Number 13 - A Little Red Book of Requests - Josh Malerman

I don't often read the same author twice in close succession, but there are authors who rise straight to the top of the TBR pile.

Josh Malerman is one of those.

This is a difficult to get hold of at a reasonable price little volume. Limited to 500 copies from Borderlands Press last year sometime.  This is copy number 265, tracked down on Ebay with a buy it now price that wasn't as frightening as it could be.

With me being the completist that I am, I had to buy it.

It contains a novella and two short stories.

Fafa Dillinger's Box
Dead Witch's Hair
Breadcrumbs

The novella - Fafa Dillinger's Box is an odd beast.  It never quite moves in the direction you'd immediately expect. Malerman creates weird little worlds for himself in his books.  Worlds where normal rules don't quite apply.  In this story, every person has a box buried somewhere in the world that contains their capacity for evil.  Our central character becomes obsessed with these boxes after a stranger, the eponymous Mr Dillinger, gives him his (Dillinger's) own box and is ordered to hide it.

The style of writing here is more akin to Malerman's Unbury Carol than Birdbox or Inspection. and that's a very good thing indeed.  This is supremely atmospheric and completely unpredictable.

Dead Witch's Hair - is a very creepy short story about a boy who requests his mother leave the light on at night. It's difficult to say much more about it without leaving spoilers.  Suffice to say it gave me a solid dose of the creeps.

Breadcrumbs - This could arguably be said to be quite a cliched trope in fiction, lost hiker, cabin in the woods etc, but the way Malerman writes it ensures that the tension is cranked up to 12 let alone 11.  This is probably the scariest of the three stories despite the familiar premise.

Well worth the money I paid for it.  I hope these stories find a home with a less limited readership.  They deserve to be known far and wide.

Number 12 - The Roo - Alan Baxter

If ever a book cover was designed to make me buy the book the instant I saw it, it's this one. If the picture of the evil killer kangaroo wasn't enough, that tagline - See You, Outback - settles the deal. 

You could accuse me of having low standards but I'd argue that you're probably right.

Anyway, aside from that amazing cover, what is the inside of the book like?

It starts with a foreword that tells us the book was actually born from a picture Keelan Burke (a well known cover artist and hoerror writer in his own right - whose work you're looking at right now) drew for a laugh.  Alan Baxter then took up the challenge of writing the book to fit the cover.

And a damned fine job he's done of it too.  It's better written than these killer animal on the loose books normally are.  It's no work of  pure literature. It's not going to worry Hilary Mantel in the race for the Booker prize this year.  It's a story about a supernatural seven foot tall kangaroo with flaming eyes and sharp fangs.  Sometimes, that's all you need for entertainment.


There are more shreddies in this book than in a factory full of breakfast cereals* and their deaths are truly magniicent in the sheer gleeful gore. The visual imagery in this book is fabulous.   My favourite image was probably Brennan Lafaro's death, I won't describe it here, buy the book for yourself. It's only short, about 120 pages, and even includes a glossary of Australian slang in the back,

The characters behave like normal people, which is unusual in this sub-genre.  Their reactions to the sight of a seven foot Roo with glowing red eyes and a mouthful of sharp teeth are entirely as you'd imagine. In its short page count, this manages some great gore scenes, laugh out loud funny moments and occasionally some real tension.

This book really needs to be filmed. Someone phone the guys that made Black Sheep - they'd ace this, it's exactly their sense of humour.

I will be seeking out more Allan Baxter books on the back of this one.

And Yes I know I've missed book 11 - that's the next play I'm appearing in and I will post my rundown on it after the performance -but just FYI - it's a play called the Herd by Rory Kinnear

*Shreddies are what I call characters who appear only to die horribly.

Number 10 - Post Office - Charles Bukowski

My first proper Bukowski novel.  Also Bukowski's first proper Bukowski novel, so it seems an appropriate one to start with.

I did read a Bukowski book - The Captain is out to Lunch and the sailors have taken over the ship - about two years ago.  It wasn't a novel as such, but extracts from his diaries.  It was still remarkably interesting.

I had high hopes for this book as several of my friends swear by Bukowski and rate him as one of the all time greats.

The plot, what there is of it, follows drunken down and out Hank Chinaski through several years of his life working for the post office.  And that's about it as far as the story goes. 

We follow him from his early days as a mailman, under a tyrannical boss, through a brief interlude where he left town for a woman, and then his 11 year stint working in the sorting office after moving back to the city. At no point does he make a concerted effort to improve himself, or move on as a character, the drunken bum we meet at the beginning is exactly the same guy who we hear at the end sits down to write a book.

The storytelling is all over the place.  it's disjointed, and occasionally barely grammatical.

And I loved nearly every page of this book.  Despite being a very ordinary story about a very flawed man, where very little of import happens, this book pulls you through it. 

It's a third of the length of the interminable My beautiful friend which makes a real difference.  Hank doesn't really get the chance to outstay his welcome the way Elana and Lila did.  Hank isn't someone you want to pop round for tea but he's a fascinating narrator.

There's a rawness and honest feel to the prose.  He's not aiming to impress with fine words and deeper meaning. he's not even trying to make us like Hank.  He's telling us about his drinking and his gambling, and his occasional conquests in sometimes lurid detail.

Every woman Hank meets is described in what, these days, would be considered disgustingly sexist detail. Breast size, ass size, etc.  But it's the character speaking, and that's his worldview. We can't only read books with characers who speak all posh and are so respectful of everything that we hold dear.  We need this type of writing too.  Hank is a low-life, and by God, we know his inner life in great detail by the end of this book.

Despite the fact that he's clearly not out to impress with fine prose, he occasionally reaches a weird sort of poetry in the rhythms of the writing.  There are moments where we feel sympathy for Hank despite everything.  He's also frequently very funny.

And he's always interetsing.

Bukowski is one of the beat generation's fabled characters, and this book is a clear sign of why that is.

I will be seeking out more of his writing, fortunately my local Waterstones normally has a good selection.

Number 9 - Ghastle and Yule - Josh Malerman

Yes, the picture shows Bird Box.  This is now the fourth copy of that book that I own - the original hardback I read, the special edition from Dark Regions Press, the regular netflix tie in edition (with Sandra Bullock on the front) that I was sent from Amazon instead of this one, and this one.

This one is the pre-netflix UK paperback.  It's special because it has a complete novella tagged in after the novel.  It's not announced on the back cover, or even in the contents list (because there is no contents list). It's just there at the back of the book.

If you want to read Ghastle and Yule in treebook format, this is the only place to find it,  and you have to find the copy without the netflix logo on it. I did find a copy with this picture on, but the netflix logo added, and the extra story was missing. Eventually, I found one from a private seller on E-bay and asked specifically if it was the right one before placing my remarkably cheap bid.

The story is easily available for your kindle, but I don't own an e-reader and I'm not particularly interested in buying one either.  Tree-books all the way for me.

After all that effort to find this, was it worth it?

Silly question - this is Josh Malerman and I'm yet to find a story of his that I dislike. This one is no exception.

It's the story of two competing horror film directors in the late 50s/early 60s and told from the POV of a cinematographer who works with both of them. They each accuse the other of stealing their ideas/films and things steadily get worse between them until... no spoilers.

It's a really intriguing story which I will definitely be rereading at some point.  There's very little explanation given as to how the idea theft - the accusations go well beyong mere plagiarism - is happening. There are hints but nothing definitive. We get a great portrait of two polar opposites at loggerheads as they, in their own ways, jointly create an entire new subgenre of horror films.

It's told in Malerman's usual crisp prose style and is a fantastic tale of paranoia and professional jealousy, and maybe something much more disturbing.

I really want to watch all of the films described in the book.  They really do sound remarkably good. Malerman's prose is uncluttered but strangely evocative and he brings these films to life in the story. 

This book is well worth getting hold of. It's easiest to find in kindle format, but if you're like me, and fancy a bit of a hunt, get this edition.  You won't be disappointed.

Number 8 - My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante

This month's book group read.

Last year my nomination for the group was My Best Friend's Excorcism.  One of the comments that was made at that meeting was that the lady in question was embarassed to read the book in public because of the cover - scroll back through my blog to see the cover in question (which I happen to think was amazingly good).

With this book, I know exactly how she felt.

This has to be one of the most uninspired covers of all time.  Even Lavinia had a better picture regardless of how generic and bland it was.

This is a coming of age story that follows Elena and her best friend Lila from childhood to late adolescence in a run down poor neighbourhood in Naples.  Elena is incredibly bright and has her first stab at writing for a magazine/journal near the end, even though it doesn't actually see print.  There's a feeling of fictionalised autobiography going on through this story.

I have nothing against coming of age stories, or stories where nothing much particularly happens.  Paul Auster's 4321 was 4 separate stories about the same boy growing up in slightly different family circumstances - and becoming a writer of different sorts in three of them.  I adored that book.

So Many Ways to begin by Jon Magregor follows a museum curator through a few weeks of his utterly unremarkable existence and is a stunnningly good read.

1933 was a Bad Year  by John Fante was one of my favourite novels of last year - again, about a character coming of age in a poor society, much like Elena in this.

However, this pales in comparison to any of those. Going by the reaction at the book group, where the women praised it effusively and there was a resounding meh from myself and the rest of the male contingent, this is a book that women appreciate much more than men.  For example, what felt like 59 pages worth of debate over what wedding dress Lila should wear - but which was actually only 2.5 pages (still 1.75 too much) - is not the sort of detail that catches my interest.

It started with a fairly intriguing prologue, where the present day Elena gets a phone call from Lila's grown up son and we find out that Lila has disappeared of her own accord.  Elena sits down to write the story of her friendship with Lila.

I assumed the book might actually lead up to the events that sparked the disappearance.  It's not an unrealistic hope.  However, that ddn't happen.  This finishes at Lila's wedding (aged 16) to a 25 year old local businessman who proposed to her two years previously.  More than a little icky.

Apparently if you want to find out why she vanished you need to read the next three volumes.

I think I will politely decline.  The writing is not bad. It was good enough to keep me reading for the most part, although there were definite lulls.  The characters of Elena and Lila are well drawn, but the story is somewhat lacking in narrative drama. We end on a huge clifffhanger over a pair of shoes that an uninvited guest to the reception is wearing.  Yes, this is that exciting a book.

 At the meeting I gave it a provisional 6/10.  I'm downgrading that to a 4.

Thankfully, a Josh Malerman that I've not yet read dropped through my door today, so something good to read next is guaranteed.

Number 7 - A Simple Plan - Scott Smith

Up until sometime about two years ago, I had no idea that the Sam Raimi film A Simple Plan was based on a book.  I loved that film, I think it's the best film Raimi has made.  Better than his Evil Dead or his Spiderman films.  Then I saw this book in the charity book section in a local branch of Tesco.

For only 50p, it was well worth the effort of picking it up.

The question is, is this a rare case of the film being better than the book, or, as more normally happens, the book is better than the film?

If I say that halfway through this I went online to order his other book, The Ruins, that would be a good sign that I liked this.

It is indeed better than the film it spawned.  Knowing the storyline wasn't an issue as the film makes several changes to the narrative.  I suppose those changes worked for the film and kept the character of Hank more sympathetic.  In a book, you can give the thought proceses that lead to a bad decision.  In a film its a good deal more difficult so I understand why, plus Raimi's changes gave us a heroic action sequence near the end, which is entirely absent from the book - replaced with Hank sinking to his lowest point.

The story follows two brothers, Hank amd Jacob, and Jacob's friend Lou.  They're driving in the snow when they swerve to avoid a fox and crash into a verge.  Jacob's dog jumps out of the pickup truck and chases the fox.  When they go after the dog they find a small plane crashed in the woods.  On board the plane is a duffel bag containing 4.4 million dollars. 

The simple plan of the title is that they will keep hold of the money till springtime, when the plane will certainly be discovered, see if anyone is chasing the money, if not, they'll split it and leave town, if they are, and there's going to be trouble, Hank will burn it so no one ever knows they had it..

Of course the plan doesn't quite go to plan.

The way things spiral completely out of control is brilliantly done.  Every action taken follows on logically from the next. Bad decisions on the spur of the moment lead to violence and recrimination. To say any more would be spoilerific in the extreme.

Hank is a great narrator.  His supporting cast are excellently drawn.  I loved the way that the initial characterisation of Jacob came from the description of his truck.  A description that told us almost as much about Hank as it did Jacob.

The tension ratchets up throughout the book, and in the closing chapters particularly I found myself almost forgetting to breathe with the depths to which Hank found himself sinking. 

Brilliant book.  easy 9/10.  I will be reading more by this writer.