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Oct. 20th, 2009 @ 02:39 pm Book review: Earthbound
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When I was reading The Turn of the Screw a couple of weeks ago I got the idea that it might be fun to write a ghost story play. I have lots of other ideas I want to work on first but it sounded interesting enough that I thought I'd read a couple of classic ghost stories to get some ideas. I bought some MR James the other day but in the meantime I already had a copy of Richard Matheson's Earthbound, in which a couple in their forties go to a seaside cottage in the off-season to help their ailing marriage. It doesn't quite work out that way as David is seduced by the ghost of Marianna, a woman condemned as a slut in life and not much changed in the afterlife. I can see why it's one of the more obscure Matheson books - it's OK and the spooky atmosphere works well at times, but it never quite gripped me. It probably doesn't help that the story is all about sex, and sex scenes in books almost invariably make me cringe.
Oct. 16th, 2009 @ 01:56 pm Book review: Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet
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After reading Quiche of Death I decided MC Beaton's Agatha Raisin books might be good for occasional light relief. Murder mysteries aren't my favourite genre but so far these books balance somewhere between a straightforward mystery and a spoof. The actual mystery in Vicious Vet isn't particularly exciting but the real reason to read them is Agatha herself, the anti-Marple who solves mysteries despite her utter lack of understanding human nature. The best moments in the second book are her terrible attempts at pursuing her handsome next-door neighbour, and his horrified responses to her ultra-aggressive courting technique had me laughing out loud a couple of times.
Oct. 9th, 2009 @ 02:26 pm Book review: The Turn of the Screw
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Back in August the Times was giving away free paperback classics for a couple of weeks, and one of them was Henry James' ghost story The Turn of the Screw. Obviously I'd heard it was a seminal spooky tale but didn't know much else about it, so it was interesting to read the thing itself. It was enjoyable, although I kept expecting a twist that never came. And I can see why the little bio page at the start of the book mentions James' idiosyncratic writing style - his neverending sentences make even some of mine seem comprehensible in comparison. You can definitely see though how the book planted the seeds for many a haunted house story to come.
Oct. 6th, 2009 @ 01:14 pm Book review: Living Dead in Dallas/Club Dead
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It's not like me to revisit a book series this quickly, but since TrueBlood, the TV adaptation, starts on Channel 4 tomorrow night, I thought I'd read the next two of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse books before I moved on to the adaptation. Both books are still plenty of fun, although I think this is clearly going to be one of those series where, in the books at least, I like the supporting characters a lot better than the leads. At least Sookie, with her occasional fainting fits and tendency to throw strops isn't a complete Mary-Sue, but I did get bored of her constant bragging about her looks ("I'm unbelievably attractive and did I mention my boobs are HUGE!") As for her vampire boyfriend Bill, he's so special and unique and different from the other nasty vampires in that he's er, hang on, it'll come to me. Pass. Never mind, Harris is good at throwing in some fun supporting characters and witty touches, so I'll be continuing with the books at some point.
Sep. 29th, 2009 @ 10:42 am Book review: Firmin
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I read most of Sam Savage's debut novel Firmin in one go on Sunday, sitting in the park. Actually it turned out to be less appropriate as sunny-afternoon reading than I'd expected. The story of a rat who's born in a bookshop basement, and as the runt of the litter has to nibble on books to survive, Firmin ends up with the ability to read. Although it's got its lighter moments, Firmin is mostly a desperately sad story, with the overwhelming theme being one of crushing loneliness. It's definitely an interesting idea and well-written, but not as much light relief as the subject-matter might suggest.
Sep. 26th, 2009 @ 11:19 am Book review: Thicker Than Water
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I seem to have got into a pattern of reading one Mike Carey novel just as the next one is published. So, true to form, the 5th book has just come out and I've got round to reading the 4th one, Thicker Than Water. As the title suggests there's a bit more of a family storyline involved this time (although there's literal blood as well of course, as the main villain is a demon who thrives on driving people to self-harm) with Felix Castor's older brother, who has only featured in minor appearances beforehand, taking a more central role. Much of the action centres on a depressing South London estate, and as well as significantly moving on the ongoing plotlines regarding Fix's posessed friend Rafi and the succubus Juliet, we get some important new information about the series' supernatural mythology. Despite the dark subject matter there's still a lot of very funny prose, and this was probably my favourite Castor novel so far. Carey's planning more in the series, which is good news - although it's great to read something completely new it's also fun to go back into a familiar fictional universe, and the Castor novels have definitely joined things like the Tom Thorne mysteries, the Shardlake series or Brenda and Effie in that regard for me. Although Thicker Than Water ends on a cliffhanger so I might end up reading book 5 a bit sooner than usual.
Sep. 18th, 2009 @ 07:07 pm Book review: Black Butterfly
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In his Lucifer Box series of books, Mark Gatiss chose to jump the action forward in each book by a couple of decades, but unlike James Bond, Box is a secret agent who actually ages accordingly. So by the third book, Black Butterfly, it's just after Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and Box is about to retire. So on his last adventure we've got an elderly agent pining for the glory days when he could get up to anything he wanted, both action-wise and in the bedroom. It's an interesting idea in theory, but in practice he still manages to do a lot, with just the odd gripe about his joints aching. Overall this is again a very silly spoof of spy novels, although not quite as goood as the first two - a lot of the humour comes from increasingly silly/smutty character names (Kingdom Kum?) Having said that my favourite gag was the evil organisation that goes by the name A.C.R.O.N.I.M. And the story picks up towards the end, with a lot of silliness involving evil boy scouts. But as he reminded us with last Christmas' TV ghost story Crooked House, Gatiss isn't a one-trick pony so if this is, as it would seem to be, the final Lucifer Box book, that probably wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Sep. 17th, 2009 @ 10:48 am Book review: Porno
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I did say things happpen in threes, including things with dirty-sounding titles. In this case Porno is Irvine Welsh's sequel to Trainspotting (although it also features characters from Glue.) Nine years after Renton ripped his friends off and ran away, the story starts with Sick Boy who's been in London working as a pimp, and returns to Leith when his aunt offers to sell him a pub for a low price. Once there he gets involved with his old friends who are making stag movies for their own amusement, and decides to up the ante and make a high-quality porn film. This takes him to Amsterdam where he finally finds Renton again.

It's a good sequel to the original, less focused on drugs (although all the main characters have given up smack, most of them are still on plenty of other things) and more on the twisted friendships they still cling on to. As with most Irvine Welsh books the use of phonetic Edinburgh dialect means it took me a while to get through, especially the chapters narrated by Begbie (I can't imagine Welsh has that much of a readership outside the UK - wasn't the film of Trainspotting subtitled in America?) but as usual he does a great job of differentiating between the different character voices. A bit of a lighter book than the first one, and an interesting return to the characters.
Sep. 6th, 2009 @ 04:50 pm Book review: Dead Until Dark
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Everyone raves about the TV series True Blood but I haven't really got into torrenting and over here it's on a TV channel I don't have so I'll have to rent it when it comes out on DVD. In the meantime I thought I'd have a go at Charlaine Harris' novels, on which the series is based. Dead Until Dark is the first one, and it's quite fun, with some witty touches - I particularly liked Harris' tendency to give the vampires really ordinary names, a gag on the exotic names they're usually saddled with. Here the main vampires are called Bill and Eric, which is hardly "Lestat."

The book's set in Louisiana and it's interesting how there's little snatches inserted which suggest some of the inhabitants refuse to accept how the Civil War ended, and there's an undercurrent of racism that hasn't gone away, although for now this isn't made a big deal of. Some of the central ideas seem lifted straight from episodes of Buffy - lead character Sookie Stackhouse (well I guess if the vamps aren't going to have silly names...) can read minds and finds this debilitating, but she's relieved to find she can't read vampire minds. There's also a subculture of humans who get a sexual thrill out of being bitten. But Harris does have Sookie threaten to name her dog Buffy, so I guess she's acknowledging the influence.

The covers are a bit offputting, looking like cheesy paranormal romance novels, and to an extent this is what this is, and for me the book gets tedious when Sookie and Bill get together and there's several sex scenes in a row, but once that's out of the way it resolves itself into a fun little mystery. I think I'll give a couple of the other books a chance before moving on to the TV show.
Sep. 2nd, 2009 @ 11:34 am Book review: Explorers of the New Century
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Magnus Mills' early books were often compared to The League of Gentlemen and I can easily see the comparison (The Restraint of Beasts includes some slightly mysterious meat and All Quiet on the Orient Express features a corner shop that doesn't really like selling the best biscuits to non-locals.) More recent reviews seems to namecheck Kafka and Beckett a lot. He writes short, comic stories with an indefinable sense of menace in the background. Actually in that respect maybe Pinter is another name to add to the list of comparisons.

Explorers of the New Century feels like a slight departure from his usual British landscapes that feel both familiar and completely fantasy-based. A sort of riff on the Scott vs Amundsen race to the Pole, the chapters alternate between two teams of explorers in a barrren terrain trying to reach the furthest point from civilisation. It's a fable, although what it's a fable about I can't say without giving away the twist about halfway through. Overall it's a bit darker and not quite as funny as his other novels. It's still well worth reading but for me the biggest problems is that Mills has given himself a lot more characters to play with in a novel as short as his others, so they never really get time to develop into the gallery of eccentrics he usually produces, and especially in the larger, British team of explorers, they tend to merge into one. Like all of Mills' books though this is definitely worth a read, it just doesn't quite suck you into its world as much as some of the others.
Aug. 31st, 2009 @ 07:10 pm Book review: The Killing Doll / Live Flesh
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I haven't read any Ruth Rendell books since I was in my teens (at the time I almost exclusively read whodunnits, and didn't really like her non-Wexford psychological thrillers) but I found a job lot of her books in one of the Amazon sales and thought I'd give her another go. This is one of those "two-novels-in-one-volume" books, and features two of her novels from the mid-'80s.

The Killing Doll features two parallel stories about mentally unstable young people: A young girl with a disfiguring birthmark who has become a surrogate mother to her younger brother; when he starts to develop an interest in black magic she becomes fixated with it, even long after he has given it up as a juvenile hobby. And a paranoid schizophrenic who barricades himself into a tunnel and occasionally murders people. I actually found this a hard read at times, because Rendell makes the killer such a pathetic, traumatised figure that I ended up feeling sorry for him to the extent that I found it upsetting. It's not a bad book but the ending's a bit anticlimactic.

I preferred Live Flesh (which was made into a Pedro Almodóvar film, although he changed quite a lot - well, he added a cute naked guy so I wasn't going to complain) which has a more straightforwardly nasty protagonist. A rapist is cornered by the police and ends up shooting a policeman, leaving him paraplegic. After ten years in prison he's released and develops an obsession with the disabled ex-policeman and his fiancee. Once again Rendell is dealing with mentally disturbed people but the theme here is taking personal responsibility, as Victor blames everyone but himself for what happened. I'm in need of something fluffier to read after these two but they made for an interesting change from my usual reading.
Aug. 23rd, 2009 @ 12:41 pm Book review: To The Devil - A Diva!
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Paul Magrs is the author of the brilliant Brenda & Effie novels, in which the Bride of Frankenstein has moved to Whitby to run a B&B, and his earlier novel To The Devil - A Diva! feels like a bit of a dry run for that series. It starts with a surprisingly touching, low-key sequence where two girls from Manchester are evacuated to the Lake District during WWII, where their adoptive "parents" seem to get ever-stranger. Move to the present day and Sally seems to be just another pensioner, while Katy has become Karla, a seemingly ageless actress who was a cult figure in the '60s and '70s as the star of numerous soft-core lesbian vampire flicks (my favourite title of these is "Get Inside Me, Satan!") The story kicks off as Karla returns to Manchester to join an X-rated soap opera, whose gay star isn't thrilled about his new co-star as he blames her for his mother's death.

As the title suggests this is a high-camp romp, largely set around Manchester's gay village where Sally's grandson strikes up a relationship with Lance, the disgruntled soap star. The characters are nicely drawn, it's very funny and often filthy - the gay sex scenes should keep the slashfic fans Round These Parts happy. The sex scenes are also hilarious, notably one character's encounter with a man with a cock shaped like a Walnut Whip. Sally does feels like a precursor to Brenda (she even has a best friend called Effie) and my main criticism is that the story's climax is a bit abrupt - it definitely feels likes Magrs intended this to be the first in a series, but he did the Bride novels instead.
Aug. 19th, 2009 @ 12:20 pm Book review: The Silent Gondoliers
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William Goldman's novella The Silent Gondoliers is told by S. Morgenstern, the same alter-ego he used in The Princess Bride, and who once again intersperses the story with little notes and interruptions. Here the story is about the Venice goldoliers, who once were the finest singers in the world - and the mystery of why they stopped singing, which is tied in with a gondolier called Luigi. The story's too short to say much more without giving it all away but suffice it to say it's another charming fairytale that Goldman populates with a cast of comic grotesques and occasional ridiculous touches - like the pitfalls of training with the world's greatest singing coach, who happens to be deaf.
Aug. 18th, 2009 @ 12:27 pm Book review: Mind the Gap
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Christopher Golden is one of my favourite obscure fantasy writers, but I wasn't entirely convinced by his The Veil trilogy. But I enjoyed myself a lot more with this, co-written by Tim Lebbon and the first in the Hidden Cities series. In Mind the Gap the city in question is London, and as the title suggests Golden and Lebbon are among the many writers to be fascinated by the London Underground and the many "lost" tunnels and stations that are still in existence but long since fallen out of use. A 17-year-old girl returns home to find her mother murdered and herself hunted by the sinister "Uncles" who've looked after them both for years. She ends up hiding in the hidden tunnels of the Underground with a modern-day Fagin's gang of petty thieves. Although the story kicks off quickly I thought the novel floundered in tone for a few chapters before settling down into an involving story that mixes the supernatural with the simply a bit weird. One annoyance for me though was that with a British writer on board there's no reason why some of Golden's Americanisms coming from English characters couldn't have been changed; there's a few too many "gotten"s for my liking. But a fun book in any case.
Aug. 6th, 2009 @ 01:03 pm Book review: Let the Right One In
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The film of Let the Right One In has been making waves this year, but I wanted to read John Ajvide Lindqvist's original novel first. Set in 1981, Oskar is a bullied 12-year-old who strikes up a friendship with Eli, the strange little girl who moves next door. Eli is a 200-year-old vampire stuck in a child's body, travelling with a paedophile who's obsessed with her, and who murders people for their blood so Eli doesn't have to feed directly from them and risk infecting them.

Following a variety of characters who are affected in one way or another by Eli's arrival, this is an excellent horror novel, very gory but also desperately sad. Lindqvist has a lot of original takes on vampire lore, and his interpretation of what exactly happens if a vampire enters uninvited is particularly memorable. It's also a decidedly odd story, where just when you think you know where you stand he piles on another level of weirdness. My only criticism would be that in its puzzle-like structure, a couple of plot strands that seem like they're going to tie in at the end actually end up going nowhere. It won't do anything to change Sweden's reputation for misery but it's a genuinely dark and really involving story.
Jul. 28th, 2009 @ 01:03 pm Book review: The Final Solution
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Michael Chabon is the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay which I absolutely loved, so I wanted to have a look at some of his other work. After that epic one I picked a much shorter book, The Final Solution, which I got through in about a day. Chabon's homage to a particularly famous literary detective (who remains unnamed although it's pretty obvious who he is) it takes place in 1944 when the detective, now an old man, is asked for help solving an unusual murder. He agrees to take on this final case, not so much because of the murder, but because he hopes to also find a missing parrot, the sole companion of a mute, refugee Jewish boy. It's quite a charming, fun little adventure, very affectionate towards the original stories it pays homage to, and shows Chabon's ability to adapt his writing style to a variety of different genres.
Jul. 26th, 2009 @ 09:47 pm Book review: What Dreams May Come
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Once again I'm catching up on Richard Matheson's novels, this time a romance/afterlife fantasy, What Dreams May Come. Chris dies in a car accident and relates his experiences in "Summerland," a kind of heaven, as he waits for his wife to join him. However when she commits suicide she's sent to her own private limbo, and Chris decides instead of waiting for her to come out of it in her own time to try and rescue her. It's well-written of course and Matheson's vision of the afterlife is an interesting one, but it's probably my least favourite of his novels I've read so far: Chris' constant mentions of how much he misses his wife in the first half of the book get annoying pretty quickly. The second half as he visits the nastier parts of the afterlife is more interesting, but overall this is a more sentimental novel than those of Matheson's that I've read before. But then I guess any book whose movie adaptation starred Robin Williams is likely to be a bit cloying.
Jul. 22nd, 2009 @ 12:59 pm Book review: A Spot of Bother
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I loved Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (I recently checked and yes, years after I read it, re-reading the last two pages can still make me teary) and I knew the follow-up was unlikely to live up to it. Luckily I went into A Spot of Bother not expecting something as good, so I was able to enjoy it on its own merits. A sad but quietly witty family drama it follows the weeks leading up to Katie’s wedding – if she decides to go ahead with it that is. Her brother’s just been dumped by his boyfriend, her mother’s having an affair and her father’s having a nervous breakdown. The short chapters jump to the POV of each member of the family and it’s involving even if not a lot happens. I found it was better in small doses though which is why it’s taken me a couple of weeks to get through. Worth getting through in the end though.
Jul. 12th, 2009 @ 06:14 pm Book review: The Tale of One Bad Rat
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It's been a quiet weekend so I decided to have a look in the pile of graphic novels that have been sitting there unread, and picked up Bryan Talbot's 1995 book The Tale of One Bad Rat. A pretty dark but eventually hopeful story about a homeless girl called Helen, who ran away from home after years of abuse by her father. Talbot's twist to the story is to make her a big fan of Beatrix Potter, and tell the story as a sort of anti-Potter tale. So Helen's pet rat becomes a metaphor for how abused children blame themselves: As rats have been demonised so, in her own imagination, has Helen. Ultimately it's a story about how art can help your life, as a quest to follow in the footsteps of Potter gives Helen the strength to confront her demons and make a life for herself. A dark fairytale, but well-written and illustrated by Talbot.
Jul. 6th, 2009 @ 01:26 pm Book review: The End of Mr Y
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In Scarlett Thomas’ The End of Mr Y a PhD student, Ariel, discovers a copy of a book by the same name in a second-hand bookshop. She’s an expert on its author, an obscure Victorian scientist, so she knows almost no copies of Mr Y are meant to exist, and also that everyone who’s read the book dies shortly afterwards. Of course this “curse” doesn’t stop her from reading it.

Although it’s got a pretty standard horror story plot as its starting point, the novel is actually a lot different to what I expected, but I really enjoyed it nevertheless – in fact I was hooked within a couple of chapters. Thomas muses on philosophy, quantum physics, time travel and the meaning of language, and although she comes close, never actually goes too far into making the book boring as a result. Probably the kind of book people either love or hate, there are perhaps moments when Thomas is a bit too clever for her own good, but the story keeps going off in unexpected directions so it doesn’t get bogged down in theory.