THE EDGE magazine | Book reviews | Kim Newman

Unforgivable Stories
Kim Newman
Pocket Books paperback, 340 pages, £6.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)

Yet another collection of Newman’s unstoppable outpourings, billed loosely as a reopening of famous ‘closed cases of fantasy and horror fiction’, but on the whole being the usual grab bag of superior magazine and anthology jottings. ‘Further Developments in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ does what it says on the tin, revisiting that celebrated fiction in order to take a largely priapic, non-supernatural and frankly, jaw-dropping, take on the hoary old tale of ‘The Good Doctor and the Mad Mister.’ It is the most successful piece on offer here.

Which is not to denigrate all of the remainder. For every ‘Amerikanski Dead At The Moscow Morgue’ (a re-imagining of the film zombie that reads like an idea in search of a point) or ‘Great Western’ (a toe-curlingly tedious attempt at a Somerset western) there is a ‘Residuals’ or ‘Quetzalcón’. ‘Residuals’, co-penned with Paul J. McAuley, cleverly asks what happens after your fifteen minutes have faded. Or, more precisely, what happens to two blokes who saved the world from alien invasion but are best remembered now for their fictional selves in a cheesy TV rerun. Mulder and Scully, your future is calling.

‘Quetzalcón’ is an eerily precise fan programme facsimile for ‘The Kingston Dunstan Convention’ at the Leech Pyramid Plaza, Docklands, in 1997. The Pratchett-esque hack famous for his overblown Aztec fantasy novels, Dunstan is lauded on the page by Jack Yeovil and Newman himself in this increasingly silly-but-sinister pamphlet.

Coming hot on the heels of the recent Seven Stars collection (and the novels Dracula Cha Cha Cha and Life’s Lottery – Christ, breathing space, please), it’s worth noting the strength of Eugene Byrne’s biographical introduction. We’ll take the school smart-arse in an opera cape given to quoting Poe from memory: ‘But lordy, was he a weird kid’ – over Stephen Jones’ embarrassing introductory hagiography for Seven Stars.

Interestingly, the volume rounds out with ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ (co-written with Byrne), a smart alternate history that finds the Vietnam War populated by British comedy heroes; South-East Asia out of Clement and La Frenais. Interesting, because it’s taken directly from the Newman and Byrne’s superb Back in the USSA, wherein the US underwent the revolution that somehow bypassed imperialist and capitalist Russia. Back in the USSA appeared three years ago in the States and still languishes without a British publisher. Pocket Books, take note. •

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