Number 48- King Sorrow- Joe Hill

This was a NetGalley ARC read in exchange for a fair review.

Joe hill continues the family tradition of the 900 plus page horror blockbuster doorstop. 

And he does it in style.  

When Arthur Oakes falls foul of a local group of drug dealers, he is forced to steal rare and valuable items from the university library. After he steals a rare arcane volume on mythical creatures, a group of his university friends band together to help him. In the process, they drunkenly (and druggedly if that is a word) release a deadly force on the world in the shape of King Sorrow, a dragon from the Long Dark who will do their bidding.  

The Dragon sorts out their issue, but the following year he returns and forces them to choose another victim.  They will have to choose victims every year unless they can find a way to rid themselves of the beast.

This is very firmly set in his father's universe.  Early on, two characters argue about whether Greg Stillson was using a baby as a human shield, or trying to save it from the gunman Johnny Smith.  There is also a not very subtle nod to the Dark Tower series in the summoning chapters.

The story is epic in scope, with a story spanning several decades and two continents.  At times it feels a little episodic, but all the plot threads do interweave. enough that by the end it was no longer an issue. 

there are plot twists and shocks, and every time you think you have the hang of where the story is going, Hill pulls the rug out from under you again. With 100 pages to go, I had no idea who might still be alive for the finale. 

Some of the set pieces are positively cinematic. particularly the sequence on the plane. King Sorrow himself is a wonderful creation, a Faustian bargainer and an utterly terrifyingly powerful beast. 

This might be Hill's masterpiece.  At no point in the 900 pages did the story seem to drag.  Even the first 90 pages which were mainly scene setting for the arrival of the eponymous evil are steeped in dread, with human villains every bit as scary as what was to follow.

With some sly humour weaved into the narrative, this is an almost flawless book.  If I had to pick a fault it would be that he refers to the twins as identical at one point, when one is male and the other female. But in the scheme of things, that's almost an irrelevance.

This is released properly next month and I will definitely be snagging myself a physical copy.  And you all need to do so as well- because I told you to.

Number 47- Grace - A.M. Shine

 

My regular readers out there will know that I am a big fan of AM Shine, even if I do get frustrated with some of his endings.

This was a NetGalley review copy of his new book, due out in October. 

This time around the horror is on an isolated island off the coast of Ireland - the Isle of Croaghnakeela- henceforth referred to as IoC.  I'm not typing that out more than once.

The eponymous Grace runs a rare book shop on the Irish mainland.  When she receives a phone call from a Catholic priest (Father Richard) on the IoC to tell her that her birth mother has died and left her her house, she drops everything to travel over to find out about her past.  She was adopted as an infant and has never known about her birth family.

Of course, the island has more than its fair share of secrets, some of them deadly, and these were the reason that her mother gave her up. When she returns to the island, it allows an old evil to rise up once more, breaking the stalemate that has existed on the island for the past 30 years.

As usual with Shine, this is incredibly atmospheric and has a number of twists and turns in the plot.  I thought one of them was sprung from left field until I realised he'd been dropping hints the whole time and, actually, this was one of the best hidden in plain sight plot twists I've seen for a good long while.

The monster at the heart of the story is truly terrifying.  It appears that Irish folklore has a lot of untapped horror potential, and AM Shine is an expert at mining those seams.

This is the least predictable of his books so far.  Before the book is halfway through, just when I thought I knew what was coming, the narrative moved in a wholly unforeseeable direction and never looked back. The second half of this book barely lets up the tension.  Some of the set pieces are among the scariest bits of writing I've seen outside of an Adam Nevill novel.

At a brief 221 pages, this packs in more atmosphere than a lot of books three times the length. The picture he paints of the island is so intense you can feel the fog creeping around you as you read it. The islanders are all well drawn characters and we understand their flaws and their actions.  

With horror ranging from the deeply personal to almost cosmic, and a truly terrifying creature at the heart of it all, this is island horror at its best.   (Is island horror a separate subgenre?  If it isn't, it probably should be.)

An easy 8.5/10.  I will definitely be buying a physical copy when it is released properly.

Number 46- Daisy Jones and the Six- Taylor Jenkins Reid

 

After 200 pages of walls of text with no paragraph breaks in the last book I read, the format of this book was a blessed relief.

This is written as snipets from interviews pieced together into a coherent story about the rise and fall of a Fleetwood Mac style rock band in the 60s and 70s.

Like a talking heads style documentary, the character name would be followed by mostly single paragraphs talking about the events under discussion at the time. Occasionally, someone would have a whole page talking about how they felt or why they did something, but it was rare.  There were frequent interjections of single short sentences.

The plot is slim. It's a rock and roll memoir from the POV of all the band members, management and their significant others. We know from the start that this is going to be a rise and fall story and the reasons for the fall are all too visible in the rise.

I thought this was a real page turner.  I read the whole thing in a matter of three days or so. It's fast paced, brilliantly evocative of the era and totally convincing.

The contradictory voices are a great way of suggesting deeper stories hidden below the surface and the character's truths hidden somewhere between what they actually say.

Daisy and Billy are a great pair of central characters and, as much as I hate will-they-won't-they narratives normally, I was invested in this one.

This is also the first time I've been able to listen to the soundtrack of a book as i read it.  The music from the TV series was released as the Aurora album that we read about. It's noticeable that the lyrics are quite different in the actual songs but I really quite enjoyed it. I normally like heavier fare, but this was a genuinely good album.  I probably need to watch the tv show now to see if the changes for tv explain the different emphasis in the lyrics.

Highly recommended.

Number 45- Satantango - Lazlo Krasznahorkai

 

This was a DNF for several reasons.

The main one is that after 200 pages I still had no inkling of any type of story and there has been at most 500 sentences in all those pages.  Very few pages had more than three very long run on sentences.

There were no paragraph breaks, just massive walls of text on every page. It was wearying to try to read it.

I never realised how much paragraphs improve the reading experience.  I can thank this book for that insight but not much more.

The plot seemed to centre around a bunch of very similar characters in a village and someone they thought was dead returning to said village for reasons too buried in walls of text to be interesting.

Apparently there is a film of this book that's 8 hours long with verrrrrryyyyyy long sloooowwww shots.  that's exactly what this felt like.

Not a fan.