Aurealis #135

by Stephen Higgins (Editor)

  The film is famous for its creepy children. They have no navels because they erupt from external wound-like wombs. These strange, murderous dwarf kids are physical manifestations of one woman’s mental illness… or are they?

  The renowned and disturbing plot underlies those funny memes using road signs that say ‘Look out for children’. If any of the Brood are about, you’d be wise to steer clear.

  It’s an impressive book but not an easy read. Stretching to over 660 pages, the discussion explores the themes and inspirations of the plot as well as detailing every aspect of the writing, casting, filming and responses. There are copious footnotes and abundant illustrations, as well as eleven appendices. As a reference to The Brood and to the horror genre in film, it is invaluable.

  The book is terribly fascinating. The dedicated attention to the movie mimics an obsessive mind, and just reading the film title on the spine is enough to spook anyone who experienced the movie back in its groundbreaking day.

  Author Stephen R Bissette is an American comic artist, editor and publisher best known for the DC Comics series Swamp Thing in the 1980s. A devotee of the horror genre, Bissette provides a lasting testament to the genius of Cronenberg’s movie.

  Piranesi

  by Susanna Clarke

  Bloomsbury Publishing

  Review by Belinda Brady

  Piranesi’s home is unusual. It’s a labyrinth full of statues, staircases, clouds and ever-changing tides. His one and only roommate, the Other, meets with him twice a week to converse, the two hidden away in their separate corners of the house on the days in-between.

  Piranesi’s days are filled with reading old journal entries, making observations or visiting the statues that adorn the halls. He’s completely alone. Until the day he comes across a message written in chalk on the pavement. The Other is adamant he didn’t write it—so who on earth did? Piranesi must find out and, soon enough, a wicked trail of mystery and deception begins to unfold.

  Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is the latest release from this award-winning author. Clarke has dumped the book’s namesake in a strange world, one he was at home in until his past comes back to find him. This story starts slowly, and some readers may struggle with this, but it’s worth persevering as things eventually take off in a gripping direction.

  Piranesi, at first, is a hard character to warm to. His eagerness to please the Other, along with his acceptance of his odd situation, is frustrating. But when his story makes a sharp turn into the unknown, the reader finally gets just why Piranesi is the way he is.

  The story’s other characters—from the Other, Laurence Arne-Sayle to Valentine Ketterley—are an intriguing lot. Their differing personalities range from borderline psychotic and deceptive to caring and helpful, each a key player in the Piranesi mystery.

  The conclusion is a bit of a head scratcher; some will love the openness of it, others not so much.

  Clarke is a magnificent writer. Her words are perfectly descriptive, their flow strong and easy to follow. The journal entries are enjoyable and will appeal to the reader looking for more insight into this truly unique tale.

  A Court of Thorns and Roses

  A Court of Thorns and Roses #1

  by Sarah J Maas

  Bloomsbury Publishing

  Review by Clare Rhoden

  Feyre hunts the borderlands that separate faeries from humans. People occupy a fragment of the country, while the fae courts share the rest.

  When Feyre kills the wrong wolf—a fae warrior in beast form—she must make amends. Lord Tamlin descends to steal her away into faerie, where Feyre discovers the quarrelsome faerie courts suffer from a magical blight. She joins her captor to help both the faerie and the human world.

  In this first instalment of the wildly popular Thorns and Roses series, the high-stakes scenario unfolds hesitantly. A kindly Tamlin magics Feyre’s family to riches, undermining Feyre’s promise to her dying mother. None of the fae mourns their wolfish friend of several centuries and, before long, Feyre and Tamlin entangle romantically.

  A modern echo of Beauty and the Beast, the story borrows from other strands such as Cinderella. Feyre was miserable in the human world, providing for her destitute father and older sisters. In the Spring Court of faerie, she can now indulge her love of painting along with imaginative sex with Tamlin, attended by clumsy dialogue.

  Characterisation is slow. Several immortal candidates compete for the role of the beast. Feyre morphs from a strong hunter into a lady of the fae court, and back to human.

  The story’s quirks work with the readability of the novel, and its enormous pull. Finish this book and see if you’re not immediately keen to read the next. See how the fractured strands can be woven together, and how the characters inhabit into their roles.

  An attention-grabbing start, this book will suit the younger end of YA readers.

  Anthropocene Rag

  by Alex Irvine

  Tor.com

  Review by Damien Lawardorn

  Anthropocene Rag is a post-apocalyptic journey into the past. Alex Irvine’s latest book is a hallucinogenic road trip where American history and folklore collide in a bizarre world of impossibilities and shifting realities.

  The story begins with a Willy Wonka riff, as Prospector Ed, an AI growing towards self-awareness, delivers Golden Tickets to six vagrant souls from across a wasteland America, inviting them to the nirvana of Monument City. The resulting voyages converge, but each is entirely unique until then, ranging from a car journey through the northern states to a riverboat ride into the heart of the country.

  While each protagonist is distinct, the sheer weight of weirdness and the shared spotlight in such a short novel leave most lacking depth.

  At every turn, the characters meet with the surreal. Irvine’s vision is one where the world has been overrun by nano-scale robots controlled by an AI, the Boom, which remakes the world at will. At the same time, the Boom is trying to make sense of itself by recreating and remixing humanity’s narratives. From Henry Ford to Paul Bunyan, Br’er Rabbit to Sacagawea, you’re left wondering what fragment of Americana will next appear in Irvine’s patchwork.

  The book is as strange as it is absorbing.

  The narrator is an aware observer, commenting on the goings-on and describing them poetically. The prose style takes some getting used to for its sometimes poetic, sometimes philosophical eccentricity, yet Irvine’s cadence is effective at lulling the reader and carrying them through a maelstrom of oddness.

  Readers well-versed in American folklore will find particular joy in Anthropocene Rag, as the book is plump with Easter eggs. Others will find the adventure and Irvine’s world mesmerising in their kaleidoscopic range.

  A Dance with Fate

  Warrior Bards #2

  by Juliet Marillier

  Pan Macmillan

  Review by Clare Rhoden

  An exhibition bout between highly skilled trainees ends in serious injury. Dau, the son of a powerful house, has lost his sight and must return home, a worthless dependant.

  As compensation, his family exacts a year’s bonded servitude from the culprit, Liobhan, who farewells her life as a warrior bard of the Isle of Swans and becomes their serf. In the company of strangers and old enemies, Liobhan and Dau journey to the manor at Oakhill.

  Here, nothing is right. Darkness stalks the little community.

  Dau’s family persecuted him before he fled from home, now he’s back on the receiving end of cruelty. His father, the nominal lord of the manor, is under the control of Dau’s sadistic brother whose repulsive crimes shake the faerie and human worlds.

  Liobhan never ceases trying to save Dau, brought to his lowest. With romance arising between the two loyal friends, this is pitch perfect YA romance. Meanwhile, the faerie queen’s consort—Liobhan’s brother—struggles to balance duty and wish. He must keep the fae safe from the wickedness of Oakhill Manor and intervene against the human sadist.

  Some readers may baulk at the Old
Irish style magical poetry, but these passages are easily skipped in favour of the tale.

  Entering Juliet Marillier’s sensuous world of ancient Celtic culture is most rewarding. This second instalment in her Warrior Bards series builds on the earlier Blackthorn and Grim novels. Fans will rejoice at a richer world.

  A Dance with Fate can stand alone, but you might develop a craving for the rest of Marillier’s books. The novel is a delight for readers of high-fantasy: appealing characters, seamless world-building, and deft plotting with a Celtic twist.

  The Lost City

  Omte Origins #1

  by Amanda Hocking

  Pan Macmillan

  Review by Clare Rhoden

  Ulla Tulin is a troll, and at least half of the Omte tribe because she’s tall and broad with an asymmetric face and mismatched eyes. But she’s also a TOMB: a ‘troll of mixed blood’, with uncertain status in society. Abandoned as an infant, she wants to learn about her background.

  The few clues lead to the secretive Omte royalty.

  This expanding of an urban fantasy delves into notions of belonging alongside experiences of being shut out. The troll world intersects with modern life, with the four major tribes co-existing with humans, mostly in Alaska, Canada and Sweden. A generous appendix explains troll society, culture, laws and language, contributing to the novel’s solid world-building.

  Modern trolls stick to their own distinct tribes, scorning children of diverse troll parents as mixed bloods. Half-human folk, like Ulla’s friend Panik, are low on the social scale.

  A vacation job at the Mimirin archives offers Ulla a chance to discover more, but moving to the hidden city of Merella presents more problems than it solves. She must cope with stowaway Hanna, a 12-year-old, and help amnesiac Eliana survive the streets.

  Ulla faces walls of silence. Redacted records and untrustworthy adults frustrate her search for information about her parents. The quest moves slowly, with more discoveries to arrive in the series sequels.

  The child-of-mystery tale is an evergreen staple of young adult fantasy. In this first instalment of her new Omte Origin series, Amanda Hocking builds on her successful Trylle books to plunge the reader into Ulla’s affairs.

  YA readers will enjoy Ulla’s exploration of her heritage as she works out how she fits into the world.

  Guardian of the Sky Realms

  by Gerry Huntman

  Meerkat Press

  Review by Chris Foster

  Gerry Huntman’s foray into the middle-grade market is a divine flight of fantasy.

  The book starts in Western Sydney where Maree Webster, an ‘almost emo’, decides to steal a famous painting from an art gallery. Why? Because she’s obsessed with it, the depiction of a wounded angel triggering a criminal side previously unknown to herself. As soon as she breaks in, she finds not only the painting waiting for her, but a stranger who will completely turn her life upside down.

  The pace of Guardian is blistering, hurling Maree headlong into a new world she never believed in before. It’s filled with angels, demons and, most worrying for her, rebirth. This speed doesn’t at first translate to page turning. The story has something fantastical occur, followed by Maree often accepting without too much thought, despite she’s meant to be an edgy teen with few friends. There’s a discrepancy between flow of information and speed with which it’s dealt.

  Once the concepts of the world settle in the reader’s mind, the story is easier to absorb and, by halfway, pages really start turning of their own accord. The texture of the book is a curiosity, pages a little different in material than usual.

  The book is a pure adrenaline hit. If it’s not a chase scene, it’s a fight, a trapped dungeon escape, a hospital break in... The action never stops. Even Henry Lawson’s grave is casts as a location, a delightful nod to Australian literature while demons kidnap a main character.

  At its core, Guardian focuses on the transition from childhood to adulthood, told through the scope of angelic rebirth. It soars on feathered wings with the message that, while one may inherit expectations, a person can still remain true to themselves.

  The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories

  by Eugen Bacon

  Meerkat Press

  Review by Maddison Stoff

  Woop Woop is a town defined by its obscurity, an Australian slang term with sister-phrases in the UK and the USA referencing an imaginary locale that’s not just far away from where you are, but less developed too. It’s not a utopia or a dystopia, just an absence made into a place. But to call this book ‘the road to nowhere’, would’ve had an adverse effect, because everywhere that looks like nowhere is another person’s world, which is really what the stories in this new collection seem to be about.

  Many of the characters in The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories are immigrants who have accidently arrived in this liminal space in pursuit of something that is unclear they’ve found. The subtext seems to point out how pervasive that space actually is. Almost everywhere can be Woop Woop for someone, and the truth of that alongside the context of the word itself are social mechanisms privileged people have constructed to deliberately obscure the cruelties of gender, class, place and race, that really choose the lives that we’re allowed to live, and the challenges that define them.

  Africa and Rome are referenced throughout the book, two ‘cradles of civilisation’ treated by the western world in very different ways, with reincarnation (and methods of divination generally) used to link characters back to their ancestors, their histories, or future worlds directly, an interesting decision for a set of largely static narratives linked by a phrase defined by timelessness. The book is like an ouroboros (an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail) structurally, a journey without an end, densely packed with layered subtext that begs re-reading afterwards.

  Hopefully, the book can change some reader’s mind about the people, or the spaces, they’d discard as marginal without further thought.

  The Lukewarm Dead

  by Greg Guerin

  Greg Guerin

  Review by Julia Scheib

  Greg Guerin’s horror novella The Lukewarm Dead follows the author’s publication of several pieces of short fiction. Spanning over two decades and several locations across the globe, it tells a story of obsession, revenge and violence through the eyes of a man who journeys from a place of luxury and comfort to the darkest corners of the human experience.

  Befitting the format, the author employs a sharp, to-the-point style of narration that takes you on a non-stop ride from start to finish. Neither the reader nor protagonist Ralph Makki get a moment of respite, as we follow Makki on his self-imposed mission to track down Alfie Soda and claim the drug that promises immortality for himself. Guerin does a great job at mapping out Makki’s journey from selfish motivation to the seemingly noble goal of putting an end to Soda’s crimes.

  But just as Makki’s travels take him to places of great violence and tragedy, the reader gets to follow his inner journey deeper and deeper into his opponent’s madness.

  Throughout the years Makki encounters several interesting characters from all over the world though they rarely feature for more than a few pages, apart from Valerie Cotes who also suffers from the effects of Soda’s drug but deals with it in a very different way from Makki. Together with Soda, these three demonstrate diverging methods of coping with violence, addiction and personal trauma.

  I found both Valerie and Soda to be fascinating characters and would have appreciated learning more about their past and inner thoughts.

  The lynchpin of the story, the drug itself, receives a well-explained point of origin and delivers a frightful picture of immortality as a curse, not a gift. I can recommend this novella to fans of speculative and horror fiction. It makes for a compelling read that will take you on a short but intense journey.

  Back to Contents

  Next Issue

  Aurealis appears ten times a year.

  Every mon
th except January and December.

  Featuring great fiction from Eneasz Brodski, Helena Purkis and Seth Robinson.

  Plus fantastic reviews (in more ways than one), news and art. Non-fiction includes Part 2 of Darren Nash’s memoir about his time at Gollanz, Amy Laurens on mermaids as metaphor in speculative fiction, and Claire Fitzpatrick explores the role of art in building a vision of the future. Plus… the concluding instalment of Conquist by Dirk Strasser. That’s a lot of plusses!

  Aurealis #136 will be out in November!

  Back to Contents

  Submissions to Aurealis

  Aurealis is open to submissions as follows:

  Submissions from Australian and New Zealand writers:

  1 February–30 September 2020

  Submissions from anyone anywhere:

  1 July–31 July 2021

  Subscribers are fast-tracked through the assessment process.

  Please read our Submissions Guidelines carefully before submitting.

  Tip of month

  All stories have a beginning, middle and end—even short ones.

  Submissions Manager: Cas Le Nevez

  Cas Le Nevez is an avid reader, reviewer and blogger of predominantly independently published books. She has spent the last eight years as part of the publishing, editing and reading online world and has enjoyed exploring the new and varied stories. She started reading with Aurealis back in 2014 and became the Submissions Manager in 2016.