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The Twist
Richard Calder
Earthlight, paperback, 282 pages, £5.99
Published November 1999
ISBN 0671037196
Review by David Alexander (1999)

Like something out of a particularly lurid 1950s B-picture, the Venusians have landed. Taking the form of seriously sexy glamour pusses, Betty Page-Marilyn Monroe hybrids, big tits and mouths just made for fellatio, they are sex-death addicts, hungry for love and death and the souls of young men and women. They are also interplanetary situationists, minus the Marxist theory and political practice, for their arrival is a psychogeographical event, warping space-time, transmogrifying the western states of America, and turning California and surrounding areas into some kind of transdimensional interzone, a virtual space of deserts, tropical rain forests and entropic border towns. 

Against this bizarre backdrop plays the story of Nicola E. Newton, a precocious nine-year-old schoolgirl, drunk on alienation and boredom and dreams of lust in the dust, who runs off with John Twist, ageing gunslinger and poetry fiend, and his partner (or should that be pardner?), Venusian good-time girl and necrobabe, Miss Viva Venera, who, many years previously, had saved him from a hanging and now waits, sometimes patiently, sometimes impatiently, for his (violent) death and the taste of his sweet-sour old soul.

The Twist, then, is yet another of Richard Calder’s wild pulp science fictions. Unlike his previous novels, but particularly the Dead trilogy, this one doesn’t quite work. Perhaps because the narrative is heavy with thick description, pop philosophy and a peculiar, quite possibly ironic brand of existential angst and agony. Or perhaps because the writing style, a rich, dense, almost 19th century prose, plays against the substance, a mix and match of themes and motifs straight out of trash culture; old-time westerns, pulp horror, sci-fi B-movies and so on. 

Or maybe because the story, which in one sense is really little more than a variant on the old rites of passage trope, which sees Nicola E. Newton pass from childhood to adulthood and beyond, isn’t terribly gripping. Nevertheless, the novel has its moments; a series of quite spectacular set-pieces — the opening stagecoach ride which plays like some warped riff on an old-time western, mutant waste zombies substituting for attacking Indians; the conceptualisation of the old town of Tombstone as a necropolis straight out of Poe or Lovecraft; and the final shoot-out in a tropical border town on the edge of the River Styx — High Noon or Gunfight at the OK Coral played as a darkly comic horror show cum science fantasy. A novel which is never quite the sum of its many parts.