Number 60 - It Came from Outer Space - Ray Bradbury

 

I've set the picture to Extra Large because it's a bloody enormous book.  This is a proper coffee table book if I ever owned one (and I own a few).

To celebrate the centenary of the man himself, I had to read one of his books, and this is one I hadn't read yet.  Back in the early 50s, Bradbury wrote a screenplay for the first science fiction film made in 3D - which was of course It Came from Outer Space - if it wasn't, there would be a different film poster on the cover of the book...

This is a fascinating slice of history.  It was compiled by Don Albright (Ray Bradburys friend and agent for many years) for Gauntlet press. It was a limited run and signed by Bradbury so if you can get a copy online you're lucky.  This is an ex-library copy so is probably not as valuable as it could be (although it does tell me that the American library system must have its good points if it stocks oddities like this).

Basically, this starts with a couple of fairly dry academic essays about the impact of the film.  That's followed by the original short story that inspired the film, and then several different treatments of the screenplay in various stages of its evolution.

The progression from one to the next  is an insight into how the creative brain works.  We start with the story about human's landing on a planet inhabited by intelligent spiders - this was the original short story.  We then see the rejection letter that Bradbury recieved for both this story and A Sound of Thunder.  That anyone rejected A Sound of Thunder is a great consolation to a sometime writer like myself.  It confirms that some editors just don't know what they're doing and there's still hope for me.

Next up is a typewritten first draft of Bradbury's treatment for the film.  This still has the title "The Atomic Monster" on the front of it, and several corrections in pen.  Also the central character's (Putnam's) profession changes almost randomly throughout this first version.  Often this is the cause of the corrections, but there are still places where he's described as a reporter and not as an astronomer.  The ending is very different to the film we know.

The second version of the story seems to be a cleaned up version of this, with the crossings out and the corrections no longer visible.  

The next version is typed more cleanly again and has inserts with extra material.

The final version has a lot more of the material we recognise from the finished film, and is nearly twice as long as the other versions.  It also contains a monologue by the sheriff which is used as the centrepoint for Bradbury's story Touched with Fire.  I have no idea which came first, this screenplay or that short story.  I know the story was in a 1954 collection, but where was it before that?  

We're then treated to a whole slew of promotional material from the film, including two short story adaptations of the film script.  I might be mistaken but this may well be the first film where the aliens are described as Xenomorphs.  

All this and an extra little short story called Troll Charge that Bradbury co-wrote whilst working for the studio, this is a beautiful insight into the creative process.

If you can get hold of a copy,. it's well worth it.

Number 59 - The Walking Dead vol 16 - A Larger World

In this volume, the focus of the story shifts.  It's not about just trying to survive the apocalypse any more.

It's about trying to rebuild.  As the title suggests, there's a larger world out there for the characters. 

This volume sees the introduction of Jesus.  He's a lot more badass than his tv version.  The first thing he does in this is beat Abraham and Michonne in a fight.  It takes a lot longer for Rick to start trusting him too. 

Possibly the biggest shock in this volume was the source of the suggestion that their favour to the Hilltop be the one that leads to all out war in future volumes. 

This isn't the most action packed book in the series, but it does a really good job of setting the wheels in motion for what promises to be the most brutal storyline so far.  The quality of the writing remains strong, the art remains at a high standard. 

Now I need to get my mitts on the next few volumes.  I wonder if I can read the whole saga by the end of the year.

Number 58 - The Brotherhood of the Grape - John Fante

One of the last books I read last year, if not the last, was 1933 was  a Bad Year by John Fante.  I'd never heard of him before and only bought it because of the Charles Bukowski quote on the cover.  It became my favourite book of the year.

Therefore, another of his books was on the cards.

When Henry Molise, a 50 year old writer, is called by his brother and told his parents are on the verge of a divorce, he returns reluctantly to his home town to try to help sort the problem.

While he's there, he is persuaded (read emotionally blackmailed) to help his father on one last building job.  His father's alcoholism is not likely to help with the building process.

This is a slim volume at a shade over 200 pages. However by the end of it I knew Henry and Old Nick (his dad) inside and out. Even the slightly more background characters were fleshed out fairly well.  These were complex and well rounded characters.

This is one of the most moving and funny novels I've read this year.  The father/son dynamic is by turns hilarious, sad and infuriating.  His relationship with his mother is equally good.  She is a great comic creation and I'm grinning now just remembering the scene where she takes the phone off henry while he's talking to his wife.

His brothers and sister aren't as rounded, but as supporting cast they do their job well.  The running joke with Mario gets funnier every time it appears. The brotherhood of the Grape - aka Nick's drinking buddies - are similarly great comic supporting cast.

It's told in a very easy prose that has true hidden depths. I raced through this book in two days and it's well and truly restored my failth in the written word to be entertaining after the drudge that was The Year's Midnight.  In a third the number of pages, this book gave far more entertainment and characterisation.

This made me laugh, it made me wipe a tear from the corner of my eye,   Books like this are the reason that I read.  I really can't praise it any higher than that.

Ray Bradbury - A Rememberance

 

 One hundred years ago today, on August 22 1920 Raymond Doglas Bradbury was born in the town of Waukegan, Illinois. He died a little over 8 years ago in June 2012.  In between those dates he produced some of the finest and most unforgettable literature ever written.

I first discovered him aged about 13 or 14  through his short work. That first story was The Emissary. I read it in an anthology whose name I no longer remember.  I still remember that final sentence, though, and all the threat/horror,/general nastiness implied in those three words... Three words that had been used early on in the story to truly happy effect, but he gave them a whole new meaning at the end of the tale.

That story was so far above and beyond everything else in that anthology that I knew I had to look this writer up and see what else he had to offer. 

I went straight to WH Smiths and found the collection which contained that story.  That was of course, The October Country.  To this day, I believe this to be one of the strongest single author short story collections ever written.The Scythe, the Wind, The Jar, Skeleton... these are all amazing stories.

This collection is one of the central reasons that I read horror fiction to this day.   It showed me how varied the world of horror can be.

I started picking up Bradbury's books wherever I could find them. I still have the majority of those old paperbacks 30 years later and they're my most read books by some margin.  

He was a master of the short story form.  Several of his stories feature the best and most shocking last lines I've ever read - for example.

"And then some idiot turned on the lights."

"It was when the jellyfish called you by name..."

"Martin had company."

They might seem innoccuous out of context like this, but they chill you to the core at the end of their repspective stories.

My first Bradbury books

Of course he didn't just write horror.  He also wrote crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and just straightforward non-genre stories.  And he did all these with the same panache and talent.  His story "The Miracles of Jamie" is one of the very few short stories that made me cry when I read it.  In 10 pages, Bradbury got under my skin so much with young Jamie's inner life that when the tragic ending of the story came around I was feeling the same levels of grief as he was.  In ten pages!  

A Piece of Wood (the title is also the last line if I recall correctly) is one of the great science fiction short stories, and it's mainly two people sat in an office talking philosophical ideas about humanity's capacity for hurting each other.

The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl is another all time favourite of mine.  A killer tries to clean his traces from the house of his victim, and cleans the house from top to bottom.  That's all that happens in the story but it's compulsive, we're stuck in the character's head as his cleaning becomes more obsessive and his insanity more pronounced.

He wrote longer work too.  He has several novels to his name.  Some of those are composite novels, created by stringing his short stories together to make a longer narrative. The others are traditional full length works. The most famous of his composite novels are The Martian Chronicles and the autobiographical Dandelion Wine.

IMHO the most successful of his patchworked novels were Dandelion Wine and Green Shadows White Whale. GSWW was another autobiaographical work, this time tellimg the story of his time living in Ireland while he wrote the Moby Dick screenplay for John Huston. These two feel like actual novels, as if they were written in the long form.

His other composite novels don't hold together as well as extended narratives and feel like collections of short stories on a theme.  Very very good short story collections, but short story collections nonetheless.


Fahrenheit 451 was a true revelation to me when I read it.  It's more relevant now than it ever has been.  It's not strictly speaking about censorship, it's about the dumbing down of society, replacing literature with huge TV screens that can almost cover walls, and the interactive games on those giant screens... It's about keeping the people dumb so they can be easily controlled.  That could never happen could it?  Scarily prescient is the best way to describe it. Oh, and the Mechanical hound is one of the most frightening things in any of Bradbury's work.

I was rereading Fahrenheit 451 in June 1996.  I lived in a tower block, on the 16th floor, with my living room windows overlooking the cities of Salford and Manchester.  i was near the end of the book, at the point where the war came and Montag and the others are watching from a distance as the planes fly over.  The book tells of the bombs falling from the planes, landing on the city, the resultant explosions...

The next line of the book is "A second later, the sound came."  The instant I read that line, there was the most enormous bang and my windows rattled.  My first though was 'fuck me, the book's got sound effects'.  I looked up and there was a plume of smoke over Manchester.  As I found out a few minutes later, the IRA had just blown up the city centre.  The timimg on hitting that exact sentence at that moment, freaks me out to this day.

Something Wicked this Way Comes is possibly my favourite of his novels, although it's a tough choice between that F451.  I must have read them both 6 times each at least.  Although I only have two copies of Something Wicked and 4 copies of F451.  Jonathan Pryce in the movie was perfect as Mr Dark.

Bradbury also wrote plays and screenplays and helped design sections of the Epcot Centre at DisneyWorld..

Bradbury was one of the biggest infuences on my taste in fiction.  His influence is spread everywhere.  Stephen King and neil Gaiman have both cited Bradbury as a major influence. Speilberg stated that Close encounters would not have ben made if he'd never watched It came from Outer Space. When Bradbury died, even President Obama was moved to realease a statement about his impact on American culture.

Despite no longer being here in body, Ray Bradbury will live forever. he leaves behind an almost unrivalled body of work.  When he was good, he was the best in his field.  When he wasn't quite that good, he still beat most of the competition.

On this, your hundredth birthday, I am raising a glass of whisky in your honour Mr Bradbury.   I can't imagine my life without your work in it.  You are one of the few writiers I can say changed the way I look at the world.

  

Number 57 - The walking Dead Vol 15 - We Find Ourselves

And back I go to the township of Alexandria - For the first time in a while, not much of this volume made it to the TV show. 

This picks up in the aftermath of the battle for Alexandria.  In the TV show, the story jumped 6 months.  Carl had recuperated from his injuries, Rick had hooked up with Michonne etc.

Here we have the immediate follow up. They're butrning the bodies of the horde they destroyed. They're building better defences outside the walls.  Carl is in a coma and we don't know if he's going to survive.  Genuinely - in this case - they killed at least one central character in the battle - one who's still alive and kicking on TV. 

Rick is asserting his control on the town, whether he wants to or not.  His grip on reality is still tenuous.  He still talks to Lori on the phone.Can he pull himself together in time to resolve issues building inside the town?

This was a nice character based volume. 

One thing I'm glad didn't make it as far as the tv was Carl's memory lapses when he woke up.  It's interesting to note that in the comic books, he's still 8 or 9 years old.  By this time in the tv series he was 15 or 16 (and played by an 18 year old)

The writing is as good as ever.  Rick and Carl's relationship continues to be the emotional heart of the story.  And a surprise at the end, although in hindsight, I should have expected it.

Volume 16 soon to follow.

Number 56 - The Year's Midnight - Alex Benzie

This is one of those books I picked up second hand almost completely at random.  Mainly because the cover looked interesting and the story sounded intriguing. I'd never heard of Alex Benzie before so this was a stab in the dark.

It's a long book, probably the longest thing I've read this year, but it felt a lot longer than it is.

This is the first time since I started this blog that I've been tempted to give up half way through a book.

It's not that the prose is bad.  The prose actually has quite a lot to recommend it in places.  It's so dense though, and very overwriiten.

The dialogue is written in such a broad scottish dialect that it was nearly 200 pages in before I could relax my brain into translation mode and read it direectly.  Prior to that I was having to read and rerread the dialogue to try to work out what the hell was being said.

 From the prologue -
Fits a fine loon like yersel deein here, at the hin end o' the fair? Id've thocht ye'd be awa lang ere the noo, gin ye'd nae mind me askin.

That's one of the easier lines of dialogue in the prologue.

You can tell Alex Benzie fancies himself a serious literary author.  None of the dialogue is in quote marks, copying Cormac McCarthy and others, he never uses one word where twenty nine paragraphs will do the job.  There are chapters that go on for ten pages, where the most that happens is a man says hello to a woman. This was heavy going.

We hear about show don't tell - this takes that to the extreme.  Instead of a short chapter telling us some key points of our central character's childhood, after the prologue, we go to his birth, and follow him from small baby, to toddler, to his early schooldays etc etc.  It's showing us why he is the way he is as he gets older, but it really takes its time.

The story isn't even that interesting.  The blurb makes it sound like there's going to be intrigue and conflict.  Instead it's actually nearly 600 pages about a lad in his late teens fixing a clock and having a crush on a girl.  And the clock repair doesn't enter the story till well over half way through.

The "villain" of the piece doesn't get even the slightest bit of come-uppance. And, yet another story where the first time the innocent young girl "becomes a woman" she gets pregnant. I'm sure it happens sometimes in reality, but why does it happen nearly every time in fiction?  

Having dragged myself through the 571 pages, do I feel a better person for reading it?  Have I been offered any great insights into life? Am I sad that these characters are leaving my life now I'm moving on to another book?

No, No and No.

I'm sure there are people out there who will gasp at the beauty of the prose (which to be fair - is very easy on the eye as dense literature goes - despite going on a bit) and will wax lyrical about the book's depiction of a microcosm of society  on the cusp of technological change and its metaphorical resonance.

Yeah sure, it has got that. The town is drawn well and we do know the characters well by the end of it.  We dislike the charcaters we're meant to dislike but... I felt no real connection to any of the characters we're supposed to like.  Despite following him through almost his entire childhood, Watchie is a bit of a wet blanket as characters go. He has no real personality.

Somehow, the surfeit of description has left him, and most of the side characters, with only one dimension visible.  The villain of the piece is the only one who feels even slightly fleshed out, mainly because of the difference between the way he presents himself publically and the depiction of his inner world.

I don't think I will be reading anythiong else by Mr Benzie.  If you wish to do so, this is available through the usual places where you can buy books. Hell, you can have my copy for the cost of postage if you ask me before I take it to the charity shop.

One good thing about the length of this, when it leaves my shelves, I've got rooom for two regular length books.

Number 55 - The Book Club - Alan Baxter

And another prose cheat read - you can tell I'd tremporarily run out of Walking dead volumes last week.

If you take a look back to the early months of this year, you will see that I was very much impressed with The Roo -also by Alan Baxter - which was a balls to the wall creature feature about a demonic killer 9 foot kangaroo.

This is a different kettle of fish entirely.

Jason Wilkes's wife never returned from her book club on Wednesday night. The only contact Jason has with the club says she left at the normal time.  The police aren't doing their job fast enough for Jason, indeed they seem to suspect him in her disappearance, so he starts investigating for himself.

It's not long before he discovers that books were not the main focus of her Wednesday meetings.  The truth is far less mundane than that.

Whereas The Roo was very broad, written with tongue firmly planted in the cheek, this is a tight little thriller.  Jason's plight is realistically portrayed  (until the otherworldly elements become apparent) and he's a deeply sympathetic central character for us.  We really hope that he's going to get his wife back from whereever she's gone.

The supernatural elements are introduced well enough that we keep our suspension of disbelief perfectly willingly.

At a shade over 100 pages, this is a fast paced story that covers a hell of a lot in between the covers.  I don't want to say where the story winds up - spoilers-  but it's unexpected, scary and deeply weird.

Another excellent novella from Mr Baxter.  I really do need to find some more of his work.  The differences between this and The Roo show him to be a massively talented and versatile writer, capable of turning his hand to vastly disparate styles.

This is available through the PS Publishing website.

easy 8/10

Number 54 - The Bird Catcher - SP Somtow

 I thought I'd go for a prose cheat read. It's been a few weeks.  Where better to look than a Somtow novella.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a very big fan of Somtow Sucharitkul - also known as SP Somtow. When I saw this novella on a famous shopping website, I figured it would make for a damned good little cheat read.

I was right.

This contains two stories, the eponymous novella and a short story called Chui Chai.

The Bird Catcher is a fictional story about a real life Thai serial killer Si Ui and his friendship with a lonely 12 year old American boy living in Siam with his mother after the Second World War. We're told the story of the friendship in flashback as the narrator describes it to his grandson after they see the mummified body of the serial killer in the museum of horrors in Bangkok.

Nicholas  is fresh out of the same internment camp as Jim Ballard.  He's seen things that children should never see. On the boat to Siam he first spots Si Ui, waiting motionless on the deck, waiting to catch the first bird that comes too close.  He's an expert at this hunting technique, and proves to be equally proficient with larger prey later on.

Nicholas doesn't fit in in the village his mother chooses as their temporary home.  Neither does Si Ui.  because of language barriers, Nicholas is one of the few in the village that Si Ui can talk to, He's not native to Siam either.  As a result of this, a bond forms between the two characters.  This rapidly turns from a bit creepy to deeply disturbing.  To say more would be to leave spoilers.

This is an elegantly written, psychologically messed up and deeply horrific tale.  It truly deserved the World Fantasy award it won.

The second story - Chui Chai - is a weird sort of a zombie story, but not quite.  It's one of the most original takes on the subject of letting a person live on after death.  This story is also contained in a couple of Somtow's short story collections.  If memory serves, he describes this as a gestalt zombie story to complement his Jungian vampire novels (Vampire Junction and its sequels) and his Freudian werewolf novel (Moon Dance).

I'm not sure what I can say about this without giving away spoilers.  A businessman spends an unforgettable night with a beautiful exotic dancer.  When he needs to find her, he learns new truths about the nature of existence itself. Once again, it's a sick and twisted little story.  Excellent stuff.

This book is everything I look for in a cheat read. Well written, creepy, funny in places, and bloody good fun.

Available online from various sources.

Number 53 - The Hatching - Ezekiel Boone

As you might have guessed from that cover, this is a book about killer spiders.

I'd never heard of Ezekiel Boone, but this looked like it might be good fun.  I do like a good creature horror - and John Connolly likes it and has he ever lied to me? Maybe he has.  I don't know.

This started off fairly well.  A guide showing his party through the jungles of Peru is introduced and immediately overrun by thousands of flesh eating spiders, along with most of the rest of his party.

As someone who likes a good shreddie or two  in a horror story, this pleased me.

We then meet an FBI agent on a stake-out in Minneapolis. After finding out about his family situation, the scene shifts again - this time to a seismic lab in India.  We learn about strange rumbles underground, too regular to be natural.  Then we switch again to a university professor in Washington who's doing things she probably shouldn't be with one of her students.  This chapter ends with her hearing about a live spider egg sac that's just been found near the Nazca lines that's been sent to her via fedex...

It continues bouncing around between characters, establishing a large cast, including the first female president of the USA - a drop dead gorgeous 42 year old, her chief advisor and lover (the ex-husband of our spider expert from the university), the surviving member of the ill fated trek in Peru - who happens to be a billionaire tech genius, some soldiers, a random writer of crime thrillers living on a Scottish island, and some survivalists in small town America,  among others.

There are many more shreddies and some of them are really shredded quite viciously and enjoyably.

The story moves at a hell of a pace. There are some moments of extreme tension.  However, the whole of the book is not as good as the sum of its parts.

One issue is the insistence on every character being described as incredibly good looking.  None of them are short and squat with buck teeth.  Every single lead character is a stunner.  It would have been nice for an ordinary character or two to be in there somewhere.

The main fault is that the story doesn't so much finish as just stop. There are whole groups of characters who still haven't met or interacted with any of the other cast yet.  The author characcter has witnessed spiders attacking someone, but made no impact on the overarching story at all.  The survivalists haven't even seen the spiders yet.  Indeed they're wondering if the spiders are real or just conspiracy.

This is because the story will conclude in book 2 - Skitter - which I am going to buy with no real qualms.

While I appreciate the fact that I probably wouldn't have picked up a 700 page book about flesh eating spiders destroying the world, a bit more effort to provide some closure to storylines in this one would have been good.

My final verdict on this will probably only be definite after I read Skitter.

Number 52 - The Walking Dead vol 14 - No Way Out

The saga continues.

Since landing in Alexandria, the programme seems to have taken all the main story beats straight from the comics.  This volume covers the second half of season six almost exactly (with the slightly different cast of course (no Daryl, Andrea in the Carol role etc)

The horde doesn't arrive at the town in the same way as it did on TV but essesntially it's the same story of the first battle for Alexandria.  Another regular from the TV passed on to the other side.

Counting down the volumes till Lucille makes her impact on assorted members of the cast.

The writing continues to be top notch.  The Rick/Carl relationship is deeply moving.  Moreso in that Carl in the comics is still not in double digits.  Sadly Chandler Riggs chose to age between seasons and failed to remain the correct playing age for the character.  I think that displays a deep irreverence for the source material.

Volume 15 has now dropped through my door and will be read as soon as I finish the novel I just started (this is a catch up and vol 15 will be book 56)