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 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 25 - The Only story - Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes is one of the most famous writers that I've never read.  Up until now.  I've heard the name for many many years.  I've heard about the awards he's won and how great he is. I've seen his books on the bestseller lists and the must-buy piles in Waterstones.

And still never got round to reading him.

This month's book group book forced me to take the leap.

The reviews of this book tell us that it's devastating, profoundly beautiful sad and powerful.

Personally, I think it's the single most middle-class and safe book I've ever read.

The prose is good.  I'll give Mr Barnes that much.  He can write. This book was never less than readable.  There were moments of droll humour which did make me laugh.

But the story is almost non-existent. Nineteen year old boy falls for a 48 year old woman at the tennis club (how very middle class). They start an affair and yadah yadah yadah.

It actually starts off pretty well. Paul is an engaging narrator to begin with, telling us the story of his youth from the point of view of his much older self, with some nice observations about memory. The problems kick in in part two of the book.  Part two also begins well.  Part one is entirely the happy nature of his relationship with Susan. Part two takes us back and looks more deeply, revealing the less pleasant aspects of their early life together.

At some point, the narrative switches from a first person past tense narration to  a second person present tense narrative voice. You watch as she does this, you watch as she does that... etc. It flicks back and forth randomly.   In this section, Paul switches from an engaging young man to a dithering and quite annoying character, you wish he'd grow up and make a decision for himself.

By part three the book has completely lost it for me.  Part three starts talking about Paul in the third person. At first I thought that maybe we were getting Susan's side of the story and my interest peaked, but it quickly became obvious that this was either some unknown person or Paul talking about himself in the third person.  Is this meant to demonstrate his distancing from his feelings because of the rather predictable events of part two?  I don't know.

Part three follows him into senior adulthood and his life after Susan.  It's extremely random and is more full of allegedly wise observations on life and love than any actual story. Susan's eventual fate is an illness that was dealt with more movingly in one of the segments of Joe Hill's Strange Weather.

He's done a good job in part two of robbing all sympathy from the reader for both central characters, so the final part of the books fails entirely to engage the emotions.  I'm not sure he was aiming for that when he wrote it.

It's all well written but ultimately it's very ordinary middle class people doing very ordinary middle class things and it all seems rather pointless.    

The title is quite prophetic, as it's probably the only story I'll ever read by Julian Barnes.