Review: Nightland Racer by Fenton Wood

Most if not all the major mainstream imprints would have no idea what to do with this book, let alone have the guts to publish it.

Nightland Racer is a 2021 novel by indie writer Fenton Wood, author of the five-part Yankee Republic: A Mythic Radio Adventure series, and his most recent work, Hacking Galileo. Nightland Racer is the first of his books I’ve read, and it’s a doozy that makes me look forward to reading more of his work. What I admire most about the current indie, Pulp Rev and Iron Age scenes is the authors’ fearlessness. I think most if not all the major mainstream imprints would have no idea what to do with this book, let alone have the guts to publish it.

Nightland Racer is an astounding “big idea” book. At first it deceives you into thinking that it’s just a straightforward alternate universe 1980s sci-fi-horror action movie homage, the low budget-direct to VHS-on the bottom shelf-at your local non-chain video rental store kind. On TV at 3:00 a.m. if you have basic cable.

However, the book is much more than that. Nightland Racer draws on themes of mythical America, the Cold War, ancient mythology and folklore, hard science, theoretical physics, and the Power of Engineering. It’s an exploration of a terrifying potential future, eldritch horror, and deep time.

Its most important and namesake inspiration is British author William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, originally published in 1912. It is considered one of the most important works of weird fiction, and foundational to the Dying Earth genre. While reading The Night Land adds context to Wood’s book, it’s not a requirement. Wood’s book is also not related to the collection of Night Land tribute fiction found here, and the highly regarded stories by John C. Wright.

In his introduction Wood tells us that his work is not a sequel to The Night Land, but a “reimagining.” Now I know that word tends to flash a well-deserved giant red DANGER warning these days, but rest assured Wood did it right, and Nightland Racer stands on its own.

The Story

Reynard "The Fox" Douglas is, or was, the world’s greatest outlaw race car driver, so good that NASCAR became little more than a boring hobby. He got himself in trouble with the law, and in the process lost his career, his wealth, his family, his whole life, becoming a washed up drunk for his trouble. To say he has a problem with the U.S. government is an understatement.

Then one day, the President himself shows up on Douglas’ doorstep, to draft him for a world-saving mission. Douglas is the only man capable of piloting the ENLAV-AM, the Experimental Nuclear Land Vehicle, Antarctic Model. The ENLAV is the world’s ultimate supercar, capable of reaching supersonic speeds in a straight run.

The government needs him to drive the ENLAV headlong into the ominous “Zone.” The Zone, a misty other dimensional realm of shadowy monsters invading the real world, is slowly growing outward from the site of the 1945 Trinity atomic bomb tests. The Zone already encompasses hundreds of square miles and will someday engulf the entire world. Douglas’s task is to detonate a nuclear weapon at its heart and destroy the singularity believed to be its source. All previous attempts to explore and destroy the Zone have ended in failure and death.

During his mission, Douglas learns that the singularity is merely a manifestation of a sentient black hole, intent on devouring Earth. Encountering the singularity, Douglas finds himself transported ten million years into Earth’s future. He encounters the strange and horrific life of the Nightland and its final civilizations, as he embarks on a race to find an ancient superweapon, the one thing that might defeat the sentient black hole and restore the world.

Now, for the writing itself.

Nightland Racer uses a limited third person narrator when the action centers on Douglas’s point of view. Wood does occasionally shift the narrator to omniscient, but only when Douglas or another character’s knowledge or observations reveal insights that alter their frame of reference. This occurs during the story’s final quarter, when Douglas has access to a far more cosmic level of perception.

The prose is straightforward and fits adventure fiction. Wood consciously avoids aping late Victorian and Edwardian flowery prose common to the original era of weird fiction. He also avoids Hodgson’s often criticized faux-eighteenth century style used in The Night Land.¹ Wood shifts often between breakneck action, scientific exposition, and travelogue to hell, all culminating in a space-bound psychedelic hard-science climax. The payoff is tremendous, and most, but not all, questions are answered.

On the negative side, the book does lend itself to periods of odd or slow pacing, and occasional data dumps. I needed multiple read throughs of some to wrap my head around the concepts. I have two degrees in history, and a third in over-baked international relations theory, and as much as I love science, a lot of this went way over my head.

There are four parts to the narrative: First, a 1980s action film setup and training montage (cue Rocky IV and the Karate Kid soundtracks). Then, a high-speed action sci-fi-horror journey into hell (the Zone.) Wood notes in his introduction that Jon Mollison’s Barbarian Emperor inspired the Zone, although I don’t think a comparison to The Mist or some of John Carpenter’s work is out of bounds either. The third is the journey through the Nightland itself, a Roadside Café of Dying Earth horror. The fourth is an ultimate battle in space via Antarctica that puts 2001, Disney’s The Black Hole, and the whole V’Ger bit of Star Trek: The (non) Motion Picture to shame. Science stretches out to incredulity, and a slew of homages to very classic pulp science fiction and science fantasy come full circle. I think there’s an homage to Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky in there too, but I might be reading too much into it.

The denouement takes place somewhere and somewhen else, and to say more would spoil it. However, it is satisfying, even sweet, in sort of a Studio Gainax kind of way (thankfully, not like the original Evangelion or Space Runaway Ideon). If Wood isn’t referencing a little bit of Dark Star and even Red Dwarf here, I’d be shocked.

The Characters

The story has few named characters beyond the protagonist and hero, Reynard Douglas, and two companions who accompany him in specific phases of the story.

In his introduction, Wood tells us that Douglas is based on “the real-life biography of Junior Johnson, and other bootleggers turned racecar drivers.” I’m not a NASCAR guy, I’m more Ford v Ferrari when it comes to racing, but Wood writes a compelling flawed hero from these sources.

Douglas’s companions are there to contrast him, move the story along, and to highlight his regeneration from bitter wash-up to hero.

His first companion is a fighter pilot straight from central casting who serves as Douglas’ ENLAV copilot. Lt Zack Strasser (great 1980s action hero name) is the only candidate to make it through the grueling selection process and come remotely close to matching Douglas’s skill. Strasser pushes Douglas to wake up to the fact that he can’t do this alone. Strasser makes the heroic sacrifice needed to transition the story from the Zone to the Nightland.

Tao is Douglas’s companion in the Nightland itself, and Douglas’ guide. Tao is one of the most unusual, horrifying, fascinating, and noble cybernetic beings I’ve ever seen in print. He’s a man of strong character, both savage and civilized at the same time. He hails from a culture long after Douglas’s twentieth century, while there was still a sun, long before the sunless Nightland. Tao plays Qeequeg to Douglas’ Ishmael, or Enkidu to Douglas’s Gilgamesh if you prefer.

Tao is introduced by rescuing Douglas from Nightland Racer’s version of the Last Redoubt, which in Wood’s universe is not the brave yet doomed final home of the evolved human race found in the original story, but home to something evil.

He’s also the source of most of the scientific expositions in the novel. However, Tao’s knowledge, the result of his cybernetic modifications, is crucial to understanding this world, its inhabitants, and civilizations, how it happened, and what happens to it and the entire cosmos.

Tao becomes Douglas’s devoted friend. He commits to the quest to defeat the evil sentient black sun dooming the Earth, the Solar System, and all of existence.

Other characters are rarely named. They are archetypes referred to by their titles such as “The President” or “The General.” They exist as foils for Douglas and represent larger and impersonal forces such as Government or Science Gone Wrong. Other characters represent the Nightland’s dying civilizations.

Some of the eldritch horrors are manifestations of Platonic Solids or embodied abstract concepts.

Now things get weird.

First up is the King Who Was A Thousand. While long dead by the era of the Nightland, the shadow of this world ruling hero and tyrant looms over the entire Solar System. Douglas and Tao’s efforts to uncover his secrets drive much of the plot. There is something of the “Emprah protects” to him, although his sourcing in actual mythology is stronger and more satisfying.

The Nighthorse. I’m just going to leave him for the reader to ponder.

Yaldabaoth. The evil sentient black hole. To not give away the game, I’ll leave you with a C. S. Lewis quote from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “…that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” I’ll also give you this clue; the name Yaldabaoth and what it represents hails from Gnosticism.

The World

Wood builds his world through exposition, Tao’s descriptions, and Douglas’s experience of the environment.

In the first part of the book, Douglas and his government handlers discuss the Soviets, and the descriptions of 1980s artifacts fix the story in time, place, and mood. The General and others lay out the threat of the Zone, as well as their limited understanding of what lies within it.

The ENLAV is described in loving detail, and engineering nerds will love it. If you’re not predisposed to science and engineering, or to the psychology behind human high-performance training, or to military team building, you will not enjoy this part as much.

Now, in the second part of the book, the journey through the Zone, Wood shows a lot more than he tells, as Douglas and Strasser go on their terrifying Cannonball Run. The danger is both psychological and very concrete at the same time.

Wood applies this technique in the third section, set in the far future Nightland. By keeping Douglas and his companions inside the relative safety of the ENLAV, traveling at enormous speed through an environment inimical to unblemished natural life, this makes the glimpses of monstrous threats powerful and effective. They linger.

The beings of the Nightland don’t just attack physically, they slowly eat away at the sanity and souls of Douglas and Tao. Wood builds on the claustrophobia, the evil black sun’s hatred of life, the loneliness of being the last of their kind, and the fear of mission failure. This makes the excursions outside the ENLAV far more terrifying.

If anything, it’s when the book stops and lingers for a while, whether contemplating a lost civilization or something so alien and evil that reality itself non-metaphorically pulls away from it, that the book pays tribute to the source material.

However, the third part of the book also makes heavy use of exposition. Tao is a walking encyclopedia of the Nightland (thanks to his cybernetic brain implants). You will either find Tao’s exposition fascinating and intellectually challenging, or you will get bored and annoyed by the “tour guide” aspect.

Wood tries, and mostly succeeds, in balancing hard science with mythology and the dark vision found in Hodgson’s book, and in the works of other authors Wood cites as influences, including John C. Wright, Gene Wolfe, and Jack Vance.

If he had left out the hard science, we would have a pure fantasy story, still powerful, but much shallower. Science blends with metaphysics and mysticism. It’s not “just” magic, or “technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.”

This becomes even more relevant in the book’s climax and decisive battle in space. It works with time itself in a satisfying way that Doctor WHO attempts but typically falls short. Tao is critically important here, because unless you are a theoretical physicist, you’re going to have a rough time enjoying this segment beyond the surface level action and amazing imagery of the most powerful forces known in the universe. However, this allows Douglas, and through him, the reader, to see, understand, and finally, take part in the final showdown between good and evil, life and death, creation, and destruction.

The Politics

Wood isn’t shy about politics, for both world building and plot construction.

Hero Reynard Douglas is no fan of the federal government and holds to a classically liberal worldview with libertarian tendencies.

Wood’s presentation of U.S. military and federal officials in the first phase of the story casts them as doomed “top men” failing to stop a slow but sure world-ending disaster, one unleashed by their own arrogance. The story makes no bones about the physical and moral dangers science can unleash, especially when “could” trumps “should,” to paraphrase a popular movie based on another popular book. Douglas encounters many twisted examples of this flavor of “the ends justify the means” morality along his journey.

The author draws a direct thread from contemporary 21^st-century politics to the dying civilizations of the Nightland. This includes commentary on evil peculiar to women, and evil peculiar to men, but posits that the worse evil occurs when both hold each other in contempt.

Wood also directly addresses the eventual fate of the United States, albeit in an approach this reviewer found a bit heavy handed but grounded in very genuine issues.

Content Warning

There are intense descriptions of body horror and torture. I agree with the recommendation of “age 12 and up,” with parental discretion advised. There is also mild use of profanity, but nothing above PG-13.

The “abhuman” monsters and other horrors of the Nightland are terrifying in appearance, their alienness, and their sheer danger and power. However, like the original Night Land, and many of the other influences Wood cites in his introduction, much of the horror is by implication. He makes excellent use of what’s left unsaid. In that, the sense of existential and spiritual dread takes hold. In other words, the exact reaction H.P. Lovecraft proposed good supernatural literary horror should cause in the reader.

Who is it for?

This book is for, well, me. “Fenton Wood” is a nom de plume, but I suspect he’s Gen X or close to it. He hits too many of the right notes, at the right time, that someone like me finds the book tailor made.

I was born in the late ‘70s, a kid in the ‘80s, and a teenager in the ‘90s. What red-blooded American boy of that age doesn’t secretly want to drive the Most Awesome Hot Wheels Car Ever to save the world on a mission given by the President, only to find themselves thrust 10,000,000 years into the future, find a best buddy who could easily be a Masters of the Universe character, face reality-defying mutants and monsters, survive a deadly hellscape of eternal night, search for a literal Man in the Moon, all the while with a freaking evil sentient black hole trying to destroy the whole universe. Just typing that all out made me want to start singing “The Night Begins to Shine” with my eight-year-old daughter.

Why Buy It?

1. Its mind blowing. I’m going to read it again. I know I missed things on the first go.

2. It’s well-executed overall. There are fair criticisms, including a pace that occasionally lags, expositional data dumps, and a heavy-handed approach to Current Year politics. However, none of these stopped me from finishing the book or hurt my enjoyment of it. Wood’s superficial knowledge of the U.S. military irked me more, but he’s also not writing Mil Sci-Fi or contemporary military thrillers, and I’m one of those veteran types who will absolutely find something wrong with even the best fictional depictions of the armed forces.

3. It pays due respect to its forbearers. Wood takes Hodgson’s setting and uses it as a springboard for his own ideas, and to pay tribute to the worthies he acknowledges. It may get you to read some old books and learn what the cultural vandals stole from you.

1. I agree with John C. Wright that this criticism is often unfair and that critics usually miss the point. Thankfully, we are not alone in this. We contend that Hodgson attempted to evoke sacred scripture in The Night Land. I also agree with the hypothesis that The Night Land was the earliest written of WHH’s novels, although the final one published. This puts the book and the rest of his entire fictional output in context. He didn’t “build up” to the themes and ideas in The Night Land, he started there, and the rest of his work flowed from and back toward it.

In an email conversation between Mr. Wright and I, John stressed that the use of a biblical style is necessary to discuss the “four last things” of death, judgement, heaven, and hell. I haven’t read the plain English “A Story Retold” adaptation of The Night Land, but I fear modernizing the language may obscure the deeper aspects of the story, even if it’s easier to read. To that point, WHH also released an abridged version of the 200,000-word novel, called The Dream of X which may serve as a better introduction to the story.