Number 9 - Plunge - Joe Hill & Stuart Immonen

 Now this was good fun.

This is a throwback to all the old 80s horror movies, with some lovecraftian demons and the fate of the world at stake thrown in for good measure.

Mining ship The Derleth (see what he did there) vanishes in the early 80s.  Decades later the distress beacon starts sending out flares and salvage ship the McReady (See what he did there? if not, go watch The Thing) is on the case.

When they get there, they find the derleth has run aground and the crew may or may not be dead. Whatever they are, they're still up and about and talking to, and killing, the McReady's crew.

The artwork is amazingly good. The script is as god as anything else Joe Hill has written.  The aple certainly didn't fall far from the tree in this family.

There are a whole bunch of throwbacks to 80s horror,  the names of the ships, various crew member names etc.  It's going to be wortth a second read to pick up on more easter eggs.

It's surreal, it's gory, it's completely bonkers and a great little cheat read. There's not much else to say about it.  There's no deep hidden meanings or messages - unless try not to let Cthulu out is enough - and I wuldn't call that a particularly hidden message.

But let's go with that - DON'T LET CTHULU GO FREE! BAD IDEA.

Number 8 - Grace - Alex Pheby

 

As regular readers may or may not recall, I read Mordew late last year and was mostly enthusiastic about it. On the strength of that book, I ordered a couple from his back catalogue including this, his first novel.

If it didn't say on the back cover that this was his debut I would never ever have guessed. This is astonishingly good. I have loved pretty much every page of this book.

An escapee from a secure hospital is injured and taken in by an old woman and her granddaughter in their house in the middle of the forest. The relationship between the three of them grows into a strange family dynamic as he recovers. However, the idyll that develops is only temporary and he has to leave and take the girl to the city where danger lies in wait.

Other than the name of the secure hospital, no place names are ever given for the main thrust of the story.  The city is only ever referred to as The City. Likewise the timeframe of the story is uncertain, probably late 90s given the backstory for the old woman. There is no identifiable technology for any given era in the story.

This lack of identifiable time and place lends a timeless quality to the story. It places everything on the edge of our reality and adds to the vague surrealism that occurs throughout.  There's a strange link between this and Mordew in that the name Anaximander appears in both. I'm wondering if this is deliberate or coincidental.

I would struggle to place this in any genre since it has elements of at least four totally disparate ones. And it does it in style.

The writing is of a uniformly high standard throughout. Although the broad strokes of the story might be predictable, the minutiae of plot details are extremely unpredictable. Pheby doesn't follow any conventional path through the story, particularly in the later chapters. He allows a lot to happen off camera that some readers would prefer to be told direct. But this reader here loved the approach.

Alex Pheby has shot straight to the upper tiers of my must read authors list. This is a remarkable book in every aspect. I slowed my reading near the end because I wanted to delay putting the book down for the last time despite the tension inherent to the story. It's very rare that happens to me. 

Get hold of a copy and read it if you like your writing intelligent and compelling. I can't recommend this highly enough.   

Number 7 - West - Carys Davies

 

This month's book group book. A debut novel by a writer with a certain amount of talent.

She apparently has a short story collection or two out and I'm in two minds as to whether I should check them out.

This isn't much longer than a short story itself.  I think it's more of a novella, 150 pages with many blank pages between the very short chapters.

It tells the story of Cy Bellman, a man in wild western times USA who decides to leave his young daughter and travel westwards in search of dinosaurs after he reads and becomes obsessed by a newspaper article about giant bones found in a valley.

The chapters alternate between his travels and the life of Bess - his daughter - on the farmstead.

The prose is pared right back to the absolute minimum, which is a good thing in this instance. His journey stretches for a couple of years and detailed accounts would have become very irritating with the sheer pointlessness of his trip.

It's a very quick read and seems to buzz with layers of metaphor about life's journey.  However, because the prose is so sparse, it's difficult to feel any sympathy for the plight of any of the characters.  It's certainly impossible to sympatyhise with Bellman.  I just thought he was a horrible father, and a rather pompous and stupid character. The motivation we were given for him just wasn't convincing enough to justify what he put himself through.

The two men in the hometown section of the book are suitably creepy with their intentions but I felt no sense of wanting their intended victim to escape.  I didn't really care. This section of the story maybe needed more physical depth than the sparing detail we were given.

Having said all that I was really enjoying the read.  the pacing was fine, the prose actually quite accomplished.  It was reminiscent of Annie Proulx for most of the book. Then the ending came and she let herself down entirely with at least three really stupid coincidences, totally impossible action and a huge and gaping plot hole.

If the ending had been satisfactory, I would have no issue with looking up more of her books.  However, when she tanked it he way she did... I'm having major second thoughts.

Numbers 5 & 6 - The Walking Dead vols 31 & 32

 

And finallly, the saga is finished. 

You could argue that Kirkman cheated on the rebuilding society bit by having Rick and Co stumble across the Commonwealth which was three quarters of the way there and just needed a nudge in the right direction and you'd probably be right.

But that flaw in the storytelling aside, this was a worthy and unexpectly emotional end to the series, I wasn't good enough at escaping spoilers to avoid learning about the major death in one of these two volumes but still when it came it was a real shock.

the final story arc, after the last time jump was a really nice way to tie up all the threads left behind.

These will be making regular trips down from my bookshelves over the coming years.  It's been a great series, the pace it's kept up and the knowledge that not a single character in it is safe has been amazing

I'll soon be returning to the tv version to see how that pans out. In the meantime, I foresee these coming down from the bookshelves for an easy exciting read on many occasions in the coming years.  

I'm genuinely going to miss these characters and that's about as high a compliment as you can pay to a series like this.

Number 4 - The Keep - F Paul Wilson

 Another of those old 80s paperbacks with the glorious covers I have lying aound the house.

I wish some publishers would go back to this type of cover.  They really do have a magic about them.

This is one book that fulfills the promise of the cover as well. 

Nazis versus vampires. It's certainly the first time I've come across this combination. Thrown into the mix are an elderly and infirm Jewish scholar and his daughter, and a mysterious stranger.

 It opens with an SS officer, swiftly rising through the ranks, being called into his commanding officers office and sent to help a major in a remote outpost in Transylvania. the Major has sent an urgent plea for help "Request immediate relocation, Something is murdering my men"

So off he goes with his squadron of Einsatzkommandos to render their assistance in their own inimitable way. 

The scene is set for a showdown between human evil and a centuries old force of nature.

The Major in charge of the Keep is not a member of the party. The only reason he still has rank is because of his record for heroism in the previous world war. His refusal to join the party is the reason why he's been shunted off to a remote outpost where it's not expected anything will happen. Out of sight, out of mind. How wrong the high command were... This gives us a relatively sympathetic German character to follow in the first third of the book.  It also provides a more balanced view of the Germans that at least one of them is a good guy at heart and not all Germans were nazis. As we find out later on, his reasonable nature has more influence on the plot than we realise.

The truly sympathetic characters (the Jewish scholar and his daughter) don't make much of an appearance early on in the book, and it's over a hundred pages in before they are taken to the Keep so we need someone we can actually not want to see immediately slaughtered to follow early on. 

The novel is surprisingly well written (apart from a laughable sex scene) and very well paced. This is one of the few books to reference Vlad Tepec and Dracula as a central plot point without making it a hackneyed cliche. 

The supernatural villain is genuinely scary and the human villains suitably nasty and cowardly.  It's a pleasure to read of the gradual thinning of their ranks. 

The story takes a few unexpected twists and turns, and with 10 pages to go, I had no idea if good was going to win over evil.

Apparently this is book number 1 in a 6 book series.  I have one other in my TBR.  I will certainly be tracking down the others.

Numbers 2 and 3 - The Walking Dead volumes 29 and 30

 And stupid blogger won't let me post the two pictures side by side. 

I didn't quite finish the series last year, still got a handful left.  The whisperer war came to an end and the attempts to rebuild sciety continue apace.  

However, the mysterious voice that Eugene has been talking to on the radio turns out to be from a society that has well and truly got back on its feet. 

These two issues deal with a team and their journey to meet these people and our first visit to the Commonwealth. 

On the surface, things seem good, what would pass for normal in society today. But there are dark undercurrents as you would expect in the Walking Dead.  In this case, a strictly enforced class system.  The evils of today's society laid bare.

In a world where the walkers have brought everyone down to the samew level, is there really any excuse to bring class warfare back into the mix?

These are the questions being asked in the latest two volumes. 

 There isn't the all out sense that anyone could die at any moment any more.  the pace has relaxed considerably. This is because it's no longer about survival.  It's about the rebuilding, and that's not possible if you're still running scared.

The commonwealth makes for a nice contrast with the previous enemies, the whisperers.  The whisperers were entirely feral. The Commonwealth are the exact opposite.

With only two volumes left, it looks like an interesting close to the series.

2021 - Number 1 - NVK - Temple Drake

 My first book of the year... needs to be something good.

What's my least favourite genre? Romance.

What's my least favourite subgenre of romance?  Paranormal romance.

I know what would be a good book to start the year... a paranormal romance novel by someone with a silly name like Temple Drake.

And goddamn it's a really good start to the year. Temple Drake is a pen name for Rupert Thomson.  If Rupert Thomson wrote a diary of how often he put the bins out I would read it.  He has one of the most hypnotically readable, eloquent and beautiful styles of any writer I know.

And his writing is in full force here.  It needs to be because the story is admittedly a bit thin.

Zhang Guo Xing is a wealthy businessman in Shanghai. One night in 2012 he runs into Naemi Vieno Kuunsela, a beautiful blond Finnish girl, in a nightclub. They embark on a passionate affair.

Alternating chapters give his and her viewpoints on events from the start to the end of the affair.  However, she isn't your ordinary woman you might meet in a nightclub.  From the prologue we know she was born sometime around 1550 and is some type of ghost or vampire. The story covers his gradual realisation that there is something not normal about her.

That's pretty much it for the storyline.  There are no vampire wars or werewolves to battle,  It's a love story between a man and a 460 year old blood drinking ghost. She's not a danger to anyone, especially not him.  He's probably a far less pleasant character than she is - this starts for him as just another in a long series of affairs before it turns into a genuine love story, whereas she has her own obvious reasons for not wanting to get involved but finds she can't help herself.

The exotic setting is evoked perfectly by Thomson's extraordinarily lucid prose.  He  really is such a good writer it makes me wonder why I bother trying to write anything of my own because I could never reach his standards. The relationship between the two leads is similarly brilliantly done. The obsession on both sides provides more than enough drama to move the story along. Thomson has always had a particular skill at making burgeoning romances something interesting to read, to his skills are on top form here.

For me to read a paranormal romance is remarkable.  For me to already be thinking this might be in the top 5 books I read this year, despite the genre, is even more unbelievable. 

A great start to the year. Go out and buy it, you won't regret it.

 Available from all good bookshops, and probably a few bad ones too.

Number 100 - West of Rome - John Fante

 

Book 100 for the year!!

Last time I managed that would have been when I was a kid and most of what I read was about half the length of this.

I needed something good for book 100 - but also short because I wanted to actually finish it this year. So a John Fante book was a natural choice.

This is two novellas - more of a novella and a short story really - My Dog Stupid (which clocks in at 138 pages) and The Orgy (which clocks in at 40).

My Dog Stupid - a cantakerous old git adopts a stray dog and loses his kids, in ways at least tangentially related to said adoption of the eponymous canine. 

This is an interesting one because I really don't believe any publishing house would touch this with a bargepole if it was written by a contemporary writer.  The narrator,. Henry Molise, is a homophobic and more than slightly racist character.  Although he's called out on it more than once, he's unrepentant and has no redemption arc.

However, there is a technical name for people who conflate the opinions of a character in a book with the real life opinions of the author.  That technical phrase is IDIOT.

If the only characters we're allowed to read about are perfect people with no foibles or flaws, then literature will suffer massively as a result. 

Despite his faults, Henry Molise is a funny character. The world is an ugly place through his eyes, a place filled with cynicism and devoid of nearly all hope. He knows he loves the dog far more than he believes he loves his children. The gradual shrinking of his family unit gives scope for a glimpse at the real feelings of the man behind the harshness.It's not necessarily a pleasant sight, but is always entertaining. 

Some would try to excuse this story as a product of the time it was written.  I say no excuse is needed when the writing is this sharp and incisive and it's so damned good.  You can't possibly agree with him on most things and that seems to me to be very much the whole point of the character.

The Orgy - this is a short story about a boy who finds out too much about his father's weekend activities.  The title is a clue and slight spoiler. I was wondering if the title was a metaphor for a lot of the story, and in some ways it certainly is.  

The narrator's father is a builder who is gifted a gold mine by an ex employee (It's a lot more believable the way it's written in the story). He starts going there every weekend with his friend and workmate. The workmate is hated by his wife because of his atheism.  The narrator agrees vehemently with his mother. One weekend, the boy is forced to go along with them.

The ending of this story is quietly devastating and genuinely moving. 

All in all this was a great way to finish off this year in books.

Number 99 - Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo

 This is a classic of pre-WWII literature that I've managed to somehow not read until now, despite having had this copy on my shelves for a good couple of years.

I wasn't sure what to expect from it. I know of the film, but haven't seen any more of the film than we see in the video for THAT Metallica song. KNowing its reputation as a classic and once banned anti-war novel, I was worried it could be a little too polemical for my tastes.

I needn't have worried.

Having read the book, I really need to see the film, just out of morbid curiosity about how to transfer this to the screen. It's written in the very close third person and follows Joe Bonham as he falls in and out of consciousness after sustaining horrific injuries on the front line in the first world war.  

As the pages fly past, the extent of his injuries becomes clear.  There's nothing left of him other than the absolute necessity to keep him alive.  He has no limbs, he's deaf and his face is also missing. This obviously leaves him as alone and as close to death as possible without actually dying - and totally unable to communicate with the world.

It's as close as a third person narrative can come to true stream of consciousness writing. He drifts in and out of fever dreams and reminiscences.  He tries to make sense of the world/ward around him based on the only senses he had left.

I started the year with a novel about a boy trapped inside his head (Patience - Toby Litt) and I've almost ended it with one too.  It's difficult to say which of the two is better as they are so different in their approach. This one is certainly the most devastating. In Patience, the narrator can celebrate his personal victories.  Joe doesn't have that option. He does have small victories, but the ending is

Slight spoiler - This was surpringly seasonal at the end, I accidentally chose the perfect time of year to coincide with the events.  In fact, this book could be seen as a perfect metaphor for 2020. Obviously, not intentional on the part of Mr Trumbo. but it's there nonetheless.

I raced through this in a couple of days.  The prose is spot on, colloquial enough to accurately depict the character, hallucinegenic in places and truly emotional.  I let out more than a few tears while reading this one.

Available in all good bookshops, I highly recommend this one to anyone.

Number 98 - Santa's Twin - Dean Koontz

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wish the story/poem was that much fun.

  

Numbers 96 & 97 - Walking dead volumes 27&28

 The most unexpected redemption arc of any character since Merle came good in season 3 and the single most emotional death in the comic series to date both feature in this pair of volumes.  Alongside a war with the whisperers and the biggest zombie horde yet. 

Action packed and emotional are the best words I can think of to describe these.  I was so glad I had vol 28 on hand when I finished vol 27 at lunchtime.  I con't imagine how I would have felt if I'd been collecting the original comics and I got to that point and knew I had a month before they would even start to resolve that cliffhanger.

I know it's winding rapidly towards the final volume and the standard has never slacked in the whole collection so far.  brilliant stuff.  I hope to finish it all this year.

Number 95 - Skitter - Ezekiel Boone

 Those people who pay attention to my ramblings may remember I reviewed a book with a very similar cover to this a few months ago. That book was The Hatching, and this is of course the promised sequel.

It's a great feat of marketing on the part of Mr Boone.  I would never have taken the chance at reading a 1000 page novel about killer spiders by an unknown author.  However, splitting that down into what I now find is a trilogy means that people like me picked up the first one on the off chance and found ourselves compelled to buy the second, and from the way this one finished, the third book will soon also make its way to my groaning bookshelves.

These are not great works of literature.  There's no bon mots or hidden deeper  meaning tp these books - although this one serves as unintentional metaphor for people's behavior in the pandemic. They are very smoothly written though.  It might not be stylish, but damn is it fun to read.

 It picks up about a week after the first one ended.  As it says on the cover, the first wave of spiders is dead.  They've left behind lots and lots of egg sacs.  Some of them traditional externally visible egg sacs attached to walls etc, but a lot more inside the bite and sting victims left alive from the first book. 

These spiders are the reason that mankind is scared of spiders to this day.  Their last appearance on the planet, before recorded human history, was enough to leave a psychic scar on evolution. They're back now and making a similar impact.

Once again the pace is frenetic, bouncing around from location to location, building up the tension in carefully calculated bursts. We don't have quite as much shreddie action in this book as there was in the first. He's building up information about the spiders and how they operate. We know all hell is about to break out and the majority of the book is building up to that... There are some new spiders in town and they have more horrific tricks up their webbing than just skeletonising their victims in under a minute.

There are a few genuinely horrible (in a good way) chapters where the true threat levels shine through. A scene in a hotel sub-basement is a particular highlight and genuinely made me shudder. Elsewhere it's gloriously trashy nonsense. Again, in a good way. All the characters are brilliant and good looking, mostly rich and powerful, and the dialogue can be hilariously over the top.  However this does match the ever escalating state of emergency so it's easily forgivable.  

The scene where the first female POTUS takes her chief of staff aside for a quick half hour roll on the sack for some stress relief possibly stretches things a tad too far but the rest of the book stays within acceptable limits.

Don't expect a satisfying ending to the story this volume.  In typical part two of the trilogy style, this finishes on a cliffhanger, when all the hell does break loose as we've been promised for the past 300 pages. Book three should be a humdinger.

For a book with more plot than action sequences it truly does read enormously quickly and easily. This is assisted by the very short chapters and jumping from one side of the world to the other.  

The characters are broadly drawn and just about on the right side of believable.There is still one set of characters who haven't really impacted on the central storyline.  The last time we saw them they'd worked something out and phoned someone in the security forces, but we still don't know the detail. Hopefully, we'll find out how they tie in in book three. Which I will definitely be buying.

I could see this being a very successful series of films or tv show if anyone optioned it.  Enormous cast, exotic locations, flesh eating spiders, it's got everything.

Number 94 - Another Avatar - SP Somtow

 

SP Somtow is always a reliable source for an enjoyable cheat read.  And an enjoyable full length novel as well - obviously - but this one is a cheat.  A really good fun short read, picked partly just to get the numbers up for the year.

This one is very squarely in the YA category of Somtow's output. That doesn't reduce the enjoyment, it just increases the speed of the read.

It follows the story of Kris (Krit), a young orphan boy living in a catholic orphanage on the edge of the the slums of Bangkok. One morning he wakes to find the God Ganesha stealing bananas from the orphanage kitchen.  After that, things get weird.

It turns out that Kris is not all he appears to be. The plot becomes very cosmic very quickly with all the gods of all major religions thrown into the mix. In a serious adult novel, maybe this would feel a bit silly, but given that this is a very short YA novella, it's perfectly fine, and Somtow's sheer energy of storytelling pulls you through with a minimum of questioning. 

Like Miriam, (see my October reviews) this is also part one of a longer work, although this one has a much better cut off point and feels like the end of part one rather than just stopping dead mid story. Also like Miriam, it offers a very different view on comparitive religions in a very easily digestible form. 

Between this and the Stone Buddha's Tears (see my September reviews), I feel I have a fairly accurate picture of the city of Bangkok. Despite the fantastical elements, these stories are rooted in a very well drawn world. These two books have given me far more insight into the culture of this city than The God Child gave me into Ghanaian culture, and they've entertained me far more.

This is available online from all the usual sources. Go out and buy it.  Somtow's renewed writing career deserves to be huge.

Number 93 - The Grieving Stones - Gary McMahon

 My second cheat read by Gary McMahon this year.

There's a melancholic feel that infests McMahon's prose, and this book is no exception. 

A therapy group take a weekend retreat to an old house deep in the Lake District, an English version of the Cabin in the Woods trope - but with Gary McMahon at the helm, you know you're not in for any cliched old nonsense.

The stones of the title are a set of standing stones near the house. There are rumours and legends that surround the stones, and the appropriately nicknamed Grief House. 

Our protagonist Alice, much like the central character in Shirley Jackson's classic Haunting of Hill House, feels a deep connection to the forces that surround the house. 

To say much more about the story would be a spoiler.  However I will say that the Backward Girl is one of the most genuinely creepy images I've read in a horror novel in several years. Also this book contains one of the best nightmare sequences I've read outside of an Adam Nevill book.

Alice is a believable and sympathic central character.  When I say believable, I mean that it's easy to believe she exists and that her actions are credible in the circumstances, rather than that we believe what she's telling us. We see the entire story through her eyes and we know she's not the most reliable narrator ever from about the halfway point.  There are hints that everything happening may well be just in her imagination, which makes the ending possibly more chilling than if the sisters and the Backward girl were really there - which they could be. There are hints in that direction too.

The supporting cast are well drawn with not a single weak characterisation. The atmosphere builds beautifully and there are a few well placed shocks and sneaky reveals. 

McMahon is one of the more stylish writers lurking beneath the surface of the modern British horror genre.  He deserves to be much more widely read. Get out there and buy his books.

I think I will schedule the Concrete Grove trilogy for a well overdue read for the new year.

Number 92 - London's Overthrow - China Mieville

 

I'm not sure what, if anything to say about this book.

China Mieville is a very good writer of a weird science fiction almost steampunk sensibility.  His first book - King Rat - was so well written, that while I was reading it, he managed to convince me there was merit in drum and bass (pone of my least favourite genres of music but damn the way he wrote about it made itr sound good) 

His New Crobuzon novels are amazingly good.Embassytown was a drag for the first half but then picked up the ball and ran with it for a brilliant second half. 

This is a different beast altogether.  It's a political polemic  -and I must say I'm very firmly on the side of his politics. He knows his stuff and expresses it a lot better than I could so I'm not sure I'm qualified to dissect this book.

He paints a grim and depressing look at London in 2011, one year into Con-dem rule.

This is a warning from history.  A lot of what he predicts in this long essay has come to pass.  It's a well argued and anger inducing read. My only real criticism of this would be the grainy quality of a lot of the photos.  I kind of get what they were aiming at, but quite a few of them just come across as bad photos rather than the intended effect.

I found it online for a price befitting the slimness of the volume.  

Numbers 90&91 - The walking dead volumes 25 & 26

 The saga continues.  I want to finish it all by the end of the year, so two at a time in between books now.

The whisperer storyline is one of the best since the series started. volume 24 ended with the biggest shock and emotional blow so far.  Volume 25 picked up from that with an emotional aftermath and massive trouble for Rick.  The story hasn't been predictable in the slightest and Volume 26 finished with an event I would never have guessed at in a thousand years.

Vol 25 also had a special free issue 1 of one of Kirkman's other comics - Outcast - which seems like a pretty good take on the demonic possession story.  As marketing schemes go, I can't say it's ineffective as I will be seeking that out in the near future.

Only 6 volumes to go... Who is Eugene talking to on the radio?  When the tv spin off ran a similar storyline, it didn't go to any good places.

I'm aware that I now have some massive spoilers for the tv series, but I don't mind.  they've done a good job of keeping the two formats distinct yet similar enough I'm sure there'll be surprises for me on the way.

Number 89 - The God Child - Nana Oforiata Ayim

 

This month's book group book. When I read the plot description I did say to myself "I hope that's better than it sounds".

Unfortunately, when I finished the book, I found myself saying "Is that it?" at the close of the final chapter.

Ms Ayim is many things, she has a list of jobs a mile long in the about the author section.  However, a competent writer is not anything that should be added to the list anytime soon.

 This book is dull and plodding.  There are flashes of good writing at random intervals but, for the most part, this is dull. Dull and meandering, filled with unsympathetic characters, and almost wholly lacking in memorable incident.

Maya is a young Ghanaian girl living in Germany. Apparently her family is minor royalty currently deposed in their home nation. Her mother thinks they should still be treated as full royalty and spends her entire section of the book pulling the old "Don't you know who I am" over all and sundry, whilst maxxing out her husband's credit card. Her cousin Kojo comes to live with them as a brother.  I have no idea how old he was supposed to be when he was introduced, but he certainly isn't a convincing portrayal of a child character of any age. 

Daddy gets fed up of Mummy's profligate spending, divorces her (I assume - it wasn't entirely clear, but they were definitely separated) and the two children end up in separate boarding schools in England. Then Maya is back in Germany for a chapter where nothing much happens.  Then she's back in England at university and she decides to go back to the homeland where her mother is living it up again on an undisclosed source of income and Kojo is now a minor politician who drinks too much and drives too fast. Apparently they have some type of impact on the world around them.

It might be just the fact that I have no sympathy at all for riches to rags charaters who continue to behave as if they're rich.  We're expected to sympathise if they can't pay their creditors.  I feel more sorry for the creditor who was ripped off for their goods/services by a character who knew they didn't have the wherewithal to pay for it. I couldn't bring myself to give a damn about anyone in this story.

I should have known what was coming early on when there was an entire chapter devoted to Maya having her hair done. That was about as exciting as this story got.  The sole exception is one chapter late on, set at an art show, that actually managed to get a point across about western views on African culture. Other than that, there was nothing of note in the entire book.

Spoiler

When the narrator loses two close relatives over two chapters, I would normally expect to be shocked and upset for him/her. When that happened here I just thought oh. This book had perecisely zero emotional impact. 

Ms Ayim manages to portray the viewpoint of a young child who doesn't really know what's going on a bit too successfully.  Sadly, this continues into Maya's adulthood and the reader is asked to do a lot of work to pull out what's actually going on. For that to work, unfortunately, the reader needs to care.

The prose manages a certain rhythm for most of the book.  That works against it because theres so little variation in tone.  The narration doen't feel any more mature when Maya is grown up compared to the early chapters when she's still a young child. There are some glaring examples of bad writing in there as well.

A sentence that reads "I took off my pyjamas, showered, got on the number 7 bus to Russell Square..." cannot be excused.  She got on the bus straight from the shower? Where was she keeping her change purse? 

This sort of thing runs through the whole book.  There are big leaps in the narrative from paragraph to paragraph, or even mid-sentence like that example. Although this does mean the book is mercifully shorter, it doesn't add to the readability. 

This could have been a fascinating insight into another culture, but the writing completely lets it down.

If you still want to read it, it's available online or in most bookstores.

Number 88 - Project Clio - Stephen Baxter

 A quick cheat read from my growing selection of novellas from PS Publishing. I only know Stephen Baxter's name from his collaberations with Terry Pratchett (which I shamefully haven't read, or indeed bought, yet). Still if Pratchett was willing to team up with him for three books, he must have something going for him.

And on the strength of this he probably does.  This is a fun little romp through a very fictionalised late 60's where the John Steed and Emma Peel Avengers series was based on a real agency who were using it to hide in plain sight. 

A mysterious company, known as the company, is producing advanced technology and, through a magazone known as Magazine, is making the nation's children produce strange toys from kits known as kits whilst they listen to endless guitar solos broadcast from the Company's own pirate radio station known as... the station.

There's a lot of ground covered in this book in a very short number of pages.  We have assassins attempting to kill ex-soldiers to stop them killing an ex-nazi scientist who  holds vital information about the company. We have a pair of agents trying to take down the evil version of Radio Caroline.  We have a good cop trying to reconnect with her stepson who is under The Company's control. Oh, and a potential alien invasion from within, setting the groundwork for invaders from beyond the Solar system to swoop in and destroy humanity.

The characters are as developed as you can get in such a short book.  The prose is witty and to the point. It's not laugh out loud funny but I did have either a broad smile or an ironic grin on my face for most of the time I was reading this.

 It's still available from PS Publishing. If short and witty take-downs of 60's tv sci fi are your thing, go ahead and buy it.  You won't regret it.

Number 87 - Wrestliana - Toby Litt

 

Toby Litt is a bit of a literary chameleon. He never seems to write in the same genre twice. he also seems to be equally adept whether he's writing a science fiction epic Journey into Space, or chick-lit, or hard boiled crime. You're never quite sure what you're going to get from a Litt novel. His most recent two (Notes from a Young gentleman and Patience - both reviewed on this blog) were particularly experimental.

This one is very straightforward in prose style as it's a biography of his great great great Grandad - William Litt, a celebrated wrestler in Cumbria in the early 1800's and a slightly less celebrated writer and poet.

This being non-fiction, it doesn't fit into the A-Z he's been building with his other books.

In addition to telling us about his great etc grandfather, he tells us a lot about himself, his own family, and his process of learning about his ancestor - the effect this had on him as a person.

He explores the meaning of masculinity then and now, the importance of being a man and the meaning of fatherhood.

He starts by telling us about his own father, and how it was his father's wish for him to write this book.  One of my favorite lines in the book appears here when he describes his father as having reached the age where "standing up from a chair is a paragraph, not a sentence". That's quietly heartbreakng as well as incredibly evocative of the fragility of age.

William Litt won over 200 belts in Cumberland & Westmoreland wrestling and wrote one of the first sports manuals - a treatise on the sport of wrestling.  He was very likely a smuggler in his younger days, but after his success in the wrestling ring, he eventually fell foul of a local lord and emigrated to Canada where he died aged 62.

In the course of his research, Toby Litt faces up to his own insecurities. How does he compare as a man to his ancestor, even to his own father?  How do his talents as a father compare? And what does fatherhood mean?

Non-fiction is not normally my genre to read in - book 87 this year and this is the first pure non-fiction so far. But this was fascinating throughout, disarmingly honest and genuinely moving in places.  All the moreso for being true.

The Lowther family get mentioned frequently as playing pivotal roles in William's life.  This is particularly interesting to me because my own Great Grandfather was a lowther, quite possibly from Cumbria... I will admit that's not something to keep many people outside of my immediate family engrossed in the book, but it certainly helped me.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Toby's ancestor is a genuine character, and Toby himself comes across as a genuinely nice guy, somewhat in envy of old William's earlier exploits. It's clear that this book was a labour of love and that comes shining through the page.  What could have been the equivalent of someone gettng the photo album out is turned into an engrossing history of a remarkable man. Through the power of prose, Toby has wrestled his ancestor onto the page, and quite definitvely won this round.

This is available through Galley Beggar Press

Number 86 - The Little Gift - Stephen Volk

 

Stephen Volk is another writer primarily known for television.  He's probably best known for the BBC fake reality show Ghostwatch that caused a bit of a stir when it first came out. He also wrote the film Gothic, the tv series Midwinter of the Spririt and Afterlife (starring Andrew Lincoln of Walking Dead fame)

So he has a very classy screenwriting career.   despite having a few of his books I'd never quite got round to reading them.  I needed a cheat read while I wait for the next few volumes of the Walking Dead  so this seemed like as good a time as any. 

I'm glad to say his prose writing is as classy as his screen work. This is one of the most thought provoking things I've read this year. I'm not even sure what genre it belongs in - and that's a good thing.

The story begins with our narrator's wife finding the little gift the cat has brought in for the family. The narrator is asked to put the bird out of it's misery and dispose of it. The very beginning is told in present tense. As he's walking to the bins to dispose of the latest gift, his mind drifts back to a day that started when the cat brought them a dead vole, and the events that followed.

The story now switches to past tense and we hear the tale of his past infidelity and what came after. To say more would be very spoilerific. 

The relationships in this book are beautifully drawn - easily the equal to any whirlwhind romance I've read in a Rupert Thomson or a Jonathan Carroll novel - and coming from me that is high praise indeed. Despite not liking the narrator for his actions, you know where he's coming from and can understand him. I was genuinely moved and shocked by some of the events that transpired.  

The metaphors inherent to the story never overpower the storytelling and the ending is well nigh perfect. I finished this late last night and it's been on my mind all day. This is a dark meditation on love and the turns life can take.

Even by PS Publishing's normal high standards, this is a well put together book.  The cover art and internal illustrations are excellent. They perfectly match the darkness at the centre of the story.

I have a few more of Mr Volk's works on my shelves.  They have all been moved much higher up the TBR pile.

There are still copies of this available through the PS website.  https://www.pspublishing.co.uk/ 

Buy it there while you can.  Jeff Bezos doesn't need any more of your money.