The Thing in the Attic

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “The Thing in the Attic” by James Blish, published in If Worlds of Science Fiction in 1954.

Gutenberg Link

The Thing in the Attic

SPOILERS BELOW

“The Thing in the Attic” is about some tailed hominids which live in the treetops of an inhospitable jungle. The protagonists are cast out of society and exiled to the ground for the crime of blasphemy because they doubt the tribe’s religious scripture. They struggle to survive life on the ground for a while until they randomly blunder into some humans, who reveal that they seeded the hominids on this world as part of a colonization effort and are just pleased as punch that some have finally adjusted to living on the ground (and never mind all the other thought-criminals before them for whom exile proved fatal).

This story was actually a somewhat compelling survival narrative until the ending came along and ruined it. The sudden appearance of the humans to bring the narrative to a close smacks of deus ex machina, and their blithe unconcern about having created a murderous theocracy does them no favors. And just what does the title have to do with the story, anyway?

Final Rating: 2/5

Snarl

Keep an eye out for the hideout. When it’s night, they are never alone. Check the time now. It’s alright now. But when it’s light, then we gotta go home. Let’s growl at Snarl, by Kelly Bender and Nathan Kelly.

Synopsis:

Something sinister is killing people in a Washington State Park. Is it animal? Is it Supernatural? When all the evidence points to the unexplained a veteran detective will have to go against all of his training to solve the unsolvable before it’s too late!

Source: Marketing copy (not on Goodreads)

SPOILERS BELOW

Snarl is about Detective Bevil, a police officer investigating a series of killings in a state park near Seattle. Witnesses report seeing “wolves or wolf-like creatures”, but the upper brass don’t believe in werewolves and think a human killer must be responsible. Bevil’s own research leads him to Native American legends of the yee naaldlooshi, or skinwalker, and sets him on a path to confronting the culprit.

This was a decent story about police confronting seemingly-supernatural horror. The narrative keeps it ambiguous as to whether there are any truly supernatural elements or whether the killer is merely a deranged man wearing a wolf pelt. In any case, I found the ending satisfying. Actually, I was a bit amused by the final panel declaring it “The End?” You see, horror stories often feel the need to end on an “or is it?” stinger, implying that the protagonists might not really have prevailed and the evil could still somehow be at large after all. In this case, though, “The End?” can be pretty definitively answered with “Yes, the end.”, as there was no actual stinger – no dangling plot threads, no loose ends, no implication that any further horror is in store. It feels like the question mark was included out of mere obligation at it being a horror convention. Which, hey, I much prefer conclusive endings like this one, so no complaints here.

Snarl was a decently enjoyable comic.

Final Rating: 3/5

Against the Stone Beasts

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “Against the Stone Beasts” by James Blish, published in Planet Stories in 1948.

Gutenberg Link

Against the Stone Beasts

SPOILERS BELOW

“Against the Stone Beasts” begins with a man named Andreson inspecting a gallery of paintings. He discovers that they are not paintings at all but rather time-portals when he accidentally falls through one, landing in Earth’s distant past where winged aliens called the Varese are at war with stone beasts that live beneath the ground. The creator of the painting-portals, John Kimball, comes after Andreson to rescue him, and tells the Varese how to win the war against the stone beasts (which he knows from looking at painting-portals set to observe their future; incidentally, the reason they aren’t on present-day Earth isn’t because they go extinct, but because they migrate to Venus).

The bizarre inverted physics that the stone beasts follow are nonsense, of course, and I didn’t care for the romance aspect of the story (which didn’t end up going anywhere anyway), but the unconventional war being waged between beings of air and earth was an interesting enough premise that I think this one was on the whole enjoyable.

Final Rating: 3/5

Red Space #2: Revenant-X

I’ve become the punisher, the reaper, the death of all things sentient and everything with breath. This mass extinction is the start of execution. I will extinguish every spark, this life pollution, and make the universe go dark, I’m the solution. Let’s callback ping Revenant-X, by David Wellington.

Synopsis:

Revenant-X is the terrifying second novel in a new trilogy of survival and exploration in deep space, from Clarke Award-nominated author David Wellington.

FEAR THE DARK.

The crew of the Artemis – led by Firewatch agent Alexandra Petrova – have survived the furious onslaught of the Basilisk and broken through the space blockade around Paradise-1. Now they can pursue their original mission and investigate why Earth’s first deep space colony has fallen silent.

The answer seems the site is deserted.

Or so they think.

Some of the colonists remain. They’re no longer human.

Petrova and her crew now face a desperate struggle to survive as they attempt to uncover the mystery of what has befallen the colony.

If they fail, the darkness that has fallen over Paradise-1 will consume them.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

The previous book in the Red Space series ended with our protagonists Petrova, Parker, Rapscallion, and Zhang making a deal with the deadly alien basilisk guarding the planet Paradise-1: it would permit them to land, and in exchange they would uncover whatever its ancient creators hid on the world for it to defend but kept secret even from it. Upon reaching the surface, however, they discover that the basilisk was not the only danger: the colonists sent to the planet have been transformed into undead revenants by a force even more powerful and malicious than the basilisk. But with the basilisk driving them to uphold their end of the deal, their only hope for getting off the planet alive requires them to head straight into the heart of evil.

This was another strong entry in the series. While the revenants did receive as much explanation as the basilisk in regards to their nature and manner of function, it wasn’t really necessary for the story: the heart of the narrative was the interactions between the protagonists as they struggle to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles and survive. There were some good twists and revelations regarding Director Lang’s true agenda in sending them to Paradise-1, and we once again end on a cliffhanger that has me eager to see where the story goes next.

All in all, Revenant-X was another very good entry in the Red Space series.

Final Rating: 4/5

King of the Hill

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “King of the Hill” by James Blish, published in Infinity Science Fiction in 1955.

Gutenberg Link

King of the Hill

SPOILERS BELOW

“King of the Hill” sees the sole officer stationed on an orbital weapons platform armed with nuclear weapons go insane from isolation and the pressure of his responsibilities. He believes that he’s been ordered to launch a nuclear strike against his own country, and a psychiatrist is charged with the urgent yet delicate task of talking him down from firing the weapons.

This was a solid suspense story. It reminded me of the bit in Dark Star where the crew tries to talk the smart bomb out of detonating, though fortunately with a happier conclusion.

Final Rating: 3/5

Red Run

Say what you think. Oh baby, I could lose my mind. You know that I can lose my mind, yeah. What do you want me to be? Headlight, hold tight. Oh baby, you know I’ve been thinking about it. You know that I’ve been dreaming about it. Let’s run from Red Run, by Brandon Barrows and Joel J. Cotejar.

Synopsis:

The McConnells are a down-on-their-luck family desperately in need of a fresh start and a lucky break. When Becky is sucked into a cycle of recurring dreams filled with monstrously burned and disfigured people, her world unravels and her dreams start to become a nightmarish reality.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

Red Run is about Beck McConnell, a woman who moves to a new town with her husband looking for work so they can support their two children. They manage to find an apartment to rent for real cheap because the last tenants disappeared without a trace in the middle of the night – no red flags there! Their neighbors are all varying degrees of weird and creepy, and Becky begins having nightmares where her bedroom is bathed in red light and attacked by horribly burned people telling her to run. And as Danny Torrance taught us, REDRUN backwards spells… NURDER! Wait, no wrong horror story. Anyway, one day the room catches fire, but having the nightmare causes Becky to wake up, so the family survives while everyone else in the building dies.

That’s… that’s it? I thought the story was building up to something: the previous tenants disappearing, a hidden room in the apartment, everyone in the building being weird, a neighbor saying that she’s researching something unnatural about the building and that the hidden room is in the exact center of the structure… But then, after all that, it turns out to just be a bog-standard “premonition of terrible fate leads person to narrowly avoid that fate” story. You know, the kind that’s usually just a few sentences: “There was this guy who was going to take a plane trip, but he dreamed that the plane crashed, so he cancelled his flight, and then the plane really did crash! Ooh, spooky!” It’s not really something you can stretch out into a full book. As a result, the story feels very weak and anticlimactic.

Red Run fails to deliver.

Final Rating: 2/5

To Pay the Piper

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “To Pay the Piper” by James Blish, published in If Worlds of Science Fiction in 1956.

Gutenberg Link

To Pay the Piper

SPOILERS BELOW

“To Pay the Piper” is set in a world where the surface has been rendered uninhabitable by biological warfare. For the past 25 years, humanity has survived only in airtight bunkers buried deep underground, while the warring sides continue the conflict by sending agents to locate and sabotage enemy strongholds. The military within one bunker is working on a project to make their soldiers immune to the surface diseases so they can wipe out the enemy’s city-bunkers, ending the war, after which the civilian population will be immunized so they can re-colonize the surface. A news reporter wants to undergo the process so he can allay public fears about it; however, he’s actually an enemy saboteur who intended both on sabotaging the machine used to administer the treatment and stealing its secrets to take back to the enemy. Fortunately, the military is able to discover and stop him just in time.

This was a decent post-apocalyptic war story about the survivors having a close brush with catastrophe. There is a certain grimness to the setting; but what separates it from the stories that are too bleak for me to enjoy is that there is still hope – the war may yet be won, and the immunization process may yet allow our protagonists to return to the surface. In spite of the current dire circumstances, all is not lost, and that makes a big difference to how I respond to the story.

Final Rating: 3/5

Ravensong #1: Ravensong

Oh I wish I could fly with the ravens high above the fog of the earth. For majestic flight, to soar through the skies, true calling of my rebirth. Let’s sing Ravensong, by Cayla Fay.

Synopsis:

A demi-god who refuses to cohabitate with humans accidentally falls in love with one in the first book of a pulse-pounding teen duology that’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Celtic mythology.

Neve has spent lifetimes defending the mortal world against the legions of hell with her two sisters.

Unfortunately for Neve, in this lifetime, she is the only one of the Morrigan—a triad of Irish war gods—still stuck in high school and still without her full power. She’s been counting down the days until her eighteenth birthday, when she finally gets to shed the pretenses of humanity and grow into her divine power.

But then she meets Alexandria. And Alexandria is as determined to force Neve into some semblance of teenage normalcy as she is haunted by her own demons—both figurative and literal.

As they grow closer, Neve decides that humanity—and, perhaps, love—isn’t so detestable after all. Which makes it all the more dangerous when she realizes that something in Hell wants Alexandria, and it’s be up to Neve and her sisters to save her before Alexandria’s past catches up to all of them.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

Ravensong is about three sisters, Neve, Bee, and Mercy, who are incarnations of the triparte Irish goddess the Morrigan. For thousands of years they have reincarnated in a quiet seaside town, where they guard a Hellgate through which demons attempt to invade. In their current life, Neve is still only 17, and has yet to inherit the full power of the Morrigan and her memories of her previous lives. She is frustrated that she’s weaker than her sisters, a liability in battle, and is being forced to attend human high school. However, everything changes when she meets a new girl in town, Alexandria. Not only does she start falling for her, but she learns that Alexandria’s family was killed by demons – something that should be impossible, as none have managed to breach the sisters’ barricade of the Hellgate. As demons target Alexandria, Neve comes to realize that there are things about the Hellgate and the demons that the sisters don’t know.

This was a strong book. Though Neve initially annoyed me with her immaturity (her complaints about her sisters sheltering her, despite needing their protection due to her lack of full powers; her recklessness in combat, despite the danger due to her lack of full powers, etc.), her romance with Alexandria gave some much-needed balance to her character and made her a lot more pleasant to read about. The revelations regarding the true nature of the Hellgate and the demons was interesting, and the cliffhanger has me eager to pick up the sequel.

Ravensong was an exciting and very enjoyable read.

Final Rating: 4/5

Mistake Inside

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “Mistake Inside” by James Blish, published in Startling Stories in 1948.

Gutenberg Link

Mistake Inside

SPOILERS BELOW

“Mistake Inside” is about Dr. Hugh Tracy, an astronomer, who is on his way to murder a man named Jeremy Wright when he suddenly finds himself transported “Outside”, an alternate world full of bizarre anachronisms. Some people there offer to help him get home if he’ll help them assassinate the land’s ruler, Yero. However, Hugh comes to the realization that Outside is really Hell and its inhabitants are demons trying to trick him into damning himself so he can’t return home. He manages to escape with help from a magician who is actually an angel. Then the punchline to the whole thing is that, while it was implied at the beginning that he was going to kill Wright for having an affair with his wife, it was actually because Wright was an astrologer and Hugh, as an astronomer, couldn’t stand his wife being involved in superstitious twaddle. Ba-dum-tish?

Yeah, this story failed on pretty much every level. Hugh was an unlikeable protagonist, the storytelling was confusing and muddled, and the twists were eye-rollingly lame. Definitely not for me.

Final Rating: 1/5

Urban Myth Dissolution Center – Case File: Kune Kune

Magical mushroom, show me your world, feed me your love in succession. Still there is room, my belly is curled, oh how I’m hungry for heaven. Let’s investigate Urban Myth Dissolution Center – Case File: Kune Kune, by Hideki Takahashi and Hakaba Bunko.

Synopsis:

No synopsis yet – check back soon!

Source: Anime Planet

SPOILERS BELOW

Urban Myth Dissolution Center is apparently a video game produced by Shueisha Games? I don’t know, I’ve never heard of it before, but this seems to be a tie-in one-shot. The Urban Myth Dissolution Center is an organization that investigates mysterious incidents. The story deals with two agents, Azami Fukurai and Jasmine, being sent to investigate reports of a sighting of a Kune Kune, a cryptid which is familiar to me as Sorawo and Toriko’s first encounter in Otherside Picnic. In this case, the true nature of the Kune Kune turns out to be… a hallucination caused by poisonous mushrooms. Oh. That’s kind of disappointing.

Since I’ve never played Urban Myth Dissolution Center, I don’t know anything about the setting: whether it includes truly supernatural elements, or if it’s a Scooby Doo-type thing where every urban myth turns out to have a rational explanation. I do have to say, however, that this story didn’t really work for me as either a fantasy or a mystery. From the fantasy side, finding out that the mysterious creature doesn’t really exist is a disappointing anticlimax. From the mystery side, it’s not fair play, as a new species of mushroom hitherto unknown to science which happens to cause whatever convenient symptoms the plot requires isn’t something the reader can be expected to guess. As such, I felt this story was rather lackluster.

Urban Myth Dissolution Center – Case File: Kune Kune didn’t impress me.

Final Rating: 2/5