Number 41 - Lockdown - Peter May

I chose this book for this month's book group as it seemed appropriate.

It's my first experience with a Peter May novel. I do have one of his on my TBR pile for later in the year for reasons which will become known when I get round to it.  However, I wasn't expecting it to be my choice so I just named this randomly for possible humour value and the fact that I'd only bought it the week before and it was close at hand.

The basic storyline - in the middle of a pandemic which has shut down London, a child's skeleton is found dumped in a holdall on a bulding site.  It's up to D.I. Jack MacNeil, on his last day in the job to track down the killer/s.

It starts off actually quite well.  It's certainly a pageturner.  I started on Sunday evening and finished it at about 6 today (Wednesday) despite only really reading it at lunch at work and about 3 hours in total at home.  The 400 pages pretty much flew past.

It needs a serious copy edit though.  It really does feel like it's a bottom drawer idea that he's pulled out and thrown at the publishers because of the current situation.  there are plot holes big enough to drive  a tank through, and inconsistencies that go beyond suspension of disbelief.

We can all do some willing suspension of disbelief at an unlikely storyline.  This, however, would need me to be held at gunpoint while a team of navvies built a structure strong enough to attempt the hold.

Spoilers will appear past this point of the review...

As I said, it starts off relatively well. I'm not entirely certain that a police chief would pass a case like this onto a detective working literally his final shift - even in a pandemic situation - but that's what the police chief does. MacNeil soon finds himself embroiled in a case bigger than he thought possible.

His disabled Chinese girlfriend, Amy,  is tasked with building a reconstruction of the dead girl's face from the skull.   In a negative point towards his inclusivity score, his girlfriend's best friend on the force, other than him, is an openly gay officer who believes McNeill to be a homophobic apeman.  This idea isn't explored in nay detail other than Tom not liking MacNeil.  No chance is given for repararion and the only phone call between the two men shows Tom to be the asshole in their working relationship.

While Amy is building the replica face in record time, we're introduced to a serial killer for hire who calls himself Pinky after the Graham Greene character. If anything Pinky emerges from the final narrative as more sympathetic than Tom, but more of that to come.  IN his first kill, Pinky shoots a random old woman in the head and stops to feed her cat before he leaves the flat.  This shows he's a nice guy really. (and to be honest, feeding your murder victim's cat on the way out would make me ask for a mercy plea in court)

MacNeil runs round from clue to clue (including a very well realised section in an underground club still operating durig the crisis) piecing together an unimaginable (or so Peter May thinks) conspiracy. Most of the people he talks to end up dead at the hands of a mystery sniper (Pinky) but at no point does he think that maybe the sniper is following him.

It actually all works pretty well until the mid two hundreds pages mark.  By this point, Macneil has ignored a voicemail from Amy, allegedly not just his lover but a close work colleague, helping him on his final case.  No particular reason is given for him ignoring the voicemail she leaves him, nor is any explanation given for when she leaves her flat without leaving a follow up voicemail so he knows where to find her after the panic of the first voicemail.

This is a cardinal sin in any thriller writing.  If you get a voicemail from your work colleague/lover in the middle of an investigation, you don't just ignore it.  He's been in contant contact with her up until this point and all the details he's been feeding her in various converations up to now have been fed back to the big bad guy (although Amy doesn't know this). 

We've also met his ex-wife and heard about his son.  However, the boy dies and the wife just fades out of the narrative never to be mentioned again. The boy's death is given as motivation several times in the last half of the book though.  

 Things take a serious turn for the worst when Pinky crashes his car and MacNeil, who happens to be driving across the same bridge less than a minute later, drags him out of the burning wreck.  Two things go seriously wrong here.  First we're told that after McNeil pulls Pinky out of the car, the soldiers pull the other passenger (who for the purposes of narrative tension should you decide to read the book shall remain nameless) out of the car with various expressions of disgust about the state he's in at the time.  Four pages later, the burning car has been extinguished and we're told the body of the passenger is still in the burned out wreck...

Secondly, we're told that Pinky is feeling no pain, despite being covered in full thickness (third degree as was) burns.  It might be true that a full thickness burn won't hurt as the burn has gone right through the pain receptors, but, around the edge of every full thickness burn, is a partial thickness burn (second degree as was), which will be right on the most painful part of the flesh and will make a grown man scream with pain.  Around every Partial thickness burn is a superficial burn (First degree burn as was), which also hurts like hell.  Basically, if there was so little of his flesh left that he was one complete full thickness burn, he'd be dead.  However, he's well enough to stab a soldier, steal his gun and run off to hold Tom and Amy hostage.

Why Tom and Amy haven't called for backup in the meantime since they're not currently being held captive by Pinky is up for debate.

The conspiracy at the heart of the story is blindingly obvous by this point. MacNeil has run into an epidemiologist whilst trying to break into a house at three in the morning - as you do.  She serves as comic relief and as someone to explain the technical side of the plot to MacNeil while he runs around being violent.

Subtlety is not a strong point in this narrative - the company that produce the only drug that works against the pandemic is called Stein & Franks... hmmm... there's not an obvious clue in that name is there.

It all leads to the silliest action packed climax to any book I've read in years.  If I thought it was inetentionally funny, I would be giving huge respect.  However, I think it's just lousy writing.

It was certainly a page turner, and hasn't put me off reading another of his later this year. The first two thirds of the book were just about good enough to forgive.  However, if the next one falls over so badly plot-wise in the last act, I think I might not read any more of his.

5/10 try much harder and hire a copy editor.

Number 40 - Big Lizard - Joe & Keith Lansdale

 

Looking back to when I started this blog, I'm surprised I've not reviewed a Joe R Lansdale book yet.  He's one of those authors who's so prolific it's pointless trying to catch up, so I try to get through one or two of his a year, in which time he puts out at least three.  He's like Stephen King in that regard.

He's also like Stephen King in that, despite an enormously large output, his quality never seems to dip. In fact he's a slight improvement on King in that regard since there are at least two King novels I don't want to read again, whereas, given the time, I would happily reread everything I've read by Lansdale.

This book is two Lansdale's for the price of one. Keith is Joe's son and has recently taken up the mantle on the Red Range comics/graphic novels created by his dad many moons ago.

Big Lizard is a superhero story with a difference.  A lot of differences.  A fuck ton of difference.

Buster Nix takes on a job as night security for Pick a Chicken, a local chicken joint where the patrons can, erm... pick their own chickens for their dinner, in much the same way as seafood places allow patrons to pick their own lobster from a tank.  In Pick-a-Chicken they can even despatch their own chicken with a company hatchet before it is cooked. 

He stumbles onto a satanic ritual in an outbuilding a few days into the job and knocks over a blazing brazier, disrupting the service and letting all kinds of hell  loose.  As a result of the botched ritual, he finds he has the ability to transform into a Big Lizard (about 8 foot nose to tail). 

The owner of the business, Elroy Cuzzins has been similarly transformed by the ritual and has become Big Chicken.  He is hell-bent on completing the ritual, which means killing several people, and it's up to Big Lizard and his friends, a teenage tech wizard and a normal sized but psychic talking chicken called Socrates, to stop Big Chicken in his tracks.

All in all this is as mad as a box of frogs.  There's some very strange but effective visual imagery going on in this book, as well as at least one point where you'll feel real sympathy for Buster.

This book is not going to win any Pulitzer prizes. it's way too much fun for that.  This is probably the funniest book I've read all year.  This is the sort of book to chill out and have a blast with.  And it does that just fine. I laughed out loud several times reading this.  There's no real poetry to the writing, but who needs poetry when you've got an 8 foot chicken on a killing spree?

There are even a few dangling plot threads for a potential sequel to pick up on.  I sincerely hope they're considering it. 

This is released in September this year from SST Publications.

https://sstpublications.co.uk/

Edited to Add

The version of this book that I read was the ARC, pictured above.  I've just recently (aka today) acquired a copy of the full end product complete with illustrations.

It's a gorgeous piece of work.  The illustrations are just as mad as the story. The binding and formatting is spot on.  It's one of those books where the quality of the paper used is so nice it's worthy of a mention.  So I'll mention it.  Even the quality of the paper is noticeably better than most books.

It's signed by Joe and Keith on one of the nicest looking signature pages I've seen (complete with its own set of illustrations). And all this for a lot less than most small presses charge for a high quality signed limited edition.

You need this book in your lives.  It will improve your entire existence. That is no word of a lie.

Number 39 - Finishing Touches - Thomas Tessier

Yet another one of those 80s horror novels with glorious cover art that I've had in my TBR pile for over a decade.

Tessier is a new name to me but is apparently a well known and well thought of writer.  On the strength of this I can understand why.

That cover is slightly misleading.  There are no women in this with literal forked tongues, but I suppose you could argue that it happens in a figurative sense.

Tom is an American, staying in London for six months on an extended holiday.  He's drinking alone in a local bar when he meets Dr Nordhagen, a very successful plastic surgeon,  and they strike up a friendship of sorts.  Nordhagen takes him on a tour of the seamy underside of London's nightlife.

Soon he meets Lina , Nordhagen's PA.  Lina takes him deeper than he ever thought he could go, including murder as aphrodisiac. But things can, and do, get more sick and twsted when we find out what Nordhagen keeps in his basement.  

To say the characters in this book may have a skewed moral compass is like suggesting that the second world war was a free and frank exchange of viewpoints about opposing ideologies.

This is an intense and erotic plunge into madness, told in an engaging first person narrative. The final chapters are amongst the most disturbing things I've read this year so far.  It's difficult to say more without leaving (more) spoilers. 

There are many questions left unanswered at the end, but I think that's a good thing.  I was expecting some big reveal in the end chapters that was going to tie up the loose ends, but I prefer the open endedness of what is there to some tacky twist ending.  Saying that, I suspect some people will find the ending so far beyond the realms of good taste that tacky would be an understatement.

This is not a book for the faint of heart or queasy of stomach.  This is balls to the wall horror and. surprisingly for a book as shocking as this, very well written.  A perfect example of the fact that you don't need sympathetic characters to make a good book, just compelling ones.

I think this is long out of print but is available online from the usual sources.

A solid 7.5/10.  I will be checking out more Tomas Tessier novels. If any of my readers have suggestions, let me know. 

Number 38 - The Walking Dead Vol 8 - Made to Suffer.

I am a tit.

I'm in the middle of Finishing Touches by Thomas Tessier.  That should be book 38 for the year.  However, I seem to have left it at work so I couldn't finish it tonight.  Therefore, I've had to pick up where I left off on this series for tonight instead.

Just like the attack on the prison was one of the most traumatic episodes of the tv show, it's been one of the most traumatic events in the comics as well.

It's good to see that the tv series took it's habit of ending on a cliffhanger and forgetting about it for a while direct from the source material.

Volume 7 finished with the Governor's forces lined up against the prison.  Volume 8 starts by going back in time to the last time we saw the Governor.  Michonne had not been overly nice to him and you could say he wasn't feeling well.  As each volume is 6 issues of the original comic, we can see that the entire first issue after leaving such a cliffhanger ending followed the opposition, filled in the blanks, and finished on the same cliffhanger.

I think that's pretty brave writing.

The action barely stops in this volume.  Yet another character who survived for at least two more seasons in the tv show dies in this one, and very graphically.  Another character I thought would die last time, died this time instead - and very graphically. I have no idea who is safe any more (except for two characters and I know even their days are numbered)

The title is "Made to suffer" and yes, indeed, we do suffer reading this one.  I felt every one of our lead character's deaths. The ending is as bleak as hell. There's been no redemptive arc for any character as they died in this. No sense of victory even as someone else we know bites the dust.  It's the nice guys who've copped it for the most part.

Brilliant stuff. Can't wait for volume 9.

Number 37 - All Your Gods Are Dead - Gary McMahon

Very late to the party on this one.  This is novella from 2007 that I picked up from Amazon last month.

Gary McMahon is not known for light and fluffy comic novels. All his work that I've read to date is moody and grim with a bleak outlook on human nature. This is no exception.

Six months after the brutal murder of his older brother, Doug Hunter starts receiving odd emails (very odd emails) apparently from his brother or the murderers.  He decides to go to Leeds to follow the trail himself since the police show no interest.  He has unusual encounters in the toilets of a pub and on the train to Leeds. When he gets there, he finds himself in a Hell even worse than you would normally expect to find in  Leeds.  The murder is linked to graffitti which has appeared stating "All your Gods are dead" and the spate of body parts which have been found in drains across the country.  Doug is soon facing forces beyond sanity

In 100 pages (probably less if you take out the empty pages after several chapters) Gary takes this story from a quite normal tale of an ordinary Joe in tragic circumstances, to a lovecraftian nightmare that feels like the bastard offspring of Naked Lunch, Videodrome and Hostel.

McMahon is not a writer who depends on gore for shock.  In this book though, he shows he can do body horror more effectively than most.  Because he is more than capable of generating a nightmarish atmosphere at the best of times, when the gore appears, it's doubly effective.

All in all this is an violent, bleak, miserablist chunk of horror fiction.  And I loved it.  Gary McMahon does gloomy horror better than pretty much anyone else and this is a fine example of his work.

The only thing that marrs the book is a printing error at the end of chapter 2 where a paragraph repeats itself.  But I can hardly blame Gary McMahon for that.

easy 8/10  

Number 36 - The Walking Dead vol 7 - The Calm Before

And it continues...

A change of pace in this volume.  This has a much more relaxed pace than the previous volumes.  Our heroes are well and truly settled in the prison. As you might guess from the cover, the pregnant character (Rick's wife Lori) is about to give birth.

Other than that, they go on a successful foraging trip that nets them plentiful supplies and a brief skirmish with more Woodbury folk.

However, there's an underlying tension.  This is the Walking Dead after all.  Something's got to be on its way.  The last page fulfils the promise of the title.  This is the calm.  The next issue is going to be one hell of a storm.  One of the best cliffhangers to date.

This issue also proved that knowledge of the tv series is no guide to what's going to happen here.  Lori's birth in the tv show was a traumatic affair.  In this it was a happy occasion. Meanwhile, one of the mainstays of the tv show died quite horribly.  No one is safe any more.  The only death I know for certain when it happens is now poor Glenn.

I know what happened in the tv version when it got to this point... what's going to happen next is suddenly a mystery.

These are such good cheat reads, and I think there's something like 40 more volumes. I wonder if I can read them all by the end of the year.

Number 35 - The Darkling Wind - Somtow Sucharitkul

Somtow Sucharitkul - aka SP Somtow is another of those authors I've been reading and collecting since my mid teens. From the first few chapters of Vampire Junction when I was 15 years old, I have loved his writing.

In recent years I've been scouring the interwebzes for his back catalogue which includes the Chronicles of the High Inquest series of novels. This is number 4 in the series and, until this year, was the final book.  However, Somtow has just published book 5 this year, so I decided to finish this one so I can read the new one sooner rather than later.

Unusually, for a book I really enjoyed, I'm not going to encourage anyone to go out and read this.  Only do that if you've read the first three in the series.

Things have become complex by this stage in the story and I can't imagine much of it would make sense without reading books 1 to 3 first.  If you've read books 1 to 3 already, what are you waiting for.

This is a mind bending series of books.  Somtow isn't telling  a story on an epic scale.  This is cosmic scale storytelling.  Book 1 - The Light on the Sound is a nice gentle introduction to the universe of Inquestors and their control over the Dispersal of Man, their games of Makrugh, and travelling through vast star systems using delphinoid starships to cruise theough the overcosm.

The Inquestors have ruled over the Dispersal of Man for twenty thousand years.  They're god-like beings, although they all started as human. Their games of tactical one-upmanship can destroy entire worlds. By the time book 4 begins, the revolution is well under way.  Allegiances shift and warp in the course of this book and it's well-nigh impossible to summarise the plot effectively, other that, in this one, as advertised on that rather gorgeous cover, their empire will finally crumble.

Somtow's prose in this book is the best it's been for the series.  Even in the first book it was good and these are some of Somtow's earliest works.  There are images that will truly stick with me - for example, a character whose madness has split his personality into a million pieces physically as well as mentally at one point is seen with all his separate beings superimposed one on top of the other, all sharing the same green eyes.  The last few chapters of this book contain some of the best of his writing that I've seen.

There are sequences that, despite being abstract in the extreme, still manage to create genuine tension.  That takes huge skill to accomplish.

Some writers build worlds in their books.  In this series, Somtow has created an entire universe with all it's own physical laws and limitations.  We have starships powered by huge whale like creatures - Remembering when this was written, this may be the first example in science fiction of this type of transport. We have living suns that bathe their humans in ecstacy, planets with think-hives that suplly the Inquestors with their knowledge.  The imagination on display is immense.

Don't go looking for hard science fiction.  You won't find complex descriptions of how things work.  We're told what they are, and that they work,and that's sufficient.  It worked for Bradbury's science fiction, and it works here.  I'm glad of it too.  If the best thing an author has to tell you about is pages of complex mechanics, it's not something I personally want to read. It's a spaceship, it goes to the stars.  That's what it's supposed to do.

It's impossible to predict where this series is going because of the sheer cosmic scale of the events. As a grand finale, this book works brilliantly (Of course now we have book 5 just released, but I've had a sneak peak at the opening and there's no cheating going on to reopen the story).  This could well be my favourite multi-volume sci-fi epic.

My only regret is leaving as long as I did between reading books three and four. One of the only disadvantages of owning as many books as I do, sometimes getting back to a series is interrupted.
The books in sequence are The Light on The Sound, The Throne of Madness, Utopia Hunters and this one. I have original 80s copies with the fabulously gaudy covers. Somtow has recently republished all 4 with new covers.

Links to buy thems are here.

Book 5 is called The Homeworld of the Heart



https://www.amazon.com/Light-Sound.../dp/B087YTPKH9/

https://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-High.../dp/1940999464/

https://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-High.../dp/0980014921/ 


https://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-High.../dp/B07B2L3SJB