Number 80 - The Walking Dead vol 23 - Whispers into Screams

The saga continues

These really are excellent cheat reads. 

After 23 volumes I'm running out of things to say about them. 

This is slow paced compared to some issues, but this is setting up what would appear to be major plotlines.  I couldn't help but notice while I was looking for the next volumes online that one three or four down the line is called The Whisperer War, which suggests this group is here for the foreseeable.

There were sections of this that filled me with a righteous anger with the behaviour of some of the characters - always a good sign that you're still emotionally attached to these people.

Carl seems to have turned into a bit of an idiot as he's grown up, but the petty jealousy towards him from people who should know better (Gregory - I'm looking at you) is frustrating for the right reasons. 

I'm only 9 volumes off the end now... and I don't know where the story goes from here, but it's been a great journey so far, and I can't see the writers letting us down in the final section of the story

Number 79 - The Crone - Bill Garnett

 

Yet another 80s horror with a tacky cover. I have no idea where or when this crawled onto my shelves.

I've never heard of Bill Garnett and Google doesn't give many clues... although this edition is currently on Amazon for a bargain £95. 

In my review of the Jack Ketchum I finished recently, I talked about how you need to give the reader characters that they care about before you start killing them off. This book breaks that rule completely. 

The central character, Peter Stone, is an entirely selfish and self-obsessed man. He lucked into a rich marriage when he got a tycoon's daughter pregnant and managed to start his own business with her family's money. He sleeps around and has no interest in his wife further than not losing his grasp on her cash.

The most sympathetic character in the book is actually the crone of the title. Magda lives in a dank attic room in a boarding house, in desperate hope that her daughter, Peter's new secretary, will call. Her daughter is too busy having an affair with her new manager. For the first hundred pages we hear a lot about Magda's background on the violent streets of post WWII Europe, including the less than romantic night that led to her fleeing to England with a new life inside her.

When the affair ends and the daughter takes drastic action that backfires badly, Magda draws on her knowledge of the occult to set in motion a ghastly revenge.

Despite breaking the rules about making us care for the characters, this is actually a damned good book.  It's no masterpiece, certainly, but I was hooked. Bill Garnett, if that is his real name, knows how to pull the reader into the story. Chapters are told from the viewpoints of random people who intersect with Peter's and Magda's lives. These characters never reappear, but their contributions give nice alternate viewpoints on the events.

The final two chapters were a touch underwhelming, as what looked like a possibly redemptive arc for Stone turned out not to be, but it was satisfyingly nasty. The monster that Magda creates is genuinely creepy and you wonder if it's possible to stop it, ot if you really want it to stop.

This looks like it should be a guilty pleasure but I refuse to feel guilty about this one.  It's well written with interesting if not likeable central characters, and a vicious streak a mile wide.

Number 78 - The Walking Dead Volume 22 - A New Beginning

 

The war with Negan is over, the war with the dead never ends...

A new beginning is a very apt name for this volume. We are four years ahead of where we last left our heroes.  A civilisation of sorts is rising from the ashes.  Eugene is building windmills, they have fresh bread for the first time in years. Rick has to contend with the idea of Carl leaving Alexandria to live in Hilltop.

A new threat is on the horizon though. A new band of survivors have found their way to the relative safety of these settlements.  Are they to be trusted?  

Further afield, who or what are the whispering dead? This is a new development that has me more intrigued than anything the comics have thrown at me so far.  

I love the fact that everyone is going round on horses now.  Clearly petrol has run out, eliminating what has to be the biggest plot hole in the tv show (at least as far as I've reached).

Rick seems to have let leadership go to his head. He's not as mobile as he once was, since the events at the end of the all out war.  The people worship him almost as a new god. While he claims to not like the attention, his response to a guard who made a mistake was extreme and very un-Rick-like.  

All in all, an excellent volume with nice new characters and a really gripping new storyline.

Number 77 - The Girl Next Door - Jack Ketchum

 

This book has a reputation. Having read it now, that reputation is well deserved.

This is one of the most brutal and disturbing books I've read.  This is a literary equivalent to Funny Games  (the Haneke movie, if you haven't seen it, you need to) in that he makes you the reader complicit in the cruelty you're reading about.

What makes it all the worse is that it's so well written you can't put it down, can't look away from the car crash brutality playing out on the page. 

It takes its time setting things up. It's chapter 25 before the really nasty stuff kicks in.  The previous 24 chapters set up the characters intimately.  We know these people, the first person narrator, David, talking as his 30 something self, describing his meeting and burgeoning friendship with Meg, the eoponymous girl next door, and Meg herself. These are hugely likeable characters even if David is ocasionally as selfish and spiteful as pre-teen boys are wont to be. He's done some bad things with the gang he hangs around with, but he's basically a good kid.

If you have a likeable character, the worst thing you can do to them in a narrative is do them incredible harm, right?

Nope. You can also make your nice pleasant lead chracter an accomplice to the evil at work. With the personable and likeable first person narration, we're watching everything and not doing anything about it either.  This is where Ketchum is Funny-Gamesing us. One of the main points of tension in this book is wondering when or if young David is going to crack. We understand his passivity but we're screaming at him to do something for gods sake before it's too late.

The story is very similar in a lot of ways to Mendal Johnson's equally notorious  Let's go Play at the Adams. I wonder if they were based on the same real life crime. A group of children on the cusp of their teens torture a local girl for their own pleasure.  In this case, also for the pleasure of the girl's guardian, her aunt Ruth with whom she's been sent to live afetr her parents died in a car crash.

This is vastly superior to Mendal Johnson's book though.  It's a long time since I read that book but I remember that it felt gratuitous for the most part. Nothing in this book does.  Ketchum uses the first person narrative to avoid giving every last detail of what's happening.  Things happen to Meg while he's not there that we learn of second hand.  He tells enough that we know what's happened, but without gloating over the detail. There's even one chapter where the narrator refuses entirely to describe what he's seen - for which I was eternally grateful.

The prose is direct and concise.  Chapter 24 is only one sentence long, but that one sentence is possibly the most chilling in the book, because it foreshadows all the bad things to come - in only 7 words.

I feel more sorry for Meg than I do for any fictional character I've read about. She's introduced so well and her personality so well drawn that when things turn nasty, we feel it.  And that's what horror is supposed to do. 

I hate when a writer gives a cast of characters that we'd be happy to see killed off and then just kills them one by one, it can be fun, but it's never scary.  For horror to work, you build a sympathetic cast and it's the people you like that you do the bad things to.  It's far more effective.

That's exactly what Ketchum has done here. This is the reason why this book has the reputation it has.   Not only did he exact horrendous damage on the nicest character in the book, he implicates us the readers in the torture by telling it first person through the eyes of a character that we can't help but like.

A strong stomach is a definite before reading this. But if you have the intestinal fortitude, this is a classic horror novel.  I'm glad I read it, and I will probably read it again at some point, but not for a long time.

This edition also contained two random short stories by Ketchum, which were good, but I was too shellshocked by the novel to really appreciate them.  It also contains an interview with Ketchum and the makers of the film version of the book ... I didn't know there was a film and I have no idea how you could possibly film it. I really don't know if I want to see it.

This book is available from all good booksellers.

Number 76 - Dr Who: Forever Autumn - Mark Morris

 

Continuing with the Halloween theme for October's horror reads marathon...

This one slightly slips on the straight horror front, but is definitely themed on Halloween, and Mark Morris has been writing horror novels for over 20 years so he has a good pedigree and therefore fits regardless.

They're my rules and I make them up as I go along and don't care what anyone else thinks.

This is of course a Doctor Who novel, therefore aimed at younger readers - so we shouldn't expect Booker prize material here. this should be fast paced, entertaining, and easily readable.

It scores on all those points and adds in a fairly creepy vibe with some scenes that would be genuinely scary on tv.

I wish this had been made as a two part episode back when 10 was travelling with Martha. It would have been a high point of the entire series. But the book is all that exists for this story so it will have to suffice.

The Doctor and Martha land in modern day (2008 ish) America in a small town called Blackwood. Ostensibly this is because of a tree in the centre of the town which is made of a black wood, but I suspect was Mark Morris punning on the name of Algernon Blackwood to pretty good effect.

This tree is actually the home to an ancient alien race who, from their descriptions in the book, resemble terrifying versions of Jack Skellington. They've just awoken a few days before Halloween and have amoral plans afoot. These aliens aren't evil.  They just don't even realise what they're doing to the townsfolk isn't nice.  They don't care.

The scene is set for a confrontation with our favourite time travelling hero. But what can he do against these creatures with their ability to turn everyday objects against us and who are practically invulnerable to any normal weapons - including the sonic screwdriver? The final showdown would have been one of the greatest scenes in Doctor Who if it had been televised. 

Reading this book it made me realise quite how far standards have dropped the last two years. 

The prose is as you'd expect for a youth oriented book, with no particular flourishes.  Having said that, Mark Morris keeps the story moving at a cracking pace and manages to generate some genuine tension - especially in the final scene at the Halloween fayre.  

One of the big tests of this type of book is whether you can picture the familiar characters in the story.  Not only could I see them in this book, I could read most of the Doctor's dialogue in David Tennant's voice (his Doctor voice rather than his natural scottish brogue). From a Doctor Who fan as obsessive as Mark Morris, this shouldn't be a surprise, but it's still impressive.

It was a genuinely enjoyable read, possibly one of the best Doctor Who novels I've read - although the last one I read was a couiple of decades ago, so my memory is a tad fuzzy.

If you're a fan of the tv show, you'll enjoy this. Go out and buy a copy.  What more is there to say?

Number 75 - The walking Dead Vol 21 - All Out War part 2

 

As the title suggests, this is the second part of the all out war with Negan.

All bets are off over who lives and dies in this volume.  Each of these volumes covers 6 issues of the original comic.  Negan appeared 4 volumes ago which means he was the lead threat in the comics for two years. 

Since he joined, the pace hasn't let up at all.  This was the biggest issue with season 7 of the tv show - instead of what happened here where Rick only pretyended to be broken, in the tv show he cracked for real.  They then had to spend half the season for him to decide that living under Negan's tyranny wasn't worth it.

 This led to a marked slowing down of pace.  It wasn't as bad second time I watched it, but it was still an issue.

This volume marks the end of me having any idea where the story goes next. I've caught up to my tv viewing.  I have season 9, but I'm watching the spin off show because I know there's a crossover and feel I need to catch up.

All the usual comments about quality of writing et al apply to this volume as much as the others.

Number 74- The Cabin at the End of the World - Paul Tremblay

 

Paul Tremblay has been making a bit of a name for himself over the last few years. He's one of the new rising stars of the horror genre, complete with the obligatory cover quote from the King.

Is he any good though?

On the strength of this, I'm very happy to say yes he most certainly is.

This is the best book so far in my  October horror novel binge.  There's certainly no guilt involved in enjoying this one.

It starts relatively normally.  Wen, a seven old Chinese girl is playing outside the holiday cabin where she's staying with her adoptive parents, Eric and Andrew. She's catching grasshoppers to keep in a jar and study them.  While she's doing this a stranger approaches who introduces himself as Leonard.

The conversation with the Leonard takes a turn for the vaguely threatening when he tells her that nothing that is about to happen is her fault.  Very soon after this, his three associates appear, each wielding an unusual home made weapon.

Wen runs indoors to fetch her two dads and a siege situation develops.  But things take a turn for the apocalyptic when the invaders announce their reason for being there.

The story is told in a tension inducing present tense, lending a sense of immediacy to the increasingly paranoid atmosphere. Tremblay shows a great control over mood and pacing.  The opening chapter is a masterclass in how to turn a situation from normal and nice, to a bit weird, to a distinct sense of threat, without ever making any overt statement of danger.

He manages to keep this mood of strangeness right the way through the book.  Are the strangers insane or genuinely on the mission they state? If their mission is genuine, who would want to live in a world with a god/higher power quite so capricious?

This is one of the least predictable books I've read all year. It's very rare when I get down to the final chapter that I still have no clue which way the story will turn, but this book had me guessing all the way.

In summary, this is a really well written, claustrophobic home invasion thriller with a nasty bite and a thought provoking narrative.  It's shocking and gory by turns and also very moving.  Pretty much every emotion you want to feel when reading a good horror novel is dredged out of you most efficiently by this book.

If his other books measure up to this, I have a new name in my favourite writers list.

easy 8.5/10  possibly higher

Number 73 - The Walking Dead Volume 20 - All Out War part 1

 

The saga continues apace

And what a pace...

Intense is not quite a strong enough word to describe this volume.  

The cover and title probably do a pretty good job of describing the plot of this volume.

The war with Negan has begun for real. A lot of story beats are familiar from the tv show, but still a few surprises. With the diversions from the tv characters alive and who's alive here, it really is difficult to guess who will survive the war.  

The writing is top notch.  King Ezekiel is so much funnier in this than he is on tv.  His exchenge with Michonne in the first few pages gave a genuine laugh out loud moment, despite the build up of tension that was happening.

Negan is a supreme villain. He has some of the greatest lines in the books.  A few of them I wish had made it to tv.  

With a cliffhanger ending like this volume has, I'm so glad I've got volume 21 on standby for when I finish my next full length novel.

Shame these finish on volume 32 - I only have 12 more of these great cheat reads to go - and only 1 more until I know nothing about what happens next, even at a wild guess...

Number 72 - The Unquiet Dead - Margaret Bingley

 

The second book in my October horror marathon.

Margaret Bingley is an entirely new name to me although she apparently published a dozen or so books back in the 80s.

I think I found this in the charity book section in my local Tesco.  With a cover like that I was hardly going to leave this one behind.  I can't help it, it's a weakness I have for 80s horror novels with tacky covers.

Sometimes, just sometimes, the inside is worth the time and effort needed to read a full novel.

The question is, was this one worth it?

I'm honestly not sure. Objectively I know this is a badly written novel.  There are grammar slips bad enough to drag me out of it time and time again. 

It's overblown and melodramatic. The characterisations are strictly cookie cutter.  There are plot holes big enough to drive a busload of devil children through - chief of which is why, if he'd had the childhood described, did one of the characters not have a body covered in scars - a point which the chief character would certainly have noticed. 

The prose, when it is grammatical is plain to the point of bland, and occasionally just plain bad. There isn't a believable conversation at any point in the entire book.

But...

I had fun with this book.  The story is overblown, but intriguing enough.  It does take a few unexpected turns and there's a vein of viciousness at the heart of it that actually captures what horror is supposed to do. The ending was actually pretty nightmarish in concept.

The story -

In the village of Lower Ditton, a pretty young mother is mysteriously killed and the police have no clues as to the identity of the murderer.  She's the third mysterious death in as many months. 

Her sister Amy moves in to help her widow look after the children. She starts to become suspicious that her nieces, along with the rest of the gang they hang around with have more to do with the outbreak of violence in the village than anyone would have predicted.  Can they possibly be guilty of all these horrendous crimes?  And why?  And how does Carlo, the impossibly handsome shop owner she falls in love with, tie into the whole affair?

It probably helps that devil children are a favourite cliched trope of mine. This has a nice take on the old theme that, whilst not original, feels quite fresh. I also like the fact that the characters take most of the book to believe in what's happening around them. Unlike the last novel I read where they accepted every silly plot turn on face value, our heroes in this book take a much more believable route of 'No that can't be true... you must be joking.... oh he's dead now as well... Oh bugger, it's all true...'

It's rare that I want to like a book less than I did, but I can't help it.  Godammit, for all the bad writing I actually enjoyed reading this.I will almost certainly buy more of her books if I see them, and hate myself for doing so. 

I can't give it a score out of 10 - it has a shifting score somewhere betweenn 4 and 7 depending on enjoyment or quality...

Number 71 - Keeper of the Children - William H. Hallahan

 

This being October, I'm sticking with horror to the end of the month - starting with this slim volume with the tasteful cover. Yet another of my 80s pulp horror novels that I have no idea where or when I bought it.  I just know it was in one of my cupboards gathering dust and I'd not read it yet.

When will I learn?

Sadly, this book does not quite live up to that cover.  

It opens well enough. Susan Benson's daughter, Jenna, fails to return home from school. By the time her husband Eddie gets home from working abroad a few days later, she's found out that Jenna has moved in with a local cult and is begging on the streets for them.

 It's up to Eddie and the parents of the other children taken by the mysterious cult leader to  try to get their children back.

This is easier said than done since Kheim, the cult leader, has mysterious powers which he uses to kill the parents off one by one, until only Eddie and Susan are left.

There's a lot of potential in a story like that.  It's a shame this book doesn't deliver on it.

The main problem is that it's too fast paced.  It jumps from scene to apparently unrelated scene with wild abandon.  It's like reading a particularly jump-cutty Michael Bay film without the explosions. I kept thinking I'd skipped a page and going back to check. Some of these jumps miss out vastly important detail - for example, when Eddie and two of the shreddies witness the first murder from a distance (where a scarecrow beats a man to death with an iron bar) and then they enter the house where it happened and phone the police, we are not advised why the three of them weren't locked up and what they told the police had happened.... 

In the one sequence where it does settle down and concentrate on something for more than a handful of pages, it's actually quite good.  Unfortunately, having 20-30 good pages isn't enough to save a novel.

There are major flaws in the plotting too.  Eddie is offered his dream job on a film in Africa.  He goes to the meeting where he's offered this job before he goes to see someone about his missing(ish) daughter. When he turns the job down, tells them he needs a few  more weeeks to try to get his daughter back, the book actually has the exec offering him the job say "Before you hang up, you bastard, tell me something. Is that kid of yours worth it?" I can't remember a less believable line in any book I've read.

The supporting cast do very little supporting.  His wife virtually disappears from the story after the first chapter, just popping in for a half a page here and there. Eddie's son actually does disappear, he only makes one more appearance after chapter one, for about five lines. 

We never learn what exactly is happening to Jenna. From all appearances she's entirely safe in Kheim's care, well fed and watered and not mistreated. She's seen from a distance a few times and pops up in the last chapter for a few pages.  There's never any real tension, no race against time for her to be rescued. There's also no satisfactory explanation as to why the authorities allow Kheim to keep all the children with him when the parents complain that they've run away and they want them back.

We never particularly learn enough about the shreddies to care about them before they're offed. They all die offscreen as well which feels wrong. 

The only onscreen violence involves cats.  One particularly bad jump cut very close to the end gives a five page description of a rat hunt before reaching the point and returning to the actual story. The author also clearly has never watched cats killing rats/mice.  He describes one cat as picking up a dead rat in its mouth and another in one of it's paws and running off.  When did cats gain the oppsable thumb required for that?

The characters seem very accepting of the most ludicrous stretches of reality. Eddie just accepts the (very silly in places) supernatural elements with barely a WTF.  His acceptance so quickly (and his wife's on one of her rare forays back into the narrative) does not assist this particular reader with my own suspension of disbelief.

Apparently Hallahan won a couple of awards for his writing, and one of his books was described by the New York Times as one of the scariest books ever written. I have to assume that this book was a misfire if that is the case. I'll need some heavy duty persuasion before I pick up another book by this writer though. 

This is available on kindle should you wish to experience the deathless prose for yourself. Physical copies appear to be hard to come by online.

Number 70 - Miriam: Memoirs of a Goddess 1: Annunciation - SP Somtow

 

I was honoured to be sent a sneak preview of this new book by SP Somtow.

As my regular readers know, I am a big fan of his work and have been since reading Vampire Junction in my mid teens.

This is a book he started over twenty years ago but couldn't find a publisher for. To be completely honest, I can understand why an American publishing house wouldn't touch it. That's nothing to do with the quality of the writing though, more the subject matter.   

The subject matter is quite obvious from the cover artwork. In this book, Somtow does to the Christian mythology what he did to Greek myths in the Shattered Horse.  I can imagine a large chunk of bible belt America wanting to burn this book for what they would describe as blasphemy.

Note the distinction there - "WHAT THEY WOULD DESCRIBE AS"

Taking an alternate viewpoint on the beginnings of Christianity is always going to annoy some people.  As a Catholic I feel that I am supposed to be outraged by this book.

But I'm not.  

It's not an offensive book in the slightest. It's an alternate history to the established lore, dealing with the life of Mary, mother of Jesus. I hesitate to say fantasy novel since so far there have been no unambiguously supernatural events. Everything has been in the realms of the possible despite the talk of Gods and the wild religious ritual which occurs.

Somtow has used Mary or alternate versions of her before. In his Riverrun Trilogy, the mother of the central character is called Mary and just happens to be the mother Goddess in quite literal terms. Here, he's going to the source of the myth, joining the story of the ever-virgin (although even the Bible tells us Jesus had brothers and sisters) Mother of Christ with the other deities common at the time.  Remember that the Romans were in charge at the time of Christ and they, along with the Greeks had their own religions which were contemporaneous with Mary's upbringing. 

At least one element - Miriam's age at the time of the birth - seems wrong to western ears, but was probably entirely normal 2020 years ago. The rather less than virgin birth could be a sticking point for some easily offended religious types. This is the family of Christ as actual people and not just religious cyphers.

This is part one of a much larger novel.  It opens with a 40 something Miriam being visited by P/Saul who wants to use her for his new religion. There is a meeting with the disciples where P/Saul tries to sell them his new vision with rather limited success. We also have flashbacks to her early life and the events that happen close to her betrothal to Joseph and the birth of her first son. It finishes at a fairly random point, but this is, as previously mentioned, only part one.

If it was written by some hack, you could argue that the more potentially controversial elements of the story are there for effect and to garner publicity, but that's not true here.  Somtow has a powerful story to tell and these are necessary elements. 

I can't wait for part 2 as this has well and truly piqued my interest and I really want to know what happens next.

Number 69 - The Walking Dead Vol 19 - March to War

 

The title and the cover aren't quite as much of a giveaway to the storyline as they may seem.

This is one of the most intense volumes yet.  The stakes are higher than they've ever been. Negan is a real badass, making the Governor look a bit wet in comparison.

It was nice to see one of King Ezekiel's character moments in the tv show came from the comics, although it was with Michonne in the comics and not Carol. It would be kind of creepy if he'd had that scene with Carol since she died early on in this version of the story.

I genuinely didn't know who was still going to be alive at the end of this volume.  I raced through it with bated breath for the action sequences near the end. 

These really are brilliantly done, even if the artwork is sometimes a little bit off.  As zombie apocs go, I think this has taken the crown.

Number 68 - The Piano Tuner - Daniel Mason

 

This month's book group read.  I knew nothing about the author before I picked this up on Amazon.

It's an attractive looking book, a perfectly pleasant picture on the front, nice quality paper, and it's just the right size for my coat pocket.

I have a few more compliments for it, but not many.

The opening line was appalling.  the rest of the prologue/chapter 1 not much better.  With an opening as weak as that, it was going to need something special to recover.

The story concerns a Piano Tuner who is commissioned by the army to travel to a remote corner of Burma to tune the piano that was sent out to Anthony Carroll, a somewhat eccentric Dr General in the army, to help him civilise the natives.

Edgar, the eponymous tuner of erard pianos, is a rather dull character. His wife is slightly less charismatic.  She only exists in the story so that Edgar can feel guilty later on when he is predictably attracted to a native girl in Burma. 

There are segments of the book that work very well.  At times the prose is truly a thing of beauty, evoking place and time with what feels like scalpel precision.

Unfortunately, much of the prose is merely workmanlike, and some of it is pretty bad. There are frequest tense shifts, the strory shifting from past to present tense for a couple of pages and then back again for no particular reason.  He also uses quote marks for 60% of the the dialogue in the book, but for the other 40% he Cormac MacCarthy's it - abandoning quotes and other punctuation - but without MacCarthy's skill at still making the dialogue easy to follow.

The precision of the descriptive passages is spoilt by things like stating that the scenery is passing to quickly for him to see - whilst riding in a horse drawn carriage. How fast exactly is that hose traveling? When I'm in a car doing 70, I can still watch the scenery go past.  Similarly, at one point he is galloping along on a pony, his fancy woman is sitting on the back of the horse in front, behind the driver(?) of the horse as it gallops along at high speed - except she is apparently riding sidesaddle and holding a parasol in one hand - WHILE ON THE BACK OF A GALLOPING HORSE.  

In the section where she is demonstrating this trick riding ability, we hear twice within three sentences how Edgar is excited by the "thrill of the speed" using the exact same words three sentences apart in the same paragraph. That's bad writing. Despite the book being set in the latter half of the 19th century, there are some remarkably 21st century attitudes on display.

The storyline meanders slower than the river he travels down for half the book. There are pages and pages of info-dump about the different tribes of Burma, about the history of the Erard Piano, detailed descriptions of how to tune a piano, etc. The second half of the story is slightly faster paced. After the build up of how amazing the Doctor is, Anthony Carroll was actually a fairly engaging character and certainly the saving grace of the story.  

However, Mason chooses to obfuscate and avoid telling us a lot of what Carroll is doing, trying to foster in the reader a sense of mystery and eventually ambiguity about the revelations at the end of the book. However, it reads more like he didn't know which side to come down on so he left bits out.  

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.  However, the lack of a strong storyline, the clumsy attempts at artful writing that come off as pretentious tosh, and the dullness of the central character are not redeemed by the occasional flashes of good writing.

A lowly 5.5/10.  If  you like your historical fiction to be pretentious, go for it.  You can buy this from most online booksellers.

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 66 - The Walking Dead 18 - What Comes After

 

This is certainly a lot faster paced than season 7 of the TV show.

The main difference is that in the TV show they broke Rick for real and then had to spend half the season getting him back into fighting shape.  In this he's blufing Negan and planning behind his back.

Several key notes from the TV show are taken direct from this volume - Carl sneaking back to the Savior's compound being the most notable. Remembering that he's maybe 11 years old in the comic, unlike the 17/18 year old in the tv show, there's a whole element of wrongness there.  Great stuff.

 I recognised several of the best lines of dialogue from the tv show as they popped up in this volume as well.

Negan is easily the best human villain of the comics so far.

 Not much more to say.  The writing is as good as ever, the artwork is maybe a little dicey in places (although Carl without the eyepatch is suitably gruesome and really well done), and the threat levels keep rising...

And of course, this is the volume where we first meet King Ezekiel. Although he seems radically different to his tv counterpoint in personality, I must say the tv version is a great double for the comic version in looks. 

Number 65 - The Outsider - Stephen King

 

Unless I just miscounted on the Wikipedia bibliography page, this is King's 59th novel.  That's good going by any standards.  But some would argue that King is quantity over quality.

I disagree,

While there are a very small handful of King novels I don't rate as highly as others, There are none where there's not been something to enjoy about them.  Even From a Buick 8 - which is my least favourite - opens brilliantly.  

In this one, I think he's close to his top form for most of it.

It opens with the discovery of the horribly mutilated body of a young boy. At least five eye witnesses identify the local well loved junior baseball coach as the person who took him away in a van on the day of his death. One saw him walking away from the site of the murder covered in blood.  His fingerprints are found in the van in the child's blood.  His DNA is at the scene.

However, he has a cast iron alibi.  He was over 100 miles away at the time of the killing and can prove it.

Something strange is going on. The front cover seems to hint at a Stranger Things type alternate dimension body double but that's misleading.  The answer to the mystery is scarier than that.

 This was the most unpredictable thing I've read from King in some time.  The big bad is genuinely creepy and dangerous and I totally failed in my game of "guess who'll still be alive at the end". At least one character death was completely from left field and unexpected.  After that, all bets were off. He admits in the course of the story exactly where the source of the idea came from, but has put his own spin on it.     

 It's written in King's usual easily readable style and builds the characters with the usual efficency. For fans of the Bill Hodges trilogy, there's a guest appearance by one of the Finders Keepers cast.

It's not his best book.  There are a couple of chapters loaded down with exposition which slow the narrative down a touch in the second half of the book. However these are necessary as the monster isn't anything instantly recognisable.

He also spends a lot of time persuading the central charcaters that the big bad is real and supernatural in nature.  Again, this is necessary as I think most readers would have complained if they'd just accepted the more outlandish plot details without question.

 I've raced through this book in under 5 days, which for a 550 page book is fast paced.  It's a tense and frightening addition to King's canon.  It might not challenge Cujo or the Shining for the top spot but it's well up to his usual standards.  The steady reaveal of what was actually going on was brilliantly done.  The opening chapters in particular, with the build up of evidence mounting, only to be smashed to pieces, were masterful.

Easy 8/10 - It contains spoilers for the Hodges trilogy, so probably best to read that first if you haven't already.

 

Number 64 - The Walking Dead 17 - Something to fear

 

And the saga moves on apace.

After setting us up in Alexandria and giving hope of rebuilding society and joining with other local commnities, things come crashing down around the ears of Rick and co.

This is the volume where Negan makes his first appearance so one of those things crashing down around at least one character's ears is Lucille, his pet baseball bat with barbed wire wrapped around it.

As a side note, I've seen several shops selling Lucille as memorabillia for the show.  I've never been quite certain about how advisable it would be to have that on display in your house...

The plot is moving so much faster than the TV show did at this point. That's probably a good thing.  

One of the biggest differences between the two versions is Carl.  This couldn't be helped I suppose, they were on season 6 when the events in this episode happened so they'd been going for 6 years and the actor had refused to stay 10 years old.  In the comics, he's still a small child and that makes some of the stuff he's involved a lot harsher than the TV ever could have done.

Just like the season opener of series 7 - this is one of the toughest and most intense to date. The famous death from this episode is, if anything, more brutal than it was on TV.  We really don't have many of the original charactyers left now.

This is one fictional world where absolutely anyone can die.  There are no characters we know will live. And that's part of what makes this so compelling.

Number 63 - Squeeze Me - Carl Hiaasen

 The first time I read a Carl Hiaasen novel, I thought I was reading a sequel since the characters had such well developed backstories that were insinuated throughout the book.  It turned out it wasn't a sequel, it's just that Hiaasen can flesh out his characters to an insane degree, giving them entire life stories without ever slowing the pace of the story.

This one is no exception.

His political leanings have always been obvious in his books and he's an expert at not letting the environmental message get in the way of the story, and yet keeping it strong and obvious.

He's never featured the actual president of the USA as a character before though. He gets more openly political than anywhere outside of his newspaper columns in this riotous new offering. It's set in a fictitious timespan in between the end of the pandemic and the re-election campagn of the POTUS.

This opens, like so many of his other books, with the violent death of a random character.  In this case, it's Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, 72 years old, "twice widowed and wealthy beyond a need for calculation". She vanishes from a fundraiser for the IBS Wellness foundation and is next seen as a large lump in the stomach of an 18 foot long Burmese Python.

 Kiki is (was) a member of the Potussies (short for POTUS Pussies), a group of dowager ladies who idolise the president and everything he stands for.

When the manager of venue hosting the fundraiser decides that the news of a giant snake eating the clientel might be bad for business, he decides to hide the truth. This kicks of a typically Hiaasen domino effect that gets wilder and funnier as it moves on.

Angela Armstrong is a wild animal removal expert. She was once a ranger but once dealt with a poacher in a somewhat overzealous manner. She is dragged into the procedings when she's asked to remove the snake - this is before the manager knows the location of the sweet(?) little old millionaire. It turns out she's every bit the typical Hiaasen protagonist, tough, princiipled and with an imaginiative take on natural justice.

Throw in a president (who's never named directly) who seems all too familiar, his wife and an amorous secret service agent, lost pearls, a pair of small time hoods, a falsely accused illegal immigrant and a psycho stalker, and you have a recipe for chaos. The multiple plot lines weave in and out of each other leading to a hilarious conclusion.

This is one of his most unpredicatble books in years, typically fast paced and funny and laced with a hefty dose of satire.  I can imagine this book will make a lot of people very angry, depending on their views about 45.  That's a good thing.  They deserve it. Those with a sensible view of the current incumbent will be laughing as loud as I was.

 Easy 8/10

Number 62 - The Stone Buddha's Tears - SP Somtow

As any regular readers of this blog will know, I'm a big fan of SP Somtow (aka Somtow Sucharitkul).  So when I needed a quick cheat read, where else to turn but this slim volume that I picked up online a couple of months back.

This was written for younger readers but doesn't stop it from being a very easy and entertaining read for a slightly older person like me.  After all, an adult is just a child with an extra decade or two (or three) worth of experience. 

Based on the true story of when the city of Bangkok erected a high fence to hide the slums contained within from the delegates at an IMF conference, this is a shaggy dog story about the meeting of two boys from polar opposite ends of society.

The narrator is simply known as Boy because his mother never thought it worthwhile to name him.  He is a beggar in the tourist district where one day he runs into Lek, the son of a prominent politician. Lek is spending his time as a Buddhist monk in order to create a photo opportunity to assist his father's political career.  He has learned the lessons of the monastery a bit too well for his father's good though. A friendship strikes up between the two boys which will have long lasting impact on both their lives.

This being a children's book we can forgive the wish-fulfilment elements of the story.  Everything works out for all the poor characters and the corrupt rich are exposed for what they are.  However, on the way to this slightly unbelievable conclusion there is some real darkness and the closing chapters are tinged with a genuine sadness despite the success of their plans. 

There is also a strong fantasy element sewn through the book with the Buddha (or a stone version of him at least) appearing in several dream sequences. This of course lends the book its title.

Somtow was a Buddhist monk himself for a while so I have to assume the depiction of life in the temple and the multiple loopholes in their regulations is accurate.

The city is a character all of its own, though distinctly schizophrenic.  The sights and sounds and smells are evoked brilliantly.  The human cast are all equally well depicted.  Somtow's prose, although it's been toned down for the youthful audience, is as lucid and evocative as ever.

Highly recommended, and available online from various sources.  an easy 7.5/10.

Number 61 - 10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world - Elif Shafak

This month's book group read.  I'd never heard of Ms Shafak before, but the title of the book was certainly evocative.

Some of the other titles in the By the Same Author are equally evocative - I particularly like The Happiness of Blond People, and The Saint of Incipient Insanities.  So she definitely gives good title... Does she give good book is the next question.

10 Minutes and 38 Seconds refers to the length of time it's reckoned brain activity can continue after a person dies.  The first two thirds of the book tell us about what goes through the mind of a murdered prostitute in those minutes.

What does go through her mind is her entire life.  Basically, it's a slightly more interesting format for telling us the character's entire back story leading up to her death and the subsequent dumping in a dustbin in the alleys of Istanbul.

She does have some memories that couldn't possibly be hers - for example, the thoughts of and conversations between her birth mother and her father, also a brief flashback of her birth mother's life and how she came to be the second wife of her father... 

That's being a little picky I admit.  The story of her life is well told, despite having very few surprises.  We know where she's going to end up so we know this isn't going to be a particularly joyous existance and the story beats are familiar, but written well enough to be excused.

Along the way through her life journey, we are introduced to five of her friends, known imaginatively in the text as "the five".  These are important charcaters because, after she's finally gone and her brain activity has ceased permanently, the narrative switches to these guys and girls.

This is where the book starts to fall down a little.  Although there had been moments of levity in the first section, to balance out the misery,  once we're following the Five, things take a tonal shift that grates badly and there are scenes of slapstick comedy. 

We also get a couple of random chapters that don't seem to have any point.  The narrative switches for one chapter to a seller of late night snacks who recognises that his customers in the nice black car have probably killed someone - due to the highly visible bloodstains spattered throughout the car's interior.  We also witness a scene where her last client goes to see his father to challenge his father over the deaths of four out of five of the ladies of the night that his father has sent his way.  Neither of these scenes is ever followed up on and I wonder why they're in the book as the potential storylines opened in these chapters simply never materialise.

The Five are not paricularly well drawn characters.  They seem to have been chosen just to shoehorn in social issues and don't have much of a personality beyond their particular social sub-group.  Here's the trans girl, here's the dwarf, etc. Their quest to give their friend a more appropriate resting place occupies most of the last third of the book.

The final section attempts to tag a happy ending onto the story of the dead prostitute.  It either works or it doesn't depending on how spiritual you're feeling at the time of reading.

Overall, this was a good book, despite the jarring tonal shift, it kept me entertained and I sped through the 300 pages in a couple of days.

I think 7.5/10

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