Number 76- Wrecker - Carl Hiaasen

 

I seem to have inadvertently stumbled into a theme of writers not using their usual writing style. First the Mieville graphic novel, then the Thomson going all Cormac on us… and now this. Carl Hiaasen writing in the present tense.

This is one of his young adult books- you can always tell from the one-word titles. All his novels for the more mature reader (that sounds less dodgy than adult novels) have two-word titles.

Wrecker – aka Valdez Jones VIII- is a troubled teen living in Florida. He calls himself Wrecker because the original Valdez Jones used to dive down to shipwrecks for salvage in the last but one century. His dad is a waster who walked out on the family to try to start a music career. He doesn’t get on with his stepfather for several reasons so he lives with his older sister, an eco-warrior campaigning against large cruise ships being allowed back into the bay. For extra money he cleans iguana droppings from a grave in a nearby cemetery. For relaxation he goes out fishing in his skiff.

It's while he’s out on the skiff that he runs into a motorboat stranded on a sandbank. The occupants are not the type of people you want to get involved with, but this chance meeting is he start of a whole new set of troubles for young Wrecker. He soon finds himself increasingly entangled in the smuggler’s nasty business. Can he find a way to extricate himself with all his limbs and his potential future intact?

Set during the pandemic, and with a very strong pro vaccination stance taken by most of the protagonists, and a sub-plot about the historical lynching of a local man, this book has actually been banned from several school libraries in Florida, and Hiaasen found several of his scheduled publicity stops on his book tour cancelled.

Personally I thought it was a fun romp like all his books and the fact that it's wound up the stupid people is a bonus.

The characters are as well drawn as ever.  Wrecker and his family and potential girlfriend are a good set of protagonists.  The villains are suitably villainous If the ending isn't entirely convincing for me, that's because it's YA and slightly simplified so I can live with that too.

It's a lightweight read (unless you're the type that gets angry when people point out that Covid is a nasty illness) but I wasn't over-convinced by the writing style.

As previously mentioned it's in present tense.  Normally this doesn't bother me, but in this book it doesn't quite work. As with all his books, he tells more than 50% of it in flashback. The flashbacks are in traditional past tense, and when it suddenly switches back to present tense for the current sections of the story, it grates. Not enough to make me stop reading or anything, just enough to pull me out of the story every time it happened. This means it's a less satisfying read than most of his books.

But it's pissed off the people who deserve to be pissed off. That earns it more points in my eyes.

Not available in the UK yet, unless you order it from the States. Well worth seeking out.

Number 75 - Dartmouth Park - Rupert Thomson

 A new novel by Rupert Thomson is always straight to the top of my TBR pile

This one came out about two weeks ago and naturally displaced pretty much everything else

Phillip Notman is a historian, married with a troubled teenage son 

On his way home from a conference in Norway, he suffers a massive sensory overload leading to a bout of nausea

 This is the spark for a mid life crisis that sees him travelling across Europe in search of his purpose

This may not sound like the most enticing plotline, and I'll be honest, if this was anyone other than Rupert Thomson I might well have put the book back on the shelf when I saw the plot description 

However, if Thomson published his shopping list I would probably buy it

 This man normally writes the coolest most lucid prose packed with Bon Mots that you'll experience

You're guaranteed a hypnotic read regardless of the storyline

In this one, he's gone all Cormac McCarthy on us and eschewed regular punctuation

Other than question marks, apostrophes and commas, there's none to be seen

Especially full stops

There isn't one in the entire book

As a result, every sentence is its own paragraph

This changes the flow of how you read it in a way I find very difficult to pin down

It works though, and this was an incredible read, leading me into the deepest recesses of Phillips psyche, the lack of punctuation accentuating his broken link with reality as he hops around Europe 

When he works out what he thinks his purpose is, this ceases to be a mere travelogue of a middle aged man and turns into something much darker

Phillip is not a likeable character. however his story is compelling due to Thomson's immaculate writing

He is totally self-centred and frustrating- particularly in the way he treats his poor family- but while I could rarely sympathise with him, I needed to know where the story was going next

His breakdown is meticulously documented, like watching a train crash in slow motion

Even his appalling treatment of his family is one more symptom of his increased dislocation

Ironically for a book about dislocation, the sense of location from the various places he visits on his personal odyssey is beautifully done and you can almost smell the various haunts and taste the Ouzo

There isn't much in the way of action, rather action that doesn't happen, but this is a character driven narrative

I loved it

Every word and sentence fragment

Through Phillip's plight we get to see the world anew and so many of its faults

And he might have a genuine point with many of them

How did our reality become what it has? 

How can we stay rational beings in an irrational world?

By the end, I might not have agreed with his plans but I understood why he felt the need

And that was quite a disturbing thing to realise

This is in some ways a companion piece with Katherine Carlyle

In both books, the central characters take off on travels to find who they really are

In both books, Thomson is playing stylistic tricks with his prose

And both books feel almost hallucinatory in the details

Available in all good bookshops, grab yourself a copy

Number 74 - Dial H - China Mieville & Mateus Santolouco

 

A China Mieville book I never knew existed.

This was a short lived reboot of a silver age character during the New 52 era at DC comics.

Fat schlub Nelson Jent is not a hero in any sense of the word.  However, when he stumbles on a friend being attacked and tries to dial for help on an old payphone, he's transformed into Boy Chimney- a frankly terrifying warrior for the forces of good.

It's a short lived change and he finds himself back to his usual shape after dispatching the bad guys. Next time he dials he becomes Captain Lachrymose...

He discovers that any time he dials the word HERO on the old phone, he transforms into a random hero, sometimes with great powers, sometimes not quite so great. He also runs into another dial user who calls herself Manteau and wears a mask over her various manifestations.

When not superheroing with her dial, she's actually a little old woman.

The scene is set for one of the weirder products of the DC factory.

The fact that the two leads are an elderly woman and a fat slob is more than a little refreshing. The storylines are surreal to say the least. The first big villain they fight has powers over nothingness. Another villain has the ability to manifest his past and immediate future selves which leads to some of the most remarkable artwork concepts I've seen in comics.

China Mieville's script starts off very sharp and occasionally hilariously funny, but the final issues seem to lose the focus somewhat.  it could be that he had to wrap things up faster than intended and the the ending is somewhat confusing and extremely meta. 

The artwork is remarkable throughout and perfectly complements the weirdness of Mieville's concepts.

I know nothing about the original Dial H comics except that they were apparently just a goofy excuse to create the weirdest superpowers they could without having to create permanent storylines around them. Mieville, in the second half of the book, creates a history and explanations for the Dials and how and why they work- also throwing in more than one type of dial for that extra bit of variety.

It's a fun way to kill an hour or two and the artwork bears up to close inspection and is worth the cost of the book all by itself. If it gets a bit silly near the end, that's forgivable. 

Number 72 - Octoberland- Thana Niveau

 

I didn't realise quite how well the backdrop matched the top of the book when I took that picture.

This is a collection of short stories by the rather wonderful Thana Niveau- aka Kate Probert. I've met her a couple of times in real life and she's one of the loveliest people you could meet.

However, she writes some nasty horror stories. In a good way. This collection showcases just how versatile a writer she is.

The horrors in here range from Bradburyesque weirdness by suggestion, to extreme Lovecraftian weirdness, to full on gore. And they all work!

There's not a weak story in this collection, and it's a big one- 25 stories and over 300 pages. That makes doing a write up slightly awkward.  I'll just have to pick a handful almost at random rather than try to go through all of them.

One of these stories, I've read before in the 9th Black Book of horror Stories. The Things That Aren't There. it's a brilliant story that reminds me of peak era Bradbury. It's a point of personal pride that I also have a story in that collection. To have an editor judge my writing to be comparable to something this good is one hell of a compliment.

Guinea Pig Girl is right at the opposite end of the horror spectrum with some extreme gore.  However the true horror in the story comes from the psychological breakdown of the protagonist, a young man obsessed with Cat 3 Japanese horror films, and one particular victim who seems to appear in the most extreme, 

Tentacular Spectacular well and truly lives up to its name. A mysterious shop in a steampunk version of London starts selling the most amazing corsets. From this starting point the story spirals into pure Lovecraftian horrors from the deep invading in great style.

And May All Your Christmas... takes one of the best possibilities around Christmas and turns it into an inescapable nightmare. This story contains some of the deepest chills in the collection (pun intended- when you read it you'll understand).

There are two zombie stories on offer- Sweeter Than to Wake and Vile Earth, To Earth Resign and I guarantee you've not read a zombie story quite like either of them.

The Queen takes something as innocuous as a beehive and creates a startlingly unpleasant and frightening tale. It would be good for a horror sequel to Bee Movie 

Death Walks on Pointe was a true surprise.  I would have thought it was by Thana's husband John Probert- who writes similarly gleeful sadistic giallos- but it turns out that Thana is equally proficient with the twisted world of the psychopath.  

I could go on.  As I said, there isn't a weak story in here. There's stories written half from the POV of a dolphin, there's satanic rituals and devil children, anxiety inducing landscapes and cityscapes, and lots more.

And all of it is fantastic. this is one of the strongest single author collections I've read since I started this blog. Thana is a multitalented and versatile writer. I'm not sure i can think of anyone who can straddle as many subgenres as in this set of stories with this level of success.

If this is still available on PS Publishing's site, buy it.  You will not be disappointed.

Number 72B- Hex- Thomas Olde Heuvelt

 

I’d heard a lot of good things about this book so I chose it for my book group for the annual Halloween Horror read. The time pressure on reading it means I had to put aside book 72 to read  this.  The review of book 72 will follow shortly.

Black Springs is not your average village. It’s haunted by the ghost of a 17th century witch. Her eyes and lips are sewn shut and her arms are chained to her sides. She can vanish and appear wherever she likes at will. The locals are so used to her that she’s just a part of the furniture. They have a complex system of cameras to track her movements around the town and clever schemes to hide her if she appears in front of outsiders.

There’s a downside. If you move to the village, you can never leave. Anyone who stays outside the town borders for too long starts to experience suicidal thoughts that will only go away if they return home. The local teens are bored of the situation and want to make their own fun.

That’s the basis for this exceptionally original treatment of the old Witch’s Curse trope. We mainly follow the Grant family, with diversions to other locals every now and again.

The normalisation of such a strange situation with the townspeople is brilliantly done, and the changes as the mask of normalcy start to slip are the stuff of nightmare.

It’s well written for the most part. There are some flashes of brilliance in there. For example, at one point, when one of the human antagonists has just punched his own mother in the face and knocked her to the ground, we get the line ““I told you not to touch me,” he said softly.” That use of the word softly after a barbaric act of violence tells us he’s in complete control of himself and made me genuinely worried for the other characters and what he might be capable of doing.

The final chapters, once the s**t has really hits the fan, form one of the best horror set pieces I’ve read in years. The book has one of the best finales in recent fiction. My first thought on putting the book down at two in the morning (there wasn’t a chance I could put it down in the middle of all that mayhem) was ‘Wow that was intense’.

It’s not a perfect book. I did think there were some issues with pacing. There was a lot of building to an event then life back to normal, build to the next one. In the days since I finished it I realise that this is just an extension of the whole normalisation theme of the book, but it grated slightly while reading it, Having said that, I also think it would have been nice to get to know some more villagers, and to know the villagers we did meet better, which would have impacted the pacing more, so I’m contradicting myself.

There were some events that didn’t quite gel with the American setting that might well have made more sense in the original Dutch version. Maybe I would have accepted them better with a Dutch setting...

Overall, I really enjoyed this book even with its flaws.  There's the occasional bon mot and the ending is one of the most horrific in a good way that I've read in recent years. I will be seeking out more of his work, When he wants to disturb the reader, this book shows he's more than capable.