Book Review: Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

Book Review: Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

Review by Casey Douglass

If I hear a tasty quote or a short sentence that strikes a chord with how I’m feeling about life, I’ll nod my head, think about writing it down and then never get around to it. Daniel Klein is someone that did actually take the next step in that process and actually put pen to paper. As a young man, Daniel labelled a notebook “Pithies” and decided to record any philosophical gem that spoke to him. Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It was born when decades later, Daniel rediscovered this old notebook, and decided to study it to see what fresh insights might be gained.

The title: Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It was born from a quote from American philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, and as you might imagine, the book itself consists of plenty of chapters, each beginning with the quote that inspired that particular chapter. In the prologue, Daniel explains the conundrum of how to best order the Pithies. He didn’t want to just arbitrarily write them chronologically, or try to categorise the pigeonhole spanning themes within. He settled on presenting them in a more natural, whimsical way, letting one idea lead him to another. I enjoyed this approach, as I felt it gave the book a more conversational flow, taking in the natural deviations that a friendly philosophical discussion might contain.

The opening sections of the book start with the topic of hedonism and such figures as Epicurus and Aristippus, but soon makes way for the pessimistic Arthur Schopenhauer and the often quite bleak Existentialists such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. This is what I referenced above, how talking about hedonism and finding pleasure in life soon diverts to the suffering it contains and notions of pain and suicide. That’s not even getting to the notion of free-will, what is our true-self and the benefits of friendship and humour. This is a book dense with ideas and I’ve only very loosely described the first third of it so far.

Don’t let the denseness put you off however, as Daniel does a fine job of making things interesting. The quote that starts each chapter is like an acorn he puts in your hand, and the humble number of pages that follow in said chapter describe the branch of the “philosophy tree” it came from. Certain of these leaves were also taken from Daniel’s own life, whether relating to what was going on at the time he recorded the Pithy, or his own views now looking back at that time. We also get to hear about his dog Snookers in some of his examples, which is something I think more philosophical discourse should include.

The topics in Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It cover quite a variety of things, and Daniel does a good job of explaining his opinions on these issues. I didn’t find myself disagreeing more than a couple of times. The only thing I felt a shake of my head towards was in the chapter about friendship and relationships. Daniel seemed dismissive of the idea of setting certain boundaries in your relationship with someone; how it goes against intimacy and the like. I can see his point and he made his case with a reasonable example, but I would say that boundaries are an important element of self-care for certain people, especially if you happen to live life as a chronic “people pleaser”.

Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It is a lovely book that provides much food for thought. I’d already read a decent number of the philosophers inside, but I also picked up a few names that I’d like to find out more about. The main discovery for me in this respect is David Pearce, a British philosopher who thinks that we must do whatever is possible to make happiness universal. Incorporated into his ideas are the use of technology, such as nanotechnology and designer drugs and how they might be used to bring this about. As someone who struggles with uncomfortable emotions like fear and anxiety on quite a painful level, this notion of what a world without certain emotions would be like is an interesting thing to ponder. I’ve yet to actually read anything of Pearce’s directly but I firmly intend to.

So for £1.99, I bought a book that took me on a philosophical tour of some of the most enrapturing ideas for the author, with the added bonus of finding some new avenues to follow along the way. I’ve spent more on crisps! If you enjoy philosophy that is presented in a calm, thoughtful way, head on over to Amazon or the publisher’s website to find out more.

Book Title: Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

Book Author: Daniel Klein

Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Released: 2015

ISBN: 9781780749327

Current Price: £8.19 (Paperback) / £1.99 (Kindle)

Splat some Bugs in Starship Troopers: Terran Command (PC)

Splat some Bugs in Starship Troopers: Terran Command (PC)

Last night while I was idly browsing Steam’s upcoming releases list, I got my first look at Slitherine’s Starship Troopers: Terran Command. It’s a real time strategy game that’s based on the first film in the series, letting the player take control of the Mobile Infantry as they battle against the Bugs. The game is being developed by Belgian developer The Aristocrats and has been in development for more than two years. It’s scheduled for release sometime in 2020, and sadly, after the game’s announcement last December, everything seems to have fallen silent. With the Corona Virus currently affecting pretty much everything, who’s to say if it will even release this year. Time will tell.

I really liked the first Starship Troopers film. The others, well, I barely remember them, but the first was a fun, gory, satirical look at how a space-age military might deal with an alien menace. If Starship Troopers: Terran Command manages to capture enough of the feel of the first film, and doesn’t make a mess of anything major, it could be the real time strategy game that actually draws me back to the genre after years of largely not being interested.

Iain McNeil, Development Director at Slitherine sums up the seemingly perfect fit of Starship Troopers as an RTS in the press release when he said: “If you take one of the most iconic movies from the 90s and shape it into a strategy game of survival, that mixes classic real-time mechanics, tower defense and tactical deployment of units then you have ‘Starship Troopers - Terran Command’ in a nutshell”.

The thing that has me the most excited comes in the description of campaign side of the game. The Steam description reads: “Remain obedient to the demands of Terran Command – no matter how costly or ruthless – to benefit from exclusive unit types and special abilities, or follow your own path to glory to become an irrefutable Hero of the Federation.” Now this might be a strange thing to get excited about, but the idea of being given a ridiculous order and having to decide if the sacrifice is worth it... that sounds fun to me.

If you think Starship Troopers: Terran Command sounds like it could be your kind of thing, head over to Steam and pop it on your wishlist. I’ve embedded the announcement trailer below if you want to see how things might look. To me, it looks a bit ropey in places, but then it’s an early glimpse of things to come, and this is to be expected. It does look fun though!

Book Review: The Hematophages

Book Review: The Hematophages

Review by Casey Douglass

The other day, I found myself wanting to read some space-based horror, something that might contain blood, ideally in rattling metal corridors and featuring a strange, twisted threat. I browsed through some of the horror presses I follow on Twitter and after a few clicks, Stephen Kozeniewski’s The Hematophages was sitting on my Kindle. The blurb told tale of a strange fleshworld, ghoulish skin-wrappers and depravity, which are three things that I didn’t know I was looking for, but on seeing them, made it an easy purchase.

The story follows Paige Ambroziak, a student who, in the opening pages, is going through a job interview. The job in question is a salvage mission to recover an old seed ship from a bizarre fleshworld, a bounty that various megacorps are salivating about claiming. Paige has spent most of her life on Yloft, a deep space outpost where she moved when she was young. This new job offers the prospect of adventure, fortune and excitement, and on landing it, her fate is sealed. She doesn’t believe this is just any seed ship however, but The Manifest Destiny, a ship that was launched when countries were powers in the world. The Manifest Destiny’s plight is even the subject of a movie that everyone seems to have grown up watching.

Paige’s journey to the fleshworld doesn’t go smoothly. Her new ship, the RV Borgwardt, crosses paths with gruesome pirates called skin-wrappers, a strange group of mummy-like creatures in which illness caused them to flay their flesh and live in zero-gravity. Beyond the threat of pirates, the fleshworld itself holds various dangers, its blood-like protoplasm the home of the Hematophages of the title: the blood drinkers. I enjoyed the fleshworld as a location. There is something quite gruesome about a planet with an ocean of blood, even the thought itself has a very strange weight to it, like dropping a stone down a wishing well and hearing something chilling echo back, rather than a “plop”.

The Hematophages themselves are a fun adversary, if fun is the right word. There is something about them that brings a lovely paranoia to the tale, and what the crew of the RV Borgwardt learn about their true nature evolves them from a simple adversary to one with a pleasing depth. Even though the Hematophages are the titular terror, I found the skin-wrappers just as engrossing. Just to get into the head-space of someone who is suffering from so much pain that they choose the life of a mummy, it’s a thought that makes you shudder.

The universe that The Hematophages plays out in is a bleak, high-tech and greedy one. The corporations rule all and fight amongst themselves. The technology allows for travelling vast distances into the “ink” while also allowing people to inject crank with the press of a button. The characters that populate the story all have their own personality, from Paige’s bunkmate Zanib who forever calls Paige “virgin” (for not having travelled before) to the intimidating Director Diane who seems to cling to protocol even when the shit hasn’t only hit the fan, but is fizzing in the electrical system too. Paige herself is a sometimes likeable, sometimes unlikeable character. She can be a bit of an arsehole but she is also capable of thinking of others. I liked her, and I appreciate the skill in writing a character that contains shades of grey.

I did get a little lost by the thread of the story on one occasion, a confusing encounter in the first half of the book left me wondering who was really dead and who wasn’t. There was a “reveal” involved which made sense, but it felt layered in a way that I still wasn’t sure about the detail of what happened, just the general big picture stuff. It’s the only thing that jumped out at me as something I had issue with, and that very well could have been on me and my concentration at the time. The story as a whole was a fun ride, and the horror elements were particularly eye-watering. If you read the book, you’ll fully understand my use of that phrase.

The Hematophages is a book that takes you on a dark journey through the “ink”. There seems little of beauty in the parts of the universe it touches upon, and what beauty is there, seems fleeting, needy and self-obsessed. There is a great mixture of fleshy horror and human greed, and it all plays out in those thrumming metal corridors that I always find add a lovely sense of claustrophobia to proceedings. The Hematophages was really fun. Enough said.

Book Title: The Hematophages

Book Author: Stephen Kozeniewski

Publisher: Sinister Grin Press

Released: 1 April 2017

Price: £13.13 paperback / £2.32 Kindle (currently)

ISBN: 9781944044558

Dark Grimoire Tarot Review

Dark Grimoire Tarot Review

Review by Casey Douglass

Many years ago, I bought the Dark Grimoire Tarot, a tarot deck that takes as its inspiration a variety of dream worlds, dark grimoires, and the horrific visions that they are reputed to lead to. The star of the show, for me at least, is H.P Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, and it was the Lovecraftian imagery that drew me to this tarot deck more than a decade ago. I’ve finally given it a more serious perusal, and this review is the result. I also gave myself a very amateur tarot reading with the deck, which begins about half way through the review. I hope you’ve got your Great Old Ones slippers on...

Michele Penco is the artist that created this set of tarot cards, and a fine job he did too. When I think of Lovecraft’s eldritch stories, I think I’ve nearly always seen most of them in my mind’s eye, as blandly coloured landscapes, with the people looking grey and unwell as they struggle with existential horror. Penco’s colour palette and eye for detail pretty much nails this aesthetic. The shadows are deep, the colours are muted, and the images carry an otherworldly melancholy that’s certainly intriguing to look at. The back of each card features a stern painting of Lovecraft himself, with an assortment of creatures looking over his shoulder.

Accompanying the cards is a small booklet that gives a very brief introduction to the deck and the various associations and meanings that the deck contains. It also details a simple Magic Pentagram card layout, in which you draw five cards, each giving a particular insight into an aspect of the issue or question you bring to them. If you have a deeper interest in learning the tarot, you’ll certainly need a heftier tome to gain a decent understanding. I’ve dabbled with the tarot before, many years ago, so I thought I would follow the technique mentioned and see what the deck had to say.

I like to view tarot as a way to plumb the subconscious depths. I also think that the universe is a very strange place and uncanny things can happen, or events might be linked in ways that we don’t yet realise. I’m happy to sit in this “don’t knowingness” as I consult this deck, and if I enjoy the experience or feel I gained an insight, that’s just a bonus. With this in mind, I decided to ask the deck “Why do I feel so doomed?”

Yes, I like to start with the light-hearted stuff. I’ve been struggling with a variety of things lately and they could all fit quite nicely into the general bracket of “feeling doomed”. Consulting a darkness-themed tarot with such a question also seems quite apt to me, especially as many of Lovecraft’s characters ended up struggling with just such a feeling. I'll paraphrase the parts of the companion booklet’s insights that seem to apply, and I'll flesh out the various meanings of the cards with my own impressions and ponderings of the imagery too. I'll say again, I’m no tarot expert, but I can certainly wing it with prompts to set my mind off in the right direction.

I shuffled the deck while thinking about my question, because... quantum/occult/theatrical reasons. I then drew my five cards. The first is meant to relate to the purpose of the query. The second, to illustrate the past that led to the current state of affairs. The third is said to show how things will progress if I continue on this path. The fourth is meant to warn of possible difficulties to overcome. The final card should deliver a way to overcome said difficulties. Here are the cards I was given:

1 – The Magician. This card appears to show Abdul Alhazred writing the Necronomicon. That’s a nice, big-hitting card to get things started! I was more drawn to the view through his window than anything though. As I write these notes, I’m sitting about the same distance from my own window, which is an enjoyable synchronicity. When I look at the image, I get the impression of life passing someone by as they sit and turn inwards. This is pretty much my own default state. Are we both approaching the same doom or both trying to escape it by turning inward?

2 – Knave of Pentacles – This is the card that is meant to tell me how I came to this current situation. The Pentacles relate to the physical body, our attachment to it, and the things around it, such as our possessions. The knave means “presage of oncoming transformation”. I also notice the gold disk that the character is holding, with their back turned to the far more interesting view behind them. In this card, I can kind of see my situation, how chronic illness has caused me to live a far more limited life, and to also become fearful and more attached to the few things that give me security.

3 – Ace of Swords – So how will things progress if everything continues unchecked? Swords are the element of Air which relates to our intellectual centre. It relates to our thoughts and how, if allowed to run loose, they can become demons and actually hinder us. The Ace aspect means a beginning or concentration of forces. Well I know how thoughts can be a pain, I’ve struggled with OCD since I was ten years old. I guess this card could be telling me that if I follow my obsessions and fears down that rabbit hole, my mind will end up creating some kind of anxiety-fueled black hole, something that would go very badly for me.

4 – Two of Swords – As far as any difficulties that might need to be overcome, it’s interesting that the next card is also a Sword, which again, is an intellectual/mind-based card. The “Two” means forces facing off against each other. I was really taken with the imagery of this card, the blindfolded musician playing in front of strange creatures. I initially thought that they were trying to attack him but on closer examination, they look enraptured by his music. A big source of my “doomed” feelings are the hang-ups I have about my writing. It’s quite funny to see a card drawn that seems to scream “Do it anyway and ignore your fears!” Maybe I should type while wearing a blindfold?

5 – Inverted Five of Swords – When I read through the small booklet, I couldn’t find any mention of “Inverted” (upside down) cards and their meanings, which is something I’ve previously used with other tarots. When I shuffled the deck, I made no effort to randomly rotate the cards at all, so they should have all come out facing the same direction. This card didn’t, and I just felt it was worth going with my feelings and keeping it inverted. From my very meagre experience with other decks, an inversion tends to carry the opposite meaning to the usual associations. The Five of Swords is another “mind” card, and again, it was the image that struck me the most. It depicts a man running from a mob of creatures. He is calm, as if he has been doing this for so long, that it’s everyday humdrum to him now. With the inversion in mind, I pondered if, instead of running away from his fears, he should turn and run towards them. I guess if nothing else, it would mark a change of pace for him. So for me, again, this card was about approaching fears rather than running away.

So, there we have it, a review of a tasty tarot deck and an amateur attempt at giving myself a reading from it, all in one article. My reading told me what I already know about anxiety, fears and acceptance, but it’s nice to have this endorsed by the dark gods too. If you enjoy the dark imagery that the Dark Grimoire Tarot contains, and you also happen to be a bit partial to Lovecraftian horror, I think it’s a fantastic card-set to own, even if you never intend to give it a run-out for a bit of tarot-reading fun.

Visit the Lo Scarabeo site for more information.

I’m off to run towards my doom now. Only kidding, I never run anywhere...

Item: Dark Grimoire Tarot

Artist: Michelle Penco

Instructions: Giovanni Pelosini

Publisher: Lo Scarabeo

Released: 2008

Price: Around £18

Book Review: Aliens: Phalanx

Book Review: Aliens: Phalanx

Review by Casey Douglass

One of the things that drives me to stories that feature xenomorphs is that they often mix science fiction and horror. When I read the blurb for Scott Sigler’s Aliens: Phalanx, I was almost put off by the word “medieval” in the description. My first reaction was that it didn’t sound like it was for me. My love for anything starring a xenomorph eventually burst through that initial resistance, and I purchased the book. Were my own personal misgivings proven correct, or was I blown away like a face-hugger disintegrating in pulse-rifle fire? Read on to find out.

The events in Aliens: Phalanx take place on Ataegina, a rugged continent of mountains and ravines. The inhabitants have been slaughtered by black-husked ‘demons’, the survivors driven to living in subterranean mountain keeps. People don’t venture above ground often, but the ones that do, the Runners, race between the various holds to trade goods. These mainly take the form of various essential medicines, but this doesn't stop them bringing a variety of luxury items too.

The book follows Ahiliyah, a young woman who is one such runner, as she serves Lemeth Hold and tries to earn her keep. She also wants to become a warrior, but in Lemeth Hold, women aren't warriors. She runs with two others, the large framed warrior-in-training Brandun, and a weaselly little gobshite called Creen. Brandun is a warrior-in-training and is already blessed with a larger frame than is expected for someone of his age. He is also a little slow at times, which Creen loves to point out to him by calling him “dumbdun”. Creen is actually the comic-relief in many ways, coming out with many cruel words but also displaying vulgar humour in almost equal measure. It is this trio that the reader gets to know during the course of the book, how their already limited world becomes yet more dangerous, as the demons start to eradicate the last traces of humanity in Ataegina.

The societal landscape, the relationships between the various holds, plays an integral part in the pressures that fall on the dwindling people. Due to the nature of the threat from the demons outside, what doesn’t naturally grow in one hold often ends up being an urgent item for another. There are a number of illnesses that can afflict people. Imbid flowers grow abundantly in Lemeth Hold, and Imbid Soup is the cure for something called Weakling Disease. If another hold is suffering from such a disease, runners from Lemeth will trade Imbid flowers for something that they might need to treat their own hold’s different outbreak of illness. Add into this the usual way that humans become greedy, paranoid and even religious zealots, and the politics between holds becomes a true driving force, and often hindrance, to them actually working together.

When the humans clash with the demons, the weapons they have at hand are knives, spears and shields. On my first thoughts about this notion, I think I was guilty of thinking “How the hell are they going to fight them with spears?” in a “Pfft” kind attitude. It didn’t take too long to think the exact same question with a more curious “How will they?” frame of mind. Having finished the book, I didn’t realise that the answer could be so exhilarating. Just as in the films, if you go from the pulse-rifles of Aliens to the cleavers and machetes of Alien3, there’s an exhilaration to be found in that.

The holds themselves are also aptly suited to this kind of horror. The humans are trying to shut out the danger, but by doing so, they have to live claustrophobic and grim lives. They use strangely glowing water in glow-pipe plumbing to light their dark corridors, harvest plants and make use of anything that sits within their “safe” realm. When things take a turn for the worst - as you’d expect they would in a tale like this – these corridors turn from claustrophobic passageways into tunnels of death. I’m not sure what is more scary, meeting a xenomorph on open ground and seeing it dart at you from hundreds of yards away, or hearing one coming towards you along a dark tunnel. Probably the latter...

Aliens: Phalanx is a very satisfying tale. We get to see all three of the runners rise-up in their hold, fighting against prejudice, fear and politics, even sometimes against each other. They all become nicely fleshed out characters with more about them than their more obvious traits. They all grow as people too, and their relationship changes and strengthens as events unfold. It was nice to see a society that viewed the xenomorphs in a different way, as demons and semi-supernatural rather than naïve humans stumbling across them on a spaceship-based jaunt across the galaxy. The story itself escalates in a way that any xenomorph fan will enjoy, and the culmination at the end is the kind that sets the previous events in a slightly different frame, which I thoroughly appreciated. Aliens: Phalanx is a brilliant story, and I’m very glad that I decided to give it a try.

Book Title: Aliens: Phalanx

Book Author: Scott Sigler

Publisher: Titan Books

Released: 25 Feb 2020

Price: £7.99 paperback / £4.74 Kindle (currently)

ISBN: 9781789094015

Dark Game Review: We Went Back (PC)

Dark Game Review: We Went Back (PC)

Review by Casey Douglass

There are so many cautionary tales about going back to things you shouldn’t. Never go back to a lit firework. Never go back to someone who treats you badly. Yet we’re human, we’re idiots, we go back. We Went Back is a free sci-fi horror game from Dead Thread Games, and even though by the end, I wasn’t sure what we “went back” to, or why for that matter, I’m kind of glad “we” did. Okay, I’m banning myself from doing “this” again in this review, unless I’m quoting something I said.

We Went Back begins with your character inside a stasis-chamber, being helpfully prompted to Press E to open the thing. The computer system warns of a life form being detected, and if you’ve cut your teeth on the space horror genre, you'll be itching to see what this life form is. Unless it’s space fleas of course, in which case you'll just itch. You move off to explore and find a camera hanging from the roof. This is an important item; it’s your way of solving the puzzle that spans the game. You then come to a door that will only open with the correct password. Opening this is your goal, and the puzzle that you have to solve.

We Went Back is a game in which you explore the corridors and the items in them, trying to find clues that will help you enter the correct password. You only really walk in one direction, and seem to make a circuit of the space station. You soon find yourself back where you started, but each time around the circle reveals new things, and these sometimes come with a jump-scare. The creepy horror atmosphere is handled nicely and I was pleased that the game also managed to create insidious and more subtle tension too. The jump-scares got me twice, one even causing me to shout: “Fuck me!” which doesn’t happen that often.

It was the more insidious type of fear that I enjoyed the most. There is a rat in a science lab that you pass early in the game. When things started happening on another rotation, I stopped short at that spot and realised that the rat was gone! This startled me and wowed me in equal measure as it genuinely felt like an “Ohh!” moment. I’ll also add, that it isn’t the end of the tale (tail?) as far as the rat is concerned, so I haven’t robbed the rat of all its mystery.

On a technical level, I played the game at 1080p, all settings turned to high on my GTX 970. It ran smoothly but I detected a slight judder to things when I looked around at times. The game recommends a 960 at minimum so maybe my 970 is too close to the lower end? Who knows. It wasn’t any kind of problem, just something I noticed. The graphical style of the environment and the objects it contains is pleasing. The life-form that you catch sight of at times was probably the least impressive visual element. The music/ambient sounds did a fine job of setting the atmosphere too, and married with the 70's style sci-fi aesthetic, does help you to feel like you are stuck in some kind of retro-sci-fi space flick.

We Went Back is a short game. The developer says it’s a 30-50 minute experience. My first playthrough clocked in at 28 minutes, and I didn’t rush. I think it’s well worth the download. If I remember rightly, the download size (not install size) was 2.5 gigabytes, so even if you have a crappy connection like mine, you can soon grab it in a couple of hours. I think the best thing I can say is that if it was a 30 minute section in a much longer game, I’d have been happy to play on to see what else might happen. As it stands, it’s a fun 30 minute horror experience that did make me jump, and I’m happy with that.

Click the link to go to the We Went Back page on the Steam Store.

Game Title: We Went Back

Game Developer: Dead Thread Games

RRP: Free!

Released: 3 April 2020

Platform: PC

Dark Fiction: What Monsters Do For Love

Love twists people into strange shapes. It can make monsters of the nicest people, and sometimes, turn a monster into something a little less monstrous. 

What Monsters Do For Love is a new horror anthology from Soteira Press. It consists of 3 volumes, each stuffed with tales of human and inhuman monsters; the shapes that love twists them into. 

My own tale: The Corrupter, is in Volume II.

Amazon links: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3.