Number 55 - The Big Blind - Lavie Tidhar

 A poker playing novice nun enters a high stakes poker tournament to win enough money to save her convent...

That's the basic plot of this novella. 

I learned a lot about the ins and outs of competitive poker but it's fairly lucky that I knew the rules as there is no explanation of any of the terminology. Maybe it would have benefitted from an early scene in the convent where she explains the mechanics of the game to one of her fellow nuns. There is a scene early on where she plays cards against them for matches which would have been an ideal opportunity.

It's a very fast read and entertaining enough.  the back  cover says that this book is a meditation on faith, but other than Sister Claire thinking about her call to the convent for two or three pages, I'm not there's really much of that. 

It feels quite cliched to be honest and very formulaic, right down to the almost miracle on the final hand of the book. however it's an entertaining enough cliché and written well enough that I didn't really care.  There are a lot worse books than this where their clichés seem uninspired and tedious. 

Your enjoyment of this will probably depend on how many hands of cards you can read described before you glaze over.  For me, he gets the balance right.  Just at the point where I wanted him to move it along and talk about the people and not the cards, he did. 

The characters are probably what make this book. Claire's relationship with her two mothers, actual and superior, are very well drawn. There's a wry humour to be gleaned from the Mother Superior's change in attitude when she sees Claire on TV about to win huge amounts of money. the other poker players are mostly drawn in very broad strokes but are distinct characters in their own right.

So this is a well paced, pleasant little read, if a little bit generic. My biggest confusion is why PS published it as there isn't even the faintest hint of the slightest whiff of fantasy or science fiction about it.

My second book by Tidhar and the second time I've promised myself I must read more of his work.

Number 54 - If It Bleeds - Stephen King

 I was going to read this as one of my "Cat on the Cover" themed reads, but, as you can see, this is the wrong edition.  So it's here in my short fiction theme instead.

This is the latest compilation of novellas by King.  He has of course done this several times now starting with Different Seasons, and they're normally very good collections.

I say "the latest" as if it's a new book, when of course it came out in early 2020 and the author's note at the end is dated 2019. The date of writing did lead to a bit of dissonance in one of the stories where the chapters' headings are the dates - set in late 2020 - and there's no mention of what we all know happened.  It was only momentary, It made me check the copyright page, and with a brief mental note that King might be a genius writer, but he's not psychic, I carried on with the book. 

To be completely honest, the worst thing was it made me realise how long this book has been sat in my TBR... I really need a spare 376 and a bit years with nothing to do but read.

Anyway - 4 novellas, kicking off with Mr Harrigan's Phone.  This is King at his folksiest. Craig is a young boy growing up in small small small-town USA. Thanks to his reading in church, he's invited to read for a local newcomer who owns the big house on the hill. Mr Harrigan is is a curmudgeonly old geezer who just happens to be a multi millionaire recently retired businessman. He also doesn't know about technology and it's up to Craig to show him how a first gen iPhone works. Naturally, this being King, something bad is going to happen. Old Mr Harrigan dies and is buried with the iPhone Craig gifted him. When Craig phones him, things happen. is it coincidence or are strange things happening from beyond the grave?

This story is low on incident even by King's standards but is a nice enough opener with good characters we can can care about, and some dark overtones.

The Life of Chuck -This isn't so much a novella as three tenuously linked short stories placed in reverse order to chart a few incidents in the life of Chuck from his death to early childhood. the first of these stories is one of my favourite things I've read from King. A slow apocalypse is happening. the world seems to be ending piece by piece and people are just trying to get on with their lives. Meanwhile, there are billboards and adverts popping up everywhere thanking Chuck, but who the heck is Chuck? The depiction of people just trying to get on with their day as the world is literally falling apart around them is spot on. A million dead in Asia? sad. A hole's appeared in the high street so I'll have to drive the long way to work?  Goddammit! Can this day get any worse?

The second of Chuck's stories is a great little character piece about a drummer in the street busking when a businessman (Chuck) in a suit starts dancing with a woman who just happens to be walking past. All three are painted in minute detail over the few pages that this story covers. Even as someone who detests dancing, I could feel the joy it gave the three characters in this bizarre interlude. bravo Mr King

The final part of Chuck's story goes back to his childhood and (almost) ties the three stories together into a coherent narrative. It tells of the room young Chuck must never enter in his grandparent's house. to say more would be spoilers.

Taken together, these three tales make a very surreal account of a man's life, but one that i adored reading.

If It Bleeds - The return of Holly Gibney and her first solo case. This really does need the reader to have read the Outsider first. If only for the very strong continuity between the stories, meaning that this gives a lot of spoilers for the Outsider.

The basic story is that there's another Outsider on the loose and Holly is on the case. This one has committed an atrocity in the opening chapter of the novella. Holly's recent experiences lead her to quickly deduce the identity of the killer, but now she needs to prove that her mad theories could possibly be true, and of course, stop this new monster from ever doing it again.

This is an exciting cat and mouse chase and the finale is a masterclass in how to build tension.

Rat - Stephen king's writer protagonists really need to stop going to remote cabins in the woods in the middle of winter to write their novels.  It never seems to go well for them. In this iteration on the scenario,  Drew Larson falls badly ill with flu, is trapped in the middle of the largest storm in years and encounters a talking rat that offers him a Faustian pact. Like Misery, this is as much a story about the creative process as it is about the characters that King chooses to put through hell for our entertainment. It's a lot more playful than Misery though. It feels like King has tried to write a Grimm type fairy tale, but in his own unique style, and I loved it. 

So overall, this book is low on horror, with only the title story really competing for that genre, but high on King's style and talent. and I read King for his style and talent. He could write in any genre and I would give it a chance. This collection is one I would recommend unreservedly.  It's playful and surreal, charming and scary, occasionally moving and quite funny too when he wanted.

I really want to read the Bitter springs novel that Drew was writing in Rat as well...

Number 53 - The Smallest of Things - Ian Whates

 Continuing my theme of short fiction, I'd already decided to read this small volume I received in the last bundle I bought from PS before I started on the John Probert book.  I'd never heard of him before so I thought it was quite a coincidence that he was mentioned in the acknowledgements in that book as the head of the small press that published it.

So we know as editor in chief of a small press he has good taste.

Is he a good writer to go with it?

The answer is a definite yes.

Chris is a fixer with a strange skill set.  he can move between different iterations of London. from the regular version he (and presumably we) inhabit, to mega futuristic versions, to smog filled nightmares. he can sense the spaces where reality is weak and leap through the gaps.

Whether any place outside of London exists in these multiverses is not discussed which is a bit of a sticking point for me- but that's incidental.

He's approached by an old friend in trouble.  Her boyfriend has just been apparently disintegrated by weird looking strangers in brown coats and hats. She knows Chris is the only man who can help her. This leads to a chase through many different versions of the city to an exciting denouement.

Multiverses are fairly popular in fiction at the moment and this is an interesting and entertaining addition to the sub-genre. Whates managed to keep me guessing throughout and the plot twists and turns nicely. His writing is always entertaining and Chris is a good narrator, even if he is a bit of a cliché. 

It's a fun read.  It might not be a literary classic but I'll definitely read more by this writer. 

Number 52 - How Grim Was My Valley - John Llewellyn Probert

 

Continuing my short fiction theme, here is a portmanteau novel by the inimitable Mr John Llewellyn Probert.

A portmanteau novel is basically a selection of short stories linked to make one continuous story. It's a difficult thing to get right. The framing story needs to make it feel like an actual novel. If the framing story isn't strong enough, it just feels like a collection of short stories with a gimmick. Even Bradbury only got it spot on once with Dandelion Wine. IMHO as good as they are, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and From the Dust returned don't feel like novels.

This manages to hit the sweet spot and feels exactly like a written version of the old Amicus movies it's so clearly a love letter to. despite being distinct stories, the framing story is strong enough to bind them all together into one coherent narrative.

That framework follows poor Robert, who wakes up on the welsh side of the border with no money and no memory. As he travels around the landscape of South Wales he hears stories from the people and places he encounters. These stories bring him ever closer to understanding who he is, and what his purpose is.

Of course, no matter how strong the framework, if the stories were weak, that would also kill the book dead, but there isn't a weak tale in here. I'm used to a certain gleeful malevolence in John Probert's short stories, and that is very much in evidence in stories like "Somewhere, Beneath a Maze of Sky", The Devil in the Details", and "The Church With Bleeding Windows". However, he also shows himself capable of some genuinely terrifying and paranoia inducing stories like The Men with Paper Faces which is easily on a par with the best that Ramsey Campbell (who wote the intro to this book) has written.

The Men With Paper Faces is probably my favourite story in the book. The images contained therein are pure nightmare fodder.

The only faults with this book are that there are a couple of annoying mistakes/typos (on one page taught in used in the place of Taut, and there was another similar homonym slip a few pages further on), and  the fact that Bangor, the city I grew up in, is clearly visible on the map in the front of the book, as is Betws Y Coed, but Robert only treks to mid Wales. I really wanted to see a story based on the legends surrounding the local areas but didn't get one.

The stories we do get though, range from very good indeed to excellent to terrifying. and the illustrations are excellent. If you can get your grubby mitts on a copy of this, you need to do so. You won't be disappointed.  The best book yet by the always reliable Dr of Terror himself.

Number 51- the Plot - Assorted talent

 I picked up this graphic novel cheap in Waterstones because it looked interesting and it was cheap.

It opens with the old cliché of the young family recently orphaned who move into a mysterious old house owned by the family with their last remaining relative. This seems to happen an awful lot. 

As is expected in this situation, strange things start happening. In this case it involves dead bodies and the local marshes.

As familiar as the storyline might be, this is well written and nicely drawn, with characters I give a damn about. The ending of this volume has me on a quest to find volume two, and quickly.

Number 50 - The Cold Summer - Gianrico Carofilglio

 This month's book group read was this Mafia thriller novel by Giancarlo Carofilglio.  I need to take a good run up before I say that name out loud.

I crossed out the word thriller above because that's one thing this book definitely isn't. It's a police procedural about the search for the kidnappers and killers of the son of a Mafia boss, but it falls short on the elements that thrill this particular reader.

That's not to say it's a bad book, it just doesn't fit with what I would normally expect from a novel about Mafia hitman and the police.

In 1992, just after the (real life) murder of a prominent judge  (who'd recently helped take down one of the largest Mafias in Italy), the son of a Mafia lord in Bari is kidnapped.  After the boy's dead body is discovered, despite the ransom being paid, Marshal Fenoglio of the Carabinieri has to track down the killers in the midst of a local mafia war.

All the ingredients are there for a fantastic and exciting cat and mouse chase between killers and targets with our brave hero showing off his skills as a detective.

That's not what we get though. Carofiglio is an ex-prosecutor for organised crime and government advisor on the anti-mafia committee so he knows the subject matter inside out and we can assume that what he's written is probably more realistic. Whether it makes for an exciting read is another question.

I managed to read this book in 3 or four days despite it being 350 pages.  It's a very quick and easy read. I was never bored with it, but I do have issues.

There's no mystery element to the story.  there's no hints for the reader to second guess the narrative.  We're given all the information unambiguously at the same time as the detective character.

At no point in the story does Fenoglio do any detective work. Quite literally, in both of the plotlines- the mafia war and the kidnapped child- one of the bad guys just decides to tell him everything he needs to know. Fenoglio himself does very little indeed to impact the story despite being the central character who's on nearly every page of the book. The closest he gets to detective work is when he takes a comment made by an associate and mentions that to a colleague.  The colleague then works out who the bad guys are, and one of them spills the beans on the other. It's the colleague and not Fenoglio who plays a substantial role in bringing the bad guy to justice too.

The pacing is slowed somewhat by sandwiching chapters with plot with chapters where the characters discuss how morally ambiguous policework is.  Probably half the book is philosophical musings about what is needed for effective policing.

The most interesting bit of the book is the central sequence where the Mafia guy is telling his story in the form of his police interviews and we learn how a small time thief can rise through the ranks and how Mafia's operate. One of the points made at the book group meeting was how this section feels more horrific because of the matter of fact way that the character talks about truly vicious killings and the correct techniques for disposing of the bodies.

There is an occasional nice turn of phrase and clever description.  All in all, I'm glad to have read it, but I'm not going to rush out to buy any of his other books. Despite the mafia being the subject of so much fiction, this book doesn't feel cliched and does feel like it's probably more grounded in reality than some others. Whether achieving that realism by all but ditching the thriller and mystery elements that normally accompany crime fiction is a good thing or not is up for debate. 

Number 49 - Thoughtful Breaths - Peter Crowther

 This elegant little volume was a surprise extra that came with my latest order from PS Publishing. Peter Crowther is one of the two head honchos at PS and is undeniably a great editor and publisher.

Luckily, his talents also stretch to the writing side of things.

This short story is a case in point.

It’s a very gentle and elegiac story set in small town USA that barely scrapes into the fantasy genre we associate with PS Publishing. It follows the Mendelsohn family from the first meeting of Boz Mendelsohn and his wife and follows them through the decades as they raise a family and eventually, tragedy strikes at the heart of the family unit. How they deal with it verges on the magical.

To say any more about the plot would really be going into spoiler territory.

I had to double check Pete Crowther’s details online after reading this. I met him at a signing once and I was sure he was very English. I was right. He is very definitely English and lives somewhere oop north.

This makes it doubly surprising that he manages to capture the essence of small-town America as elegantly and brilliantly as he does in this. The writing is folksy and feels as American as Stephen King.

It’s gorgeously written, evocative and emotional. And at only 32 pages isn’t a huge time commitment. There’s no reason not to read this. Go out and buy it. It will gently break your heart and you'll love Mr Crowther for doing it.   

Number 48 - Caviar - Sturgeon

 

I can't believe how long I've owned this book, and kept it in a position or relative prominence because of that rather glorious cover, and never realised what was going on with the title...

This is a collection of 8 of his short stories. covering over 10 years of his career. 

It opens with Bright Segment, which, if I'm reading the copyright page correctly, is original to this collection and therefore the most recent, meaning it was published in 1955. This is a spectacularly gruesome and sadistic piece of work. When the narrator finds a woman who's been viciously attacked and thrown out of a moving car, he takes her home to look after her because he's scared the authorities would blame him if he called them. I'm pretty certain the home made surgical techniques he uses to fix her up (that are described in precise detail for several pages) would have killed her faster than the existing injuries but that's another matter. The story turns psychologically cruel in the latter half, once she's recovered from the injuries. Once we learn the meaning of the title, the horror becomes absolute.  A great opener, not for the squeamish.

Next up is Microcosmic God (I'm pretty certain this is the title story in another collection of his), the oldest story in the book. A brilliant scientist manages to create life, and a race of creatures more brilliant than he could ever hope to be. He sets himself up as their God and tasks them into solving impossible scientific challenges.  The evil banker who makes his fortunes on the back of the inventions is stereotypically evil and wants power to go with the money. The situation escalates. The ending is a bit anti-climactic.  GRRM used a lot of the ideas in this in his story Sandkings (and more efficiently). 

Ghost of a Chance comes next.  A woman finds she must refuse the advances of any man who comes near her because a jealous ghost is following her and torturing any man she shows friendship with all sorts of amusing punishments. This is not a story that would be published today, not just because of the slightly dated narrative style that typifies the collection, but because of the inherent sexism of the narrator and the whole denouement. This is very much a product of  its time.  It's amusing enough but a guilty pleasure.

Prodigy is set in a distant future where children are tested for normalcy and euthanised before they're 5 years old if they deviate too far. Andi is not a normal child, but his death has been delayed to see if he could be of benefit to society due to his extraordinary abilities. Another quite nasty little tale.

Medusa is a pure science fiction fantasy about a quest to kill a madness inducing planet. The crew of the spaceship have all been driven preemptively mad with directly oppositional psychoses by the mission leaders. chaos inevitably ensues.  Another product of its time although I suspect that even at the time, the psychological aspects of the story would have made anyone with an ounce of knowledge say "huh". The idea of how the spaceships travel is the best part of this story, which is unfortunate.

Blabbermouth - a man's new girlfriend has a psychic power to discern any guilty secret in the vicinity.  However, she also has the uncontrollable urge to tell the nearest and dearest whatever the deep dark bad thing might be. Again this story feels very dated indeed.  

Shadow, Shadow on the Wall - a boy, locked in his room by his wicked stepmother, plays shadow games with his lamp and befriends the creatures he sees there. Revenge on his stepmother is sweet. the ending of this story is brilliant.  The last line is perfection itself.  It's right up there with the last line of Bradbury's October Game.

Twink - Despite this being one of the first ever nominations for the Hugo Award for best short story of the Year, I wasn't a big fan. Twink is the narrator's daughter and is undergoing a procedure for which the narrator is needed.  There's a weird twist and I'm not sure I really got the ending.  It may be because it was the early hours and I was tired. It's not a title I can safely google to try to understand it fully.  The word has a new meaning these days.

All in all this was a good collection with some real stand out stories. Some have to be seen as products of the age, but I have no issue with that. The writing is dated in places and the attitudes most certainly are. It more than lives up to that glorious cover.