Number 10 - Post Office - Charles Bukowski

My first proper Bukowski novel.  Also Bukowski's first proper Bukowski novel, so it seems an appropriate one to start with.

I did read a Bukowski book - The Captain is out to Lunch and the sailors have taken over the ship - about two years ago.  It wasn't a novel as such, but extracts from his diaries.  It was still remarkably interesting.

I had high hopes for this book as several of my friends swear by Bukowski and rate him as one of the all time greats.

The plot, what there is of it, follows drunken down and out Hank Chinaski through several years of his life working for the post office.  And that's about it as far as the story goes. 

We follow him from his early days as a mailman, under a tyrannical boss, through a brief interlude where he left town for a woman, and then his 11 year stint working in the sorting office after moving back to the city. At no point does he make a concerted effort to improve himself, or move on as a character, the drunken bum we meet at the beginning is exactly the same guy who we hear at the end sits down to write a book.

The storytelling is all over the place.  it's disjointed, and occasionally barely grammatical.

And I loved nearly every page of this book.  Despite being a very ordinary story about a very flawed man, where very little of import happens, this book pulls you through it. 

It's a third of the length of the interminable My beautiful friend which makes a real difference.  Hank doesn't really get the chance to outstay his welcome the way Elana and Lila did.  Hank isn't someone you want to pop round for tea but he's a fascinating narrator.

There's a rawness and honest feel to the prose.  He's not aiming to impress with fine words and deeper meaning. he's not even trying to make us like Hank.  He's telling us about his drinking and his gambling, and his occasional conquests in sometimes lurid detail.

Every woman Hank meets is described in what, these days, would be considered disgustingly sexist detail. Breast size, ass size, etc.  But it's the character speaking, and that's his worldview. We can't only read books with characers who speak all posh and are so respectful of everything that we hold dear.  We need this type of writing too.  Hank is a low-life, and by God, we know his inner life in great detail by the end of this book.

Despite the fact that he's clearly not out to impress with fine prose, he occasionally reaches a weird sort of poetry in the rhythms of the writing.  There are moments where we feel sympathy for Hank despite everything.  He's also frequently very funny.

And he's always interetsing.

Bukowski is one of the beat generation's fabled characters, and this book is a clear sign of why that is.

I will be seeking out more of his writing, fortunately my local Waterstones normally has a good selection.

Number 9 - Ghastle and Yule - Josh Malerman

Yes, the picture shows Bird Box.  This is now the fourth copy of that book that I own - the original hardback I read, the special edition from Dark Regions Press, the regular netflix tie in edition (with Sandra Bullock on the front) that I was sent from Amazon instead of this one, and this one.

This one is the pre-netflix UK paperback.  It's special because it has a complete novella tagged in after the novel.  It's not announced on the back cover, or even in the contents list (because there is no contents list). It's just there at the back of the book.

If you want to read Ghastle and Yule in treebook format, this is the only place to find it,  and you have to find the copy without the netflix logo on it. I did find a copy with this picture on, but the netflix logo added, and the extra story was missing. Eventually, I found one from a private seller on E-bay and asked specifically if it was the right one before placing my remarkably cheap bid.

The story is easily available for your kindle, but I don't own an e-reader and I'm not particularly interested in buying one either.  Tree-books all the way for me.

After all that effort to find this, was it worth it?

Silly question - this is Josh Malerman and I'm yet to find a story of his that I dislike. This one is no exception.

It's the story of two competing horror film directors in the late 50s/early 60s and told from the POV of a cinematographer who works with both of them. They each accuse the other of stealing their ideas/films and things steadily get worse between them until... no spoilers.

It's a really intriguing story which I will definitely be rereading at some point.  There's very little explanation given as to how the idea theft - the accusations go well beyong mere plagiarism - is happening. There are hints but nothing definitive. We get a great portrait of two polar opposites at loggerheads as they, in their own ways, jointly create an entire new subgenre of horror films.

It's told in Malerman's usual crisp prose style and is a fantastic tale of paranoia and professional jealousy, and maybe something much more disturbing.

I really want to watch all of the films described in the book.  They really do sound remarkably good. Malerman's prose is uncluttered but strangely evocative and he brings these films to life in the story. 

This book is well worth getting hold of. It's easiest to find in kindle format, but if you're like me, and fancy a bit of a hunt, get this edition.  You won't be disappointed.

Number 8 - My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante

This month's book group read.

Last year my nomination for the group was My Best Friend's Excorcism.  One of the comments that was made at that meeting was that the lady in question was embarassed to read the book in public because of the cover - scroll back through my blog to see the cover in question (which I happen to think was amazingly good).

With this book, I know exactly how she felt.

This has to be one of the most uninspired covers of all time.  Even Lavinia had a better picture regardless of how generic and bland it was.

This is a coming of age story that follows Elena and her best friend Lila from childhood to late adolescence in a run down poor neighbourhood in Naples.  Elena is incredibly bright and has her first stab at writing for a magazine/journal near the end, even though it doesn't actually see print.  There's a feeling of fictionalised autobiography going on through this story.

I have nothing against coming of age stories, or stories where nothing much particularly happens.  Paul Auster's 4321 was 4 separate stories about the same boy growing up in slightly different family circumstances - and becoming a writer of different sorts in three of them.  I adored that book.

So Many Ways to begin by Jon Magregor follows a museum curator through a few weeks of his utterly unremarkable existence and is a stunnningly good read.

1933 was a Bad Year  by John Fante was one of my favourite novels of last year - again, about a character coming of age in a poor society, much like Elena in this.

However, this pales in comparison to any of those. Going by the reaction at the book group, where the women praised it effusively and there was a resounding meh from myself and the rest of the male contingent, this is a book that women appreciate much more than men.  For example, what felt like 59 pages worth of debate over what wedding dress Lila should wear - but which was actually only 2.5 pages (still 1.75 too much) - is not the sort of detail that catches my interest.

It started with a fairly intriguing prologue, where the present day Elena gets a phone call from Lila's grown up son and we find out that Lila has disappeared of her own accord.  Elena sits down to write the story of her friendship with Lila.

I assumed the book might actually lead up to the events that sparked the disappearance.  It's not an unrealistic hope.  However, that ddn't happen.  This finishes at Lila's wedding (aged 16) to a 25 year old local businessman who proposed to her two years previously.  More than a little icky.

Apparently if you want to find out why she vanished you need to read the next three volumes.

I think I will politely decline.  The writing is not bad. It was good enough to keep me reading for the most part, although there were definite lulls.  The characters of Elena and Lila are well drawn, but the story is somewhat lacking in narrative drama. We end on a huge clifffhanger over a pair of shoes that an uninvited guest to the reception is wearing.  Yes, this is that exciting a book.

 At the meeting I gave it a provisional 6/10.  I'm downgrading that to a 4.

Thankfully, a Josh Malerman that I've not yet read dropped through my door today, so something good to read next is guaranteed.

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.

Number 6 - Minotaur - Benjamin Tammuz

Managed to finish book number 6 with 2 minutes to go before midnight, so I've oficially just done 6 books in January alone. Not too shabby, and well on track now to beat last year's total.

I picked this up in Waterstone's late last year mainly for the title, read the blurb and decided it seemed interesting enough to give it a shot.

An Israeli secret agent, on his 41st birthday, sees ands falls in love with a girl slightly less than half his age.  He starts writing to her anonymously and a weird relationship forms between them.

This book has a very weird structure.  the opening chapter, details the first sighting, followed by a selection of the letters that he sends to her, and some of the replies that she writes back, whether she has a way of replying or not. This section covers nearly a decade and we learn of two other men in her life in this time.

A dramatic incident ends this chapter.

Chapter 2 then jumps back in time and follows the life of the first of the men in her life.  Chapter three jumps further back again and follows the second man in her life, and the final, longest chapter, follows the secrret agent, Alexander Abramov, through his whole life up to and including the events of chapter 1.

This means segments of the story are repeated two and even 3 times from differing viewpoints.  But despite knowing what's coming, the book stays compulsive and manages to raise tension impressively well.  The opening chapter is one of the most weirdly disturbing things I've read outside of the horror genre.

This is a novel about love, and hope, and dashed hopes and life and death, and it juggles these themes brilliantly.

The narration is cool and calm throughout. One of the reviews on the back compares this to Kafka (who is name checked a couple of times especially in chapter 1) and I can certainly see where that's coming from. The prose is a little clunky in places, one of the traits of most translated novels IMHO, but nothing that truly detracts from the power of the story being told.

I'm not entirely certain what, if any genre, this belongs in.  I have a feeling that the final chapter might have been more compelling to me if I knew more about Israel/Palestine history as it did slump ever so slightly in the middle of this section. However, it gave an interesting history lesson (although of limited scope) and some insights into a piece of history I confess to being mostly ignorant about.

This is another early contender for book of the year.  i will be picking up more work by this writer.  To write with this structure and still surprise the reader in the later chapters is a real talent.

easy 8.5/10.  This is a minor masterpiece.

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.

Number 4 - Psycho - Robert Bloch

Despite having watched the film at least a dozen times and owning the book for well over a decade, I'd never actually read it.

I wish I could read/watch Psycho without knowing the secret buried in the heart of the story, but it's probably the single most well known twist to the tale in fiction.

Knowing the twist did mean that I could spot every time Bloch inserts another clue as to what's really going on, how innocuous all those little comments were, and how well hidden it all was in plain sight.

I know I would probably have reached part one of the reveal and would have been completely thrown. The way it's written is very clever indeed even if it's not particularly subtle.  I don't know if I would have figured out the grisly detail from part one of the reveal. It's possible the number of rip offs from this story would have made it easy to spot. On the other hand, it really hasn't dated badly like some of Bloch's other fiction and it might have been one shock on top of the other. Without a mind wipe and a reread, there is no way of knowing.

I envy those first readers to pick this up with no idea of what was happening.  The same goes for those first audiences for Hitch's great film.  Hitch does stay reasonably close to the book and there are no massive diversions.  I admit to still seeing Antony Perkins sat behind the counter despite Bloch describing Norman as fat, balding and quite pathetically middle-aged.

Which do I prefer? The book or the film?  I honestly couldn't say.  The film rightfully changed the way films are made, and set so many templates in place.  It's one of the single most important films in horror history.  The book has faded somewhat into obscurity which is a damnable shame. The book is every bit as cleverly done as the film. It's quite compulsivly readable and manages to build tension and shock despite how well known the story is.

I urge everyone reading this to check it out for yourself and read the origin of a piece of horror history.  You won't be disappointed.

Number 3 - Living with the Dead - Darrell Schweitzer

My first cheat read of the year at a mere 60 pages.

This rather handsome and very slim edition was sent to me in a mystery bundle from PS publishing (very good value way of getting lots of books cheap).  I'd kind of heard the author's name before but only peripherally.  I've never knowingly read anything he's written before.

After reading this, I need to rectify that situation.

This is a brilliant piece of writing.  The basic set up - a town called Corpsenburg where the unseen government send dead bodies to be stored on a regukar basis.  This has always happened and no one in the town will question it. After every shipment, the people of the town are assigned bodies which they give space to in their houses, on the chairs, round the walls, a baby in the breadbin.  The bodies don't seem to decay so most people are feeling rather crowded out but they don't object. This is their duty and the way things always were.

Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, starting with a local rep for the unseen government, the son of the last rep who was the son of the last rep etc. This is the way things have always been.

When he spots the most beautiful dead woman in the world in the  most recent shipment... it sets in place a sequence of events which start change in the town. 

This is one of the strangest and creepiest books I think I've read in a long long time.  It genuinely did send shivers down my spine as well as prompting several WTF's.  The prose is smooth and understated, full of symbolism and hidden meanings.  I will certainly be rereading this book to extract more from it.

Another early contender for best book of the year.

It might still be available through PS Publishing. Otherwise if you want a copy, try amazon or abebooks or whatever your favourite second hand book dealer might be.

2020 Number 2- Lavinia - Ursula Le Guin

Second book of the year and the first book group read.

I've heard of Ursula Le Guin but never read any of her novels before.  I know that some of my family really rate her so, despite this book having one of the most uninspiring covers I've ever seen, I was hopeful for this one.

The only thing I had ever actually read by Le Guin was a review she wrote of Toby Litt's Journey into Space, his generation starship novel.  In that review she seemed to constantly compare his book to her own generation starship novel and find his wanting in comparison to hers.  By the end of the review you probably knew slightly more about her book than his.  However as I disagreed with every negative point she made in her review, and at least one point she raised was directly dealt with in the narrative of his book, and so wasn't the plot ho;e she claimed, and almost demonstrated that she hadn't read his book properly in the first place, I was never inspired to track down her generation starship novel, or even to take note of its name.

So, after reading this, am I any more inclined to chase down her self praised novel?

This book tells of Lavinia, a minor, though crucial character from Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid.  Lavinia was the inal bride of the central character of Aeneas. When Aeneas arrives on the shores of Italy, she is fighting  off the attentions of other suitors and when she is betrothed to the newcomer instead, a war breaks out.

Lavinia is given only a few stanzas of the poem and not fleshed out in any way.  Ursula here tries to remedy that and gives us her full story from childhood until turning into an owl randomly on the final page.

 The prose is workmanlike at best with no real passages that ever stand out.  Virgil apparrently would switch around in his timelines, so Ursula chooses to do this as well.  The book opens when she's 19 and sees the ships sailing in that carry her husband to be.  It then jumps back to her childhood and it's page 90 something before the ships reappear.  In the preceding seven dozen pages we are treated to her meetings at a local shrine with the poet Virgil himself from the future, tellinig her that he created her and detailing her future up until the end of the war - all very meta.

Once she's met Aeneas formally, but before the war, we get a flash forward to her married life with him, discussing points of what happened in the war.  It then goes back to her regular timeline and tells us of the same events but spread over lots more pages.  It does this two or three times and completely robs the narrative of any form of tension.

The main issue I have with this book is that Lavinia does very very little, especially in the first three quarters of the book up until the end of the war. She tells her dad to wait for a few days to allow her to choose her husband.... and that's it.  Everything just happens around her after that and she plays no active part in the story until the final quarter - where the war is over and it's now Ursula's imagination at work and not Virgil's. Sadly, once let off the leash to do her own thing with the characters we get some very par for the course politics with no real oomph.

In any book where the characters are fated to do certain things, it's really pretty disappointing if, after being told that their fate involves a war in which thousands will die because of you, the character then sits back and does nothing about it, makes no effort to change the written course.  And this is Lavinia's biggest fault. She just kind of says "yeah whatever, that sounds cool" and lets all her friends and neighbours go out and die rather than just trying for a peaceful solution over the minor misunderstanding that started the fighting. If she'd tried to do something but in vain, it would have added so much more to her character.

Life in pre Rome Italy is fairly well drawn but not amazing.  This particular sub-genre of historical fantasy mixed with myth is a well ploughed furrow.  Guy Kay is a particular proponent of this sub-genre and this effort from Ursula pales in comparisoin to even his weakest book.

There's nothing spectacularly wrong with this, it's just a bit meh in comparison to my other reading in this field. No wow factor in the slightest.

I'll be generous and award it a six out of ten.

2020 - Number 1 - Patience - Toby Litt

My first book of 2020, and it's a good one I'm pleased to announce.

I've been reading Toby Litt ever since I needed a third book to round off a threee for two and picked up a copy of Corpsing at semi-random in Waterstones way back in the year 2000.  It's safe to say I'll give anything he writes a try.  He's a very very talented author and not scared to take risks.

He has an ongoing project to work his way through the alphanet with his book titles.  O seems to be conspicuous by its absence sadly, but P is here in a simplistically beautiful bound edition from Galley Beggar Press.  Even the packaging this came in was extraordinary. Inside the box it was wrapped in black crepe paper and felt like a  real luxury item to open. GBP are certainly a good press to order from - they really take pride in their products.

Which means the quality of the writing is more than likely to be very good indeed.  Why go to that sort of effort for anything less than sublime writing.

And that's what we have in this book.  Toby Litt has excelled himself with thia one.

It tells the story of Elliott - a young boy confined to a wheelchair and unable to communicate except though grunts, gestures with his eyes and slight nods. He spends most of his days either parked in front of a window or in front of a white wall. He lives in a home run by nuns, his only contact with his parents is Christmas and birthday cards which are his main method for marking the passage of time.

Despite being stuck in his chair and unable to communicate, he is astoundingly intelligent.  He notices everything. He knows how one of his fellow patients is feeling by the colour of her knees. There's a desperate loneliness inside him though. When a new patient arrives, Jim, he feels he's found his soulmate.  Jim is blind and dumb though.  How can they learn to communiate? How can they ever
be friends and have fun?

The style of writing in this book is adventurous to say the least and grammar takes a back seat and every paragraph is one very long continuous sentence often run on into each other with no punctuation marks in sight not a comma not a full stop or colon or semi colon or anything just a blinding whirl of words where we the readers have to pick and choose our own rhythm and rhyme and reason and follow his stream of consiousness which helps place us squarely inside the head of young Elliott as he tells us of his days and his feelings and his hopes and fears.

And it works.  It works amazingly well.  It needs concentration, but I found i would hit the flow and internal rhythms of the language inside of a page and then I found it almost impossible to put down.

Elliott is a truly sympatheitic creation.  I found myself laughing and crying in equal amounts in this book. I won't reveal how a boy with cystic fybrosis, unable to do anything but grunt manages to communiacte and befriend a blind and dumb friend, but it is genius.  I nearly cheered when they worked out their communication method, as well as wiping a small tear away.

Despite the fact that you could argue very little happensd in this book (it starts with a multi page description of a whitewashed wall)  this is a compelling read, truly emotional and life affirming. 

As much as I've loved the rest of Litt's books, and three of his have hovered in my top ten for many years now - Hospital, Journey into Space and deadkidsongs - I may now have a new favourite.

easy 9/10 maybe more...  

Number 60 - The Heidelberg Cylinder - Jonathan Carro;ll

And number 60 for the year was this excellent novella from Jonathan Carroll.

This is a limited edition, signed by Carroll himself and Dave McKean - the artist responsible for that rather excellent cover. When I bought this, it was the second most expensive book I'd ever bought - and I'm glad to say that a google search shows it's held its value if not put some on.

The story is typical Jonathan Carroll.  A couple are making a drink for the two delivery men who've just dropped off a new fridge when there's a knock at the door.  At the door is what appears to be a pair of god-bothering evangelists.  But these are far from normal.  They claim to have the big answers to everything and say they can prove it, They offer $1000 to each of the four if they're not satisfied with the explanations.

That's when things get weird.  The story moves into the realms of the fantastic very rapidly from then on, magical powers, denizens of  Hell being relocated to small town USA, a guest appearance from Satan himself... This is a great fun little novella.  It's surreal and funny and packed with Carroll's always excellent prose and wit - with an underlying darkness and a complete up in the air ending.

Although I do think recent works by Carroll have kind of fizzled out rather than ending, this one has an almost perfect close.

A jolly good book to end the year on.

Number 59 - Bluebeard - Angela Carter

A cheat read by any other name.

I'm determined to do 60 books this year, and with slightly over a day left, this called for a very short book indeed.

This is a selection of fairy tales retold by Angela Carter. Her collection The Bloody Chamber is one of my favourite collections. Something about the prose in that and the Saints and Sinners collection (Saints and Sinners is also known as Black Venus with minor changes to a couple of the stories) almost makes me feel drunk if I read too much of it.

The stories in this are much more plainly written. they're almost completely straightfoward retellings of popular folk tales.

After her retelling of Bluebeard as the title story in The Bloody Chamber, this very very normal version seems almost a disappointment, although the little comic morals she inserts at the end of the story are witty and gave me a wry smile.

Similarly, the red Riding Hood version here pales compared to it's counterpoint - The Company of Wolves - in The Bloody Chamber collection.  It's nice that the ending isn't the usual happy ending we expect in this story though.

Puss in Boots - another story also told far differently in TBC - is retold here completely straight, although the amorality of the cat in tricking or threatening everyone he meets into doing his will is amusingly highlighted.

The sleeping beauty in the wood - the first half of this is the entirely traditional version we all know, but this then gives us the Prince's half ogre mother who decides she wants to eat Beauty and her two children while the handsome prince (now king) is away in battle.  Not the happy ever after we're used to.

Cinderella is a completely traditional telling with no surprises at all.  Cinders is sickly sweet and nice in this version. It's only the second moral appended to this that gives any kind of subversion.

Ricky with The Tuft - I confess to not knowing this particular fairy tale.  it's an interesting one, highlighting the diference between outer and inner beauty.  I felt very sorry for the plain but clever sister once the beautiful sister became clever.

The Foolish Wishes - the woodcutter who is granted three wishes and loses them all without gaining anything except a black pudding... this has always been a favourite story of mine and this is a funny enough retelling.

I wish this collection had more of Carter's trademark intensity in the prose but I ain't got any ancient gods popping by to grant me that one.

A fun diversion, and good choice for a cheat read.

Only one book left now to get 60 for the year.

Number 58 - 1933 Was a bad Year - John Fante

The last book I read was easily the worst thing I've read this year.  This book goes possibly to the opposite extreme.

A late contender for my book of the year.

I only picked this up in Waterstones last week because A - it was thin, B - the title was intriguing and C - the Bukowski quote on the cover.  I'd never heard of Fante before and that is entirely my loss. This guy could really write. Anyone that Bukowski quotes as inspiration, you expect a high standard. And I certainly wasn't disppointed.

Fante wrote with a clear and concise style, it's almost poetic in places.  It's funny in a very droll way, beautifully descriptive without ever leaving you feeling like there are wasted words on the page. I could see young Dom and his family.  I could almost smell the linament he obsessively uses on "the Arm". The sense of place in the tenement block where he shares a cramped three bedroom apartment with his parents, his Gran and his three younger siblings was amazing.

Dominic Molise is a 17 year old boy, son of an Italian immigrant bricklayer, gifted with the greatest southpaw pitching arm in the Midwest. He tells us it is at any rate.  So does his best friend Kenny, one of the rich kids from across town who he plays baseball with regularly. They have a plan to skip this dead end town and try out for the major leagues.

This is as perfect as writing gets. Humorous yet quietly devastating.  Every character is fleshed out and believable, the dialogue sparkles and the ending left me wanting more.  Sadly, as this very short novel was published posthumously, it strikes me that there probably isn't a follow up.

This book manages to encompass an examination of friendship, awkward coming of age, first crushes, familial love and sacrifice, comedy and tragedy in a mere 100 pages, which flowed past as is it was only 20 the prose is so lucid.

I was wiping a few tears away in the closing pages of this book.  One of the most moving pieces of literature I've read in many years.

Easy 9/10 - should have been longer.

Number 57 - Christmas Slaughter by Mark Grant

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

I really must learn. I thought this would be a good trashtastic quick read for Christmas.

Trash is a definite.  It's really not as good as that cover seems to suggest it might be. And I know that's a piss poor cover.

I think this book is aiming at some type of satire and isn't meant to be serious.  I really hope it's not meant to be serious - the rebel organisation is called Free American Revoltianry troops for crying out loud.  However, there is the very slight problem that it's just not bloody funny either.

Apparently Mark Grant was a pseudonym shared out between authors by Avon books in the late 80s/early 90s.  The series this book belongs to was started off by David Bischoff - actually a name I've heard of, and someone whose name I've seen on a few well regarded novelisations of popular movies. Mid-series on the Mutant Amok books (this is apparently number 5 in that series) he handed the reins over to Bruce King - who is clearly guilty of this piece of crap writing.

To read this book is an act of unalloyed, conscious  masochism.  In fact, even the old Baron De Masoch would probably have balked at being asked to complete this book. It starts badly, and disintegrates as it moves on.  Every weapon the characters use is described in intimate detail, as is the ammunition, and range and damage it can inflict. True weapon porn.  When it moves into actual sex porn in later chapters it's unutterably bad and possibly the least erotic fiction I've read ever in my life.

 There truly is no level on which this book actually works. As a thriller, it's not thrilling. As a comedy, it's not funny. As sci-fi it fails. As horror it's just not the least scary. As gore, it's not even that gory and as literature it scores in the negatives.

I only know of one writer worse than this. At least Mr Bruce King has a basic grasp of grammar and a rudimentary knowledge of basic plotting. the best thing that can be said about this book is that it has a beginning a middle and an end.  Not a good beginning, middle and end, but they are there. And I was so glad to reach the end of this.

a clear 0/10 for this.  I'm guessing this will be the worst book this year.

Number 56 - The 39 Steps - John Buchan

Only a few days left till the end of the year, and I figure I can hit 60 if I stick to thin books like this one.

This is of course the basis for teh Afred Hitchcock film of the same name.  Published in 1915, it's credited as inventing the entire genre of the spy novel.Therefore it's an important, if rather slim, volume.

I'd love to say that I think it's better than the film and everyone should rush out and read it but I can't. It's not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination but does it deserve the classic status?

It's well paced, the story moves at a fast clip but the action rarely takes off.  The big action set pieces we associate with this story seem to be unique to the filmed versions, especially the Big Ben finale.  In fact the eponymous steps barely make an appearance in the book.  They're mentioned briefly about halfway through, but don't reappear as a plot point until very late on.

There isn't really much in the way of action, there's lots of running and hiding, and a few disguises but precious little in the way of actually trying to solve his problems - at least until the closing chapters, where the biggest problem, the dead man in his apartment and him as lead suspect, has solved itself in any case. He's a very reactive, rather than a proactive, protagonist (a retagoinist?) 

Some bits of the story have aged very badly, several mentions of the Jew conspiracy for example.  As a cardr carrying member of the Labour Party I''d be unable to recommend this book unreservedly purely for the antisemitism on display from the good guys.

Considering the book was published a year into WWI and set the same year, the story seems to be ignorant of the history of the period, and the world war hasn't yet started... I can only assume it was written a couple of years earlier and took time to get published.

It was still a solid enough read, as long as you could allow for when it was written.  It's certainly a product of its time.

6/10

Number 55 - Glorious Beasts by Gary McMahon

I was very priveleged to be asked to beta read the new novella by Gary McMahon.  Since it's not seen publication yet (although it certainly will early in the new year) there is currently no cover photo to post - so here is a picture of the glorious beast who wrote the novella himself.

Glorious beasts is a post apocalyptic weird western monster story.  A mishmash of genres like that can be a disaster in the wrong hands. But McMahon is a fine writer at the best of times and this is one of my favourites of his stories to date.

There are shades of Cormac McCarthy in the central relationship between the lead character Cable and his son Walker  as they take on a quest to search for a missing baby. The baby was stolen from its mother in the middle of the night, I don't want to even hint at the reasons for the abduction as I've promised to not leave any spoilers on this.

In a very small number of pages, McMahon gives us a mystical journey through a bizzarre and thoroughly real feeling world into a true nightmare. Despite the fanatastical elements (of which there are many) the world building McMahon has achieved is convincing throughout.  The flawed and damaged Cable is an unusual hero ands the future world seen through his eyes is a bleak place indeed with very few avenues for hope.The end of the quest is horror purified and refined and spat in our faces with full force. 

This story has lots to say about father/son relationships, and the reasons that people carry on despite everything. All this in a mere 56 pages (including title pages on the word document).

When this is published, I will ensure I edit this to include the location where you and I can buy it from.

Easily 8/10 for me.

Number 54 - Fevre Dream by George RR Martin

Some people may notice a link between this and the last two books I read.  Three books, effectively the same title - as different as bright pink chalk and a moldy gorgonzola.  This has been an extremely rewarding themed read.

Fifteen years before A Song of Ice and Fire was published, George RR Martin published this - a story of bloodsuckinmg fiends on the riverboats of the southern states of America.

It's been languishing in my collection for many years and I kept meaning to pick it up and read it but never quite did.  I loved his collection of short stories, Songs the Dead Men Sing, and couldn't quite get into The Armageddon Rag when I tried it.  After reading this, I will have to try again.

We are introduced to Captain Abner Marsh, a riverboat captain down on his luck.  Most of his boats have just been destroyed by poor weather and his one remaining ship isn't something he can easily turn a dollar on.  He needs a break.  That's when he meets the mysterious Joshua York, a stranger who offers to go into partnership with him and who will build him the finest steamboat the river has ever seen.

There are some caveats to the deal, including not asking any questions about York or his behaviour, nut Marsh goes along with it. Of course he lives to regret the decision.

This book builds the tension from the first page.  The cover kind of tells us what York's big secret is, but there's much more to it than that. I found myself consistrently wrong-footed by the story.  It never quite went down the alley I expected.  The vampires are different from the ones we're used to from the many many Dracula variants on the bloodsuckers myth.  I laughed out loud when York made the point that Vlad Tepes (aka the impaler) was certainly NOT a vampire.

The historical detail feels real and well researched without ever bogging the story down. The period is very well realised and the characters are all truly convincing.

I wish I'd read this book many years ago.  It's now right up at the top of my favourite vampire novels, along with SP Somtow's Vampire Junction, and TM Wright's The Last Vampire.  A truly original take on a hoary old cliched subject.

Number 53 - Fever Dream - Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch

The observant people might spot a link between this book and number 52...

This is a short story collection featuring 6 Robert Bloch tales and 4 by Ray Bradbury. As a sign of how long this has been on my shelves, I bought it for 5p in a second-hand shop. At least it has 5p written on the first page of the book.

Just take a moment to appreciate that cover art.  They certainly don't make them like that any more.

It opens with The Shadow from the Steeple - a Bloch story. This is Bloch in full blown copying Lovecraft mode.  This story is actually a sequel of sorts to Lovecraft's The Haunter in tthe Dark - this is explicitly referenced in the text, complete with a run down of the plot for those who haven't read it.  I'm not 100% certain if this is a pastiche or if it's supposed to be serious. It does blow apart the plot hole at the end of the story it follows from. Our central character goes looking for the survivor of the HPL tale and things don't go amazingly well for him. It opens with a lovely introduction to a taxi driver, which lasts about a page and a half, but then he's never seen again and we're told he was the last person to see his passenger (a mr Fiske) alive, followed by a flashback to the original tale and Fisque's quest to find Dr Dexter and the eventual meeting.It's entertaining but too slavish to HPL and feels very dated indeed.

Next up - The Watchers - Ray Bradbury - A classic story featuring a man convinced that insects are spying on him and out to kill him because he thinks he knows their plan.  There is a fairly gruesome twist at the end of this one.  This one also wears a HPL influence proudly on its sleeve and also feels dated, though far less so than the preceding story. I don't know how much of an influence this was of Stephen King's Creepshow segment regarding a very similar phobic lead character.

Back to Bloch with The Grinning Ghoul - I might have enjoyed this story more 30 years ago.  Another one that feels horribly dated.  It hasn't aged well at all, a very predictable story about a psychiatrist whose latest patient's tale of subterrenean beasties turns out to be all too real.  there are some nicely creepy sections but the structure of the story is not great and half the story could have been cut.  The shock ending is barely worthy of the name.

Sticking with Bloch - Mannikins of Horror - the best of the Bloch stories so far.  I think this was the basis for one of the segments in the Amicus portmanteau film Asylum (also written by Bloch so fairly likely) although the Amicus version doesn't have entrly the same plot as this one.  An inmate in an asylum has been making incredibly realistic clay models, so realistic they start moving. This is good, gruesome and fairly original. Some of the imagery is still stuck in my head 4 days after reading it, always a good sign.

The title story, Fever Dream by Bradbury.  This has long been one of my favourite Ray Bradbury stories. As many times as I've read it, the sense of creeping nightmare never fails.  This is a possession tale like no other.  A sick boy lying in bed feels bits of him suddenly stop belonging to himself. This one sends shivers down my spine every time.  As long as it's still my spine, I suppose I should be happy. The ending is well nigh perfect.

The Druidic Doom - Bloch again on another slavish HPL impersonation.  This starts by telling us our central character - the unlikelily named Sir Charles Hovoco, new owner of the Nedwick estates -  is going to die and then spends many many pages giving us the back story for the new landowner's land, and in particular about the old altar he finds on one of his walks before finishing him off.  In 20 pages, Sir Charles, our alleged lead character appears on maybe 5, mostly in the early part of the story, just to ask about a part of his land. Again, not a great story,

The Dead Man - Ray Bradbury - I'm sure I must have read this one before (I have literally every Ray Bradbury collection available except for Dark carnival), but I couldn't remember it at all.  This is a quirky little gem of a story.  I'm still not entirely convinced that farmers in small town America go to see a manicurist at their local barber shop, but it may have been a tradition at some point, I don't know.  That minor point apart, this story of Odd Martin who believes he's dead and takes to lying in the street for hours on end is beautifully done.  We get very little from his point of view, the vast majority of this story is through the eyes of the townspeople watching him and his odd behaviour and his unlikely finding of love. In just 21 pages Bradbury manages to paint the town and several of it's people in loving detail, and provides a hell of a good ending too, creepy and moving all at the same time.

A Question of Etiquette - Bloch - the new best Bloch story in the collection.  This one has barely dated.  A census taker knocks on the door of the latest house on his rounds and meets a captivating stranger who - erm - takes him captive through witchcraftery means and takes him to a meeting with the devil.  This is so well done, it restored my faith in Bloch as a writer.  Told in crisp prose, free of the HPL type embelishmets, this story twists and turns its way through to the ending it deserves.

The Handler - Bradbury - One of Bradury's more gruesome horror stories.  A mortician likes to take his revenge on the inhabitants of his town after their deaths.  Lucky for him there are very few open casket burials in his hown.Unluckily for him, revenge can come from any source in a Bradbury story.  I seem to recall reading somewhere that Bradbury disowned some of his early work for being too unpleasant, and this was one of those.  However it's another old favourite of mine with delightful poetic justice dished out to pretty much anyone alive or dead in the story.

The Man who Cried Wolf! - Bloch - A man decides to convince his wife she's mad with the assistance of a local lady werewolf.  A fine story to end on, even though there is an irritating plot hole in the final couple of pages.

Overall this is a very good collection indeed.  If you're a fan of Lovecraft imitations, you will probably get more mileage from a few of the Bloch tales than I did.

Number 52 - Fever Dream - Samanta Schweblin

This was my latest cheat read to get the numbers up.  Found it in Waterstones, thought it sounded interesting and it was dead short.

But is it any good?

The title sums it up very nicely indeed - although the original title in Spanish was The Rescue Distance (the spanish equivalent of that obviously). I'm not sure which title is better.  The Spanish title suits the book very well - possibly more appropriate than the English title - but only really makes sense as a title when you've read the book, whereas Fever Dream wwas a title that caught my attention (for various reasons)  The rescue distance is the distance Amamnda keeps between herself and her daughter Nina at all times.

This is a book that deserves to be read in one sitting.  It takes the form of a conversation between Amanda and David.  Amanda is apparently in a hospital bed with David sitting by her side, trying to get her to talk about some unspecified happening, the thing that brought them here to the emergency clinic.

The tension ratchets up and up with no letting go from the beginning.  It's a shame I had to go back to work and concentrate on other things repeattedly in the last couple of days while I was reading this.  I will be setting aside a free few hours at some point for a reread of this, to get the full effect.

The translation is excellent. The atmosphere is about as claustrophobic as I can remember a book this short ever being. The hints and foreshadowing are masterfully done with a nice level of ambiguity  as well. The layers of the story buid and overlap, painting a genuine fever dream. I get the feeling this will terrify most parents of young children.

It's very difficult to put down.  We need to know what the event was, what is it about the worms or the things very much like worms. What is it David wants to know, and does Amanda actually know better than him?

Highly recommended.

Number 51 - Kissing the Bee - Kathe Koja

My second Kathe Koja of the year.

I made a few comments in the blog about the last Koja novel I read to the effect that romance is my least favourite genre. But goddammit I loved Kink even though that is ostensibly the book's main genre if you had to pigeonhole it.

I wish she'd stop doing this to me.  This book is a young adult novel about two best friends at high school, Dana and Avra.  Dana, the narrator, is madly in love with Avra's boyfriend, Emil, but doesn't want to admit it.Truly the  stuff of the most normal of soap operas.  This is not the type of stuff I normally like to read.

However, because of Kathe Koja's writing, I fully symapathised with Dana, wondered why she wanted to hang with Avra in any case (despite undertanding exactly why)  and really wanted to know where the story was going. The will-they-won't-they was actually important to me while I read this book.

It isn't written in the normal stream of consiousness that the last few Koja novels I've read have been.  The prose is much plainer and grammatical, but still just as compelling and emotional. The relationships between the three central characters are etched razor sharp on the page. Dana makes for a genuinely likeable protagonist.

As an extra layer to the story, we have segments from the project Dana is writing about bees for her Bio class. These serve to highlight and mirror the emotional story, as well as providing some interesting informaion about our buzzing little friends.

It's only a short book and a very fast read and well recommended despite being in my least favourite genre.  I can't even say this one comes close to psychological horror the way that Kink did.

A solid 7/10