THE PREPOSTEROUS BOLLOX OF THE SITUATION
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She has such an interestingly beautiful face
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Rose Leslie by Rebecca Miller for Bust
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Carice van Houten by Janey van Ierland
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Drew Barrymore
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Léa Seydoux
“The Gunslinger is a quiet, meditative novel; as inauspicious a way to start a sprawling epic fantasy series as I’ve ever encountered. In Roland Deschain, the titular Gunslinger, there’s a superb, violent, powerful and thoughtful protagonist – Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name by way of Robert Browning’s poem, Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came. He’s cold and dark, and we see him wander through dusty western towns, shooting and fucking his way towards his nemesis, The Man in Black. This is Randall Flagg, whom you might remember from The Stand (though he is never called by that name here). He’s a Very Bad Man. It transpires that he’s been a part of Roland’s life, in various guises, since the Gunslinger was a child, and that’s he’s responsible for some horrible things. Roland has to find him, catch him and kill him. That’s what a Gunslinger does…”
“The film takes all that was best about the Grindhouse, from the memorable characters and sleazy exploitation to the raw style and sheer crowd pleasing, and gives it the benefit of modern techniques and a more generous budget. The result is both a brilliant homage to the Grindhouse and a thoroughly enjoyable B-movie in its own right.”
(via The Day Hollywood Stood Still: Nude Nuns With Big Guns does what it says on the tin)
The Fallen by Dale Bailey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I very much want to give this book five stars, I really do. It’s the best horror novel I’ve read in years. The characters are deftly, if lightly, drawn, and their stories are immediately engaging. The protagonist is one of the most ingenious - and sympathetic, and simple - villains I’ve ever read; no irredeemable and totally evil bad guy, but a flawed and sad character who is as interesting as the others who oppose him. And the writing is sublime; far too assured for a first novel, with King’s pacing and eye for detail, and Bradbury’s lyrical description, it’s a pleasure to read.
But it’s a first novel, and there are many - minor, minor - faults that come along with that. It’s too short, for one. In these days of ponderous doorstops, that’s a rarity, but I could have read so much more of this. The characters, the setting, the mystery, I could have managed a book twice the length. And with its brevity comes a scarcity of incident; while the central mystery, and its attendant investigation, is gripping, there seem to be many avenues of plot left untapped. This gives the impression of a novella stretched to novel length, though any writer with as firm a grasp of his craft as Bailey shows here should be able to fill a novel easily enough, it’s odd that so little happens.
It’s a shame that these faults, small as they are, overwhelm the brilliance of the rest of the novel, but there it is. This book is far closer to five stars (“it was amazing”) than it is to four (“really liked it”), but honesty prevails. It was very nearly amazing, and I shall be looking for more of Dale Bailey’s work in the future.
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“But then there are two stories in the collection that barely qualify as horror – at least, not in the sense that people usually talk about King’s writing. It was a revelation, that this man who was so expert at finding what scared me was also able to write stories with nothing but an emotional core.”
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
A difficult review to write, given the recent passing of Ray Bradbury and my childhood devotion to his works. I have always had Fahrenheit 451 on my shelf, always unread. I have a few unread Bradbury books on my shelf, as I have always wanted some to discover for the first time (as a child, one of my first understood implications of mortality was that my favourite writers would one day not be there to offer new books for me - a selfish notion, perhaps, but children are selfish creatures).
So, Fahrenheit 451 - Bradbury’s masterpiece, by most accounts - a short book I thought I would devour in one sitting, and a book it took me some days to finish. I approached this book as an adult, and my adult opinion is that Bradbury’s greatest strength was that he never grew up, he always saw and described our world through the eyes of a child - and Fahrenheit 451 is a book of far more weighty themes.
I found two difficulties with this novel: the first is that it’s written in the beautiful and lyrical prose of Ray Bradbury, yet seen through the eyes of a protagonist who has never read a book. Where does Montag, our viewpoint character, get the tools to describe his world so poetically, in a world where books are banned and burned? Secondly, the novel is no such thing - it is (and I never knew this until I finished it, though I could tell the pacing and plotting was somehow ‘off’) a fix-up of separate short stories, melded together into a novel; for me, this doesn’t work. The plot lurches from one section to the other, and some character traits and motivations are wobbly and inconsistent as a result. There are other, more minor, faults - the fact that Montag meets exactly the right people in the right order at the right time to service the plot is probably old-fashioned melodrama by the time of the 1950s, and the nuclear finale seems rushed and unconvincing.
That’s not to say this is a bad book. It’s probably best read at a younger age, where its naivete is diminished (I shall be handing my copy down to my daughter), and it doesn’t travel as well into adulthood as almost any other of Bradbury’s wonderful works. His prescience of the modern world - the public devotion and identification with soap opera and reality TV, and the insular world of the iPod - is scarily accurate, and the main theme of book suppression and burning seems less science fiction today than it might have done when the book was published. And, if nothing else, this is a book of wonderful and beautiful prose by the master of the style. Ray Bradbury wrote like no one else, and he did it for a lifetime. If nothing else, there’s that.
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“Stephen King connoisseur James Smythe is revisiting the horror master’s oeuvre in chronological order. This week, he locks fangs with a slow-burning tale of vampires in small-town America…”
Old City Blues by Giannis Milonogiannis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
An interesting story with a ho-hum ending, greatly enlivened by some kinetic scribbly art halfway between Otomo and Paul Pope. Some of the panels descend into chaos, and a few of the hand-lettered speech balloons take some parsing, but this is a visually beautiful read.
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House of Windows by John Langan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Langan has a nice prose style (despite his consistently using ‘insure’ instead of ‘ensure’ throughout), but there really isn’t enough story here to make a novel - a novella might be pushing it. The tale within a tale format fails to add anything to the narrative, and in fact leaves us without a first person account of the finale, wherein characters guess at what may have happened - this is clunky to the point of distraction. I’ve liked all of Langan’s short fiction, but for me he has failed to make the leap to novel here.
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Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lvy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A difficult book to rate and review. What’s here is a gripping story, well told. (Despite some problems with either the translation or the literal adoption of the French idiom - some of the dialogue is quite bizarre and seems to have been written just to fill the space in the balloons, which seem drawn on the page and therefore need filling up with words!)
It’s a gripping, mysterious tale, with excellent art which copes well with the demands made upon it… but there’s no rationale or explanation offered at the end. There are too many weird occurrences to not explain anything, and Sandcastle loses a lot of goodwill by refusing to address its central and attendant mysteries.
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The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A continued return to form (along with 11.22.63 and Duma Key) from the recently lacklustre King, and a substantially better Dark Tower novel than the series (which took a drastic nosedive in quality between books four and five) has seen for many years.
I would have preferred to have spent more time with Roland and his Ka-Tet - the principal characters of most of the series - but I was drawn into each successive story-within-a-story to the point where I was surprised and wistful as they came to an end and I was returned to the enclosing narrative. The mark of a master storyteller, and King is on fine form here.
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Blindsight by Peter Watts
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow…
Within the genre of science fiction there are many sub-genres, the most prevalent of which include first contact with aliens, space warfare, hard SF, future earth, and big dumb objects - I’ve never read someone put these all together as well as Watts does here.
This is in many ways a difficult book; the science is by no means easy, and the characters (including the non-empathic (and intrinsically unreliable) first person narrator) are humans augmented beyond humanity; the aliens are truly and unknowably alien, and the plot (and the novel on the whole) relies a great deal on the reader keeping up.
If there are faults, it’s that the climax seems rushed and oblique, and the lack of characterisation means that the essential connection with the cast is diminished. But the pace is brisk, the science is cleverly handled and explained, and the themes of consciousness, sentience and intelligence are rare in a book overflowing with so many other good qualities.
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Empire State by Adam Christopher
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Another abandoned book. The idea of ploughing through more of this turgid and characterless drivel is just too much.
Now, I should be the target audience for this; I love science fiction and superheroes, I love steampunk and deadbeat detectives - I even love smog and airships. But all that Christopher has done in Empire State is to loosely string these tropes and cliches together - there’s no plot, and what there is is amateurishly assembled; the complexity of the world is inconsistently handled and little makes sense. The fact that there’s an alternate universe only nineteen years old, filled with people and buildings and technology many years older, where NO ONE questions this anomaly, is ridiculous - and saying that the anomaly causes this acceptance is cheating.
Most of the 278 pages I have read consisted of characters relating the plot to each other; and these characters are 2D creations, and frequently infuriating - the sort of characters that COULD explain the questions the protagonist has, but don’t. The protagonist is an idiot. If you read the blurb at the back, the author reveals all of the character names gleaned from Pixies songs - that’s the sort of book this is; a clever assemblage of better work by better creators, little more than fan fiction.
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Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse by Otsuichi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A strangely lopsided collection this: the shortest story, Yuko, is a very nicely constructed twist-in-the-tale yarn, that’s all the better for its unpredictability, and the titular story meanders its way to a fairly understated though more predictable end, but it’s all compulsive reading. The set piece for this book, though, is Black Fairy Tale, which takes up about two thirds of the book (why this collection isn’t named for this story instead of the clunky title it’s been saddled with is beyond me). Black Fairy Tale concerns a girl getting visions from her newly-transplanted eye - from this hoary beginning unfolds a veritable mashup of plots and ideas that build to quite a crescendo. It’s unpredictable and daft in places, but its Grand Guignol climax is wonderful.
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The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 21 by Stephen Jones
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This edition of Best New Horror loses one star automatically for its useless and irrelevant Summary and Necrology sections, which take up almost 200 of this book’s 500 pages. The Necrology I could - with respect for the departed - understand, but Jones’s dry listing of all the year’s publications is an absolute waste of time and paper, and an editorial indulgence.
As to the stories; with any anthology, it’s a mixed bag, but this book particularly seems to drift by each year on fumes. King and Hill’s Throttle is a tired and unexceptional retread of Duel, but with motorbikes; not worthy of either writer at their best, and two stories - by Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley - had to be abandoned as they were old and tired and impossible to wade through.
And yet - and this is the reason I buy and devour this anthology series every year - there are the gems you’d miss if you didn’t read this book. Like the discovery of Joe Hill and Kelly Link in its pages in years past, Best New Horror can always be relied upon to introduce you to new writers you won’t have read before, or to remind you of newer names with their latest work. In this regard, this volume gives us Stephen Volk’s incredible After The Ape and Terry Dowling’s haunting Two Steps Along The Road, as well as effective tales from Michael Kelly and Chris Bell.
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Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A very hit-and-miss work which sets itself up well (even though the entire subplot featuring Christian fundamentalists - itself quite one-sided - could be excised) but then the book takes a sharp shift a few chapters before the end, accelerating events madly towards a rather muddled and unsatisfying conclusion.
I thoroughly enjoyed the creationist/evolutionist arguments, the science (and the science fiction) was grounded and well explained, and the main characters of the two palaeontologist (a human atheist and an alien theist) were likeable and believable.
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