Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

Jordan Peele (writer/director of acclaimed movies Get Out, Us and Nope) presents this anthology of 19 short stories from black voices of horror fiction, co-edited by John Joseph Adams. Featuring a line-up of award-winning writers, Out There Screaming won the 2023 Bram Stoker award for superior achievement in a horror anthology.

Like any collection of short stories, this is a mixed bag of delights but there’s something here for everyone. The collection veers from N.K. Jemisin’s twisted tale of police brutality and body horror through to tales of spiritual traditions like obeah and juju, even taking a few detours into Black Mirror-esque science fiction dystopias. Many of these stories deal explicitly with the horrors of historical and present day black lived experiences: slavery, life under Jim Crow, everyday racism and sexism; meanwhile others are simply black writers telling their horror stories. One or two of the stories didn’t really land for me, but the vast majority of these had me in their thrall.

In terms of stand-out stories, Violet Allen’s The Other One grabs the reader hard. Our heart-broken narrator is sending text messages to her ex-lover into a void of silence… until one day she receives a jarring reply followed by threats and demands for money: “lol, why are u texting my boyfriend?”

In Tananarive Due’s The Rider, two young civil rights activists realise that their bus will never get them to their demonstration. Invasion of the Baby Snatchers by Lesley Nneka Arimah is a wild ride that wears its X-files influences on its sleeve right from its killer opening:

“Used to be, you could tell an alien pregnancy from a human one with your naked eye, back before they’d figured people out…. But of course, they learned.”

In Your Happy Place, Terence Taylor channels the uncanny feeling of Peel’s own Get Out when a prisoner discovers the horrifying secret between a new reform programme for inmates.

As a white reader, I’m sure there were details and layers here that I simply missed and I can’t help but wonder what those were and how it would have affected my reading experience. Out There Screaming is a thought-provoking and chilling anthology that will send readers scurrying away to track down the other works of writers included here. I would love to see this title reprinted in a few years time with the addendum “Volume 1” for the sake of clarity, because it had since become the first in a series.

Out There Screaming was published in paperback earlier this month and is currently available on Kindle for just 99p. Thank you to NetGalley and Picador for providing a digital advance review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Morning Computer

I've been feeling inspired this morning by Warren Ellis's daily writing site: morning.computer, in which he commits an act of daily journalism by jotting down a brief paragraph or two. It's a splatterboard for his thoughts, way to connect with his readers (the term "PR" just doesn't feel right applied to Warren),  and - I suspect - a way to practise writing for writing's sake, without the need to perfect, promote or polish.

If you're a fan of Ellis, you won't be surprised to learn that these posts can cover anything from thoughts on tech, history, book and cinema reviews/rereads and the general demands for MORE WHISKEY NOW OHMYGOD WHY IS THE SUN ALREADY SHINING.

This is one of my favourites: http://morning.computer/2014/07/notebooking/

Sample:

"I’ve tried making notes on my phone, and it’s fine for some time-sensitive reminders, but for development and that certain writer’s form of “thinking out loud,” nothing works better for me than making marks on paper. I am trained to not be able to fully apprehend a thought until it’s in front of me."

I may return to this blog yet...

Guess The Book...

I've been racking my brains for a good way to get back into blogging again and I really don't know where to start. So how about a quick snapshot of the best of what I've read since I last posted - bonus points if you can guess the book!

• a collection of Caitlin Moran's journalism
• a comic book series about 2 hipsters who have the (very) unique power of being able to freeze time at the moment they reach orgasm. In the style of Robin Hood, they decide to put this power to good use by robbing a bank for money to keep the public library open
• a crime thriller featuring a LA love triangle, crooked cops and dead prostitute
• a graphic novel that's been described as Downton Abbey - with zombies
• the obligatory Game of Thrones doorstop
• a history of comic books, written a Scottish writer living in LA
• a transcript of a Stuart Lee stand-up show, with extensive liner notes from the comedian himself
• a guide to new words coined to describe new stuff that we encounter in this Brave New World of the internet
• a graphic adventure where Captain Nemo's granddaughter takes on the Third Reich in an alternative world inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis
• too many X-men and Batman graphic novels to name...
  

I've always made it my aim to read widely, eclectically, unpredictably if possible.. I think I've done OK there.  So far.

To The Devil His Due

Daredevil Volume 1 (Marvel Comics, 2012)

Collecting issues #1-6

Writer: Mark Waid

Penciler: Paolo Rivera, Marcos Martin

Inker: Joe Rivera

Letterer: VC’s Joe Caramagna

Daredevil’s been in a funk for several years now, with each new creative team that takes over the book putting Matt Murdock through ever bleaker adventures. These stories resulted in a grim and gritty outlook  for Daredevil.  This new series from writer Mark Waid comes as a breath of fresh air.  Daredevil has a light, breezy tone throughout as he bounces back from his lowest point.

Stylistically the book stands out too.  The stories here are bright, colourful and visually appealling.  Regular series artist Paolo Rivera uses a range of new short-hand techniques to show how the blind Murdock navigates his world and in particular his sense of “radar vision”.  Although this might sound superfluous to the spandex heroics, it’s really a central point of the book.  The character of Daredevil rests upon the concept that a blind man can have such mastery of his environment that he can become a superhero – make no mistake, a little of the old suspension of disbelief is needed here.  But the art on this book will make you see the world from Matt Murdock’s perspective.

Overall, this was a great start to a new series and a perfect jumping-on point for new readers.  I’m looking forward to seeing where else Waid’s run takes Daredevil.

(As a postscript, I've linked to the Amazon page above by force of habit but when I checked out AbeBooks, there's a cheaper copy available here.)

GoodReads

One of the fun things I've been doing this last years is tracking all my reading on a GoodReads profile site.  My profile's here if anyone's interested.  It's a great way to catalogue your reading, follow trends and keep a record (although it won't ever replace my trusty List) and for geeks like me you can make some pretty pictures to show off the books you've read.  This is especially good if you read a lot of books that you don't own, if you have an e-reader or if you get a lot of books from your local library*.

As soon as I've figured it out, I'll get a widget up on this page to show/shame what I read last year.

I just about hit my target of 60 books to read in 2012 (with a little bit of cheating - including speed-reading comic books to get through my quota as the end of December began to loom).  I've set myself a target of a modest 65 to read in 2013, with a personal promise (ha ha) to read more novels and comics.


*Which of course, would be a legal requirement in my future vision of book-centric dystopia. Benefits would then be deducted for people who didn't check out a pre-agreed number of items per annum and it would be a horrible, horrible place to live.  Judge Dredd would be on the scene to inform my ridiculous rules.  You have been warned so at least try to act surprised when they march you down to the self-checkout machines.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone!  This is my “oh-my-god-I can’t believe how long it’s been since I posted” post.  Which is a shame, because I’ve read lots of cool things that I really wanted to write about on here.  I worked out from my Master List (which I may share on here someday), that I read about 60 books last year.

And about 16 of them didn’t even have pictures in or anything, so there.

For the last 2 years I’ve read many many more graphic novels than, well, non-graphic novels.  So perhaps one of my reading resolutions this year should be to read more proper books?

My major news is that, as of Christmas 2012, I am now the proud (read “smug”) owner of a Kindle Fire.  I wasn’t aware of all the great stuff the Fire device could do, so for those not in the know it’s more-or-less an Android tablet computer as well as being an e-reader.  There’s enough distractions on it that I haven’t read a whole book on it yet, but suffice to say that it’s going to liven up my daily commute.  Plus everything is linked up to the Amazon store, so if you’re not on your guard it can be a dangerously short number of clicks to get you from “I wonder if China Mieville has any new books out since I last checked” to “well, now I have ALL his books available on this shiny little black monolith” and “wait, where did all my wages go again?  Oh yes, I spent them on that obscure fantasy writer that Neil Gaiman recommended on his blog”.  You have been warned.  I will try my best not to reach that stage.

Whilst I love those old-fashioned paper things we call books, reading on the Kindle is a completely different experience which will undoubtedly change what I consume as well as how.  I had a discussion this morning about which books would be the most/least inappropriate to enjoy digitally.  Apparently, if you download William Gibson’s cyperpunk standard Neuromancer, your head will explode.  Meanwhile I can’t even contemplate downloading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury; I can only imagine him turning his grave at the very notion.  [Note: Bradbury did eventually embrace e-books and released his work in a digital format, but I can’t help but feel this would have been at least partly down to his publishers’ input].

I’m currently finishing off a library book before diving into my Kindle downloads: DC: Legacies by Len Wein.  As the title suggests, it’s a history of the DC universe spanning 10 issues and told from the perspective of Paul Lincoln, a long-term collector of superhero memorabilia.  So far, so good –there’s not so much a strong story as a general thread tracing the development of the fictional DC world.  It shows where the first masked avengers came from, leading through to their persecution and eventual disappearance in McCarthy-era America, then the apperance of a new group of brightly coloured superheroes and the cosmic crises, corruptions, deaths and (yes, of course) resurrections that the comics industry has entailled.  I’ve enjoyed it but I know very little about the history of comics before the 1980s.  If you’re a fully paid up member of the continuity police, I imagine this book will make your head spin; DC seems to revise its “official” history every year to the point that the company itself can’t hope to keep up with what the current accepted line is.  But to pick that apart too much would be to miss the point of a fun romp through 60 odd years of publishing history.

Enough about me though… what are YOU reading?

Revisiting the Classics

I've done it again.  I've fallen behind with this blog.

It always happens the same way.  I'll read a book that I like so much that I avoid reviewing it, for fear of not getting down in words how I felt about it.  And then I read more books, and I tell myself that I can't write any more reviews until I've reviewed The Book I Really Liked, and so on.

And now it's nearly May.

I've read 16 books since my last post - and some of them didn't have any pretty pictures in either!  And for the past month, I've been revisiting some of my favourite graphic novels.  It wasn't by choice, but it just turned out that way that I'd checked 2 or 3 stone-cold classics out of the library at the same time.

Firstly I've been rereading League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, 1969, the 2nd part of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's tour de force of fictional worlds and characters.  I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the first volume, and from then on the books have got more and more convoluted with a range of increasingly obscure references.  It's a bit over my head to be honest; I'm not well-versed in 60s culture and literature - but that doesn't affect the plot too much and it's still a great read.  The final part of the trilogy is set in 2009 and will be published this Summer.

After that I read Maus, one of the first graphic novels I ever read.  I've always been grimly fascinated by Holocaust narratives, although they tend to leave you upset and guilty and a little bit ashamed to be part of the human race.  Maus is the record of Vladek Spiegelman's experience of the War and time spent in Auschwitz, as well as the story of his strained relationship with his son and wife in present-day New York.  It's based on one simple idea: each nationality is depicted as a different animal.  The Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Americans dogs - the French are frogs.  It all sounds very cutesey and even a little disrespectful, but Spiegelman's work doesn't make light of the horrific things his father lived through.  Disney it ain't.  An accessible, moving read, Maus is one of those books that give the lie to the idea that comics are for kids and 40-something Batman nostalgics.

I just finished reading Blankets (Craig Thompson) a few days ago.  It's been nearly a decade since I last read this novel (and Maus), so I was interested to see if my reaction to it had changed at all.  Clocking in at just under 600 pages, Blankets is an absolute brick of a book - "it was Professor Plum, in the library, with the paperback edition of Blankets!"  More than anything else it's a coming-of-age story, as much about brotherly love and the joys of growing up in a small town as it is concerned with the central story of young love, and its inevitable death.  It's a very teenage book and I wasn't quite as bowled over by it as I remember reading it when I was 17 or thereabouts.  The story is still incredibly touching, tender and funny.  Among other things, Thompson writes convincingly about the loss of faith in organised religion without ever coming across as preaching or dogmatic.

So that's what I've read in the last week or so.  I'll try and fill in the gaps in my reading record sometime soon...