Fantastic Metropolis

Books

• The Twist, Malignos, Frenzetta and Dead Girls, Richard Calder
  Of the four novels I read by Calder this year, I liked Malignos the best, most likely because I have a soft spot for twisted quest fantasy, but you really can’t go wrong with Calder’s frenzied, decadent take on genre tropes, whether he takes on the western (The Twist), sf (Dead Girls), fantasy (Malignos), or an admixture of sf and fantasy (Frenzetta).
• Weirdmonger, D.F. Lewis
  When it comes to modern weird fiction in the Lovecraftian sense of the term, D. F. Lewis and Thomas Ligotti are at the top of the heap. This collection is dense, labyrinthine, eerie, and utterly unique.
• The Ice Harvest, Scott Phillips
• Ravelling and Los Angeles, Peter Moore Smith
  Los Angeles, Smith’s most recent novel (just published, actually) is a gritty, surreal take on L.A. noir. Ravelling (which was nominated for an Edgar), Smith’s first novel, is ok, but suffers from serious narrative lag in places and is almost derailed by an overwrought and over the top antagionist.
• Game, Conrad Williams
  A tweaked, taut piece of weird noir. Excellent.
• The Brotherhood of Mutilation, Brian Evenson
  The protagonist loses a hand during an “infiltration.” After falling into a deep depression he is contacted by representatives of a religious order who believe he is uniquely qualified to take on their case. Where some writers would have gone into splatterland, Evenson uses controlled, minimalist prose to turn out a savage religious satire disguised as an existential detective story.
• The Nightmare Factory and My Work Is Not Yet Done, Thomas Ligotti
  I’d read The Nightmare Factory before, but went back through it this year. I’d not read My Work Is Not Yet Done and wasn’t entirely prepared for the shift in style. Having spent some time with it, I’ve found it’s grown on me quite a bit.
• Nemonymous 2 and 4
• Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan
• Sinai Tapestry, Edward Whittemore
• When Gravity Fails, George Alec Effinger
• The Heisenburg Mutation and Other Transformations, Steve Redwood
• Things That Never Were, Matthew Rossi
  It’s hard not to lapse into hyperbole when talking about Rossi’s stuff. Rossi takes ideas that most would bloat into a novel (Doc Holiday as the Fisher King, various conspiracies about the Great Old Ones, the idea that the colonization of North America was an attempt by the occultists of the day to get their hands on a vein of untapped spiritual energy, and so on…), condenses them into concise, intense essays and moves on. That Things… is his first collection… bloody hell.