SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

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

Him Geoff Ryman Angry Robot/Watkins 2023 Pb, 366pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781915202673

A young woman, Maryam, becomes pregnant in an unusual way: “I didn’t do anything.” She’s hurriedly married off to a troublesome preacher, Yosef, who is exiled from Yerusalam to the obscure northern village of Nazareth to live in dusty poverty. Maryam names her daughter Avigayil – but four or five years later the child insists: “My name now is Yehushua… I’m a boy.” Over the years, Yehush hangs out with boys in the village and becomes an apprentice to the tekton, the local builder. At 12, already showing significant spiritual awareness, Yehush confounds the priests and scholars at the temple in Yerusalam in a beautifully-written scene. Life goes on, Maryam has six more children, and Yehush grows into a somewhat difficult adult, whose preaching draws many followers – but ultimately we know how it will end. Him is Geoff Ryman’s first novel in 18 years, and is a triumph. Most of the story is told from Maryam’s troubled viewpoint – I’d imagine devout Catholics will be appalled – and yet somehow Ryman renders the well-known story, and its characters, new and utterly real and believable. The people of Nazareth even sound Northern!

Dead Monkey Rum Robert Guffey Planet Bizarro Press 2023 Pb, 178pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781915546005

A monkey who drives a ’57 Chevy, smokes cigars, swears like a trooper, drinks in an LA beach bar and chats up (human) barmaids – this has to be one of the strangest beginnings to a novel. And it only gets crazier as the story unfolds. The monkey is involved in some very dodgy deals, one of which results in him (with a feisty barmaid) being pursued by huge semi-human thugs intent on retrieving a Tiki idol. It ends up with an astonishing supernatural climax on Easter Island. Sometime FT contributor Robert Guffey’s Dead Monkey Rum is one of the weirdest romps you’ll ever read, which along the way explores some serious moral issues.

Saturnalia Stephanie Feldman Verve Books 2023 Pb, 238pp, £9.99, ISBN 9780857308399

Stephanie Feldman’s Saturnalia is about Philadelphia with a difference, and an exclusive fraternity/ sorority house with a difference. Nina left the ultra-elite Saturn Club three years ago, largely because of toxic relationships; now her only friend from that time has invited her back for Saturnalia – and offers her a wodge of cash if she’ll steal a small package for him. When she does, reawakening a lot of uncomfortable memories of the Saturn Club and former friends and lovers along the way, her curiosity gets the better of her and she takes a look inside, and finds an astonishing occult creation. Much of the book is about her fleeing a mysterious and very deadly hunter, leaving a trail of bodies in her wake, and discovering by the end who she can, and more crucially who she can’t, trust. A very dark, often painful and sometimes brutal novel, which draws you along with Nina every step of the way.

High Vaultage Chris and Jen Sugden Gollancz 2024 Hb, 384pp, £22, ISBN 9781399604161

High Vaultage is a sort-of steampunk Victorian detective novel. It’s 1887, Queen Victoria has more mechanical parts than human, and London has expanded to cover the entire southern half of England. At its heart is a massive tower which supplies unlimited power – but at the cost of plunging the Thames into a permanent frozen winter. Brunelian engineers seem to run the city, tearing down entire neighbourhoods almost at random for new building projects. Journalist Clara Entwistle teams up with ex-Detective Inspector Archibald Fleet, himself partly mechanical, as private investigators. Most of their cases seem trivial, until they discover a connection between them and a series of bank robberies which have the police and the press puzzled. The plot is convoluted and on the whole successful – but the book would have worked far better if husband-and-wife authors Chris and Jen Sugden hadn’t written it as a comic novel (with the predictable but utterly false comparisons to Pratchett and Aaronovitch), or at least if they’d learned that humour works best when it’s understated, not slapping you in the face so hard you wince.

Aleister Crowley MI6: The Hess Solution Richard C McNeff Mandrake 2023 Hb, 266pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781914153235

In FT408 I reviewed Richard C McNeff’s novel Aleister Crowley MI5. Now he’s back with Aleister Crowley MI6: The Hess Solution. Crowley is living out his last years in the Netherwood guesthouse in Hastings, impoverished and drug-addicted, but still a figure of fascination. He’s teaching Latin to Will, a young lad who works at the guesthouse, who wants to become a priest – and Crowley tells him about a manuscript he has that must be saved: the Z File, purportedly the diary of a German with close connections to Rudolf Hess. The novel begins with Hess’s ill-fated flight to Scotland, which is still shrouded in mystery even today. There are extracts from the diary, and scenes of intelligence meetings and operations which may or may not have happened in reality – this is, after all, a novel. And it’s a star-studded book: among the many characters making a sometimes brief appearance are Lady Frieda Harris (the artist of Crowley’s Book of Thoth Tarot), occultist Dion Fortune, Ian Fleming, Anthony Blunt, Maxwell Knight (M), Jack Parsons and Cameron – and even two of the Beatles, high on LSD in a fun scene in a London club. Unlike Aleister Crowley MI5, which followed Crowley and a bunch of his associates from pub to club over 24 hours in a continuous narrative, this one leaps around in place and time, between Hastings and Scotland and Germany and Los Angeles and London, and between Crowley in the late 1940s, secretive events in the 1930s, LA in the 1950s and London in the Swinging Sixties. It’s sometimes difficult to keep track of it all, and how much of it, if any, is based in historical truth, who knows? But it’s a fun ride.

Relight my Fire CK McDonnell Bantam 2024 Hb, 509pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780857505354

CK McDonnell handles the humour much more successfully in his fourth novel about the Manchester-based weekly newspaper, the Stranger Times, whose motley crew of journalists (so unlike those of Fortean Times!)

discover that the paranormal events they get caught up in are far weirder than the ones they write about. Relight my Fire

starts off with someone on a new drug leaping off a roof to fly, only to crash at the feet of Hannah, assistant editor at Stranger Times, who is still trying to figure out her relationship (or not) with DI Tom Sturgess, who is “now working full-time on what at least one of my bosses delights in referring to as ‘weirdy bollocks’”. Hannah finds herself being a besotted fan-girl to a rock star from her youth – who is involved with a maverick scientist who we eventually discover is not

someone you want to trifle with… Add to this a series of graverobbing incidents and a bunch of supernatural figures (some distinctly less friendly than others), and Hannah and her colleagues find themselves caught up in a plot that builds to a genuinely scary climax.