While a few of my scheduled reviews for December were shifted forward to January because I was unexpectedly sick and so missed my deadline, one of them didn't happen at all, namely my monthly review of a book by an Arizona author. That's because we lost Weston Ochse on 18th November and I'd planned to review one of the many books of his I have on my signed shelves in memory but I just couldn't get into the right mindset to tackle it.

Wes wasn't just a well-known author, who picked up a Bram Stoker Award for 'Scarecrow Gods', his first novel, and turned out a heck of a lot more in the quarter of a century since. He was a massive part of local fandom, serving as our toastmaster at Westercon 70 and taking up that role at TusCon after the death of Ed Bryant, whenever he wasn't on deployment. He couldn't make it this year, so my last memory of him was accidentally stealing his punchline from him during Meet the Guests a year earlier. We only chatted briefly after that, at least long enough for me to apologise.

I've read 'Scarecrow Gods' and some of his stories here and there in anthologies, but he wrote a lot of books and I haven't read most of them. I know I should. Much of it, including his acclaimed 'Seal Team 666' series, which has been tagged with "optioned for a feature with Dwayne Johnson" for so long now that I'm sure a bunch of us believe we've actually seen it, references his military service, which spanned his entire adult life.

I vividly recall a reading that he gave at one of our local cons, very possibly Virtual CoKoCon 2021, about a deployment to Afghanistan (if memory serves), written from the point of view of a soldier who was simply being driven down a road, but having to be utterly aware of everything around him. In his Q&A he talked about how soldiers like him had to be switched on 24/7 in those situations and how difficult it is after coming home to switch back off again. It was impactful writing and it hit us hard because we all knew that the soldier in the story was Wes himself.

He did come home, of course, every time, the only mission he couldn't survive being retirement, a base irony that none of us appreciate. It's going to be very strange indeed when we attend events and see his wife, fellow author Yvonne Navarro, with the latest generation of their Great Danes, but without Wes at her side. He was enough of a force of nature, able not merely to weather any storm but to thrive within it, that it's difficult to believe that he's gone and we're still here. It's a small mercy that he left behind so much of his writing for us to explore and enjoy.

Case in point, this short novel, which I believe I picked up from him at a Phoenix Fan Fusion, maybe long enough that it was still called Phoenix Comicon. It has a wonderful cover that features all the components I associate with Wes's writing and, of course, 'Apocalypse Weird' can't not remind me of my own brand, Apocalypse Later.

It turns out that 'Apocalypse Weird' is a shared universe that chronicles the end of the Multiverse, written by many hands and published by Wonderment Media. From what I can tell, they aimed at a set of twenty volumes, of which they managed at least eleven, but their website's been gone since 2016, so I'm going by old information. Some of those books are clearly related and serve as parts of series within the broader series. This doesn't appear to be one of those, but the way it ends firmly suggests that its story is only partly told and some other book will continue it. I presume that's not going to happen, unless it's done by fan fiction writers, who were apparently explicitly encouraged by Wonderment.

I don't know anything about this Multiverse that had been explored in nine books before this one, but I'm aware of multiverse theory and how pop culture has tended to explore it. It seems pretty clear that, in this multiverse, the universes closest to ours contain many of the monsters that ours has confined to myth: chupacabras and death worms and the like. Here, they just pop out of those connections and naturally spawn trouble wherever they go. This is an apocalypse, after all, or a few of them all wrapped up into one big nightmare.

What worked the most in Wes's contribution to this series was the visual element. It's been quite a while since I read 'Scarecrow Gods' but I don't remember seeing it while I read it. Certainly, there were visual elements, not least what the title refers to, but it was a book to me rather than a film. This reads like a movie, with every idea he conjured up appearing to work as a striking image, the sort of shot that would make it into the trailer to talk us into swapping our hard earned cash for a full experience, carnival barker style.

Nothing moves on I-10 any more and there are living human beings crucified on the windmills near Palm Springs. A young lady is replaced by a doppelganger but she's stuck there watching it from a safe place in the crawlspace. The Black Bishop steals people away by sending a flock of huge black birds down to abduct them. Back at his grotto, boys and girls become monks and nuns, disfigured like Cenobites. There's a character who's so fat that he never leaves a basement, though he's also an incredible psychic power, and another who looks at the world through the eyes of a drone fleet. Each of these would look amazing on the big screen, even if we could argue about which directors and cinematographers should tackle them.

The first scene to actually set us on the path to figuring out what's going on in this apocalypse has an overt choice though. One of the principal protagonists—there are a few whose threads merge together in the end—is Blane, who enlists Dick Smith, a life insurance salesman from Denver, into the cause of the League of the Red Palm at a strip club. He doesn't ask permission. He slices open his arm, drips blood into a vodka martini and adds cherries to render the colour believable. Dick is now a zombie whose body Blane can now operate as a remote spy. It's a good scene, full of motion, but it's easy to see the glass in red and everything else in monochrome, Sin City style.

There's a lot here and I honestly don't know what I can talk about and what I can't, in case you're a fan of the series and haven't got this far. I get the impression that any part of it could constitute a spoiler because it feels like Wes was referencing earlier books, picking up plot strands from this or that and weaving them a little closer together. That may or may not be what the other authors did with their books, but it comes across here like we're being thrown far out and deep into the waters of the series and, having swum safely to shore, we're either going to want to dive back in for more or get the hell off the beach.

I'm thinking I'm the former. If the best aspect to the book is how visual it plays, the worst is that it ends and in a way that I think is probably typical for the series, in that it's as much a beginning as it is an end because it's always going to carry on in someone else's book. Suddenly I wish there were a lot more 'Apocalypse Weird' books on my shelf than this one, but I wish Wes was still with us more. He's very missed by a lot of people. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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