Number 64 - Children of the Dark - Charles Veley

 I love a good "devil child" novel - as regular readers of this blog will know, I also like the occasional bad "devil child" novel (see my review of Margaret Bingley's The Unquiet dead for proof).

What I don't like is tedious medical soap operas that very very clumsily change genre in the last three chapters. 

That unfortunately means that, despite the rather eye-catching cover, this one is a definite miss.

The storyline is supposed to be about children who suddenly turn evil and kill those around them. What we get is the politics and love lives of the staff of the doctor tasked with solving the problem. 

An ex member of staff is sleeping with his receptionist whilst planning a hostile takeover of the clinic run by our noble doctor, who also has to deal with troubles at home and the fallout of a legal case that is referenced many many times. The receptionist is feeling guilty about cheating on her military vet husband who has serious PTSD. All this is going on instead of the story about children going mad and killing people.

Also in place of juicy shreddies, we get seemingly endless pages of medical detail on how to separate out viral particles, medical jargon and gobbledygook that all turns out to be pointless when the source of the plague of suddenly violent children is revealed.

There really isn't much to recommend this.  It's been in my TBR for probably 20 years and it really should have stayed there.  That Les Edwards cover really is the best thing about it. 

One of my biggest questions - the lead character is called Neils - is that pronounced Kneels or does it rhyme with Miles? I was switching pronunciation all the way through.

A lot of the time, these mass market paperbacks from the 80s are worth silly amounts of money.  This isn't one of those. If you see a copy going cheap online - ignore it.  It's not worth your time. 

File under "I read this so you don't have to".

Number 63 - The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths - Harry Bingham

 

Harry Bingham  knows how to give good title. This is the third book in a series.  The first two are called Talking with the Dead and Love Story With Murders.  The series is narrated in first person by a detective in rural South wales called Fiona Griffiths.

That makes this a more than slightly ominous title for book three. However the strange death is more figurative than literal. Fiona has to go undercover to solve a serious fraud case which seems to have branched out into murder. She's not well known for her emotional stability at the best of times and finds her new undercover identity supplanting her own.

This is one series that seems to improve as it goes on.  The first was very good, but turned a bit silly near the end.  It was well enough written though that I had no hesitation in picking up book 2.  Admittedly, even if I had doubts, that title, Love Story with Murders, would have persuaded me. Book 2 either managed to hold back on the silliness or incorporate it more naturally into the narrative.  

Book 3 is the best of the series so far.  despite being nearly 450 pages, the p[lot zips by at a cracking pace and it feels like half that length.  

There still is a level of silliness in this, some of what she does would almost certainly have blown her cover (or just plain had her killed), but it's convincing enough while you're reading that it's easily forgivable. Apart from anything else, it's too entertaining to nitpick. 

I have book 4 on my shelves and will be reading that in the not too distant future.

Number 62 - Joe Hill's the Cape Fallen - Ciaramella Howard Daniel

 

In Joe Hill's The Cape, Eric, the anti-hero/villain of the piece, disappears for three days at the beginning of his killing spree. In this story, the writers of the original graphic novel fill in the gap in the narrative.

What did he do on those three days? the answer is another set of murders - and they're here for you to see in all the gory detail.

This is a well drawn, well written and gleefully nasty graphic novel. Subtlety is not an option here.  We get more of Eric's backstory, letting us understand a bit more about why he's the way he is. We get a nice bunch of shreddies who may or may not deserve what's about to happen. and we get a bunch of gruesome killings.  

No great depth to it, no hidden meanings. Some ironic humour, and good attention to detail.  I particularly like the callback on the final death to an event early on in the book. 

The artwork is good with some amazing full page and double page spreads.

If you're looking for a good way to kill a half an hour or so, you can do a lot worse than reading this.

 

Number 61 - Light Perpetual - Francis Spufford

 

This month's book group book.  Francis Spufford is a brand new author for me and I had no idea what to expect from this. It's not a book I would have picked up under normal circumstances.

It's sold as a big high concept novel. The reviews talk about his originality. 5 children are killed when a bomb hits a branch of Woolworths in the London Blitz.  What might have happened if they'd lived? A sort of reverse It's a Wonderful life.

The problem is with reversing that is this. The original version of events takes up the first five pages and the alternate version takes up the remaining 300. There's no real links between their lives, they cross over occasionally but not often.  Basically, it's snippets from the lives of five people who were once in the branch of Woolworths on a day when it didn't explode.

 That's not a strong hook for a story.

We get glimpses into each of their lives with 15 year gaps, similar to the old 7 Up programme. I kept expecting there to be some kind of reference to the central conceit that these were just "what if" lives, but nothing concrete ever appeared. there was no joining thread between the narratives and it all felt pretty pointless.

The opening chapter was bloody awful.  poorly written, try-hard creative-writing-course-first-day standard. The rest of the book was an improvement.  In places it's actually very well written. The chapter with the 50 year old Alec taking his granddaughter to the park was beautifully done. However, there are also lots of places where I found myself skimming the text because he was waffling on a bit and not being all that interesting.

The characters were just about worthy of the title "Character".  None of them were particularly complex. Spufford's idea of depth of character is to have the dishonest property dealer a lover of all thing operatic, and making the skinhead nazi a closet gay.

There no real twists or turns.  A lot of it is entirely predictable if not cliched. I'm afraid the biggest compliment I can pay this book is that (after the first chapter) it's mostly quite readable. The most interesting this about it is that the names of the characters were taken from a list of the dead when a shop was blown up in the London Blitz. It's an easy read and I blasted through it in a couple of days.  I probably won't remember a thing about it by next week though.

A generous 6/10 for the occasional section with good prose. 

Number 60 - Outcast volume 5

 

The saga continues apace.

After the doom and gloom of the previous 4 volumes (not that that's a bad thing, I like well portrayed doom and gloom) suddenly there's help for Kyle and his family and hope for a solution to their problems.

Unfortunately, any successes he scores are bound to be met with resistance and we see the arrival of a new leader of the possessed by the end of this volume.

Not really much to say that hasn't been said before.  

I have a slight issue with one of the bad guys bearing too close a similarity to the Reverend.  the cast is growing, so we can probably expect shock good guy deaths in the not too distant future - this is the guy behind the Walking dead after all. 

There are only 3 more volumes of this available. i notice the most recent was released this year.  I don't know if that's the final or if the comic that these compile issues of is still ongoing...

I'll find out soon enough.

Number 59 - Broken - Karin Slaughter

 

Karin Slaughter must be the most appropriately named writer in history.  She writes gruesome crime/police procedurals featuring some spectacularly messy crime scenes. 

One of the best things about her books is that you have no idea who will actually survive, or how much will be left of them. This is no exception, and I was convinced that yet another of her regular characters was about to meet a nasty end.  Whether they did I'm not going to say.

I'm a bit late to the party here.  There are about 6 more in this series already.  In this book she manages to say goodbye to Grant County as the central location.  Despite Sara having left Grant County a few books previously, she hadn't truly said goodbye to the town or made peace with some of its inhabitants.  

This opens with a young student murdered by the lake just before Sara returns to her parents' house for Thanksgiving.  The prime suspect for the killing is arrested and confesses.  However he then kills himself in the jail cell and writes "Not me" on the wall in his blood as he dies.

Sara has a very personal grudge against Lena Adams, the arresting officer and calls in Will Trent from the GBI to investigate the deaths. Lena and Sara are both characters we sympathise with. Putting the antagonism between the two heroes (flawed as they may be) creates a huge amount of tension at the heart of the book. 

The story moves at a cracking pace and, as previously mentioned, we don't know who will live till the end of the book.  Sara and Will are both in the sequels so they're in the clear, but the rest of the cast don't have that luxury. I suppose if I'd read this when it came out, I wouldn't have had even that reassurance.

The plotting is as strong as ever, with the various plot threads pulling together to reach a satisfying conclusion. I'm not sure it would be possible to pick out the murderer early on in this but that's not a bad thing. It's a procedural as much as it is a detective story and the journey to the solution is as important as the answers to the questions. The pieces of the puzzle are carefully laid out and there's a lot of pleasure to be had from working out various character's motivations.

If I was to criticise it, maybe there was a bot too much luck (both bad and good) involved in the eventual unmasking of the killer, but that's a minor quibble. 

This is a worthy goodbye to Grant County.  i will be sure to continue with the series sooner rather than later.

Number 58 - Survivor Song - Paul Tremblay

 My second Paul Tremblay novel. It seems to prove that the first of his that I read wasn't a fluke. Along with Josh Malerman, Tremblay seems to be bringing a freshness to the horror genre.

This one is a scarily appropriate book to read at the moment, despite having been written a few years back now. Set in an outbreak of a superfast and violent strain of rabies, it follows two women trying to find a safe place for one of them to give birth.

Like Cabin at the End of the World, this takes a big potentially world-changing event and concentrates on a very small cast caught up in the chaos of it all. 

One of the things that sets this apart is that the characters at the heart of the story are unimportant to how the impactful event will play out. There are no scientists trying to get their miracle cure out to the world, no politicians trying to save as many as they can, just two very human characters, trying to get through it. 

The story follows Ramola, a paediatric doctor as she tries to help her friend Natalie get to a hospital to have her baby. Natalie's has just been killed by a rabid intruder and Natalie herself was bitten as she tried to fight him off.  The story only covers maybe three hours of their lives, but is packed with incidents and tragedies.

One thing that always bothers me in this type of survival horror is why the survival of the central characters is apparently more important than that of the people around them.  In this book, it just isn't. This is something else that elevates this.  

It's as much a character study of the two women as it is a horror story. We know them extremely well by the end of the book and feel enormous sympathy. The prose is the same lean present tense narration that characterised Cabin.  This increases the tension with the sense of immediacy. there are also some neat tricks with they typesetting and layout which really add to the impact and the emotional punch - especially in  the closing chapters.

It's been a while since I read Cabin, I can't remember if the superplague was one of the disasters we heard about in that book. It feels familiar though so I think the two books are part of the same fictional universe.  

If you have the stomach for a book about a super contagious disease laying waste to a section of humanity after the past 18 months, this is a great one to try.

Available from all the usual outlets.