The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks (Max Brooks & Ibraim Roberson, 2009)

Very brief but enjoyable visual accompaniment to Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival guide. Taking a handful of the stories from the book’s Recorded Attacks section, illustrator Ibraim Roberson gives Brook’s prose a grotesque spectacle that make me want a faithful movie adaptation on World War Z even more.

Very quick but I like it a lot.

4/5

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson, 2005)

Whilst The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo suffers from a horridly simple, almost workman-like writing style and is let down by it’s last hundred pages, it is still hugely enjoyable and effortlessly enthralling. The premise of a recently convicted journalist for the crime of libel being hired to investigate the forty year old disappearance of a wealthy businessman’s niece is packed with enough twists and nastiness to make even the moments of downtime riveting. The late Stieg Larsson, being and investigative journalist himself, throws all he knows into the narrative, creating moments of tension out of characters sitting around chatting conspiracy and looking over forty year old evidence.

My major beef comes within the last hundred pages. With the main narrative concluded, Larsson insists on rounding up the libel case that opened the book and in having the epominous girl with the dragon tattoo being an expert computer hacker, our heroes not only win too easily but the manor in which they do so seems somewhat contrived. Need impossible evidence to convict the man you’re after? Lisbeth Salander to the rescue. She’s too much like hackers you see in movies like Swordfish. A couple of taps at the keyboard, the use of a back door here, the use of a decoding encryption there and viola! All the incriminating information you need. It’s weak, sloppy and a tad unnecessary. And it certainly did not need a hundred fucking pages dedicated to it.

But it did at least make me want to read the next two, which I have ready and waiting. The Girl Who Played With Fire, its immediate sequel, focuses on Salander on the run after being accused of murder. A much more bare bones and more enticing prospect after this labyrinth plot line.

4/5

Bag of Bones (Stephen King, 1998)

I actually still have about 170 pages left of this to read but, seeing as the major climactic plot development has already happened, I really don’t think there’ll be a whole lot else to say and much more before the end that will sway my opinion.

Bag of Bones is intermittently excellent but is far too long. The story of an author who suffers from severe writers block after the sudden death of his wife, the narrative is split between two concurrent plot threads: the first being our protagonist’s move to his summer lodge in Sara Laughs (just outside the fictional town of Derry, featured in It and Insomnia) and his subsequent involvement in a bitter custody battle between a billionaire software mogul and his daughter in law. The second being Sara Laugh’s dark and cursed past, a past that is visited upon our hero from the moment he arrives at the cabin.

The main problem here is the ghost story element, a superfluous story thread that feels added purely on the basis that this is a Stephen King novel, therefore necessary. It just doesn’t work. The real meat here is the custody battle. It is this stuff that saves the book from being too dull to give up on half way through. It’s compelling and tense, and, in true King fashion, goes in directions you wont see coming. In Max Devore, King gives us another villain you just love to hate, a horrid, bitter old man who is determined to gain sole custody of his granddaughter through any means.

A fair effort but definitely marks the start of King’s downfall pre and post accident. Oddly though, I’m finding I’d like to try From a Buick 8 again.

3/5

The Great and Secret Show (Clive Barker, 1989)

There’s something about Clive Barker in that something as flawed and over-written as The Great and Secret Show can still captivate me despite being overly long. The basic premise of two warring men (The Jaff and The Man Fletcher respectively) fighting over The Art, a power that can lead to the sea of Quiddity, the nexus of everything, is filled with Barker’s twisted yet limitless imagination and, for the most part, reads like a rip-roaring ride of fantasy mixed with Barker’s own take of the nature of existence (something that features heavily in his later fantasy novels like Weaveworld, Sacrament and Imajica). Yet it’s this endless imagination that is the books ultimate undoing in that, in being unable to contain himself, Barker has fashioned a narrative that seldom knows when to stop indulging.

That’s not to say The Great and Secret Show is bad, just a bit long winded. At nearly 700 pages with text to rival the Lord of the Rings in terms of size, there is much in the latter half of the book the could have been scrapped. Tommy-Ray’s escapades as the Death Boy, whilst interesting, are not needed and do little more than pepper the main narrative with extra garnish. Oddly, the same can be said for the central love story that ultimately fuels the plot but comes as nothing at the end. The main interest lies in secondary characters like Grillo and his female companion Tesla, who drive the latter half of the novel once the shit really hits the fan.

But, whilst being a tad flowery at times, Barker style is at once engaging and holds a certain air of eloquence that makes the remarkable seem as such and the grotesque something to admire. The Jaff’s main weapon is to fashion monsters by exploiting people’s fear and bleeding them out through the victim’s pours. Not as nasty as Weaveworld’s decaying witch that spits out deformed foetuses, yet is far more disturbing.

I like The Great and Secret Show very much, despite its indulgent nature. It’s brimming to the surface with ideas and would be a classic of the fantasy genre if only it kept such ideas in check. I’m hoping its sequel, the 1996 novel Everville, will do just this.

4/5

Shutter Island (Dennis Lehane, 2003)

I think after this I'd rather read the book before seeing the film. Dennis Lehane is popular but after getting 200 pages into Shutter Island (and easy feat seeing as the print is mashoosive) I wasn't entirely sure why. Maybe my opinions are tainted by the fact that I really enjoyed the hell out of the movie but Lehane's writing prose is limited. There's a workman-like sensibility to it, almost akin to a "my first popular novel". Everything is skimmed over with no depth, and considering much of the plot revolves around one man's descent into madness and its subsequent repercussions, depth is something that is drastically needed.

Reading the book seemed somewhat superfluous as, in essence, the movie is identical. Much of the story is the build to the inevitable Big Reveal but seeing as I already knew what said reveal would be, half way through I found myself wondering what's the point? None of the images presented, especially during the dream sequences, have the same impact as they do on film. It's like a film's script (which was, admittedly weak and I now see why) without the Scorsese flair. In fact, having now read the book, I'm not sure if the film would have appealed much at all.

Shutter Island is one of those books where you know that you, as an amateur writer, can do better.

2/5

Horns (Joe Hill, 2010)

If anyone were to ask me who I'd be reading in twenty years time the answer would come easily and without hesitation: Joe Hill.

I loved Heart-Shaped Box and whilst his collection of shorts (20th Century Ghosts) contained a few duds, for the most part they were excellent, the likes of Pop Art and Last Breath in particular, were works of an exciting new talent. But it has also been a while between projects (H-SB was released way back in 2007) so my anticipation for Horns was near astronomical by the time of release. But this gap also shows Hill's determination not to release sub par material. Having worked for a year on a novel titled The Surrealist's Glass, he admitted that it just wasn't working and rewrote it to what eventually became Horns. We'll never know which manuscript was better but considering how good Horns is it hardly matters.

Horns is also a very different beast from H-SB. Effectively a story about a man possessed with the powers of Satan, the forefront of the narrative is about the character's motivations and what led them to decisions that ultimately ruined the lives of the four key players. It's Merrin's murder that is the catalyst but she is just as much a protagonist as Iggy, our "hero" who seems to acknowledge the fine line between good and evil and that sometimes, evil will benefit more. As such, two of the five main sections of the book are told in flashback, detailing our character's lives from the age of 15 to the night of Merrin's death. It's compelling stuff and one trump card that Hill has managed, with H-SB also, is his ability to tell enough back-story without bogging the reader down, something his father (Stephen King) has failed to do on numerous occasions.

But, this being a story about the devil, there is debauchery aplenty and, in places, it’s filthy. It doesn't quite trump H-SB's ghost crawling out of the mouth moment or anyone masturbating to a snuff film with a pistol in their mouth but someone does die after having a snake crawl down their throat.

I loved it. Having read 90 pages, I sat down on Sunday for a quiet hour to read and ended up finishing it. Both Horns and H-SB have their good and bad moments and whilst I would honestly say that it's difficult to differentiate between the two in terms of quality, Hill's sophomore effort is step up in terms of maturity and writing prose. I just hope that it isn't another three years before his next one.

I’d like to see him try something epic next time. Maybe a zombie apocalypse?

5/5

The Birthing House (Christopher Ransom, 2008)

Beyond terrible.

I wont spoil it for those that want to give this one a try but, with an opening line as lazy, in your face and hackneyed as it has, this book was doomed from the start. To say it's poorly written is so far beyond stating the obvious it’s a joke and never once was it remotely scary. It's the first book in well over a year that I've put down before finishing. I even gave it away to a colleague just to be rid of it.

At least I have Horns by Joe Hill to read now. Now that is a man who can write a book.

Just avoid this one if you can. It fucking blows.

1/5