Sourdough and Other Stories, by Angela Slatter
When we were children, if we have been lucky, our parents and grandparents have been reading or telling us bedtime stories, mostly fairy tales. As adults, we still like to read (or listening to) stories , which are the substance of what we call “fiction”. Fiction has many faces, encompasses different genres, one of which is defined “fantasy”.
Fantasy (the genre most closely related to the literary worlds of our childhood) sometimes takes the shape of a classical fairy tale, a subgenre unfortunately seldom revisited by contemporary writers.
Angela Slatter, the author of the present Tartarus Press collection, is an Australian writer who creates wonderful fairy tales for grownups, crafting exquisite , colourful stories featuring vivid characters and mesmerizing plots embellished by an evocative, elegant prose.
To say that she’s a born storyteller is an understatement but to label her narrative style with a proper adjective is a difficult task.
There are so many excellent tales in the volume that commenting upon all of them in detail would be tiresome, but some stories deserve a special mention such as “ The Angel Wood”, an enchanting, powerful tale where pagan traditions betrayed by a young woman are later embraced by her older daughter; “ A Porcelain Soul”, an extraordinary, magical yarn depicting a peculiar art academy where dolls are made and then given a soul; or the outstanding “Lavender and Lychgates”, a perceptive, ghostly piece depicting delicate family matters – (a stillborn child tries to return to exact that motherly love he was never allowed to experience) with an insightful touch.
In the delightful “The Shadow Tree” a dark-skinned nanny endowed with secret powers takes care for good of a couple of mischievous, spoiled royal brats, while in the fascinating “Sister, Sister” a princess is abandoned by her husband for her wicked, inhuman sister, and in the lovely “Sourdough” true love triumphs over witchcraft.
“The Story of Ink” and its sequel “Lost Things” are vivid gothic tales of a very dark nature.
“Dibblespin” is a cruel story of lycanthropy, but also of family ties and missing affection, while “Gallowberries” and “Ash” are tales of terrible beauty about the solitude and the power of witchcraft.
“A Good Husband” provides the breathtaking portrait of a supernatural creature living in a pool and describes how she relieves a poor, disfigured girl from her desperate love feelings.
In short, Slatter’s fairy tales have a ravishing quality which leaves the reader totally spellbound by their elegance and imaginative power.
Highly recommended.
Snobbery with Violence, by M.C. Beaton
M.C. Beaton must be one of the hardest-working authors writing in the mystery genre. She is most famous for having written twenty-six Hamish MacBeth detective novels and twenty-one Agatha Raisin mysteries but, it turns out, has also found time to write four historical whodunits. The Edwardian Murder Mystery series was originally published under Beaton’s actual name, Marion Chesney, but are currently being republished with nice Julia Quinn-esque covers asserting the authorship of M.C. Beaton, presumably to solidify her detective brand and keep the Chesney name for her romantic fiction. Snobbery with Violence, a tale of murder and mayhem at a high-society house party, is the first of the Edwardian Murder Mysteries.
Lady Rose Summer was something of a fair-weather Suffragette – while she believed that women’s rights were certainly worth fighting for, the photograph of her at a protest which was published on the front-page of the Daily Mail was really a step too far. With her debut season in London society already becoming something of a disaster, Rose’s parents decide that she must abandon political protest and forget about improving her mind (after all, what gentleman would wish to wed a human encyclopaedia?) and concentrate on making a suitable match. Of course, Rose’s choice of an ideal suitor is vastly different from her father’s picture of the ideal son-in-law and so, when Rose announces her intention to become engaged to notorious bounder Sir Geoffrey Blandon, her father employs Captain Harry Cathcart to do some discreet digging into Blandon’s character. Once Cathcart brings to light Blandon’s dishonourable motives, Rose breaks off the engagement, takes the unforgivable step of making a huge scene in public, and seemingly throws away her chances of ever making a “good” marriage.
The SS: A New History, by Adrian Weale
The SS as an organisation is in many ways synonymous with Nazi Germany – while the brownshirted SA may have provided Hitler’s muscle during his ascent to power, their leadership was brutally suppressed and they had little impact on the actual period of Nazi rule, especially by comparison with the SS. Originally conceived as a security detail for Hitler and the party leadership, once the SS came under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, it shaped itself to be the aristocracy of the Nazi Party.
Partly of the party, but increasingly also of the German state, by the time Germany had been defeated in the Second World War the SS had generated a bureaucracy and organisational structure of Byzantine complexity, taken part in the war on all fronts through the armed Waffen-SS, and undertaken the bulk of the activity in a project with which its name will probably be forever associated, the so-called ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question.’ Key elements of the SS included the SD, its security service arm, and the SIPO security police organisation. The Gestapo, the main German political police organisation also came under the auspices of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, as did more or less all German police organisations to a greater or lesser extent (even fire-fighters and rural gendarmes). In addition, there were a myriad other sections with military, economic, social and cultural objectives. For instance, there was the Lebensborn organisation, which assisted racially sound pregnant women in finding homes for their babies, as well as projects researching the background to Aryanism and the connection between Aryans and the Nordic races. All of this was contained within a complex administrative structure based around ‘Main Offices’, with empire building just as common inside the SS as it was outside. The SS built up an organisation so large and multi-faceted that it has often been called a state within a state.
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Five copies of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet to be won [closed]
Here at Bookgeeks we’ve been big fans of Reif Larsen’s debut novel, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. Simon A reviewed the book when it was published in hardback, we have recently interviewed Reif, and now we are offering five lucky people the chance to win a copy of the lovely new paperback edition, published on 7th October, courtesy of the kind folks at Vintage.
To win, you need to go to the website for this wonderful book, tsspivet.co.uk, and answer the following question:
Q: If you go through to Gracie’s room (click on the iPod), what do you find if you move your mouse over the telephone handset?
Reckless, by Cornelia Funke
Cornelia Funke’s Reckless is an intricate novel. Family struggles, friends and lovers, fairy tales and a more modern world, all weave together in a novel that masterfully evokes the danger that has always lurked at the heart of childhood stories. Reckless is just as enthralling and thought-provoking as her “Ink” series, and we begin, as happens in Inkheart, with a portal: a way to a different world. For Reckless, it is the quintessential magic mirror, the one that leads to another place, a land where fairy tales are dangerous and the search for magic is the domain of those brave enough to face its secrets.
Jacob Reckless has been navigating the paths and hidden valleys of this land for several years and has built a life as an adventurer. He has met and made friends; he has found something missing from his life.
It was true what they said about the Fairies. Nobody came to them if they didn’t want you to. That had also been true when Jacob first searched for them three years ago, but even then there had been a way to find them.
You just had to bribe the right Dwarf.
He has kept the fairyland his secret, something that he refuses to share with his brother or mother. But his mother has died, and his brother, Will, has followed him into the perilous world of the fairy tales. Jacob’s first though is one of anger: How dare Will come to his private land? But he soon realizes that Will’s journey is not merely an annoyance, but an actual danger, and he must make terrible choices as they get swept up into the war that has engulfed the land.
For it is not merely magic that is making fairy land dangerous, they are a land at war, caught in a vicious fight between the rock-like Goyl and the Empress. The Goyl are winning, steadily destroying the armies that stand in their way, backed by a fairy curse that turns anyone they injure to living stone. But even with their ever growing army, the rockmen still search, tracking a legend, a whisper of a jade warrior, an unparallelled fighter, the only rockman worthy of guarding the king.
Sides will be chosen, but war here is not a story of heros and villains, monsters can be more than they appear, and mankind more monstrous than it would ever believe. Funke, as always, does an exemplary job in world building, and her prose rings with the poetry of long lost stories. This fairy world lives and breathes, interacts with the world outside but overcomes it (and owes much to the terrifying version of fairy tales found in older, non-sanitized, versions), and the characters that inhabit it draw the reader into their dreams. For that is the true danger of fairy, not its reality but its ability to make those that visit it forget there is anywhere else, not the apple, but the sleep that comes after.
The memories of the streets and houses where they all had grown up, of the lights and the noise, and of the girl she had been there–all but faded, far away. The present swiftly became the past, and the future suddenly wore strange clothes.
This review first appeared on Bookbitz, the sister site of Bookgeeks dedicated to reviewing books for kids and young adults.
Simon Kurt Unsworth: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
“Let’s sort out our terms of reference here. I’m assuming by ‘the book I’d like to be buried with’ that we’re granting me some kind of zombified afterlife in which I can read, and that I’ve been buried with one of those booklights, and maybe some peanuts to keep me going when I get peckish? I’m also assuming that we’re meaning ‘a book I’d like to read again’, which helps – it means I can discard all those books I’ve enjoyed but am unlikely to tackle more than once (Danielewski’s House of Leaves, for example, which I thought was great, but I really can’t be bothered doing all that ‘holding the book upside down and reading great long lists of stuff’ again). In the end, this came right down to the wire in a all-out scrap between three books, all of which I’d have been perfectly happy to read in my coffin at leisure as the Rapture happened around me. The two losers (let’s not call them that, actually: let’s call them the two equally wonderful books that I didn’t pick this time) are The Collected Ghost Stories of MR James and Junji Ito’s three-part graphic novel about a town cursed by spirals, Uzumaki. Both of these are superb, nigh-on faultless, pieces of art which have brought me hours of pleasure, but in the end, I didn’t really have a choice. So, the book I’d like to be buried with is Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.
I think I was about 12 when I first read ‘Salem’s Lot; I’d read Carrie previous to it, which I’d enjoyed but which hadn’t done too much for me, so my buying it wasn’t because I was a King fan per se. No, I bought it for three reasons: firstly, I was on holiday in Wales, in a rainy caravan park, and just before we’d left home, I’d seen the first part of Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of ‘Salem’s Lot on TV – I was concerned that my parent’s very basic video wouldn’t tape the second part, and I wanted to know what happened, damnit! Second, the cover had a big, bald creepy vampire face on it, which intrigued me. And, thirdly, it had a cover quote by the Manchester Evening News, my local newspaper (“Triple H for horror!” was another quote, if I remember correctly, although not the one from the Evening News, I don’t think). I mean, how could I not buy it from the camp shop? Despite my mum’s misgivings, I used some of my own money and bought the book, and read it over the course of the week’s holiday. As the rain boinged on the caravan roof, I became entirely immersed in Maine, and in the goings-on in a small town, and I was genuinely, absolutely entranced.
For me, in ‘Salem’s Lot, King does so more than tell a vampire story (although he does, and a damn good one at that); he paints a town. I loved (and still do) the way King allows his characters (the town included) to unfurl, opening out before our eyes. It feels, somehow, like we’re not so much being told a story as let into a series of secrets that, almost accidentally, form a narrative. For an imaginative young boy just beginning to expand his reading choices into the world of ‘adult’ fictions, it was almost revelatory, that you could spend time over the small details, could let things happen at their own pace. It seems so obvious now (and I also know King wasn’t the first to do it; after all, ‘Salem’s Lot is, according to him, simply Peyton Place with vampires), but at the time it was a major lesson in how stories could and should work. As an adult, I can analyse why ‘Salem’s Lot is so good, and tell you that it’s because the set-pieces are thrilling, that it’s both creepy and moving, that the characters are complex and believable, that it never tries to make the vampires anything less than alien and vicious, that King’s eye for the details of a small town, and the lives that small town contains, has never been finer, but none of that really matters. No, what matters is this: at the time I first read it, ‘Salem’s Lot felt real.
It’s not a perfect book, by any means (how does Barlow get into the Petrie’s house without being invited? Huh? Huh?), but all of the faults that (for me) came to characterise some of King’s later work are held in check – the plotting never gets flabby, the authorial voice never gets too folksy, the characters are likeable without being contrived and, perhaps most importantly, despite its length, it never contains simply too many unnecessary words or feels too big. Sprawling and grandiose, yes, but always manageable. And in Straker and Barlow, of course, you have one of the greatest villainous double acts created, both urbane and violent, selfish and driven by lusts and yet veneered with charm and able to intellectually rationalise the horrors that they perpetrate. Before them, the human frailties King gives his other characters seem tiny but are never insignificant, which is how it should be: humans are worked upon, twisted and reformed by exposure to something evil, made into something new and less pleasant. Barlow and Straker are Evil, and when our heroes go into battle against them, it makes the stakes (no pun intended) as high as they can be.
I’ve reread ‘Salem’s Lot fairly regularly between that first experience and now (most recently listening to it as an unabridged audiobook on my iPod, which was a new and fun way to experience it), and whilst I’ve never quite caught that anything like that initial rush of sheer enjoyment that the first time delivered, each subsequent reading has given me something new and something good. Barlow and Straker, Ben Mears, Susan Norton, Mark Petrie, all may have aged since I first found that paperback in a dreary shop in Wales, but they haven’t dated a bit.”
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About Simon Kurt Unsworth:
Simon Kurt Unsworth was born in 1972 somewhere in the northwest of England, on a day during which no mysterious signs or portents were seen. He spent most of the following years growing, and hasn’t stopped yet, although he’s swapped upwards for outwards these days. He lives in Lancaster (just below the Lake District) with his wife and child, which is a good place to live if you like that sort of thing – it has a river, some pubs and roads of varying quality. He writes when he’s not working, spending time with his family, cooking, walking the dogs, watching suspect movies or lazing about. His stories have appeared in the Ash Tree Press anthologies At Ease with the Dead, Exotic Gothic 3 and Shades of Darkness, as well as in Lovecraft Unbound, Gaslight Grotesque, The Black Book of Horror 6 and Black Static magazine. His story ‘The Church on the Island’ was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and was reprinted in Stephen Jones’ The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #19 and The Mammoth Book of the Very Best of Best New Horror. His first collection, Lost Places, was published by the Ash Tree Press in March 2010.
- Visit Simon’s blog
I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett
As someone who started reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, as a logical progression from Douglas Adams, I confess I have always found the distinction between his ‘normal’ and young adult books slightly hard to understand. The ‘normal’ books contain no sex, no swearing and only cartoon violence, plus they can be exceedingly, wonderfully silly. The young adult titles (this is the fourth in the Tiffany Aching series, and we have also had The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, and the non-Discworld Nation) are characterised by their unwillingness to patronise or in any way talk down to their intended audience, with their fair share of darkness and serious themes, as well as the same love of language that pervades all of Pratchett’s work. With the physical format of I Shall Wear Midnight mirroring exactly what a normal ‘adult’ Discworld novel would look like, it seems even the publishers aren’t making much of the distinction any more. All things considered, this is A Good Thing, because I Shall Wear Midnight is a book that can be enjoyed equally by Pratchett-adoring grown-ups and younger readers who may only have met Pratchett through the Tiffany Aching books.
Tiffany Aching is now established as the witch of the Chalk – despite still being a teenager, she is immersed in the reality of witchcraft as being about helping those who cannot help themselves, doing the unpleasant jobs that nobody else wants to do and, mostly, not doing magic. She also understands that the job is largely about confidence and presentation. An incident at the beginning of the book where Tiffany has to deal with the aftermath of a shocking piece of domestic violence shows her maturity (and demonstrates the maturity Pratchett expects from his younger readers) – and in this, as in so much else, Tiffany is assisted by the wonderful Nac Mac Feegle, aka the Wee Free Men, a tribe of brawling, sheepdip-swilling reprobate miniature Scotsmen who are one of Pratchett’s most enjoyable comic creations. They are sworn to follow and protect Tiffany, who they regard as the Hag O’ the Hills, whether shes wants them to or not.
Tiffany is forced to face the reality that witches are becoming increasingly unpopular – it turns out that a dark force, the Cunning Man, has been unleashed – the spirit of a long-dead witchfinder, he can poison people against witches, who by their nature focus on doing the right rather than the popular thing, and are thus always at risk of a backlash. The Cunning Man’s poison complicates Tiffany’s dealings with the dying Baron of the Chalk, his son Roland and Roland’s new fiancée, and many other people whose respect she has come to take for granted. Despite the fact that the vitriol stirred up against her leads to her imprisonment (in the dungeon of the castle, with the goats) she manages, with (or perhaps despite) the help of the Feegles to face the Cunning Man, without requiring the help of veteran witches Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg.
This being Pratchett there are plenty of Themes to Ponder and Things to Think About in I Shall Wear Midnight – society’s capacity for scapegoating and vilifying those who are different, borne out by witchhunts in our own history, and the importance of psychology (or Headology) in maintaining the special nature of certain vital castes and groups that society needs to function. However, that never detracts from the fact that this is a simple, enjoyable and laugh-out-loud-funny story told with Pratchett’s usual verve and style. However old you are, you’re never to old to read stories this good. And if you don’t believe me, I’ll send the Wee Free Men round to your house – when they’ve finished drinking the paint thinners, widdling in the fish pond and fighting each other just for fun, their final rejoinder to the unbeliever will surely be a resounding
CRIVENS!
Buy this book, and I am sure they will leave you in peace.
This review first appeared on Bookbitz, the sister site of Bookgeeks dedicated to reviewing books for kids and young adults.
No Mercy, by Sherrilyn Kenyon
When shape-shifter Dev Peltier crosses paths with Samia, a fierce immortal Amazon warrior, he realises he may have met his match. Live fast, fight hard and if you have to die then take as many of your enemies with you as you can. That is the Amazon credo and the words Sam has lived and died by. Now in her immortal life she is haunted by a past betrayal, her reason for becoming a Dark-Hunter and Dev is still feeling the loss of his mother, who was killed by his enemies, the Daimons. Now those enemies have a new found power that threatens their very existence and possibly the world. They have to pull together and fight hard if they want to survive and be together at the end of it.
No Mercy is book twenty-seven in Sherrilyn Kenyon’s popular Dark-Hunter series and possible the best one yet. It opens with the chance encounter of Dev and Sam at Sanctuary, the bar Dev’s family owns and a safe haven for Dark-Hunter. This is where their story begins. Throughout the book, they face the continuous threats from the Daimons, who now have the power to walk in daylight among other things and have to come to terms with their forbidden relationship.
Reif Larsen
Reif Larsen is twenty-eight, studied at Brown University and has taught at Columbia University, where he is finishing his MFA in fiction. He is also a filmmaker and has made documentaries in the US, UK and sub-Saharan Africa. He lives in Brooklyn. Bookgeeks reviewed his first novel, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, which is published in paperback at the beginning of October.
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
You may think you know the story of Treasure Island from the many films that have been produced over the years but these are often quite loosely based on the book. Read the real thing and you’ll find a much more sinister world of ruthless men who shatter the quiet and innocent world of our hero, Jim Hawkins, whose family own the previously quiet country inn, The Admiral Benbow.
And there is plenty of iconic action and characters in the book too. Indeed, many of the traditional images of pirates that we hold to this day come from Treasure Island. Think of pirate and you’ll think of talking parrots, sailors with wooden legs and perhaps dreaded ‘Black Spot’. Also, it is generally agreed that many of the pirates in the book are based on real ones who were active in Stevenson’s day, some say that Captain Flint is supposed to be based on Blackbeard.
A Loyal Spy, by Simon Conway
Like many things in life, it’s possible to stop thinking about the real meaning of the labels that we apply to the stuff that surrounds us – and in my case this is certainly true of the notion of the thriller novel. In my younger days I hoovered up Tom Clancy, Jack Higgins and Alistair McLean, yet somewhere along the line lost the taste for them. As a result, I forgot that a good thriller is genuinely thrilling, so I am grateful to Simon Conway for reminding me of that fact. A Loyal Spy is actually the second of his novels to feature the intelligence agent and action man Jonah Said (the first being Rage), but it’s the first I have read and it’s a fantastic cross between John Le Carre’s character-driven, introspective oeuvre and the more fanciful and action-packed output of your Frederick Forysthes and Robert Ludlums.
Jonah Said is a member of a top-secret, deniable, British government black-ops team called the Afghan Guides, whose involvement in Afghanistan predates 9/11 and goes back to the end-days of the Russian occupation. Jonah is the agent-runner for Nor, who, being of Arabic extraction, like Jonah, is trained as a spy by the Brits and then infiltrated in to the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, as a double-agent. As the ISI was instrumental in the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Nor becomes increasingly involved in the jihaddi movement, but when the Afghan Guides are pulled out of the country because of changing political priorities, Nor is cut off. Post 9/11, the country is back at the top of the agenda, and the Guides are back too – but Nor betrays them, leading them to commit a crime that will dog their careers. It’s the spectre of that event that provided the motivation for the actions of many of the protagonists in A Loyal Spy.
The Player’s Curse, by Brian Thompson
Brian Thompson’s Bella Wallis is an uncomfortable heroine. Sensitive, strong-willed, drawn to reveal the secrets around her, Bella and her alter-ego, sensationalist author Henry Ellis-Margam, poke and prod at the mysteries around them, even when it upsets those they love.
In The Player’s Curse, the third in the series, Bella’s compulsion to understand the hidden aspects of the world around her, and to bring to light the stories that surround them, places her in direct conflict with the love of her life, and will, once again, put her own life in danger. She seeks out the strange, the puzzling; she chases the story behind the secret, and her travels take her outside of London and into the company of strangers.
Bella’s strength, though, lies in these abilities and this determination, and her investigations are about more than uncovering individual answers, they are about understanding the world around her, about seeing the universal motives behind individual acts, and the individuals behind the most bizarre mysteries. Read more
Elliott Allagash, by Simon Rich
This may be Simon Rich’s first novel, but the 25 year old already has CV lined with achievements and accolades those twice his age would be jealous of. As well as being the youngest ever writer on American televisual institution Saturday Night Live, he’s written for a plethora of top notch magazines and edited two humour collections.
Given he’s probably not stopped working since he graduated high school, his choice to set his debut novel there is perhaps because it’s the time in his life he’s paused for breath long enough to salvage a few memories. Or maybe it’s because he feels he has a good grip on the novel’s subject matter. Either way, Elliott Allagash reads like a story equally steeped in pink fuzzy nostalgia and stomach churning memories.
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Tell All, by Chuck Palahniuk
Chuck Palakniuk’s latest novel Tell All has been hailed as ‘vintage Palahniuk’, marking a shift away from his later works such as Snuff and Pygmy towards his earlier more thought provoking novels. It is an ironic title for an author whose career is founded on brutally parodying the post modern and the falsities and corruptions of our society. However set along side a generation of authors with a fascination for the excess and debauchery, and hyper reality of the super modern world, his work like that of Coupland, Sedaris and Easton Ellis has already become ‘vintage’, these writers have been around for over ten years, and mark an epoch of writing which perhaps we are ready to move away from.
Tell All is a novel about immortalisation, and the lengths people will go to to live forever. Using his usual mode of operation, Palahniuk chooses to rely on endless name dropping (highlighted in bold through out text) and splitting the novel in to acts rather than chapters to give the piece his characteristic style. The novel is set in the hey day of Hollywood glamour, and follows Miss Kathie (Katherine Kenton), a Hollywood star of immortal fame, as she is slowly degenerating into old age, under a front of plastic surgery, drug abuse and extensive pampering, administered by her maid and the mastermind behind her stardom, Hazie.
Palahniuk references Dorian Gray, the ever youthful man, who hides his aging portrait in a locked attic. Miss Kathie keeps a self inflicted image of herself in the form of a mirror; kept in a vault alongside her dead pets, husbands, numerous vintage champagnes and her ancient diaphragm. Hazie marks all of Miss Kathie’s wrinkles and other flaws into the mirror with a diamond ring, her own record of her ageing, marking the excess of a life of indulgence.
When Miss Kathie meets the handsome Webster Carlton Westward III, her latest suitor and soon to be seventh husband, she finds a manuscript in his possession, a tell all biography, a memoir of her life, including how she will die, in his possession. Turning against the young lathario, Miss Kathie foils numerous would be attempts on her life, until the final climax of the novel when we uncover who the perpetrator really is.
Although the characters of Palahniuk’s novels are purposefully depth-less, his novels are starting to follow suit. After novels such as Lullaby and Invisible Monsters with their clever twists and complex plot, his latest work has paled in comparison. Has he already said everything there is to stay about his epoch, and have we already deserted him?
Allyson Bird: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
“‘The Wine Dark Sea by Robert Aickman would have made joint first choice but that problem has been decided for me because it has already been mentioned in this series …the other is Nest of Nightmares by Lisa Tuttle. A friend in California sent it to me last year and I was devastated when I had to send it back. Quite fortuitously, as copies are hard to come by now, I went into the dealers’ room at WHC Brighton this year and found a copy quickly. I asked Lisa to sign it – a wonderful moment for me.
In Nest of Nightmares Lisa Tuttle gives me the mystery I long for and everything isn’t neatly tied up. I don’t always want that. And, there is much more going on than the literal meaning of the words. Her fiction is enigmatic and all the stronger for being so. Her characters are ordinary people facing the strange and I remember the imagery long after the final page has been turned. Women are mad, or are they? They are taken over, as are some of the ones they love — but by whom or what? They feel trapped. One protagonist is belittled (Robert Holdstock mentioned this when he talked of the story, Flying to Byzantium in Horror 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman) and others are driven by ‘forces’ supernatural or otherwise. They face life and death and we wonder if they live …what will be the outcome? They are never let off easily. The way back can be fraught with danger and some make the choice to stay or can’t get away from the ‘supernatural’ knowing a price will be paid.
And then we come to The Nest at the end of the collection. A real horror story for me, and as with many of Lisa Tuttle’s stories, it can be read on many levels. There is so much pain and yet hope in that story. We are all mortal and just perhaps… whether it is something we shouldn’t wish for… there might just be more about our world that we can’t comprehend.”
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About Allyson Bird:
Allyson’s debut collection, Bull Running for Girls, won The British Fantasy Society award for best collection in 2009. Her second, Wine and Rank Poison from Dark Regions Press, will be launched at Fantasycon this year. Autumn sees the publication of her first novel, Isis Unbound, from the same publisher. She is also co-editing an anti-fascist, anti-racist anthology, with Joel Lane, called Never Again. This is due out from Gray Friar Press in September.
A little on Wine and Rank Poison.
Revenge. Best served cold. Here are ten stories involving most of the deadly sins: greed, lust, envy, wrath, and pride. Strange stories woven in time and place from Ancient Greece to 1929 Odessa, Italy to the modern United States…stories that mix reality, mythology, legend, half-humans, and the inhuman…
Allyson lives near the South Yorkshire moors with her husband and young daughter.
- Visit her website here: www.birdsnest.me.uk
Old Masters, by Thomas Bernhard
This is an odd book. Reading it was sort of like taking a bite out of an apple to find that it contains banana on the inside. Firstly, it doesn’t really follow the rules that novels are supposed to adhere to. If you asked someone to describe a novel to you, they would say things like ‘has a plot’, ‘has characters’, ‘has paragraphs’ and possibly ‘has a narrator’. Old Masters doesn’t have a plot. It pretty much just has one character. It consists of one long, rambling paragraph. And its narrator is so entirely absent from the book it’s an effort to remember he is there at all.
Nothing happens other than the speaker, Atzbacher, goes to meet his friend Reger at the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, and speculates as to why he is there. Basically the book is just a medium for Reger’s opinions on everything from art to air temperature, and most of the book is just his views, given by the narrator, with each section ending ‘Reger said’, ‘Reger said’ without variation. Irrsigler, Reger’s friend who works in the museum, crops up on the sidelines but has no real part to play. Reger comes, every other day, to the Kunsthistoriches Museum to sit in front of Tintoretto’s ‘White-Bearded Man’, on a specific couch in the Bordone room. The mystery of the book is why he does this, and picking up clues to help us eventually make sense of Reger’s life is the point of the book. It aims to touch on universal themes of loss, love and life but falls far short of the profundity it aspired to. The characters are quite mono-dimensional, dialogue between them is almost non-existent (the book is basically one long Reger-rant), and as a result what was supposed to be touching and evocative just becomes borderline irritating.
Dark Peril, By Christine Feehan
Dark Peril is the twenty first book in Christine Feehan’s Dark series. Dominic – one of the most powerful Carpathian males – believing his existence is coming to an end, ingests vampire blood containing dangerous parasites in order to gain entrance to the vampire run laboratory and learn their plans. Thinking this is the most honourable way to end his life, he will get the information that is needed to save his race, report it to the Carpathian leader and go out fighting. One thing that he did not take into account was finding his lifemate, Solange Sangria, along the way.
One of the last Jaguar people, Solange has spent a long time alone, fighting to save her people from her Father, Brodrick the Terrible, who slaughtered her family. She is heading to her one last battle that she will surely not come out of alive. Then, at the end of their lives, they find each other unexpectedly.
Warrior of Rome: King of Kings and Warrior of Rome: Lion of the Sun, by Harry Sidebottom
The second and third instalments of historian Harry Sidebottom’s historical series continue in the same vein as the first book, Fire in the East. At the start of King of Kings, the barbarian-turned-Roman Ballista and his retinue are fleeing the fall of Arete, following the betrayal of the city to the Persians at the end of the first book. Once back in the court of the elderly Emperor Valerian, and reunited with his Roman wife, Ballista gets drawn in to the political machinations of Valerian’s inner circle, which he is much less equipped to handle than the battlefield.
King of Kings sees Ballista taking on various missions – including a government role overseeing the persecution of Christians, which he creatively obstructs, and various military missions. As part of a broader narrative arc, King of Kings is slightly less successful as a standalone novel than the first volume of the series, because there is not much connecting Ballista’s different missions, although it becomes more engaging in the final section, when the Romans embark on a campaign against the Persians with Valerian himself at their head.
Wicked Appetite, by Janet Evanovich
Janet Evanovich can always be depended on for a good time. Her heroines, whether covered in muck, fighting off the latest round of villains, or just trying desperately to deal with the men in their lives without losing their minds, have a sense of humour and determined attitude that make following their stories laugh out loud funny and oddly reassuring. No matter how fraught real life gets, it rarely involves a temperamental flying broom or a ninja cat (not that the ninja cat wouldn’t be welcome, on occasion).
Wicked Appetite is the start of Evanovich’s newest series and lands her readers right in the action. Welcome to Marblehead, Massachusetts, close to the infamous Salem, home of the historical. And the weird. And what sounds like the world’s most amazing bakery. And Elizabeth Tucker (Lizzy to everyone except her mother), a heroine who may make unbelievable cupcakes, but only barely has a handle on the rest of her life.
Of course, the rest of her life currently involves two men (one dark and mysterious, one blonde and mysteriously helpful), a possibly ninja cat, and a co-worker who wants more than anything to be a witch, with the expected disastrous results. Lizzy really just wants to be the best baker in the town, and is well on her way, but life intervenes, and it turns out that she is not only a baker but also an Unmentionable, able to sense specific magical objects.
Luckily, her entre into this magical life is smoothed over by Diesel, tall, blonde, and apparently oblivious to the hilarity that his mere presence inspires. (Seriously, the man works for a topic secret agency whose acronym spells… BUM.) Lizzy and Diesel must team up against the (yet again hilariously named) Gerwulf Grimoire (equally hot, but tall, dark, and a bit scary) to seek out the collections of artefacts that represent the seven deadly sins, and when you add a Renaissance Faire loving henchman to the mix, the search turns… pointed.
Evanovich does an excellent job keeping the humour and the pace at fever pitch. Lizzy doesn’t so much walk through life as tumble, and her exploits and the sheer comedy of the situations she finds herself in create a sense of irreverent hilarity that carries the story through its more ridiculous sections. This is a quick read, and, though the first in the series, leaves a lot to be explored of the characters it introduces (not the smallest question of which is: where in the word did Diesel meet the monkey? Also, a monkey?). Wicked Appetite is time well and humorously spent.
The Crowded Shadows, by Celine Kiernan
Celine Kiernan’s The Crowded Shadows sits neatly as the middle book in the Moorehawke trilogy. Wynter, Christopher, and Razi are searching for Alberon, Razi’s half-brother and the heir to Jonathon’s throne. Rumours swirl through the forest of a secret and terrible weapon, of something that could rain fire down on anyone foolish enough to get in the way, and Wynter for all her level-headedness and her father’s careful training, is less aware of the dangers around her than she realizes.
This is certainly a second novel in a trilogy, and as such loses some of its punch merely because it quickly becomes evident that Wynter and her friends may not find Alberon’s secret encampment in this installment. Instead, the story delves further into the culture and history of the mysterious Merron and highlights the weaknesses that put each of the characters in danger.
Her father had taught her well about travelling alone, and up until this moment Wynter had conscientiously followed all the advice he’d ever given. She had been disciplined, she had been careful and she had been totally in control. Now, panicked beyond reason, Wynter fled through the sweltering heat of midday with nothing on her mind but that man’s hot eyes and the fear that he might someday look at her again. Read more
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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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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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