is recommended to anyone with the intelligence to appreciate it.
What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower, by Margaret Killjoy
Combustion Books | $8
A clever experiment—adapting the “choose your own adventure” format for adults—What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower may be worth the minimal ($8) investment simply for the fun of it.
Whether the experiment completely succeeds, however, probably depends on the reader’s individual imagination. Author Killjoy provides little detail and the writing seldom departs from the utilitarian. Patience is also needed with the unwieldy second-person narrative required by the format. No matter what choices are made, “you”—Gregory, the protagonist—are never fully fleshed out. Adventure, emotion, battles, danger, and death are shorthanded rather than described. Gregory is allegedly a decadent sort, but merely referring to absinthe and drugs are not enough to make “you”
depraved and dissolute. Nor is the plot, no matter what turns you decide on, exactly entrancing. There’s a light veneer of steampunk, but it’s easily scratched off. What’s left is something of a mishmash of goblins, gnomes, an underground world, something of a rebellion, and lots of names with unneeded apostrophes. As for any of the permutations, one finds oneself dying rather abruptly in many cases, but that’s part of the fun of it; die and try another path. Despite its imperfections, the book and its format remain interesting enough to keep a reader exploring—which is probably the point.
BOOKS IN BRIEF
For those who like their pulp flavored with crime, the Hard Case Crime imprint has returned (thanks to Titan Books) and been re-launched. The first four novels have gloriously cheesy covers and stories to match. In Getting Off by Lawrence Block a promiscuous babe sets out to kill every man she’s had sex with. The Consummata is an unfinished Mickey Spillane novel, posthumously completed (at the late author’s request) by Max Allan Collins. A Collins solo effort, Quarry’s Ex, features his hitman hero, Quarry. Of the most interest is Christa Faust’s Choke Hold, which brings back Angel Dare, the ex-porn star turned vigilante.
A Weird Writer in Our Midst: Early Criticism of H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi (from Hippocampus Press) is about as far from the Hard Case quartet as one can get. As ignored by the literary mainstream as Lovecraft may have been in his day, his work elicited considerable response from fan writers and amateur journalists. Despite the ease of commentary the Internet now provides any reader, one yearns for the erudition of this earlier era. Of particular interest to us are letters from fans (including August Derleth and Robert Bloch) to Weird Tales.
Artist Richard A. Kirk is featured in this issue, but he’s an author too. His dark novella The Lost Machine came out last year, but hasn’t received much notice. (It is easiest to find through www.richardakirk.com.) Graced with five pages of his detailed, elegant art, the story is set in a weird (or alternative or future) world in which an unjustly sentenced school teacher survives prison and sets out to find the true criminal. Although brief, Kirk’s strange journey is well worth taking: the revelations seem to exceed the word count.
THE TASTIEST PART OF THE BRAIN, by Emily Jiang
Not your emotional center—too
messy, too gushy with hate-love
scrambles. Not your language
control—too silly, too chewy
from unsung rambles.
Perhaps your fine-tuned motor
skills—I’d like to dance, to play,
be free. Perhaps your squished
occipital lobe—I’d like to see
what you can see—
how you recognize rights
from wrongs, how you memorize
lyrics of songs, how you plan
to organize, justify, socialize
scattered synapses firing shambles.
But I prefer your corpus
collosum, that stringy-loopy fiber,
strongest in musicians, connecting right
with the other right, connecting
you with me.
RICHARD KIRK: WEIRD VISIONS, interview by Ann VanderMeer
Richard A. Kirk’s official bio describes him as “a visual artist, illustrator, and author living in Canada.” But take a closer look and you’ll see so much more. His influences are wide and varied. He takes his cue not only from other visual artists but from all creative endeavors as well as the natural world around him. Kirk’s attention to detail allows the viewer to see wondrous things in the most ordinary of objects as well as the beauty in the weird. And it is important to take a closer look, because that is when his work truly comes to life.
WT: Have you always known you would be an artist? What is your earliest memory of creating art and what did you create?
RAK: I have one piece of early artwork, a crayon drawing called “Fish” that I did in public school. Unfortunately I have no memory of making it. My earliest memory of drawing is sitting in the kitchen, in the very early morning before anyone else was up and around. I used to make a pot of tea and draw monsters on pads of cheap Manila paper. My obsessions as a kid were insects and Daleks, no doubt much to the general misery of the insect population. I can’t speak for the Daleks.
After reading Gerald Durrell I decided I basically wanted to be Gerald Durrell, and spent hours drawing imaginary zoo plans. Drawing was always a way for me to create worlds. For the longest time I clung to the idea that my future would have something to do with insects but art won the day.
When I was young, English comics were my introduction to art. Later, I discovered many of the classic illustrators such as Aubrey Beardsley and Ernest Shepard. I think my work now has such a strong connection to my love of books because of those early illustrations. It was book illustration above all else that made me want to start drawing in the first place. That is why I see such a tragedy in the current trend in cutting back on school libraries.
WT: Would you describe your workspace?
RAK: My studio has moved around the house, but for the past few years it has occupied what normal people would describe as a dining room. It contains one of my drawing tables, an old library card catalogue and atlas stand that I use to store supplies, a paper rack, way too many books for the space, and a cabinet full of found bones, skulls, fossils, and other oddities. There is also a small dog that, given half a chance, loves to sleep on my drawing table. The studio has two windows facing south and east so the light is good. It is a good place to be and central to the rest of the house, which means I can be an artist and still see my family.
WT: You work in a variety in mediums, one of them being silverpoint. Can you tell us a something about this process and why you work in it?
RAK: I discovered silverpoint when reading Patrick Woodroffe’s book A Closer Look. It seemed ideally suited to my style so I immediately investigated the technique. Essentially, it consists of drawing on a prepared ground (with a slightly toothy finish), using silver wire. I load a piece of wire into a 0.5 mechanical
