Book review: A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar

 Wow.

As Tidhar's novel opens it seems to be an alternative history. We are in London in November 1939, but Europe is not at war. In this timeline, the Communist part took power in Germany in the early 1930s leading to disruption and many refugees fleeing to Britain, where Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists appears on course to win the election fuelled by anti-immigrant, -communist and -Jewish rhetoric.

One of these refugees is a man calling himself Wolf, who is working as a low-rent private eye. He hates the whores who work in the alleys near his office/apartment, he hates the kindly old Jewish baker who rents him the room, he is constantly bitter about The Fall, as the collapse of Germany is referred to and, especially, about how close he himself came to power. In best noir style, events are instigated by the arrival of a beautiful (Jewish) heiress at Wolf's office.

The tale switches between Wolf's journal - where we get his observations and thoughts, often distasteful, sometimes humanising as he remembers the past events that shaped him - as well as the observations of someone who refers to himself as the Watcher, clearly a disturbed individual even before he takes action, some third person narration - and the reveal that the story of Wolf is being told inside the head of Shomer, a Jewish pulp fiction author as he endures the horrors of Auschwitz.

Tidhar masterfully weaves a fine noir detective story, made powerful by the frame and characters. The description of Wolf losing his temper and shouting and spitting in rage would be enough to tell us who he is, even were we not given other clues. In his investigations, he looks up his former associates - notably Goebbels and Hess, both having "sold out" - but we also see Ilse Koch, Klaus Barbie and Josef Kramer. Along with Mosley we meet his wife Diana and her sister, Unity, both fervent Nazis. Wolf bumps into Leni Riefenstahl, now an up-and-coming Hollywood actress (this giving us one of several surprisingly funny scenes, where Leni tells him she is filming a sequel to The Great Gatsby where Gatsby (played by Humphrey Bogart) had become a gun runner before retiring to run a bar in Tangier where she, playing Daisy Buchanan, finds him, before the scene ends with Leni, tearfully, saying "We'll always have Nuremberg, won't we, Wolf?")

Shomer, in his mind, puts Wolf through many humiliations and degradations but is unable to avoid giving his character humanity, for all the seething bigotry that drives Wolf's hatred and violence.

I don't tend to read fiction about the Holocaust; I know the details, I've read and seen much non-fiction, as well as the great Primo Levi and don't feel the need to descend into that place again, but in embedding the story in this way Lavie Tidhar casts light on those events, and on the experience the refugee and the foreigner and the other, as well as the perpetrators. (To be clear, I am not feeling in the slightest forgiving of or sympathetic to Hitler, or the others, but the character of Wolf in this novel goes through a journey that might just allow a measure of redemption). The rise of Mosley and the crowds that welcome him with anti-Semitic chants also draws a parallel with the return of the far right in our own time - although it was published in 2014, I couldn't help but see echoes of the events of Charlottesville in 2017 and those "very fine people on both sides".

A Man Lies Dreaming is a stunning novel that has left me shaken and moved, and will stay with me for a very long time indeed.

Game Review: World War Cthulhu: The Darkest Hour

Reviewing a roleplaying game (RPG) book is quite different than reviewing a fiction or non-fiction book; they are still storybooks in a way, but also instruction manuals, rule books, reference tomes and guidebooks to the setting - the world in which the game takes place. It would be unusual to read it cover to cover, you would tend to read sections some several times and dip into others, returning later for reference. The criteria by which they are judged is, therefore, quite unique.


World War Cthulhu: The Darkest Hour is a primary setting guide for a pre-existing game. Call of Cthulhu is a bona fide classic of the genre, one of the first games to move roleplaying away from the hack n slash of Dungeons and Dragons and its ilk into a more investigative, thinky, character-driven milieu. It is based of the Cthulhu Mythos writings (primarily by H.P. Lovecraft, but expanded by others) and I don't think it's any coincidence that it is since that games' 1981 launch that Lovecraft's work has been rediscovered by an ever wider audience.


The primary setting for the original Call of Cthulhu is, as with Lovecraft's stories, New England in the 1920s (with adventures in exotic places such as Antarctica and the Amazon), though the horrors can be transplanted to any era or locale, and there are many supplemental books that do so. World War Cthulhu, as you can probably guess, is a guide for adventures in World War II, and is excellently done. As well as their standard military roles (for the Allied forces, naturally) the characters are agents for a shadowy civil servant who tasks them with investigating potential extra-dimensional spookiness - at the same time as having to survive the very real horror of the bloodiest conflict in the history of humanity.


As such, the game can be run leaning either way; classic Cthulhu-style, using the war as a backdrop, or primarily focusing on the war itself with occasional added horror (imagine some other terror invading the trenches, like the zombies in the movie Deathwatch) or some mixture of the two.


As a supplement to Call of Cthulhu, this is excellent. There is lots of great background on the various intelligence agencies (there is, understandably, a push to make the characters intelligence operatives rather than straightforward soldiers, as investigation - often behind enemy lines is such a large part of the game) and great short summaries of the theatres across war-torn Europe and North Africa.; general information on the status of various countries as well at least three or four adventure ideas for each as well as a list of "Fortean events" through out the period for extra inspiration. There are, of course, equipment guides (description and statistics for a wide range of WWII weapons, prices for both legal and black market goods, etc), background on some historical figures and how they might be connected (Ian Fleming, Dennis Wheatley, Kim Philby, Aleister Crowley, and others) and, of course, an update of the Dark, Lamentable Catalogue - a guide the Elder Gods and other entities, as well as various Earthly factions and cults. As is now usual, the book ends with a fully fledged adventure to get you going - although extra supplements, including adventures, have already begun to appear. i have not yet run this adventure, entitled The God in the Woods, as I have a couple of my devising to get the group into the swing of things, but it's always good to have one as back up and it looks to be a good one.


The book is very well put together - a solid, attractive hardback (build quality is a consideration for RPG books, as they will get a lot of handling while using for reference) with a good contents page and index, something that many RPGs still lack, an unforgivable omission for any sort of reference book - with good artwork and layout, double columned throughout with good placement of tables and highlighted boxes for important text and examples (again, the number of game books where a table turns up many pages away from the section to which it refers is quite astounding. There is an old joke that RPG designers have an excellent vocabulary that unfortunately doesn't include the word 'proofreader'). The writing itself is solid and, importantly, clear.


This book is produced by a company called Cubicle 7, from whom I have bought quite a few books in the past (they produce the utterly superb Laundry Files RPG, based on Charles Stross' wonderful books) and they have quickly gained a reputation for quality and attention to detail. There's always a good amount of free downloadable content on the website (character sheets, tables and even adventures) and I can personally vouch for their superb customer service; when you buy the physical book you get a PDF as well and they one time I had to chase up the link I received an immediate response.


A great advantage to this setting, of course, is the vast amount of material available online. I have researched locales and buildings (I needed a ruined castle in Poland for my adventure) along with timelines of the war to plan my campaign and the location of adventures.


Highly recommended for your insanity inducing, squamous horror laden, world changing conflict pleasure.