Number 28 - The Pearl - John Steinbeck

 

Of Mice and Men was one of the two best books I read for school all those years ago. For some reason though, I've never really read much else by Steinbeck, despite owning a nice hardback set of 5 of his books.  for the record, since school I've read Travels with Charlie and Grapes of Wrath.

This is not one of the hardbacks as you can tell. This is a freebie I picked up as part of a set that someone was giving away on one of those facebook giveaway pages.

It might be short but it's taken me a couple of days to read it.  Not because it's a struggle to read, but because the prose is so good it demands to be savoured. 

I don't remember OMAM being written as poetically as this, which is probably a good thing.  Age 14 me would probably have hated it. Age 21 and a bit me finds it a great pleasure to read.

The story is based on an old Mexican folk tale about a man who finds a giant pearl. However, far from being the thing that changes his life for the better, it does the complete oppposite.

I genuinely felt angry at the side characters for taking advantage of, or trying to take advantage of, poor Kino, the man who found the Pearl of the World. For a work this short, the town and its people are amazingly well drawn. Kino is beautifully realised as a character with all his hopes and dreams for what this amazing gift from nature will get him.

The prose is as close to pure poetry as it gets. The ending is true tragedy. 

This is a great little book and I will have to pull down one of his others sooner rather than later.

Number 27 - A Basketful of Heads - Joe Hill /Leomacs/Dave Stewart

 

More Joe Hill graphic novel goodness.

This is as mad as a box of frogs and is easily as good as (if entirely different to) anything in the Locke and Key series.

It follows the story of June Branch. She's just popped over to see her boyfriend, who's a summer deputy on a peninsula somewhere on the US coast.

However, when a group of convicts escape, and the power is cut by a storm, she finds herself trapped. her only defence is a viking axe she finds herself the temporary owner of.  It has the remarkable power that when she decapitates an attacker with it, the head stays alive and talking.

She soon finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy with a few talking heads offering their opinions.

What is the truth about what's happening on the peninsula and how deeply involved is her boyfriend?

The story rushes by at a fast pace.  June is a great protagonist. There are twists and turns galore. the artwork is perfectly suited to the writing.  There are tricks in the presentation here that tell the story in a way that would be impossible to replicate in prose.

There's not much in the way of subtlety going on in any of this. But if you're picking up a graphic novel with that title and cover, I doubt that subtlety is top of the list of what you're looking for.

The Hill House comics series are definites on my to be collected list.

Number 26 = Unquiet waters - Thana Niveau

 The second story collection I've read by the oddly monikered Thana Niveau.

My only complaint about it is that there are only four stories so the whole thing was over in just over 100 pages.

Thana's stories are so smooth and easy to read but superbly creepy.  They read like the offspring of Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell with a touch of Pat Highsmith thrown in for good measure.

This mini collection kicks off with To Drown the World. A man drives to see his sister after receiving a strange message. she lives on the other side of a causeway which he has always found nightmarish to drive across. He has a fear of the open sea.  His sister however has always loved it and felt like it's part of her.  That could never be a problem could it?

This is the longest story in the collection and packs a real emotional punch. The last few pages of this story are brilliantly effective. Eldritch horror doesn't come much better than this.

The second story is the Reflection. This is a super-creepy doppelganger story. It reads like something ray Bradbury would have written on a really mean spirited day when he just wanted to scare the bejeezus out of everyone.  I really thought this would be the best story in the collection

Then I read Rapture of the Deep. Two friends go SCUBA diving.  Strange things happen.  

I can't give any more of the story away than that.  However, the writing in this is superb.  You feel and experience the sense of dislocation that the characters feel. this is the literary equivalent of watching Gravity on IMAX 3D and feeling yourself alone in a great void. I can'r remember an atmosphere like this in anything I've read in years.  And she does it in under 20 pages.

To round the collection off we have Where The Water Comes In- a psychological horror delving as deeply into the central character's psyche as anything Highsmith managed in short fiction with some added Campbellian weirdness. This has a nasty twist at the end and was a more than satisfying closer to the collection.

I have both of Thana's novels on order. I hope her long work is as good as these colelctions have been.

Black Shuck Books seem to be a small press to look out for.  They seem to be concentrating on the absolute best of modern British horror writers.  There are 12 of these mini collections in the Black Shuck Shadows series featuring Gary McMahon, Simon Bestwick and other names I'm not so familiar with, but have heard good things about.  I will be investing in a few of them over the coming months.

I biought this from Waterstones but they can be bought direct from www.blackshuckbooks.co.uk/shadows

Numbers 22,23,24 & 25 - the Bandini Quartet - John Fante

 

I wondered when I picked this up if I should count it as one book or 4.  After reading it. it's most definitely 4.  The lead character may be Arturo Bandini in each, but they are at least three different people with the same name. 

The Bandini in Wait Until spring bandini might well be the bandini from Ask the dust, but he certainly isn't the same character as in the other two books.

If it had been one continuous story across 4 novellas, I would have said one book, but with there being no continuity in personality or history or family memers between the books, it has to be 4 separate books.

Wait Until Spring, Bandini 

One of the few book titles I recall with a comma in it. This is the youngest Bandini we meet.  He's 14 and a bit of an arsehole. Actually, in the opening chapter he's 14, then 12, then 14 again and back to 12 before reverting back to 14 and staying that age for the rest of that particular story. There's no flashbacks or anything in the first chapter, just seriously dodgy copy-editing on behalf of the publishers.

He lives in a very poor area.  His family are desperately poor and his parents struggle to feed him and his two younger brothers. He has a crush on a pretty girl in his class who barely knows he exists.  His father goes out drinking and doesn't return for days. All in all, it's a pretty miserable existence.

This was the first of the Bandini novels to be published - way back in the thirties. The attitudes on show are a product of their time and I imagine there are a lot of people might take offense at aspects of the story.  That's their prerogative. Personally, I find books about flawed characters to be far more fascinating than books about perfect people who never put a thought wrong. 

It follows young Arturo through a few eventful weeks in a frozen Colorado winter, where he's unable to even play his beloved baseball - receiving no reply but the title of the book whenever he suggests it.  His father's longest disappearance to date, the most miserable christmas day in literature and a deeply unrequited first crush serve to batter the young man over the course of 200 pages. 

The writing is deceptively simple yet emotive. This version of Bandini actually raises some sympathy from the reader despite his flaws and his lapses into unforgivable behaviour - especially the way he treats his mother on occasion. 

As an example - this is a quote descibing Svevo - Arturo's father - taken from the first chapter.

"Svevo Bandini's eyes watered in the cold air. They were brown, they were soft, they were a woman's eyes. At birth he had stolen them from his mother - for after the birth of Svevo Bandini , his mother was never quite the same, always ill, always with sicly eyes after his birth, and then she died and it was Svevo's turn to carry soft brown eyes."

That's just gorgeous writing.  It's mirrored later on in the narrative with a reference to Arturo's eyes.  There's subtlety happening in this book behind the brashness of the title character. 

This was a great opener to this omnibus edition even with the continuity error with his age in chapter 1.

The Road to Los Angeles

This was the first Bandini book written, but the last to be published.  It was printed posthumously in the mid 80s. That should be a clue that there were maybe reasons that Fante didn't think it should be published.

18 year old Bandini in this book lives in California with his mother and 16 year old sister.  His father has been dead for some years. If the 14 year old Bandini was a bit of an asshole (excusably though since he's 14, he's struggling to cope with his home life and his changing body), this incarnation of the character is almost irredeemably nasty. 

He's self absorbed, lazy, completely egostistical, possibly psychotic and entirely impossible to sympathise with. There's humour to be found of a very wry type in the disconnect between his proclamations of greatness and the reality of his life. The level of delusion he operates on are quite disturbing to be honest. He tells everyone he's a great writer despite not having written anything. He reads Nietzche and the like constantly (although it's clear he understands very little of what he absorbs) and imagines himself to be superior to everyone around him.  He can't keep a job and of course this is everyone else's faiult, but nothing to do with him. He's racist throughout the book and talks down to absolutely everyone.

His behaviour towards his mother and sister is horrific throughout.  In the first book, despite his outbursts he always loved his mother and treated her with respect when he wasn't stealing from her or trying to avoid doing what she asked. In this book, his behaviour is abusive at best. He has decided he's the boss in the house, he treats his mother like dirt and never says anything even remotely nice to his sister. Screaming verbal abuse at her is the best he ever treats her. Violence creeps in for no good reason later on.

Since this book went unpublished for so long I don't believe it was meant for publication.  I don't think this is the Bandini that Fante wanted the word to see. The prose is not as nice as the first book and the character is too annoying.

I actually think I would have enjoyed it more as a separate volume with Bandini's name changed.  The sudden personality change from the first book (along with the move halfway across the continent and other changes) maks this one unsatisfactory.  There were still glimmers of the great prose and as a portrait of a delusional psychopath, it's actually pretty good. 

Ask The Dust

This was the second Bandini novel published - also in the 30s the year after Wait Until Spring.

Bandini is back to his relatively sane self for this one and there's no reason to believe that this isn't the same characcter from book 1 but almost grown up. Once again he's 18.  he's moved across the country to live in LA where he's striving to become a writer. 

Prior to moving to LA he had a short story published. that's the proudest achievement of his entire existence. He lives in a run down hotel in Bunker Hill and spends his time doing anything he can to avoid the task of actually writing. He develops a very disturbing relationship with the barmaid at a nearby bar. I did find myself wondering what she saw in him since he was rarely if ever nice to her, yet the relationship develops in any case.

His racial attitudes haven't improved that much, even though the object of his affections is not exactly of aryan descent. There is some self-awareness in this this book that his attitudes are wrong and that they stem from his own treatment at the hands of racists as a child on account of his Italian ancestry. This self awareness is both a good thing, as it almosts lends him some sympathy, and deeply frustrating since he fails to learn the lessons from it. He's certaimnly a more complex Bandini than the Bandini from Book 2.

Once again, the prose sings off the page. The wry humour is back.  His visit to a lady of the night was a particularly funny sequence. The story takes a dark turn towards the end and it closes on an extremely sombre note.

One amazing thing is how much he gets paid when he does finally sell another short story.  

After an iffy second book, the omnibus was back on track.

 Dreams from Bunker Hill

The final Bandini book - written in the mid eighties, shortly before his death. He narrated this book to his wife from what would be his deathbed.  He could no longer type because diabetes had robbed him of his sight years before.  Weirdly, in the three volumes written in the thirties there were references to Bandini worrying about his sight.  I wonder if his family had similar issues as he was growing up.

Bandini is now 21. However it's a different Bandini again since, when he visits his family at one point, he is a middle child with an older brother, a slightly younger sister  and a younger brother (all of whom he gets on well with). He's hustling for writing work in LA still, but with more success than his Ask the Dust alter ego.

This book is much more episodic than the first three (and 50 pages shorter) and hence the overall story arc is less satisfying than books 1 and 3.  I'm not sure book 2 had much of an arc to it at all. The character's racist tendencies, whilst still present, are pretty much kept to his thoughts rather than his actions and are that bit more palatable as a result. 

He bounces from job to job and does his usual trick of winding up everyone he comes in contact with.  This time the jobs are all in writing related circles and he seems to be making a success of his stay in LA at last. The ego is still there but also toned down.  He still thinks he's God's gift to women (a trait he has in all 4 books despite his notable lack of success). 

He also still has a treat 'em mean attitude that does not sit well with a modern day lead charcter - however, see my comments on the first book in the quartet.  It's an uncomfortable read through a modern lens, but art should aim to disturb the comfortable. All 4 volumes in this omnibus achieve that aim.

Overall this has been a great read.  Books 1,3, and 4 were particularly good, but book 2 just didn't seem to fit.

I'm a bit worried what the book group are going to say next week as this was my choice for them to read...

Number 21 - The Blue Canoe - TM Wright

 

I hope it's just the brightness settings on my screen that render the cover picture as dark as it appears, because it's a seriously creepy cover when seen normally.

It looks ok on my phone, so i'll not mess about trying to change it.

TM Wright was one of the leading proponents of quiet horror. He didn't use endless gore or violence in his stories, he created an atmosphere of... I'm not quiete sure. It's not, strictly speaking, dread, it's something more insinuous than that. His writing unsettles you and can make you doubt the reality around you.

This is one of his later works, published by PS Publishing. That creepy looking cover perfectly fits the story inside.

The title page describes it as "A memoir of the newly non-corporeal" and that's as good a clue to the story as you can have. 

The unlikelily named Happy Farmer is existing inside a big house, along with other shapes and shades that ocasionally visit.  Nearby  there is a lake, and on that lake there is the Blue Canoe of the title.  He uses it to visit a hill on the other side of the lake where there's an empty village or hamlet. He remembers his past loves who may or may not exist and visits a town named after the lake for his breakfast.

There's not really much obvious story to this book.  The reader has to do a lot of the heavy lifting for him/herself to work out what, if anything, is happening or has happened. It's all told in random bursts of stream of consciousness with at least a half a dozen different threads to the story all being told simultaneously. 

The sections are separated by roman numerals that become something other than roman numerals as the book draws on.  Chapter headings are almost randomly allocated.  Towards the end we suddenly find chapter 1 which is a whole new narrative thread again, but which seems to tie some of the more disparate threads together.  Or maybe it doesn't.  I don't know.

If the afterlife really is like this, it's a horrible concept and that's where this qualifies in the genre. 

The piecemeal storytelling keeps you off balance and wary all the time you're reading it.  You never quite know what is or isn't real inside this mini universe Wright has created. 

It deserves to be read in as few sittings as is possible. that way it flows much better than just reading 5 pages at a time.  It starts to make sense (almost) when you devote some time to this book. A good long reading session enables you to truly feel the flow and power of his writing.

There's a very wry and dry sense of humour running through it.  It's never laugh out loud funny, but I found myself grinning, although sometimes I wasn't sure why.

It's not a book I think everyone would love.  It's very different to a regular narrative.  It's one I will probably reread just to see if I can figure it out properly next time.

For me, Wright's prose has always been addictive. He writes smoothly and hypnotically. Regardless of the storyline, his prose is an experience all of its own. this book is no exception. The imagery is hallucinatory. there are nuggets of real wisdom in there, and a lot of what the hell is going on? 

If you like a book that's a challenge as well as an easy read, this will do that for you.

Number 20 - Zero Day - Ezekiel Boone

 

As I start one trilogy, time to finish another. As you can probably guess from that cover, this is the final part of the Skitter trilogy I started last year. 

This trilogy couldn't be any more different from Ramsey's highluy literate and measured prose in the Daoloth trilogy. This is action movie horror story telling. Fast paced and no frills.

The second book ended on a cliffhanger - several cliffhangers really - and this picks things up directly from those events. One puzzle he left the second book on is immediately - nnd somewhat annoyingly- discarded. It's clear he's realised that he set an impossible task for that particular set of characters and deals with it by making a blink and you miss it statement about why they chose not to do what they were aiming to do.

If you've read the previous entries about this trilogy, you'll know the basic storyline. Even if you haven't, you can guess what it might be.  The killer spiders have unleashed a third wave on humanity. This time, it could mean the end.  However, our intrepid heroes have been learning over the previous two books and may well have a way of fighting back.

Throw in a military coup against the president when she refuses to nuke everything west of New York, a lot more spider carnage than in book two and the scene is set for an exciting conclusion.

The pace barely slacks in this volume.  We have the same cinematic cutting between disparate groups of characters as was a feature of the previous two, the same glossy action over believability that makes this whole series a somewhat guilty pleasure, and plenty of shreddies who serve no purpose other than to be eaten.

There are some annoying loose ends.  Why are certain characters apparently immune to being attacked by the spiders?  Is it simply to have placeholder characters in specific locations so he can keep popping back to see how things are going? No explanation is ever hinted at.  They've not been implanted, they just walk through swarms unharmed for no reason.

What was the purpose of the family on the Scottish island?  They witnessed one spider attack from a safe distance in book 1, made a phone call in book 2, and did nothing in book 3. They could have been excised entirely from the story without any plot or emotional impact. They were never in danger, and they never interacted with the main cast.

Those criticisms aside, when the action ramped into top gear near the end, it was genuinely exciting.  I was cringing in a good way at some of the action sequences. The descriptions of the spiders crawling over the heroes was enough to make my skin crawl. When I thought one of the leads was about to die. I was  actually really upset.

If you're looking for a no brainer series of books, something to entertain without being too challenging, this is a damned good choice. They're not perfect, but I know I overanalyse at times.  Stay away from that and you'll have a ball with these books.

Number 19 - Doll - Ed McBain

 Ed McBain is one of the legends of the crime writing scene.  His 87th Precinct stories - of which this is apparently number 20 - paved the way for hard hitting realistic cop shows like Hill Street Blues.  His influence on the genre can't be denied.

He was so popular when this one was published, they didn't even bother to put his first name on the cover.

I've read several of these books now and they deserve the praise heaped on them.  They're fast paced, exciting and compulsive reads.

With a few hours spare in a day, I've been known to finish them in a day.  

I really should be reading them in sequence, but with more than fifty to source, that's a tall order and they work well as stand-alone novels in any case.

This one revolves around the hunt for the killer of Tinka Sachs, a fashion model.  Her daughter was sitting in the next room playing with the eponymous toy while a man viciously hacked Tinka to death. 

It's a case that leads Detective Carella into mortal danger. He follows up a lead on his own and goes missing.  His colleagues have to pull out all the stops to solve the murder and his disappearance.

The prose is brisk and plain, whilst still breaking most of Elmore Leonard's rules of writing on a regular basis. Adverbs are used to describe how characters speak when necessary.  They don't just say things. People whisper, shout, ask and correct others. This is a great example of why Elmore Leonard's rules only apply if you want to write like Leonard.

And the style really works.  It never feels like complex writing. It draws you in and makes you feel for the character's plights. The tension genuinely ratchets up in the last few chapters. I was really annoyed that I had to go back to work with 30 pages left to go.

I was more annoyed that the previous owner has torn out the last page.  Luckily, the main plot was resolved before that, and I've only missed a loose end or two being tied up, or set up for book 21, I'm not sure.  I popped onto Abebooks and ordered myself a new copy so I can read what I've missed for 83p plus postage.

There are some aspects that need to be looked at in the light of the fact the book was written in the 60's.  Although the intent is not to offend, the description of the black detective might not pass muster these days. 

I wuld love to see a TV version of these books, in the original 50s/60s settings. With more than 50 books, there's a lot of material they could choose from.  For short books they have a large cast and it would make a great ensemble drama.

 I have a whole slew of these still to read.  You will see more reviews popping up from time to time.  Hopefully, the rest of them haven't been vandalised.

Edited to add - my replacement copy arrived and I managed to read the last two pages. They made an unexpectedly moving close to the novel.  McBain really was a master of the art,

Number 18 - The Searching Dead - Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell is another of those writers I've been reading for decades and one of a select few by whom I own 40 separate books. This is one of his more recent, though I'm still slightly late to the party on it as it's part one of a trilogy that was completed a year or two ago.

Ramsey has never been a writer of schlock horror.  He has always relied on building an atmosphere that unnerves rather than going for the big loud scary stuff. That's not saying he can't write a set piece, he certainly can, but he earns them and they have so much more impact because we go into them with our nerves already on edge.

This book is no exception. Young Dominic Sheldrake lives next door to a graveyard.  The night before he starts at his new grammar school he witnesses a strange man in the cemetary. The next day he recognises the strange man as one of his new teachers, Mr Christian Noble. Meanwhile, an elderly neighbour claims a man at her spiritualist church has brought her deceased husband back. No prizes for guessing who the new man might be.

It turns out that Mr Noble is far from your average history teacher, and soon his malign influence is causing problems for many people. He has plans that involve the elder gods, and that's not good news for anyone.  But what can one young teenager and his two best friends do to stop him?

The setting is a brilliantly drawn small town in early 1950s England. The school and its environs feel absolutely real. I wouldn't be surprised if the more mundane (as in not supernatural rather than not interesting) parts of the story might be drawn from Ramsey's own schooling experiences.

Dominic is a very interesting narrator, telling us his childhood memories and always hinting at bad things to come.His relationship with his parents and his two best friends Jim and Bobby are eminiently believable. It's written in Ramsey's usual very formal style and contains a few of those well earned set pieces.There's a definite wry mordant humour running through the storytelling.  Simply naming the villain of the piece Christian Noble is a prime example

One thing I've touched on in other reviews is how much I dislike it when characters instantly believe in the most extreme supernatural events without any rationalisation (William H Hanrahan i'm looking at you here). One of the genius aspects of Ramsey's writing is that the characters struggle so much to comprehend what's going on around them. When strange spectres with gibbous blobs for faces are following them, they still don't believe the evidence of their own senses even as they flee in terror. This self-doubt lends an almost hallucinatory feel to his writing.

The story felt unfinished in this volume.  Nothing that happened quite lived up to the foreshadowing of disaster in his life - but there are two more volumes to go. As stated, this is book one of a trilogy.  Book two is on my reading list for the very near future and I aim to fit the whole series in this year.

This is a typical Ramsey novel, creepy as hell (or some malformed further dimension) and a damned good read.

Number 17 - A different Kind of Light - Simon Bestwick

 Another Simon Bestwick scoop.  The book launch for this happens tomorrow and this is the ARC I was sent last week.

This has to be the first time that I've reviewed the same writer twice in a week, but Mr B is a twisted guy who keeps himself busy through exorcising his demons by passing them onto us so there's a lot of material there.

In this one we walk the well trodden path of the protagonist discovering an old film and chasing it up to their cost (see Adam Nevill's Last Days, Ramsey Campbell's Grin of the Dark, Theodor Roszak's Flicker, Paul Auster's Book of Illusion etc).

Familiarity is a good thing in this case and certainly doesn't breed contempt.  The monsters contained in this old film are truly nightmarish.  

Set in a chaotic and unpleasant near future, the story kicks off when the narrator Ash is asked to authenticate the aforementioned film, footage of a famous crash at Le Mans where dozens of people in the crowd were killed when a car ploughed into the stand. In this particular footage, something can be seen hovering over the dead and dying in the crowd. When the creatures turn to look at the viewers of the film, that's when all hell breaks loose.

This isn't paced as quickly as the Devils novella I read last week.  A large proportion of the story is centred on Ash chasing round the country researching the maker of the film. In lesser hands this could feel like info-dump, but Simon manages to use the search for inormation to build the atmosphere. The more we learn about what happened to the last guy, the worse we know things are getting for poor old Ash. One scene in particular is easily one of the best horror set pirces I've read this year so far.  

Ash and Dani are good protagonists and their relationship is a fine emotional backdrop for the story. The chaos and turbulence in the country is never explained, but serves the story nicely.  I'm wondering if it's one of Simon's more cheerful predictions of a post-Brexit Britain 😃

Well worth spending your hard earned cash on, it's available through Black Shuck Books https://blackshuckbooks.co.uk/

There's an online book launch tomorrow Thursday 25th February https://www.facebook.com/events/451228906006232/

Number 16 - Love After Love - Ingrid Persaud

 

This month's book group read.  There is no way I would ever pick up this book through my own choice.  As regular readers of this blog know - romance is not my chosen genre.  To put the word love in the title twice is unforgivable. It makes the book look like something twee and horribly icky.

Because of the title alone, this is one of those books that when you put it down you can't pick it up again.

It's not as twee or icky as it sounds.  It's actually fairly well written and contains some quite tough subject matter.  

But that cover just makes me cringe and not want to pick it up.

The story follows a Trinidadian "family", Betty and her son Solo, and the lodger Mr Chetan.

Betty is a single mother because she pushed her alcoholic wife beating husband down the stairs when Solo was very young. This is told in the first chapter so I don't count that as a spoiler.

Mr Chetan is a local teacher who moves in and becomes a part of the family although, for reasons of his own, he can never have a proper relationship with Betty. When the family secrets are revealed, the unit breaks apart and we follow the three on their separate tangents through life. Will the rifts between them ever be healed?

Each chapter is written in the first person from the POV of one of the three characters.  It's good that each chapter is headed by the name of the character because all three voices are very similar and could easily be confused. The lilting rhythm of the trini dialect it's written in is very easy to read, but should vary for the different voices.

The book paints a good portrait of Trinidadian life. Persaud must be a fan of Trini cooking because there are pages that feel like a recipe book.  Sadly, those are some of the most interesting sections.

It might be an easy read, the prose might be almost poetic, but there's something not quite there for me. I never really connected with the characters. They don't lead particularly fascinating lives. The ending is very emotional, but I wasn't that bothered because of my lack of connection to the characters.

I've read several books about ordinary people doing ordinary things and loved them. But here, it doesn't work. Despite that quote on the front saying that this is Unforgettable, I think I'll have trouble remembering anything about this in a few weeks.

Maybe if it had a title that didn't make me cringe every time I picked the book up, I might have enjoyed the contents more, because, other than the similarity of the narrative voices, there isn't that much wrong with the book.  I can't deny that the prose is good. When she writes about cooking, you can almost smell the spices. She deals with some tough subject  matter without flinching. Objectively, this is an admirable book. I feel like I should have liked this more than I do. But I don't.

Number 15 - The Devils of London - Simon Bestwick

 

From being several years late to the party on my last read, I'm well ahead of the publishers on this one. 

I've been honoured to be asked to beta read a new novella by Simon Bestwick. As this isn't published yet there's no cover art so you can have a picture of the man himself looking pensive.  Or like he needs to use the bathroom - I'm not entirely certain.

I won't say too much as it's very much an early draft still and likely to change before a publisher gets his or her grubby mitts on it.

A group of housemates crowded into a slum in the terraces of London wake one day to find the city is on fire.  Soon they find themselves attacked by a gang of right-wing thugs.  They escape, only to run into a much worse danger of supernatural origin.

The story is told at breakneck pace. It's not as atmospheric as some of Simon's work, but it's just not that type of story.  This one depends on the sense of panic and confusion, with a large dollop of demonic terror thrown in for good measure. 

 It never lets up for a minute as our steadily decreasing cast move from pantry to frypan to fire, to firestorm, to deep pit of fiery lava, etc and hope becomes a long dreamed of memory.

 There's enough of Bestwick's normal political undertones to really piss off the right-wingers. The chase is genuinely exciting and the characters are fleshed out enough that we hope they'll make it to the end without being char-grilled.

For most of the rest of you, you'll have to wait till it's formally published. You've got a damned good read waiting for you.  I look forward to reading the finalised version myself.

Number 14 - The Ruins - Scott Smith

 

My regular readers may remember that I reviewed A Simple Plan at about this time last year, also by Scott Smith, and thought it was an amazing book. It was the on the strength of that that I bought this one.

And I wasn't disappointed in the slightest.  This is a horror story par excellence. 

A group of friends holidaying in Mexico go on a day trip, looking to find the brother of one of their new friends who went looking for an archeological dig and hasn't returned yet.

In the depths of the jungle they stumble across a hill covered in strange red flowers and vines. Suddenly a group of natives appear and order them away. When one of the friends steps into the vines, events take the first of many dark turns.

The sense of dread builds rapidly and never really falters. From the moment they find themselves on the hillside we know that this is going to be a full on nightmare. Smith has built the characters nicely in the preamble to reaching the hill and we care about what might (or will) happen.

The quality of the writing means the suspension of disbelief required for the story is never an issue, as wild and fantastical as the events become in the last two hundred pages, we're so mired in this story that we accept it. He's careful to throw things at us in stages, giving us a steady reveal of quite how bad a situation they've found themselves in. Every time we think things can't get worse...

He switches viewpoints frequently between 4 of the 6 stuck on the hillside. It's possible to argue that they made silly decisions at times, but we're far enough inside the characters' heads to understand why they did the things they do. These are brilliantly realised normal people stuck in an insane situation. We know that these people are in a horror story.  They don't. They're going to make mistakes.

There are some errors in the book.  But they're almost certainly down to the publisher and not the author. In some German speech the English word "Two" is used consistently instead of the German "Wo". 

The thing that bugs me most about this book is that it's described in the reviews on the cover as a Suspense Novel, and not a horror story.  Even The Stephen King quote shies away from the word. Two of the internal reviews call it what it is, but it's disappointing that the others don't. It's not a shameful thing for a book to be a horror story, especially not when it's this damned good.

This is a scary, tense and brilliant horror novel. I just wish Scott Smith would write more books.  He's one of the best out there. Every bit as good as Stephen King at his best.

Number 13 - Peter Crombie: Teenage Zombie - Adam Millard

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

This was an ideal choice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

Number 12 - Lanny - Max Porter

 

Where to start with this one?

Shortly before starting this blog I read Max Porter's first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers which was very good and very odd and was enough to make me pick this one up last year.

I was worried in the first few pages that this might be pretentious codswallop because of the tricksy looking gimmicks he plays with the typesetting but I needn't have been.  Pretty soon, the visual tics were just another part of the storytelling and I was fully engulfed in the weird little world Porter builds in these pages.

I won't say anything much about the storyline.  I think this is a book that benefits from a completely cold read. 

I will say though that I cannot remember the last time a book had this much of an emotional impact on me. 

The style of writing is unusual to say the least. Part 2 of the book is unique in my experience. the way he wrote that sequence left me reeling. Flashing from viewpoint to viewpoint, giving us ever so brief glimpses at what's happening from a myriad of differing voices.  It's an experiment in writing that could have gone horribly wrong, but IMHO he pulls it off in spades.

In the first section, we're introduced to Lanny's parents, his new art teacher Pete, and  Dead Papa Toothwort, a spirit that inhabits the local countryside, and glimpses of assorted villagers. Through these people's perspectives we build a picture of Lanny himself. This section alternates between funny and deeply moving with ease. A sense of tension builds discretely  The community is brilliantly realised to the point you can nearly smell it.

From part 1 we're so close to the characters at the centre of the story that the events in part 2 are as traumatic for us as they are for the family. The voices of the village add to that trauma, layer by layer. The maelstrom of voices is almst unbearable. It actually made me question my own attitudes when I've read real life reports of similar events.

This is one of the most remarkable books I've read since I started writing this blog. I am truly gobsmacked at the force of storytelling in this book. I loved some of these characters intensely while I was reading it.  Little Lanny himself is one of the most remarkable portraits in words I've ever read. 

This is by turns a moving family drama, a horror story and an enigmatic fable. I can't praise this book highly enough. 

9.9/10 purely because I refuse to give perfect 10s.

Number 11 - Somebody Come and Play - Clare McNally

 

Yet another 80s mass market horror novel with a gloriously tacky cover. I have way too many of these. 

I was in the mood for something trashy and this certainly fits the bill.  There are four other books by Clare McNally listed in the front of this one. Three of those are the Ghost House trilogy so proudly proclaimed on the front cover. A quick clance at Amazon shows she was a busy little bee in the 80s with around a dozen books to her name.

I wonder if they're written as well as this one was.  If they are, they're probably not worth picking up unless the price is in pennies rather than pounds (which a few of them are - these are not books that have accumulated fiscal value).

If this one is a fair one to judge by, they don't have much literary value either.  I imagine that if I'd read this in my early teens I might have been impressed - but even by my late teens I was starting to read good horror authors and I would have let her fall by the wayside.

The basic story of this is a haunted house with a devil ghost child who lures people to violent deaths on a fairly regular basis. She uses an imaginary toy room to attract children to her for her own reasons that we discover very late on.

It's not very well written at all. None of the dialogue feels real. None of the characters are convincing. The denouement lacks drama or tension and it's generally not scary. There are numerous typos and sloppy editing on view throughout.

So why did I enjoy reading it?

I have no idea on this one. I know how bad it is. It's not so bad it's good.  It's just bad. But I had fun with it anyway. The storyline is just good enough to keep the interest going and there are character deaths I didn't see coming despite the overfamiliarity of nearly every aspect of the plot. 

Basically this is pure trash but fun pure trash. I'm glad I only paid £1.15 for it from whichever second hand place I found it in whenever I bought it (and that could be decades ago...). 

This is not an investment book. This is a switch off the brain and critical faculties book. It might be a good intro to horror for a younger reader. The prose has no gloss to it, which makes it a very easy read.

Maybe the nostalgia factor is a reason I liked it. I honestly don't know why.

Number 10 - Carol - Patricia Highsmith

 

I keep saying I don't like romance novels.  And I genuinely don't.  There are only two endings to a will they/won't they scenario and I've always contended that that's ok for a subplot but not for the whole central drive of the story.

However, this is by Patricia Highsmith and this is one of three of her books that I hadn't read yet. I've been reading her books since I was in my teens and I've not found one I disliked yet.

Originally published as The Price of Salt, under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, this is Highsmith's second novel. It was released in 1953 and is very much a product of it's time. 

By today's standards the plot is unremarkable. But back when it first came out it was quite revolutionary.  It's credited as being the first lesbian romance novel with a happy ending (although the sacrifices one of the characters has had to make somewhat undermine that score)

The plot is fairly basic. Therese is working part time in a department store when she serves Carol and is immediately fixated with her. This being New York in the early 50s, she tries to keep her feelings under wraps even while a relationship develops between them and they start spending lots of time together.

Highsmith's greatest talent was always her ability to drop you in the heads of her protagonists. This book is no exception. The whole book is told in close third person from her point of view.  We know every thought in Therese's head from the first stirrings of love to her full acceptance of the way she feels.

Guilt is always a primary motivator in Highsmith's novels, and again, this is no different. Only this time it's not guilt over some act of violence, it's over her feelings for Carol.  Again, this is 50's America.  Lesbians were something "other", a love that dared not show its face.

The prose is dry in places. I'm not sure Highsmith was at the height of her talent with this book, but it's still fairly compulsive reading. 

In the afterword in this edition, Highsmith describes Therese as a bit of a wet blanket and I pretty much agree with that.  But, as Highsmith also points out, it's a result of the time and place and her upbringing.  Despite her wet blanket qualities, she never comes across as a whiner or annoyingly self-centred. 

An interesting thing to note is that Highsmith recounts her inspiration for the story being when she herself worked in the dolls department of a large store and found herself transfixed by a customer - a scene we read in chapter two of the novel.  When Highsmith calls Therese a bit of a wet blanket, how much self-deprecation is going on there?

This isn't the novel to convert me to romance reading.  It is however still a damned good read. From a historical viewpoint it's a great portrait of a moment in time and the attitudes that were prevalent. And, being written contemporaneously, we can be assured there's no looking back through any tinted goggles. We also know it made a huge impact at the time.  The two leads didn't have to die for their sins and were allowed to love each other.  That makes this a hugely influential book.

Since the film was released a few years back, this is easily available again in any reasonably good bookstore. If you want a copy of The Price Of Salt with the original pen name on it, you'll be looking in the region of £300-£500. You're probably better off going with a modern copy.

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.