SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

DAVID V BARRETT ROUNDS UP THE LATEST TITLES FROM THE WORLD OF SPECULATIVE AND FANTASTIC FICTION

The Dark Side of Alice in Wonderland Angela Youngman Pen & Sword 2021 Hb, 185pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781526785817

The Victoria & Albert Museum’s delightful exhibition Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser (see pp14-15) focuses on Alice and reinterpretations of her story, rather than on Lewis Carroll/ Charles Dodgson himself, so we’re spared yet another discussion of the morality of his photography. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with Angela Youngman’s book, which is unremittingly negative from beginning to end. Was Dodgson a pædophile? No; although it’s unacceptable today, photographing children naked was quite normal in Victorian times. Or was he Jack the Ripper? That 15-page chapter could have been one very short word long. Do Alice and other characters exhibit traits of people with an assortment of present-day alphabetsoup psychological syndromes? By this point, frankly, who cares? With its ludicrously short resources page (just 19 books) and the skimpiest of indexes, this book takes unsourced superficiality to a new level. Avoid!

Through a Looking Glass Darkly Jake Fior Alice Through the Looking Glass 2021 Hb, 178pp, £19.95, ISBN 9781527256903

Through a Looking Glass Darkly is a rewriting or “reimagination” of Lewis Carroll’s second Alice novel. Author Jake Fior, who runs an Alice bookshop in London, has added an external framing narrative and made changes to the internal story, though he has retained much of the original text. Alice, a present-day teenage girl, buys a looking glass from a charity shop and, like Carroll’s Alice, steps through it into the world of the Red and White Queens and Humpty Dumpty, where she has to confront and defeat the Jabberwocky – not knowing that the looking glass was once owned by

Aleister Crowley who, in a magickal falling out with Golden Dawn founder McGregor Mathers, had trapped a demon inside it… The book is beautifully produced; a shame, then, that it is so poorly proof-read: there are not only typos but lines missing or out of place, absent page numbers, paragraphs not indented and in one case an illustration covering part of the text.

Aleister Crowley MI5 Richard C McNeff Mandrake of Oxford 2021 Pb, 206pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781914153020

Aleister Crowley MI5 is a revised reprint of Richard C McNeff’s 2004 novel Sybarite among the Shadows. It covers a day and a night in the life of Crowley’s former disciple Victor Neuburg and his encounters with various artistic luminaries of 1936 London, mainly in pubs and clubs around Fitzrovia – including the Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place, home to the Sohemians pub meeting, frequented by many forteans pre-pandemic.

Neuburg meets up with Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis and many others, including gossip columnist and future MP Tom Driberg and “Queen of Fitzrovia” Nina Hamnett, whom Crowley had unsuccessfully sued for libel. Crowley’s spectre hovers over nearly every conversation, though he only arrives in the story halfway through (apart from a fleeting appearance in drag at a Surrealist exhibition off Savile Row, where Salvador Dalí delivered a lecture wearing a deep sea diving suit). Once Crowley appears, though, he takes centre stage, with clandestine meetings with one Captain King (actually senior MI5 officer, naturalist and broadcaster Maxwell Knight, who inspired Ian Fleming’s M) and drinks in a late-night bar with Wallis Simpson and a hen-pecked Edward VIII…

Brilliantly researched, this is an astonishing read, a 24-hour snapshot of the seedy underground life of artists, poets, prostitutes, spies and royalty of mid-Thirties London, all revolving around the fading powerhouse (“make-up could not disguise how… the skin had sagged and grown pitted”) that was the Great Beast.

Notes from Small Planets Nate Crowley HarperVoyager 2020 Hb, 253pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780008306861

Notes from Small Planets by Nate Crowley (probably no relation!) claims to be “your pocket travel guide to the worlds of science fiction and fantasy”. It’s (in its own words) a “parody guidebook” that plays with the archetypes and clichés of the genres. Fine, and amusing enough – but this was done (and done so much better) 25 years ago by Diana Wynne Jones in her The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

The Book of Darryl The Goggles & Matthew Bate Farrar, Strauss & Giroux 2021 Hb, 165pp, £20.99, ISBN 9780374115319

Darryl is a 16-year-old living in a grotty suburb of Roman-occupied Nazareth 2,000 years ago – but though people wear robes, there are mobile phones, TVs and skateboards. He’s one of those kids who gets bullied, at least when other kids even notice him. His life changes when a teenager called Jay moves in next door. Together with a couple of other kids, Jude (who hates Jay) and Mary, they form a heavy metal band, Iron Messiah. The book has the best crucifixion gag I’ve seen since The Life of Brian. The band are playing at crucifixions: “Darryl found them unfulfilling at best, uncomfortable at worst – what if it was someone they knew?” The Book of Darryl is a weird mixture, which somehow really works – but there’s an additional app that’s a complete waste of time. You download it, then point your phone at any of the pictures in the book and animated versions of them appear on your phone.

Unlike a comic where the images and text are integrated, this means stopping reading to point your phone at a picture.

The Society Ethereal Transit Thomas Vaughn Bad Dream Entertainment 2020 Pb, 131pp, £9.99, ISBN 9780996038195

Imagine what it must have been like for the few true believers who didn’t die in the Heaven’s Gate “UFO cult” suicides. In The Ethereal Transit Society, clearly inspired by that event and the beliefs behind it, three survivors of a similar group follow a cosmic signal to the grave of their founder in deepest Arkansas, on his instructions, to complete his work, preparing for the End Times. It’s a strange story, becoming more and more so as spiritual and/or celestial powers begin to make themselves manifest apocalyptically… Thomas Vaughn’s debut novel is very short, but surprisingly powerful.

The Mechanical Maestro Emily Owen SilverWood Books 2020 Pb, 320pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781781329672

Let’s finish with Emily Owen’s The Mechanical Maestro, a splendid mid-Victorian story of a couple of young watch-making brothers who create a clockwork figure which can not only learn and play any music on any instrument, but can compose its own. Inevitably Maestro, who has developed consciousness, is exploited as a music hall marvel; is chased after by other, more second-rate, inventors who want to discover how he works; and is campaigned against by a preacher who sees him as an affront to God’s creation. And then Maestro sees a petite, silvery female automaton singing, and falls head over heels for her – but is she all that she seems? The brothers’ teenage sister is a botanical genius, creating weird and wonderful versions of plants which have their own vital part to play in the story. This is a fun romp, beautifully told, with plenty of lessons about humanity’s less pleasant characteristics.