The Protos Experiment - Simon Clark

Despite having limited experience in the field of cinema, Simon Clark's idea for The Protos Experiment seemed a natural for it to be developed as a film script. That ambition has come to fruition with the movie premiering of the film directed by Laurence and Brian Avenet-Bradley at Cannes this year. Although not yet on general release, Clark's own novelisation appears to retain much of that cinematic quality, but also some novelistic originality and ambition.

Ironically, for something that has such a strong visual presence, the novel opens with a scene in a room of near complete darkness where, after convincing himself that he is not dead and opening his eyes, a man discovers that he is in some kind of chamber divided by plastic sheets (always a worrying sign) where a number of other people who can't see each other are chained up. John discovers that he himself is chained to a deranged monster of a man who is going to kill them all. It's a bold and compelling way to start the novelisation, but not an entirely surprising one from Simon Clark the author of the Blood Crazy trilogy.

A bold opening, it's also the least of what is to occur over the remaining chapters of the book, each one building on what John experiences in the first, but rather than illuminating what is going on, the mystery only deepens, as does the fearful anticipation of further horrors to occur. To say much more about what goes on would not just be a spoiler but unnecessary, suffice to say that there are a number of similar dangerous, life-threatening scenarios that John, Kyra and a number of others all face. That should be enough of a teaser - albeit not described anywhere near as bone-chillingly terrifyingly as Clark’s writing - for a reader to want to find out what is going on. The reader however has one slight advantage in knowing what has happened before - Kyra and John have no memory of what has happened previously, or how they got there - but I'm not sure that this knowledge makes thing any less thrilling or terrifying for the reader. 

While there is an element of familiarity with such an environment now from Squid Game (the origin of this story dating long before the Korean TV drama), but it's the way that the author makes the horror of each situation fresh and immediate that elevates the book beyond a series of gladiatorial bouts or just a desperate battle for nothing more than survival. There is the hint from the title of course that what is taking place is part of something of an experiment, but what elevates The Protos Experiment is the insight it gives the reader into the inner thoughts, experiences and associations that John and Kyra make with their own deeply dark buried fears. The Protos Experiment is as much about the horror within as it is with what we face in the world outside, or rather it explores the connection between them, and considers who we could possibly trust should those memories be controlled or manipulated.

Which should be nothing new to any reader of horror fiction or horror movies, as it is the ability of such work to touch on those personal sensitivities and feelings that really provoke a reaction. There are some creators who know very well how to manipulate such reactions, who know that “When your imagination turns rogue it gnaws its way into your brain” and Clark is a master of such writing. He has found a perfect outlet to consider such matters in The Protos Experiment. Because yes, it soon becomes obvious from the artificiality of the situation and how it has been set up that there is indeed some kind of experiment being played out here, but it's one where the consequences for the subjects are very real and very horrific.

Actually, it's more than a single experiment, but rather a number of related experiments, each designed to test and produce the desirable results. There is much more to The Protos Experiment than the initial shock set up, but like any the experiment, there's an unpredictability about the outcome, other than the certainty that each one that follows will be no less disturbing. There is not much else you can be sure of in the novel, and that need to make sense of what is going on will keep you reading. And since that is certainly a factor, you may be led to consider that The Protos Experiment is possibly an experiment in writing as well. Like the metafictional predicament in Stuart Turton's The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, the question arises as to at what point the experiment ends and reality begins, or are we all just victims of our own minds, impulses and memories? Coming from a publishing company that specialises in metafiction, you can't discount anything here.

While that may be interesting to consider, there is nothing to suggest that it is the intention to merely play a game with the reader, other than in the tradition of playing with their perception and reaction to the situations in the narrative. This one has more than enough on that front to keep you horrifyingly enthralled at the increasingly strange direction it is heading towards, one that can only be resolved by getting to the end. It's not unlike Squid Game or Evelyn Hardcastle then in that respect, but the intentions behind The Protos Experiment are quite different, and indeed not unrelated to those unfathomable complexities of the human mind and its unpredictable behaviours. To such an extent that even if you think you know where this is going, when you reach the end of a chapter half way through the book promises that “the best was yet to come”, you can be sure that it is, and it's not for the benefit of the test subjects.

Is the reader also a test subject? I suppose to an extent all horror writing is an attempt to stir and make a connection to our deepest darkest fears; it's practically part of the job description. Simon Clark has already proven to be very adept at identifying where the most effective responses are likely to be ellicited and manipulated. The author however isn’t going to let any experimentation or literary theory get in the way of writing an effective SF horror novel. Like his Blood Crazy trilogy, Clarke uses the conventions of the genre to shock and thrill, but also to explore the extremes of human behaviour at its untested limits and give the reader some serious questions to think about how little they really know about themselves, and others.

Reading notes: The Protos Experiment by Simon Clark is published by Darkness Visible (only noticing what a great name this is for publisher and it works well for this book) on 8th October 2024. I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a preview ePub copy. The trailer of the film can be viewed online here. I intentionally avoided it before reading the book as I didn't want it to influence my own mental visualisation, but aside from the main characters looking completely different from how I saw them in my mind, the clips look remarkably close the way I imagined. That's a sign of how good the writing and descriptions is, and how effective they are at creating a cinematic drive.