Here’s the problem. In 1933, Walt Disney adapted the classic tale of the Three Little Pigs into an animated short. It was an unexpected crossover success. Audiences loved the pigs, and loathed the wolf, who they saw as a symbol of the Depression. “Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” became a national rallying cry. Disney made some other shorts starring these characters, but somehow they didn’t make the impact the original did. His verdict: “you can’t follow pigs with pigs.”

CS Lewis follows pigs with pigs here – or to be more exact, he follows pigs with a single half-sized runt of a pig that has mange, watery eyes, and a cracked hoof.

Why does this book exist? It’s not bad. It just doesn’t make a case that it ever needed to be written. Narnia is again under the yoke of oppression, and the Pevensie children have to save it. Usually when writers re-tell the same story, they up the stakes, often to the point where it becomes ridiculous (the Rocky series eventually had Sylvester Stallone going twelve rounds against international communism). Prince Caspian does the reverse, lower the stakes. Why?

This is a 5% milk version of TLTWATW . Queen Jadis was evil incarnate, King Miraz is a unmemorable fop. Once the fate of the world hung in the balance, now we’re resolving an dispute of Narnian regency. Exciting! Caspian never seems heroic or kingly – he does nothing except blow a horn and invite the Pevensies back to Narnia, where they immediately take over and virtually evict him from his own book. Even Lewis’s imagination fails to find cruise control mode: there’s no bits of whimsical imagery like the lamppost in the forest, or the faun with the umbrella.

It didn’t have to be this way. Prince Caspian could have been its own book, like the later Narnia titles. The hooks are all there. For example, we know the Pevensie children grew to adulthood in Narnia, before returning to their own world and their childhood bodies. How did this affect them? Apparently it didn’t. They still talk and act like upper middle class British schoolchildren. Why weren’t they transformed and left alien by their experiences? Why wasn’t their return to the human world marked by misbehavior and disassociation as they struggled to adapt? There’s so much material for a story here, so why did Lewis run a repeat?

There’s two great scenes in this book. The first is the early scenes between Caspian and Dr Cornelius – it’s exciting and well-paced, the way the conspiracy unfolds little by little. The second is the chapter “Sorcery and Sudden Vengeance”, where a disgruntled dwarf tries to overthrow Miraz by bringing the spirit of Jadis back. Unusually intense and almost diabolical – moments like this are why not all Christians are comfortable with Lewis’s subject matter. “No one hates better than me.”

Two exciting moments, that hint at Lewis stretching himself as a storyteller and a thinker. The rest of the book is like a musician working the scales. In a way, the title seems to refer to the book’s own stature. It’s a Prince, but TLTWATW remains the king, and it has no enchanted horn to blow.

“One trick pony” is usually used in a disparaging way, but really, it depends on how good the trick is. Drugs are a one trick pony, but based on various after school specials I’ve seen, they’re certainly worth doing, and are probably the only thing worth doing.

Fuan no Tane is the ultimate one trick manga. It’s a barrage of ghost tales and urban legends, 3-4 pages each, with no characters, no stories, and sometimes hardly any text. Like snowflakes, none have much effect on their own, but when they come at you as a blizzard, you soon feel very cold. And addicted. It’s hard to stop reading Fuan no Tane, but I recommend it in only small doses. You can’t exactly marathon this stuff, it’s like too many dances with China White, you overdose at a certain point and your brain shuts down.

If you were raised on urban legends about men with hooks for hands and killer toilet seat spiders, you’ll feel right at home here. Some are brutal and gory, with “The Ear-Slashing Monk” being the most memorable in this category. Others have a strong element of camp. Still others bypass camp completely, and enter a Daliesque world of postmodern absurdism. “The Eyes that Seek”, for example, involves an army of detached eyeballs rolling down the highway.

Japanese humor notoriously inaccessible to Westerners. I don’t know if these ghost stories are Japanese in origin, or if Nakayama has adapted western material, but the terror impulse is probably far more universal than laughter. A lot of these are definitely creepy – although some of the cartoony ones do take the edge off the proceedings a little. It’s a great formula from a quality assurance standpoint, too. It doesn’t matter that some of the chapters fall flat, because there’s another one straight away to take the taste away.

Nakayama followed this up with Fuan no Tane Plus (aka, More of the Same™), and more recently Kouishu Radio, (aka, More of the Same™: The Samening, Electric Boogaloo). I think this might be the only trick he’s capable of.

None of which matters to an addict, of course.

This book fetishises ugliness, in both senses of the word “fetish”. It fixates upon it, and also elevates it to the level of a talisman made of vomit and putrescence. Hogg doesn’t do softness, it does rot. It doesn’t do hardness, it does blood-stained tire irons and blood-engorged extremities. It doesn’t do dryness, except for hard industrial sheet metal that scrapes your knees during oral sex. It doesn’t do wetness, it does blood, spit, mucus, and bodily fluids. Stephen King once said that being hangover gives you an uncanny ability to zero in on only the ugliest things in your surroundings. If so, Hogg‘s having the worst morning after in history. And it’s written by a legendary science fiction author.

It’s an eternal complaint: the Dear Reader betrayed. David Gemmell once described buying Michael Moorcock book, expecting gallivanting adventures with dragons and wizards, and getting a dragonless yarn about a black transvestite. He said that established writers should only write what their readers have come to expect, and all experimentation should be reserved for pen names.

Whether or not you agree, Hogg is probably Exhibit A in the prosecution’s case. I’ve never heard of someone playing against type like this, before or since. Delany’s a watchword for erudite, dense science fiction, but this is a book full of scatological atrocities. You can almost see publishers’ wilting away from revealing the author. On my edition’s cover, the words “a novel by Samuel R Delany” are printed in type so small they’re almost invisible (rendering the book an authorless curiosity that sprang forth fully formed from Sade’s third eye, or something).

The story’s pretty incidental: a young man falls in with a rough crowd and gets sodomised, violated, et cetera. Sometimes it’s been marketed as gay erotica, though there’s nothing erotic about it. The date feels like it falls somewhere in the 60s or 70s. It also feels timeless, and also placeless – where are we, exactly? Hard to say. Urban hellholes become rural hellholes. At some point we end up along the coast, and like Edgar Allen Poe found the sea’s a pretty big hellhole in its own right.

Hogg‘s a bit like the fourth story in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, mixed with whatever Jack Kerouac “wandering around raising a ruckus” story you like the best. It has some influences from older transgressive lit, and is probably old enough that it could be considered an influence to many others.

Or maybe not. The book was written in 1969, a time when stories could conceivably be censored for obscenity and public harm (and their authors sent to prison). It was a trunk novel for decades, before finally seeing publication in 1995. A shame. Hogg really belongs as part of the 1960s counterculture. It likely would have harmed Delany’s credibility among the sci fi literati (such as it was), but again, that’s what pen names are for. Let rumors circulate for years about who wrote that godawful Hogg abomination.

Besides…trying to push the boundaries of good taste in the fucking nineties? That’s like trying to make it big with rap metal in 2004. What’s shocking for the 60s isn’t so shocking next to Stokoe’s “Cows”, Aldapuerta’s The Eyes, and Palahniuk’s “Guts” (to pull three examples out of my ass). Hogg has to beat off some stiff competition, fnarr fnarr, and it comes out looking rather limp. Hogg wants to be the bleeding edge. It ends up being more of a historical curiosity, a book that can only be written about using the past tense.