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 95 - Skitter - Ezekiel Boone

 Those people who pay attention to my ramblings may remember I reviewed a book with a very similar cover to this a few months ago. That book was The Hatching, and this is of course the promised sequel.

It's a great feat of marketing on the part of Mr Boone.  I would never have taken the chance at reading a 1000 page novel about killer spiders by an unknown author.  However, splitting that down into what I now find is a trilogy means that people like me picked up the first one on the off chance and found ourselves compelled to buy the second, and from the way this one finished, the third book will soon also make its way to my groaning bookshelves.

These are not great works of literature.  There's no bon mots or hidden deeper  meaning tp these books - although this one serves as unintentional metaphor for people's behavior in the pandemic. They are very smoothly written though.  It might not be stylish, but damn is it fun to read.

 It picks up about a week after the first one ended.  As it says on the cover, the first wave of spiders is dead.  They've left behind lots and lots of egg sacs.  Some of them traditional externally visible egg sacs attached to walls etc, but a lot more inside the bite and sting victims left alive from the first book. 

These spiders are the reason that mankind is scared of spiders to this day.  Their last appearance on the planet, before recorded human history, was enough to leave a psychic scar on evolution. They're back now and making a similar impact.

Once again the pace is frenetic, bouncing around from location to location, building up the tension in carefully calculated bursts. We don't have quite as much shreddie action in this book as there was in the first. He's building up information about the spiders and how they operate. We know all hell is about to break out and the majority of the book is building up to that... There are some new spiders in town and they have more horrific tricks up their webbing than just skeletonising their victims in under a minute.

There are a few genuinely horrible (in a good way) chapters where the true threat levels shine through. A scene in a hotel sub-basement is a particular highlight and genuinely made me shudder. Elsewhere it's gloriously trashy nonsense. Again, in a good way. All the characters are brilliant and good looking, mostly rich and powerful, and the dialogue can be hilariously over the top.  However this does match the ever escalating state of emergency so it's easily forgivable.  

The scene where the first female POTUS takes her chief of staff aside for a quick half hour roll on the sack for some stress relief possibly stretches things a tad too far but the rest of the book stays within acceptable limits.

Don't expect a satisfying ending to the story this volume.  In typical part two of the trilogy style, this finishes on a cliffhanger, when all the hell does break loose as we've been promised for the past 300 pages. Book three should be a humdinger.

For a book with more plot than action sequences it truly does read enormously quickly and easily. This is assisted by the very short chapters and jumping from one side of the world to the other.  

The characters are broadly drawn and just about on the right side of believable.There is still one set of characters who haven't really impacted on the central storyline.  The last time we saw them they'd worked something out and phoned someone in the security forces, but we still don't know the detail. Hopefully, we'll find out how they tie in in book three. Which I will definitely be buying.

I could see this being a very successful series of films or tv show if anyone optioned it.  Enormous cast, exotic locations, flesh eating spiders, it's got everything.

Number 85 - Luther The Calling - Neil Cross

 

Neil Cross is known primarily these days for his tv writing.  He wrote two episodes of Doctor Who for Peter Capaldi's doctor (and very good they were too), he was a lead writer on the spy show Spooks, he wrote a recent serial called Hard Sun and of course, he wrote the whole of the show Luther.

He's also an excellent novelist. His book Holloway Falls was one of my highlights last year. This of course, is a novel based on his show Luther.  I'm not sure the star of the show is the most unbiased source they could find for a cover quote, but that's what the marketers went for.

It serves as a prequel to the tv show, with an early case in his career that paved the way for the unpredictable character the viewers know and love.

A young couple have been murdered in their home, both of them cut open and mutilated. The woman was 9 months pregnant. The baby is missing. Luther is assigned the case to find the murderer and to try to recover the baby if it's still alive. Are there links between this and some cold case kidnappings from many years previously? He also has to help an old man being victimised by local heavies and try to save his precarious marriage.

This is fast moving, brilliantly paced, violent and shocking throughout. Subtlety is not a strong point in this book.  It's  written in a no-nonsense, very immediate and tension inducing present tense.

The opening line, "John Luther, a big man with a big walk, crosses the hospital car park, glistening with the rain." sets the tone perfectly for what's to come. Tough guys doing what they do best.  Having said that, he does have his sensitive side and we keep full sympathy with  him throughout.  His build up of rage is understandable. When Luther bends the rules it's because someone deserves it.

This man is not a good policeman.  He can solve a crime.  He's great at that part of the job, but he's distinctly lacking in the following the right channels part of the job.  As such he's the classic renegade cop.  Pretty much all that's missing in this is the "you've got 24 hours or you're off the case" speech from his boss. Without leaving spoilers I hope, there's actually a neat reversal of that oh so familiar trope in the middle of this book.

There are twists and turns galore. It's not entirely unpredictable - I did see one of the biggest reveals in the story about 150 pages before it happpened - but it's never boring, it's never tedious and it keeps you turning the page. Also, I do have a talent for spotting plot twists before they happen.

 The villain is spectacularly evil. One of the main weaknesses of the book is the partial explanation given for this... I'd say more, but spoilers. This book also breaks the rule of making the villain the hero of his own story.  The most interesting villains don't think they're bad people. They think they're good people forced into doing bad things.  The bad guy here knows he's in the wrong and doing it for entirely selfish reasons.  As such, he's definitely scary, but not particularly credible.

Having made that criticism, it must be said that the tension in the closing chapters is almost unbearable. Knowing he doesn't care about anything other than himself does raise the stakes immensely.

I've raced through this one in a couple of days.  It might not be the strongest of Neil Cross's books, but it's still damned good and well worth getting hold of, especially if you're a fan of the tv show.

7.5/10

Content warning - there is some cruelty to animals and children. this is not for the faint hearted.

Number 7 - A Simple Plan - Scott Smith

Up until sometime about two years ago, I had no idea that the Sam Raimi film A Simple Plan was based on a book.  I loved that film, I think it's the best film Raimi has made.  Better than his Evil Dead or his Spiderman films.  Then I saw this book in the charity book section in a local branch of Tesco.

For only 50p, it was well worth the effort of picking it up.

The question is, is this a rare case of the film being better than the book, or, as more normally happens, the book is better than the film?

If I say that halfway through this I went online to order his other book, The Ruins, that would be a good sign that I liked this.

It is indeed better than the film it spawned.  Knowing the storyline wasn't an issue as the film makes several changes to the narrative.  I suppose those changes worked for the film and kept the character of Hank more sympathetic.  In a book, you can give the thought proceses that lead to a bad decision.  In a film its a good deal more difficult so I understand why, plus Raimi's changes gave us a heroic action sequence near the end, which is entirely absent from the book - replaced with Hank sinking to his lowest point.

The story follows two brothers, Hank amd Jacob, and Jacob's friend Lou.  They're driving in the snow when they swerve to avoid a fox and crash into a verge.  Jacob's dog jumps out of the pickup truck and chases the fox.  When they go after the dog they find a small plane crashed in the woods.  On board the plane is a duffel bag containing 4.4 million dollars. 

The simple plan of the title is that they will keep hold of the money till springtime, when the plane will certainly be discovered, see if anyone is chasing the money, if not, they'll split it and leave town, if they are, and there's going to be trouble, Hank will burn it so no one ever knows they had it..

Of course the plan doesn't quite go to plan.

The way things spiral completely out of control is brilliantly done.  Every action taken follows on logically from the next. Bad decisions on the spur of the moment lead to violence and recrimination. To say any more would be spoilerific in the extreme.

Hank is a great narrator.  His supporting cast are excellently drawn.  I loved the way that the initial characterisation of Jacob came from the description of his truck.  A description that told us almost as much about Hank as it did Jacob.

The tension ratchets up throughout the book, and in the closing chapters particularly I found myself almost forgetting to breathe with the depths to which Hank found himself sinking. 

Brilliant book.  easy 9/10.  I will be reading more by this writer.