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Simon & Schuster, UK, 1999
Four Walls, Eight Windows, US, 2003 |
The Twist
Simon & Schuster, UK, 1999; forthcoming from Four Walls
Eight Windows, US, Winter 2003
'Think Robert Coover crossed with Jack Womack, Lucius
Shepard, and film director Jim Jarmusch, and you have the faintest
inkling of Calder's distinctive accomplishment with this book … If I
had to pick a single author to match Calder's effect, I'd choose
Michael Moorcock. Like Moorcock, Calder is at ease cutting and
restitching the gladrags of pop culture, highlighting the fruitful
contradictions and disturbing conjunctions of his patchwork creation
… Any reader even a little weary of rationalist SF that tries to
polish up the cosmically ineffable into shiny Hugo Awards owes it to
themselves to clamour for more of Calder
…'
Asimov's
'Old West, Gothic grotesquery, mid-(alternate)-20th-century
conformist stodginess and outsider ventures into the wild side,
you'll find them all here, along with elements of pulp SF infused
with love, death, Schadenfreude - the whole shebang … What had begun
as a quirky, campy romp through Gothic/Romantic regions suffused
with 20th-century pop culture manages to develop its own strange
eloquence …'
Locus
'A truly glorious romp … a
gem.'
Interzone
'The novel is original and strong, and portrays a
pseudo-Gothic town of Tombstone that has been overrun with Venusians
who are attempting to steal the souls of its human inhabitants.
There is not much of a plot, but that does not matter - this is a
giddy, baroque journey into something new and exciting, and what the
novel lacks in pace it makes up for in style. Calder's characters
are well drawn and the environments well realized. The Twist
constructs a detailed and fascinating setting for an innovative
science fantasy of a type that rarely appears.'
'The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction' edited by
George Mann |
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