Here at The Fantasy Hive we don’t like numbers, or stars, or quantifiable ratings – although we do accept we will have to give out numerical scores for all of the eventual finalists.

Going forward, the judging team will comprise of Theo, Cat and Vinay. Gray lent us their expertise for the first part of our process but has had to now step back due to personal scheduling constraints.

Rather than put a score on each semifinalist, Theo, Cat and Vinay will be ranking them as we go through our reviews – inspired by the process used in the SPFBO Champion of Champions contest.

The winning book and chosen finalist will be the one with the best average ranking once all the reviews are done and the judges have ranked all six books.

(If there should be a tie on average ranking then the winner will be the one with the most 1st places, if still tied then it will be the one with the most 2nd places and so on.)

This will make for a more dynamic leader table as books can shuffle up or down the list all the way to the sixth and final semi-finalist review.

So on to our first semifinalist review of THE BODDICKER LETTERS where the judges will comment under the headings of worldbuilding, Prose, Character and Plot, before giving their pithy one line conclusions and fitting this week’s semifinalist into our overall ranking table.

Worldbuilding

Theo: I’m not very familiar with Lovecraft’s writing beyond the name and the headlines, so – until a certain word appeared – I could take the setting entirely at face value. It poses an interesting question about when does ‘drawing on a source material’ move beyond fan-fic (which I hasten to point out is not a derogatory term) and into inspiration. I found the writing captured the miserable dampness of an unwelcoming town. One of the joys and constraints of the story was in its epistolary nature – we know the story and the place only through the titular letters of Titus Boddicker. Boddicker has a fine eye for scenery ‘Imagine the beaches in the Virginias but remove all sun and sand and joy from the equation’. However, the author’s  scope for wider world building is limited by and to the mercurial and increasingly deranged focus of Boddicker. 

Cat: I rather enjoyed the nods to this author’s clear inspirations, notably Lovecraft for the lore and Dracula for the methodology, even the recent ‘Nosferatu’ movie for the tone. As has been said, this is not an original world, but I appreciated the author rising to the challenge of playing in someone else’s sandbox and feel that he did it justice; not to the extent of some other Arkham writers as no limits were really challenged from the source material, but enough that I enjoyed the ride. The length of the book was also well-chosen, as anything more would’ve been too much – it didn’t overstay its welcome.

Vinay: I am not too familiar with a lot of Lovecraftian stuff (barring of course the image of a tentaclely being of horror, Cthulhu), so a lot of the worldbuilding did feel atmospheric. The worldbuilding is just limited to the one town of Innsmouth but it definitely felt very intensely described, taking on various hues depending on the narrators mood. I did feel the town contributing significantly to the  creepy, ominous and disorienting feel on the narrator’s descent into madness and instability. The size of the book also meant we spend almost all of our time here and in a way, that is sufficient worldbuilding for this book. I particularly liked this dialog that describes the shore of Innsmouth – “What little sand there is remains studded with stones and bones from various creatures that have dashes themselves to pieces on the shore”. This further highlights how eerie and unsettling the town is

Prose

Theo: It is quite an achievement to sustain a story through letters alone and to keep me turning the pages. There was a delightful charm in the butterfly flitting of focus in the asides and digressions. Boddicker’s letters are peppered with protestations of love for his absent partner alongside fears for what the enforced separation might do to their relationship and resentment towards her parents. It lent an authenticity to the Boddicker ‘voice’ without bogging the tale down in mundanity and one of my kindle annotations is simply “Really good voice!” The prose is the book’s great strength capturing the arrogance, fragility, and desperation of its protagonist. This is one line – of several – that I bookmarked.

Innsmouth, for the few bright spots I have unearthed, is nothing more than a town that has already died but has not gained the good sense to accept its fate as of yet.

Cat: The limitations of the epistolary style helped craft an appropriately moody atmosphere for me, from the terrible town and its inhabitants to his own rather egotistical manner – which made for increased amusement as his sanity begins to take a turn (I couldn’t help the shadenfreude, but suspect that’s intentional with the character!). At exactly the halfway point the book takes a turn, suddenly making me realize how I’d been lulled into a ‘nice Victorian’ sensibility, as we have what my notes term ‘pre- and post-Necronomicon’ writing. We have a letter dated ‘January 32nd’, several repeated entries, and the sudden ‘Christ’ at the start of chapter 17 was an unexpected jolt. When the writer uses prose well to indicate increasing madness, I felt he did a very good job contrasting with the earlier polite/formal style and ups the tension very well.

Vinay: Boddicker Letter brings in one of my favorite style of narration – the epistolary style. This style also helps to highlight the instabilities of the character and this is the biggest highlight of the book. Boddicker penning the letters to his love showcases pomposity & naivety at first before becoming something starker, darker and inchaotic. There is one particular letter that is all about repetition all the way through and does a fantastic job of detailing how lost Boddicker is. It feels all bubbly and lovelorn at first but then the letters take increasingly darker turns and it is a testament to the writing style that you feel yourself dragged along on this demented journey. Given the epistolary nature, the author feeds several inconsistencies in the way the letter is drafted – the salutations, the dates, multiple letters on the same dates, the scratched out portions of the letter. I really leant into this and was trying to pick the inconsistencies in order to find out the state Boddicker was in when he was writing these letters

Characters

Theo: Our view of the secondary characters is limited so they can lack a bit of depth or texture, but that is intrinsic to the way the story is told and the nature of Boddicker himself. The intensity of the focus on Boddicker as narrator and protagonist almost inevitably means the other characters are reduced to cyphers captured only in the quotes and descriptions that Boddicker gives them, and he is not only an unreliable narrator but a somewhat ungenerous one. While we may not get much insight into the secondary characters, Boddicker is sufficiently compelling to carry the story.   

Cat: I found myself wondering what was really going on outside of the letters, particularly regarding the recipient, so it was a pleasure to finally hear her side at the conclusion; perhaps we could have done more worldbuilding using the ‘publisher’ framing device. I agree that everyone bar the narrator seems to just be a plot contrivance, but this seemed to tie in to his deep-seated egotism and almost selfish attitude; he really is the Main Character and portrays himself as such. It says a lot that I didn’t find him unlikeable enough to put the book down – on the contrary, his nature drove the story to the point where I wanted to see his comeuppance, with other town residents clearly reading between the lines as we are. Also (coincidentally) I was tickled to see the love-rival shared my surname! 

Vinay: There is really just one character of note showcased and that is Boddicker. We see him go from this naive, idealistic, pompous character to someone who is completely driven by his darker side as the book progresses. The letters do a good job of that but I did spend a good time in the first 30% of the book scoffing at the weakness in Boddicker. Even as events escalate, you can see the various dimensions of Boddicker come through, some letters are dark, some capture the confusion that he faces while some bring forth the longing and optimism that he feels at the beginning of the story. The rest of the characters dont really get much airtime and therefore they do come across as rather insignificant, even if some of them do play critical roles later. There is an attempt at the end to show the viewpoint of the recipient of Boddicker’s letters but that doesnt go too deep. 

Plot

Theo: Being unfamiliar with the Lovecraft source/inspiration material, I wasn’t too aware of some plot/world inconsistencies and the fickle focus of the plot seemed to align with the general unreliability of Boddicker. Certainly there is no clear resolution of what has happened and why but I quite liked that vagueness. I wonder how far reading Shadow Over Innsmouth would improve or detract from my appreciation of The Boddicker Letters?! For me there were echoes of The Wicker Man, Rosemary’s Baby delivered in a kind of Edgar Allen Poe style. There is a creeping horror through the story and I actually quite liked the two sharp twists in the tale of the story.   

Cat: The plot is almost taken wholesale from the movie ‘Dagon’, with a mix of Lovecraftian tales included to add flavour. However, as I recognised this from the start, I found it so enjoyable a tribute that the pages flew past, with the inconsistencies easy to gloss over due to the unreliable protagonist. By the end, it seemed as if Boddicker had always been fated to go to this little town, targeted by the residents due to his personal pride and greed, thus capturing him in a neat trap that he could never have foreseen (including his ‘chance’ encounter with the Necronomicon) – a closed circuit of a book. I felt it flowed well as a pulp tale and didn’t ask too much of the reader while recognising its flaws. Pretty much as Lovecraft’s work does!

Vinay: I have not seen the movie that Cat references nor have read much of the material, so I had no idea where the plot was going except that it was immensely compelling and disturbing and quite unputdownable. There is a point around the 40% part of the book where the pace slackens as you want something to happen and another when Boddicker undertakes a short trip outside Innsmouth that took a bit of the momentum away but the rest is built on some fabulous unreliable narrator voice and plotting. I do think the size of the book does a lot to mask that nothing much really happens barring Boddicker’s journey and the book really doesnt have much to sustain beyond that. The ending in a way feels both open and close, several unanswered questions but an important resolution in terms of renewal which I really liked. The creepy, unsettling elements add to the plotting urgency especially towards the end but there is also a lot that is hinted than explicitly being told – which I dont favor much as a reader.

Conclusion

Theo: An unusual and well sustained epistolary narrative that kept me intrigued. 

Cat: A fun pulp adventure that blossomed when the madness came into play!

Vinay: An atmospheric horror tale that relies on epistolry writing to deliver an unsettling book

And the Current state of play

After one semifinalist review our embryonic table looks like this

Current Ranking of Books	Theo	Vinay	Cat
1st

And our current leader with an average ranking of 1.0 is

The Boddicker Letters