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So it’s September tomorrow and that means the start of one of my favourite blogging event’s, Carl’s RIP VIII and the opportunity to read scary and thrilling stuff along with lots of other members of the book blogging community.
As is traditional I have pulled together a book list out of which I hope to be able to meet Peril the Second, where I need to read four books that fit the description of perilous. I’d love to be able to read them all, but we’ll see how that goes.
My list is (in no particular order):
- London Falling by Paul Cornell
- NOS4R2 by Joe Hill
- Horowitz Horror by Anthony Horowitz
- Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood by Christopher Fowler
- The Night Eternal by Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan
- Nocturnes by John Connolly
- Through Dead Eyes by Chris Priestley
- Mayhem by Sarah Pinborough
- Drood by Dan Simmons
- The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates
A pretty good selection I think, and I’m looking forward to all of them.
I may also take part in Peril on the Screen but no real plans on what that might involve, though it is really about time I re-watched one of my Desert Island Films, Son of Frankenstein with *sigh* Basil Rathbone.
Every so often a book comes along that everyone seems to be reading and talking about all at once, and because I can be a bit perverse I tend to avoid them until the puff dies down a bit, then I dive in when no-one else is looking and often fall in love with them quietly in a corner. I did that most recently with Gone Girl (which I thought was great as you can see here) and was going to do the same this time round with Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls which only came out in April. But something drew me in, possibly the tagline; after all who can resist the idea of “the girl who wouldn’t die hunting the killer who shouldn’t exist”? Certainly not me.
So the book opens in Chicago in the 1920s where we meet Harper Curtis who I think its fair to say is not a nice man at all. He’s in pretty dire straits when we first come across him, beaten and hunted, but he finds himself in possession of a key to a very particular House one that allows him access to other times (and for that reason really deserves to be capitalised). Harper is a killer, hunting down the shining girls, young women of promise and vitality whom he taunts and murders rather brutally. But he meets his match in Kirby Mazrachi who astonishingly survives his horrendous attack and when the police cannot (understandably) find her would-be murderer begins to investigate and comes across evidence which points to a situation which cannot possibly be true. But of course is. And she goes after him.
The Shining Girls is absolutely brilliant, a fabulously clever idea and a wonderfully constructed book which twists and loops through time as we follow both Harper and Kirby. The structure of the novel is complex but never confusing though it must have required a phenomenal amount of organisation to keep the various stories straight over 80 years of events. The young women whom Harper kills are all proper characters; we learn quite a bit about each of them and that makes what happens to them so awful. Kirby is a wonderful character, trying to make sense of the terrible thing that was done to her but still flawed and damaged as you would expect. Harper is just a dreadful human being; it isn’t clear whether the House “makes” him do these awful things or whether he would have done something like this anyway, it’s just the spread of his attacks over time which keeps him hidden. But totally totally odious.
I really loved the mix of time-travel and serial killer and I appreciated that not all of the answers are handed to you as a reader. The situation is just as it is and I found that was good enough for me. Definitely a book worthy of re-reading.
It is no secret to anyone who reads this blog regularly (and there must be someone out there, surely?) how much I like Ben Aaronvitch’s Rivers of London series, and how thrilled I was to get my copy of Whispers of Underground signed at an event last year. Sadly I couldn’t make the London event this year but no matter, as soon as my copy of Broken Homes arrived I dived (dove?) right in and devoured the thing in short order.
So much as before we have Peter Grant, PC and wizard, his boss Nightingale and colleague Jenny still on the hunt for the rather nasty Faceless Man, still interacting with the various incarnations of the Thames and its tributaries and still being dragged in to any case with a whiff of the supernatural. This story starts with an odd car crash, some mutilated bodies and *gasp* the need to go south of the river to work out exactly what, if anything the connection is with a particularly unusual housing complex designed by the somewhat eccentric Erik Stromberg.
As you might expect I really loved this and its mixture solid police work and, well, magic. The story really clips along. As always (and its perhaps a bit of a cliché to say this, but hey, this is how things become clichés) London itself is a significant character and also as always I learned quite a bit that I didn’t know about the city that I live and work in. Although I think all the books are strong this seems to me to be the best since Rivers of London itself.
And the end was Oh!
Followed by Ah!
Followed by a rush to the web to find out when the next volume is due because I want to see where this is all going.
Absolutely great stuff.
Fear the Dark says the front cover of Justin Cronin’s The Twelve, the sequel to his really quite popular The Passage which I read and reviewed last year. Reading that old review it was pretty clear that I expected to plunge into the newer novel quite soon but after Christmas but I got diverted as I often do by new bright and shiny things so here we are in August and I’m only getting around to writing about it now having read it a few weeks ago.
I also notice from that older review that I had picked up some mixed vibes about The Twelve, and perhaps that’s why I put off reading it, but never fear I have got there in the end and there is something to be said for reading dark horror on very warm and sunny summer days.
So The Twelve is bit timey-wimey in as much as it takes as back to the events of the original novel as seen by a different group of characters all so that a rather nasty villain can receive a proper set-up before h forges on to create havoc in world fully of vampirey things. Most of the (not exactly) flashbacks are designed to give us a more detailed back story for characters old and new so that the big climax (and it is really quite a big one) will have the appropriate amount of oomph. There was at least one person i didn’t expect to be there at all and although i was pleased to see that person (despite what they were going through) it did kind of undercut the “what just happened there?!) last couple of paragraphs of The Passage.
It’s not as compelling as the first novel but I still enjoyed it a great deal, reading it in huge page-turning chunks. There’s a nice set up for the last book in the trilogy although I’ve no idea when that’s coming out.
So pretty cool all in all.
A new Neil Gaiman novel is always something to look forward to, and I pre-ordered my copy of The Ocean at the End of the Lane as soon as I was able, knowing that whatever the tale being told, it would be something special.
The book starts with our narrator in the present day, having come back to his hometown for some unspecified family event, and finds himself turning up at an old farmhouse at the end of the lane where hi house was. We then flashback some forty years to when he was a little boy, a very unhappy child living with his parents and his sister, not at all at ease with the world around him. The family’s lodger steals their car and commits suicide in it, troubled by money and having betrayed his friends. And it’s this event that puts our narrator in real danger, because it unleashes on the world some rather nasty things from beyond our world, and the only people who understand what it means and can help to put it right are a young girl, Lettie Hempstock, her mother and grandmother who all live in the farm with the duckpond that might be something significantly more than it appears.
I thought this was a lovely story, capturing magic and legend and myth, the unpleasantness of adults and the horror of things beyond our ken. There are some astonishingly grotesque characters, particularly the sinister nanny Ursula Monckton who is definitely something else. And at the centre is a little boy who makes a friend and has to find the courage to fight for what he cares about. It’s a difficult book to write about in some ways because it’s the atmosphere that’s so important. The best thing perhaps to repeat the quote by Neil Gaiman on the back cover of my edition:
[it] is a novel of childhood and memory. It is a story of magic, about the power of stories and how we face the darkness inside each of us. It’s about fear, and love, and death, and families. But, fundamentally, I hope, at its heart, it’s a novel about survival
I think that really does sum up the themes that he explores, and I was totally bowled over. Gaiman has such a strong, loyal following that there is always a danger that you review the man and his body of work rather than the individual story at hand. And there is a tendency for his stuff to build up such anticipation that there is a danger of being disappointed (like my friend Silvery Dude who thought it was but not up there with his favourite Neverwhere)
I’m not sure its my favourite of Gaiman’s books (for me that’s a tie between American Gods and The Graveyard Book) but it is remarkable and one that I plan to re-read in the future. A sweet tale with something very dark at the centre.
So, this is another one of those books that’s been on Mount TBR for what seems like forever. It’s been on and off various challenge book lists from RIP to 24-Hour-Readathon and back again but poor thing never got read. And that’s despite a strong recommendation from the Book God to whom it actually belongs.
The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque by Jeffrey Ford has a tantalising premise. Imagine that you are a tremendously successful portrait painter at the end of the nineteenth century, do famous and feted that you have become a bit jaded. Imagine that you are accosted outside your home in New York and offered and enormous sum of money to paint the portrait of a woman known only as Mrs Charbuque. But of course there is a catch; you have to paint her portrait without ever seeing her, based only on the sound of her voice and the answers to the questions you put to her and the conversations you may have. Would you do it?
Our hero Piero Piambo decides that he has nothing to lose, and the that the additional money he will be given if the final portrait looks like her will allow him to step back from the world of high society and paint only for himself.
In the background are his relationships with friends and lovers, the world of turn-of-the-century New York and a growing obsession with finding out more about the mysterious Mrs C, all the while dodging her deranged and jealous husband while a series of rather nasty murders is being carried to. Are all these things connected?
Well, of course they are, don’t be silly.
I really liked this book, largely because I took a shine to Piero himself, rather a decent cove who gets dragged into something even stranger than it at first appeared. It has a lovely atmosphere and there is a nicely realistic love story in the mix, it’s creepy in a cosy way, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. It was one of those enjoyably comfortably satisfying books to read. For some reason it made me think a bit of Kings of Eternity though I have no idea why as they seem to have little in common; perhaps it was tone or something, not sure.
Saw the likely end coming before I got there but didn’t mind that at all as it was delivered in a nicely over the top manner.
But this is a good read for a rainy afternoon. I liked it so much I made Silvery Dude buy a copy.
John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things is another one of those books that I’ve had for a while but only really paid attention to when Silvery Dude told me that I would enjoy it. I made a start sometime last summer and for some reason couldn’t get on with it; the Silvery One dared to suggest that I might find it difficult to put myself in the mind of the lead character given that I have “never been a 12-year-old boy”, I countered with the fact that I had lost my mother so thought I might have an inkling of what was going on in our hero’s head. Though of course I was much older, but still.
For the lead character is indeed a young boy called David whose mother has died and who has had to watch his father remarry and have a child with his second wife. World War Two is in full flow and David is struggling with what looks like OCD, anger over his loss and feeling left out in his father’s new family (though not because of his stepmother who I rather liked). Like any sensible child he has a love of books but they begin to speak to him at night and start to affect the way he look sat the world.
And then the Crooked Man comes and David crosses over into a dark and dangerous world populated by the myths, folk and fairy tales with which he has become absorbed. Enticed by what appears to be his mother’s voice, he has to make his way through many perils to reach the King of this land and find his way home.
I thought this was a really dark story, which makes sense when you think about what the fairy tales we all know and love were like before they were sanitised for the safe consumption of youngsters. The Huntress in particular is truly dreadful, but it is the Crooked Man himself, who preys on the fears and jealousies of children to get what he wants; truly evil. And I’m not ashamed to say that I cried at the end, sad and lovely all at once.
My edition of the book has a fabulous section at the end which gives background on the tales referenced in the story for those who find that sort of thing interesting – that would be me – and led to a little follow-up reading list:
- From the Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner
- Nocturnes by John Connolly
- Transformations by Anne Sexton
- The Island of Dr Moreau by HG Wells
David’s story stayed with me for days after I read it. Another potential re-read, and a further read for Once Upon a Time VII.
It’s so long since I’ve written a book review that I’m bit concerned that I’ve forgotten how but I am on a reading jag at the moment and have already built up a bit of a backlog (13 books and 7 films) with no sign of slowing down the reading/watching process, and I’m determined to catch-up before it all gets out of hand, so apologies in advance if your feeds etc. get swamped over the next week or so. Though some of the reviews may be fairly short given that I am known these days for having a poor remembery and some of this stuff goes back to May.
Let’s start with The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll. This was one of my reads for Carl’s Once Upon a Time challenge which finished on 21 June so well out of date in recording my thoughts. Carroll is one of those authors that I’ve been meaning to try over the years, as other bloggers have recommended. We already had this one in the house as part of the Book God’s Fantasy Masterwork collection so it seemed a good place to start. And it’s a book about books; well, a book about stories and their power and the obsession that readers sometimes develop with particular writers, especially writers that may have influenced during their childhoods.
The main characters in this story are Thomas, a school teacher who decides, along with his equally obsessed and fairly recently acquired girlfriend Saxony, to write a biography of the late and much-loved children’s author Marshall France. Previous attempts had failed under the apparently malign influence of France’s daughter Anna who still lives in her father’s house in the small town of Galen. Thomas and Saxony decide to move there in the hopes of persuading her to help. And that’s when things get weird.
This is one of those books that I wasn’t sure whether I liked or not until I had actually finished it, but it really stayed with me, especially the idea that the magic of writing could seep out into the real world. Elements of the story are really quite disturbing and it’s one of those fantasy novels that almost but not quite slips into horror. After a few months my considered opinion is that this is a really clever, slightly scary and distinctly odd book with a very original take on the imaginary becomes real theme and one that I may very well re-read.
And I’ll never look at bull terriers in quite the same way again.
I had a lovely birthday with some fabulous presents including the following books:
- Red Gloves by Christopher Fowler – wanted this for ages and it was possibly my present of the day
- Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear – Cthulhu-based short stories with a beautiful cover
- The Eiger Sanction by Trevanian – I enjoyed the Clint Eastwood film many years ago without realising it was based on the first of a series of thrillers (thanks to Anne Billson for telling me that) so thought I’d give this a try
- Tom-All-Alone’s by Lynn Shepherd – looks fascinating
My brother the Stanley Scot gave me a book voucher and I have planned a spending spree with Silvery Dude at the end of February.
Looking forward to diving into all of these!
I absolutely love HP Lovecraft; I gave a bit of background to my adoration when I reviewed one of his short stories during an ill-fated challenge to read 100 short stories in a year, and that still stands. He got to me young and I haven’t even tried tear myself away from the eldritch world of Cthulhu and the Elder Ones.
At the Mountains of Madness is probably my favourite Lovecraft novella and I was excited when the Book God pointed out that a graphic novel of said tale had been published and of course I had to get it. Rather good it is too, capturing the horror of the ill-fated Miskatonic University expedition of 1930 without being too gruesome.
At the same time I came across a short e-book called Ice Cores, a set of essays on ATMOM which look at the influences on Lovecraft which may have had an impact on his writing of the novella , as well as the context in which he was
writing, and a bit on the story’s publication history. The author links fascination with the polar regions right back to Frankenstein, some of Poe’s stories (Arthur Gordon Pym for one) and in turn some works that Lovecraft himself influenced. An interesting diversion, though much of what he covers is necessarily speculation. Gets you thinking though.
All of this makes up a tiny bit for my disappointment that, for the moment at least, it doesn’t seem the movie version of ATMOM planned by Guillermo del Toro and set to star Tom Cruise will be made. Let’s hope that changes soon; I would love to see what he might do with this atmospheric tale.
Bride of the Book God 