Another Day, Another Hackneyed Alien Invasion

by Tony Fonseca

10/28/2005 

Morden, Simon. Another War. Tolworth, Surrey: Telos, 2005. 131 p.

About the only element of this novella—marketed as “another day, another war”—from Telos Publishing that I enjoyed was the conception of the central mystery: an old manor and its surrounding property in England, which has disappeared into thin air some eighty years previous to the action of the novel, has suddenly resurfaced. Surrounded by an impenetrable bubble which seemingly causes all life within it to instantly die, wither, and disintegrate into ash, the manor turns out to be the focal point of an alien invasion by Cthulhian creatures that can freeze dry any life form with a simple touch. Of course, a supernatural find of this nature would not be one to be deciphered by scientists; it would default to the British army, aided by MI5. This is where Simon Morden's story begins to fall apart.

Two military stereotypes, Thacker, a loose cannon type who we are immediately told (as in the first line that introduces him) would routinely flirt with any army nurse (think Mickey Spillane crossed with John Wayne), and Dickson, an army bureaucrat, are the principle investigators on the case.  Are these the right guys for the job?  Apparently so, for Thacker manages to get inside the protective bubble through an extremely dangerous maneuver which leads at least this reader to question his sanity and his discretion.  Once inside, he finds two British subjects, both of whom had vanished eighty years before, but neither of whom has seemingly aged a day in the meantime.  He gets military help, corners the two men who have been firing weapons at him, and finds out that they have been defending themselves against the military because they believed the humans were actually alien spies.  With a little interrogation, the modern Brit army discovers that a scientist/engineer who was a contemporary of the two long-lost men had managed to build a sort of time machine, which allowed him to travel in other dimensions as well.  The only problem is that the alien creatures which this scientist (named Jack) had happened upon now have the ability to use the machine to come to modern day England.

At this point, the action increases dramatically—or I should say melodramatically—and the novella degenerates into your typical alien versus human beings "war of the worlds" clone.  And it is badly done at that.  

As I have often pointed out in various reviews, one of the biggest inconsistencies with horror novelists is that they desire to create truly horrifying creatures, and then have to vanquish them.  To be truly horrifying, a creature must be capable of threatening the very existence of all humanity.  Human beings must seem absolutely powerless against them.  But when your monsters can easily be dispatched with an AK-47, and their splatter is more disgusting than the heinous method with which they terminate the lives of human beings, readers are going to find it difficult to feel fear.  That is exactly what happens when reading Another War.  Morden's aliens are disgusting, but they are not frightening.  They are only marginally interesting in that they are a recognizable offshoot of Lovecraftian monsters, updated and multiplied exponentially.

Despite the innocuousness of its monsters, perhaps the most questionable aspect of Another War is the absolutely ridiculous image of a human being getting stretched (literally), to become a thirty-foot tall, paper thin, evil godlike creature.  If there is a sillier image in recent horror fiction (I'd say in all horror fiction, but then there's The Castle of Otranto’s Monty Pythonesque giant helmet), I haven't seen it.  Then there's the relative ease at which Jack-the-God can be defeated—by Thacker in a suit of armor no less.  While I can understand Morden's conception of the time/dimension manipulation being tied to the motif of the heroic human in history (The Gilgamesh epic, Beowulf, etc.) and the "magical" suit of armor, I can't but question its execution in this particular novella.  To put it bluntly, it just doesn't work.

While Morden can be credited with having a wonderful kernel of an idea, any conscionable reviewer would have to conclude that Morden fails to grow that kernel into anything palatable.  I'm not even sure that expanding the story, as is—silly alien octopi, Slim Fast gone awry superhuman, magic suit of armor—would make it better.  In fact, the only other element I could find about the novella was its length.  Were it novel length, it would have been unbearable.