Number 75 - Chasing Spirits - John Llewellyn Probert

 

75 books seems to be a nice figure to end the year on. 

I've reviewed a few of Mr Probert's books so far.  His Dr Valentine books are must reads.  Dr Valentine is one of the most fun serial killers you'll read about.

In this book, we're introduced to John Glory, a screen writer who keeps running into various supernatural entities and finds himself saddled with a reputation as a psychic detective.  Think of an unwilling, unemployed alcoholic British version of Kolchak with a great line in sarcasm and you're pretty close.

There are three stories, all interlinked, and they detail Glory's first three cases.  From the quick throwbacks in the second and third stories to the details of the previous tales, it seems like these may have been published separately at some time and collected here for the first time.  

Glory is a brilliantly funny character.  After the shitty time I've had this week, this book gave me the first good laugh I've had in days.

It's only short. Each story is only about 40 pages and I blasted through each of them in no time. 

If you need a quick and easy read, with a sick sense of humour and the occasional bit of gore thrown in for good measure, this is ideal.

I still want to know what the rude mnemonic for the external branches of the carotid artery is though.  

This has been a great last book to wind the year up with.  I have his other new book - How Grim was ny Valley positioned very high up in the TBR for early next year.

Number 74 - A refrigerator full of heads - Rio Youers et al

 

This is the follow up to Jo Hill's rather fun A Basketful of Heads from a couple of years back.

The story of basketful of heads revolved around an ancient Norse axe that left its victims still alive and able to talk regardless of how many pieces they happened to be in.  Given that our plucky heroine had a tendency to aim for the neck, she managed to solve the mystery around her with an ever growing collection of talking heads in a basket.

The axe is back again in this equally fun follow up. This manages to increase the insanity levels by a factor of 10 with the introduction of three more weapons, a dagger, a sword and a belt, each with their own powers which I'll not spoil for you.

There's a much bigger head count, necessitating the titular fridge for storage. It's not just humans that get chopped either. 

There are bad guys trying to collect the full set, and they'll stop at nothing to get it. 

This is big, daft, gory, violent and totally unnecessary. I loved it. 

Number 73 - Billy Summers - Stephen King

 

No it's not horror.  Get over it.

Yes King is still a horror writer, even if he does branch out.

OK, mini rant nearly over with.  I hate when people complain that King has written something other than a flat out horror novel or that he's not a horror writer any more.

He can write what he wants to.  He doesn't owe any readers anything. As long as he keeps up his regular standards, that's all we should expect.

This is a crime novel  An assassin for hire on his "one last job" that goes horribly wrong. King even mentions very early on how the "one last job" is practically a sub-genre of its own. And his contribution to the sub genre is vintage King.

Billy Summers only kills bad people. he's known for his ability to blend in, get the job done and escape into the shadows. He wants to retire but the offer of $2m is too much to resist so he takes the infamous one last job. 

Once on the job, waiting in his temporary assumed identity, he suspects that something is not quite right on this one. After the hit, things turn bad quickly and he finds himself evading justice and his ex employers and seeking vengeance on a very bad man indeed. 

This is a book of two halves.  The first half leading up to the hit, and the second half is the fallout. He finds himself teamed up with an unexpected companion and the second half is part buddy movie (with a difference) along with the revenge story.

As per usual, King takes his sweet time in telling the story. He builds the characters and their relationships intricately and convincingly.  By the end of the book we know nearly all there is to know about the eponymous Billy. There are emotional highs and lows throughout and we (this reader for definite) really want him to succeed with his shot at redemption.

Despite the genre, this is unmistakably Stephen King, and (as previously mentioned) vintage King at that. The plot unfurls at a leisurely pace and picks up momentum as it goes.  It's a challenge to put the book down for any reason in the last 150 pages.

There's a nice couple of Easter Eggs for the constant readers, with some non-too-subtle references to other King novels.

If you like King's writing, you'll like this. I like him.  I have 70 of his books on my shelves. and this ranks in with the best of them.

Number 73 - The Summer Book - Tove Jansson

 

I can't think of a more appropriate book to read during the recent bout of minus 6 degree weather. This month's book group book and one I was looking forward to.

I knew Tove Jansson from the Moomins. One of my most magical memories from childhood was the Moomins on TV. I was a bookworm even back in those days and no doubt will have read any of the books that were available.

Sadly, I just didn't particularly like this book. It's not badly written. The prose is actually very good. It's lyrical and poetic and all very nice. It's just not very interesting to this reader.

It's not what I would call a novel.  It's a series of very short anecdotes about a little girl and her Grandmother living on an island off the coast of Norway in the summer months. There's no single story, no real continuity, not even any call backs to previous events. It all feels very choppy and episodic.

It's all very prettily written and lots of metaphors for life happen to the characters and it's all very meaningful and lovely. It has a deep ecological message from well before such things were fashionable. But this is one book where I have to admit that it wasn't written for me. 

Sophia doesn't always ring true as a character. She's a preteen child but has chapters where she talks like a university lecturer. 

For such a short book it took me a week to read it.  I think if it had been close to 200 pages I would have given up. For all the nice writing, it's just too cloying and sentimental. There are a few laughs, but few and far between for me and the book never hooked my interest or made me care for Sophia or her Grandmother. 

Number 71 - Holy Ghost Road - John Mantooth

 

This was a NetGalley read and another brand new author for me.

Some books take their time in establishing a setting and the characters and the plot will slowly develop as the location etc become clearer.

This doesn't. we're plunged into the action on page one and it never lets up.

When we meet our central character Forest, she's on the run. She needs to get to her Gran's house.  her Gran can help her, she always has done in the past. Surely her dreamwalking powers will save Forest now. What is she running from? She's not sure herself.  It's scary though. It has something to do with the strange preacher Nesmith who has an uncanny influence on everyone in the county, and indeed has shacked up with Forest's mother.

The only thing worse than Nesmith, is his sister Ruby Jewel, a blind old woman who still seems more alert and aware than any human should be. Or maybe the goat-headed thing that is following Nesmith as he searches for Forest to deliver her into a fate possibly worse than death.

Together with a friend she meets on her dangerous run, Forest must travel the Holy Ghost Road to her Granny's house and her only hope of salvation.

This is gorgeously written southern-gothic horror. The atmosphere of dread and mystery is sustained through every word of the book. 

There are familiar elements to the story but they feel fresh under Mantooth's restrained prose and perfectly nuanced storytelling. 

There are layers upon layers to the story and this will certainly reward a reread sometime. There are dark themes running through the book, loss and grief, the negative side of family, the power of belief vs logic.  These make for a compelling coming of age story as Forest travels her own spiritual journey as well as the grueling physical trek down the eponymous highway.  All the while she needs to avoid the grasps of the villainous trio who dog her footsteps the whole distance.

I will certainly be buying a physical copy of this for my reread, whenever that might happen. Mantooth is a major talent. By all the gods and demons, he can spin a damned scary yarn.

Number 70 - Free Country, A Tale of the Children's Crusade

 

This is the book I needed to buy after the incomplete story in the big Books of Magic omnibus.

The story in that book told how Timmy was persuaded to travel to the Free Country, which was part of a big Vertigo Comics crossover event in the early 90s. 

This book follows the Dead Boy Detectives as they investigate the disappearance of an entire village worth of children. As well as this village of missing children, all the children of power are being kidnapped from our world too. there is a dastardly plan in action and only the two dead children have any inkling that anything untoward is happening.

Eventually they cross paths with Tim and all the plotlines are resolved satisfactorily. 

There are a whole host of writers and artists in the mix here. Surprisingly it still makes for a coherent and consistent experience, both in terms of artwork and writing.

This is partly due to some story tinkering that Gaiman talks about in the introduction. We don't get the full details of all the kidnappings, or indeed three of the children of power being returned to the real world. these were  details that were fleshed out in the individual issues of the assorted comics at the time. It seems a shame that more of those details weren't incorporated here, but I suppose pages were limited. there is still a feeling of incompleteness left behind though.

What remains of the story (including a new middle section, written specifically for this volume) is still very good and thought provoking. There are some disturbing concepts flying around and the identity of the true villain surprised me, even though it was more than signposted from fairly early on (plus I think I probably read the comics beck in the day so it's doubly annoying).

It's a good and entertaining read, and made me realise that my first experience of reading Toby Litt was several years earlier than I thought...

Number 70 - The Ladybird book of the Zombie Apocalypse

 After the Alice Sebold, I needed a palate cleanser.

This was ideal.  Short, pithy, masterful understatement in the humour. The first page suggests that, in a zombie apocalypse, there's a chance that shops may offer reduced services and stock. That's the level of the humour here and I liked it a lot.

Anyone who grew up with the old Ladybird Books will recognise the format and style of this one. Every page is accompanied by a picture in the style of, or taken from, an old Ladybird book, but with horribly inappropriate text on the page opposite. As pisstakes go, this is really quite effective. 

It kills 10 minutes easily enough. 20 if  you stop to examine the pictures in detail.

Nothing more to say- it was only 20 pages of text.

Number 68 - Lucky - Alice Sebold

I try to read at least one biography a year to shake things up a little. I realised I was nearly in December and hadn't read one yet so I grabbed this one off my shelves where it's been sat for many many moons.

When Alice Sebold was a student, she was viciously attacked in a local park. The attack formed the basis of The Lovely Bones. However, while she was writing that book, she realised she needed to put the true story out there as well and she stopped her work on The Lovely Bones to write this.

I have to say that this was a very difficult read. Not because of the prose, the language used is clear and concise, with no flourishes.  It couldn't be easier to read on that level. Indeed, it's a compulsive read on that level.

What makes it difficult is the subject matter. As previously mentioned, this is about a violent sexual attack and its aftermath.

The attack is described in vivid detail with nothing left to the imagination. She keeps the writing cool and dispassionate. This makes the horror of what happened to her so much more acute.

The rest of the book deals with the aftermath, including family and friend reactions (none of which are good enough or can be), the trial and conviction of the rapist, and a seeringly honest description of her life with PTSD even after her allegedly successful outcome of the story.

It's a long time since a book put me through the emotional threshing machine quite as much as this one did. Her description of the trial made me physically angry and the cross examination she was given regarding her identifying her attacker - particularly since they had samples of his hair in evidence which proved it was him almost beyond doubt. At the end of the trial chapters I had to put the book down and cry.

Thankfully, there is a thread of hope running through the book, or this would have been a truly unbearable read. As it is, this is emotionally tough, but compulsive and one of the most heartfelt biographies I've had the "pleasure" of reading.

I can't recommend this book too highly. It doesn't come across as a misery memoir.  It's far too well written for that. There's nothing sensationalised about any of the details of her life. It's a book that will stay with me for a long time.

Number 67 - The Grave - Charles L Grant

 Charles Grant is one of a handful of writers for whom I own 50 plus books. This is one of his earlier books but one of the more recent additions to my shelves.

It's an Oxrun Station novel. Oxrun Station is the Charlie Grant version of King's Castle Rock or Derry, a small town in the USA where weird things happen. (I just checked the dates and castle Rock does predate Oxrun so i do have it the right way around)

Personally, I think I'd prefer to live in Castle Rock because it's not as creepy. Pennywise would probably be too scared to live there to be honest.

You can normally depend on Grant to build a weird and dreamlike atmosphere where reality is debatable. This book is no exception.

Josh Miller is an investigator in Oxrun Station.  he specialises in finding weird and rare objects for people (this was before the days of Google and EBay). While he's out searching for his latest assigned item, he finds the police at the site of a nasty car crash. One of the occupants of the car has vanished, leaving his arm behind, but not even a trail of blood. 

This is the first in a sequence of events that lead Josh to realise he's being followed by something not quite natural. 

As per normal for Grant, he takes his time building up the atmosphere. Every chapter ends on a minor cliffhanger (sometimes quite a major one), so I did a lot of finishing reading mid-page in this book, at a point where I didn't feel I needed to keep going.

Some aspects of this book do feel a bit dated. Josh is very sexist as a boss by today's standards. But this book wasn't written now so it's a much better reflection of the time it was written than any bowlderised vision of it would be. I do feel it's important to look at when a book was written before you criticise, and, by the standards of the time, Josh is a nice guy.

There are a number of other disappearances before the end of the book, and a lot of weirdness that josh has to face. 

I loved that the supernatural is the last thing to occur to him as an explanation for the increasing weirdness.  it grounded the character in reality much more.

The final chapters in this book contain some of the most concentrated horror I've read from Grant. Almost from when we discover the reason for the book's title up until the conclusion, the pace never lets up. Josh's reality is fracturing, and we have no idea if he's going to actually survive to the end of the book. 

The sense of his disintegrating mental state is palpable. His fear radiates from the page. 

I will admit that I figured out what was going on fairly early, but that increased the tension in the final sequence because I knew what he was walking into even if he didn't.

If you can track down a copy of this, do it. The prose is dripping in atmosphere. There's a constant sense of unease that's almost unmatched in modern horror fiction. Whilst his plotting wasn't always the strongest, at his best he was one of the scariest writers out there. Considering the lack of overt violence in any of his books, that's a hell of an achievement. 

This book is a great example of what he was capable of. the set pieces are genuinely scary and the final act is up there with the best he's written.

Number 66 - The Books of Magic Vol 1 - John Ney Reiber + artists

 It'a a complicated thing to try to collect the Books of magic graphic novels. There's a newish iteration which pops up with similar names to the original series every time you search the assorted book sites.

To make it easy i went for this omnibus which contains the first two years of John Ney Reiber's version of the story.

This of course also contains the storyline I read not too long ago, but being a graphic novel, the reread doesn't take too long.

One thing that becomes very clear when reading this number of the stories back-to-back is how often Tim doesn't need to do anything because a protector he doesn't know he has will pop up and save the day on his behalf. He becomes a very passive character in his own story.

The protectors vary from a unicorn he accidentally revived, to the wife and child of a chained-up angel, to a demonically controlled future version of himself to his childhood imaginary friends come to life. 

It's never less than entertaining and there is a great imagination on display, but I found myself wanting Tim to be a more active feature of the plot. It's very rare he does anything for himself.

That said, he does help other people semi-regularly, in particular his Dad and a succubus who moves in next door. 

There's also a prologue i hadn't read before from a crossover event called the Children's crusade that happened in the 90s at vertigo comics.  Unfortunately, it only contains one section of that story and tells the reader that his voyage back from the land he was transported to can only be read by buying another graphic novel (which I have done, but under duress).

It's fairly weird reading this now, when the "future" version of Tim Hunter lives in the year 2012... It really hammers home how old I am since I used to have the original comics when they came out.

I will be seeking out volume 2 rather than trying to figure out which of the individual storyline graphic novels I need to buy.

Nuber 65 - Lost boy Lost Girl - Pater Straub

 

I had only ever read Straub's rather good collaborations with Stephen king - Talisman and Black House - and had never read any of Straub's solo works. When he sadly passed away earlier this year, I thought it was time to fix that and recommended this for the book group's Halloween read.

He's such a well-respected author in the field, what could go wrong? 

Sadly, this choice of book did. I hope it's one of his lesser works, because I didn't find much to enjoy in this at all. The story starts when Tim Underhill, a writer of horror fiction, visits his brother for the sad occasion of his sister-in-law's funeral after her sudden death. 

There are a number of disappearances happening in the town.  Teenaged boys have been vanishing, never to be seen again. 

Eight days after the funeral, Tim's nephew Mark joins the list of the missing.

This has the potential to be a good story, but I found the pacing, the structure and the plotting let the whole thing down.

It hops randomly through the timeline. I normally don't mind a bit of back and forwards, but it needs to make sense to the storytelling. This starts with Tim travelling back to his old hometown, a couple of chapters in, it jumps in mid chapter, via Tim's journal, to 9 days later where he's travelling back to the town after receiving news of Mark's disappearance. The next chapter, we're back at the funeral of the SIL. A few chapters later, we're following Mark in the week before his mother's death. then it's the day before his mother's death mid chapter, then in the next chapter we're back to a week before her death. 

When it settles down, we get what starts as an interesting storyline about Mark's obsession with a creepy old house on a parallel street that backs onto his house. This part is possibly the best section of the book.

However, we soon jump back to after his disappearance again, and the rest of the book flips randomly.  The timelines seem all messed up too.  There's supposed to be 8 days between his mother's death and mark's disappearance, yet he and his friend seem to spend about two weeks and more before mark stumbles upon at least one of the house's dark secrets.

One of the creepiest things about the book for me was the number of times Tim, the narrator of the book, refers to his 15-year-old nephew's good looks.  Every single time he refers to Mark, the word beautiful, or a close synonym, will appear. I got the message that Tim thought his nephew was beautiful first time he said it, I didn't need the other 3987 references to it.

Another structural deficit is the way the book switches from third person to first person quite randomly. The segments from Tim's journal make sense, but in other places, suddenly a paragraph will be full of I's instead of he's.  This is in sections of third person narrative where Tim is referred to as Tim or he.  Then suddenly he remembers he's the narrator and says I.  And it's jarring. it makes no narrative point or sense.

Tim's reaction to his nephew's fate seems at odds with his character. Mark's fate, if we take it at face value from the book, is all kinds of icky and not in a good way. Tim's brother is allowed throughout to be a horrible racist and is never pulled up on it by any of the supposed nice people around him.

The style of writing, whilst it does have its inconsistencies, is always easily readable and grammatical.  One member of the book group said it was a page turner. that's probably the best I can find to say about it.

I went into this book with very high expectations and was hugely disappointed.  Maybe if I hadn't read it immediately after Foulsham I might have been more forgiving of it. 

This is one book that's getting donated to a charity shop rather than going back on my shelves.  I'm willing to try another of his books that I have on my shelves, since this had faint glimmers of quality. But this particular book rates a measly 4 out of 10 for me. 

Number 64 - Foulsham - Edward Carey

 The sequel to Heap House which i read at about this time last year, and sent me on a quest for as many of Carey's books as I could find. Warning - discussion of the plot on this book will give spoilers for book 1.

I'll say now that this is even better than Heap House, but you will need to read Heap House for this to make any sense at all. The world built in these books is truly unique. The starting point of this story would just seem very silly indeed if you hadn't read the first book. 

Heap House was a definite highlight of last year and this is almost certainly in my top 3 of the year this year.  it might even be at the number one spot.

I thought there was no such thing as a new story, but Edward Carey has proved me very wrong indeed. I can't think of anything similar to this series in anything I've read. 

It's 1876. Victoria is on the throne of England. The Iremonger family in Heap House are responsible for dealing with all the rubbish London produces. 

Foulsham is the London borough closest to Heap House. At the end of book one, Clod Iremonger was very different indeed and his object, James Henry Hayward, was human again.  Likewise, Lucy Pennant had changed and been thrown out onto the heaps to vanish amongst the rubbish.

Can they regain their humanity? Literally.

Can they avoid the ire of the Iremonger family?

Why are the heaps rising up and threatening to swamp the town?

What is the cause of the illness flooding the town and causing people to change?

All these questions and more might be answered in this book.

I can't remember any book this year so far that had this same effect on me. Not a chapter went by without a new shock or twist or mind-bending turn of phrase that made my jaw drop. It gives a whole new meaning to money talks.  Also to the phrase "he has a way with things". I would expand on those pointsbut... spoilers. 

This might be YA fiction, but it's the single most original and exciting piece of writing I've seen in years. The illustrations are pitch perfect and add another layer of surrealism to the proceedings. 

He expands on the history of the family and their relationship to the town, introducing new members of the family and new dangers. Characters who were briefly mentioned in book one come to centre stage here and form their own threats or alliances with our heroic leads.

It's all just brilliant.  This is as close to flawless as writing gets. Everyone needs to read this series. It's surreal, it's funny, it's exciting, it's disturbing. It's just amzing.

Read it.  it's brilliant!

Number 63 - The Dismembered - Jonathan Janz

 

I was sent a preview copy of this by the publishers in exchange for a fair review.

I'd never heard of Jonathan Janz before, but this sounded like good fun.  And by God I was right.

This is a grand guignol gothic novel with a more modern sensibility. Imagine if Edgar Poe hadn't been constrained by the mores of his time and had written a balls-to-the-floor all action-adventure novel packed with gore, gratuitous violence and occasional sex and you're pretty close to this book.

Written in a very good imitation of the gothic style, this tells the story of American writer Arthur Pearce, who encounters a beautiful young woman called Sarah Coyle on a train through rural England. He rescues her from an attempted assault and accepts an invitation to her stately home to assist her further.  Her younger sister, Violet, has been betrothed to a man she believes to be evil and possibly not completely human, and she thinks Arthur is just the man to help break his hold on her innocent younger sister. 

When he accompanies the family, including the third sister, the beguiling Elizabeth, to the castle of the dastardly Count Dunning, the action kicks in and the pace doesn't let up until the end of the book.

There are gruesome murders, shocking twists, surprise betrayals and excessive violence galore for the last two thirds of the book. One more thing that marks this as different to the books it pays tribute to is the fact that the women are not helpless young creatures who need to be saved by the big strong handsome hero. They're strong, independent and just as likely to help save the day as young Arthur.

I don't know if this is Janz's normal style of writing, but it works brilliantly. It genuinely reads like a gothic novel of the era, especially in the first third where the situation is set up. When all hell breaks loose in the last 60 odd percent, it somehow manages to keep the feel of the gothic style, whilst delivering some decidedly modern style violence.

 I've had a great time reading this and will be procuring a real copy when it's properly released. 

This is released in the very near future and can be purchased through the Cemetery dance website.

Number 62 - Silent Voices - Gary McMahon

 

Part two of Gary McMahon’s trilogy that I started last year with The Concrete Grove.

The tagline on the back of the book reads “IT’S CALLING YOU BACK…”

In my brain that tagline morphs into an earworm of the old Rainbow song “Light in the Black” which has the chorus “Something’s calling you back, like a, light in the black” and I did wonder, idly, whether you could rewrite the song lyrics to match this book.

However, “Something’s calling you back, like a nihilistic glimpse into a terrifying existential void” didn’t quite scan to the tune.

We are returned to the run-down council estate on the outskirts of Newcastle/Gateshead known as the Grove.  At the centre of the estate stands the Needle, a large tower block, and source of the energy that sucks out the soul of the area. 

Simon and his two friends went missing as young children in the Needle twenty years prior to the events in this book. They returned three days later with no memory of what had happened (and indeed thinking they’d only been a couple of hours), damaged and scared.

As adults, they lead vastly different lives, but are all still carrying the scars from the events of that weekend as ten-year-olds in the strange place hidden at the centre of the Needle. Simon has escaped the Grove completely. Or so he believes.  Something is waking and he finds himself drawn back to the North East to confront the events of his childhood. He seeks out his two friends who are facing their own weird happenings. Together they will face the strange forces gathering around them again.

I normally try not to compare with Stephen King but returning to the weird hometown to face up to the childhood trauma is such a King staple, it’s hard not to. In this book Gary McMahon seems to be channelling his inner King, with healthy dollops of Ramsey Campbell and a bit of Lovecraft for good measure.

And it works brilliantly.  There are some weird images that I know will stick with me for some time.  The plot propels itself along at a rattling pace. The characters are well drawn and totally believable. The steady encroachment of the supernatural is handled beautifully, and the characters’ responses are entirely plausible. Their growth from disbelief and rationalisation to acceptance is handled to perfection.

 I have book 3 ready and waiting in my TBR pile and I’m really looking forward to how this trilogy will come to a close.

This is written well enough that it would work well as a standalone novel, but there are obviously advantages to having read the first book in the series.

Whatever order you want to read them in, just read them.  You won’t regret it.

Number 61 - Monstress volume 7 - Devourer

 After the shocking betrayal at the end of volume 6, this volume is carried by teh supporting cast much more than some of the earlier volumes.

The artwork continues to outshine virtually every other comic book in existence.  Indeed, this volume features some of the best full page and double page spreads of the entire run so far.

The storyline is complex without being convoluted and continues to be as satisfying as most prose novels.  there is nothing lightweight about this story, despite the graphic format.

I have a feeling it's going to be a while before volume 8 appears.  I might need to start reading the individual comics as they come out...

Number 60 - Night of the Mannequins - Stephen Graham Jones

 

Nearly a year to the day since I read my first of his books (The Only Good Indians), I finally got round to reading another of his.  When your TBR pile is as out of control as mine, these things happen.

It certainly has an opening line for the ages. 

"So Shanna got a new job at the movie theater, we thought we'd play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I'm really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all,"

That's now a firm fixture in my favourite opening lines ever.

This book has cemented Jones in my eyes as a major talent, and proved that The Only Good Indians wasn't a fluke.

It's a slim volume, and I read it in just a couple of hours, making it a perfect cheat read.  

Sawyer Grimes is a high school student who, as mentioned in that opening sentence, plays a prank on one of his friends, along with his little gang. they sneak a mannequin into the theatre where she works.

The prank backfires and things turn nasty.  Sawyer finds himself taking desperate measures to save people from Manny the mannequin's reign of terror.

This is all told in Sawyer's chatty, conve4rsational voice. As unpleasant as proceedings become, he remains upbeat and hopeful that he's doing the best he can for everyone. 

Sawyer is one of the most delightfully unhinged unreliable narrators I've experienced in several years. Teenaged angst rarely comes with this shade of psychosis thrown into the mix.  of course, it rarely comes with the idea of a killer mannequin either... 

This was a much easier read than The Only Good Indians, and the story a lot easier to follow. Definitely a contender for best cheat read of the year. Psychologically all kinds of messed up and one of the best examples of the villain being a good guy in his own story that you'll ever find.

number 59 - Daphne - Josh Malerman

 

A new book by Josh Malerman will always go as close to the top of my TBR pile as possible. This one was no exception. 

In this book, he gives us a very Malerman take on the slasher genre. 

Daphne is a seven-foot-tall denim clad ghost in KISS makeup who kills basketball players in the town of Samhattan. 

If you think that sounds far-fetched, the most famous slashers out there are a school caretaker who was burned to death and invades teenagers; dreams, a super strong guy who wears a captain kirk mask and gets up every time you kill him, and a nine-year-old boy who drowned and somehow came back as a hulking killer in a hockey mask.  Daphne is almost normal by comparison.

Being a Josh Malerman book, there's more going on here than just a bunch of shreddies getting shredded (or in this case crushed). He uses the traditional tropes of the slasher to look into the causes of fear and anxiety.  Daphne is not just an unstoppable ghost; she is a personification of fear itself.

The book manages to be a tense and scary horror story with plenty of teens dying horribly, and a close look at anxiety and its effects. 

As usual with Josh Malerman, I raced through this in a couple of days.  His distinctive style is remarkably easy and fast to read. His characters are all well drawn and relatable. His shreddies are given just the right amount of background before Daphne folds them into shapes they were never supposed to inhabit. 

There's surprisingly no gore in any of the killings but they're still wince inducing as the mental pictures given to us don't need the addition of buckets of literary blood. Daphne is a scary villain, and the story has a few surprises up its sleeve.

Malerman is one of those writers, who, despite an instantly recognisable style, seems to be able to write vastly different novels in different styles of horror equally well. This is no exception. Highly enjoyable, slightly silly in a good way, but thought provoking when it wants to be.  Another excellent read from Mr Malerman.

Number 58 - Shock Value - assorted writers

 

I bought this at Grimmfest from the publisher's stall. I thought it looked like it would be a fun little cheat read.

I was half right.

It was a cheat read and over in slightly under an hour.

Fun barely featured.

This is an anthology of horrors in comic form.  When I glanced through it at the stall, I thought the art looked quite good. That's true for two of the 6 stories involved. The other's the art is almost as good as the stories they're telling.

Sadly, the stories contained in this collection range from piss poor to just OK.  

The story about the vampires contracting a disease is interesting but isn't actually a story, more a jumping off point for something bigger and better.  It was an interesting concept (and better art than some of the others) but it is just an idea rather than a story with beginning, middle and end. This is still the best part of the publication.

The invisible man story was just about passable.

The three-part story with the mermen is just atrocious. The writing is poor and the artwork even worse. I hope I never have to read anything else that bad again.

I know that a 6-page comic strip is not a lot of time to tell a satisfying story, but it can be done. With only the two exceptions above, all the stories in this book fail spectacularly, either let down by script or artwork or both. 

This was a bad choice of cheat read. I can see what it was aiming at - but it missed on nearly all counts. I could have bought a few more drinks with the money I spent on this.  I'm annoyed about that... 

Number 57 - The Vessel - Adam Nevill

 

Isn't she a beauty? Rumour has it that she leans further out of each successive cover of the book and the last person to buy it, she's going to crawl out and... well it won't be pretty.

But don't let that put you off from buying a copy.

By Adam Nevill's standards, this is a very short book indeed, coming in at about 150 pages. There is a reason for that, which is explained in the afterword.

 Jess is a struggling single mother who takes on a job as carer to a decrepit and very senile old woman in a crumbly old vicarage called Nerthus House. Characters forced into bad situations because of cash problems seems to be a theme in Adam's work. Jess has problems other than cash though.  She's a single mother because her ex is an abusive and controlling bully. He's not ready to give up on the family unit, no matter how often she tells him it's over.

When she can't get childcare, Jess is forced to take her young daughter Izzy to Nerthus House while she performs her nightshift. Flo Gardner, her patient, develops an unhealthy bond with young Izzy, and Jess finds herself in a battle for her daughter's affections and her soul.

There isn't much that I would call original in this story. The story follows a well-worn trail and isn't difficult to predict, but Nevill's prose, and some truly weird and disturbing set pieces elevate the material above most other similar stories. His prose actually reminded me very strongly of Ramsey Campbell in this book. There have always been vague shades of Campbell in his writing, but in this book, I'm not sure if it's that the themes are more Campbellian or the writing itself. 

In the afterword Nevill talks about how this started life as a screenplay before being converted to novel form (much like Cunning Folk was) but he's experimented here with making the book entirely plot driven and removed most of the internal views we would normally see in his books (which are usually very character driven rather than plot driven). This is the principle reason for its brevity.

It's an experiment that is largely successful. It was a quick and easy read and created a real atmosphere of dread in its short number of pages.

This blog gets a thank you in the afterword. It's good to see that the work I put into these reviews doesn't go unappreciated. I'm very grateful to the talented writers and I hope that I'm making some contribution to spreading the word.

This book will be formally released at Halloween. My copy is the limited-edition hardback which was sent out early. The mass market editions can be ordered from Adam's website when they become available.  You won't regret it.

 All – Tagged "Novels"– Adam LG Nevill 

Number 56 - Money - Martin Amis

 

Back to books.

Normally, I only read horror novels in October, but this was my book group read, and I did start it in September. I finished it in the early hours of Saturday morning just gone so it took a while to read.

This book really stretches the limits of the boundaries between what's good writing and what's a fun read. If you're one of those readers who insists on having a likeable protagonist, don't even bother with this. 

The book follows John Self, a misogynistic, alcoholic. drug addicted asshole. He's been tasked with directing a film in Hollywood off the back of some controversial adverts he made in Britain. He spends the book flying back and forth between London and New York, spending more and more money, drinking, jerking off, reading porn and mistreating women.

He's quite simply one of the most repulsive narrators of any book I've ever read. 

The brilliance of the book is in the act of literary ventriloquism that puts us so firmly in his headspace. That headspace isn't somewhere that any sane person wants to be, but it's kind of addictive after a while. One of his few saving graces is that he's entirely self-aware of his faults is too weak to do anything about them without some outside agency. His weakness is also something he is keenly aware of.

The subtitle of the book is "A Suicide Note" so we know it's not going to go to a happy place at the end. Initially the situation seems quite unbelievable- why would anyone give this disaster of a man the responsibility, he's been given? And then the pieces start to slip into place as to what is actually happening. From that point on, I fhought it was compulsive reading, waiting for the fall that was looming ever closer.

The gradual reveal of the plot, told in a very close up first person through the eyes of someone who can't actually see it for himself is quite brilliant in my humble opinion.  

It's a difficult read.  I won't deny that.  I was the only member of the book group that finished it. his narrative voice was too much for the rest of the group and I understand completely why they didn't finish. I found it very funny though. The humour is as black as it's possible to get before it turns into something entirely different, so my love of dark fiction probably helped me get through it. 

There are bon mots galore in here if you go looking for them. One of my favorites was where he describes a body builder he sees in the street as "some track suited miracle of push-ups and alfalfa".

Frequently we're given his version of events and left to work out for ourselves how it looked to the rest of the world around him. The disconnect between his view and reality is both jarring and hilarious in equal measures.

Your mileage may vary on whether the inclusion of a writer with a very familiar name as a central character in the story is amusing or pretentious twaddle. 

It's broad satire on a particular subset of society in the 80s and I would like to hope they're consigned to history. But I look at modern day reports that the Bullingdon club still exists and is still up to its old tricks and I realise that these people might well be running the country at the moment... Please excuse the political digression.

It's a difficult book to love but an easy one to admire. I think it repays the effort required to read it in absolute spades. If you like a challenging read, go for it.  I don't blame you if you fail, but please, push through with it.  You might even find yourself feeling sorry for him by the end of the book as Amis manages to somewhat humanise this monster of a narrator.

Grimmfest final day

 

Day 4 – Final Day

I was really flagging badly by this point.  The caffeine drinks were essential to my continued state of uprightness. I may need to consider factoring in the extra cost of taxis home next year.  It’s still well worth it.

A full day of films ahead again, starting with…

The Harbinger – Dir Andy Mitton, Cast – Gabby Beans, Emily Davies, Raymond Anthony Thomas, Cody Braverman

Pandemic paranoia gives way to a much more existential dread when Monique is called by an old friend to help her.  She’s been having bad dreams of a creature that wants to remove her from the world quite literally.

This was another contender for best film of the weekend.  It certainly contains the best jump scare. Films about dreams can often become irritating with characters conveniently waking (or not) from their nightmares at the behest of the plot. There’s nothing worse than a shocking character death that’s instantly rewritten.  This manages to evoke true horror from the world of nightmares and was certainly a real highlight of the weekend.

Feed Me – Dir Adam Leader,Richard Oakes -  Cast – Christopher Mulvin, Neal Ward, Hannah Al Rashid, Samantha Loxley

When a depressed guy agrees to an assisted suicide in possibly the most gruesome and drawn out manner imaginable, the scene (and table) is set for one of the maddest and least predictable films of the weekend.

I really wasn’t sure about this film for the first 15 to 20 minutes, but it grew on me pretty quickly once the plot really kicked into gear. This was funny, nightmarish, gory and gross and totally off the wall. By the end of the film my initial doubts were well and truly allayed and my biggest issue with it is that there is no meat on a finger.  If you fry it, you’re just going to get crispy skin on a bone and not a particularly tasty snack.

Vesper – Dir Kristina Buozyte, Bruno Samper – Cast – Rafaella Chapman, Eddie Marsan, Rosy McEwan

A change of pace now with a thoughtful and slow paced environmental science fiction film set in a not too distant future where all plant life has been polluted.  The rich live in domed citadels and the poor outside of the domes are forced to trade the blood of their young for seeds to feed themselves.  The seeds are engineered to only grow one crop so the demand can never change.

This was a welcome slow down from the insanity and intensity of the first two films of the day. Beautiful to look at and very well acted, particularly by the young lead.

Do not Disturb – Dir John Ainslie, Cast – Kimberly Lafferriere, Rogan Christopher, Janet Porter

Drugs are bad, kids.  Don’t do it.  Particularly not when a raving mad guy (whose tie switches position from on to off, to round his head, to loosely over one shoulder etc, depending on the camera shot) throws a bag of murder peyote at you on the beach before walking into the sea and disappearing.

The couple at the centre of this film don’t heed this advice, and are rapidly losing hours from their lives as well as finding they’ve killed and eaten potential sexual partners… 

I really enjoyed this. It’s not perfect.  You need to ignore logic at times, and forget how difficult it is to clean up blood, and how much dead bodies smell and weigh. But if you can ignore that, this is a damned entertaining piece of drug fuelled mayhem.

Dark nature – Dir – Berkley Brady – Cast – Hannah Anderson, Madison Walsh, Roseanne Supernault

A therapeutic hike into the American wilderness turns out not to be quite so relaxing as was hoped for. After escaping a violent relationship, a young woman joins her friend’s therapy group on a weekend retreat into the mountains.  As you’d expect from a horror film, they find their worst nightmares made real instead.

This was a beautiful to look at film.  The backdrops and locations are truly stunning.  The performances are solid throughout.  I’m not sure if I was dosing a bit by now and missed a bit of dialogue here and there, but there were some decisions made by the characters that didn’t quite add up. The monster looked good and wasn’t overused. Overall this was a pretty effective little movie.

The Lake – Dir Lee Thong, Cast – Wanmai Chatburirak, Palita Chueasawathee, Su Jack, Zang Jinsheng

I love a good monster movie, especially kaiju films.  I was really looking forward to this one. A Thai variation on the theme…

It started well, with the baby monster wreaking havoc in a village by a lake, killing everyone in sight. However, it went downhill after the first 40 minutes or so. It was so disappointing when the mother was on her rampage, and walked politely through the standing traffic rather than batting cars aside with every step.

The monster design seemed to change several times through the film and the human storyline was poor even by the standards of Kaiju films. If I’d seen that shot of the monster’s face through a car window one more time, I would have watched Jurassic park in the lobby instead – at least it was scary in JP.

I get that they were trying something a little different to other rampaging monster films, but it was something that’s been done before and better (and made sense in the other variations on this idea).  There were hints at a more interesting storyline that never came to fruition. This was a frustrating film.  So much potential, but ultimately wasted.

Sadly, that was the last film of the festival. However, we all decamped to the festival bar and got roundly drunk. The organisers were there and as friendly and effusive as ever.  

Grimmfest is a definite highlight of the year – and two duff films out of 21 is a damned good batting average. There were several guests across the weekend who were all interesting and good to chat to. If you could find time between films, there’s always a guest or two hanging around. 

Now that the weekend has been fully documented, normal service will resume.  I have three books to write up...

Grimmfest Day 3

 

Day 3 – Saturday

If I was feeling a little tired on the morning of day 2, I’m properly flagging now.  The can of monster from Tesco was an absolute necessity today.  I always walk home from the festival in the evenings and with the last film ending at 1am, I got home at about 2.  Then to get up in time for the bus into Manchester is a struggle.

Day 3 opened with another batch of short films.  There were 5, but only 4 are listed in the programme.

The shorts Some Visitors and Old Timers both had almost identical stings to the tale, but Old Timers definitely did it best. 

Some Visitors is a home invasion story that was reasonably good but was a little bit annoying when the action sequences started.  If someone knows how to fight (and the central character certainly did), they don’t flop their arms weakly around them if someone is trying to strangle them.  Also (sorry, slight spoiler) if they take a meat cleaver to the shoulder, that’s the collar bone broken and they ain’t using the arm on that side again for a few months if they don’t bleed out and die. It ended nicely, but the fight scenes were too silly and unrealistic.

Old Timers was a lot more subtle and delivered its twist with panache. It was certainly the best of the shorts for the whole weekend.

The Evil is Inside looked like it was going to borrow from the old Bill Pullman film Frailty, but then just stopped mid story which was a bit of a shame.   The Baby Next Door was entertaining and yet another baby centric short.

The first full length feature of the day was Moon Garden

Moon Garden – Dir Ryan Stevens Harris 

This was a really quite special movie. It’s not a horror film as such, although the Teeth character is truly nightmarish. A young girl falls down a flight of stairs and enters a dream world while her parents worry at her hospital bed. This uses traditional stop motion and time lapse photography to stunning effect.  I’ve not seen a film like this in years.  It’s another one that compares very favourably to early Tim Burton with its fairy tale feel. I voted for this as the best movie of the festival.

The Q&A with the director was the best Q&A of the weekend too

The Goldsmith – Dir Vincenzo Ricchiuto, Cast – Stefania Casini, Guiseppe Pambieri, Gianluca Vannucci

When three criminals break into the isolated home of a goldsmith, they find themselves caught in a deadly trap. This ratchets the tension brilliantly and throws in unexpected character deaths and some truly surreal horror moments towards the ending.  Recommended.

Night Sky – Dir Jacob Gentry, Cast – Brea Grant, AJ Bowen, Scott Poythress

This was a very entertaining road trip movie with a thief heading across the USA to New Mexico with a young woman who isn’t entirely human while a cold blooded killer tracks their every move. The dialogue was great between the leads and it built genuine tension  as it moved on. 

The Price We Pay – Dir Ryuhei Kitamura, Cast – Emile Hirsch, Stephen Dorff, Vernon Wells

More robbers on the run.  This time they hole up at a remote farmhouse with their reluctant hostage where they find the proceedings are far more dangerous than anything they’re hiding from.  This contains some of the most creative character deaths I’ve seen in a long while. Buckets of blood are thrown gleefully across the screen to accompany the spot on characterisations and crackling dialogue between the leads.  This was one I thought about voting for as best film.

Next up was supposed to be Cult hero. But, the organisers had managed to get a copy of Pussycake with English subtitles so I saw that instead.

Pussycake- Dir Pablo Peres, cast – Macarena Suarez Dagliano, Aldana Ruberto, Anahi Politi

An all-female rock band (the eponymous Pussycake) are sent to a small town for their next gig.  Unbeknownst to them, the previous day, a portal had been opened to an alternate dimension in this town, leading to the release of a deadly creature.  This is the second best “alien slug which turns people into drooling blood soaked zombies” film of the festival but is still good fun. The performances are decent and, even though we know from the start who lives and who dies, it stayed entertaining and happily blood soaked throughout.  The beach scenes were particularly good and the most original thing about this film.

I’m glad we had this film on the Saturday because it meant there wasn’t a bad film all day.

Final film of the night

Malibu Horror Story – Dir Scott Slone, Cast – Tommy Cramer, Dylan Sprayberry, Jacob Hughes

This is a found footage film of sorts, following the investigation into the disappearance of 4 teenagers the previous year. It has the most jump scares of any of the movies all weekend and delivered them impeccably. The creature wasn’t overused and was genuinely pretty bloody scary. A good end to a very strong day at the festival.  

Once again, I left at 1am and got home at 2 but it was well worth it. Day 4 write up to follow soon. 

Grimmfest Day 2

 

day 2 - already it's a struggle to wake up early enough for the bus into Manchester. There's a full day of films ahead starting at 10:30 with Piggy

Piggy - Dir Carlota Peroda, starring Laura galan, Adrian Grosser, Carmen Machi

Sara is a large girl and continually bullied by the popular kids in the town (leading to her rather unflattering nickname), and even her supposed best friend doesn't stick up for her. After a particularly nasty session of bullying, Sara witnesses a visiting serial killer kidnapping the girls in his van.  She says nothing and allows him to drive off. 

Over the next few days, she keeps quiet about him when questioned by the police and forms a weird relationship with him. 

This is a brilliantly disturbing film, psychologically convincing and repulsive at the same time.  There's not a weak performance in the film and it leaves you feeling a bit shell shocked.  This is the sort of film I go to Grimmfest to watch.  

Megalomaniac - Dir Karim Ouethaj, Starring Eline Schumacher, Benjamin Ramon, Wim Willaert

If Piggy was a bit messed up from a psychological viewpoint, this is ten times nastier.  The son of a serial killer from a few decades ago takes up the family mantle.  His sister is attacked viciously at work. He gives her a pet to look after, aka a new victim who is kept chained in the spare room. 

This is a fantastically well made film.  Every shot and camera angle specifically calculated for maximum impact. This makes Piggy look like an episode of the magic roundabout.  Whether it's enjoyable or not is up for debate, but it's a great film by any objective standard of filmmaking. 

The next film was supposed to be Pussycake, but thanks to a complete screw up by the distributor (nothing to do with the festival organisers), the copy they started showing had no subtitles.  That's not ideal for a Spanish film.

Instead of that, the festival bods showed Holy Shit! in this slot.

Holy Shit! - Dir Lukas Rinker, Cast - Tomas Niehaus, Gedeon Burkhard, Olga Van Luckwald

Single location films can be difficult to pull off. When the location in question is a collapsed porta-potty, and the whole film centres on one actor for 90% of the running time, it takes something special to make it work. This film has that something special.

A man wakes up. He can't remember the previous night.  He's in the aforementioned porta-potty and his right arm is skewered on a piece of rebar so he ain't going nowhere fast. We hear over a nearby loudspeaker system that the demolition is due to commence in 30 minutes...

What follows is a tense, funny, occasionally gross race against time to escape. I had a few issues with the ending but nothing unforgivable. Other than that, this was great fun and highly recommended. Several scenes had me squirming in my seat.

Final Cut - Dir Michel Hazanavicus, Cast - Romain Duris, Berenice Beho, Gregory Gadebois 

This is an almost shot for shot remake of One Cut of the Dead. There's a couple of extra jokes thrown into the mix. There isn't really anything to mark it as different from the original though.  it's nicely done, although (unlike the original) I did find myself wondering whether the "one take" gimmick of the opening 30 odd minutes was genuine. There are some very very obvious edit points in there...

House of Darkness - Dir Neil LaBute, Cast - Justin Long, Kate Bosworth, Gia Crovatin

A pick-up artist drives his latest conquest to her home in the middle of nowhere. It turns out to be a huge estate, and she invites him in.  Thus begins a comedy of manners with a dark heart. 

This one split the audience. At least one person I spoke to was pretty angry about it saying it wasn't a Grimmfest movie.  I disagree entirely.  Despite the fact that the story could have been told in half an hour, I thought this was so well acted that I was never bored in the slightest. It did need the nightmare sequence in the middle of the film to remind us it was a horror film before the ending (which certainly was horror). The twist was fairly predictable, but it didn't spoil my enjoyment of this one.

Candy Land - Director John Swab, cast - Olivia Luccardi, Sam Quartin, Eden Brolin

At a truck stop/brothel in bible belt America, a client is viciously murdered, and later a girl is abandoned by her cult and taken in by the sex workers for safekeeping. The killings continue and soon no one is safe. 

This is a confrontational film which doesn't back away from much in its depiction of the sleaze inherent in both the sex workers and the religious cult's lives. It's not as hard hitting as megalomaniac was, but i was grateful for that to be honest. 

I thought the ending was possibly a little bit weak, and I was wondering at one point why no one had smelt a particularly badly hidden corpse. Those concerns aside, this was an excellent film, brilliantly acted and some real shock moments.

Since Holy Shit! was meant to be the final film of the day, the organisers brought Cult Hero forward from day three for those who'd already watched HS!. 

Cult Hero - Dir Jesse Thomas Cook, Cast Justin Bott, Jessica Vano

the first dud of the festival for me.  There's a fine line between a parody of bad horror, and actual bad horror.  This took a running jump over that line.

It's always a bad sign when the title is different in the programme than in the film itself. The title in the opening credits was Cult Busters and the film is as poor as that title. It's about a washed-up cult buster who once caused the mass suicide of a cult, who is recruited by a Karen to free her husband from what she believes to be a dangerous cult. 

For a comedy film the jokes were very weak and relied on really badly done overacting by the main leads tp try to sell them. I think I heard three laughs during the running time of this film, and probably a dozen people took the sensible option and left for their lodgings/a drink not far into it. I should have done. It was too silly, not gory enough for what it was trying, and just lazily written.

I will write up day 3 tomorrow.

Grimmfest 2022 - Day 1

 Not about books for the next couple of posts

Grimmfest is an annual horror film festival in Manchester and one of my top priorities every year. It's where I've spent the last weekend, and the reason I've had about 12 hours sleep since Friday.

Here are my opinions on it day by day.

Thursday 6th October - a nice easy lead in to the main body of the festival, with a shorts programme and two films

There were 6 shorts, all of which were well worth watching. The highlights, basically the ones that I can came straight back to me when I looked at their titles, were Yummy Mummy and Baby Fever. they both feature pregnancy as the central theme.

Yummy Mummy follows a young woman who finds herself increasingly depersonalized by her husband, his family and the medical staff she sees. This is taken to nightmarish proportions and was really quite disturbing.

On a lighter vein, Baby Fever featured a prom queen to be who accidentally becomes impregnated by a slug type creature from the lab where she loses her virginity to the school football jock. This leads to some queasy makeup effects and a blackly comic descent into madness.

The other shorts were Enough Sleep (another baby themed horror), Ringworms (gory fun), Unheimlich (which I'm struggling to remember details of other than it was surreal and B&W), and Tranvia (a woman boards a tram to hell).

The first full film of the festival was The Loneliest Boy in the World.  Dir - Martin Owen, starring Max Harwood, Ben Miller and Susan Wokoma.

This was a gorgeous picture, very reminiscent of Tim Burton before he became quite so irritatingly self-indulgent. A young man just released from therapy is told he needs to make friends if he wants tto stay living in his dead mother's house. he does what we would all do in this situation and digs some up from the local graveyard including the local school jock who recently died in a car smash, and 3 victims from a recent plane crash.

When they start talking back to him, the film really takes off and runs with it. this is surreal, touching and occasionally quite gross as his friends continue to decompose whilst handing out life advice and getting him back on track. Thoroughly entertaining and unexpected.

The Passenger - the second and final film for opening night - Dir Fernando Gonzalez Gomes, Raul Cerezo, Starring Ramiro Blas, Cecilia Suarez, Paula Gallego, 

I wanted to like this much more than I did. I don't know if it was the projector at the Odeon, but this was very dark.  it seemed like in some scenes they'd blown the lighting budget on slime instead. This is a Spanish film with a parasitic alien slug that turns the cast into zombies one by one. 

It starts well with good character development as the 4 leads travel in a van across Spain. On the back roads they run over a woman and take her on board the van to get her to hospital. Once the monster mayhem started, I thought the writing lost a lot of the tightness that it had in the beginning.  

There were a couple of my pet peeves with this type of film.  Not one but two lots of "we need to split up" when it was far more sensible to stick together. A character who took a blow to the head and was so badly hurt that an hour later (in film time) he started passing out. However, after a glass of water he was completely cured.  When one of the characters is fighting a zombie in the back of the van, the two characters in the front don't notice for several minutes because they're playing music?  I recognise that that bit was an attempt at comedy, but it wasn't particularly successful IMHO and was vaguely irritating.

One of the characters witnesses one of the zombies decapitate a man at the petrol station. When her friend comes back and asks her what's wrong, she doesn't just point at the corpse on the floor behind her.  Which wouldn't have made much difference since it was gone and not even any bloodstains to show where it was.

It was an ok film but, with a bit more attention to detail on the edit, and less sloppy writing once the action got underway, it could have been excellent.

Day 2 and 3 write up tomorrow.  I need my beauty sleep.

Number 55 - Roth-Steyr - Simon Bestwick

 

I needed something to wash the bad taste of the Douglas warner book out of my mouth, so a quick cheat read from the ever-reliable Mr. Simon Bestwick was in order.

It follows the story of Valerie Varden, a pathology lab worker in a hospital in Manchester with a secret past.  When a pair of bodies, murdered with an unusual gun, show up on her slab, she has to confront the dark secrets she's hiding from her girlfriend, whilst facing off against dangerous enemies from her much longer past than anyone knows about.

Things take a turn for the weird in this book on about page 5 when it's revealed that she pre=dates the first world war. Indeed, she was an Austrian countess in the first part of her life.

There follows a winding tale of revolutions and revolutionaries and eternal soldiers (till you kill them).

I have to say, I didn't enjoy this one as much as his other books. Whilst the central story is excellent, and the modern-day sequences are tense and exciting, there are parts of the backstory that feel like so much info-dump about the politics of WWI era Austria which didn't feel completely necessary to the storyline.  This info-dump slowed the mid-section of the story down quite considerably for me. It's clear that he finds the politics of 1910s/20s Europe to be endlessly fascinating, but it felt a bit like a history lecture for a few pages rather than a tense thriller. 

Other than that, the book is actually great success.  The trip into cosmic horror close to the end is one of Simon's most effective horror sequences. Val is a mostly intriguing narrator, a complex and sympathetically drawn protagonist, and I didn't want anything bad to happen to her, which says something. 

Apparently there is a sequel in the works, and I will happily be reading that too. 

This book can be ordered from Black Shuck Books - order it direct so Bezos doesn't get a share of your hard-earned cash.

Number 54 - Death on a warm wind - Douglas Warner

 This was a cheat read randomly chosen from my TBR shelves mainly for the thickness of the book and the rather interesting cover.

I think I found it in the charity section at the front of my local Tesco a couple of years back.  After reading it, it's going straight back there.

Douglas Warner died in 1967 apparently. This copy must have been printed in the early seventies since the price on the back cover is in decimal currency (25p in case you're interested). 

He's a bit of a forgotten author and wrote 4 books whose titles started Death On A ___. It's fair to say I will not be seeking out any of his other books. This one was more than enough.

This is a clear contender for worst book of the year so far.  Maybe the past several years. I would rather read the Louise Penny/Hilary Clinton book again than this one.

It's a shame because the opening couple of pages of this are very good.  The opening sentence is a corker "Robert Colston died three times, though only the last one was for keeps"

It goes downhill rapidly from thereon in.

The story follows a newspaper editor - Ian Curtis - who witnesses the final death of Robert Colson, shot dead in front of the newspaper offices where he (Ian) works whist attempting to deliver an urgent message.

Curtis decides to investigate and uncovers a terrible conspiracy. 

When I say a terrible conspiracy, I don't just mean that in the world these characters inhabit, the consequences could be dire, I mean the conspiracy is badly thought out, implausible and totally stupid.

It all links to five years previously when Robert had predicted an earthquake that was going to strike the town of Arminster before it happened.  Of course, he wasn't believed and 95,000 people apparently died in the tragedy. 

This is where things start to get really silly. We find out the details of the earthquake in chapters 3 through 8, a good third of the book. This is supposed to be in the form of an article about the earthquake commissioned by Curtis from his star reporter called Holt. These chapters are supposed to be the article Holt wrote.  Characters refer to phrases used in this segment later on.  Therefore, you would expect it to be written as per a newspaper article.  

However, it's written in close third person, swapping between about 7 characters (including Colston even though there's no way Holt could have talked to him). The language used is unlike any ever in any newspaper ever published. It's 40 pages long - and it's the worst depiction of an earthquake ever set to paper.

The first one bunch of characters know about it is when the chandelier in their ballroom starts swinging like a pendulum. Take note that this is apparently a force 8.7 quake, but the characters haven't felt the earth move at this point. The fact that an earthquake of this magnitude is so localised as well seems rather implausible.

We also hear about one pair of young newlyweds and their sexual misadventures just before the quake hits (she is refusing his advances because she's never done it before, just before the room collapses on them killing her), because obviously this would be included in an article written for publication in an evening paper, and something that the surviving member of the couple would tell the journalist in the first place. 

Colston is living in this town even though he knows what's happening.  he knew ten hours before the quake the time it would happen and the epicentre. However, when his warnings fell on deaf ears, he went back to his boarding house and didn't clear off out of the town. Therefore, he's caught in the quake, loses his memory because of a blow to the head, and regains his memory 5 years later when he's assaulted and hit on the head a second time.

The reason Colston knew the earthquake was going to happen?  It had been hot weather for five weeks and there was a warm wind from the south... That explains the title at least. Even for the time it was written the science is hokey and unbelievably badly thought out.

The political intrigue he tries to instill into the plot is a damp squib. A couple of shouting matches between two equally tedious characters.

If this hadn't been only 133 pages, I might have given up on it. The contents of the message that Colston was trying to give to Curtis is so obvious, and such a coincidence that he got his memory back just in time before the events of the last section of the book.

All this is told in a deathless prose that barely held my interest and it was a struggle to carry on with it. This isn't a so bad it's good book. It's just bad. It's close to unreadable.  It's a couple of hours of my life that I wish I could have back.

I read this so you don't have to.

Number 53 - Dead Water - C.A. Fletcher

 

This was a NetGalley read provided for a fair review.

C.A. Fletcher is another completely new name for me.  It wasn't until the rather brief author bio at the end of the book that I even knew he was a he. There are no previous publications listed so I assume this is a debut novel.

On a remote Scottish island, trouble breaks out when an ancient curse is released. The water becomes a source of terror, and the islanders are pulled into a struggle between life and death,

Stated that way this sounds like standard fare, but Fletcher is a damned good writer, and this feels like a totally fresh, original and frankly, bloody terrifying, read.

This is packed with set pieces and action sequences that left me reeling. Some of the imagery is dredged from the scariest of nightmares. 

The plot takes a while to build and become clear, but it's never slow paced.  He switches viewpoints between each of the characters in alternating short chapters. The tension builds from the first pages.  Events may start slowly, but there's a clear set of dominoes that he topples one by one, each time raising the stakes and thinning out the cast still further. 

It's all told in a perfectly rendered present tense, which gives everything a sense of immediacy and ratchets the sense of unease even more. He uses the opening chapters to put flesh on the bones of his characters, giving them all good backstories and motivations. The location is perfectly painted and is almost a character in itself.  The sense of isolation from the rest of the world is palpable.

I loved the way that he credits the reader with enough intelligence to put the pieces together, particularly in the first half of the book.  

The power of the writing raises what could have been a very generic story into something new and brilliant. There's even space for some of the blackest humour I've seen in a good while.

It's a fantastic book. If you like deeply chilling tales of remote communities getting being destroyed by unstoppable supernatural forces, this is the book for you.

Number 52 - We were the Mulvaneys - Joyce Carol Oates

 

This was the book group choice for the early September meeting.

I've heard good things about Oates and was looking forward to reading this and it is indeed very well written.  However, I'm totally conflicted on this book as I don't know if. at any point, I enjoyed reading it or not.

There are a lot of promises made about this book in the blurb and the reviews. I don't think it delivers.

I have almost never used slow as a bad thing when describing a book.  Slow paced is frequently the best way to build your cast and your atmosphere and make us care for the characters.

However, this book is glacially slow paced. I would be reading it for an hour, and realise I'd only read 15-20 pages. Considering this book was 453 pages, quite frankly I'm amazed I finished it in only 3 weeks.  That's the longest it's taken me to finish a book in several years.

The prose is so dense, light bends around it. There are some sequences of great writing, but it's never a quick or easy read. 

The story follows a family - the Mulvaneys, who live in a farm on the outskirts of a small town in 70s America (New York State). The father - Michael Sr - is a successful self-made businessman who runs his own roofing firm.  He's a social climber and one of his proudest achievements is getting accepted into the local country club. His wife - Corrinne - potters about with running the farm and an antiques business from one of their outhouses, which is treated more as a hobby and excuse for her to collect worn out oddities than a serious attempt at money making. 

They have 4 children, Mike Jr (aka Mule), a successful high school athlete, Patrick, the brainy one and possibly autistic, Marianne the beautiful daughter and popular cheerleader in the school, and Judd, the alleged narrator and youngest in the clan.

I say alleged narrator because of the sheer quantity of inner thoughts he describes for the rest of the family that he has no real way of even guessing at and the fact that he refers to himself in third person for most of the book. 

Oates spends a long time setting up this almost perfect family and their rituals before Marianne is assaulted and, bit by bit, the foundations of the family crumble and it all falls to pieces. 

The book was written well enough that I kept reading, despite the snailpace of the storytelling. But on reflection, I can't honestly say I was ever emotionally involved with the story. Everything is so dry and impersonal, even when it occasionally switches to first person.

I'm not sure any of the characters were particularly well drawn except for the mother. The father was particularly one dimensional. Corinne is too cliche mother hen although her complicity with her husband against her daughter makes her slightly more complex (and a lot less likeable).  Mule was shipped off out of the story at the earliest convenience without ever impacting on the storyline. Patrick's story arc is strange at best and unconvincing. Given the level of detail in Marianne's character early on, her later storyline seems to just pick random segments from her life and feels, not rushed, but certainly incomplete.  The story is written by the adult Judd who is apparently a journalist by trade.  However, the book certainly does not read as if a journalist 

The point was raised last night that the attitudes on display in the book seemed to belong to the 50s and not the 70s.  Maybe rural New York state is a few decades behind... i don't know. 

There's a paucity of incident in the book. The only section with any real drama is the section where Patrick plans his revenge. The pace did pick up in this bit of the book, but the revenge is slightly anti-climactic. The chapter headings for the last three chapters give away the ending of the book.

It's a real contradiction. I can find nothing to really praise about the book except the writing, and even that is so dense it makes it a difficult read. I scored it a 7 at the book group last night because I couldn't in good conscience score it lower because of the prose. But if I was to score it on compelling storyline and character, I think it would be a 4. 

On technical merit, this is a good book.  By almost any other metric, it isn't.