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So following my plea to you all here, the votes are in, and (excluding Silvery Dude’s own not-counted-cos-it’s-his-fault-anyway comment) the results are 3 for, 1 against and 1 don’t know.
I am nothing if not a woman of my word and so I will give in and watch the thing……
I’ve set myself some conditions for viewing which are:
I will watch the movie before the end of October 2009;
I will not prejudge the outcome but will keep an open mind;
I will review the film fairly and honestly on Bride of the Screen God.
However, some decent chocolate and alcohol of a suitable nature must be available to sustain me during my ordeal (describing it as such kind of undermines the not-prejudging thing, but hey, that’s me, underminer-girl)
I actually have a copy of the DVD in my possession as I could see how this was going; the pouty teen angst cover is depressing me already, hence Mr Pattinson’s mug at the top of this post.
And lord help us, the sequel is out in November……
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.
The RIP IV challenge is indeed here and after some consideration I have come up with the following list from which to select my four books for Peril the First. I’m also going to try to participate in Short Story Sunday if I can.
So the list is:
- The Lamplighter by Anthony O’Neill
- something by Stephen King – either Duma Key, Cell, Just After Sunset, or even a re-read of ‘Salem’s Lot in this rather lovely edition
- Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist
- 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill
- The Mark of the Beast by Rudyard Kipling
- Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
- Come Closer by Sara Gran
- Drood by Dan Simmons (despite the mixed reviews)
So that looks like a reasonable selection, but what of the other challenges I’ve been involved in? Well I still have good intentions for the 42 Challenge and the Art History Reading Challenge, the 100 Shots of Short is looking a bit peaky, but I am definitely going to have to throw in the towel when it comes to the Non-Fiction Five Challenge – that’s just not going to happen this year.
This is not my first exposure to the Gothic creepy tales of Chris Priestley; last year I read and reviewed this, and Tales of Terror from the Black Ship has a very similar structure.
Ethan and Cathy are ill, and have been left home alone by their father who has gone off in search of a doctor. But this is no ordinary home; The Old Inn is perched on top of a cliff which is only joined to the Cornish coastline by a bridge of rock. A huge and powerful storm has blown up and while they wait for their father to return, they are joined by a mysterious stranger called Thackeray, a youngish man who has somehow managed to make his way to the inn through the treacherous weather. He settles in to see out the storm, and to “entertain” the children he tells them creepy stories, all connected with the sea and sailors.
And after that it’s more of the same, which is no bad thing in my book. The stories are nicely unsettling, as is the wraparound tale, because it becomes very clear that something is not quite right in Ethan and Cathy’s world.
Favourites for me were The Boy in the Boat (beware innocent looking little children), Nature (you will never look at snails the same way again, though in all honesty I have trouble looking at them at the best of times), and The Scrimshaw Imp (I didn’t know what scrimshaw was until I read this).
I really enjoyed this book, and the unsettling nature of some of the tales wasn’t lessened by the fact that I was reading it during a more or less sunny late July. Recommended for the Gothic lovers among us, this would have worked really well for Carl’s RIP challenge.
So you have two children with a pet gazelle (like you do) and a treasure map, who go off exploring behind their father’s back and find a whole world underneath the city full of monsters and pirates and creepiness. Will they find what they are looking for? Do the 26 lines of the story actually stick to the alphabet as we know it, or do things go a little awry?
This is a great alphabet book, full of wonderfully creepy illustrations with lots of detail to pore over at your leisure. It’s huge fun and I for one became very fond of that gazelle.
Oh and look out for the creatures with deep sea diving helmets for heads…..
Another read for the Dream King Challenge.
I actually finished reading Declare last weekend, but a mixture of workload and being severely under the weather for the past three days (can’t decide if it’s a new cold or if I just haven’t entirely got rid of the one I had before Christmas and it’s just come back to remind me how much it cares) meant that I haven’t been out from under enough to consider posting. But I’m beginning to feel a little bit better and may have revived sufficient brain cells to do this some justice. Because I really, really enjoyed this novel.
Bit of background; the Book God is a Powers fan and has been encouraging me to try his stuff, but the only thing I’ve read is The Anubis Gates which was good but didn’t have me rushing to the bookshelves to locate any more. Every time I say to the BG that I’m looking for something to read, he says “why not try Declare?” but I’ve usually gone off and found something else. The thing that made me change my mind this time was reading The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross – more of that later.
Declare brings together espionage and the supernatural; that’s clear from the beginning. It tells the story of Andrew Hale, recruited by the British Secret Service at the age of seven, undercover in France during the Second World War and in Berlin and the Middle East afterwards, and his connection with Kim Philby and an unfinished operation code-named Declare.
I’m not going to say anything more about the plot; the pleasure of this book is how convincing it is about the world it operates in, of spies and resistance movements and the use of the supernatural by countries for their own ends. It’s very creepy in places, incredibly atmospheric, and Powers has taken what we know about Philby and put an unusual interpretation on the facts. It’s worth reading the author’s afterword.
As for Stross, well he became aware of Declare when writing The Atrocity Archives and although superficially they have common themes, they really are quite different. I think Stross himself said that if he was writing like Len Deighton, then Powers was John le Carre.
I can really recommend this.
So yesterday found me in our garage unpacking a couple of boxes of books which have been in storage there for goodness knows how long, and I came across the Library of America edition of HP Lovecraft’s Tales, a handsome book which gives an air of scholarly gravitas to stories that are usually printed with more lurid covers. I’m sure I’ve said elsewhere that I have a huge affection for Lovecraft; I first came across him while I was still at primary school in the early 1970s (I must have been about 11); I still have the original paperback and looking at the cover I’m surprised my parents didn’t take it away from me, but there you are.
The first story in the collection is The Statement of Randolph Carter written in 1919 and full of things that would be familiar to all readers of his later work (Lovecraft himself described it as a ghastly tale and said that it was based on an actual dream). Carter and his friend Harley Warren head off into Big Cypress Swamp but only Carter makes it back out. This is his attempt to explain what happened based on the little he can recall.
It’s full of wonderful stuff; the pair have talked of “why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years” which gives you some idea of what they were off looking for. The tone of the first couple of pages put me in mind of Charles Gray as The Criminologist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, though the story gets a bit more hysterical towards the end. Not one of my favourites but it was good fun to read it again.
It’s always exciting when you find a new author that you think you are really going to enjoy, and extremely gratifying when you turn out to be right, as I have been with Charles Stross. I have read about him for a long time, and been intrigued by reviews of his books, but until now haven’t tried any of his works. And in looking for something different after my failure with Emperor, I decided to throw myself into The Atrocity Archives and I’m so glad I did because it is exactly what I needed!
In the acknowledgements at the beginning of the book Stross refers to three authors who made it possible for him to write the book – HP Lovecraft, Neal Stephenson and Len Deighton, which is a really interesting mix when you stop to think about it. The first two have been referred to on this blog more than once (I think – they are both favourites) and Deighton I know mostly through Michael Caine playing Harry Palmer in the movies but don’t think I have ever read.
So as you may have gleaned this is about spies and codes and Nameless Old Ones as seen through the eyes of Bob Howard who has been conscripted into the organisation known as The Laundry and about his experiences as a field agent. It is almost impossible to explain the plot without giving anything away but it is really enjoyable and if you are a civil servant you will recognise some of the worst traits of government bureaucracy (although obviously exaggerated – I don’t remember any zombie doormen, but you never know, I just might not have been looking in the right places). It appeals to the X-Files-and-Fringe-loving part of me, the bit that finds gibbous and rugose perfectly acceptable adjectives, and accepts whole-heartedly that there are lots of secret basements all over the place harbouring information it is better for us not to know about.
I really, really, enjoyed this and am already hunting out more of his work. And don’t skip the afterword – really interesting stuff there too.
I feel as if I have been reading this book forever; that isn’t a criticism of the book itself, just that I started it before my hiatus and have only just finished it today so it has been with me for what seems like a very long time.
I have to say upfront that I was intrigued about how I was going to react to Something Wicked This Way Comes, because I saw the film adaptation many, many years ago, and although it was only one viewing it has stuck with me ever since. As suspected the film and the book are different in a number of ways, but both are equally enjoyable.
This is the story of two boys, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, and how they get drawn into the sinister world of Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show when it turns up in their Illinois hometown. The carnival, and particularly its proprietor Mr Dark, is incredibly sinister and it becomes clear very quickly that all is not as it seems.
This story deals with so many themes – the desire to grow up, the lure of temptation, disappointment, the power of goodness – that it’s difficult to know where to start. I found it wonderfully atmospheric and quite chilling, and the characters – Mr Dark, Charles Halloway, the Witch – really memorable. It is interesting to me that my favourite character in the book (as in the film where he is played by the wonderful Jason Robards) is Charles Halloway, the older father of a young son wondering what he had a achieved with his life.
I think that this is definitely one that I will come back to in the future – if you haven’t tried Bradbury before this is a good place to start. And isn’t it a great cover?
I started writing this post, for the last book in the RIP III challenge, back on 4 October, and it seems strange to come back to something I read all those weeks ago and try to put down in words why I enjoyed it. Because I really did enjoy Uncle Montague – a collection of stories told to Edgar during apparently one visit to Uncle Montague in his strange house in the woods.
The stories themselves have a connecting theme – they are all ostensibly about bad things happening to usually young people who don’t listen to what they are told, although I’m not sure that you could call them morality tales. They have a lovely creepy Gothic atmosphere to them and are enhanced by the wonderful illustrations by David Roberts – I particularly like the expression on young Edgar’s face on the cover, which gives a strong impression of someone trying desperately not to look round at what might be behind him.
Particular favourites are Climb Not and A Ghost Story, but they are all very good, and the revelation of exactly what predicament Uncle Montague is in was satisfying. So definitely worth reading, though as I said more atmospheric than genuinely scary.
This was my final read for the RIP III challenge.
Bride of the Book God 