Number 37 - Observatory Mansions - Edward Carey

 

As any regular readers of this blog will know, I fell in love with Edward Carey's writing style last year when I read Heap House (which I bought when I mistook him for Edward Gorey based on the artwork).

This is his debut novel, and more adult oriented than the Iremonger books.

It does feature a lot of the themes that run through Heap House. A run down building inhabited by a bunch of grotesques, an obsession with gathering objects other people see as junk etc. However it is still a very different novel.

It is narrated by Francis Orme, a,,, actually, I'm not sure what single adjective could possibly accurately describe him. He works as a statue on a plinth.  He's blessedly oblivious to everything happening around him even as he describes it to the reader.  He obsessively collects (steals) objects for his rather inappropriately named exhibition (which is locked in the basement and no one is allowed to even know of its existence). He has a narrative voice unlike anything else I can remember reading (including Heap House). he wears white gloves at all times and saves them to his own personal museum of white gloves when they get dirty (with a card explaining why they're discarded, including dates from start to end of wearing and the reason for their disposal). He is not your everyday narrator.

Observatory mansions is his home.  It used to be the stately home of the Orme family, complete with opulent furniture and paintings, attendant servants and acres of its own grounds.  Now it stands in the middle of a traffic island and all the grounds and all the luxury contents gone, including the servants.  it's been split into flats to try to raise money for its upkeep but most of the tenants have died or moved on and now there are only 7 residents in the building. Most of them are as strange in their own way as Francis.

Their insular existence is threatened when a new tenant arrives. She shakes up the lives of all the residents, but especially Francis's. 

This is one of those books that can make you laugh out loud and then cry and then laugh again... on the same page. The family secrets that are steadily revealed in the narrative are shocking and funny and tragic and completely unpredictable. 

The cast of almost grotesques is made completely sympathetic by the brilliant writing style. We accept their eccentricities and foibles and sometimes outright nastiness and still feel sorry for them.  

This isn't a happy book despite the number of laughs.  It isn't a depressing book despite the misery inflicted on the cast of characters. It walks that tightrope with consumate ease, performing backflips on the rope, just because Carey is so talented he can do that just for the hell of it.

I chose this book for my book group and I think it will make for an interesting discussion. I know thee are members of the group whose tolerance for weirdness is not as high as mine. I will find out in the next week or two.

Number 29 - A Spider on My Tongue - TM Wright

 If you were to ask me for a list of the best horror novels ever written, A Manhattan Ghost Story by TM Wright would be close to the top every time. It was followed a couple of years later by a sequel, The Waiting Room.  And many years later by this slim volume.

Abner Cray, lead character in the first book, and object of the search by his best friend Sam Feary in the second, is now living, or maybe not, in a house in the woods with a legion of unwanted guests.

His reality has fragmented almost completely.  This book takes the form of a journal detailing his current existence and flashbacks to what led him here, with musings on life and death and the differences between the two states.

It's a weirdly compulsive, totally fractured and not 100% sane narrative. It bounces from subject to subject, flashback to present to nightmare fuel at the drop of a hat.

It has a very similar feel to the TM Wright I reviewed a couple of months back.  It seems like his later books became quite samey, with a lot of repetition of the same verbal tics and narrative trickery, and legible story coming in in second place behind the style. 

The style is very readable and very creepy when it works.  It insinuates itself into your brain without you noticing. The horror comes in quietly at an existential level rather than being immediately frightening.  I still prefer his books that had more conventional narratives along with the existential terror.

This is one for Wright completists like me I think. It's difficult to find online for a reasonable price.  For the casual fan, read Strange Seed, Manhattan Ghost Story, The Woman next Door, The School, the Playground or any of his books from that sort of era. They're more satisfying reads than this one as good as this one is.

Number 8 - The Eyes of the Carp - T.M. Wright

Another very weird book.  And again, completely intentional on the part of the writer.

T.M. Wright has a very distinctive style. He wrote fractured narratives more skillfully than nearly any other writer I can think of.

This book is no exception.  

Kevin, the narrator doesn't stick to the subject at hand for long.  He jumps back and forward in time.  The diary style date headings cease making sense very rapidly, and once they're replaced by increasing and decreasing levels of pi it just becomes surreal.

Surreal is probably the single best word to describe this book.  Kevin is not the world's most reliable narrator.  The fractured nature of the storytelling gives us a picture of how broken his mind is.

The story follows Kevin and his wife after they move into a strange house in the middle of nowhere.  Weirdness ensues, but seems to be more from the narrator than the surroundings.

Once again with a TM Wright book, I have to say that I only had a vague idea what was going on, although the ending was probably 75% clear. However I loved the journey to get to whatever that destination was.  It was creepy and strange and disturbing in a way I find it difficult to pin down. 

We are seeing the world through Kevin's eyes and it's not a nice place.  Kevin is not a nice man. There are several instances of way too much information. It's a good literary impression of what living with a serious mental illness might feel like.

It's very short and an easy, if confuzzling, read. 

I got lucky and found a cheap-ish copy on Ebay which I snatched up.  This tends to sell for silly prices online.  If I'd paid the regular price for this I might have been less pleased with it. But since I found it for reasonable second hand rates, especially considering it's a signed limited edition (number 19 of 750) I can't complain.

Number 65 - Tumor Fruit - Carlton Mellick III

 It has to be said that this has an eye-catching cover. 

Carlton Mellick III is somewhat of a legend in the world of  bizarro fiction. On the strength of this book I completely understand why. 

A flight from earth to a new planet passing close by in the solar system is attacked by strange creatures, causing it to crash into the ocean.  The ocean is highly acidic and melts many of the survivors save for a small number who manage to float to "safety" on the acid-proof life rafts.

The survivors find themselves on an island with very few supplies. The air itself is toxic.  the flora is poisonous and the fauna has a taste for human flesh. Survival may prove to be an issue for the steadily reducing cast. By the time they realise that no rescue is coming, the only source of nutrition they have is the flower like tumors growing on one of the castaways (see cover picture).

I had zero idea what was going to happen next in this book.  Every page brought new surprises almost.  

That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on the skill of the writer.  A bad writer fails to keep any internal logic and the surprises are there for the sake of being shocking.  However, Carlton Mellick III is apparently a pretty damned good writer as everything that happens feels right for the book. He creates an internal logic and flow to the narrative that allows all the weirdness to exist as an organic part of the story. 

It's frequently laugh out loud funny.  It's frequently gross. It's frequently in horribly bad taste. it's frequently all those things at the same time. It's always entertaining. and is surprisingly moving when it wants to be.

This was my first taste of Carlton Mellick's particular brand of lunacy, and I want more of it.  

Number 57 - The Death of Francis Bacon - Max Porter

 

I genuinely have no idea what I just read. Do I need to be an expert on Francis Bacon to make sense of this book? 

Randomness and broken language fill this book. 

The blurb says "A great painter lies on his deathbed. Max Porter translates into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind"

I'm afraid I didn't get any particular mind pictures from this. I couldn't get any type of story. As a portrait of a broken mind, I suppose it works. 

it's very very short. if it had been any longer I'm not sure I could gave persisted with it. 

After the amazing book that was Lanny, to read this is a bitter disappointment.  Maybe it is my ignorance on display here.  there were a couple of flashes of narrative but they were all too quickly buried in the utter randomness of word choice. 

Not for me this time. I can honestly say, if this was the first Max Porter I read, I would never read another.

One good thing that's come about from this is that I did look up Francis Bacon's artwork and some of it is rather extraordinary. I am tempted to buy a print of one of his pictures for my living room.

I suppose it does marry up to Bacon's art style - the visceral and jusp plain weird mixed in together.

  However as a reading experience, nope.  

Number 27 - A Basketful of Heads - Joe Hill /Leomacs/Dave Stewart

 

More Joe Hill graphic novel goodness.

This is as mad as a box of frogs and is easily as good as (if entirely different to) anything in the Locke and Key series.

It follows the story of June Branch. She's just popped over to see her boyfriend, who's a summer deputy on a peninsula somewhere on the US coast.

However, when a group of convicts escape, and the power is cut by a storm, she finds herself trapped. her only defence is a viking axe she finds herself the temporary owner of.  It has the remarkable power that when she decapitates an attacker with it, the head stays alive and talking.

She soon finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy with a few talking heads offering their opinions.

What is the truth about what's happening on the peninsula and how deeply involved is her boyfriend?

The story rushes by at a fast pace.  June is a great protagonist. There are twists and turns galore. the artwork is perfectly suited to the writing.  There are tricks in the presentation here that tell the story in a way that would be impossible to replicate in prose.

There's not much in the way of subtlety going on in any of this. But if you're picking up a graphic novel with that title and cover, I doubt that subtlety is top of the list of what you're looking for.

The Hill House comics series are definites on my to be collected list.

Number 21 - The Blue Canoe - TM Wright

 

I hope it's just the brightness settings on my screen that render the cover picture as dark as it appears, because it's a seriously creepy cover when seen normally.

It looks ok on my phone, so i'll not mess about trying to change it.

TM Wright was one of the leading proponents of quiet horror. He didn't use endless gore or violence in his stories, he created an atmosphere of... I'm not quiete sure. It's not, strictly speaking, dread, it's something more insinuous than that. His writing unsettles you and can make you doubt the reality around you.

This is one of his later works, published by PS Publishing. That creepy looking cover perfectly fits the story inside.

The title page describes it as "A memoir of the newly non-corporeal" and that's as good a clue to the story as you can have. 

The unlikelily named Happy Farmer is existing inside a big house, along with other shapes and shades that ocasionally visit.  Nearby  there is a lake, and on that lake there is the Blue Canoe of the title.  He uses it to visit a hill on the other side of the lake where there's an empty village or hamlet. He remembers his past loves who may or may not exist and visits a town named after the lake for his breakfast.

There's not really much obvious story to this book.  The reader has to do a lot of the heavy lifting for him/herself to work out what, if anything, is happening or has happened. It's all told in random bursts of stream of consciousness with at least a half a dozen different threads to the story all being told simultaneously. 

The sections are separated by roman numerals that become something other than roman numerals as the book draws on.  Chapter headings are almost randomly allocated.  Towards the end we suddenly find chapter 1 which is a whole new narrative thread again, but which seems to tie some of the more disparate threads together.  Or maybe it doesn't.  I don't know.

If the afterlife really is like this, it's a horrible concept and that's where this qualifies in the genre. 

The piecemeal storytelling keeps you off balance and wary all the time you're reading it.  You never quite know what is or isn't real inside this mini universe Wright has created. 

It deserves to be read in as few sittings as is possible. that way it flows much better than just reading 5 pages at a time.  It starts to make sense (almost) when you devote some time to this book. A good long reading session enables you to truly feel the flow and power of his writing.

There's a very wry and dry sense of humour running through it.  It's never laugh out loud funny, but I found myself grinning, although sometimes I wasn't sure why.

It's not a book I think everyone would love.  It's very different to a regular narrative.  It's one I will probably reread just to see if I can figure it out properly next time.

For me, Wright's prose has always been addictive. He writes smoothly and hypnotically. Regardless of the storyline, his prose is an experience all of its own. this book is no exception. The imagery is hallucinatory. there are nuggets of real wisdom in there, and a lot of what the hell is going on? 

If you like a book that's a challenge as well as an easy read, this will do that for you.

Number 12 - Lanny - Max Porter

 

Where to start with this one?

Shortly before starting this blog I read Max Porter's first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers which was very good and very odd and was enough to make me pick this one up last year.

I was worried in the first few pages that this might be pretentious codswallop because of the tricksy looking gimmicks he plays with the typesetting but I needn't have been.  Pretty soon, the visual tics were just another part of the storytelling and I was fully engulfed in the weird little world Porter builds in these pages.

I won't say anything much about the storyline.  I think this is a book that benefits from a completely cold read. 

I will say though that I cannot remember the last time a book had this much of an emotional impact on me. 

The style of writing is unusual to say the least. Part 2 of the book is unique in my experience. the way he wrote that sequence left me reeling. Flashing from viewpoint to viewpoint, giving us ever so brief glimpses at what's happening from a myriad of differing voices.  It's an experiment in writing that could have gone horribly wrong, but IMHO he pulls it off in spades.

In the first section, we're introduced to Lanny's parents, his new art teacher Pete, and  Dead Papa Toothwort, a spirit that inhabits the local countryside, and glimpses of assorted villagers. Through these people's perspectives we build a picture of Lanny himself. This section alternates between funny and deeply moving with ease. A sense of tension builds discretely  The community is brilliantly realised to the point you can nearly smell it.

From part 1 we're so close to the characters at the centre of the story that the events in part 2 are as traumatic for us as they are for the family. The voices of the village add to that trauma, layer by layer. The maelstrom of voices is almst unbearable. It actually made me question my own attitudes when I've read real life reports of similar events.

This is one of the most remarkable books I've read since I started writing this blog. I am truly gobsmacked at the force of storytelling in this book. I loved some of these characters intensely while I was reading it.  Little Lanny himself is one of the most remarkable portraits in words I've ever read. 

This is by turns a moving family drama, a horror story and an enigmatic fable. I can't praise this book highly enough. 

9.9/10 purely because I refuse to give perfect 10s.

Number 67 - Fight Club 2 - Chuck Palahniuk/Cameron Stewart

 

How would you like your sequel done sir?  I think I'll have it surreal, metaphysical with a side order of what the fucking fuck is going on, please.

I've read some weird stuff, much of it by Chuck Palahniuk.  I've read some metaphysical stuff where the author has inserted himself as a character - Paul Auster and Stephen King spring immediately to mind. 

This has to take the biscuit for sheer bizzarreness. The first book is hardly "normal" but this is in a different league. 

It starts with a brief recap of the final couple of chapters of the original novel 

We then jump about 10 years, the nameless narrator from the novel is now called Sebastian and is amarried to his girlfriend, Marla, from the first book.  They have a 10 year old son - who is nameless.

Sebastian thinks he has Tyler under control through strict medication. However Marla has been swapping out his medication for sugar pills because she's bored of the surburban life and is cheating on him with Tyler. 

By the end of chapter one, the house has been blown up and the boy apparently kidnapped. To get him back, Sebastian must rejoin Project Mayhem to try to track him down.

After that, things get weird. 

A few chapters into the book, Marla contacts an author with a weird name who's composing a story at a "Write Club". These characters develop a more and more prominent role as the story continues.  To say more would be spoilerific in the extreme. Suffice to say, this is on a par with Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium for meta writing, maybe even more meta.

The artwork is impressive throughout. The cover art from the original issues of the comic is stunning. The writing is funny, fast paced and exciting, even if there are many places that make me say WTF.

 I still think the film is better than the first book, and I really liked the first book, and I have to say I think the first book is better than this one. Mainly because it was easier to work out what was happening.

 It's still well worth reading.  If you like Palahniuk, you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

Number 40 - Big Lizard - Joe & Keith Lansdale

 

Looking back to when I started this blog, I'm surprised I've not reviewed a Joe R Lansdale book yet.  He's one of those authors who's so prolific it's pointless trying to catch up, so I try to get through one or two of his a year, in which time he puts out at least three.  He's like Stephen King in that regard.

He's also like Stephen King in that, despite an enormously large output, his quality never seems to dip. In fact he's a slight improvement on King in that regard since there are at least two King novels I don't want to read again, whereas, given the time, I would happily reread everything I've read by Lansdale.

This book is two Lansdale's for the price of one. Keith is Joe's son and has recently taken up the mantle on the Red Range comics/graphic novels created by his dad many moons ago.

Big Lizard is a superhero story with a difference.  A lot of differences.  A fuck ton of difference.

Buster Nix takes on a job as night security for Pick a Chicken, a local chicken joint where the patrons can, erm... pick their own chickens for their dinner, in much the same way as seafood places allow patrons to pick their own lobster from a tank.  In Pick-a-Chicken they can even despatch their own chicken with a company hatchet before it is cooked. 

He stumbles onto a satanic ritual in an outbuilding a few days into the job and knocks over a blazing brazier, disrupting the service and letting all kinds of hell  loose.  As a result of the botched ritual, he finds he has the ability to transform into a Big Lizard (about 8 foot nose to tail). 

The owner of the business, Elroy Cuzzins has been similarly transformed by the ritual and has become Big Chicken.  He is hell-bent on completing the ritual, which means killing several people, and it's up to Big Lizard and his friends, a teenage tech wizard and a normal sized but psychic talking chicken called Socrates, to stop Big Chicken in his tracks.

All in all this is as mad as a box of frogs.  There's some very strange but effective visual imagery going on in this book, as well as at least one point where you'll feel real sympathy for Buster.

This book is not going to win any Pulitzer prizes. it's way too much fun for that.  This is probably the funniest book I've read all year.  This is the sort of book to chill out and have a blast with.  And it does that just fine. I laughed out loud several times reading this.  There's no real poetry to the writing, but who needs poetry when you've got an 8 foot chicken on a killing spree?

There are even a few dangling plot threads for a potential sequel to pick up on.  I sincerely hope they're considering it. 

This is released in September this year from SST Publications.

https://sstpublications.co.uk/

Edited to Add

The version of this book that I read was the ARC, pictured above.  I've just recently (aka today) acquired a copy of the full end product complete with illustrations.

It's a gorgeous piece of work.  The illustrations are just as mad as the story. The binding and formatting is spot on.  It's one of those books where the quality of the paper used is so nice it's worthy of a mention.  So I'll mention it.  Even the quality of the paper is noticeably better than most books.

It's signed by Joe and Keith on one of the nicest looking signature pages I've seen (complete with its own set of illustrations). And all this for a lot less than most small presses charge for a high quality signed limited edition.

You need this book in your lives.  It will improve your entire existence. That is no word of a lie.

Number 5 - Their Heads are Anonymous - Alistair Gentry

As you may have noticed, I occasionally choose books based on the covers alone. For reasons lost in the mists of time, that's why I bought this one.

Can it possibly live up to that cover?  If it lives up that cover is that a good thing? No i's not.  A book with a cover like this needs to exceed the promises the cover makes by a huge huge distance.

This sadly, doesn't even live up to that godawful picture.
This should be filed under "when will I ever learn".

It doesn't know what it's meant to be.  Is it a comedy?  A couple of wry smiles here and there doth not a comedy make.  Is it a horror novel?  It's never scary. it's never shocking. It tries too hard to go OTT in a couple of places that it fails entirely to shock.  Is it science fiction?  It has some sci-fi elements, but badly written, ill-explained and tedious.  And mostly nonsensical.

It starts in an ok fashion and deteriorates. I struggled to get to the end of this.  When you have 10 pages to go and you're wondering if you should bother, that's not a good sign.

Basic story - a huge amusement park (supposedly a satirical take on Disneyland) - our hero works as a giant bunny, his girlfriend plays a gnu. He's been hallucinating recently and seeing flying saucers. The boss of the camp is a snuff pornographer with a private army who decides to lock the park up tight and start playing his games with the guests, as you do. Of course, no outside agency intervenes at any point, except for a news helicopter which gets shot down.  At the time of the park's takeover, Parry, the guy in the bunny suit, has fallen down a shaft of some sort after passing out through an illness which is never mentioned again, and his girlfriend is locked in a tower somewhere after being sexually assaulted by her boss. There's also a "mystery guest" who comes in as a recurring character but who adds zero to the narrative. Lots of people are killed, no one from outside comes to help, it's up to Parry and Priscilla (the Gnu) with the help of the aliens to save the day.  Or should I say it's up to the omniscient aliens who can raise characters from the dead to save the day.

This should have been just my kind of thing.  It strives to be quirky, it tries to be shocking, it aims at some metafictional sci fi plot twists.  But the execution is bloody awful.  The writing style varies from bland to what-the-hell-am-I-reading-and-is-there-any-point-in-me-carrying-on. The characters are not even complex enough to warrant saying they're one dimensional.

The good guys do nothing of note for themselves.  Only the metaphysical creatures from the flying saucers allow them to actually participate in the story in an active way. The bad guy is just that.  He does bad things because he wants to because he's bad.  A good villain is still the hero of his own story.  Charles Bigger, the villain, is just evil and knows it. He knows he's the bad guy and doesn't care.  In the hands of a skilful writer, that can just about work...

In this guy's hands... nope

Remember I read this so you don't have to.

It's on amazon if you really want to.  But don't.  This is the literary equivalent of unblocking drains.