Fight Club with Werewolves

 Bored Gay Werewolf is about Brian, a guy whose life has been so upended by his werewolf curse that he’s dropped out of college, doing drugs and working as a waiter in a dead-end bar. He’s got friends, but he doesn’t let them in, and he’s drifting aimlessly through a dull life of empty Grindr pick-ups until the next full moon.

 Brian doesn’t have great control over his transformation and in fact he's accepted that he might commit the occasional, accidental murder every full moon.

 Then he meets another werewolf: Tyler Gainsborough, whose business card reads ‘Entrepreneur and Business Coach’. Tyler’s looking for other werewolves that he knows are out there, hiding, and he’s got a plan: he’s going to set up an app for them, filled with inspirational articles on how to be an alpha in your personal and professional life. He also offers to coach Brian on how to control his werewolf side better.

 Initially, Brian rebuffs Tyler, but slowly falls under his charm. Brian joins a world of start-up business culture, training, protein shakes, martial arts and meditation. He writes articles for the upcoming werewolf website. At first, Brian’s encounter with Tyler’s world has positive effects - he works out regularly, shakes off his rut, and can control his werewolf transformations. Except, he also becomes a jerk to his previous friends as he embraces the new world of masculinity he’s getting into.

Then everything comes to a head when Tyler gets frustrated with his inability to find other werewolves. He proposes another plan - why find other werewolves where you can make them? And what will Brian do when he’s caught between his old friends and his increasingly unstable mentor?

 While werewolf urban fantasy has its own little niche of alphas, betas and hot shirtless guys, this book is more at the gay fiction end of the spectrum - exploring more about culture, identity and masculinity. Who are your real friends? How do you reconcile being a tough man in today’s culture when you’re also gay and sensitive? 

 The book’s written in a heavy exposition, present-tense style that reminded me of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and the satire of bro-culture also balanced by reveals amongst Brians’ friend group and a sense of a deeper fantasy world and community out there that’s beyond what Brian knows. A good read.

Existentially Challenged is the sequel to last month’s book review, Differently Morphous by Yahtzee Croshaw. Once again, Croshaw has a refreshing take on urban fantasy by showing the impact of magic being revealed to the world.

 This book’s focus in on religion. Magic in this universe comes from bargains or possession by one of the Ancients, Cthulhu-esque entities that live outside of space and time. Like gods. And if you can prove that there are gods that are real and grant power, how does that affect people’s beliefs?  Crowshaw’s tackles this theme with his subversive sense of humour.

 A year after the events of Differently Morpheus, the Extradimensional Appropriation Act is passed that makes it illegal for people to claim to have magic. (Cue a nice gag scene where a group of stage magicians have to admit that they are cold reading people to stay ‘legal’ during performances). 

 The Department of Extradmensional Affairs (or DEDA) is empowered to investigate claims of magic. Their current case is where a young girl, Miracle Meg, can heal people through her connection with her Ancient, El-Yetch. Genuine faith healing! However, a few suspicious corpses of people horribly aged to death are found in the area, which suggests that this healing isn’t as genuine as it appears. 

Alison Arkin and her over-the-top partner Doctor Diablerie (think of a dramatic 1930s villain in top hat and tails) investigate what’s really happening with Miracle Meg, and her family, Miracle Dad and Miracle Mum. The role of the internet is a big part in the Miracle Meg case, with her followers big on the forums, her father desperate for fame and television appearances, and a group of Youtubers in a van (with a dog) following the case and making things more complicated for Alison.

 Several subplots weave in the background for the other DEDA agents. Pyrokinetic Victor Casin tangles with a woman possessed by the same entity that empowers him. Is she his girlfriend or his archnemesis? Or is that one and the same? And Adam Hesketh struggles with his first proper investigation that isn’t a seek and destroy mission. And he’s terrible at it. Alison tries to piece together Diablerie’s real backstory and agenda; what’s he actually planning?

 Despite their powers, the DEDA agents aren’t the world’s sharpest lot. They blunder their way through events, making disastrous decisions, but get there in the end. The story’s told through a mix of regular third person narrative, internet forum chats and other extracts. The book skewers the religion and the media, particularly in a great scene where the Christian Church is accused of breaking the Extradimensional Appropriation Act, culminating in a late-night television debate between followers of El-Yetch and hardline pastors.

 I enjoyed the first book more (the mystery was tighter) but this is still an entertaining read. I liked how the characterisations of the DEDA were dug into a bit more. And I’m looking forward to the next one, and discovering Doctor Diablerie’s secret agenda…

I want to blog about my Joomla update.

So, I was thinking of updating my WordPress website late last year. I had so many plugins my dashboard was flickering with ads, and my list of pages had a warped layout because of extra columns, inserted by said plug-ins. I didn’t like the layout or how I’d set things up. Time for a rebuild.

And then the WordPress drama happened, and I was like, right, what else is out there? Is WordPress the ultimate open source blogging these days?

This book stood out while browsing for two reasons. 

One: Yahtzee Croshaw? Didn’t he do those video game reviews back in the day for the Escapist? What’s he doing writing urban fantasy?

And two: based on the blurb, this story is about an urban fantasy reality where the masquerade breaks, and the prosaic world is exposed to magic for the first time. Not something I've encountered a lot of.

Let’s check it out.

The Ministry of Occultism keeps Britain safe from magic and monsters. But their practices are all mired in the nineteenth century. The organisation sponsors demon hunters, is led by a doddery council of robed elders called the Hand of Merlin, and funnels all detected magical practitioners into two schools: a pleasant one designed to find out which people for sure can cast magic, and a more sinister reform school. Rather than being taught to channel the magic and integrate with society, the students are instead treated like prisoners.

Things change when a group of extra-dimensional creatures, called shoggoths by the Ministry, ask for refugee status. Unlike their Lovecraftian namesakes, these shoggoths, or fluidics, are sweet, enthusiastic but bumbling sluglike creatures, eager to integrate with society and eat garbage. They see themselves as part of a whole, rather than as individuals. Usually, the Ministry sends in flannel-clad Yorkshire demon hunters to shoot the fluidics with salt (which kills them) each time they cross over, but in this case, the fluidics contact the well meaning Henry, who stages a public march with a mass parade of the entities. With the supernatural exposed, the Ministry is outed and forced to shed its nineteenth century practices, joining the British government as the Department of Extradimensional Affairs.

Our main protagonist is Alison Arkin, a wannabe magic student, but leaves to work for the Ministry when the teachers discover she doesn’t have any actual powers, only an eidetic memory. After a few disastrous administration assignments, Alison is partnered with field agent Doctor Diablerie, a pretentious and possibly unstable individual who wears a top hat and cloak, and speaks about himself in the third person and who doesn’t appear to have any of his own magic. (I wasn’t sure Diablerie was a Doctor (Who) parody at first, given his bluster and nonsensical babble, but he remains marvelously Over The Top throughout the book, although his presence may be an acquired taste. Despite Diablerie not having any explicit magical abilities (he mostly blusters his way through things) he has a 100 percent case clearance rate.)

While I was initially interested in the Department’s transition into the real world (complete with humorous clashes with more politically correct public service staff and policies) the actual main plot is more of a mystery. Someone is murdering fluidics! Diablerie and Alison investigate, and Alison doggedly pulls everything together. I was pleasantly surprised by the mystery’s pay off - it’s well done. Yahtzee is skilled at setting up a joke or situation that leads to a strong punchline or payoff, even if it’s down the track.

 The tone of the book is humorous, a bit Laundry Files, maybe a touch of Discworld. It took me a while to become fully immersed, but as the cracking plot progressed, I was hooked.

 Anyway, recommended.

Is this book pretentious? Is it a work of brilliance? I’ve read it twice, and I’m still not sure. It’s written by Grant Morrison, formerly a luminary of Vertigo Comics. (If you were like me, you had a whole pile of these in your teenage bedroom, and they made you glow with an inner sense of superiority when you compared yourself to your friends who were instead into X-Men or Batman.)

It’s essentially a shaggy dog story. Luci LaBang, a magician and drag queen, tells the story of her involvement in cutting edge panto ‘Phantom of the Pantomime’ in the city of ‘Gasglow’. When the lead actress has a terrible accident, she’s replaced by the mysterious Luda, another young man in drag, who shows up out of nowhere. As rehearsals continue, one by one, other cast members undergo terrible accidents. What’s really going on? (Pronouns and identities shift a bit based on the characters’ current personas, much like what’s going on the play itself.)

 Everything is leading up to the ending, which requires an understanding of pantomime. Don’t worry, the book explains this to you clearly, especially if you missed out on this British cultural experience as a child. Most of the drama is centred around the unfolding rehearsals for the Phantom of the pantomime, which digs into the entire world behind this type of play.

 “The trick in panto is for performers to establish an intimate, confessional relationship with the audience while wrapping them into the performance as a kind of omniscient chorus.”

 Luda is eager to learn magic from Luci, ‘the Glamour’, which, as far as I could understand, is used to have psychic LSD trips. For those used to hard magic systems like Brandon Sanderson’s, you’d be going, what? A complete magic system, and all it does is give you surreal visions and get you high? This is what a lot of real world occultists were doing with all of their rituals and drugs, including Morrison’s own practices. There’s a lot of talk about the Glamour, but other uses are mysterious and evasive.

 “The Glamour provided the means to blend the real, and the imagined, smoothing out divisions between the physical and the not, subject and object, the masculine and feminine, God and Devil. The Glamour encouraged new relationships between seeming binaries that folded all polar opposites together into multifaceted wholes.”

 What Luda wants to learn from it is shapechanging, or how to disappear into herself. Perhaps to become Luda ‘for real’. Her presence, at first entertaining, becomes more sinister, and her backstory more convoluted, tormented and surreal as the story progresses.

 Luci dismisses Luda as her apprentice, and you could read the end arc as Luda’s revenge against her former mentor, or is it? Or perhaps as an indirect, surreal battle between dueling magicians. Anyway, like the pantomime, the Glamour and the story itself, nothing is really certain and that too, I think, is the point. 

 Recommended, especially if you like Morrison’s work or reality-blurring narratives.