Young Sherlock Holmes: Death Cloud, by Andrew Lane
Aside from the dancing, homicidal pastries, Barry Levinson’s 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes was just plain great. Yes it had Holmes and John Watson meeting at boarding school (The cries of Sherlockians ring out “Not canon! Not canon!”) and involved an hallucinogenic poison dart spitting Egyptian cult with a secret pyramid headquarters under London’s Docklands, but that doesn’t mean it was all bad. OK, the flying machine was pretty bad and there’s still no getting away from those pastries but as a youthful adventure yarn Young Sherlock Holmes was seriously good fun. It was meant to be the first in a series (be sure to watch right through to the end of the credits for a spoiler scene for the planned second film) but bombed at the box-office and so the proposed series was shelved. So, for the past twenty-five years, the potential of the youth of Sherlock Holmes has been a largely untapped if still rich resource. Fortunately, Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes: Death Cloud has now arrived to help fill the void in the great consulting detective’s back-story.
Death Cloud takes place in 1868 when Sherlock Holmes is fourteen. A desperately lonely Sherlock has been boarding at Deepdene School for Boys and is looking forward to spending the summer holidays back at his family home. However, as his fellow students are being collected by their families, Sherlock is summoned to the headmaster’s office where his elder brother Mycroft is waiting for him. Sherlock’s father has been unexpectedly recalled with his regiment to India and, since his mother is still suffering from some unexplained illness and Mycroft is busy working for the government, Sherlock is to be sent to spend the summer at Holmes Manor in Hampshire with his Uncle Sherrinford (one of the names that Arthur Conan Doyle considered for his detective before settling on Sherlock) and Aunt Anna.
The Hell Of It All, by Charlie Brooker
Potty-mouthed misanthrope Charlie Brooker has carved himself out a rather attractive niche of the last few years, as a sort of thinking man’s Alf Garnett. Imagine the bastard offspring of Jeremy Clarkson and Stephen Fry – full of hatred and disdain for the majority of things in the world, but with a withering wit and turn of phrase that few are able to rival – and you’re part of the way there.
The Hell Of It All picks up where Brooker’s last book, Dawn of the Dumb, left off, and is essentially a collection of his Screen Burn and G2 columns written for The Guardian between August 2007 and August 2009. Also included in this volume is a never before published piece intended for The Guardian entitled ‘Why don’t you blow your own head off?’ which was spiked at the time as it was deemed too dreary for a Monday morning.
Light Boxes, by Shane Jones
Two words here: delightfully quirky. This really is the only way to describe the magical, hallucinogenic and psychedelic fairy-tale that is Light Boxes, Shane Jones’ short debut novel, originally published through Baltimore’s Publishing-Genius Press in an edition of 500, and now issued by Hamish Hamilton, as well as being optioned for film by director Spike Jonze (‘Where the Wild Things Are’). To be fair, it stretches the definition of what is usually considered a novel – it’s more along the lines of an experimental story told in a series of prose poems. For a start, it’s a small book, in both size and page count (167 pages), consists of a number of extremely short, sharp ‘chapters’ (the longest being just under five pages but most often shorter, with each written from the point of view of one of the story’s characters or the omnipresent narrator), with some ‘chapters’ being just numbered lists and with yet others being simply a single sentence on a page. In addition, fonts and letter-sizes are expressively played with as well, helping to tell the story as well as creating an unsettling edginess to what is already a strange, surreal tale.
February is holding the inhabitants of a town hostage to snow, cold and grey skies, and has decreed that all flight, of whatever kind (even that of birds), must cease completely. To make matters worse for them, he has been kidnapping the children of the town. Thaddeus and Selah are the parents of Bianca, whose own kidnap prompts her father, in alliance with The Solution (a group of bird-masked and top-hatted balloonists dedicated to restoring flight), the Professor (the inventor of the light boxes of the title), Caldor Clemens (a seven foot giant), the townspeople and the buried children to wage war against their icy oppressor, because slowly, surely, February’s cold is killing the townspeople and sapping them of happiness. Simply put, they’re metaphorically fighting for their very existences and physically for the return of the other, warmer seasons. And that is it, in a nutshell.
Grace Williams Says It Loud, by Emma Henderson
Grace Williams Says It Loud tells the story of a severely mentally and physically disabled young girl, sent to live in a mental institute at the age of eleven. Set in the 1950s, it explores the stigma attached to disability and the consequences for Grace in particular. Nothing really happens as such, and that is sort of the point. Grace was confined within the Briar Institute for most of her adolescence, and her relationship with a fellow patient, Daniel, is at the centre of her life and of the book. An epileptic who lost his arms in a car accident, Daniel injects some love and life into Grace’s existence. Human relationships are explored in detail; from the Briar staff who regard the patients as little more than animals, to Grace’s parents who love her but cannot cope with her care.
In essence, Grace Williams Says It Loud is a portrait of its central character, and as such it is well written and engaging, for the most part. At times, it seems a touch long winded, but this is perhaps down to Henderson’s desire to convey every small detail of Grace’s uneventful life. Mundane incidents are given vitality as we see them through Grace’s eyes, and Henderson’s skilful use of language conveys Grace’s personality to the reader, while it remains buried for most of the other characters. Use of first person narration was slightly problematic for me. Grace tells her own story with wry humour, sarcasm and a range of knowledge which jars with the protagonist and her situation. Her voice is extraordinarily poetic and assured, as Henderson tries to humanise a girl who was voiceless due to her disability.
Overall, the impression which stays with the reader is of the injustice of much of Grace’s treatment and the barren life she leads. In recent times, attitudes to disability have undeniably improved but there is still a way to go. Grace’s story is one which should go some way to representing a section of society which has remained largely voiceless.
Read about Emma Henderson’s real life inspiration for this book over at Bookhugger
Hitch-22, by Christopher Hitchens
Over the course of 40 years (!) of articles and TV appearances, Christopher Hitchens has established himself as the radical’s radical – or perhaps more accurately, the iconoclast’s iconoclast. He has been, for many, the epitome of a coruscating, globe-trotting political journalist – or perhaps more accurately, The Don of a certain kind of louche, macho, self-consciously intellectual commentary. Either way, for all those 40 years he has been a scourge of the forces of political and moral conservatism the world over.
Now, as a supporter of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and as the coiner of the term Islamofascism, he finds himself accused of making the most predictable and cliched journey of all – that of the youthful firebrand becoming a right wing, reactionary bore. Hitch 22 is a memoir designed to show this up as a distortion, even a perversion, of the truth. This Christopher Hitchens remains at heart the rarest of things, an intellectual radical who has not succumbed to groupthink. In this version it is the orthodox Left who have veered from the principles of secular equality and radicalism, not Hitchens. A personal memoir this may well be, but Hitch 22 is much more a daring, ego-centric and, it must be said pretty convincingly accurate, portrayal of where liberal thought is today and how it got there.
Laird Barron: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With
“T.E.D. Klein’s Dark Gods, a quartet of novellas that hit the stands in 1985 as a follow-up to his famous novel The Ceremonies. Klein, a respected former editor of The Twilight Zone Magazine, gave us a tour de force with his novella collection and demonstrated his standing as a master craftsman possessed of a sophisticated and cerebral style matched by perhaps a handful of modern fantasists.
The contents of Dark Gods include Children of the Kingdom, in which the author is enthralled by the tales of an old priest regarding lost tribes, subterranean kingdoms, and an ancient evil that occasionally rises to plague the surface world; the events of Petey transpire during a housewarming party in a remote Connecticut mansion as guests slowly uncover a macabre puzzle left behind by the former, utterly mad occupant; Black Man with a Horn may well be the crown jewel of the set — certainly a classic homage to Lovecraft’s Mythos in which an elderly author shares a plane ride with a missionary who’s convinced agents of a diabolical tribe are stalking him; Nadelman’s God is the tale of a man whose melodramatic college-era poetry has been co-opted by a lunatic who believes it possesses the power to summon a monstrous supernatural entity. Hilarity ensues.
Dark Gods has exerted some influence on my writing career. It reinforced my long held notion that novella-length horror is the genre at its most sublime. Klein’s masterpiece, alongside Peter Straub’s Ghost Story and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, is always close at hand. I often open it at random to instruct myself in the fine art of building atmosphere that gradually, and inexorably, draws in the reader and delivers unto him or her an exquisite thrill; a glimpse of the numinous in the yellowed and curling pages of an ‘80s paperback.”
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About Laird Barron:
Laird Barron is the author of two collections: The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, and Occultation; both from Night Shade Books. His work has appeared in places such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Clockwork Phoenix, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies. Mr. Barron is an expatriate Alaskan currently at large in Washington State.
- Visit Laird’s website and journal
- Read interviews with Laird at Clarkesworld Magazine, and at Books Are My Only Friends – Part 1, Part 2
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby is one of those novels about which it is difficult to say anything new. High schoolers who had it forced down their throats remember it as that novel about rich people and a green light somewhere, with all details forgotten after the final exam. It’s a shame because Fitzgerald’s language is perfect. There’s not a misplaced or unnecessary word in the whole novel. Forget about what you thought in high school. This is a novel for people who have lived, experienced heartbreak and disappointment, but still hope. You weren’t ready for this book at 16 – but you’re ready for it now.
For those who don’t remember, this is the tale of Nick, a young man working in the financial sector in New York in some low paying job. He rents a run-down house in an otherwise fancy neighborhood, just across the bay from his uber-wealthy cousin Daisy and her slightly frightening husband. His neighbor is Jay Gatsby, a mysterious and secretive party-throwing type who swims in money. Slowly, with perfect tension, Fitzgerald reveals to you that Gatsby is not all that he seems, and that he isn’t across the bay from Daisy by accident.
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A Gambling Man, by Jenny Uglow
Jenny Uglow’s A Gambling Man is a book with a very specific focus. It chronicles Charles II’s return to rule Britain and the ten years that follow: full of women, science, and the forceful personality and vision of the man who restored the monarchy and finessed his way through a series of crises that required this changeable, flexible monarch to rise to the occasion and define the role that the monarchy would inhabit for future generations.
We begin with Charles’ return. Jenny Uglow’s prose places her readers on the deck with Charles as:
All afternoon Charles paced the deck in his new clothes. As he walked with long, fast strides, the sailors examined their king. At twenty-nine, he was tall and dark, his face strong, with a long nose, heavy jaw and brown eyes slanting under thick, arched brows. He wore his own dark hair, and bore a hint of a moustache above full lips. His mouth could curl in amusement, purse in though, tighten in anger. A mobile, sensual face. Today he smiled and cracked jokes to the audience that scuttled behind him, weaving between barrels, tripping over ropes.
And This is True, by Emily Mackie
To say that Emily Mackie’s debut novel is a thought-provoking and adventurous look at human relationships and the affect society has on them would be a bland understatement. And This is True is the story of Nevis Gow, a fifteen-year-old boy who has travelled the country in a caravan with his father since he was small. Nevis has never attended school and his father doesn’t work. Together the two of them scorn society and set out to take on the world.
But deep down, underneath the security and warmth he gains from the day-to-day life of the caravan, Nevis has a secret. He doesn’t just love his father; he’s in love with him. And when the duo finds themselves stranded and staying with a Highlands farming family, it is he who struggles to cling to their past life, refusing to let his father move on.
American Devil, by Oliver Stark
Oliver Stark’s American Devil owes a lot to current American crime fiction. The setting, the hard-bitten detectives, and the duo of psychologist and detective will be familiar to all fans of the genre, but Stark holds his own in a debut that focuses on characterization and has a villain certainly creepy enough to keep the pages turning.
Stark focuses on the internal twists and turns of his characters and adds little quirks and original ideas to the stock personas that Tom Harper and Denise Levine represent. Harper, on leave for striking a fellow officer, has been asked back into the department for a specific reason: he has a knack for these kinds of cases, the pattern-killers, and the city is terrified (and the police force under pressure), and so he has returned – at least for the duration of the hunt for the killer. Levine is an expert, a psychologist whose research into childhood neglect and the emotions of criminals allow her to create profiles and deliver insight into the patterns that the killer is creating; but she is also one of the psychologists employed by the police department to treat their own, and it is Harper himself, struggling with anger and the crimes, who draws her into the investigation. Read more
Making Shore, by Sara Allerton
Sara Allerton’s debut novel is an impressive and affecting war story – based around and inspired by the real experiences of young merchant seaman Brian Clarke during the Second World War, but with Allerton putting those events in to an original fictional framework which place this firmly in the domain of the novel. The story is that Clarke wrote his memoirs but, as must often be the way, was unable to make the distinction between the remarkable and the mundane; by allowing a novelist to tell his story, freed from the strictures of reportage, the entire story is considerably elevated to the realms of the truly memorable.
The hero of Making Shore, Brian ‘Cubby’ Clarke, is a young wireless operator assigned to the aging tramp steamer SS Sithonia for a voyage to South America. Wireless operators were employees of the Marconi Company, not permanent crew members, and were thus assigned to many different vessels – and on this one, his fellow operator Joe Green, larger than life, is to become his dearest friend, as close as a brother.
Hellhound On His Trail, by Hampton Sides
The relationship between assassin and target is an unusual one. The latter has usually built up a public standing of repute through years of work, and whether generally considered good or evil, it’s their public persona which ultimately leads to their murder. The former, on the other hand, is often unknown, unexpected and at least slightly deranged. Yet the two are bound together in one frenzied moment of history, both forever nailed to one particular date, time, place and event.
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Two great historical trilogies to be won [closed]
For fans of historical fiction there’s a wealth of great new writing to choose from at the moment – and thanks to the splendid folks at Headline, one lucky winner of our new competition can get two trilogies of great historical novels.
Firstly, we have the nautical adventures of Nathan Peake, as written by Seth Hunter: The Time of Terror, The Tide of War and the forthcoming The Price of Glory. Described as ‘Patrick O’Brian meets John Le Carre’, they feature Nathan Peake, British naval officer and spy during the war with Revolutionary France. In the first of these tales, it is 1793, and Peake, Commander of the brig-sloop Nereus based at Rye in East Sussex, is unhappy with his commission and is desperate for some real action. When revolutionary France declares war on England, he gets his chance. The French have killed their king and are about to embark on that violent period of bloodletting known as the Terror. Peake is entrusted with a vital mission to wreck the French economy by smuggling millions of French banknotes across the Channel and into the heart of Paris. But opposition to the Terror mounts and Peake is soon forced to leave Paris and find the storm-tossed British squadrons in the Atlantic…
Secondly, we have first three books of M.K. Hume’s King Arthur series: Dragon’s Child, Warrior of the West and The Bloody Cup. They tell the epic tale of the man destined to become Arthur, High King of the Britons.
The Dark Ages: a time of chaos and bloodshed. The Roman legions have long deserted the Isles and the despotic Uther Pendragon, High King of Celtic Britain, is nearing death, his kingdom torn apart by the jostling for his throne. Of unknown parentage, Artorex in growing up in the household of his foster father Lord Ector. One day, three strangers arrive and arrange for Artorex to be taught the martial skills of the warrior; blade and shield, horse and fire, pain and bravery. When they return, years later, Artorex is not only trained in the arts of battle, he is also a married man. The country is in desperate straits for the great cities of the east are falling to the menace of the Saxon hordes. Artorex becomes a war chieftain, and wins many battles that earns him the trust of his Celtic warriors and proves that Artorex alone can unite the tribes. But, if he is to fulfil his destiny and become the High King of the Britons, Artorex must find Uther’s crown and sword. The future of Britain is at stake.
Andrew Kaufman
Andrew Kaufman was born in the town of Wingham, Ontario, Canada, the birthplace of Alice Munro. This makes him the second best writer in a town of three thousand. He is also a film maker, radio producer and a regular contributor to the McSweeney’s website. Andrew’s debut, All My Friends Are Superheroes was a cult bestseller, and his new novel, The Waterproof Bible, is published by Telegram Books in July.
The Demon’s Covenant, by Sarah Rees Brennan
The Demon’s Convenant is Sarah Rees Brennan’s second novel and follows the same characters found in The Demon’s Lexicon. Mae, Alan, Jamie, and Nick are still fighting the forces of darkness and dealing with the fallout from Mae’s struggle to save her brother. Though they have gone their different ways, and are separated in the beginning of the novel, Mae soon calls the group back together when her brother is again threatened; the magicians have returned, and they want Jamie for their own.
This book focuses on Mae and her unique place in the group. The only one with no obvious and flashy talents of her own, she gets by on guts and grit and a flair for tactical planning. Between Jamie’s need to explore his talents, and the magician’s determination to recruit him for their cause, Mae fights to protect her brother from the temptations that swirl around him, and from the smaller, but no less painful, aches and pains of growing up. Read more
The Tide of War, by Seth Hunter
Occasionally you come across a series of books that stand alone, not needing their fellows to reinforce the mystique of their imagined characters and plot. The Tide of War by Seth Hunter achieves this, and I can say this with confidence as I have never read the first of the trilogy, The Time of Terror. As such this book was approached on its own merits, and I was unable to rely on Hunter’s previous work for support.
Set during the late 18th Century, The Tide of War concerns the adventures of one Nathan Peake, a British Navy captain who has witnessed the Terror of revolutionary France (the previous book) as well as the brutality of active service on the high seas. In this novel Peake is dispatched to the Caribbean during the wrangling and battles between colonial powers and the newly formed United States of America.
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Lost Places, by Simon Kurt Unsworth
Horror, at its best, takes the mundane and every-day, and then corrupts it through a distorting lens beyond what it’s built to withstand. The safety of the normal world is left behind, replaced by a tangential, edgy unfamiliarity. Allied, of course, to a heightened sense of skin-crawling fear (but not necessarily gore, although it has its place, but only in the right measure). Each of the eighteen stories in Lost Places, Simon Kurt Unsworth’s first collection (from the excellent Ash-Tree Press of Canada), carves moments out of life, and then stretches them out to beyond their (and the character’s) natural endurance. (Note: in this review not every story will be touched upon, but representative examples will be highlighted instead).
At the heart of Simon Kurt Unsworth’s writing is a temporal and spatial disruption, a dislocation of reality, inflicted on characters whose worlds and realities have been fractured. The veils between this world and the one next door are often much thinner than we bargain for: Lovecraft realised this too, and very effectively utilised the idea in his Cthulhu Mythos cycle. Simon updates this device superbly, bringing home to us that it wouldn’t take much, a twist in space here and a break in the flow of time there, and chaos would surely ensue. This theme is emphatically emphasised by the opener, “A Different Morecambe”, where a simple day-trip to a familiar haunt reveals how fragile reality is: and “The Station Waiting Room”, where a village’s unknown malaise is discovered to have an origin beyond our knowledge and understanding. The disruptive influence in “The Lemon in the Pool” is the all-too human fear of rejection and of not belonging, being out of place and time: “Old Man’s Pantry” is where the veil alluded to is at its thinnest – a runner, practising his sport within a myth-infused landscape, becomes entrapped in a frightening fusion of the two worlds, when a figure out of legend is given the flesh of a terrifying, relentless, unforgiving solidity and reality.
Remember You’re a One-Ball!, by Quentin S Crisp
In spite of the rather inelegant title of his new novel, Quentin S Crisp is a renowned stylist whose literary production, although confined within the world of small, indie press, has been widely praised for its beautiful narrative fashion and its exquisite phrasing.
My personal enthusiasm for Crisp’s superb writing style has been sometimes attenuated by a certain degree of smugness, a tendency to an excess of introspection to the detriment of a proper development of the stories’ narrative structure. Read more
We Need To Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is a conundrum. It is complicated; it is simple. It is the story of a victim; it is the story of a perpetrator. It is all of those things, complexity layered onto clarity, love mixed inextricably with hate, and, above all, blame and responsiblity, and where either, or both, really lie.
Eva, the book’s centre and Kevin’s mother, talks to the readers through letters. Letters she writes, without fail, to her absent husband. Letters where she tries to understand what happened to herself, to Kevin, to their family–what happened to cause Kevin’s deadly rampage, where the root of the action lies. It has taken Eva two years to reach this point, two years to gather the courage and allow herself to wonder, to face what happened on a day she refers to as Thursday. There is bravery in her actions, but it is a brittle, fragile sort of bravery, and Eva readily admits that:
I’d always made it a policy, one you admired, to face what I feared, though this policy was conceived in days when my fears ran to losing my way in a foreign city–child’s play. What I would give now to return to the days when I’d no idea what lay in wait (child’s play itself, for example).
Songs of a Dead Dreamer, by Thomas Ligotti
Thomas Ligotti is widely regarded as one of the most important writers currently working in the horror genre. His work is the subject of intense debate by fans and scholars alike. His often complex stories have conspired to bring him almost mythic status and this has been intensified by the difficulties of finding his earlier work, much of which is now out of print.
This collection by Subterranean Press is a reissue of a collection originally published in 1985 and is the first in a planned series which will allow readers to get their hands on this, till now, hard to find material. These editions are also the definitive versions with many changes by the author ranging from single words to additions of whole paragraphs. Consider this the directors cut.
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The Bookgeeks Interview
Simon Kernick
Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most exciting new thriller writers. He arrived on the crime writing scene with his highly acclaimed debut novel The Business of Dying, the story of a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. However, Simon’s big breakthrough came with his novel Relentless which was selected by Richard and Judy for [...]
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Latest Competition
Five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of the big film releases of 2011, and to celebrate its release on DVD we have five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won – consisting of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
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