Number 20 - Noonspell - JN Williamson

JN Williamson was a fine anthologer (I think that's the correct term).  The Masques anthologies that he put together are very sensibly regarded as classic horror collections and I urge you all to seek them out.

How good a writer is he in his own right?

On the strength of this book, sadly, not very good at all. The most interesting thing about this book was finding a bookmark inside from when I clearly gave up on reading it 25 years ago. The bookmark was a slip of paper from the job centre and was dated 26/1/94.

The cover is quite cool.  Star publishers did good cover. The basic idea of the story is actually a pretty good one. A chat show host - Grady Calhoun - is cursed by the sillily named Calvin Rajelis and told he will die in 45 days by his own hand to stop the suffering of those he loves and cares for. From that point on, nasty things start happening to his friends and family.

The first chapter was good. There are one or two pages later on where he demonstrates reasonable writing skill and an ability to create a good atmosphere. Sadly the book is 251 pages long.

The main let down is that, to take the story seriously, and therefore for any atmosphere to affect us, we a) need to like the main character, and b) take astrology seriously. Unfortunately, the lead character is bland beyond words. We don't like him, we don't really dislike him (except for one point which I will come to later). And astrology plays an enormous part in this story.  The expert he turns to for help is an astrologer who has page long speeches about Saturn rising in Uranus etc.

Apparently Calvin is not just guided by evil stars, he may well be able to manipulate his own future by influencing some sort of OTT astrological bulldust.  I tuned out of the explanations by that point.

Calvin is also in league with/controlling/a reincarnation of  some weird type of ghost/zombie/disembodied soul or something that's never quite made clear but is apparently something to do with astrology. This ghost/zombie/starsoul thing - called Billy Salvo - goes round killing and hurting everyone Grady loves/likes and occasionally just someone he said hello to at a dinner party. He can appear in any shape to whoever and can be in multiple places at once.

The surrounding characters, or shreddies - since most of them exist only to die in aid of what plot there might be - are even more bland.  The staff at the tv station meld into one person after a while, so devoid are they of distinguishing characteristics.

His love interest, the stupidly named Bud Rocker (a weathergirl from the tv station he works at) has almost as much personality as boiled, unseasoned tofu.

He attempts to give the token black character a personality by using unconvincing street slang and having him call Grady Grade-A because that is obviously such a funny running joke.

The ex wife has slightly less backbone than the average slug, and I would personally rather spend time with a slug than anyone like her. The four children he has with the ex wife barely feature (except for the older son - who I will come back to later), even in Grady's internal monologues. For characters as apparently central to the twisted revenge plot, they needed to be actual personalities.  I think we were supposed to sympathise with them just because they're children.  But that's not enough.

The story is nonsensical and poorly constructed. Characters and locations change from one paragraph to the next with no warning or indication. No double spacing between paragraphs where a total change of narrative point has occurred, no
                                              ---------
or anything of the sort. Just a total offputting switch from one line of text to the next.

One or two of the deaths are well thought out. The mad cat lady's death was reasonably amusing. When Bud's sister is tricked into assaulting her own child, that was actually fairly effective. The rest are well... not so good.

There is a scene where Billy Salvo apparently rapes the ex wife, on the front seat of a small car, without adjusting the angle of the seat, without moving onto her side of the car, without the handbrake and gearstick getting in his way.  The longer the scene dragged on for, the more I wondered how it would be physically possible.  A scene of that type should leave you shocked at what's happened to the character, not wondering about the practicalities.  

Attempted rape was used against Bud later on in the book. This is the description given when Bud looks at Billy's penis.

"...even his private parts were not quite normal. When he undoubtedly functioned - she could not question that, didn't dare hope after what had happened to poor Jean Calhoun - it wasn't right.The thing was corrupt, unclean. It observed ancient, malodorous midnights."

Add to prose as deathless as that, and the use of rape as a weapon against the only two central females in the story,  the fact that one of the torments visited on Grady is that he's made to think his oldest son might be gay... (That's the bit I said I'd come back to - twice) this is not a book I would recommend for anyone to read.

I should have realised when the back cover said "...there were no options left. He had to fight the curse that was killing his loved ones OR give in to the overpowering evil of the... Noonspell" (emphasis mine because an OR indicates a freaking option) that this may not be the best book ever written.

2/10

Number 19 - Under Rotting Sky - Matthew V Brockmeyer

As you may be able to guess from the Not for Resale band across the cover of this book, it's an ARC (Advance Review Copy), indeed the first ARC I've been sent specifically to review for this blog..

Matthew Brockmeyer is a new writer for me. To be honest I'd never heard of him before I saw this cover pop up on a mutual friend's facebook feed a few weeks ago. I love that picture, although I'm not sure how Maurice Sendak would feel about it.

This is a collection of twenty short stories. They cover themes from lycanthropy and other assorted shapehifting, demonic possession, all too human psycopathy, lots of drug use, some Chthulu based insanity and a few gruesome accidental deaths.

The stories on the whole are well written. Some are distinctly unpredictable, leading this reader down one path and cleverly wrongfooting me in the closing pages. Others are slightly more predictable. Unfortunately there were one or two near the end of the book that I thought slipped into cliche - not bad stories, but missing the originality evident elsewhere in the book.

My undoubted favourite in the book is Have a Heart. This was a real gut punch of a story. It's also the one of the few stories without a villain.  All the unpleasantness  in this one (and it is truly unpleasant - in a good horror story way) is down to carelessness and bad luck on the part of the characters.

Carried statues is another one with no villain. A piece of flash fiction about a genuine medical condition (I googled it afterwards to find out). In slightly under two pages it manages to raise full sympathy for the central character and send a small shiver down the spine.

The opening story, Mine, is the one pictured on the front cover. Poor Maurice Sendak would be spinning in his grave at this one.  A deeply sinister take on a child letting his inner wild thing run free.

Joyride seems to be a typical ghost story to begin with, leading the reader down a well worn path, but ducks into the metafictional undergrowth at the end, and leaves the reader with a sour taste in the mouth.  This was another real standout story in the collection.

The title story is a graphically told depiction of a destructive relationship. The subtitle of this one is "A Ghost Story" and the narrator is haunted by many things including his addiction, and his memories of the perfect relationship. This is as downbeat as the title suggests. Not that downbeat is a bad thing.

In fact none of these stories have a particularly happy ending - but in short horror it is difficult to leave things all shiny and good at the end and still scare/disturb the reader for the rest of the tale.

I really enjoyed 18 out of the 20 stories in this book.

Two of them didn't quite work for me. One didn't seem to be a horror story until the last sentence. Up until then it was a fairly (actually very) good picture of a disintegrating relationship. The sudden shift in the last paragraph just left me with a feeling of "is that it?". After the good work that had gone on earlier in the story, it was frustrating.

The other miss for me is set in 1860 and written in the form of a journal kept by the narrator. Faux olde english writing is very difficult to pull off well. Matthew's writing style is good, but felt too modern in this story to be entirely convincing.  This was also a fairly predictable story which didn't help.

Other than those two stories though, I found this to be a very strong collection by an exciting new talent in the field. When he's good, he's very good indeed.  Some of these stories are startlingly original.  Some are deeply disturbing. Even the two that missed the mark for me were very readable.

Honourable mentions to A Dirty Winter Moon, The Long List, Reckoning the Corn, Mall Santa and The Gym Teacher.  I would love to write comments on all of them, but I have a day job and my bed awaits.

 Overall, 7.5/10.

This book will soon be available from Black Thunder Press  although I can't find their website through google, I assume they sell though Amazon.

For more info on Matthew Brockmeyer, check his website.

http://www.matthewbrockmeyer.com/

Number 18 - Notes For a Young Gentleman - Toby Litt

Toby Litt is a bit of a literary chameleon.  In his 12 novels so far published, he rarely touches the same genre twice. King Death and Corpsing both broadly fall into crime fiction, but are still very different novels. His book titles so far (fiction) have been in alphabetical order (Adventures in Capitalism, Beatniks, Corpsing, Deadkidsongs etc)

This is his latest novel. And it's weird.

He's written weird stuff in the past.  Hospital was utter chaos from start to finish and ran through pretty much every posible genre.  I love that book even though I'm pretty certain I didn't undertand most of it and there are many levels to the story I missed entirely.

This one makes Hospital look normal in comparison.

Written mostly in a lot of very short paragraphs.

          With different timestreams indicated by different depths of indentation of the paragraphs.

Sometimes words are in a different colourred font to the rest of the sentence. The reason for all this is almost explained near the end of the book

The story starts off about a young gentleman parachuting into rural Englend on a quest to assassinate Winston Churchill on behalf of the Fuhrer.

          But he lands in a tree and has to cut himself free, injuring his foot. He passes out and wakes                 in a strange house in the middle of the local woods known as the Darkenings. His rescuer is
          a local woman witch named Olwyn and she appears to have miraculous powers.          

          From there things get less clear. Clarity of narrative is not the author's purpose in this book.

In lesser hands this book could have turned into a complete disaster.  The storyline goes all over the place, and time.  Anachronisms abound. But Litt is too careful a writer for those to be accidental. The book becomes more about the flow of words and the crashing of one sentence into the next than about any story. 

Odd sentences that don't link to the paragraphs above and below are rife.

In its best sequences, this book flows and washes over the reader like a tide. 

It drags you through the pages in a freewheeling whirling dervish of words. 

It surpasses my meagre ability to describe the feelings it induces.

With its extremely off the wall style of writing and experimental text layout, this isn't a book for the casual reader.  It needs some effort to get into it.  Like a magic eye painting, you have to allow it to show you what it's about.

It would be very easy to dismiss this book as pretentious, but for me the quality of the writing pulls this out from that trap.

Some sample quotes

"Masturbation is a bit like buying oneself a birthday present -- one knows one is going to be pleased-ish with what one gets, but there's never any chance of surprise."

"Her skin appears to have been removed, scrunched up, slept on by elephants and then put back as it was before."

"When we have nothing else, breathing becomes a great pleasure. "

"I hear scissors repeating the first syllable of their name."

"Being buried alive felt inexplicably familiar, until I paid attention to the word familiar."

I finished this book last night and it's still not quite settled in my mind what any of it is about. But the experience of reading it, for me, was a pleasure unlike many others. I've certainly not read anything that quite compares to this book, in structure, plotting or narrative.

I honestly don't know what score to give it.  But, if you can put the effort in, this book will certainly reward you.

Toby Litt's A-Z of the writer of the A-Z can be found here

https://tobylitt.wordpress.com/ 

This book is available on Amazon or through SeagullBooks

http://www.seagullbooks.org/index.php?p=book_details&book_id=NzAz

Number 14 - Untied Kingdom - James Lovegrove

The long awaited review of book 14 - Jame's Lovegrove's Untied Kingdom. There's my cat Grendel checking it out.  Her review of it went somethhing along the lines of "Miaow miaow mew prrr" - although she might have been asking me for more food.

I'm a sucker for any book with a good pun in the title. And this one is particular genius.  I'd never noticed before I found this book that you can reverse the meaning of the word United by transposing the middle two letters. That was the entire reason that I bought this book, sometime back in 2003 or 2004. It also has the tagline "A State in a state" at the top of the back cover...

I read it then and thought it perhaps too episodic but a damned good fun read. I also wondered what could have reduced England to the state it's described. These days, it's looking like an accurate prediction.

The basic story - after a series of disasterous political decisions, England has been ostracised by the international community and bombed back to a third world state. As this was written 16 years ago, its vision of a post brexit future is scarily prescient. The government have decamped to the Bahamas for the duration, leaving the ordinary people to get on with it. That's the state of the nation when we meet our reluctant everyman hero Fenton Morris.

He lives in the town of Downbourne - about 55 miles from London. In the middle of a festival held by the town mayor, who fashions himself after the Green Man of olde english folklore, a gang of raiders from London attack the town and kidnap many of the women, including Fen's not-so-loving wife Moira.

He decides the only decent thing to do is to try to rescue her and sets off on a journey across the South of England.

On his way he runs into a friendly railwayman. This section starts oh so pleasantly but very quickly becomes uncomfortable.  This segment is brilliantly done with the atmosphere becoming more strained and awkward between the two men as it moves on.

His exit from the train leaves him lying in a field with a broken leg, unable to move.  Considering that this section of the book is nearly 50 pages, the fact that it's never boring and manages to rack up the tension to the level it does is truly remarkable.

Fen then finds himself in the midst of a semi-religious cult with an all too human focus to their devotion - a second rate writer they have decided holds the answer to England's current predicament.. This section is hilariously funny and was the bit that stuck with me the most from my first reading.

After leaving this bunch of lunatics behind he finds himself in a much more comfortable prison  of sorts while he recuperates from his injuries.

Eventually, he makes it to London, but what is he going to find? A parallel narration to Fen's tells what is happening to Moira as his quest becomes more and more delayed and convoluted.

The alternating storylines serve to increase the tension for the reader.  We can see more and more trouble brewing in Moira's story, which picks up and gains pace during the happier segment of Fen's.

This book swings from dark to funny and back again effortlessly. On this reread I didn't find the episodic nature quite as offputting as first time I read it, possibly because I was expecting it.

I found myself visualising Martin Freeman playing Fen in any potential film version of this book. Although a few in my book group thought he was a bit too wimpy, I really liked the character. He's not an action hero, he's a decent man, trying to do something most likely impossible, just because it's the right thing to do. The characters that drift in and out of his journey are well realised and always entertaining - if not all likeable.


The book is a very easy read and I highly recommend it.

Available from all good bookshops and even on Amazon

8/10

Number 17 - Bobby Knocks - Josh Malerman

The ulitmate in cheat reads.  I read Bird Box an few years ago and thought it was on of the best books I'd read in a long long time.  This copy is the special limited edition from Dark Regions Press (and is totally sold out).  The artwork on that sleeve is truly amazing and the quality of the book, from the look to the feel of the paper is absolutely top notch.

That's the full wraparound picture. Vincent Chong is an awesome cover artist.

It also has several illustrations by Glenn Chadbourne scattered through the book. Atmospheric black and white sketches like this one...

All in all, this copy of the book is a work of art.

Why did I say this was the ultimate cheat read? Basically, I've not reread the whole book, but, as the title of this entry might suggest, I just read the new novelette included in this edition and set in the Bird Box world.

Bobby Knocks is told entirely in first person present tense by Bobby, a thirteen year old boy who's been camping outside a house and watching the occupants to see if this is a safe place for him to ask to live after his family died in the events. He's trying to get the courage to knock on the door and request shelter.

It's a tense and brutal story, and well up to the standards set by the full novel. Through Bobby's eyes we get to know the characters inside the house, his nicknames for them provide a great quick insight to the five adults and the tensions between them

If I have any criticism, the picture on page 330 should be on page 332 as it gives away the ending two pages early.

Excellent work all round.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R1XK9DK6UUXK2H?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp


For those who want to see, this was my review of Birdbox when I first read it

Number 16 - Elevation by Stephen King

Another cheat read for me.  Nice and short - only 133 pages of fairly large type.  Once again, I read this in a day.

Our lead character is losing weight. He's not getting smaller, just losing weight. Even when he loads his pockets with quarters, he wieghs the same as before.  For some reason, gravity is slosing its hold on him. Mixed in with this is the story of  a new local restaurant run by a pair of married women which is faring badly with the locals through homophobic attitudes.

This book has received a fair few negative comments - and after reading it I know why. That's not saying that I agree with the negativity leveled at it.  I know what the reason for it is.

Personally I thought it was excellent. It wasn't scary, but some of King's best loved work (particularly in his shorter fiction) hasn't been scary.  Look at Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, The Body (filmed so memorably as Stand by Me). Therefore the "it isn't scary" comments as a reason people don't think it's good really don't hold water.

The reason people online have been nasty about this is that the esteemed Mr King is vitriolic in his dislike of homophobia, with several sideswipes at Trump and his politics.  This book is about those attitudes breaking down. It's wide open to SJW accusations and that is IMHO the root of the negative commentary.

The one criticism I would level is that people's attitudes in the town change possibly too quickly and easily. It's maybe a little naive that things would improve so much so quickly.

The finale of the book is sad and touching and oddly uplifting (pun well and truly intended).

7/10

Number 15 - Dead Shift by John Llewellyn Probert

The more astute of you may notice that I've jumped stratight from 13 to 15.  I wiill post my thoughts on book 14 next week after the book club meeting.  I bet the tension is killing you all. As strees is known to cause hear palpitations I will reveal that book 14 was Untied Kindom by James lovegrove.  That should hopefully relieve enough of the stress that none of you suffer unnecessarily.

John Probert has a gleefully vicious sense of humour. He's also an enormous fan of the classic horror of the old Hammer movies (and indeed amicus et al) and the writings of Dennis Wheatly, HP Lovecraft along with modern masters of horror.

His influences always shine through in his work. His love of old movies was explored in his Doctor Valentine series with a half-ptromise that there will be a Dr Valentine 4 based on Italian Giallo fims.  I so hope he gives us that one soon.

This book - Dead Shift - is clearly influenced by the satanic rituals of Dennis Wheatley's work and a huge dollop of tentacled monsters that would fit in nicely with the Cthulu mythos. But, though he wears his influences on his sleeve (and namechecks them in his books) he certainly can't be accused of ripping them off. 

This book never takes itself too seriously. It's a crackingly good homage to the aforementioned writers in a very easily readable straightforward style, with several belly laughs popping up in the midst of the demonic monster chaos, bloodshed and mayhem. He even manages to generate genuine tension in places.

In the opening chapter, an old man tries to summon an unknown entity in a deserted tower block. He's found by a passing security guard and taken to the local hospital. There he tries to continue his ritual and literally all hell breaks loose. A brave quartet of staff join forces to combat the evil. How many will survive? The fate of the whole world could be in their hands.

It's very short, I read it in one day - which, as a cheat read, that's ideal. But despite the brevity, it packs in a lot of stuff.  Many many dead people, not all of whom have stopped moving, tentacles,  giant insects, killer fungus, tentacles, parallel dimensions, evil books, more tentacles.

I won't make any claims for this as a work of high literature. But it's bloody good fun.  It does exactly what it sets out to do, and dos it bloody well.

An easy 8/10 for sheer energy.

John Probert is currently trying to review every cult movie ever at his House of Mortal Cinema

The book is available from Horrific Tales Publishing www.horrifictales.co.uk  

Film review - Teeth (2007)

A slight change of pace before my next book review

Here is my favourite amazon review I ever posted (warning its a bit spoilery)

To be sung to the tune of Jake the Peg...

[Chorus:]
I'm dawn O keefe, diddle-iddle-iddle-um
With my extra teef, diddle-iddle-iddle-um
In retrospect, not where you'd expect
So people should show me respect
Coz I'm dawn O'Keefe, Diddle-iddle-iddle-um
With my extra teef, diddle-iddle-iddle

My step-brother tried touching me, with shock he nearly died
It nearly bit his fingers off, he cried and cried and cried.
Cos I was born with surplus teeth, I've got an extra set.
I had to join the group and proclaim the creed
That you can't even pet.
[Chorus]

I had a dreadful sexlife really, my boyfriends more than moan,
Coz when they try it on with me, it bites right through the bone.
I really was quite popular, the boys they were a dreaming
But when they got their peckers up
They couldn't breathe for screaming.
[Chorus]

I had a bad stepbrother, he really was a martyr
He obsessed until again he met, the vagina dentata.
It wasn't his finger this time chomped, coz he wanted more
His dog couldn't believe its luck
and ate it off the floor.

I'm Dawn O [stops to think]

...Ew, that's too gross

I'm dawn O keefe, diddle-iddle-iddle-um
With my extra teef, diddle-iddle-iddle-um
There are some people I have missed
This includes my gynaecologist,
He got a bit too personal and fingers, he lost three.
I'm feel empowered and so free, unless I say you can't touch me
Because I'm Dawn O'Keefe, diddle-iddle-iddle-um
With the extra teeth... diddle-iddle-iddle-um

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuJmfczbLS8