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.