**
Forcing further adventures into the loosely-sealed middle of a serial was a strange decision (one they repeated from the previous film), but an interesting alternative to a straight novelisation. The author gets what he can out of the restrictive setting and explores the characters' feelings at this specific point in time before he runs out of ideas and segues into flashbacks to tell slavishly traditional 'Trek tales.
David Massey, Moira Sheehan and Kathy Dickinson, Frontier: Elite II – Stories of Life on the Frontier
**
A world-building story cycle of standard sci-fi tropes to help you pass the tedious autopilot time or escape to the polygon universe during silent reading sessions at school. I never took it up on either of those options while this sat in the box of Amiga manuals for years, but better never than late.
Fave: David Massey's 'All That Glisters...'
2007 / Ebook / 112 pages / USA
***
This apocalyptic goth-chick-lit was the best of the fictional entries, even if the bar was set very low. I'd get more out of this personal reimagining if I was familiar with the album, rather than just enjoying having a bespoke reading soundtrack and trying to spot connections on the fly. Or maybe that'd just annoy me.
Rhys Hughes, The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension
1995-2011 (collected 2011) / Ebook / 230 pages / UK***
Non-comprehensively collecting the stories the author would probably least like his mum to read, they're not all rapey, but enough of them are to make it his least palatable collection. Including the whimsical Fanny Fables seems irrelevant until the author succumbs to temptation and enters his story and character at the end, there it is.
Fave: 'The Sickness of Satan'
2012 / Audiobook / 153 pages / UK
***
I appreciate that this authentic gothic pastiche didn't commit itself to period padding, feeling more like a film where we're not forced to spend more time with these neurotic kids than we have to for the story. It's still a bit too long to maintain a consistent atmosphere or spookiness, mind.
