BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

Heliogabalus, or the Crowned Anarchist (1934) Antonin Artaud   Blue of Noon (1935) Georges Bataille   Literature and Evil (1957) Georges Bataille   Bataille, philosopher and 'intellectual', and Artaud, a 'major figure of the French avant-garde' were almost exact contemporaries. I may have more to write about the former in due course but I am afraid that in this review I am somewhat inclined to take my axe to them.  Artaud's dramatic text Heliogabalus is certainly a curiosity - one part flummery, one part insanity and one part genius. It is an account of sorts of the decadent teenage androgynous Emperor Heliogabalus. Blue of Noon is a minor work that I suspect Bataille did not want published and Literature and Evil is a collection of essays on the margins of French intellectual life in the 1950s. Not that the average reader (in which category I include myself) will have an earthly idea what Heliogabalus is all about (given the limits of a modern education) unt

The Dedalus Book of the Occult (2003) Gary Lachman The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence (2007)   Kirsten Lodge (Editor) The Dedalus Book of the Occult (subtitled The Dark Muse ) is one of Gary Lachman's lighter weight excursions into the history of the esoteric but it is well worth having in the Library. In effect, it is a series of suggestive and rather entertaining biographies from the Enlightenment world of Swedenborg, Mesmer and Cagliostro to the modernist occultism of the much less well known Daumal, Milosz and Lowry. There are just over 40 of these pen portraits under five occultist headings (Enlightenment, Romantic, Satanic, Fin de Siecle and Modernist) with good short introductions to each section. It is a book that can be usefully 'dipped into' whenever one of the 40 pops up somewhere else. The last quarter or so is a smattering of original texts, perhaps somewhat hard to fathom out of their full context and in an order that may have its own occult mea

The Behemoth (2016)/The Behemoth 2 (2017)   Scotch (2016) Is There Anybody Out There (2018) Pixie (2018) In the relatively early days of the podcast boom, Rick Coste Productions produced some above average short 'weird fiction' narrative series geared largely to younger audiences but which are listenable for anyone else. The wierdness is often, although not always, explained in more realistic ways than usual but every series has been well written enough to carry that off. The Behemoth is the single voice (mostly) story of an unusual and weird road trip. A 'monster' (a mysterious stone man) arises out of the sea at Cape Cod and walks in a straight line across the United States. A lonely teenage girl, Maddy, makes her way to him and decides to walk with him. In the event she is a protective force for her silent friend as the usual suspects in a disturbed society insist on seeing the 'monster' as a problem rather than as a natural force to be respected and

I came to this with great expectations because it is written by a 'literary figure', albeit that it is an early work (1987) and only the first in a series of 11 science fiction 'culture novels'. Those expectations were too high but it has to be said that Iain M. Banks (aka Iain Banks) writes infinitely better on a technical level than the vast majority of science fiction writers. There are moments where his talent for precise description make the novel almost filmic. There are also times where an intelligent writer's sensibility comes through. He makes you think about the types of psychological adaptations our species might make to the world of the space opera. His aliens are not so unbelievable in terms of thought processes either. And yet, and yet ... the sensibility is a hybrid between the intelligent and the adolescent. Long bone-crunching battle scenes might have come off Playstation 3 if it had been invented (one stifles the occasional yawn) while

The Mask of Cthulhu (1939-1957 coll. 1958)  The Trail of Cthulhu (1944-1951) August Derleth.   The Taint and Other Novellas (1971-1983 coll. 2008)   Necroscope (1986) Necroscope II: Vamphyri (1988) Brian Lumley August Derleth saw himself as H.P. Lovecraft's natural heir, weaving his stories into the Cthulhu Mythos and incorporating the 'dreadful events in Innsmouth' and other incidents from the original corpus. He will suggest, in a fit of in-joke paranoia, that Lovecraft and others died young because they knew too much - a nice little conceit. He has been much and rightly criticised on two grounds - for being derivative (and even thieving and manipulating Lovecraft's unpublished drafts for his own purposes) but, more seriously, for attenuating the raw cosmic horror of the original (as if he had failed to understand its essential bleakness). Both accusations have merit. He constructed a mythological fantasy of good and evil much closer to religious tradition a