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I wanted to be sure and review a romance book for Valentine’s Day. But—and I don’t mean to hurt any feelings when I say this—most romance books just put me right off. They’re either too cutesy or else too hot and heavy for my taste. The latter type are what my mother calls “bodice-rippers” and Kevin Brennan calls “naked torso” books, after the typical cover art. We will discuss this more later.

There’s nothing “wrong” with either type of book, of course. But I like to seek out the strange, the esoteric, the bizarre… something that defies easy categorization by genre.

In Love With Eleanor Rigby was exactly what I was looking for. One way I could tell this was from the reviews on Amazon, most of which are from baffled fans of “normal” romance books who aren’t sure what they just read.

Well, I can see why. It’s ostensibly about a romance between a man named Joe and a woman named Tabitha. Already, you can see where the confusion sets in. “Eleanor Rigby” is not a character, but is a reference to a song of that name by the Beatles. If you know the song, it gives some idea of the tone of the book. I didn’t know the song and only listened to it as part of my research for this review.

Anyhow, Joe loves Tabitha, and hopes that Tabitha loves him back. But Joe has a secret: he’s a recovering alcoholic, and for some time he’s reluctant to tell Tabitha this, and when he finally works up the courage to do so, it is a tense moment in their blossoming relationship.

And that, in a nutshell, is the story. It’s a short story, and you might even suggest that not much happens. That’s because it’s really all about how the story is told. In other words, it’s literary fiction. The phrasing is intricate, philosophical and rambling. Joe, the narrator, is given to over-intellectualizing, as his AA therapist frequently reminds him. At times, he calls the nature of reality into question.

This is probably why a lot of the reviewers were flummoxed. And then there is the matter of the cover, which you’ll notice I didn’t post at the top like I normally do. Well, that’s because I think it’s important to know what the book is before seeing the cover. But now we need to talk about this:

So, it’s not exactly one of the “naked torso” books, but as you can see, a more southerly portion of the anatomy is highlighted. And given that there is only a passing reference to a beach in the book, it’s fair to say that this cover, while in some sense eye-catching, does not accurately reflect what kind of book it is. It’s rather like this early poster for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

On one hand, it’s probably not a good idea to market a work of literary fiction about struggles with addiction and loneliness with a cover that looks like a sexy romp. On the other hand, everyone I know who writes literary fiction tells me it’s basically impossible to sell it, so it’s hard to blame someone for resorting to such methods. Better to have a thought-provoking book marketed like tawdry pulp than a trashy story marketed like it’s something profound, don’t you think?

Well, I think so. But, it may be that the Venn diagram of people who read serious literary fiction and people who read books with swimsuit-clad posteriors on the cover are simply two non-intersecting circles. Which can lead to misunderstandings. For example, some reviewers claimed the book is full of typos. Believe me, I have read books that were full of typos. In fact, I may have even written books that were full of typos! And I don’t think most of the oddities in this text are typos. Rather, they are deliberate attempts by the author to convey a stream-of-consciousness.

Personally, I enjoyed the book, and I sympathized with the protagonist. This may come as a shock, but I too tend to over-think things. I think anyone else who does that will be likely to enjoy this story as well. I recommend checking it out. Whether you also choose to check out the models on the cover, I leave to your discretion.

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To recap the previous episode: when we left our hero, Daniel J. Boorstin, he had just discovered that the foundations of the U.S. government were under threat from competing narratives of pseudo-events, which flood the public discourse and make getting a true understanding of political reality from the news effectively impossible.

A lesser man might have turned away at this point, unable to face any further horrors. But not Boorstin! No, he had to know it all.

Having defined the pseudo-event, Boorstin proceeds to document how every aspect of life is becoming more and more dominated by images, facsimiles, reproductions and imitations. Travel, once truly an adventurous activity, is reduced to tourist packages that offer pre-planned experiences. Celebrities have taken the place of heroes; instead of being famous for great deeds, they are famous because they are famous. Images have replaced ideals as the ultimate goal of people, organizations, and nations.

Among the many aspects of American culture that Boorstin analyzes, I want to highlight some of his thoughts on the literary industry that may be of interest to my fellow authors. For example, this remarkable passage on machine translation:

What Thomas J. Watson Jr., president of International Business Machines Corporation, calls the ‘Information Explosion’ is having an ever wider and deeper effect on the form in which we are willing to have our ideas expressed. And incidentally, it cannot fail to affect the respect we show for literary or any other kind of form. Translation, until recently, has been among the subtlest, most difficult and most respected of literary arts…

Now, in order to make available the increasing printed resources in other languages, the new data processing industry has perfected a machine translator. The Mark II machine, developed jointly by IBM and the Air Force, can take a passage of Russian and translate it into what IBM calls ‘rough but meaningful English.’ Here is a sample product of the machine when applied to a passage of Russian literary criticism:

United States appeared new translation immortal novel L.N. Tolstago ‘war and world / peace’ Truth, not all novel, buttony several fragments out of it, even so few / little, that they occupy all one typewritten page. But nonetheless this achievement. Nevertheless culture not stands / costs on place. Something translate. Something print. Truth, by opinion certain literature sceptics, translation made enough / fairly ‘oak.’

This goes on, but you get the idea. Basically, they have been working on AI literature for way longer than you thought.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as what Boorstin sees going wrong with the literary industry:

The expression ‘best-seller’ is, of course, another by-product of the Graphic Revolution. It is an Americanism (still not found in some of the best English dictionaries) which first came into use in the United States at the beginning of the present century… the word ‘seller’ in England had originally meant a person who sold; only around 1900 did the word come to mean a book (later any other item) that sold well. This subtle transference of ideas was itself interesting, for the very expression ‘best seller’ or ‘seller’ now implied that a book somehow sold itself: that sales bred more sales.

And so:

Best-sellerism has thus come to dominate the book world. Leaders in the book trade themselves often attacked it. In his Economic Survey of the Book Industry in 1931, O.H. Cheney called best-sellerism ‘an intolerable curse on the industry.’ But, he explained, there was (and there remains) a substantial commercial basis for the institution: one way to make a book a best seller is to call it one. Then many potential book buyers ‘want to join the thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of the inner circle of the readers of the book.’… A buyer going into a bookstore is apt to ask for a best-seller; even if he doesn’t, he is apt to be urged to buy a book because it is one…

…One of the most interesting features of the institution is how flimsy is the factual basis for calling any particular book a best seller. To speak of a best seller—to use the superlative to apply not to one item but to a score of items—is, of course, a logical contradiction. But the bookstores are full of ‘best sellers.’

In Boorstin’s view, basically everything is like this; manufactured and carefully-curated simulacra replacing real experiences. And how desperate are we for something that seems genuine to cut through all the public relations verbiage and artificial hype of pseudo-events?

Our hunger for crime news and sports news, then, far from showing we have lost our sense of reality, actually suggests that even in a world so flooded by pseudo-events and images of all kinds, we still know (and are intrigued by) a spontaneous event when we see one.

I’m convinced that part of the reason for the celebration of Luigi Mangione is that his crime was something unexpected and unplanned, and thus instantly attention-grabbing in a world of ads and social media memes.

There’s more—much more—but I can’t quote the whole book, now can I? After all, it would be particularly ironic to confuse the map with the territory in this, of all cases!

Suffice it to say, Boorstin saw the post-Graphic Revolution world as full of images that loom larger than the things they are meant to represent. And just as pseudo-events beget more pseudo-events, so do images beget other images, endlessly refracting until the underlying reality is a distant memory.

In other words, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, the modern world is not only faker than we suppose, it is faker than we can suppose. Everything is a shadow of a shadow of a shadow, to where even what we think of as “real” is actually only a really thick shadow.

There is only one sphere of life that Boorstin does not excoriate for its replacement of reality with image. Not because he didn’t see it—it is inconceivable that he did not—but probably just because he was too classy to mention it. Well, I like to think I run a family-friendly blog, even if that family is the Addams Family, but I simply can’t ignore this particular issue.

The topic I am thinking of is, of course, sex. Now, even in Boorstin’s day, sex and media had already intermingled to quite an extent, and it is no doubt only the good librarian’s conservative sense of propriety that kept him from mentioning Playboy etc. But modern life has seen the Sexual and Graphic Revolutions combine to bring forth some real monstrosities.

The examples are endless, but I am thinking of one particular social media controversy from last year. Someone on Twitter modified this poster for the Amazon Prime series Fallout, probably using AI to do so. The modified poster gave the central figure tighter pants and a more toned backside. The person who modified it believed the woman wasn’t eye-catching enough in the original depiction. Naturally, there was a backlash, and a resulting discussion about sexism, male gaze, etc. etc. etc.

Now, what part of this whole sad episode is fake? Haha, trick question: it’s fakery all the way down! It is a poster for a television show adapted from a video game, further modified by machine to resemble a more visually striking conception of the female form. Literally everything about it is fake, and to become emotionally invested in arguing about any aspect of it is to lose oneself in shadows to the nth power.

Indeed, image so dominates modern concepts of sex that it poses a real danger to human reproduction. Does this seem impossible? Did you ever hear the tragedy of Julodimorpha bakewelli, a species of Australian beetle whose males are so attracted to discarded beer bottles that they mate with them instead of the females of their kind? Could a similar fate befall humanity, with the proliferation of things like AI romantic partners and virtual reality erotica? I don’t know, but I think we’re trying to find out.

None of this would come as a surprise to Boorstin, who in 1962 saw a world awash in shadows and illusions. To the extent it has changed, it has been a change in degree, not in kind. Influencers may have replaced movie stars, and social media may have replaced the nightly news, but it is just a more refined version of the same problem.

So what, then, is the solution? It may be impressive that Boorstin saw and understood the danger of trends that now permeate the society you and I inhabit. But that is of no help to us, unless he can offer us some way out, some hope of finding something real to grasp.

Here is Boorstin’s closing statement. It wasn’t enough to save us in 1962, but maybe, just maybe, we can for once harness the power of the internet to promote something true. Marshall McLuhan, whom Boorstin references more than once, said that “the medium is the message.” I am praying he was wrong. We’ve got the medium, now Dr. Boorstin supplies the message:

Each of us must disenchant himself, must moderate his expectations, must prepare himself to receive messages coming in from the outside. The first step is to begin to suspect that there may be a world out there, beyond our present or future power to image or imagine. We should not worry over how to export more of the American images among which we live. We should not try to persuade others to share our illusions. We should try to reach outside our images. We should seek new ways of letting messages reach us; from our own past, from God, from the world which we may hate or think we hate. To give visas to strange and alien and outside notions… One of our grand illusions is the belief in a ‘cure’. There is no cure. There is only the opportunity for discovery. For this the New World gave us a grand, unique beginning. 

We must first awake before we can walk in the right direction. We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.

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In case you forgot, according to the Gambrel/Schoch Treaty of 2022, January 31 is Second Halloween. And since it falls on a Friday this year, I have to review something appropriate to the season.

But what would that be? I already reviewed plenty of Halloween and Halloween-adjacent books back in October. For this, I felt that something slightly different was in order. So, after some searching, I was able to scare up (ha!) this curious little volume.

If you’ve read much Lovecraft, you know he had a distinctive writing style. A style sometimes described as, “why use fewer words when more will do?” More charitably, we might say he liked to employ unusual adjectives to convey how strange and horrible many of the creatures and places he imagined were. So for instance, despite his own atheism, he would use “blasphemous” as an intensifier to describe just how thoroughly out of line with our normal rules of reality something might be. And of course, he more or less singlehandedly kept alive the use of the word “eldritch”, to the point that it is now almost synonymous with his style of horror.

The Lovecraftian mode is surprisingly seductive. Once you’ve read a couple of his stories, even if you smirk a little at how overwrought they are, you’ll likely find some of his literary mannerisms seeping into your own writing, like unhallowed shadows from the penumbra of unlighted corridors beyond time; nameless abysms swaying horribly to the piping of a damnable flute held in cacodaemoniacal claws…

See what I mean?

Osvaldo Felipe Agorarte clearly does, and has become so enchanted with HPL’s anti-lyrical prose that he has adapted famous historical documents in this manner. So for instance, the Declaration of Independence is rendered:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, but that there are dark powers beyond our understanding that seek to destroy our free will and replace it by a tyrannical rule.

And the Gettysburg Address is rewritten as:

It is for us to continue the fight against the terrors that threaten our world, to resist the madness that grips our enemies, and to ensure that our nation, under God, and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish.

(For the sake of politeness, let’s just ignore what Lovecraft’s opinions on the actual versions of either of these texts would likely have been, okay?)

Is this rewriting amusing? Yes, it is, at least to me. It’s not quite as catchy as “I pledge allegiance to Queen Fragg and her mighty state of hysteria,” but still, it makes me chuckle.

On the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily continue to be amusing after the first five or six times. It reminded me of a typical Saturday Night Live skit (at least from the days when I watched SNL, which I really haven’t done since Tina Fey stopped appearing regularly), in that it takes a mildly funny joke and carries it on way too long.

As with SNL skits, to fully flesh it out to feature length, the joke needs some sort of development. What I would have liked to see would have been something where the documents start out more or less like we know them, but keep hinting, with increasing urgency as time progresses, at the terrible forces which threaten our world. Like a good Lovecraft story, or even better, an M.R. James story, the horror needs to creep up on you gradually. If we got the feeling that Jefferson was getting vague premonitions of cosmic horror, and by the time we get to say, Calvin Coolidge, he’s really staring down the barrel of a Nyarlathotep-style apocalypse, that would be interesting. (Although it’s tough to imagine “Silent Cal” talking like Lovecraft, no matter what was going on.)

But as it is, it’s kind of a one-trick pony. Admittedly, some of the historical documents are interesting in their own right, and I’d never even heard of some of them, so it was educational in that respect. And it is illustrated with some appropriately grotesque artwork, like that seen on the cover. On the other hand, it’s set in a font that I guess is meant to be Gothic, but frankly looked like a baroque, serifed equivalent of Comic Sans, which makes it a bit of a chore to read.

All in all, it’s an interesting concept, and could be the basis for something promising, but probably isn’t worth buying at its current price, unless you are madly in love with HPL’s prose and simply can’t get enough of it.

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Imagine this: one day you are wasting time scrolling through political Twitter in an election year. Amid all the angry ranting, the stupid jokes, the obligatory posturing, the bots, the polls, etc. you see some rando post a cover of a book, saying something like, “this will explain it.”

The book looks interesting, so you make a note of it. It’s expensive on Amazon, so instead you wait to get it from the library. Meanwhile, politics continues. The election happens. A great deal of pixels are expended by people writing about the election, the transition, and the meaning of it all. Social media is the epicenter of all these different sources of opinion, competing to emit the “hottest” of all possible “takes.”

Finally, you read the book. The book is over sixty years old. Indeed, it’s older than one of the candidates in the election. Most of the media we are familiar with today did not exist when it was written. Innumerable technological and cultural changes separate the book’s era and the present day.

So you know that whatever agenda the book’s author had, it can’t possibly have had much of anything to do with the current controversies. He didn’t have any type of modern “derangement syndrome”. Any such hang-ups he may have had are entombed with him. After all, you know what happened between 1962 and today, whereas the book can ipso facto only make educated guesses.

You might expect the book to feel outdated or quaint or charmingly naive. After all, many books from these bygone eras evoke nostalgia for their time, and what American hasn’t occasionally felt wistful for decades past? On the other hand, you might expect the book to feel like a relic in another way, to be offensive, or to expound views of the world that we find at best laughable or at worst repugnant. There are certainly a lot of old books that do that, too. When you read old books, your reaction is usually, “Ah, the good old days!” or “Oh, how far we have come!”. There is also a third category, which is “<sigh>, nothing ever changes…”

The Image is different. It does occasionally evoke all three of these feelings in various places. But none of them form your dominant reaction. Instead, it’s more like…

Well, put it another way: when you read an old book you expect to know more about your own time than the author of that book. That’s not to say you’re “smarter” than the author in any way; just that you are aware of facts that they are not. You read old books, generally, to either understand Universal Truths, or else to learn something about a particular period in the past.

This Daniel J. Boorstin, though… he understands our time perfectly. And he knows us—better, methinks, than we know ourselves.

JFK was still alive. Watergate not only wasn’t a scandal yet, but the place hadn’t even been built. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were just names on a map to the average American. And the nearest thing to “social media” was fan clubs.

Yet, though he was writing in the oft-romanticized era of a supposedly more innocent America, Boorstin saw, with terrifying clarity, the shape of things to come. Like a prophet of old, he inveighs against evils that 1960s America must have seen as remote and unfathomable, but are now familiar to the citizens (prisoners?) of the internet age.

The pervasive alienation of modern life; this strange world of propaganda, manufactured controversies, of information warfare, where elections turn on social media ads, and celebrity influencers shape the course of geopolitics… this is the world that anyone my age or younger has grown up in, and which, if we are to lead happy, fulfilling lives, we must somehow navigate. Or perhaps even escape.

Of course, just as a fish cannot know what water is, having never known its absence, it is hard for us to clearly see the pseudo-world that surrounds us. That is Boorstin’s other great advantage: he knew the other world, the one that came before… and so he is well-suited to be our Virgil, guiding us through post-modernity.

I know, this seems like a tall order for a simple book. And make no mistake, I’m not saying that reading it will instantly solve all our troubles. Like the famous quote from The Twilight Zone says, it will not end the nightmare… it will only explain it.

Let’s begin, shall we?

***

Boorstin starts off innocuously enough with a definition of “pseudo-event”: i.e. a manufactured event that exists solely for the purpose of making news. The quintessential example is the press conference, when politicians and other public figures speak to reporters. Any one who has ever watched a press conference knows there is an inherent artificiality to them, and yet they remain major topics of discussion among pundits. As Boorstin puts it, “demanding more than the world can give us, we require that something be fabricated to make up for the world’s deficiency.”

Once you’ve read Boorstin’s description of pseudo-events, you start to realize that the news is full of them. On a typical day, there are far more pseudo-events than real ones in the headlines. And one pseudo-event can spawn more. A good modern example would be when President Obama, after a controversy surrounding a clumsily-worded answer to a question at a press conference, held a “beer summit” to try and smooth over hurt feelings.

Increasingly, politics has come to be dominated by those most adept at generating pseudo-events. To use one of Boorstin’s examples, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s great talent was his ability to manipulate the press–many members of which despised him–into providing breathless coverage of his flamboyant announcements of names and lists of alleged communists.

As Boorstin explains, in the era of modern media, even a politician doing nothing at all can be “news”, e.g. Senator so-and-so’s silence on a given issue can spawn a whole series of speculative articles. The entire category of news known as “current events” is completely saturated with pseudo-events that it takes a truly spectacular development for reality to break through.

Pseudo-events are one epiphenomenon of what Boorstin calls “The Graphic Revolution”: the logarithmic increase in the transmissibility of, and demand for, news. This revolution began with the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s and continues to the present day.

One consequence of the Graphic Revolution, as the name implies, is the proliferation of images. Whereas before people learned information about the world primarily through wordy descriptions, either spoken or textual, beginning in the 19th century, images could now be readily created and reproduced. This change in how information was transmitted began to slowly redefine how people perceived reality, to the point where images could actually overshadow the real thing they were meant to represent.

(It’s not billed as such, but on top of everything else The Image is a fantastic chronicle of American history. Boorstin concisely narrates the flow of major technological and cultural changes that have shaped the country’s growth.)

Boorstin gives example after example of how pseudo-events can be staged to seem more interesting to viewers on television than those witnessing the event in person (e.g., a parade for General Douglas MacArthur’s return to the United States) or how a minor comment by a senator can be blown up into a full-fledged controversy. Real events are later re-enacted for the cameras, and so the reenactment rather than the reality forms the dominant image in the public mind.

Summing up, Boorstin says that, “our ‘free market place of ideas’ is a place where people are confronted by competing pseudo-events and are allowed to judge among them.” With the rise of pseudo-events, which are neither wholly true nor wholly false, Boorstin argues, “the American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality.” Which has frightening implications for America’s democratic institutions. When a government is built on the idea of a well-informed populace, what happens when the very concept of what it means to be “well-informed” becomes blurry?

So, by now I hope you are saying to yourself, “Well, this sounds like a very intriguing book. Perhaps I shall have to see if I can acquire a copy.”

Reader, I have not finished summarizing the book yet. What I have described above is only Chapter 1.

The Image is not just about the collapse of America’s governing institutions as a result of our increasing inability to discern lies from truth. As Arthur C. Clarke would say, “nothing as trivial as that.” From here, things are going to get much weirder, much darker, and much more personal. What we’ve covered so far is like the titular play in the book The King in Yellow: where reading the seemingly-innocuous first act sucks you in, and only once your eyes fall on the opening lines of the second act do you descend irrevocably into madness.

Except, of course, in reverse. Obviously, I think that reading The Image is actually a path to sanity, to making sense of an increasingly mad world. Then again, Hildred Castaigne would say the same thing about the play The King in Yellow, so it really is all a question of trust.

I make a pact with you, dear reader: you check out the free sample on Amazon, and see if you’re intrigued enough to want to read the whole thing. Then come back here in, oh, I don’t know–shall we say two weeks? Two weeks it is! And there will be no more shadows between us, only truth, as exists between master and apprentice blogger and reader.

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This is a classic novel about an envoy to a planet known as Winter, a world as cold as the name suggests and populated by ambisexual humanoids. Naturally, this results in quite a culture shock for the envoy, Genly Ai, who has to deal with understanding their alien nature as well as the intricate political machinations that take place between the various nations of the planet. His primary guide to understanding this is a politician named Estraven. (Hilariously, auto-correct wants to change this to “estrogen.”)

The first half of the book is lyrical, mystical, and well-nigh incomprehensible, at least to me. I had trouble keeping track of who was who, what was what, and generally following what was going on. Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it. Actually, I enjoyed it quite a lot, in the way one can enjoy a beautiful piece of music.

But then in the second half, things started to coalesce. Estraven, in particular, becomes a phenomenally well-developed character who starts dispensing pearls of wisdom like this:

“To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here ‘all roads lead to Mishnory.’ To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road…

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

What an absolutely killer insight! It’s the sort of gem that makes me so glad I read the book, and make it a perfect entry for Vintage Science-Fiction Month. This is why we observe it every January; it’s an opportunity to look up classic books like this and find what it was that made the foundational works of the genre so striking to generations of readers.

Estraven and Genly are eventually forced to work together to make a nightmarish 80 day trek across a frozen wasteland. (I highly recommend reading this book on a snowy winter night if possible.)

These scenes, while maybe a little repetitive, were still very effective. The two characters, having nothing else to do, learn a lot about each other and themselves. By the end of the journey, I absolutely loved Estraven, who is really one of the most fully-realized ‘alien’ characters I can recall. Which makes the way the story ends all the more powerful.

The book is remarkable for the way it depicts a truly alien world. I only know of a few modern authors–A.C. Flory and Lorinda Taylor, to name names–who have attempted anything like this. And no wonder, because it’s very hard to do, but done well, it makes for a remarkable, dream-like experience to read. They say the value of reading is that it lets you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Well, in this case, it’s more like 800 miles in an androgynous alien’s skis. And that, my friends, is what science-fiction is all about.

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Look at that cover! It’s sharp, and scary, and eye-catching. I knew I had to read this the minute I saw it. The title is intriguing too, calling to mind Brutal Doom, the mod that made the infamously gory and violent video game Doom even more gory and violent. I found the whole composition so arresting that I decided to buy it on the spot.

As it turns out, this is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style of book, and (again evoking Doom, albeit with considerably less gratuitous carnage) it is largely set on an abandoned moon base which has been overrun by creatures known as Saturmeks: alien entities highly reminiscent of Daleks with chainsaws.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself! The protagonist of the book is Hilary Hils, a research assistant to Prof. Vyvian Wylie. Hils is accidentally teleported forward in time to the moon, where a research base has been taken over by the aforementioned Saturmeks.

And that’s where you come in: from there, it’s up to you to decide how Hils will proceed. Will you simply sit quietly and wait for Prof. Wylie to fix the machine and rescue you? Or will you start exploring the moonbase, and even try to stop the hideous aliens? The choice is yours, and which ending you get depends on how many points you have, which are acquired periodically at certain critical moments in the story. As a hint: risk-taking and boldness are rewarded. I mean, who takes part in an adventure story just so they can make the “safe” choice?

It’s a fun and surprisingly gripping experience, and I found myself chuckling as I eagerly hopped from page to page to see what the consequences of my decisions would be. It combines the interactivity of a video game with the added demands on the imagination required for reading. It wouldn’t be a bad choice as a gift for a kid in the 10-12 age range who doesn’t typically enjoy reading the books assigned in school. From what I’ve heard, there are a lot of them these days.

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One of the rules for writers, laid down somewhere in the fragments of an ancient Instagram post by the mad literary agent Abdul Al-Hazred, is that a writer should give their audience what they expect. A steady hand at the tiller and no surprises, that’s what readers want! And if a writer must venture outside their typical comfort zone, at least they should do it under a pseudonym, so people don’t accidentally get exposed to something they didn’t expect.

How powerful is this rule? So powerful that even the richest and perhaps most (in)famous living author conforms to it.

Naturally, because I am a rebel without a clue, I like it when people break this rule. So I was delighted when one of my favorite authors decided to do exactly that in this book.

Travailing Through Time is a very un-Bertoccian book. Usually, his stories are about millennials trying to navigate modernity, usually with a heavy dose of ironic detachment and witty pop-cultural references.

Travailing Through Time is different: it’s about hardworking farmers in colonial New England. Simple, God-fearing people, who have no time to spare for ironic detachment. As for cultural references, well, they basically begin and end with the Bible.

In short, it’s a picture of a people and a place totally different from us and ours. Having established this, Bertocci then proceeds to introduce, in a clever way, a glimpse of a more modern sensibility. Only a hint, nothing more.

Both the drama and the humor of the story come from the obvious questions: what would people of the past make of us? When we look back in history, it’s too easy for the people to appear to us as caricatures. Which of course is also how we would appear to them. It takes work to really know and understand a person, or a people, or a place.

And since the New Year is always a time for reflection, this seems like a good time to ponder the questions raised in Bertocci’s ingenious little story. What do we really know about the past? And what would the past make of us? Leopold von Ranke said “All ages are equidistant from eternity.” We mustn’t think of ourselves as somehow “better” than the people of another time just because we are more recent. It’s 2025, after all.

All these big ideas, Bertocci packs into a witty and entertaining short story. A perfect choice for starting the new year off the right way.

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As usual, I am using the last Friday of the year to do a recap of all the book reviews I wrote in the past twelve months

In January I reviewed Periapsis Christmas Vol. 1, a collection of short sci-fi stories based around the theme of Christmas. Then, for Vintage Science-Fiction Month, I reviewed the classic Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. Then I took on the cozy mystery Whole Latte Death by Chris J. Pike and M.D. Cooper. Then another vintage sci-fi read was in order, the sweeping and depressing A Canticle for Leibowitz.

For February I reviewed Post-Modern Romance by Nick Ryder, a truly bizarre book. Next up was an Adam Bertocci take on the day of romance, Crappy Valentine’s Day. I followed that up with a review of Wodehouse’s hilarious short story Honeysuckle Cottage and then another of my favorite authors, Zachary Shatzer’s comedy Sorcerers Doomed.

March began with the trippy and weird Roger Zelazny book The Dream Master, followed by the science fantasy The Last Ancestor by Alexander Hellene. This was followed by C. Litka’s tale of tropical seafaring romance, The Prisoner of Cimlye and the humorous short story Ghosted by H.L. Burke.

April started off with The Snow Queen of Somerville High by Adam Bertocci and then Zachary Shatzer’s wonderful allegory Dog Wearing a Bowler Hat. Then I wrapped up the month with another Litka adventure, Passage to Jarpara.

I began May with Junkyard by Lindsey Buroker, followed by Reality Check by Dave McCreery. Then came time for a book by one of our favorites here at Ruined Chapel: Carrie Rubin’s Broken Hope. I finished off the month with Fear Extinction by T.S Becker.

June started with my review of the weird western His Ragged Company by Rance D. Denton, followed by the romance/crime thriller Casino Queen by Cara Bertoia. Then it was time for another medical thriller, this time with a historical twist, in The Third Man, by Geoffrey Cooper. Then I ended Waterloo month with a memoir by one of Napoleon’s soldiers.

July began with a familiar duo: first, Zachary Shatzer’s comedic political thriller Puppet Dance, then Adam Bertocci’s The ‘I Want’ Song. Then I indulged myself just a bit more with another Napoleonic history book.

For August, I reviewed the cryptid horror story The Killer Catfish of Cape Cod by Bill Russo, followed by the sci-fi classic The Joy Makers by James Gunn. Next up was a history of the Library of Congress Card Catalog. I finished up the month with Ex Marks the Spot, mayhap one of Adam Bertocci’s finest books, followed by Carrie Rubin’s Malignant Assumptions.

September began with the supernatural crime thriller The Valley Walker by T.W. Dittmer and the Arthurian-Gothic The Governess of Greenmere by Paul Leone. Then, once Autumn officially began, I reviewed the Autumnal cozy mystery Harvest and Haunt by Eva Belle

October is a month that has this little-known holiday in it. I try to keep this to myself, in my quiet, unassuming way, but it’s called Halloween. So, I reviewed some books that fit the spirit of the month. First up was Knee-Deep in the Dead by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver, a novelization of the video game Doom. Then came The Thing from HR, a brilliant Lovecraftian horror-comedy by Roy M. Griffis. Then, to put Halloween in its proper historical context, I reviewed a vintage Halloween reader, and then, when I couldn’t choose just one Halloween-related thing to review, I picked a whole slew of them.

November began with a book called The Samhain Visitors by Paul Rix, which is not cheating by including a Halloween story in November, no matter what anyone else says. The following week, I reviewed Zachary Shatzer’s collection of short stories, Mayor of Turtle Town. Then, I tackled a work of significant non-fiction, Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, which explains at least half of everything that’s wrong with the modern world. Then, to lighten the mood, I finished the month with Bertocci’s Watching Wonderful.

For December, I reviewed the supernatural post-apocalyptic romance When Her World Went Away by Alexis L. Carroll and the sci-fi political thriller Vote for AIDAN by Tanner Howsden.

I wish you all a very Happy New Year. I’ve got some good books lined up to review for 2025; I think you’re going to enjoy them. 🙂

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Ah, US Presidential elections! An opportunity for citizens to civilly debate their differences and then settle on a candidate who best reflects the values of the nation, all in the spirit of good fellowship and totally without inflaming irreconcilable ideological and cultural divisions.

So, if you’re sad that the fun of a presidential election has just passed, and won’t come round again for another four years, have I got good news for you! The book we are reviewing today is about the 2036 election. The premise: one of the candidates for the Democratic nomination is an MIT-designed Artificial Intelligence named AIDAN.

AIDAN, the creation of one Dr. Isaac Shipley, has already established itself as a competent CEO, now aims to unseat the favorite for the nomination, the temperamental Senator Quinn Albrecht, and position itself as the top challenger to incumbent president Sarah Mincetti.

Naturally, while AIDAN is a bit awkward at first, it quickly gains ground due to the fact that it is a distributed intelligence network that can literally start raising money to address a problem within minutes of being told it exists. Typical politicians’ “I feel your pain”-style bromides can hardly compete with that.

But the world of politics isn’t so straightforward as that. There are all sorts of behind-the-scenes plots, conspiracies, blackmail threats and double-crosses going on that make the campaign far more difficult. And the vulnerabilities of human and machine alike come into play: where exactly is the machine drawing its data from? And as for the human candidates; why are they continuing to fight never-ending political battles when all they really want to do is go home to their loved ones?

The book reminded me of some of the better Hitchcock films, in that it’s a fast-paced thriller, yet also seems to have a certain wink-to-the-audience quality that gives it a lighthearted tone. I mean, virtually every dialogue between the Republican president and her wife is laden with cheesy sexual innuendos. Maybe you disagree, but I can’t help feeling like that’s supposed to be funny.

That said, the book raises some very profound and interesting questions politics and AI, and while this might be controversial, I think it is quite probable that something like this will happen in the future. (“God help us, in the future.”) I doubt they’ll bother to actually give the AI a body, though. The debates will just look like when Watson was on Jeopardy! Why, the very fact this book exists tells you that the idea is in the air. Science fiction is so often the precursor of science fact…

It’s an entertaining, thought-provoking, mildly disturbing, and often campy take on politics. Rather like The McLaughlin Group.

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This is a post-apocalyptic survival story with supernatural romance elements. Neither of these are genres I particularly like, but this book pleasantly surprised me. Part of what makes it work is that not a lot of time is spent on explaining why the apocalypse occurs. One minute everything is fine, then bam! It’s… not fine. Everything is destroyed and monsters are coming out of the Earth to kill everyone.

The story follows a woman named Sairha, and a man named Sven whom she had just met prior to the apocalypse. The couple, as well as Sairha’s friend Cassandra, start out on a trek across the wasteland. Along the way, they meet other survivors, as well as plenty of monsters and other dangers.

It’s pretty much what you would expect from a post-apocalyptic story, but what makes it work is how the monsters are kept out of sight for much of the time. They are most threatening as a lurking menace, hinted at without knowing exactly what they are.

What also makes the story effective is how the tension is built. More than once, the party goes to some sinister location, such as an abandoned store, and, after a nerve-racking buildup, nothing particularly bad happens. This has the effect of ratcheting up the fear so that when something does finally happen, it’s like an explosion of energy. “Hours of boredom punctuated by a few seconds of terror” as the saying goes. Not that the story is boring, of course, but you can see how the endless hiking across a wasteland is going to wear down the characters’ patience.

There are a few decisions the characters make that I questioned, but as I have said before, it wouldn’t be a horror story if everybody made the right choices. All told, if you like dark supernatural fiction with just a bit of romance, this is an excellent choice.