Number 98 - Monstress Volume 1 - Liu & Takeda

 

Another randomly chosen graphic novel for a cheat read - although this was 200 pages, making it one of the two longest graphic novels I currently own. 

As with a lot of the graphic novels I've chosen randomly from Forbidden Planet this year - I chose it because it was cheap and the artwork looked really rather special.

There's a lot to unpack in this book.  Marjorie Liu on writing duties is building a whole new world of magic mixed with science and Lovecraftian horrors from the dawn of time.

Also throw in a war between half breed humans and full bloods, a race of superbeings and have plot points described by talking cats with too many tails, and you run the risk of overegging the pudding.

However, Liu, assisted by Takeda's stunning artwork, manages to never overstep the mark.  This never feels silly and the next bit of weirdness feels earned and logical in the framework of the story.

Our central character - Maika Halfwolf - is everything you want from a questing heroine.  She's more than capable of looking after herself in a fight, has magical powers which occasionally manifest and a mysterious past. She's brave and loyal to her friends, and dedicated to avenging her mother's death in unexplained (so far) circumstances. She is also host to a malicious demon from prehistory which has issues with not killing everyone near her. That's the least of her problems though.

There's a lot of worldbuilding going on.  The first issue was 70 pages long in order to set up all the various alliances and feuds. This is epic fantasy on the scale of A Song of Ice and Fire. It's won several awards and it's very easy to understand why. 

There are some obvious influences to the story. But they're incorporated naturally enough so they don't interfere with the storytelling. It's virtually impossible to write something 100% original anymore in any case. This still feels fresh.  It's what you do with the ingredients that makes it work.  The story is strong enough in its own right that it doesn't feel derivative.

I've always said it's better to create new strong female characters than it is to change the sex of existing male characters and this is a beautifully done example. It covers important themes of sexism and racism without being in your face about it. 

I'm wishing I'd got into graphic novels a lot sooner.  With material of this quality that I've been missing out on through pure ignorance and dismissal of the form, I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Number 97 - Famadihana on Fomalhaut IV - Eric brown

As titles go, that's not a good one.  It took me 4 tries to pronounce it and I still don't think I did it right. Even with the alliteration, it's clumsy.  There's no hard and fast rules about titles, but when they trip off the tongue like it's superglued in place, that's not a great sign.

Fortunately, the story does improve on the title. 

Matt Hendrick is a cop trying to find his estranged wife, who along with her surgeon lover, has kidnapped his daughter.  He's traced her to a distant planet, 4th from the sun Fomalhaut an d the book opens with him telemassing (this particular book's version of teleporting interstellar distances) to the local spaceport.

There he meets the mysterious Tiana, who's girlfriend has recently disappeared. They head off into the wilds to track down their respective loved ones, meeting up with the native inhabitants once there. 

For a story about a quest to a far off exotic planet, two thirds of this could have been set in any regular ship port on planet earth.  It's only in the final 25 pages (this is not a long book, which was the reason i chose it) that the location and storyline justify the sci-fi setting.  Prior to that it was just another regular cop tracing mis-per story.

The style of writing was reasonably good, if a bit bland.  The sections in italics at the end of every chapter from Tiana's point of view were needless and irritating.  There were only 2 that delivered any information we hadn't been given in the preceding chapter. The rest just felt like Brown was repeating himself.

I received this book in one of the bundles that PS publishing offer on their discount site.  I also happen to have books 2 and 4 of the quartet on my shelves. because I already have them, I will pick them up and read them at some point. If they are up to this standard, they will be a decent way to kill an hour or two,  I hope book 3 arrives in the bundle I ordered the other day, then I don't need to make any effort to find book 3

Number 97 - Joyland - Stephen King

 

I suddenly realised when I looked at my list for the year that I hadn't read any Stephen King yet in 2021. 

So to make up for that grievous omission, I picked up this one that's been gathering dust for  a couple of years.  

As you can guess from the fact that the publisher is Hard Case Crime, this isn't a horror novel.  There's no terrifying presences stalking the cast.  There is a small amount of supernatural but it's on the side of our narrator.

Devin Jones is a college student whose girlfriend has just ditched him. he's working a summer job at the Joyland of the title.  This is the early 70s and Joyland is a small theme park on the North Carolina coast. He hears about a murder that happened on the ghost train ride a few years earlier. It's rumoured that the ghost of the girl who was murdered appears to staff and occasional visitors to the ride. 

Devin also meets the second love of his life whilst moping about the first. Other characters include the carnie psychic, a dying young boy, some lifelong friends and more carnie staff.

King takes his time with the storytelling.  People who accuse him of bloat in his writing will likely hate this book. I've noticed that most of what people call bloat is his character and world building.  This book is a character piece, a coming of age story with a slight murder mystery thrown in for good measure. By the end of the book he's built this insular world of Joyland so beautifully it's almost a surprise to realise you didn't work there yourself at some point.

The murder mystery isn't particularly mysterious.  The cast is relatively small and the choices are limited. But that's not the point of this book. This is about the characters.  If the chapter where young Mike visits Joyland doesn't fill your heart with a bittersweet joy, you don't have feelings. I was grinning and trying not to cry simultaneously at the evocation of the boy's experience at the park.

This may well be my favourite non-horror King book. Devin is a totally believable and relatable narrator, recounting his youth and how he got over his first true love ending rather cruelly. We feel for him and sympathise with his darkest moments and we're happy as Howie the Hound when he scores his victories.

My next King book will be a horror, but this is proof that King can write pretty much anything he sets his mind to. 

Number 95 - Of Whimsies and Noubles - Matthew Hughes

 

As you might be able to guess from the title, this book is a whimsical affair.  A whimsy in this case though, is a portal through different dimensions that works as a wormhole to vastly distant corners of the universe, but can send people mad who enter them unmedicated.

An art forger in the distant future trades his latest forgeries for Noubles, a rare and highly sought after jewel. He soon finds that he's been double crossed and is stranded on a prison planet and forced into dangerous work.  Can he find a way out?

There are some nifty science fiction ideas at work in this.  Where do Noubles come from?  Who built the whimsies since they're certainly not natural occurrences?  What lives inside them?

The whole thing is engagingly written.  Hughes has a slyly sarcastic style that I like a lot.  To be completely honest he won me over with the author bio.

"Matthew Hughes writes science fantasy.  Booklist have called him "heir apparent to ack Vance," George RR Martin has called his Archonate tales "a tremendous amount of fun", and Robert J Sawyer has called him "a towering talent". Hughes calls himself "Matt". His webpage is at www.matthewhughes.org ."

Everything after that was a bonus.  

It's very short.  I read it in a couple of hours and enjoyed myself immensely in the process. i will be seeking out more of his work.

Number 94 - Gideon Falls vol 4 - The Pentoculus

 

This series gets more mind-bending by the volume.

The stakes are raised considerably in this collection of issues 19 through 24 of the original comic. 

I am so glad I'm reading them in this form instead of having to wait a month for the next issue. The drawback is that some of the double page spreads don't have the same impact. Whereas the comics open flat, there's always the crease in  the centre of a book with a solid spine. 

The art continues to impress with the highly original use of layout to advance the storytelling. 

The writing continues to impress.  The tension has really wracked up considerably in this volume.  Things are starting to make more sense but that doesn't lessen any of the impact. It's pretty obvious why this won so many awards while it was out.

It's easily on a par with my previous favourite series Locke and Key.

Number 93 - Cunning Folk - Adam Nevill

 Nobody writes "Bad Place" horror novels quite as effectively as Adam Nevill.  Ritual, Apartment 16, House of Small Shadows and No One Gets Out Alive all have locations so well drawn that no sane person would want to go there. 

In his new novel out now from his own imprint (Link at the end of the review), he somehow manages to give us his scariest location yet.

A young family, Tom and his wife Fiona and 4 year old daughter Gracie, desperate to leave the inner city, buy a decrepit old house in an unnamed village somewhere in the deep countryside in the South of England. The suicide of the last owner isn't really an issue for them.  that's history.  it doesn't matter any more. They're going to do the house up and make a beautiful family home for dear little Gracie to grow up in. 

That's the plan anyway.  They hadn't banked on a pair of truly malicious neighbours. From an initial frosty welcome, events start spiraling completely out of control. And who will believe Tom when he says the neighbours have magical powers and are laying curses on him and his family? 

As much as I've loved everything else Adam Nevill has written, with this book, he smashes it out of the park.  The horror starts in such a grounded way for Tom et al.  The financial stakes are so high, this is the greatest gamble he's taken - but we know from the prologue what the neighbours are capable of doing and that things are unlikely to turn out nicely. At the very least, he may well end up financially ruined, or he could lose so much more than mere money. When things start to escalate, they become more vicious than anything I've seen in any of Nevill's other work.

The sense of doom is palpable, the flashes of hope that glimmer through the gloom are extinguished in the cruelest of ways. One scene in particular, and it's immediate aftermath felt like a hammer-blow to the psyche. It's not an unearned shock, or done solely for effect. It's a shock that's been carefully planned and built up to. From that point on it's almost impossible to put the book down.

Despite the oh-so-familiar trope of the family buying a new home and bad things start happening, this feels like a fresh take on the old storyline.  The place is a bad place because of the neighbours, not the place itself.  The story wrong-footed me several times and I was second guessing myself constantly - and getting it wrong most of the time. 

There is a jet black sense of humour running through the book as well, despite the darkness. this just serves to drive the shocks deeper. 

This is quite possibly the best thing that Nevill has written to date. Tom's relationship with Gracie and his fears for her feel so true, I wonder how much of the early part of the novel is maybe based on the real experience of buying a place in the country and uprooting with the family.

As usual from Ritual Limited, the book itself is an object of beauty before you even open it.  Everything about this book is top quality, the artwork, the feel of the paper, everything.

The only thing I think would have improved this book would have been if the toy penguin was called Fluffy and not Waddles.  People who know the other work of Mr Simon Nevill (Adam's brother - a very talented family) who drew that rather terrifying boar's head on the front cover will understand what that means.

This book and all his back catalogue are available through his website 

All – Adam LG Nevill

Number 92 - Birthday - Cesar Aira

 

I picked this up very randomly in Waterstones on Sunday.  Basically because it was very thin.  The description said it was about a guy who just past his 50th birthday and a chance conversation made him reevaluate his life.

This did resonate with me a little since I turned 26 and a bit quite recently myself.  It feels dishonest if the bit is more than half the total...

I'm not sure this classes as a novel or even a novella.  It's more like a 80 something page essay.  There's no real story, just a geezer ruminating on the fact that he's not young any more.  He tells us his thoughts about a host of the big subjects in life.  He makes a few good points.  He waffles on about some tripe as well.  

He talks about his plan as a novelist and how he's not convinced he's done enough.  He's refreshingly honest in his self assessment, but not seeringly honest. I can't say I came away from this book with any real impression of the writer as anything other than a slightly self obsessed bore. 

It kills a couple of hours. There are a few nice observations. It's generally quite readable. I can't really praise it much more than that.

Number 91 - Pretty Deadly Vol 3 - The Rat

 Volume 3 of this series sees another time jump.  this time it's set in Hollywoodland in the 30s.

One of the descendants of the lead character from volume 1 has been murdered and her uncle enlists the help of  Deathface Ginny to solve the murder.

each of these three volumes has been radically different from the others. From the weird western vibe of volume 1 - to the war story of volume 2, her we have a film noir vibe that is perfectly captured in Emma Rios's continued beautifully rendered artwork.

Rios needs as much credit for her artwork and layouts as Kelly Sue Deconnick does for the writing. Their talents meld amazingly well.  These are not comics to be quickly skimmed.  These are filled with resonances and deeper meaning. They need to be savoured. There are pages where you can forget about the story for a moment and just appreciate the artwork.  

This series is easily on a par with Sandman. Any story that can encompass the range of time periods and moods as this has so successfully is special indeed. The fact that they both feature a female Death character is probably just coincidence. 

This is the end of the Pretty Deadly series for now, and it's a great ending,  but there are story strands left open which I would love to see continued.  Hopefully there will be another story arc to come. 

Number 90 - English Magic - Uschi Gatward

 This collection of short stories is the latest offering from Galley Beggar Press. Not only did it come with the usual dedicated bookmark that these special editions are supplied with, it also came with a crushed dried flower.  A very unusual touch indeed.

Unsurprisingly, since this is a debut collection, this is a new author for me.  And I have to say that when she's good, she's very good indeed.  There isn't a badly written story in the collection. 

The book isn't without its faults though.  As with a few non-genre short story collections I've read, there are a few stories that don't end, they just stop.  

When I make that comment I'm reminded of the bit in Stephen King's novella "The Body" (filmed as Stand by Me) just after Jordy has told the story of Lardass Hogan and he's disappointed when his friends ask him what happened next.  However, the story of Lardass Hogan tells of one particularly dramatic and memorable event.  The stories in this collection that don't end just seem to be everyday slices of life that don't seem to have any particular point or meaning to them and I don't see the reason for stopping where they do.

They are extremely well written and a pleasure to read.  They just frustratingly seem to suddenly sputter out.  This seems to be typical in "literary" short fiction.  It's my biggest complaint about the Paul Theroux short story collections I've got. Also the Jon McGregor short story collection, as much as I love his writing...  

I love short fiction. I started on Ray Bradbury's short fiction when I was 12 and it showed me how amazing a good short story can be. But his stories have a distinct beginning, middle and end.  Some of the stories here succeed on that front, but not all.

The Clinic is a great opening story but the first to frustrate me with the ending.  It felt like the opening chapter of a much longer work.  There was so much unanswered detail.  Why is their child so advanced?  Why do they feel the need to keep it hidden? Why take the extreme measures they do?  But there are no answers, so as brilliant as it was while reading it, the end left me wanting. As an opening chapter this would be brilliant, you'd have me hooked, as it stands, it's sadly lacking.

My Brother is Back has a similar lack of detail, but the story feels more complete. We feel for Syed on his return to England after a mysterious incarceration on US shores.  The ending to this feels natural, as he finally gets to relax and wait for the promise of normalcy to return. 

Oh Whistle And... is the most interesting stylistically.  It's written in lots of short freewheeling and not immediately obviously interlinked paragraphs.  It efficiently builds the picture of a large group of people, none of whom are named with more than a single letter of the alphabet, and who are either monitoring or being monitored for their political/religious beliefs. A really interesting piece and possibly my favourite in the book.  this style of freewheeling narrative is difficult to pull off but Gatward manages it here.  

Beltane tells the vaguely threatening tale of a couple attending a rural festival in an English village. Another good story with a more natural feeling end.

The Bird - A couple return from their honeymoon to find a bird is trapped behind their fireplace and tapping tapping tapping at the back of their gas fire.  Again, this is a strong story, mired in mataphor and symbols, and with a definite end.

On Margate Sands follows a pair of friends trying to find an old attraction one of them remembers seeing in Margate many years earlier.  It's a sad little meditation of memory with a bittersweet feel.  Another strong story.  

The Creche - a day trip with the toddler group goes badly.  This is another frustrating story.  it was witty, funny, deeply insightful and then it just stopped... I'm not sure if it's just me that can't see the symbolism in the ending but I was enjoying this so much and there seemed no point when it finished.

Lurve - maybe I need to be more in with the fashionable crowd to get this one.  It's the longest and one of my least favourite in the collection.  It paints a good picture of a set of unlikeable self absorbed characters on the edge of the art crowd in London. Again, it just sputters out.  Again, this could be a starting point for a much longer and deeply satisfying work.

Lammas - Again she tries a freewheeling approach to narrative.  This jumps about all over the place, and time.  Unfortunately, I don't think this one holds together particularly.  The quality of the prose dips in this story too. The opening is florid to the point of being irritating.  My least favorite in the book by a fair margin.

Samhain - I really don't quite know what to make of this one.  It certainly ends on a vaguely threatening note.  It seems deliberately obfuscated though.  Lovely atmosphere built up, but I'd prefer to have a clear idea of what the ending was.

What's For You Won't Go By You - is the Ollie in this one of the characters from Lurve?  I'm not sure.  he seemed very similar.  Another slice of life that seems too unfocussed with no real end. A pleasure to read still, just unsatisfying when it finished.

backgammon - the final story. An woman gets an insight into the possibly abusive relationship her friend is involved in. Again, this reads like the start of a longer piece.  Although in this one, I can see how the end is a comment on how people leave awkward situations hanging because it's the easiest thing to do.

With only one exception, I thought the writing in all these stories was very good indeed.  I would like to see her write in past tense a little more.  All these stories are in the present tense. This makes it feel like there isn't much variety to the stories as the style rarely changes. That's only a minor quibble since it was never a chore to read any of it, in fact I took great pleasure from most of the stories.  That makes it seem more of a shame that they feel unfocussed and unfinished at times.

I will certainly be checking out her next book when it comes out. maybe it will be the novel that at least one of these stories seems to want to be the start of.

Number 89 - the Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

 Neil Gaiman does an imaginative variation on Kipling's Jungle Book.  Instead of Mowgli living in a jungle and befriending the wildlife, we have Nobody Owens, a child who finds himself orphaned and living in a large cemetery being raised by ghosts (and a vampire).

Considering that this is a children's book, the opening chapter is very dark indeed with The Man Jack  proving to be a really quite scary villain as he creeps through the house and viciously murders Bod's entire family.  

Luckily for Bod, he's chosen that day to toddle unseen from the house and up the road to the deserted (by humans) graveyard. After a confrontation and a plea on his behalf, the decision is taken by the ghosts to grant young Bod the freedom of the graveyard and raise him to adulthood.

Like the Jungle Book, this book takes the form of a series of interlinked short stories.  The longest story joins them together and uses plot elements from all the preceding tales to give a more than satisfying conclusion to one of the overarching plots.  I found the final chapter to be really quite moving.  

As usual for Neil Gaiman, the prose is excellent.  He achieves a fairy tale feeling which is deceptively charming, given the darkness of the subject matter.  Bod is a brilliant creation and watching him grow and mature is a lovely experience. The supporting cast are all uniformly engaging, some mysterious, some funny, some scary.   The illustrations are rather good as well.

I was going to power through this book but found myself slowing down to savour it instead.  As children's books go this has plenty to engage the more mature reader too. 

Buy it for your kids if you must, but don't feel ashamed of reading it for yourself too.  You won't regret it.