Number 43 - Skinners - Adam Millard

A very good cheat read this one.  100 pages of straight down the line entertainment.

It might not be the most intellectual book I've read this year.  Maybe not even the most intellectual book I've read this week, but for pure entertainment it scores highly.

An earthquake hits Los Angeles and releases swarm upon swarm of carnivorous beetles which proceed to eat every living thing in their path.

if you're looking for deep metaphorical insights into the human condition, this is the wrong place to look.  If you're looking for dozens of excoriations, this is the place to be.  Skin ripped off page after page, eyelids and eyeballs eaten live on the screen in your imagination when you pick up this book.

The prose is crisp and uncluttered, and sprinkled liberally with some pretty funny jokes in amongst the numerous violent deaths. It's gory, it's funny, it's got an unexpectedly downbeat ending.  And it's bloody good fun to read.

You always know what to expect with an Adam Millard book, and I think this might be my favourite so far.  It's certainly the first book I've completed in one day for several months.

It's available cheaply enough on Amazon - go out and buy it.

Number 42 - Don't Panic - Neil Gaiman

The more observant may have noticed number 41 is missing - if you can hold your breaths a while longer I will post that in good time - it's a play I'm currently involved in and I don't want to review it here until after the performance.

Onto this - book number 42 every year has to be a Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy related book. If that's not an actual law, it should be. If you don't know why, read Hitcchhikers. Last year I finally got round to reading Eoin Coiffer's book 6 of the trilogy.  It was ok but nothing to get excited about.  There were some good moments but despite a fairish impersonation of Adam's style, Coiffer wasn't able to replicate the conciseness of an Adams book, or the humour value.  Therefore it was twice as long as any of the other five books in the trilogy, and only half as funny - overall a disappointment.

This on the other hand, managed to be as funny as any of the HHGTTG books.  It's far and away the funniest non-fiction book I think I've ever read. Gaiman replicates Adams' style of writing perfectly in telling the life story of the man himself. It's packed full of arcane little bits of trivia that even I - as a lifelong HHTTG obsessive - didn't know.

I was lucky enough over 20 years ago to meet Douglas Adams when he visited my local Waterstones on the publication of Last Chance to See. From the short talk he gave and the very brief chat when I got my books signed, I can say that this book seems to give a very accurate picture of the man. As Douglas himself says in a presumably pre-humous quote "It's all devastatingly true - except for the bits that are lies"

(Is pre-humous the opposite of posthumous? If it isn't it should be - or does it just refer to a bowl chickpeas and some lime juice and oil - or would that be pre-hummous?)

It's very affectionately written. Gaiman is obviously as in love with Douglas's body of work as me.
The interviews scattered throughout the book are fascinating.

In one chapter, we read a selection of quotes from letters sent to Douglas Adams - and the responses they received.  It's a tragedy he died before the internet and chatrooms were a big thing.  No one would care about JK Rowling. Douglas would be the putdown king of twitter judging from his responses to the silly questions people would ask him.

The unpublished elsewhere snippets of hitchhikers deleted scenes are fantastically funny. I've laughed out loud at this book more than any other in the past few years.

It not only fulfilled my book 42 law, it fulfilled my promise that I need to read at least one biography a year. So I'm doubly happy that it's as good as it is.  This is the third revised edition, containing as it does a final chapter about his death and the eulogies given by his compatriots. I don't know if it was revised since to mention the publication of book 6.

All I can say is that, if they ever want to try again to ressurect the trilogy, Neil Gaiman is the man they need to hire.

Fantastic read - available on Amazon fairly easily. An easy 9/10

Number 40 - Holloway Falls - Neil Cross

Neil Cross is best known for writing for TV.  He wrote a full series of Spooks and every pisode of Luther so far, as well as Hard Sun and a pirate series called Crossbones which appeared on tv in the US.

He started with novels.  And some very good novels too.  A couple of years back I'd picked (or had chosen by the book group) a string of not good books and was starting to wonder why I bothered reading.  Then I picked up my copy of Mr In Between by Mr Cross and found my reading mojo again within three pages.

Neil Cross is one hell of a writer when he goes for it. He creates mostly believable characters - and manages to give his less solid creations good solid reasons for being the way they are so disbelief is always well and truly suspended whilst buried in the worlds he creates.  Occasionally, you might start picking at plot holes later on, but never anything that spoils the experience.

This book is no exception.  A revenge thriller that never quite goes the way you expect it to. Taut and lean prose, this is a page turner par excellence.  There are scenes of incredible tension and moments of true emotional depth.  There is a slight saggy section in the middle, but not to any real detriment. 

The story follows William Holloway - a cop who pops up in one of his previous novels if I'm not completely mistaken. He's suffered a breakdown several years earlier when he found out his wife was cheating on him and done things he probably shouldn't have done.  Now the prostitute he's been paying to pretend to be his ex-wife has been kidnapped and murdered, and Holloway is in the frame.

Mixed in with this story is a man who faked his own death, a conspiracy theorist and a fake messiah... How the plot strands interweave and interconnect is quite remarkable and eminently readable.

If you like well written twisty-turny, gritty thrillers, pick this up if you can find it.  I think I only have three more of his books to read and I'll have read all of them.  I hope he gets a new publisher soon.  I want more. 

Number 39 - 668 - the Neighbor of the Beast - Lionel Fenn - aka Charles L Grant

Many years ago, I was at a book signing by Terry Pratchett.  Someone asked him is there was going to be a sequel to Good Omens and, quick as a flash, he said "You mean 668, The Neighbour of the Beast?". We all laughed and thought it was a jolly funny joke.  I'm pretty certain this book existed back then, whether the venerable Mr Pratchett knew about it or not will never be known.

It's certainly one of my favourite punny titles of all time.

Lionel Fenn is (as suggested by the title of this entry) a nom-de-plume of Charles L Grant.  Charlie Grant is one of the greatest horror writers bar a very small few.  He wrote incredibly atmospheric and downright scary horror fiction, with a minimum of gore and a maximum of creeping you the hell out. 

Under the name of Lionel Fenn, he skewers his own genre mercilessly, as well as taking wide ranging pot shots at science fiction. He takes the cliches from the genres and works them into ever increasing levels of ridiculousness.

This one is no different.  It's book 5 in the Kent Montana series of books.  Kent was introduced to the world in the book Kent Montana and the Really Ugly Thing from Mars.  Since then he's fought the reasonably invisible man, the Once and Future Thing, and a moderately viscious vampire.

As per the back cover of all of the books in this series - He's the descendant of Scottish nobility, or so he claims. He's an out-of-work actor. He never gets a good script... but his life is more exciting than any science fiction movie. In fact his life IS a science fiction movie.

In this, sadly the last of his adventures, he faces off against the elder gods and assorted demons, and a street full of characters whose lives make the the cast of the most OTT soap opera seem entirely not dysfuntional.

When writing this type of over the top parody, there is a very fine line between writing accurate pisstake on the worst the genre has to offer and actually writing badly.  The casual reader is asked to take a lot on trust.Thankfully, Charlie was such a good writer that these books hardly ever cross that boundary.  The plethora of genuinely funny gags helps enormously.

Mr Grant was clearly having a ball writing these books and that really shines through. There are many laugh out loud moments in this book, often at the expense of the French for no particular reason.The style of writing is razor sharp, letting the silliness inherent in the demonic/cthulu type story shine through whilst still showing a huge amount of love for the source material.

I'm not sure the plot entirely made sense, but I don't care in the slightest.  Great fun to read and highly receommended if you're in the mood for something very silly indeed.

All the Fenn books are currently available in e-book format.

Number 38 - Ghoul by Mark Ronson

This book has been languishing on my shelves for several years.  Probably picked up at a car boot sale or some second hand place purely on the strength of that cover.

It's a shame the book doesn't quite live up to it.

We have three groups of characters to follow - an israeli secret agent and his new girlfriend following a lead about a new hashish fed assassin cult, a bunch of hippies looking for "The experience" in a far off valley led by an American psychopath into human sacrifice, and finally the beautifiul archeologist, her father and her new love interest who are excavating a secret hidden tomb in the same valley.

So far so cliched. Maybe the characters will meet in interesting ways. Maybe they'll team up against the ghoul which pops up occasionally in the narrative. Maybe that would be hoping for too much.

The book is solidly written, and the characters fairly well drawn - even if there are a couple or more blatant sterotypes in there.

Unfortunately, none of the groups ever meet up for more than a page at a time. There are just three narractives that sort of circle each other and only meet tangentially.  Particularly the spy character.  He only runs into one member of the rest of the central cast and that's in the final pages.  He doesn't do anything to move along anyone's narrative but his own.

The same goes for the eponymous ghoul.  It just sits in wait and doesn't really do much. It eats a couple of people. and runs away from one. It doesn't actually have any impact on any of the plot lines in what's intended to be its own book.

The ending leaves things wide open for a sequel. In other words, it leaves most of the story so far totally unresolved. I'm hoping the sequel doesn't exist.

This book sells for the cheapest on Amazon at about £26.  This can only be for that rather fetching Les Edwards artwork on the cover.  It certainly isn't because the book is any kind of great literature.

As far as these potboilers go, it's ok.  I've read a lot worse.  I've read a hell of a lot better though.