It - Stephen King
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe - Thomas Ligotti
The Loney - Andrew Michael Hurley
Killing Floor - Lee Child
Mr Mercedes - Stephen King
Bazaar of Bad Dreams - Stephen King
The Quincunx - Charles Palliser
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Melmoth the Wanderer - Charles Maturin
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Transcendent - Stephen Baxter
Europe: In or Out - David Charter
The Scarlet Gospels - Clive Barker
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
And here's what I thought of them.
It - Stephen King
I first read this in 1988. It was the first 'grown-up' book I had ever read, having existed on a diet of comics, film and horror magazines, and Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebooks up 'till then. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was the most amazing, scary, exciting, moving, and completely absorbing book I have ever read, dominating my life for the ten days it took to get through its 1,116 paperback pages. I lived it. I was right there with the characters, with the Losers' Club, spending that summer not in 1988 but 1958, worrying about the bully, Henry Bowers, running with Stuttering Bull and Richie Tozier (beep-beep, Richie) and the rest, from the Teenage Werewolf or the Mummy or Pennywise himself. I could feel what it was like to be a kid in Derry in the fifties, with the summer sun blazing down in The Barrens and the vivid, visceral manifestations of the thing in the sewers. The book had a very definite feeling, a thick, powerful atmosphere, that made me feel nostalgic for a time before I was even born. I recounted the progress of the story to a mate at school, turning it into a potted serial. I was nervous about the sinks and toilets in my house. I cried at the end. I wrote a letter to FEAR magazine years later to praise It to the heavens, when they asked for people to let them know their favourite books, comparing it to the Rob Reiner film Stand By Me, but a horror version of Stand By Me. I bought a new copy of the paperback because my first one looked battered, and because this new one was thicker and therefore 'cooler'. I got the hardback from my uncle's bookcase, where he'd had it for years, before I'd realised its tremendous importance. It started me off on regular visits to the horror section of the library where I devoured the rest of Stephen King's work, and James Herbert's, and Dean Koontz's, and Clive Barker's, and Robert McCammon's, and H.P. Lovecraft's. It was rather a seminal book for me.
Of course when I re-read it 2016 it had a fraction of the impact, because I'm older and I've already read it, plus a thousand books since. I saw that Stephen King repeated himself sometimes in the same chapter, going over what he'd just said like a drunk struggling to make a point. Maybe he was drunk when he wrote those parts. I didn't mind. Apart from that it was still great writing. The appearances of the monsters were so well-done I could almost smell them, so incredibly vivid. The evoking of childhood, of the pure, beautiful love kids have for their friends, and the equally beautiful, timorous love that young lads feel for young lasses before their innocence is gone. Amazing, amazing. And I might have cried at the end again.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe - Thomas Ligotti
Don't read this if you're feeling a bit vulnerable, because it won't help.
Thomas Ligotti is a well-renowned horror writer who suffers from chronic anxiety and anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure from everyday activities usually found enjoyable, e.g. exercise, hobbies, music, etc. His fiction is heavily influenced by H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James and Arthur Machen, all leading lights of horror fiction.
This Penguin Classics edition comprises his first two collections of short stories. Ligotti is only one of ten living writers to have a Penguin Classics edition of their work published, which you could choose to see as proof of how highly regarded he is.
His stories deal with how the universe is a vast, weird place, and the human race is but an insignificant, if not downright ridiculous, speck. He suggests there are other places whose inhabitants see us as playthings. A lot of darkness, scary puppets, and unsettling towns are involved. There is no sex, swearing or violence in anything he does. Instead, there is what one critic called 'philosophical horror', ideas that challenge our mainstream views of reality.
He's very bleak, but in a compelling way. His stories are beautifully written, and are often ambiguous, inviting interpretation. Some of his tales were disturbing in a vague yet profound way - the implications are too horrific to dwell on for long. Some of his imagery is convincingly nightmarish - tableaus of such strangeness they seem transplanted perfectly from a bad dream directly to the page. See 'Sideshow, and Other Stories' and 'Gas Station Carnivals' from another Ligotti collection Teatro Grottesco for examples.
I really recommend his stuff, but maybe small doses is best.
The Loney - Andrew Michael Hurley
A grim, drizzly, haunting story published by Tartarus Press of Leyburn, North Yorkshire, who specialise in weird and supernatural fiction. I've a soft spot for Tartarus ever since their books took over the bookshop in the Dean Clough Mills in Halifax where I used to work. Many a lunchtime I'd go down there and pore over their tomes, thinking, "If I could afford these beautifully-presented books of obscure horror fiction, I would get some." Eventually I did (E.T.A. Hoffman's The Sand-Man, Robert Aickman's Sub Rosa, and Arthur Machen's Tales of Horror and the Supernatural), most of which remains unread - so many books, so little time.
The Loney is Tartarus's first publication of an original story, and it follows on from those other authors in terms of literary, subtle horror. It has a melancholy, drab atmosphere, very moody and well-written with realistic characters, but I have to admit that while reading it, its subtlety passed me by. I was left thinking, "Is that it? What was really going on there?" It's only afterwards that I found myself trying to work it out, piecing together the incidents and clues, and this was where I found the pleasure.
Killing Floor - Lee Child
Never read any Jack Reacher before this. I wanted to see. I just had to see. Like you do when you pass a car crash.
Lee Child's writing is laughable. Most things are described as big - big desks, big doors, big cars, big men. It's almost as if Lee Child is really, really into big things. This is the first Jack Reacher book he wrote, so I thought I'd see why it's so popular. As I suspected, it's because it take no effort to read and it has violence. Reacher is good at headbutting, finger-snapping, head-kicking, and he's tall and attractive to women. The final scene has a shootout which is written in such a shit way, it's as if a teenager was copying out what he saw in a run-of-the-mill action film.
I won't read any more.
Mr Mercedes - Stephen King
When he's good, Stephen King is very good. When he's not, he's just... meh. This is meh. I mean, it's kind of interesting (nutter mows people down in a car, taunts detective about it, they play a game of cat and mouse), but it doesn't read like the kind of book that Stephen took a long time over, it feels churned out, light. A nice diversion. Nowt special.
Bazaar of Bad Dreams - Stephen King
There are some corkers in this latest collection of short stories from the 'master of horror'. 'Mile 81' is about an alien disguised as a car that eats people. Ridiculous? Childish? Lowbrow? No. Fun.
'Premium Harmony' is horror at its most mundane, bleak, and realistic - it reminded me of Thomas Ligotti. 'Morality' maps out the deterioration of a couple's relationship after they agree to commit a sin on someone else's behalf, for $200,000.
There is subtlety here, well-drawn characters, poignancy, and straight supernatural horror, a wide-ranging and absorbing collection.
The Quincunx - Charles Palliser
The lives of the London lower classes are brought to life in this epic tale. Set in the early nineteenth century, mostly in London, it's about a young man, John Mellamphy, cheated of his fortune, and his attempts to work out his family history and reclaim his rightful inheritance. This is a book all about detail - the vivid and intimate chronicling of John and his mother's descent into poverty in London, the complicated plot with its fine legal points which have so much import on the characters, the many, many characters themselves (a whole parade of Dickensian villains and heroes), and the telling of the story itself, which I found out (after finishing the book's 1,300 pages) is told by an unreliable narrator. This one will bear re-reading with this fresh information! (But not for a while.)
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Another long novel set in the early nineteenth century, this one concerning gentlemen magicians in England. It's as if Dickens or Austen had been resurrected and asked to produce a fantasy novel. Two very different men, Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell, attempt to bring magic back to England after its absence for three hundred years. I loved the witty way it was written, its Dickensian style, and its footnotes expanding on the history and lore of English magic, though after a few hundred pages, its meandering progress started to get on my nerves a bit. I didn't have the patience or time to allow myself to sink into it, which is completely my own fault, and I'm sure I missed some of the plot points which would explain what it all meant at the end. Another one that will bear re-reading when I have more leisure.
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Nihilistic, brutal, inventive, the only criticism I have is that the film is so entrenched in my mind that the book kind of pales in comparison. David Fincher's film is pretty much the book anyway, but adds to it, enriching it with shadowy cinematography and clever directing and editing. This is not a valid criticism, I know.
When I bought this, it was a self-imposed choice between Bleak Indictment of Modern American Life 1 (Fight Club) or Bleak Indictment of Modern American Life 2 (American Psycho). I haven't seen the film of American Psycho, so I'll be reading that soon.
Melmoth the Wanderer - Charles Maturin
A Gothic classic. It started off with such promise. There were murders, spooky houses, portraits whose eyes moved, and it was all very Gothic, as you'd expect. The first major chunk is about a poor lad forced to become a monk, and the obscene cruelties he is subjected to because he does not want to be a monk. Just when you think he has suffered enough torment, the monastery finds new ways to punish him. This goes on for scores, nay hundreds, of pages, and is such a lengthy ordeal for both the character and me, the reader, that I felt as wretched as him by the end of it (in a good way).
The problems start when a young girl is shipwrecked alone on an island. It starts well, and gets interesting when Melmoth appears and starts trying to corrupt her, but it goes on for so long I started to get fatigued by it all. She is so pure and innocent. He is so evil and manipulative. She loves him with such childlike tenderness. He just wants to break her heart. This goes on for page after page. Eventually, the story got to be a chore, and the essential horror of Melmoth and his condition was only coyly hinted at for much of the book, which I found frustrating.
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
I love Kubrick's film version. And I kind of love the book now, even though, having recently sired a daughter, it was very uncomfortable reading. I had to stop in some of the more horrible places and take a breath. Yet it's written in a witty, clever way, which almost makes you forget how much of a monster Humbert Humbert is. He is pretentious, and writes flowery prose, and tries to justify his statutory rape with his argument about nymphets, and the uncomfortable part is, there may just be something here that men recognise in Humbert's blind lust and forbidden desire. (Please don't put me on a list, this is stolen from established literary criticism.)
Transcendent - Stephen Baxter
The third in Baxter's Destiny's Children series, it revolves around Michael Poole of twenty-first century Earth and a posthuman girl half a million years in the future. I used to love Stephen Baxter - his Manifold series of Time, Space and Origin were fascinating, as were his books told from the points of view of woolly mammoths, and his epic history of all primate development over millions of years called Evolution. But this and the previous books in the series left me cold. Maybe they weren't as good as those other books, or maybe I've changed as a reader, but they seemed mechanical somehow - the plots seemed to be about overcoming a set of obstacles, and this was done, and that was that. It's interspersed with visits to out-of-the-ordinary future civilisations, which, while interesting, didn't feel satisfying.
Europe: In or Out - David Charter
Non-fiction. A nice alternative to the fiction bandied about during the EU referendum campaign. I was always inclined to vote Remain, but just so I could have some facts handy, I read this book which went over ten general themes and ten specific sectors, and described how those areas would be affected by remaining or leaving. As suspected, the upshot was that if we left the EU, there would be uncertainty and the likelihood of a worse deal for the UK. If we stayed, there would be continued bureaucracy, inefficiency, but predictability and a largely positive arrangement for the UK.
So that was a waste of time.
The Scarlet Gospels - Clive Barker
Ah, Clive. You perverted, story-telling genius. The Books of Blood. Weaveworld. Imajica. The Great and Secret Show was (and probably still is) one of my favourite books of all time.
What the hell was this? Pinhead tries to take over Hell. Maybe I've been away too long, but this didn't seem like the beautiful writing and inventiveness of old. Yes, there was gore (buckets of it, no bad thing, there was stuff in your other work that was almost unbearable - I'm looking at you 'The Midnight Meat Train'), and colourful descriptions of outlandish places, but it didn't seem as original or well done. It felt like a rush job, like something that maybe had been written for one final Hellraiser film. And there were quite a few typos in the text. It just felt sloppy. Must try harder.
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
A literary murder mystery in twelfth-century Italy. Killings in a monastery, an English monk using logic to find the culprit.
What a chore to get through. This falls under the category 'very slightly interesting but will struggle through because meant to be good'. There are long tracts about the rivalries between various religious factions, long descriptions of the intricately-carved entrances to churches, and in the middle of this, a fairly entertaining whodunnit. But by the end I found I just didn't care whodunnit, exhausted by the exposition dumps of religious history. There are good things about it, too - the uncovering of monastic life (not as saintly as it's meant to be), the importance of books and knowledge, and when Umberto isn't going overboard on philosophical discussions or religious arguments, it's great writing. But in the end it tested my patience, pinned it down, straddled it, and beat it about the face and body with a massive Latin text.
