Number 39 The Walking Dead the Alien - Brian K Vaughan & Marcos Martin

 There's not really much to say about this.  It's not by the usual TWD writers. It's a tie in with some series I've never heard of - I think it's called The Private Eye. It's very very short.

The artwork is actually better than the majority of the regular TWD issues.  The story is pretty basic, two characters trying to escape Barcelona at the beginning of the apocalypse featured in the regular series.

It's well done, engaging for the half an hour it takes to read (if you stop to admire the visuals).  I might have got more out of it if I'd known the comic it's crossed over with.  I still might have been a bit miffed at the cost of such a slim volume.  

If you want to read this, and it is certainly worth reading, I'd advise tracking down a used copy as this is overpriced/

I'll not deny the quality of the binding etc, but for once I find myself thinking I paid a bit over the odds for this. 

Number 38 - The Pilo Travelling Show - Will Elliott

 

Last year I read the Pilo Family Circus, a surreal, grotesque and frankly quite hilariously disturbing book about the strangest circus you could imagine. It seemed to end quite definitively, but that didn't stop Will Elliott writing the sequel.

And boy am I glad he did. 

This is just as good as last year's offering, going deeper into the lore of the Pilo circus, but still leaving those explanations loose enough that we don't get disappointed with them. Sometimes trying to absolutely explain everything can get in the way of a good story. Elliott trusts his readers to fill in around the edges.

Jamie, the reluctant clown recruited in book 1 is once more dragged into the strange world of freaks, clowns and powdered souls. There's been a change in management in the circus since the events of the last book, and chief clown Gonko isn't happy. What follows is a series of plots,  double and triple crosses involving horrific violence, slapstick and more twists than a twisty thing.

There are scenes that are truly disgusting (in a good way - this is a horror novel after all) and others that are laugh out loud funny.  One of the reviews on the back cover compares this to a cross between David Lynch and Chuck Palahniuk, and that's a fair comparison. This is brilliantly surreal, compulsively readable and unlike anything I've read before (except for the first book in this series).

It's available through most good booksellers, but you really do need to read the Family circus first or this will be entirely incomprehensible. 

Once again, this is one of the highlights of the year.

Number 37 - The Blurred Man - Anthony Horowitz

 Cheat reads don't get much more cheaty than this. An 80 page children's detective story - I think it may be a novelette rathaer than a novella.

I found this in a charity shop yesterday for 99p and it was worth every penny.

The Diamond brothers are private detectives. Well Tim Diamond is officially a detective, and Nick - his sassy 14 year old brother - is his assistant.  Of course, this being a kid's book, tim is as dense as a very dense thing and Nick is the one with the brains.

In this one they've been asked to investigate the mysterious death of Lenny Smile, head of a children's charity called Dream Time.  He's just been run over by a speeding steamroller and the rich American author who had donated millions to him wants to know where all the money has gone.

It's all very silly. Tim misunderstands absolutely everything that's said. Nick is always there with a witty comment. No one knows anything about the sadly departed Lenny Smile and the Russian State circus doesn't seem like the most inviting place. 

I had to check when this was written (2003) because of some of the references and the fact that some of the jokes might not get past an editor these days - especially in a children's book. 

Not really much to say about other than I can understand why he's one of the more popular children's authors.  This was good fun to read with some very funny comic set pieces.  I can't really complain that the humour is a bit juvenile considering the target audience, but there are some truly shocking dad jokes in there. I've saved them and will be using them as and when the circumstance arises.

Good fun for the little ones.

Number 36 - The Wrack Line - Robert Edric

 

Another cheat read from my expanding collection of PS Publishing novellas. 

This one thankfully wipes out the memory of that other one a few books back and restores my faith in their publishing choices.

This book lives in the hinterland between literary and genre fiction. There's no overt horror, or supernatural going on in this story, but the tone is perfect for a really creepy horror story.

Our unnamed first person narrator travels to a chalet in a decaying seaside town for a break from his existence.

He sees a woman standing in the dunes near his chalet.  Then she turns and wallks away. There's no clue where she disappeared to or who she was. His meetings with a few of the locals add more layers to the mystery of who she was,

The sense of deacay and sadness almost radiates from the page. The mannered prose conjures an atmosphere of something not quite right, although what that something is isn't at all obvious. 

The atmosphere may be ominous throughout, but there's very little drama in the story.  Not much happens at all Even for a 90 page novella, it's short on incident. That's not to say it's boring, at no point can that be given as a criticism.  but the whole thing feels quite slight once it's over, which is a shame because I really enjoyed reading it.

One thing that did bug me... he stays in this chalet for at least six weeks.  It has no running water.  the only source of water is a nearby standpipe.  Also no electric or gas.  I found myself wondering where he relieved himself, and how did he cook all the supplies he bought in the local shop.

Minor criticisms aside, I would actually recommend this quite highly. It's a well written contemplative and atmospheric piece of fiction. We feel as lost as the nameless narrator throughout, with time blurring much the same way as the sea blurs with the sky on the horizon of the view from his dilpidated chalet.

 

Number 35 - the Devil's Paintbrush - Jake Arnott

 

My 200th blog post! It's come around fast - only 2 and a bit years.  

Jake Arnott is best known for his crime novels set in the latter half of the 20th century - The Long Firm, He Kills Coppers, Truecrime.  That's the trilogy that made him famous and rightly so.

This is very surprisingly an embellished true story about the night Aleister Crowley, the infamous practitioner of black magic, ran into Fighting Mac, a very famous general of the British army in the Boer war, in a bar in Paris where he was hiding from a scandal that was about to break regarding his recent posting in Ceylon.

I assumed it was all a flight of fancy and Arnott had just thrown these real life characters together to see what might have happened, but in the afterword, it's explaimed that on the night in question, the two really did meet and spend the evening together.

Arnott used Crowley as a character in The House of Rumour as well. that book is well worth seeking out, it's got a truly unique structure to the story, based on the tarot deck and the story incorporates the Joestown massacre, Rudolf Hess flying to England in WWII to try to negotiate a truce, and Aleister Crowley being hired for nefarious purposes by British intelligence in WWI among many other threads. But I digress.

This is a young Crowley. The year is 1903. The scene, Paris. He is looking to take control of the magick order he is in, and he decides that Fighting Mac (Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald - one of the very few majors to have risen to that rank from being a private with no connections) can help him. 

The chapters alternate between the viewpoints of the two very different characters.  Through flashbacks, we learn of the chain of events that led to Fighting Mac's disgrace, but they're tied into the narrative so well that they become an integral part of the story rather than feeling like info dump.

I made the mistake of googling Fighting mac when I started the book, to find out if he was real, and as a result, I found out quite a major spoiler for the ending.  However, it didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book.  Arnott is a great writer.  I'm not a great fan of historical fiction, but this is briliantly done.  It swept me through the story, I could almost smell the battlefields. 

There were sections so well written I reread the page just for the pleasure of the way the words flowed. 

I recommend this, and all Arnott's work without any reservation.

easy 8/10 maybe higher

Number 34 - Road Rage - King/Hill/Matheson

 

A quick graphic novel to bump the numbers up.

This book contains comic-book adaptations of Stephen King and Joe Hill's collaberative story Throttle, which was written for a Richard matheson tribute anthology, and also the story that Throttle was based on - Duel by Richard Matheson - so memorably made into Spielberg's first full length feature film.

As such, we know that both stories are about a truck with a faceless driver trying to run people off the road.In the Hill/King story, the potential victims are a motorbike gangon their way home from a failed drugs deal.

It also allows for multiple vehicles to be involved and allows the truck to catch a few of them.

Whilst it is a good story it does suffer a little from the fact that the charcaters are not people we want to see survive in the first place. 

They also make the mistake of giving the truck driver a motive.This makes the whole thing less of a rollercoaster than the Matheson story.

The artwork is good but not brilliant.

Duel is by far the better of the two stories.  The truck driver has no motive other than the poor sod in the car overtook him twice. This makes it far more terrifying as it gives a whole "this could happen to anyone" element to the tale. You don't need to be part of a motorbike gang who did something really bad for this guy to come after you.

I assume the text in this story comes direct from the original short by Matheson.  If so, I need to seek that collection out and add it to my exponentially growing TBR. Just the snippets of text by themselves were tension inducing. The artwork adds a whole extra layer of nightmare to this retelling. Everything seems skewed and off kilter.  It's ugly but it works beautifully for the story being told.  

Being a huge fan of the film, I obviously knew how the story would turn out, but taht didn't stop it from being a truly excellent read.

Available from all good bookshops with a graphic novel section, there's no reason not to seek this one out.

Number 33, Albion Fay - Mark Morris

After the last couple of duds I needed something good to cleanse the palette. Mark Morris is a good go-to for that sort of task.

Luckily for me, this book is well up to his normal high standards. It's a nice quick read at 120 pages and pulls one of my favourite tricks in horror fiction.  It's set in an easily identifiable real world, with characters who feel entirely real, and a supernatural element that may or may not be completely imaginary.

Since an ill fated holiday to the eponymous Albion Fay - a holiday cottage in the middle of nowhere, located next to some mysterious caves - Frank's family life has fallen apart.  His twin sister changes after going missing, no longer the confident one, she's distracted and nervous. His parent's already fractious relationship has descended still further into physical violence. 

The unsuccessful holiday happened when he was 10, but the aftereffects are with him decades later.  The story starts at a family funeral nearly 40 years later and flashes back to several different timeframes, steadily filling in as many gaps in the narrative as are necessary.

The gradual reveals are handled masterfully and he builds a steadily increasing atmosphere of dread.  The style of writing is evocative of Graham Joyce and Ramsey Campbell at their best. There are genuine emotional shocks on display and undercurrents of deeper and nastier horrors.

This is the horror of the half glimpsed shape and implied mopnsters, combined with some monstrous behaviour from the very human protagonists. By the time we reach the first flashback, we know Frank quite intimately, and this reader at least, wants to know what made him the way he is. 

Like The Brain from beyond, this book is also written in the present tense.  But this is present tense in the hands of a writer who knows how to use it for full impact.  there is a sense of immediacy to the story that helps drag the reader through to the closing pages and the shocks contained therein. 

This is available online, through the Snowbooks website 

 https://www.snowbooks.com/books/albion-fay/

I highly recommend you treat yourself.
 

Number 32 - The Brain from Beyond - Ian Watson

 When I picked this out of my TBR pile I thought it looked like a fun piece of nonsense. I was half right.

This is the closest thing to a DNF (Did Not Finish) I've had since I started writing this blog. If it had been even 10 pages longer I don't think i would have bothered. Considering that it's only 112 pages, that's quite remarkable.

The problem is the prose style.  it's just irritating.  I'm normally a fan of present tense narrative for the sense of immediacy it brings to the story.  But this book uses it so badly.  Although I don't think there's much that could have salvaged this short of a total rewrite by someone who can write. Just switching tense would probably not have fixed anything.

The story follows some characters on a time machine, going through their history salving from failed time machines. It starts with 25 solid pages of incomprehensible infodump in the form of the worst expositional dialogue I think I've ever experienced. That's nearly a quarter of the book!

Once the actual story gets up and running it doesn't get much better.  Compared to this book, the technobabble in The Unreasoning Mask made perfect sense. And there was less of it.  If I'd had to read the word Multiyottaflop one more time I think I would have binned this book. 

I think it's supposed to be funny. However, writing arch overegged prose with stupid made up words is not a recipe for humour that particularly whets my palette. I don't know what Watson was aiming at with the writing style in this, but he missed it completely.

From the usually reliable PS Publishing this is a real disappointment. At least I know I can clear a couple of books from my TBR pile.  The other Ian Watson book I received in a PS Bundle of books will be heading straight for the charity shop along with this one. 

Number 31 - The Unreasoning Mask - Philip Jose Farmer

 I'm not sure where to begin on this one.

Farmer is a writer I obsessed on in my teens and early 20s and managed to collect more than 40 of his books.  This is one I didn't get around to reading all those years ago, and it has to be said that it has an amazing cover. 

Sadly however, the cover is the best thing about this book by a considerable distance. Other than the  opening line - "The Bolg kills all but one!" 

That does at least grab the interest quite effectively.

There's a lot of imagination on show in the book, as per usual for Farmer.  However it doesn't translate into a hugely enjoyable read.

The situation we're in at the beginning is extremely alien and requires a lot of infodump to bring about any clarity. The central character isn't particularly sympathetic or interesting. 

We know he has been compelled to steal an icon from a temple on an alien world.  The icon is the egg shaped item on that gorgeous cover. It's called the Glyfa (the easiest of the alien names to pronounce in the book) and is sentient and arranged for Ramstan (our hero) to kidnap it. And who is the green robed figure Ramstan keeps seeing? 

What follows next is an exciting chase through assorted layers of technobabble and extreme philosophising on religion and the nature of the pluriverse as they try to avoid the aliens whose god they've stolen.  They also encounter the Bolg from the opening line - a supergiant thing/being that burns and destroys any planet with sentient life.

There are occasional flashes of greatness that reminded me of why I used to love his books. One chapter in particular where Ramstan does nothing but descend in a launch past layers of a 2km tall tree and witnesses all the different species is described so well you can almost see it.  The atmosphere he creates in that chapter is how the whole book should have felt. 

Sadly, he fails to do that.  We spend the first few chapters entirely confused about what's happening. It settles down to something we can follow, but then we get a full 3 chapters of infodump near the end to explain what the Bolg actually is, and soon after we get the worst ending on any book I've read since I started this blog.  

I wanted to love it. Farmer was an old literary obsession after all, and that cover... but he was always in all honesty a little bit hit and miss.  This is a definite miss.  

Number 30 - Loyalties - Delphine de Vigan

 I fond this book in the reduced section of my local Waterstones. I knew nothing about the writer, just that the blurb sounded interesting, it was quite short and it was only a couple of quid.

I've genuinely only just noticed the three faces in that cover art and that's freaking me out a little.

This is translated from the French by George Miller.  He deserves credit for his work here.

The story tells of 12 year old best friends Theo and Mattis, who, like all childhood BFFs, keep each other's secrets, and they share a particularly troublesome one.

Two more central characters are Helene, the boys' teacher, and Cecile, the mter of Matthis. Helene suspects there is something wrong with Theo but has no idea what. Cecile dislikes Theo intensely, she thinks he's a bad influence on her son, but she has her own problems with a recent discovery she made about her husband (not a cliche affair, something much worse).

This is not a happy book.  this is not a book that will see you through the dark evenings with a happy chuckle. All these characters are lost. none of them can cope with their lives.  Helene's quest to help Theo could end her career. Theo's home life is the definition of miserable and he is desperate for a way out, any way out that he can manage.  Cecile's world is falling down around her. And Matthis finds himself unwilling accomplice to Theo's plans.

I raced through this book in just over a day. It's a compulsive read.  George Miller has made a fine job of the translation.  His prose is brisk and emotive without ever straying into sentimentality.  We're presented with these broken lives and left to decide our own feelings.

My only complaint about this book is the ending.  It just seems to stop without truly resolving anything. However, when I make this criticism, I'm reminded of when Gordy tells the story of Lardass Hogan in Stephen King's the Body (filmed as Stand By Me). The other characters say "that was great, but what happens next" which really pisses young Gordy off, the story ended where it needed to. 

I can understand why the book finishes where it does (sort of).  I'm just annoyed because I want to know what happens next. There's a lot up in the air. She's left me wanting to read more. That's normally a good thing. But in this case, maybe I wanted something more definitive as a close to the story than what we have here.

In conclusion, great book, not sure about the ending... either 7 or 8 out of 10.

Number 29 - The Changing - FW Armstrong

 

FW Armstrong is a pseudonym for the usually very reliable TM Wright. I was very excited to find he'd written under another name and that those books were available online for semi-reasonable prices.

And check out that cover! If that doesn't scrwam 80s horror novel, what does?

Sadly, If I hadn't knowwn this was TM Wright, I would never have guessed from the writing.  This is easily the least good thing I've read by him.

The plot involves, as you can probably guess, werewolves. A recurring character of Wright's - Ryerson Biergarten - makes his first appearance in this book. he's a psychic investigator, helping a cop friend investigate what appears to be the work of a werewolf, tearing employees at the Kodak city to shreds.

We're given a number of suspects who all have their own reasons for believing they might be the werewolf and all is revealed in due course. It does feel like he just rolled a dice to decide who it was though.

I spent most of this book assuming that this was the first thing he wrote, and that would account for the slump in the quality of the writing - which only shows the briefest glimpses of his usual genius.

However, on checking the dates, this was published the year AFTER A Manhattan Ghost Story, which is one of my all time favourite books and is one of the 10 books that consistently occupies the top three slots. I find myself hoping that this was one from the slush pile that he gave to Tor and it actually predates the time he found his writing mojo.

The plotting also seems quite lazy. Wright doesn't always bother to make too much sense, but the books normally hold together better than this. A story about investigating supernatural killings should be a lot tighter than this is. The shock scenes don't shock, and there are times where it just feels a bit silly. 

And where's the atmosphere? Wright's writing normally creates a full time sense of unease.  That's missing here among unconvincing stock characters with bad dialogue. 

The most effective sequences are the side plot that barely touches on the main story.

This sounds like I hated the book.  I didn't. I raced through it in two days. It's as easy to read as anything else he's written.  It's just missing that dark twisted heart that I associate with his writing.

I wish I could give this more than a 5/10.