Politicians are delicately sucking the marrow out of dismembered pinkie fingers, and several members of the national cricket team sip congealed blood from Martini glasses. Then again, if Human were to go all po-faced we’d have missed the humorous vignettes that litter the book.įor example, in the zombie strip club (where the material being taken off isn’t clothes): It feels as though if Human wanted to, he could write the definitive insight into the dark corners of South African private schooling, for example, and be properly t errifying without needing the gross-out horror and comic-book mad men who give their demon-slaying shotguns a name that feature in Apocalypse Now Now. By the end it could well be that all the loose ends have been neatly tied up, I just don’t know if I remember them all well enough to be sure. Sometimes, however, you are left wishing the novel would slow down. Human is knowing and funny, and while some of the one liners and puns are packed with Roger – Moore -as- James – Bond corn, ther e’s enough that work to leave the final balance in Human’s favour. Sometimes, this is great – there are plenty of twists to keep the reader on their feet and lots of humorous vignettes to enjoy along the way. Human doesn’t hang around long enough to think about that too much though, and the book’s pace is spectacularly quick. Starting off from stories of the almost-forgotten Afrikaans medicine men known as ‘sieners’, Human weaves an entertaining story of comic book violence and paranormal horrors that takes in San mythology, the Boer War and the changing face of Cape Town. If that’s fantastical, though, a ll belief must be suspended when the paranormal element kicks in and it turns out the demons in the fantasy flesh fests that are Zevcenko’s best sellers aren’t actually well hung stars in costume… Zevcenko’s world is already odd and dark and only vaguely believable: where the school playground is dominated by gang warfare between the drug pushers and the arms dealers, the boy’s solution is to become a porn baron and sell his wares to both sides. Privileged, white and resentful of everything (especially his autistic brother) Zevcenko is moody, cynical, disaffected and, frankly, downright unpleasant.
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Apocalypse d Now Now tells the story of 16-year-old Baxter Zevcenko, a Capetonian Holden Cau l field for the Facebook generation. Perhaps that’s unfair to Human, but there are broad enough similarities in his tale of a hidden world of mythological creatures, shamans and warlocks which lurk behind the respectable surface of Cape Town’s middle class suburbs and the mystical characters of Zoo City that comparisons are unavoidable.īeyond those surface similarities, however, Human takes his story in a very different direction to anything Beukes has done in her three novels, and by doing so proves that there’s plenty of ideas as yet unexplored within the genre locally. H er influence is almost palpable throughout the book. I mention Beukes here, because she’s credited as both mentor and inspiration by Charlie Human in the acknowledgements section of Apocalypse Now Now, the Capetonian’s debut novel.
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In the vanguard of SA speculative writing is – of course – Lauren Beukes, the success of whose The Shining Girls means she can now be counted as part of the international establishment for sci-fi and magical realism.
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Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium may not be doing much for the reputation of South African alternate reality fiction, but fortunately there’s so much more high-quality local stuff around since the release of District 9 that it shouldn’t make too much difference in the long run.