Number 69- A Cruel Fate- Lindsey Davis

 

You can see from the front cover why I picked this up.  I was looking for a quick read, and i have read one of Davis's Didio Falco book and really enjoyed it, so this looked like a great choice.

However- I'm going there sorry- its A Cruel Fate indeed if someone makes you read this book.

I am grateful for having read it because I now understand what people mean when they make the "show don't tell" criticism.

It tells the story of a captured bookseller in the English Civil War and his time interred in a dungeon in Oxford Castle.  This is mixed in with the story of a woman looking for her brother, a captured soldier, also held in the Castle.

I know Lindsey Davis CAN write, and she can do it well. I have no idea why she doesn't here. This is told in the simplest terms possible.  There isn't a single simile or metaphor in the entire book. There's no imagery, there's no style to the writing.  

It's as if the writers of  Peter and Jane (or Janet and John depending on which country you read your preschool books) got together to tell a story about a torturer in the English Civil War being mean to his prisoners.  

The present tense narration makes it feel worse. I never realised how much prose is improved by comparisons and slightly more complex language than the Tiger Who Came to Tea. In fact The Tiger Who Came to Tea is a much better book than this since the writing has a rhythm to it which this book doesn't.

The editing on this book s sorely lacking too.  How else could writing as poor as this sneak through?

Given power, Provost Marshal Smith uses it with no restraint. Why should he? He behaves like this because nobody stops him.

For that "Why should he? to make the point the author wants to make, the previous sentence should say "Given power, Provost Marshal Smith makes no effort to show restraint." or words to that effect. 

Instead of showing us how letters were sneaked out of the prison, she tells us that "Somehow letters were delivered".  It strikes me that there might have been an interesting chapter regarding getting hold of writing materials and smuggling the letter etc. but instead we get one line to TELL us it happened. The whole book is like this.

I know that this book was written for a cheap giveaway, but she could have put some effort into it. If I'd never read anything else by this writer, I would assume she just couldn't write.  

This will be dropped straight back in the charity box I picked it up from a few weeks back. 

Number 68- Barrowbeck- Andrew Michael Hurley

 

From the author of Starve Acre comes this collection of loosely linked short stories all set in the Northern England town of Barrowbeck.

I wanted to love this book a lot more than I did. Hurley is a great writer and I love the weird town set up normally (witness Malerman's Goblin, CL Grant's many forays to Oxrun Station, King's Derry/Castle Rock etc)

Unfortunately this is a very mixed bag. Some of the stories are brilliant, but others are merely quite good and feel unfinished.

There are a variety of writing styles on offer, matching the shifting timeframes. We start with a strong folk horror aspect to the founding of the town, things living in the ground granting permission for the settlers on the run from Viking raids.

We move through the middle ages and witchcraft trials before hitting the 20th century and finish off in the near future with environmental catastrophe.

My favourite in the collection is Natural Remedies set in 1938 where a childless couple is offered assistance of a supernatural nature. This was shocking and quietly heartbreaking in only a dozen or so pages.  The Strangest Case- telling about a murder trial in 1792 was another highlight.

The biggest problem with the stories being themed around the town is that there seemed very few links between the tales other than the town. Given the dramatic nature of the founding of the town, it would have been reasonable to expect those powers at work to be referenced again but they didn't seem to be. s the stories were set closer together in time in the latter half of the book, there was an occasional namecheck, or a mention of driving past a location from an earlier story, but that was pretty much the limit of it.

Overall I really enjoyed it.  there isn't a bad story in the book, but the standouts are good enough to make the others pale a bit too much in comparison. With several of the stories I was hooked throughout, with great character build up, great momentum and then they just kind of stopped rather than ended. I can't fault his style of writing, just his endings don't always land for me in these stories. When they do, they really work brilliantly. 

Number 67- The Night watch- Sarah Waters

 

This is the last of the 4 books I read last week. This one took about a day and a half when I had nothing else to do.

I read Fingersmith a few years back. After a twist I didn't see coming a third of the way through, I thought it descended into entirely predictable melodrama and was underwhelmed. I did like her writing style, but the story was somewhat lacking.

It's taken a while to try her writing again. 

This one is set in 1947, 1944 and 1941 in that order. It follows a loosely connected group of characters in the aftermath of WWII in London, and then takes us back to the events which shaped their lives.

This leads to some quite major narrative issues.  Because we never return to the 1947 timeline, I would have liked to see some endings to their storylines. Duncan has a loose ending to his story, but he's the only one. All other characters are just left at random stages in their relationships with no resolution to any plot points.

The reverse chronology is interesting in that it lets us fill in gaps as we read, but it's the only real point of interest in the narrative. Run in the usual order, this would be a perfectly standard story of assorted relationships. I was never bored reading this, but I did find myself wondering, about 200 pages in, when the story was going to start.  When I got to the end of the book, I'm not entirely sure it ever had done.

The section with the backstreet abortion is shocking and graphic in its detail and really does open a huge unanswered question about why she is still with the father of the baby in 1947. 

One of the biggest questions running through the book is why was Duncan in prison? In 1947 he's been released, in 1944 he's incarcerated but near the end of his sentence. The section in 1941 that explains it should be a dramatic highpoint of the book.  Instead it's one of the most ridiculous things I've read in years. It is truly farcical on what, in skilled hands, should have been an emotionally charged finale to his storyline. When dealing with the subject matter at hand in a serious novel, this chapter is almost offensively played for laughs.

People talk about men not being able to write women. This book pretty much demonstrates that Sarah Waters is very bad at writing men.

Her prose is nice. Her stories so far have done very little for me. I'm not sure when, if ever, I will return to her books.

Number 66- Watching Evil Dead- Josh Malerman

 

Last week I read 4 full books in 5 days.  This week I'm struggling to find the time to read one short book, let alone catch up on doing the write ups.  This was book 3 of the 4.  It was also the quickest of the week.

When I heard about this book (I follow Josh on his socials, so that was well over a year ago) I did wonder if I would like it, or even find it interesting.  But Josh has a habit of taking subject matter that I think doesn't sound promising and turning it into great stories by force of his writing. (who else could make a telepathic killer pig into one of the most terrifying literary villains I've read in recentish years?)

This is non fiction. Its the story of the night he introduced his then girlfriend (now wife) to the cinematic treat that is The Evil Dead. 

Part love story, part treatise on the creative process, part commentary on the genre, part confessional, part film analysis, part relationship drama, all driven by a manic energy that drags the reader (this one at least) through the book at a rate of knots.

The only thing I can really compare this with is Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing. King's Danse Macabre is a close relative but not really comparable IMHO. I actually felt the prose was reminiscent of Bradbury quite frequently while I read this. That's one of the greatest compliments I can pay to a book.

A life affirming story of the roots of creativity. I loved this far more than I ever expected to.  Once again just down to the power of Malerman's writing. This is probably going to be in my top 10 for the year. An easy 8.5 or maybe 9/10

Number 65- Written On The Dark- Guy Gavriel Kay

I somehow managed to go from the middle of June until last week with this book on my selves without reading it. That's the longest a GGK book has lingered unread on my shelves for a very long time.

It was well worth the wait as usual.  This time the setting is based on medieval France. 

Thierry Villar is a poet in the taverns of the city of Orane. He finds himself conscripted by the King's Provost into helping investigate the sudden violent death of the Mad king's brother and regent, the Duke De Montereau. Because he is a well known face in the taverns, he is ideally placed to ask questions and people will answer him.

He finds himself entangled in the political fallout from the death of such an important member of the aristocracy.  Combined with a possible invasion from nearby Anglcyn and the threat of civil war, he's in deep over his head.

This is written in Kay's usual smooth and hypnotic prose. There is virtually no traditional fantasy element in this book. There's no magic or mysterious powers or unexplainable events further than one character with visions.

It's shorter than many of his recent books, but no less effective for it. A worthy addition to his volume of work.

Number 64- Oktober - Stephen Gallagher

This book has been waiting around in my TBR for several years. For obvious reasons I had to, at the very least, start reading it in October. I started on the 29th (playing catch up here on quite a scale) and finished on Monday this week - 3rd November.

I love that cover, but it has almost nothing to do with the story inside.

Jim Harper is a tutor to a spoilt rich girl. When she goes to a ski resort next to an experimental facility run by her family business, Jim tags along. He injures his arm and accidentally wanders into the facility where he's assaulted by a member of staff.  To try to save his life, they inject him with an experimental stimulant they're working on.  This apparently fails and they leave him for dead and try to cover up the incident.

He's not dead though and recovers with no memory of what happened. Unknown to him, the company is still watching him and the drug they gave him may have side effects they never expected.

There are some nice ideas hidden in this book.  However it takes forever to get to them. I wasn't particularly taken by his writing style. The prose is pedestrian in the extreme and very jump-cutty (if that's not an actual word I don't care, it describes how I felt about the writing). Too much of the action happens off screen and mentioned in passing. I don't think he achieved much of an atmosphere for most of the book, where some authors would have the pages dripping with paranoia. 

There is a strong focus on the office politics of the company whose research has led to all of this in the middle section of the book.  Unfortunately, it doesn't make for the most thrilling content.

The ending of the book is rather excellent though. It more than makes up for the rest of the book. This is where pretty much all of the horror appears. If only the rest of the book had been as effective as the final couple of chapters, this would have been an easy 9/10 read. However, I struggle to award this more than 6.5 because of the slog to get through to those last pages.

Number 63- The Fisherman- John Langan

 

Another recommendation from a Facebook group and thanks again to that group.

This isn't a book that makes me realise why I love horror fiction so much, but it is a good solid read that's alternately moving and pretty damned scary.

Abe and Dan are both young widowers who work together in upstate New York. For companionship, they fish together. When Dan hears about Dutchman's Creek, near a reservoir upstate, and the things to be found there other than fish, he persuades Abe to go there on their next trip. 

After 60 something pages of good character development, the two men are told a story of the origin of Dutchman's Creek, mysterious happenings at the clearance of the villages in the path of the new reservoir, and a villainous man known as the Fisherman.  This story takes up the next 200 pages of the narrative before returning us to Abe and Dan for the last 100 pages. 

It's an interesting structure for the book, but could have been balanced slightly better.  Parts of the story within the story could certainly have been trimmed. It did seem to go on for longer than it should have IMHO.

The story moves from personal grief to cosmic horror with links to old testament and earlier mythological monsters. 

I found the Abe and Dan sections were better than the very long middle section. Abe's voice as narrator was affecting, and  could hear the new York drawl in his voice as I read it. The whole book is slow burn and atmospheric horror. When things get scary, they genuinely do raise the pulse rate (mine at least) and some of the ideas and concepts on offer are pretty disturbing.

The only flaw is that the middle section does meander more than the creeks and rivers it describes in such gorgeous detail. On the strength of this I will definitely be reading more by this writer.

Number 62- Your Shadow Half Remains- Sunny Moraine

 

This was a completely random choice for me on the strength of that gorgeous cover. 

The basic plot is a variation on Bird Box but instead of weird creatures , it's humans- specifically the eyes- that send people into their murderous and suicidal rages. 

The story starts a couple of years after the madness took hold. Riley is living in the secluded house by a lake where her grandparents slaughtered each other. She hasn't seen a human in as long as she can think. 

The time is the near future where it seems deliveries and food production have been automated. Deliveries are becoming more sporadic and more expensive, but they are still somehow happening. The electricity supply is still on as is the internet to allow her to order. 

Why there's no reference to growing her own food, I'm not sure.  This is the least self-sufficient apocalypse survivor I think I've read for some time. 

That's not a major fault though, since the book is rather brilliantly written.  The observations I just made did not occur to me in the slightest while I was reading it.

A new neighbour moves into a house down the road, throwing Riley's life into chaos. This is an exploration of grief, survivor guilt and loneliness. With some evil crows thrown in for good measure.

The biggest flaw with this book is that, despite the trips up the garden path on the way there, it did finish almost exactly as I thought it would. Is that inevitability or predictability? In this case, since I did enjoy the journey as much as I did, I'll be generous and say it's more inevitable.

The prose is fluid and Riley is a great creation.  She makes a fully sympathetic and relatable protagonist.

Another great read in my October horror marathon.

Number 61- Boys In the Valley- Philip Fracassi

 

Last year I read an advance copy of Gothic and liked it enough that I went out and bought this by the same author.  I've seen this recommended on several Facebook horror groups  so I thought it was a good choice.

I'd like to thank everyone that recommended it. The second book in a row where I can use the phrase "Books like this are why I read horror fiction".

The year is 1905 and in a church run orphanage in a remote Pennsylvania valley, the coming winter will be dangerous for more than just the sub-zero temperatures.

In the middle of the night, the Sherriff and two deputies arrive with a dying man in tow. The man was shot whilst performing a horrific ritual. HIs flesh is covered with arcane symbols, and on his death something is unleashed. 

The boys start behaving strangely, forming rival groups, and dying violent deaths at the hands of their friends.

This is about as claustrophobic as horror gets. The orphanage is miles from anywhere and escape is next to impossible.  Once the violence begins, the book becomes almost unputdownable. Fracassi has created characters that you genuinely care about so when he put them under threat, the tension is unbearable.  The last 150 pages of this book are genuinely stress inducing in the best possible way). 

Although one of the priests is cruel in his treatment of the children, Fracassi thankfully never gives in to the lazy clichés that seem to be compulsory in stories about priests and young boys these days.  The terror of what happens once whatever was in the dying man is released is more than enough.

If the ending of this doesn't raise a tear or two, then there is something wrong with you. This is an easy 9/10 for me. go out and buy it.

Number 60- Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke- Eric LaRocca

 

Now books like this are the reason I read horror fiction.

This is my first taste of Eric LaRocca but it is certainly not going to be my last.

This is a collection of three novellas/short stories.

The title story is certainly the highlight of the three.  It may well be the best piece of epistolary fiction I think I've ever read. All three stories are excellent.  But this one is just a level above.

We read the emails and Instant Message threads between Agnes and Polly, starting with a simple advert trying to sell an antique apple peeler. things quickly descend into one of the most uncomfortable pieces of fiction I've read in years.

The depiction of codependency  that builds up is masterly. The little vignettes that are dropped into the narrative are perfect little horror stories in their own right. in this story, they are stepping stones to a whole new extreme of psychological harm.

What have I done today to deserve my eyes?  I'm not sure, but I don't think this story is going to leave my brain for a long while.

The Enchantment- the second story in the book is a more straightforward narrative topped with an "oh my god how did I not see that?" revelation. 

A couple move to a remote island to try to recover from the suicide of their teenaged son. The death of the son is the only sticking point in the whole book.  His chosen method of suicide is not entirely practical, or possible to do by yourself. But that's a minor issue.

On their first night on the island, they're visited by a mysterious young man. From then on, things become more disturbing. Who is the young man?  What is his purpose? The answers are beautifully revealed.

The final story- You'll Find It's Like That All Over- is a clever little tale of social discomfort leading to something really quite nasty.

One of my favourite things about this collection is that it manages to shake this particular reader to the core without any excessive gore or any unnecessary violence. There are some unpleasant descriptions of death, but no overt gore. This is psychological horror at its finest. 

I love it. I will definitely be seeking out as much of his writing as my psyche can stand.

Number 59- The Melting Dead- Doug Lamoreux

 

The first book in my usual October horror marathon and I chose this classy looking tome.

On a small island in the middle of the Mississippi river, a meteor storm has unexpected consequences.

The radiation from the meteorite kills a family who then rise from the dead, but they're melting.  the only way to stop themselves melting is to sate their hunger by eating the flesh of the living.  Everyone they eat is affected by the same malady and soon there is a fight to the end for the rapidly shrinking number of humans left on the island versus the increasing horde of the Melting Dead.

This book knows what it's aiming for and it mostly hits that target so kudos for that. Mr Lamoreux is kind enough to let us know exactly which films he's homaging (or ripping off depending on how much you're enjoying the book) by namechecking them every time he does it. 

The new variant on the zombie cliché was a welcome thing. the writing... wasn't. This book needs an editor to pick up on the grammatical errors. Also the constant "this was like this bit out of that film" was wearying after a while. 

It wasn't funny enough for me to count it as a horror comedy. It wasn't scary enough to be an effective horror novel. It falls very much between two stools. 

There's a common aphorism that says that a bad horror novel becomes a comedy, and I think that might be what the writer was trying for.  He did write quite a bad horror novel. It's entertaining enough in its own terms, but I had to drag myself through the last half of the book.

But hey. with a title like The Melting dead and that cover, what was I hoping for?

Number 58- You Go home- Steven Sherrill

 

I'm more than a week behind on doing these write ups, and 3 books behind. So this one is going to be brief.

Much like this book.

This was my quick cheat read before I started on my usual October Horror reading. It's a collection of flash fiction by the rather talented Steven Sherrill- writer of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break.

I want to know what he was smoking when he wrote some of these.  There's some very weird stuff in here.

One of the stories has a longer title than the text of the story.

Things To Do With Dead Me is literally a list of surreal things to do with a dead body. 

It's a very quick book to read (it is a chapbook after all) and I was pretty confuzzled throughout. It's all very well written and strange and wonderful in its own weird way. I'm really not sure if "Like" is the right word to describe my feelings for this book. 

It's one I'll be dipping into on and off when I need a dose of something not quite right.

Number 57- Act of Oblivion- Robert Harris

 

The eponymous Act of Oblivion was the death warrant for the signatories on the death warrant of King Charles 1st

This is a historic thriller by the author of Fatherland, Pompeii, and The Ghost. It tells of the manhunt for the various escapees from justice- particularly two colonels who managed to cross the Atlantic and settle in the fledgling American state.

Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law Colonel William Goffe have managed to flee Europe on a ship bound for the new world. In London, Richard Naylor, Secretary to the regicide committee of the Privy Council has made it his mission to track them down.

In the foreword, Harris admits that Richard Naylor is a completely fictitious character, something that renders much of the book similarly based totally on Harris's imagination.  That's just an observation not a criticism.  This is, as he says in the foreword, a fictionalised account of their escape and the hunt.  the main historic events are all as accurate as they need to be.

I did find myself wondering why the two colonels still had their English army tunics so many years into their exile. It would have made much more sense after the arrest warrants were publicised across the Atlantic for them to simply take on new identities and merge into a new township where they weren't known. Instead they're still hiding in cellars and effectively prisoners wearing their increasingly old and presumably threadbare uniforms.

The middle section of this book was most effective, while the chase was still on and Naylor had tracked them to the New World. The last third was still good, but I was starting to doubt any of the details about the two colonels. The section dealing with the plague and Great Fire in London was a particular highlight of the book. 

Overall, this kept me reading and interested.  It's a solid read. I'm not sure it's a classic of any sort, but I'm glad I read it.

Number 56- After Dark- Murakami

Several years ago I read Kafka On The Shore.  I enjoyed the writing style, but when I got to the end I thought "Wut? was there a point to any of that?"

I finished this late last week and... well, it seems his writing is consistent.

The action, such as it is, centres around a small cast of characters up and about in the early hours in a Japanese city.

Mari is sitting in a small café trying to read and drink her coffee. She's interrupted by a young jazz saxophonist called Takahashi, and soon afterward by the a representative of a local love ho (love hotel where rooms are booked by the hour) to help with a Chinese girl who has been viciously beaten. 

Meanwhile, her beautiful sister, who has been asleep for three months, is about to experience a strange awakening.

I really liked the flow of language.  The prose was almost hypnotic.  I raced through this in two days.

 

However, when I got to the end, I felt like I'd been cheated. Spoilers ahead.  Apologies, but I can't explain this in vague terms.

 Strange things are happening to Eri- Mari's sister.  These things never intersect with the story of the characters outside her bedroom and her television, except for brief references to the office of the man who beat the Chinese prostitute. She finds herself awake in a situation from which there appears to be no escape. The next time we see her, she's back in her own room, on her own bed, with no explanation as to how she got there.

There's a fine line between being mysterious and leaving unanswered questions, and lazy writing because you don't know the answer yourself. This feels like Murakami took a running jump over that line. The resolution of that storyline felt so lazy that Snorlax is jealous (Japanese book, a Pokémon reference is allowed). 

The worst thing is, without that storyline, the book would have been 100 times better. It felt like weird padding for the sake of it. It added nothing in the end and was a net detraction from the quality of the book.

So basically, it's enjoyable to read, but don't expect to finish the book and think that it was a good story. Maybe there's something cultural that doesn't come across in the translation.  Maybe I'm too dumb to understand the parallels and subtext.  Maybe HM is a lazy writer who fudges details because he thinks it sounds mysterious. It's one of those three.

Number 55- The King of Satan's Eyes- Geoffrey Marsh

This is the first book I've read by Geoffrey Marsh.  It is however, probably the sixty somethingth book I've read by this writer.

That is just a slightly confusing way of saying that Geoffrey Marsh is a pen name for one of my favourite writers- in this case Charles L Grant- and this is the first book of his under this pen name that I've read.

Grant's pen names are all water related, Geoffrey Marsh, Lionel Fenn, Mark Rivers and Timothy Boggs. I have yet to source books from those last two pen names. 

Back to this one...

This is the first of the Lincoln Blackthorne series. Lincoln Blackthorne is an adventurer unsuccessfully trying to live a quiet life in a sleepy midwestern town.

These are tongue in cheek adventure novels in which many a buckler is swashed. (I actually googled to see which way round that should be. If you see someone claiming to buckle swashes, they're wrong... ) It's not as funny as the Lionel Fenn Kent Montana books, but is equally outrageous.

Lincoln is relaxing in his tailor shop when he's suddenly attacked by villains with a machine gun. He escapes and is tasked by a local collector of rare objects to find the eponymous King of Satan's Eyes. The King is a playing card from a mystical pack that was scattered many moons prior. Anyone who gains who whole deck of cards can apparently live forever. For reasons. Linc's taskmaster of course has all the cards but this one and needs to complete the set.

It's all quite silly and good fun with half a dozen villains popping up, a chase across South America and the Highlands of Scotland, femme fatales who may or may not be treacherous, and many scrapes with death including falling from planes and close encounters with big cats.  It's vaguely confusing.  I never quite understood how the playing cards were so powerful, but the characters chasing after it did (with the exception of Lincoln who remained pleasantly baffled throughout). 

It's not Grant's greatest work but was a fun and undemanding read. And that cover is just mad. I get the feeling that someone gave Charlie a really bad title and bet him he couldn't make a story out of it.

This character and his scrapes would actually make for a good film or tv franchise. I'd watch it anyway .

Number 54- Hansel and Gretel- Stephen King & Maurice Sendak

 

Whoops, is this my first King read of the year?  I need to get one of his full works down my eyeballs soon.

We all know the story here, Hansel and Gretel taken into the woods to die when they find a witch's cottage yadah yadah yadah

This is King's retelling, and it's pretty standard stuff.  No real changes to the story.  he's simplified his style a touch for the younger readers and there's only the well known little bits of violence in there.

Sendak's artwork is the usual high quality workmanship, colourful and slightly surreal.

There's an introduction by King to tell us how the project came about. 

He actually wrote in Danse Macabre an interesting section about this story and how the subject matter would be something people would not read to their kids if they stopped to think about it, amoral stepmother, evil dad (he knows he shouldn't leave the kids to die but does it anyway, so he's evil.  She sees nothing wrong with it, it's just a way for them to live- so she's amoral) abandon two children to die.  This is followed by enforced slavery, attempted cannibalism and justifiable homicide. 

He's got a point.  I'll still be buying this for my youngest niece for Christmas though.

Number 53- When the Moon Hatched- Sarah A Parker

 

Where do I start with this one?

This is not a good book, and the review may contain some spoilers.

Romance is not my genre, but I have found a couple of books that I did enjoy within it. I read a fair amount of fantasy and typically will enjoy a well written fantasy novel. Romantasy is a mash up genre I've never really tried as it didn't appeal. Therefore I was a bit apprehensive before i even picked this one up.

Even with not much hope of a good book, this managed to subceed (is that the opposite of exceed?)  my expectations on almost every level.

The one claim this book can make to originality is that when dragons die, they calcify and float into the sky to become more moons. Although even Doctor Who had an episode where the moon hatched and a dragon flew out so this could be argued to be a variant on that.

On a world populated by magical fae and dragons, Raeve is an unstoppable paid assassin capable of taking out any target and disappearing into the shadows. Kaan is the dragon-riding king of a neighbouring land. She's fierce and independent and doesn't need a man in her life, but just like that fast show character of the tough woman, every time that Kaan is near her she pretty much loses it with lust and all her abilities seem to fly out of the window. 

We have the traditional hate to love narrative which is annoying enough in a well written book, but in this it's the most irritating I've ever seen it. Every time they meet for the first 400 pages he's saving her life, or healing her wounds, rescuing her from imminent danger while she simultaneously announces how much she hates him, tries to run away from him and tells us readers how much she wants his body. It gets old very quickly.

I know there are only so many stories, and fantasy has a lot of familiar tropes, but some fantasy authors can make the old tropes feel like something new and original. Parker takes the tropes and runs them all in the most predictable fashion possible.  Every plot twist seems to be ripped off from a million better books.  At one point she escapes from Kaan, and finds herself captured by a warrior tribe, who instantly invoke the ancient prophecy standard, and proclaim her their queen with a title that is just far enough from the word Khaleesi to avoid being sued for a direct copy.

All this predictability might be excused if the writing was up to par.  But this is the worst written book I've completed in years. She seems to have favourite words which she uses multiple times in a handful of pages, whether they're good word choices or not.  In the first real chapter of the book, she uses the word "demure" five times in three pages. 

Later on, when she's been captured by the warrior tribe and they're fighting to the death to see which of them should take her as their bride, in a matter of 4 or 5 pages, characters "fist" handfuls of sand, weapons, and assorted other objects at least a dozen times. In a chapter close to the end, in a protracted and cringeworthy sex scene, Kaan fists first her hair and then "his own length". In a chapter from the main villains point of view, he also "fists" his "solid cock". Someone really needs to point Parker in the direction of the words Grab, Hold, Grasp, Clench, Grip, Seize, or any one of the dozens of better words she could have used.  

Speaking of cringeworthy sex scenes, (these thankfully only take up two chapters) Raeve refers to her lady parts as her throbbing entrance at least 5 times in those two short chapters. She refers to her heart as the hard organ inside her chest dozens of times throughout the book. It's a sign that she's softening when it just becomes the organ in her chest.  

In Kaan's chapters, he also refers to the organ in his chest multiple times.  This highlights another basic flaw in the writing. If writing first person narratives from multiple points of view, you should be able to tell the difference between the voices. You can't.  The villain swears more in his chapter than the other three narrators, but they all have the exact same verbal tics and phrasing. 

And.

The.

Strange.

Emphasis.

Thing.

That happens at least twice in every chapter. I think I counted 8 times in one of them. 

It's all very poor, repetitive, very derivative, repetitive and predictable, with the most annoying and cliched characters I've had the misfortune to read about in years. The plotting is lazy in the extreme.  When she's decided she needs to get revenge on the man who captured and tortured her in the early chapters, but instead settles down for sex fantasies with Kaan in a cabin in the forest, the villain conveniently decides to travel to Kaan's kingdom for a visit allowing her to seek her revenge without having to really put any effort into the search for him. 

The reveals as we get close to the end of the book are not shocking. They're painfully obvious set ups for book two. I was seriously considering DNFing this book with only 50 pages to go out of 570.  The best I can say about the ending is that they at least cleared up one plotline. 

In case anyone was wondering, I will not be reading book two.  

Number 52- Love on the Dole- Walter Greenwood

 

Many moons ago, in the days when I still had a full head of hair and barely needed to shave once a fortnight, I played Harry Hardcastle in the stage adaptation of this book.

I was kind of aware that it was based on a novel, but I never made the attempt to read the book until the end of last month (sorry, playing catch up)

The story is fairly controversial for the time it was written. The Hardcastle family live in Hanky Park, a massively deprived area of Salford where everyone lives hand to mouth, pawning their family's good clothes every week to afford food. Where siblings share beds regardless of gender, even sharing their parent's rooms in their tiny houses with large families.

Harry starts as a clerk in the local pawn shop but foolishly quits to apprentice at the local factory. Sally works at the mill.  She's described as being a natural beauty and half the male cast of the book are deeply in lust with her, only union leader Larry Meath wants her for her mind as well as her other assets. Sam Grundy, the villainous bookmaker, only wants one thing from her.

We follow the family through nearly ten years of their subsistence. Harry has his own girlfriend and, despite not being married, engages in marital activities with her on a regular basis. The extra marital affairs would certainly have been scandalous at the time, and the very end of the book, with the way Sally is able to lift her family out of the absolute poverty would have raised a lot of eyebrows.

This is poverty porn 1930's style. The copy I read was printed in 1935 which explains the condition. 

A few major takes I got from this book were exactly how much life has improved. Most of the employment tricks used in this book, the hours, the hire and fire policies, the pay, etc would be completely illegal today. The welfare state provides a safety net that we should all stop taking for granted. 

Yet, despite all the differences, there were times when I was thinking that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The attitudes of the well off to the poor, the response to the poor standing up for themselves, and the government trickery to pay the poor as little as they could all felt very familiar even today. 

This is an important yet fairly ignored work. It's basically a UK version of the Grapes of Wrath and deserves more attention. 

The writing is typical of the time it was written. By today's standards it could be described as overwritten, but it's still an easy read. Some verbal tics such as characters ejaculating when they talk raise smiles for the wrong reason.

The dialect the characters talk in might be difficult for some readers, but, having lived in Salford myself for a few decades, I didn't have any issues. I was surprised to learn that the area where I work used to be the local millionaire's row. The main location of the book was demolished in the 60s and 70s and is now a heavy concentration of high rise blocks.

This is a fascinating glimpse at bygone times. Highly recommended.

Number 51- After the Fall- Queyssi & Juzhen

Now this was just poor in virtually every aspect of storytelling.

The artwork is good although it does seem like the worst excesses of early sword and sorcery artwork where all the women have impossibly perky bosoms and none of them wear many clothes. The female costumes are never particularly practical.

The script is cliched nonsense.  the panels below the review are typical.

This is the first time I've seen a blatant continuity error in a graphic novel.  on page 6, one of the impossibly perky-bosomed women is holding a toddler in her arms.  The toddler is nude and his/her bottom is clearly visible.  In the second panel on page 7, the woman holding the child passes them to another impossibly perky-bosomed lady (this one has her magnificent mammaries on full display) but now the child has a brown tunic.  Two panels later on the same page, they appear to be nude again.

The plot is typical post apocalyptic monsters running around with mutant humans and the real monsters are the remaining normal people type of thing, along with a plot reveal that throws the entire timeline of the story onto the scrapheap.

This was very poor apart from the artwork.  Really not recommended.  if someone offers you a copy, ask them why they hate you so much.

File this one under I read it so you don't have to.  Although you might enjoy the bosoms.  there are a lot of them in here.

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Just to be unambiguous, there are no characters in the story with more or less legs than the standard bipedal humanoid.

Number 50- The Midnight Library - Matt Haig

 

From the multitude of reviews, this is a totally original concept and unique storyline for a book. 

It isn't.

It's not a bad book by any stretch, but I don't think this is a particularly amazing book  either. 

It's not an original idea. It's just another entry in the list of "What would your life be like if you'd made different choices" subgenre. 

Nora is fed up.  She never made it as a swimmer when she was young, her music career never took off, her novel never got written, and she's just been sacked from her dead end job in a music store.

She decides to end it all and wakes in a strange library where every book she chooses is one of the lives she could have lived if she'd made different choices.  

Cue a string of "Success isn't everything if you don't have your family/friends" type stories and an ending so cheesy the gorgonzola in my fridge is jealous.

It's all very easily readable and moderately entertaining. But it's so predictable.  There are no surprises at all at any point in this book.

The lesson at the end is condescending and insulting to pretty much anyone desperate enough to be doing what Nora tries. 

I don't think I was bored at any point while I was reading it.  But I certainly wasn't particularly entertained either.

This was my first matt Haig book, and almost certainly my last.