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!

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.

Come Armageddon, Come

The title of today's blog comes from a song I've been listening to on repeat recently: Everyday Is Like Sunday by Morrissey.  There's a great video on YouTube here - a strange juxtaposition of the song with footage of ultra-violent video game, Grand Theft Auto 4.  (Which reminds me again of my favourite quote about video games:  Charlie Brooker once described Call of Duty as "the Citizen Kane of shooting people in the face", but that's another story...)

That song always reminds me of Cleveleys, a town not far from me which many local people like to think of as a picturesque and traditional seaside resort.   I like to think of it as the arsehole of the north-west, although to be fair there's probably a lot of worse places I have yet to discover.

This is a very roundabout way of saying that I've just finished reading BPRD: Plague of Frogs, a graphic novel with strong overtones of The End of The World, Doomsday and all of that nasty stuff on the horizon.  Those of you with normal social lives who do not read comics will probably recognize the character Hellboy from Guillermo del Toro's film adaptations.  Well, the BPRD is sort of a spin-off comic from Hellboy.  In the books, Hellboy starts off as a member of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence until he gets tired of the administration's interfering and strikes out on his own leaving the team to soldier on without him.  Think X-files, if Mulder and Scully each had a supernatural ability of their own.  The BPRD are a rag-tag bunch of misfits who investigate paranormal activities and crimes.

Plague of Frogs is an omnibus edition of the first 3 BPRD graphic novels (The Hollow Earth, The Soul of Venice & other stories and Plague of Frogs.  In other words, it's a real brick of a book.  Now the Hellboy series is notable for two big reasons: the intricate mixture of folklore, myths and legends to create a truly twisted world - and secondly Mike Mignola's crisp art and uncanny ability for drawing nasty monsters.  BPRD plays to the strengths of its parent title and the first storyline, The Hollow Earth, is fantastic.  By the time of the second volume, Mignola was hard at work on both the monthly Hellboy title and the Hollywood film adaptation.  He took a risk and let other teams of writers and artists take on the BPRD for a series of short stories.  As a result these tales are choppy - some brilliant, some no more than brief diversions that just serve to emphasize how strong the first story arc was.

By the last third of the book however, the BPRD have found their groove.  At this point, Mignola is back writing and Guy Davis does the artwork (Dave Stewart colours the pages).  The final story in the omnibus is the titular Plague of Frogs, a story that sets up plot-lines for years to come by introducing the frog-monsters.  And if you feel your eyes rolling around in your head at the mention of the word "frog-monsters", you're not alone.  Believe me, I was very cynical about the notion of a race of mutated frog creatures as the main baddies.  I don't really associate frogs with anything scary or supernatural, but Mignola manages to make even a innocent frog in the background of a panel really unnerving.  And by the time the frog-monsters appear, there's nothing funny about them at all.

Just to recap:

Good Frog

Bad Frog

If there's one writer that's influenced Mignola with these stories, it's H.P. Lovecraft.  Plague of Frogs is rife with cults, conspiracies and acolytes.  The crazed servants of the Ancient Gods walk among us and work tirelessly to prepare the way for their arcane masters, who will awaken before we know it.

And then we're all for it.

Mignola walks the same path as Lovecraft, albeit with less casual racism.  And that's a match made in Heaven Hell.

Walking With Zombies

And now back to our scheduled viewing.  I may have mentioned once or twice how much I love The Walking Dead (Image Comics).  Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard have created a modern classic with their ongoing story of survival in the wake of a zombie apocalypse.  On the surface, the story seems trite and cliched: "something bad" has happened - nobody knows what! - which has left the world overrun with perambulatory carnivorous cadavers and the few humans who remain must fight for their existence.

All horror fans know how that story goes: usually badly, ending with a fade-out to the credits as the zombies finally break through the shopping mall.  After 90 minutes or so of struggle and strife, the characters we've come to know and love inevitably meet their sticky ends in an all-you-can-eat zombie buffet.  Right?

Not so in The Walking Dead.  Don't get me wrong, a lot of the tried-and-tested plotpoints are present here, but this series has been running for 90+ issues.  At a rate of 1 issue a month, that means this story has been unraveling for nearly 8 years.  And it's still being published today.

Playing cowboys and Indians for real: Carl in The Walking Dead

Kirkman's elevator pitch for The Walking Dead was a "zombie movie that doesn't end" and that's what he and his co-creators have produced.  This is a story about the constant pressure of survival and how living through a zombie apocalypse affects the characters in the long-term.  It's about the cumulative psychological traumas and tragedies the main players have endured, the tough choices they've been forced to make and how it all affects them, every day.

Oh, and it's also about how the real threat to survival is other human beings, not the flesh-munching zombies of horror movie fame.

But you already knew that, right?

Cut...

Cut is a horror graphic novel from Dark Horse comics, with story by company founder Mike Richardson and Todd Herman and Al Milgrom on pencil artwork and inks respectively. The first thing you notice about this book is its size: published in the “digest” comicbook format, Cut is small enough to fit in your pocket and runs to around 115 pages.

The plot? Glad you asked:20-something Megan wakes up to find herself held prisoner in a strange abandoned house. But who – or what – has kidnapped her?

In brief, Cut is a solid but unexceptional horror story. The creative team have done a fantastic job of creating a real atmosphere of terror throughout without resorting to the Hollywood horror staples of explicit violence and gore. There's only one full page splash that I can remember, and the writer saved it up to ensure it had the most impact: unlike many comic book full page shots, the page is entirely justified. (I'm thinking here of the typical monthly DC or Marvel titles, where you only get 22 pages of story to keep you going until the next issue, and sometimes anywhere from 3-5 of those can be full page “impact” shots – they look great but are nearly always style over substance and you end up getting less bang for your buck).

Special credit has to go to the art and colours team who work their magic to create deep, moody scenes – reminiscent of Dark Horse favourite Hellboy, or British artist Kevin Walker – punctuated with a handful of brighter scenes, flashing back to before the horror began. Although it doesn't rely on cheap visual tricks, the heroine of the piece does spend the second half of the story topless, admittedly for a (flimsy) narrative reason. (For the curious amongst you, Megan takes her sweater off and hangs it out of the window in order to collect some water from the rain to sustain herself).

Ultimately Cut felt to me like it was lacking in the story department: the plot could use a bit more meat on its shambling narrative bones. On the other hand, the ending does leave you wanting more from the story which, in horror, is not always a bad thing. My problem with the book was that it all feels slightly inconsequential – and I can't make much further comment without ruining the twists of this short graphic novel...

The Dark Horse comics website offers up a 15 page preview of the book here.

Introduction

I'm starting this blog for myself as much as for anyone else to read. I want to regularly write, and regularly publish something, even if only a handful of people read this. As a big reader – meaning I love to read, and not that I'm a bit on the chubby side– I get through a fair few books, even though I'm a slow (I say thorough) reader. I also have whimsical dreams of writing my own stories sometime in the future, so I like to think a lot about what I read, what it says about me for reading it and what it says about the general mood of the reading public at the moment. Or something like that, hopefully with less pretentiousness...


In addition to being a bit of a bookworm, I've also recently become a new father. Those two things don't often go together, I know, but I'm managing to balance them for the time being. So I'm going to write about that too, as well as sharing anything interesting on the internet that I might come across, as well as discussing music and films... Maybe I'll have seen/read/heard something you haven't, and you can link or suggest to me something I'm unaware of, so there's something in it for everybody. Finally, I'm currently writing reviews for various publications, so I'll put them up on here for your perusal too.


Anyway, I have some strange reading habits. I like to think I'm an eclectic reader, with wide-ranging tastes, sampling a bit of anything that appeals in order to improve my mind but maybe really I just read any old rubbish I can find. An eccentric reader might be more accurate.


I think I have a form of literary ADD, in which I'll pick up one book whilst I'm in the middle of another. Again, not because I'm so intelligent that I can focus on multiple stories at the same time, recalling the intricacies of many plots and appreciating not just one, but several master wordsmiths at once – but more because I have a short attention span. Either way, I've currently maxed out my public library card (meaning I have 20-plus library books around the house!)


So, out of interest, here's a rough list of the books I'm currently reading:


20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (on audiobook)
Bird by Bird, a book on writing
Museum of Terror Volume 3, by Junji Ito – a horror manga anthology
Jamaican Witchcraft: The Reluctant Obeah Man
Horowitz Horror, by Antony Horowitz (what were the odds?)


They're the ones I can remember anyway. Along with this, I'm dipping into various short story collections and podcasts of old time horror radio shows. I read a lot of graphic novels/comic books, as well as horror and short stories, but I'm also interested in British legends and folklore, world mythology, local history and young adult reading. A lot, basically.


So anyway, this blog is going to be first and foremost a type of reading diary, where I can recommend or rave and rant against books I've enjoyed or detested. Apart from that, we'll see. Personally I think I'll be doing well if I make it to a 3rd post.


Welcome aboard.