Number 55- The King of Satan's Eyes- Geoffrey Marsh

This is the first book I've read by Geoffrey Marsh.  It is however, probably the sixty somethingth book I've read by this writer.

That is just a slightly confusing way of saying that Geoffrey Marsh is a pen name for one of my favourite writers- in this case Charles L Grant- and this is the first book of his under this pen name that I've read.

Grant's pen names are all water related, Geoffrey Marsh, Lionel Fenn, Mark Rivers and Timothy Boggs. I have yet to source books from those last two pen names. 

Back to this one...

This is the first of the Lincoln Blackthorne series. Lincoln Blackthorne is an adventurer unsuccessfully trying to live a quiet life in a sleepy midwestern town.

These are tongue in cheek adventure novels in which many a buckler is swashed. (I actually googled to see which way round that should be. If you see someone claiming to buckle swashes, they're wrong... ) It's not as funny as the Lionel Fenn Kent Montana books, but is equally outrageous.

Lincoln is relaxing in his tailor shop when he's suddenly attacked by villains with a machine gun. He escapes and is tasked by a local collector of rare objects to find the eponymous King of Satan's Eyes. The King is a playing card from a mystical pack that was scattered many moons prior. Anyone who gains who whole deck of cards can apparently live forever. For reasons. Linc's taskmaster of course has all the cards but this one and needs to complete the set.

It's all quite silly and good fun with half a dozen villains popping up, a chase across South America and the Highlands of Scotland, femme fatales who may or may not be treacherous, and many scrapes with death including falling from planes and close encounters with big cats.  It's vaguely confusing.  I never quite understood how the playing cards were so powerful, but the characters chasing after it did (with the exception of Lincoln who remained pleasantly baffled throughout). 

It's not Grant's greatest work but was a fun and undemanding read. And that cover is just mad. I get the feeling that someone gave Charlie a really bad title and bet him he couldn't make a story out of it.

This character and his scrapes would actually make for a good film or tv franchise. I'd watch it anyway .

Number 54- Hansel and Gretel- Stephen King & Maurice Sendak

 

Whoops, is this my first King read of the year?  I need to get one of his full works down my eyeballs soon.

We all know the story here, Hansel and Gretel taken into the woods to die when they find a witch's cottage yadah yadah yadah

This is King's retelling, and it's pretty standard stuff.  No real changes to the story.  he's simplified his style a touch for the younger readers and there's only the well known little bits of violence in there.

Sendak's artwork is the usual high quality workmanship, colourful and slightly surreal.

There's an introduction by King to tell us how the project came about. 

He actually wrote in Danse Macabre an interesting section about this story and how the subject matter would be something people would not read to their kids if they stopped to think about it, amoral stepmother, evil dad (he knows he shouldn't leave the kids to die but does it anyway, so he's evil.  She sees nothing wrong with it, it's just a way for them to live- so she's amoral) abandon two children to die.  This is followed by enforced slavery, attempted cannibalism and justifiable homicide. 

He's got a point.  I'll still be buying this for my youngest niece for Christmas though.

Number 53- When the Moon Hatched- Sarah A Parker

 

Where do I start with this one?

This is not a good book, and the review may contain some spoilers.

Romance is not my genre, but I have found a couple of books that I did enjoy within it. I read a fair amount of fantasy and typically will enjoy a well written fantasy novel. Romantasy is a mash up genre I've never really tried as it didn't appeal. Therefore I was a bit apprehensive before i even picked this one up.

Even with not much hope of a good book, this managed to subceed (is that the opposite of exceed?)  my expectations on almost every level.

The one claim this book can make to originality is that when dragons die, they calcify and float into the sky to become more moons. Although even Doctor Who had an episode where the moon hatched and a dragon flew out so this could be argued to be a variant on that.

On a world populated by magical fae and dragons, Raeve is an unstoppable paid assassin capable of taking out any target and disappearing into the shadows. Kaan is the dragon-riding king of a neighbouring land. She's fierce and independent and doesn't need a man in her life, but just like that fast show character of the tough woman, every time that Kaan is near her she pretty much loses it with lust and all her abilities seem to fly out of the window. 

We have the traditional hate to love narrative which is annoying enough in a well written book, but in this it's the most irritating I've ever seen it. Every time they meet for the first 400 pages he's saving her life, or healing her wounds, rescuing her from imminent danger while she simultaneously announces how much she hates him, tries to run away from him and tells us readers how much she wants his body. It gets old very quickly.

I know there are only so many stories, and fantasy has a lot of familiar tropes, but some fantasy authors can make the old tropes feel like something new and original. Parker takes the tropes and runs them all in the most predictable fashion possible.  Every plot twist seems to be ripped off from a million better books.  At one point she escapes from Kaan, and finds herself captured by a warrior tribe, who instantly invoke the ancient prophecy standard, and proclaim her their queen with a title that is just far enough from the word Khaleesi to avoid being sued for a direct copy.

All this predictability might be excused if the writing was up to par.  But this is the worst written book I've completed in years. She seems to have favourite words which she uses multiple times in a handful of pages, whether they're good word choices or not.  In the first real chapter of the book, she uses the word "demure" five times in three pages. 

Later on, when she's been captured by the warrior tribe and they're fighting to the death to see which of them should take her as their bride, in a matter of 4 or 5 pages, characters "fist" handfuls of sand, weapons, and assorted other objects at least a dozen times. In a chapter close to the end, in a protracted and cringeworthy sex scene, Kaan fists first her hair and then "his own length". In a chapter from the main villains point of view, he also "fists" his "solid cock". Someone really needs to point Parker in the direction of the words Grab, Hold, Grasp, Clench, Grip, Seize, or any one of the dozens of better words she could have used.  

Speaking of cringeworthy sex scenes, (these thankfully only take up two chapters) Raeve refers to her lady parts as her throbbing entrance at least 5 times in those two short chapters. She refers to her heart as the hard organ inside her chest dozens of times throughout the book. It's a sign that she's softening when it just becomes the organ in her chest.  

In Kaan's chapters, he also refers to the organ in his chest multiple times.  This highlights another basic flaw in the writing. If writing first person narratives from multiple points of view, you should be able to tell the difference between the voices. You can't.  The villain swears more in his chapter than the other three narrators, but they all have the exact same verbal tics and phrasing. 

And.

The.

Strange.

Emphasis.

Thing.

That happens at least twice in every chapter. I think I counted 8 times in one of them. 

It's all very poor, repetitive, very derivative, repetitive and predictable, with the most annoying and cliched characters I've had the misfortune to read about in years. The plotting is lazy in the extreme.  When she's decided she needs to get revenge on the man who captured and tortured her in the early chapters, but instead settles down for sex fantasies with Kaan in a cabin in the forest, the villain conveniently decides to travel to Kaan's kingdom for a visit allowing her to seek her revenge without having to really put any effort into the search for him. 

The reveals as we get close to the end of the book are not shocking. They're painfully obvious set ups for book two. I was seriously considering DNFing this book with only 50 pages to go out of 570.  The best I can say about the ending is that they at least cleared up one plotline. 

In case anyone was wondering, I will not be reading book two.  

Number 52- Love on the Dole- Walter Greenwood

 

Many moons ago, in the days when I still had a full head of hair and barely needed to shave once a fortnight, I played Harry Hardcastle in the stage adaptation of this book.

I was kind of aware that it was based on a novel, but I never made the attempt to read the book until the end of last month (sorry, playing catch up)

The story is fairly controversial for the time it was written. The Hardcastle family live in Hanky Park, a massively deprived area of Salford where everyone lives hand to mouth, pawning their family's good clothes every week to afford food. Where siblings share beds regardless of gender, even sharing their parent's rooms in their tiny houses with large families.

Harry starts as a clerk in the local pawn shop but foolishly quits to apprentice at the local factory. Sally works at the mill.  She's described as being a natural beauty and half the male cast of the book are deeply in lust with her, only union leader Larry Meath wants her for her mind as well as her other assets. Sam Grundy, the villainous bookmaker, only wants one thing from her.

We follow the family through nearly ten years of their subsistence. Harry has his own girlfriend and, despite not being married, engages in marital activities with her on a regular basis. The extra marital affairs would certainly have been scandalous at the time, and the very end of the book, with the way Sally is able to lift her family out of the absolute poverty would have raised a lot of eyebrows.

This is poverty porn 1930's style. The copy I read was printed in 1935 which explains the condition. 

A few major takes I got from this book were exactly how much life has improved. Most of the employment tricks used in this book, the hours, the hire and fire policies, the pay, etc would be completely illegal today. The welfare state provides a safety net that we should all stop taking for granted. 

Yet, despite all the differences, there were times when I was thinking that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The attitudes of the well off to the poor, the response to the poor standing up for themselves, and the government trickery to pay the poor as little as they could all felt very familiar even today. 

This is an important yet fairly ignored work. It's basically a UK version of the Grapes of Wrath and deserves more attention. 

The writing is typical of the time it was written. By today's standards it could be described as overwritten, but it's still an easy read. Some verbal tics such as characters ejaculating when they talk raise smiles for the wrong reason.

The dialect the characters talk in might be difficult for some readers, but, having lived in Salford myself for a few decades, I didn't have any issues. I was surprised to learn that the area where I work used to be the local millionaire's row. The main location of the book was demolished in the 60s and 70s and is now a heavy concentration of high rise blocks.

This is a fascinating glimpse at bygone times. Highly recommended.

Number 51- After the Fall- Queyssi & Juzhen

Now this was just poor in virtually every aspect of storytelling.

The artwork is good although it does seem like the worst excesses of early sword and sorcery artwork where all the women have impossibly perky bosoms and none of them wear many clothes. The female costumes are never particularly practical.

The script is cliched nonsense.  the panels below the review are typical.

This is the first time I've seen a blatant continuity error in a graphic novel.  on page 6, one of the impossibly perky-bosomed women is holding a toddler in her arms.  The toddler is nude and his/her bottom is clearly visible.  In the second panel on page 7, the woman holding the child passes them to another impossibly perky-bosomed lady (this one has her magnificent mammaries on full display) but now the child has a brown tunic.  Two panels later on the same page, they appear to be nude again.

The plot is typical post apocalyptic monsters running around with mutant humans and the real monsters are the remaining normal people type of thing, along with a plot reveal that throws the entire timeline of the story onto the scrapheap.

This was very poor apart from the artwork.  Really not recommended.  if someone offers you a copy, ask them why they hate you so much.

File this one under I read it so you don't have to.  Although you might enjoy the bosoms.  there are a lot of them in here.

.

Just to be unambiguous, there are no characters in the story with more or less legs than the standard bipedal humanoid.

Number 50- The Midnight Library - Matt Haig

 

From the multitude of reviews, this is a totally original concept and unique storyline for a book. 

It isn't.

It's not a bad book by any stretch, but I don't think this is a particularly amazing book  either. 

It's not an original idea. It's just another entry in the list of "What would your life be like if you'd made different choices" subgenre. 

Nora is fed up.  She never made it as a swimmer when she was young, her music career never took off, her novel never got written, and she's just been sacked from her dead end job in a music store.

She decides to end it all and wakes in a strange library where every book she chooses is one of the lives she could have lived if she'd made different choices.  

Cue a string of "Success isn't everything if you don't have your family/friends" type stories and an ending so cheesy the gorgonzola in my fridge is jealous.

It's all very easily readable and moderately entertaining. But it's so predictable.  There are no surprises at all at any point in this book.

The lesson at the end is condescending and insulting to pretty much anyone desperate enough to be doing what Nora tries. 

I don't think I was bored at any point while I was reading it.  But I certainly wasn't particularly entertained either.

This was my first matt Haig book, and almost certainly my last.

Number 49- What we talk about when we talk about love- Raymond Carver

 

Apparently this is a classic collection of short stories. I know it's what made Carver's name on his side of the Atlantic, but I'm not sure I agree with the general adulation this collection seems to attract.

For me, a good short story has a beginning, a middle and an end.

With few exceptions, this is a collection of middles. 

We're dropped into the middle of a situation (with varying degrees of interestingness) and after a few pages, Carver stops writing and moves onto the next.

None of the contents of the book are badly written.  I do like the spare prose style. there isn't a wasted word in the book.  However, there are no particular bon mots or truly memorable events.  

There are several very nice character studies.  He manages to build the characters very efficiently. They seemed quite real as I was reading each story.  The dialogue always felt natural and unforced.  It's a shame they were never particularly memorable.

I finished this book last week and I struggle to remember what most of the stories were about from the titles. It's not a good sign when they've faded so completely from my memory in such a short time. I cannot recall any plot detail for most of the contents of the book. 

 

There are two stories that I thought did have full set of beginning, middle and end and they are also the stories that stuck with me the most.

Tell the Women We're Going is a disturbing vignette. It has a particularly subtle way of telling a very unsubtle story.  He builds tension beautifully in the second half of the story. The last line of the story is a masterpiece of understated brutality.

Similarly, Popular Mechanics has a last line that hits hard in a backhanded way.  In just three pages he gives us a deeply shocking and disturbing story. this is the story that has stuck with me most from the collection.

I don't think this is a BAD collection of stories.  I've read far far worse, and as I said, I like the prose. I just found it overall a little underwhelming and forgettable. It subceeded my expectations by quite a distance. I might try more Carver in future.  He won't be very high on the TBR pile though.