Number 80 - The Walking Dead vol 23 - Whispers into Screams

The saga continues

These really are excellent cheat reads. 

After 23 volumes I'm running out of things to say about them. 

This is slow paced compared to some issues, but this is setting up what would appear to be major plotlines.  I couldn't help but notice while I was looking for the next volumes online that one three or four down the line is called The Whisperer War, which suggests this group is here for the foreseeable.

There were sections of this that filled me with a righteous anger with the behaviour of some of the characters - always a good sign that you're still emotionally attached to these people.

Carl seems to have turned into a bit of an idiot as he's grown up, but the petty jealousy towards him from people who should know better (Gregory - I'm looking at you) is frustrating for the right reasons. 

I'm only 9 volumes off the end now... and I don't know where the story goes from here, but it's been a great journey so far, and I can't see the writers letting us down in the final section of the story

Number 79 - The Crone - Bill Garnett

 

Yet another 80s horror with a tacky cover. I have no idea where or when this crawled onto my shelves.

I've never heard of Bill Garnett and Google doesn't give many clues... although this edition is currently on Amazon for a bargain £95. 

In my review of the Jack Ketchum I finished recently, I talked about how you need to give the reader characters that they care about before you start killing them off. This book breaks that rule completely. 

The central character, Peter Stone, is an entirely selfish and self-obsessed man. He lucked into a rich marriage when he got a tycoon's daughter pregnant and managed to start his own business with her family's money. He sleeps around and has no interest in his wife further than not losing his grasp on her cash.

The most sympathetic character in the book is actually the crone of the title. Magda lives in a dank attic room in a boarding house, in desperate hope that her daughter, Peter's new secretary, will call. Her daughter is too busy having an affair with her new manager. For the first hundred pages we hear a lot about Magda's background on the violent streets of post WWII Europe, including the less than romantic night that led to her fleeing to England with a new life inside her.

When the affair ends and the daughter takes drastic action that backfires badly, Magda draws on her knowledge of the occult to set in motion a ghastly revenge.

Despite breaking the rules about making us care for the characters, this is actually a damned good book.  It's no masterpiece, certainly, but I was hooked. Bill Garnett, if that is his real name, knows how to pull the reader into the story. Chapters are told from the viewpoints of random people who intersect with Peter's and Magda's lives. These characters never reappear, but their contributions give nice alternate viewpoints on the events.

The final two chapters were a touch underwhelming, as what looked like a possibly redemptive arc for Stone turned out not to be, but it was satisfyingly nasty. The monster that Magda creates is genuinely creepy and you wonder if it's possible to stop it, ot if you really want it to stop.

This looks like it should be a guilty pleasure but I refuse to feel guilty about this one.  It's well written with interesting if not likeable central characters, and a vicious streak a mile wide.

Number 78 - The Walking Dead Volume 22 - A New Beginning

 

The war with Negan is over, the war with the dead never ends...

A new beginning is a very apt name for this volume. We are four years ahead of where we last left our heroes.  A civilisation of sorts is rising from the ashes.  Eugene is building windmills, they have fresh bread for the first time in years. Rick has to contend with the idea of Carl leaving Alexandria to live in Hilltop.

A new threat is on the horizon though. A new band of survivors have found their way to the relative safety of these settlements.  Are they to be trusted?  

Further afield, who or what are the whispering dead? This is a new development that has me more intrigued than anything the comics have thrown at me so far.  

I love the fact that everyone is going round on horses now.  Clearly petrol has run out, eliminating what has to be the biggest plot hole in the tv show (at least as far as I've reached).

Rick seems to have let leadership go to his head. He's not as mobile as he once was, since the events at the end of the all out war.  The people worship him almost as a new god. While he claims to not like the attention, his response to a guard who made a mistake was extreme and very un-Rick-like.  

All in all, an excellent volume with nice new characters and a really gripping new storyline.

Number 77 - The Girl Next Door - Jack Ketchum

 

This book has a reputation. Having read it now, that reputation is well deserved.

This is one of the most brutal and disturbing books I've read.  This is a literary equivalent to Funny Games  (the Haneke movie, if you haven't seen it, you need to) in that he makes you the reader complicit in the cruelty you're reading about.

What makes it all the worse is that it's so well written you can't put it down, can't look away from the car crash brutality playing out on the page. 

It takes its time setting things up. It's chapter 25 before the really nasty stuff kicks in.  The previous 24 chapters set up the characters intimately.  We know these people, the first person narrator, David, talking as his 30 something self, describing his meeting and burgeoning friendship with Meg, the eoponymous girl next door, and Meg herself. These are hugely likeable characters even if David is ocasionally as selfish and spiteful as pre-teen boys are wont to be. He's done some bad things with the gang he hangs around with, but he's basically a good kid.

If you have a likeable character, the worst thing you can do to them in a narrative is do them incredible harm, right?

Nope. You can also make your nice pleasant lead chracter an accomplice to the evil at work. With the personable and likeable first person narration, we're watching everything and not doing anything about it either.  This is where Ketchum is Funny-Gamesing us. One of the main points of tension in this book is wondering when or if young David is going to crack. We understand his passivity but we're screaming at him to do something for gods sake before it's too late.

The story is very similar in a lot of ways to Mendal Johnson's equally notorious  Let's go Play at the Adams. I wonder if they were based on the same real life crime. A group of children on the cusp of their teens torture a local girl for their own pleasure.  In this case, also for the pleasure of the girl's guardian, her aunt Ruth with whom she's been sent to live afetr her parents died in a car crash.

This is vastly superior to Mendal Johnson's book though.  It's a long time since I read that book but I remember that it felt gratuitous for the most part. Nothing in this book does.  Ketchum uses the first person narrative to avoid giving every last detail of what's happening.  Things happen to Meg while he's not there that we learn of second hand.  He tells enough that we know what's happened, but without gloating over the detail. There's even one chapter where the narrator refuses entirely to describe what he's seen - for which I was eternally grateful.

The prose is direct and concise.  Chapter 24 is only one sentence long, but that one sentence is possibly the most chilling in the book, because it foreshadows all the bad things to come - in only 7 words.

I feel more sorry for Meg than I do for any fictional character I've read about. She's introduced so well and her personality so well drawn that when things turn nasty, we feel it.  And that's what horror is supposed to do. 

I hate when a writer gives a cast of characters that we'd be happy to see killed off and then just kills them one by one, it can be fun, but it's never scary.  For horror to work, you build a sympathetic cast and it's the people you like that you do the bad things to.  It's far more effective.

That's exactly what Ketchum has done here. This is the reason why this book has the reputation it has.   Not only did he exact horrendous damage on the nicest character in the book, he implicates us the readers in the torture by telling it first person through the eyes of a character that we can't help but like.

A strong stomach is a definite before reading this. But if you have the intestinal fortitude, this is a classic horror novel.  I'm glad I read it, and I will probably read it again at some point, but not for a long time.

This edition also contained two random short stories by Ketchum, which were good, but I was too shellshocked by the novel to really appreciate them.  It also contains an interview with Ketchum and the makers of the film version of the book ... I didn't know there was a film and I have no idea how you could possibly film it. I really don't know if I want to see it.

This book is available from all good booksellers.

Number 76 - Dr Who: Forever Autumn - Mark Morris

 

Continuing with the Halloween theme for October's horror reads marathon...

This one slightly slips on the straight horror front, but is definitely themed on Halloween, and Mark Morris has been writing horror novels for over 20 years so he has a good pedigree and therefore fits regardless.

They're my rules and I make them up as I go along and don't care what anyone else thinks.

This is of course a Doctor Who novel, therefore aimed at younger readers - so we shouldn't expect Booker prize material here. this should be fast paced, entertaining, and easily readable.

It scores on all those points and adds in a fairly creepy vibe with some scenes that would be genuinely scary on tv.

I wish this had been made as a two part episode back when 10 was travelling with Martha. It would have been a high point of the entire series. But the book is all that exists for this story so it will have to suffice.

The Doctor and Martha land in modern day (2008 ish) America in a small town called Blackwood. Ostensibly this is because of a tree in the centre of the town which is made of a black wood, but I suspect was Mark Morris punning on the name of Algernon Blackwood to pretty good effect.

This tree is actually the home to an ancient alien race who, from their descriptions in the book, resemble terrifying versions of Jack Skellington. They've just awoken a few days before Halloween and have amoral plans afoot. These aliens aren't evil.  They just don't even realise what they're doing to the townsfolk isn't nice.  They don't care.

The scene is set for a confrontation with our favourite time travelling hero. But what can he do against these creatures with their ability to turn everyday objects against us and who are practically invulnerable to any normal weapons - including the sonic screwdriver? The final showdown would have been one of the greatest scenes in Doctor Who if it had been televised. 

Reading this book it made me realise quite how far standards have dropped the last two years. 

The prose is as you'd expect for a youth oriented book, with no particular flourishes.  Having said that, Mark Morris keeps the story moving at a cracking pace and manages to generate some genuine tension - especially in the final scene at the Halloween fayre.  

One of the big tests of this type of book is whether you can picture the familiar characters in the story.  Not only could I see them in this book, I could read most of the Doctor's dialogue in David Tennant's voice (his Doctor voice rather than his natural scottish brogue). From a Doctor Who fan as obsessive as Mark Morris, this shouldn't be a surprise, but it's still impressive.

It was a genuinely enjoyable read, possibly one of the best Doctor Who novels I've read - although the last one I read was a couiple of decades ago, so my memory is a tad fuzzy.

If you're a fan of the tv show, you'll enjoy this. Go out and buy a copy.  What more is there to say?

Number 75 - The walking Dead Vol 21 - All Out War part 2

 

As the title suggests, this is the second part of the all out war with Negan.

All bets are off over who lives and dies in this volume.  Each of these volumes covers 6 issues of the original comic.  Negan appeared 4 volumes ago which means he was the lead threat in the comics for two years. 

Since he joined, the pace hasn't let up at all.  This was the biggest issue with season 7 of the tv show - instead of what happened here where Rick only pretyended to be broken, in the tv show he cracked for real.  They then had to spend half the season for him to decide that living under Negan's tyranny wasn't worth it.

 This led to a marked slowing down of pace.  It wasn't as bad second time I watched it, but it was still an issue.

This volume marks the end of me having any idea where the story goes next. I've caught up to my tv viewing.  I have season 9, but I'm watching the spin off show because I know there's a crossover and feel I need to catch up.

All the usual comments about quality of writing et al apply to this volume as much as the others.

Number 74- The Cabin at the End of the World - Paul Tremblay

 

Paul Tremblay has been making a bit of a name for himself over the last few years. He's one of the new rising stars of the horror genre, complete with the obligatory cover quote from the King.

Is he any good though?

On the strength of this, I'm very happy to say yes he most certainly is.

This is the best book so far in my  October horror novel binge.  There's certainly no guilt involved in enjoying this one.

It starts relatively normally.  Wen, a seven old Chinese girl is playing outside the holiday cabin where she's staying with her adoptive parents, Eric and Andrew. She's catching grasshoppers to keep in a jar and study them.  While she's doing this a stranger approaches who introduces himself as Leonard.

The conversation with the Leonard takes a turn for the vaguely threatening when he tells her that nothing that is about to happen is her fault.  Very soon after this, his three associates appear, each wielding an unusual home made weapon.

Wen runs indoors to fetch her two dads and a siege situation develops.  But things take a turn for the apocalyptic when the invaders announce their reason for being there.

The story is told in a tension inducing present tense, lending a sense of immediacy to the increasingly paranoid atmosphere. Tremblay shows a great control over mood and pacing.  The opening chapter is a masterclass in how to turn a situation from normal and nice, to a bit weird, to a distinct sense of threat, without ever making any overt statement of danger.

He manages to keep this mood of strangeness right the way through the book.  Are the strangers insane or genuinely on the mission they state? If their mission is genuine, who would want to live in a world with a god/higher power quite so capricious?

This is one of the least predictable books I've read all year. It's very rare when I get down to the final chapter that I still have no clue which way the story will turn, but this book had me guessing all the way.

In summary, this is a really well written, claustrophobic home invasion thriller with a nasty bite and a thought provoking narrative.  It's shocking and gory by turns and also very moving.  Pretty much every emotion you want to feel when reading a good horror novel is dredged out of you most efficiently by this book.

If his other books measure up to this, I have a new name in my favourite writers list.

easy 8.5/10  possibly higher

Number 73 - The Walking Dead Volume 20 - All Out War part 1

 

The saga continues apace

And what a pace...

Intense is not quite a strong enough word to describe this volume.  

The cover and title probably do a pretty good job of describing the plot of this volume.

The war with Negan has begun for real. A lot of story beats are familiar from the tv show, but still a few surprises. With the diversions from the tv characters alive and who's alive here, it really is difficult to guess who will survive the war.  

The writing is top notch.  King Ezekiel is so much funnier in this than he is on tv.  His exchenge with Michonne in the first few pages gave a genuine laugh out loud moment, despite the build up of tension that was happening.

Negan is a supreme villain. He has some of the greatest lines in the books.  A few of them I wish had made it to tv.  

With a cliffhanger ending like this volume has, I'm so glad I've got volume 21 on standby for when I finish my next full length novel.

Shame these finish on volume 32 - I only have 12 more of these great cheat reads to go - and only 1 more until I know nothing about what happens next, even at a wild guess...

Number 72 - The Unquiet Dead - Margaret Bingley

 

The second book in my October horror marathon.

Margaret Bingley is an entirely new name to me although she apparently published a dozen or so books back in the 80s.

I think I found this in the charity book section in my local Tesco.  With a cover like that I was hardly going to leave this one behind.  I can't help it, it's a weakness I have for 80s horror novels with tacky covers.

Sometimes, just sometimes, the inside is worth the time and effort needed to read a full novel.

The question is, was this one worth it?

I'm honestly not sure. Objectively I know this is a badly written novel.  There are grammar slips bad enough to drag me out of it time and time again. 

It's overblown and melodramatic. The characterisations are strictly cookie cutter.  There are plot holes big enough to drive a busload of devil children through - chief of which is why, if he'd had the childhood described, did one of the characters not have a body covered in scars - a point which the chief character would certainly have noticed. 

The prose, when it is grammatical is plain to the point of bland, and occasionally just plain bad. There isn't a believable conversation at any point in the entire book.

But...

I had fun with this book.  The story is overblown, but intriguing enough.  It does take a few unexpected turns and there's a vein of viciousness at the heart of it that actually captures what horror is supposed to do. The ending was actually pretty nightmarish in concept.

The story -

In the village of Lower Ditton, a pretty young mother is mysteriously killed and the police have no clues as to the identity of the murderer.  She's the third mysterious death in as many months. 

Her sister Amy moves in to help her widow look after the children. She starts to become suspicious that her nieces, along with the rest of the gang they hang around with have more to do with the outbreak of violence in the village than anyone would have predicted.  Can they possibly be guilty of all these horrendous crimes?  And why?  And how does Carlo, the impossibly handsome shop owner she falls in love with, tie into the whole affair?

It probably helps that devil children are a favourite cliched trope of mine. This has a nice take on the old theme that, whilst not original, feels quite fresh. I also like the fact that the characters take most of the book to believe in what's happening around them. Unlike the last novel I read where they accepted every silly plot turn on face value, our heroes in this book take a much more believable route of 'No that can't be true... you must be joking.... oh he's dead now as well... Oh bugger, it's all true...'

It's rare that I want to like a book less than I did, but I can't help it.  Godammit, for all the bad writing I actually enjoyed reading this.I will almost certainly buy more of her books if I see them, and hate myself for doing so. 

I can't give it a score out of 10 - it has a shifting score somewhere betweenn 4 and 7 depending on enjoyment or quality...

Number 71 - Keeper of the Children - William H. Hallahan

 

This being October, I'm sticking with horror to the end of the month - starting with this slim volume with the tasteful cover. Yet another of my 80s pulp horror novels that I have no idea where or when I bought it.  I just know it was in one of my cupboards gathering dust and I'd not read it yet.

When will I learn?

Sadly, this book does not quite live up to that cover.  

It opens well enough. Susan Benson's daughter, Jenna, fails to return home from school. By the time her husband Eddie gets home from working abroad a few days later, she's found out that Jenna has moved in with a local cult and is begging on the streets for them.

 It's up to Eddie and the parents of the other children taken by the mysterious cult leader to  try to get their children back.

This is easier said than done since Kheim, the cult leader, has mysterious powers which he uses to kill the parents off one by one, until only Eddie and Susan are left.

There's a lot of potential in a story like that.  It's a shame this book doesn't deliver on it.

The main problem is that it's too fast paced.  It jumps from scene to apparently unrelated scene with wild abandon.  It's like reading a particularly jump-cutty Michael Bay film without the explosions. I kept thinking I'd skipped a page and going back to check. Some of these jumps miss out vastly important detail - for example, when Eddie and two of the shreddies witness the first murder from a distance (where a scarecrow beats a man to death with an iron bar) and then they enter the house where it happened and phone the police, we are not advised why the three of them weren't locked up and what they told the police had happened.... 

In the one sequence where it does settle down and concentrate on something for more than a handful of pages, it's actually quite good.  Unfortunately, having 20-30 good pages isn't enough to save a novel.

There are major flaws in the plotting too.  Eddie is offered his dream job on a film in Africa.  He goes to the meeting where he's offered this job before he goes to see someone about his missing(ish) daughter. When he turns the job down, tells them he needs a few  more weeeks to try to get his daughter back, the book actually has the exec offering him the job say "Before you hang up, you bastard, tell me something. Is that kid of yours worth it?" I can't remember a less believable line in any book I've read.

The supporting cast do very little supporting.  His wife virtually disappears from the story after the first chapter, just popping in for a half a page here and there. Eddie's son actually does disappear, he only makes one more appearance after chapter one, for about five lines. 

We never learn what exactly is happening to Jenna. From all appearances she's entirely safe in Kheim's care, well fed and watered and not mistreated. She's seen from a distance a few times and pops up in the last chapter for a few pages.  There's never any real tension, no race against time for her to be rescued. There's also no satisfactory explanation as to why the authorities allow Kheim to keep all the children with him when the parents complain that they've run away and they want them back.

We never particularly learn enough about the shreddies to care about them before they're offed. They all die offscreen as well which feels wrong. 

The only onscreen violence involves cats.  One particularly bad jump cut very close to the end gives a five page description of a rat hunt before reaching the point and returning to the actual story. The author also clearly has never watched cats killing rats/mice.  He describes one cat as picking up a dead rat in its mouth and another in one of it's paws and running off.  When did cats gain the oppsable thumb required for that?

The characters seem very accepting of the most ludicrous stretches of reality. Eddie just accepts the (very silly in places) supernatural elements with barely a WTF.  His acceptance so quickly (and his wife's on one of her rare forays back into the narrative) does not assist this particular reader with my own suspension of disbelief.

Apparently Hallahan won a couple of awards for his writing, and one of his books was described by the New York Times as one of the scariest books ever written. I have to assume that this book was a misfire if that is the case. I'll need some heavy duty persuasion before I pick up another book by this writer though. 

This is available on kindle should you wish to experience the deathless prose for yourself. Physical copies appear to be hard to come by online.

Number 70 - Miriam: Memoirs of a Goddess 1: Annunciation - SP Somtow

 

I was honoured to be sent a sneak preview of this new book by SP Somtow.

As my regular readers know, I am a big fan of his work and have been since reading Vampire Junction in my mid teens.

This is a book he started over twenty years ago but couldn't find a publisher for. To be completely honest, I can understand why an American publishing house wouldn't touch it. That's nothing to do with the quality of the writing though, more the subject matter.   

The subject matter is quite obvious from the cover artwork. In this book, Somtow does to the Christian mythology what he did to Greek myths in the Shattered Horse.  I can imagine a large chunk of bible belt America wanting to burn this book for what they would describe as blasphemy.

Note the distinction there - "WHAT THEY WOULD DESCRIBE AS"

Taking an alternate viewpoint on the beginnings of Christianity is always going to annoy some people.  As a Catholic I feel that I am supposed to be outraged by this book.

But I'm not.  

It's not an offensive book in the slightest. It's an alternate history to the established lore, dealing with the life of Mary, mother of Jesus. I hesitate to say fantasy novel since so far there have been no unambiguously supernatural events. Everything has been in the realms of the possible despite the talk of Gods and the wild religious ritual which occurs.

Somtow has used Mary or alternate versions of her before. In his Riverrun Trilogy, the mother of the central character is called Mary and just happens to be the mother Goddess in quite literal terms. Here, he's going to the source of the myth, joining the story of the ever-virgin (although even the Bible tells us Jesus had brothers and sisters) Mother of Christ with the other deities common at the time.  Remember that the Romans were in charge at the time of Christ and they, along with the Greeks had their own religions which were contemporaneous with Mary's upbringing. 

At least one element - Miriam's age at the time of the birth - seems wrong to western ears, but was probably entirely normal 2020 years ago. The rather less than virgin birth could be a sticking point for some easily offended religious types. This is the family of Christ as actual people and not just religious cyphers.

This is part one of a much larger novel.  It opens with a 40 something Miriam being visited by P/Saul who wants to use her for his new religion. There is a meeting with the disciples where P/Saul tries to sell them his new vision with rather limited success. We also have flashbacks to her early life and the events that happen close to her betrothal to Joseph and the birth of her first son. It finishes at a fairly random point, but this is, as previously mentioned, only part one.

If it was written by some hack, you could argue that the more potentially controversial elements of the story are there for effect and to garner publicity, but that's not true here.  Somtow has a powerful story to tell and these are necessary elements. 

I can't wait for part 2 as this has well and truly piqued my interest and I really want to know what happens next.

Number 69 - The Walking Dead Vol 19 - March to War

 

The title and the cover aren't quite as much of a giveaway to the storyline as they may seem.

This is one of the most intense volumes yet.  The stakes are higher than they've ever been. Negan is a real badass, making the Governor look a bit wet in comparison.

It was nice to see one of King Ezekiel's character moments in the tv show came from the comics, although it was with Michonne in the comics and not Carol. It would be kind of creepy if he'd had that scene with Carol since she died early on in this version of the story.

I genuinely didn't know who was still going to be alive at the end of this volume.  I raced through it with bated breath for the action sequences near the end. 

These really are brilliantly done, even if the artwork is sometimes a little bit off.  As zombie apocs go, I think this has taken the crown.