Book Review | Kill Baxter by Charlie Human

The world has been massively unappreciative of sixteen-year-old Baxter Zevcenko. His bloodline may be a combination of ancient Boer mystic and giant shape-shifting crow, and he may have won an inter-dimensional battle and saved the world, but does anyone care? No.

Instead he's packed off to Hexpoort, a magical training school that's part reformatory, part military school, and just like Hogwarts (except with sex, drugs, and better internet access). The problem is that Baxter sucks at magic. He's also desperately attempting to control his new ability to dreamwalk, all the while being singled out by the school's resident bully, who just so happens to be the Chosen One.

But when the school comes under attack, Baxter needs to forget all that and step into action. The only way is joining forces with his favourite recovering alcoholic of a supernatural bounty hunter, Ronin, to try and save the world from the apocalypse. Again.

***

The antidote to Harry Potter is back in Charlie Human's bawdy new novel: a lively elaboration of the mad as pants brand of South African urban fantasy advanced in Apocalypse Now Now which, whilst thrilling, makes some of the same mistakes its predecessor did.

Kill Baxter kicks off a matter of months on from the apocalyptic conclusion of Human's debut. Our sixteen year old protagonist may have saved the world, however his heroics haven't made a lick of a difference to his unlikely life.

By resolving to be a better person, Baxter tries to take matters into his own hands, but it isn't easy to be decent when you're rolling with Ronin:

"You cured yet? I could wait while you knock one out in the bushes."
"Thanks, but I'm OK," I say with a sarcastic smile. "Besides, nobody is apparently ever cured of addiction. Only in remission."
The bounty hunter has become a closer friend than I could ever have anticipated. Thanks largely to the fact that he helped me rescue Esme. He's the only one that I can really talk to about all the strange creeping, crawling, screeching, roaring things that cling to Cape Town's underbelly. Plus he always has drugs and alcohol. (p.11)

Luckily, drugs and alcohol aren't Baxter's major malfunction. Instead, he's hoping to be rid of his reliance on lies and the like. Fat chance of that, though.

Book Review | The Three by Sarah Lotz

The world is stunned when four commuter planes crash within hours of each other on different continents. Facing global panic, officials are under pressure to find the causes. With terrorist attacks and environmental factors ruled out, there doesn't appear to be a correlation between the crashes, except that in three of the four air disasters a child survivor is found in the wreckage.

Dubbed The Three by the international press, the children all exhibit disturbing behavioural problems, presumably caused by the horror they lived through and the unrelenting press attention. This attention becomes more than just intrusive when a rapture cult led by a charismatic evangelical minister insists that the survivors are three of the four harbingers of the apocalypse. The Three are forced to go into hiding, but as the children's behaviour becomes increasingly disturbing, even their guardians begin to question their miraculous survival...

***

Before the Frankfurt Book Fair a few years ago, a partial manuscript of The Three was sent to a selection of editors. A perfect storm of offers followed, and less than a day later, a substantial six figure sum from the Hodder & Stoughton coffers proved sufficient to secure the company Sarah Lotz's phenomenal novel. On the strength of an excerpt alone, this was practically unprecedented, especially for an author absent a track record to trade on.

But that, as a matter of fact, isn't entirely accurate: though The Three is the first book to bear her name in such a prominent place outside of South Africa, Lotz has been around the block and back—in the publishing business, that is. In the past, she's worked with her daughter Savannah on the Deadlands saga; she's one of three writers behind Helena S. Paige's pseudonymous Choose Your Own Erotica novels; The Three, however, has most in common with the scathing urban horror Lotz and Louis Greenberg collaborated on as S. L. Grey: not enjoyable novels, no—the events the Downside descents document being altogether too terrible to take pleasure from—but blerrie good books, to be sure. As, in its way, is Lotz's latest.

A horror novel with a hell of a high-concept, The Three is a nightmarish indictment of contemporary culture in much the same way The Mall and The Ward were. Instead of demonstrating the darker side of capitalism or the health system, however, here, Lotz sets her sights on the religious right—in particular the way some folks use faith to advance their own agendas.

Book Review | The New Girl by S. L. Grey

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Don't mess with the creepy new girl

Ryan Devlin, a predator with a past, has been forced to take a job as a handyman at an exclusive private school, Crossley College. He's losing his battle to suppress his growing fascination with a new girl who seems to have a strange effect on the children around her.

Tara Marais fills her empty days by volunteering at Crossley's library. Tara is desperate, but unable, to have a baby of her own, so she makes Reborns — eerily lifelike newborn dolls. She's delighted when she receives a commission from the mysterious Vader Batiss, but horrified when she sees the photograph of the baby she's been asked to create. Still, she agrees to Batiss's strange contract, unaware of the consequences if she fails to deliver the doll on time.

Both Tara and Ryan are being drawn into a terrifying scheme — one that will have an impact on every pupil at Crossley College...

***

Over the years, upside citizens have lived in blissful ignorance of the deeply weird world beneath their feet, where "good inculcation" awaits at the hitherto unheard-of Academy whilst an impossible Mall provides "a pleasureland of tastes and styles." All this, plus "solid justice, a primo bureaucracy, and excellent modification and termination at the Wards." (p.30) That's hardly the half of all that downside has to offer, either... though I dare say you and I wouldn't want anything to do with any of its trademark madness.

Inevitably, however, a few browns — that's us — have stumbled into the dark passages of this subterranean pseudo-civilisation in the process of searching for something, like Dan and Rhoda did a kid. Others, like last year's Josh and Lisa, have been drawn there, and invariably detained. But never before have downside citizens dared to come up, up and away into the light of day.

In The New Girl, the third in a loose series of insanely nightmarish horror novels by S. L. Grey — which is to say the open pseudonym shared by South African authors Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg — that's about to change, because the sinister community is recruiting. Among them, some have a hunger for new blood, new knowledge, primo new products to repackage and pass on to the Mall's shoppers... and where better to look than at school?

At the outset of Grey's new novel, both Tara and Ryan — two of our three perspective characters — are employed at Crossley College. As part of a concerted effort to at least appear interested in her brat of a stepson, Tara volunteers at the campus library Martin has never yet frequented. Ryan, on the other hand, is the janitor. Painfully estranged from his wife and daughter, he hopes to show them that he deserves a second chance. Thing of it is, Ryan's ex suspects him of abusing Alice; she, at least, wants nothing to do with him, no matter how long he can hold down a reasonably responsible job.

Both Ryan and Tara are soon struck by Crossley College's newest student, namely Jane:

Tara's first through is that the kid's mother should be shot — poor mite is asking to be bullied; Tara's almost certain that her hair is dyed. It's that peculiar bile shade that results when wannabe-platinum brunettes get the peroxide mix wrong. And there's something off about her school uniform, her frayed blazer is a darker shade than Crossley's regulation baby-shit colour, and her skirt is too large for her small frame; the stitching showing in the seams as if it's homemade. (p.12)

Jane's an odd-looking sort, to be sure, but her appearance isn't even the strangest thing about her. The other kids — up to and including the usual bullies — flat-out refuse to have anything to do with her, and some of the teachers seem intimidated too.

For the time being, suffice it to say that Ryan's interest in Jane is hardly healthy. As "something dark starts uncoiling inside him," (p.41) he's drawn almost inexorably towards her. Luckily, he hasn't forgotten what he's working towards... though what he'll do when he finds out that his family has all but forgotten him is anyone's guess.

Tara, meanwhile, takes pity on the poor kid, in large part because of the hellish year she's had herself:

She has to face it. If it wasn't for that ill-fated pregnancy, she wouldn't be trapped here. She'd be back in New Jersey, or possibly teaching in another state, praying that the school administrators didn't dig too deeply into her background (she is, after all, just one Google click away from being found out). Still, she can't afford regrets, and in any case there's something about this place that's got to her, squirmed its way under her skin. It's not the city itself; she's still struggling to get a handle on its aura of suppressed violence, clogged highways, paranoid security estates and sprawling townships. She's not sure what it is, suspects it's because there's so much need here. [...] Kids like Jane, for instance. Staying here helping needy kids like her, well, it would be a way of doing penance for what's gone before, wouldn't it? (p.79)

What's gone before is something we learn later, something which adds a tragic element to Tara's tale, and factors in to her oddball hobby: baking fake babies, or rather Reborn dolls. She's designed so many of these uncannily lifelike infants of late that she's had to start selling them, so when a client called Vander Batiss asks to buy a living dead doll — stitched shut at the lips and the like — Tara is taken aback, but the money's too good to turn down.

Needless to say, The New Girl is not a novel that trades in nice things. Never mind the sugar and spice, Grey's latest takes in paedophilia, brainwashing, slavery, pass-the-buck parenting and the corruption of innocent children by adults in positions of power. It's all desperately unpleasant, and for the first time since this previously scenic series started, I found myself wishing for something resembling respite.

It's not that Grey goes too far. Though The New Girl's darkness is undeniably darker, having to endlessly one-up what's come before is a difficult position horror authors all too often find themselves in; I won't hold that against this novel. A more potent problem is that the lightness that leavened these traumatic fantasies in the past is all but absent, despite The New Girl taking place in our world.

If you want to blame anyone, blame the school principles [...] willing to sell their souls and their children for some seriously good money. Or blame the teachers, blame the parents, blame society. Blame fucking capitalism; you may as well bash your head against a brick wall. (p.276)

Grey's sick sense of humour is still in there somewhere, and the satire — directed towards the education system in this instance — is characteristically sharp. But I cared not all for The New Girl's nasty characters. One of our protagonists is a child predator; surely I need say no more about him than this. The other may be more relatable, but Tara is so passive and self-pitying that I felt at best indifferent about whatever fate awaited her.

To return to my reviews of the previous books in the Downside series, "The Mall made an immediate impact, harrowing off the bat and darkly hearty thereafter. But more than a year on, what's remained with me is its cutting criticism of consumerism; its self-aware skewering of today's culture of consumption." The Ward, in turn, "embiggened this nightmarish scenario brilliantly, introducing downside more quickly than before and giving readers a longer look at its larger infrastructure," specifically that of the healthcare industry.

It's great that Grey refuses to simply repeat the aforementioned formula ad nauseum — the decision to delay and delay our return downside is I wise one, I think — unfortunately what's upside is even less alluring than the malignant modification wards and subversive superstores readers of this series have explored before, and nowhere near as novel. There remain reasons to recommend The New Girl — it's well paced, brutally barbed and surprisingly satisfying at the absolute last — but it is, I fear, the least in the Downside series so far.

***

The New Girl
by S. L. Grey

UK Publication: October 2013, Corvus

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Book Review | Apocalypse Now Now by Charlie Human

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Baxter Zevcenko's life is pretty sweet. As the 16-year-old kingpin of the Spider, his smut-peddling schoolyard syndicate, he's making a name for himself as an up-and-coming entrepreneur. Profits are on the rise, the other gangs are staying out of his business, and he's going out with Esme, the girl of his dreams.

But when Esme gets kidnapped, and all the clues point towards strange forces at work, things start to get seriously weird. The only man drunk enough to help is a bearded, booze-soaked, supernatural bounty hunter that goes by the name of Jackson 'Jackie' Ronin.

Plunged into the increasingly bizarre landscape of Cape Town's supernatural underworld, Baxter and Ronin team up to save Esme. On a journey that takes them through the realms of impossibility, they must face every conceivable nightmare to get her back, including the odd brush with the Apocalypse.

***

Baxter Zevcenko has worked hard to get where he's gotten. He has good friends, great entrepreneurial expectations, a gorgeous girlfriend — name of Esmé — and if the Spider has a head, it's him.

The Spider, by the by, is a schoolyard syndicate of porn brokers in indirect competition with the two larger gangs that operate at Westridge High. Things between the Form and the Nice Time Kids are coming to a head, however, and Baxter believes the resulting rise in violence will be bad for business:

One student getting stabbed would be inconvenient. A gang war could be the death knell for [the Spider]. Lockers would be searched, pupils would be questioned, parents would be summoned, and there are just too many trails leading to us. (p.12)

Really, Baxter has no choice but to intervene — or so he sees it.

He sets out, in any event, to engineer a seemingly impossible peace. And credit to the kid, he nearly succeeds. But while his mind is mired in machinations of the Machiavellian kind, Esmé goes missing... and to make matters worse, all signs point to her having been kidnapped by the Mountain Killer: a serial murderer who has made his name in the Cape Town area by carving the all-seeing eye — the very occult icon Baxter has been dreaming of recently — into the foreheads of his twelve (going on thirteen) victims.

Which just goes to show: when you've got it good, what you really have is that much more to lose.

If you were thinking all this must represent rock bottom for our poor protagonist, you couldn't be more wrong, because there's a very real possibility that Baxter is in fact the Mountain Killer. A possibility Sergeant Schoeman, "the Michelin man of the South African police force," (p.60) treats very seriously indeed.

Add to his incessant dreams of death and his close ties to at least two of the Mountain Killer's victims the fact that Baxter has a family history of mental maladies: he sees a psychiatrist himself, whilst his baby brother Rafe is mostly mute and his Grandpa Zev believes with every fibre of his weakening being that giant crows are out to get him.

Fact is, though, they are. Or at the very least they were. But now it looks like they're rather more interested in our man... and giant crows are far from the only evil he needs to deal with.

So it is that Baxter finds himself swept up in the seedy "supernatural ecosystem" (p.112) that debut author Charlie Human superimposes upon his rendition of sunny South Africa. The existence of the Hidden Ones might well catch readers off guard, particularly considering how abruptly this becomes the book's foremost focus, but it comes as no surprise to the possibly homicidal anti-hero at the darkly fantastic heart of Apocalypse Now Now:

I've been bathed in the warm glow of supernatural fantasies ever since I can remember. The fairy tales my parents read me as a kid, TV, video games, it all kinda feels like they've been preparing me for this moment. It feels somehow natural and the other world, the one with taxes, life insurance, twenty leave days a year, cancer, and the realisation that you're never, ever going to be a celebrity, is the shadow, the fantasy and the delusion. The world is as I always intuited it to be; weird, fractured and full of monsters. (p.116)

Monsters Baxter will have to handle if he has a hope in hell of getting Esmé back, assuming he hasn't already killed her himself. To that end, he pilfers profits from his porn business to pay for protection from a bearded, booze-soaked bounty hunter: Ronin in both name and nature. Together, they literally lay waste to Cape Town — not that it's the prettiest of places to begin with. Here's Baxter on what is practically his back yard:

It smells like wet dog and puke. One thing I love about the canal is its honesty; like a sick, swollen artery beneath the Botox of suburbs. The homeless was here listening to the sounds of rich people frolicking in their garden jacuzzis. Through the windows you can see lawyers watching TV or bankers furtively looking at PornTube, while drunks have sex in the long grass that borders the canal. I pull my grey hoodie over my head and pedal faster. (p.41)

Cruel and unusual as it is, Apocalypse Now Now's setting is pitch perfect for the wicked fun forthcoming. I've spent quite a while in South Africa myself, and in certain spots it is awfully end-of-the-world-esque. The idea, then, that there could be some strange undiscovered space between the squalorous urban sprawl and the baked wilderness outwith its cities is not as mal (if I may) as it appears. Mix in some canny concepts and creepy creatures from local folklore and you can imagine how well the setting lends itself to the terrific tale Human tells.

That said, the way the author expands the story's speculative elements is lazy at the least. Smack bang in the middle of Apocalypse Now Now there's an ugly infodump during which Baxter gets the grand tour of a shelter housing several supernatural specimens, all while an obscenely convenient character explains the larger lay of the land.

The only other nit I feel compelled to pick relates to how Human almost entirely abandons the hijinx at Westridge High with which his book begins. I'd have loved to spend a little longer learning about Baxter and the Spider before the appearance of the last living Obambo. Failing that, Human could have come full circle before the conclusion, and though to a degree he does, the scant resolve he offers at this stage is too little too late to sate.

Thankfully, these issues don't massively detract from the breakneck pace and mad imagination that make Apocalypse Now Now such an addictive experience. As one of an associate of Ronin's remarks: "There's no pause button, you understand? [...] Once it starts you have to see it through." (p.244)

All too true!

Between The Shining Girls, the lion's share of the short stories collected in Ivor Hartmann's excellent AfroSF anthology, and S. L. Grey's next novel, 2013 looks to be a tremendous year for South African speculative fiction: a welcome trend Apocalypse Now Now continues, irrespective of a few founding foibles.

***

Apocalypse Now Now
by Charlie Human

UK Publication: August 2013, Century
SA Publication: July 2013, Umuzi

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Book Review | The Ward by S. L. Grey

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Lisa is a plastic surgery addict with severe self-esteem issues. The only hospital that will let her go under the knife is New Hope: a grimy, grey-walled facility dubbed 'No Hope' by its patients.

Farrell is a celebrity photographer. His last memory is a fight with his fashion-model girlfriend and now he's in No Hope, alone. Needle marks criss-cross his arms. A sinister nurse keeps tampering with his drip. And he's woken up blind...

Panicked and disorientated, Farrell persuades Lisa to help him escape, but the hospital's dimly lit corridors only take them deeper underground - into a twisted mirror world staffed by dead-eyed nurses and doped-up orderlies. Down here, in the Modification Ward, Lisa can finally have the face she wants... but at a price that will haunt them both forever.

***

First impressions have a nasty habit of lasting forever, so it was well that The Mall made an immediate impact, harrowing off the bat and darkly hearty thereafter. But more than a year on, what's remained with me is its cutting criticism of consumerism; its self-aware skewering of today's culture of consumption.

The first collaboration between South African authors Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg under the open pseudonym S. L. Grey was a hair-raising horror novel in its own right, however: an unsettling study of two fractured characters trapped in a mega-mall as magnificently twisted as their own minds. It took us downside, to a world somehow under ours, where legions lived simply to shop, or serve, or else squash those individuals who refused to submit to management's demands.

Though the story of Dan and Rhoda is over - and how! - The Ward embiggens this nightmarish scenario brilliantly, introducing downside more quickly than before and giving readers a longer look at its larger infrastructure. We soon see how horribly organised the operation is - how committees meet to debate the merits of repurposing a person's parts, for instance - but this insight hardly detracts from the unknowableness that is amongst The Ward's most terrifying tools.

In the same way as the previous pair, two new characters trade chapters throughout The Ward. The first is "Farrell. Josh Farrell," (p.79) a spoiled fashion photographer who awakens in New Hope Hospital with no memory of his admission. It says as much as I should about Farrell that whilst he awakens blind, with a palimpsest of puncture marks criss-crossing his arms, what really worries him is his missing iPhone. After all, how can he keep his meeps up to speed without instantaneous access to MindRead?

We're on a first name basis with our other protagonist, Lisa Cassavetes. Hers is a more sympathetic perspective than Farrell's by far... though readers can't trust Lisa completely either. She's a plastic surgery addict with body dysmorphic disorder come to New Hope - known as No Hope by its long-term clientele - seeking treatment no other hospital will agree to. But the speed with which the doctors here clear her prayed-for procedure leaves even Lisa feeling uneasy, then when she tries to leave she sees something she can't believe:

"I run out into the corridor. It appears to be as deserted as before, but then I catch a glimpse of movement. A bulky, malformed shape is shuffling towards the far end. There's something... wrong about the way it's moving, as if the proportions of its body are skewed. It's too far away for me to figure out if it's because its legs are too short, its arms too long or the head too big. It pauses, turns around as if it can feel me staring at it — and then it's gone." (pp.39-40)

Lisa and Farrell's narratives come together more immediately than Dan and Rhoda's did, and there are other differences between The Mall and this new novel, but out of the gate, I fear The Ward feels like a retread of familiar (and thus less terrifying) territory — an impression which persists until we descend into a very different downside. Gone are The Mall's shoppers and blank-faced sales assistants; in their place, imagine anonymous nurses performing obscene procedures on misshapen patients.

There's no shortage of body horror in this book, nor of more meaningful fear. To grotesque effect, Grey often calls up the uncanny, including examples of disruption, doubling and dismemberment. But The Ward's most successful scares emerge from its pitch-perfect setting, which evokes an atmosphere that is never less than alarming:

"Listen to the quiet conversations of the nurses, the old women moaning in pain like mourners at a funeral, the building breathing, the stale air circulating, the tick of the drip machine. And underneath it all, a distant thrum, like the hospital is built over a massive beehive, or a full stadium buried hundreds of metres deep." (p.20)

Newcomers are apt to take a little less from The Ward's explanations and elaborations than returning readers, but this is an accessible novel nonetheless: short, sharp and shocking, with powerhouse pacing, great characterisation and an unforgettable setting that trades on real repugnance rather than The Mall's counter-capitalist satire. S. L. Grey's depiction of postmodern horror is practically peerless, so come one, come all to New Hope hospital. "If you aren't at death's door when you get here [...] you will be when you leave." (p.12)

...

This review was originally published, in a slightly altered form, on Tor.com.

***

The Ward
by S. L. Grey

UK Publication: October 2012, Corvus

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Book Review | The Mall by S. L. Grey

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Dan works at a bookstore in a deadly dull shopping mall where nothing ever happens. He's an angsty emo-kid who sells mid-list books to mid-list people for the minimum wage. He hates his job.


Rhoda has dragged her babysitting charge to the mall so she can meet her dealer and score some coke. Now the kid's run off, and she has two hours to find him. She hates her life.


Rhoda bullies Dan into helping her search, but as they explore the neon-lit corridors behind the mall, disturbing text messages lure them into the bowels of the building, where old mannequins are stored in grave-like piles and raw sewage drips off the ceiling. The only escape is down, and before long Dan and Rhoda are trapped in a service lift listening to head-splitting musak. Worst of all, the lift's not stopping at the bottom floor...

***

I was a wee tearaway, once upon a time. Weren't we all?


Me, I'd strategically steal away from school to waste away my days in and around the local shopping centre, with all my mallrat friends. Me and mine... we would prop up Burger Kings and internet cafes for hours on end, nursing a couple of Cokes with six straws in each, or spend entire afternoons gravitating from one shopfront to the next, and the next after that.


In retrospect - hell, I knew it then - we were probably something of an annoyance, so it was not uncommon for security guards to move us along, thinking out of sight, out of mind or some such rubbish. From time to time we'd be thrown out of the shopping centre entirely - whereupon, wickedly, we would "accidentally" blockade the entrance... so that didn't happen too much. But there was this one guard in particular who - for good reason, I don't doubt - kind of had it in for us. No doubt we'd chanced our luck with him too often as was, so on this occasion he marched us all to the security office proper, the better to bestow upon us the sort of telling off he believed we needed away from prying ears.


That's a walk of shame I've never forgotten, not because anything untoward happened that day - turned out we were just getting another lecture - but because the security office was secreted somewhere above or below the aisles I thought I knew like the back of my hand, through a network of corridors and stairways impossibly vast and labyrinthine to boot. The idea (far less the fact) that there was this whole other mall, behind and between and beneath the shopfronts I'd been haunting my whole adolescent life... it was deeply unnerving knowledge. I don't set foot in a shopping centre these days without wondering about its hidden darker half.


Evidently, S. L. Grey and I share a certain terror, for The Mall is a deeply discomfiting descent into the bowels of just such a nightmare, by way of broken mannequins, horrifying hobos and psycho spam on jelly cellphones. It is too a biting satire of consumer culture, capitalism and advertising which gives customer service a whole new meaning, and bestows upon the act and the art of shopping the very element of insidiousness I've always suspected it had. "Fucking malls," one of our protagonists puts it, "with their mirrors on every available surface; beautiful girls beautifully dressed telling me with every sexy spike-heeled step that I have no chance." (p.74)


Alternating between chapters in the company of Rhoda, a British runaway with a drug habit and an appetite for self-destruction, and Daniel, a miserable bookstore employee who still lives with his mum, The Mall is ragged-sharp and cynical - a short, smart horror novel which begins and ends with such unbridled energy as to ensnare as if by accident:

"My first instinct is to grab his hand, snap back his index finger, and floor the fucker. Instead I keep absolutely immobile, sucking in deep jags of oxygen to try and still my heart. It's jack-hammering like it does when I've taken too much MDMA, but it's vital I get my shit together and calm the fuck down." (p.3)

Which Rhoda does... eventually. But only after she's taken Dan hostage at knifepoint, bullied him into helping her find the boy she was meant to be watching who went missing while she was scoring some coke. It makes perfect sense when you think on it: the boy - whose name our expat is so strung out she can't recall - looks to have wandered off into the nether regions of the mall, and Rhoda needs Dan to get her through the security doors. See?


What they find in the abandoned levels beneath the shopping centre, however - what unspeakable horrors await the pair in this black hole full of FUBAR - will cost the both of them dearly. Rhoda is suddenly "as serious as someone who's fucked up her life for five hundred rands' worth of blow can get," (p.81) and she'll need to be, to survive.


Rhoda and Dan play off one another terrifically. Though their relationship is initially adversarial - what with the hostage-taking and all - they quickly realise they will have to work together to stand a chance of escaping this squalid sub-urban nightmare. As their friendship deepens, out of necessity at first, then by way of an attraction that seemed to me a touch too easy, there remains always an edge to their dialogue, a barb to their every encounter which keeps one's blood up when from time to time the awfulness of the Other mall takes a back seat.


It rarely does. The Mall is on from word one, and the excruciating tension Grey so cannily establishes only down-shifts when our unlikely pair must take stock. Mostly they're running. Mostly they've good reason to be running, for "this place, this world, this reality - whatever the fuck it is - is twisted. Seriously twisted. Sick." (p.147)


You can reduce the vast majority of horror novels to one of a few formulae: there's the end of the world, of course... there are the ghost stories, hauntings of objects of all sorts... there are the vampires and the zombies and the werewolves. And that's pretty much it. The Mall fits into no such narrative mold. If it reminded me of any one thing, I'd have to say the Silent Hill video games, except here the hill is the fucked-up underbelly of a shopping centre, and I'll tell you now: it's anything but silent. Crazed, sure... cacophonous, absolutely. But never quiet, except perhaps in the ominous silence heralding the arrival of yet another new nightmare.


The Mall is the best horror novel I've read in 2011, not least because it's so original. Don't be dissuaded by the dime-a-dozen premise; from the tragicomedy of errors set-up on out, S. L. Grey - the pseudonym of South African authors Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg - really brings it. Thanks to pitch-perfect pacing, a couple of characters you can really get behind in Dan and Rhoda, and an impressive repertoire of cruel and unusual sure to wipe the smile right off your face, The Mall is a lunatic thrill ride through a hellish tableau from which all your worst fears will burst, writhing like maggots on a hunk of week-old, mechanically recovered meat.


Muzak to my ears, in short.

***

The Mall

by S. L. Grey

UK Publication: June 2011, Corvus


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Book Review: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

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"Zinzi December has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things. But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she's forced to take on her least favourite kind of job - missing persons."

***

Who here remembers urban fantasy? Hands up.

No, no, no. Those of you waving your arms in the air at the thought of some forbidden affair between a tough female protagonist and a gentleman of the night, think again. Of late, there's been a largely regrettable insurgence of such fiction: a counter-culture of wish-fulfillment fiction bearing transparent elements of the fantastic and set against one urban environ or another has arisen - if only to be subsumed itself by the zeitgeist. Paranormal romance by any other name (the vast majority of which smells as sour as the likes of Laurell K. Hamilton and Stephanie Meyer have taught us to expect) has thoroughly co-opted urban fantasy in recent years, and the genre, as is, bears only a trifling resemblance to the mature and sophisticated fiction it once espoused. In short, an overabundance of Twilight wannabes and screeds of sexy vampires have given urban fantasy a bad name. With Zoo City, South African author Lauren Beukes is taking it back.

Meet Zinzi December. Animalled after murdering her own brother, Zinzi serves out her penance in a district of Johannesburg where "Zoos" such as she and sometime-significant other Benoit can live in relative peace, zoned off as they are from the rest of the world. With a Sloth slung over her shoulder, an externalisation of her fratricidal guilt and a constant reminder of her crime, life isn't easy for Zinzi. Against her better judgment, she works as a 419 scam artist in order to repay the staggering debt she has accumulated thanks to a past-tense drug addiction, making ends meet in the erstwhile by "finding lost things" with the supernatural talent she acquired as a by-product of being animalled. Only ever things, though - never people. But Zinzi's fallen on hard times. When one of her clients ends up mercilessly slaughtered and an opportunity to pay off her crippling debt once and for all arises, she puts her principles to the side and sets about her unusual charge: the rooting out of a missing Afropop starlet.

You simply wouldn't credit that Zoo City is only Lauren Beukes' second novel. She doesn't put a foot wrong for the duration. With endless verve and a cynical wit, she carries off a concept so audacious as to beggar belief, an inspired riff on the daemons of His Dark Materials which has humanity reevaluating its roots in the aftermath of the Zoo Plague, or AAF (Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism). "It's a fragile state - the world as we know it," Beukes warns us. "All it takes is one Afghan warlord to show up with a Penguin and a bulletproof vest, and everything science and religion thought they know goes right out of the window." Relevant and revelatory, the ghettoisation of the Zoos in the pockmarked and unrelentingly urban landscape of Johannesburg also recalls the quandary of the slumdog prawns of District 9, yet Beukes confers on the animalled of her novel a murky sense of depth Neill Bloemkamp could only imply.

The Zoos are tragic creatures, one and all; some hateful, others haunted - Zinzi most of all. A recovering journalist, as Beukes has it, and "master builder in the current affairs sympathy scam," Zinzi is an embittered anti-heroine living, as all Zoos do, in fear of the Undertow, an unknowable terror which suffuses the fringes of her existence. She has, of course, more immediate concerns, foremost amongst them the everyday dangers of life in a city bereft of (conventional) order. Singularly the most disturbing of all her encounters in Zoo City, short perhaps its truly gruesome dénouement, is with a gang of junkie tunnel rats who have stolen her phone. Zinzi has fallen so far, yet she still has her pride, and so she makes the mistake of confronting them. Realising her mistake, she runs; they tear through the sewers after her with a rusty, sharpened screwdriver and such unadulterated hate that we see it is the city, in as much as the Zoos, that she need fear.

Zinzi is not so easily dissuaded. She washes the stink of the sewer off her and immediately follows up on her next lead: could Songweza, the absent half of Afropop sensation iJusi, have taken up with a burly bouncer working the doors of Counter Revolutionary? Zinzi is a strong female protagonist in every sense; and she is strong in the face of violent crime, betrayal and a city that seems to want her dead - not just a bit downtrodden until she attracts the attention of a devilishly handsome werewolf, as in the mode of many so-called "urban fantasy" narratives. Her Sloth, meanwhile, is more than a glorified pet: it has its own personality, its own desires - often at odds with Zinzi's - and yet it is a part of her that she must come to terms with, however much she despises what Sloth recalls, for the Undertow comes for all those who are separated from their animal companions.

Zoo City is lean and mean urban fantasy in the best and most respectable sense of the thing. In Zinzi Beukes gives us a truly compelling character: strong, centered, flawed just so and brilliantly intertwined with her world. In the titular district of Johannesburg, the South African author offers up an environment so desperate and evocative it puts innumerable paint-by-numbers fantasylands to shame. Hard-bitten, deliciously vitriolic and utterly engaged, both with the city and what the city means to those who call it home - for want, one intimates, of anywhere else to - Zoo City is, in short, the best thing to happen to urban fantasy in years.

***

Zoo City

by Lauren Beukes

September 2010, Angry Robot

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