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So another quickie review of a fun, scary read. Half-Minute Horrors does exactly what you might think; it pulls together over seventy stories aimed at giving youngsters a good fright through a mixture of prose, poetry and pictures and is really very enjoyable.
The selling point for me was the range of authors included – really well-known names from Neil Gaiman to Joyce Carol Oates (two of my absolute favourites as regular visitors to this blog will know) via Gregory Maguire, Margaret Atwood and Holly Black.
You could choose to read one of these a day if you are a person with discipline and iron self-control. I of course approached this the way I eat chocolates – only meant to have one or two (honest) but before I noticed half of them were gone.
Either way this is cool and creepy and a good introduction to scary stuff.
So how do you review an Edward Gorey book?
The Iron Tonic doesn’t have a plot as such. It has twenty-eight lines of poetry. But of course the thing about Gorey is the artwork; the illustrations are wonderful, bizarre, Gothic and worth paying attention to. And the subtitle probably tells you all you need to know: a winter afternoon in Lonely Valley.
And I for one agree that the careful stroller should beware of objects falling from the air….
So this was my first proper exposure to Nick Hornby; of course I know who he is, I have High Fidelity on DVD (saw a bit of it when channel surfing and thought it looked good enough to buy but I haven’t yet watched it), I know about his Arsenal thing, I know the titles of most of his novels and so on.
But The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is the first of his books that I have ever read; I’m not even sure when I got it (must be recorded in a post on here somewhere) but I know why I bought it, and that’s because it’s a book about books and reading, and I can’t resist anything like that.
And of course when I started reading this Mr Hornby started popping up all over the place, because he is the screenwriter for the acclaimed (and hopefully to be seen by me at some point) film An Education, so I found myself watching him being interviewed by Jonathan Ross on the BBC; don’t you find it often happens that as soon as something comes to your attention in your reading you start seeing references to it all over the place?
I always find it difficult to review books like this because it really comes down to whether you like the writer’s voice or not and I found that I did. Setting aside his inability to get very far with the Iain M Banks novel he started (I have to understand that not everyone gets sci-fi, but it’s really difficult to make allowances sometimes), I enjoyed the columns and I clicked with his sense of humour.
I’ve added some titles to my wishlist, and actually succumbed and bought a couple of recommendations when on my way to meet my friend-who-hasn’t-yet-got-an-alias-for-the-purpose-of-being-referred-t0-in-this-blog on Thursday afternoon and thought I was going to be early so hit Waterstones, and we know how that normally ends. Please don’t tell the Book God, I’m supposed to be under a book-buying embargo on the run up to Christmas…..
Anyway, how can you possibly dislike someone who can point out that “there comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you are a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I’m beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.”
Will almost certainly be getting more Hornby – once I’m allowed to that is….
Otherwise known as the it-really-freaked-me-out Swedish zombie one.
So Handling the Undead is the second book by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who wrote Let the Right One In which was one of my favourite reads of last year and spawned one of the best films of 2009 (thoughts on the book are here, and the film over here).
We are in Stockholm; the whole of the population seems to be sharing in one giant communal headache as it what feels like a thunderstorm is approaching, and no electrical appliances can be turned off, so this is a group of people under some stress. And then suddenly it stops. And roughly at the same time the dead come back to life; well not all of the dead, only those who have passed away during the previous two months.
We follow what happens over several days through a small group of characters: David, a stand-up comic whose wife is killed in a car accident just before the zombie stuff starts, and is among the first to come back; Magnus, a reporter whose young grandson died in an accident several weeks before; and Elvy, recently widowed, and her grand-daughter Flora, who both have a paranormal gift and can tell what others are feeling. Not giving too much away here as these characters and their respective situations are all introduced in the first few pages and give the emotional heart to the book.
Now I will put my cards on the table here and say that I have always had a problem with the concept of zombies in that they totally terrify me. I don’t think I have ever been able to sit through a whole zombie movie. I can happily read/watch anything about vampires, werewolves and other supernatural beasties, but zombies definitely give me pause. And I think it’s because it could happen; not the living coming back to life as such, but large groups of people becoming violent through some kind of virus or something sounds all too plausible to me and I’d rather not think about it, thank you very much.
And certainly the beginning of the book played into all of that, being pretty gruesome and not a little frightening, and it’s probably my own fault that I got so freaked as I started reading the book in bed, a stupid thing to do giving everything I said above and perhaps I deserved what I got (but thankfully no nightmares).
But then it turns into something quite different. What do the reliving actually want? How would you react if someone close to you came back but weren’t quite right? How does a modern, liberal, enlightened western European nation actually handle a situation (the answer being not terribly well and far too slowly)? And how do people of faith deal with what could be a harbinger of the end times? Oh, and can love survive?
Sounds like heavy stuff but this manages to deal with all of these issues in a thoughtful way, and this is where the range of characters actually helps move things along as they all look at the situation from a slightly different perspective. And I was so keen to find out how this would all end that I finished the book in bed in the small hours of the morning, despite my previous misgivings. It is quite gory in places but not gratuitously so.
Highly recommended. And my third read for the RIP Challenge. And I may just have to look at this zombie thing in a whole new light …
Or the non-science-fiction-science fiction one.
So this is the latest from the great Iain Banks, one of my favourite authors. In the US (and possibly elsewhere, I’m not absolutely sure) this is being marketed as a science fiction novel, but not here in the UK where it’s being positioned as a mainstream novel which kind of has sci-fi overtones. I heard Mr B being interviewed on Simon Mayo’s radio programme some weeks ago and this was touched on, and he seems to regard Transition as non-sci-fi. Although I’m only a reader, I beg to differ….
The multiple universes, the mechanisms for travelling between them, and the all-powerful Concern all push me towards the sci-fi view. However you could see it as it’s described in the blurb which explains it as a “high-definition, hyper-real, apocalyptic fable” and a great deal of the action does take place in “our” world, in the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attack on the Twin Towers. But an awful lot of it doesn’t…..
But setting all of that aside, it is a really absorbing story of politics and greed and paranoia and terrorism and torture and parallel worlds and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I particularly liked The Transitionary (which is probably just as well) moving between worlds and interfering in various ways for the greater good (or is he?) and Mrs Mulverhill and her habit of wearing small hats with veils, a style I never managed to pull off in the ten minutes when it was fashionable in the eighties. The structure of the novel, using multiple narrators really worked for me as well given the subject matter of the story, and although I had to read the end a couple of times to make sure I really had understood it, I found it a satisfying read.
And I don’t care, I’m going to claim this for the 42 Challenge.
Can’t wait until the next Culture novel, though.
So, more Gothic creepiness from the wonderful Mr Priestley in Tales of Terror from the Tunnel’s Mouth, and a good read for RIP IV.
Robert Harper is returning to school, desperate to get away from his stepmother with whom he has been spending his time while his father is fighting the Boers in South Africa. Robert is travelling by train, and we first meet him on the platform with said stepmother, an emotional woman who has a premonition that something will happen to Robert, involving a tunnel and a kiss. Robert shakes her off, gets on the train and finds himself in a carriage which slowly fills up with a number of gentlemen also travelling to London.
Robert dozes off, and when he wakes up he finds that all the other passengers are asleep except for a young woman with red hair, dressed completely in white, who is sitting opposite him. The train has stopped at the mouth of a railway tunnel, and to while away the time the mysterious woman tells Robert a number of sinister stories, while he struggles to keep awake…..
Another really enjoyable collection, with a little mystery at its heart – who is the woman in white? What (if anything) does she want with young Robert? Why is everyone else solidly asleep?
Favourites in this collection are:
- The Glasshouse – you really shouldn’t get too close to some of those plants….
- The Crotach Stone – beware the auld folk….
- Sister Veronica – art appreciation and nuns…
And the illustrations by David Roberts are equally creepy.
This is my second read for RIP IV
So The Kingdom Beyond the Waves is sort of a sequel to The Court of the Air (which I reviewed here) in as much as it takes place a few years after the events of that book and features some of the same characters but that’s as far as it goes. It’s possible, I think, to read this as a standalone novel, and a very enjoyable piece of steampunk it is too.
What we have is an adventure-quest-type story. Amelia Harsh, she of the gorilla-sized arms who appeared briefly in the first novel, has a bit of an obsession with the lost land of Camlantis, a perfect society blown into the sky to be hidden rather than fall prey to the barbaric hordes seeking to destroy it. She is funded in her search by the wealthiest man in Jackals, Abraham Quest, equally obsessed. She heads into hostile jungle territory on a submarine with a crew of liberated prisoners and a mercenary army of extremely effective female warriors. It becomes clear, however, that she has not been told the whole story, and there is danger and treachery aplenty before she reaches the end of her search….
As I said, this is very enjoyable, although I will be honest and admit that it took me longer to get into, mostly because I found it difficult to immediately engage with any of the main characters. But once again the world of Jackals and the other societies that surround it are so wonderfully imagined and constructed that I persevered, and there came a point when all the subplots and the main story came together and everything clicked in such a way that I was really keen to find out how all this was going to be resolved. Great stuff.
I think I found out about this from Neil Gaiman’s blog, but of course I can’t find the reference now and it’s entirely possible that I’ve made the whole thing up and picked this up from somewhere completely different, so if it was you that pointed me in the direction of Gunnerkrigg Court then thank you because it’s absolutely brilliant.
So this is ostensibly a classic boarding school story; Antimony Carver (known as Annie) has just started her first year at Gunnerkrigg. Her mother is dead, her father isn’t around, and she is an odd and self-contained girl with some interesting knowledge and unusual talents.
This first volume is about her settling into the school, her friendship with Kat, and the strange, sort-of-Gothic things she comes across, including a Minotaur (possibly the Minotaur), demons, robots, shadows, mythical creatures, Gods and demi-gods.
This is great stuff. I love the artwork, I love Antimony herself (and what a cool name that is), and all of the other characters are fascinating in their own way. I particularly like Reynardine and will be interested to see how he develops. For although this is the first part of the story to be published in book for, this began life as a webcomic, and the adventures continue here. Well worth a visit.
OK, so where to start with this one? Sharp Objects is about a reporter, Camille, who is sent by her paper in Chicago to investigate the murder of one girl and the disappearance of another in her home town of Wind Gap, Missouri. Is a serial killer involved? How are the local police faring in their investigation? Is it a local or an outsider who is committing these crimes? All the usual questions that you would expect when death hits a small town.
And of course, all is not well in Camille’s life. She has a tragic past (death of her sister); to describe her relationship with her mother (with whom she is forced to stay during her trip) would be a gross understatement; and, well, to put it (incredibly) mildly, she doesn’t exactly have a history (or a present) of looking after herself.
And of course, the crimes may all be a lot closer to home than she thinks.
I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about this novel. There’s a very prominent endorsement from the great Stephen King (well, I think he’s great) on the back of the edition I read, where he talks about Sharp Objects as ‘relentlessly creepy’, ‘dreading the last thirty pages’ and so on. And in some ways he is right, it is creepy, the story does linger, it does have a cumulative nastiness factor. Whether you have any positive feelings about the characters or not (and some reviewers really don’t like the portrayal of women in this book) it is in many ways very powerful. But……
And I’m not sure what that but is. I felt a lot of sympathy towards Camille because of her awful childhood and what it had done to her both physically and mentally. But something went askew for me towards the end, and I think it’s because after a slow and relentless build up it was all suddenly over. There was a huge revelation (for Camille at any rate) all the pieces appeared to drop into place, and then there was a ‘Carrie’ ending (film not book so if you haven’t watched the Brian de Palma movie you might not know what I mean). And you knew it was coming, and if you had half a brain you knew what it was, and for all those reasons it was a bit unsatisfying. Which is a real shame.
This is absolutely by no means a bad book; I just think it could have been even better.
This was my first read for RIP IV.
So in The Victoria Vanishes our favourite elderly detectives, Arthur Bryant and John May become involved in yet another peculiar crime as women start turning up dead in London pubs. Not violently dead, you understand, but drugged and basically put to sleep. Bryant in particular has cause to be concerned as it becomes clear he saw one of the women shortly before her death entering a pub which, the following day, has mysteriously disappeared and possibly hasn’t actually existed since before the war. So, why are these women being killed? Why are they being killed in pubs? And what happened to The Victoria?
The joy of this novel isn’t just the plot, which is enjoyable and ingenious if a tiny wee bit far-fetched (a very minor quibble believe me), but the knowledge of and love for London which comes through every page. Fowler gives a list of the pubs frequented or at least mentioned in the book, and a number of them are in the area near my office (around Holborn, Fleet St, The Strand and Shaftesbury Avenue) and between us the Book God and I managed to identify a number that one or other or both of us had been in over the years we have lived in London. Sadly a lot of these pubs are beginning to be overrun by developers, but there are still one or two dotted around that are worth visiting, and they give a colourful backdrop to an enjoyable story.
And that brings August to an end and Crime Month is over for another year. I managed to read eight from what was quite an extensive list, and could quite happily have read more if the need to earn a living hadn’t inconveniently got in the way!
So it’s August Bank Holiday and in London it’s warm and humid but there is a promise of autumn (my favourite season) later in the week, and I am two thirds of the way through the Annual Lord of the Rings Extended Version DVD marathon which finishes this evening with (of course) The Return of the King. It’s only five weeks until I go on holiday, and I have Carl’s RIP IV challenge to participate in so what more could a girl need? Apart from a new handbag, of course…….
Bride of the Book God 