Booksquawk

FULL DARK, NO STARS

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 04:52:00 +0000

by Stephen King
352 pages, Hodder and Stoughton

Review by Pat Black

Here we go, then – Stephen King unleaded, super-nasty, no messing about. Does he cut the mustard?

Kind of. I’d say he cuts the chutney rather than the mustard in Full Dark, No Stars – a weird four-novella collection of the type only he seems to be able to get away with. It’s the same sort of format as Different Seasons, the book that gave the world The Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil and Stand By Me. It’s also the same sort of format as Four Past Midnight, but that’s by-the-by.

There’s strong meat in here. Marinaded in something sticky and sweet, though – maple syrup, maybe. You know, something a bit sickly. I know a guy who had a great recipe for pork using Dr Pepper, in fact. No, wait – chutney was the last metaphor I used. That’s sweet enough. Let’s go with that.

But it’s a bloody good Sunday roast. Like most of Stephen King’s writing, no matter how much you have, it’ll never be enough. You’ll head back to that fridge with its crinkly tinfoil platter again and again… maybe even in the dead of night. Perhaps you even lick your fingers in the ghastly light of the fridge as your family sleeps, unaware.

You craven god-damned meat picker! Fridge vulture!

This is rubbish isn’t it? Review 100, too. Let’s start again.

It’s nice to see Stephen King finally getting his dues for knocking-on 40 years in the writing business. You’ll read very few reviews these days having a pop at him, and that includes this one. Even the snootiest broadsheet sweetie-rustlers are prepared to acknowledge that whatever you make of his subject matter, there are few writers with such a finely tuned ear for human speech, behaviour and patterns of thought.

He’s primarily known as a writer of scary stories, and certainly his early books are some of the finest ever written in that genre. Gareth Marenghi owes King all he ever achieved during that strange, psychotic “horror boom” in the 1980s. Was it a coincidence that this ghoulish literary phenomenon reached its height during the era of Thatcher and Reagan? What were we frightened of? But that’s for another Squawk.

But although fear was his thing, King wrote in just about every genre you could ask for. In this respect, he’s very close to one of his idols and the other main contender for the title of “Greatest Living American Writer”, Ray Bradbury. Uncle Ray had a similar knack of turning his hand readily to frightening stories as quickly as he did to parables about Martians or dinosaurs or robots.

I’m pretty sure King would graciously concede the title to Bradbury, one of his idols. But if King’s career were to end tomorrow, his sales and influence bow to no-one aside from Agatha Christie and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

It’s curious that, despite almost being turned into the world’s first personalised Stephen King bumper sticker in 1999, as well as the years beginning to creep up on him (and he’s not alone there, jeez-o), he continues to be so productive. And so effective.

He’s like a serial killer – one who somehow keeps getting away with it for years on end. He’s not going to stop willingly. And his latest effort could be just as good as his first. There aren’t many writers you can say that about.

Serial killer, oooh. Now that’s a much better metaphor than marinades or, indeed, mustard, because Full Dark, No Stars, has dark business on its mind.

The three long stories are chiefly concerned with murder. The first, “1922”, is the first-person confession of an Oregon farmer who decides to bump off his wife when she looks to sell their farm out from underneath him in the process of their separation. Two truly appalling things about this – first, he enlists his son in the task, “cozening” him and turning him against his mother, and second, the murder itself. There’s no poison in the tea or convenient accident in store for Wilfred the farmer’s slatternly missus. She’s butchered like a hog, and then thrown down a well for the rats.

What follows is a tale of guilt and spiralling disaster, as the authorities and then the consequences begin to creep up on our narrator and his haunted son. There are one or two more otherworldly things which threaten to break out in the background here, but thankfully King reins these things in before they become that detestable horror cliché: the unreliable narrator who suffers delusions of ghosts and spirits. What I liked best about “1922” was the grit and grue, the literally gory details of dumping a body and covering one’s tracks, while in the background the authorities become suspicious.

A Wikipedia check reveals all sorts of interconnectedness in this story’s farm setting within the King milieu – the kind of ret-conning he’s been doing for years. You know, like maybe a character in the Stand once lived there, or Pennywise the Clown once disguised himself as a tin of beans on a shelf in the kitchen to frighten some kids in the 1950s, or Roland the Gunslinger went for a crap in the outhouse when it briefly appeared in the fifth f*ckin’ dimension, etc.

I hate all that wank, but I was struck by the reappearance of waving cornfields as something to be scared of in King’s work. I always wonder what it is that makes certain things recur in some artists’ work. What’s so scary about those fields, Steve?

More familiar King territory, now, in “Big Driver”. This echoed a suspense story he wrote in his last short story collection, where a woman is captured by a lunatic and has to try and escape before he can return to do some awful things to her. In that story, the day is saved – but in this one, it isn’t. Well, not quite.

This one echoed Misery in its mixture of rank bad luck and malice carried out by an apparent rescuer. A seemingly benign trucker captures and violates an author of “Knitting Circle” detective stories after she takes a short cut on her way home from a personal appearance at a library, and finds herself in Shitsville. King can sometimes err on the crass side, blending hideous violence with a zany, Warner Brothers cartoon sensibility, but to his credit he steers clear of these patterns in his brief descriptions of the violence. His heroine is left for dead in an effluent pipe, alongside the remains of what we presume to be the trucker’s previous victims.

The true horror comes in the aftermath, where Tess the author begins to see attackers everywhere. This wasn’t based on a Sixth Sense-style delusion, swapping dead people for violators, but based on the very real fear that the trucker is still out there on the Interstate as she tries to get home. She begins to fear every man she comes across on her nightmare journey.

Even worse, there is the suggestion that she is marked with the shame of sexual assault, something that was not and could not ever be her fault. She feels she cannot go to the police or even a doctor, because she is a moderately famous author and it will get out, and she can’t deal with that idea – being the naked victim. And there is a suggestion of what I felt was the real, prosaic horror of this story: the idea that there are thousands of women out there who did not make any complaint about what happened to them, who felt ashamed of raising the alarm, and who now have to live with the fear that any man they ever meet might harbour a similar smiling, seemingly benign monster.

It builds up to a satisfying tale of revenge, and in this “Big Driver” mimics any number of appalling exploitation films like I Spit On Your Grave. But ignoring the framing, and looking at his depiction of the victim, this is a powerful feminist piece.

“A Good Marriage” is the most gripping story. King admits that he based this on a real-life serial killer case, where a wife was completely unaware (so she says) that her husband was Denis Rader, the infamous multiple murderer known as BTK, who was finally snared after a 30-year career in murders and executions.

“Hi darlin’, eh…. I’ve been arrested.”

“Jesus Christ! What for?”

“Well…”

It’s an old, old tale – a wife or child or relative finds evidence that the person they are living with isn’t quite who they seemed to be. I know I’ve come up with similar ideas for scary stories before, and I’m sure you have, too. In fact, one idea I was going through a while back concerned a wife who was worried about why her husband is withdrawn and exhausted all the time, staying out late and being “away on business” for days on end, and so forth. She suspects an affair, BUT…

So yeah, we meet Darcy, a typical middle class King heroine. She’s left alone in the house one night, with her husband Bob away on business and her children long since flown the nest. She heads down into the basement to dig out some batteries for the TV remote. She’s expecting a call from Bob, whom she has spent 30 years with. A nice man who’s never given her a big problem, a loving father to their two children.

Another King favourite – the fateful stumble - is all it takes to knock Darcy’s perceptions of married life askew. This recalled Bobbi in The Tommyknockers, where a woman literally trips over a little bit of metal in the forest which actually turns out to be the tip of a giant alien spaceship, pulling all sorts of psychic shizzle.

So anyway, Darcy nearly trips over a box filled with old catalogues. Through sheer curiosity, she flicks through the pile of magazines, and finds… Oh…

And then, mildly shocked but rationalising what she’s seen, she stumbles across something else, a hidden hatch set into the basement floor. So then she opens that, and… Oh!

It turns out that dear old Bob isn’t really Bob. At least, not all the time. He is in fact a serial lust murderer, responsible for doing some nasty things to women (and a child, in one case) and then taunting the police about it in a series of gruesomely upbeat handwritten notes - all signed, “Beadie!”

The mental processes the woman goes through were absolutely compelling. It boils down to a simple question: what would you do? Well, I guess the answer’s simple, too – call the police, let them handle it. But would you? After thirty years, and you still loved him? And more importantly, a few weeks before your daughter gets married, and while your son is negotiating the big contract that could set him on the road to being a millionaire?

I’d like to think that yes, well, that’s all too bad, but my husband is a nutter. And I’d call the cops. But I suspect some of you reading this might not. You might lie to yourself… You might try to forget you’d seen it… You might try to convince yourself that you’d gotten it all wrong… Or more realistically, you might worry that your husband will decide to make you his latest leisure project, if he suspects that you’ve rumbled him.

Or you might have an even more selfish fear – that if it all came out, you’d be blamed, even made complicit in some subtle way.

These parts of the story, where Darcy deals with the horror of discovery and puzzles over just what she wants to do, were wonderful. And there’s tension, too. She takes a phone call from her man during which he uses… and King’s phrasing is beautiful… supernatural slyness, to deduce that not only is Darcy upset, but is lying about why she is upset, which is probably something to do with Beadie’s special hidey hole. Hunter’s vision, all the way.

So is he going to stay away for another night, as planned? Or will Darcy - still in bed, confused, nauseous, frightened, wondering what to do – get an unexpected personal alarm call a few hours later from Bob?

Or if not Bob, maybe… Beadie?

It’s a Stephen King book. What do you think?

Full Dark, No Stars sometimes makes a mockery of King’s own pulpitty pronouncements in his (now customary and occasionally pompous) afterword. King says that for authenticity, his fiction always seeks to trace how a person would realistically act. Anything which fails to replicate this authenticity, no matter what the subject matter, isn’t worth the bothering, King asserts.

He sets himself a high bar, there. And he fails to clear it more than once. Would a dutiful, well-adjusted son actually conspire to slaughter his mother? No he would not. Would a mousey novelist left for dead after a horrifying assault turn the tables on her rapist in a cold, clinical manner, in order to exact a satisfying revenge? No she would not. Would a retired detective, who’s spent years of his life tracing a f*cking maniac, allow the families of the victims to go their graves without finding out who the killer was? Out of some sense of nobility or deference towards the guy’s wife? No he would not.

That’s not what would really happen, Stevie. And this was what you said you were aiming for. Sorry mate.

Oddly enough, the only part where I thought: Oh aye... I could see how that would go, comes in the only supernatural story here, “Fair Extension”. Again, not a new plotline – a bloke suffering from cancer goes to a roadside amusement, where the owner offers him a chance of fifteen years of healthy life. The snag is that in return, the guy must pick someone whose life should be ruined while his thrives.

So who does the guy choose to ruin – his boss? A former partner? A childhood bully? An adulthood one? Or, let’s get darker… a relative?

Nope, this guy picks his more talented, better-looking and far more successful best friend.

I know some people who are like that, and I’ll bet you do, too. Hey, maybe it’s you – or at least, the Shadow You that grins in the mirror. The snarks. They just can’t help it, can they? They have to be picking at stuff – like you, foul Sunday roast leftover carrion feeder! They can do nothing else.

This is the area that King explores so well, that heart of darkness that exists in all of us. Like watching Norman Bates mop up in the bathroom and push the car into the swamp, King makes us queasily complicit in all manner of horrors.

And yet, for the nicest of reasons, King lets us down. Even though the book’s title hints at something brutal and nasty – stygian, joy-free horror without hint of hope or redemption – King never really follows through. He can’t quite stop himself from injecting some moment of hope, catharsis, revenge or redemption in these stories. The unjust are punished in Full Dark, No Stars, as surely as they got theirs in the EC Comics of the 1950s. The wickedness is not allowed to win, and put to a stop.

The only tale which is infused with wickedness without punishment is “Fair Exchange” – but even that has a certain fatalistic acceptance to it. We look to blame circumstances and individuals for the bad things which happen to us, King seems to be suggesting. But sometimes your luck just isn’t in. You get dealt a bad hand, and you have to make the best of it. God help us, “Fair Exchange” actually has a happy ending. And not a little glee.

Full Dark, No Stars is not quite what I was expecting, but like everything else the man wrote, it’s worth your time and money.

Mostly Dark, Wee Bit of Light might be better way of putting it.

KRONOS

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 06:57:00 +0000

by Guy Adams
288 pages, Hammer

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

Hammer horror films are back! That simple statement fills me with a frankly quite ridiculous amount of joy. Since being (most aptly) resurrected from the grave in 2007, the legendary British studio has been behind 2010's “Let Me In” and 2011's somewhat iffy “Wake Wood”. I'm frothing with excitement at the prospect of seeing their take on Susan Hill's “The Woman in Black” and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the film will see a return to the creepy gothic thrills of older productions. The revitalised studio is not just putting out new movies, they are also digitally remastering a significant number of films from their extensive back-catalogue and releasing a range of horror novels. The novels range from original works by well-established authors (such as Helen Dunmore's recently released ghost story, “The Greatcoat”) to adaptations of classic Hammer films. I hope to get round to reading many more of these books in the near future as I can categorically state that I had more fun with Guy Adams' “Kronos” than I have had with any other book for a very long time.

Based on the relatively obscure 1974 film “Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter”, “Kronos” is an action-packed period romp. The novel follows the adventures of ex-soldier and professional vampire slayer Kronos and his hunchbacked assistant Professor Grost. Summoned by an old army colleague to investigate a series of mysterious deaths in a sleepy English village, Kronos soon uncovers evidence that the deaths can be attributed to the nefarious work of a particularly unpleasant type of life-sucking vampire. Accompanied by a sexy gypsy girl (who contributes little to the plot other than looking pretty), Kronos and Grost struggle to uncover the identity of the fiend before it strikes again. Things don't go smoothly, as the narrow-minded villagers quickly begin to suspect the enigmatic swordsman as being the root of their problems. Will the heroes prevail against the combined forces of evil and pig-ignorance?

Of course they will. Although the plot might keep readers (who haven't seen the movie) guessing as to the true identity of the vampire, the ultimate outcome is never in doubt. Naturally, Kronos and Grost save the day and kick a lot of living and undead ass whilst doing so. However, this sort of story is rarely hamstrung by its predictability. A novel based on a cheesy, low-budget 70s horror movie is never going to be a great work of literature but in the capable hands of Guy Adams, the story becomes a wildly entertaining jaunt with lashings of gore, violence and humour. Indeed, “Kronos” differs from its source material by being significantly more amusing than the original film. Die-hard fans of the film (I'm sure there aren't many of them) might find the jokes detract from the creepy atmosphere but I personally felt that the humour added to the proceedings. Kronos remains a bit of a stiff character but the comic banter between Grost and Carla the sexy gypsy girl help to lighten the tone and provide more than a few chuckles.

Each chapter in the story is told from a different character's point of view and some may find the use of multiple narrators a bit tiresome. A few of the chapters are little more than a couple of pages long and no sooner has the reader gotten accustomed to one narrative voice does Adams switch to another. However, a good deal of the humour comes from reading different characters' interpretations of the strange goings on in the village. A straightforward omniscient narrator would be unlikely to capture the quirkiness of the different personalities in the book. This minor quibble aside, Adams' novel is fast-paced, highly entertaining and doesn't overstay its welcome.

The extent to which people will enjoy this novel largely depends upon what they are expecting from it. Those expecting a complex narrative or a genuinely dark and brooding atmosphere are likely to be utterly dismayed by the novel's jaunty, often silly take on the genre. Those who have fond memories of the high-camp, low-budget Hammer horror films with gushing bright red blood and heaving bosoms in tight corsets are likely to feel right at home. “Kronos” might seem an odd choice for Hammer studios to release in their new range of books but it shows me that whilst the studio has lain dormant for a long time, it has not lost its sense of humour. I don't think this is the last novelization of a classic Hammer movie we'll see... I'm hoping we'll be treated to paperback adaptations of “The Plague of the Zombies”, “Frankenstein Created Woman” or “The Reptile”. Of course, what would make me truly geek-out would be for Hammer Books to commission someone (me, perhaps?) to write a novelization of the classic Kung-Fu / Horror crossover “The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires”. I'm waiting for your call, chaps.

Hereward L.M. Proops

PUNCHLINE

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:51:00 +0000

by Paul Fenton
Kindle Edition

Review by Bill Kirton

It seems I’m forever making disclaimers about books written by friends but it’s important to establish that I NEVER let that sort of subjectivity influence what I write. No, the only subjectivity involved is ‘Did I enjoy the book and, if I did, why?’ If I don’t like a book, I don’t read beyond the first few pages. Life’s too short. So my comments here are just a record of my reactions as I read this book and my critical reflections after I’d finished it.

First then, the general points. It’s a crime/mystery novel but, as well as ticking the boxes the genre requires, the author also manages to parody it and sometimes offer a wry commentary on its conventions. It’s intriguing, funny, clever and has that essential page-turning impetus.

I hesitate to say much about the circumstances in which the protagonist finds himself and how he reacts to them because, with such a layered construction, the slightest lapse on my part could be seen as a spoiler. The first person narrator is a writer who discovers that his books are on the shelves of bookshops but each credited to a different author and none of them to him. His feelings when he finds the first of these plagiarised novels are sensitively observed and beautifully described – except that words such as ‘sensitive’ and ‘beautiful’ don’t convey the baseness of some of his responses. This is the sort of spare writing advocated by Elmore Leonard.

Sometimes, though, when the pace is hurtling along and we want to know how a particular situation will be resolved, the narrator’s reflections, associations and digressions tend to slow progress. They’re always very entertaining but Fenton has piqued our curiosity and that needs to be satisfied, so we’re eager for the old ‘what happened next?’. On the other hand, one of the many revelations which form the book’s dénouement suggests that this digressive tendency might perhaps be indicative of … no, that might be a spoiler.

The plotting is careful and the characters’ actions, while sometimes extreme, are always plausible and played out in very real settings, conveyed by witty observations of telling details, and the wise-cracking narrator sees the humour in every situation. In fact, Fenton places him in several scenarios which might be seen as typical set-pieces in the crime genre. The difference here is that, while definitely a master of the one-liner, he’s not your run of the mill, hard-nosed Private Eye, but a ‘normal’ person walking the ‘ordinary’ streets of Clapham.

I’m forcing myself to resist quoting some of the situations he finds himself in and how he reacts to them. They’re very funny, but conveyed in terms which show that Fenton’s choice of title was deliberate. He sets up some gags, yes, but he invariably takes them an extra step or adds a twist which intensifies them. And they’re all very carefully written. Look, for example, at the writer’s dismissive attitude to wannabes:

“Yeah, right. Everyone has a novel in them. Almost everyone is capable of sexual intercourse too, more or less, but no one likes to watch ugly people f*ck.”

And, while it’s funny that he’s nearly knocked out by a dominatrix brandishing a latex dildo, it’s even better when she says “And do you want to know where it was just a few minutes ago?”

If you don’t like rude words or a high body count, skip over some bits, but if you like to be drawn into a book, intrigued by questions of who and why, entertained and made to laugh, Punchline is for you. It’s great writing. Why it wasn’t snapped up by a mainstream publisher is a mystery.

THE BLACK TATTOO

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:23:00 +0000

by Sam Enthoven
528 pages, Razorbill

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

Slugs and snails and puppy dogs' tails. That's what little boys are made of according to the old rhyme. Advances in medical science have proven this to be utter bollocks but those of us with any experience with young lads will know exactly what the rhyme is getting at. Little boys are pretty revolting creatures. Whether they are running around with their fingers up their noses, farting on their siblings' heads, pulling wings off insects or drawing grisly pictures of flaming orphanages, little boys can be comfortably relied upon to turn a perfectly innocent game into a full on imaginary bloodbath. Teenage boys are even worse. When not locked in their room, sweatily engaged in pleasures of the palm these acne-ridden youths can be found aimlessly hanging around street corners, showering the pavements with spit and found mumbling charmless compliments to passing females. Their primary interests tend to be violent video games, violent films and internet pornography (most likely the violent kind).

Appealing to these socially awkward, greasy adolescents has been a matter of consternation for countless writers for hundreds of years. Robert Louis Stevenson's “Treasure Island” is a great example of a book aimed at this bloodthirsty young market. The adventurous tale of pirates and buried treasure also included scenes of brutality and violence which remains pretty shocking today (Don't believe me? Go and read the prolonged gunfight in part four of the book – it is staggeringly violent). Unfortunately, when faced with the choice between reading a book and playing “Call of Duty 3” on Xbox Live most teenage boys would grunt unintelligibly, scratch themselves and reach for the joypad.

Sam Enthoven's debut novel, “The Black Tattoo” is unashamedly aimed at teenage boys. It's got magic, kung-fu fighting, samurai swords, hideous demons, vomiting bats and enough action to satisfy even the shortest of attention-spans. What the novel lacks in subtlety it more than makes up for in sheer inventiveness. Just when you think that you've figured out the direction the novel is taking, Enthoven throws yet another curveball and the storyline veers off in yet another bizarre direction.

The story follows Jack and Charlie, two teenage boys with typical teenage problems and anxieties. Hot-headed Charlie is struggling to come to terms with the separation of his parents. The quieter, more introspective Jack feels as though he exists in the shadow of his better-looking, more charming best friend. This gnawing jealousy doesn't get any better when his friend finds himself inheriting supernatural powers. All of a sudden, Charlie can pull off a phenomenal range of martial arts moves, he can shoot fireballs out of his hands... hell, he can even fly. To top it all, his new powers have also left him marked with an awesome tattoo that flows like some kind of liquid across his back and arms. As Charlie flexes his new-found muscles, Jack can't help but feel like their friendship is under threat. The boys find themselves drawn into a cabal of secretive warriors who have devoted their lives to battling a fearsome demon known as the Scourge. When Charlie finds himself under the demon's control, Jack is forced to journey to the depths of hell in order to save his friend and stop the Scourge from destroying the universe. I could go on and reveal just how utterly bonkers Enthoven's story gets but I don't want to spoil any of the increasingly outlandish surprises that lie in store for the reader.

Enthoven's style is straightforward and uncomplicated. There's plenty of vivid descriptions when they are needed (a great example being the sense of awe and wonderment that Enthoven creates when his characters first glimpse the epic vastness of hell) and he writes the action (of which there is plenty) in suitably crisp, clipped prose. In fact, Enthoven's control of language during the pulse-pounding sequences of gladiatorial combat in hell is worthy of special mention. As many writers will tell you, emotion is easy to get down on paper but accurately capturing fast-paced and convincing action is no mean feat. Enthoven's book is so full of fist fights. swordplay, shattered bones and gushing demon blood that it reminds me of some bizarre literary adaptation of the videogame “Mortal Kombat”. “The Black Tattoo” is unlikely to win any accolades but if there was a prize for “best written scene where a teenager drinks bat-vomit”, this would definitely be a contender.

Of course, being aimed at teenage boys, the novel is unlikely to attract much praise from older readers. This is a bit of a shame because, whilst totally over the top and wholly ridiculous, “The Black Tattoo” is also fantastically good fun and a perfect antidote to the winter blues. The insane plot moves at a frenetic pace and whilst it could be criticised for being a little on the immature side, it never fails to be entertaining. If you're looking for sickly sweet romance or a thought-provoking exploration of the human psyche, you're in for a big disappointment. However, if your horrible inner child is hungry for a ludicrously silly romp through the bowels of hell, don't hesitate to pick this one up.

Hereward L.M. Proops

JUDGE DREDD:

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:00:00 +0000

The Cursed Earth
by Mills, Wagner, McMahon, Bolland
160 pages, Titan Books

Review by Pat Black

The police! What to say about them? They keep us safe in our beds, they sort out really rotten people, and yet they’ll bust you in a heartbeat if you’ve got bald tyres. They are the law!

Well actually, they’re not the law. Not all of it, at least. But Judge Dredd… now he is the law. The future lawman was created by 2000AD, as I’ve banged on about in several reviews now, as a science fiction equivalent to Dirty Harry from the second issue (or “prog”, to the duemillescenti).

An enormous success, Dredd survives to this day, and is arguably one of the few comic book characters to successfully cross the Atlantic from the UK to the States, with his helmeted head instantly recognisable.

Much like Harry Callaghan, Dredd was something of a fascist with a quick trigger finger. What made this especially appalling was that Dredd wasn’t a maverick like the Hollywood character he was modelled on. Instead of a lone figure operating in the margins, Dredd is in fact the ultimate authority figure in Mega-City One, one of the few surviving cities on Earth following nuclear war in the 22^nd century. The east coast megapolis is a police state, and the Judges also take on the role of jury and executioner, delivering on-the-spot, harsh justice to miscreants in the city after corrupt politicians fall out of favour following the war.

In The CursedEarth, written by Dredd co-creators Pat Mills and John Wagner, a different Dredd emerged from the brutal lawbringer 2000AD had nurtured in its first year. Tasked with crossing the nuclear desert that divides Mega-Cities One and Two in order to deliver a vaccine that prevents a zombie apocalypse, a more noble, heroic character emerges. He still has the rather arch attitude which many of us will know and love in the police, but Dredd is also scrupulously fair. The law is his religion, and he will never deviate from it.

Dredd takes some “redshirt” Judges as well as state-of-the-art war droids to help in his quest, all packed into The Killdozer, a futuristic battle tank. But the zero on the wheel comes in the form of Spikes Harvey Rotten, a punk rocker with a grenade for an earring, a crook who Dredd brings on board for his skills on a flying motorcycle. The Cursed Earth first appeared in 1978, so punks were all the rage in the UK. In the flawed but ultimately heroic Spikes, we can see echoes of other Judge Dredd supporting characters and anti-heroes such as the skysurfer, Chopper – the perfect foil for the Judge, who, though tough, does have something of a stick up his arse.

When the adventure gets going, it’s breathtaking. I remember the Victor comic reprinting long-running adventure serials that first appeared in the early 1960s, but surely no-one in Britain had encountered a serial quite like this. Part road movie, part classic western, Dredd’s team brings justice to the lawless places in the desert, facing off against marauding man-eating rats, deformed mutants, roaming bandits, bloodbank robots turned into vampires by faulty programming and alien-owning slave drivers who put extraterrestrials to work in mines. In this latter adventure, the Killdozer sees a new arrival, the anteater type creature, Tweak. Dredd senses that Tweak is intelligent, and he helps the alien defeat the evil slave regime while offering him sanctuary. This is one of several areas where Dredd is moved by nobler sentiments quite apart from his usual brutal, by-the-book stance.

The centrepiece of the book, though, is the Pat Mills-helmed Repentance sequence, where Dredd falls foul of an atavistic dinosaur-worshipping town which leaves him tied to a stake as a meaty tidbit for the genetically-engineered tyrannosaur, Satanus. Satanus turns out to be the son of Old One-Eye, the tyrannosaur queen of Flesh, an older, much more violent 2000AD strip also penned by Mills. The king tyrannosaur gets a lot of page-time and you sense Mills relished revisiting the world he crafted in Flesh. The captions get pulpier along with the chapter titles (“THE DEVIL BEAST TRIUMPHS!”) and the carnage factor goes through the roof.

And – get this – Satanus was cloned, with his DNA implanted into an alligator egg – an idea that Michael Crichton would make popular in Jurassic Park 15 years later. Interesting.

As well as shootouts, dino-carnage (Satanus eats the inmates of an entire jail at one point) and brutal action, there’s satire. Dredd fights a group of mutants in Mount Rushmore, and ends up knocking the teeth out of that mountain’s latest addition…. Then-US president Jimmy Carter. Given Pat Mills’ left-leaning tendencies, I’m not sure what to make of this hilarious image – perhaps it’s just a spot of anarchy, something 2000AD employed very well over the years.

Dredd also goes to Las Vegas, where the Judge system has been completely corrupted by some very dodgy Italian Mafioso stereotypes. The comic would later find itself in big trouble with another two-issue strand, which quite openly lampooned some very famous fast food trademarks, which at the time were only just starting to appear in British high streets. All surviving issues were pulped when McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken got wind of what was happening. They cannot be reprinted – even today - although the introduction to this edition does tease us with some inoffensive panels of the banned strips, the Holy Grail for 2000AD collectors.

A satire too far then; the moment where Dredd finally met his match. Not so in The Cursed Earth, though. After a final battle with a demented squadron of war droids left to bake in the desert, Dredd faces one last ordeal in order to deliver the vaccine to Mega-City Two on the west coast. It’s still a thrilling read. The majority of the art is by Mike McMahon, the man who first drew Dredd, and his punk rock, chaotic style contrasts with the cleaner lines and inking of Brian Bolland. It’s the best of Dredd, and a great place to start the Judge’s considerable back catalogue.

THE WORLD THAT NEVER WAS

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:04:00 +0000

A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents
by Alex Butterworth
416 pages, Vintage

Review by Marc Nash

I'd booked a ticket to a panel discussion on the roots of anarchism, but by the time the event came round, it was shunted over into a discussion on the Occupy protest. Three of the quartet of panellists were able to slide over easily enough to address the new slant. The fourth, a writer rooted more in history than journalistic contemporary culture, proved to be more reticent. He was Alex Butterworth and so I bought his book.

The book certainly demonstrates its depth of research, profiting from a relatively new resource of the Okhrana's (Tsarist Secret police) files which turned up in suitcases in Paris when they had been assumed to be lost forever. Being a tome on anarchism, on covert cells who didn't tend to document their extra-legal activities, the corroborating evidence does tend to emanate from the forces of government. This lends the book an inclination to greater detail and authenticity when considering those combating anarchism, than those fomenting it. The involvement of the authorities in many anarchist acts might appear mind boggling, supplying depleted dynamite sticks or acting as paymasters, had I not years ago read the wonderful novel by GK Chesterton, "The Man Who Was Thursday," which satirises this tendency with great humour.

But the anarchists were not a standing joke. They assassinated a US President, a Tsar and an Italian king amongst other acts, but nowhere in Butterworth's book are we really given an idea of why. Other than laying out the notion of "propaganda by deed", an anticipation of spreading the anarchist message through the audaciousness or multiplicity of anarchist terror acts, but we are not informed of what that message was. The book opens with the theorist exemplar Peter Kropotkin, who along with veteran of the Paris Commune Louise Michel (whose own highly moral propaganda by exemplary deed eschewed violence) stride throughout the whole period covered by the book, but nowhere are Kropotkin's ideas given anything but cursory consideration.

For me The World That Never Was reads like a Who's Who of anarchism, but one reduced to the lives of 'celebrity' anarchists. It's personal rather than political in its study of individuals, as perhaps is suggested by the book's subtitle "A true story of dreamers, schemers, anarchists and secret agents". And yet as comprehensive a dragnet as the book appears to offer, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the most significant of US anarchists, are given scant treatment. Moreover, perhaps collective anarchism's greatest expression, that of the Ukraine's Nestor Makhno in the wake of the chaos in revolutionary Russia, is given no treatment whatsoever. Even if Butterworth felt that Ukrainian anarchism's actual flowering fell outside his period, it must have been developing its ideas and structures throughout his chosen period, since it didn't spring into the fully anarchist Free Territory fully formed. Just as criminal an oversight was the devoting of a mere two single line references to anarcho-syndicalism, the arranging of anarchist structures along the lines of industry-wide trade unionism. Any sort of collective anarchism is strangely overlooked in this book, which again returns me to the sense that the interest is with the personalities rather what lay beneath.

There are good sections of the book, particularly the opening setting of the Paris Commune in which Butterworth demonstrates a keen historian's ability to bring a past event alive. The Commune is a period well documented and covered by many historians, so I feel he fares less well when he delves into the murky and poorly illuminated world of individual activists. His small picture is very small indeed. Never did I get a sense of just how widespread, influential and current anarchism was throughout Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth centuries. I can't help feeling that this book is a great opportunity missed, especially in the current climate as we reconsider just how we protest and oppose our governments.

11/22/63:

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:39:00 +0000

A Novel

by Stephen King

752 pages, Hodder & Stoughton

Review by Paul Fenton

I keep putting off reviewing this book, and it has nothing to do with the story, or the characters, or the author ... it’s just that when I start a review, I usually like to lead in with the book’s title, and this one I keep forgetting.

11.22.63 by Stephen King. There, now I have a handy reference point. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? I’m sure to American readers it is immediately recognisable as a date, and a historic one at that; but when I read those numbers, two possibilities spring to mind:

1. Bust, waist and hip measurements for a human pear

2. NFL offensive play-calls

The second possibility makes very little sense, because I’m obviously not American and I know nothing about the NFL. But still, there it is: 11.22.63, hup hup!

As recent Stephen King books go, it’s good, it’s different, I liked it. At 752 pages, it’s also looooong – but we expect that when we pick up a new King book, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

The protagonist in the story is Jake Epping, a high school English teacher who travels back in time through the portal in his local diner’s storeroom to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

Yeah, it sounds really silly when you blurt it all out like that. It sounds like it might have been written as a follow-up to “Zombie Shape-Shifters from Jupiter Attack!” When I first read the story’s synopsis I thought: really? You sure about this one, Steve? I suppose he was sure, because he’s got 752 pages of Jake Epping to argue in his favour. All those pages go a long way to building the characters, setting the scene, making us perhaps not quite believe in the “rabbit hole” as he calls it, but at least helping us accept it for the duration. Putting the time travel concept to one side, and all the paradoxes and butterfly effects it entails, 11.22.63 is more about the ethics and consequences of meddling with the past than it is about “WTF? How did I end up in 1959?” Jake, now known as George Amberson, sets himself up as a teacher in a town outside of Dallas, gets a girlfriend, becomes entwined in the lives and loves and losses in the little town of Jody.

At some stage during the vast middle part of the story, I fell out of touch. Sure, there are the trips into Dallas where George Amberson rents a house across the street from Lee Harvey Oswald and all the associated tension and exciting historical detail, but still…it felt like there were two distinct stories in the book. The first is the story of Jake Epping, sent back to 1959 to gather enough intelligence to convince himself that Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed a lone gunman, and then stop him from killing Kennedy; the second is the story of George Amberson, high school English teacher and director of the school play and love interest of Sadie the librarian. As a reader, the success of the book is judged by how much you fall in love with George Amberson and Sadie Dunhill – Jake Epping’s quest to save JFK seems at times almost secondary. Still a good read for all that, and a good strong finish, provided you make it through that dry middle bit.

THE TOURIST

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 03:57:00 +0000

by Olen Steinhauer

Minotaur Books, Kindle Edition

Review by J. S. Colley

If you came here hoping for a review of the book based on the movie starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, you’ll be disappointed. (Was there a book based on that move? I don’t know.) The only similarity between that movie and this book is they are both thrillers. Having said that, I think George Clooney has rights to make this book into a movie. What he’s going to title it, I don’t know, since some other movie producer already beat him to “The Tourist.”

I picked up The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer on the recommendation of a friend. (Okay, I admit, I thought it was a book based on That Movie, but my friend soon set me straight.) I used to be a fan of spy novels, but ever since Reagan challenged Russia to “tear down this wall,” I’ve stopped reading them. Oh, wait; wasn’t it called the Soviet Union back then? I think so. Now I’m getting really confused.

In any case, I’m glad my friend pointed me toward this book because it is one of the better spy novels that I’ve read.

So, here’s the gist of it: Charles Alexander is an operative known as Milo Weaver to a US intelligence agency that nicknames their operatives “tourists,” for obvious reasons. The book starts with Charles contemplating suicide, but stuff happens and it never gets done. The Dexedrine addicted ex-tourist is pulled back into a life he thought he’d left behind.

Yeah, yeah, I know. There are lots of clichés — the failed marriage and the kid he never has time to see. Maybe because I haven’t read a spy novel in such a long time, this didn’t bother me one bit. The characterizations are great and the novel is well-written.

In fact, I liked it so much, I read the next book in Steinhauer’s series, called The Nearest Exit. I recommend them both.

HABIBI

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:06:00 +0000

by Craig Thompson
665 pages, Faber & Faber

Review by Marc Nash

This is a brilliant book, but an impossible one to recommend. Dealing with the negatives first, its subject matter includes rape, forced prostitution, castration, slavery and racism, which straight away mean it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. And yet the book also has so much praise.

Set in the desert kingdom of Wannatolia, a curious blend of medieval Muslim Sultanate and modern cityscape (with an environmentalist subtheme), a young girl is given into early forced marriage. But her husband is murdered and she is sold into slavery, eventually ending up in the Sultan's harem. However while caged in the slave market, she protects an abandoned dark skinned child. Their tentative relationship is well detailed, as these two people with no status forge an existence on the margins of society. They are two children having to function as adults, and their vulnerability in the face of their tough environment and to each other is rather touching. When they are split asunder as the girl is snatched and taken to the harem, we follow both their stories, through various tragedies and smaller triumphs, until they are reunited as very different beings indeed for their experiences.

I'm unsure as to whether this story, swooping between brutality and minor reassertions of the goodness of the human spirit as it does, works. The lurches from one emotional pole to the other leaves the reader concussed and bruised. I'm also curious as to how a Muslim reader would find the text, freely quoting the Qu'ran and the Hadiths, while demonstrating an unpalatable moral world of harems, slavery and abuse, ineluctably tied to a State run along Islamic lines.

But for me the beauty of the book, and there really is great creative and aesthetic beauty contained within all the narrative ugliness, is in the graphic art itself. It is here that the Islamic setting really comes to the fore, since one of the book's main themes is that of Arabic calligraphy. Thompson uses the fluid form of the Arabic script to blend with other fluid images, that of water, blood, potions, tree foliage, the venous system, animals and djinn. The graphic representation throws up some wonderful images throughout, harnessing the non-realistic style of the book.

So, undoubtedly a work of huge merit. But can I commend it to you unreservedly? No, I'm afraid I can't. Think of this review as representing a content warning and make your own judgment.

SEXTON BLAKE

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 05:11:00 +0000

(BBC audio)
by Donald Stuart

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

Is a radio dramatisation suitable fodder for a Booksquawk review? Probably not, but I've been so busy recently that I've been hard pushed to get any book reviews written lately and really enjoyed listening to these recently rediscovered recordings of a BBC radio adaptation of my favourite fictional crimefighter. First broadcast in August 1967, the series only ran for 17 episodes before coming to an end in December of the same year. The recordings, thought lost for many decades have recently turned up (probably in someone's shed). This isn't the first radio series of Blake's adventures and his stories had been thrilling generations of readers by the late sixties. Indeed, devoted fans of the detective will point out that the 1950s and 1960s could hardly be called Sexton Blake's golden years. The outlandish villains and often-fantastical adventures of the 1920s and 1930s had been replaced with grittier, more realistic scenarios. However, whilst Donald Stuart's radio dramas may lack zany felons such as Zenith the Albino or Waldo the Wonderman, they make up for it by being tight, satisfying little thrillers.

The late William Franklyn stars as Blake, giving the detective a laconic yet confident manner. Blake's natural reserve and stiff upper lip contrasts wonderfully with the energy and wit of his youthful assistant Tinker, played with great Cockney charm by David Gregory. Other well-established characters such as the dull-witted Detective Inspector Coutts and Blake's long-suffering secretary Paula Dane make regular appearances and give the two lead characters the opportunity to exchange some fast-paced and pleasingly chirpy banter. Considering their age, the recordings are of a pretty good quality. There are a couple of moments where one gets the impression that a spot of remastering would have been of use but generally everything is crisp and clear.

There are actually three double-CD collections currently available, so here's a quick rundown of them.

“Liliesfor the Ladies and Other Stories” contains the first three episodes from the series. The titular “Lilies for the Ladies” sees Blake investigating the suspicious deaths of a number of wealthy high society women. “The Sin-Eater” is a complex tale where Blake is faced with a baffling series of cryptic messages written on playing cards whilst “Bluebeard's Key” sees the detective on the trail of a serial killer.

The second collection, “The Vampire Moon and Other Stories” offers up some slightly faster-paced tales than the first and is my personal favourite of the three. “The Vampire Moon” sees Blake investigating the mysterious death of a secret agent in a Chinese restaurant whose last words hint at a terrifying conspiracy that threatens the world. “The Fifth Dimension” has the detective scratching his head over a truly bizarre case of a disappearing man and “First Class Ticket to Nowhere” sees Blake and his team of intrepid crime-busters squaring up to an international ring of drug smugglers.

The third collection, “The Eight Swords and Other Stories” offers the best value for money with four entertaining stories. “The Eight Swords” has Blake investigate the poisoning of a rather unpleasant actress at a hair salon. “A Murder of Crows” revolves around the pursuit of a serial killer who only targets men called George Crow. “Double and Quit” is a cracking Cold War tale of espionage where Blake is recruited as a special agent and forced to go undercover in a prison. Finally, “You Must Be Joking” sees Blake on the trail of a killer who taunts his victims with chilling limericks informing them of their fate.

All three collections come with a bonus recording of a very early Sexton Blake drama from 1930. Being one of the earliest surviving examples of a radio drama, one shouldn't expect too much from “Murder on the Portsmouth Road”. The sound quality of this bonus story is so poor that it's a struggle to understand exactly what is going on. Even if you do finally get to grips with the scratchy recording, the paper-thin plot doesn't really stand up to the more sophisticated narratives of the other stories on the CDs. As a period piece, it's a pleasant little distraction but is unlikely to be listened to more than once.

The BBC and AudioGo should be commended for these releases. Whilst the somewhat dated radio dramatisations of a forgotten Sherlock Holmes clone are undoubtedly aimed at a (very) niche market, they are undeniably enjoyable and well worth tracking down if you're looking for something a little bit different.

Hereward L.M. Proops

BOX OF MUSTACHES

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:35:00 +0000

by Stan Evans
161 pages, iUniverse

Review by Melissa Conway

I saw the movie Captain America a few months ago and noticed the name of the actor who played the main character was Chris Evans. His name brought to mind a boy I had in my high school Speech class, Jim Evans. I didn’t know Jim well, but he had a biting wit and a propensity for drawing graphic cartoons that reminded me of my older brother. Jim (and everyone else in class) was witness to one of my Most Embarrassing life moments – the time I got up in front of class to give a speech I was totally unprepared for. I had decided to wing it because the assignment was to give a humorous speech and I was SO funny, wasn’t I? Jim could have pulled it off, I’m certain, but me…well, I blanked out and ended up stuttering and spluttering and staring out at the class in horror before ducking behind the podium. There may have been a few public tears of shame shed. The stank from that experience forever soured me to public speaking. But I digress.

On this particular evening (after I saw Captain America and thought of Jim), I was mostly looking for an excuse to avoid my latest manuscript, but whatever my motivation, I ended up Googling around to see if Jim had an Internet presence. I knew he had a twin brother, so I typed in something like, “jim evans twin stan” and Bingo! I stumbled upon the book I’m reviewing tonight.

I probably would have glanced at the book’s description, said, “That’s cool,” and moved on to some other manuscript-evading tactic, if it weren’t for a couple of odd coincidences that eventually compelled me to buy the book.

The first coincidence was that Jim’s twin, author Stan Evans, self-published in the early 2000’s with iUniverse; same as me. The second and more compelling coincidence was that the story is about Stan and Jim’s childhood, which sounded (at first) eerily similar to my own. The cover says, “The darkly funny, true story of how twin brothers survived their mother’s madness.” Since I have often considered writing a book about my own ‘offbeat’ childhood, I was curious if the initial appearance of similarity between us played out.

In some ways, Box of Mustaches had me in a déjà vu grip as I read, especially the spot-on evocations of being a kid in the seventies. In other ways, the story had me thanking my lucky stars that my mother’s brand of eccentricity was mild in comparison to what Stan and Jim endured. I never would have guessed Jim’s life was so tragically dysfunctional; he seemed so confident – a defense mechanism, I suppose. To a troubled teen struggling to fit in with his peers when his life is anything but normal, the appearance of normalcy would have to be the next best thing.

The author’s writing style is very readable. In itself, the story is not amusing in the slightest, but seen through Stan’s eyes, the tragedy is quite funny. My sense of humor is similar to the author’s, that “laugh at everything” attitude that helped me survive the worst of the incomprehensible things my mother did and said over the years.

The chapters jump around in time and one is written like a script, but it’s not jarring. We read about the twin’s grandmother Centa, who was raped by a Russian soldier in a concentration camp in Poland and gave birth to their mother, Heidi. 16-year-old Heidi’s obsessive ambition to become an actress leads her to leave Germany for America. There, she marries, has the twins, and begins a slow spiral into insanity.

The author does a fine job characterizing the players in his life, and does an equally fine job communicating the raw emotion the events that shaped him inspired. By the end of the story, when he summed up his feelings for his mother, I was teary-eyed because on many levels I could relate to his powerful, conflicting love-hate.

It was interesting reading about Coeur d’Alene, Idaho from Stan’s perspective, as well. Like me, he and his brother moved to town in the middle of their high school careers. Also like me, they came from California and found that there was a pervasive anti-outsider bent at Coeur d’Alene High (no one cared that my ancestors were pioneers in the area). Unlike me, they arrived after their mother shot their step-father, turning him into a paraplegic and getting herself committed in the process.

Would I recommend this book to someone with no connection (however vague) to the author? Definitely. It’s a fine indie example. I was somewhat astonished at how brutally honest the author was about people who are (or were at the time of publication) still alive, but he puts forth a hopeful message for those who find themselves on the receiving end of someone else’s crazy: you can survive and you can succeed in life despite the hardship you’ve undergone.

Stan Evans went on to become an award-winning producer. I have no idea why he was unable to secure a ‘real’ publisher with his undoubted connections in the biz, but I’m glad I stumbled upon this hidden treasure.

THE ISTANBUL PUZZLE

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:04:00 +0000

by Laurence O’Bryan
432 pages, Avon

Review by J. S. Colley

I entered a contest on HarperCollins’ website authonomy.com to receive a proof copy of The Istanbul Puzzle—and I won! Yeah, me! It was doubly nice as I love puzzles and my guilty pleasure has always been religious conspiracy-theory thrillers. This one certainly didn’t disappoint. The book is due to be released the middle of this month, so this is a pre-publication review.

Just as riots break out in London after a minor incident at a local mosque, Sean Ryan learns his partner and co-founder of The Institute of Applied Research, Alex Zegliwski, has been brutally murdered while on assignment in Istanbul. Alex has no next of kin and so the police ask Sean to come to Turkey to identify the body. Once there, Sean meets Isabel Sharp, Alex’s liaison officer at the British Consulate, when she saves Sean from meeting the same fate as his partner. Isabel is not only investigating Alex’s beheading, but also recent chatter on the Internet that threatens to “bring Armageddon to London.”

Is Alex’s death, the riots, and the chatter all connected? The only clue to the mystery surrounding Alex’s death is an envelope containing a USB memory stick and some blown-up photos of mosaics. Who is the enemy and who is the ally? The reader is left guessing. This book does what a thriller is supposed to do—keep the reader on edge with every turn of the page. The Istanbul Puzzle weaves elements together in a plot that is very believable in the current political/religious climate.

What makes this book even more enjoyable is Laurence O’Bryan’s knowledge of Istanbul, which is obvious in his descriptive passages of the city. O’Bryan evokes all the senses, and makes the reader feel as if he/she is right there. I like to learn something when reading a novel—even a thriller—and this book did not disappoint. I feel as if I’ve visited the city and the beautiful Hagia Sophia, the church that had “once been the Islamic world’s St. Peter’s.”

I’m eagerly anticipating O’Bryan’s next novel in the series titled, The Jerusalem Puzzle. He also has a website where he posts puzzles related to the book. What fun!

HOW I ESCAPED MY CERTAIN FATE:

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 05:45:00 +0000

The Life and Deaths of a Stand-up Comedian
by Stewart Lee
304 pages, Faber & Faber

Review by Bill Kirton

Stewart Lee is either hilarious or mind-numbingly boring. I’ve heard both assessments of him by people who’ve been to his shows. I’ve only ever seen him on TV (but will be at one of his live shows in February) and, for me, he’s very funny and one of the most daring stand-ups around. He’s a highly articulate (and literate) man of strongly-held political and artistic ideals and he treats the business of comedy with intelligence and respect.

How I Escaped My Certain Fate consists of the scripts of three complete shows performed in 2005, 2006, 2008. But the scripts are interspersed with Lee’s own background in the business, his reflections on their genesis and development, and long explanatory footnotes, some of which are mini-essays in themselves, on various aspects of humour, audience manipulation, good and bad taste and anything else which might arise from the bizarre tradition of stand-up. The whole thing is a fascinating tour through the history of the medium (primarily in the

), Lee’s own attraction to it, and the values, meanings, limits and liberating effects of laughter. He investigates topics, techniques, styles, intentions and is totally honest about the choices he makes in terms of material and presentational method.

For him, an audience is an organic whole which needs shaping, leading by the hand, dividing then reuniting. His relationship with it is a constant source of fascination for him. He sets out to stretch and test the limits of its tolerance, learning about others but also about himself in the process. From Bergson and beyond, theorists have recognised that laughter is an intellectual rather than an emotional reaction and Lee uses his onstage experiences and the reactions he provokes to analyse its components, study the uses which other comedians have made of it, and ‘explain’ his own challenging material. He suggests, in fact, that “Within a few years, these ‘jokes’ as we comedians call them, will have been entirely purged from my work in favour, exclusively, of grinding repetition, embarrassing silences, and passive-aggressive monotony”. He’s joking, of course, but, paradoxically, there are already signs of such a progression in his act. He’s joking – but he means it.

In one show, his theme led him to a particularly explicit situation which combined elements that, on the surface, couldn’t possibly be part of a comedy routine. He knew this was coming and so he had to prepare the audience for it and keep them laughing rather than stamping out of the theatre from anger or disgust. This is part of how he did it:

“I was trying everything I could to isolate individuals in the audience, or pockets of people in the audience, and make them think about their responses. By dividing the audience into those who ‘get it’ and those who don’t, eventually, usually, the ‘don't gets’ wanted to be part of the ‘do gets’, and gradually a strong enough coalition of the willing was formed to support the unacceptable stylistic and narrative thrust of the last half of the show.” (Interesting that he used the word ‘unacceptable’ – showing how aware he was of the transgressions he was about to make.)

His words are those of someone for whom stand-up is a way of exploring things beyond ‘jokes’ and cheap laughs. They’re written by someone with a facility for language, a sharp, perceptive intelligence, and a real interest in people. The book asks many questions, gives stand-up a new perspective and, yes, is still very, very funny. Anyone interested in laughter and where it comes from will find this a provocative but rewarding, enjoyable read. It’s much, much more than a celebrity memoir.

THE COMPLETE BAD COMPANY

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:58:00 +0000

368 pages, 2000AD
Milligan, Ewins, McCarthy, Dillon

Review by Pat Black

We’ve Squawked about comics before. We’ve even Squawked about 2000AD before. But now we finally arrive at the best of the best – Peter Milligan’s evergreen Bad Company.

2000AD is a lonely old soul out there in the firmament; a single blaze of colour travelling on across British newsstands, a battered survivor from the days when the racks were once filled with comics. In the quarter-century since 1987, when I began seriously getting into 2000AD, the home-grown comics market has become all but extinct. The Beano and Dandy are still clinging on, desperately hoping that all sorts of gimmicks and commercial tie-ins will drag them back from the brink. But I fear that it’s the dads and granddads who continue to buy these funny pages, not the children. The same is true for Commando, which continues in its own unique way, having lasted nearly ten times longer than the Second World War it depicts.

But the sci-fi themed 2000AD has never quite been for children. It was always too violent, too outré, and too unusual for my palate when I was a primary school child. But as I got older, everything clicked into place. Suddenly I saw the appeal: 2000AD was cool. Its heroes were cynical, not morally uptight like good old Dan Dare or Roy Race. They didn’t play fair or follow clean lines - and sometimes they even lost out to their enemies. And it was staggeringly violent; I’ve got an ABC Warriors review brewing, pending a belated delivery from Santa, but suffice to say I’ve never seen such carnage in a product ostensibly for children.

I recognised that the comic also had something to say about our world, even while depicting alien ones. I could appreciate Halo Jones’ boredom as she traipsed around shopping malls with her alien friends on other planets, and you didn’t have to be a genius to work out that super-cop Judge Dredd was taking a massive sideswipe at American culture, even while paying homage to its crime fiction.

It even had its own version of swearing – and by crud, I can’t have been the only boy whose raging hormones were thankful for the sight of women on its pages; lovingly-penned tips of the hat to the Marvel and DC heroines and villainesses whose curves entranced many a young man across the decades. You certainly didn’t get that in the Beezer. And even if supervixens like Judge Anderson or Durham Red weren’t quite real women, they were a welcome break from the lumpy, authoritarian irritants in polka-dot dresses and pearls that you saw in every other boys’ comic.

All of which leads us to Bad Company. This strip came about during that period of the eighties when Vietnam war movies were becoming major award winners as well as big box office – the era of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and Casualties of War. Following 2000AD’s well-established history of reflecting popular culture as well as creating it, Bad Company took the conventions of these contemporary military dramas – raw recruits; harsh jungle; strange, unknowable enemies – and put them into outer space, on the planet Ararat.

The story is told through the eyes of Danny Franks, who fills in his diary while he takes his first tour against the vicious alien enemy, the Krool. These bug-eyed monsters are as fond of torture and cruelty as they are of military conquest, making them a particularly fearful foe. Young Danny’s unit soon comes under attack, but they are saved by the legendary Bad Company. Led by the Frankenstein-esque Kano, a victim of the Krool’s hellish torments who managed to escape their prison camp, they are a rag-tag bunch of psychopaths operating off the grid who only exist to put an end to their enemy – and sometimes, each other. The survivors from Danny’s unit band together with the Company in a grim battle against the Krool, the feral human tribes who scavenge the battlefields and even their own dead colleagues, reanimated as “war zombies”.

There was some unpleasant violence on these pages, delivered in a peculiar tone of dread and horror with grim scenes of decay and filthiness which conjured the atmosphere of the trenches in World War One. It also had the outright nihilism which makes 2000AD so unique even today; one panel depicting Kano executing a Krool prisoner was, frankly, a bit much, even if it was only a bug-eyed monster biting the bullets.

We had weirdness, too – with references beyond the reach of most 10-year-olds, you would hope. In one section, the soldiers encounter hallucinogenic headwinds while crossing one of Ararat’s plains, which make them face their own worst fears. In an almost too-cute nod to human recreational drug-taking, the soldiers suffer flashbacks to this experience in later episodes.

All the while, brooding Kano leads the gang on his own personal mission of revenge, the key to which resides in a black box he carries about with him.

This story was superlative – and disturbing. The moment when Danny comes face-to-face with a fallen comrade who gets reanimated as a zombie is unforgettable. But the first part of the saga is nothing like as chilling or effective as its barnstorming sequel, Bad Company II.

Here, we follow Danny – now the leader of Bad Company – as he follows Kano’s mission statement to rid Ararat of the foul Krool. But there’s trouble brewing among the ghetto planets nearby, with stories of a Frankenstein-esque creature who hunts both humans and Krool alike. Separate from this familiar-sounding menace, Danny enlists a new crew on a mission to take down the godhead of the alien empire - the Krool heart, a monstrous entity with near-omnipotence - as it nears the end of its life cycle and prepares to spawn a successor. But, this being Bad Company, it seems that the comrades-in-arms hate each other almost as much as they hate their target.

Bad Company II is... well, I want to say it’s The Empire Strikes Back to the first part’s Star Wars, but that doesn’t quite cover it; perhaps Lord of the Rings-to-The-Hobbit is a better comparison to make. It’s a sequel that not only improves on the original but also has much bigger themes on its mind, and a more pronounced psychedelic tone which might be a distraction were it not for the personal dramas that keep our attention from wavering.

As Kano returns, tormented (and sometimes taken over) by the Krool warrior his consciousness is fused with, so Danny begins to wonder about the relationship between human and Krool, between life and the universe, between pain and redemption, between the one and the many... and lots of other things which probably have no business hiding between the covers of a comic read by a boy aged 11.

That said, there are still thrilling moments of combat as well as intriguing personal animosities among the new members of the Company itself – the best of which is the relationship between De Racine, decadent member of Earth’s ruling Elite, and Protoid, the bizarre shape-shifting alien whose ship the Company uses to reach the Krool Heart.

The artwork by Brett Ewins, Steve Dillon and Jim McCarthy is also first-rate – an occasionally psychedelic journey beyond the grime, gunshots and gore that must have had all three licking their lips at the prospect of creating such bizarre worlds, both internal and external.

I was thrilled with this strip when I first read it as a laddie, but I was astonished when I re-read it in this book many years later. It is mind-blowing, epic stuff that dares to be cerebral. As a boy, reading this strip was a little like that fugitive feeling you got if you stayed up late to watch TV and stumbled upon a movie like Blade Runner; you didn’t quite get what it was all about, but you knew it was cool and stylish, you never forgot it, and you wanted to experience it again.

This book contains stories which appeared in annuals and later episodes of Bad Company – but the first and second stories are where it’s at; some of the very best in British comics.

This saga is hardly alone in the history of 2000AD. Away from the tired old superheroes and their over-familiar costumes, backstories, villains, sidekicks and girlfriends, 2000AD dares to be different, even today. Nothing lasts forever, of course, and god knows it’s done well to last so long with all its UK peers long consigned to history. But I hope 2000AD can carry on far into the future, even with the once-futuristic sounding dateline of its title far behind us.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW:

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:27:00 +0000

Sue Eckstein, Interpreters

Interview by Pat Black

Interpreters by Sue Eckstein looks at the history of one family from before the Second World War to the present day, in Germany and Britain. Here, Booksquawk talks to the author about her inspiration and some of the themes of the book.

Booksquawk: Your book has war as a background theme. Although we don’t see much combat until the end, it’s quite clear that the experience of war has had a huge effect on Julia’s family. Was this intended to be a comment on conflicts which are currently going on around the world?

Sue Eckstein: War and its effect on those who were involved and those who were affected by their “inheritance” is very definitely a major theme in Interpreters. I never intended it as a comment on conflicts which are currently going on around the world and I’ve always thought of it as a novel that relates very particularly to the Second World War and to Germany and Britain in particular. But, now you’ve asked the question, I can see that to some extent the same kind of issues could possibly arise in other times, places and conflicts.

B: I found the family dynamic relating to Julia, her daughter and Max fascinating. Was this a comment on the death of the traditional family unit, or was it more of a reflection on Julia herself?

SE: I think that Julia feels that much of her family’s dysfunction is a result of its structure (though the reader knows better) and so she very consciously sets out to create a family of just her and Susanna where she feels more in control. Max, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have a plan of how to create a perfect, functional family but just does it. Susanna is attracted to Max’s family’s fluidity and the space it gives her to be herself. It’s interesting that in real life, I’ve opted for some kind of hybrid – a nuclear family but almost always with other people visiting or staying… And I strongly believe it is good for children to have many significant adults in their lives as support and role models – rather than just their parents, however good and loving they may be.

B: Interpreters is striking in the way it outlines how history affects individual families, and not just populations en masse or political movements. Do you think the individual is supreme when it comes to affecting the course of families and lives, or is there part of Tolstoy’s thinking regarding War and Peace in there – that we’re all merely players on a pre-planned stage?

SE: Crikey! That’s a tricky question! I’m not so sure about the pre-planned stage thing but I do believe that whatever people do or plan, they are very much dependent on outside circumstances and events. Individuals can only plan so far – we never really know what is round the corner. I think that comes out in the novel – Julia’s mother clearly did not want to create the edgy childhood that Max and Julia experience, or the unhappy marriage – but the experiences of her past didn’t allow the happiness she imagined and hoped she could bring to her husband and future children. Likewise, Julia could only do so much to create the childhood she thought would make Susanna happy.

B: The psychoanalytical sections were by far the hardest-hitting. Did Julia understand what her mother had gone through before hearing the tapes, and were they intended to be a help in forming closer ties with her daughter?

SE: No, Julia very definitely had no idea what her mother had gone through before hearing the tapes. As far as Julia was concerned, her mother was a very ordinary but often very unhappy and secretive English mother. My feeling is that hearing the tapes in the car, and hopefully talking about them with Max, would give her a much better understanding of her mother and I think the relationship would change as the result of hearing them. Many, though not all, of the secrets and mysteries of her childhood would begin to make more sense. I imagine that (after the novel ends) Julia and her mother may well never speak about the tapes but there would be a silent, unspoken closeness…Julia would appreciate what her mother had tried to do in spite of her upbringing and experiences and also the courage it would have taken her mother to allow the tapes to be listened to in her lifetime.

B: Interpreters spans generations in one family’s lifetime. But in looking at bigger pictures, the book concentrated on very small things – relating mainly to Julia’s recollections connected with the house, and some of the objects in it. Could you talk more about the juxtaposition of big memories and small objects in Interpreters?

SE: I hadn’t consciously set out to write a novel that juxtaposes big memories and small objects but now you point it out, I think that’s exactly what I was doing! I think it takes very little to evoke a great deal. The smouldering cigarette in an onyx ashtray, the fringes on the Turkish carpet, the wooden ark made by Julia’s grandfather – all these have much greater significance beyond the things themselves. I like to leave it to the reader to make the connections and I hope that I have succeeded.

Interpreters is available now.

THE YEAR GOD’S DAUGHTER

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 06:00:00 +0000

Child of the Erinyes
by Rebecca Lochlann
348 pages, Erinye Press

Review by Melissa Conway

I am acquainted with the author via social networking, which should in no way be construed as an admission that the following review is biased. If I don’t like a book, I won’t finish reading it no matter who wrote it.

The Year God’s Daughter is the first in author Rebecca Lochlann’s Child of the Erinyes series. Even without reading the bio on her website, it’s obvious from the first few pages that this is an author who did her research. She spent fifteen years acquainting herself with ancient Greece, and it shows. Authenticity is steeped into each chapter.

If you are not a fan of historical fiction, don’t let that stop you from reading this excellent book. The finely-honed characterization is such that even with a host of unfamiliar names, you will never lose track of who’s who. The narrative never gets boring – the author has produced a fine balance between description and action.

The story opens with the child Aridela, beloved princess on the island of Crete, recklessly attempting to fulfill her dream of becoming a bull dancer – she believes the goddess Athene has made it her destiny to accomplish the daring and difficult feat. Menoetius is a young foreigner, bastard son of the High King of Mycenae, tasked with finding any weakness in Crete’s defenses. They meet under dire circumstances, and thus begins “Glory, passion, treachery and conspiracy on the grandest scale.”

Divine destiny is a deep-seated theme throughout. Constant regional earthquakes are interpreted by the ruling priestesses as omens, and most everything is imbued with celestial meaning. The reader is immersed in a vivid culture of devoted spirituality. Athene must be appeased with violent sacrifice and every year that sacrifice is the queen’s latest consort – a man who bested all other competitors for the honor of living large for a year and then allowing his blood to consecrate Crete’s soil. Crete is a matrilineal society, but male-dominated kingdoms surround them, and contempt for Athene is spreading on the mainland. If the encroaching changes reach as far as Aridela’s peaceful, prosperous island, a long-prophesied catastrophe will befall them all. From the start, we know this story is headed for a spectacular, world-changing ending. I can’t wait for the rest of the series to see how it all plays out…

Rebecca Lochlann has produced a book of uncommon quality. Highly recommended.

BULLDOG DRUMMOND

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 06:00:00 +0000

by Sapper
320 pages, Wordsworth Editions Ltd

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

What ho, chaps! Fed up with modern thrillers with their labyrinthine plots, gritty action and humourless, navel-gazing anti-heroes? If you're bored of Jason Bourne or Jack Reacher makes you retch, then perhaps you should turn to Sapper's “Bulldog Drummond”. First published in 1920, the novel was quickly followed by a number of sequels, as well as enjoying successful adaptations on the radio, cinema and television.

The novel follows the adventures of Captain Hugh Drummond. Returning to London after World War I, Drummond finds civvy street a little bit dull compared to the excitement of life in the trenches. In order to satisfy his desire for adventure, he places an advert in The Times offering his services to those who require them. Whilst Drummond is not a handsome man (his brief career as an amateur boxer has left him with a broken nose), his indefatigable “can do” attitude and his boundless optimism make him an immediately endearing character.

When Drummond is contacted by the inconveniently beautiful Phyllis Benton, he can't bring himself to turn down her request to aid her father who she fears has fallen victim to a gang of unscrupulous blackmailers. In no time at all, Drummond finds himself up against the villainous Carl Peterson and his cronies who seek to organise a Socialist uprising in Britain for their own financial gain. Drummond takes great pleasure in upsetting Peterson's dastardly schemes whilst always sticking to his strongly-held belief in the importance of sportsmanship and fair-play. He's not the sort to mercilessly pick off Peterson's henchmen with a sniper rifle. For an ex-soldier, Drummond seems remarkably averse to firearms and is far more likely to go toe-to-toe with his opponents in a good old-fashioned fist fight. However, Drummond's such a gentleman he'd most likely help them back to their feet and dust them off after knocking them down with a devastating right hook. It is this reluctance to killing his opponents that prolongs Drummond's adventure. One gets the impression things would be a lot more simple if he were to toss a grenade in through an open window of Peterson's headquarters and be done with it. Instead, Drummond and Peterson toy with one another, taunting and verbally sparring until it becomes abundantly clear that they're both enjoying their strange, confrontational relationship.

Aiding Drummond on his jolly japes are a group of his chums from the trenches. A gang of ex-soldiers from both high and low society, Drummond's pals are as inexplicably upbeat and fearless as the man himself and the banter between them as they sip beer and puff away on their pipes whilst plotting their next move epitomises the great British stiff upper lip. Whether providing Drummond with a bit of muscle, piloting aeroplanes for a quick jaunt across the channel or disguising themselves as waiters so that they can drop the antagonist's dinner into his lap, Hugh's friends add a welcome bit of comic relief to the story.

There's no escaping the fact that “Bulldog Drummond” is a period piece. The dialogue is peppered with hilariously dated slang and the author's attitude to women renders them little more than pretty bits of decoration to beautify an otherwise dull room. The character of Phyllis is as one-dimensional as they come and only serves the purpose of looking nice, being in need of rescue and wilting in our hero's arms. The most interesting female character is the chain-smoking, seductive Irma. Peterson's “daughter”, Irma is the novel's proto-femme fatale but her promising character is never exploited fully. By the time we reach the closing chapters, Irma has taken a back-seat in the proceedings and her ultimate fate barely gets a mention (though I am reliably informed she returns in the sequels).

The most glaringly dated aspect of the novel is Drummond's politics. Unlike modern heroes who work outside the bounds of society, Drummond is a staunch supporter of the status quo. The prospect of a Socialist uprising in Britain would undermine the rigid class system that he so fervently admires (after all, he is at the top of it). The reader is kept in the dark when it comes to the finer details of Peterson's plot and this is probably due to the fact that Sapper had not fully figured their plan out himself. The message he wanted to put across was very simple: Socialism is unworkable and dangerous. Its supporters (the trade unions) are deluded and naïve. Of course, one must always look at the context in which a book is written. Drummond's sportsmanlike attitude when taking on his opponents seems a logical reaction to the indiscriminate horrors of the First World War with the advent of mechanised warfare. British society was shaken by the war and many were concerned that the Bolshevik uprising in Russia would spread to our shores. Sapper's uncomplicated politics and straight-talking hero were aimed to remind the reader of what it means to be British, the Bulldog breed.

For all its faults, “Bulldog Drummond” is a great read. With a likeable hero, fast-paced action and a sense of fun that is lacking from many modern thrillers, it is easy to see why Sapper's square-jawed gentleman adventurer enjoyed such popular success. Paving the way for pulp heroes such as Doc Savage and cited by Ian Fleming as a major influence on James Bond, Bulldog Drummond is indeed a great British hero.

Hereward L.M. Proops

MAKE LOVE! THE BRUCE CAMPBELL WAY

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:44:00 +0000

by Bruce Campbell
368 pages, St. Martin's Griffin

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

There are two types of people in this world: those who don't know who Bruce Campbell is and those who worship him. B-movie regular, star of Sam Raimi's “The Evil Dead” trilogy and Don Coscarelli's “Bubba Ho-Tep”, Campbell might not have enjoyed A-list success but his colourful acting CV has made him a genre icon and a staple on the convention circuit. He has also made quite a profitable career of mocking himself, from playing a washed-up version of himself in “My Name is Bruce” to his hilarious autobiography “If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor”.

Like the bastard offspring of his autobiography and “My Name is Bruce”, “Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way” is a self-effacing comic novel which follows the misadventures of Campbell's fictional self after he is cast in an A-list Hollywood romantic comedy. The fictional movie in which the fictional Campbell is cast is titled “Let's Make Love”. Directed by Mike “The Graduate” Nicholls and starring Richard Gere and Renee Zellweger, the movie seems a guaranteed box-office success. However, when Campbell is cast as Foyl the Doorman, his very presence on-set seems to taint the production with his B-movie sensibilities. Subjected to numerous re-writes, the film's heartfelt dialogue is replaced with slapstick fight scenes and expensive camera-work is replaced with shaky hand-held shots.

Campbell's attempts to get a better grasp of the character of relationship expert Foyl lead him into a series of adventures. Campbell finds himself an unwilling participant in an adult movie, fights a duel at a Southern Gentlemen's Club, locates John Dillinger's preserved penis in the Smithsonian Museum and helps organise a NASCAR-themed wedding. His repeated run-ins with the authorities during this time leads to him becoming public enemy number one, culminating in a ridiculous gun-fight at the novel's climax.

Consistently amusing and occasionally hilarious, “Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way” is a highly enjoyable read. The novel is full of humorous photographs and graphics to illustrate the action of the story and Campbell's ability to sustain the paper-thin plot over 300 pages pays testament to his skill as a writer. The plot moves along at a fair pace and Campbell is more than generous with his celebrity cameos (Jack Nicholson's pitch for a “Chinatown” sequel is guaranteed to raise a chuckle). Being a work of fiction, readers shouldn't expect any great insight into Hollywood or expect to learn much about the “real” Bruce Campbell. On the cover copy of the book, Campbell points out that “everything in the book actually happened – except for the stuff that didn't.”

Ultimately, the amount of enjoyment a reader gets out of this book will depend upon how much they like Bruce Campbell. If you haven't heard of Bruce Campbell (shame on you!), this book probably isn't the best place to start. To the uninitiated, I'd recommend they grab a DVD of “The Evil Dead II” or “Bubba Ho-Tep” and prepare to enter B-movie heaven. Fans of Campbell's movies will doubtless get a kick out of this goofy adventure and it is thoroughly refreshing to see an actor try something different rather than opting for yet another cookie-cutter ghost-written memoir. He's not the best writer on earth (if the truth be told, neither is he the best actor) but the book's energy, charisma and wit explain why Bruce Campbell's popularity endures.

Hereward L.M. Proops

SQUAWK OF THE YEAR

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 03:26:00 +0000

Wherein we squawk about our favorite books from 2011.

Bill Kirton:

I won a couple of awards for my own books this year and, even though I jumped at the chance to exploit that, I acknowledged that I was uneasy about the whole business of ‘competitive literature’. Nonetheless, that’s what I’m forced to apply here. So I flicked back through the books I’ve read in 2011 which I thought worth reviewing and came up with a short list, every one of which could have ‘won’. There was The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes), Empty Chairs (Stacey Danson) and Absolute Zero Cool (Declan Burke) – all very different but each one totally absorbing, moving and/or entertaining. In the end, though, I had to go for Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. The title’s provocative and, predictably, has the religious right fulminating and wanting it burned without even opening it. And that’s a huge pity because, in a way, it emphasises the rightness and absolute values of the teachings of Jesus as wonderful social(ist) insights into how people can live together in harmony and mutual respect. (And I write that as an atheist.) On the other hand, it exposes how organised religion has deliberately subverted and distorted those values in the interests of a ruling elite. All of which makes it sound heavy going. But it’s not. It’s funny, immensely readable, and creates powerful, credible characters - good and less good - in familiar set pieces such as the Sermon on the Mount, Gethsemane, the money-lenders in the temple and the several miracles. It makes the New Testament make sense.

Marc Nash:

"Free Fall" by Nicolai Lilin - Non-Fiction. Throw your old hat Vietnam memoir books out, this is dirty guerilla war 21st Century style. A Russian sniper in a plain clothers "Sabotage" brigade gives you the experience of war like no other, from the effects of temporary blast deafness, through to the precise nature of destruction wrought upon the human body by the latest infantry armaments. The outrages committed on both sides in a war most people know nothing about are written about matter of factly. Demanding you the reader to come to the same conclusion about their inevitability. Vertiginous reading.

Melissa Conway:

2011 was one of those years where I was forced to schedule in down time, which tends to make relaxing just another chore. I didn’t read nearly as much as I normally do, but even if I had, my choice for best book would have very likely been the same because it was simply an outstanding read. What’s more, the work in question, Jane Borodale’s The Book of Fires, is not my normal fare. I tend to stick to genre fiction, but this is a literary novel of exceptional quality. I devoured it back in January, but when it came time to pick my favorite, it immediately came to mind. For the full rave, click on the title above to see my Booksquawk review (be warned, there are spoilers).

Pat Black:

My Squawk of the Year goes out to Ed Siegle's Invisibles - an offbeat hero's journey that takes us from Brighton to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro as a man seeks out his father. This book manages the difficult trick of creating magic without resorting to the mystical.

Hereward L.M. Proops:

It's really hard to pick a single book to crown as my read of the year. I could go for Fred Limberg's superlative thriller "Ferris' Bluff" or Glen Duncan's literary horror "The Last Werewolf". However, I'm going to have to opt for Axel Taiari's jaw-droppingly good vampire novellette "A Light to Starve By". A haunting story, beautifully written and brutally violent, Taiari manages to accomplish more in 30 pages than many novelists do in 30 years of writing. Now available for free on Amazon's Kindle store, "A Light to Starve By" is so good that it almost makes one forget the terrible crimes against vampires committed by Stephenie Meyer and her cronies. Taiari puts vampires back in the shadows where they belong. I can't wait to read more by him.

Paul Fenton:

It's been a light squawk year for me. I have been lax, and heavily distracted by tedious life matters, but Horns by Joe Hill has managed to poke a hole through my brick-like procrastination barrier. Ignatius Perrish wakes one morning with a set of devilish horns protruding from his temple, and the story which follows is as much about who he is and how he arrived at such an awkward state of horniness (not the fun kind), as it is about what he does next. His family and friends all think he murdered his girlfriend, and his new head gear makes people want to divulge their deepest, ugliest secrets; and that's where the true horror of the story sits. Well, most of it.

S.P. Miskowski:

Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors by Livia Llewellyn, 214 pages, Lethe Press.

Batten down the hatches. At least two of the stories in this collection will scare the hell out of you. A few will hurt your feelings. I was inconsolable after reading “Horses.” Then I read the rest of the book, and my only question is: Why do I have to write the way I do, instead of the way Llewellyn does? Muscular, precise, violent, and agonizingly truthful, her fiction takes no prisoners and makes you wonder why you bothered reading all those other writers, the ones who ramble and whine about life while she delivers it, bloody and screaming, into your arms.

J.S. Colley:

I’ve been given the task of picking my favorite book of the year. I say “task” because this is a difficult choice. While I’ve read many great novels this year, the three that jump out at me are: The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Being Dead by Jim Crace, and Florence and Giles by John Harding.

Just at this moment, I’ve chosen The Road as my Squawk of the Year, only because the main characters in Being Dead were not that likeable. I would have to give you a spoiler alert if I explained why I didn’t choose Florence and Giles. The writing in both, however, was superb.

The Road did not disappoint on any level. The writing was original and marvelously executed, the characters and plot compelling. There was not one point in the book where I questioned why a character acted or reacted the way they did. And the ending, while not unexpected, was satisfying. It wins my unputdownable book of the year. I hope to have more them in 2012.

Happy New Year to all.

INTERPRETERS

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 06:21:00 +0000

by Sue Eckstein
214 pages, Myriad

Review by Pat Black

It’s weird going back to your hometown; weirder still to go back to the house you used to live in when there’s another family in there. This is what happens to Julia Rosenthal, the narrator of Interpreters, Sue Eckstein’s second novel, when she takes a trip back to the place she grew up in with her brother Max.

There’s family history to be examined in this story. As Julia looks in each room she sees them as they once looked in the time when she grew up while her mother and father’s marriage foundered. It’s a book concerned with the past as well as the future, and the intricate structures and relationships that make up a life – so we also get a flavour of what happens with Julia’s free-spirited daughter Susanna, and her odd decision to grow up under the care of her Uncle Max, a Steiner teacher.

As well as the recollections of family life – from one beautiful moment where Mrs Rosenthal almost begins an affair with a music teacher, through to the moment where the father changes from a bumbling drunk to a loving father in the reader’s eyes – there are transcripts of psychoanalytical conversations in the text. These turn out to be from the grandmother of the Rosenthal clan, covering her time growing up in Germany before, during and after the war. Her ordeals serve to put our modern day tensions and problems in their proper context.

For me, the great beauty of this short, but complex book was that odd sensation you sometimes get at family gatherings where you spot little correlations between family members often generations apart, whether they’ve met each other before or not. And it’ll make you think of the strange forces, characteristics and attractions that led you to be exactly where you are right now.

HOW LATE IT WAS, HOW LATE

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 06:07:00 +0000

by James Kelman
374 pages, 1998, Vintage

Review by Pat Black

One of life’s little ironies: the morning after this book won the Booker Prize, I was taking part in an undergraduate tutorial looking at ways of deconstructing poetry. I had to report our group’s progress back to the whole class, but owing to a bit of stage fright and a thick accent, the lecturer didn’t understand a word I was saying. No amount of enunciation could get through to this person, and it required prompts from the other class members in order to get our points across, accompanied by no small amount of sniggering. That incident remains a big embarrassment to me, like something out of a nightmare.

James Kelman might have written this scene himself, glottal stops and all. After 20 years of successfully employing the Glaswegian accent in his short stories and novels, in the mid-90s he produced How Late It Was, How Late. It’s one of the most controversial Booker winners – an accolade which prompted one of the judges to threaten to quit, for reasons only they can know. Perhaps they were the type of person who would tut, frown and make a diffident public speaker stutter and repeat himself in front of a class of his peers. Perhaps they “didn’t quite catch the accent”.

Ah, it’s just one of those things. You’ve got to get on with it, I suppose, and learn your lessons. And that’s the tenor of the entire novel in a nutshell as it follows Sammy, a 38-year-old Glaswegian who wakes up in a whirlwind after a lost weekend of hard drinking and god knows what else in his home city. Sammy attracts the attention of the police – or “sodjers”, as he calls them – and after an unfortunate incident Sammy ends up in a jail cell, not only blind drunk but just plain blind after being given a beating.

From then on we follow Sammy’s internal world as he feels his way through his predicament, sightless. We piece together his family life and his past, his time spent inside prison, his relationship with his teenage son and also life with new partner Helen – who has gone missing, incidentally. He meets a variety of people along the way, some who help him – like Boab, his kindly neighbour – and others who might be of a less charitable disposition.

The Glaswegian dialect didn’t seem that difficult to follow; certainly it’s less broken, apostrophised and glottal than Irvine Welsh’s representations of east coast/Edinburgh speech. But the working class cadences are spot on, as is the swearing and slang talk. It’s almost as if a somewhat shrill, gallus little guy was narrating in your own mind.

Sammy is a chancer, and as we find out a little bit more about his life we see hints here and there of what he was up to when the drink took hold of him. As Sammy adjusts to his new, dark world, he has to learn to interact with his surroundings afresh. Next-door neighbours and passers-by seem kind enough – but are they all they seem? He’s desperate to get to Glancy’s, his local pub – but will the patrons take kindly to his presence once he gets there? Why are the police so keen to find out what he was doing that weekend, and just what is the “political” stuff they keep mentioning?

Classic Kelman traits are on show. First of all, the common man’s struggle against any form of authority. Sammy is faced with doctors, secretaries and form-fillers of every description as he attempts to gain medical attention for his blindness, and he is driven to rage by their bureaucratic natures and middle-class diction. Then there’s Kelman’s cute touch with snobbery regarding the use of language, particularly Scottish dialects. Sammy hears a story about a former prisoner who writes into a broadsheet newspaper, and makes a spelling error. The newspaper chooses to reproduce the error, with “sic” printed alongside it, a wink and a nudge on the part of the editor telling readers of a certain background all they might wish to know about their correspondent. Given the negative attention Kelman received for this novel based on its central character, subject matter and use of the English language, this proved beautifully prophetic.

I’m fascinated by a current theory called “the Glasgow effect”. Studies have been carried out into why that city in particular has such an atrocious record with early death, poor health standards, drink and drug abuse and violence compared with other UK cities which share its deprivation indicators and also geographical location, temperature and weather. The answer is... nobody knows. This theory argues that it’s purely psychological – that there’s a peculiar fear and anxiety which stalks Glasgow’s streets, a cycle of grief and oblivion that spans generations and snuffs out lives too soon.

Kelman’s book addressed “the Glasgow effect” nearly 20 years before it came into being. Sammy is subjected to an odd psychoanalysis by several characters, including his persistent lawyer Ally and a doctor who examines him. It looks into Sammy’s problems with anxiety and panic, and his responses to this in life. You wonder where all that came from; you wonder if the author is trying to analyse an entire city. Prophetic words, in any case.

The storyline is simple, and yet I wondered whether or not it was possible to read more into what goes on. Ally the lawyer, who offers to pursue Sammy’s compensation case, had something of the divine about him. There seemed to be a number of Homeric references, too – a man trying to get home; his missing partner is called Helen; he’s trying to reach his son... and blindness? Polyphemus? Again, perhaps I’m reading too much into it. Blame that bloody English lit class.

And there was something that disturbed me about Sammy. He wasn’t quite Kelman’s stock-in-trade – cheeky but loveable chancers, trying to put one over the authorities - but something altogether darker. I’m not sure I liked him. I can’t decide if this was because he partly reminded me of someone I knew, the person I used to be, or the person I might still become. The answer to how Sammy ends up on the tiles isn’t perhaps one we’d like to hear.

But How Late It Was, How Late, is still an odyssey worth taking, a great Glasgow novel by one of the great Glasgow writers. Ultimately, it’s about having hope, in spite of your circumstances and sometimes in spite of yourself.

A B & E

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 05:49:00 +0000

by Marc Nash
184 pages, New Generation Publishing

Review by Paul Fenton

Words. I thought I knew a lot of them, but it seems I was wrong. After reading A B & E by Marc Nash, I feel like a chimp who’s been taught to screech out a few word-like sounds, or maybe a defrosted caveman educated by Katie Price. Not sure which is worse.

I’m not just talking about volume of vocabulary employed, but the arrangement. The associations, the twists of meaning against itself and back again, as a reader you can’t help but admire the artistry in the design. A B & E, though only a short novel (184 pages in paperback), took me a rather long time to read, because it’s dense. Rich. Every word demands your focus, every play on words requires your comprehension ... and thank Jebus for the built-in dictionary function in the Kindle, because without that I’d still be scratching my head at irruption, lordotic and modegreened (though to honest, even the Kindle dictionary struggled with mondegreened, and I had to hit up Wikipedia). The pressure to review such a bold, skilled experimental novel, it’s kind of daunting.
Me like book. Book good.

The protagonist is Karen Dash (an alias), a gangster’s moll hiding out in Corfu away from the vengeful eye of her criminal husband. She’d cheated on Damon with his chauffeur, and for her the penalty is Grecian exile.
Karen tells her story to listener or listeners unseen (though that becomes clearer later on) in a first-person monologue. The storytelling seems to take place almost exclusively in bars, with trays of cocktails always at hand to help out – between the chapters are cocktail recipes, perhaps put there to aid the person wanting a more empathetic reading experience.

Me like booze. Book like booze. Me like book.

My incipient low culture-itis reared its virulent head early on in the book, and I found myself picturing Karen as more perverse and intellectual Samantha Jones from Sex and the City, a forty-something cougar with a cosmopolitan in one hand and a young man’s pride and joy in the other. Her tale moves between past and present, from how she met Damon and came to cheat on him, to her nights of drinking and seduction, a short cycle which seems to repeat itself almost endlessly.

There’s a subplot with a secondary protagonist running alongside Karen’s tale of decadent woe, a hospital nurse in the UK. The connection between the two isn’t obvious, but there is a pleasing twist which makes having followed her progress worthwhile.

I found the early chapters more challenging than the latter. I’m not sure if that’s because of the sometimes obscure Greek mythology references in the first half (though I do like my Greek mythology), or if I was simply getting into the groove of Nash’s style. Here is a writer who seems to have no fear of ignoring literary conventions and the predictable requirements of mainstream fiction. Nash writes with an emphasis on the writing. If you’re after a James Patterson style page-turner, you might want to look elsewhere. If you’re after the latest addition to the Twilight saga, why are you even here? If, however, you appreciate exquisite writing which demonstrates with great flexibility just what this English language of ours is capable of, then I would have no hesitation in recommending A B & E to you.

Here. Read Book. Book Good.

UN LUN DUN

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 05:37:00 +0000

by China Miéville
520 pages, Macmillan

Review by Marc Nash

Un Lun Dun is an abcity. A sort of inverse of our own cities. Made up of all the detritus and refuse rejected by us in the course of our daily living. So Un Lun Dun is constructed from broken umbrellas and unwanted goldfish flushed down our toilets. And Miéville does construct a wondrously imaginative world. But herein lies my first problem with how it's offered up. The phantasmagoric creations come so thick and fast, the reader is not permitted a mental pause to contemplate and bask in them (a few do have sketched cartoons dotted throughout the book to aid our teeming minds).

So in many places the book doesn't breathe and yet in other places, where the characters themselves take a break from the action, the book sags under its improbable and poorly drawn characterisation. The main character schoolgirl Deeba is engaged on a quest within Un Lun Dun and forms deep, emotional friendships incredibly quickly which determine her loyalties and decisions in an incredulous way. And as Miéville ramps up the phantasmagoric powers of the baddies who seem to hold all the aces, somehow Deeba takes an intuitive and unfounded decisive act that sweeps them away. Author ex machina as she guesses right every time, within this upside down and inside out world that supposedly operates counter-intuitively. I've found this in all three Miéville books I've read now. A certain carelessness or actual indifference towards both characterisation and plot resolutions. Maybe because for Miéville, all the fun lies in ushering forward the next set of fantastical creations from his fertile mind.

There are some redeeming setpieces. There's an excellent riff on words taking physical form and the author has great fun at the expense of prophecy and myth that turn out to be wide of the mark. In fact I would employ the word 'riff' for his writing throughout this book. The novel is a piece of virtuoso work, a constant guitar solo with riffs off the main theme. But ultimately it strikes me as self-indulgent because the rest of the arrangement doesn't seem to be in place. The rhythm section as it were. Throughout the book, the writer part of me kept wondering whether most of the words came out all of a piece and no further work on them undertaken. Unutterably pointing to the strength of Miéville's creative imagination for this wonderful array of original and unique beings and yet also containing an inbuilt smugness that their creation was sufficient, that their phantasmagoric nature didn't require a correlative logic to be developed alongside them. For a world of alternative realities, so much of the plot tramps along in the most mundane of human fashion.

Yes, this book is mainly for young adults, so that maybe their demands on credible character and plot devices might not be so rigorous as mine, but for the third time I feel a little cheated at a half-baked execution. I keep reading him to try and get under the skin of Miéville's cult status. But each time I am left outside, failing to become a convert. And yet I persist, because I know the ideas present are inherently fascinating, if only he could embed them in a fully crafted work of literature.

NIGHTINGALE SONGS

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 06:22:00 +0000

by Simon Strantzas
210 pages, Dark Regions Press

Review by S.P. Miskowski

Everybody’s talking about Simon Strantzas. Okay, not everybody, but plenty of writers and editors are talking about Nightingale Songs, released in November. After years of publication in fine magazines and anthologies–earning that rare reputation among his peers as a writer’s writer, an artist whose desire for popularity has not tainted his aesthetic principles–Strantzas has suddenly hit the ground running with his third collection of short fiction.

Delightfully somber and full of doomed characters making dreadful decisions (in other words, painfully true to human experience) Nightingale Songs does not overshadow the author’s subtle and quietly disruptive previous collections, Beneath the Surface and Cold to the Touch. Instead it represents a natural evolution in the voice and preoccupations of a unique talent in modern fiction.

Beneath the Surface suffered from the unexpected demise of its first publisher, but was recently republished by Dark Regions. The second collection, beautiful in every respect, is now out of print and difficult to find. I hope Tartarus Press makes Cold to the Touch available as an ebook in the near future.

I want more readers to get their hands on Strantzas, but he’s one of those writers you can’t sell with a tag line, or even a review. You have to read his prose and allow yourself to be swept away by the obsessions of his characters, to appreciate his art. The devil is in the details, in the nuances, in the perfect choice of words and the illuminating juxtaposition of images. Like Nabokov, he doesn’t give you a theme and a cookie and a pat on the head. You have to read and think for yourself, and then you get it or you don’t. These days, how many writers have the nerve to send their work out into the world without explaining it to death?

In that spirit, I will not attempt to explicate these stories. It’s enough to know that they range in setting from a universally recognizable suburbia to the remote and ruined beaches of an oil disaster site to some strangely malevolent back roads at night. These landscapes are a projection of the characters’ state of mind but also a catalyst, provoking irrational and often desperate acts.

Sometimes the action of a Strantzas story is inaction, or a character’s inability to move from condition to action. The results range from a dreamy or hallucinatory tone to a sense of impermanence that all but overwhelms the reader. Nothing is certain, and nature is not on our side. Our most important plans are feeble against the vast, mysterious cosmos. Our purpose, if we serve one, is either unknowable or constantly changing. The message may be bleak, but the writing is thrilling.

Influenced by H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman, and Ramsey Campbell, the author has been moving for some time toward a thoroughly independent worldview. With Nightingale Songs he offers that view without apology. Yes, it is dark, but it is recognizable too, containing the black-edged beauty of life as well as unavoidable horrors and intimations of mortality. If you love good writing that challenges, enthralls, and offers no easy escape, read Simon Strantzas.

THE GIFT OF HORROR: Happy Holidays!

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa Conway) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:04:00 +0000

Reviews by S.P. Miskowski

Brand New Cherry Flavor: A Novel of the Occult

by Todd Grimson
352 pages, Schaffner Press

The revenge story is my favorite kind, revealing as much about the nature of the perpetrator as it does about the targets of her wrath. And boy oh boy, do we get to know protagonist Lisa Nova! James Ellroy has called Todd Grimson “the hippest writer in America today.” If Ellroy wrote that about me, I’d be tempted to read the blurb every night before bedtime. Yet hipness can be a burden if you don’t have the talent to match it. Fortunately Grimson shows plenty of talent in this hard-as-rock-candy novel about an aspiring actress/director seeking revenge against the producer who messed with her personal American Dream. If you like some crazy with your Los Angeles cuisine, and a bit of magic realism with your outright horror, this is your flavor, right here.

Come Closer

by Sara Gran
168 pages, Soho Press

Amanda is under pressure. Her job at a successful architectural firm is exciting but stressful. The loft she is converting with her husband needs more work, and it isn’t as accessible as she would like. Still, things could be worse. Those weird noises she keeps hearing could signal the arrival of something supernatural, or the start of her own psychological unraveling, or maybe the emergence of Amanda’s true self. The one she doesn’t share with anyone, even her beloved husband. Because how could he understand the petty, dirty, mean things she sometimes feels an overwhelming urge to do? That’s all I’m going to say about this book. No. Here’s another thing. I love it. And here’s one more. Buy it. You’re already online. Buy it now.

Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors

by Livia Llewellyn
214 pages, Lethe Press

Dark Fiction

by David Kempf
356 pages, RealTime Publishing

An ambitious novel that centers on a Faustian bargain between a college student, the horror writing professor he admires, and some powerful supernatural beings who feed on human dread, Dark Fiction may be rough going for readers who are not in on the joke: Much of the text is provided by our undergraduate protagonist, who is not the prose stylist he believes himself to be. His sophomoric attempts at bloodcurdling fiction are author Kempf’s satirical take on student writing, especially genre writing. By the time the young wannabe has run through every cliche in the moldy how-to manual of horror, he is well on his way to becoming the next free ride for those supernatural thugs. His stories may lack style and coherence, but they are bursting with the manic energy that only a credulous and over-confident student can offer.

The Loving Dead

by Amelia Beamer
272 pages, Night Shade Books

Amelia Beamer’s refreshing and always surprising take on the undead uprising poses the question most of us didn’t know we were afraid to ask: What if the zombie plague was equal parts STD and MDMA? Set in and around San Francisco, The Loving Dead follows a small group of housemates as they try to stay alive–and, if possible, hook up–during the end of the world. It’s equal parts quasi-romantic sex comedy and dark horror; well worth picking up if you’re not afraid of risky storytelling, sexy dirigibles, and zombified Trader Joe’s employees. (Review by Cory J. Herndon.)

The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan
400 pages, Roc Trade

Thanks to Lynda E. Rucker for recommending this novel at her blog. I love a good story about a writer and few novels present as fascinating a writer-protagonist as Sarah Crowe in The Red Tree. Self-exiled to a remote rental house in Rhode Island following a tragic personal loss, Sarah discovers a manuscript by the house’s former tenant. The manuscript covers the known history of an unusual and apparently ancient oak tree on the property. It also chronicles the strange events that occurred while the former tenant was doing his research. Soon Sarah is drawn into the history of her temporary home, where past and present overlap, and the natural world may collapse into something less natural but terrifyingly real.

Tooth and Nail

by Craig Dilouie
258 pages, Schmidt Haus Books

Two things make this zombie apocalypse novel stand out from all the other zombie apocalypse novels. One is its immediacy, and this is achieved through a formal convention; author Dilouie gains momentum by telling his story entirely in present tense. Second, the story focuses on the challenges faced by American soldiers who have been recalled from combat posts around the world to try and contain a rabid outbreak in New York. Now the soldiers must overcome existential angst to do battle with the fellow citizens they have spent their lives protecting. This novel has earned high praise from author David Moody (Hater, Dog Blood), and he knows the undead like nobody’s business.