Book Review: The West Passage by Jared Pechaček

A world peopled by creatures straight from the pages of a medieval manuscript, with a story strange enough to match.

Weird stuff reviewing continues! No really, this one is also baffling, although in a very different way to either OKPsyche or Rakesfall. In The West Passage, the debut novel by erstwhile social media fashion commentator, strange art purveyor and all round interesting person Jared Pechaček, the story is relatively linear and comprehensible, but the visuals? Ooh the visuals are something else.

The story follows two apprentices from the Grey tower, one learning to become a Mother, caring for people at death and birth, and holding on to a great memory trove of song-lore in the meanwhile, and the other training to become a Guardian, charged with the defence of the palace against the Beast. Shit, as it often does in stories, goes all wrong, and they both have to travel away from their home in Grey to try to put the world to rights, and find a way to stop the looming arrival of the Beast, who threatens to destroy everything. Along the way, they discover that all is not necessarily as they expected to find it in the rest of the palace, find friends and enemies, learn, grow and all that good stuff. You know, stories?

So what is it that sets this one apart? Why is this part of weird shit summer?

Well, for a start, look at that cover. Is that a lady with a tower for a head? Yes. Yes it is. That is very much emblematic of what you're in for here. It starts slow, at the beginning. Off hand comments about twiggy hair or spiny hands that catch on the edges of your attention - did it really just say that? maybe it was metaphorical? - that keep on building and building, little hints, little wrongnesses, until you can't quite ignore them. And then the book hits you with art like this:

That thing on the right? With the gothic architectural twiddle for a head? That's a beehive. It pisses honey. Just... roll with it.

And once you get to this point, the floodgates really open, and it all comes gushing (sorry) out. Pechaček really shines in his visual descriptions - of people, of scenery - and doubly so in his ability to capture abstract, the almost indescribable, with metaphorical and whimsical and often somewhat grotesque language. For instance, we have this passage on the Beast:

the Beast might pass equally as a subtlety at the banquet table of the apocalypse, or as a costume at a masque where every player represents three simultaneous crimes. Now enters Madame Murder, all blood and bone, who is also Sir Larceny, all grasping hands and covetous eyes, who is also Treachery, all knives and masks.

Does this physically tell us what the Beast looks like? No, not at all. And yet somehow we come out with a sense of it nonetheless. And there are many, many things like it throughout the book - things that we have no easy map for within the world of simple physical description, but to which Pechaček gives life through these little passages of metaphor. These descriptions are also heavily grounded in the assumed chronology of the world of the story - as you can see from the manuscript styling of the art (which varies according to where in the setting we are for that part of the story, incorporating visual aspects of different real-world manuscript traditions to give a sense of the relation between the areas of the world), there's a strong medieval flavour running through it all - and so they feel all the more tied into the story itself. They make use of concepts at least passing familiar to either of our two protagonists, to set the scene for the reader in terms that make sense for the story's frame of reference, and so never falter, never break the cohesion of our immersion. Likewise the steady creep of it all, the absolute rejection the classic wall o' text, brick to the face exposition, makes it all the more clear that strange to us is normal to the world. People with bird heads are unremarkable, so of course it only comes up in the text as it becomes relevant (for instance in what sex acts they can and cannot perform). Otherwise, it's just sort of... there.

But that doesn't mean there's no explanation in the story - far from it. I would, in general, describe this as a worldbuilding-forward novel. Much of the core story isn't really about the protagonists; they're just the people it's happening to. They don't really make choices that change the way the plot flows, or perform feats that no one else could do. Instead, they're the vector through which we steadily uncover the mystery of the world... within its own terms, its own lore. Rooted in the perspective of someone from Grey, we learn to interrogate the (very little) we know, and dig further into the wider, richer history of the place we call home, and to understand that the stories we know aren't necessarily the  immutable truth we thought them to be. For the reader, that means a steady, gentle exposition, that last pretty much through the whole story, of the core question that hits you on the first page - what on earth is this world? It's a story to explore an idea, to understand a place, and simply to visit it. To see its many parts and begin to know it. And that's somewhat delightful.

Especially because that place is playing with the common fantasy trope of the fallen world - the story takes place in a crumbling, decrepit, enormous castle-like structure, full of tumbled masonry, empty halls and piled rubbish. Nothing is as it was in the days gone past, and people yearn for the glory of the stories of old. So far, so familiar, right? But because this story is so lore-forward, so focussed on that self-narration, the way that this fallen glory comes across is precisely alongside our interrogation of the truth of it all. We are constantly aware, from fairly early on, of the unreliability of our sources, and so we are constantly on guard, watching for the potholes in these songs of greater days, wondering what other information might be hiding there. It makes for a very interesting experience. It also goes hand in hand with one of the areas Pechaček dwells on often, around worship, holiness and magic, and how that plays into the strict hierarchical and inheritance based system that seems to be in place in his world. The Ladies - with their strange and varied morphology - are extremely powerful beings capable of miracles, who head up a governing structure whose steepness is nearly vertical. Our protagonists exist somewhere near the bottom in an even further fallen bywater of this fallen world. The Ladies are worshipped. But how does worship - and holiness, and miracles, all words Pechaček uses directly in the text - exist in a world where that power visibly flows from beings you can see and touch? That's a mystery the text does not exactly solve, but you can feel it being lingered on, in moments, the way the story takes us to these parts of the world, gives us these moments of something... magical.

And that is a word I don't believe is used even once. People are cursed, transformed, charmed and otherwise affected by incomprehensible power... but not once is anything referred to as "magic". In a fantasy book. Isn't that interesting?

Historically, at various points, what cultures conceptualised as prayer, song, poem and magic spell has has intersected and flowed together in ways that seem strange to a modern, Christian, Anglophone mind. We have plenty of historical examples of the holy and the magical overlapping, combining and working together without qualm, or the one being in a place we might expect to see the other. And so it is absolutely fascinating to see a work of fantasy take this historical truth and run with it - so much of this story is rooted in an alien perspective, so why not this thing too? It's another little, subtle... and yet enormous, fundamental thing that adds to the rootedness of the story perspective, layering and layering up the different aspects of the telling to feed into the creation and uncovering of this strange, beautiful world.

But there is a story - and there are characters - and I don't want to imply those aren't a part of the telling. We predominantly spend time with the two above mentioned, who begin the story as Pell and Kew, and both of whom have somewhat differing but interesting perspectives, but who have a common home and a great deal in common in their foundations and worldviews. They are also both incredibly driven by duty, a motivation I'm always a sucker for in fiction.

Once again playing with common tropes, there's something of the traditional narrative to taking these impoverished, ignorant, lowly characters and inserting them into a grander story. But where in many others they might end up politicking with the great and becoming the focus of a world that previously did not care about them, here their interactions with power are generally fleeting, and rarely upset the status quo (and if so, never for long). This isn't a story of their rise through the ranks to grander status. The world has its inertia which one, or even two, people cannot fight alone, even if they want to. Politics, throughout the story, remain obscured and distant to them, beyond the scale with which they are already somewhat familiar, and they are often pawns in someone else's story. Things generally happen to them. And again, for the story being told, for this uncovering of a world, I think this decision really works, even if it makes a lot of the time spent with the characters somewhat melancholic. We see how trapped and powerless they are, how their ability to do their duty - however sacred - is hindered by forces utterly beyond their grasp, and it's hard not to feel incredibly sorry for them, sad for the state of the world they exist in, and by extension and resonance, sad about a lot of other things in the real world besides.

So this is not an entirely cheery book, I have to say. But it's not quite so grim as all that, in the main because much of the story is so focussed on uncovering all this lore, all this wonder, that the awe, fear, confusion and mortal peril tend in the moment to overwhelm the quiet, unrelenting sadness of it all. But it is there, and after closing the final page, it does sit with you - this is a story that lingers in the mind, both visually and emotionally.

Is it a perfect story? I will admit not. I found the ending a little rushed, and somewhat out of tone with much of what went before, precisely because of that rush - everything else has proceeded at its own pace, and given that sense of pervasive doom, inevitable sadness, and when you give a sudden uptick, those are hard emotions to maintain. There's also just quite a lot going on to follow in the last 5-10% or so, and I think some of the more emotive parts of it might have hit harder and been more impactful (read: heartwrendingly sad) if they'd been given a little more time to breathe.

There are also a couple of loose ends of plot - one of which feels somewhat significant - that don't really get tied up in any meaningful way. They just sort of... trail off, as the narrative camera pans past, in a way I found somewhat unsatisfying, rather than plot hooks for a sequel, or deliberate mysteriousness. And they do niggle, now I sit back to reflect on the story.

But on the whole, I think I'm willing to ignore them, because so much of what I got from the rest of it was so good.

It's a deeply strange, intensely visually driven book, and a story you read to get a mad ride through a baffling world, rather than to fall in love with people or to be carried away by events. But so much of what is it is so beautiful, so vivid, so enthralling, that even an intensely character focussed reader (i.e. me) could be carried away by it.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful but surreal and intensely visual world; strong emotional resonance; sheer wtfery

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Jared Pechaček, The West Passage, [Tordotcom, 2024]

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

Book Review: Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera

What the heck did I just read (complimentary)?

I've apparently been on a bit of an unreviewable fiction run. I'm not complaining (they've all been stellar) but Rakesfall, the new novel by Vajra Chandrasekera, is not ending this streak on either count.

If you have read his previous novel The Saint of Bright Doors (which Adri covered as part of her roundup here), you might think yourself familiar with the strangeness Chandrasekera puts in his stories - the geography that shapes itself to will and politics, the deftly inexplicable intrusions of the fantastical into the world. But I say to you, having read Rakesfall now, my friend, you have absolutely no idea the depth of the pool into whose shallow end you have merely dipped your toes. The weirdness is off the charts, and he's holding no one's hand this time, except to drag them through the layer by vivid layer of this strange, piecemeal story that slowly coalesces into a sublime whole, without you ever noticing it happening.

The story follows two characters (or perhaps more) whose lives touch each others again and again and again, throughout time and space and branching timelines. Through a sequence of at first what seem like unconnected stories, we see them relate and relate and relate over and again to each other, to the world, and to the substance of their own relationship, until we begin to see that the story has never really just been about them, as if the kind of relationship that transcends lifetimes can ever be a "just". I've seen the book described by some as a series of short stories with a thread of connection between them, but that does no justice to how thoroughly interwoven each part of this novel is, if you're paying attention to look for the connecting threads. They are everywhere, offhand comments and motifs and themes and ideas and names and ghosts all. Some of them even reach further, back to The Saint of Bright Doors, although I would not call this any kind of sequel. What do these characters do? Well, many things. But it is not in their actions that the story really lies, but in their interrelations, and their relationship to the story, to the very idea of stories, instead.

Some books are plot heavy. Some are character driven. Some world-building focussed. Rakesfall is in the rarer category of theme-driven, and the even rarer still selection of theme-driven and also good. And its strength there lies in not letting itself get too bogged down in one single message, to the detriment of all else. Some stories have a single driving ideal at the core of themself, and by focussing on it to the exclusion of all other parts of craft, they wear down the reader so much without rewarding them that the book becomes a lecture instead. Chandrasekera does not have one note here, but a symphony - to say this book cares about one thing is to have missed five others. I'm sure I have missed five different things in my own muddling through. But I found plenty, and each is gently, quietly interwoven with all the others, to be drawn out by someone wanting to look for it. As a story about stories, it understands how crucial a part the reader plays in that dynamic - the need to trust them, to let them find their own way, their own understanding of what is provided, and feel no need to browbeat them into comprehension, to require them to take a single canonical point. The themes I found in it - and enjoyed, well-explored as they were - were around power and oppression, colonialism, autonomy, destiny and inevitability, the role of the player in the story, the power of choices. I am certain I missed some axes of it that overlap into politics I don't know well.  

But the reader does need to be willing to do the work. And that, I think, is going to be the trouble for this book. It is never going to be escapism, or a pacy, distracting, linear read. It's a book whose content, whose meaning, is to be worked for, and it is important to go in willing to put in that bit of effort.

Because if you do? You will absolutely be rewarded.

If nothing else, the prose is delicious. One of the delights of being the age I currently am is that there are now more and more authors writing books who grew up on my internet, on my references, in my generationalect, so to speak. People who use the slang I use, in the tone I use it, whose view of the world is so clearly coloured by the vast, unpoliced, unpatrolled and uncontrolled wilderness that was the internet of the 90s and 00s. I see that in Rakesfall, too, in the way Chandrasekera switches tone and formality, using a downshift into the casual as a subtle irony, or to undercut a mood, like so:

The simile of the two-handled saw is not a parable. It isn't even a story. That it is self-consciously a simile suggests an unseriousness, a little haha hoho, a little lol j/k.

Or the way tone and formatting intrude in the following segment of a quasi-mythical tale within the story:

One day, the king on his throne hears faraway weeping, and he knows it's from the haunted cemetery outside his city, where a seditionist poet impaled for high treason cries, undying or undead, for water. All his soldiers pee themselves a little, so the king calls up his favourite wrestler, biggest face in the city, beloved far and wide as the best good guy who isn't afraid of anything, and the king says, my Beloved Bro, will you Please take this Cup of Water out unto the Dread Cemetery and give it to that Loud Fucker, and Tell him to (a) Pipe down and (b) give Thanks to the generosity of his King? And the wrestler says, Sure Thing my King.

There's a whole essay you could write about the use of capitalisation here, as well as the contrast between that "unto" and the "Loud Fucker"/"Beloved Bro". The way the tone rattles around between high, mythic formality and the numinous and then right down into the most informal and millennial of slang resonates beautifully with how the story is, itself, told, meandering through time and place, through people who are the same but different, from the visceral act of self-flaying in a bathroom to an undying being flying through space. So often, "inconsistent tone" would be a deserved insult, but here, it is anything but - in that inconsistency, it maintains coherence with its own ideas of itself. It could not be the story it is if it were tied down to a single way of speaking and being. This is especially true for tying it in to the characters, who might otherwise be held at arms length from the telling, and who need to be in close, for you to see the echoes of themselves throughout their selves across their time.

Even aside from his tonal choices, the language Chandrasekera uses is consistently well-chosen. He dwells often on the physical, on skin and blood and texture, on the cutting of flesh and the lolling of tongues, and that is so, so necessary in a book whose concept and overarching purpose are so distant from the grit of humanity. It needs tying down, grounding to something familiar, to let us explore that vastness.

But it is not just the prose. Though distant, the characters are well-drawn, and though confusing at first, the plot coalesces into something truly great by the end of the book. Where many stories experience a quickening towards the end, a visible moment where things begin to come together, and where the pace of events kick up a notch - the Eurovision key change moment, if you will - this has none of that. I say "coalesce" because that is exactly what my understanding did, emerging from the mist of the story with delicately paced exactitude. There was no one moment of insight, just a steady, dawning comprehension that lasted over a third of the book, and left the final page closing with a deep sense of satisfaction.

With every compliment I can muster meant - because it's one of my favourite books, and one I would so rarely draw a comparison to - what Rakesfall reminded me most pointedly of is Vellum, by Hal Duncan. Both are stories that use concepts of personal archetypes, a group of souls rattling around time's dice cup, bumping into each other through eternity. Both reject linearity. Both reject categorisation. Both embrace the grit and grime of humanity alongside the sublime, and refute any idea of a mismatch between them. They're not the same book, by any means, but they have some of the same spirit, and must be approached in similar ways. I suspect Rakesfall, as I find Vellum does, would reward each reread with discoveries of new twists, new nuances and new references, and give the reader a different experience every time. And, ultimately, both are books I want to put into people's hands and just say "it's fucking weird, I can't explain it, just trust me... and come back when you're done". They're books to have conversations about. They're books to have conversations with.

Which is, ultimately, why I adore Rakesfall. It's a story that understands stories, and asks the reader to work with it, to reach out and meet it part way, to understand those stories too. To draw from a negative review I saw of it online - it is an experience as much as it is a story - and the beauty of that is that that experience is necessarily a singular beast. My time with it will not be your time, nor my own in a year when I come back to it (as I surely will), pen and paper in hand, ready to make notes. And because it yearns for you to reach out to it, to work with it, because you must do the work to listen and to think, the experience that comes out at the end feels all the more intimate, all the more personal, all the more beautiful.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful, winding, tone-shifting prose; a plot that materialises gently out of the ether; immaculate pacing

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall, [Tordotcom, 2024]

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

Book Review: OKPsyche by Anya Johanna DeNiro

A strange, surreal, emotional and deeply lyrical window into a woman's life through peculiar events

One of my longrunning soapboxes that I occasionally like to climb up onto is that we need more fucking weird books. The ones where, when you try to explain what it's about to someone, you come up blank and are forced to wave your hands, roughly describe the vibes and then give up, foisting it into their hands and telling them to just read it, then they'll understand. The stories where words fail you and you need simply to emote at people until they join your little growing cult, and go on to vibrate incoherently at people themselves to read this inexplicable book. I love those ones. The fucking weird ones.

But the "words fail you" part is a bit of a bugger for a reviewer. My entire purpose in this whole situation is to put some words around things in a manner that is at the very least intended to be one (or more, if we're feeling fancy) of helpful, persuasive, instructive or entertaining. So let's see what we can do.

Sometimes, if you're lucky, someone will buy you a present. And not just any present, but the type that surprises you—this wasn't on any list you made, or something you asked for. It's a present that comes entirely out of the blue, something you didn't even know existed, but now it's been handed to you, you realise you've never wanted anything more*. But it's ok! You just unwrapped it, so that insatiable desire has been satiated immediately, and you get the double joy of discovering it and having it all to experience together. That is the experience of reading OKPsyche. I knew very little about it before beginning, only that Adri recommended it highly. I didn't really know the plot or the vibe or... much of anything at all. But sitting reading it on the train, being immersed in it, was the experience of knowing I had desperately wanted something like this, if only I'd thought to ask.

OKPsyche is the surreal story of a woman —a trans woman— who is struggling. With dating, with friendship, with her relationship with her son, with her relationship with her mother. Big themes. It is a story deeply seated within her perspective as she navigates these, in a slipshod, hallucinogenic order, pulling in characters who may or may not exist, and may or may not be able to solve her problems. It's not a book where things are ever really explained, but one where you just have to sit back and let the experience, and more importantly the emotions, wash over you. It's an emotionally delicate novel, if nothing else—not that the emotions it portrays are gentle, small ones, but that DeNiro does so with scalpel accuracy, cutting into the finest threads of feeling as you tangle through the experience of the plot.

And this is, in many ways, why it is such a hard story to pin to the page. Things happen —of course things happen— through the course of the story. But that's not what the story is about. It is instead one so deeply rooted in feeling that everything else simply... falls away. And those are always the stories it is hard to hold in your hands, to sum up to someone else. 

If I tell you that she stumbles into contact with a strange helper who, after slightly eyerolling her love life problems, arranges a parcel be sent to her that contains a boyfriend she can construct for herself, it sounds like a wacky, lighthearted, silly story. But if I also tell you she has to grapple with her mother's dying just as she's trying to reconcile with her son, who is learning to relate to who she is now... well, that's not wacky at all. In some stories, that juxtaposition would feel callous, or disingenuous, the silliness of the one undermining the other. OKPsyche never feels callous. The strangeness of the tone and telling make the two distinct parts —and the many others, lest you assume this is a book of only two themes— become one, and creates a coherent, albeit dreamlike, feeling to the whole. Instead of adding layers of distance that keep us at arm's length from the emotional resonance of the story, somehow the surreality of it all actually pulls us in closer, forcing us to focus on the core of it all, rather than dwelling on the details, because sometimes the details are so self-evidently mad, you simply have to.

Most of all though, the surreality is only that quarter-turn surreality that still has its feelers deep into the real. It's nonsense, but it's the sort of nonsense that feels like a true telling of the inside of someone's head, of the way someone might think, might experience the world. It feels authentic precisely because it's so odd.

And that contrast is at the heart of what the story does so well—it's full of those contrasts. Beautiful prose for mundane situations. Deep compassion for those who don't always have compassion for you. Emotional closure for a story that doesn't truly end (because what story ever really does?). The key for such stories is to find the fulcrum, and DeNiro has balanced things perfectly here. The tone, the pacing, the moments of depth, all placed just so to leave you breathless, while not having a single hair out of place—the artful artlessness of proper craft. You close the final page and you see how much skill has gone into every word of it, and appreciate it all the more.

Ultimately, though, it's still a story that leaves me at a loss. For so small a volume, it looms too large to be captured in 1,000 words and change. It craves hand gestures, tone of voice, all the little things that tell the story when we can't tell the story. So please, picture me waving my hands, leaning forward, emphasising that this book is something special. Because it is. And if you read it, hopefully you'll be left speechless too.

*this brought to you by the lasercut wooden put-it-together-yourself model of the Vettweiss Froitzheim dice tower I was once given for Christmas, which I cherish greatly

The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose, complex emotions, weirdness

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10

Reference: DeNiro, Anya Johanna. OKPsyche [Small Beer Press, 2023].

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

Microreview [Novella]: High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson

 Sometimes answers are overrated, and vibes are all you need. That’s definitely true of High Times in the Low Parliament, where a weird setting and eccentric interpersonal drama vastly overshadow the plot – and to great effect.

According to the blurb, High Times in the Low Parliament is the story of Lana, a scribe from Aldgate, forced into service in the Low Parliament at a time of crisis, where continued hung votes may risk a return to endless war, and the fatal flooding of parliament itself. There, along with some unlikely friends, she must do what she can to prevent such a fate.

According to the author, it’s a “lesbian stoner buddy comedy”.

Both are very much true, but neither fully capture the compelling strangeness of it all.

At the start of the story, it does feel like a prosaic tale of a person from a humble background going off into a dangerous situation where they may end up changing the world. But as things progress, as more and more details of world-building, of the situation Lana is in, of the fairies and the politics and parliament and all that’s afoot become more apparent, the further we stray from anything so mundane as a traditional narrative. By the end, the story has unmoored itself completely from the reader’s expectations, and become something else entirely.

Parliament is revealed to be a place of driftingly hallucinogenic strangeness, peopled by tired scribes, argumentative deputies from a variety of European locations and a plethora of disgruntled fairies, all of whom are caught up on the issue of the frequent hung parliaments. It is revealed early on that if parliament continues as it has been, the fairies will unleash the sea to drown the humans failing to reach agreement, leaving themselves as the only ones alive in the aftermath. But why is that so critical? We see hints, and fairies here and there reveal their fears about what humans could do, along with references back to an old agreement that they’re keeping humanity to. But this is a parliament – and a story – far more inward than outward focussing. Why does it truly matter what happens here? What are the real-world ramifications? How does what the deputies argue for or against actually impact people outside of parliament (or does it at all)? These are not questions Robson has concerned the narrative with beyond the odd wisps here and there in passing.

But nor is she concerned with giving us a deeply rooted world, a clear picture of this strange Angland – a distorted mirror on English history. Again, we see hints here and there, or increasingly meaningful absences (where are the men? Are there any men? Wait, babies come from where?), but again, answers are not forthcoming. The questions merely hang in the background, with clues only adding to the layers of mystery and confusion. The more you learn, the more you wonder. Is this an alternate timeline, split off after some critical, possibly fairy-fuelled, event? Is this a complete rewrite of history, are the changes meant to simply be facets of the world? Is this meant to be a critique of the various “what if women were in power” stories that crop up frequently in SFF? Is this about Brexit? Are we just mocking politics as a process? Critiquing human nature in all its fractiousness? There are no answers here.

So what is there instead? For a start, there are characters. Lana Baker, the protagonist scribe, is a gloriously happy-go-lucky chancer, eager to flirt with pretty much any woman – human or fairy – who crosses her path, and determined to find joy in her life despite reality and circumstances conspiring against her. Her persistent flattery of literally everything that moves is strangely endearing, precisely because it is without any sort of selectivity, and because it seems at all times to be entirely sincere. There is very little guile to Lana, nor planning, plotting or thoughts beyond the present. She lives in the now, fuelled by drink and mood-altering yeast, and is so entirely content with this state of affairs, it’s hard not to be charmed by her along with everyone else.

The cast of secondary characters are all viewed through the lens of Lana’s jollity and hedonism, but we get occasional hints of their interiority by their interactions with each other, little glimpses of what this world might look like at a step removed from Lana. Bugbite, the moody overseer of the scribes, slowly warms to Lana’s charms, and reveals herself to be an outcast among her fellow fairies, desperate for companionship but so overcome with concern for the impending doom of parliament she can’t help but take her agitation out on her scribal charges. Eloquentia, a French deputy of the house, meanwhile seems distant and aloof, her concerns about the goings on of politics completely divorced from Lana’s focusses on life and joy and comfort and romance, but her sharpness and wit comes through in snippets, in her observations of Bugbite’s behaviour and Lana’s approaches. We see enough of them to know both would approach – and have – their problems in a totally different way to the progression of the story, but Lana steamrollers everything around her, whether simply because the story is told from her perspective or because she truly does pummel reality around her to behave as she wants it to, and so we can only theorise about who the other characters would be without her influence.

In some ways the story feels a little like what would happen if Tamsyn Muir’s Coronabeth Tridentarius got a novel told from her own perspective – a sheer force of cheerful optimism banging at the doors of the narrative until it gives up and lets her have her own way. Lana has that same solidity of belief in the way the world should be, she hammers it into shape as the story progresses, seemingly without even trying all that hard.

The other thing the story has – and in absolute spades – is vibes. Atmosphere. That weirdness and nonsensical ruleset that you don’t know until you read the tale (and then have somehow internalised and make a peculiar sense) that proper fairytales have. Why are things like this? Not a question anyone cares to answer. But by the end, it sort of, maybe, kind of makes sense? If you look at it side on. It feels right, even if the mysteries are endless and the logic somewhat ungraspable. And that feeling, that charming oddness, is what really drives things. It’s what sucked me in and kept me reading, and will, I suspect, be my abiding memory of the book in 12 months’ time.

But a huge part of the atmosphere is built on the foundation of no answers. This is not a book for people who need their magic spelled out, the rules of their worlds carefully delimited. It is a book that rewards coming in with an open mind, and a willingness to roll with everything it throws at you. Because if you can? The lingering questions are a huge part of the fun. I am thoroughly enjoying sitting here and wondering exactly how everything worked, how things came to be and why and what, and knowing that I won’t get any answers to any of it. It is a sort of delicious ignorance that fuels imagination, rather than the frustrating lack of answers.

That High Times in the Low Parliament restricts itself to novella length is a blessing – its strangeness and absolute commitment to answering none of its own questions are glorious at this length, but I feel like a novel length would start demanding more sense, more clarity than are available at present, and a great deal of the story’s charm would be lost in getting those answers. A novella gives it the space it needs to be precisely itself, no more and no less. And what that is is delightful, if you’ve a mind to meet it there.

--

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10 

Bonuses: +1 impeccable vibes

Penalties: -1 would have been enjoyable to see a little more of the secondary characters

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference:  Kelly Robson, High Times in the Low Parliament [Tordotcom, 2022]

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

Microreview: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Is this film about everything? Yes and no. But it's certainly everything I was looking for.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a brilliantly maximalist film that’s grounded in a middle-aged Chinese-American woman managing a laundromat. A woman who’s thrust into a multiverse in which she’s a key player. Everything but the kitchen sink is thrown with verve and style. The ‘verse becomes so expansive that it could unleash the viewer into a never-ending vacuum in which their perception be overloaded with infiniteness. It could be so overwhelming that they lose touch with what ties them to their world and holds them together. Just like how things could’ve played out for the laundromat owner - Evelyn - if the film left things pessimistic and unresolved. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a contradiction in which almost everything that can happen does happen (and that’s part of what makes it so fun), but its devotion to a small, key cast of characters that Evelyn needs, also champions how, often, less is more.

Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) runs a laundromat with her estranged husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). Meanwhile, she’s also dealing with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) whose attraction to the same sex she disapproves of. While dealing with taxes one day, she finds herself plunged into the multiverse, and soon finds out that she’s the only person capable of dealing with a force that seeks to destroy all the ‘verses. And that force might be something closer to her than initially thought.

The film tackles the meaningless of the universe, particularly how its amplified when we have infinite information - whether it be from multiverses or the Internet – and how once we know everything in the world, and yet nothing of value, we can be certain that nothing matters. That hopelessness is amplified further by how miniscule Earth in all its multiverses play a very small part in the grandeur of the universe. That’s the downside of all-knowingness of our planet in the most macro sense. The bright side is that the film never shies away from showing creative universes that simultaneously offer broad comedy and serious introspection, and somehow all having connective tissue, ending each universes' storyline satisfactorily.

This film also manages to be a hard-hitting family story. Whether it be Joy trying to have her mother and grandfather accept her homosexuality, Evelyn struggling to understand her daughter and reconnect with her husband, or Waymond trying to regain the spark he once felt in his life—this film doesn’t come close to fumbling its exploration of humanity. Those storylines are elevated by an incredible cast. Michelle Yeoh is brilliant as anyone who's seen any of her films would probably suspect. She plays more personalities than I can count and infuses each one with believability. Ke Huy Quan is the moral compass of the film and brings so much joy to every one of his lines. Speaking of joy, Stephanie Hsu who plays the daughter Joy Wang will probably be the character that the audience can relate to the most. The 2020s’ haven’t been the most uplifting years and Joy is almost a manifestation of that, voicing that feeling more authentically than any character I’ve seen.

Everything Everywhere All at Once should please everyone. For those looking for absurdity, the film delivers. It’s also accessible, offering action and pacey developments aplenty. It has its finger on the pulse of the last few years, no doubt sparking debates and introspection of our own lives. And without spoiling things, it offers a message that I found to be a salve for all the pain of the universe. The best art is one that can move you, entertain you, and almost change the chemistry of your brain, making you a different and often better person. Everything Everywhere All at Once did all those things, and left an indelible mark that I will cherish in this puny world. Despite the nihilism that often creeps into my worldview, it’s nice to embrace the smaller things, like great movies that keep you afloat. Nothing matters, but I can still love some of the things that don’t.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, stand-up comedian, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!

Microreview [Film]: Colossal

A singular, underappreciated gem. 

Whenever I tell people that one of my favorite films of the 2010s is Colossal, they usually don’t know what it is or laugh at me. Not so different from how I suppose the giant monster within the film would be reacted to in real life. Its hulking size might be imposing, but its low-budget, wacky CGI makes it so you can’t help but disdain or smile at its awkward hilarity. The film’s tonal shifts are jarring but in a way that I found engagingly – not unenjoyably - abrasive. The plot falls apart under scrutiny but soars if you join the film’s wavelength. Its themes don’t have a thread extending through the whole film—it’s more like threads end, more threads come in, and old threads reappear in a distorted form – but all those threads are emotionally impacting, despite their disparate length and attention. Colossal might not be an objective masterpiece, but it has so much warmth and charming conviction to be original that watching it feels like the giant monster within the film is giving you a friendly hug.

Gloria (Anne Hathaway) is an unemployed writer dealing with alcoholism. After her boyfriend (Dan Stevens) who owns their place breaks up with her, she returns to her hometown in Mainhead, New Hampshire. At Mainhead, she reunites with old friends, including Oscar (Jason Sudeikis). Things are going all right until she starts to believe with evidence that a giant monster occasionally appearing and causing destruction in Seoul is tied to her.

Every character here is a mess, but for the most part, those flaws underscore humanity rather than depravity. The villain is a very pointed exception. For a while, the antagonist appears to be Gloria herself. It’s a lighthearted first half where the stakes aren’t dire, and the tone is something of relaxing lunacy.  But as Gloria deals with her own baggage, she’s tossed something far worse. The reveal of that antagonist is where the rug is pulled from under the viewer and the dramatic elements become more prevalent than the comedic.

A tonal shift so extreme could’ve been bungled, but because the film’s dealing with very eccentric elements early on, the reception for Colossal going almost off the rails wasn’t the crash into awfulness for me that it would’ve been in films that started more conventionally. By introducing a gleeful cavalcade of eccentricities, the film opens the doors to big narrative swings that would’ve been a foul rather than a home run in other cases.

I love Colossal. I love its characters—both the half-baked and fully-formed. Its over-the-top climax. Its valiant ending that quickly turns pessimistic. I love that its twists and turns are so special that I would never think of spoiling it for anyone. I especially love its monster’s design. It might get laughs and jeers from the audience but it bounces off like the bullets that are ineffective against it. For all of Colossal’s ridicule, it’s a film unabashedly itself. It’s so confident that you might mistake its resolved stature for a giant.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 For an unforgettable climax
                +1 For an underrated Jason Sudeikis performance.

Penalties: −1 For not fully utilizing a couple members of its talented supporting cast

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, stand-up comedian, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!

Microreview [video game]: Headlander by Double Fine Productions

Getting into your head

The weirdest thing about Headlander is that you can't jump. Can you imagine completing a Castlevania without jumping? Bionic Commando didn't let you jump, but it had the bionic arm. There is no bionic arm in Headlander. There are short range teleporters, but otherwise your legs are simply for moving left and right. Except, at any point in time, you can pop your head off of whatever robot body you're currently inhabiting and fly around. I guess that's pretty weird too, now that I think of it.

In Headlander, you are a disembodied head. You have a little thrust rocket and not much else at the start. You progress in the game by attaching yourself to headless robot bodies with varying abilities. There's an experience point system, and you can upgrade your head's abilities. By the end of the game, you'll have more abilities than you'll know what to do with. The story kind of gets a little lost, but the gist of it is that you might be the last surviving human after everyone has uploaded their brains to robot bodies, but an AI named Methuselah has taken control of them and you have to stop him.


Headlander does this all within a beautifully realized 70's sci-fi style. Funk. Rooms with shag carpeting all over. An early area known as "the Pleasure Port", which is full of sexual overtones without ever doing anything get in trouble with a ratings board. Every enemy shoots lasers, and they bounce around the room. Trippy colors everywhere. Every non-combat robot body can dance. I didn't grow up in the 70's but it all seems very spot-on. It's a fun to explore world with a lot of what we expect out of a Metroidvania.

Where it loses some shine is that there's a real lack of enemy variety. It's mostly humanoid robots that stand still and shoot bouncing lasers at you. After you learn how to aim for their heads as a reflex, they don't offer much challenge. You also get the ability to pop the heads off of enemy robots while disembodied early on, which is a quick way to disarm them if you're not actively being shot at by other robots. There are a couple more enemy types that show up late in the game, and some with defense against having their heads immediately removed, but they're rare. It's also a fairly short game, but that's less of a complaint and more of a welcome sight that the game won't overstay its welcome.

However, beginning to end, Headlander is good, weird fun. There's a moment halfway through that I won't even begin to spoil that literally made me laugh out loud and it reminded me that these moments are what Double Fine does best, even if the gameplay has a few kinks. Headlander's a pick-me-up for a boring weekend.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 that moment, +1 having a colorful fun world

Penalties: -1 not enough variety of enemies, -1 navigating the Power Dome area is a pain

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 (well worth your time and attention)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Double Fine Productions. Headlander [Adult Swim Games, 2016]