Double Review: Demo Reels and Arthouse Madness, by Vince A. Liaguno, and Fever Dreams of a Parasite, by Pedro Iniguez

I've been enjoying a lot of horror-adjacent novels in the last couple of years, and playing horror-focused games such as Call of Cthulhu, so I thought I'd be fine reading two new horror collections in rapid succession for Skiffy and Fanty. I was not fine. Maybe the problem is with me, and the way the world is now, not with those two works I had requested on NetGalley; regardless, I couldn't summon enough enthusiasm for either to write full reviews for the wider audience that sees my Skiffy and Fanty posts. So I'm giving quicker reactions here for each collection.

Demo Reels and Arthouse Madness is a collection of poetry by Vince A. Liaguno, coming out on Feb. 25. He's "a self-identified unapologetic horror and pop culture junkie" and an award-winning editor and novelist. He has an amazingly vivid way with words, and makes some really interesting connections between seemingly disparate elements. I thought the ideas behind "Dumbwaiter", "Demo Reels", and other poems were arresting, and numerous poems contained kernels of brief, dark humor. He eloquently states a thesis in "Storytelling":

"Fuck once upon a time and happily ever after, all those
lazy literary conceits that lull into false senses of security.
Good storytellers are like doomsday preppers
who spin conspiracies of fear wrapped in quaint fable jackets,
who knew the fictions that demand attention are the ones
with the piranhas' serrated bite."

But I strongly oppose Liaguno's apparent conviction that horror stories are the only ones worth telling. His poems are often viscerally effective, but rarely uplifting; the closest they get to that mood is exemplified by a couplet in "Horrors of the Female Persuasion":
"Hear her roar and listen to her scream and watch her kill and see her survive.
She's a woman in horror: Cheer her. Fear her. Reengineer her. Revere her."

Mind you, Liaguno obviously isn't trying to be uplifting. He seems focused on exploring various facets of people and cultures and how they can be monstrous and perpetuate horrors, individually and socially, and reactions to these horrors (with a few resisters and even fewer survivors), and he's very good at his craft. I also really appreciate his "Movie Reference by Poem" appendix, helpful to readers. Some people will definitely find this book very rewarding. It's definitely good work; it's just not my cup of tea.

Fever Dreams of a Parasite is a collection of horror short stories by Pedro Iniguez, coming out on March 13. They are effectively written, displaying various scary, nightmarish, weird, and folk-horror elements throughout that were told in coherent tales. And I like and sympathize with a fair number of the protagonists, some of whom are just trying to get by in hard times, including discrimination and economic deprivation, and some who are struggling to help and protect others.

However, en masse, the collection doesn't quite work for me. Perhaps that's because I was reading one story right after another rather than spacing them out the way one might encounter them in magazines. The characters and setups were different, but most of them consisted of "Here comes Doom! ... Here's the Doom! Let's roll around in it for a little while!" Sometimes they end when the Doom is complete, and sometimes there's a little epilogue where the Doom is spreading or, rarely, when a survivor reflects on their escape; however, they seemed much of a muchness to me.

"But Trish," you may say, "Aren't you just being one of those awful reviewers who complains when an [insert genre] book is written in [insert genre] style?

Maybe so, but I've reviewed a number of books in the last year or so that at least contained strong horror elements, and positively enjoyed and recommended quite a few. The stories here by Iniguez don't reach that level for me, but I definitely hope that Iniguez keeps writing and trying out new ideas, and that he'll find some kind of spark or story seed that he'll develop well enough for me to think of him as a master storyteller rather than a promising journeyman. In the meantime, anyone who wants distraction from the horrors of the real world via supernatural stories (with enough real-world flavor to keep them grounded) could do a lot worse than giving this collection a try.

Content warnings for both books: Horror, body horror, mental invasions, sexual violence, child abuse, deaths, poverty, discrimination.

Disclaimers: I received a free eARC of each book for review.

Eligibility for 2025 Best Fan Writer award nomination

 I was tremendously pleased and flattered that Nerds of a Feather recently put me on their longlist to consider nominating for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. The other nine people on that list are Anna (forestofglory at Lady Business), Gautam Bhatia (Words for Worlds), Jake Casella Brookins (Ancillary Review of Books), Elias Eells (Bar Cart Bookshelf), Zach Gillan (the Ancillary Review of Books, various others), Jenny Hamilton (Reactor, Reading the End), Archita Mittra (Strange Horizons), Renay (Lady Business), and Alasdair Stuart (The Full Lid). I haven't read essays by all of them, but I'm familiar with many, and this is heady company indeed!

Due to this honor by Nerds of a Feather, I'm writing now about my eligibility as a fan writer for my 2024 works. Almost all of my fan writing takes the form of reviews, mostly book reviews, and most of those appear either here on my blog or at Skiffy and Fanty (https://skiffyandfanty.com/author/trishmatson/). Notable exceptions for 2024 include an essay that I wrote for Issue 82 — "Be the Change" of the Journey Planet online fanzine, "Changes Needed for the Hugo Awards Process"; a poem that also appeared in that issue, which I originally wrote for this blog, "A Vanilla Villain's Variant Villanelle" (about Dave McCarty and the 2023 Hugo Awards fiasco); a Skiffy and Fanty interview of Natania Barron focusing on Netherford Hall; and a long composite interview I posted here, with Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery editor Oliver Brackenbury and the two authors whose novellas comprised DESS, Bryn Hammond and Daniel Quiogue.

Some of the audio/video/gaming updates I wrote last year included mini-reviews, and I also participated in a Skiffy and Fanty contributors' roundup of favorite things from 2024. But as for dedicated reviews, I wrote 26 for Skiffy and Fanty and four for my blog in 2024. Here are some of my favorites:

RPG review: Jason Thompson's Dreamland RPG
Book (collection) review: Resurrections, by Ada Hoffman
Book review: Sun of Blood and Ruin, by Mariely Lares
Books(s) review: Liberty's Daughter and Thoughts on Worker Bees
Book review: The Jaguar Mask, by Michael J. DeLuca
Book review: Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford

Audio/Video/Gaming Roundup, 2025 Part 1

This year, I'm going to reverse my process of previous years and post the updates up top so readers don't have to scroll down to see my latest activities. I'll continue to add links to all my text reviews at SkiffyandFanty.com in this older post. For roundups of my 2024 and 2023 activities in podcasting, gaming, media, videos, etc., please see here, here, here and here. Activities from before then are listed further back in my blog.

March 26, 2025
GAMING: As mentioned above, I played Foretold: From Earth at Capricon during the first weekend of February. Shaun had wanted to record something since we were all going to be there together, but there wasn't any particular topic that strongly appealed to us. I had played a couple of versions of Foretold before on Groundhoggoth's Discord channel (more about that in the Jan. 21 gaming roundup), and I thought we could get it done in an hour or so, so I suggested it and led us through it. We had a lot of fun!

On Jan. 25, I played a one-shot of Swords of the Serpentine: Takedown, organized by someone on The Good Friends of Jackson Elias server. Paul Weimer was also in this, so that was fun. The SotS system adapts "the GUMSHOE investigative roleplaying system to create a fantasy RPG with a focus on high-action roleplaying and investigation inspired by the stories of Fritz Leiber, Terry Pratchett, Robert E. Howard, and others." So we were doing detection and political intrigue; we had conversations with various people in the city (involving some verbal fencing), ended up sneaking into someone's mansion while they were at a party elsewhere, and interrupted a magical ritual that could have doomed the city.

On Monday, Feb. 17, I played a one-shot of Deadlands on the Wacky Wednesdays channel, an offshoot of TGFOJE. They set it up for Wednesdays, but the games usually start too late for me, but this one was held on the afternoon of Presidents Day. Deadlands is based on the Savage Worlds RPG; it's Weird West with steampunk elements. This was my first time playing in Savage Worlds Adventure Edition (SWADE), and several others were beginners too, but we had fun learning it together. First, the team worked together to stop a runaway stagecoach; later, we were investigating a town and suddenly got ourselves into a gunfight.

On Feb. 22 our Stargate campaign (using Wyvern's system, adapted from D&D 5e) launched Season 2 (S2E1 "Welcome to the Jungle"). Gatemaster Andrew Pontious figured out a way for us to move forward in time despite one of the players not wanting to be spoiled beyond Season 2 of SG-1: Our team has been transported to another galaxy along with some refugees from Goa'uld tyranny, and we don't have a way back yet. The Tinkerers, the leaders here, are aware of the G but don't want to get into war with them; they don't want to send us home until they're sure they can trust us. And they want us to gain their trust by doing some missions for them. So far, we're going along with it.
On March 15 we continued with S2E2 "The Labors of Hercules" by starting one of those missions. A spaceship has started attacking a peaceful mining world with drones at regular intervals. We figured out that these attacks started a couple of years after the people of that planet started broadcasting radio, and convinced them to stop doing that. The attacking spaceship left, but NOT by wormhole/hyperspace, so we figure it's from just a few light-years away. Stinger at the end: My Aturen character, Jileria, found a mystery box in a locker at our lab with the Tinkerers; some kind of organic-metallic "fly" was inside, but we managed to contain it before it escaped.

On Feb. 28 I started participating in a playtest of Cold City 2, being run by Groundhoggoth. The kickstarter for Cold City Hot War 2nd edition ended March 25, but the playtesting continues for a little while. Cold City is set in post-WWII Berlin, with weird horror elements; each player's character is from a different faction (usually American, British, French, or Russian), so although we work together to investigate and defeat some common threats, we're also working against each other to keep secrets and gain advantages for our factions. I'm playing Ursula Weiskopff, a German who openly worked for the Nazis while secretly trying to help my queer friends escape and survive; later, I secretly worked for the OSS. Sooner or later, I'm expecting Ursula to be attacked by someone who only knows about her overt past. I'm not sure I'd want to play her for a long campaign, but this was planned for a short run anyway. After our first session, which was a couple of hours focused on designing our characters, we played on March 7 and March 21; we may continue for a few sessions in April to wrap things up, although the playtest feedback period will be over by then. So far, we dislike that this version of CCHW seems to value player input considerably less than the original, heavily leaning toward GM planning vs. collaborative storytelling. But we're still having fun together. 

On March 24, I played what ended up being the conclusion of our Thunderchild campaign, in which Groundhoggoth had modified Cold City Hot War and set it a few months after H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. We played several other times in February and March; this was our 11th and ultimately final session. We had known we were approaching the endgame, but events just kept gaining momentum for the exciting conclusion. My character, Iris Worthington, had gained control of the Thunderchild program, but she ended up being killed. However, we did eradicate some lingering Martian influences, so that was satisfying. This has been one of the best campaigns I've played in, for setup, GMing, role-playing, and players working with each other (although characters were occasionally opposed) to build a story together. I'll write a separate post about this soon.

 

March 25, 2025: Oh dear, it's been a while!
TRANSCRIPTS: I've made progress in transcribing the 2024 Skiffy and Fanty podcasts, but I'm not quite done yet. I hope to get them all done by mid-April.

AUDIO/VIDEO:
Only two Skiffy and Fanty streams that I've been on have been released since January. On Feb. 3, the podcast for our annual year-in-review-and-forecast show "Looking Back, Moving Forward" was released; the video released "last month" is here. (Why is YouTube so nonspecific on dates?) I was talking/streaming with Shaun Duke, Paul Weimer, and David Annandale; if you want to know my specific recommendations, check the shownotes or the transcript.

On Feb. 13, Skiffy and Fanty released an actual play podcast of a game Shaun, Paul and I played together at Capricon in Chicago (also on YouTube with just audio). We played the science fictional indie collaborative narrative game "Foretold: From Earth" and had a blast doing it.
Of course, I continue watching Skiffy and Fanty shows on https://twitch.tv/alphabetstreams on Friday nights at 8 Eastern, participating in chat even if I'm not on camera.

Jan. 21, 2025
AUDIO/VIDEO: I continue to edit podcasts and YouTube videos professionally for the Twitch streamer Arvan Eleron. The Hearthglow campaign based on the Tales & Tomes from the Forbidden Library D&D 5e module had a new video and podcast posted Jan. 15 and will get another podcast episode Jan. 22. This will probably wrap up in March, and he'll launch something else later. (UPDATE 3/25: Actually, Hearthglow will wrap up with a live show in Connecticut in April!)

AUDIO: For Skiffy and Fanty, one podcast and video that I'm on have been released so far this month. It's a "Mining the Genre Asteroid" episode about Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow (1955) that Shaun Duke, Paul Weimer and I recorded this fall on Shaun's alphabetstreams Twitch channel. Skiffy and Fanty will resume streaming there starting Jan. 31, at 8 p.m. Eastern, and should have new programs, mostly live, every Friday.

GAMING:
Jan. 13: Thunderchild: The modified Cold City/Hot War campaign, set in London a couple of months after H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, resumed after its winter break. As other characters explored their own agendas and objectives, my character, Iris Worthington (a suffragist and the daughter of an industrialist), finally won the trust of the head of the Thunderchild science/defense project when she realized her brother had secretly obtained and experimented with Martian War Machine materials, and turned him in to Captain Spencer.
Jan. 20: Thunderchild: It's worse than that; Ronny Worthington was also selling information to the French, and by the end of the session, they had established a beachhead in the south of England. Meanwhile, other characters are finding out horrific things about the Aurora Project to create modified humans who no longer need sleep, and the Royal cousin in our group has been marked for destruction by whoever has been wielding a captured heat ray.
Thunderchild is a game being run on a private Discord server, so I can't share it here. However, the DM, groundhoggoth, is great. He has a number of games for sale at itch.io; I've played two of the Foretold one-shot narrative card games and enjoyed them greatly. 
Meanwhile, Cold City/Hot War will be launching a kickstarter for a second edition soon. That page includes a link to sign up for playtests. You can also find out more about the game at the DriveThruRPG link there.