Tuesday 27 February 2018

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 32

I'm still writing these posts in rather retrospective and haphazard fashion, and coming back to this one, it certainly does seem like a random selection.  And all the more so because the next couple have themes of sorts.  Yes, themes!  That's the sort of mad ambition you don't normally see around these parts.  But there's none of that here, unless you consider "totally unrelated nineties anime" a theme in itself.  And even then, Ys buggers that up royally, what with being from the eighties and all.

Oh well!  Best to embrace the chaos, I suppose.  At least it's a solid batch, which feels like something that's been rather rare of late, and at least we have a couple of proper standouts.  As a fun game, you might as well try and guess what they are from among: 3X3 Eyes: Legend of the Divine DemonPhantom Quest CorpYs: Legacy (Book Two) and Elf Princess Rane...

3X3 Eyes: Legend of the Divine Demon, 1995, dir: Kiyoko Sayama

It's funny that I ended the review of the first 3X3 Eyes OVA by saying how much I was looking forward to part two and that it's only now, many months later, that I've got around to watching it.  Blame the running time for that: three forty-five minute episodes in a row requires a chunk of time that I don't often have, and it would be a shame to split up what's effectively one long movie.  Though in the case of Legend of the Divine Demon, it's a touch more complicated than that, given that the first episode stands on its own as a relatively self-contained story, in which we're dumped unceremoniously into a mystery that won't really get answered until the very end.  Why is Pai, the last of the mystical race known as the Sanjiyan Unkara, living a mundane life as a Japanese schoolgirl, cared for by two elderly grandparents?  And why doesn't she recognise Yakumo, the human she previously turned into her immortal servant, when he finally tracks her down after what we learn to be an absence of four whole years?

It's an intriguing setup, and that first episode is kind of a belter, all told.  But it's really only a warm-up for the main feature, in which the pair join the hunt for an artifact that acts as a gateway to Pai's otherworldly home, all the while trying to restore her lost memories.  It's great as a sequel to the original OVA, solid as a standalone story, and excellent as a chunk of a wider narrative, even if this would be all there'd ever be; we get enough answers and sufficient resolution not to feel shortchanged, and there's a definite (and pretty epic) story being told here, with a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Looking back at my review of the first OVA, these are very much the same virtues I was talking about there, and that goes for the rest as well, though the animation is a bit more impressive this time.  I grumbled a little that the 3X3 Eyes OVA had no really stand-out moments, but that isn't the case this time around, and there are, in particular, some terrific action sequences.  Another new virtue is that Yakumo has somewhat come into his own as a protagonist, especially given that he's picked up some kick-ass martial arts skills to compliment his inability to die, and though Pai is still a bit dull, at least there's a solid plot reason for that.  In fact, it's one that gets resolved in quite a heart-tugging fashion, which I certainly wasn't expecting from a mid-nineties horror anime.

In short, this is really good stuff.  And since you're only likely to pick it up in the Pioneer box set that contains both releases, it really is worth the effort of tracking down: 3X3 Eyes, in all of its incarnations, rises head and shoulders over similar titles, with its fantastic central conceit, its enticing mythology, and its knack for generating proper shocks by taking the time to invest in its characters and narrative first.

Phantom Quest Corp, 1994, dir's: Morio Asaka, Kôichi Chigira, Takuji Endo, Junichi Sakata

If you should happen to have seen the Ghost Sweeper Mikami OVA then I can keep this one awfully simple: Phantom Quest Corp is that, except rather better on all fronts.  Want a comedy action show about a young, ghost-fighting redhead with a taste for short dresses, a weakness for money, and a posse of kooky sidekicks?  Then Ayaka Kisaragi is your girl.  Coincidence?  Plagiarism?  Who knows, or - twenty-some years after the event - much cares?  Personally I'm willing to pin this on one of those weird cases of parallel inspiration that sometimes comes along, and leads two comic book teams to simultaneously tell tales of humanoid swamp creatures or two animation studios to conclude at roughly the same time that films about anthropomorphised bugs are just the best damn thing.  If only because, otherwise, Phantom Quest Corp would be the most obvious of rip-offs and surely no-one could imagine they'd get away with it.  For that matter, it's not as though horror anime wasn't already screaming to be pastiched in such a fashion by this point in time; it's no great leap to assume that two separate creators watched one too many self-serious tale of moody male exorcists battling evil spirits with a predilection for the fairer sex and concluded that the whole business needed flipping on its head.

And that was a very long diversion to stave off admitting that there's not a huge amount to say about Phantom Quest Corp.  The animation is strong, and excellent in the action scenes; the character designs are pleasing, and the characters themselves, while shallow as a bunch of particularly shallow puddles, are entirely acceptable to spend time around.  Really only Kisaragi gets anything by way of development, and then not much.  By the fourth episode, we know more or less what we knew by the end of the first: that she likes to drink too much and has a penchant (though no discernible talent) for karaoke, that she's awful at keeping her business in the black, and that she's very good indeed at kicking the crap out of vampires and demons with her magic extending lipstick.

Okay, so that's not a character trait.  But I'd have been remiss in not mentioning the magic extending lipstick.

Point being, if there's one thing seriously missing here, it's depth; that and some sniff of an ongoing plot that would stop Phantom Quest Corp feeling as if you'd just watched four episodes at random from a fairly aimless series.  Then again, at least all four episodes deliver fun and moderately novel stories, and at least the animation quality never dips.  These things don't make Phantom Quest Corp the least bit special, or even worth the effort of hunting down; but they do make it worth a couple of hours of your time if you should happen to stumble across a cheap copy.

Ys (Book Two), 1989, dir: Jun Kamiya

There was no reason to imagine that the last three episodes of Ys: Legacy would magically become meaningfully better than the first four, and sure enough, every failing I noted there is present and correct for the action-packed climax: stiff acting, clunky animation, uninspired music, bland designs, and a plot that could not be any more the plot of a hugely generic nineties JRPG if it tried - which in fairness, it does in fact seem to be devoting a great deal of energy to.  Perhaps the most exciting innovation here from a narrative point of view is that the villain's kidnapping of a significant character means that two of agonisingly dull hero Adol Christen's fetch quests get rolled into one, saving us yet another episode of him going somewhere and fighting some monster and grabbing another MacGuffin.  Though it's worth noting that if said character had been less of a jerk and hadn't withheld crucial information, the same result could have been accomplished in a fraction of the time, and they probably wouldn't have been kidnapped.  Because, yes, that's the sort of story we're dealing with here.

And yet Ys does end in marginally better fashion than it began.  The locations and monsters feel a little more fresh, the pacing picks up somewhat, and there's even a glimmer of something like originality, as we begin to suspect that the reason the villain Dark Fact refuses to just kill his damn nemesis and be done with it is something more than the usual villainous overconfidence.

Oh, right, did I mention last time that the villain is called Dark Fact?  I guess that's another small thing in Ys's favour.

If we were really to reach, I'd add - and I strongly suspect I'm giving too much credit here, or that my brain was overthinking madly due to lack of meaningful stimulation - that by the end I felt Ys was saying some moderately interesting things about religion, as we're left wondering why any creator would build obvious flaws into their universe, let alone why they'd be surprised when said obvious flaws lead to everything turning out terribly.  Even if Ys chances upon its themes rather than seeking them out or even earning them, they're themes nonetheless, and that's something.  Oh, and I really love the closing track on the later episodes; it's nineties Japanese hair rock par excellence, and it almost makes me want to hang onto the DVDs.  But, you know, I probably won't, because one good song (that I can just listen to on Youtube here) and a bit of inadvertent theological deconstruction aside, Ys was basically dreadful.

Elf Princess Rane, 1995, dir: Akitarô Daichi

If you ever want to sell me on a sixty minute, two episode OVA that never got so much as completed, comparing it to Dragon Half, as one reviewer did, is an excellent place to start.  And as it turns out, it's not the unfairest of comparisons either; while Elf Princess Rane is parodying a wholly different set of tropes in an entirely different fashion, there's definitely a spirit of high-energy lunacy and anything-goes physical comedy that binds the two at least a little.

For something so patently absurd, Elf Princess Rane is surprisingly sophisticated in its storytelling.  We basically have three interconnected plot strands: there's our kinda-hero Go Takarada, a teenager who fancies himself as a treasure hunter but doesn't have the first clue what he's doing; there's Rane, the titular elf princess, who Go finds when she comes to Earth in search of some sort of mystical treasure, and who is in turn being tracked by another elf, Leen, at least on the rare occasions when she remembers to bother; and lastly there's floppy-haired nominal villain Takuma Zenshuuin, who's in love with Mari Yumenokata, who's in love with Go, but is also the architect of a nefarious plan to turn the entire city into an amusement park, against the best efforts of the fire department and their top employee, who's one of Go's numerous identical sisters.  (Another one, incidentally, works for Zenshuuin.)

You know, I'm not sure how I figured that to be three plot strands!  Perhaps the point is more that there are essentially three major protagonists / antagonists with their own significant plots, none of which are especially privileged.  And the way they intertwine without derailing each other is really rather clever, while also being the heart of Elf Princess Rane's humour: in its crudest form, Go will do something, which Rain will misinterpret (because the two of them can't communicate) and which will inadvertently factor into Zenshuuin's plans - but crucially, none of them are ever disillusioned that they're the centre of the story.  And I have to stress that I'm grossly oversimplifying here: quite a number of the cast also get significant narrative threads.  For something both so short and so busy, it's quite the little triumph of elaborate storytelling.

Of course, ingenious storytelling isn't necessarily what one goes to a two episode comedy OVA for, so let's be thankful that Rane is also damn funny in places.  There are gags that fall flat, at least in part because the material is borderline untranslatable; the most irritating is Zenshuuin's habit of talking nonsense, which Anime Works represent with reversed subtitles that necessitate pausing the DVD (unless you're much better than me at reading backwards quickly) and which are mostly just plugs for their other releases.  But you can always opt for the splendid dub instead, most of the jokes land, and perhaps more than that, there's a baseline of silly good-naturedness that's amusing in itself.  Elf Princess Rane is the sort of release that's funny almost by osmosis; just hanging out with these absurd characters and watching them bounce off each other is a pleasure.

I'm running the risk of making this sound like some sort of masterpiece, and in all fairness, it's not that; I didn't even love it in the way that I do Dragon Half.  But it is a heck of a lot of fun, and its flaws are largely inconspicuous.  The animation and music are considerably better than they need to be, for example, and show a proper degree of affection; even the fact that there's no real ending is sort of okay, since the show just turns it into another gag.  There's a surprising degree of unnecessary nudity, which certainly might bother some people; there's the aforementioned subtitling joke, which gets real old real fast.  But that's it; Elf Princess Rane is a rare pleasure, and I dearly wish there was a bit more of it.

-oOo-

Looking back, that was actually a really solid batch.  I mean, Ys was kind of awful, but it's wasn't awful awful.  And just possibly it suffered for the fact that I was knackered during most of January and kept nodding off while watching things, which normally I'm pretty good at not doing.  Actually, just between you and me, down here in the conclusion that surely no-one ever reads, I actually drowsed off a bit in 3X3 Eyes: Legend of the Divine Demon, too.  But I'm ninety-nine percent certain that was my fault more than its.

Next time around, I think, we're likely to have the "nineties anime that isn't from the nineties" special, because this blog series is nothing if not confusing and inconsistent.



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Tuesday 20 February 2018

The Bad Neighbour Sold to Flame Tree Publishing

I think I mentioned in my end of year round-up that there was big news on the way, of the sort that I couldn't reveal at the time.  Well, now I can, and it's of the immensely good sort: Flame Tree Publishing, as part of their opening foray into novel publishing, have picked up my crime debut The Bad Neighbour.

But let's unpack that a little, since it's all sorts of exciting beyond the basic level of "I've sold another novel and people are going to get to read it."  Flame Tree first: I've talked about them a few times here on the blog.  We ran into each with their Gothic Fantasy anthology series, which I've been in a couple of now, and which are also the two single loveliest books I own.  I mean, they're beautiful; they're the books that I show off to visitors, even if you've only come to read the electricity meter or deliver the post.  They're the sort of books that, when you find out that those same publishers are opening to novel length fiction, you make damn certain you have something to put in front of them and hope that they'll bite.

They bit.  And on a book that - this is the other exciting part, by the way - is absolutely nothing like what anyone might consider a 'David Tallerman book.'  If you're one of those people who's followed my career through it's many twists and turns then, firstly, thank you! and secondly, this one's still going to come as a shock.  And I mean that, I hope, in a good way.  It's an exciting prospect as a writer to get to move wholeheartedly into a genre you've hardly more than glanced at before.  That genre, in this case, being an urban crime thriller, one set in present day West Yorkshire and drawing on elements of my own life and experiences.

I've never been much for writing what I know, not when I can make stuff up and get paid for it.  However, I'd been thinking that I wanted to try my hand at writing crime for a long time, rather than merely flirting with it as I had in the Easie Damasco books and elsewhere.  And a number of factors, including a surprising discovery about the house that I bought back in 2011, happened to come together and form the seeds of a story that I knew I really, really wanted to tell, and sooner rather than later.  Thus was born the tale of Ollie Clay, the twenty-something supply teacher who makes a dreadful mistake when he invests an unexpected windfall into a battered terraced house in the outskirts of Leeds without pausing to wonder just who he might find himself living next-door to.

But let's not say any more than that; it's early days, after all.  While we already have that splendid cover up in the top right, there's still a long way to go with The Bad Neighbour, and though I'm expecting it to be out this year, I don't have a solid release date as yet.  More news as I get it, then, and expect me to be talking about this one a lot in the coming months!

Saturday 10 February 2018

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 31

I'm so far ahead with these posts now that I'm in the rather weird situation of having to write up the summaries weeks after having written the reviews; heck, I say weeks, but I don't even remember when I watched this stuff!  I guess Christmas, since I found the time to get through Sol Bianca: The Legacy, which had been on my shelf forever, and there's only one time of the year when you're guaranteed three whole hours in a row to sit down and watch anime.  Man, wouldn't it be great if it was Christmas all the time?  I mean not all the rubbish stuff, like the crap songs and the weird food and the indiscriminate tree murder.  No, just the bit where you get to hang out for a week watching all the anime that you otherwise can't make time for.

So in the spirit of Christmas, possibly, unless I've just got my dates mixed up, let's dig into some not-remotely-seasonal nineties anime.  This time around: Gestalt, MadaraUrusei Yatsura: Ryoko's September Tea Party and Sol Bianca: The Legacy...

Gestalt, 1997, Osamu Yamasaki

It seems to me that there was always something a little sleazy and exploitative about the way that anime was released outside of Japan prior to the twentieth century - and I'm not talking about the likes of Legend of the Overfiend here.  I'm referring more to the rough-and-readiness that companies like MVM, US Manga Corp and ADV brought to the scene: though evidently there was at least some earnest desire to introduce good-quality anime to the US and Europe, that was never to say that anyone would ignore the possibility of a quick buck, even when it wasn't strictly deserved.

And so we get to Gestalt - or rather, the first two episodes of Gestalt, since that's all that was ever released.  I am assuming that MVM knew this when they committed to releasing the title on DVD, and I'm further assuming that the decision to not mention the fact that this was two episodes of a canceled miniseries (or series, for all I know) was not an accidental one.

It's useful to know this going in, because it certainly does sugar the pill if you don't expect any answers, or even for our intrepid heroes to do more than talk about the country in question, which dashing young priest Oliver is seeking when he gets sidetracked into rescuing sexy and initially mute sorceress Ohiri, who may well come from the land of Gestalt and certainly knows a great deal more than she's letting on.  What any of that is we're unlikely to ever know - I've no idea if the Manga got a release outside of Japan - and what we get instead is a bit of an introduction and what amounts to a side quest.  And this, on the whole, is probably a good thing.  I mean, the many questions raised are tantalizing, but this isn't like Sol Bianca, where the prospect of never discovering how things will work out is legitimately painful.  Gestalt is silly and fluffy and not terribly concerned with its own plot; it would much rather spend time parodying other anime and JRPGs, with gags such as the way Ohiri's initial voicelessness manifests in her talking in rectangular dialogue boxes that look exactly like something out of Final Fantasy.  Really, that's about the level we're operating at here, and if the idea makes you smile then you're probably on Gestalt's wavelength.

I certainly was, on the whole.  The animation is resolutely mid-budget TV quality, but the characters are charming, the action sequences are fun, the spell effects are pretty cool, and by the end I was left vaguely sad that there'd never be any more episodes, but not so much so that I felt I'd wasted an hour of my life.  I paid about £2.50 for Gestalt, and I'd say that was precisely right: it kept me amused, Oliver and Ohiri were likable company, and there's every possibility I'll want to watch it again one of these days.  For an utterly dispensable, unfinished, comic fantasy OVA that MVM dropped out for wholly mercenary reasons, I'm willing to call that a win.

Madara, 1991, dir: Yûji Moriyama

Beyond a certain point, it's the little things that count.  I mean, if you were to try and persuade me that Madara was hackneyed crap then I'd have a hard time fighting its corner.  There's a chosen-one hero, there's an evil lord, there's a village full of kindly folks who all get slaughtered early on enough to kick the plot into motion; there's a fair maiden who turns out to have powers of her own, and eventually the hero's brother turns up.  Would you be astonished to hear that he holds a grudge against Madara and blames him for the death of their mother?  I suspect you wouldn't.  No, it's easy to see how someone might take a cursory look at this and determine that it was a damn sight like every other nineties fantasy movie, anime or no.

But let's focus in on a few details, shall we?  Because for all the ways that Madara feels achingly familiar, there are a couple more where it's surprising as all get out.  Madara's chosen-one power?  Why, that would involve shooting rockets out of his shoulders and firing off his own hands like little punchy missiles.  And heroine Kirin's special ability?  Well, she can control two giant mecha.  Oh, and at one point, Noah's arc turns up.  It's kind of a spaceship.  Piloted by a guy with monkeys.  And none of this is explained at all.  Like an awful lot of Madara, it just sort of happens, and you're expected to rock along with it.  Probably this has a fair bit to do with the disadvantages of adapting the manga into two hour long OVA episodes, but the result in the moment is a certain fever-dream quality, along with a gleeful sense that just about anything might happen next.

This is helped no end by a sparse but superb soundtrack - the punky end song is marvelous - and by the visuals, which, though not extraordinary in terms of budget, are exemplary on the level of ambition and design.  Again, it comes down to the little things, those details of character and small touches that are frequently the difference between mediocre and really good animation.  But there's also some exciting design work going on - the monsters are enticingly weird - and, what really sets Madara apart, an ambition in the colour scheme that's especially rare.  The show overwhelmingly favours reds, blues, and some of the most gorgeous shades of purple you're every likely to see, and a surprisingly excellent print makes the colours pop.  Madara has moments of genuine beauty, and that's not something you have any right to expect from a cheesy nineties fantasy OVA about a guy who rocket-punches monsters.

I suspect the crucial difference here can be traced to Yûji Moriyama, who has immediately entered the pantheon of my nineties anime heroes.  Moriyama wouldn't have such an amazing career as a director (though he was behind my beloved Geobreeders) but, taken as a whole, his CV is astonishing.  Project A-Ko, Wings of Honneamise, Evangelion, Gunbuster, Robot Carnival, Macross Plus, and, for the coup de grâce, All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku!  Seriously, if you ever need to win a nineties anime game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Moriyama is your man.

As is probably obvious by now, I had great fun with Madara; really, it ticked all of my nineties anime boxes.  None of that quite adds up to it being any sort of classic, because that would require a great deal more originality than we get.  But then, sometimes a classic isn't what you're after.  I had a joyous two hours reveling in Madara's craziness, its refusal to explain the basics of its wacky universe, and its endless shades of purple, each more gorgeous than the last.  In fact, while I'd recommend Madara to anyone who wants a couple of hours of bonkers but undemanding fantasy, if you're a fan of purple then it really is an indispensable release.


Urusei Yatsura: Ryoko's September Tea Party, 1985, dir's: Keiji Hayakawa, Junji Nishimura, Mamoru Oshii, Tsugio Ozawa, Iku Suzuki, Osamu Uemura, Kazuo Yamazaki, Naoyuki Yoshinaga

Did I enjoy the Urusei Yatsura movies enough to watch the eleven OVAs that were also released?  Er, it seems that I did; or at least I managed to find a reasonably-priced copy of the box set and couldn't resist, which amounts to the same.  At any rate, only two of them were even close to feature length, so we're all spared the bother of me trying to find interesting things to say about nearly a dozen more Urusei Yatsura releases.

Except that I don't really have anything interesting to say about Ryoko's September Tea Party either.  The thing is, it's a clip show is what it is, though I didn't know that going in: apparently there's about fifteen minutes of new footage here, though it feels like less.  The arc plot, if you're feeling generous about using words like "arc" and "plot", finds Ryoko - a character I'm not confident I've run into in the movies - suffering from such ennui with her life of crushing wealth and inactivity that she orders the army of ninjas who apparently look after her to organize a tea party and invite a select few of the inhabitants of Tomobiki, including Lum and her obnoxious darling Moroboshi.  Ryoko then precedes to tell them stories about how she first came to town, which presumably they all already know, and then interrogates her guests for anecdotes about their own bizarre lives.  The result is eight or so sequences plucked apparently at random from what I assume to be the first season of the show, since this was the first of the OVA releases.  Some of them are pretty funny; others don't stand alone at all.  All of them rely on a knowledge of the characters that would utterly defy the casual viewer.

At least the production values are solid: the new footage is especially good, but the scenes from the show are hardly shoddy.  And there are two or three presumably new tunes, too, if you're the kind of person who hunts down vanishingly rare anime releases from three decades ago to hear a bit of J-pop you've never run across before.  Um ... I'm reaching here, aren't I?  The truth is, while Ryoko's September Tea Party started pretty well, by the end I was eager for it to be over.  All its best material is clustered in the first half, and after that it's a bit like - well, like watching a load of people you barely know hanging out at a party to which you weren't invited.  So definitely one for the fans, I'd say, in so much as that means anything thirty years after the event.

Sol Bianca: The Legacy, 1999, dir: Hiroyuki Ochi

Perhaps the most curious thing about Sol Bianca: The Legacy is that it exists at all.  The original, two part OVA that this rather longer entry is a sort-of sequel to and sort-of reinterpretation of underperformed sufficiently that it was never finished, despite being all sorts of fantastic.  So did its reputation grow in the intervening eight years?  Did Japanese audiences realise they'd dropped the ball in dismissing one of the most gorgeous, unusual, and engaging slices of anime ever and begin to clamor for more?  Or at least for some closure, since Sol Bianca did a frustrating business of raising questions that would never be answered?

Perhaps!  I guess stranger things have happened in the world of anime.  But at least on the latter count, The Legacy was sure to be a disappointment: it's not much of a one for question-answering, and its universe and themes are sufficiently different-seeming that they're hard to square with Sol Bianca in any meaningful fashion.  Nor does it quite look the part: eight years was a long time in nineties animation, such a long time that the seemingly short gap between the two releases was enough to usher in a computer-assisted approach that, while probably nigh-on cutting edge for the time, stood no hope of being as pretty as the truly lovely original.  The style reminds me more of American animation, or specifically of what certain video games were getting up to in aping that style.  It's terrifically smooth and the characters look great in close ups, the CG is surprisingly well integrated and certainly warrants its inclusion, but there are enough shots that appear flat-out wrong that its hard to be consistently impressed.

To some extent, that's Sol Bianca: The Legacy all over.  It's never bad and occasionally really good, certainly on a par with most of what was around at the time.  If the cast feel a touch watered down - their response on finding a young stowaway this time is not, for example, to start looking for the nearest airlock - it's still great to see a show where most of the characters are adult women who act at least somewhat in a manner that real adult women might act.  Meanwhile, the arc plot takes a couple of episodes too long to find its feet, but when it does, it's actually pretty novel and exciting, hinting at a wider universe in satisfying ways and tying off enough loose ends to not aggravate.

But it's not Sol Bianca.  In fact, more than anything, it feels like a piece of really solid Sol Bianca fan fiction made by people who obviously have a ton of affection for what's come before, even if they don't altogether get what made it work.  Yet at the same time, the results are good enough to leave you wondering what might have been; how might these characters and this setting have developed given another OVA or even a full series?  In that sense, Sol Bianca: The Legacy doesn't so much as fill the hole left by the original as dig another, somewhat smaller hole nearby.  It's a worthwhile addition to one of the great anime franchises to never remotely reach its full potential, but not quite a worthy one.  Nevertheless, there remains a smart, original show here, one with a fine cast brought to life with solid production values, and the excellent music alone makes it worth a punt.  By all means give Sol Bianca: The Legacy a go if you ever get the chance, there's a lot to like and a fair bit to love.  Just know that, despite what its title may think, it's not quite the legacy that the marvelous Sol Bianca truly deserved.

-oOo-

Again, what with the whole time lag thing, my memory is a little blurry here, and you know what's weird?  The thing that I remember with most fondness is Gestalt.  It can't possibly have been half as good as I remember, and yet I really want to know what would have happened.  Meanwhile, the disappointment of Sol Bianca: the Legacy has decreased with time, to the point where I'd already quite like to give it another go.  Which leaves Madara as the only thing my opinion has stayed exactly the same on, even if all I can remember is how damned purple it was.  Oh, and there was that Yurusei Yatsura OVA, wasn't there?  Man, I hope that buying the entire Yurusei Yatsura OVA collection was a better investment than it seems to be on the available evidence!

Next time around?  Who can possibly remember?  But it's a safe bet that some of it will be utterly terrible and at least one thing will be kind of great!



[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

Sunday 4 February 2018

Corporate Cthulhu Open For Business

If there really are merciless elder gods from beyond time and space hovering on the fractured fringes of our reality, it makes perfect sense that they would find themselves in the world of big business.  I mean, really, where else would they wind up?  Why sleep away the eons in the frigid depths of the ocean when you could be drawing down a six figure salary just for turning up to a few meetings?  Why spread madness and horror from some dingy cavern or dream-dimension when you can wreck the sanity of whole nations with a little malpractice in the world of high finance?  Why scour the earth of sentient life yourself when you can set up a corporation to do much the same and rake in a buck or seven trillion while you're at it?

Yup, as strange as the tales gathered within the anthology Corporate Cthulhu: Lovecraftian Tales of Bureaucratic Nightmare surely are, the strangest thing is that it took so long for someone to put the two concepts together.

Well, okay, this certainly isn't the first time - though to my knowledge it is the first time anyone's thought to use the combination for a themed collection, so credit is still due to editor Edward Stasheff and publisher Pickman's Press for taking a good idea and running with it.  But I know for a fact that the concept isn't one hundred percent new because I wrote my own story pairing the twin nightmares of the Mythos and rampant capitalism way back in my early years as a writer.  The God Under the Church was born out of the same impulses that led to many of the stories in my collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, and was even a near miss for that book, due to the fact that I didn't have the time at that point to polish it up to my satisfaction.  But I didn't want to miss another opportunity to get it back out there, and there couldn't have been a more perfect fit for a tale in which a new corporate director starts to discover the very-sinister-indeed history of the company in which he's worked.

If that sounds like your idea of fun, you can pick up a copy of Corporate Cthulhu here on Amazon UK and here on Amazon US.  And here's the full table of contents:
DEATH PLEDGE by Jeff Deck
WELCOME TO THE R’LYEH CORPORATION by James Pratt
SHADOW CHARTS by Marcus Johnston
CASUAL FRIDAY by Todd H. C. Fischer
THE GOD UNDER THE CHURCH by David Tallerman
REFUSAL by DJ Tyrer
DAGON-TEC by Adam Millard
ESOTERIC INSURANCE, INC. by Evan Dicken & Adrian Ludens
CAREER ZOMBIE by John Taloni
BOEDROMION NOUMENIA by Andrew Scott
INCORPORATION by Max D. Stanton
THE LOPONINE EXPLOITATION by John M. Campbell
FESTIVAL PREPARATIONS by Justin Bailey
MARYANNE’S EQUATIONS by Harry Pauff
WHOLESOME LABOR by Sam Rent
LIKE A GOOD NEIGHBOR by Wile E. Young
TINDALOS, INC. by Charlie Allison
CLEAN UP AISLE FOUR by Josh Storey
FORCED LABOR by Peter Rawlik
THE SHADOWS LENGTHEN in the Close by Ethan Gibney
IT CAME FROM I.T. by Gordon Linzner
RETRACTION by Marie Michaels
FACILITIES MANAGEMENT AT DAGOCORP HQ by L Chan
NO DOVES COME FROM RAVEN EGGS by Mark Oxbrow
APOTHEOSIS by Darren Todd