GHR: Scales

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Games Half Remembered is an occasional series about old games. Some of these games I have played, others I have merely admired, but all of them have stuck in my memory for one reason or another.  The rest of the series can be found here.

Published in January 1994 by INS/MV publisher Siroz (who later changed their name to Asmodee Editions) and written by the legendary designer Croc, Scales is an urban fantasy game with a contemporary setting that feels very much like it was inspired by Nephilim, the World of Darkness, and older French initiatic games like Hurlements.

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On “The Tree” by H.P. Lovecraft

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Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of H.P. Lovecraft, which I will slowly be working my way through.

When you decide to write around the story you actually want to tell.

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REVIEW: The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel

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Depending upon who you ask and where you look, the Mothman was first spotted either by a crew of grave-diggers or a bunch of teenagers hanging out near the dis-used munitions storage facilities on the outskirts of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Both sets of sightings describe a large man-sized creature with glowing red eyes and huge bat-like wings. The first sighting of the Mothman was in November 1966 and dozens of near-identical sightings would follow before dropping off almost completely in December 1967.

Over the years, various attempts have been made to account for these sightings; Wild-life experts have claimed that when the residents of Point Pleasant claimed to have seen a man-sized bat-winged creature with glowing red eyes, they were actually seeing either large barn owls or a type of crane with distinctive red plumage on its head. Psychologists have claimed that regardless of what it was that the original witnesses saw, many of the dozens of subsequent reports were results of either hoaxing or a kind of mass-hysteria wherein everyone decided that they too wanted to be part of something that was garnering national attention. The debate still rages at a level sufficient to have established the Mothman as a solid second-tier cryptid: Sure he’s no Bigfoot or Nessie, but he’s easily bigger than the Skunk Apes of Florida or the Ogopogo lake monster.

The thing is that while Mothman is a cool creature and the weird mass-hysteria following the initial sightings is interesting enough to sustain the occasional fresh book or documentary series, the Mothman himself is really only the tip of a much larger and weirder iceberg.

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REVIEW: Tickets Please for Call of Cthulhu

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Tickets Please is a self-contained Call of Cthulhu adventure that is part of Type40’s ‘Adventure Seed’ series of scenarios. Like the other instalments in the series, Tickets Please is short and relies on superior production values to convince buyers that a series of really quite sparse notes are actually a viable adventure.

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REVIEW: Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

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Nearly sixteen years after her untimely death, Octavia Butler is having a bit of a moment. Over the last few years, a concerted effort has been made to re-discover and re-claim the legacy of the first ever science fiction author to receive a MacArthur fellowship.

It is not hard to see why this would happen… Though widely-respected and a winner of various awards during her lifetime, Butler’s name has started to fade from view for the simple reason that she was never one of the four or five (predominantly white and male) authors whose continued sales keep the lights on for genre publishing. The institutions of SFF publishing are barely interested in live mid-list authors, so why would they give a shit about dead ones? Especially when the dead mid-list authors in question write books as difficult, problematic and profoundly unfashionable as Fledgling.

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On “The Terrible Old Man” by H.P. Lovecraft

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Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of H.P. Lovecraft, which I will slowly be working my way through.

This is basically the 1920s equivalent of a right-wing Gran Torino meme.

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REVIEW: The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

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Given that I didn’t think that much of The Twisted Ones, I was surprised to find myself reading T. Kingfisher’s second horror novel The Hollow Places.

Perhaps I am growing generous in my old age but I did quite enjoy some of that book’s characterisation and while I felt that Kingfisher lacked the stomach to engage the book’s darker themes and images, I was at least impressed by her ability to locate these themes in the first place. Sadly, The Hollow Places is not an improvement on The Twisted Ones as while the worse bits of that novel are (thankfully) not replicated in this one, this relative easing of the reader’s burdens comes at the expense of much of what made The Twisted Ones interesting. Like islands on the Danube, my interest in this author’s output has now slipped beneath the waves.

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REVIEW: The Route of Ice and Salt by Jose Luis Zarate

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Much of what passes for social justice is actually nothing more than the effects of the market. This is quite evident in the realm of representation where calls for greater inclusivity inevitably come with unspoken caveats about the kinds of stories and the kinds of sensibilities that people want to see represented.

Indeed, people will get worked-up about gay kisses and non-white faces in Marvel movies but they would never take it upon themselves to seek out the work of non-white LGBT writers and directors. People will spend years obsessing over sexually ambiguous glances between characters played by straight male actors but they would rather shit themselves in public than sit through a film by someone like Lino Brocka.

I say this not to ‘gate-keep’ concerns over queer representation but to stress that while people may be interested in stories about gay characters, they are only interested in certain kinds of stories told about certain kinds of gay characters in certain kinds of ways. Indeed, stories about gay men told by straight men and women are going to be very different to stories about gay men told by gay men. The ideas that straight women have about gay men are likely to be far more palatable to straight women than the ideas of gay men about themselves. This is why straight men watch girl-on-girl porn but might not watch the films of Lisa Cholodenko. This is why straight women will spend hours reading Yaoi and BL comics but will not necessarily think to seek out the novels of Christopher Isherwood.

While we all like what we like and there’s no accounting for taste, it is interesting to think about the differences between the representation of people and events and the different sensibilities that can inform that representation. Where do those sensibilities come from?

Jose Luis Zarate’s The Route of Ice and Salt is a Mexican novella set aboard the ship that transported Dracula to Whitby in Bram Stoker’s original novel. It is about yearning, loss, and the predatory nature of the male gaze.

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