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There are twenty stories in Lovecraft Unbound, which I’ve chosen as my read for RIP VI’s Peril of the Short Story, and I’m doing them in batches of five. Here are my thoughts on the first tranche:
- The Crevasse – a classic Lovecraft creepy, claustrophobic tale of unnamed things in the Antarctic – really liked this one;
- The Office of Doom – what do you think might be the consequences if you got a copy of the Necronomicon through an ILL? – a gross oversimplification of a great story
- Sincerely Petrified – can a made-up legend take on a life of its own? – interesting premise let down by really very unsympathetic characters
- The Din of Celestial Birds – don’t go into the hovel, no seriously, don’t – doh, too late – couldn’t really get into this one at all
- The Tenderness of Jackals – dark urban fantasy, but didn’t feel that Lovecraftian to me….
So a mixed bunch as you might expect, will be interesting to see what the next five are like!
I think my reading slump might just be over, and this is the book that sorted it all out. All it took was a fast-paced sci-fi thriller with zombies which I couldn’t put down to remind me how much fun books actually are and get me out of my rut.
So, this is the story of Georgia Mason and her brother Shaun, bloggers in a world where zombies are very real. Twenty years before (the book is set in 2034, so a near future thriller) the release of two viral based cures for cancer and the common cold combined to create something new and horrible which leads to the dead becoming undead in that zombie way. This infection has changed the whole world; for example, any animal weighing more than about 40lbs will convert so people don’t really have pets, livestock is very carefully controlled (although for some not controlled enough), there are no-go areas and travel is a dangerous business unless you are properly equipped.
The way the media reacted (or rather didn’t react) to the initial outbreak has led to suspicion and distrust, so new ways of getting stories out to people through accredited blogs have sprung up. And that’s where Georgia, Shaun and their colleague Buffy come in; their big break is to be selected to cover the presidential campaign of Senator Peter Ryman.
And that’s what makes this a bit different from your run-of-the-mill zombie horror story. Because the zombies and the infection and the changes to everyone’s way of life are in the background, and this is really a thriller about political campaigning, dirty tricks, conspiracy theories and the fight for the country’s direction. It just so happens that because of the zombie thing the stakes are much higher and more (un)deadly.
I loved this; just couldn’t put it down. It helps that I could visualise this as a sort of West Wing with ghouls and I did play “cast the movie” while I was reading it but it is genuinely gripping and I really wanted to know who was behind the awful things that were happening. And it also helped that I really, really liked Georgia.
The structure of the book really helps things move along too; punchy chapters interspersed with extracts from the various blog reports being posted by Georgia and her team. And in places it is genuinely moving.
So don’t let the zombies put you off, this might give you nightmares but they’re likely to be more about what politicians are willing to do to get power rather than how best to despatch the not-dead.
Looking forward to reading the sequel as soon as I can get my hands on it.
I seem to have an awful lot of reading going on at the moment; some of these books have been sitting on my table for months (if not longer) and I will at some point have to decide whether I am going to persevere or give up, but not just yet, I think:
- The Mitford Girls by Mary S Lovell – “‘I am normal, my wife is normal, but my daughters are each more foolish than the other‘ bewailed Lord Redesdale, father of the Mitford girls. Part of my Mitford obsession as mentioned briefly here.
- The Sicilian Vespers by Steven Runciman – “On 30 March 1282, as the bells of Palermo were ringing for Vespers, the Sicilian townsfolk, crying ‘Death to the French’, slaughtered the garrison and administration of their Angevin King.”
- Bone Song by John Meaney – “Tristopolis. Death’s City. Countless dead lie in the miles of catacombs beneath its streets.” Zombies and stuff in noir crime story.
- The Women of Muriel Spark and Muriel Spark – reading these as background to the great abandoned but about to be resurrected Reading Muriel Project
- Growing by Leonard Woolf – an autobiography of the years 1904 to 1911, set aside for some reason I can’t quite fathom
- The Nightmare Factory by Thomas Ligotti – to be dipped into, prose is very, very lush.
- Jigs and Reels by Joanne Harris – forgot all about this one, must finish it as I’ve enjoyed the stories I’ve read so far
- Small Avalanches by Joyce Carol Oates – another dipper
- O, Beloved Kids by Rudyard Kipling – Kipling’s letters to his children, which was intended to kick-start a Kipling fest after I visited his house in the summer; still something I want to do…..
And sad to say I’m still reading some of the books on this list, namely:
- Foreign Devils on the Silk Road by Peter Hopkirk – as recommended by the Book God after an excellent lecture on engaging with China which we attended at the British Museum
- The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks – vaguely unsettling what to do if they were real guide-book
- The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping, edited by Jill Foulston – which called out to me by name when shopping in Blackwell’s on the Charing Cross Road for a present for Silvery Dude
So I’ve been talking recently about my reading slump, and several people suggested that I needed to be reading more than one book at a time (I have tended to be very traditional and have no more than two, three at most, books on the go); that way I can switch as my mood takes me.
That may seem very obvious to many of you, but let’s note for the record here that one person’s obvious is usually my “jings, why didn’t I think of that?”
So I have thrown myself into this with gusto, and am currently at various stages of reading the pile at you see here:
- Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock – a planned read for the Once Upon a Time challenge, this is a sequel to the equally excellent Mythago Wood
- Making Money by Terry Pratchett – will confess that I’m stalled with this one, I should be loving it but am finding it difficult to pick up again – another planned read for Once Upon a Time
- The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd – recommended by the Silvery Dude and only started late last night – creepy
- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell – because I’m in a bit of a non-fiction phase and I keep on meaning to read this
- Foreign Devils on the Silk Road by Peter Hopkirk – as recommended by the Book God after an excellent lecture on engaging with China which we attended at the British Museum
- Classic Crimes by William Roughead – what it says on the tin
- The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks – vaguely unsettling what to do if they were real guide-book
- The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping, edited by Jill Foulston – which called out to me by name when shopping in Blackwell’s on the Charing Cross Road for a present for Silvery Dude
- Duncan Grant by Frances Spalding – a Bloomsbury fix for the Art History Reading Challenge
And I might even finish some of these!
So, I’ve probably stated elsewhere that I’m not really very good with zombies, they totally creep me out and I’ve tended to avoid them for that reason.
However, I’ve recently begun to find the literary versions rather interesting, starting with Handling the Undead, and now in World War Z.
I think I picked this up on a trip to Forbidden Planet but I’m not entirely sure why; possibly the cover but more likely because I read about it on someone else’s blog and it just sounded like something I would want to read. And it certainly was, because I was totally drawn into the story and ended up cracking through the novel in almost a single sitting.
So this is looking on ten years of fighting a zombie plague (for want of a better description) which has swept across the planet from its beginnings in China, that led to a huge, almost catastrophic reduction in the population of earth, a massive war and a realignment of the planet’s political structures.
For me the huge success of this novel was the fact that it looked back and was structured as an oral history, the sort of thing you see on satellite TV channels every day; people from all walks of life and all affected nations telling their stories. It’s well-written and pacy and has enough gruesomness in it to satisfy the horror fan but without being overwhelming. And the people and stories are credible and not stereotypical, and advance the plot in a convincing way.
And the way the zombie menace spread, the inefficiency of a variety of governments in dealing with it and so on has parallels in today’s world. If you replace “zombie” with bird flu or Ebola and imagine what would happen if something like that got loose in the world, our reaction would probably be something like this – trying to confine it, failing to do so and then panicking before taking quite radical and drastic action.
All without the need to kill the undead with baseball bats, of course.
Really very, very good.
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 …
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.
I actually finished reading this weeks ago but have only just got round to writing this review because I didn’t really know what I wanted to say. Some of you will remember that I read my first Dan Simmons novel towards the end of last year (my review is here) and that I absolutely loved it. The Song of Kali is a trickier proposition.
So the American poet Robert Luczak has been commissioned by a magazine to write an article about the Indian poet M. Das, who appeared to be dead but has now resurfaced with a new work. Luczak’s wife is Indian, so she and their baby daughter accompany him to Calcutta to locate Das and see if a deal to publish the new poetry can be worked out. And then, of course, it all goes horribly wrong.
Has Das come back from the dead? Is there going to be a new age of Kali where violence and destruction hold sway? Will the Luczak family get out of all of this unscathed?
This seems to me to be much more of a horror than a fantasy work; it’s incredibly dark, grim, violent and really, really disturbing in places. I struggled to finish it despite the fact that it is so well written, because it is pretty compelling stuff which lodges in your mind, and actually I wasn’t sure that I really did want to know how things were going to work out.
This is very much an acquired taste, and was my first read for the Once Upon a Time III challenge.
I don’t normally do posts that are just about stuff, but it has been that kind of week really. I’ve finally caught up with my blog reading, having been out of touch really since the middle of January when my flu/trip to Glasgow/bad weather/work overload phase started. Everything is back to normal except for the work thing which is likely to continue for the rest of this year (but which I’m secretly enjoying, if I’m honest….) So I’ve resigned myself to blogging even more erratically than normal and not really commenting elsewhere (sorry guys) but you never know, if I get myself organised things might improve.
So, stuff:
- I’m really very sad that Steven Page is leaving Barenaked Ladies – I know the band will probably continue and will still be great, but it just won’t be the same
- One of my New Year’s resolutions was to buy fewer books and to read more from my tbr pile. I’ve done quite well, though helped by having my birthday at the end of January and getting my fix through the Book God’s gift-giving, but I have finally succumbed and bought two novels which I’ve been waiting for with bated breath – Drood by Dan Simmons(who can ignore a book which begins “My name is Wilkie Collins”?) and Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist (after last year’s Swedish vampires, we now have Swedish zombies). Irresistible.
- I took delivery of some Dr Who figures as shown in the picture (along with a mini-Cyberman and mini-Dalek) – this is potentially very sad when you consider that I am a forty-seven year old woman, but I choose to see it as something positive – everyone has their particular enthusiasm and mine just happens to be a very small rubber David Tennant
All that plus the Book God and I are going to see Watchmen at the London IMAX tomorrow afternoon…………….
Updated – and Criminal Minds is back on British TV so Friday nights are fun again and I no longer have to wonder about who got blown up in the SUVs…
Bride of the Book God 