her to come make an appearance at their record release show that night in Hollywood. This began a return to the spotlight, and kicked off new interest in the character.

This is where the book does a tremendous service to the memory of Maila (and Vampira). Sandra dives deep into the circumstances leading up to the lawsuit against ABC 7 and Elvira, and the lawsuit itself. Contrary to the popular understanding of the suit, ABC 7 actually approached Maila and Cassandra Petersen about launching a new version of the Vampira show, in which Vampira would be Elvira's grandmother. Negotiations went on for some time, contracts were signed, but then ABC 7 decided to go ahead with the show without Maila. Cassandra Petersen became Elvira and continues her success with the character to this day. Sandra reveals through documentation that Maila was the victim of her own poverty, having to rely on ineffectual lawyers who missed deadlines and misfiled paperwork, leading to the dismissal of the suit (did didn't lose on the merits) and her being cut out of participation in the Elvira show that she was entitled to.

Even though Maila never truly rose out of the poverty that dogged her, the resurgence of Vampira's name recognition, coupled with the attention to Edward D. Wood, Jr. that came about largely as a result of the Tim Burton movie, did allow Maila to make meaningful connections with a younger generation of fans and friends. After she passed and Sandra received all of her papers and recordings, Sandra did some digging into things that Maila never had access to, and uncovers a truly powerful revelation that literally left me in tears as I finished the book.

In the end, this book is a gift to fans of old horror movies, fans of Hollywood history, and in a very real sense, to a few specific individuals who have a greater understanding of themselves in the world as a result of this book.

The Math

Highlights: A loving but nuanced portrait of a complicated individual, amazing 1950s old Hollywood vibes, unequalled context added to a pop culture mystery that seemed straightforward

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

Reference: Niemi, Sandra. Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira [Feral House, 2021].

Posted by Vance K—resident cult film reviewer and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together

Book Review: A Hunger with No Name by Lauren C. Teffeau

An unflinching science fiction and environmental fable about the costs and dangers of societal extremes.

There is a strong movement, maybe the dominant undercurrent ethos of science fiction, that science fiction (and I am talking strictly about science fiction and not fantasy) is not about the future, alternate present, alternate past or whenever it takes place in which it is set. Instead, the rosetta stone of much of science fiction is--what is this novel, story, work talking about in the modern day. What is it showing, through a mirror darkly (or sometimes very much obviously). Figure that out, and you can really dig into what an author is doing, intentionally or otherwise.

So with that in mind, let’s look at Lauren C. Teffeau’s A Hunger with No Name. We start off in a slowly decaying herding village of Astrava. Our main character, Thurava, is training with her mother to be a herder of the sheep (or perhaps llama-like) lucerva. This is a herding society where herders take their flocks to pastures and then return with them with the change of seasons back to their village to be shorn. We quickly learn this itself is a change, the herds used to be kept a lot closer, but the nearby river has dwindled in recent decades, and so cannot support the village and pastures both. We get a sense of diminishment, that the way of life of Thurava’s people is under slow constant squeeze.

There’s more, though. This is a post-apocalyptic society, one that grew up in the wake of a dominant and highly technological civilization that collapsed. Astrava and its peers are what came out of that fall.
And then there is the Glass City. A city of wonders, of technology, of very different ways of life. Of, perhaps, a return to the life before the apocalypse. The Glass City has sent an automation, a representative, to coax and convince people to give up the herder life and come to the City to find work and stability. Is it a false premise? An illusion? Those who have gone to the city have NOT sent messages back as to their life there. Not even Thurava’s best friend.

Given the attitudes and fear and apprehensions of life before that apocalypse, you’d think an automation from the Glass City urging to come to its home with the hope and promise of those beforetimes would be a nonstarter. However with their way of life diminishing year by year, the trickle of people heading to the big city and a new life becomes a flood, once that eventually drives Astrava to come to the Glass City, and find out for herself what is really happening, and what she can do about it.

I very deliberately used the word fable in the tag line of this review and I want to interrogate and explain why as the focus of this review. A Hunger with No Name is a science fiction novel but it is even more so a fable¹, right from the name which has that resonance to it. What is, in fact, the titular hunger with no name? It does get a personification in this book, as Thurava finds out as the dark secret (even to most residents) of the Glass City. That monstrous personification is what has been driving the city, and also its effects on its neighbors, including Astrava, for quite some time.

But again, why is this a science fiction fable? It’s a fable in the same way the movie Snowpiercer is a fable, or In Time. If you want a literary parallel, the closest thing I can think of that really sits in the same space as this novel are the stories in Stanslaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, which explicitly says they are “fables for the cybernetic age”. But this is a novel-length fable which does veer against the usual short length nature of the form. And Lem’s fables are written for humor to leaven his fables and messaging. The author, here, is most deadly serious in her fable.

But now as to the clincher as to why this story isn’t just a straight up science fiction novel. Our main character, Thurava, is engaged directly in the idea of gathering stories. She goes from herder of lucerva to herder of knowledge, of stories, of the culture of her people. Once she reaches the glass city and see what it is doing to her, to her people, her ambitions to preserve and transmit and keep the stories and culture of her people makes her, in effect, a storyteller, a transmitter of culture, knowledge, and the philosophy of her people, their way of life. Even more so than the aforementioned Lem, by grounding Thurava as a storyteller, and infusing her story with stories she learns, collects, tells.

But while Thurava is at first trying to be a preservationist, trying to preserve, the force of the story as she learns the truth of the Glass City, is to be spurred to eventual reluctant but decisive action against it, especially once that hunger’s nature, and its all consuming desire becomes clear. Once Thurava learns the truth of it, she has no choice but to take action against it. She is a reluctant protagonist, but when the truth of the fable that she is in becomes clear, the inevitability of her course of action plays out in the denouement of the book.

So what is this a fable of? It’s simple. The heart of the city and what Thurava finds there, as well as the societal and social structures around it, are a metaphor and a personification of rapacious and unrelenting late stage environment-destroying capitalism². It is literally a hunger with no name, and a bottomless hunger at that. The author gives it a form and a shape for Thurava to fight against and oppose. That too puts this in the realm of a science fiction fable. Opposing an entire societal structure that we live in is hard to handle (or even believe can be done, and especially not by one person). But giving the hunger with no name a form (and a name), Thurava can take decisive and destructive action against it.

But this is also more of a fable than a hard science fiction story in that it doesn’t take a hard look at the long term consequences of her actions and their aftermath. One could really see Astrava’s ultimate course of action in apocalyptic terms, and it does fundamentally change the way of life for the residents of the Glass City, and not at all for the better. Thurava’s course is a radical one, but in keeping with the fable frame, we are looking at it as a response to the personification of the problem that the aforementioned personification embodies.

Thurava’s story may not satisfy everyone, in the end. It may not satisfy you if you are not in a mood and mindset to receive it. It is a fable that will absolutely enrage a strand of readers who see the fable and its metaphors as a call to radical action. It’s not a comfortable story, by any means, but it takes time to get to that discomfort. Like the slow fade and fall of the Astrava, the novel takes its time but the eventual descent into the solution Thurava takes takes on the air of inevitability, but uncomfortable inevitability.

As mentioned before, most fables leaven humor into the story. Some do not. All, however, are made to ask and answer moral questions and sometimes pose answers. A Hunger with No Name asks a moral question and while it does not use humor, it uses the unflinching lens of the author to give an answer to it.

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Highlights:

• Strong science fictional and environmental message in a novel length fable form
• Excellent use of Thurava as a main character as storyteller and reluctant but decisive agent of change

Reference: Teffeau, Lauren C, A Hunger with No Name, [University of Tampa Press, 2024]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

¹There appears to be a difference between fables and parables that I can’t quite parse. Is this novel really a parable instead of a fable? I’m not sure, but the whole idea of a moral lesson or message is definitely on point here.

²There is also the possibility, given the nature of the automations and the works of the hunger with no name, that there is also a message against LLMs and generative AI at work here. That is less clear, and may be something the reader (me) brought to this fable.

Book Review: The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

Working forwards and backwards in time to tell the story of a city and the demon who loved/loves it.

It seems Nghi Vo possibly likes to play around with the scale of her stories. In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the small becomes the large; items spiral out to become stories. In her new novel (a short one, but she assures us, definitely a novel), she plays something of the reverse trick. Or possibly both at the same time. The story follows a demon, Vitrine, in the city she has helped shape for many years, a city that welcomed her as a refugee from her original, fallen home. She has curated it, whispered in the ear of its leaders, artists, librarians and pirates, sculpting it like a gardener with a well-tended hedge. And then, right at the start of the story, it is destroyed. Angels sweep in, unexplained, and put it to fire and the sword. All her work is gone. The story is of the aftermath, her memories and gried sweeping her up, telling stories of the large, spiralling down into the smallness of one single existence - her own - while reciprocally telling that grander scale through the moments of its individuals, day by day and year by year.

If it brings to mind anything - I'm not sure it truly does; it's a singular book in many ways - it is The City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky. At the simplest level, they are both stories of the soul of a city, told through a chorus of its inhabitants. The difference, however, is a big one. Where for Tchaikovsky the story of the city is the purpose in and of itself (and a very well executed one), for Vo here, the story of the city is only a half of what's going on. The rest is the story of Vitrine herself, and her care at that macro scale, using the humans that inhabit her city - and she is fiercely possessive of it, even after its downfall - as tools to shape it, things that can be discarded, that will pass even as the city endures, not stories or ends themselves. Vitrine lives outside of the scale of human life, and so the story must expand outwards, beyond those boundaries, to attempt to contain her.

This presents itself both subtly and unsubtly throughout. One of the most pleasing reflexes of it is the offhand remarks about how long Vitrine takes applying herself to a given task - stretched out into the days, weeks or months as debris falls and bodies rot around her in the aftermath. We observe the story through Vitrine's scale, experiencing events in a way that feels natural because it is natural to her, but then are jarred into awareness by these little comments, slipped around the edges, reminding us that nothing about her sits naturally with us, however it may feel in the moment. This is someone who can remain sat in one place for months, who can wait out a river. Vo manages to marry an extremely human and an extremely extra-human sense of wonder and scale throughout, with Vitrine's emotional reactions - intense, moving ones - lending accessibility to the broader scope of the story.

Where Tchaikovsky gives us the full view of his city by using multiple viewpoints, seeing it differently through each new set of eyes, Vo does is by using the same eyes, but seeing those people. There's a continuity that brings - Vitrine has been there and can keep on seeing, so can pull herself out of the "now", because she too experienced the "then". She can see change on a scale inaccessible to a mortal.

Even if it were only that, even if it were just a story of one demon's grief of her lost city, and the back and forward tale of its past and future circling around its apocalypse, it would be interesting enough. The prose is lovely, often bringing up moments of beautiful description, especially of colour and texture. You get a sense of the city as a physical place, as well as a cultural one, and for the complex mass of people moving within it. The beauty slips in even in the darker, more visceral moments of death and destruction and dismemberment. It is a lovely thing to read, just to exist in its descriptions and flowing use of language, just to be embedded within Vitrine's perspective on the world, swinging between abject sorrow, rage and a sort of wry humour about herself and the people she has experienced in her city.

For example:

Like comets who found the earth too cruel

or:

She was a thing that had been pared down by pain until there was only a sliver of her left, and everything she had regained, from the top of her dark head to her gleaming black eyes, to her sharp white teeth to her brown skin hectic with a madder blush, she had made herself.

For a story so concerned with the grander scale, it is one profoundly unafraid of the physical, and it is enriched by it.

But it is not only that - the city, at the start of the book, is destroyed by angels, but not all of those angels escape unscathed by the angry demon who tries to stop them. One, cursed by Vitrine, returns. Keeps returning. And so, as well as the story of her city, it is the story of these two immortal beings, tied together by a cataclysm that was almost beyond human terms of reference, that they both lived through (though no unscathed). Theirs is a complex relationship outside of the usual human frame of reference, and one that takes the whole book to develop, not reaching its climax (no, not like that) until the very end of the story.

I want to stress here, it's not a simple enemies to lovers type of romance story. Whatever they are moment to moment, neither Vitrine nor the unnamed angel (she is not particularly interested in small talk with him) exist on a human level, with human emotions on a human scale. Whatever they experience with, through and around each other somewhat defies description. It is just that - experience. It is a string of captured moments that become something more, but evade categorisation. 

Which makes it rather hard to review. I don't, honestly, quite know what I think ultimately passes between these two characters, by the end of the story. It feels profound. It feels intense. But I don't think I entirely understand it. Instead, it sits in my head, making me wonder, making me chew at it, considering. I want to reread it, to ponder it again. It is the good sort of incomprehension, of a thing that may be currently evading me, but is graspable, and will be worth the time spent in reaching for it.

What I do know, even without that understanding, is that Vo has done a fantastic job in capturing a sense of two beings beyond the scale of human lives, who nonetheless interact with them. Vitrine and the angel feel different to one another, and yet also similar, tied to the same outsideness, that immunity to mortal scale, that makes them both alien and compelling to the reader. The holy is a rare sight in SFF - even more so than the religious - but there is something of it here, in the unknowable actions of powers beyond mortal control, seeking to reckon with one another in rules that are never stated, with powers that exist within a framework of intuition, not hard logic. They are as they are, and do as they do, and exist together, in this space for a little time, as we observe them, but cannot grasp them. The scene early on, in which Vitrine witnesses the destruction of her city, is powerful for its distance, its cold incomprehensibility. It's awful. But it also has the feeling of something so utterly beyond human power that nudges into the sort of boundaries quite apart from "magic" in the commonly used modern sense. If it is magic, it is at a scale beyond the individual, and thus its grandeur.

Wholly different from her other work, there is nonetheless an extremely distinctive feel of Vo here throughout, the deftness of her descriptions, the fierceness of her protagonist. It is a beautiful, sad, evocative story, that manages to compress something enormous and otherworldly into something graspable and personified, in a way that seems quite unique. It is thoughtful, provocative, and full of depth, and a story I think will reward multiple reads, and intensive discussion. I enjoyed it immensely.

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The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose, unusual framing, a complexity that keeps on giving the more you think about it

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Nghi Vo, The City in Glass [Tordotcom, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social