When you judge a book by its cover, you’ve got to be open to the chance of a mistrial. Phyl-Undhu’s title made me think it would be another attempt to stick electrodes on Lovecraft’s corpse and make him jump and dance for a few moments. Instead I got an extremely dense, detailed and scary story, with an excellent ending.

The story’s about a virtual-reality videogame that seems to take over peoples’ lives. Not through hypnosis or any sort of conventional addiction, but by being fascinating, confusing, and unsolvable.

None of the characters are sure how to beat it, they only know that they have to find “Phyl-Undhu”. The game is described as a massive environment that – like Stephen King’s Midworld – is both alien and very familiar. I liked Land’s invocation of apocalyptic size. That’s another nice touch often missed in horror stories about electronic games – a huge game like Skyrim can sometimes trick you into thinking it goes on forever, and that idea has a certain eerie power.

Playing the game occupies one corner of the story. The other corners are filled with philosophical fluff from Nick Land’s head, such as transhumanity, solipsism, and the “Fermi Paradox” (which questions why, in a universe replete with life’s building blocks, we’ve never seen signs of it anywhere except Earth). Many of these elements play into the larger story about the game, but in a way that doesn’t slow the momentum or drag things down.

The ending came and went, and it took a few moments for the full implications to sink in. I won’t spoil it, but it’s very, very good. Nick Land understands that a story’s end should NOT be the end, that it should take up residence in your mind and keep you thinking long after the pages go quiet.

I’m not very familiar with Nick Land, only knowing him as an “alt philosophy” person in the same category as Mencius Moldbug and Nick Bostrom. This is his first overt fictional work (as far as I know), although nothing he does can really be classified easily. In this case “futuristic philosophical horror” seems the closest fit, but it’s still a bad one. You’ll have to read for yourself.

It’s times like these that I remember The Matrix Online.

Back in the day, The Matrix was the shit. Yes, nothing says high quality like fecal matter with a definite article, but the movie lives up to hype. Say what you will about Keanu’s acting, or the apparent plot holes (how does Cypher get into the Matrix, why can’t Agent Smith “hack” more bullets into his gun, etc), the Matrix kicks ass and induces excitement deep in my pyloric valve.

The trouble with success is that it can leave you unprepared for subsequent failure. Four years later, we were watching confused critics struggle with the overlong (and unsatisfying) The Matrix Reloaded. Most of them missed the boat with the first movie, and they were anxious not to seem like out-of-touch old fogeys a second time. The glowing reviews for a mediocre sequel must have struck a chord of “we can do no wrong” in the Wachowskis’ heads, and so they plunged ahead with some very questionable media ventures.

The third, final, and shit awful Matrix movie left a lot plot points unexplained, but that was okay, we were told, because the story would continue with The Matrix Online PC MMO. It probably seemed like genius at the time. You’d play in an interactive world of “red-pilled” humans, with the story of Zion and Machine City and the Merovingian continuing on around you – and you could be an active participant, if you liked. It was going to be the wave of the future,  films and videogames becoming an inseparable braid.

It launched. It flopped. And five years later, it was cancelled. At a time where World of Warcraft had ten million subscribers, TMO’s player base had dwindled to just five hundred active accounts. What went wrong?

1. They got Monolith Productions to create the game. I’ve been playing Monolith games since 1997 (not continuously, there were some bathroom breaks), and I speak with authority when I say they’re the most inconsistent company on earth. Blood is good. Claw is good. Get Medieval is bad. Shogo is bad. Blood II is bad. Gruntz is good. Sanity is bad. No-One Lives Forever is good. Aliens versus Predator 2 is good. No One Lives Forever II is bad. Tron 2.0 is good. Contract JACK is bad. FEAR is good. Condemned is bad. And so on. It’s like someone’s tossing a coin.

2. The Matrix Online, by most accounts, falls into the bad column. I haven’t played it, but people tell me that it’s like a spiritual descendant of the two sequel movies – glossy, superficially well put together, but cold, unfocused, and unengaging. Apparently the game had bugs right until the very end. It’s normal for MMOs to launch with bugs. But TMO still looked like an alpha, right up until someone pulled the plug.

It’s an interesting study in the difference between games and movies. The Matrix Online was a bust, and that marked the last time anyone ever made a videogame based off the Matrix. It seems crazy. The Matrix franchise is tailor made for videogame treatment. Many games now copy the Matrix‘s distinctive visual style by default. But with games, you only get one shot.

Meanwhile, the Wachowski’s are sitting on an ever-growing pile of box office bombs, and yet they’ve received a $175 million budget for their upcoming movie. Hollywood still hasn’t caught up to the fact that The Matrix was a fluke and the Wachowskis will probably never do anything worthwhile ever again.

Slinking between genres and hiding in the cracks of the Dewey Decimal System is Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath. It has 13 stories. None of them straightforward, and all of them hard to classify. Whether they’re fantasy or horror or something else is up for debate – the point is, they don’t suck.

“Beatrice” is a steampunk romance featuring a man and a woman who are in love with (respectively) an airship and a steam locomotive. Tidbeck tweaks preconceptions by giving the male and female leads an utterly platonic relationship: it’s the machines that are the love interests. It’s difficult for a human to have a lover that needs oil changes, but the absurd premise doesn’t get in the way of the poignant ending.

“Pyret” is a brilliant piece of forged history that reminds of Bigfoot mythology combined with Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Though it’s written in a deliberately scholarly tone, it packs lots of emotional heft as we learn of a Swedish mythological creature that might not be mythological. Tidbeck has a talent for evoking pity and sympathy for the alien and monstrous.

“Jagannath” is a Noah’s ark story with a critical extra ingredient – the boat has a personality. In a desolate future, a couple of humans (or creatures that are similar to humans) must survive by travelling inside the belly of a gigantic “mother” that roams the barely-habitable landscape, looking for food. Again, a strange premise that the reader accepts uncritically on the strength of the writing.

There’s some shorter stories – some are less elaborate than others, but all of them are well conceived. “Cloudberry Jam” features a woman growing a child inside an empty jam tin. “Herr Cederberg” is about a man who wants to be a bumblebee. JG Ballard isn’t far from one’s mind when reading some of these – Tidbeck loves weirdos who get vindicated at the end.

Jagannath’s stories are screwy and weird, but they’re also disciplined exercises in storytelling efficiency. You can’t always see where a story’s going at first, but you quickly learn to relax, because you’re in good hands.