Description
British author Richard Calder (Dead Girls, Cythera, Frenzetta, et al.) is at the forefront of a new wave of delectably bizarre science fiction authors — like Paul Di Filippo, Cory Doctorow, Steve Aylett, Karen Michalson, and Allen M. Steele — who appear to walk a tightrope between insanity and genius. This daredevilry is fully on display in Calder’s The Twist, a dark love story set in an alternate Wild West that is a kind of cosmic bridge between Earth and the planet Venus.
Following a “psychogeographic event” that connected western America to Venus in the 1950s, lawless frontier towns like Tombstone are now inhabited by goth cowboys who wear black lipstick and eye-shadow, shape-shifting Venusians who hunger for freshly detached human souls, wild neo-Nazi youth, and cannibalistic changelings called zanies. Nine year-old Nicola Newton is traveling west with her parents when they are forced to share a stagecoach with a legendary gunslinger named John Twist and Viva Venera, a beautiful Venusian necrobabe, a “depraved cherub” waiting for him to die so that she can lovingly consume his soul. Nicola, a precocious prodigy who hates her parents and everything they stand for (she describes her mother as “a morbidly obese, cannibalistic pig-spider engorged on the meat of its offspring”) runs away the first chance she gets and joins up with the gunslinger and his alien lover/executioner. She is soon guzzling whiskey, killing bounty hunters, and rescuing the world from utter annihilation.
