Number 34 - Carpenter's Farm - Josh Malerman

It's not often I can do this - go and read it for yourself for free.
//joshmalerman.com/carpenters-farm/?fbclid=IwAR3WnmKma0E_9dxChhwty8lehIphgJGE2VicbhbsUkeY69tASnf-ClZ484k

When the lockdown began, Josh Malerman started writing a new novel - online, a few chapters at a time, and completely free to anyone who wants to read it.

He finished it a couple of weeks back, and I finished reading it about an hour ago.

Just because he's given us all this book for free doesn't mean he's skimping out.  The usual Malerman quality shines through as normal.

The story follows a group of actor friends who become concerned about one of their group who left the big city a few months ago to live on a farm he'd just inherited in Michigan.  (I wonder how close to the town of Goblin Carpenter's Farm might be) .Oliver doesn't seem himself any more.  They're worried and go to check on him, except for the narrator who has an acting job he can't ditch at the time.

The narrative structure is unusual.  It's told in first person past tense but by a character who isn't at the farm for a lot of the story, and for most of the book he's telling us the story of what happened to the others second hand, at the same time as telling us what he was doing elsewhere as events at the farm went awry.

The actual weirdness takes a while to kick in past a few hints in early chapters although the storytelling style is great foreshadowing personified.  We know something is wrong, but we don't know what or how.

I'm not going to give any spoilers as to what is happening except that psychologically it's very twisted and a really marvellous idea, a very weird variation on the theme of one of my favourite Ray Bradbury stories. Something very strange is in the fields behind Carpenter's Farm. 

The unnamed narrator is very well drawn and his paranoia about his friends is shown to perfection.  We worry about these characters because he is so concerned. In the closing chapters we learn exactly how right he was to be worried.

This is vintage Malerman.  He's fast becoming one of the fixtures on the horror scene, consistently putting out novels of easy readability, great weird atmosphere and some startling originality.  No two of his books have been the same, yet they're all distinctly Malerman.

I can't wait for the new Bird Box novel - Malorie - due out in just a few short weeks. This one has really whet my appetite.

Number 33 - from a low and quiet sea - Donal Ryan

This month's book group read

I'd never heard of Donal Ryan before.  However, from the number of award nominations this book has had, and the four full pages of glowing reviews before the book starts, it's fair to say that he's well thought of as a writer.

And from the evidence on offer in this book, that's easily understandable.

This is very short - only 180 pages - yet it manages to tell the stories of three very different men, and join the three stories, almost satisfactorily, together.

The first man is Farouk. He's a happily married doctor in war-torn Syria, with a young daughter.  As the danger increases  in his village and the fighting draws closer, he chooses to throw his lot in with a people smuggler and get him and his family to safety.

The second is Lampy, a bit of a simpleton no-hoper from the back end of nowhere, somewhere in rural Ireland.  He drives a minibus for the handicapped at a local care home, taking them out for day trips. 

The third is John.  This is the first first-person narrative we hear.  He's telling us about his life, counting down all his sins in a final confession.

There are a couple of other narrators in the last 30 pages, but they all serve to fill in the gaps in the stories we've heard to date, and to join the dots between them.

The ending of the story does rely rather too much on coincidence and the strangest minibus design in history. Plus, at one point our doctor character is described as taking a pulse with his thumb and diagnosing an old man's illness.  As anyone who's ever been trained to take a pulse will tell you - YOU DON'T TAKE A PULSE WITH YOUR THUMB, your thumb has a palpable pulse in it.  You can take a pulse from a marble statue with your thumb, it will be your own pulse.  The fact that he diagnoses the old man with an irregular heart rhythm is not surprising since his own pulse is getting in the way. This guy should not be a doctor.

If you can forgive the minibus design flaws and the medical inaccuracy. this book works very well indeed.  The prose is never less than very very good indeed.  The first sequence in particular utlised very long run on sentences to good and strikingly beautiful effect.  It was reminiscent in this way to Patience by Toby Litt, my first book for this year.  I think Toby's prose was better overall though.

Lampy's section, after a while, had me reading in a strong Irish accent.  It was similar in flow to Farouk's story, but with the different dialect backing it up.  The only thing that I found segregated the writing in John's segment was the first person narration.

However, despite the flaws this is a very well written and fairly moving book.  I'm not sure it's as heartbreaking as the reviews n the opening pages suggest, but this is just my hard hearted opinion.

Still an easy 8/10

 

Number 32 - The Walking Dead 6 - This Sorrowful life

The saga continues. 

The biggest lesson to learn from this volume is not to mess with Michonne.  After what she went through in volume 5, she deserved her revenge, but it's possibly the most brutal thing we've seen in the graphic novels so far. 

This far into the story, the characters have become real so when bad things happen - and this is the Walking Dead so we know it's going to - I'm feeling for them.  I shouldn't do because I know how likely they are to die.  And a few of them in particular I know the likely when and how.

That said, there were moments of genuine tension in this volume. One specific double page spread shocked me to the core. 

The artwork continues to improve and the story is really picking up pace. I think I might well start preferring this to the TV show if it continues to improve at this rate.

I ordered volume 7 from the interwebzes yesterday so hopefully it will arrive before I finish my next actual wordy novel. 

As cheat reads go, these are absolutely top notch.

Number 31 - New Blood - Richard Salem

Yet another of those 80s paperbacks with garish covers that I seem to have many more of than is sensible...

Sometimes these are little gems, real works of good fiction hidden behind those bloodstained pictures.  Sometimes, as those who read this blog on a regular basis will know (in fact most of the time) I finish them through brute determination not to let it beat me and the best thing about it is that it's short.

Richard Salem is actually a pseudonym for a historical writer called Graham Shelby, who has several books to his name (but his wikipedia entry is nothing more than a list of these books so it seems unlikely he has any kind of prominence in the field) so this isn't  afirst novel, we can hope that he actually knows how to string sentences together.

And he can to a point.  This is never less than readable.  However it's never much more than readable either, and the storyline, despite a promising premise, is utter nonsense by the end of the book. This review will be a little spoilerific as the main letdown on this book is the solution to the mysteries set up in the first two thirds.

The book follows Clay and Holly Ryan, a successful rich couple from New York who decide to relocate to the country after Holly is attacked on her way home by two masked men.  After a mysterious phone call tipping them off about a small town called Credence, they go for a visit and quickly buy themselves a home in this apparent paradise.

Their first friends are a successful author who lives down the road and his wife, Willis and Karen. Willis is a megahunk and Karen his idolising wife. They've not lived in the town long.  They moved there after Karen was attacked by two masked men and they decided to move to the country. A mysterious phone call told them to check out Credence, etc etc etc.

First rule of buying a new house.  Never do it somehwere that only has one bridge in and out of town.  There will be dark secrets and you'll be trapped.  Clearly, the two couples in this book have never heard this advice. 

The town itself is almost perfect on the surface but there are strange things happening. Where are the old people?  And where are the children - in a fair sized small town, there are only six children and all under the age of 8?  Why is everyone so scared of the smallest injury to the point that everyone uses plastic glasses and even the butter knives have been blunted to the point they can't cut through a scone?

We also see a few of the locals spew black oily blood from their eyes, nose and mouth as they die horribly for no pasrticular reason other than the plot needs something more.

What looked like reasonably good foreshadowing early on in the book turns into quite repetitive spoonfeeding later on.  There really isn't much more to the mystery of what's happening than those few questions and, coming in at 227 pages, it's not that much of a hook to build your tension on.


Karen is apparently bitten by a spider at the town fete and taken to the local doctor's office where she's kept overnight.  A few months later she finds out that she's pregnant. She has no idea who the father could be since her megahunk husband is apparently completely impotent. This is where the real problems start in the plot.  

You see, there are no old people in the town because the doctor has been testing an experimental serum on the townsfolk.  This keeps them younger than their years but makes them extremely haemophiliac and apparently makes the women infertile. It also causes them occasionally to spontaneously erupt thick oily blood from every orifice and die horribly for no particular reason.

The doctor has lured our two couples to the town because he needs the "New Blood" of the title.  His devious plot is to impregnate healthy, non-setrum infected women with men in the town's sperm to see if they can produce... something or other.  I was starting to not care much by this point.

The biggest problem is that his method of impregnating poor Karen was to drug her with a dart gun and let just one of the townsfolk have a ride on her, once, after which she was automatically pregnant.  Becasue we all know every woman automatically becomes pregnant after one unprotected session. It was such a successful technique that he was about to try it with Holly in the closing chapters, despite also trying to murder her husband.

That and other revelations in the final chapters, including the doctor's trrue identity, managed to completely lose any of the early promise this book might have had. There was actually a reasonably effective action sequence near the end of the book, but the explanations just killed the plot deader than any of the earlier vistims of the blood eruptions.

There is also a serious need for a copy editor in a few places. At one point he has Holly and Ryan discussing the questions listed earlier and how odd that both women had been attacked etc.  On the next page we have the following quote... "It didn't occur to them that it was more than just coincidence, the four of them being here in this West Virginia town".  They'd literally just spent three pages discussing the attacks, with Holly described as disturbed by the similarities.

In total, it's better than a lot of these books with these covers, but not by that much. I didn't struggle to finish it. I didn't put it down thinking "Will I ever learn?". That is the highest praise I can give it.

This book is available on Amazon but will set you back in the region of £15-£20 for some reason. I peeled a 50p sticker from the front of this before I took the picture.  It looks like I could make a profit if I chose to sell it.

The previous owner of this book apparently only made it to the end of chapter 18, as I found a post-it note stuck to the page with the word Can Opener written on it at that point.  I'm assuming it was a bookmark of sorts.

Number 30 - The Walking dead vol 5 - The Best Defense

The Saga continues

With our heroes settling almost nicely into life at the prison, a new external stimulus to move the plot along is needed and this volume delivers in spades (and bowie knives) when Rick, Glenn and Michonne go looking for a helicopter they see crash after flying over the prison.

When they find it, it's empty and the footprints look like another group of people found the helicopter first.  They follow the tracks, and as anyone who knows the tv series will know, they find the town of Woodbury and the introduction of our first properly psychopathic villain in the shape of the Governor.

David Morrissey really was a gent compared to the version in this version.  He's already committed acts of violence against the three that are nastier than anything he did on tv.

Meanwhile in the prison, tensions are rising again as they wait for the group's return.

This is a series that gets better as it goes along.  There was at least one moment, maybe three or four to be honest, that really shocked me.  The artwork has improved and it's easier to distinguish between some of the characters.  Also the background styling is much better than the first few issues.

I have part 6 all ready and waiting. And I can't wait.  This was another cliffhanger.

Number 29 - Blasted things - Lesley Glaister

Lesley Glaister's sixteenth novel - and the sixteenth novel I've read by Lesley Glaister.

From that statement (and my review of Aphra's Child last year) you might deduce that I am a fan of lesley Glaister's writing. This is her newest book, released this week by Sandstone Press. It will be available through all good online booksellers since we can't get out to a traditional bookshop yet -  but if you go direct to their website, they have no commission to pay.

From the back cover, this book sounds like a story of a doomed romance in post First World War Britain.  I disagree with that. it's a much darker story. It's a difficult book to categorise, flirting as it does with a number of genres. there are hints of psychological thriller, a crime story of sorts, a passing wave of the hand at a love story, but between which characters?

Told in Glaister's traditional smooth and elegant prose, this is the story of Clementine, a nurse in WWI who loses her love on the front lines and settles for a staid marriage to a middle class doctor back home.  Her life is turned upside down when she has a chance encounter with Vince, a war veteran with half a face. He lives above a bar in a nearby town and is smitten with his landlady, but he'll take whatever he can get from poor Clem.

As I said at the top of this review, I have read Lesley Glaister's entire output.  Unlike any other writer where I've read more than 10 of their books, I still have no idea where the story is going or the path she's going to take me on to get there. 50 pages from the end of this and I had no idea how the story was going to wrap up.

The 1920's setting is immaculately done.  At no point do any of the character's actions or dialogue feel even slightly anachronistic. Clem is a remarkably well drawn character. Her helplessness at being trapped in a marriage that doesn't interest her shines off the page. Vince is a thoroughly dislikeable but strangely sympathetic creation too.  His manipulation of Clementine is thoroughly creepy and nasty, but do his motivations offer him redemption?

A nice touch is the switch from past tense to present tense depending on which of the two characters is the focus of the chapter.  Their first couple of meetings are actually told twice, once from her perspective and again from his.  That she manages this without seeming repetitive is truly remarkable.  The differing viewpoints serve to ratchet the tension to perfection.

One of the joys of a Glaister novel is that the reader is left to make these decisions for themselves.  there's no preaching or moralising, just a clinical deconstruction of cause and effect. Clues can be scattered early in the narrative and it's up to the reader to determine why things happen later on.

(sidebar here - when I first read Trick or Treat many years ago, the ending seemed a little strange.  But at 3 o'clock in the morning, my mind suddenly put together the reasons why what happened at the end happened.  The two keys to the end of that book had been mentioned in passing about 50 pages in and 90 pages in and never mentioned again. My piecing together of that particular jigsaw gave the whole book an entire new meaning.)

As any regular readers of this blog know, I am a sucker for a good punny title, and this is a great one, referring as it does to both the two central characters and the events surrounding them.

I've raced through this novel in just a couple of days.  She is one of the easiest and most effortless authors I know of.  That's even more remarkable when she can hide so many layers of narrative in prose as lucid and clear as she writes.

this is an easy contender for book of the year.  Emotional without being mawkish, funny in places, and a real sense of tension in others.  In the hands of a lesser writer, this story could have been melodramatic nonsense.  In the hands of Lesley Glaister, it's an elegant and moving portrayal of two very damaged people.

Easily 9/10 from me, maybe higher.

Number 28 - Stations Of Shadow - J Daniel Stone

My first experience of J Daniel Stone's writing was his segment of the reather good collection I Can Taste The Blood which I read and reviewed last year (around April time if you want to check it out). I finished that review with a promise to read more by this young writer, so here we are.

As you can see this copy has a "not for resale" band across the front of that rather eyecatching cover.  This is a review copy and the book comes out properly in July.  It will be available through Amazon, but if you order direct from Lethe Press the publishers don't have to pay any commission to Jeff Bezos and will make more money to publish more books.

The story follows two drag queens in New York, Sebastian, aka the Hydra, and Adrian, aka Hera Wynn.  Sebastian is the new queen of the underground circuits Thanks to a mindblowing performance. His partner and occasional lover Adrian is determined to find his secrets. How did he perform  that effect at the last show?  Was it some spectacular make-up or mechanical effect, or is it something more basic and terrifying?

The underground scene in New York is portayed in such grimy detail you almost feel you want to take a shower.  The settings are almost a character of their own.  The sexual politics will certainly wind up a certain demographic, but they're not the type who would openly admit to reading a book set in New York's queer scene anyway. Anyone with an open mind will have no issues.

This book deserves to be read in as few sittings as possible.  Set aside a few hours, stick some Tool, or A Perfect Circle or Puscifer on your music system and let Stone's hallucinogenic and occasionally brutal prose drag you through the seedy world of the underground clubs and the resident freaks and weirdos. He'll take you on a wild ride and you may not come out the other side quite the same as you entered.

I'm not sure it all made complete sense.  There were times when I genuinely wasn't sure if what was happening was real in terms of the narrative or the result whatever illicit substance the character involved had just ingested. But it's so well written, I don't really care.

Stone wears his influences on his sleeves. His writing is occasionally reminscent of Kathe Koja - who also gets namechecked in the book.  Every one of Maynard James Keenan's bands is referenced multiple times and, at least once, his song lyrics are paraphrased into the prose. Other writers who are namechecked and whose influence is notable include Lorca and Shirley Jackson. There are characters named for Oscar Wilde and Byron.  He manages to keep his own distinct voice despite the high visibility of his influences, and his voice is pretty damned good. One thing is for certain, he's got good taste.

It's not a perfect novel. I do have a couple of minor quibbles with it.  The word raped/raping is used as a metaphor several times in the book, occasionally within a few pages from the last appearance.  It feels like an overused phrase and started to pull me out of the narrative when it appeared.

My other quibble is that there are a couple of times where, instead of finding his own imagery, something he excels at in the rest of the book, he chooses to compare what's happening to scenes from a specific film or tv show - "Creepy dance reminiscent of the 2018 reimaging of Suspiria" and "looking like people from the "Eye of the Beholder"episode of the Twilight Zone" were the worst examples of this.

This sort of thing can be acceptable if used in dialogue as it's giving character to the speaker and telling us his likes and dislikes, but feels awkward to me when used in an omniscient third person narration. Apart from anything else, I've not actually seen "Eye of the Beholder" so I don't know what is being described.

These are very minor faults though in an otherwise very good read.  I will certainly be tracking down the rest of the books listed in Stone's back catalogue.

This is a new writer to keep an eye out for.  He could be massive one day.

To find out more about J Daniel Stone, yon can visit his website www.solitaryspiral.com

An easy 8/10 I think.

Number 27 - Sleeping Beauties - Stephen and Owen King

27 books into the year and not a Stephen King so far... That was a situation that needed remedying.

Trying to keep up with Stephen King is a sisyphean task.  He seems to put out at least three a year and half of them are 700 pages plus.  Like this one.712 pages in this rather handsome copy.

This one is co-written with his less famous writer son. The story is fairly high concept.  Mother nature has had enough. Women are falling prey to a sleeping sickness.  If they fall asleep, they become encased in a weird cocoon and don't wake up.  If someone does try to wake them or remove the webbing from their faces, they become psychotically violent, kill whoever is in the immediate vicinity and go back to sleep.

The men are left wondering what the hell is going on and their worst nature is coming to the fore. The cocooned women are waking in a strange new world which they can make better than the world they just left.

A mysterious stranger arrives in the town of Dooling.  The first thing she does is violently kill a pair of meth cooks before allowing the sheriff to take her to the nearby prison.  She can commune with animals, and appears to hold the key to what is happening.

I'd be interested to see what femininsts make of this novel.  It's very very pro-female and men seem to get the blame for all life's problems.

This is the first King novel I've seen with a character list at the start.  As usual with his enormous books, he builds an entire community.  We get to know most people of import in the town and in the prison.The character list is irrelevant though as I never really felt the need to refer back to it at any point.

The pace of the book is good.  The prose is the usual King - very easily readable and keeps you turning the page almost compulsively.  Even in a book this size, I don't see the "bloat" that many people complain King packs his books with.  He makes each character important to the story in some way and doesn't let them just fade out of the story randomly. (see my review of Blood forge which felt bloated at half the length of this book). Even the minor parts are recognisable and distinct characters.

Amusingly, Joe Hill (King's more famous writer son) gets a shout out when one of the convicts is wheeling a trolley of library books around the prison. 

It's not perfect.  A pair of escaped convicts are introduced to the storyline very late on - like page 600 ish.  The brief backstory they're given could easily have been slotted into the narrative in the early chapters -  and then let them reappear at the apposite moment.  This would have been a far more effective way to bring them into the final stages of the plot. It would have led to an "Oh shit, they're back" moment rather than the "Who the hell are these guys?" moment we had instead.

The mysterious stranger's powers seem to fluctuate. She could have helped a  lot more in the final chapters than she does. Her motivation seems less than clear.  Is she really just trying to provoke the male of the species into more and more violence?

And why does one of the characters choose to drive out of town to get help instead of just picking up the phone?

It's a hefty tome but I got through it in a relatively short time. It was never boring in the slightest.  It might not be classic King, but less than classic King is still better than many horror writers out there at the pinnacle of their talent.  Not thinking about Blood forge at all when I make that comment.

I'll give this one a 7/10