Review: Tales from the Algorithm

The dark side of our relationship with technology is proving to be a rich and fruitful source of horror. The film Host told its story entirely via the medium of Zoom calls* to great effect.  Writers like Eric LaRocca have updated the epistolary novel to tell stories that play out over email and DMs too. It’s hard to even write about tech horror with referencing Black Mirror as a touchpoint: the show has become so synonymous with the subject that anything that follows in its wake gets described as Black Mirror-esque. This indie published collection of short fiction from Madam Lether sits firmly in this sub-genre.

Tales from the Algorithm is a speculate horror collection with excellent queer and trans rep, highlighting the dangers lurking beneath the enticing world of modern tech.

VR gaming.

Chat rooms.

Large language models.

Assistive tech that helps you get to grips with the world.

There’s something sinister hiding behind each of these, waiting for its victim, and Madam Lether is always asking us to think about what we lose when we let the algorithm take the wheel for us. Who exactly is benefitting from this, and at what cost to us?

The writer is indeed quite literally asking us to consider this, in the short interludes between stories that serve as end-pieces. At first this felt on-the-nose to me; this isn’t a convention that we’re used to in modern fiction and addressing the reader directly, ostensibly to moralise, was jarring. I felt that I didn’t need a summary after each story to tee up the next one… until I began to think of this as the voice of a classic horror host. This is exactly what the likes of The Cryptkeeper or Cousin Eerie used to do, if in different media from prose fiction. They’d frequently pop up in the comics or TV show cackling with awful puns and comments like “Oh dear… it didn’t end too well for old Edgar Allen there now, did it? Maybe the young man in our next story will fare better!” I don’t know if this was intentional by the writer, but I began to really enjoy these short intermediary sections. 

"Reality is a negotiation. We're simply improving the terms."

My favourites from this collection included:

Digital Memory: in which the protagonist purchases a device to re-live their favourite memories, but they quickly realises that the tech is editing and improving upon their lived experiences and including an ex-partner who wasn’t present the first time around.

Blind Spot: a fiercely independent woman gets an optical graft to allow her to see again, but finds that her new vision is controlled by corporate interests.

Alexander: the climax of the collection, in which an ancient vampire grapples with the modern world of tech. The image of him attempting to put together his first PC has stuck with me and made me laugh. The vampire realises that the modern digital age offers him so much more opportunities for stalking his prey…

"They live. But survival is a mercy with teeth."

There’s a recurring image woven into these stories: a young boy in a hoodie, who always seems to be on the edges of things. The seemingly unrelated stories begin to form something of a short story cycle, which I loved. This was really interesting and I would have liked to see the links between the stories explored a bit more, because (without spoiling things too much), there are definitely seeds that have been sewn for future works and I was expecting them to have their final pay-off in this collection.

The range of tech explored in this collection is also impressive: Dead Link plays out via Usenet group posts. This is the one technology that I haven’t any experience of and whilst it was fascinating, it could perhaps benefit from some background info about the tech for the younger readers. Usenet has become something of an elder internet legend and there’s plenty of potential for creepiness here - and this is something unique that I’ve never seen before elsewhere.

"What happens when the very tools meant to enhance our lives begin to change the way we live them?"

There were some stories that I wish had been more explicit with their threats and developed further. There’s often a sense of something eldritch and threatening, but in one or two of the stories I felt that this needed to be more foregrounded - not drawn entirely out into the light but slightly more out of the shadows so that the reader was clearer on where the fear was coming from.

Finally, one story includes a "choose your own ending" style dilemma which I loved. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that neither ending is a typically happy one, but this was an inventive way to involve the reader - and make them complicit in the character's fates.

Madam Lether is a queer writer and drag artist originally from Blackburn. I received this digital ARC in return for an honest (if much overdue) review of this book, which I can only apologise for. I read these stories back in May-June of this year, and Madam Lether has been exceedingly lovely waiting for me to publish my thoughts. Again, please accept my apologies for the delay!

Tales from the Algorithm is available directly from Madam Lether’s website (Tales from the Algorithm)  as well as Amazon’s Kindle store, should you feel like buying a book about the horrors of tech from an evil tech conglomeration.

* In all fairness, so did the recent update of War of the Worlds helmed by a persistently baffed Ice Cube, but far less effectively!

The Strange World of H. P. Lovecraft

I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of the audiobook of Mark Hayes' The Strange World of H. P. Lovecraft from Arcturus Digital Audio. Narrated by Sarah Ovens, this was a great overview of Lovecraft's life and fiction. Once I'd started, I couldn't stop listening to this and it made me want to return to Lovecraft's stories.

The first few chapters were biographical and traced Lovecraft's personal life, his depressions and financial troubles. The book addresses Lovecraft's many biases head on and goes some way to explaining what may have led to some of his abhorrent views (especially his misogyny).

The last chapters of this are more of a "who's who" of the characters, alien races, and deities from Lovecraft's fiction.  The book neatly explains the idea of the Cthulhu mythos, including the collaborative processes by which it grew - and continued to grow after Lovecraft's own death. In fact, after reading this I now think of Lovecraft as the Bob Dylan of horror fiction: others have subsequently made more impact and done more interesting things with his ideas. His influence is everywhere in modern horror fiction.

I'm possibly the perfect audience for a book like this. I don't consider myself an expert on Lovecraft by any means: I've read some of his most famous stories but couldn't reel off his creations. It helps to have some familiarity with Lovecraft's fiction, because the alien-sounding names can be quite disorientating. But if you don't know your Yog-Sothoth from your shoggoths, your Deep Ones from your Elder Ones, or your Nyarlathotep from your Azothoth, this book is here to help.

I was initially concerned that this one might be too much of a dry and academic read, but this turned out to be a very accessible and entertaining guide. My only criticism is that the audiobook does occasionally repeat points it has made in previous chapters, but I'm sure this would be less obvious if I hadn't been binging it.

The other (minor) point I'd make is that the physical version of this book appears to be packed with some incredible cosmic horror art (see below), which clearly is something that you can't experience in the audiobook version. So if you can, it's worth checking those out too.

Mark Hayes has also previously written Lexicromicon: A bluffers guide to the writings of H P Lovecraft and based on the strength of The Strange World, I'll try to track that down too. His further thoughts on Lovecraft's fiction are available on his blog at Lovecraftian | The Passing Place.

Blurb:

In this fascinating reference guide, you will discover the secrets and mysteries of H. P. Lovecraft's iconic worlds. From the Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos to the shifting places of the Dreamlands, the settings of Lovecraft's stories are replete with terrifying monsters, bizarre creations and cosmic mysteries.

The world of Cthulhu is brought to life as never before in this volume and you will soon become an expert in the characters and locations of Lovecraft's tales. As well as descriptions and explanations of the key people, events and places, this book includes an exploration of Lovecraft's legacy and examines how his writing has continued to enthrall and influence people for nearly a century.

Acquired Taste

This guy.

This fucking guy.

Let me back up: one of the weird little habits you pick up when you start reviewing books is that you find yourself constructing that review on the fly, in real-time, whilst reading. When you're 100 page into a new read (or even less), you find yourself asking yourself "what do I think of this book?", "how am I going to describe it?"... "how will I write about this?".

Or at least I do.

Often it's clearcut. In fact, I find (and I suspect this is true for other amateur reviewers and fans out there too) that if I'm enjoying a book enough in the first half, I may even develop blind-spots for things that would normally annoy me. My inner critic will absolutely STFU if I'm being pulled along sufficiently by the story and I'm having a blast. This may be a sign that I shouldn't really, y'know, try to review books in the first place. But anyway, that whole debate is for another post.

The point I'm circumventing here is I find this book incredibly difficult to rate or describe. I went through a lot of feelings whilst reading this collection of short stories. It's beyond a cliche by this point to when reviewing short story collections to comment that they're "a mixed bag": some stories land, some don't, que sera sera. Personally I find that this isn't often true for me. I love short stories and I've actively tried to increase the amount I read. (Finishing this book took me up to 250 short stories for this year so far, so I don't think I'm doing too badly here, but that's an aside). I can normally find something to love about most short story collections, even if I enjoy some much more than others.

And I thought the same was true for Acquired Taste. A few stories in, I thought I had the measure of this book. Clay McLeod Chapman loves many things: dialing things up to 11; wacky - even campy - humour;  being gross; and alliteration to name a few.  But I wasn't sure if I personally enjoyed his style or not, if he was for me. I can definitely see the appeal here and would recommend him to other readers, but I'd more or less come to conclude that he wasn't quite for me.

I enjoyed Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, And Key, in which a moralising pastor enlists the local scout group to collect and burn the town's stash of lurid horror comics, before having the tables turned on him. The Spew of the News was a fine railing against the corruptive influence of TV news bias, as the narrator's boomer parents become unrecognisable to him. This story more or less revisited the author's 2025 novel Wake Up and Open Your Eyes. In Room with a Boo, we meet a single woman isolating during the Covid pandemic alone, until she realises that she already has a ghostly cohabitant. Pump and Dump may have been the point where I started to doubt if this writer is for me: a questionable haunted object story where the object in question is a breast pump. At this point admit I started flicking through to see how many stories were left in the collection.

But then came the razor-sharp Pick of the Litter, a flash fiction piece which hinges on a wonderfully dark twist. The immediacy of this story alone made me sit up and pay attention and the second half of this collection was more effective for me.

In Knockoffs, the toner veers quickly from OTT silliness to something very dark. The Nocturnal Gardener is bittersweet, and made me forget that a few 100 pages back, I'd been reading about a haunted breast pump. For me, the two standout stories here were Hermit and Stay On The Line, both of which were highly emotive and haunting pieces of fiction.

Clay McLeod Chapman's range here is impressive. He riffs on social media, the US civil war and, perhaps more than anything else, family. I was struck by how often fatherhood was central to the stories here. This may sound fairly run-of-the-mill but I don't think it's something that's very popular in horror right now, so I was pleased to find it here in spades. Clay's characters are dads getting their house ready for a baby; confused dads who can't keep up with the latest toy craze from Youtube; dads coming to terms with their last night of trick or treating before their child ages out of the tradition. There's so much paternal love here in amongst all the off-the-wall horror and it was genuinely touching.

The collection ends with Nathan Ballingrud's Haunting Horror Recs, in which two fans track down the elusive writer after hearing that he works in a local bookstore.  I loved this story, but I think other readers' mileage with depend very much on how much of a horror fiction nerd they are, since this felt a bit like an extended inside joke.

There's a lot to love in this collection and it truly earns its title Acquired Taste. This isn't a book that I'd rush to push into the hands of every horror reader: I firmly believe that one is still to come, and I'll be waiting eagerly to read Chapman's masterpiece when it does.

Thank you to Titan Books and Netgalley for my digital ARC.

Grief-Eater

 "I die alone in the back of an abandoned car"

So begins Emma Osborne's debut novella: in disorientation and death. Then comes rebirth, resurrection, as our narrator Kristina returns as a zombie. Through flashbacks, we discover her history and abuse at the hands of her homophobic family.

"Grief Eater" shares some of its undead DNA with vampire novels since every bite of human flesh allows Kristina insights into her prey's memories of life. She begins to hunger for both revenge and the painful truth: how did her family truly see her?

It's been a while since I've read a 1st person zombie POV story and I don't recall one as well-crafted as this. A perfectly formed novella. Bleak, blood-drenched and heart-breaking, Grief Eater is out now from Interstellar Flight Press.

When The Wolf Comes Home

As per usual, I spent a few days after finishing this novel to let my thoughts on it marinate before starting on my review. I was undecided on what to say in this review and then, all of a sudden, it didn’t matter anymore. Just before I started writing, Stephen King heartily recommended this book on social media: “terrific…. sink your teeth into a classic”. And now nothing I have to say will really matter: the King has spoken.

Struggling actress Jess is having a terrible night at her waitressing job. Her absentee father has just passed away and she could really use a break from cleaning disgusting toilets to make her rent payments. To top it all off, she’s accidentally pricked herself with a used hypodermic syringe whilst on clean-up duty. On her arrival home, she finds a shell-shocked 5 year old boy in the bushes outside her apartment, hiding from … something.  Moments later, a naked man bangs on the door of her neighbour’s flat, demanding for help finding his missing son.

And then all hell breaks loose…

When The Wolf Comes Home arrives with a fanfare of positive soundbites from a complete who’s who of modern horror. King’s rave review echoes what I’ve heard elsewhere about this book, and herein lies my problem. I liked this book and yet…. I can’t help feeling that I’ve missed something here. It’s fine, it’s fun, it’s a very Stephen King-esque thriller. This was broadly my reading experience, up until the last third of the book which I felt elevated it to above a 3-star read. (Sidenote: the need to sum up my feelings on a book neatly with a rating out of 5 is one of my enduring frustrations with writing reviews).

Part of my ambivalence stems from this being a chase novel: for some reason, I can never connect to them as well as other types of narratives.  The very nature of the thriller requires that the reader doesn’t ever really get a good understanding of the characters and their inner workings; the protagonists must always be on the run and under threat. For most of the book, Jess and the boy are running from the boy’s father. That’s the point of When The Wolf Comes Home: it’s about fear and the forms it can take, how it changes as you grow up, the lengths people go to avoid it and the power of confronting it. It’s also about the power of imagination.

For most of this novel, I felt that it was well-written and fun, but it didn’t spark anything exceptional. Not that that’s any kind of criticism. And then the last 3rd of the book took a weird turn and, for me, that’s where things really started getting going. I loved the last part of the novel and the final confrontation between the boy and his father.

“Nobody hides like tears, she realizes. We could learn a thing from them.”

Is this a werewolf novel? Kind of, sorta, maybe.

Is that a spoiler? Quite possibly. Sorry.

This book is going to be big (and it deserves to be). Horror fans will eat it up (and what big teeth we have!) and it’s crowded with references to other works of horror. There’s even a character named after Talking Scared podcast host Neil McRoberts. Still: I can’t reiterate enough that I wanted more of something from this book and I can’t quite put my finger on what and who am I to argue with horror royalty?

Nat Cassidy is a New York-based overachiever. Not content with his current career writing prose fiction, he’s also a successful actor and playwright. Honestly his CV is formidable and all signs are that he’s got plenty more works of horror fiction in him. The LineUp has described him as the Stephen King of TikTok. He also bookends this novel with an extremely affecting afterword which casts new poignance over the book and is well-worth reading afterwards the main action is over.

Thank you to Titan and Netgalley for the digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

When The Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy was published by Titan Books on 22nd April. (Sorry this review is overdue!)

Carrion Crow

 “There are some facts about the world that only your mother can teach you.”

I mainly read and review horror fiction. This puzzle box of a novel took me entirely by surprise. In its early pages, I was fascinated by its idiosyncrasies and portrait of late Victorian British eccentricity, but left wondering “at which point will the horror show its ugly head?”. I even began to wonder if I’d made a mis-step in requesting this book for review.

I needn’t have been so concerned. By the time this book was finished with me, I was left with no doubts. This is one of the most affecting books I’ve read in a long time. Parry’s rich prose is a barbed delight: I was amused, upset, disgusted, appalled and horrified - frequently all within the space of a few pages. The writing employs all five senses to thoroughly revolt you and there are some grotesque descriptions in this book that will stay with me for a long time.

Marguerite Périgord is engaged to marry Mr Lewis. Her disapproving mother Cécile confines her to the tiny attic of their dilapidated London home by way of preparation for her married life. Isolated from her family and with only the novels of Victor Hugo and Mrs Beaton’s Book of Household Management (“the thousand pages of prescribed femininity, the dictionary of what men wanted from women”) for company, Marguerite earnestly begins her education.

“It is the great shame of my life, Marguerite, that you have turned out the way you have, despite my best efforts. You will be the death of me, I think…”

As the novel discloses its secrets, we learn about Cécile’s life and the lengths her daughter must now go to for survival as her ostentatious meals are provided less and less frequently. This is a witty, scathing novel about scandal and unfulfilled promises, about what it means to be a mother, a daughter, and a wife at the mercy of a cruel patriarchy; but perhaps most of all it is about generational trauma.

I devoured the second half of this novel in a day, on a train back up north from (appropriately enough) London. My friend was surprised when I told her how horrible Carrion Crow was since she’d seen me chuckling to myself a lot whilst reading it. I hadn’t realised how much I’d laughed during this book until someone else pointed it out. This is a very witty novel: horrible things happen, but you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the way in which some of them are described.

In terms of comparisons, the book that Carrion Crow reminds me of most is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind, in terms of the sense(s) of the disturbing and macabre, the abundance of bodily fluids, and the sheer revulsion invoked by the prose. Fans of Camilla Grudova will also find a lot to enjoy here.

I would not recommend this book to everyone - please check trigger warnings before proceeding because there’s a lot here that could be damaging. But for readers who can stomach it, this book will be a carton of mixed eggs, where the first one you choose will be a sweet chocolate fondant; the next, a sharp vinegared hard-boiled egg - and the third one you bite into just might contain a fragile baby bird beneath its crisp shell.

I’m off to devour the rest of Parry’s back catalogue like a boiled calf’s head that I must strip of every last scrap of meat from for sustenance.

Thank you to RandomHouse UK and Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of this book.

Gigantvm Penisivm: A Tale of Demonic Possession

"Death, IRL, is the final cancellation"

 When I requested a review copy of Gigantvm Penisivm, it’s fair to say that I wasn’t expecting a literary tome that tackled its themes with gravitas. From award-winning Filipino author, Jose Elvin Bueno, this novel is billed by publisher Clash Books as a satire on social media influencers and most intriguingly “A24’s Bodies, Bodies, Bodies meets Talk To Me“. My interest was piqued and I saw the potential for a whacky “I-can’t-believe-what-I-just-read” book.

Rafa, Basti, Vicente, Pia, and Mitzi are a group of vacuous social media-addicted influencers: a fin-tech wunderkind; an OnlyFans pornstar; an Instagram model; and so on) who get together on a Friday to stave off the ennui of their privileged lives with drugs and alcohol. The characters are all obsessed with their metrics of online engagement (or as the author puts it amusingly, their “anals and algos”). Basti suggests a demonic summoning to liven things up, using the obscene incantation “Gigantvm Penisivm”. Things go predictably south from there when the spirit possesses each character one by one. After a few chapters with these odious self-obsessed characters, I was more than ready for them to get bumped off in the time-honoured tradition of a trashy horror movie. Sadly, I have to file this novel comfortably in the “not for me” box and I will not be recommending this in good faith to anyone I know.

In the defence of Gigantvm Penisivm (a phrase that you probably won’t find anywhere else on the internet), the premise offers rich potential for satire and social commentary. The early chapters stress the importance of names and draw an interesting parallel between social media handles and the horror trope that if you know a demon’s name, then you have a degree of power and control over it. Characters are referred to by their @-tags throughout the book: an interesting convention at first, but it gets tiring quickly. There’s a suggestion of interplay between the followers/followed and the influencer/influenced, which I was anticipating would be teased out in the context of a horror story about demonic possession.

The book also comments on the importance of telling your own story (or Story, like on Instagram, geddit?) and maintaining a strong authorial voice. The whole narrative is framed as a story that is playing out for the online viewers (and by extension, the voyeur that is the reader). I was anticipating some unreliable narrator shenanigans here, and I’m always here for that.

In short, I started to expect too much from a book of this title.

It’s unusual that I can pinpoint the exact point that I mentally check out of a book, but I can tell you that I knew none of my early optimism for Gigantvm Penisivm was going to be fulfilled when I read the word “milkers” used to describe a character’s breasts. There’s no coming back from that.

This book crawled along at snail’s pace. It is narrated in the first person by both Rafa and Mitzi who alternate chapters. It doesn’t take long to realise that narrator 2 is describing exactly the same events that narrator 1 has just told you, chapter by chapter. I was expecting there to be conflict between the two voices as they began to contradict one another, making you question who to believe - but alas there was no discernable reason for this device, making for a tedious and frustrating read where very little of interest happens.

It wasn’t always easy to tell the narrative voices apart, so there are key phrases repeated throughout to establish the character’s POV. Unfortunately this means that the phrase “that adorable slut” and “that r*tard” are used multiple times. The r-slur appears nearly 30 times in this 267-page book. It’s 2024; there’s no excuse for this and it adds nothing to the book. Another recurring motif is that every mention of the word “influencer” is stylised as “f**k this word, influencer”. I read this phrase more times than I cared to count. In fact, repetition is a major theme of this book and it didn’t feel intentional.

And what of the actual possession? Reader beware, SPOILERS lie ahead so please stop here if you don’t want to know more about this book’s plot.

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Our group of feckless influencers succeed in summoning up the world’s dullest spirit. Upon taking control of each character’s body, the spirit cites lengthy passages of legislature, strips them of their money (which they apparently give up voluntarily; perhaps demons accept crypto as currency these days?) and imposes martial law. It transpires that the demon is none other than Ferdinand Marcos, former President of the Phillippines. I am not at all familiar with Filipino politics, so I may well have entirely missed the satire here. I understand that the actions of the possessed mirror the real-life decrees of Marcos, who ruled as a corrupt dictator for 14 years. Someone less ignorant of this part of the world may get a lot more out of this novel than I did.

The Gigantvm Penisivm has very little bearing on the story thankfully, until the final pages of the novel which, apropos of nothing, include a graphic sex scene between Marcos and the pornstar character. My research on whether this is based on any historical fact has proved inconclusive.

I wanted so badly to DNF this book but I made myself finish it. There is no horror here, and worse still there is no satire or humour. I count myself lucky that there was no punning on the phrase “brand penetration” - a missed opportunity, if you ask me

If you want to experience this for yourself, Gigantvm Penisivm was published on 5th November and is available as a paperback or on Kindle from Amazon. Thank you to Netgalley and Clash Books for providing me with this ARC and I can only apologise for my honest review.