The Death of Bunny Munro, by Nick Cave
You can read en extract from The Death of Bunny Munro at our sister site, Bookhugger.co.uk.
There is a fluffy stuffed bunny on the front cover of Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro. That first glance of fuzzy, friendly bunny, before you read any of the text, is certainly the lone warm and fuzzy point of a very strange roller coaster ride of a book. Bunny Munro is a terrible husband. He is a terrible father. He treats others with contempt and disdain. But, he is the voice of the novel, and Nick Cave keeps him just barely sympathetic.
Even with a tumultuous spiral into desperation and depravity, after all of the terrible things he has done to other people, after meaningless sex, unwitting betrayal, and criminal neglect, Bunny Munro still retains his connection with the reader and enough humanity to elicit pity. Somehow, book never loses sight of Bunny Munro’s last saving grace, that he is, after all, human.
Bunny swaggers onto the scene in a seedy motel room. His first act, his introduction, is a double betrayal of his wife: a dismissal of her depression and an affair, one in a long line, with a prostitute. Only a few minutes from home, drunk on the entire contents of a mini-bar, Bunny, and thus the reader, alternately looks at the news report of a rampaging man in a devil suit, a pier burning down outside the window of the motel, and the prostitute who becomes the final straw for his wife. The world around him has lit itself on fire to warn Bunny of the error of his ways, but in his blindness and hubris, he cannot see what his actions are leading to. Read more
The Devil’s Ladder, by Graham Joyce
The worlds created by Graham Joyce can be fairly hard to categorise. His work is often described as speculative fiction due to the way in which he mixes the contemporary world with myth, legend, horror and the fantastic. The Devil’s Ladder, Joyce’s latest novel for children, is also something of an interesting mix of genres as two regular children become embroiled in the supernatural world of demons as they experience visions and are called upon to help save the world as we know it from the gathering forces of evil.
Since Sophie attends the fairly rough Abbey South School while James the geek goes to posh Castle Gate, it seems that they have nothing in common save for the same walk to and from their respective schools each day. Sophie has noticed James as he walks along alone with his head buried in a book trying to avoid the various bullies who seem to like to torment him but she has never really given him much thought. This all changes on the morning when Sophie sees the words THE TIME HAS COME painted in large white letters on a wall near school and the phrase echoes around her mind, bringing to the surface regular dreams that have been haunting her in which she encounters the same sentiment. Shocked by this intrusion of her dreams into reality, Sophie collides with James as he walks past and is further disturbed to note that the title of the latest book he is reading is also The Time Has Come. After an argumentative exchange with James, a rather freaked out Sophie continues on her way to school but, as the day progresses, she determines to track James down to ask if he noticed the writing on the wall that morning and to see if there is any link between her dreams and his book.
Orbus, by Neal Asher
I think a short confession is in order: Orbus is the first of Asher’s Spatterjay novels I have read. It is always an interesting experience diving into the middle of a long sequence of novels: you’re dropped into their established continuity and you have to swim or else drown in a sea of odd names, gimmicks, and underdeveloped characters. Luckily, Orbus is a lot more accessible and, frankly, a lot more readable than many of the fifth and sixth installments of the contemporary ‘genre’ epic. In brief then: Orbus is a spaceship captain sent with a pair of wisecracking war-drones to terminate the agents of a race of psychotic crabs (the Prador) who have infiltrated the demilitarised zone dividing their homeworlds from those of the AI-ruled humans, the Polity. However, they become involved in the hunt for a rogue Prador called Vrell, in whose fate it seems pretty much everyone has some kind of stake. Things heat up, things explode, battles are fought and some sort of outcome is reached – which is just as you would expect, this being Space Opera of the rather modern sort exemplified by, say Alastair Reynolds.
Indeed, this book benefits from a deep-seated straightforwardness of approach. It rattles smartly enough through events, letting the action do the talking even while you are carefully fed the usual dribs and drabs of exposition and backstory that makes it all, if not spring to life, then at least seem plausible and interesting. There is a lot of combat – in space and out of it – which is something Asher does well, and there are some pleasantly unexpected moments of excitement and suspense to add to the entertainment value. Whatever else might be said of it, Orbus is not a dull book.
Interzone, by William S. Burroughs
The Interzone is the International Zone in Tangier, Morocco where William Burroughs lived for a time after his accidental shooting of his wife while stupendously high caused him to leave Mexico in something of a hurry. The time that Burroughs spent living in Tangier was greatly influential in the development of his writing style and subject matter and so it is fitting that Interzone is the title of this excellent collection of his early short stories. Interzone features many of the characters and concepts that would be developed more fully in Burroughs’ more famous works such as Nova Express and the seminal Naked Lunch. Although the quality of the stories collected in Interzone is rather variable, the collection is immensely important as marking the turning point from the more traditional first-person style of Burroughs’ earlier novels like Junky and Queer to his later, more experimental works.
Interzone is divided into three distinct sections, the first of which being simply called Stories. Perhaps the most notable of the Stories is “Twilight’s Last Gleamings” which was originally written in 1938 in collaboration with Burroughs’ childhood friend Kells Elvins and is widely accepted as being his first attempt at fiction. Although the story as it appears here in Interzone is a copy from memory of the original, it is still the most complete version of the original that was written by Burroughs and Elvins after they were inspired by hearing about the sinking of the ship the Morro Castle. The majority of Burroughs’ stories are autobiographical to a certain extent, sometimes very disturbingly so. This is particularly true in the case of “The Finger”, a fictionalised account of how Burroughs came to deliberately cut off the last joint of his little finger in an effort to impress a young man in 1939 and how the episode led to a brief spell in a psychiatric hospital. Of the rest of the Stories “The Junky’s Christmas” is perhaps the best and most poignant, telling as it does the story of Danny the Car Wiper, a young junky desperate to score a hit on Christmas Day. The full line-up of Stories is:
- Twilight’s Last Gleamings
- The Finger
- Driving Lesson
- The Junky’s Christmas
- Lee and the Boys
- In the Café Central
- Dream of the Penal Colony
- International Zone
Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock
With this collection of short stories, featuring a shared cast of characters and set in the nowhere town of Knockemstiff, Southern Ohio, Donald Ray Pollock has made a significant contribution to the American literature of dispossession, small town despair and death. Functioning as a complete antidote to Garrison Keiler’s fictional Lake Wobegone, Knockemstiff is a town in which no-one really wants to stay, but no-one ever manages to leave – and in the meantime, the misery is liberally shared around.
At the front of this book is a map showing the key features of Knockemstiff – the Dynamite Hole, Owl’s Car, the Store, the houses of the benighted inhabitants and so on. It adds an added degree of coherence to this collection. About the only escape any of these characters achieve from the world shown in the map is a chemical one: whether it’s alcohol, weed, lighter fluid or just doughnuts, everyone in Knockemstiff is addicted to something.
The Dangerous Book of Heroes by Conn & David Iggulden
I’ll be quite frank: I enjoy a rousing tale of derring-do as much as the next manly fellow. I like my heroes bristling with weapons and facial hair, preferably whilst rowing longboats and shouting ‘ho!’ a lot. So I was all set to enjoy The Dangerous Book of Heroes as a kind of guilty pleasure. The format is simple enough, with each hero (or set of heroes) enjoying a short biography, pleasantly illustrated with the sort of line drawings that used to grace boys’ magazines – something the book is very conciously trying to imitate. From early exploits to heroic last stands, we follow each life through to its noble conclusion and the idea is that we learn something in the process. Which is unfortunately where the Book of Heroes starts to go a little astray.
My first surprise was that while some might talk of Alexander, and some of Hercules (with others preferring Hector and Lysander, no doubt), if they were looking for them in The Dangerous Book of Heroes they might be a little confused. Strangely, there doesn’t seem to be any room in this book for anyone who doesn’t have English as a first language, or at least the best interests of England at heart. It might be a minor quibble, but I’m pretty sure that less than half of the world’s greatest heroes were born outside of the home counties: it’s one thing to write a book on English Imperial Heroes and call it just that, but to just call it the Book of Heroes gives the rather unpleasant implication that anyone who didn’t fight for the Empire was somehow unworthy of inclusion.
The Captain’s Table, by Brian Thompson
The Captain’s Table is Brian Thompson’s second foray into Bella Wallis’ life and loves. The first, The Widow’s Secret, is both a portrait of the danger and adventure to be found in Victorian England and a representation of the struggles a writer faces when confronted with real life and a need to create.
Thompson’s focus is on Bella Wallis, an attractive, intelligent, and witty widow who makes her living (secretly) as Henry Ellis Margam, sensational novelist extraordinaire. She survived her first outing, barely, and is now searching about her for a new thread to weave into a novel. Although the plot of the mystery is, almost, typical (there is a damsel in distress, an eccentric inventor, and a writer-turned-detective), Thompson’s characters take what could be a series of tired and worn clichés and turn them upside down to reveal a writer struggling to deal with the real world, a damsel whose distress is at least partially due to her own choices, and an inventor whose eccentricity does not prevent him from being a loyal and brave friend. Read more
Win limited edition proofs of Stephen Donaldson’s Fatal Revenant [closed]
Fatal Revenant, Book Two of “The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant,” begins where The Runes of the Earth ended: Linden Avery watches from a balcony while Thomas Covenant and her adopted son, Jeremiah, ride desperately toward Revelstone. But their reunion has vast consequences which she could not have foreseen. Soon she is betrayed by the people whom she most needs to trust. Transported deep into the Land’s past, she is forced to confront mysterious strangers, legendary heroes, and ancient evils, and to stand alone against the malevolence of the Despiser’s minions.
Abandoned in Garroting Deep, the most bloodthirsty of the Land’s long-dead forests, she reaches a fearsome decision: she determines to reshape reality in an attempt to end the Despiser’s evil and her son’s suffering. However, her purpose requires her to find Loric’s krill, a weapon abandoned among the Hills of Andelain millennia ago. And she needs the aid of friends and allies who will turn against her if she reveals her intent. Attacked by enemies old and new, and harried by strange beings with ambiguous agendas, she strives toward Andelain. But the ravenous skurj are rising, and all of her actions appear to serve her worst foes.
We have eight limited edition proof copies of Fatal Revenant to give away, courtesy of the nice people at Gollancz, and to be in with a chance to win one all you have to do is answer this question:
The unlikely hero Thomas Covenant suffers from which disease?
a. Polio
b. Schizophrenia
c. Leprosy
The Blue Moment, by Richard Williams
There’s a reason why I don’t write music reviews. It’s not that I don’t like music – quite the contrary, I love it, in almost all its forms – but unlike the task of using words to describe other words that is writing a book review, writing music reviews requires both mastery of musical technicalities (syncopation, rhythm and metre, keys and chords, and so on), but also the wisdom to use that knowledge sparingly and focus on describing how something really sounds, and how it makes the listener react. For me, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis is the lynchpin of my CD collection, a wonderful, calming, engrossing, transcendent display of musical genius that provides at least two of my Desert Island Discs – but it’s hard for me to describe why it’s so wonderful. Richard Williams has taken the opportunity of the 50th anniversary of its release to chart the impact it had on jazz, on art and on some very unlikely types of popular music. Where Miles Davis managed only a few pages of his autobiography devoted to this album, Williams has written a whole book – and a great read it is too.
There are tomes devoted purely to the detail of the recording sessions for Kind of Blue – the environment, the creative process, the false starts, and all of those minutiae – but this is not one of those books. For the fan of Kind of Blue though, Williams does put the album in the context of the history of jazz up to that point, and the context of Miles’s career so far, with a lot of emphasis on the legendary Birth of the Cool sessions that predated Kind of Blue by ten years, on the work the trumpeter did with Gil Evans, and on the history of his so-called ‘First Great Quintet’ which provided the backbone for the Kind of Blue band. There’s some information about the sessions themselves, more than I was aware of from Miles’s autobiography, from Ian Carr’s superb biography or from the album’s liner notes, but Williams doesn’t get carried away with this side of things. He’s more interested in Kind of Blue’s cultural impact – and what an impact…
The Poison Garden, by Sarah Singleton
Sarah Singleton’s The Poison Garden has something that, occasionally, feels rare in young adult literature: children who behave much like children really do. Thomas, and, to a lesser extent, Maud, both seem to be first and foremost children. They get frightened and want help. They are curious but also distractable. They love playing games of make-believe. They bond in their youth and loneliness. Instead of making her characters proto-adults, Singleton allows these traits of childhood (and some of the angst and despair of early adolescence) to propel the plot.
In addition, Singleton does not allow more minor characters to languish in obscurity. Although Thomas is the central character and the main focus of the book, Maud, his friend, has a delicate force and power all of her own, and the wholeness of her character (and all of the minor and surrounding characters in the book) makes the story come alive. Thomas, a little older and more suspicious than Maud, reacts to all of the strange situations he finds himself in with bravery, but they both (as many children their age would) look to those around them for support. Although much of that support is questionable (and possibly deadly), the children learn quickly to keep their eyes open and watch the ever shifting alliances of those who guard the gardens. Read more
Scar Night, by Alan Campbell
It took the arrival of the third volume of Alan Campbell’s Deepgate Codex, God of Clocks, on my doormat to prompt me to pick up the first volume, Scar Night – and now I have read it, I only wish I had not waited so long. It’s an evocative blend of grimy fantasy, with shades of Jeff VanderMeer, China Mieville and Neal Stephenson in the grotesque city of Deepgate, and with distinct steampunk undertones in the form of the mouldering technologies whose use has been forgotten over the course of milennia, to be replaced by superstitition and ignorance.
The city of Deepgate is almost a character in the story – built on a giant web of chains, it perches above an apparently bottomless abyss. There is a whole theology surrounding the abyss – the dead are ceremonially cast down there, to reside in the City of the Dead. The Church of Ulcis is the spiritual and temporal authority in Deepgate – with assassins, an airship navy responsible for defence of Deepgate against the desert tribes, and a propensity to use chemical weapons against them, it nevertheless appears to be a fading institution.
The White Queen, by Philippa Gregory
UK readers – be sure to check out the great new Philippa Gregory competition on our sister site Bookhugger
Philippa Gregory is one of the most popular as well as prolific writers of historical fiction working today and with The White Queen she begins a fascinating new series which is sure to be a hit with longtime fans and new readers alike. Best known for writing about the Tudor period in bestsellers such as The Other Boleyn Girl, The White Queen marks a step further back into the past for Gregory as she turns her attention to the Plantagenets and the Cousins’ War. Better known now as the War of the Roses, it was known contemporaneously as the Cousins’ War since it was, in effect, just that – cousin against cousin, brother against brother, Yorkist against Lancastrian. Gregory brings this lesser explored period of history to life by highlighting the dramatic and important stories of those in the background, the indomitable women behind the power, beginning with Elizabeth Woodville, the eponymous White Queen
Elizabeth Woodville was a young widow who approached the recently crowned King Edward of York with a financial plea and ending up getting far more than fiscal advice. Elizabeth was an exceptional beauty and she almost inevitably caught the eye of the young King. The two quickly fell in love and married secretly without securing the permission of any of the King’s advisors. As rumours of the marriage spread amongst the nobility, outrage at such a breach of convention started to build and when Elizabeth was finally formally presented at court as the new Queen, plotting and intrigue swiftly began. Forced by necessity and aided and abetted by her mother, Elizabeth starts to change from being a rather naïve young women into a savvy political operator who forms alliances and brokers marriages with the single-minded goal of securely her family’s grip on power. Elizabeth does great work to strengthen her husband’s position as King but it isn’t long before old threats to his rule resurface.
Read more
The People’s Train, by Thomas Keneally
Thomas Keneally has visited the past for inspiration before with his award-winning (and best-selling) take on the complex Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s Ark. Here, in The People’s Train, Keneally goes a step further: he has taken the story of Artem Sergeiev, a Bolshevik Russian immigrant to Australian in the early 20th century, and turned into the memoir of Artem Sasurov–a man who flees a Siberian labour camp and ends up in Brisbane. Alongside Artem is the fictional character of Paddy Dykes, a fictional journalist who shoulders the narration in the second half of the novel.
Like Schindler’s Ark, The People’s Train places itself in an historical area with a raft of recognizable names. However, Train is twinned–it is actually two first person narratives standing alongside each other, two lives woven together and into history. It is this journey from biography to supposed memoir to second memoir that separates this book from the famous Schindler’s Ark. Artem Sasurov is both Keneally’s creation and an echo of the real Sergeiev, but in the end, he is more art than truth, and the power in the character comes from the voice that Keneally creates for him.
The Sorceress, by Michael Scott
Nicholas Flamel has been an extremely popular alchemist of late. Although perhaps most famously featuring as the eponymous philosopher in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, it is in Michael Scott’s excellent The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series that the man himself takes centre stage. The Nicholas Flamel of Scott’s imagining began life as a humble bookseller who, approximately five hundred years ago, happened upon a copy of the Book of Abraham the Mage, a book written in an ever-changing language that contains all the knowledge of humanity. The book contained passages concerning an ancient race known as the Elders and their prophecy that one day twins would come who were destined to either save the world or to destroy it. Prophecies such as these are never quite as clear as you would like.
Over the course of the previous two books in the series, The Alchemyst and The Magician, Flamel has come to believe that twins Sophie and Josh Newman are the twins spoken of in the prophecy and he has sought to train and prepare them for the upcoming battle. Before either of the twins are able to fully realise their potential, their powers must be awaken and so Flamel is guiding them as they travel the world seeking the people – not all of them human – who can Awaken them. Things have been further complicated by the fact that Nicholas Flamel and his wife Perenelle have been maintaining their youth for centuries by brewing a monthly batch of the immortality potion detailed in the Book of Abraham the Mage but, with the book lost and the recipe for the potion being different every month, they have begun to age and time seems to be running out for Flamel.
Tide of Souls, by Simon Bestwick
Seeing this on the shelves was a joy to behold, not only because it’s the latest in Abaddon’s Tomes of the Dead imprint, (the previous tome I read, Al Ewing’s I, Zombie was a successful if somewhat quirky amalgam of sf (alien invasion), noir crime (private investigator), horror (bucket loads of the gory stuff) and the undead (the private investigator)), but also because Simon Bestwick’s name adorned the rather day-glo cover that rather cheapens this powerful and decidedly different take on the zombie-trope.
To this reader, Bestwick is amongst the frontrunners of the niche world of the macabre ghost story; his A Hazy Shade of Winter was the first Ash Tree Press title I bought. Not only did his tales of contemporary hauntings, both in the mind and of the land, take a frim hold on me, they also alerted me to that publisher’s high quality catalogue. His latest collection, All the Pictures of the Dark is available from Grayfriar Press – I’m three stories in and have no hesitation recommending it on the strength of those alone. Plus Bestwick’s up for a British Fantasy Award for Best Novella with The Narrows in September at the Fantasycon in Nottingham. Now he’s been given the chance to write a mass-market paperback and the tantalising possibility of him lending his powers of atmospheric suggestion to a full-blown zombie apocalypse was one I could not deny mself, and I applaud Abbadon for adding him to their roster.
Black Flies, by Shannon Burke
In Black Flies, his second novel, former paramedic Shannon Burke adheres to the old dictum of writing what he knows, and lays bare the virtually battlefront conditions facing ambulance crews who serve American ghettoes, in this case Harlem. Ollie Cross missed out on getting in to med school, so goes to work for the Paramedic Service instead, and gets assigned to one of the toughest possible beats. Working in Harlem is more than just a job – and Ollie Cross almost pays a very heavy price.
As a newbie, Cross is predictably the target of hazing from his colleagues – but this is more than just mucking around with his locker, their desire to break him in quickly reveals the very casual attitude that the paramedics have towards the value of human life, perhaps based on the similarly casual attitude that many occupants of Harlem have towards one another’s existence. The paramedic that Cross partners with most of the time, Rutkovsky, is willing to let him almost kill patients to demonstrate the right way to do things, while others are almost sociopathic in their outlook, verging on abusing the powers of life and death that society gives them. Only one medic, Verdis, lives in the community which the station serves, and he is reviled by some of his colleagues for caring too much – they think it compromises his efficiency.
Moriarty, by John Gardner
Spin-offs of major novels featuring either the hero or secondary characters are nothing new. Rarely approaching the level of the host books but still being somehow fun, they were generally a guilty pleasure back then and remain so today.
John Gardner was at this game for years, having banged out a lengthy run of post-Ian Fleming James Bond novels. He was an unabashed hack, a pen for hire with no loftier ambition than to earn and to entertain. Good for him. Moriarty is the final part of a series he wrote set in the world of that other great lynchpin of British crime, Sherlock Holmes. Written in the 70s, it lay unreleased for 30 years but luckily for genre fans, legal disputes tend to melt away after death. Read more
The Dwarves, by Markus Heitz
We all know that the races and creatures created and popularised by JRR Tolkien have, over a period of many years, dominated the landscape of epic fantasy: although they sometimes go by other names, orcs, elves, goblins, trolls and of course dwarves have been re-cycled, re-used and re-invented by numerous authors. Stan Nicholls set out to show a different side of orcs, and now Markus Heitz is doing the same with dwarves. Perhaps more than any other race, dwarves have never transcended the sidekick role assigned to them by Tolkien; they have also changed remarkably little as they have plodded from one author’s imagination to another. Even Terry Pratchett, that great debunker of fantasy stereotypes, has left their essential dwarven-ness intact, and the hairy creatures that covet gold, sing songs about gold, get drunk and have brawls are really quite close to Heitz’s dwarf creations (though perhaps Pratchett’s are a little more…. Welsh).
In The Dwarves, written in his native German and now translated for the English market, Heitz tells us the story of Tungdil, a foundling dwarf raised by humans. His master is a magus, one of the handful of sorcerors who protect the land of Girdlegard, a sort of gigantic bowl of a land, surrounded on all sides by mountains through which five passes, guarded by the five dwarven tribes, are the only ingress. Girdlegard is also home to Elves, Alfar (basically Dark Elves), gnomes, trolls, orcs, etc., with the evil races having entered though the now-abandoned Fifthling Kingdom of the Dwarves. There’s also the Perished Land to content with, a blight kept at bay by the sorcerors, on which any who die are resurrected in torment (so I suppose you could say they’re zombies, although Heitz calls them revenants).
Midnight Walk, edited by Lisa Morton
A horror anthology just when horror seems to be out of fashion, and, on top of that, featuring none of the usual “big names”? The Editor and Publisher must be stark crazy… or tremendously ambitious. Whatever the truth, here we are with fourteen new tales “of terror and suspense” mostly from comparatively new writers trying their hands at the old game of frightening their readers in any possible way. Predictably, some succeed and others fail but everyone tries real hard.
Armand Constantine opens the ball with Monsoon Devil, a colourful, entertaining tale of violence and (wrongly placed) revenge. John Palisano contributes The Tennatrick, a story always on the verge of total implausibility, revolving around an alien creature starting fires in the forest. Unfortunately, after an excellent, thrilling start, the tale runs out of steam. Del Howinson’s Alley Oops is a cute, well told story with an unexpected twist in the tail, featuring an old lady and a bag-snatcher. Read more
The Bookgeeks Interview: Chris Hannan, author of Missy
Chris Hannan’s work as a playwright has been produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican (1991) and by Sir Peter Hall at the Old Vic in London (1997) as well as by the National Theatre of Scotland in its inaugural season (2006).
He often creates big central roles for women. The Guardian hailed Elizabeth Gordon Quinn as a “monstrous and magnificent heroine”.
Four of his plays have had their world premiere at the prestigious Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, including Elizabeth Gordon Quinn and the award-winning Shining Souls. His 1990 play The Evil Doers was produced by the Bush Theatre in London and won numerous prizes including a Time Out Award, and in 2001/2 he was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Drama at the University of Cambridge.
In 2008 his first novel Missy was published in the UK and the US – so we thought we’d ask him about the process of creating it and his inspirations…
-
Connect with Bookgeeks
Bookgeek Chic
