112 pages, Paperback
First published June 20, 2017
Reissued 4/2024
Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction (2017)
World Fantasy Award Nominee for Novella (2018)
Podcast coverage and full NEW review on the way,
Sunday, May 4, 2025
Book Review Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones (Re-issue, re-review, podcast coverage on the way)
Book Review: New Tomorrow by Cody Goodfellow
NewTomorrow by Cody Goodfellow
484 pages, Paperback
I have been reading Cody Goodfellow for two decades, and when I read his first novel, Radiant Dawn, I was convinced that he would be as big as anyone in the horror genre. I thought he would have massive book deals, fan clubs, movies, etc. Cody is a writer’s writer. He has the respect of those of us in the serious genre lit world. A few Wonderland awards, he has accomplished many great things, but he is not the household name I think he deserves to be.
Sure books like Repo-Shark or Scum of the Earth are genius works, but they are not commercial. I consider his horror novel Perfect Union a horror masterpiece, but it might be a little too strange for the spinner racks at drugstores. All that said this new novel while still being very Cody Goodfellow, with the right word of mouth and luck (let's be honest that is important) this is a story that should appeal to the mainstream.
An alternate history pulp era superhero tale that could be pitched as The Boys or Watchmen in a great depression setting. Sci-fi superhero crossovers with this kind of ambition are often not ready for primetime, and they often feel like underdeveloped sketches. What is special about New Tomorrow is how it feels fully developed, like a world that has been growing for a long time. It has the super smart and totally bat-shit crazy Cody Goodfellow hybrid that he has perfected. These are weird heroes White Devil and Kid Amoeba feel natural in this pulp era alternative.
“All this she’d learned when the real Electrocutioner died in her arms after saving the city from Dr. Gift, another suicidal lunatic who couldn’t hang himself. And still, the comics, the radio serial, the Electrocutioner Shock-Mittens, kept coming, as if their hero was old enough to vote.
So much for superheroes. She didn’t know if she would ever be worthy of the pretentious title, nor it worthy of her. She only knew she loved it.”
As you can see, the heroes feel like they were torn from a classic graphic novel that has lived in your memory, but at the same time, they are totally original and natural. Goodfellow understands the world he is playing with. This alternate world feels like it is in the past of a comic book universe, but it feels adjacent to our history. A lessor author wouldn’t or couldn’t make you feel like you were in the era but this novel does just that.
“The mask craze first struck New York four years ago when a gang in pirate costumes and a bulletproof flying coupe began knocking over Jewelry stores and banks under the colorful sobriquet, The Red Hook Wreckers. A rogue mobster calling himself El Pulpo donned an octopus mask and gunned down crime boss Giuseppe Masseria in Coney Island and eluded police for six months before he was served equally rough justice by Corsair, who was unmasked as a former cop drummed out of the force for being Sicilian. That so many on both sides of this weird civil war were frustrated inventors, scientists, and engineers whose bright ideas had been suppressed by the patent office only added to fuel the controversy.”
That passage highlights what Cody brings to the alchemy of this one-in-a-million novel. A knowledge of history, both real and pulp fictional, literary talent and a weird imagination capable of supporting a marriage of all these elements into a blended family. Who else could come up with a hero like Kid Amoeba?
“By trial and error, it had perfected its Camouflage, studying the rootless men, walking, hitching, and riding the rails. They were innocuous enough not to attract the authorities but large enough to present a target to predators.”
One of my favorite moments in the novel comes about halfway through when the pulp superhero elements fade into science fiction and alternate history. Real-life robber barrons whose names historians might recognize go to a meeting with the inventor who represents the hinge point where history changes with the invention of teleportation. It is a bad part of this culture, but how well does this technology work, in the hands of the villain…it changes everything. The change of venue makes an excellent shift in the narrative.
“Good God,” Whitney said, “We’re not on Earth.”
“At last, the sparkling intellect that conquered the markets reveals itself,” Chalice said. “What you’re seeing is the actual hub of our operations, through our best guess is it’s on the far side of the Milky Way. Suffice to say it is a long walk home. For want of a better name, I call it Circe, after the Greek goddess of transformation and initiation.”
“So this is a kidnapping?” asked Sarnoff, who had at least some inkling of the business of force from his humble beginnings as a newspaper boy.
“Merely a demonstration. This meeting ends when I’ve said my piece, and you’ve said yours.”
The historical vibe is also one of my favorite things in the novel, and pure Cody Goodfellow.
“A Salvation Army band slowly murdered “Onward Christian Soldiers” on the corner of Tenth Avenue and 34th. The White Devil flipped a quarter into their collection Kettle as he passed, crossing 34th amid a stream of bleary-eyed men and women going to or from soul-killing jobs. The sun’s dying rays touched the roofs of tenements and smoke stacks high overhead, the leaden heat stored up from the sweltering day seeping back out of the half-molten asphalt. Everything west of 10th had been swept away by bulldozers and wrecking balls to make way for a new tunnel to Jersey.”
One of the best things about New Tomorrow is something I refuse to spoil, and that is the nature, backstory, and tactics of the villain; it is so well thought out. The good guys and the big bad could all hold the weight of a novel on their own, but instead, the epic treat is that we get a saga-worthy cast of characters.
The historical vibe is also one of my favorite things in the novel and pure Cody Goodfellow. Check out this part…
“A Salvation Army band slowly murdered “Onward Christian Soldiers” on the corner of Tenth Avenue and 34th. The White Devil flipped a quarter into their collection Kettle as he passed, crossing 34th amid a stream of bleary-eyed men and women going to or from soul-killing jobs. The sun’s dying rays touched the roofs of tenements and smoke stacks high overhead, the leaden heat stored up from the sweltering day seeping back out of the half-molten asphalt. Everything west of 10th had been swept away by bulldozers and wrecking balls to make way for a new tunnel to Jersey.”
It highlights the vibe, the historical feeling you get reading the novel. New Tomorrow is punching above its weight class on almost every page. It is a epic worthy of the word, that is as strange as it is ambitious. An unbelievable triumph.
Here is the problem. I don’t know if it will be discovered. I thought it was inevitable before. You have to take me seriously and read this. Then you have spread the book around. It is the reason this book will keep finding fans.
Book Review: The Deading by Nicholas Belardes
The Deading by Nicholas Belardes
The Deading
Again I need to preface this review with an acknowledgement of this being written while I am under the gun of some deadlines so this might not get the attention some books get.
It should be noted that I root for every book. Ecological horror is one of my greatest fears and passions. A book with this passage…“Now we rise. Now it’s us. In the name of Emma Goldman & Frida Kahlo, we rise. In the name of Jane Austen & Mary Shelly. In the name of Octavia Butler, in the name of Patti Smith whose songs tell us to pray screaming.” Should win me over. I wish I could say that it did.
There is some really fantastic writing at times. Some cool ideas, but this was a case ¾ of the way through I started to wonder if I was missing something. I wondered If the book was out smarting me. I decided to peep the reviews on Goodreads. This book has a 2.6 rating and I get that. I hesitate to beat up on a book already doing poorly but I think this novel is making few mistakes that could’ve been avoided.
The comps on the cover are Under the Dome and the Last of Us. Sure there are people trapped in a small isolated town and there is a fungus virus but the thing from Last of Us this novel needed was strong characters. After closing the book I didn’t remember a single character. The prologue matched the title, but not the tone of the rest of the book. The most interesting chapter (number 26 which I dog eared to go back to) was not from a character's POV but from a omnipresent WE. It started “We remember the day our city was on the news, many weeks ago now a memory…” that highlighted the problem that stretches of chapters the POV felt like mystery, it was on purpose at times it left this reader feeling confused and needing an anchor.
I don’t mind asides, but a great amount of the word count of this book goes into stuff about bird watching. I don’t hate bird watching, and probably had a higher tolerance for these chapters, I suspect one reason the rating are low is that horror readers who have a membership to the American Bird Watching Association is a small Venn Diagram. The novel also had some repetitive prose. I would give the author another shot, He seemed to be shooting for an artistic vibe, but needed a little more grounding in basic commercial storytelling.
Book review: Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 by Hugo Gernsback
Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 by Hugo Gernsback
Some books are more important than they are actually good. Ralph for short (better than R1+AROY) is an important historical document, despite not exactly being good writing or storytelling. If read the right way, it can be very entertaining. Written in 1910 or 1911 by Hugo Gernsback in his magazine Modern Electronics. This was of course, a new field, electronics. John Ambrose Fleming, the first professor of electrical Engineering at University College in London got that gig less than a decade earlier. Gernsback was a publisher, but he saw himself as an inventor. This radical thought experiment showed him going far beyond what was currently technologically possible.
Perfect for Science fiction, just one problem, the genre didn’t exist yet. Ralph as a story is very, very important, not just because of how crazy ahead of the time it was. First serialized in 1911 in his electronics journal Ol’ Hugo had no idea that in sixteen years he would be inventing not technology, but a storytelling genre.
There is a reason the science fiction award is called the Hugo, and yes, I am aware that SF in a sense already existed, but Gernsback, Amazing Stories, and indeed Ralph play a role in inventing the genre we see expressing itself across media. Now the edition I read is based on the text of an edition from the 50s, and it had been revised a bit in 1928, but still the ideas are quite revolutionary for 1928, but in 1911 it is CRAZY.
From a universal translator, thumb drive newspapers. Anti-gravity flying cars, microfilm, vending machines, satellites, tape recorders, solar energy, and a few others are accurate or close to accurate predictions. This is all fun stuff to read about, and the technologies that were pretty close to the eventual thing that was invented. Even more fun is the stuff that never happened. One of my favorites was a postage stamp-sized newspaper you buy to download the news.
This is an important book, but make no mistake, the story and characters are thin. You are reading it for the thought experiment of the technology at the time. For that, it is a valuable snapshot of wild speculation of many sitting at a typewriter in 1911 and thinking about the future and certainly a better example than Poe’s The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall," which still people traveling in balloons in a thousand years.
As far as a work of Pre-Science Fiction I think this novella is a must-read. The faults are many, but the strengths are enough to validate its importance.
Thursday, April 17, 2025
Book Review: Gather at the Hall of Planets by K.M. O'Donnell (AKA: Barry Malzberg)
Gather at the Hall of Planets by K.M. O'Donnell (AKA: Barry Malzberg)
I generally will give more time and attention to a Barry Malzberg novel, and while I enjoyed this one, this felt like a SF satire spin of the Day of The Burning, that I read last year. I think this one came out first and by indications this was a Donald Wollheim concept, much like Campbell suggesting Foundation to Asimov. OK, is a little less of a big deal of a concept but you get the idea.
My favorite thing about this novel is picturing a smoke-filled office in NYC with Wollheim and Malzberg being two cranky old school SF dudes developing the idea. What I am sure they started with is a novel set at a WorldCon was a good way for Malzberg to vent all his anger and frustrations with being a SF writer, woah boy, does he do that.
It was also a way for him to get in some jabs at their old pals and colleagues, and sell a few Ace Doubles. This novel owes much to Anthony Boucher’s murder mystery, Rocket to the Morgue published 30 years earlier. That locked door mystery featured caricatures of LA-based SF writers with whom Boucher was in a writers' collective. This group included Robert Heinlein, Hubbard, and more. I can’t help but compare the two novels, and Boucher’s satire or caricatures of major SF figures were more obvious in Rocket. That novel was pre-scientology, and while you might guess that Gather was aiming at Hubbard, it is more AE Van Vogt, who was an early follower, that gets the treatment in Malzberg’s novel. I am assuming he had a Van Vogt experience like the one in the novel. Seekers of Tomorrow editor Sam Moskowitz and his tensions with Author/editor Fredrik Pohl are treated with humor for those in on the joke. I am sure that will be lost on 99% of anyone attempting to read it today.
The concept is that Sanford is warned a malevolent alien has infiltrated the Worldcon SF convention, and you need to find him. The alien storyline is the same as the Day of the Burning, a later Malzberg novel, and that storyline is better told in that novel. In Gather it is more of an excuse for Malzberg to vent. On the surface, it is about the struggles of an SF writer, but Kvass like BM ended up writing Erotica.
Sanford Kvass is a cranky old SF writer; maybe worse than Barry and that is saying something. The book is meant to be funny, and maybe if I were in a different mood, I might have laughed more. I mean, Malzberg uses Kvass to take a literary dump on the problems of being a writer in SF. “You don't have to refund the money, you idiot, they're canceling. They're dropping the whole science fiction line effective immediately and converting to sex books period if you would deliver the book when you were supposed to deliver it you would have $2000 and all the rights back to because they would have released it, but now you've only got 1000 and you can't even write the book. I want my money, Sanford, I mean that. I can't go advancing people and being screwed this way give me the money.”
Did Kvass/Malzberg want to be SF writer? Not really. And he makes that clear. Even their intentions when starting in the genre seemed lost…
“At around the time you become a professional writer a startling realization hits you it may come during the course of writing a book or more likely in the periods(longer and longer and more agonizing) in between books, and that realization is that what you are doing has absolutely no connection with what you thought you were going to do when you fell into it in the first place.”
Knowing what I know about PKD’s book deals with this part when Kvass refers to paperback only authors as “paperback prostitutes,” is an eye-opening look at the business of it all.
“But then of course, you take the fast deal with the paperback prostitute, you're Just filling in time, just going from month to month period, there are no royalties or increments with paperback. On the other hand, who has the time to angle for a hardcover? Then too, hardcover can be a worse deal than paperback unless you get some kind of edge or a break in reviews. Most affairs end dismally and are more expensive than simple relationships with prostitutes. “Paperback prostitutes” Kavass mumbles, and then, embarrassed, plunges his head into the coffee cup.”
The best and probably most grumpy part of the book was this exchange when Kvass explains his feelings on the entire process….
“Besides, there is an audience out there. At some point along the way, people have gotten around to “reading” your “books”; there are certain “responses” towards your “books”, and every now and then they give you indication, through postcards or strange notes to one another in the subculture called “fanzines” that what you have been doing has some connection to them after all. This is the most insane thing of all, because it is impossible to imagine that anyone could take this seriously, there are people who find it consequential. They form “opinions.” they purchased copies in enough quantities of sometime items to guarantee “royalty rates.” Many of them turn out to want to be “writers” themselves and ask for advice. They want to know what's the best way to go from specialized sale at the beginning or whether they should go right out and try to sell big a commercial novel so that they can make “big money” and spend the rest of their lives “doing the kind of work that we really want to be doing.”
This novel is pretty tongue-in-cheek on topics I find funny and ripe for satire, so I am surprised I didn’t enjoy it more. It maybe a function that I read at a busy time, none the less I don’t think it is one of the more important Malzberg works but I may have to give it another spin.
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