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!
