Number 46 - Shy - Max Porter

 Lanny was one of my favourite books of the last few years. The Death of Francis Bacon  confounded me almost completely (although it did inspire me to check out Bacon's artwork).

After such opposing reactions to his previous two books,  I had no idea if I was going to like or understand what the hell was going on in this one.

Luckily, this one does have a clearly discernable narrative combined with Porter's inimitable style and therefore it's a definite on the success side.

Shy is a teenager living in a last chance boarding school for out of control youth. The book follows him one evening as he leaves the dorm and walks to a nearby pond carrying a rucksack full of stones.

We are let into all his most intimate thoughts and flashbacks to his life so far. We hear all the voices that have shaped him into what he is now. 

Impossibly, considering how deeply unlikeable Shy would be if you were to meet him in real life, Porter manages to garner, if not full blown sympathy, an understanding and acceptance of why he is the way he is. By the end of the book I found I liked him despite myself. 

It's written in Porter's usual choppy style with no regard for sentence structure or traditional narrative form. It bonces back and forward through his thoughts and experiences and feels like a more genuine stream of consciousness writing as a result.

Just because it's only 120 pages doesn't stop a book from hitting you right in the emotions and this does it in spades. It's a remarkable act of literary ventriloquism that dropped me completely in the head of a character far removed from my experience as I think is possible. 

Max Porter is a genius and his writing is genuinely unique. His books have all been drastically different but all instantly recognisable as his writing.  That's one hell of an achievement. I will continue to pick up his work as soon as I see it in the shops.

Number 38 - Room - Emma Donoghue

 

I could make this review just the one word - "WOW!" but I think that would be unsatisfactory.

I'm very late to the party on this and it has been in my TBR for a couple of years at least. Now I've read it, I wish I'd done it a long time ago.

Some books you read, and some you experience.  This is an experience. 

Jack is 5. He lives in Room with Ma. Old Nick comes in at night and makes squeaks on Bed with Ma. Sometimes he brings Sundaytreats.  Nothing else exists for Jack. Outside is a fantasy he sees on TV. 

We're thrown right in at the deep end in this book. The whole story is narrated from Jack's totally unique point of view. 

This book is has leapt straight into my top ten all time reads. I genuinely cannot remember the last time a book had the emotional impact on me that this book had.

I was wiping tears from my eyes for nearly a third of the book at least. I could feel young Jack's confusion as he learnt the truth about his existence. When I read the escape attempt, I had to take an extra half an hour for my lunch to get through it and then recover emotionally enough to go back to my desk. 

This book is genius on every level. Jack's voice is convincing with the grammar errors scattered through it. There's always enough information for us to fill in the gaps between what is happening and what he thinks is happening. His innocence makes the book truly heartbreaking.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

Number 22 - The Troop - Nick Cutter

 

I'm a bit late to the party on this one.  I've been hearing great things for several months on various horror pages online. And, in this case it appears everything I've heard is true.

A troop of scouts are on a weekend camping trip on a small island. On the first night, they have a visitor.  This visitor is sick and horribly contagious.

it's not any normal sickness either. it's vile and disgusting and pretty much sets a benchmark for what body horror should be.  To give detail on the specifics of the illness risks going into spoiler territory. but trust me it's like nothing I've read before and Cronenburg would be proud of some of the imagery going on in this book.

The boat that's supposed to pick them up never arrives, leaving them stuck with the disease and each other. Cabin fever turns out to be as dangerous as the infection threatening their lives.

This book hurt me, in all the right ways that good horror is supposed to.  It's told in alternating segments, mostly set on the island, but newspaper reports, and extracts from court and military hearings which explain exactly what's going on to the reader, letting us know exactly how far up that creek without a paddle the troop are. The final chapter is a huge gut punch with massive emotional impact.

It's well written with engaging characters, who are fleshed out nicely through a solid use of flashbacks. The tension is unbearable for most of the book. It's gory and disgusting in places but it never feels superfluous.  It's an integral part of this story, and not just cheap shock tactics. A strong stomach is necessary. 

I did find myself wondering why they didn't just make some oars and row the small outboard off the island, but that's a minor complaint.  This is a bunch of increasingly dysfunctional teenagers... is a plan like that going to occur to them as easily as it did to me sitting in my comfy chair reading this?

The only other niggle I have is the relatively early revelation of the number of survivors in one of the report segments. This turned the latter section of the book into an exercise in guessing who dies next, which has its own merits, but might have been more effective if we didn't know the exact number.

I will definitely be reading more by Nick Cutter (and maybe looking up his writing under his real name too).  He is without doubt, the most exciting new author I've found in the genre since Josh Malerman.

Number 15 - Beyond Here Lies Nothing - Gary McMahon

 

And near the end of my continuing series theme, the final part of the Concrete Grove trilogy by Gary McMahon.

It's a crying shame that Gary isn't as big a name in the horror scene as James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell. He's equally as good as either with his own distinctive brand of downbeat urban horror.

Whereas Ramsey's books are filled with middle class characters and paranoia, Gary's books are filled with the inhabitants of the council estates that cause Ramsey's characters so much dread.

The council estate in this trilogy is a character all of its own, filled with people just trying to get on with life, whilst all around, the badness is like an infection that's impossible to shake.

A personal factor that made this book extra creepy for me is that the central character this time around is called Marc, spelled with a C, the good way to spell it. I don't actually recall this happening in any other book. Reading about horrible things happening to Marc hit closer to the bone than they might have done normally. People called John must be used this sensation, but it's new to me.

Marc is in the Grove for the funeral of a friend he met whilst researching a local urban myth. He runs into the strangely seductive Abby, whose child went missing a few years previous, the last of 4 girls on the estate to simply vanish. The child's father is a returning character, a gangster who appeared in the previous books, and he doesn't take kindly to people who take too much interest in his ex partner.

This is just the start of Marc's problems. There are a few parallel storylines going on, involving Marc, the gangster, and an obsessed copper who worked on the case of the missing girls with no success. 

They pull together quite masterfully towards the end, even though the characters don't necessarily all interact at any point.   That takes a lot of skill to pull off (and is something I only just realised today writing this, a full 36 hours after finishing the book) but McMahon does it with no visible effort.

The horror becomes more cosmic than the previous volumes, each book allowing the scope to widen a bit more.  Again, this expansion of the in-story universe seems effortless. 

The prose is easy to read yet still atmospheric. There are some images from this book that will be difficult to shake off.  Particularly those surrounding a very surprise return of a character from book one, and the injuries sustained by a supporting character. 

There was once scene that felt a little cliched, and stood out for the wrong reasons, but in a novel of this length, it barely mattered. 

Read the trilogy from the start if you can.  They're all standalone novels, but together are greater than the sum of the whole. 

I'll start as I began. It's a damned shame Gary isn't a household name. He deserves to be. I've not read a bad book by him yet and he's so much better than some writers who are far more famous.

Number 99 - Chump Change - Dan Fante

 

Dan Fante is the son of Jon Fante.  As any people who read these reviews regularly will know, I discovered Jon Fante entirely by chance a couple of years back because I liked the title of one of his books (1933 was a bad year). he rapidly became a firm favourite of mine. 

I'm close to having read everything Jon Fante ever published and I wondered if the talent ran in the family. So I ordered this online - his books don't show up in Waterstones the way his dad's do - and I'm so glad I did.

The unflinching gaze at the underbelly of life is well and truly present in the writings of both father and son. 

This book is one of the most disturbing things I've read this year.  I find myself hoping that it is complete fiction and not based on Dan Fante's real life.

However - the lead character is Bruno Dante.  His father is Jonathan Dante -  a novelist and screenwriter dying from diabetes. We meet him in the book, lying on his deeathbed, a shriveled husk of his former self with no lower legs due to his illness, and only breathing through a sheer refusal to die just yet. Jon Fante died of diabetes - he too had lost his feet to the disease. 

 Jonathan Dante's book that is referenced in this is called Ask the Wind.  The last of the Bandini novels was Ask the Dust. There are so many similarities between Jonathan Date and Jon Fante it's impossible to surmise anything other than Dan wrote his father into this book under a very thin veil indeed.

Given that the father character IS his real life father, how much of the character of Bruno is Dan Fante?  

Bruno is not a nice man.  He's an out of control alcoholic with a mean streak a mile wide and totally self destructive.  We meet him first when he's released from rehab a few days early so his wife can take him back to LA to see his father before he dies.

What follows is a compulsive and horrifically readable account of alcoholism and a crash to the bottom. I'm not sure Dante makes one good decision at any stage of the book. We certainly can't root for him and his behaviour. We can't sympathise in the slightest.  But Fante's prose makes us understand him and empathise. We can hope that he might turn a corner somewhere, but it never seems likely. This spiral is a bad one. The only thing close to a redeeming feature is his attempts to look after the dog, and he's not even very good at doing that.

This book messed with my dreams and gave me a sleepless night. Most horror novels I read don't manage that. His depiction of broken humanity is so convincing that it hits on a deep deep level. However there are shafts of humour shining through. This isn't a misery memoir.  It's compelling in part because of the jet black humour used to illuminate the darkness.

I will certainly be tracking down more of his work.  He truly manages to carry on his father's legacy.

Number 93 - Cunning Folk - Adam Nevill

 Nobody writes "Bad Place" horror novels quite as effectively as Adam Nevill.  Ritual, Apartment 16, House of Small Shadows and No One Gets Out Alive all have locations so well drawn that no sane person would want to go there. 

In his new novel out now from his own imprint (Link at the end of the review), he somehow manages to give us his scariest location yet.

A young family, Tom and his wife Fiona and 4 year old daughter Gracie, desperate to leave the inner city, buy a decrepit old house in an unnamed village somewhere in the deep countryside in the South of England. The suicide of the last owner isn't really an issue for them.  that's history.  it doesn't matter any more. They're going to do the house up and make a beautiful family home for dear little Gracie to grow up in. 

That's the plan anyway.  They hadn't banked on a pair of truly malicious neighbours. From an initial frosty welcome, events start spiraling completely out of control. And who will believe Tom when he says the neighbours have magical powers and are laying curses on him and his family? 

As much as I've loved everything else Adam Nevill has written, with this book, he smashes it out of the park.  The horror starts in such a grounded way for Tom et al.  The financial stakes are so high, this is the greatest gamble he's taken - but we know from the prologue what the neighbours are capable of doing and that things are unlikely to turn out nicely. At the very least, he may well end up financially ruined, or he could lose so much more than mere money. When things start to escalate, they become more vicious than anything I've seen in any of Nevill's other work.

The sense of doom is palpable, the flashes of hope that glimmer through the gloom are extinguished in the cruelest of ways. One scene in particular, and it's immediate aftermath felt like a hammer-blow to the psyche. It's not an unearned shock, or done solely for effect. It's a shock that's been carefully planned and built up to. From that point on it's almost impossible to put the book down.

Despite the oh-so-familiar trope of the family buying a new home and bad things start happening, this feels like a fresh take on the old storyline.  The place is a bad place because of the neighbours, not the place itself.  The story wrong-footed me several times and I was second guessing myself constantly - and getting it wrong most of the time. 

There is a jet black sense of humour running through the book as well, despite the darkness. this just serves to drive the shocks deeper. 

This is quite possibly the best thing that Nevill has written to date. Tom's relationship with Gracie and his fears for her feel so true, I wonder how much of the early part of the novel is maybe based on the real experience of buying a place in the country and uprooting with the family.

As usual from Ritual Limited, the book itself is an object of beauty before you even open it.  Everything about this book is top quality, the artwork, the feel of the paper, everything.

The only thing I think would have improved this book would have been if the toy penguin was called Fluffy and not Waddles.  People who know the other work of Mr Simon Nevill (Adam's brother - a very talented family) who drew that rather terrifying boar's head on the front cover will understand what that means.

This book and all his back catalogue are available through his website 

All – Adam LG Nevill

Number 58 - Survivor Song - Paul Tremblay

 My second Paul Tremblay novel. It seems to prove that the first of his that I read wasn't a fluke. Along with Josh Malerman, Tremblay seems to be bringing a freshness to the horror genre.

This one is a scarily appropriate book to read at the moment, despite having been written a few years back now. Set in an outbreak of a superfast and violent strain of rabies, it follows two women trying to find a safe place for one of them to give birth.

Like Cabin at the End of the World, this takes a big potentially world-changing event and concentrates on a very small cast caught up in the chaos of it all. 

One of the things that sets this apart is that the characters at the heart of the story are unimportant to how the impactful event will play out. There are no scientists trying to get their miracle cure out to the world, no politicians trying to save as many as they can, just two very human characters, trying to get through it. 

The story follows Ramola, a paediatric doctor as she tries to help her friend Natalie get to a hospital to have her baby. Natalie's has just been killed by a rabid intruder and Natalie herself was bitten as she tried to fight him off.  The story only covers maybe three hours of their lives, but is packed with incidents and tragedies.

One thing that always bothers me in this type of survival horror is why the survival of the central characters is apparently more important than that of the people around them.  In this book, it just isn't. This is something else that elevates this.  

It's as much a character study of the two women as it is a horror story. We know them extremely well by the end of the book and feel enormous sympathy. The prose is the same lean present tense narration that characterised Cabin.  This increases the tension with the sense of immediacy. there are also some neat tricks with they typesetting and layout which really add to the impact and the emotional punch - especially in  the closing chapters.

It's been a while since I read Cabin, I can't remember if the superplague was one of the disasters we heard about in that book. It feels familiar though so I think the two books are part of the same fictional universe.  

If you have the stomach for a book about a super contagious disease laying waste to a section of humanity after the past 18 months, this is a great one to try.

Available from all the usual outlets.  

Number 51 - The Concrete Grove - Gary McMahon

 

This book is the first book I ever finished reading at a heavy rock festival... On Thursday night  I was left with only 50 pages to go when my friend (and passenger to the festival) arrived so I needed to be a little bit sociable. So I stuck it in my bag and finished it on Saturday morning sitting in my tent after waking up early.

I had virtually no signal so, two heavy metal filled days and much mental and physical exhaustion later, here's what I thought of it.

Those who follow this blog will know that i am very keen on McMahon's miserabilist musings. His novels are written from the point of view of those at the bottom of the heap. So much horror seems to be written about the comfortably middle class and fairly well to do section of society. The very real urban nightmare settings for McMahon's books really make him stand out.

This book, part one of a trilogy, is set in the Concrete grove of the title - a sink estate where people land after they've missed every safety net and crashed through every crack to hit the bottom.

 Hailey and her mother landed there after a family "incident" left them with nothing. One day Hailey visits The Needle- an abandoned tower block in the centre of the estate around which all the streets are arranged in concentric circles - and encounters... something. It's only the first chapter so normally I would regard that as fine for giving spoilers, but in this case, certainly not.  The imagery in that first chapter is so fresh and startling that to even hint at it would do the book a massive disservice.

The power that exists in the Grove has noticed Hailey and from that point on, things get decidedly weird for everyone around Hailey, including Tom, the helpful jogger who takes her home after finding her collapsed in the street. It can see a person's deepest hidden fears and make them face up to their own demons. Some people, like local loan shark Monty Bright, have welcomed them in. 

This is filled with bizarre, surreal and goddamned scary set pieces. Even the mundane is frightening in the Grove. To have a twisted supernatural force  at work at the same time helps remove almost every glimmer of hope from these character's lives.  However, because of the skill in the storytelling, that light is always there at the end of the tunnel.  Whether that's daylight, or a freight train coming down the tracks to crush everyone in its path is another matter.

This is the first part of a trilogy, whether the characters who almost/sort of survived this book will make a reappearance is something I'm excited to find out. 

Side note. according to the author's note at the end of the book, The Needle is based on a tower block in Dunston in the north east of England. The first address I can recall living in was on a street almost opposite that tower block.  There was a great urban legend about it (which isn't used in this book) which I may need to try to use in a story of my own.

I'm not sure if this book is still in print, but it is available online from most of the usual suspects.

Go out and buy it if you enjoy existential horror set in grim and all too recognisable urban settings.  I know I do. 

In fact, just go out and buy it if you like well written horror that'll creep the bejeezus out of you. You won't be disappointed.

Number 38 - The Pilo Travelling Show - Will Elliott

 

Last year I read the Pilo Family Circus, a surreal, grotesque and frankly quite hilariously disturbing book about the strangest circus you could imagine. It seemed to end quite definitively, but that didn't stop Will Elliott writing the sequel.

And boy am I glad he did. 

This is just as good as last year's offering, going deeper into the lore of the Pilo circus, but still leaving those explanations loose enough that we don't get disappointed with them. Sometimes trying to absolutely explain everything can get in the way of a good story. Elliott trusts his readers to fill in around the edges.

Jamie, the reluctant clown recruited in book 1 is once more dragged into the strange world of freaks, clowns and powdered souls. There's been a change in management in the circus since the events of the last book, and chief clown Gonko isn't happy. What follows is a series of plots,  double and triple crosses involving horrific violence, slapstick and more twists than a twisty thing.

There are scenes that are truly disgusting (in a good way - this is a horror novel after all) and others that are laugh out loud funny.  One of the reviews on the back cover compares this to a cross between David Lynch and Chuck Palahniuk, and that's a fair comparison. This is brilliantly surreal, compulsively readable and unlike anything I've read before (except for the first book in this series).

It's available through most good booksellers, but you really do need to read the Family circus first or this will be entirely incomprehensible. 

Once again, this is one of the highlights of the year.

Number 14 - The Ruins - Scott Smith

 

My regular readers may remember that I reviewed A Simple Plan at about this time last year, also by Scott Smith, and thought it was an amazing book. It was the on the strength of that that I bought this one.

And I wasn't disappointed in the slightest.  This is a horror story par excellence. 

A group of friends holidaying in Mexico go on a day trip, looking to find the brother of one of their new friends who went looking for an archeological dig and hasn't returned yet.

In the depths of the jungle they stumble across a hill covered in strange red flowers and vines. Suddenly a group of natives appear and order them away. When one of the friends steps into the vines, events take the first of many dark turns.

The sense of dread builds rapidly and never really falters. From the moment they find themselves on the hillside we know that this is going to be a full on nightmare. Smith has built the characters nicely in the preamble to reaching the hill and we care about what might (or will) happen.

The quality of the writing means the suspension of disbelief required for the story is never an issue, as wild and fantastical as the events become in the last two hundred pages, we're so mired in this story that we accept it. He's careful to throw things at us in stages, giving us a steady reveal of quite how bad a situation they've found themselves in. Every time we think things can't get worse...

He switches viewpoints frequently between 4 of the 6 stuck on the hillside. It's possible to argue that they made silly decisions at times, but we're far enough inside the characters' heads to understand why they did the things they do. These are brilliantly realised normal people stuck in an insane situation. We know that these people are in a horror story.  They don't. They're going to make mistakes.

There are some errors in the book.  But they're almost certainly down to the publisher and not the author. In some German speech the English word "Two" is used consistently instead of the German "Wo". 

The thing that bugs me most about this book is that it's described in the reviews on the cover as a Suspense Novel, and not a horror story.  Even The Stephen King quote shies away from the word. Two of the internal reviews call it what it is, but it's disappointing that the others don't. It's not a shameful thing for a book to be a horror story, especially not when it's this damned good.

This is a scary, tense and brilliant horror novel. I just wish Scott Smith would write more books.  He's one of the best out there. Every bit as good as Stephen King at his best.

Number 99 - Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo

 This is a classic of pre-WWII literature that I've managed to somehow not read until now, despite having had this copy on my shelves for a good couple of years.

I wasn't sure what to expect from it. I know of the film, but haven't seen any more of the film than we see in the video for THAT Metallica song. KNowing its reputation as a classic and once banned anti-war novel, I was worried it could be a little too polemical for my tastes.

I needn't have worried.

Having read the book, I really need to see the film, just out of morbid curiosity about how to transfer this to the screen. It's written in the very close third person and follows Joe Bonham as he falls in and out of consciousness after sustaining horrific injuries on the front line in the first world war.  

As the pages fly past, the extent of his injuries becomes clear.  There's nothing left of him other than the absolute necessity to keep him alive.  He has no limbs, he's deaf and his face is also missing. This obviously leaves him as alone and as close to death as possible without actually dying - and totally unable to communicate with the world.

It's as close as a third person narrative can come to true stream of consciousness writing. He drifts in and out of fever dreams and reminiscences.  He tries to make sense of the world/ward around him based on the only senses he had left.

I started the year with a novel about a boy trapped inside his head (Patience - Toby Litt) and I've almost ended it with one too.  It's difficult to say which of the two is better as they are so different in their approach. This one is certainly the most devastating. In Patience, the narrator can celebrate his personal victories.  Joe doesn't have that option. He does have small victories, but the ending is

Slight spoiler - This was surpringly seasonal at the end, I accidentally chose the perfect time of year to coincide with the events.  In fact, this book could be seen as a perfect metaphor for 2020. Obviously, not intentional on the part of Mr Trumbo. but it's there nonetheless.

I raced through this in a couple of days.  The prose is spot on, colloquial enough to accurately depict the character, hallucinegenic in places and truly emotional.  I let out more than a few tears while reading this one.

Available in all good bookshops, I highly recommend this one to anyone.

Number 93 - The Grieving Stones - Gary McMahon

 My second cheat read by Gary McMahon this year.

There's a melancholic feel that infests McMahon's prose, and this book is no exception. 

A therapy group take a weekend retreat to an old house deep in the Lake District, an English version of the Cabin in the Woods trope - but with Gary McMahon at the helm, you know you're not in for any cliched old nonsense.

The stones of the title are a set of standing stones near the house. There are rumours and legends that surround the stones, and the appropriately nicknamed Grief House. 

Our protagonist Alice, much like the central character in Shirley Jackson's classic Haunting of Hill House, feels a deep connection to the forces that surround the house. 

To say much more about the story would be a spoiler.  However I will say that the Backward Girl is one of the most genuinely creepy images I've read in a horror novel in several years. Also this book contains one of the best nightmare sequences I've read outside of an Adam Nevill book.

Alice is a believable and sympathic central character.  When I say believable, I mean that it's easy to believe she exists and that her actions are credible in the circumstances, rather than that we believe what she's telling us. We see the entire story through her eyes and we know she's not the most reliable narrator ever from about the halfway point.  There are hints that everything happening may well be just in her imagination, which makes the ending possibly more chilling than if the sisters and the Backward girl were really there - which they could be. There are hints in that direction too.

The supporting cast are well drawn with not a single weak characterisation. The atmosphere builds beautifully and there are a few well placed shocks and sneaky reveals. 

McMahon is one of the more stylish writers lurking beneath the surface of the modern British horror genre.  He deserves to be much more widely read. Get out there and buy his books.

I think I will schedule the Concrete Grove trilogy for a well overdue read for the new year.

Number 86 - The Little Gift - Stephen Volk

 

Stephen Volk is another writer primarily known for television.  He's probably best known for the BBC fake reality show Ghostwatch that caused a bit of a stir when it first came out. He also wrote the film Gothic, the tv series Midwinter of the Spririt and Afterlife (starring Andrew Lincoln of Walking Dead fame)

So he has a very classy screenwriting career.   despite having a few of his books I'd never quite got round to reading them.  I needed a cheat read while I wait for the next few volumes of the Walking Dead  so this seemed like as good a time as any. 

I'm glad to say his prose writing is as classy as his screen work. This is one of the most thought provoking things I've read this year. I'm not even sure what genre it belongs in - and that's a good thing.

The story begins with our narrator's wife finding the little gift the cat has brought in for the family. The narrator is asked to put the bird out of it's misery and dispose of it. The very beginning is told in present tense. As he's walking to the bins to dispose of the latest gift, his mind drifts back to a day that started when the cat brought them a dead vole, and the events that followed.

The story now switches to past tense and we hear the tale of his past infidelity and what came after. To say more would be very spoilerific. 

The relationships in this book are beautifully drawn - easily the equal to any whirlwhind romance I've read in a Rupert Thomson or a Jonathan Carroll novel - and coming from me that is high praise indeed. Despite not liking the narrator for his actions, you know where he's coming from and can understand him. I was genuinely moved and shocked by some of the events that transpired.  

The metaphors inherent to the story never overpower the storytelling and the ending is well nigh perfect. I finished this late last night and it's been on my mind all day. This is a dark meditation on love and the turns life can take.

Even by PS Publishing's normal high standards, this is a well put together book.  The cover art and internal illustrations are excellent. They perfectly match the darkness at the centre of the story.

I have a few more of Mr Volk's works on my shelves.  They have all been moved much higher up the TBR pile.

There are still copies of this available through the PS website.  https://www.pspublishing.co.uk/ 

Buy it there while you can.  Jeff Bezos doesn't need any more of your money.

Number 77 - The Girl Next Door - Jack Ketchum

 

This book has a reputation. Having read it now, that reputation is well deserved.

This is one of the most brutal and disturbing books I've read.  This is a literary equivalent to Funny Games  (the Haneke movie, if you haven't seen it, you need to) in that he makes you the reader complicit in the cruelty you're reading about.

What makes it all the worse is that it's so well written you can't put it down, can't look away from the car crash brutality playing out on the page. 

It takes its time setting things up. It's chapter 25 before the really nasty stuff kicks in.  The previous 24 chapters set up the characters intimately.  We know these people, the first person narrator, David, talking as his 30 something self, describing his meeting and burgeoning friendship with Meg, the eoponymous girl next door, and Meg herself. These are hugely likeable characters even if David is ocasionally as selfish and spiteful as pre-teen boys are wont to be. He's done some bad things with the gang he hangs around with, but he's basically a good kid.

If you have a likeable character, the worst thing you can do to them in a narrative is do them incredible harm, right?

Nope. You can also make your nice pleasant lead chracter an accomplice to the evil at work. With the personable and likeable first person narration, we're watching everything and not doing anything about it either.  This is where Ketchum is Funny-Gamesing us. One of the main points of tension in this book is wondering when or if young David is going to crack. We understand his passivity but we're screaming at him to do something for gods sake before it's too late.

The story is very similar in a lot of ways to Mendal Johnson's equally notorious  Let's go Play at the Adams. I wonder if they were based on the same real life crime. A group of children on the cusp of their teens torture a local girl for their own pleasure.  In this case, also for the pleasure of the girl's guardian, her aunt Ruth with whom she's been sent to live afetr her parents died in a car crash.

This is vastly superior to Mendal Johnson's book though.  It's a long time since I read that book but I remember that it felt gratuitous for the most part. Nothing in this book does.  Ketchum uses the first person narrative to avoid giving every last detail of what's happening.  Things happen to Meg while he's not there that we learn of second hand.  He tells enough that we know what's happened, but without gloating over the detail. There's even one chapter where the narrator refuses entirely to describe what he's seen - for which I was eternally grateful.

The prose is direct and concise.  Chapter 24 is only one sentence long, but that one sentence is possibly the most chilling in the book, because it foreshadows all the bad things to come - in only 7 words.

I feel more sorry for Meg than I do for any fictional character I've read about. She's introduced so well and her personality so well drawn that when things turn nasty, we feel it.  And that's what horror is supposed to do. 

I hate when a writer gives a cast of characters that we'd be happy to see killed off and then just kills them one by one, it can be fun, but it's never scary.  For horror to work, you build a sympathetic cast and it's the people you like that you do the bad things to.  It's far more effective.

That's exactly what Ketchum has done here. This is the reason why this book has the reputation it has.   Not only did he exact horrendous damage on the nicest character in the book, he implicates us the readers in the torture by telling it first person through the eyes of a character that we can't help but like.

A strong stomach is a definite before reading this. But if you have the intestinal fortitude, this is a classic horror novel.  I'm glad I read it, and I will probably read it again at some point, but not for a long time.

This edition also contained two random short stories by Ketchum, which were good, but I was too shellshocked by the novel to really appreciate them.  It also contains an interview with Ketchum and the makers of the film version of the book ... I didn't know there was a film and I have no idea how you could possibly film it. I really don't know if I want to see it.

This book is available from all good booksellers.

Number 74- The Cabin at the End of the World - Paul Tremblay

 

Paul Tremblay has been making a bit of a name for himself over the last few years. He's one of the new rising stars of the horror genre, complete with the obligatory cover quote from the King.

Is he any good though?

On the strength of this, I'm very happy to say yes he most certainly is.

This is the best book so far in my  October horror novel binge.  There's certainly no guilt involved in enjoying this one.

It starts relatively normally.  Wen, a seven old Chinese girl is playing outside the holiday cabin where she's staying with her adoptive parents, Eric and Andrew. She's catching grasshoppers to keep in a jar and study them.  While she's doing this a stranger approaches who introduces himself as Leonard.

The conversation with the Leonard takes a turn for the vaguely threatening when he tells her that nothing that is about to happen is her fault.  Very soon after this, his three associates appear, each wielding an unusual home made weapon.

Wen runs indoors to fetch her two dads and a siege situation develops.  But things take a turn for the apocalyptic when the invaders announce their reason for being there.

The story is told in a tension inducing present tense, lending a sense of immediacy to the increasingly paranoid atmosphere. Tremblay shows a great control over mood and pacing.  The opening chapter is a masterclass in how to turn a situation from normal and nice, to a bit weird, to a distinct sense of threat, without ever making any overt statement of danger.

He manages to keep this mood of strangeness right the way through the book.  Are the strangers insane or genuinely on the mission they state? If their mission is genuine, who would want to live in a world with a god/higher power quite so capricious?

This is one of the least predictable books I've read all year. It's very rare when I get down to the final chapter that I still have no clue which way the story will turn, but this book had me guessing all the way.

In summary, this is a really well written, claustrophobic home invasion thriller with a nasty bite and a thought provoking narrative.  It's shocking and gory by turns and also very moving.  Pretty much every emotion you want to feel when reading a good horror novel is dredged out of you most efficiently by this book.

If his other books measure up to this, I have a new name in my favourite writers list.

easy 8.5/10  possibly higher

Number 21 - Caging Skies - Christine Leunens

Before the cinemas shut up shop for the duration, I was lucky enough to manage to see Jojo Rabbit and I thought it was Taika Waititi's best film to date.  I also noted from the opening credits - Based on the novel Caging Skies by Christine Leunens.

Going by the old adage that the book is better than the film, I popped into Waterstones the next day and picked this up.

Based on the novel appears to be somewhat of an overstatement.  The film bears as much resemblance to the book as Cannibal the Musical bears to the real life story of Alferd Packer. I think "based on" needs to be changed to "vaguely inspired by".

The central idea is there - fanatical member of Nazi youth discovers his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in the attic. But that's as far as teh resemblance goees.

Johannes isn't a cute young 12 year old innnocently falling in love with the girl. He doesn't have a weird invisible friend in darling Adolf himself.  He's 16 when he finds her, and his interest in her is less than innocent. And, when the war finishes, the film finishes, but the book has nearly 200 pages left.  The book is almost a different genre completely from the film.

I stilll love the film.  The changes to the story are necessary to keep an audience watching I suppose.  The Hollywood need to give your protagonist some redemption if he's done things he shouldn't seem to dictate the way the film moves. The invisible friend is a brilliant shorthand way to show how infatuated with the third Reich young Jojo is.  He's also shown to be a nice guy at heart frequently and learns how misguided he's been.

The book is so much darker.  We read everything from Johannes' first person viewpoint. We witness his indoctrination by the Nazi ideals after the Auschluss.  We don't need a goofy Hitler figure telling him what to do, he's more than happy to join in with the bookburning for himself.

Johannes is far from a compassionate, or indeed reliable, narrator and his conscious cruelty to Elsa is never redeemed.  The book reads more as a descent into madness and borderline psycological thriller than the happy fantasyesque story the film led me to expect.

However it's so well done that the confounding of the expectations is a good thing in this case rather than a disappointment. We might not like Johannes as a person, but we still feel his sorrow when family members die and feel sorry for him regardless. And it still manages to pull of a deeply black humour.

The ending leaves a few unanswered questions, as it should given the lack of reliability of the narrator.

All in all, this is a completely different experience and story to the film, and disturbing as hell in places.  I loved nearly every page of it.

A strong contender for best book of the year.  A solid 9/10