WITCHFINDER GENERAL by Ian Cooper. Auteur £9.99

Reviewed by Jim Steel

Media studies publisher Auteur’s ‘Devil’s Advocates’ series is a new line of novella-length books that examines iconic horror films. This title, featuring Michael Reeves’ 1968 masterpiece, comes out along with another that explores Let the Right One In, and there are further titles planned that will look at Saw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Michael Reeves only made three films before dying at the age of twenty-five. When a fractious Vincent Price said he’d made eighty-four films and asked how many films Reeves had made, he famously replied, ‘Three good ones.’ This apocryphal story says more about the tension between the two men on set than it does about Reeves. Anyone who has seen The She Beast or The Sorcerers can hardly rate them as quality films; excuses can be made because of the small budgets, but the fact is that they are not very good. Witchfinder General, however, remains a powerful, violent and alarming film. It’s based on Ronald Bassett’s 1966 novel which took as its source material the real-life sixteenth-century atrocities of Matthew Hopkins, who spread terror across south-east England as he tortured and executed huge numbers of innocents. In the film Hopkins is played with great restraint by Vincent Price who gives one of the best (and most chilling) performances of his career. Ian Ogilvie, as a young Roundhead trooper, is the one who must try and stop Hopkins from shattering his family.

Cooper’s book is intended for people who are already familiar with the film and have a deep interest in it. One problem becomes instantly apparent: Reeves’ body of work offers little else to compare it with, and wondering where it might have stood in relation to his later work can offer up no more than guesswork. We could also have stood for a bit more on the career of Bassett, and even that of Hopkins himself, but, short of including a script, Cooper is very good when dealing with the making of the film, its variant editions, and its critical reception.

He also adequately covers the films that drew on Witchfinder General, including the brief horror wave that aped it. Reeves was a cineaste and Cooper explores the work of the directors who influenced him. Again, that presents a problem that is not of Cooper’s making; some of them, such as Don Siegel, had still to make some of their most notable films at the time of Reeves’s death, a fact which occasionally leads Cooper up blind alleys. Cooper does, however, make a convincing case for placing the film in the ‘heritage film’ (or costume drama) genre in the years before Merchant Ivory arrived and gave it an unnatural polish.

There’s no index for this short book but there is a five-page bibliography for those who wish to investigate further.

REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. Atlantic Books £18.99

Reviewed by Jim Steel

Stephenson’s latest behemoth is set now. Richard Forthrast is a multimillionaire who has made his fortune through a World of Warcraft clone called T’rain. Having learned from the original, he has made it easy for Chinese kids to become gold farmers since that is an arrangement that suits everyone. The kids do all the slogging in this on-line fantasy world and sell all of the magic gizmos to the lazy, rich westerners. Someone comes up with the anagrammatic REAMDE virus which locks down players’ info, forcing them to tramp across the virtual world to deposit a small sum of virtual gold. When Peter, boyfriend of Richard’s adopted niece Zula, sells some credit card numbers to the Russian mafia and infects their data, both Peter and Zula are kidnapped by the mafia and flown to China to track down the hacker. The insane mafia boss has hired a team of ex-Spartnez security consultants to take out the hacker but Zula, trying to avoid bloodshed, sends them to the wrong floor. Unfortunately this floor contains an Islamic terrorist cell which is being watched by MI6. Much carnage ensues. The cast splinters and proceeds to have adventures around the Pacific Rim.

Some say that this isn’t science fiction but there is a point pretty early on where Stephenson makes a Brontian address directly to you, Reader, which demonstrates that this is a novel. The brief parts that take place in the world of T’rain are just as valid as the parts that take place in the ‘real’ world, even when layered with the irony of the players. Given that much of this geeks ’n’ guns adventure reads like a novelisation of a Bond movie, the real world should really be taken with a pinch of salt as well. One of the Spetsnaz, the almost superhuman Sokolov, even notes the importance of carrying a towel. It is also a romantic comedy with plenty of obstacles lying in the way of several potential couples.

REAMDE is enormous fun to read and feels as if the author had a great time writing it. It is, however, an enormous book – 7 cm across its smallest dimension – and it may well be Stephenson’s personal contribution to the eBook revolution. There is little else about it that is revolutionary, though; WoW was spoofed by South Park years ago, and the Russian mafia and home-grown British fundamentalists feel like yesterday’s news. Even the focus on the Pacific Rim feels somewhat quaint these days (take that, India and Brazil!). More worryingly, the Islamic fundamentalists are portrayed as psychotic killers whereas the Christian fundamentalists are portrayed as stoic eccentrics (Anders Breivik showed the error of that line of thinking) and one can’t help wondering if this had any bearing on Stephenson’s decision to make Zula an African orphan.

You will enjoy it despite its flaws but it won’t change your life. Unless you drop it on your foot, that is.

TERMINAL WORLD by Alastair Reynolds. Gollancz £8.99

Reviewed by Jim Steel

Misleadingly labelled ‘steampunk’, Reynolds’ latest novel is more like the baroque Mars of Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road mixed with a dash of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ preposterousness. It may feature copious amounts of airships and goggles but the subgenre runs only surface-deep here.

Set 10,000 years after Mars has been terraformed (the nature of the world is implicit), it begins in Spearpoint, a city clinging to an orbital tower. Quillon is working as a coroner inNeonHeights, a zone that runs on early twentieth-century technology, and has to flee when his secret past as a genetically-modified ‘angel’ from a higher zone comes to light. He leaves Spearpoint accompanied by Meroka, a foul-mouthed smuggler from the noir-based zone, and they encounter adventures before being rescued by Swarm, a fleet of airships delightfully named after butterflies and commanded by a man with an urge to uncover the lost history of the world. Meanwhile the technological zones move, bringing chaos and death to the world.

It’s a messy novel. After the opening pages the viewpoint stays pretty much with Quillon but this unfortunately means that the other characters have a tendency to speak their thoughts instead of leaving us to deduce them. This renders many of them one-dimensional. The plot itself also comes across as picaresque and feels somewhat rushed towards the end as Swarm attempts to bring help to Spearpoint. There is, for example, a clumsily-executed (in several senses) mutiny that could have been dropped without affecting the novel in the slightest. The barbaric Skullboys and the cybernetic vorgs (a name that unfortunately recalls Star Trek’s Borg) provide the external villains and there is plenty of action to counteract the flaws but the main selling-point must be Reynolds’ delicious world-building.

GUARDIANS OF PARADISE by Jaine Fenn. Orion £7.99

Reviewed by Jim Steel

The third volume of Fenn’s Hidden Universe space opera series combines disparate elements of the first two but can easily be read without recourse to her earlier novels. The mythical Sidhe, a matriarchal race of psychic mutants, are controlling humanity for their own sinister if elusive ends and Fenn pits a trio of viewpoint characters against them: Nual, a renegade Sidhe; Taro, a punk slum kid; and Jarek, a trader with his own spaceship.

At first the Hidden Universe has all the familiarity of a Bester or Dick novel from the fifties but Fenn introduces some sex to modernise the template (and well-written sex at that; no nomination for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award here). The world-building definitely does feel somewhat seat-of-the-pants at times. Two of the characters have implants that enable them to fight and even fly, but it doesn’t occur to them to wonder about the power sources. It does occur to the author, though, who later utilises it as a plot device. The same characters are also stranded on a holiday planet modelled a bit too much on Oceania (a joke about ‘coco nuts’ proves that the author has a sense of humour even if the characters don’t) where they are recruited by local mafia for a mission that they also seem strangely uncurious about. At least it gets the plot moving again after a spell in the doldrums. The less said about the attempts to grapple with information technology the better, though; a walk-on computer expert has OCD and mutters stuff about ‘mirror worms’. However, the secret behind interstellar travel is truly disturbing.

All in all, it’s an enjoyable if wobbly thriller which shows that Jaine Fenn is a writer of promise.

Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #38, edited by the eponymous nine-month chair of the BFS, is now available in paperback and for free download in various ebook formats.

It features “The Lives and Spacetimes of Thornton Excelsior” by Rhys Hughes (actually eight stories in one), “Better than Llandudno, eh?” by Michael W. Thomas and “Old Preach’s Gods” by Z.J. Woods, as well as two stories by contributors to Dark Horizons and Full Fathom Forty: “The Daylight Witch” by Jim Steel and “Off and On Again” by Alison Littlewood.

Books from Paul Magrs, Reggie Oliver, Anne and Todd McCaffrey, Nathalie Henneberg, Glen Duncan, Vendela Vida, Wil Wheaton, Johnny Mains, Guy Haley, Ian Cameron Esslemont, and Catherynne M. Valente are up for review, as well as seven comics, six audio adventures, five films and one game.

Contributing reviewers include Jacob Edwards, Regina Edwards, Michael W. Thomas and Douglas J. Ogurek. Cover art by Howard Watts.

More information and links on the Theaker’s Quarterly blog

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