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GIGANTIC by Ashley Stokes

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This is a thoroughly enjoyable read and a bit of a suprise from Ashley Stokes. His short story collection Syllabus of Errors was allusive, elusive, spiked with flashes of dark insight into the nightmare of history.

I have strong memories of that book eight or nine years later. Complex stories that are worth reading several times – in other words I should go back and read it again.

But his new novel is a rambunctious adventure following a trio of cryptozoologists on the track of the North Surrey Gigantopithecus – the Surrey equivalent of the yeti.

“You’ve not experienced that thrill when suddenly, for a moment, you glimpse it between the trees – gigantic, proud, alive, part of us, the missing bit of us – ”

Kevin Stubbs holds down a job in IT by day, and at night he kits up with camcorders, thermal imaging device and sample jars for a session of stake-out operations through the woods. The obsessive search for the beast has cost him dearly – his Ukranian wife has custody of their small son. The local wags chant “Monkey magic” when he goes into the boozer. But Kevin is on the brink of The Great Confirmation when the whole world will queue at his doorstep and his son will finally be proud of his old man.

The novel is full of laugh-out-loud moments – after a description of the Aleister Crowley-devotee fourth-dimension-probing third team member, Kevin relates in a deadpan tone: “This is one of the things about getting involved in the GIT. You meet people you wouldn’t ordinarily meet …”

But the leader of this 3-person team – Maxine – is a complete and total skeptic! There’s a thoroughly plausible backstory to this. And when you think of it, what fanatical skeptic wouldn’t jump at the chance of being appointed head of a team of pseudo-scientists?

Despite this, the trio have a warm loyalty to each other. The novel is structured around the official reports written by Maxine (aka the Sci-borg) followed by Kevin’s passionate extrapolations and background stories. Kevin Stubbs is a fascinating ‘anorak’ cynical/gullible character with lots of wry looks at suburbia. His exchanges with Max are hilarious – this cryptid-busting trio could easily be the premise for a long-running comedy series.

It’s great fun to read of the traditions and lore of this tight-knit confraternity. They have their decades-old grainy footage of the beast, competing theories (is the creature paranormal or a primate), discussions about sensing equipment, and memories of the founding fathers of the movement. It can feel like a cross between an extremist political cell and a local hill-walker’s group.

There is a hilarious incongruence between the dry notes by Maxine (“There was some delay in leaving the property due to a dispute about money and the witness’s reservations about GIT Cryptozoologist Funnel”) and the expansive and passionate accounts Kevin gives.

“You’ve not experienced that thrill when suddenly, for a moment, you glimpse it between the trees – gigantic, proud, alive, part of us, the missing bit of us – ”

Clearly the Gigantopithecus is a proxy for that one last piece of magical mystery in life, that secret magic we still believe in. Stokes throws in a few associations with the lost forests of England – we feel a distant yearning for the impenetrable forest – Andreaswald, the dreaming forest of England – and the wild beasts that roam therein. We crave a few relict stands of trees that have escaped the concrete, the planning, the cultivation – I think of Hopkin’s lines:

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And bears man’s smudge, and shares man’s smell;

The novel was also a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, as Stokes peppers the story with references to 1970’s formative influences, including Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, the UFO craze, Judge Dredd, role-playing games, and also that familiar small-town scene of the local wags at the bar passing sarcastic comments.

Great tale, ingeniously put together, builds up momentum to a thrilling ending.

Will A. Stokes stay with lick-your-thumb novels of suburban intrigue or will he go back to the challenge of divining the widening gyres of idiocy and extremism?

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Line by Neil Bourke

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A fascinating debut novel I had the pleasure to review for The Dublin Review of books.

Speculative novels from Ireland are as rare as hens’ teeth, despite the towering examples bequeathed to us by Jonathan Swift and Flann O’Brien. In more recent decades we have Mike McCormack’s fictions, and a YA novel by Sarah Maria Griffin. That’s about it as regards novels that meet Margaret Atwood’s tighter definition of speculative fiction as extrapolating the latent possibilities of current trends.

So I was immediately hooked when I heard of the premise of Bourke’s novel: a line of people queuing for generations, not sure what they are waiting for, but utterly convinced of the importance of keeping one’s place in the line. And ready to torture those who transgress.

The book twists between adventure and satire and existential questions – it’s Waiting for Godot crossed with Gulliver’s Travels. Seriously, that fits best.

Not surprising that it’s from Tramp Press. They brought out A Brilliant Void a couple of years ago – a collection of classic science fiction from Ireland. It’s like a window into a different era. There was a time when Ireland – or Dublin at least – was home to several sci-fi and horror writers: Dorothy McArdle, James Fitz-Maurice O’Brien, Jane Barlow, and many others.

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David Wheldon, writer and pathologist, passed away

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I was saddened to hear that the writer and pathologist David Wheldon passed away on January 7th this year. He had lived in Bedford for many years.

A note on his life and work is in The Bookseller.

I read David Wheldon’s novels The Viaduct and The Course of Instruction in a different era, when I was working on the building sites in London. They made a deep impression on me, and a few years ago I wrote an essay for The Stinging Fly about these early novels.

I exchanged emails with David over the course of a few years and am proud to be able to call him a friend. In our emails we chatted about his medical work, about my small son, and about his wife’s artistic work – his wife is the artist Sarah Longlands. And occasionally about our own work.

He kept writing and working right up to his sudden death at the age of seventy. Some recent stories of his have appeared in Confingo, Nightjar Press, and Woven Tale Press.

He had a website with samples of his poetry and short stories, and several essays, including some on his medical work. The link to that website doesn’t work now – I hope it goes back online soon.

I will have more to write about Wheldon’s work soon.

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The Heartsick Diaspora

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I’ve been looking forward to Elaine Chiew’s collection of short stories for a couple of years ever since I read a few in the Unthology anthology brought out by Unthank Press. Elaine is ethnic Chinese from Malaysia, educated in the USA and now lives in the UK. A very modern spread of identities.

Well at last it’s here and I pitched a review to Litro Magazine.

I was attracted to Chiew’s writing by its sheer brilliance and by how it captures the giddy sense of living in a world where everyone is guessing the rules. As I mention in the review, one takeaway point from the stories is that the clash between the older generation’s values and the newer is greater than east-west divide.

Easily the best collection I’ve read this year.

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Mentoring

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I have edited fiction and non-fiction for Mira Publishing UK for some years. I have taught courses in creative writing and been involved in many writing groups. I also proofread commercially in my day job.

I am on the Irish Writers Centre list of professional mentors.

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Writers’ Workbench at IWC

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Enhance your creative/critiquing skillset and knock your writing into shape.
This course takes a hands-on approach covering:
Creativity,
Dialogue & description
Finding your voice,
Style, Structure/plot,
Editing

Practicing editing techniques will be a crucial component and some of the mechanics of dialogue, description, and POV will be covered. The course is suitable for those who have attempted some writing and for those in need of a new approach. Participants will be expected to complete two pieces of fiction or creative non-fiction.

At the Irish Writers Centre on Parnell Square

Bookings via the IWC website: https://irishwriterscentre.ie/collections/spring-2020/products/the-writers-workbench-with-aiden-oreilly-2020

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