May's speculative and literary fiction: the best-written recent releases
Read the opening pages from our picks below ^ The Decent into Hell
In today’s issue
— ‘Aye, aye, I ain’t sit down good when I spotted the wretch. Man dead and he’s still making front page.’: our final pick of the best-written recent releases in literary fiction. Our previous picks for May and all the books considered can be found here.
— ‘We open on a guy in a cockpit’: the best-written recent release in speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror).
—‘However far our jaws drop or however wide our minds are stretched—picture Bowman juddering through the vortex in 2001: A Space Odyssey—we must never let arrogance convince us we’ve a true sense of the scale of this abomination’: The Descent into Hell, part 7 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com. Thanks for the support Auraist readers have already shown this series.
We’ve now organised the site so you easily access our archives of author masterclasses on prose style, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.
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LITERARY FICTION
Rosie
While the shop ain’t busy I told myself, Rosie girl, drink a cup of coffee-tea and check the papers. Nobody’s coming for a shot of rum this hour and on the dry goods side it’s always one-one person throughout the day. Aye, aye, I ain’t sit down good when I spotted the wretch. Man dead and he’s still making front page. And look at that. Boysie playing innocent down to the end. Exactly who that badjohn think he fooling? At least now he’s in the ground we might get an ease from seeing him all the time. Something else will take over the news. Every night the Lord’s seen me on my knees begging that boy doesn’t fill the gap he’s left. They say goat don’t make sheep. Well, this is one time I hope they’re wrong, yes.
A sudden hard rain made me put down the papers. Two schoolchildren, a girl about seven and a boy child a little younger, rushed to shelter under the shop awning. The way she held on to the boy I could tell she was a good big sister. I called to them.
Come inside and don’t get wet. You see how the sun still shining? Rain go pass now for now.
They came and stood by the door. I smiled.
Come in. Come in. I don’t bite.
The girl pulled her brother where they were safe from the pelting rain.
You know that when sun shining and rain falling, monkey does be marrying. Either that or the devil and he wife fighting.
Poor children looked at me like I was about to gobble them up.
A good five minutes hadn’t passed and rain stopped just so. The two bolted. I watched them speed off, holding hands tight tight. Steam rose from the hot pitch, releasing a sickly sweet smell that made me feel slightly nauseous. Then something happened. Maybe it was the pitch smell or the little boy and girl holding hands or just reading the death notice. Could be all three. Suddenly I realised what had been bothering my head. I was thinking of Boysie.
What’s that game children play? The one with two circles holding hands and singing in turns. Oh, yes,
In a fine castle, Do you hear, my sissie-o? In a fine castle, Do you hear, my sissie-o?
Without missing a beat, the second circle would reply.
Ours is the prettiest, Do you hear, my sissie-o? Ours is the prettiest, Do you hear, my sissie-o?
What song did we throw back? Ah yes,
We want one of them, Do you hear, my sissie-o? We want one of them, Do you hear, my sissie-o?
From the side, under a laden guava tree, a boy, had to be less than ten, was watching us playing in the road. Our eyes made four. Without words he knew that we coolie orphans, holding hands while singing louder and louder, had room for other unclaimed children.
Which of us do you want? Do you hear, my sissie-o?
I broke hands mid-song so he could join my circle. He came forward slowly and gave me his hand. That little hand squeezed mine just a bit tighter than the others. I squeezed back. Which of us do you want? Do you hear, my sissie-o? A scared boy, out on the road by he-self, nobody looking to see what he was doing, that barefoot, raggedy child grew into John Boysie Singh, the Rajah. How that happened?
MAY’S SPECULATIVE FICTION
Books considered
The Familiar Leigh Bardugo
Weird Black Girls Elwin Cotman
The Wings Upon Her Back Samantha Mills
Extinction Douglas Preston
Calypso Oliver K Langmead
Someone You Can Build a Nest In John Wiswell
The Universe Delivers the Enemy You Need Adam Marek
The best-written of these is
We Won’t Show Any of This
We open on a guy in a cockpit. He’s in his late forties, early fifties. We’re calling him Roger. He’s your everyman. But his life has been a series of unique and incredible experiences. What we see is this guy’s psychology and history written all over his face. In his expression, you know? This is set in 2024, so he was born in the late 60s, early 70s. Specifically he was born in 1969. I mean conceived in 1969, on the day of the moon landing. The most important thing is that the sense of possibility and wonder that struck the world on that day made his folks – Kelly and Charles are their names – wonder at the possibility of making a baby and bringing it into this exciting new world. This spacefaring world, that was just created with that momentous first footstep in the lunar dust. They’re not even American. They’re French for goodness’ sake. But we won’t show any of this. All we see is the guy in the cockpit. That’s you.
So Roger didn’t grow up in France. This isn’t that kind of movie. He actually spent the first 14 years of his life on the run. With his parents. Who had accidentally committed a crime. We’re still working out what that was. But it was serious enough that they had to be on the run from the law because they knew if they were caught at least one of them would go to jail and then their plans of raising a beautiful new human being together would be trashed. But they didn’t do anything that’ll put our audience off them – not murder, and nothing depraved. Nothing that really hurt anyone. A corporate crime of some kind. Or a misunderstanding with some sanctimonious local preacher who’s not who he’s making out to be. His treachery maybe. But I’m coming round to the idea that it’s a military crime, involving a dodgy army captain. He’s rotten to the core. He set them up. He’s the real bad guy. You get the picture. But we won’t show any of that.
All you need to know is, Roger’s parents were good people with a good heart who got tangled up in a bad circumstance by mistake and they didn’t want it to determine the rest of their lives. So they were starting over. Critically though, this starts the pattern for Roger. A pattern of screwing up and running away.
If we were making a prequel, and that’s not an impossibility, what it might focus on is Kelly and Charles on the run with their kid through 1970s and early 80s America. Picking up on a few key historical moments. Showing their minor struggles and triumphs, with every episode ending with them having to move on again because they’d raised someone’s suspicions about their origins. Like that movie with the dad and his daughter on the run from the evil laboratory that’s given her superpowers she can’t control. Similar to that. But without the superpowers. This is pure realism. At this stage anyway.
Kelly and Charles were those kinds of people who, wherever they go, they just raise the forces of antagonism right up out of the ground around them – that’s their flaw, and the pattern their son Roger inherits. It’s the flaw that’s the foundation of the whole series. Because the prequel would work best in an episodic format. But this piece we’re making here, it’s a film. A short film. And it’s about one thing. You in the cockpit and everything you’ve been through. And we won’t show anything but you and the cockpit. This is all happening in your head, you get it? It’s important that it’s clear there. Because if it’s not clear there, it won’t be clear here, on your face. We need to see all this. That’s your job.
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire.
Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey
The Descent into Hell
The road ahead remains difficult. Showtime and dozens more channels worldwide may still sue me, in gentrified parts of Madrid I still get gobbed at by strangers wearing jumpers with asymmetric sleeves, and I’m still emailed promises to drown Ella, Trinna, Les, his dog Stanley and me in a bath of rat droppings and dress our corpses in too-tight jeans. But such practical challenges can be overcome with the appropriate countersuits and, if only as a last resort, my most painful and humiliating throws.
The real challenge, and I’m uncertain if I’m up to it, is to get across using human language the true magnitude of The Return’s rottenness. Short of describing it in demonic tongues, which I’m not yet prepared to risk, communicating this will probably be beyond me.
Les has even claimed the show’s worse than the worst pornography, because at least porn’s upfront when it comes to its depravity. It doesn’t aim for or elicit accolades from the cultural elite. Have a think about this. Whether it’s worse or not, what kind of TV drama could be so depraved a seen-it-all type like Les would even consider comparing it to porn featuring rape or torture? That’s what this series does to you. It is cosmically bad. It is inconceivably bad.
I mean that. We need to accept that an all-time catastrophe made by a ten-dimensional demon will reach depths impossible for any three-dimensional being, me certainly included, to get their head around. We therefore need to accept as well that not only will courage be required on this journey but humility too. However far our jaws drop or however wide our minds are stretched—picture Bowman juddering through the vortex in 2001: A Space Odyssey—we must never let arrogance convince us we’ve a true sense of the scale of this abomination.
It’s probable that three-dimensional beings aren’t even supposed to try to comprehend that scale. It isn’t too late to stop reading. The Return’s destroyed marriages, engagements, sex lives, friendships, security teams, hairstyles, shoes, toes, ankles, knees, bottoms, minds, entire identities, sobrieties, nonwrestling streaks, reputations, made people apathetic or in one case pleased about some of these destructions, made people authentically despairing about modern corporate culture, turned tranquil Rottweilers into furious maniacs, induced uncanny out-of-body subspace experiences, and as we’ll see reduced people to babbling wrecks, made them build dioramas of the town of Twin Peaks in their flat, wallpaper their flat with pages from Mr Morrissey’s novella, and believe the series’ title lettering was beaming down at them from the sky, that its green rays had infected and puppeteered the whole of the Ultraverse.
And even if you make it through more or less unscathed and inside your own skin and not puppeteered by imaginary lettering, you might still find yourself shouting on street corners to alert your fellow citizens to the fact that this show ever existed.
Dante gets thrown into the conversation sometimes by its fans, and I suppose you can only nod along. It has made Twin Peaks as a whole a kind of Divine Comedy in reverse, which kicked off in the first fourteen episodes with a kind of TV heaven, which was followed by an annoying but not yet horrific purgatory with the next fourteen, and then a headlong plummet with Season 3 all the way down to actual TV hell. But I have been in hell many times before. I know the footholds, secret paths, dead ends, deceptive signposts (Shambolic Means Authentic; Not Quite So Abominable on a Fourth or Fifth Watch; Hours of Dead Air on TV Are a Handy Shortcut to the Transcendental Void).
If you feel up to it, then, let’s commence on this journey through hell and try to get some sense of its barbarities. And as you’ll see, like attempts to comprehend a black hole with a tape measure, normal states of mind are unequal to this task. Nothing about The Return is normal, and that includes what’s required to start comprehending it. To provide even a glimmer of its real nature, we’ll need to employ unusual measures and tools.
I suppose I have to say it: there will be plenty of spoilers. But I also have to say that whenever anyone uses the word spoiler in relation to this series, implying that it could possibly be spoiled for your average viewer, somehow made less enjoyable, that’s when I feel the approach in my brain of full-blown psychosis.