Neon – A Literary Magazine

Author: Kristine Ong Muslim | Publisher: The Unnamed Press | Buy: Amazon UK / Amazon USA | More: Goodreads

It’s hard to say exactly why the illustrations in Kristine Ong Muslim’s recent short story collection Age Of Blight (published by The Unnamed Press) evoke such a strong sense of discomfort and dread. They are, after all, rather mundane. There’s nothing horrifying about a vintage photograph of a man feeding an elephant seal, for example, and yet in context it’s all rather unsettling: the swollen body of the creature, perched at what surely must be an uncomfortable angle. The stiffly-upright man. The mottled dryness of the seal’s body. There’s something not quite right here – a feeling only compounded by the sketches of hybrid monsters that head each story. A mere glance through the book produces a cocktail of feelings: sadness, otherness, even discomfort – all feelings which the stories themselves go on to concentrate and refine to almost overpowering effect.

The text itself begins with an introductory note that describes some of the places which will feature in the stories to come. There’s the suburb of Bardenstan, where something terrible is  fated to take place in the year 2115. There’s the town of Outerbridge, the very last place where crops are actually grown on American soil. And in between the two is Station Tower, a nine-storey apartment building that serves as an architectural embodiment of hell. These places are, of course, fictional, but Muslim insists that they could be real, that they may exist in this timeline or another. It’s a spectacularly well-crafted piece, which sets up nicely a certain level of doubt about reality, about fiction and about the world in which – having opened the book – we now find ourselves.

That said, one of the very first stories takes place in a world that is recognisably our own. “The Wire Mother” is the gruesome tale of Harry Harlow, an American psychologist who conducted a series of controversial (and, some argue, unnecessarily cruel) social isolation experiments on monkeys. The details revealed in the story are almost too far-fetched to be believed, but all are verifiable. The result is a story that feels as though it couldn’t possibly be based in the world as we know it, but very certainly is.

Indeed, most of the stories in the first chunk of the collection could be considered historical rather than speculative. It is only with “No Little Bobos”, the début story of the second section of her collection, that Muslim begins to step off into the entirely speculative. It’s a trick she pulls off with admirable flair. The story begins with a description of the “Bobo doll experiments” conducted by social scientist Albert Bandura in 1961 and 1963 – a series of tests in which children were shown footage of an adult attacking a doll, then later exposed to a similar-looking doll to see what their reaction would be. Muslim’s story leaps a hundred years into the future to explore a strange, regimented extension of the same experiments.

“No Little Bobos” seems to mark a step away from the historical and into the purely speculative. Several excellent and slightly-horrifying stories follow, from the short but spine-tingling “Playground” to the much more involved, but equally creepy “Dominic And Dominic” – a story in which a young boy’s fingernail clippings, once planted in the garden, grow into another version of himself. The overall effect of this shift from the real to the not-real is a marvellous one – by beginning with historical fact, and then stepping off into the unfamiliar, Muslim brings the two uncomfortably close together.

The four sections of Age Of Blight are titled “Animals”, “Children”, “Instead Of Human” and “The Age Of Blight”. With each one the stakes seem to rise a little. The atmosphere becomes increasingly bleak and apocalyptic, and we are edged further and further away from a perspective that is known or recognisable. This gives the book a wonderful sense of gathering momentum – what was an uneasy creeping sensation in the first few stories is now a ball of raging anxiety, panic, chaos.

The final few stories paint pictures of sickeningly nightmarish worlds. In “The Quarantine Tank” the narrator and his tribe live in fear of a beast that makes its home inside a tank on the grounds of a nearby chemical plant. Though the protagonist is clearly human, he lives in a world that is cruelly alien and deeply segregated, but one that feels every bit as authentic as that of the lab in “The Wire Mother”. The final story “History Of The World” offers a vision of two climbers stranded on opposing cliff faces, clinging on with the last of their strength, each waiting to see the other plummet and die. It is without much context, but in tone and feel it makes a perfect ending – it is just as cruel and compelling and unusual as the stories that opened the set. The age of blight has, it seems, finally arrived.

This is a collection that should be read as a whole – each story builds on those that came before, the atmosphere thickening with each tale until it’s so heavy it’s almost oppressive. The stories themselves sometimes seem incomplete, but they’re definitely intended to be part of a wider vision – little by little we are edged from our comfortable lives into the dream-like world described in the introduction. Age Of Blight is far from being a happy read, but it is unendingly fascinating.

Editor: Merritt Kopas | Publisher: Instar Books | Buy: Amazon UK / Amazon USA | More: Get Twine

Before we can really dig into the intriguingly-titled anthology Videogames For Humans (edited by Merritt Kopas), we must first understand a few things about Twine. This is Twine, the hypertext storytelling tool – not twine as in a length of string. The simple program allows people with little or no knowledge of coding to create interactive stories, poems and other written objects. Its simplicity and flexibility has lead to the formation of a thriving community of Twine artists distributed around the world.

All of this and more is explained in detail in the introduction to Videogames For Humans – but you don’t really need to know any of it. All you need to know is that a Twine text is the digital equivalent of a Choose Your Own Adventure Book – a story in which the reader doesn’t just passively read, but makes decisions, picks paths and interacts with the written word on screen.

The book – a hefty volume weighing in at almost six-hundred pages – features a selection of Twine texts, each of which is played through and commented on by another writer. For those who have never read one before, the playthrough may seem like an odd medium, but when it comes to conveying the form and mood of a Twine game, it works far better than a review or feature article. In fact, the anthology doubles its value by having not only a reading of the original text, but a second creative piece arising from the observations and commentary of the writer completing the playthrough.

For example,  in the playthrough of “Fuck That Guy” by Benji Bright, player Riley MacLeod doesn’t just offer a straightforward run through of the text in question, but instead begins with a personal anecdote about being propositioned by a man in a van, and then – as the game progresses – moves on to talk about his experience as a “radical queer trans man”. It’s an intriguing piece that greatly enhances the original Twine text, and allows one to see if from a thoroughly different perspective.

Similarly Austin Walker’s playthrough of “There Ought To Be A Word” by Jeremy Penner is as much about Walker as it is about the game. He writes about how his own experience online dating mirrors that of the until-recently married narrator of the story. It’s a wonderful combination of fiction-that-might-be-nonfiction and actual creative nonfiction, rife with both sadness and honesty. The echoes between one narrative and the other are a pleasure to discover.

The two games we have discussed so far both explore sex, sexuality and dating. This is far from an uncommon theme in Videogames For Humans – indeed a large proportion of the featured texts can be sorted into more or less the same few categories: sex, identity, mental health and memoir. Flicking casually through, one might get the impression that Twine is used mainly as a creative method of catharsis – a way for writers to put readers forcefully in their shoes, or exorcise some personal demon. Though these types of story dominate, they are by no means the only note at which Twine is capable of singing.

“And The Robot Horse You Rode In On” by Anna Anthropy (played by Cat Fitzpatrick), for example, is an at-times hilarious dystopian sci-fi adventure story. It has a great deal in common with the old-school Choose Your Own Adventure series – but also manages to take things to another level in the way that it plays with narrative, truth and perspective.

“Even Cowgirls Bleed” by Christine Love (played by Leigh Alexander) is quite a different animal. It features a rather excitable pistol-wielding city dweller, who decides to fulfil her fantasy of being a gunslinging cowgirl out in the wild west. Both the format and tone of the game are unique – you progress by targeting words in the text with a crosshairs; an action that very often results in the protagonist simply shooting something. Despite a rather moving ending it is still immense fun to play.

You are not, by the way, restricted to being simply a reader of playthroughs. Most of the Twine games featured in the book are available for free online, and the digital version of the book comes complete with a folder full of pre-downloaded games. You don’t need any special software or knowledge to play; if you can browse the internet, you should be able to play all the games on offer with very little difficulty.

This being the case you are, of course, presented with a choice. You can read the playthrough of a given game before opening it up to try for yourself, or play the game before reading what someone else has to say about it. I tended to favour playing the games first – as this allows you to explore and experience the texts while they are completely fresh and unknown to you. The playthrough in the anthology then allows you to examine different paths to the one you took, and gain a greater insight into possible readings of the game.

“Nineteen” by Elizabeth Sampat (played by Patricia Hernandez) was one game where I was particularly grateful that I played before reading the playthrough. It’s a powerful little story about the author’s attempts at suicide. It is unusual in that, quite often, one runs very quickly into a dead end. You’ll find yourself staring at a screen where there’s nothing more to click. You are forced to either use your browser back button or restart the entire story and pick a different route. This conceit was at first annoying, but very quickly came to feel like an integral part of the game; although it doesn’t move quite as freely as some of the other stories, it is among the most compelling. The playthrough, however,  doesn’t add very much – Hernandez works her way through the narrative and makes a few light observations, mostly limiting herself to straightforward factual notes. To read the playthrough first might well have sapped the game of some of its power.

On the other hand, in the case of “Sacrilege” by Cara Ellison (played by Soha Kareem), the playthrough was crucial to my experience of the game. “Sacrilege” is a kind of heterosexual female version of “Fuck That Guy”, which makes use of Twine to enact some excellent formal devices. The setting is a nightclub, and the sentences of the story arrive in hypnotic pulses, as though in time to a beat. Towards the end though, the rhythm of the story does give way to a more preachy tone, as the narrator is handed a six-page instruction manual, detailing exactly how they should be making choices. It’s a sharp tonal shift, and somewhat undermines the point of the story. The playthrough, however, rescues the experience – it’s packed with insightful and interesting commentary, and is very much worth a look.

As previously noted, there are a great many stories sandwiched between the covers of Videogames For Humans –  too many to list in detail here. If you’re remotely curious, then I suggest you get a copy of the book and try them out for yourself. For someone new to the world of Twine the anthology can serve as a menu – a way to pick interesting works in which to indulge from the otherwise-overwhelming array of Twine tales on offer. For experienced players Videogames For Humans can be considered a showcase of just what Twine can do. At just ten dollars for the eBook and all the games, it’s certainly a worthwhile investment.

Author: Steve Aylett | Publisher: Unbound | Buy: Amazon UK / Amazon USA | More: Goodreads

Steve Aylett promises a lot in the video introduction to his most recent book Heart Of The Original. In its pages, we’re told, we’ll “discover why the same idea is repeatedly hailed as a breakthrough, why obvious outcomes are met with surprise, why almost any situation is improved by a berserking hen, why the best way to get into something is to think of it as mischief, and how you can locate new ideas by thinking spatially.”

It all sounds terribly interesting, and the questions he poses are ones that I certainly want answers to. Fortunately for me, the book does provide these answers… albeit in a somewhat more woolly and hand-wavey way than I was hoping. The blurb and description make this tome sound like a relatively serious, well-researched exploration of human psychology, with particular attention paid to the ways in which we think about ideas. Alas, it is not – instead Heart Of The Original is an exceptionally well-written and imaginative rant. This book is endlessly linguistically adventurous, and its pages are heaped with surrealism and wit… but it is a rant nonetheless.

Any fans of Aylett will be familiar with his style. A mix of Douglas Adams and Chuck Palahniuk (although I’m sure Aylett himself would baulk at being described as such), he is furiously inventive and amusing, laying down pages that are alternately satirical, surreal, insightful and just plain strange. He has a particular gift for the apt simile. Turns of phrase such as “strange as a giraffe” or “indigestible as a helicopter” leap out from almost every fresh page. Aylett’s playful use of language alone was enough to keep me reading well past bedtime.

As much as I enjoyed Heart Of The Original, however, I disagreed with it completely. Aylett is cynical about other writers and artists, deriding the majority as passionless, imagination-less drones who are only capable of spouting ad nauseum a remix of all the material they have read before. He denies the value of building a canon, of reworking, of remixing, of creating something influenced by what has come before. The only originality that seems of value to Aylett is that which comes wrapped in a kind of dream-like mysticism. He writes at length about “real” creativity and “true” originality – concepts which some might argue don’t actually exist.

It’s ironic that the brief note from the publishers at the back of the book is quite keen to give credit to their influences. Unbound publish books in a fairly-unusual crowdsourced fashion, the idea for which they trace back as far as Samuel Johnson. Heart Of The Original, therefore, would not exist in its present form without its predecessors and its influences – even the font in which the book is set has a history that includes much inheritance and borrowing.

The more interesting elements of the book – an exploration of why new ideas are often unwelcome for example – are touched upon only lightly, and left behind with speed. It is, overall, light on fact and heavy on style. But then, it’s also very much a book that’s not supposed to be taken as deadly serious. It is Aylett’s own personal mad rage against the world, and when taken with that in mind it’s a deeply entertaining one. It may not do everything it promises in the introduction, but what it does do it does with flair and humour. Whether you agree with its central argument or not, the book is bound to spark something.

Author: Arnt Jensen | Publisher: Playdead | Buy: Amazon UK / Amazon USA | More: Steam

Limbo. The word, in its original Latin, means “edge” or “boundary” and refers to the edge of hell: a place where the not-quite-damned are sent to languish – a plane of existence for the souls of unbaptized infants, or those who might have found salvation… had they not died quite so abruptly. In other contexts it is an intermediate state, a thing unresolved. You wait in limbo to hear the test results, to resolve the legal battle. Whatever definition you use, limbo is not a pleasant place to be.

And this too holds true for the game of the same title. Produced by Playdead in 2010, Limbo is a two-dimensional puzzle platformer that garnered a string of gushing reviews when it was first released. The Escapist called it “freaky, weird genius”, and Xbox World 360 declared it to be “easily the platform’s greatest successor to Braid”. Reviews elsewhere were smattered liberally with the words “masterpiece” and “genius”. It won the “Game Of The Year” and “Best Indie Game” awards at the 2010 European Milthon Awards, and has received further accolades for everything from its sound design to its adventure-game qualities.

Once you play the thing, you’ll see that the praise is certainly deserved. Limbo displays an emotional intelligence that easily outstrips many higher-budget contemporary games. It plays with your perceptions and your emotions even as you play with it. A trip into Limbo is an absorbing experience, and one that will leave you unexpectedly changed. On top of all that, it’s stunningly elegant, even beautiful, and there’s a weight and poetry to every scene that belies its simple interface.

You play as a small boy, only ever seen in silhouette. At the very start of the game you wake up in a forest. From this starting point you run, jump, slide, crawl and clamber your way through a series of increasingly deadly obstacles, escaping dismemberment by the skin of your teeth over and over again. It seems that almost every other living thing in the world of the game wants nothing more than to murder you: you are stalked by a giant spider, hounded by cannibal children, crushed to death in hidden bear traps, and preyed upon by carnivorous flies.

No explanation as to how you ended up alone and in the wilderness is forthcoming, but there are occasional clues. As you leave the forest behind you enter an area that resembles a ruined city. Decayed buildings and broken signs proliferate. Amongst the ruins you catch tantalizing glimpses of the game’s only friendly figure – a girl of similar stature to you, who distinguishes herself from the other creatures of Limbo-world by not immediately trying to kill you. These narrative elements hint at rather than tell a story, leaving the narrative wide open to interpretation. Theories range wildly: perhaps you are a boy who – having fallen from a treehouse and died – is now making his way through hell, or perhaps you are lost in your own brain, while your physical body lies comatose in hospital. Maybe you are dead, and the girl is burying your body, or maybe you are caught between hell and the real world, desperately trying to break through to one or the other.

You could subscribe to any one of a number of explanations as you try to make sense of this puzzling game. Ultimately though, I get the sense that Limbo is not meant to be fully explained. More than anything else it resembles a nightmare – though it has its own internal logic, there is no concrete reason why it exists. That said, I did find the ending somewhat disappointing. It is spectacular, and it remains in keeping with the tone of the rest of the game, but I was hoping for perhaps a little more resolution, a little extra hint towards one theory or the other. Limbo denies the player this satisfaction – appropriately, perhaps – and leaves you to puzzle over its meaning long after the closing credits.

If Limbo is indeed a playable vision of a childhood nightmare, it is a fantastically accurate one. Throughout this adventure you have little with which to defend yourself. The mechanics of play are simple: you can run and jump, push and pull. You can flip switches and climb ropes. There are no weapons to be found, except those that you can improvise from your environment. There are no safe havens, no save points, no inventory, no health counters – none of the