Number 76- Wrecker - Carl Hiaasen

 

I seem to have inadvertently stumbled into a theme of writers not using their usual writing style. First the Mieville graphic novel, then the Thomson going all Cormac on us… and now this. Carl Hiaasen writing in the present tense.

This is one of his young adult books- you can always tell from the one-word titles. All his novels for the more mature reader (that sounds less dodgy than adult novels) have two-word titles.

Wrecker – aka Valdez Jones VIII- is a troubled teen living in Florida. He calls himself Wrecker because the original Valdez Jones used to dive down to shipwrecks for salvage in the last but one century. His dad is a waster who walked out on the family to try to start a music career. He doesn’t get on with his stepfather for several reasons so he lives with his older sister, an eco-warrior campaigning against large cruise ships being allowed back into the bay. For extra money he cleans iguana droppings from a grave in a nearby cemetery. For relaxation he goes out fishing in his skiff.

It's while he’s out on the skiff that he runs into a motorboat stranded on a sandbank. The occupants are not the type of people you want to get involved with, but this chance meeting is he start of a whole new set of troubles for young Wrecker. He soon finds himself increasingly entangled in the smuggler’s nasty business. Can he find a way to extricate himself with all his limbs and his potential future intact?

Set during the pandemic, and with a very strong pro vaccination stance taken by most of the protagonists, and a sub-plot about the historical lynching of a local man, this book has actually been banned from several school libraries in Florida, and Hiaasen found several of his scheduled publicity stops on his book tour cancelled.

Personally I thought it was a fun romp like all his books and the fact that it's wound up the stupid people is a bonus.

The characters are as well drawn as ever.  Wrecker and his family and potential girlfriend are a good set of protagonists.  The villains are suitably villainous If the ending isn't entirely convincing for me, that's because it's YA and slightly simplified so I can live with that too.

It's a lightweight read (unless you're the type that gets angry when people point out that Covid is a nasty illness) but I wasn't over-convinced by the writing style.

As previously mentioned it's in present tense.  Normally this doesn't bother me, but in this book it doesn't quite work. As with all his books, he tells more than 50% of it in flashback. The flashbacks are in traditional past tense, and when it suddenly switches back to present tense for the current sections of the story, it grates. Not enough to make me stop reading or anything, just enough to pull me out of the story every time it happened. This means it's a less satisfying read than most of his books.

But it's pissed off the people who deserve to be pissed off. That earns it more points in my eyes.

Not available in the UK yet, unless you order it from the States. Well worth seeking out.

Number 66- Peter Crombie Vs the Grampires - Adam Millard

 I'm several books behind at t6he moment. the reason for this might be apparent in the backgrounds of the pictures in the next few posts.

This is the sequel to Peter Crombie Teenaged Zombie.  Peter is still a member of the undead, resurrected by his father who is still the leading mad scientist in town.

His best friend is still a vampire ghost and the really-not-his-type girl next door still has a major crush on him. 

What is new is that the monkey can talk and Count Dracula has moved into the local old folk's home and is creating an army of elderly vampires.

The scene is set for as epic a showdown as is possible in this sleepy little town.  Luckily, there's another stranger in town who might be able to help- if he can persuade people his name isn't Vannel Singh.

This is typical Adam Millard in younger readers mode, fast paced, funny and self referential.

He doesn't care about being politically incorrect, even in a book aimed at children.  This is packed full of the sort of comments that we read are being removed from Roald Dahl's children's books- particularly when referring to the attractiveness, or otherwise- of the neighbour girl, and her lithp. And it's all the funnier for it.

It's a quick easy read- as you'd expect from a children's book.  It's probably not a future classic of children's literature, but it's good fun with plenty of laughs to be found in the surrealist world he's created here.

Number 83 - Heap House - Edward Carey

 

I just discovered that I bought this book by mistake.  I found it in Poundland in their book section for only a pound.  That's both a great bargain and a damned shame. More on that statement later.

When I saw that illustration I thought that this was by the illustrator of that alphabet book with all the dead children so I snapped it up. As i just discovered, that alphabet book is called the Gashlycrumb Tinies and it's by Edward GOREY.  He died in 2000 and so is most definitely not the author of this book which was written in the mid 2010s.

Back to that statement about this being in Poundland being a damned shame... Poundland's basic business model is buying remaindered stock for any non food items and things that you would reasonably expect to pay more than a pound for.  That means that this book certainly didn't sell as many copies as it deserves to.

This might be a children's or Young Adult book, but it's one of the best things I've read this year. I've had so much fun reading this book. 

The storyline is kind of traditional - strange family, strange house,  in comes a stranger and things start to unravel. The most sympathetic member of the family faces a quandary regarding his loyalties... etc.

What makes this almost entirely unique is the plot details. The reason the family is so strange, the setting, and the characters set this book apart from pretty much anything else I've ever read.  I genuinely can't think of anything that this would compare directly to. Think Dickens trying to write Gormenghast with Neil Gaiman and Lemony Snickett with a dash of Roald Dahl and indeed the aforementioned Edward Gorey and you'd be somewhere in the ballpark.

Heap House is the home of the Iremonger family.  It's set in the middle of huge rubbish heaps imported from neighboring London. All the upstairs Iremongers have names almost but not quite like ordinary names.  Our hero is Clod Iremonger (short for Clodius), he has cousins called Moorcus and Timmus who also feature heavily in the story.  Our heroine is Lucy Pennant, a new servant in the house. All the servants are distant relatives too poor to live in the main house.  Once indentured they lose their London names and just become known as Iremonger. Lucy doesn't want to lose her name

Everyone who lives in the house has a birth object that they cannot be parted from. Clod's birth object is a bathplug, Timmus carries around a tap etc.  Clod has an almost unique abilty to hear all the birth objects talking. They all shout out names.  His bath plug, for example, always shouts James henry Hayward. 

The drama starts in the story when his great aunt Rosamud's door handle goes missing.  Clod and Lucy meet and form a forbidden friendship. Events quickly spiral out of control.  Items are moving by themselves.  Huge angry creatures are forming from the rubbish and a storm is gathering over the heaps.

There's a very blatant anti-capitalist metaphor at the heart of the story which adds whole layers of meaning to the proceedings.

The mock Victorian setting is brilliantly created and helped along by the mordantly funny illustrations that introduce every chapter. I didn't realise that this was part 1 of a trilogy when I bought it.  I'm very happy that it is because that means I have two more books in which to experience this world in. I've already ordered both of them.

This is still available in the usual outlets, although in paperback with not such a great looking cover.

It may be aimed at the younger generation but it entertained this adult enormously.  an easy 9/10 

By the way - here's the Edward Gorey thing if you've never seen it before

Animated Gashlycrumb Tinies Alphabet - Narrated by TDC - YouTube

 

Number 13 - Peter Crombie: Teenage Zombie - Adam Millard

 After the brilliance that was Lanny, I needed something that would be as far away in style and content as possible so as to not invite comparison. A palette cleanser or an amuse bouche you might say.

This was an ideal choice.

When Peter Crombie is killed by a golf ball while walking past the golf course, his life becomes a lot more interesting.

His father is your stereotypical mad scientist and ressurrects his son in his lab in the basement. Soon Peter has made friends with a local ghost of a vampire and finds himself on a quest to stop a vampire queen from eating the local am-dram group.

Being aimed at the younger market this isn't as gruesome as Millard's other books but it certainly doesn't suffer because of that.

The story is told at breakneck speed and has punchlines almost every other paragraph. The jokes have a pretty good hit rate (although for me that could be at least partly down to my love of  Dad jokes) and this is therefore a damned funny piece of writing. There are atrocious puns galore, sideswipes at celebrity culture and some mercifully non-pc running jokes .

Adam Millard can always be relied on for a quick easy and laugh out loud funny read. There is a sequel to this sitting on my shelves and I will certainly be reading that sooner rather than later. 

This is a genuine guilt free fun read. If you want cheering up, go out and buy Adam's back catalogue. you won't regret  it.

  

Number 98 - Santa's Twin - Dean Koontz

 

A very quick festive read. That's the positives out of the way.

Dean Koontz is not a poet. This is written in bloody awful rhyming verses that don't scan.  I'd be more forgiving of the book if it didn't make such self aggrandizing claims in the blurb on the inside of the dust jacket.

"At the request of his fans, bestselling novellist Dean Koontz has created a contemporary masterpiece that is destined to take its place alongside "The Night Before Christmas" and A Christmas Carol as a perenniel yuletide favourite"

Someone somewhere thought this was worthy to be mentioned in the same sentence as A Christmas Carol?

The storyline is pants, but it's a Christmas story about Santa primarily written for kids, so that's to be expected. However, even writing for kids, write your verse so it scans, make some effort to make it fun. This is too wordy for younger children and too childish for older. It falls firmly between two stools.

The illustrations are very good.  I had quite a lot of fun playing "Where's the snowman" after I finished the book.  There's a snowman hidden in every picture somewhere, even in the picture on the front cover - see if you can spot it.

I wish the story/poem was that much fun.

  

Number 47 - Squirm - Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen is another of those authors I've been collecting books by for well over a decade.  As far as I know I have everything he's written, but I am a couple of books behind on reading his YA books. 

His fiction novels all tend to have either one or two word titles.  The two word titles are all adult novels.  The one word titles are for younger people. 

In practice this means that there's no swearing, no sex and the violence is kept offscreen in the one word titles.  They're still the same brand of easy to read lunacy, normally with a very strong environmental message built in.

This one is no exception.  Billy Dickens is a Floridan high school kid who loves wildlife, and just happens to collect snakes.  He won't stand any nonsense and will always fight for the underdog.  This is typical of Hiaasen's lead characters.

Within the first two pages you can't help but like young Billy regardless of how unlikely some of his behaviour may be.

This is a very good thing since Billy is the first person narrator, telling us most of the story in the present tense.

His dad walked out on the family when he was a toddler.  In the first couple of chapters he finds out where his dad lives and cons his mother into letting him fly across the USA to Montana to meet him. His dad turns out to be an eco warrior chasing after a particularly nasty big game hunter and spoiling his hunts.

 Even though this is 276 pages it flies past as if it was half that length.  The weakness of the first person narration is that the bad guy barely features at all, but Billy is such an entertaining narrator that that doesn't really matter.  The closing chapters contain some genuine tension and the message about wildlife preservation is crystral clear without being sledgehammer style unsubtle. 

It's predictable once the pieces start slipping into place, but it's not written for adults.  However, as YA fiction goes, it's easily substantial enough to keep me entertained.  If I wanted to, I could probably pick a plot hole or two - but see the end of the first sentence in this paragraph.  And it's so entertaining it would be churlish to do so anyway.

This is still available from all good booksellers and probably quite a few bad ones as well. 

He has a new adult novel due out in the next month or so, and I've already preordered it.