Dan
I’m very happy that Dead Ink are bringing Nathan Ballingrud’s stories into print on this side of the Atlantic. If the previous collection, North American Lake Monsters, concentrated mostly on, duh, monster stories, this one Is more explicitly supernatural, with all the stories tapping into an overarching mythology of Hell and the creatures that live there. It’s potent, fiercely imaginative stuff with vivd and intense imagery throughout. Ballingrud appears to have all the power and imagination of the early Clive Barker, and I am more than ready for whatever comes next.
Not actually a new novel, the indicia indicates that this was originally serialised back in 2013. Knowing that it’s easy to spot in the shape of the book, which feels like a novelisation of several D&D sessions (albeit ones put together by a DM with a fondness for the philosophical conundrum alongside the stealing and the stabbing and the setting things on fire). It’s a quick and simple read, with a lot of good gags and with enough going on under the surface to raise questions around personhood and free will. Nothing groundbreaking, but a good diversion for a few hours.
The storylines here don't really gel at all, it feels like two novellas awkwardly pushed together, a feeling only intensified by the cheap and easy way one of them is resolved. There are dangling characters and motivations, hints at setups that don't go anywhere....King's afterword suggests this one was a difficult experience for him, and sadly you can see that on the page. Even in his late period he can still write a good book (I really liked Billy Summers), but this isn't one of them. I wouldn't mind at all if Holly had a rest for a couple of books now.
It might be a bit niche, but there’s something about polyphonic novels set in a tight geographical location but ranging though time that I really like. I loved Alan Moore’s Voice of The Fire, Andrew Michael Hurley’s Barrowbeck and now Sarah Hall’s Helm. It’s a really good evocation of a place and the people who inhabit it over thousands of years, culminating in a glorious soaring sequence that will live long in the memory, all told in distinct voices and some excellent prose.
Wow. It’s been a long time coming, but this is Joe Hill’s best novel by a long way. It’s a beast of a book - I read an eARC, but I’d guess the print version isn’t going to be far short of a thousand pages - but nothing is bloated or wasted. It’s a genuine epic that spans decades and continents as the story of how a group of friends make a deal with something they really shouldn’t have plays out down the years. It feels lazy to make comparison with Hill’s dad (although to be fair he does kind of invite it with direct references to The Dead Zone and The Dark Tower here, let alone the first word of the title), but this is up there with any of King Sr’s biiiig books, and possibly even better. It has lots to say about class, about friendship, our emergent billionaire class, folklore and mythic archetypes and their relevance to the 21st century, plus there’s a bloody enormous dragon that loves nothing more than smashing up untold amounts of buildings and military hardware. It’s exciting, funny, tense and sad, and it’s the most fun I’ve had with a book for a long time.
This is the story of two British women over the next forty years or so, taking in climate change, eco-activism, rewilding and pandemics. It takes the form of pair of separate narratives that brush up against each other and overlap here and there as each chapter hops us forward a few years. Swift does a great job of keeping us up to date with these women’s personal lives and relationships over the decades while also sketching the political and social changes happening. She never flinches from the scale of the catastrophe facing us, but crucially offers hope and solutions instead of wallowing in doom. It’s tempting to read this as a smaller scale, more intimate, version of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future, but that isn’t necessary - it’s a more than good enough book to stand on its own. Plus it has some excellent dogs* in it. I really liked this one.
I’ve been waiting a long time for a UK edition of this one, and Dead Ink have finally obliged. It was worth the wait, an astonishing collection of stories. It doesn’t stint on the promise of monsters in the title, there are vampires, zombies werewolves and -yes!- a lake monster here, but it’s always the humans in the foreground. Not necessarily particularly likeable ones either, although you needn’t fear that this is some kind of trite ‘actually, MAN is the real monster’ exercise. Ballingrud manages to make us empathise with his cast of ex-cons, homeless people, harassed mothers, and lost children looking for fathers and belonging. It’s elegant, atmospheric and disturbing. What more do you want?
Horror on every level, from squirming gore to colossal historical injustice, with a good side helping of ambiguity - it would be easy to write this book with Good Stab as an avenging hero, but here he is a brutal monster. It’s just that pretty much everyone else is worse. Not always an easy read, but a very good one.
Perhaps deliberately for a book about AI, this all feels very uncanny valley. Something is off throughout, and the whole thing feels like a classic locked room detective story filtered through the scratchy eyeballs of someone who has been awake for far too long already. It’s a very well crafted trick, and good vibe for a futuristic story that is very much in conversation with it’s predecessors (there are several direct references to The Haunting Of Hill House, for instance) but it also highlights the chief flaw of this short novel - it feels consciously worked on, something that is too openly striving for an effect. Basically the bones are too visible and there isn’t enough flesh in the story to cover them. It’s still an intriguing set up, but it’s too cerebral and designed to ever become fully engaging.
Simon Darcourt in the last book, The Marriage At Cana by the Unknown Master in this one...very Cornish
A new Guy Gavriel Kay novel is always a treat, something to savour for the lyrical prose, the wise eye, and the compassionate characterisation. This one returns us to the world of Sarantium, albeit around a thousand years on from those books, around the time of the Hundred Years War, or it’s equivalent in the Kayverse (I just made that term up and I hate it already).
It’s a briefer book than some of his best, and I missed the opportunity to wallow in the world and the characters. The shorter length means you don’t get under the skin of anyone apart from the lead in quite the same way as you do his longer works, but it also fits the fancy that this is a recounting of something that actually happened long ago. It’s like the best history lecture you ever went to, and Kay is still probably our greatest living fantasy writer.
These books are a fantasy companion to Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, in that they relatively lowkey (although the stakes do get raised in this one) and the villains are largely kept offstage in favour of spending time with likeable characters who are -shock - nice to each other. These characters are mostly all wounded one way or another and the books have a melancholy air, but they don’t dwell on this darkness. Instead they focus on the importance of consolation and the bonds of friendship (even if Thara is terrible at recognising these latter). Ultimately they speak to what we can be instead of what we so often are, which is needed more than ever these days.
Frustrating one this. It started slowly, but I persevered and ended up very much enjoying the middle section, where things escalate and there’s a strong sense of rising terror. But the final act is pretty underwhelming and doesn’t really stand up to much interrogation at all. Almost brilliant, but ultimately falls short.
A lot of the other negative reviews have covered what I didn't like about this book - the lack of incident, the multiple POVs leading to a lot of padding and redundancy, the terribly cliched depiction of religious Americans - but it is also worth highlighting that this is one of the worst evocations of contemporary Japan I have come across. It doesn't appear that the author has done anything more than speed read a few articles on the Internet and picked up on a few buzzwords like freeter. Very disappointing.
An excellent farce set in a small town in Vietnam. Many disparate strands of plot are juggled and the outcome knits them all together nicely. Recommended. Plus I'm always a sucker for hard-living monkeys.
A strong collection of stories by Bristol writers, mostly with a genre slant, and mostly set in or around Bristol itself, but at several different whens. By the very nature of an anthology some are stronger than others, but I'm not naming names - the whole thing is worth your time and money!
The story of a band that never made it, this memoir is terrific for the first half. It's funny, spirited, and a celebration of the spirit of rock n roll. Towards the end though it runs of steam, much like the Hollywood Brats themselves, and an unpleasant note of bitterness creeps in.
Gripping and hilarious, this tale of a road trip gone horribly awry is one of the best books I've read this year. There is plenty of incident, from bad peyote trips to biker showdowns to a diner that may be run by cannibals, but there is also plenty of subtext to chew on, as a journey through America becomes a journey into the narrator's psyche. Jung's take on synchronicity is explicitly mentioned a few times, and his idea of the amina is at the heart of the book. And if that sounds heavy, don't worry, you're never far away from another tragicomically bad decision by our hero, usually while deep under the influence.
And Mr Keevil appears to know his Richmond Fontaine records, which is another plus as if one were needed.
This tries to be two books at once, a memoir cum history of late sixties / early seventies radicalism from the author's perspective, and then a book about the Grateful Dead. The two don't sit together well, not least because the Dead were never really a political act. It's a shame, as there are the seeds of two decent books here, but neither come to fruition.
An Adam Nevill book is always going to be a good read, but I don't think this one will ever be a favourite of mine. The first hundred or so pages borrow extensively from one of his short stories, and I read them with the feeling that I'd seen it all before. Once this platform is raised, the book does take on more of its own identity but for me at least, the threat was never as scary as the beast in the forest from The Ritual, or as visceral as No One Gets Out Alive. It's still worth reading, well written and atmospheric, but it didn't quite click with me like some of his others have.
There's an old Oysterband sleeve quote that goes something like “to love this land and its people while hating how it's ruled and a lot of what it stands for is a contradiction many people will find strange”. It's this contradiction that is at the heart of the Devices trilogy, the struggle between authoritarian rule and anarchist do as you please. It's very political, not in a partisan way, but in exploring what it means to be British, what Britain could and should represent. That may sound rather po-faced, but Purser-Hallard writes with warmth and wit, and he keeps the pages turning. There are weighty questions of national identity, personal responsibility, and the nature of stories below the text, but there are also swordfights, explosions and secret fortresses disguised as Civil Service offices. The idea of a modern day King Arthur sparring in the shopping centres and coffee shops of modern Britain could easily have fallen prey to cliche and silliness, but the books manage to sidestep that and offer a thought provoking and very entertaining read.
A series of vignettes of Pacific life and events since 1950. Individually interesting, but there is no through line and it doesn't cohere as a book
