Number 25- The leaves forget- Alan Baxter

This is a new novella by the ever reliable Alan Baxter. He's a very versatile writer. The first of his I read was the Roo- a comic horror about a killer Roo.  Since then I've read a really excellent Lovecraftian cosmic horror novella, a pair of novella collections that were truly chilling and put me off mushrooms for life, an action packed supernatural thriller, and now this, which is different again.

Craig's sister Olivia went missing six months ago. When a neighbor returns from a long stretch abroad and gives him 15 letters from Olivia which had been addressed to the wrong flat, he finally has a clue where to find her, and he travels with his family to rescue her.

This is a novella of two halves.  the first half is the letters, and the second half is the rescue mission. Olivia has been taken in by a cult and is in very deep danger. The clock is ticking as to whether they can find her in time, if she's still alive.

It's a fast paced read, I got through it in just a couple of hours. The opening chapter turned my internal narrator Australian and it stayed that way throughout. 

The supernatural elements are nicely incorporated piecemeal into the narrative. They help the story build to a violent and shocking dénouement. 

It's a good fun read that will keep you entertained for a couple of hours. The characters are well drawn and sympathetic. Their relationships feel genuine which adds a whole nother level of nuance to the story.

This is a typically good Alan Baxter book.  I have  a growing selection on my TBR pile so there will be more in the near future.

Number 24 - Factotum - Charles Bukowski

 

The first Bukowski quote I ever read was “How the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30 AM, by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”

And now I know the source.

It comes in about two thirds of the way through this, the second volume about Hank Chinaski, a slightly fictionalised version of Buk himself.

That quote sums up the book in many ways.  We follow Chinaski on a downward spiral, and he isn't exactly starting on a high. he moves from job to job and city to city as the whim takes him.  

He's an archetypal bum and down and out.  He's not the sort of person you want to meet. he has a bad attitude and comes across as a distinctly unpleasant type, the sort of garrulous drunk who'll corner you in a bar and talk at you, then offer to fight you on an imagined slight.

But by god is he a fascinating character.  It's like watching a train crash in slow motion. And  Bukowski's no nonsense almost poetic prose makes it so you can't look away. This book really does look into the darkest corners of humanity and offers little in the way of hope. 

There is a droll humour underlying most of the book.  Chinaski, despite his many many unforgivable faults, is a witty character. His observations on life are frequently profound. He might be a repulsive person, but he has insights to offer on life from an angle we don't see much.

I can understand why a lot of people would truly hate this book. The narration is disjointed and rambling. it's a loosely connected series of anecdotes about assorted jobs he held down, bars he drank at, and women he was abusive towards. It doesn't so much end, as Bukowski just stopped writing. but I found it effortlessly and compulsively readable. You might feel you need a bath after reading this, but you'll see life from a different perspective while you're reading it. 

Recommended for those who can read different viewpoints even if you don't agree with them.

Number 23- All The Fiends of Hell- Adam Nevill

 

A new Adam Nevill book is always a highly awaited prize in my world.  here is the limited edition hardback edition, beautifully modelled by a fiend of my own (his name's Bluey and he's sweet natured really)

To start with, look at that gorgeous cover. This book is a thing of beauty before you even open it. The attention to detail that goes into these Ritual Ltd special editions is exemplary. They all feature great artwork on the covers and are printed on really high quality paper. And, considering they're on a small print run, they're remarkably cheap.

When I heard that Adam was writing an alien invasion/apocalypse novel, I have to admit I was a little worried. He's always tended to folk horror or haunted places (with one exception) and I wasn't sure if his style would suit a more science fiction setting.

I needn't have worried. This is possibly the scariest thing he's written so far. It appears to follow on from one of the stories in Wyrd in which a town is totally deserted. 

Karl wakes up after a bad case of flu left him bedbound to find that everyone has vanished. Waking up after illness into a post apocalypse world is not the most original of openings, but I've never seen it done in such an unsettling manner as this. The opening of the story and his exploration of the deserted towns is so eerie and off-putting, it left me genuinely nervous.  This only got more intense as the horrors appeared.

Karl is an everyman, He has no special skills or aptitude for surviving in an apocalyptic landscape.  He has no special knowledge of what the hell is going on and no way to fight the alien creatures that have descended to clear up the last pockets of humanity left behind after the mass slaughter on the Night of Bells. He finds himself in charge of a pair of orphaned children (who he's also not equipped to deal with) and together they must navigate the new world, trying their best to stay alive.

The set pieces in this book- and there are an awful lot of them- are amongst the most terrifying sequences Nevill has committed to paper. The nebulous horrors that hunt the survivors are unstoppable killing machines.

To say this book is bleak is an understatement. There is a sense of hopelessness that permeates every page, exacerbating the dread that comes with each new appearance of the horrors. I found myself unconsciously holding my breath for pages at a time. The writing is so tense I've almost left gouge marks on the cover from gripping it so tight.

There are shades of many previous works, War of the Worlds, Day of the Triffids, Nope, etc., but this is distinctly Adam Nevill's story and it's probably the best of it's type that I've read. I love that Karl doesn't have a clue what's going on or what he can do.  I love that there are no magical explanations of what the aliens are or why they're doing this.  Humanity is gone with a whimper not with a bang, and those left behind might have been better off if they'd been taken on that first night.

If I read anything else as scary this year I'll be very surprised (although Josh Malerman has a new one coming out in June which is the strongest contender I know of).

You can order a paperback copy through Amazon or through the Ritual Ltd website if you would prefer to not line Mr Bezo's pockets any more than necessary. The link to the shop is here All – Adam LG Nevill

Numbers 21+22- Descender Volumes 2+3= lemire + Nguyen

This should just have been number 21, but at the end of volume 2, I had no choice but to move on to volume 2 immediately.

That should be a pretty good indication of the quality of the story.

The story of companion droid Tim-21 in the post-harvesters civilisation continues apace.

After giant robots called Harvesters decimated the population of the galaxy, the survivors waged war against all robots with any type of intelligence. 

Sought by robot hunters after his presence was detected on a distant mining planet, Tim-21 and a rag-tag band of droids and humans are looking for the boy Chris (now a man) that Tim was companion to,

After their close escape at the end of the precious volume, Tim and two human companions have been taken to the Machine Moon- headquarters of the robot resistance.

 Danger lurks from all sides and there are betrayals and double crosses that threaten to destablise the entire galaxy, maybe even sparking a full scale war.

 Volume 2 ended on such a cliffhanger I had no choice but to continue into Volume 3.  Lemire has done that to me with two different stories this year now.

Volume 3 doesn't actually do much to resolve the cliffhangers, but provides a lot more background detail on each of the central characters through expertly interweaved flashbacks.

The storytelling is epic yet on a personal scale.  Dustin Nguyen's artwork is stunning throughout- The watercolour palette is so distinctive and gorgeous to look at.  You could find so much to love in these volumes even if you hated the story (which you won't because that's great too).

This is building up to be my favourite of his stories so far. 

Number 20- Blood Mist- Robert James

Yet another of those novels with the sort of subtle and understated cover you don't see often enough these days.

When picking these old paperbacks from the depths of my collection, it's always a bit of a gamble.  For many of them, the cover is the best thing about them,

This one is as good as the cover. 

When building works uncover the tomb of an ancient evil, it rises to spread terror on the populace. lots of shreddies meet their doom and the evil fetishises endlessly over our brave hero's girlfriend.

There are some strange narrative choices in this book, particularly the fact that in all sections from the point of view of the ancient evil creature,  it refers to humans as Homos. Even when the book was written, that was odd.

This is better than many books of this type despite that. The prose is workmanlike and packed full of typos (I'm guessing spellcheck didn't exist back then), but the story stays mostly coherent, and once its internal logic is in place it sticks to it.

The characters are one dimensional, but that's one dimension more than the characters in something like Cat's Cradle that I read a few months back. The romance between Robert Welman and the beautiful Jane Kelly borders on the saccharine but from the wrong direction. I don't mean that travelling from sour through to sweet to saccharine it stops short, I mean, whatever is on the other side of saccharine...

The sex scenes are laughably bad. The humour is hit and miss. The final showdown and the sting in the tail are well delivered (mostly).

One thing I did appreciate was that the characters didn't instantly go along with the supernatural explanations. The writer does make them argue against it until they have no choice but to believe.

It is definitely a product of its time with some of the attitudes and stereotypes on display, but I can ride with those.

Overall it's a fun piece of hokum. I'm not rushing out to find more of his books, but I'm not disappointed with this one.  My expectations weren't high, and it met them easily. 

Number 19- Baumgartner - Paul Auster

 

This book can be filed in the very rare category of Time Thief.

You pick it up to read a page or two, ten minutes later you're 70 pages in and an hour has gone past without you noticing.

Plot wise, there's nothing much to it.  An old man reminiscing about his life and his marriage, still coming to terms with her loss still ten years after she died in a freak accident on the beach.

What makes this book is the prose and the character of Baumgartner.

We meet him on a bad day.  He's trying to get around to phoning his sister, but life keeps getting in the way. From burnt and broken pots to a stumble on the basement stairs, he is not having a good time. This opening chapter is hilarious and moving. 

Apparently the book was born when he tried to write a short story (which became chapter one) and he realised there was more to tell. 

This may be his last novel as he is battling cancer, but if it is, it's a great finish to a long and distinguished career. 

My only gripe about the book is the extremely open ending which I found rather unsatisfying. Although part of that might be that I didn't want it to end.

Some things I found frustrating in The Assault, I thought added to this. It jumps randomly through the two years of his life that it follows. In The Assault, it felt bitty and fragmented.  However, this book feels like a cohesive entity. The slices of life here are well chosen, an, more importantly, beautifully written.

Baumgartner is a philosopher by profession, so the book contains a fair amount of his thoughts on the meaning of life and its assorted challenges. This fits in with his character and ties in with the storyline. There's a repeated comparison between the loss of a loved one and phantom limb disorder that really strikes home.

Auster's prose is as magical as ever and the prime cause of the time-thievery.

An ealy contender for best book of the year.