Horror and science fiction are the two genres that forked away from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. That story contained elements of both, but the forward-thinking optimism of science fiction warred against the regressive atavism of horror, and the styles went their separate ways.
Some artists have wondered whether the genres are destined to combine again someday. What if the end product of science is horror? What if our increasing body of scientific knowledge is a Malthusian trap destined to destroy us? Pierre and Marie Curie discovered radium at the turn of the century. They thought they had found something benign and interesting – further developments produced a weapon that blasted 200,000 people to dust. We now live in an age of robotics and genomics – many dice are in the air, and who knows where they’ll land. While we wait, we might get a forewarning in the form of art. Certainly Frankenstein seems to have predicted a few things.
Hellstar Remina is a one-volume manga that Junji Ito created in 2006 that serves as a marriage of science fiction and horror set in a near-future earth. A strange planet has been discovered in the night sky, and it is on collision course with Earth. As panicking mobs tear cities apart, a group of people make a stand against the cosmic darkness filling the sky and the man-made darkness engulfing the the world below.
Remina isn’t as scary as Uzumaki or as revolting as Gyo, but it moves at a blistering pace, and if the story’s developments sometimes don’t make sense, at least you’re not given enough time to think about them. Without exaggerating, as much happens in Remina‘s one volume as happens in Uzumaki‘s three. Impressively, character development isn’t totally perfunctory, with a lot of cultists and greedy industrialists and whatnot. The end of the world means an end to consequences, and Ito documents mankind’s pathology to the full.
Remina is Ito’s most advanced work from an artistic standpoint. Buildings topple like dominoes, blast overpressure waves scatter crowds of people, and tsunamis engulf landscapes. There’s so much complicated and difficult art here, and all of it is rendered in Ito’s signature “organic” style. You’re a little scared to touch this guy’s drawings, his linework seems to be made of squirming bacteria rather than ink.
The bonus story “Army of One” is a welcome addition to the volume. A mysterious lunatic is stitching dead bodies together, and to make it worse. Very spooky and cool. Don’t waste time thinking about the ending – obviously not even Ito knows what it means.
Ito is a fan of sci-fi from way back…I’ve heard that his first creative effort was an abandoned SF novel in the style of Sakyo Komatsu. Hellstar Remina isn’t his best work, but it’s arguably the last 100% good thing he did for his fans, and a crazy ride to remember by any standard. Ito would soon lose his fastball and start creating boring Ray Bradbury ripoffs like Black Paradox. But for now, doomsday looms.
When reading a favoured author I feel a sensation of comfy familiarity – like I’m putting on much-worn, much-loved jacket. I don’t think I’d ever feel that about Dennis Cooper, even if he did become a favoured author. This is a collection of short prose pieces that can’t really be classified at all. The style and format changes constantly. Some pieces are short stories, others take the format of conversations or letters, others are metafictional and are presented via transcribed live performances, etc.
The book ends with an interview with the author and a list of his influences. This reads not as an afterword but as a continuation of the rest of the book. No doubt if he’d included his grocery list, it would also have seemed like a part of the book.
The quality is as unpredictable as the writing, but there are two very good moments in this collection. The first one is “The Guro Artist”, about a pederastic lunatic who kidnaps a boy with “an ass too exquisite to waste its whole life squeezing out shits” and surgically remakes him into a living anime character. It goes for only three pages but is as disturbing and horrible as anything I’ve read.
Following straight after is “The Anal-Retentive Line Editor” a series of letters to a gay erotica writer from a magazine editor from hell (or maybe Sodom). (“…my big dick [Bland, de rigueur. Perhaps ‘gigantic,’ ‘monster,’ ‘humongous’? You could also indicate whether it is circumcised or not. Is the dick leaking seminal fluid? If so, that would add some pizzazz]“). One of the longest things in the book but far and away the funniest.
The other stories I can take or leave. A comparison to Burroughs seems obligatory, but only because of the gay sex – the actual prose is more redolent of authors like Palahniuk. There’s some disquietening stuff in here, but much of it is adulterated with comedy, and your default expression while reading is one of amused horror.
“Ugly Man” is about a man with a debilitating disease that renders him hideous to the eye. He copes by sleeping with lots of male prostitutes. “The Brainiacs” is about a kid deciding to become a terrorist. Being a jihadist on a holy war doesn’t make you immune from being a loser who gets picked on.
The longer works, “Anal-Retentive” aside, are not very interesting. The opening story “Jerk” feels like reading Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, a basic idea made into a very long tale, and your boredom rises with the body count. “Oliver Twink” is the same. It occupies a ton of pages and doesn’t really pay for its keep. “Three Boys Who Thought Experimental Fiction Was For Pussies” has lots of gay innuendo, but I found it boring.
If you want good, discerning fiction…well, I’m afraid Dennis Cooper doesn’t much care what you want. This collection is what it is. There are no rules, and no limits. Reading it makes me feel like a windcock blown every way but loose.
Byzantium was my favourite book in the world for a while. It’s a dense and well-researched epic about 10th century monk Aidan, and his journey to deliver the Book of Kells to the emperor of Constantinople. Every other historical thriller seems fake next to it. I don’t like slash and hack Conan the Barbarian stories starring historical people (Conn Iggulden, etc.). Byzantium feels more authentic and real. Not that I’d know whether it actually is, of course, but if it’s a deception then it was good enough to fool me, and maybe it will be good enough to fool you.
Byzantium has a putative main character, but a lot of the focus is spent on the setting and world, with the characters sometimes only wending a barely noticeable passage through it. Several worlds, in this case. Aidan journey takes him from Scandinavia to the Bosphorus to the Middle-East, to rags to riches to ruin.
Aidan is unworldly, but he has courage and faith. Plenty of the latter, in fact. Byzantium is the tale of a man facing the perils of the world with a cross around his neck. In a sense, the main character isn’t Aidan but Aidan’s faith. His candle against the dark.
Main characters don’t always survive.
Byzantium is gripping from beginning to end, but the real paydirt is its scenes of spiritual desolation and internal misery. As disaster piles on disaster, Aidan feels a wrenching abandonment from his god and savior. Few books manage to describe a crisis of faith this well. Aidan’s ideals are no match for the reality of the world he lives in, and eventually all he has is a doxastic cynicism. Wolves sometimes hide in the sacristy. Every hope can be a false one, even the hope of death. And when man makes a plan, God laughs.
I should advise that this is a slow book. There’s lots of GRRM-esque scenes of courtly intrigue, and lots of scenes with the purpose of elaborating small details in the, well, Byzantine plot. Some of them might bore at first, but if you re-read the book, these quieter scenes are the ones you’ll find most fascinating. There are a couple of rousing battles, but Lawhead comes from the “less is more” school. If you want characters who fight bandits every couple of pages like a D&D game, Conn Iggulden and David Gemmell might be more for you.
Byzantium is great, but it falls short of perfect. Fourteen years later, I notice Persian flaws that I didn’t see before. Lawhead gives Aidan a love interest, realises he has nothing for her to do, and writes her out of the story. The pacing is uneven: with the big final showdown having Lawhead racing around like a shop clerk five minutes before closing time.
Nevertheless, Byzantium is truly special. Lawhead has revisited this basic story a couple of times (Patrick, The Iron Lance), but the first blade from the mould cuts the deepest. Definitely the first thing to check out by this author, although The Song of Albion isn’t far behind.
