The King of Terrors was written after Johnstone was diagnosed with a brain tumour in the first stages of the pandemic. The context is important: the book is certainly recognizable as Johnstone’s work, but there’s a twist. It’s the same kind of thoughtfully minimalist, sometimes scientifically informed poetry we might expect from its author, but its navigation of an uncertain future is unique in that it uses apostrophe to imagine a world without its speaker. The first poem, “Future Ghost,” begins with a sentimentality that nevertheless gets straight to the point:

I’m never alone with my wife,
who promised to stay forever
and has, longer than anyone I’ve known.

The poem makes interesting use of apostrophe, with lines like “If I can confess, then I’m sorry I’ve taken / forty years / to learn how to treat others kindly” interspersed with disarmingly straightforward statements like “I’m not ready for this to end.” “Hematology” starts with a grammatical construction that strips the speaker of all agency: “Let me tell you what I was told: the virus / will spare those who stay two metres apart.” “Will Work for Blood” breaks the fourth wall with the aside, “On tenderhooks. No, I didn’t / misspeak—I prefer malapropisms.”

“Kraken” marks a shift toward busier, less minimalist poems. It begins,

Slip of the tongue, slip of the sea’s
eight arms, and the whirlpool begins
to compress its armour:
failed spears, failed reel, a lens
to enlarge the pericardial inferno
thrashing like an ocean of downturned blades.

The formal contrast between it and the previous poem, “Hauntology” (“those dreaming / the cyclone’s whip, // prostrate eyes / opening to sheets tossed up”), illustrates Johnstone’s formal adeptness as well as his restraint. It’s unique for a poet to be able to write something so formally involved yet choose to operate so frequently in a lapidary register.

The titular poem is firmly in the realm of the latter. “The King of Terrors” combines pandemic-era imagery with a general fear of death:

First there was fear. Fear of being shut in, a continent of shut-ins, shut up.

Fear without breath.

Fear of continental drift, the advance of the recently landed.

Fear hovering between two ways –

alveoli
deflated like punctured balloons.

“Literally ‘Former, Elder’” focuses on fellow poet Michael Prior. The end of the poem shifts its temporal perspective in a way that is especially affecting:

Prior, as in safety is a priority. Visit me
in the past,

              a parallel
              time,

              and I’ll visit
              you on the day

of your coronation.

The play with verb tense and address is complemented by the most avant-ish section of the book. “Slice-Selective Excitation (Brain Scans 1-5)” consists of erasures of a prose poem, two of which display only the text that fits in the visual patterns of a brain scan. Terms like apologize, White dwarf, and MRI recur across the different sections, reiterating the poem’s content while pointing to its method. Similar to a writer like Helen Hajnoczky, Johnstone straddles the avant-or-not divide that still often determines our categorization of contemporary poetry. “Slice-Selective Excitation” is measured and conceptually airtight; unlike much formally oriented writing, however, and in keeping with the rest of The King of Terrors, it’s far from emotionless.