Strange Tales, Volume III, edited by Rosalie Parker
The World Fantasy Award winning anthology Strange Tales is back with a third volume of seventeen weird or unusual tales, encompassing a variety of subjects and writing styles, but sharing a distinct character: good quality. Predictably, not every story pleases this reviewer to the same extent, but that’s just a matter of personal taste.
I will mention first the three stories which struck me as really outstanding. Nina Allan’s The Lammas Worm is an extraordinary piece told in an exceptionally captivating narrative style, revolving around old unwholesome myths and featuring a weird girl who joins a circus company, bringing about trouble and tragedy. Sanctuary Run by Daniel Mills, where a young man seeking refuge from a snow blizzard becomes the guest of a strange community, is dedicated to Robert Aickman and does have an Aickmanesque tone, disquieting in a puzzling way and totally fascinating, especially for the things left either unsaid or unexplained. I was also bewitched by Angela Slatter’s Sister, Sister, a vivid, powerful fantasy where a former princess is abandoned by her husband for her wicked, inhuman sister. Read more
The Minutes Of The Lazarus Club, by Tony Pollard
Enjoyable if slight historical thriller treading the well worn paths of Victorian London to create an atmospheric story of murder and espionage.
The Lazarus Club is a secret talking shop for some of the brightest minds of the age. Surgeon George Phillips is invited to join by none other than Isambard Kingdom Brunel, currently obsessed with building the biggest ship of the age, The Great Eastern. Phillips becomes fascinated by the secretive Club, by its thrilling discussions of revolutionary ideas and by some of its more enigmatic members, Brunel in particular. However when a string of grisly murders becomes connected to the Club, it is Phillips who becomes involved up to his neck. Read more
Bequest, by A.K. Shevchenko
In A.K. Shevchenko’s debut novel, the fate of Europe could be drastically altered by the contents of one document – no, it’s not Stalin’s shopping list or Hitler’s letter to Santa Claus, it’s the will of a Cossack general whose audacious theft of treasure from the Tsar could have repercussions for Russia, Ukraine and the UK well over a century later if it comes to light. This book is reminiscent of Robert Harris (though not perhaps at his best), and takes in settings as far apart as Argentina and the Ukraine, as our heroine, young London solicitor Kate, and our ambitious young Russian Security Service agent Tara Petrenko, criss-cross the globe pursuing their own agendas with regard to the will, with a number of historical flashbacks thrown in for good measure.
Opening with the revelation of the death of key character is a brave way to start the book, and Shevchenko’s occasional repetition of the opening paragaphs of chapters is a clever device that gives a nice echoing effect. The characters are pleasingly three-dimensional too: Kate is an average young woman living a slightly chaotic and unsatisfactory life, only involved because she happens to have Ukrainian ancestry; Petrenko starts out as a simple baddy, but is eventually revealed to be quite morally conflicted, more John Le Carre than Robert Ludlum.
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Veiled Detective, by David Stuart Davies
David Stuart Davies is certainly a very brave man, for with The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Veiled Detective he has produced a radical re-imagining of the Sherlockian world of Arthur Conan Doyle that is sure to polarize fans of the world’s greatest consulting detective. Sherlock Holmes, as created by Conan Doyle, has inspired a loyalty and devotion among readers that is quite unrivalled. It is hard to imagine any other fictional character who still receives fan mail and requests for assistance at his fictional home address more than a hundred years after his fictional self would have died. However, the Holmes canon is not completely sacred as there are a great number of novels and short stories written that seek to plug the gaps in Holmes’ life as chronicled by Conan Doyle. Indeed, over the years, Sherlock Holmes has found himself thrust into all manner of scrapes, with his adventures ranging from fighting Dracula to playing a role in The Prisoner of Zenda to preventing a Martian invasion. But the bravery from David Stuart Davies lies in the fact that with The Veiled Detective he has gone far beyond the accepted grounds of pastiche by offering a story wherein the characters involved are so radically different from those of Conan Doyle that their exploits cast doubt onto and subvert all of the canonical Sherlock Holmes works.
The Veiled Detective opens in Afghanistan in 1880 as army medic John H. Walker is treating wounded soldiers. Realising that there is nothing he can do for the remaining wounded men save for making them comfortable until death comes, Walker despairs of the conflict and abandons his field hospital to slope off quietly and get drunk. Walker ends up drinking even more than he intended and is discovered in a stupor the next morning by his commanding officer. Having been found to have abandoned his post and allowed fellow soldiers to die, Walker is first imprisoned in a hellish military prison and then given a dishonourable discharge from the army and sent back to England in disgrace. On the voyage home Walker is snubbed by his fellow passengers as word of his disgrace has got out and he comes to realise that there is no decent, respectable future awaiting him in England. Walker eventually finds an ally in Captain Reed, a self-confessed thief who was also dishonourably discharged from the army. Reed proposes that Walker could serve some nebulous role in his business organisation and, glad to have any prospects at all, Walker quickly agrees. It is when Walker is back in England that the radical alterations made by David Stuart Davies to the world of Sherlock Holmes are confirmed. It emerges that Captain Reed is a trusted lieutenant of Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, and that Moriarty has a very special role in mind for Walker.
Blood’s A Rover, by James Ellroy
In the 80s and 90s James Ellroy defined modern American noir. Seminal books such as LA Confidential, The Black Dahlia and White Jazz with their hard-boiled mix of hipster speak, clipped stream of conciousness prose and a paranoid, parallel hinterland of pseudo history set the template for an entire, reinvigorated genre. Ellroy placed American noir back into the lineage of Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Elmore Leonard and Dashiell Hammett from whence it had strayed and his achievement cannot be overstated.
Now you can’t move for expansive, hard-boiled takes on American history as told through its underbelly. So much so, it’s almost impossible to imagine 21st century American crime without him. This influence reaches way beyond fiction and even if we bet without every American crime novel written since The Black Dahlia, no Ellroy would also mean, for better or worse, no Sopranos, Pulp Fiction, Dexter or Red Riding. Even things a million miles from the mean streets of LA, like Mad Men and Deadwood owe a less obvious but nonetheless meaningful debt to Ellroy. As I said, his achievement really cannot be overstated.
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Walking the Dog, by David Hughes
When illustrator David Hughes approached his fiftieth birthday, he turned himself in at his local surgery for a mid-life MOT and was not overwhelmingly surprised to be told by his GP that he was drinking far too much and exercising far too little. Although both of these slothful habits suited Hughes down to the ground, their adverse implications with regard to his projected lifespan prompted his family to decide that Hughes needed to shape-up and that the best method for him to do so would be to buy a dog and then proceed to walk it.
Two weeks later, on a Sunday, we drove to Uttoxeter to choose our detox terrier. I still wasn’t sure if I wanted a dog.
The dog is to be very generously given to Hughes as a birthday present. At the Saredon Kennels in Uttoxeter Hughes encounters a depressed looking wire haired fox terrier named Murphy who was the father of the litter that Hughes and his family had come to view. Although he feels a certain affinity with Murphy (“I still wasn’t sure if I wanted a dog but I wanted to take Murphy home. He needed rescuing, obviously the life of a stud isn’t all it’s cracked up to be”), Hughes is persuaded that a puppy would be a more suitable companion for him and so Dexter is chosen to join the family.
At Macclesfield, an hour later, Dexter was sick in the car.
None of This Ever Really Happened, by Peter Ferry
None of This Ever Really Happened was publisposhed in hardback under the title Travel Writing. The new title is fitting for a novel that places the author at the centre of a story that blends fact and personal history with fiction and is also populated by personal friends and famous writers. It must also be ironic, as there are passages in the novel that are drawn directly from real life, notably the sections that present the narrator’s travel writing about Mexico and Thailand and his summarised, back-story career trajectory which precisely mimics the author’s (their names are identical also – well, almost, the ‘r’ of Peter is dropped).
Both Ferrys (Peter [author] and Pete [narrator]) are creative writing teachers and in some ways the novel operates as a discussion of or guide to the techniques of contemporary fiction. A class discussion in which Pete Ferry instructs his assembled students is used as a framing device for a story which he acknowledges is partially made or sexed up. It begins with a car that Pete sees being driven erratically, as if the driver were heavily under the influence. He shadows it, agonising over whether he should help in some way, whether he would be able to confiscate the driver’s keys.
Hyddenworld: Spring, by William Horwood
Williams Horwood’s Duncton novels, starting with Duncton Wood, were an essential part of my teenage years, and of my transition from more simplistic tales to books for adults, complete with sex, violence, religious persecution, frailty and hope – they may have been about a civilisation of moles, but telling people that really doesn’t do justice to what Horwood achieved in the two trilogies of the Duncton series. While he has published other novels, nothing Horwood has done since, I suspect, has made the same impact on the bestseller charts or the reading public – so it was with surprise and delight that I was offered an advance copy of the first of four new novels from Horwood, the Hyddenworld quartet.
While the Duncton books were technically fantasy, they, like Watership Down and no doubt other tales of talking animals, tended to find themselves on the general fiction shelves in the bookshop – but with Hyddenworld, it is firmly at the fantasy shelves that Horwood is aiming. His objective is ambitious: to create a fusion of ancient English myths and legends with an environmental parable about man’s impact on the Earth, through the medium of fantasy. The Hydden are rather Hobbitesque, but their ability to hide from human eyes and live unnoticed, while using the best bits of human technology, is more reminiscent of the Borrowers. Rather than just having a race who are very good at hiding from humans, Horwood introduces a rather clever element – the use of henges as portals that allows Hydden to enter the human world, growing to human size, and humans to do the same in reverse.
Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life: Volume 1, by Bryan Lee O’Malley
With Bryan Lee O’Malley’s pop culture venerating Scott Pilgrim saga coming to an end in July with the release of the sixth volume and a film version starring everyman du jour Michael Cera out sometime this summer, the first five volumes in the series are each being given a much deserved reprint over the next few months. As is logical, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life is the first volume to be re-released.
Scott Pilgrim is a 23-year-old slacker living in Toronto with his gay roommate Wallace Wells. Since he doesn’t have to trouble himself unduly with the world of work, Scott’s primary activity is playing bass in a band, Sex Bob-Omb, with his friends Kim Pine (drums) and Stephen Stills (guitar). One year out of a bad break-up, Scott has recently started dating a high-schooler named Knives Chau. While his friends think this kind of inter-age romance is scandalous, they’re also pretty certain that no one in his right mind should date a girl named Knives, Scott believes it to be OK so long as all they do is go for pizza and talk about her day at school.
Get Me Out of Here, by Henry Sutton
Canary Wharf in wintertime can be a fairly bleak and forbidding place, never more so that in the midst of a global banking collapse – perhaps enough to make anyone a bit depressed. For Matt Freeman, protagonist of Henry Sutton’s latest novel, the place seems to have made him more than a bit down in the dumps. The book opens with Freeman acting like a spoilt city boy while returning a pair of glasses – nothing but the best for a young high flyer, cash-rich, time-poor. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that Freeman is fooling himself far more effectively than he is fooling the rest of the world.
Matt Freeman at first seems harmlessly delusional – with his constant talk of setting up business deals in North Korea, and his endless obsession with upmarket branded goods, as well as a distinctly offhand attitude to his fellow man, he is hard to like and hard to take. He becomes harder still to tolerate when his attitude to women, his pervasive fantasy life, begins to emerge. Matt Freeman has issues with women – he can barely seem to tolerate his girlfriend, and he fantasises about several of his neighbours, spying on them from the balcony of his architect-designed flat at the fringes of the Barbican.
An Elegy for Easterly, by Petina Gappah
Taken individually as well as when assembled collectively, the short stories that comprise Petina Gappah’s debut collection, An Elegy for Easterly, offer a powerful lament for the Zimbabwe of Gappah’s childhood, a Zimbabwe that has all but disappeared behind the tragedies of totalitarianism, hyperinflation, corruption, crippling poverty, misogyny and an unchecked AIDS epidemic. Although, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the suffering that has been experienced in Zimbabwe, all of the stories are tinged by the twin spectres of death and despair, Gappah manages to provide moments of sparkling humour while at the same time highlighting the endurance and resilience that is shown both inspiringly and heartbreakingly by Zimbabweans today. An Elegy for Easterly has been rightly acclaimed; Gappah’s stories are a triumph of truth, tragedy and insight into a hugely misunderstood country.
All thirteen stories in An Elegy for Easterly are excellent, but there are several that particularly stand out. There are important and deadly secrets at play in most of Gappah’s tales; secrets, whether at a national or personal level, which everyone may well know but that no one will talk about. In ‘The Cracked, Pink Lips of Rosie’s Bridegroom’ guests at a wedding all notice the signs of AIDS to be seen in the bridegroom’s face. They know of his chequered sexual history and that being with him will ultimately prove the death of his bride, but none of them warn her. Many things are left unsaid in Gappah’s Zimbabwe. In ‘Something Nice from London’ Mary Chikwiro is sitting with her extended family at Harare airport waiting for the flight from London that will bring her brother Peter back to his family. It is common in Zimbabwe for families to eagerly await the gifts and much-needed foreign currency that relatives who have been abroad will bring them, but it eventually becomes clear that Peter will not be bringing his family anything; it is his body that is being flown back to them. While her elderly relatives stubbornly repeat the old adage that one mustn’t speak ill of the dead, Mary seethes in silent anger over the brother whose much-heralded trip to London brought the family nothing but heartache and impoverishment.
Your Face Tomorrow, by Javier Marias
Your Face Tomorrow is a truly remarkable novel, in every way. Granted, some perseverance is needed initially, as the way in which Marias’ narrator allows his story to unfold is unique and startling, but perseverance is swiftly displaced by compulsion, and you are compelled to turn each page not so much by a racy plot as by a matchless ability to marry philosophical observation of human nature with a rapier wit and a dazzling range of allusions.
Your Face Tomorrow was published in three volumes and is divided across those volumes into seven sections: fever, spear, dance, dream, poison, shadow and farewell. The narrator is a Spaniard, married but separated, with two young children, living in lonely exile in London. His own failings led to the marital schism but his distant wife is never far from his thoughts and he often ruminates on the nature of his inevitable successor in her affections. A bored and underpaid BBC employee, this exile, Jaime Deza, is invited by a friend, Sir Peter Wheeler, an Oxford professor, to a party where there will be an opportunity to meet a man who could offer him more stimulating and remunerative work. After meeting the man, Bertram Tupra, and passing a small test set by Wheeler, Deza learns that both his old friend and his new acquaintance are, or in Wheeler’s case have been, members of a branch of the military or secret intelligence services and that they intend to enlist him, even though he is foreigner.
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
In the spring of 2001 war-reportage comics pioneer Joe Sacco was in the Gaza Strip with journalist Chris Hedges working on an assignment for Harper’s magazine. The pair were working on chronicling how the Palestinians in the town of Khan Younis were coping during the early months of the Second Intifada against the Israeli occupation when Sacco happened to remember a reference that he had read many years earlier in Noam Chomsky’s book The Fateful Triangle. The passage in question was a short quote from a United Nations report concerning a large-scale killing of civilians that had occurred in Khan Younis in 1956; Sacco and Hedges agreed that this sparsely reported incident should be included in their article if research proved it to have some validity and current resonance. They then spent a day in Khan Younis “gathering eyewitness testimony to what happened in the town in November 1956 during the Suez Canal Crisis, when Israeli forces briefly occupied the Egyptian-ruled Gaza Strip.” The stark stories told to Sacco and Hedges by old men and women about their fathers and husbands being killed in their homes or lined up in the streets and shot were clearly a tragic yet vital element of the history of Khan Younis and so the events of 1956 were worked into their Harper’s article.
Unfortunately, as Sacco notes in his introduction to Footnotes in Gaza, “for whatever reason, that section was cut by the magazine’s editors.” For Sacco such an omission, one that effectively threw the greatest ever massacre of Palestinians on Palestinian soil back into obscurity, was extremely galling. Believing that far too many historical tragedies throughout the ages have barely been awarded footnote status in the broad sweep of history – even where they contain “the seeds of grief and anger that shape present-day events” – Sacco decided that the story of Khan Younis needed to be told and so Footnotes in Gaza was born.
An Empty Death, by Laura Wilson, and The Interrogator, by Andrew Williams
Two excellent wartime thrillers, but each one quite different in its approach to the genre.
Laura Wilson’s An Empty Death is the second book to feature detective Ted Stratton. The first outing, Stratton’s War, was a good debut, albeit one owing a fair amount to the John Lawton’s Frederick Troy books. An Empty Death is an altogether more singular novel and takes the series into new, more psychological territory.
1944 and London is exhausted by war, loss and the strain of living under the raining V-1 flying bombs. Stratton is tired of the job. Doctors are tired of dealing with bomb victims. Even the murderer is tired by the strain of not being who he wants to be and the effort of maintaining the pretense. Set in and around the Middlesex Hospital and the pubs of Fitzrovia, An Empty Death is an unglamourous, unsentimental, occasionally seedy novel – as if Patrick Hamilton had written a crime-based sequel to Hangover Square or 20,000 Streets Under The Sky. And is inevitably all the better for it.
Naamah’s Kiss, by Jacqueline Carey
Jacqueline Carey’s Naamah’s Kiss lives in the same world as her well known “Kushiel” series, but the focus has shifted from the pain as pleasure in the previous series to the worship of the pleasure of the transitory, the fragile, and the new. For the first few chapters, we have also left D’Ange and travelled to Alba to meet the Maghuin Dhonn, the people of the Brown Bear, the oldest tribe of Alba and a people whose small magics are only echoes of the great magicians that live in their histories.
We meet Moirin, a child brought up in the empty wilderness by her mother. Able to slip into the shadows between twilight and the world of the living, Moirin moves undetected and safe through the forest she inhabits, and her life revolves around the small magics she learns from her mother and her secret: the presence of a bright lady and a man with a seedling cupped in his palm, gods from another land.
As Moirin nears puberty, she discovers another gift, an ability to coax seeds to grow, to help plants to thrive, and to gentle give health back to land around her–she also learns that her history, and her heritage, are mixed. Not a pure Maguin Dhonn, her father is a D’Angeline priest, and that heritage may have something to do with her gifts. The gifts are still small ones, though, and she is quickly distracted by puberty and all of the changes it brings. Not the least of these changes is the attention of Cillian, the son of the local lord who is rapidly growing infatuated with Moirin. Cillian’s love reveals another of Moirin’s gifts; she has a connection to Naamah, the fallen angel whose domain is sexuality, and Moirin finds desire flowing through her. Read more
The Thirteen Curses, by Michelle Harrison
Michelle Harrison’s debut novel, The Thirteen Treasures, won the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize in 2009, and its sequel, The Thirteen Curses, is another story of a young girl struggling to deal with a gothic and dangerous world populated by fairies and other creatures out of myth and legend.
The Thirteen Curses follows Red, a young girl who has been haunted by fairies and the disappearance of her brother. Trapped in the fairy-realm because she took Tanya’s place, Red knows that this may be her only chance to find her younger brother, stolen by the fairies years before. Armed with little more than a pair of silver scissors and the research she had done to protect herself from the denizens of that land, Red sets out to make a bargain with the fairy court, determined to bring her little brother home.
Red’s determination to find her brother leads her deep into the fairy-realm and in spite of all of her precautions and knowledge, she is quickly captured by the Hedgewitch, an evil woman with a sinister purpose for Red. In her fight to escape, Red discovers another prisoner in the house, someone that holds the key to the mystery of Red’s past. The Hedgewitch is in more danger than she realizes, though, because Red is more powerful than even she knows, and her history is even more complicated than any fairy tale. Read more
All That I Have, by Castle Freeman
Some books are an unexpected delight, and Castle Freeman’s new novel is one such – a short and simple tale of country people. Set in the backwoods of Vermont, All That I Have is narrated by Sheriff Lucian Wing, the last word in low-key lawmen. Wing instinctively understands that the approach needed to police the collection of towns in his jurisdiction is not a loud, shouty, throwing-his-weight-around style, but a folksy and very personal method that recognises his place as a part of the community as well as its policeman. It’s an approach he learned from the previous sheriff, his mentor, and it’s served him well so far, though it’s thoroughly tested by the end of the book.
The sheriff, a laconic, down-to-earth and fundamentally good man, has to contend with the apparent intrusion in to his domain of some shadowy Russians, who have bought a hilltop mansion near the town, and their supersmooth New York lawyers and agents. The Russians have crossed paths with the locals, and specifically with Sean ‘Superboy’ Duke, a handsome but empty-headed young stud. Superboy is apparently Lucian Wing’s pet project, and his ambitious deputy is convinced that he takes it too easy on him – but Sean’s dad was killed in the first Gulf War, and from then on he’s always had a special status in the community. Sean has got himself involved with the Russians way over his head, a fact that becomes apparent very early on, when Sheriff Wing finds a Russian who has been beaten, stripped naked and tied to a tree. Superboy is not noted for his subtlety.
The Shadow Dragons, by James A. Owen
It is always dangerous to insert well known figures into a story not their own. James Owen’s Imaginarium Geographica series is full to bursting with literary and historical figures living out lives just a shade different from those recorded in the history books. The Shadow Dragons is the fourth book in this series and follows Here, There Be Dragons, The Search for the Red Dragon, and The Indigo King in chronicling an exploration of the Archipelago of Dreams, a magical land that contains all of the places found in song and story. There are echoes of Avalon, of Neverland, even of Narnia, in the Archipelago, and these fantastic places are accessible only through the maps found in the Imaginarium Geographica, an atlas that three companions have been commanded to guard and explore.
These three companions, called caretakers, are none other than John (J.R.R. Tolkien), Charles (Charles Williams), and Jack (C.S. Lewis); they are first appointed caretakers as young men at Oxford, and part of the fun of the entire series is ferreting out the sparks that turn into some of their novels (there is, for example, a talking badger that bears no little resemblance to some of the characters in Narnia). Another part of the fun is watching these three young men, friends in real life, explore a world that is made of the stuff that inspires and weaves dreams and myths. They are not the first to hold the office of caretaker; they follow after such luminaries as Edgar Allan Poe, Leonardo Da Vinci, Jules Verne, and a host of other famous names literary, artistic, and otherwise.
B Is for Beer, by Tom Robbins
Apparently, B Is for Beer got its start in life from a bet. Not an actual bet per se, but rather a bet featured in a cartoon featured in a newspaper that featured in Tom Robbins’ reading pile. The cartoon involved a publisher and a writer walking into a bar with the publisher remarking, “No, I don’t think a children’s book about beer would sell.” Robbins took this to be a challenge and so began to write B Is for Beer, his first book in six years. A fable about beer aimed at both children and adults that began as a whimsical gamble might not sound particularly promising, but in the hands of Tom Robbins it’s an idea just crazy enough to work.
B Is for Beer might be a small novel in terms of pages, but it features Robbins’ typically large scope in a story that explores the fantastical nature of seemingly mundane affairs:
Once upon a time (right about now) there was a planet (how about this one?) whose inhabitants consumed thirty-six billion gallons of beer each year (it’s a fact, you can Google it). Among those affected, each in his or her own way, by all the bubbles, burps, and foam, was a smart, wide-eyed, adventurous kindergartner named Gracie; her distracted mommy; her insensitive dad; her non-conformist uncle; and a magical, butt-kicking intruder from a world within our world.
Hunger, by Michael Grant
Sometimes people are locked away to keep others safe from them; sometimes people are locked away to keep themselves safe from others. Michael Grant’s Hunger tells the story of a group of kids locked away for their own safety, but locked in their prison, hidden away from prying eyes, is a danger greater than any of them can imagine.
The book starts three months after the final battle of its predecessor, Gone, and all of the familiar characters are back. After rebuffing the attacks of the kids from Coates Academy, Sam Temple now finds himself as one of the two oldest inhabitants of the FAYZ and the boy in charge of life in general. Sam is a natural leader, and he was a key part of the defence of Perdido Beach, but he is still only fifteen, and the responsibilities of running what amounts to a small (adolescent) town have begun to wear on him.
Life moves on in the town. Kids are still developing strange powers, and the divisions between the “freaks” and the “normals” threatens to spiral out of control. One of the most pressing needs is food–and the simple task of harvesting cabbages from a field quickly highlights what will be a source of trouble for the kids of FAYZ–the kids are not the only ones showing strange talents; animals, insects, even birds, have started showing strange and disturbing new abilities: talking coyotes, worms with serrated teeth and territorial impulses, and bats that can swim complicate even the simplest of plans.
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