The European Review of Speculative Fiction

Book Review: Peacefire

European Review of Speculative Fiction

Andor Bochenkov


Title: Peacefire

Author: Amber Bird


Peacefire opens with a bang and never lets go. Amber Bird’s skewed take on cyberpunk drags the reader through a queered up, near future landscape of one potential dystopia waiting for us around the corner. Breezy and light in tone, it could be read as young adult or adult fiction; but Bird takes the themes of cyberpunk – high tech, low life – to a new and sometimes enlightening place. She focuses on the roots of dystopia: the disintegration of family, the loss of identity and privacy, the erosion of moral choice in a consumer culture.

Written from a female hacker’s point of view, Bird stays realistic about her character’s limitations both social and physical. Much of the book takes place on a couch, with the narrator focused on the arduous and, at times pointless, process of information gathering, coding and security intrusion. Forget what you know about tough men with electrodes stapled to their foreheads making instant cyberchoices which condemn the world. This book shines light on the demented concept of cyberpunk’s iconic macho loner. Bird shows instead a family struggling with slow motion disaster and tasting every repercussion of choices they’ve made or having lost agency, that were made for them by prior generations.

She dwells on moral agency, the thrill of the long hunt and the necessary interconnectedness of being a real person, making her cyberpunk as much a genre criticism as an adventure story.  One part morality tale, one part queer re-vision of the universe, three dashes of crazy plot twists and some romance, this book could well have been Pride, Prejudice and Global Conspiracy if Lizzie had a genderless sibling, way too much computer hardware and access to unlimited cat videos. If you aren’t queer, neuro-atypical, versed in fighting the Man or otherwise used to the weird wild universe of everyone who isn’t walking around with lots of power and privilege, then this novel might be a soft entry into the critical rejection of what starts as mansplaining and ends with the deaths of continents.

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Book Review: Monstrumfuhrer

European Review of Speculative Fiction

Andor Bochenkov


Title: Monstrumfuhrer

Author: Edward M Erdelac


Sometimes there’s a literary conceit that seems obvious but has never been done before: Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies or Iron Sky, the Nazis hiding on the moon. Edward M Erdelac takes the Frankenstein myth and imagines the Nazis under Joseph Mengele gained access to reanimating the dead. A novel about Nazi undead supersoldiers could have been a rousing B movie style pulp adventure. This is not that book. This is a soul rending Holocaust narrative meticulously researched where the body horror and desecration of Frankenstein are echoed and amplified by the reality of Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz. Monstrumfuhrer uses the justifiably grotesque process of violently raising the unwilling dead to play out the visceral cruelty and unthinkable debasement of real-life death camps.

Erdelac raises Auschwitz from the lonely bones of its present state to the living breathing circus of horrors it once was. Using the famous Mengele twin experiments as a starting place to explore man’s inhumanity to man and then extrapolates from the tangible horrors of known experiments to the suddenly plausible violations that resulted in The Creature. Just as the original novel exposed Doctor Frankenstein as the real monster, Erdelac exposes Mengele as an abomination, a perversion of both pride and intellectual pursuit. In effect he puts the notion of science for science’s sake on trial.

This reviewer happens to have an advanced degree in history with a focus on genocide. As such, Erdelac faced a much more discerning reader: the willing suspension of disbelief is that much harder when you know how the Krema worked and how ghastly the camps were. To his credit and to our horror, Monstrumfuhrer captures the sinister malice of camp life, heaping brutality upon brutality. Mindnumbing would be a good description of the text precisely because it properly catches the essence of ghetto life, camp life, the fickle fate of partisans behind enemy lines and the ultimate chaos that comes at war’s end. You can taste the ash of human flesh as it rises on the stale wind.

Nor does Erdelac spare his characters: The Creature is a thing of menace and hatred, a self-interested and amoral creature whose might give shim the right to violate others as he pleases. In his broken hero Jotham we find a child old before he was young, disfigured by the needs of survival and murdered in soul while his body remains. Around him are children less fortunate and less sane. The Romani and Sinti called the Holocaust the Porajmos, the Great Devouring. Erdelac pays them apt tribute as well as tipping his hat to gothic literature and winking at Dracula in how he manages the gypsy camp and the tensions between ethnic victims at Auschwitz.

As a horror story this novel excels. As a way to tackle the Holocaust with enough mental distance to handle the unspeakable dread of human truth, this book surprises with its intimacy and accuracy. It serves the same purpose as Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic, allowing the reader to step into the shocking unthinkable world of a death camp without losing a sense of self. There’s a story there too, a plot and its trappings that keep the tale going. These are almost irrelevant to what it achieves by simply taking a supernatural tale of desecration and turning it on its head.

Mary Shelly was supposedly challenged to tell the scariest story possible and she came up with Frankenstein and his creature. What Erdelac honours her memory by showing readers that we created something Nth times more terrifying through hatred, nationalism and an unwillingness to get along with our fellow humans. This could have been set in Kampuchea (Cambodia) or Rwanda or even Ancient Melos which fell to Athenian genocide. The story remains the same. By linking it to Mengele, the hideous butcher of so many innocents, he couples one sociopathic physician with another, linking Shelly to her future Europe and asking the reader to consider how we arrived at the Nazis in the 1930s. In 1818, when her manuscript saw print, already there were inklings of what a modern age might do to persons bent on evil. Monstrumfuhrer then meditates on that evil showing that while humanity had jumped forward a century in technology, it had learned no more of compassion or justice.

Book Review: Redemptor

European Review of Speculative Fiction

Andor Bochenkov


Title: Valducan Series – Redemptor

Author: Seth Skorkowsky


Seth Skorkowsky’s fourth outing with the Valducan knights promises to be a lighter more action-oriented adventure. Redemptorintroduces Vatican demon hunters aptly named Paladins who run a collision course with the disfigured corpus of the emotionally maimed Valducans. All seems clear: the Valducans and their professional rivals have demons meddling with human affairs in South America and as they give chase inevitable mayhem will result. But Redemptorraises the stakes, taking the Valducan universe to a Lovecraftian level of divine indifference. If the prior books explored the soul breaking hunger of demons and angels, of the slow corruption that both hunters and prey experience, this novel provides a breezy cheerful trapdoor to existential hell itself.

At the open, the reader staggers from grotesque corruption of human life to the next, stalking behind the hunters as they seek to prevent a major demon incursion. It takes all they have to simply fight this agent of perversion to a standstill. It’s an enduring theme of Skorkowsky’s work that in the pursuit of free will for the innocent, the tainted and the blessed alike lose themselves to forces both divine and amoral. The weapon Redemptoritself proves to be a conceit one step beyond this, a cosmic horror that eclipses that battle. In a heartbeat the book’s primary antagonist subsumes that cluster of evil almost effortlessly.

What hope do a group of hunters have against something so inexorable and vast? It’s the question to punches holes in the moral floor, putting the book into freefall. Suddenly Skorkowsky’s heart-warming inclusion of families and children, mentors and students, mutates into a sinister race against dread fate. All those vulnerable souls, all that innocent flesh amply exposed to the unloving unreasoning force of an extinction event personified. That little adventure story so full of pulp and pace becomes a kind of farce where strength of arms, even purity of soul, mean almost nothing.

Do the Valducans prevail? It’s worth a read to find out. To suffer through the bruises, broken bones and deaths to get something akin to closure. Readers won’t get a satisfying end because Redemptorhas obliterated that option. In a universe capable of such casual negation and cruelty there can be no end on a human scale. We begin to question the threads of human existence, to wonder if all this struggle has value. One could argue that’s the point of horror as a literary form: to present our struggles and question what matters. The Valducans have an answer that may surprise the innocent and jaded alike.

Book Review: Bound

European Review of Speculative Fiction

Andor Bochenkov


Title: Bound

Author: Alan Baxter


Anyone reading Bound by Alan Baxter would recognize it as an Aussie book five paragraphs in. Oz goes full throttle from the moment you arrive – the animals are there to kill you, the beaches boast waves big enough to drown the Prime Minister and the sun will roast you alive (they have monuments for the hapless many who succumbed – usually water fountains for added irony). That’s Australia and that’s Bound. It starts with a punch and never lets up. Every character is there to kill you, every scene will drown you in tragedy and suspense and the world itself has enough cruelty to burn you down to your skeleton.

Plotwise the book takes the reader down the rabbit hole to a world where magic not only exists but subverts humanity in various ways – we are not only low on the food chain but the use of magic itself tends to remove us from our humanity. It’s an almost Lovecraftian conceit which combined with the Australian landscape which comes alive and tries to murder you translates into a grimdark plunge into sex, madness, combat, betrayal and the occasional murder / snacking on a human. It gets dark from there and then darker still until we’ve got old gods fighting new ones and an incarnation of the Narns that should curdle your blood walking free in the suddenly less kind world.

In a way the actual character and plot are secondary to the world Baxter paints. What he’s introduced us to is a very brutal universe where humanity lives in dangerous ignorance while corrupt powers collide in a bid for power and control. In that world any character can be explored and one suspects Baxter will do so in subsequent books. In such a universe the only sane men are those who fight and whose violent demarcation of their boundaries and limits define their humanity. Bound serves up several examples of that struggle. Both villain and hero alike claw their way through Baxter’s cruel cosmos – failure leads to extinction, survival leads to evolution and perhaps to extinction of a different sort. No one exits the book unscathed neither in body nor soul. Read it at your peril, because the novel has bite and it will like its plagued world, leave some proper scars.

Book Review: Valducan Series

European Review of Speculative Fiction

Andor Bochenkov


Title: Valducan Series – Dämoren, Hounacier, Ibenus

Author: Seth Skorkowsky






Book Review: Grayshade

European Review of Speculative Fiction

Andor Bochenkov


Title: Grayshade

Author: Gregory Wilson

Sometimes a book turns out better than it has any right to. Somehow Grayshade, which starts as a genre comforting spin on gritty fantasy and feels like a shared world built by gamers, turns into something more, something intriguing and seductive. Titled after the narrator, a religiously driven killer, author Gregory Wilson takes his unreliable narrator through the wringer and out to a new place beyond the reader’s expectations. When you forget the author and fully give in to the verisimilitude of the worldbuilding, you know you’ve got a winner.

Wilson paints his wider world with spare references to places beyond the ken of Grayshade, the fanatic assassin who begins to question his purpose and more impotently begins to suffer. Wilson’s an English professor and it shows – his allusions to classical literature are many and well placed. Shades of the blind Tiresias who finally sees echo as Grayshade goes from murder to doubt to potential protector. More than anything else, this fast paced adventure evolves in its finessed transformation of the narrator. “Like Flowers for Algernon” or “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones” Wilson wraps the revelatory and morally important nature of his main character’s journey in a great story.

We ache for Grayshade as he learns about the world outside him, not just geographically beyond the little city where his cult reigns supreme but beyond his mental walls. Wilson keeps the hints spare and action flowing; he does not ever sacrifice a scene for exposition. So there’s a mystery here for the reader to solve, a set of breadcrumbs set out like tiny clues and embedded Easter Eggs that make the process of getting to the denouement much sweeter. Plus, it’s just plain fun. What should be a shady guy (literary pun intended by Wilson?) who “learns his lesson” and becomes one of the good / not so shady guys becomes a timely study in the price of fanaticism and the burden of violent faith. Look for the book and be prepared to wait for the sequel. Grayshade will get under your skin.

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