Number 60 - It Came from Outer Space - Ray Bradbury

 

I've set the picture to Extra Large because it's a bloody enormous book.  This is a proper coffee table book if I ever owned one (and I own a few).

To celebrate the centenary of the man himself, I had to read one of his books, and this is one I hadn't read yet.  Back in the early 50s, Bradbury wrote a screenplay for the first science fiction film made in 3D - which was of course It Came from Outer Space - if it wasn't, there would be a different film poster on the cover of the book...

This is a fascinating slice of history.  It was compiled by Don Albright (Ray Bradburys friend and agent for many years) for Gauntlet press. It was a limited run and signed by Bradbury so if you can get a copy online you're lucky.  This is an ex-library copy so is probably not as valuable as it could be (although it does tell me that the American library system must have its good points if it stocks oddities like this).

Basically, this starts with a couple of fairly dry academic essays about the impact of the film.  That's followed by the original short story that inspired the film, and then several different treatments of the screenplay in various stages of its evolution.

The progression from one to the next  is an insight into how the creative brain works.  We start with the story about human's landing on a planet inhabited by intelligent spiders - this was the original short story.  We then see the rejection letter that Bradbury recieved for both this story and A Sound of Thunder.  That anyone rejected A Sound of Thunder is a great consolation to a sometime writer like myself.  It confirms that some editors just don't know what they're doing and there's still hope for me.

Next up is a typewritten first draft of Bradbury's treatment for the film.  This still has the title "The Atomic Monster" on the front of it, and several corrections in pen.  Also the central character's (Putnam's) profession changes almost randomly throughout this first version.  Often this is the cause of the corrections, but there are still places where he's described as a reporter and not as an astronomer.  The ending is very different to the film we know.

The second version of the story seems to be a cleaned up version of this, with the crossings out and the corrections no longer visible.  

The next version is typed more cleanly again and has inserts with extra material.

The final version has a lot more of the material we recognise from the finished film, and is nearly twice as long as the other versions.  It also contains a monologue by the sheriff which is used as the centrepoint for Bradbury's story Touched with Fire.  I have no idea which came first, this screenplay or that short story.  I know the story was in a 1954 collection, but where was it before that?  

We're then treated to a whole slew of promotional material from the film, including two short story adaptations of the film script.  I might be mistaken but this may well be the first film where the aliens are described as Xenomorphs.  

All this and an extra little short story called Troll Charge that Bradbury co-wrote whilst working for the studio, this is a beautiful insight into the creative process.

If you can get hold of a copy,. it's well worth it.

Number 59 - The Walking Dead vol 16 - A Larger World

In this volume, the focus of the story shifts.  It's not about just trying to survive the apocalypse any more.

It's about trying to rebuild.  As the title suggests, there's a larger world out there for the characters. 

This volume sees the introduction of Jesus.  He's a lot more badass than his tv version.  The first thing he does in this is beat Abraham and Michonne in a fight.  It takes a lot longer for Rick to start trusting him too. 

Possibly the biggest shock in this volume was the source of the suggestion that their favour to the Hilltop be the one that leads to all out war in future volumes. 

This isn't the most action packed book in the series, but it does a really good job of setting the wheels in motion for what promises to be the most brutal storyline so far.  The quality of the writing remains strong, the art remains at a high standard. 

Now I need to get my mitts on the next few volumes.  I wonder if I can read the whole saga by the end of the year.

Number 58 - The Brotherhood of the Grape - John Fante

One of the last books I read last year, if not the last, was 1933 was  a Bad Year by John Fante.  I'd never heard of him before and only bought it because of the Charles Bukowski quote on the cover.  It became my favourite book of the year.

Therefore, another of his books was on the cards.

When Henry Molise, a 50 year old writer, is called by his brother and told his parents are on the verge of a divorce, he returns reluctantly to his home town to try to help sort the problem.

While he's there, he is persuaded (read emotionally blackmailed) to help his father on one last building job.  His father's alcoholism is not likely to help with the building process.

This is a slim volume at a shade over 200 pages. However by the end of it I knew Henry and Old Nick (his dad) inside and out. Even the slightly more background characters were fleshed out fairly well.  These were complex and well rounded characters.

This is one of the most moving and funny novels I've read this year.  The father/son dynamic is by turns hilarious, sad and infuriating.  His relationship with his mother is equally good.  She is a great comic creation and I'm grinning now just remembering the scene where she takes the phone off henry while he's talking to his wife.

His brothers and sister aren't as rounded, but as supporting cast they do their job well.  The running joke with Mario gets funnier every time it appears. The brotherhood of the Grape - aka Nick's drinking buddies - are similarly great comic supporting cast.

It's told in a very easy prose that has true hidden depths. I raced through this book in two days and it's well and truly restored my failth in the written word to be entertaining after the drudge that was The Year's Midnight.  In a third the number of pages, this book gave far more entertainment and characterisation.

This made me laugh, it made me wipe a tear from the corner of my eye,   Books like this are the reason that I read.  I really can't praise it any higher than that.

Ray Bradbury - A Rememberance

 

 One hundred years ago today, on August 22 1920 Raymond Doglas Bradbury was born in the town of Waukegan, Illinois. He died a little over 8 years ago in June 2012.  In between those dates he produced some of the finest and most unforgettable literature ever written.

I first discovered him aged about 13 or 14  through his short work. That first story was The Emissary. I read it in an anthology whose name I no longer remember.  I still remember that final sentence, though, and all the threat/horror,/general nastiness implied in those three words... Three words that had been used early on in the story to truly happy effect, but he gave them a whole new meaning at the end of the tale.

That story was so far above and beyond everything else in that anthology that I knew I had to look this writer up and see what else he had to offer. 

I went straight to WH Smiths and found the collection which contained that story.  That was of course, The October Country.  To this day, I believe this to be one of the strongest single author short story collections ever written.The Scythe, the Wind, The Jar, Skeleton... these are all amazing stories.

This collection is one of the central reasons that I read horror fiction to this day.   It showed me how varied the world of horror can be.

I started picking up Bradbury's books wherever I could find them. I still have the majority of those old paperbacks 30 years later and they're my most read books by some margin.  

He was a master of the short story form.  Several of his stories feature the best and most shocking last lines I've ever read - for example.

"And then some idiot turned on the lights."

"It was when the jellyfish called you by name..."

"Martin had company."

They might seem innoccuous out of context like this, but they chill you to the core at the end of their repspective stories.

My first Bradbury books

Of course he didn't just write horror.  He also wrote crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and just straightforward non-genre stories.  And he did all these with the same panache and talent.  His story "The Miracles of Jamie" is one of the very few short stories that made me cry when I read it.  In 10 pages, Bradbury got under my skin so much with young Jamie's inner life that when the tragic ending of the story came around I was feeling the same levels of grief as he was.  In ten pages!  

A Piece of Wood (the title is also the last line if I recall correctly) is one of the great science fiction short stories, and it's mainly two people sat in an office talking philosophical ideas about humanity's capacity for hurting each other.

The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl is another all time favourite of mine.  A killer tries to clean his traces from the house of his victim, and cleans the house from top to bottom.  That's all that happens in the story but it's compulsive, we're stuck in the character's head as his cleaning becomes more obsessive and his insanity more pronounced.

He wrote longer work too.  He has several novels to his name.  Some of those are composite novels, created by stringing his short stories together to make a longer narrative. The others are traditional full length works. The most famous of his composite novels are The Martian Chronicles and the autobiographical Dandelion Wine.

IMHO the most successful of his patchworked novels were Dandelion Wine and Green Shadows White Whale. GSWW was another autobiaographical work, this time tellimg the story of his time living in Ireland while he wrote the Moby Dick screenplay for John Huston. These two feel like actual novels, as if they were written in the long form.

His other composite novels don't hold together as well as extended narratives and feel like collections of short stories on a theme.  Very very good short story collections, but short story collections nonetheless.


Fahrenheit 451 was a true revelation to me when I read it.  It's more relevant now than it ever has been.  It's not strictly speaking about censorship, it's about the dumbing down of society, replacing literature with huge TV screens that can almost cover walls, and the interactive games on those giant screens... It's about keeping the people dumb so they can be easily controlled.  That could never happen could it?  Scarily prescient is the best way to describe it. Oh, and the Mechanical hound is one of the most frightening things in any of Bradbury's work.

I was rereading Fahrenheit 451 in June 1996.  I lived in a tower block, on the 16th floor, with my living room windows overlooking the cities of Salford and Manchester.  i was near the end of the book, at the point where the war came and Montag and the others are watching from a distance as the planes fly over.  The book tells of the bombs falling from the planes, landing on the city, the resultant explosions...

The next line of the book is "A second later, the sound came."  The instant I read that line, there was the most enormous bang and my windows rattled.  My first though was 'fuck me, the book's got sound effects'.  I looked up and there was a plume of smoke over Manchester.  As I found out a few minutes later, the IRA had just blown up the city centre.  The timimg on hitting that exact sentence at that moment, freaks me out to this day.

Something Wicked this Way Comes is possibly my favourite of his novels, although it's a tough choice between that F451.  I must have read them both 6 times each at least.  Although I only have two copies of Something Wicked and 4 copies of F451.  Jonathan Pryce in the movie was perfect as Mr Dark.

Bradbury also wrote plays and screenplays and helped design sections of the Epcot Centre at DisneyWorld..

Bradbury was one of the biggest infuences on my taste in fiction.  His influence is spread everywhere.  Stephen King and neil Gaiman have both cited Bradbury as a major influence. Speilberg stated that Close encounters would not have ben made if he'd never watched It came from Outer Space. When Bradbury died, even President Obama was moved to realease a statement about his impact on American culture.

Despite no longer being here in body, Ray Bradbury will live forever. he leaves behind an almost unrivalled body of work.  When he was good, he was the best in his field.  When he wasn't quite that good, he still beat most of the competition.

On this, your hundredth birthday, I am raising a glass of whisky in your honour Mr Bradbury.   I can't imagine my life without your work in it.  You are one of the few writiers I can say changed the way I look at the world.

  

Number 57 - The walking Dead Vol 15 - We Find Ourselves

And back I go to the township of Alexandria - For the first time in a while, not much of this volume made it to the TV show. 

This picks up in the aftermath of the battle for Alexandria.  In the TV show, the story jumped 6 months.  Carl had recuperated from his injuries, Rick had hooked up with Michonne etc.

Here we have the immediate follow up. They're butrning the bodies of the horde they destroyed. They're building better defences outside the walls.  Carl is in a coma and we don't know if he's going to survive.  Genuinely - in this case - they killed at least one central character in the battle - one who's still alive and kicking on TV. 

Rick is asserting his control on the town, whether he wants to or not.  His grip on reality is still tenuous.  He still talks to Lori on the phone.Can he pull himself together in time to resolve issues building inside the town?

This was a nice character based volume. 

One thing I'm glad didn't make it as far as the tv was Carl's memory lapses when he woke up.  It's interesting to note that in the comic books, he's still 8 or 9 years old.  By this time in the tv series he was 15 or 16 (and played by an 18 year old)

The writing is as good as ever.  Rick and Carl's relationship continues to be the emotional heart of the story.  And a surprise at the end, although in hindsight, I should have expected it.

Volume 16 soon to follow.

Number 56 - The Year's Midnight - Alex Benzie

This is one of those books I picked up second hand almost completely at random.  Mainly because the cover looked interesting and the story sounded intriguing. I'd never heard of Alex Benzie before so this was a stab in the dark.

It's a long book, probably the longest thing I've read this year, but it felt a lot longer than it is.

This is the first time since I started this blog that I've been tempted to give up half way through a book.

It's not that the prose is bad.  The prose actually has quite a lot to recommend it in places.  It's so dense though, and very overwriiten.

The dialogue is written in such a broad scottish dialect that it was nearly 200 pages in before I could relax my brain into translation mode and read it direectly.  Prior to that I was having to read and rerread the dialogue to try to work out what the hell was being said.

 From the prologue -
Fits a fine loon like yersel deein here, at the hin end o' the fair? Id've thocht ye'd be awa lang ere the noo, gin ye'd nae mind me askin.

That's one of the easier lines of dialogue in the prologue.

You can tell Alex Benzie fancies himself a serious literary author.  None of the dialogue is in quote marks, copying Cormac McCarthy and others, he never uses one word where twenty nine paragraphs will do the job.  There are chapters that go on for ten pages, where the most that happens is a man says hello to a woman. This was heavy going.

We hear about show don't tell - this takes that to the extreme.  Instead of a short chapter telling us some key points of our central character's childhood, after the prologue, we go to his birth, and follow him from small baby, to toddler, to his early schooldays etc etc.  It's showing us why he is the way he is as he gets older, but it really takes its time.

The story isn't even that interesting.  The blurb makes it sound like there's going to be intrigue and conflict.  Instead it's actually nearly 600 pages about a lad in his late teens fixing a clock and having a crush on a girl.  And the clock repair doesn't enter the story till well over half way through.

The "villain" of the piece doesn't get even the slightest bit of come-uppance. And, yet another story where the first time the innocent young girl "becomes a woman" she gets pregnant. I'm sure it happens sometimes in reality, but why does it happen nearly every time in fiction?  

Having dragged myself through the 571 pages, do I feel a better person for reading it?  Have I been offered any great insights into life? Am I sad that these characters are leaving my life now I'm moving on to another book?

No, No and No.

I'm sure there are people out there who will gasp at the beauty of the prose (which to be fair - is very easy on the eye as dense literature goes - despite going on a bit) and will wax lyrical about the book's depiction of a microcosm of society  on the cusp of technological change and its metaphorical resonance.

Yeah sure, it has got that. The town is drawn well and we do know the characters well by the end of it.  We dislike the charcaters we're meant to dislike but... I felt no real connection to any of the characters we're supposed to like.  Despite following him through almost his entire childhood, Watchie is a bit of a wet blanket as characters go. He has no real personality.

Somehow, the surfeit of description has left him, and most of the side characters, with only one dimension visible.  The villain of the piece is the only one who feels even slightly fleshed out, mainly because of the difference between the way he presents himself publically and the depiction of his inner world.

I don't think I will be reading anythiong else by Mr Benzie.  If you wish to do so, this is available through the usual places where you can buy books. Hell, you can have my copy for the cost of postage if you ask me before I take it to the charity shop.

One good thing about the length of this, when it leaves my shelves, I've got rooom for two regular length books.

Number 55 - The Book Club - Alan Baxter

And another prose cheat read - you can tell I'd tremporarily run out of Walking dead volumes last week.

If you take a look back to the early months of this year, you will see that I was very much impressed with The Roo -also by Alan Baxter - which was a balls to the wall creature feature about a demonic killer 9 foot kangaroo.

This is a different kettle of fish entirely.

Jason Wilkes's wife never returned from her book club on Wednesday night. The only contact Jason has with the club says she left at the normal time.  The police aren't doing their job fast enough for Jason, indeed they seem to suspect him in her disappearance, so he starts investigating for himself.

It's not long before he discovers that books were not the main focus of her Wednesday meetings.  The truth is far less mundane than that.

Whereas The Roo was very broad, written with tongue firmly planted in the cheek, this is a tight little thriller.  Jason's plight is realistically portrayed  (until the otherworldly elements become apparent) and he's a deeply sympathetic central character for us.  We really hope that he's going to get his wife back from whereever she's gone.

The supernatural elements are introduced well enough that we keep our suspension of disbelief perfectly willingly.

At a shade over 100 pages, this is a fast paced story that covers a hell of a lot in between the covers.  I don't want to say where the story winds up - spoilers-  but it's unexpected, scary and deeply weird.

Another excellent novella from Mr Baxter.  I really do need to find some more of his work.  The differences between this and The Roo show him to be a massively talented and versatile writer, capable of turning his hand to vastly disparate styles.

This is available through the PS Publishing website.

easy 8/10

Number 54 - The Bird Catcher - SP Somtow

 I thought I'd go for a prose cheat read. It's been a few weeks.  Where better to look than a Somtow novella.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a very big fan of Somtow Sucharitkul - also known as SP Somtow. When I saw this novella on a famous shopping website, I figured it would make for a damned good little cheat read.

I was right.

This contains two stories, the eponymous novella and a short story called Chui Chai.

The Bird Catcher is a fictional story about a real life Thai serial killer Si Ui and his friendship with a lonely 12 year old American boy living in Siam with his mother after the Second World War. We're told the story of the friendship in flashback as the narrator describes it to his grandson after they see the mummified body of the serial killer in the museum of horrors in Bangkok.

Nicholas  is fresh out of the same internment camp as Jim Ballard.  He's seen things that children should never see. On the boat to Siam he first spots Si Ui, waiting motionless on the deck, waiting to catch the first bird that comes too close.  He's an expert at this hunting technique, and proves to be equally proficient with larger prey later on.

Nicholas doesn't fit in in the village his mother chooses as their temporary home.  Neither does Si Ui.  because of language barriers, Nicholas is one of the few in the village that Si Ui can talk to, He's not native to Siam either.  As a result of this, a bond forms between the two characters.  This rapidly turns from a bit creepy to deeply disturbing.  To say more would be to leave spoilers.

This is an elegantly written, psychologically messed up and deeply horrific tale.  It truly deserved the World Fantasy award it won.

The second story - Chui Chai - is a weird sort of a zombie story, but not quite.  It's one of the most original takes on the subject of letting a person live on after death.  This story is also contained in a couple of Somtow's short story collections.  If memory serves, he describes this as a gestalt zombie story to complement his Jungian vampire novels (Vampire Junction and its sequels) and his Freudian werewolf novel (Moon Dance).

I'm not sure what I can say about this without giving away spoilers.  A businessman spends an unforgettable night with a beautiful exotic dancer.  When he needs to find her, he learns new truths about the nature of existence itself. Once again, it's a sick and twisted little story.  Excellent stuff.

This book is everything I look for in a cheat read. Well written, creepy, funny in places, and bloody good fun.

Available online from various sources.

Number 53 - The Hatching - Ezekiel Boone

As you might have guessed from that cover, this is a book about killer spiders.

I'd never heard of Ezekiel Boone, but this looked like it might be good fun.  I do like a good creature horror - and John Connolly likes it and has he ever lied to me? Maybe he has.  I don't know.

This started off fairly well.  A guide showing his party through the jungles of Peru is introduced and immediately overrun by thousands of flesh eating spiders, along with most of the rest of his party.

As someone who likes a good shreddie or two  in a horror story, this pleased me.

We then meet an FBI agent on a stake-out in Minneapolis. After finding out about his family situation, the scene shifts again - this time to a seismic lab in India.  We learn about strange rumbles underground, too regular to be natural.  Then we switch again to a university professor in Washington who's doing things she probably shouldn't be with one of her students.  This chapter ends with her hearing about a live spider egg sac that's just been found near the Nazca lines that's been sent to her via fedex...

It continues bouncing around between characters, establishing a large cast, including the first female president of the USA - a drop dead gorgeous 42 year old, her chief advisor and lover (the ex-husband of our spider expert from the university), the surviving member of the ill fated trek in Peru - who happens to be a billionaire tech genius, some soldiers, a random writer of crime thrillers living on a Scottish island, and some survivalists in small town America,  among others.

There are many more shreddies and some of them are really shredded quite viciously and enjoyably.

The story moves at a hell of a pace. There are some moments of extreme tension.  However, the whole of the book is not as good as the sum of its parts.

One issue is the insistence on every character being described as incredibly good looking.  None of them are short and squat with buck teeth.  Every single lead character is a stunner.  It would have been nice for an ordinary character or two to be in there somewhere.

The main fault is that the story doesn't so much finish as just stop. There are whole groups of characters who still haven't met or interacted with any of the other cast yet.  The author characcter has witnessed spiders attacking someone, but made no impact on the overarching story at all.  The survivalists haven't even seen the spiders yet.  Indeed they're wondering if the spiders are real or just conspiracy.

This is because the story will conclude in book 2 - Skitter - which I am going to buy with no real qualms.

While I appreciate the fact that I probably wouldn't have picked up a 700 page book about flesh eating spiders destroying the world, a bit more effort to provide some closure to storylines in this one would have been good.

My final verdict on this will probably only be definite after I read Skitter.

Number 52 - The Walking Dead vol 14 - No Way Out

The saga continues.

Since landing in Alexandria, the programme seems to have taken all the main story beats straight from the comics.  This volume covers the second half of season six almost exactly (with the slightly different cast of course (no Daryl, Andrea in the Carol role etc)

The horde doesn't arrive at the town in the same way as it did on TV but essesntially it's the same story of the first battle for Alexandria.  Another regular from the TV passed on to the other side.

Counting down the volumes till Lucille makes her impact on assorted members of the cast.

The writing continues to be top notch.  The Rick/Carl relationship is deeply moving.  Moreso in that Carl in the comics is still not in double digits.  Sadly Chandler Riggs chose to age between seasons and failed to remain the correct playing age for the character.  I think that displays a deep irreverence for the source material.

Volume 15 has now dropped through my door and will be read as soon as I finish the novel I just started (this is a catch up and vol 15 will be book 56)

Number 51 - Malorie - Josh Malerman

This has to be my most anticipated book of the year, in fact of the last two years.  It was originally slated for release last year but Josh Malerman is a perfectionist when he wants to be and it was held back while he gave it those last few tweaks.

The big question is of course - was it worth the wait?

There's a danger inherent in looking forward to a new book, or film, or whatever, that you'll build it up so much in your mind that the real thing can never compare.

Judging by the fact that this is the fourth Malerman book I've reviewed this year (and I think the 8th since I started this blog). any regular readers out there will be able to guess how high my hopes were for this book.

And it not only lived up to, but exceeded them.


The story picks up a few years after the ending of Birdbox, and then jumps another ten for the main body of the novel.

Seventeen years have now passed since the creatures arrived.  Malorie is still living with the two children, now on the cusp of adulthood.  When she finds out that her parents may still be alive, she sets out on a quest to find them.

Josh Malerman is a world-builder.  In each of his full length works he's created distinct strange, warped realities that work on their own terms.  The world he created in Bird box is nightmarish and claustophobic in the extreme.

I've seen negative reviews of Bird box, claimig the science is hokey.  Of course it is.  It's not a scientific treatise.  The central characeter isn't some scientific genius trying to piece together how and what went wrong, she's a terrified woman trying to survive a danger that can't even be looked at safely. How and why it's happening isn't important.  It is happening.  That's what we need to know. The point of the story isn't to be scientifically accurate, it's to create tension and make us scared for this woman and these two children.  And by god he did that in spades in the first book.

He keeps that going in Malorie too.  We also see chapters from the points of view of young Tom and Olympia. The relationships between the characters are strained - two teenagers and the ultimate in strict moms.   These are scared people trying to survive a world that human's don't seem equipped for any more. Is survival all it's cracked up to be? Shouldn't people be trying to move on? As Tom yells at his mother at one point "All we ever do is survive!"

There are segments in this book so intense that I physically forgot to breathe while I was reading it. The set pieces are startlingly good.

There are minor flaws.  A character they meet along the way (I won't name because - spoilers)  is allowed to fade out of the story just as he was becoming an interesting protagonist in his own right.  There are a few coincidences that seemed a bit too convenient.  But these are minor quibbles in an otherwise excellent book.

This is a worthy follow up to Bird Box.  It builds on the mythology of the first book.  We find out how people have been trying to move on in a world where survival is a skill in itself.  Malorie has kept her small family apart from the world and it's through hers and the children's perceptions that we encounter the changed landscape of the world.

Last but not least - check out that gorgeous cover.

Easy 8/10

Available from any place you can buy books.  Try to support your local bookstore.  Jeff Bezos doesn't need any more money.

Number 50 - The Walking Dead vol 13

And the saga continues apace

Well actually the pace has slowed a fair amount.  After the killing of half the cast a few volumes back, it's time for new characters and they need time to settle in. 

This volume is the first one where I recognised nearly every story beat from the tv show.  They're in Alexandria and trying to get used to life in relative peace.

But is that even a good idea?  Should they let their fighting instincts relax?  Can they trust the people in this apparent haven?

It's clear that the townspeople have become lax and the fighting instincts of our heroes come to the fore, leading them into higher positions of authority in the town.

As Sheriff, Rick suspects a townsman of beating his wife.  His reaction is arguably a little over the top. 

Meanwhile, on a scavenging trip, Glenn and the town's other scavengers attract the attention of a violent group of survivors, provoking a confrontation.

The relaxed pace is a pleasure.  It's impoossible to keep the writing as intense as it had been.  This volume ended on a cliffhanger so I'm expecting bloodshed in the next volume.  And I know that Negan is due to make an appearance in the not too distant future.

Given how much more brutal the Governor was in the comics than on TV, I dread to think how much more vicious Negan is going to be. 

Number 49 - The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

Where do I start with this one?

This is one of the most famous book that I'd never read.  65 MILLION copies sold.  It's extolled as a masterpiece by many brilliant people (and Will Smith).

A Fable about following your dreams!! I have a feeling that this review may show me to be somewhat cynical in my outlook.

A shepherd boy dreams of finding treasure near the pyramids.  Twice.

He goes to see a gypsy woman to interpret his dream  She tells him he's going to find treasure if he goes to the pyramids.

Well that was worth the one tenth of whatever treasure he finds that he agrees to pay her.

So he sets off on a quest to find his treasure, to follow his dreams. On his way he encounters hardships and... actually no he doesn't.  Even the very few relatively minor setbacks he encounters are not actually setbacks but the next step he needs to take to follow his dream and find the treasure.

I know this story is an allegory from start to finish, and it's not meant as a rollicking adventure or action packed treasure hunt, but surely, some kind of narrative tension or drama somewhere down the line would have been nice.  Knowing that it's all metaphor doesn't make a character sitting down and having indepth erm... heart to heart chats with his own heart any less silly.

The prose is occasionally very good, but often it feels like this book should have been printed on a soft-focus photograph of an inspirational lanscape and typeset in a dramatic, yet friendly, font.  This felt like 150 pages of inspirational photo memes (without the photographs).

 That's not to say I hated the book.  I certainly didn't.  It was a perfectly pleasant read.  I could almost see why people of certain mindsets would view this as a classic. 

Follow your dreams and you'll get there as long as you don't give up! That's the message that this book heaves at us for its full length.  Everything the boy does drives his quest forward and gains him friends and riches.

People who've never really faced any hardship are bound to feel that message is a valid one.  And the majority of names that are dropped in the author's introduction, and the reviews on the back are names from the priveleged set.  If they met the shepherd boy before he was rich, I doubt they'd give him the time of day. Or is that my cynicism talking?

The biggest issue that this book has is that I feel it's my fault entirely for not thinking it's the true blue classic its painted as and nothing to do with the overblown proselytising and tweeness of the book's central theme.

 5 out of 10.  Available from all bookshops.

Number 48 The walking dead - Vol 12 - Life among them

And the saga continues.

Slightly misleading picture on the cover of this one.

The "Them" in the volume title isn't zombies any more.  Our intrepid survivors have reached Alexandria.  The episodes of the TV show that covered this were very faithful to the source material.  We're so caught up in the paranoia of Rick and his friends that we struggle to trust these new people with their apparently perfect existence. 

As with the TV show, there are moments where we start wondering if Rick is turning into one of the bad guys, especially  the ending of this volume.

The storyline Carol followed in the tv show seems to have been transferred to her from Andrea almost completely.

The pace drops in this volume compared to the action of earlier issues.  But that's not a bad thing.  There are several new characters to meet and bonds to establish. This volume, and I assume the next one, explores trust issues and paranoia.  The father/son storyline continues to be the emotional heart of the story.

It's getting close to where I am in the TV series (end of season 8), so I know Negan is about to make an appearance, as well as King Ezekiel and the Hilltop cast.

This is the point in the narrative where the story ceases to be merely about survival, but about trying to rebuild some form of workable society - with a war or two thrown in for good measure.

Number 47 - Squirm - Carl Hiaasen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Number 46 - The walking Dead Volume 11 - Fear the Hunters

The last volume ended with the group running away from the farm as it was overrun by a horde of zombies.  This one picks up on the action a few days down the road. 

It all seems to start happily with the discovery of a working van complete with bedding and blankets which will make the journey to Washington so much easier. 

However, the tragic actions of one of the twin boys leads to a moral dilemma.  When that is ended suddenly and violently, the group is stalked and hunted by a group of humans.

This volume was the loose basis of the Terminus storyline in the tv show, and one or two scenes were repeated very faithfully (although with different characters in the victim position)

The usual mix and match of who's alive and who's dead from the tv series to the comics continues - Andrea (on the cover here) died very early in the tv show, but is still here in season 5 events.  I get the feeling that Carol (who is no longer with us in the comics) has been given the Andrea storylines for the TV. 

The artwork seemed sub-par in places in this volume but the story is as gripping as ever. 

These continue to be the best cheat reads I've found to date.

Number 45 - Pilo Family Circus - Will Elliott

I'll start by saying a big thank you to my friend who recommended this book to me.

From that, you can probably guess that I enjoyed this one.

I'd go so far as to say that this is an easy contender for best book of the year.  Discovering writers like this is why I love reading so much.

I'd never heard of Will Elliott before a few weeks back when a friend on Facebook posted a recomendation.  I thought it sounded interesting so ten minutes later I'd ordered it from a famous online bookstore.

The basic plot - Jamie is just your average guy trying to get by with a shitty job in a lousy neighbourhood and less than desirable housemates.  On his way home in the early hours of the morning he witnesses a gruesome event involving three clowns, one of whom drops a small velvet bag.  When Jamie takes the bag he finds his life becomes a lot more... interesting.

He is (slightly less than) cordially invited to audition as a clown himself.  Not having any choice in the matter, he does so and passes. He then finds himself working for the weirdest circus I've encountered in fiction.

This place makes the big top in Ramsey Campbell's The Grin of the Dark seem completely normal.  At least the big top section in that just feels like a bad trip.  The Pilo circus is a brilliantly realised location, filled with freaks and strange creatures, magicians and fortune tellers. You can almost smell the sawdust and the smoke. It's location is somewhere not earthbound so poor Jamie is as stuck as it's possible to be.

At no point in this book did I have any idea where the totally insane storyline was going. The clowns are by turns hilarious and terrifyingly violent. The   rest of the circus characters are no more pleasant. 

The writing is pretty straightforward but occasionally throws in a bon mot or two.  It has a very visual feel to it and I raced through this in the brief slices of time I've had available for reading this past week. 

Why this didn't make Elliott a household name I don't know.  I do know that it won a few awards the year it was published, and they were well deserved.

I've already ordered the sequel - The Pilo Travelling Show - and will probably be reading that in the next few weeks.

Numbers 43&44 - The Walking Dead vols 9 and 10

I just realised, when I put the picture of volume 10 on my facebook album and it lined up with volume 9, the pictures along the bottom of the front cver lines up perfectly with previous volume. This has been going on since the first volume and I hadn't noticed.

These really are a type of genius in design.

The story continues to improve as well.  In the TV show, one of my favourite episodes was just after the prison fell, and there was a two-hander with just Rick and Carl, Rick desperately ill and helpless, leaving Carl properly on his own for the first time.  It was an acting masterclass from Chandler Riggs, and still his best contribution to the show.

I was so happy to find that that was taken directly from a single issue of the comic. Not only that, but the writing in that editition is genuinely touching.  Carl is becoming a very strong charater in his own right and not just a bratty kid. The Rick/Carl relationship is now front and centre of these volumes.  How do you saty a parent in a world like this?

These two collections are my favourites to date.  I genuinely do think this is just getting better as it goes on.  I'm starting to prefer this version to the TV.  In these two volumes, I've been genuinely moved, upset and shocked by various happenings.  I also felt real fear for the cast when the herd appeared.

Abraham, Eugene and Rosalita make their first appearances in Vol 9.  There's some alpha posturing between Rick and Abraham which leads to a truly emotional revelation in vol 10 when they go on a road trip to Rick's old hometown. 

The parallels in the storylines between this and the TV version are almost as fascinating as the story itself.  The actors they hired for Eugene and Abraham are the most perfect of the characters so far. They even look closest to the original versions. 

The artwork is subtly improving all the time as well.  Loving these books.

Number 42 - A Liar's Autobiography - Graham Chapman

Book number 42 for the year has to be, by law, connected with Douglas Adams.  therefore I've naturally gone for the autobiography of Graham Chapman.

The link might not be immediately obvious, but there are a few.  Douglas Adams was a co-writer with Chapman on a sketch show.  He also wrote some material for Monty Python.

More importantly, he's one of six writers allegedly behind this book.  David Yallop, Alex Martin, Pedro Montt, David Sherlock, Douglas himself and of course there's some input from a geezer called Graham Chapman. I suspect Pedro Montt may be a fanciful addition to the list of writers since he's a dead ex-president of Chile....

When I picked this book up I wasn't entirely certain what to expect.

Now I've put it down again having read it, I'm not entirely sure what I just read.

It's certainly a pauntly enough read (those who've read the book will know what that means) and is laugh out loud funny in many places. However the opening chapters were a struggle to get through.   The randomness that characterised Python humour was in full flow and then some.  It made no effort in the opening chapters to give any type of coherent narrative, jumped about in time and even into space, and made zero sense.  That type of knockabout randomness might (and does) work when on a screen, whizzing past in a matter of a couple minutes, but sustained over 20 plus pages, it's a bit of a chore to get through.

It's possible he's putting on paper the feeling of the DT's that he's going through in chapter nought, but I can't say for certain.

However the style did settle down considerably and the narrative is a lot less cluttered and more readable from that point on.  It's almost impossible to know what is and isn't true in this book.  Some of the falsehoods are obvious, the flights of complete fancy etc.  Much of the rest of the book feels like anecdotes of reasonably amusing stories that have conflated over the years and expanded, so in the midst of the fabrication there's a real event or three going on.

There's one chapter that's actually incredibly moving (chapter 9 -  where he lets a pair of young men stay in his house to keep them out of trouble with the law) and, confusingly enough, there are swathes of this book that feel like he's laying his soul bare on the page for us to see with seering honesty.  He then spoils that effect every time with another digression into fanatasy.

I made the mistake of reading the chapters where he's at medical school while I was on my luch at work.  This is not advisable.  There is some gratuitously unpleasant description of  mucus and pus filled orificeses.

The footnotes scattered through the book are used to great comic effect.  He frequently seems to be having chats with his co-writers in the footnotes. Once the writing settled it was genuinely good fun to read.  The pictures scattered throughout are also pretty funny.  Try not to look at page 208 though.

The whole thing is very choppy, lots of little anecdotes with varying degrees of reliability in the telling.  Being an autobiography, obviously it just peters out at the end, although he does manage to close off a running joke type thing in the final pages which gives for a definite sense of an end even though it isn't one.

I'm glad I finally got round to reading it.  It's available from various online sources.  I got mine from the charity section at the front of my local Tesco about two years ago.

Number 41 - Lockdown - Peter May

I chose this book for this month's book group as it seemed appropriate.

It's my first experience with a Peter May novel. I do have one of his on my TBR pile for later in the year for reasons which will become known when I get round to it.  However, I wasn't expecting it to be my choice so I just named this randomly for possible humour value and the fact that I'd only bought it the week before and it was close at hand.

The basic storyline - in the middle of a pandemic which has shut down London, a child's skeleton is found dumped in a holdall on a bulding site.  It's up to D.I. Jack MacNeil, on his last day in the job to track down the killer/s.

It starts off actually quite well.  It's certainly a pageturner.  I started on Sunday evening and finished it at about 6 today (Wednesday) despite only really reading it at lunch at work and about 3 hours in total at home.  The 400 pages pretty much flew past.

It needs a serious copy edit though.  It really does feel like it's a bottom drawer idea that he's pulled out and thrown at the publishers because of the current situation.  there are plot holes big enough to drive  a tank through, and inconsistencies that go beyond suspension of disbelief.

We can all do some willing suspension of disbelief at an unlikely storyline.  This, however, would need me to be held at gunpoint while a team of navvies built a structure strong enough to attempt the hold.

Spoilers will appear past this point of the review...

As I said, it starts off relatively well. I'm not entirely certain that a police chief would pass a case like this onto a detective working literally his final shift - even in a pandemic situation - but that's what the police chief does. MacNeil soon finds himself embroiled in a case bigger than he thought possible.

His disabled Chinese girlfriend, Amy,  is tasked with building a reconstruction of the dead girl's face from the skull.   In a negative point towards his inclusivity score, his girlfriend's best friend on the force, other than him, is an openly gay officer who believes McNeill to be a homophobic apeman.  This idea isn't explored in nay detail other than Tom not liking MacNeil.  No chance is given for repararion and the only phone call between the two men shows Tom to be the asshole in their working relationship.

While Amy is building the replica face in record time, we're introduced to a serial killer for hire who calls himself Pinky after the Graham Greene character. If anything Pinky emerges from the final narrative as more sympathetic than Tom, but more of that to come.  IN his first kill, Pinky shoots a random old woman in the head and stops to feed her cat before he leaves the flat.  This shows he's a nice guy really. (and to be honest, feeding your murder victim's cat on the way out would make me ask for a mercy plea in court)

MacNeil runs round from clue to clue (including a very well realised section in an underground club still operating durig the crisis) piecing together an unimaginable (or so Peter May thinks) conspiracy. Most of the people he talks to end up dead at the hands of a mystery sniper (Pinky) but at no point does he think that maybe the sniper is following him.

It actually all works pretty well until the mid two hundreds pages mark.  By this point, Macneil has ignored a voicemail from Amy, allegedly not just his lover but a close work colleague, helping him on his final case.  No particular reason is given for him ignoring the voicemail she leaves him, nor is any explanation given for when she leaves her flat without leaving a follow up voicemail so he knows where to find her after the panic of the first voicemail.

This is a cardinal sin in any thriller writing.  If you get a voicemail from your work colleague/lover in the middle of an investigation, you don't just ignore it.  He's been in contant contact with her up until this point and all the details he's been feeding her in various converations up to now have been fed back to the big bad guy (although Amy doesn't know this). 

We've also met his ex-wife and heard about his son.  However, the boy dies and the wife just fades out of the narrative never to be mentioned again. The boy's death is given as motivation several times in the last half of the book though.  

 Things take a serious turn for the worst when Pinky crashes his car and MacNeil, who happens to be driving across the same bridge less than a minute later, drags him out of the burning wreck.  Two things go seriously wrong here.  First we're told that after McNeil pulls Pinky out of the car, the soldiers pull the other passenger (who for the purposes of narrative tension should you decide to read the book shall remain nameless) out of the car with various expressions of disgust about the state he's in at the time.  Four pages later, the burning car has been extinguished and we're told the body of the passenger is still in the burned out wreck...

Secondly, we're told that Pinky is feeling no pain, despite being covered in full thickness (third degree as was) burns.  It might be true that a full thickness burn won't hurt as the burn has gone right through the pain receptors, but, around the edge of every full thickness burn, is a partial thickness burn (second degree as was), which will be right on the most painful part of the flesh and will make a grown man scream with pain.  Around every Partial thickness burn is a superficial burn (First degree burn as was), which also hurts like hell.  Basically, if there was so little of his flesh left that he was one complete full thickness burn, he'd be dead.  However, he's well enough to stab a soldier, steal his gun and run off to hold Tom and Amy hostage.

Why Tom and Amy haven't called for backup in the meantime since they're not currently being held captive by Pinky is up for debate.

The conspiracy at the heart of the story is blindingly obvous by this point. MacNeil has run into an epidemiologist whilst trying to break into a house at three in the morning - as you do.  She serves as comic relief and as someone to explain the technical side of the plot to MacNeil while he runs around being violent.

Subtlety is not a strong point in this narrative - the company that produce the only drug that works against the pandemic is called Stein & Franks... hmmm... there's not an obvious clue in that name is there.

It all leads to the silliest action packed climax to any book I've read in years.  If I thought it was inetentionally funny, I would be giving huge respect.  However, I think it's just lousy writing.

It was certainly a page turner, and hasn't put me off reading another of his later this year. The first two thirds of the book were just about good enough to forgive.  However, if the next one falls over so badly plot-wise in the last act, I think I might not read any more of his.

5/10 try much harder and hire a copy editor.