Comic-books are a medium, not a genre; they can tell any story and suit any palate. You want horror? I've got bottles of the stuff. Welcome to 'Splashes of Darkness.' ​

Judge Anderson’s a long, cool, meditative drink, cwtched up in a shady spot on the hottest, most wretched day of the year. The city may be stinking, noisy, fractious and intense, but there’s refuge to be had here. Satan is a surprising but well-balanced addition to the mix. Dangerous, tantalising, intoxicating. He’s the stranger who catches your eye at the bar, the off-hand comment that snags your interest and – were it not for watchful friends – the nightmare you’d be praying to wake from.


The Hamlyn edition of Satan that I own pairs the main story with an earlier short called The Jesus Syndrome. It’s a slender tale with a lot of heft, in which the Chief Judge outlaws Christianity – a minority religion in this world of the future. The writer (Alan Grant) uses this as a lens through which to examine the morality of the Judges system, pitting Anderson against the thuggish Judge Goon, bringing her inner conflicts to a head, and sending her off on her own path. Satan, set several years later, brings Anderson back to Megacity One to be assessed for fitness by Judge Dredd. During this time, an asteroid crashes to Earth, unleashing the long-imprisoned Lucifer. Only one woman has the skills, insight and experience to confront the devil.

​Of all the characters I’ve come across in 2000AD, Cassandra Anderson undergoes the biggest internal journey. She is the pure soul trying to stay sane, moral and whole in a dystopian state run by fascists, trying to change the system from within. Anderson sunk her nails in deep when I was at an impressionable *age, for all the wrong reasons. Halo Jones was mine, but Judge Anderson belonged to my brother so, naturally, I grew jealous. Where Halo was an ingénue, trying to find her place in her world, Judge Anderson came fully-formed. She was a psychic cop, dealing with supernatural threats – tough as nails when she had to be, but sensitive and kind when it mattered. And in the brutal world of 2000AD, it mattered a lot. Back then, I wanted her (ahem… her book) more than anything else in the world.


Satan came along **much later. In terms of narrative and sheer artistry, it displayed a maturity that far outstripped its contemporaries at DC and Marvel, and gave me a whole new appreciation of what the medium could do. I’m not religious now, nor was I then, but the questions raised in this book surpassed theology to plumb the depths of humanity. It’s a thoughtful read, carefully paced to give the reader time to ponder the imponderables. They get to the heart of what it means to be righteous and flawed, what it means to make a choice and take responsibility for your actions. 


Any hormone-driven fantasies I’d previously entertained were cast aside through raw appreciation of the heart and soul Grant gave this extraordinary character and the philosophical narrative he wove around her.

Arthur Ranson’s artwork plays a huge part of that too, bringing subtlety of expression, cultural diversity, and a full emotional range to the inhabitants of Megacity One. The story may be relatively low on action but it remains an apocalyptic event – both literally and figuratively. As such, he draws it big, wielding his fine-liners fearlessly to create some truly epic and astonishing imagery, crammed with sumptuous detail. I have never been more taken in by the sketched sense of ‘multitudes’ – whether in the revivalist crowds of John Baptiste, the rotting bodies littering Lucifer’s history, or the extraordinary page of reaction portraits Ranson uses as Icarus comes crashing to Earth.


This style, melded with Grant’s deeply introspective script, creates a deeply familiar world – for all its SF trappings – full of downtrodden masses and callous bullies, fear and love, honour and hypocrisy, etched on the faces of those around us.

Satan himself must have been quite the challenge to both Grant and Ranson. Encapsulating the ultimate religious evil as a credible being, a vast supernatural threat, and yet still something that can be ultimately defeated (spoilers be damned) is a tough act to pull off. I mean, if nukes don’t cut it, does Cass really stand a snowball’s chance? I was blown away by it. This is Milton’s Satan in many ways – beautiful, charming, innocent and defiant – but taken to the far edge of his existence and beginning to crack. The character design is deliberately statuesque, marble made flesh, standing 120 feet tall; overwhelming in every way.


It shouldn’t work, conceptually or narratively, and yet for me, the creators nail it, thematically, spiritually, and emotionally.


The dénouement did feel a little precipitous first time round – having had all that build-up – and we get precious little sense of the effect Satan has on Anderson, the Judges, or the world at large. (In the timeframe of this story, at least.) However, subsequent readings have given me more appreciation of the inner tale, told from Satan’s perspective: his rambling reminiscences, all his insecurities and uncertainties layered in from the start. It’s good stuff: unexpected and powerful. I don’t know if mankind’s origins and destiny are delved into any ***further by the team at 2000AD or whether this is something of an aberration in their universe, but I’d certainly be interested to find out.


Like many of these long-running series, there are various jumping-on points which crop up for newbies and, checking the online stores, I see there are currently 5 chunky collected editions of Anderson stories available, both digitally and in paperback.


Hmmm. I might…just…add some to my basket and… oops.

Written by Alan Grant
Illustrated by Arthur Ranson
Lettered by Annie Parkhouse/Steve Potter
Published by 2000AD
Available now!
Reading experience: 4.5/5
Reviewer: Dion Winton-Polak

​* I was 9, maybe 10 years old. One Christmas my foster-brother’s dad dropped by with some presents for us. Judge Anderson Bk2 for Patrick, and The Ballad of Halo Jones Bk2 for me. Neither one of us had been comic readers up to that point, but they blew our tiny minds.


** Christ, I was in university when it was published!


*** I’m talking rot. Just remembered that an earlier Anderson story is referenced in Satan where we learn about an alien race that created humanity. Lucifer talks as though there is a God though, so who knows how they untangle it all. Or if…

TIME guitarist Jesse Johnson in 1986 released an album entitled Shockadelica, which title Prince liked, and as there was no title song on the album, wrote one and offered it to the guitarist. Jones declined and Prince then released the track before Jones could get his album out.

Ween later covered the track and made it considerably more sexually explicit, which is actually in keeping with the meaning of the song’s title to Jesse Jones, who used it to describe his feelings of desire.

The main characters of Jon O’Bergh’s novel appropriated the title for a horror podcast. One can’t copyright a title, but sometimes it’s not really appropriate to use one that is identified with a certain time or deed. Certain expectations get set up.

I get it, though. “Shockadelica” is more suitable for address to say, early Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer, Bloodrock’s DOA, stuff that was informed by psychedelic music but had deeper and darker intent.

Still, it’s offputting. It takes a while to assimilate the new meaning, if indeed one ever does.

The two podcasters run into some serious weirdness in the building they live in, and the result of their investigations into that weirdness are the events of the book.
It’s what I’d call a ‘summer read’. There’s not a tremendous depth to it, it is not weighed down by the author’s philosophy, it’s just a sequence of events, with some fun characters.

One of the main characters is the “Bone Man’, whose name is a re-spelling of Alice Cooper’s offstage name, and O’bergh recorded an album of songs ostensibly by this character, which is available at, say, Soundcloud if you’ve a mind to look it up.

They’re not terrible songs, and O’Bergh is an able musician. He’s also an able writer… though in truth it took me a while to cozy up to his terse sentences. The style is a little choppy – not clunky exactly but it took a few pages for me to assimilate.

The book is not especially original, but the characters are well-drawn, not caricatures. The tropes the author invokes have their own resonance and inform the narrative – with the rock-world backgrounding there’s an especial poignance to the images of goat-headed Satanists and the metal musician with serial-killer tattoos.

It’s a quick read. I read the ebook, which didn’t have page numbers, but I’d say it was somewhere around 50,000 words. The action moves along rather well, and the series of events isn’t out of line for the setup.

The protagonists are likable enough. I do confess that I expected Alan and Velma and Daphne to come in at some point, and Shaggy and Scooby. It didn’t turn out that way but the comparison is unavoidable for me.

I like Scooby Doo, Where Are You? So that wasn’t an issue, and overall I’d give the thing 3 ½ stars. There’s a lot to like. But I did find this to be very nu-horror in that it is slight and depends on in-vogue tropes and feels inspired by 80s fictions – the closest comp to the style would be two-headed Canadian novelist(s) Michael Slade. The apartment building is very Ira Levin with maybe a side of Seinfeld for comic relief and updating.

The actual horror isn’t super-horrible. It’s a murder-mystery more than a horror novel. The gore is beside the point. But the book is aimed squarely at the alt-lifestyle set of the horror audience and should connect there, or with people who are not extremely well-read in-genre and don’t get the tropism and inside joke level that is built-in to things like this.

It’s an accomplishment, I think, to take such banal elements and concoct a readable tale. That speaks well of the author’s ability, and I’ll look out for the next burnt offering.
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The book is tasty and the impression overall is amiable. I just found the recipe a little underdone.

Of the thirteen stories—two of them previously unpublished—that make up The Skeleton Melodies, Clint Smith’s second collection, there are a handful that come close to being compelling examples of a particular kind of contemporary horror, one in which, whatever the central conceit, the narrative is underpinned by the failure of the protagonists either to know themselves or to escape the sins of the past. A couple of stories—‘Details that would Otherwise Be Lost to Shadow’ and ‘The Undertow, and They that Dwell Therein’—stand head and shoulders above the rest, demonstrating his skill in depicting people damaged by their inability to make sense of their own memories, and thus left susceptible to all manner of nightmarish fantasia. 


At the beginning of ‘Details that would be Otherwise Lost to Shadow’, the narrator, Tara Keltz, stands at an upper storey window watching as her husband gets out of his car with their daughter and a woman who seems like an awkward, jilted mockery of herself. The house from which Tara watches her family enter their own house, is itself a parody, one she calls the ‘Motley House’, describing it as schizophrenic, as though built by “four or five capable craftsmen”, each of whom had contributed their own “inimitable elements,” no matter how discordant it made the whole. From the day they moved into their own home seven months prior, Tara, an interior designer, is intrigued by the house across the street, and finally gets the chance to satisfy her curiosity when a ‘for sale’ sign appears in the front yard. It is in the course of this first visit—or perhaps ‘intrusion’ is the more correct word—that Tara catches that unsettling glimpse of her alternative self. The scene feels almost Lynchian in its depiction of a distorted reality, of a world turned inside out. It’s as though Tara has stumbled into Lynch’s mysterious red room, or perhaps the house’s designers were familiar with the peculiar geometries of Hill House. Afterwards, she realises she’s experienced a dislocation of both time and self. Nine years earlier, she had almost been killed after being hit by a car while out for her morning run. Is this apparition she encounters a version of herself, one where that ‘almost’ doesn’t apply? Subsequent trips to the second floor room seem to suggest that this grey, decaying zombie-like Tara, has become the repository of the physical pain the living Tara was left with after the accident, pain that she had, for professional and personal reasons, worked hard to suppress. What Tara witnesses from the window, and what is made clear in the disturbing climax, is that this broken, shadow creature is trying to usurp the life that Tara has. Smith’s rendering of this eerie confrontation is skilfully done, and the story’s understated coda feels right, leaving Tara as one of the few characters in the collection, to achieve some measure of reconciliation with the past.


Gwen, the central character of ‘The Undertow, and They that Dwell Within’, is coming to terms with the end of her marriage, and with trying to console her mother, Kathy, grieving the recent loss of her father. As a distraction, the two agree on a road trip from rural Tennessee to the Florida coast for a short beach vacation with Gwen’s two kids. Throughout the journey, Gwen reflects on the causes of the slow dissolution of her relationship with Sean, not caused by any infidelity—unlike her mother’s marriage—but rather the gradual abdication of responsibility, the realisation that long before their break-up, she was living the role of single parent. She also has to contend with her mother’s search for consolation, found in a hybrid of religion and self-help texts, and perhaps an over-idealisation of her recently dead father. The friction between the two is palpable, and is underscored by TV reports of mass shark attacks along the coast, reports that appear to both fascinate and scare Gwen’s kids. An explicit reference to the cross country road trip undertaken in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’, adds to the sense of foreboding, of the family blundering toward some existential threat. Two further incidents ramp up the anxiety: an accident in their motel room involving her young daughter Abbi; and a dream Kathy relates to her about a vision she has of her father standing in a field surrounded by forest, dressed in his old rail-man’s uniform. Elements of the dream disturb her—old cornstalks snap beneath her feet as she runs toward him; his lips are withered and he has no teeth, his voice seems to go backward, as if “looping down his throat”; as he talks, seeming to warn her about shells, black hair dye runs down his face like blood. Despite the strangeness of the dream, Kathy consoles herself with the claim that he’s “safe in Heaven.” Later, alone, Gwen interprets the dream far more ominously, imagining her grandfather was speaking about Hell. The increasingly hysterical tone of the media reports about the shark attacks also begins to seep into her consciousness, causing her to envision herself being eaten alive—the “paramount horror.” By the time the family reach their rented beach house, even the idyllic scene—the “twilight tinge” of the sky, and the soft powdery sand—can’t quite dispel the feeling of unease. In a sense, it’s the dreadful power of Kathy’s dream, coupled with the more widespread sense of mass anxiety about sharks, that triggers the startling, nightmarish apparition that engulfs the family at the end. Again, Smith paints a vivid and surreal picture of horror manifesting out of the collision of sensationalism and petty human anxieties. It’s a bold and memorable story. 


Another of the more successful stories is ‘Fiending Apophenia’, a cloying, almost suffocating tale, that, on the surface, is about two young men, small time cannabis peddlers, paying the consequences for failing to adhere to that most basic of drug business tenets, to not get high on your own supply, or indeed, to not short-change the boss. But the tale morphs into something much weirder as the particular variety of dope that protagonist Wes and his pal Todd smoke—christened Apophenia by their boss—leads Wes, perhaps in a state of heightened paranoia—to perceive a kind of inverted world existing in the shadows of our own. Smith uses a first person framing device that works as a literalisation of the phenomena of apophenia—prompted by news of the discovery of a mutilated body and the disturbing, resonant memory of the number 283, the narrative shifts from first to third person as Wes suffers a dissociation of both time and identity. There’s a sense then that the body of the story is Wes’s attempt to find connections, to see the pattern hidden in the bizarre and violent events of this one night in the past when he caught a revelatory glimpse of something both horrific and impossible, yet at the same time real—“that these things (that both he and Todd would become) were always there--here”. Though Wes escaped that purposeless life, going on to graduate and become a teacher, marry and have a kid, there’s one final reunion with his old drug pals that confirms what he has known all along, that the young man he has seen as a negation of himself, is in fact, inescapably, the real Wes. There’s something of Ligotti in this willing acceptance, this “heaving hunger in these bottomless apertures between who we were and who we will be.”


Both the longest story ‘Haunt Me Still’ and opener ‘Lisa’s Pieces’ are about men who return to their home towns—the former for a funeral, the latter for a high school reunion—in what turn out to be doomed attempts, if not to recapture people they had lost, then at least to understand the reasons for that loss. Despite being very different in tone—‘Haunt me Still’ is more reflective and searching, more grounded in reality, while ‘Lisa’s Pieces’ is more vengeful and more firmly located in the grand guignol tradition—both are concerned with guilt and the need to expiate for past mistakes. Though the latter story is indebted to Mary Shelley (and Universal’s Bride of Frankenstein), in its botched attempt to resurrect the title character, Smith loses control of the material and it descends into a luridly over-written and the over-the-top climax, whose impact is dissipated beneath an avalanche of alliterative images and compound modifiers. Colin, the villain of the story, doesn’t simply intuit something, he “cognitively catches” it; the reanimated Lisa is described as draped in a “tangle-swaddled sheet”, and as “a ghastly statue, a vein-rivered Venus from some lurid Louvre”; protagonist Lew “parry-ducked” when defending himself from Colin, and lands a punch that causes a “meaty-moist gasp”. ‘Haunt Me Still’ is less burdened by such over-writing, (though again the occasional sentence is “gilded with gravelly giggles”), and is far more effective for it.


Most of the remaining stories suffer from Smith’s tendency to over-elaborate a description, to stretch a metaphor too far, to use words like ‘pate’ or ‘repast’ in place of head and meal. He has a fondness for the word ‘appraise’ which he uses frequently when describing what a character sees, with no sense of assessment or judgement involved. Narratives become bogged down in the clutter of superfluous description, as in the opening of ‘Fingers Laced, as Though in Prayer’, where a stern school bus driver tells off one of her charges, “addressing the boy by way of the rearview reflection in the wide, overhead mirror, ” and a little later, when we’re told that the sunlight accentuates “the cornfields already withered appearance.” The story itself echoes works like T.E.D. Klien’s The Ceremonies, that explore links between nature, harvest, and sacrificial rites, while others deploy familiar tropes like werewolves (‘Animalhouse’), witches (‘By Goats be Guided’), pagan cults (‘The Pecking Order’) and the harvesting of body parts (‘The Rive’). Sometimes, as though unsure of his characters’ motivations, he feels the need to give us details that have little consequence in the story. In ‘The Pecking Order’, we’re told Meg wears her purse strap across her chest as “a habit of mugger deterrence she and many of her female classmates had adopted in college in a self-defense class near her dorm.” I get it, Meg is cautious, but do I need to be told about her classmates, or about the proximity of the self-defense class to her dorm?


This is a shame, because such laboured and turgid prose distracts from the inventiveness of Smith’s storytelling. For example, ‘The Fall of Tomlinson Hall: or, The Ballad of the Butcher’s Cart’, is one of the rare stories here that is perhaps underwritten, and is all the better for it. The story nods overtly to Robert Louis Stevenson, as it follows the quest of two cooks to gain ‘leverage’ on their employers at a well-to-do gentleman’s club. The story reworks themes around bodysnatching and cannibalism to offer a glimpse of the not so subtle mechanisms through which social and political elites exploit the underclass. There’s no doubt that, perhaps with the help of a more judicious editor, Smith has the potential to become a very good writer. He has a wild imagination, and the ability to conjure up vividly original metaphors, as when describing a character’s sense of guilt “that worked like an unexpected bruise, one you catch in the mirror—surprised to see it, but unsure of how it had set in so deeply”. At his best, his stories show us ordinary people trying and, more often than not, failing, to make sense of a fucked-up world. No matter how grotesque or unreal the situations in which they find themselves, nor how egregious their mistakes, these are men and women we can empathise with. Suffice to say, Smith himself is not yet the finished article, but a work in progress. 

Mike O’Driscoll

Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Tade Thompson returns to the genre with FAR FROM THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN, a standalone sci fi thriller. The starship Ragtime has travelled light years to the distant colony of Bloodroot bearing a thousand sleeping passengers. When a massacre aboard rouses Captain Michelle Campion, her distress call is answered by disgraced investigator Rasheed Finn and a desperate struggle for survival ensues…
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With deft prose and vivid imagery, FAR FROM THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN is a fast-paced and exciting read. Thompson assembles an interesting cast of characters in an immersive futuristic scenario. The friction between Shell and Finn, two similarly jaded professionals, contrasts well with the alien and beguiling Joké, while the mandroid Salvo provides a logical foil to proceedings. This unlikely team find themselves trapped aboard the crippled Ragtime with their life support running out, the tension ratcheted up by a malfunctioning AI, berserk killer robots, leaked experimental plants – and a rampaging wolf. As in the author’s ground-breaking ROSEWATER trilogy, the spiritual elements add colour and mystique to the hard-tech backdrop.

A host of influences are on display here from 2001 to Iain Banks (‘Excession’ came to mind) to Alien, yet Thompson weaves his own story, and with remarkable poignancy for such a speedy escapade. There’s insightful commentary about the price of colonialism and those who exploit humanity for their own ends, woven around the central murder of a character who’s hard to care about, but ultimately makes for a compelling point.

In fact, FAR FROM THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN plays out more as a thriller than a mystery. While the setup suggests a puzzle at the heart of the novel, the plot resolves without much complexity and the political elements surrounding the action provide the real intrigue. The moral subtext is both thought-provoking and timely.
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The cracking pace, richly realised setting and sharp characters result in a smart, original and above all electrifying deep space adventure.
Strap in for the ride.