Number 36 - Brouhaha - Ardal O'Hanlon

 

Another Irish writer, this time it's that genial chap from Father Ted and My Hero. From the cover though, you can see that this isn't going to be a genial little read.

This is a crime thriller set in small town Ireland near the border in the early noughties. 

Dove Connolly is dead, apparent suicide via shotgun in the face. His best friend, Philip Starkey has returned to the town of Tullyanna to investigate how this ties in with the disappearance of his girlfriend Sandra thirteen years previously.

This kickstarts a chain of events involving strange comic books, local ex gangsters now current political candidates, more murders and lots of border politics.

It's all a bit of a curates egg. There are parts of this book that sparkle off the page.  You can almost hear Ardal reading it out and it's great. It's witty and almost compulsive.

However, and this becomes more pervasive the further in you get, there are bits that are really a bit of a slog. Lots of info-dumping and not much in the way of entertaining story.

In the final chapters, we don't even witness the final reveal of the truth first hand.  The heroes are told second hand by the policeman who took the confessions. It feels like a bit of a cheat to me to do it that way. 

The fact that some of the revelations about the missing girl come completely from left field with no foreshadowing in the slightest is less than satisfying. There's no hint whatsoever even in any of the character's flashbacks about her (they all grew up together and were in varying relationships with the missing girl) or even in her diary that one of the lead characters has read several times. A good twist has to have some basis in what has come before, not just "oh, she'd been doing these outrageous things all along and none of you boyfriends or best friends or even her diary had any idea about it".

So all in all a mixed bag and ultimately a bit disappointing. Some great writing, and some that needs work.

Number 35 - The Watchers - A.M. Shine

 

This month's theme of Irish writers continues with the debut novel by A.M. Shine, one of my favourite new writers I discovered last year with The Creeper.

In rural Ireland, Mina's car breaks down next to a strange forest.  There are no animal or bird sounds, except as night falls when she hears an ungodly bestial screaming. In the morning, she knows she needs to go for help and she walks into the woods...

There she finds a small group of people sheltering in a small building against the creatures that come out at night.  The Watchers won't let anyone leave the forest alive.

This is unrelenting tension from the first chapter onwards.  We're thrown straight into the danger and Shine barely lets the reader relax for even a single page.

There's even room for some major plot twists along the way. I admit I did work out the biggest twist about 100 pages before the reveal, but that doesn't spoil the book in the slightest. It was hinted at subtly enough and  remained ambiguous enough until the reveal that I wasn't sure I'd picked up the foreshadowing and the hints  correctly. and there was a huge sense of achievement when my suspicions were confirmed.

If there is any flaw with this book, it's the final couple of pages. The climax of the book did inspire an eye roll rather than shock as it's a bit of a cliched way to end a story, but, this is a debut novel and the rest of the book is so good, I'm not that bothered.

The characters are all well drawn. Their behaviour seems entirely plausible in this horrific situation they're all trapped in. The tension is sustained perfectly and kept my nerves on edge the whole time I was reading it. I've not read anything with this level of sustained suspense since the Ritual by Adam Nevill.  There are emotionally charged sequences that really hit the mark with pinpoint accuracy.

If not for the last two pages, I would have said this was better than The Creeper. Regardless, whatever his next book is, it's going to the top of my TBR. 

AM Shine is one hell of a scary writer.

Number 34 - There was a Crooked Man - Cat Hogan

 A nice little segue from one theme to the next here. There's a cat on the cover, and she's an Irish writer.  Irish writers are this month's theme.

I'd never heard of Cat Hogan before but this was cheap in the sale section of Waterstones and sounded interesting.

Scott Carluccio Randall is a real piece of work. He's a drug dealer and people trafficker living in Marrakesh as the book opens. He victimises his closest associate Fran just for fun.  

Back home in the Irish village they both left on short notice after a violent incident, Jen, a victim of Scott's violence in that incident, lives in terror of his return.

Her friends, family and therapist all think she's paranoid, but she knows he will return to complete the job he left unfinished last time, and both she and her 10 year old son will be his victims.

This is a tautly written thriller with engaging characters that we can empathise with. 

This read well as a standalone novel with many hints as to the violence in the past.  However, I discovered when I looked at the "by the same author adverts at the end of the book, "They All Fall Down", as namechecked on the top of the cover, is actually book one and this is a sequel.

Ah well.  One more for the shopping list.

Highly recommended.  The plot moves at a good pace. Scott is a proper villain and his insanity shines through his pages. Jen's paranoia seems perfectly reasonable in response. 

I wonder if my opinion of this will change once I've read the first book.

Number 33- The Last House on Needless Street -

A very delayed write up on the last book in my 'cats on the cover' theme. I've been away with no internet connection so it would have been difficult. The copy I wanted had a cat on the cover, the copy I actually received was the one in the picture, so I'll have to make do with the letters preceding "riona" in her name to make the connection.

After the difficult read that was the Bulgakov, I really needed something light and easy and this fits perfectly in that category.

I've heard a lot of things about this.  It seems to be a real marmite book (for non-UK residents, Marmite is a spread that people put on toast that you either love it or hate it, no in between. I think it tastes like a yeast infection would, so you can make your mind up which side of the fence I'm  on in that debate.) 

Ted lives in a run down house at  the end of Needless street. He shares the house with his daughter Lauren and his cat Olivia. A new neighbour moves into the empty house next door who could blow their world apart, which may not be a bad thing.

The book is narrated in alternating chapters between each of the four characters (yes, the cat narrates her own sequences).

It becomes very obvious, very quickly that all is not as it seems in Needless Street. Catriona Ward takes her time to drip feed us any explanations about the odd events and disturbing behaviour of our protagonists. The atmosphere she creates is creepy and suspenseful and the reader is constantly guessing (in my case mostly wrongly) what is actually going on. I can't say any more about the story without risking major spoilers.

I raced through this book in one day. I don't think it lives up to the quote in the reviews that span the first 6 pages about it taking the crown from Shirley Jackson's Hill House, but it is an extremely dark and brooding horror novel. It brilliantly takes some hoary old horror tropes and turns them on their head in a most surprising fashion.

An easy  8/10 and her other books are next on my shopping list. Count me in the "love it" group on this debate.

Number 32 - The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

 

Nearing the end of the cats on the cover theme…

The Master and Margarita is a classic of Russian literature and Mikhail Bulgakov’s most famous work. It’s not an easy read. Any Russian novel written between the two world wars is going to be a challenge for a casual reader and this is no exception (and I admit that, even though I keep this blog, I am a casual reader and read for pleasure. This blog is merely an attempt to tell people which books achieve this aim or not, and why).

The Devil has come to Stalin era Moscow and he’s brought some troublesome friends. We first meet him when he encounters a poet and an editor arguing about the existence of Jesus in the street. He tells them the “true” story of Pontius Pilate passing sentence. He goes on to predict the imminent violent death of the editor, and the incarceration in a mental hospital of the poet. These predictions rapidly come to pass and he moves into the deceased man’s apartment, from where he starts his reign of chaos over the city.

The style of writing is convoluted, and every character has at least three different names they’re known by, and these names are used completely randomly which makes things occasionally difficult to follow.

Fortunately, last week I was away and removed from all normal life distractions, so I had most of the week to sit and read. If I hadn’t, I would probably have taken 4 weeks or so to get through this. As it was, it took me 4 days.

I won’t lie. I did struggle to get into this one. It took till about page 200 before the style finally clicked. From the séance in the theatre onwards this was a pleasure to read. Prior to that there were flashes of brilliance, but it was difficult. 

Despite this I do think that this is a work of genius by most metrics. It’s surreal. It’s funny. It’s occasionally shocking. It seems to have quite a modern sensibility despite being a 90-year-old novel. As it’s a contemporaneous satire on Stalin’s Moscow, I probably did miss out on a lot of jokes and references, but there are sequences in this book that are timeless. A naked witch flying through the air on the back of a large pig that used to be the downstairs neighbour is an image from the book that particularly stuck in my mind for brilliant and funny surrealism.

This is as mad as a box of frogs when it gets going. It was constantly surprising and at no point could I predict where the plot might lead next. Even in the very difficult opening chapters the plot carried me through. I had no idea what I was reading, but it kept me interested. Once the style clicked with me, it was actually a weirdly easy read.

I'm very glad I read  it despite the early struggles. Do I recommend it to anyone else?  If you like densely written, strangely plotted Russian novels that confuse and confound, definitely. 

number 31 - The Cat Who Saved Books - Sosuke Natsukawa

 

Running a little bit behind on these at the moment.  I finished this last week but haven't had a chance to post here. 

First of all, that's a very pretty cat on the cover, and it's shiny, and that's the entire reason I bought this.  Yes, I am that easy to persuade to buy a book.

This is another Japanese fantasy novel in the form of four linked novellas. This time, the theme is the value of books.

Rintaro Natsuki is a teenager who runs a bookshop, Natsuki books, with his grandfather. When his Grandfather dies he's considering closing up the shop and moving away to live with his aunt, (both parents having died when he was a very small child).

He's visited in his shop by a ginger tabby cat that talks.  It takes him through a labyrinth that appears at the back of the shop on quests to save books from undignified fates.  One man who imprisons books, one who destroys them and one who betrays them.  The fourth quest is a far more personal odyssey for young Rintaro.

It's written in a very similar style to Before the Coffee gets Cold as well as being an identical format.  I don't know if that's a common format in the Land of the Rising Sun, or just for the books that publishers deign to translate for the English audiences.

 This was a nice easy read with some good points to make about the value of books and the trend for simplifying and bowlderising works of literature.  Rintaro makes for a sympathetic protagonist and his developing relationships form a nice emotional heart to the story.

All in all a solid little book, a quick read with a great cover.