18/12 CALLING OCCUPANTS

PIC: some machine, 2012 - GM, Akira the Don, Quitely

IF WE CAN SPARKLE HE MIGHT LAND TONIGHT

Brace, brace, brace for “Last of the Summer Spunk”, as big-hearted fash strumpet Bonnie Blue gives back to the heroes of the Greatest Generation and the pension punks of the Baby Boom! Fresh from a Balinese lock-up, the cheeky Derbyshire lass will be revving up her battered, clap-ridden ‘Bang Bus’ for a lust-crazed tour round select UK senior care homes and hospice facilities! Don’t miss the ‘Blue and the Grey’!

But even if you can’t make it in person, don’t despair! Simply include your dentures with a stamped, addressed envelope and Bonnie will let them have a quick nibble around her nethers prior to prompt return of post!

Last call for a demoralising knee trembler, grandad!

Meanwhile, a controversial decision by Styrian authorities has resulted in a temporary ban on Mircalla Karnstein’s “1,000 Lesbians Drained” challenge as advertised on the Sapphic vampire countess’ OnlyFangs page and etc etc…

Meanwhile, as 3I/Atlas makes its closest approach to planet et Earth, humanity is currently conducting our first ever ‘Planetary Defence Drill’, allowing us to ‘simulate’ our response to close encounters with asteroids and other spacefaring objects. This unprecedented move has, of course, nothing to do with the possibility that the interstellar enigma on fast approach might not be a natural phenomenon but a technological artefact checking us out for laughs.

We could all be Cybermen by Christmas Eve! Or the Kree and the Skrulls could be scouting us out as a strategic bide-a-wee!

O brave new world, that hath such daily news in it!

Otherwise, it’s been a red-letter year for the Grim Reaper, this of Our Lard 2025. Death and more death! It can only get better, unless it gets much worse! Perhaps in the coming year, the Pale Horseman can pick his targets with a little more care…

Thank heavens for the time-sucking distractions of the Oblivion Machine! The War Between the Land and Sea has been more enjoyable than the last season of Doctor Who, with tight and suspenseful writing by Russell Davies and Pete McTighe that weaves gold from straw in the classic Davies style. When is Salt going to turn into a man again though? That seemed like a significant development that has yet to be readdressed.

The BBC is definitely onto something here and the potential for a recurring series of ‘Wars’ between opposite things is worth exploring exhaustively and at length.

The War Between the Ground and the Sky. The War Between the Back and the Front. The War Between the First and the Last. The War Between the War and the Peace. There may be no end ever to the fun, so do feel free to add your own pitches for this exciting new franchise experiment.

IT: Welcome to Derry ended on a satisfying note. I was delighted that those good kids all made it to the end, and even wee Ricardo got his post-mortem moment.

I was incredibly impressed by Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, with Michael B. Jordan’s commanding presence in the dual role of the Smokestack twins, and a whole supporting cast of finely drawn characters. When the twist arrived, I was a momentarily deflated, as I’d expected something a bit different, but the mild disappointment didn’t last long. This was a great film. The dance scene in the juke joint is one of the most memorable in cinema history. Ideally, go in without spoilers of any kind. Don’t read any reviews or anything about it.

Luvkraft vs Kutulu wrapped up last week so there will be no Friday fiction until the New Year when we pivot from maximalist psychedelic horror to a different kind of psychedelia with the Gasglow novella 3 Archive & Analysis: 3 Against Mystery and the Business of the Black Knot.

YABBA DABBA DOO TIME!

Sean – I don’t know what Literary Fiction is, but I feel certain I don’t write it and never will. How many examples of acknowledged Literary Fiction can you think of by self-taught writers who did not have higher university education, for instance?

We might, then, think of Literary Fiction as fiction by and for the middle classes, except that Irvine Welsh is considered an author of Literary Fiction, so perhaps going to university is not a precondition.

What is or is not regarded as Literary Fiction appears to me to be defined by a literary establishment of academics and critics. Academia tends to express distaste when confronted with the kind of self-taught, gothic/decadent pulp psychedelia I tend to favour. Literary fiction, then, is ‘civilised’ fiction, domesticated fiction, written by people who know the rules of composition and can produce work that satisfies academic criteria for good, that is non-showy, non-self-conscious, writing!

A given writer may even cross the streams; Michael Moorcock’s ‘A Cure for Cancer’ would not be considered literary fiction while ‘Mother London’ would be.

‘Brave New World’, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Riddley Walker’ are considered literary fiction, even though they are ostensibly science fiction, and two of those are written in invented languages. American Psycho would be considered a literary novel along with the rest of Brett Easton Ellis’ output, even though it shares much of its toolkit with the splatterpunk genre.

Therefore, it strikes me that ‘Literary Fiction’ is a loose and arbitrary classification wholly dependent on the whims and favours of academia! How would you define it?

There’s always the possibility to reprint New Adventures and we’re hoping to get the Heavy Metal stuff back. Contractually, I still own my rights to the work.

Kevin – I agree. I’m all for the powers of Light or Good or whatever they want to call them showing up for once in these stories, where cosmic evil seems to be the most powerful thing in the universe with no opposition, except a bunch of kids usually. That’s presenting a one-sided view of how the universe is organised. More Turtle!

My problems with Frankenstein, had more to do with the script and story than the direction. I did think the design smacked of raw mood boards rather than genuine creative inspiration – the tower was just the Wallace Monument in Stirling, Scotland, except bigger. without no attempt to make up something new, for instance. I thought the writing and dialogue were infantile and mawkish, where the film might have more effectively emphasised the terror and chaos in the novel.

Osiris – you’re spot on about my collage approach! I’ll be presented with an idea, and I’ll make a list of everything else that idea makes me think of. If I’m going to write about a subject, I want to say everything I possibly can so that I don’t have to go back to it!

In the case of Batman/Deadpool, it was a classic Batman team-up, which immediately made me think of Brave and the Bold, which led me to Haney, because his were my favourite B and B stories. Haney’s approach then gave me a basic template for how the story would be presented and broken into chapters and so on…

I’ll then put all that into the mix, so that the finished work contains everything I have to say or think about the subject at that time.

Ks – Flex Mentallo is another example of that collage method, although it was also heavily autobiographical. I had the basic story idea and borrowed the set up from The Singing Detective. In that story, a bitter, hospitalised and bedbound writer hallucinates and creates a whole new pulp noir based on his own life, interwoven with detective fiction tropes and the popular music of the 1940s. Flex Mentallo has a pop star preparing to commit suicide while hallucinating and creating in his mind a whole new story based on his/my life, interwoven with superhero comic tropes and imagery! Each issue focused on a different age of comics – Golden, Silver, Dark, and Modern - which also stood in for stages of human development – child, pre-pubescent, adolescent, adult. Each issue was exploring the ideas from a different perspective and through different filters, so there was a lot of scope for jumping around, which kept things interesting for me and easy to write. I had all the threads running in my mind as I wrote it. I didn’t separate them out, they developed together.

Seamus’ wizard hat might provide ironic distance, but it’s also something to embody and signal his entry into non-ordinary states. A crossing point. The more he uses it, the more genuinely magical the hat will become, taking on the quality of charm, then totem, then potent magical artefact…

My knowledge of the Minor Arcana is basic. I’ve become quite conversant with the subtleties of the Major Arcana, but I’m weak on the Minor. I was given the Crowley Thoth deck when I was 19, as my entry into Magic so I’ve always used the Princes and Princesses in my readings. It barely occurred to me to realise that traditional decks have Knights, Pages, Kings and Queens in place of Princes and Princesses, Knights and Queens. This arrangement appears to have been an innovation of the Golden Dawn, which Crowley maintained for his Thoth deck.

From what I can discover, Crowley preferred Knights to Kings because Knights represented dynamic energy in movement, where Kings were seated, static and immovable. Crowley chose the Knight as the Prime Mover and the Queen as the receptive matrix, like Chokmah and Binah on the Tree of Life. He chose the Prince and Princesses as representative of these Masculine generative force and the Feminine developmental force on a lower, more human and individual key.

I don’t know much about Nick Harkaway (son of John LeCarré). I have one of his books - ‘Angelmaker’? - downstairs but haven’t read it. No idea if he was influenced by my work or not!

Thanks for the McGlashan!

David – look forward to the fiction! space travel – The Right Stuff is great. For the weirder, racier and more occult side of the US rocket program you could look into Jack Parsons’ work at JPL. I was mad on this stuff as a kid (I have some amazing stuff from the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing - maps, cut-out dioramas, spacecraft models and specs) but a lot of my reference books are decades out of date. I had a quick look at Goodreads and there are hundreds of interesting books on this subject! It should be easy to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Not much of a crime noir reader but William McIlvanney’s Tartan Noir Laidlaw novels are fantastic and incredibly well written.

Ken – the Superman ‘IT’ was brilliant! An abstract, spinning, upright cigar shape with rainbow colours! A menace for the ages and a perfect recruit to our new team…

Dorothy – we could have a whole League of Extraordinary ITs on our hands! Check out my Klaus stories with Dan Mora if you haven’t already! My own favourite winter reading is whatever I happen to be reading when November comes around! Right now it’s Tom’s Crossing.

Patrick – lest, I wander into Marie Antoinette’s boudoir by mistake, when I talk about expertise, I’m not necessarily referring to the skills of a rich, educated elite.

What I really meant was this: when I have a problem with my lights, I will engage an electrician. I will resort to a plumber for my pipes, and when my teeth hurt, I want a dentist to take a look at them, not a good-hearted fishmonger. For the delicate business of negotiating with a potentially hostile and technologically advanced species, I don’t know if I’m entirely comfortable with plucking some random English dude off the streets and expecting him to forestall a war. I’d be more likely to get a Reform voter who hates foreigners.

It makes sense dramatically, of course, and it’s part of his charm that Russell Davies believes that most ‘common’ people are basically decent, (I don’t believe I’ve ever met a ‘common’ or ‘ordinary’ person whether working, middle, or upper class - everyone is weird in one way or another - so I’m not entirely onboard with the basic notion that there exist a majority of people who are ‘ordinary’ and a smaller group of others who are by nature ‘extraordinary’), while most professionals don’t know how to do their jobs, which is why I’m willing to overlook the unlikelihood that they’d get precisely the right guy. Otherwise, however, it’s fairy tale stuff, as you say. RFK doesn’t count as an ‘expert’ in this or any alternate universe, but neither does a random Target shopper, at least as I see it. I’d rather talk to a trained, qualified doctor about vaccines.

Love the Triumph idea. Finding out that he actually dodged a bullet by not being remembered is an interesting thing to explore character wise. Imagine walking around knowing you did something irreversible and drastic but fortunately no-one remembers but you. This might make it difficult to be fully committed when people treat you as an exemplary hero while you know you’re perfectly capable of fucking up massively!

Kristina – I’ve never read The Iron Dream, but I’ve known about it since it was published, so I’m familiar with the story. I still regard Nazism to some degree as a wayward art movement, which gives the German flavour of fascism a flamboyance and campness that is not shared by other mass-murdering despots of the 20^th century and helps explain some of Nazism’s dark allure and glamour.

That’s an interesting way to look at Tom’s Crossing. I’m reading it in chunks every night before I go to sleep.

Yes, we’re planning on a physical version of the deck! The Major Arcana has taken us five years to complete, so we’ll probably take a breather before thinking about the Minor Arcana!

Bobby – the ending of Luvkraft vs. Kutulu upset me too, so yes, I’ll take that as a compliment! I wanted to write a proper horror and knew I’d done it to my satisfaction when it made me feel a bit queasy. Hopefully, the OTT steroidal Lovecraftian prose helped to emphasise the absurdity and gave the whole thing a wry distancing effect. In the end, the monsters are still finding it all very amusing from their alternative perspective – they entered our world via a gruesome story, then went home the same way, leaving their impression on our minds! Thank heavens, it’s not real!

I think horror obfuscates death by having it happen to other people while we watch!

Hope the event goes well! Sounds great!

Back next Wednesday with our bumper Christmas edition! Yes, that’s right! We’re bringing back Christmas, the way it used to be! Not just Christmas but Merry Christmas! For the longest time, these two beautiful words have been banned from hanging out together by the woke killjoys of the Anti-Christmas Army but NO MORE!

See you there!..