by David Rix
One of those wonderful creatures called readers once told Joseph Conrad that his novel 'Lord Jim' could have been much shorter if he'd told the story in a simpler way. Conrad does not record whether he punched the person in question up the bracket. One suspects not. The old grump probably just smiled wearily, the way these Polish aristocrats with French literary antecedents tend to. Anyway, adhering to what we might term the Setting Conrad Straight Principle, let me try to sum up David Rix's remarkable first book.
A frustrated artist called Don has a breakdown.
His ex-girlfriend, Jacki, is worried.
Don has a car accident near a wind-farm.
Disoriented, Don meets a strange girl called Feather.
Feather is tattooed with an image of Don Quixote.
Feather draws Don into a world of violent creativity.
Jacki becomes very worried.
Feather reveals that she has super-powers, sort of.
Don and Feather vanish, after upsetting poor Jacki no end.
Police baffled.
Oh, and there's a short story as well.
There, all perfectly simple. Except that it's not. What the Giants Were Saying is a powerful
and at times disturbing book. At one point I thought to myself 'This is a lot like J.G. Ballard's
wackier New Wave material - ah, those were the days. Whatever happened to all that mucky
stuff about Liz Taylor?' Sure enough, on page 118, we find that Feather was a Ballard fan
in her youth, before she got the weird tattoos that transformed her into... Well, into something
more and/or less than human.
What we have here, as in Ballard's Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition and The Unlimited Dream Company, is a vision of transcendence through violence - hence (I presume) the recurring image of Don Quixote. Once transcendence was attained through Christian chivalry, then came Romantic/Decadent ideas of individual creative genius, and finally we got an overdose of political ideology. And now - well, what? Perhaps a yearning after some kind of personal fulfilment that has nothing to do with society, sanity or even life itself.
That, at least, seems to be the message of this book. If there is one. I'm not sure. The
point is that I enjoyed it, in my slightly odd way. Let me add that thanks to the authorıs skill
in the visual arts this is a beautifully produced book. But not, perhaps, one to give to a
Presbyterian auntie for Christmas. While nothing is explicitly described, the mutilation level
is almost enough to put Clive Barker off his Horlicks.
http://www.eibonvalepress.co.uk
This magazine offers the discerning reader four stories. Four. Count them. There are rainforest tribes that consider four a very big number indeed, but I suspect many small press readers will think paying for a quartet of tales is a bit pricey. Such people are wrong. It's quality, not quantity, that counts. Just because publishers insist on marketing big, fat books (for big, fat readers?) doesn't mean that the rest of us should go along with it. So let's consider quality, with an eye to the supernatural.
Two of the stories here are roughly classifiable as horror, though perhaps modern fantasy would be nearer the mark. The authors are Don Tumasonis and Christopher Harman; men with growing reputations. Tumasonis has his own territory, now. He ranges among mountains in sunnier lands, and finds strange things there. Or, in the case of this story, he finds a terrible and destructive reality. I can't really describe the events of 'Thrown', but suffice to say readers will find much to admire here. The denouement will, I suspect, divide people firmly into radicals and traditionalists. I was somewhat divided myself.
Christopher Harman's 'The Last to be Found' is more traditional in approach. The setting is a house where assorted characters are reunited to discuss strange happenings. So far, so Hammer. But Harman's writing is so good, and the events described so disturbing, that cliche is soon forgotten. There are overtones of Aickman, here, and De La Mare. Again, the ending has a truly nightmarish quality - an ending that never ends, perhaps.
The two science fiction stories in NG4 are a bit beyond me. I gave up on sf in the early Eighties, partly due to the emergence of William Gibson and his stylishly sterile cohorts, but mainly because I started finding other stuff more satisfactory. Suffice to say that both stories - by Jan Wildt and Paul A. Gilchrist - are well-written and full of ideas, but neither is quite my cup of tea.
As usual there are two editorials, by the intellectual welterweight tag-team of Jeff Paris and Adam Golaski. Golaski leads with a closely-reasoned essay on the horror genre. It contains the sentence: 'Readers, in the end, must bear the brunt of the blame for the success of bad horror.' This made me feel guilty as hell for reading all those James Herbert books in the Sixth Form. Oh well. Suffice to say that I agree with Golaski's argument for horror as a more elevated thing than the overly-familiar 'high school kids get diced' stuff.
In what is almost a pendant to Golaski's piece, Jeff Paris tackles sf and makes the irrefutable point that if a genre can be clearly defined, it is not alive. New Genre in alive. Rejoice! Or at least, enjoy it.
http://www.new-genre.com
Not so many years ago
I paused in Peterborough,
And visited the Cathedral there,
On a tour so very thorough.
My guide was a willing volunteer,
But one with so much knowledge
That you would think he'd learned it all
At some posh Oxbridge College
Who was this paragon, you ask?
Cardinal Cox, it seems;
Though I suspect his title
Is more a nickname than an actual clerical rank, so you'll never see him dressed up in a big red nightie and a funny hat, except possibly in your dreams.
At this point the muse deserted me. The point is that Cardinal Cox of Peterborough is writing small collectionettes of poetry on mystical, magical and supernatural themes. He was kind enough to send me Tir na nOgham, and I enjoyed it. Why not sample it for yourself?
http://www.geocities.com/dj_tyrer/atlantean_pub.html