Number 47- The Year Of The Storm- John Mantooth

My second John Mantooth novel after the rather good Holy Ghost Road last year and I can confirm that HGR was not a one off.  Mantooth’s brand of southern gothic hits just as hard in this book as the previous. (Although I've read them in the wrong order of publication somehow)

This time around we’re introduced to Danny, a 14-year-old boy whose mother and autistic sister vanished in a storm a few months earlier. He still holds out hope that they’re alive, even though everyone around him presumes they’re dead.  Until a stranger (Walter) appears at his door telling him he knows where they are.

Intertwined with Danny’s story, we also have Walter’s tale of growing up in this small town several decades earlier, and a strange phenomenon he calls “slipping” that he learned when he himself was 14.

This is a moving and occasionally chilling coming-of-age story with supernatural overtones. I suppose there are inevitable comparisons with the King, but this easily holds its own.  The southern gothic stylings separate it effectively from anything Good Ol’ Stevie has thrown at us.

It explores themes of parental alienation, coming out in a time when it was much less accepted, loss, grief, hope against hope, and the importance of family.

Chapter 8 may well be the best use of foreshadowing I've read in may years. And this was his debut novel apparently. He handles the shifting time streams with ease. Even when the main narration shifts to present day, it never interferes with the flow in the slightest.

This is a great piece  of writing and a contender for best book of the year so far.

Number 46- The Nightmare Girl- Jonathan Janz

I read one of Jonathan Janz’s books last year and liked it so much I bought a few more.  This is the first of those few more that I’ve got around to.  My TBR is in 4 figures and still growing.  I really need a spare 957 years or so with nothing to do but sit around and read.

When Joe Crawford stops a young woman from slapping her toddler son in a petrol station forecourt, he has no idea what a chain of events he’s just sparked off.  It starts with the mother (and her mother) attacking him, moves on to the mother immolating herself a few chapters later, and from then on, things get intense and violent.

It turns out the family are part of a fire worshipping sect and they have plans for Joe and his family.

This is a fun romp. The last book of his I read was the Dismembered, which was written in a faux gothic style. This is set modern day and is written in a much more modern style. It starts off dramatically and builds to an incredibly violent final act.

There are some implausible elements that took me out of the story a little bit- for example, the amount of personal information Joe’s cop friend tells him is surely enough to get him dropped from the force.  Also, Joe turns from a believable builder/contractor looking for work into an unkillable fighting machine for the final section. The levels of damage he seems able to take whilst still wiping out cult members with whatever comes to hand feels somewhat beyond the normal boundaries of survivability.

That’s just me taking the finale a bit too seriously though and it has to be said that Janz creates some powerfully tense scenes amidst the mayhem. Other than the “how is he not dead yet” element (arguably a key part of the action horror genre in any case), the blood soaked finale is a great piece of action writing. It's cinematic in scale and you can almost see the blood spatter coming off the page. 

The twists and turns of the plot are well handled.  The characters are well enough developed that this reader at least felt for the good guys and hated the bad guys appropriately. The relationship between Joe and his wife feels real, with its humour and occasional clashes. The villains are given just enough complexity to keep them from feeling stereotypical.

Overall, this is a damned fine piece of writing and I will certainly be reading another Janz novel at some point in the near future. I'm very impressed at the way he can write effectively in two quite different styles. That's a real talent.

Number 45= Hammers on Bone - Cassandra Khaw

The hard boiled detective story is one of the most enduring tropes in fiction. It's also the one that seems to be riffed on most commonly in other genres. We have a large assortment of magic users who happen to be hard boiled Private eyes- the Dresden Files being probably the most popular.  Then there's Charlie Huston's series about vampyre detectives. I have one somewhere about a zombie detective. Eric Garcia has the Rex series where the narrator is a velociraptor disguised as a human (and they're actually really good)...
 

I didn't think there were any varieties left.

Then came this book. The mash-up we never knew we needed.  Hard-boiled detective, Cthuluesque ancient gods and magical London…

A young boy hires the narrator to kill his stepfather.  His stepfather is a monster he says, and our narrator is the man for the job because he’s a monster as well. This paves the way for a surreal trip through a very recognisable London, albeit a London filled with strange creatures hiding in human skins, chasing a very non-human foe which is spreading a pestilential force. When the hard boiled narrator is a Lovecraftian ancient one in a borrowed skin, you know you're in for a weird ride.

As expected from Cassandra Khaw, the prose is unmistakable.  Her off-kilter writing style seems to work fantastically well when she’s talking from the POV of a weird creature, so it works fantastically well here.

The London setting feels anachronous to the American PI/killer for hire stereotype that the narrator appears to be disguised as, but this adds to the unsettling nature of the book. 

It’s a quick and surprisingly easy read with a real hard-boiled gumshoe feel to everything despite the ever-increasing supernatural content. It's a truly mind-bending book. You will find yourself asking WTF on many occasions.  Khaw’s imagination is on a high octane mix of something very weird in this book and it works beautifully.

I was on the fence about Khaw's books after Nothing but Blackened Teeth. But with this and The Salt Grows heavy it's clear that the wilder the story, the more her style matches it.

Number 44- Behold The Ape - James Morrow

 I've been a big fan of James Morrow for a long time, at least 3 decades, since I first read Towing Jehova- a novel about God's corpse floating in the Pacific ocean. Most of his books are high concept fantasies that satirise religious themes.

This one is no exception- as you can probably guess from the title and the cover, this one is taking swings at creationism.

The brain of Charles Darwin has, in good old-fashioned mad scientist fashion, been transplanted into the skull of an ape. It just has- ok. He teams up with a b-movie horror actress to make horror films that will educate the masses in USA about evolutionary theory instead of creationism.

There's an awful lot to take on trust here and the suspension of disbelief necessary is somewhat higher than average.

One of the issues with the satire in this book is that it's aimed squarely at something that isn't a problem outside of selected bits of the USA so it doesn't really hit that hard outside of America.

He's taking swipes at very easy targets, but not targets that are meaningful to the majority of the planet. This lessens the impact as much as the ease of the swing does. 

The basic idea is admittedly extremely funny.  He's found a way to explain it that does make some sort of sense within the narrative as long as you buy into the world he's built here (although it's also supposed to be our world so...). The portrayal of Hollywood in the transition to talkies actually feels quite real. This is one of the more successful aspects of the story.

As far as I can tell, this book never found a UK publisher, since my copy came from the States. This may be a reflection of the specificity of the satire. 

It's good fun to read, but is nowhere near the standard of his other works.  Overall disappointing.

Number 43- Ascender Volume 3- Lemire & Nguyen

 The series is heading for its conclusion now. The front cover kind of gives away which legacy character from descender is going to make his comeback and he does so in grand style that sets things up nicely for the final volume.

All previous comments about this and the Descender series about the standard of writing and quality of artwork still apply.

Number 42- 42- curated by Kevin Jon Davies

There was only ever one book going to be number 42 this year.  A very generous gift I received at Christmas. 

I said Curated by rather than Edited by because it does seem like a collection of artifacts on display rather than an edited selection of his writings.

This is a coffee table book.  I've needed to take it to work in a rucksack, it's so big.  

Basically, it's selected notes and letters to and from the legend that was Douglas Adams. There are some fascinating insights into his creative process and his life.

Most of the material has already been covered in Neil Gaiman's excellent biography of Adams (Don't Panic) and the similar compilation of Adams' scribbles - The Salmon of Doubt.

However, this book doesn't just transcribe his writings, we see pictures of the original notebooks, the scrappy post-it notes, and the manuscripts complete with crossings out and rewrites, which gives us more insight again into his creative processes. Knowing how many times he would rework some of his sentences gives hope to us mere mortals. Some of the items chosen are more interesting than others, but that is the nature of this type of beast.

There are also some letters written TO Adams post mortem.  remembrances from those who knew and worked with him.  Neil Gaiman's letter is the post perfectly worded description of the loss of a friend and colleague that I think I've ever seen.  It's one of the most deeply moving pieces of writing I know of. From the opening line of "I remember the day I learned you were dead" onwards, the depth of love and respect he had for Douglas cries off the page.

Obviously, there is no narrative or story being told, but the notes are compiled in roughly chronological order.  After seeing his progression through his life, I found myself a little emotional when I saw the cover of the ZZ9 (HHGTTG fan club) memorial issue of their newsletter. That page of this book is headed Dead for Tax Reasons, a touch I'm sure Adams would have enjoyed.

I think the only H2G2 related reading I have left to find is Starship Titanic, unless I discover he wrote Dr Who novelisations under a pseudonym (something that I'm sure would have been mentioned in here).