Number 18 - The Searching Dead - Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell is another of those writers I've been reading for decades and one of a select few by whom I own 40 separate books. This is one of his more recent, though I'm still slightly late to the party on it as it's part one of a trilogy that was completed a year or two ago.

Ramsey has never been a writer of schlock horror.  He has always relied on building an atmosphere that unnerves rather than going for the big loud scary stuff. That's not saying he can't write a set piece, he certainly can, but he earns them and they have so much more impact because we go into them with our nerves already on edge.

This book is no exception. Young Dominic Sheldrake lives next door to a graveyard.  The night before he starts at his new grammar school he witnesses a strange man in the cemetary. The next day he recognises the strange man as one of his new teachers, Mr Christian Noble. Meanwhile, an elderly neighbour claims a man at her spiritualist church has brought her deceased husband back. No prizes for guessing who the new man might be.

It turns out that Mr Noble is far from your average history teacher, and soon his malign influence is causing problems for many people. He has plans that involve the elder gods, and that's not good news for anyone.  But what can one young teenager and his two best friends do to stop him?

The setting is a brilliantly drawn small town in early 1950s England. The school and its environs feel absolutely real. I wouldn't be surprised if the more mundane (as in not supernatural rather than not interesting) parts of the story might be drawn from Ramsey's own schooling experiences.

Dominic is a very interesting narrator, telling us his childhood memories and always hinting at bad things to come.His relationship with his parents and his two best friends Jim and Bobby are eminiently believable. It's written in Ramsey's usual very formal style and contains a few of those well earned set pieces.There's a definite wry mordant humour running through the storytelling.  Simply naming the villain of the piece Christian Noble is a prime example

One thing I've touched on in other reviews is how much I dislike it when characters instantly believe in the most extreme supernatural events without any rationalisation (William H Hanrahan i'm looking at you here). One of the genius aspects of Ramsey's writing is that the characters struggle so much to comprehend what's going on around them. When strange spectres with gibbous blobs for faces are following them, they still don't believe the evidence of their own senses even as they flee in terror. This self-doubt lends an almost hallucinatory feel to his writing.

The story felt unfinished in this volume.  Nothing that happened quite lived up to the foreshadowing of disaster in his life - but there are two more volumes to go. As stated, this is book one of a trilogy.  Book two is on my reading list for the very near future and I aim to fit the whole series in this year.

This is a typical Ramsey novel, creepy as hell (or some malformed further dimension) and a damned good read.

Number 17 - A different Kind of Light - Simon Bestwick

 Another Simon Bestwick scoop.  The book launch for this happens tomorrow and this is the ARC I was sent last week.

This has to be the first time that I've reviewed the same writer twice in a week, but Mr B is a twisted guy who keeps himself busy through exorcising his demons by passing them onto us so there's a lot of material there.

In this one we walk the well trodden path of the protagonist discovering an old film and chasing it up to their cost (see Adam Nevill's Last Days, Ramsey Campbell's Grin of the Dark, Theodor Roszak's Flicker, Paul Auster's Book of Illusion etc).

Familiarity is a good thing in this case and certainly doesn't breed contempt.  The monsters contained in this old film are truly nightmarish.  

Set in a chaotic and unpleasant near future, the story kicks off when the narrator Ash is asked to authenticate the aforementioned film, footage of a famous crash at Le Mans where dozens of people in the crowd were killed when a car ploughed into the stand. In this particular footage, something can be seen hovering over the dead and dying in the crowd. When the creatures turn to look at the viewers of the film, that's when all hell breaks loose.

This isn't paced as quickly as the Devils novella I read last week.  A large proportion of the story is centred on Ash chasing round the country researching the maker of the film. In lesser hands this could feel like info-dump, but Simon manages to use the search for inormation to build the atmosphere. The more we learn about what happened to the last guy, the worse we know things are getting for poor old Ash. One scene in particular is easily one of the best horror set pirces I've read this year so far.  

Ash and Dani are good protagonists and their relationship is a fine emotional backdrop for the story. The chaos and turbulence in the country is never explained, but serves the story nicely.  I'm wondering if it's one of Simon's more cheerful predictions of a post-Brexit Britain 😃

Well worth spending your hard earned cash on, it's available through Black Shuck Books https://blackshuckbooks.co.uk/

There's an online book launch tomorrow Thursday 25th February https://www.facebook.com/events/451228906006232/

Number 16 - Love After Love - Ingrid Persaud

 

This month's book group read.  There is no way I would ever pick up this book through my own choice.  As regular readers of this blog know - romance is not my chosen genre.  To put the word love in the title twice is unforgivable. It makes the book look like something twee and horribly icky.

Because of the title alone, this is one of those books that when you put it down you can't pick it up again.

It's not as twee or icky as it sounds.  It's actually fairly well written and contains some quite tough subject matter.  

But that cover just makes me cringe and not want to pick it up.

The story follows a Trinidadian "family", Betty and her son Solo, and the lodger Mr Chetan.

Betty is a single mother because she pushed her alcoholic wife beating husband down the stairs when Solo was very young. This is told in the first chapter so I don't count that as a spoiler.

Mr Chetan is a local teacher who moves in and becomes a part of the family although, for reasons of his own, he can never have a proper relationship with Betty. When the family secrets are revealed, the unit breaks apart and we follow the three on their separate tangents through life. Will the rifts between them ever be healed?

Each chapter is written in the first person from the POV of one of the three characters.  It's good that each chapter is headed by the name of the character because all three voices are very similar and could easily be confused. The lilting rhythm of the trini dialect it's written in is very easy to read, but should vary for the different voices.

The book paints a good portrait of Trinidadian life. Persaud must be a fan of Trini cooking because there are pages that feel like a recipe book.  Sadly, those are some of the most interesting sections.

It might be an easy read, the prose might be almost poetic, but there's something not quite there for me. I never really connected with the characters. They don't lead particularly fascinating lives. The ending is very emotional, but I wasn't that bothered because of my lack of connection to the characters.

I've read several books about ordinary people doing ordinary things and loved them. But here, it doesn't work. Despite that quote on the front saying that this is Unforgettable, I think I'll have trouble remembering anything about this in a few weeks.

Maybe if it had a title that didn't make me cringe every time I picked the book up, I might have enjoyed the contents more, because, other than the similarity of the narrative voices, there isn't that much wrong with the book.  I can't deny that the prose is good. When she writes about cooking, you can almost smell the spices. She deals with some tough subject  matter without flinching. Objectively, this is an admirable book. I feel like I should have liked this more than I do. But I don't.

Number 15 - The Devils of London - Simon Bestwick

 

From being several years late to the party on my last read, I'm well ahead of the publishers on this one. 

I've been honoured to be asked to beta read a new novella by Simon Bestwick. As this isn't published yet there's no cover art so you can have a picture of the man himself looking pensive.  Or like he needs to use the bathroom - I'm not entirely certain.

I won't say too much as it's very much an early draft still and likely to change before a publisher gets his or her grubby mitts on it.

A group of housemates crowded into a slum in the terraces of London wake one day to find the city is on fire.  Soon they find themselves attacked by a gang of right-wing thugs.  They escape, only to run into a much worse danger of supernatural origin.

The story is told at breakneck pace. It's not as atmospheric as some of Simon's work, but it's just not that type of story.  This one depends on the sense of panic and confusion, with a large dollop of demonic terror thrown in for good measure. 

 It never lets up for a minute as our steadily decreasing cast move from pantry to frypan to fire, to firestorm, to deep pit of fiery lava, etc and hope becomes a long dreamed of memory.

 There's enough of Bestwick's normal political undertones to really piss off the right-wingers. The chase is genuinely exciting and the characters are fleshed out enough that we hope they'll make it to the end without being char-grilled.

For most of the rest of you, you'll have to wait till it's formally published. You've got a damned good read waiting for you.  I look forward to reading the finalised version myself.

Number 14 - The Ruins - Scott Smith

 

My regular readers may remember that I reviewed A Simple Plan at about this time last year, also by Scott Smith, and thought it was an amazing book. It was the on the strength of that that I bought this one.

And I wasn't disappointed in the slightest.  This is a horror story par excellence. 

A group of friends holidaying in Mexico go on a day trip, looking to find the brother of one of their new friends who went looking for an archeological dig and hasn't returned yet.

In the depths of the jungle they stumble across a hill covered in strange red flowers and vines. Suddenly a group of natives appear and order them away. When one of the friends steps into the vines, events take the first of many dark turns.

The sense of dread builds rapidly and never really falters. From the moment they find themselves on the hillside we know that this is going to be a full on nightmare. Smith has built the characters nicely in the preamble to reaching the hill and we care about what might (or will) happen.

The quality of the writing means the suspension of disbelief required for the story is never an issue, as wild and fantastical as the events become in the last two hundred pages, we're so mired in this story that we accept it. He's careful to throw things at us in stages, giving us a steady reveal of quite how bad a situation they've found themselves in. Every time we think things can't get worse...

He switches viewpoints frequently between 4 of the 6 stuck on the hillside. It's possible to argue that they made silly decisions at times, but we're far enough inside the characters' heads to understand why they did the things they do. These are brilliantly realised normal people stuck in an insane situation. We know that these people are in a horror story.  They don't. They're going to make mistakes.

There are some errors in the book.  But they're almost certainly down to the publisher and not the author. In some German speech the English word "Two" is used consistently instead of the German "Wo". 

The thing that bugs me most about this book is that it's described in the reviews on the cover as a Suspense Novel, and not a horror story.  Even The Stephen King quote shies away from the word. Two of the internal reviews call it what it is, but it's disappointing that the others don't. It's not a shameful thing for a book to be a horror story, especially not when it's this damned good.

This is a scary, tense and brilliant horror novel. I just wish Scott Smith would write more books.  He's one of the best out there. Every bit as good as Stephen King at his best.

Number 13 - Peter Crombie: Teenage Zombie - Adam Millard

 After the brilliance that was Lanny, I needed something that would be as far away in style and content as possible so as to not invite comparison. A palette cleanser or an amuse bouche you might say.

This was an ideal choice.

When Peter Crombie is killed by a golf ball while walking past the golf course, his life becomes a lot more interesting.

His father is your stereotypical mad scientist and ressurrects his son in his lab in the basement. Soon Peter has made friends with a local ghost of a vampire and finds himself on a quest to stop a vampire queen from eating the local am-dram group.

Being aimed at the younger market this isn't as gruesome as Millard's other books but it certainly doesn't suffer because of that.

The story is told at breakneck speed and has punchlines almost every other paragraph. The jokes have a pretty good hit rate (although for me that could be at least partly down to my love of  Dad jokes) and this is therefore a damned funny piece of writing. There are atrocious puns galore, sideswipes at celebrity culture and some mercifully non-pc running jokes .

Adam Millard can always be relied on for a quick easy and laugh out loud funny read. There is a sequel to this sitting on my shelves and I will certainly be reading that sooner rather than later. 

This is a genuine guilt free fun read. If you want cheering up, go out and buy Adam's back catalogue. you won't regret  it.

  

Number 12 - Lanny - Max Porter

 

Where to start with this one?

Shortly before starting this blog I read Max Porter's first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers which was very good and very odd and was enough to make me pick this one up last year.

I was worried in the first few pages that this might be pretentious codswallop because of the tricksy looking gimmicks he plays with the typesetting but I needn't have been.  Pretty soon, the visual tics were just another part of the storytelling and I was fully engulfed in the weird little world Porter builds in these pages.

I won't say anything much about the storyline.  I think this is a book that benefits from a completely cold read. 

I will say though that I cannot remember the last time a book had this much of an emotional impact on me. 

The style of writing is unusual to say the least. Part 2 of the book is unique in my experience. the way he wrote that sequence left me reeling. Flashing from viewpoint to viewpoint, giving us ever so brief glimpses at what's happening from a myriad of differing voices.  It's an experiment in writing that could have gone horribly wrong, but IMHO he pulls it off in spades.

In the first section, we're introduced to Lanny's parents, his new art teacher Pete, and  Dead Papa Toothwort, a spirit that inhabits the local countryside, and glimpses of assorted villagers. Through these people's perspectives we build a picture of Lanny himself. This section alternates between funny and deeply moving with ease. A sense of tension builds discretely  The community is brilliantly realised to the point you can nearly smell it.

From part 1 we're so close to the characters at the centre of the story that the events in part 2 are as traumatic for us as they are for the family. The voices of the village add to that trauma, layer by layer. The maelstrom of voices is almst unbearable. It actually made me question my own attitudes when I've read real life reports of similar events.

This is one of the most remarkable books I've read since I started writing this blog. I am truly gobsmacked at the force of storytelling in this book. I loved some of these characters intensely while I was reading it.  Little Lanny himself is one of the most remarkable portraits in words I've ever read. 

This is by turns a moving family drama, a horror story and an enigmatic fable. I can't praise this book highly enough. 

9.9/10 purely because I refuse to give perfect 10s.

Number 11 - Somebody Come and Play - Clare McNally

 

Yet another 80s mass market horror novel with a gloriously tacky cover. I have way too many of these. 

I was in the mood for something trashy and this certainly fits the bill.  There are four other books by Clare McNally listed in the front of this one. Three of those are the Ghost House trilogy so proudly proclaimed on the front cover. A quick clance at Amazon shows she was a busy little bee in the 80s with around a dozen books to her name.

I wonder if they're written as well as this one was.  If they are, they're probably not worth picking up unless the price is in pennies rather than pounds (which a few of them are - these are not books that have accumulated fiscal value).

If this one is a fair one to judge by, they don't have much literary value either.  I imagine that if I'd read this in my early teens I might have been impressed - but even by my late teens I was starting to read good horror authors and I would have let her fall by the wayside.

The basic story of this is a haunted house with a devil ghost child who lures people to violent deaths on a fairly regular basis. She uses an imaginary toy room to attract children to her for her own reasons that we discover very late on.

It's not very well written at all. None of the dialogue feels real. None of the characters are convincing. The denouement lacks drama or tension and it's generally not scary. There are numerous typos and sloppy editing on view throughout.

So why did I enjoy reading it?

I have no idea on this one. I know how bad it is. It's not so bad it's good.  It's just bad. But I had fun with it anyway. The storyline is just good enough to keep the interest going and there are character deaths I didn't see coming despite the overfamiliarity of nearly every aspect of the plot. 

Basically this is pure trash but fun pure trash. I'm glad I only paid £1.15 for it from whichever second hand place I found it in whenever I bought it (and that could be decades ago...). 

This is not an investment book. This is a switch off the brain and critical faculties book. It might be a good intro to horror for a younger reader. The prose has no gloss to it, which makes it a very easy read.

Maybe the nostalgia factor is a reason I liked it. I honestly don't know why.

Number 10 - Carol - Patricia Highsmith

 

I keep saying I don't like romance novels.  And I genuinely don't.  There are only two endings to a will they/won't they scenario and I've always contended that that's ok for a subplot but not for the whole central drive of the story.

However, this is by Patricia Highsmith and this is one of three of her books that I hadn't read yet. I've been reading her books since I was in my teens and I've not found one I disliked yet.

Originally published as The Price of Salt, under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, this is Highsmith's second novel. It was released in 1953 and is very much a product of it's time. 

By today's standards the plot is unremarkable. But back when it first came out it was quite revolutionary.  It's credited as being the first lesbian romance novel with a happy ending (although the sacrifices one of the characters has had to make somewhat undermine that score)

The plot is fairly basic. Therese is working part time in a department store when she serves Carol and is immediately fixated with her. This being New York in the early 50s, she tries to keep her feelings under wraps even while a relationship develops between them and they start spending lots of time together.

Highsmith's greatest talent was always her ability to drop you in the heads of her protagonists. This book is no exception. The whole book is told in close third person from her point of view.  We know every thought in Therese's head from the first stirrings of love to her full acceptance of the way she feels.

Guilt is always a primary motivator in Highsmith's novels, and again, this is no different. Only this time it's not guilt over some act of violence, it's over her feelings for Carol.  Again, this is 50's America.  Lesbians were something "other", a love that dared not show its face.

The prose is dry in places. I'm not sure Highsmith was at the height of her talent with this book, but it's still fairly compulsive reading. 

In the afterword in this edition, Highsmith describes Therese as a bit of a wet blanket and I pretty much agree with that.  But, as Highsmith also points out, it's a result of the time and place and her upbringing.  Despite her wet blanket qualities, she never comes across as a whiner or annoyingly self-centred. 

An interesting thing to note is that Highsmith recounts her inspiration for the story being when she herself worked in the dolls department of a large store and found herself transfixed by a customer - a scene we read in chapter two of the novel.  When Highsmith calls Therese a bit of a wet blanket, how much self-deprecation is going on there?

This isn't the novel to convert me to romance reading.  It is however still a damned good read. From a historical viewpoint it's a great portrait of a moment in time and the attitudes that were prevalent. And, being written contemporaneously, we can be assured there's no looking back through any tinted goggles. We also know it made a huge impact at the time.  The two leads didn't have to die for their sins and were allowed to love each other.  That makes this a hugely influential book.

Since the film was released a few years back, this is easily available again in any reasonably good bookstore. If you want a copy of The Price Of Salt with the original pen name on it, you'll be looking in the region of £300-£500. You're probably better off going with a modern copy.