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.