Number 46 - The Creeper - A.M. Shine

 

This was a Netgalley read, free in exchange for a fair review.

AM Shine is a completely new name to me. but I loved that cover and the story sounded interesting.

And by God does it deliver in spades!

This is one of the best horror novels I've read for a few years. A. M. Shine is a major talent.

As far as I can see, this is only his second novel. Within a minute or two of finishing this book, I'd already ordered his debut, The watchers, and it will be very high up on my TBR pile when it arrives.

Back to this book though.

The story opens with a young woman hiding from something following her. The atmosphere is palpable even in the short prologue. 

We then jump forward a couple of years and we're introduced to Alec Sparling, a reclusive type living in a secluded mansion who's just paid off a detective to deliver him the recording of the last 999 call made by the terrified girl in the prologue.

He then recruits Benjamin French and Chloe Coogan, a young historian and a newly qualified architecture student respectively, to investigate a hidden village deep in the countryside of Ireland, apparently untouched by the outside world for 200 years.  While they're there, he instructs them to ask about a local superstition known as The Creeper.

You see the Creeper three times, first time, from a distance, the second time he's closer, the third night, he's at your window, after that you won't see much else.

From this fairly simple premise, Shine has created a paranoid and deeply scary thriller. Ben and Chloe are likeable and sympathetic protagonists.  Their mounting terror as they come to believe the superstition is superbly realised, with Ben's skepticism steadily eroding.  

Shine proves he can handle gory detail just as well as he can build atmosphere using shadows and suggestion. His prose is a pleasure to read, lucid and intelligent, and creepy as hell.

he's a name to look out for.  If he's this good on book 2, who knows what heights he'll reach.

Number 45 - Monstress Vol 6

 

This continues to be an endlessly fascinating series, just as satisficing as any prose novel

The artwork in this series is so good it's spoiled most other graphic novels for me.

In  this volume, the war is upon our heroes and the fighting can be delayed no longer. 

The politics are getting somewhat difficult to follow, although that could be because its months since I read the previous volume.

I will be making time at some point to read these back to back. 

As ever, the mix of cyberpunk, old gods and sentient half human half beasts is a stunning feat of imagination. Maika is a badass lead character and I can't wait to catch up on the next volume.

Number 44 - Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake

 

Another of the series of books I started last year.

Titus Groan was chosen for my book group and I was extraordinarily grateful. It gave me the excuse to finally get around to it and I loved it. 

So onto book two.  We delve deeper into the traditions and rituals of Gormenghast castle. Steerpike continues to murder his way up through the ranks. Titus is now seven years old (at the start of the book) and showing a rebellious streak of his own that can only lead to trouble.

The book follows his schooling under the strangest cast of teachers in fiction, the courting of Dr Prunesquallor's sister, and the rising threat from inside the castle in the shape of the devious and evil Steerpike. 

They don't write books like this any more. Never use just one word when two chapters will suffice. But those chapters are gloriously written. 

The cast of grotesques are beautifully (if that's the right word) drawn. You can practically see Irma Prunesquallor's nose poking out of the pages. You can feel the grime and the dirt of the castle and its environs. You can almost smell the atmosphere. 

This is a dense read.  It's very very wordy indeed, but in this case, that's not a fault. Once you tune into the cadence and the rhythm of Peake's writing, you become immersed.

I actually read this in just 3 days.  This edition is quite small print and was still 512 pages. It's not a short book or an easy read by any stretch of the imagination - and this book really does stretch the imagination.  As you can probably gather, I had a lot of spare time for reading in this past week.

This is frequently laugh out loud funny.  Given how dark the humour is, I'm not sure if that says more about me or the writing. For lovers of gorgeous prose, seedy atmosphere and jet black humour, this is an ideal book.

If you want fast moving action and nothing else, stay away.

On a weird note, I read the last hundred pages with BRMC's weird instrumental album - The Effects of 333 - playing in the background.  It really added to the atmosphere and made the build up to the showdown at the end so much more tense and exciting.

Number 43 - The Books of Magic-Bindings - Jon Ney Reiber

 

Collecting issues 1-4 of John Ney Reiber's run on The Books of Magic, this is a reread for me after nearly 30 years (back when I used to buy this particular comic. I wish I knew where the original comics were now)

For a series I  liked as much as this, I remembered absolutely nothing of this storyline.

Tim Hunter is a 13 year old boy who recently was visited by most of DC Vertigo's range of magic users in a mini series by Neil Gaiman.  This was the start of a new continuing series created for Vertigo under the talented hands of John Ney Reiber.

In this volume we discover hidden truths about young Tim's past and, most importantly, his parentage. At the same time he finds himself caught up involuntarily in the affairs of a decaying and withering Land of Faerie, facing a foe who strikes fear into the hearts of the bravest warriors.

The story was as intriguing and magical as I remember (I remember how much I enjoyed it but no details), but the artwork was not as good. In places, the best that can be said is that it's functional.

I stopped buying the comics for financial reasons back in the 90s. I will be trawling the comics fairs for the omnibus editions to try to complete the series.  Then I'll start on the new series that came out more recently which has been confusing my efforts to track down these volumes 

Meanwhile, this is a nice wander down a forgotten alley of memory lane.

Number 42 - The Salmon of Doubt - Douglas Adams

 

Book number 42 in the year has to be HHGTTG related. If that's not actually a law, it should be.

This year, that honour fell to this, the posthumous collection of Douglas Adams's essays, the one HHGTTG short story - Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, and the existing 11 chapters of the book Adams was working on when he died.

It's a fascinating and well researched/compiled collection of Adams's writing outside of the novels.

His trademark humour shines through most of the essays and letters, regardless of how serious the subject matter might be. In some places, he's remarkably prescient in the ways computers would take over every aspect of life.

In others, he's not quite so accurate.  in one essay about the future of magazines, he says that unwanted advertising will be a thing of the past when magazines and newspapers start happening online... Oh how I wish that prediction had come true.

His story about traveling to Australia to try to compare a new personal submersible vehicle to raiding the backs of the local aquatic life (namely the local manta rays) is particularly funny.

The short story has been about for a long while but I'd managed to never read it before picking up this book.  It's everything you'd expect from Adams, except a lot shorter than usual. It's also dated rather badly due to the satirical ending which will probably be lost on anyone who doesn't know about 80's world (USA) politics. 

The novel extract is both brilliant and desperately sad.  Brilliant because it's so bleeding funny. desperately sad because it's unfinished.  It was a new Dirk Gently book, although apparently he was thinking of reworking the ideas into a Hitch Hiker's format. The plot was pretty much insane but certainly involved time travel.  I was really getting into the story, as hard as I was trying not to (because I knew it was only a fragment), and suddenly it just finished. We will never know what the relevance of Desmond the rhinoceros might be to estate agents battling talking kangaroos in the distant future. We'll never know why the femme fatale was missing only the back half of her cat. there's a deep seated tragedy in that.

Twenty years on, Adams is still one of the greatest geniuses to grace the world of comic literature. If the heaven he didn't believe in believes in him, I hope he's happy there and keeping the angels amused with his anecdotes about the sheer inconvenience of the afterlife. 

Number 41 - Sallow Bend - Alan Baxter

 

I was sent a review copy of this from Cemetery Dance in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

I was very happy to be sent this review copy, as regular readers of this blog will know, I think the name Alan Baxter is an assurance of quality and he is one of my current "collect everything I can that he's written" authors. It feels good to be reading his latest before it's officially out.

This book, actually the first full length novel I've read by Baxter, continues the tradition of quality I've seen in his other works.

Nestled in a sweeping curve of the river Sallow, the town of Sallow Bend harbours its own dark secrets.

The carnival has just rolled into town. Two local girls have gone missing. When the girls are found alive and well, the townspeople are jubilant. But what they don't know is that something else has come back to the town with the girls, and it has its own agenda. People start dying, and only one man has any idea of what's happening, but what can he do to stop the rising death rate when no one will believe what he has to say?

In a welcome twist to the traditional tropes, the carnival isn't the source of the troubles; they've just arrived at the same time as an old evil has risen in the town, and they're as likely to die by its hands as any of the townsfolk. 

This is a fast paced and occasionally pretty gross horror novel. Despite the presence of so many familiar tropes (small town American setting, ancient evil rising etc) this wrong footed me on several occasions. The way the villain is introduced to the story was brilliantly done and totally unexpected.  

At least one character who I assumed to be an unredeemable bad guy turned into one of the most sympathetic characters once we found out why he was the way he was. Even the villain has good reason for her quest for vengeance against the town.

Baxter creates an ever increasing sense of dread and hopelessness throughout. We're never quite certain who will survive. The final confrontation is as tense as any you'll read in a Stephen King novel. (I know I try not to compare horror writers to King because it feels lazy on my part, but again, this shares enough thematic similarities it's almost unavoidable)

I missed the Australian setting of his other books that I've read. The American setting has a more familiar feel to it and therefore less of the weird atmosphere I found in the two Gulp collections. that's only a minor quibble though. My only other quibble is that some of the characters were so well drawn that I wanted them to play a more active role in the story and it was slightly disappointing that they didn't. 

There's also some well integrated social messaging that comes across as a natural part of the story rather than preachiness. 

The writing is unpretentious and an easy read. Good characters and a refreshing and unpredictable take on some old conventions. The monster is genuinely threatening and almost completely original.

This is a great slice of small town horror. Go out and buy it when it's released. You won't regret it.

Number 40 - Born To The Dark - Ramsey Campbell

 The second book in Ramsey's Bricester Mythos trilogy and the follow up to The Searching Dead (which I wrote up here in February last year if you want to look up my thoughts on that volume)

Firstly, it has to be said that PS Publishing did an amazing job with these books, and Les Edwards (the cover artist and a bit of a legend in the horror field) is as great and eye-catching an artist as he ever was.

The story picks  up in the 80s, 30 years after the events of the Searching Dead.  Dominic Sheldrake is now a married university lecturer with a child of his own. He teaches film study, which allows Ramsey to ruminate on some of his favourite films and their meanings in the course of the book.

In the opening chapter he meets up briefly with Jim and Bobby, his friends from the first book for a long delayed reunion.  This is used to give a slightly clumsy recap of the first book as well as reintroducing us to the cast.

Unfortunately, in the political discussion that ensues in chapter one, we find that Dom is now a poster boy for Thatcherism, which made me dislike him quite intensely. I hope this is done to inject a feel of the 80's rather than further self insertion of the author into the text.

When he returns home to his wife and child (Lesley and Toby even though the blurb on the inside cover names his wife as Claudine who is actually one of Toby's friends). We find out that Toby suffers from seizures in his sleep and they've just been referred to a facility called Safe to Sleep. 

Of course, all is not well at safe to Sleep, and Dominic soon finds himself fighting to reveal the truth about the facility to his loved ones or anyone who will listen. The facility is run by Christian Noble, Dominic's ex-teacher, and the cult leader Dom faced in the first book. What is the Noble family doing in the clinic?  Can Dom do anything to fight?

The sense of paranoia that develops once the plot starts gathering momentum is masterfully done. How can he fight this evil if no one, including his nearest and dearest, believes a word he says?

It's all written in Ramsey's unmistakable style.  There's something insidious in the prose that slowly nibbles away at your sense of reality while reading a Ramsey Campbell novel. This one is no exception. despite my initial dislike of Dom in the early chapters, I soon sympathised with him and wanted to see him persuade the people around him what was really happening.

One of my pet hates in horror is when everyone just accepts what's happening without a problem. This book certainly doesn't suffer from that. It derives probably half the horror from the fact that only Dom knows what's happening and he just can't make anyone believe him.

It's not a perfect book. The opening chapter was a bit clumsy, and despite the number of times we're told Toby is advanced for his age, he never seemed to speak realistically as a 5 year old child. It was a damned good read nonetheless and those are minor quibbles.  

I have book 3 on my shelves, pulsating and calling out to be read. 

It shall wait it's turn.