Number 9 - Plunge - Joe Hill & Stuart Immonen

 Now this was good fun.

This is a throwback to all the old 80s horror movies, with some lovecraftian demons and the fate of the world at stake thrown in for good measure.

Mining ship The Derleth (see what he did there) vanishes in the early 80s.  Decades later the distress beacon starts sending out flares and salvage ship the McReady (See what he did there? if not, go watch The Thing) is on the case.

When they get there, they find the derleth has run aground and the crew may or may not be dead. Whatever they are, they're still up and about and talking to, and killing, the McReady's crew.

The artwork is amazingly good. The script is as god as anything else Joe Hill has written.  The aple certainly didn't fall far from the tree in this family.

There are a whole bunch of throwbacks to 80s horror,  the names of the ships, various crew member names etc.  It's going to be wortth a second read to pick up on more easter eggs.

It's surreal, it's gory, it's completely bonkers and a great little cheat read. There's not much else to say about it.  There's no deep hidden meanings or messages - unless try not to let Cthulu out is enough - and I wuldn't call that a particularly hidden message.

But let's go with that - DON'T LET CTHULU GO FREE! BAD IDEA.

Number 8 - Grace - Alex Pheby

 

As regular readers may or may not recall, I read Mordew late last year and was mostly enthusiastic about it. On the strength of that book, I ordered a couple from his back catalogue including this, his first novel.

If it didn't say on the back cover that this was his debut I would never ever have guessed. This is astonishingly good. I have loved pretty much every page of this book.

An escapee from a secure hospital is injured and taken in by an old woman and her granddaughter in their house in the middle of the forest. The relationship between the three of them grows into a strange family dynamic as he recovers. However, the idyll that develops is only temporary and he has to leave and take the girl to the city where danger lies in wait.

Other than the name of the secure hospital, no place names are ever given for the main thrust of the story.  The city is only ever referred to as The City. Likewise the timeframe of the story is uncertain, probably late 90s given the backstory for the old woman. There is no identifiable technology for any given era in the story.

This lack of identifiable time and place lends a timeless quality to the story. It places everything on the edge of our reality and adds to the vague surrealism that occurs throughout.  There's a strange link between this and Mordew in that the name Anaximander appears in both. I'm wondering if this is deliberate or coincidental.

I would struggle to place this in any genre since it has elements of at least four totally disparate ones. And it does it in style.

The writing is of a uniformly high standard throughout. Although the broad strokes of the story might be predictable, the minutiae of plot details are extremely unpredictable. Pheby doesn't follow any conventional path through the story, particularly in the later chapters. He allows a lot to happen off camera that some readers would prefer to be told direct. But this reader here loved the approach.

Alex Pheby has shot straight to the upper tiers of my must read authors list. This is a remarkable book in every aspect. I slowed my reading near the end because I wanted to delay putting the book down for the last time despite the tension inherent to the story. It's very rare that happens to me. 

Get hold of a copy and read it if you like your writing intelligent and compelling. I can't recommend this highly enough.   

Number 7 - West - Carys Davies

 

This month's book group book. A debut novel by a writer with a certain amount of talent.

She apparently has a short story collection or two out and I'm in two minds as to whether I should check them out.

This isn't much longer than a short story itself.  I think it's more of a novella, 150 pages with many blank pages between the very short chapters.

It tells the story of Cy Bellman, a man in wild western times USA who decides to leave his young daughter and travel westwards in search of dinosaurs after he reads and becomes obsessed by a newspaper article about giant bones found in a valley.

The chapters alternate between his travels and the life of Bess - his daughter - on the farmstead.

The prose is pared right back to the absolute minimum, which is a good thing in this instance. His journey stretches for a couple of years and detailed accounts would have become very irritating with the sheer pointlessness of his trip.

It's a very quick read and seems to buzz with layers of metaphor about life's journey.  However, because the prose is so sparse, it's difficult to feel any sympathy for the plight of any of the characters.  It's certainly impossible to sympatyhise with Bellman.  I just thought he was a horrible father, and a rather pompous and stupid character. The motivation we were given for him just wasn't convincing enough to justify what he put himself through.

The two men in the hometown section of the book are suitably creepy with their intentions but I felt no sense of wanting their intended victim to escape.  I didn't really care. This section of the story maybe needed more physical depth than the sparing detail we were given.

Having said all that I was really enjoying the read.  the pacing was fine, the prose actually quite accomplished.  It was reminiscent of Annie Proulx for most of the book. Then the ending came and she let herself down entirely with at least three really stupid coincidences, totally impossible action and a huge and gaping plot hole.

If the ending had been satisfactory, I would have no issue with looking up more of her books.  However, when she tanked it he way she did... I'm having major second thoughts.

Numbers 5 & 6 - The Walking Dead vols 31 & 32

 

And finallly, the saga is finished. 

You could argue that Kirkman cheated on the rebuilding society bit by having Rick and Co stumble across the Commonwealth which was three quarters of the way there and just needed a nudge in the right direction and you'd probably be right.

But that flaw in the storytelling aside, this was a worthy and unexpectly emotional end to the series, I wasn't good enough at escaping spoilers to avoid learning about the major death in one of these two volumes but still when it came it was a real shock.

the final story arc, after the last time jump was a really nice way to tie up all the threads left behind.

These will be making regular trips down from my bookshelves over the coming years.  It's been a great series, the pace it's kept up and the knowledge that not a single character in it is safe has been amazing

I'll soon be returning to the tv version to see how that pans out. In the meantime, I foresee these coming down from the bookshelves for an easy exciting read on many occasions in the coming years.  

I'm genuinely going to miss these characters and that's about as high a compliment as you can pay to a series like this.

Number 4 - The Keep - F Paul Wilson

 Another of those old 80s paperbacks with the glorious covers I have lying aound the house.

I wish some publishers would go back to this type of cover.  They really do have a magic about them.

This is one book that fulfills the promise of the cover as well. 

Nazis versus vampires. It's certainly the first time I've come across this combination. Thrown into the mix are an elderly and infirm Jewish scholar and his daughter, and a mysterious stranger.

 It opens with an SS officer, swiftly rising through the ranks, being called into his commanding officers office and sent to help a major in a remote outpost in Transylvania. the Major has sent an urgent plea for help "Request immediate relocation, Something is murdering my men"

So off he goes with his squadron of Einsatzkommandos to render their assistance in their own inimitable way. 

The scene is set for a showdown between human evil and a centuries old force of nature.

The Major in charge of the Keep is not a member of the party. The only reason he still has rank is because of his record for heroism in the previous world war. His refusal to join the party is the reason why he's been shunted off to a remote outpost where it's not expected anything will happen. Out of sight, out of mind. How wrong the high command were... This gives us a relatively sympathetic German character to follow in the first third of the book.  It also provides a more balanced view of the Germans that at least one of them is a good guy at heart and not all Germans were nazis. As we find out later on, his reasonable nature has more influence on the plot than we realise.

The truly sympathetic characters (the Jewish scholar and his daughter) don't make much of an appearance early on in the book, and it's over a hundred pages in before they are taken to the Keep so we need someone we can actually not want to see immediately slaughtered to follow early on. 

The novel is surprisingly well written (apart from a laughable sex scene) and very well paced. This is one of the few books to reference Vlad Tepec and Dracula as a central plot point without making it a hackneyed cliche. 

The supernatural villain is genuinely scary and the human villains suitably nasty and cowardly.  It's a pleasure to read of the gradual thinning of their ranks. 

The story takes a few unexpected twists and turns, and with 10 pages to go, I had no idea if good was going to win over evil.

Apparently this is book number 1 in a 6 book series.  I have one other in my TBR.  I will certainly be tracking down the others.

Numbers 2 and 3 - The Walking Dead volumes 29 and 30

 And stupid blogger won't let me post the two pictures side by side. 

I didn't quite finish the series last year, still got a handful left.  The whisperer war came to an end and the attempts to rebuild sciety continue apace.  

However, the mysterious voice that Eugene has been talking to on the radio turns out to be from a society that has well and truly got back on its feet. 

These two issues deal with a team and their journey to meet these people and our first visit to the Commonwealth. 

On the surface, things seem good, what would pass for normal in society today. But there are dark undercurrents as you would expect in the Walking Dead.  In this case, a strictly enforced class system.  The evils of today's society laid bare.

In a world where the walkers have brought everyone down to the samew level, is there really any excuse to bring class warfare back into the mix?

These are the questions being asked in the latest two volumes. 

 There isn't the all out sense that anyone could die at any moment any more.  the pace has relaxed considerably. This is because it's no longer about survival.  It's about the rebuilding, and that's not possible if you're still running scared.

The commonwealth makes for a nice contrast with the previous enemies, the whisperers.  The whisperers were entirely feral. The Commonwealth are the exact opposite.

With only two volumes left, it looks like an interesting close to the series.

2021 - Number 1 - NVK - Temple Drake

 My first book of the year... needs to be something good.

What's my least favourite genre? Romance.

What's my least favourite subgenre of romance?  Paranormal romance.

I know what would be a good book to start the year... a paranormal romance novel by someone with a silly name like Temple Drake.

And goddamn it's a really good start to the year. Temple Drake is a pen name for Rupert Thomson.  If Rupert Thomson wrote a diary of how often he put the bins out I would read it.  He has one of the most hypnotically readable, eloquent and beautiful styles of any writer I know.

And his writing is in full force here.  It needs to be because the story is admittedly a bit thin.

Zhang Guo Xing is a wealthy businessman in Shanghai. One night in 2012 he runs into Naemi Vieno Kuunsela, a beautiful blond Finnish girl, in a nightclub. They embark on a passionate affair.

Alternating chapters give his and her viewpoints on events from the start to the end of the affair.  However, she isn't your ordinary woman you might meet in a nightclub.  From the prologue we know she was born sometime around 1550 and is some type of ghost or vampire. The story covers his gradual realisation that there is something not normal about her.

That's pretty much it for the storyline.  There are no vampire wars or werewolves to battle,  It's a love story between a man and a 460 year old blood drinking ghost. She's not a danger to anyone, especially not him.  He's probably a far less pleasant character than she is - this starts for him as just another in a long series of affairs before it turns into a genuine love story, whereas she has her own obvious reasons for not wanting to get involved but finds she can't help herself.

The exotic setting is evoked perfectly by Thomson's extraordinarily lucid prose.  He  really is such a good writer it makes me wonder why I bother trying to write anything of my own because I could never reach his standards. The relationship between the two leads is similarly brilliantly done. The obsession on both sides provides more than enough drama to move the story along. Thomson has always had a particular skill at making burgeoning romances something interesting to read, to his skills are on top form here.

For me to read a paranormal romance is remarkable.  For me to already be thinking this might be in the top 5 books I read this year, despite the genre, is even more unbelievable. 

A great start to the year. Go out and buy it, you won't regret it.

 Available from all good bookshops, and probably a few bad ones too.