number 22- Snow Angels Vol 2- Lemire & Jock

 

The mysteries posed in volume 1 find themselves mostly answered in this second volume. The origin of the Trench, and the history of the residents are explained more than satisfactorily.

An excellent ending to the series.  The artwork is excellent as is the writing. 

Go out and beg borrow or steal it.

Maybe don't steal it. But if you do, and you get caught, don't tell them I told you to.

Number 21- A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World- C A Fletcher

A couple of years back, I read Dead Water by CA Fletcher, found it appropriately creepy so I went out and bought this.  To be honest, I would have been tempted to pick this up on the strength of that title if I'd seen it before knowing anything about his writing. 

Apparently he also writes as Charlie Fletcher, so I have a few more books to seek out for my ever expanding TBR mountain.

This is every bit as good as the title promises.  

100 years after humanity has all but died out after something happened to make 99.999% of the population infertile, the last few settlements of humans are scattered far and wide.

There are a couple of families on the Scottish Isles.  When a smooth talking thief visits our narrator Griz's family on their island, it sets off a chain of events.  The stranger leaves early in the morning, taking Griz's dog Jess with him.  Griz sets off on a journey across a deserted Britain to get her back.

This is my second real contender for best book of the year so far. Griz makes for a remarkable narrator. I was thoroughly invested in the quest to retrieve poor Jess. I'm a cat person not a dog person, but this book made me feel for that dog as strongly as Griz did.

Fletcher's depiction of a landscape abandoned for decades and reclaimed by nature is stunning.  The pacing and characterisation are spot on.  I'd worked out one of the surprises near the end of the book at least 100 pages early, but there was at least one other that took me completely unawares.

I can't really say much else in case of spoilers.  This is a beautifully written book that pushed all the right buttons for me and I recommend it unreservedly.

Number 20- Our Wives Under the Sea- Julia Armfield

 

A new author to me, and another book group choice.

Sorry, there will be quite a big spoiler in this review so if you want to read the book before coming back and reading this review, feel free, but I don't recommend it.

Miri's wife Leah is an underseas researcher. Leah was stuck at the bottom of the ocean for months when her vessel developed a fault.  Now she's back and behaving very strangely.

The book is told in alternating chapters from each of the two lead's POV. This leads to the first of the big problems with this book.  Both first person narratives sound exactly the same. If it wasn't for the chapter titles telling us who was talking, on the occasional pages where either Miri doesn't talk about Leah or Leah doesn't mention the sea, it is impossible to tell the narration apart.

It should be more than subject matter that separates the voices of your characters when writing multiple POV.

The writing feels nice.  I'm not sure there's anything objectively wrong with the prose (other than the aforementioned uniformity of voice across multiple first person POV). SPOILER!!!! The story has a really interesting concept.  There's submarine drama, there's body horror, there's a woman metapmorphosing into a fish. I'm not sure how any writer could take the ideas on display here, and with nice prose, write a book as tedious and uninteresting as this was.  But Julia Armfield has managed it.

There are ways of making your story ambiguous and mysterious and not answering the audience questions that work, that fill the reader with a sense of wonder and mystery.  There are ways of making your story ambiguous and mysterious and not answering the audience questions that feel pretentious and lazy and like you don't know the answers yourself but you thought you'd write it anyway. This book feels like the latter to me.

More spoilers

The fact that the submarine crew do nothing at all to help their situation makes their story anticlimactic. The fact that they try nothing in their time at the bottom of the sea makes their story lack drama. Their eventual escape feels like the writer just trying for that lazy air of mystery by not explaining why it happens. 

When I read the Deep by Nick Cutter at the end of last year, there was a palpable sense of claustrophobia in the deep sea setting.  There was a sense of awe at the surroundings. In this, there's three not exactly fleshed out characters who occasionally get on each other's nerves in the dark. then one snaps and does something silly. There's really no comparison between the two books for dramatic stakes.

This was sold in the horror section of at least one local Waterstones.  Even by my wide ranging definitions of horror, this one was mis-shelved.

A book this short should not feel as long as this did. Just as an example of how enthused I was to continue reading this book, how much the storytelling had me hooked, there was one night last week where I had a spare hour to sit reading, and I chose to clean the bathroom instead.

The whole book can be summed up by the last sentence on page 203.  "For a long time, nothing happened."

Not recommended.

Number 19- Intermezzo- Sally Rooney

Prior to my book club choosing this book, I was dead set against reading anything by Sally Rooney- merely because her most famous book is called Normal People.  That is IMHO, possibly the most bland and uninteresting book title I have ever heard.  However, even I am willing to admit that that is a weak excuse to write an author off.

Now I've given this one a go and I'm happy to announce that I will never read a Sally Rooney novel again because I read half of this one and gave up.

I now have a good excuse for not wanting to read her.

This is told from alternating viewpoints of two brothers.  One is Peter, a 32 year old womanising solicitor, and the other is Ivan, is a 23 year old chess prodigy who barely knows how to talk to another human, let alone a woman.

Peter is still in love with his first long term girlfriend but is currently involved with a student in her early 20s. Ivan is desperate for anyone who'll look at him twice.

Ivan falls for Barbara, a woman in her late thirties/early forties, when he meets her at a chess display in a social club in the arse end of nowhere.  She's not a chess player, she's there to move the chairs and lock up.  She provides the third narrative voice of the book, doubling up in Ivan's chapters.

The chapters with Ivan and Barbara are ok to read but nothing special, and the sex scenes are cringe inducing. The biggest problem with the book is Peter's chapters.

Yoda it feels like they were written by. Object and subject of sentences transposed. Constantly. Sentences without verbs. Irritating as hell I found it. Boring his character is. Nothing he seems to have done by halfway through the book.

Ivan, although on the surface, the character that should be most sympathetic, the introvert being pulled out of his shell by his first real relationship, seems more of an incel and a complete stereotypical nerd, the further the book wears on. Barbara didn't seem to have much of a personality other than wondering what people would think of her shagging a guy half her age.

In the two hundred pages of this tedious and poorly written dross that I dragged myself through, I found zero of interest, and no characters worthy of sympathy. I had no compulsion to continue reading at the end of part one of the book.  When part two opened with the most Yoda speak so far, I gave up. 

At least I know my suspicions about her writing skills were on point.

Number 18- Ghost recall - Alan Baxter

 

The final part of the Eli Carver thrillers provides a balls to the wall action finale.

If you've ever wondered what you'd get if you crossed Jason Bourne with Randall and Hopkirk (deceased) and threw in a smattering of John Wick style ultraviolence, look no further.

Eli Carver is a hitman literally haunted by five of his victims. In the previous two volumes, it's been kept ambiguous as to whether the ghosts were real or if he was slightly off his rocker.  In this volume we learn the truth.

After he's jumped by a gang of thugs and steals a mysterious ring from one of their unconscious bodies, Eli finds himself caught up in battle to the death with a secret society of moon worshippers.

There are very few writers can write a fight scene quite as convincingly as Alan Baxter. When you learn that he is a martial arts instructor when not writing, it comes as no real surprise. 

Even the most over the top action scenes in this series have felt feasible because of the clarity and detail. 

This series would make for an excellent trilogy of films. It's action packed, fast moving and occasionally gory fun. The ghosts provide a surreal humour and horror overtones. Eli is an entertaining narrator and this is a great way to kill a couple of hours. Highly recommended.  Possibly the most fun I've had with a book so far this year.

The whole trilogy has just been released in a single volume just called Recall.  It's available through Alan Baxter's website - Books By Alan - Alan Baxter - now you've got no excuse not to buy it.

Number 17- Supporting Roles- Stephen Volk

 

A pair of short stories/novellas by the very talented Mr Stephen Volk. This is possibly one of the best looking books so far from PS publishing.  The art and the design of the pages is gorgeous and adds to the reading experience.

It turns out I'd read one of these before.  The three Hunchbacks is one of the Holmes meets Poe/Dupin stories in Under a Raven's Wing. 

It was still as excellent as it was in that collection. the rats sequence was equally nightmarish.

The House that moved Next Door is a superbly creepy story.  It's hard to say much about the story without leaving spoilers so I'll stick with a strange childhood encounter in the house next door has repercussions throughout a man's life.

There are no easy explanations offered and the afterword tells us that this was initially written for an anthology of Aickmanesque stories.

if this is what Aickmanesque is, I need to read myself some Aickman, 

Overall a great little book that killed an hour in an exceedingly spineshiversome way.