Booksquawk

MY FATHER'S FORTUNE

2012-05-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

by Michael Frayn
288 pages, Metropolitan Books

Review by Bill Kirton

As well as being an entertaining, absorbing read, this is a master class in the art and craft of writing. It’s a memoir in the course of which Frayn sketches the broad sweep of the history of his immediate family, with his recollections of his father and the similarities and differences between them as his primary focus.

It must be difficult, when writing something as personal as this, to separate the writer and the person doing the recollecting. When taking something as intimate as a childhood memory or a close family relationship and then using writerly skills to present it in its clearest form and with exactly the impact you felt it had on you yourself, you run the risk of fictionalising it, creating a distance between you and the memory. In fact, Stendhal, in his memoirs, often stopped and told the reader ‘I’m not going to describe this any further because it would be to “faire du roman”’, i.e. turn it into fiction. But Frayn has no such problems; he’s totally honest about what are the facts of events and what he’s guessing may have been happening. He often prefaces a description of an incident, a person or an experience by telling us that he thinks it was thus but it may have been otherwise. Many of the sequences begin with ‘I’m pretty sure that …’, ‘I suppose …’ and other such expressions.

But the people and places in his life are all given a real, independent presence, with their hairstyles, the clothes they wear, their habits and way of speaking, or their rooms, the colours of the walls, the character of their neighbours. And subtly, amongst them all, interacting with them, observing and affecting them, there’s Frayn the boy and young man, being evoked at his various stages by Frayn the writer as the one becomes the other.

The ‘Fortune’ of the title is carefully chosen because the book’s not just about the shifting finances of the Frayn clan during the war and post-war years but also the luck, bad and good, which befell his father and the family. One of his earliest memories is of his mother telling him, when he was about six, that his forebears were French and that, in the 16th century, one of them, a pirate, was caught and hanged. His ship was impounded and its gold was still being held ‘in Chancery’ for any Frayn who could prove he was a descendant. And it’s from such telling little details that Frayn constructs the various themes of his tale and sets up ironies, parallels, mysterious ‘correspondances’ (sic) which give meaning to events as they unfold.

Frayn makes much of the accidental nature of life, nowhere more so than in recounting how his parents met. He feels ‘an instant of vertigo’ when he thinks of the implications of that chance event but then he recounts it in the simplest terms, telling how a friend asked Tom, Frayn’s father to be, to go to a party with him because the friend fancied a girl called Vi who was going to be there. Tom shrugged and agreed to go. Frayn’s aunt told him that, when the two men came into the room, Tom saw the girl his friend fancied, walked straight across to her and said ‘I’m Tom. I suppose you’re Vi’. And that was it. From that meeting came, in Frayn’s words, ‘My existence, for a start, and my sister’s. The lives of my three children and my sister’s two. Of our eleven grandchildren…’

He’s articulating simple truths that govern the existence of each one of us, and his narrative recalls not just his own people and surroundings but the changing face and pace of London, the shifting social and cultural moods and habits of

Britain

. When you read My Father's Fortune, you get to know Frayn and his family but your own memories are triggered or new ones are formed by sharing his persuasive evocation of life over the decades from the thirties onwards. It’s a wonderful book.

MONSTERS OF WEST VIRGINIA

2012-05-22T20:50:00.001-07:00

by Rosemary Ellen Guiley
144 pages, Stackpole Books

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

For as long as I can remember, I've been a little bit obsessed with monsters, ghosts and things that go bump in the night. Once, when I was about eight years old, I wore a set of plastic werewolf teeth and ran around the local D.I.Y. Store growling at the terrified / bemused adults. I spent hours poring over luridly illustrated children's books exploring the paranormal and for a number of years I was convinced that I had seen the demon hound Black Shuck (most sightings of Black Shuck occur in East Anglia but I was certain that I had seen him in a field in Devon). With age came maturity and the realisation that what I had seen that foggy evening was, in fact, a calf.

Age, however, did not rob me of my fascination with the paranormal. Whenever I visit somewhere new, I read all I can about any strange goings on in the area. Horror movies, particularly those involving strange and fantastic creatures, are real passion of mine. I've never given up trying to convince my darling wife that “Tremors” is one of the best films of the 1980s. I'm a subscriber to the monthly nerd-fest that is “Fortean Times” magazine and I find a heck of a lot of inspiration for my own strange stories within its pages (look out for my upcoming short story featuring a cat with two faces).

When I saw “Monsters of West Virginia” reviewed in the latest issue of Fortean Times, I couldn't resist buying a copy. I've no particular interest in West Virginia (other than a couple of unprintable jokes an American friend of my father's once told me) but it seems the mountain state has more than its fair share of strange creatures and creepy goings-on.

Now might be the time to mention that whilst I totally love the idea of ghosts and monsters, I don't actually believe in them. I think it would be awesome if they did exist but with the advances in science and our growing understanding of the world we live in, it seems increasingly less likely. For a truly immersive experience of such cold scientific facts crushing a pleasant fantasy I recommend visiting the Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition... pay ￡7 entry only to have the faint glimmer of hope that the Loch Ness monster is real mercilessly bludgeoned out of you by an endless stream of evidence arguing against the existence of such a creature. But I digress...

Rosemary Ellen Guiley, the author of “Monsters of West Virginia” does believe in the existence of monsters. To be more specific, she believes in alternative dimensions where such creatures exist and the theory that they occasionally find a way through the fabric of space and time into our own world.

Bullshit, I know.

Tenuous pseudo-scientific explanations aside, Guiley's short book is great entertainment. “Monsters of West Virginia” examines all manner of paranormal sightings: from possible UFO crash-sites to monstrous birds, demon dogs to big cats. There are whole chapters devoted to the Yayho (West Virginia's own equivalent of Bigfoot) and the state's most famous cryptozoological critter, the Richard Gere-pestering Mothman. Other chapters in the book detail some very strange beasties such as the Sheepsquatch (a vicious man-sheep thing) and the Snallygaster (an enormous flying lizard thing).

Whilst Guiley is undoubtedly from the Fox Mulder school of thought and actively wants to believe, she does bring a healthy dose of scepticism to the table. A number of the sightings of the creatures come from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when unscrupulous editors would fabricate ridiculous stories in order to sell more newspapers (much like the utterly sordid and regrettably untrue affair between myself and Scarlett Johansson). Guiley also utilises her knowledge of Native American folklore to add an extra level of depth when examining the strange cases. The sightings of giant birds are linked to the myth of the Thunderbird and Guiley also provides the reader with accounts of Yayho or Bigfoot sightings from a Native American perspective.

There were a couple of occasions when even I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief and I began to wonder whether the author was so monumentally naïve that she would include any old nonsense in order to pad out the book a bit more. The giant flying manta ray spotted flying over a road seemed less than plausible whilst the entire final chapter, “The Enchanted Holler”, sounded like the deranged ramblings of that nutter you always end up sitting next to on the bus.

“Monsters of West Virginia” isn't going to set the world aflame. Any book of this sort is aimed at a niche market. It's a pleasant little distraction for those interested in the paranormal but it is unlikely to convert any sceptics into fully-fledged Bigfoot-hunters. I enjoyed reading it and I'm sure others will too. Just remember to take it with a pinch of salt... or maybe even a bucketful.

Hereward L.M. Proops

AUTHOR INTERVIEW:

2012-05-20T21:43:00.001-07:00

Will Macmillan Jones, author of the madcap fantasy The Amulet of Kings: The Banned Underground, Book one.

Interview by Pat Black

Booksquawk: The Amulet of Kings is as much a work of comedy as it is of fantasy (if not more). In the review, I point out that although it would seem to have a lot in common with the work of Terry Pratchett, at heart it’s more in tune with Douglas Adams. Would you say this is fair enough?

Will Macmillan Jones: Perhaps that’s right. Myself, I’ve always felt a strong affinity for the work of the towering comic genius of Spike Milligan and the immortal Goon Show. Perhaps with a more modern dash of Robert Rankin thrown in for good measure.

B: Location is important to the story – although the Helvyndelve isn’t a real place, the Lake District and Helvellyn are, obviously. How did the real-life location inspire you?

WMJ: The lakes are possibly my favourite place in the world. I haven’t given up entirely on an ambition to live there. The sense of mystery, of myth, and the feeling that even in this mundane. overly safe world we have made for ourselves, adventure can still be found lurks around every hill, every fold, along every stream. I’ve got an edition of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen which shows an enchanted dwarf sitting on a rock, naturally enough with a drink. That was an inspiration too – the mystical and magical here present in this world with us, if we walk a familiar path at a different time of day.

B: Oompa-oompa oom pa-pah. Let’s talk about music now – there’s barely a sentence goes by without a gag or reference to rock n’ roll bands. Name your ideal 10-track mix CD to accompany The Amulet of Kings. Do you play music yourself, or are you more of a listener rather than an active combatant?

WMJ: Yes, I’ve got a much beloved Les Paul Studio. But I’m not good enough to play more than the very odd gig with some extremely charitable friends, who turn my amp down when I’m not looking...Tracks? Too many to list, really. But anyone could start with Led Zep’s ‘Rock n Roll’, AC/DC and ‘Whole lot o’ Rosie’, then classics: ‘Jailhouse Rock’, ‘Johnnie B Goode’ ‘Gimme Some Lovin’, ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ – oh the list can go on. My ipod is crammed with blues, rock and jazz.

B: Let’s place Fungus the Boogieman in a three-way fantasy deathmatch with Animal from the Muppets and the late Bob Holness, who popular myth once had it played the sax riff on Baker Street. What happens next?

WMJ: Oh come on, we all know that Urban Myth is just a myth...maybe. Close as Fungus is to my heart, who’s ever going to put Animal second to anyone????

B: You’ve just released the sequel to The Amulet of Kings – The Mystic Accountants. Can you talk a little about that, and where the series is going after that?

WMJ: Mystic arrived in my head shortly after the first major rewrite of Amulet of Kings. The bulk of the book was on paper in four weeks, would you believe? I think that I wore that keyboard out completely, I was typing so fast! Well, it’s another day, and another gig. But this time the feedback blows the Throne of the King Under The Mountain to Kingdom come. And The Banned have to replace it... Introducing Dai, the bass playing Bass drinking dragon, a rather put upon RAF fighter pilot and a lot of bad jokes about traffic policemen... The problem with my plots are that they can get a bit surreal, I’m afraid, but I wouldn’t want to spoil any surprises. But the music is there, as you’ve already guessed. The Banned are off on tour. My off-white witch even gets pulled at a beach rave this time, but I’m not allowed to talk about that in case she comes after me!

I’m actually signed for eight books, book 3 – The Vampire Mechanic is now in copyediting at the Publishers for a 1 November release, and book 4 – Sex and Thugs and Rock n Roll – is pouring out as we speak. There’s actually too much material, and some of it is going to wind up in book 7 instead. Book 5 (Their Dark Design) is partly written already and book 6 (Have Frog, Will Travel) is in advance plotting, so Safkhet and I are planning on a new book every 6 months for another couple of years yet! I’ve just created a fantastic new character ( no, I’m not going to tell you Ricky Valens’ real name and give the joke away) and already he’s demanding a whole book of his own.

Fortunately, each book is planned to be a completely standalone story, so I can have as much fun as I like with the characters, and then run away to play with some others whilst the first lot find it in their hearts to forgive me for what I’ve done to them!

THE BANNED UNDERGROUND:

2012-05-20T21:37:00.001-07:00

The Amulet of Kings
by Will Macmillan Jones
174 pages, Safkhet Publishing

Review by Pat Black

Jazz! Bee deep a bop booyah. A wonder what a jazz troll would call himself? Boulders Starduster? Bridge Canyonhowler? TripTrap McScrotum?

Anyway, The Banned Underground: The Amulet ofKings, Will Macmillan Jones’s 90-jokes-per-page comic fantasy, isn’t about a jazz troll – it’s about a bog troll, Fungus the Boogieman. He plays sax for the band in the title, an underground (literally) rock n’ roll band made up of dwarves and other fantasy creatures who play in the Helvyndelve. This is the dwarf city underneath Helvellyn in the Lake District, where all manner of insane goings-on are taking place – not to mention the old sword-and-guts type of warfare for the sake of the Amulet of Kings.

The story follows Chris and Linda, a pair of teenagers sent to stay with their Uncle Ben and Aunt Dot – real name Grizelda – in the Lake District one summer. Except Dot’s a witch, not averse to turning taxmen and cold-callers into toads. During an attack on the couple’s magic cottage by Ned, a servant of the Grey Mage (the baddie), Chris and Linda are rescued by Fungus the bog troll and whisked into Helvyndelve, where they’re plunged into the middle of a plot by the Dark Lord and his henchmen, the Bodgandor, to steal the Amulet of Kings and attain unlimited power, or control over his taxation affairs, one of the two.

So much for the plot; although it moves fast, and deals with not a few battles, the true joy of this story is in the banter between characters. There’s no-one, from dancing plants and skyrocketing goats, who don’t have some sort of punchline or insane remark to make. The dialogue tickles many funny bones, and will remind you in the best way of Spike Milligan, the Goons and their spiritual heirs, the Pythons. In terms of the fantasy setting, the book most recalls Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, but there are strong echoes of the inspired inanity of Douglas Adams. Whereas in Adams’ world, you could imagine him putting together plots for the HitchHiker’s Guide as he travels around Europe, then I can see how Macmillan Jones came up with plots and gags for his own fantasy world from the Lake District, particularly Helvellyn – places close to my own heart.

Music is another of the author’s favourite themes, and there’s some rib-tickling musical references all through the text. AC/DC fans in particular will enjoy the references to the Antipodes’ finest export – but there’s barely a paragraph goes by without a joke. Lovers of footnotes will also find lots of asterisked gags beneath the line to chew on.

Read the Author Interview here.

A fine piece of work for lovers of fantasy and comedy - or simply miserable buggers who could do with cheering up.

THE BEST SUPERNATURAL STORIES OF JOHN BUCHAN

2012-05-17T22:22:00.000-07:00

Selected and Introduced by John Haining

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

I've been a huge fan of The Thirty Nine Steps ever since I picked up a copy one lazy afternoon as a student and read the whole thing in one sitting. Although I was studying English literature, John Buchan's classic thriller wasn't a set text for any of my modules. If memory serves me correctly (and let's remember, I was a student at this time so much of my short-term memory underwent some serious punishment in those hazy days) I'd only heard the author's name mentioned by some of my more engaging lecturers as someone whose work they felt I'd enjoy. They weren't wrong. Buchan's short novel blew me away. Sure, there are aspects of it which have aged very badly (Buchan's anti-semitism is pretty hard to avoid) but the frantic pacing and the brilliant build-up of tension throughout the novel puts it in a league of its own. Small wonder that it is often cited as the first modern thriller and the forefather of Ian Fleming's Bond adventures. In the twelve years since I was first introduced to the dashing, square-jawed Richard Hannay, I've read The Thirty Nine Steps three or four times and it never fails to entertain me.

Skip forward to October 2011. A plumper, hairier, more sober Hereward is taking a jaunt to Inverness and finds himself, screaming toddler in arms, in Leakey's Bookshop. Those lucky enough to live in Scotland who don't know this fantastic second-hand bookshop would do well to seek it out. A converted church literally packed to the rafters with a staggering range of books, Leakey's is a book-geek's nirvana. So there I was, my daughter grizzling away on my shoulder, scanning the shelves for a bargain. When I saw this book, I must confess that I came pretty close to dropping the little one. TheBest Supernatural Stories of John Buchan... holy shit. Regular readers will know that I am a total sucker for anything remotely supernatural. I had no idea that Buchan had turned his hand to short stories of the fantastic or supernatural but there it was in front of me.

It has taken me far too long to get round to reading this book, but I'm very glad I did. The introduction gives a very detailed, if somewhat dry, account of how each of the stories came to be written. Haining provides curious readers with details of Buchan's influences and goes into some depth about Buchan's fascination with the supernatural world. Although interesting, the introduction is, at times, a little bit too academic, leeching a little bit of the fun-factor out of some of the sillier stories in the collection.

Whilst a couple of the stories are pretty uneventful affairs and will be quickly forgotten, there are more hits than misses. Journey of Little Profit is written with a tremendously broad Scottish dialect and is an evocative little tale of a lawless drover's unlucky encounter with a substantially more wicked being. The Outgoing of the Tide is a slow moving tale about witchcraft but is a great example of how the atmosphere of a story is just as important as the action. The Green Wildebeest is an African-based adventure which reminded me of Rider Haggard whilst The Grove of Ashtaroth and The Watcher by the Threshold are Lovecraftian tales of old gods and their lingering influence on the world. The Magic Walking Stick is a charming little tale about a young boy who finds himself in possession of a walking stick which enables him to travel instantaneously anywhere he desires. Clearly aimed at younger readers, this story is beautifully simplistic but also artfully crafted. Tendebant Manus is a tale of supernatural possession but Buchan sidesteps the cliché by choosing focus on character rather than cheap ghostly thrills.

One tale in particular stood out above all the others. Indeed, no-man's-land is such a brilliant story it alone makes the book worth tracking down. Fans of monsters and things that go bump in the night will be delighted with this stunning little novelette. The plot is pure pulp and all the better for it. An Oxford academic with a particular interest in Celtic history and mythology goes on holiday to the highlands of Scotland where he encounters a race of proto-humans whose continued survival has led to the myth of the brownies. Buchan's characteristic skill of cranking up the tension through the course of the story is used to marvellous effect and his descriptions of the Scottish landscape manage to capture both its beauty and its bleakness.

The Best Supernatural Stories of John Buchan is great fun and well worth scouring the internet and second-hand bookshops for a copy. Fans of Buchan's thrillers will be entertained by seeing how the writer's confident, direct writing style is well suited to other genres. Hard-core fans of horror might find some of Buchan's stories a little bit bloodless but those who stick with them will see that his supernatural tales weren't exercises in the grotesque but great examples of how tension and atmosphere can be used artfully to create stories that are both gripping and unsettling without resorting to shock tactics.

Hereward L.M. Proops

DOOMSDAY

2012-05-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

by Graham Brown
472 pages, Ebury Press
Published in the US as Black Sun, by Dell

Review by Pat Black

Doomsday is the sequel to a novel I reviewed a year or so ago, The Mayan Conspiracy. A mixture of Dan Brown, Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy, it was a serviceable enough adventure story following a group of secret service operatives and scientists trailing a mystery energy source into an ancient Mayan pyramid in the Brazilian jungle. It had baddies chasing them, lots of gunplay, nasty natives and – star prize - monsters.

Here’s the sequel, then, featuring the surviving characters – led by Hawker, the mysterious pilot-cum-mercenary with a past, Danielle Laidlaw, the secret service action girl, and Professor Michael McCarter, eh, the science guy.

This story picks up a couple of years after the group’s jungle japes, as the Mayan Clock ticks down to December 21, 2012, when of course the world ends, or something.

Fresh from having recovered an ancient stone in the Mayan pyramid, which emits a previously unknown type of energy, Laidlaw and McCarter are on the search for the three other stones referred to in an ancient prophecy. Hawker, burned by the CIA despite his services for Uncle Sam in the last novel, is off saving remote communities in the Congo – until a call to rescue his former buddy Laidlaw puts him back into the thick of things.

The Russians and the Chinese are after these energy stones, too – the Chinese, led by Bond villain billionaire Kang, and the Russians, helmed by Ivan Saravich, ex-KGB true believer and now-disillusioned capitalist. Dig out the black hats, here’s the bad guys!

On top of the villains, there’s a strange Russian child, named Yuri, who may yet hold the key to the whole mystery.

The first thing to say is that this is a far superior book to the first story, which had the feeling of a first act that was extended to book-length, leaving itself a little threadbare in the process. Doomsday is a much leaner beast in comparison, covering around four times as much ground in what seemed like half the time. It never feels laboured, nor does it linger in one spot for too long. The thrills include a shoot-out in Mexico, a daredevil rescue in a Hong Kong skyscraper, an encounter with sharks during an underwater sequence in the Gulf of Mexico, a helicopter shootout in the Mexican wilderness featuring a baddie in a reinforced exoskeleton and a tense stand-off beneath the Yucca plains in the US.

Brown keeps his plates spinning well, taking a break from the pyrotechnics involving Hawker and Danielle to cover a no-less-fascinating stand-off between Laidlaw’s boss, Arnold Moore, and Stecker, his poison apple nemesis from the CIA. As the energy given off in incrementally increasing bursts by the ancient stones takes out spy satellites and darken cities, foreign powers begin to get suspicious of each other. Nuclear warheads are primed, and as Hawker and Laidlaw race to find the secret of the stones it appears that the Mayan doomsday prediction might be right on the money.

It’s a fine adventure story with stirring conflicts and a great big pay-off – something its predecessor lacked – but there are other, intriguing aspects. In unexpected ways, Doomsday examines the nature of faith, whether that’s in a religion, a political system, your duty to your job or even your commitment to a partner. Brown references Macbeth, as the main protagonists head towards a commitment which could either save the world or destroy it, based on nothing more than a gut feeling. Would Macbeth have wielded the dagger anyway, had the witches just kept their mouths shut? It’s a question that continues to intrigue us. Prophecy and predestination are a key part of the secret of the stones, and these notions themselves are examined as a powerful fantasy which can either spur people on to success (“I was born to do this… this is my destiny,”)… or to goad or manipulate people into doing things (“Your father would be proud of you… I always knew you were a failure”). It was a key component of the book, and an unexpected source of depth.

I read this one on the beach, and it was well suited to the location. Shall we hear more from Hawker, Danielle and McCarter? Aye, why not?

THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY

2012-05-13T20:42:00.000-07:00

by John le Carre
686 pages, Sceptre

Review by Pat Black

Well, aren’t I quite the fan? I enjoyed Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy so much, I’ve read the book, watched the old TV show on DVD and now I’ve seen the movie. If there’s an amusing fridge magnet or a T-shirt I can buy, do let me know.

I’ve also watched the Smiley’s Peopleseries, which brings an end to John le Carre’s spy saga involving a battle of wits between British Secret Service veteran George Smiley and his Soviet nemesis, known only as Karla.

So, I’ve spoiled the novel of Smiley’s Peoplefor myself; I know how it all ends. But what I didn’t know until recently is that the Smiley/Karla story was a trilogy. The Honourable Schoolboy is the mid-point of this, so, unlike with Tinker Tailor, I had the pleasure of knowing nothing at all about the story when I opened the book.

It’s a dense book. Like Tinker Tailor - and like George Smiley - it refuses to be rushed, taking its less-than-sweet time. It’s perhaps a sign of my advancing age (and I should confess that I’ve been listening to Tony Blackburn’s jazzfunksoul show on Radio 2 this afternoon, and enjoying it), but I would probably have been bored rigid with TheHonourable Schoolboy had I tried it 10 or 15 years ago. I may have gotten to the end – I’m one of these people who must see a book through, even if it’s awful – but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.

Now, a few years and at least three stone in weight later, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this second journey through the heart of the Circus, and beyond. There’s something quite unique about le Carre’s fiction: it is a ponderous, calculated fictional world, and requires more than a video game hair-trigger concentration span to get into. In today’s publishing world that is a very rare thing. I enjoyed The Honourable Schoolboy in the same way I did TTSS; for its calculated, complicated world, its atmosphere of deeply buried enmities and above all, its lo-fi tradecraft. We’re talking about a time in publishing history which took place after I was born, but already the lack of technology feels like it was from a different geological age. Someone refers to a computer, just once, and we imagine a clanking, hissing piece of machinery, spitting out punchcards and possibly psychotic, like Stephen King’s “The Mangler”.

It’s a polite novel, too, in spite of the grating attempts at slang. How does that grab you, sport? In fact, the novel is like a ladies’ luncheon society suddenly turning sinister over whose turn it is to pay the bill, relationships going sour over a period of months without so much as a flicker in the dentures. What the hell am I talking about?

We join Smiley and co after the events of Tinker Tailor. With the mole in his grave, the British Secret Service begins the humiliating business of dismantling its apparatus across the world. In many cases, literally – conferences at the Circus HQ are conducted in crumbling rooms with not even the baize on the tables surviving the purge, having been ripped apart by “housekeepers” looking for evidence of the mole’s treachery in the form of bugs and other recording equipment. As metaphors for the death of Britain’s influence on the world stage go, it’s, er, a bit of an open goal.

Smiley, acting as head of the Circus in the wake of the dreadful Allenby’s resignation, goes about closing down bureaux across the world, on the assumption that just about every operation they’ve undertaken over the years has been blown by the traitor from the preceding novel (who I am struggling manfully not to name here!). But for Smiley – a crafty man with fathomless depths of intelligence and tactical nous – it provides an opportunity to hit back. By means of “back-reaching”, Smiley can look at operations the traitor closed down without good reason – a sure sign that the operation was potentially dangerous to Karla, the Soviet spymaster who directed his activities. One of these avenues of inquiry throws up a “goldseam” – a trail of money, apparently from Soviet funds, which went to an unknown source in Hong Kong (then still under the jurisdiction of the UK, of course).

Enter the honourable schoolboy in the title, Jerry Westerby. Jerry is a journalist, but also a “sleeper” agent, a part-timer kept as a reserve by the Circus until such times as he’s needed. Smiley dispatches Westerby to Hong Kong, under the cover of his day job, in order to find out more about this goldseam, where the money came from, and whom it’s going to.

To reveal more about the plot would take more time than we’ve got here, but Westerby finds himself putting the screws on sources in Hong Kong in order to get account information, before following through on tips and deductions to look into a decorated British citizen, Mr Drake Ko, OBE, who seems to be the key to the whole affair. From here there’s a plot to stimulate the opium market in Red China, as well as an attempted bid to smuggle a senior Soviet operative into Hong Kong.

Of course, there’s a woman involved in this – an expatriate English girl, a high-class escort who seems to have a hand in every single strand of the story. And it’s here that the story’s true “zero on the wheel” can be found.

Where THS trumps TTSS is in its scenes of violence and peril. It was a lunge into Fleming territory – exciting, sure, but a marked difference from the concealed menace of Tinker Tailor. I was a little disappointed in some of the things the recent movie adaptation of Tinker Tailor inserted into the story, presumably as a sop to stop people getting bored. There were a lot of dead bodies, blood, bullets, brains and general violence (not to mention the curious fact that Smiley’s lieutenant, Guillam, is gay in the film, which he is not in the books). This book has a lot more action in it, as Westerby gets handy with his fists, dodges bullets from the Khmer Rouge and heroin barons in Cambodia as he chases one line of inquiry, and is almost taken out by a fiendishly clever car bomb. So, if you felt Tinker Tailorwas missing a bit of oomph, The Honourable Schoolboy ramps it up.

The setting is crucial, too. Le Carre never pulls a punch when he examines what foreign intervention has done to China, and with Westerby taking a detour through unbelievably hostile places in Laos, Thailand and Cambodia just as the US pulls out of Saigon, Le Carre is equally clear on where the US stands as a foreign power under Nixon (I wonder what Smiley would have made of the west’s flatlining incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan?). There’s a sort of Ragnarok feeling to proceedings here, including a surreal dinner party taking place at an ambassador’s house even while mortars and rockets clatter into the building, quivering the cutlery and dimming the lights.

It’s a novel about journalism, too – a viewpoint into an increasingly lost world of male-dominated, drink-fuelled machismo, deadlines and ancient, iron-clad typewriters, lugged around the world in cases like blunderbusses. The foreign stringers Westerby mingles with seem to be right out of a comic book, sybarites and fornicators one and all (whahey!), but I can attest to this portrayal as having some truth to it. Back in the dim days when I first laid down copy, I can tell you that the sleazy booze culture of the newsroom was still alive, although in its death throes. Women were outsiders; male clubbishness was the order of the day, and pecking orders were in place for the young bucks and the old grizzlies alike.

Should anyone miss those days? Well, with luck, the sexism is on the wane (quite apart from the content of some newspapers and websites), but the day of the booze-addled clichéd hack is just about out the door now, save for the rare occasions when I feel like playing up to it. A lot of those lads I used to do “liquid lunches” with back in the day – less than 15 years ago? Long enough, folks – are in their graves, few of them surviving long past retirement.

But is the journalism any better these days? I couldn’t possibly comment.

This is an extremely class-conscious novel, something I suspect le Carre may not have intended. Everyone who is anyone comes from Oxbridge, and outsiders – the Scots or the Welsh, in this novel – are described as exactly that. The formidable Russian expert Connie Sachs aside, there are few shining beacons of feminism, or even equality, in this book (published in 1977, set two-and-a-bit years earlier). The ladies are either fruity bluestockings to be chased by much older men, fallen angels, full-on whores or simple props to occupy the time, with a nod to Michael Stipe. Much of this is a symptom of the age, but I was confounded by the denouement to the story, which demands that we believe, after everything we’ve encountered in the previous six hundred pages, that an experienced, tough, cynical man involved in a deadly line of work would ignore years of training, narrow escapes and front-line combat because he thinks he might be in love with someone he’s barely met.

It’s the only part of the book that doesn’t quite work, and the novel is flawed – though not fatally – because of it.

Le Carre is on record as saying that he regrets that this is a “Smiley” novel, feeling that his short, round, bespectacled little owl pulled readers out of the main thrust of the story - Westerby’s eastern odyssey. I disagree; Smiley’s presence is often electrifying. More disappointingly, Peter Guillam, Smiley’s trusted lieutenant, is given very little to do this time. He only really serves as something of an amanuensis, a prism to reflect Smiley’s ponderous, inscrutable genius as he ties together the loose ends in the face of pressure from Whitehall as well as the “Cousins” in US intelligence. Of Ann, Smiley’s unfaithful wife, there is mercifully little apart from one dodgy scene outside her bedroom window which I think I once saw in Holiday On The Buses, or the Benny Hill Show. Just ditch her and get on with it George, eh?

So, The Honourable Schoolboy is a full meal, for sure, with lots of strong meat – a paradox in that it’s dense, slow-moving and considered, and yet a furious page-turner and thriller, too. If you’re on board the le Carre bus and liked Tinker Tailor, then this is more of the same. Roll on Smiley’s People, and here’s to St George – long may he keep slaying dragons, though hopefully for fairer hands.

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

2012-05-11T22:08:00.000-07:00

by EM Forster

236 pages, Penguin

Review by Pat Black

Not so very long ago, I was leaping up and down like a maniac at a wedding. It was a good wedding – everyone was thunderously drunk and having a wonderful time. One key test when we evaluate weddings: were people dancing? If loads of people were dancing then it was a good wedding. This is immutable.

Anyway, I was wearing a kilt – I’m Scottish, and also a bit of a tart – although the do was taking place in the lion’s den itself… well, in south-west London, at any rate. It’s quite common to wear the kilt up north at social functions, and I’d long been threatening to do it since migrating south. There’s a woad-splattered Celt in me who takes a perverse pleasure in being asked about the kilt, or more accurately, being challenged on it.

And so it happened that during the wedding party, New Order’s “World In Motion” was played. I was already up and running on the dancefloor, and myself and another lad wearing a kilt decided to play along, for a laugh.

The significance of this to the civilised planet: “World In Motion” was England’s official song for the 1990 football World Cup campaign, a reminder of that horrible few weeks when They Nearly Won It. The song is a memorable rose poking out through the landfill site that represents most other football-related musical releases, I would grudgingly admit, madcap genius from an inspired time in British culture. It was at number one for weeks, even before England threatened to win the tournament, losing to the Germans as usual in the semi-finals. The English get rather misty-eyed about this song – a reminder of a better time.

The chorus features New Order, one or two gurning celebrities of the time, and the England squad, chanting: “En-ger-land!”

For any Scotsman, the idea of England winning the World Cup, or even winning a corner at the World Cup, is death. So of course, my fellow Caledonian dancefloor partner and I chanted nothing of the sort, substituting “En-ger-land!” for “Scot-er-land!”

Well, you know, I say “death”… not really. It doesn’t matter. We weren’t serious about it. We were hardly going to stomp off the dancefloor in a huff, swearing blood oaths or anything. It was a giggle.

So after the music stops, this fellow taps me on the shoulder. He sneered: “But… you’re wearing a kilt! And you’re singing ‘World In Motion’.”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s a joke.”

“You’re singing ‘En-ger-land’! I heard you! Ha ha ha ha!”

“No, I wasn’t. I was singing ‘Scot-er-land’. And, it’s a joke.”

He shook his head. “En-ger-land! Ha ha! And you’ve got a kilt on! You do realise what this song is about?”

“It was a joke, mate.”

In some parts of the world, another key test of a good wedding is whether or not there was a fight, but we shall skip over that.

Finally, I spit out my point: acting out of place is still a very frown-worthy endeavour for many people in England. That could refer to a sight such as a Scotsman doing the highland fling to New Order; or it could be something a bit more subtle, and much more sinister. A sense of place is not an exclusively English phenomenon, of course, but you do still encounter it here and there. Writers of the late Victorian and Edwardian period captured this beautifully.

I once heard about someone who retired to the south of France (without bothering to learn the language), complaining about the influx of refugees and asylum-seekers into that country. EM Forster understood this attitude acutely – that proper behaviour travels only in the cool English blood, with savagery and base passions diverted to alien veins. The notion is illustrated, and subverted, in the best way in A Room With A View.

It’s a two-parter from the Edwardian era, when the British Isles still had plenty of clout in world affairs, and modern warfare and Bolsheviks were still to crush notions of class, place and society. The nation was also slowly shedding the mantle of Victorian repression, too. European sensibilities (even I’m buying into that sense of one’s place… what the hell does that even mean?!) were starting to cross the Channel to England’s green and pleasant land. Conservativism and buttoned-down social barriers were being challenged by new attitudes.

Forster’s heroine is rosy-cheeked ingenue Lucy Honeychurch, taking a tour of Florence with her horror of a cousin, Charlotte Bartlett. The older Charlotte is a waspish prig who acts as chaperone to young Lucy, and along the way they meet several comical characters including Miss Lynch the hopeless novelist and the father-and-son act of Mr Emerson and his boy George, the latter pair sharing the Italian pension they are staying in.

“They’re socialists,” Charlotte hisses.

In many ways the book’s key scene comes right at the start, when Charlotte complains the girls didn’t get a room with a view. The Emersons gallantly offer to swap their rooms with the two ladies.

There is an embarrassed silence.

Finally, once an awkward sense of protocol and one’s placeis followed to the letter, Charlotte finally agrees to the swap deal and the journey continues. Along the way, Lucy and George witness a fatal stabbing in a town square, close enough to bloodstain the picture postcards the girl has bought. Swollen with a sense of occasion and of violent passions building up in even the most chaste breast, Lucy and George share an intimate moment during a flash of lightning.

And intimate moments, particularly with people like the Emersons, will not do. Especially when they are also witnessed by a breathless and conspicuously scandalised Charlotte.

A hasty retreat is beaten, to Rome, where the Vyses have a place that would take in Lucy and Charlotte at a pinch. From there, the story moves to England, where we meet Lucy’s family a number of months later. It turns out that Lucy has agreed to marry Cecil Vyse, a nice enough chap, but one who “would never wear another fellow’s cap”, as Lucy’s brother Freddy puts it.

But fate – and maybe mischief, on the part of the faux-innocent Charlotte, who of course swears she never told a soul about what happened on the violet-strewn Italian hills – intervenes to place the Emersons once more into Lucy’s path. From there, she is forced to confront a rather un-English idea indeed – following one’s heart, in defiance of all social conventions.

It’s a brilliant novel, with great comic moments. There’s one particular scene where George Emerson, Lucy’s young brother Freddy and the Reverend Beebe, the vicar, decide on a whim to go skinny dipping in a pond. This being an English comedy, and this being an English vicar, the trio are of course discovered in their plashy endeavours by a passing troupe of flustered parishioners, including Lucy and Cecil.

As it’s a comedy, the story has certain lines that it must travel along. But it has a very dark heart. The elder Mr Emerson’s impassioned plea to Lucy near the end of the novel puts a dagger to the throat of convention, spits in the eye of a sense of entitlement, and punches the idea of turning away from our deepest desires in order to do the decent thing - right in the balls.

Forster could well have written a different ending to this novel, one which might have had more in keeping with Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, and certainly one which would have been in keeping with the occasionally dark tones he strikes. We know only too well how this story would have ended, and which suit Lucy would have accepted, in the real world. But A Room With A View stands as an irreverent masterpiece, and showcases the British class system in the best light possible – by not taking itself in any way seriously.

ALEPH

2012-05-09T16:28:00.000-07:00

by Paulo Coelho
288 pages, Vintage

Review by Pat Black

Reading Paulo Coelho is a bit like being sat next to an unexpectedly charming stranger at a boring dinner party. You’re entranced, laughing where you’re meant to laugh, pondering where you’re meant to ponder. You’re given plenty of space to put forward your own ideas and concepts. There’s no argument involved, just a genuine exchange of stories, memories and imagery. You’re open-minded, uncynical and even unguarded. What a clever and articulate chap! you think to yourself, as you fork another slice of melon. I feel like I’ve known him all my life. Jesus, I might even Facebook him.

And then, out of nowhere, you slam on the brakes. The wine goes down the wrong way. Paulo has to reach over and thump you on the back. Other guests look over, amused at first, thinking he’s told you a capital joke, and then concerned that your mirth might be fatal. But he has not told you a capital joke. And you’re not amused.

Finally, once your tubes are clear, you roar:

“You believe in what? Are you insane, mate?”

Aleph refers to a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, another man given to odd, though compelling concepts about life, belief and infinity. The Aleph is a place, or a thing. It’s a point in the physical universe from which every other thing can be seen. Allowing us to look through the eyes of God.

Brazilian mega-selling author Coelho believes in God, and appears to be a devout Christian, but he believes in a lot of other things, too. In this book – narrated by a Brazilian writer named Paulo, who travels the world going to book signings and parties – many things are examined, from philosophical points of view which we can all relate to, to utter arcana which we cannot.

I like Paulo Coelho. I’ve read his first book – The Alchemist – and now his latest, and both have been fantastic pieces of work in all senses of the word. There’s a synchronicity to this, as I took Aleph on holiday with me, much as I did with The Alchemist on my first big holiday which did not involve causing chaos in Europe with my equally psychotic friends, 10 years ago. I won Aleph as a prize not long before I set off – almost as if fate pressed it into my hands at the right time. In the author’s world, this fact cannot be a coincidence, and its interpretation is not a glib one.

The difference between the two books is that you can take The Alchemist for what it is – fiction – but Coelho seems to want you to go a stage further in Aleph. It seems to me that this book is most definitely angled as non-fiction. Basically, we’re meant to see Paulo Coelho, as he is written in this book by an author called Paulo Coelho, as some sort of modern-day mystic or wizard, a warrior of light going about his business trying to understand the universe, part of some kind of inner quest or journey as he travels the world signing books and meeting fans. This book’s events and divinations are not portrayed as fictional devices and storytelling flourishes, which we can all take in without prejudice, but as actual things which happened in the real world.

Houston, we have a problem.

The plot, if you can call it that, is negligible. Paulo starts off meeting a mentor figure called J, who has to help him rediscover his pathway in life. So there’s a hint that Paulo has lost the way a little, something to do with life becoming routine, and also something to do with disconnecting with people. J urges Paulo to follow his instinct and succumb to the random to rediscover his mystical mojo and get back on the right road. Sounds a bit like Shelley’s negative capability to me, or perhaps using the Force. Hey, I’ve tried to use the Force loads of times. I keep trying to move beer glasses along bar-tops into my hands, using only my mind. It never works, and I look constipated.

Anyway, Paulo, being a bit of a famous author, is invited to book-signings across the world. He is accompanied by a retinue of publishers and editors, and along the way he gets invited to other book-signings and launch events. On a whim, and much to his organisers’ chagrin, he starts accepting invitations to visit far-flung places he wouldn’t normally go to – leading to the book’s central journey on the Trans-Siberian railway. The “signs”, you see, are pointing him in this direction.

(Red lights flash... WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!)

Along the way, he meets a very unusual young lady of Turkish extraction, a violin virtuoso called Hilal who pleads with Paulo to be allowed to accompany him on his journey. Paulo, a man who listens to and believes in portents, energy fields, past lives, soothsaying, clairvoyancy, magic, and many other things besides, takes a leap of faith and invites the young lady to a posh dinner, seating her at a top table along with some publishing executives. At this dinner, Hilal announces to everyone that she was sexually abused as a child.

Go, go, Gadget Embarrassed Silences!

Now with the best will in the world, you’d think that Paulo’s every instinct would be screaming at him to ditch this unfortunate individual at the first opportunity. You might even be tempted to order security to remove her from the dinner itself – leaving her with helpline numbers to call. But no; the girl, who keeps giving Coelho creepy come-ons and frankly stalkerish pledges of love and loyalty, the kind that a rational person would suspect might end with murder, secures herself a place on the train through Russia with the author and his team. From there, things get weirder. Paulo and this girl encounter the Aleph together – a moment of understanding where they both look into each other’s souls and see a past life. It seems that they have both encountered each other before, and Coelho understands that there is some kind of lesson here for him through their connection.

The Aleph, by the way, appears in a physical place, a psychic ley line, if you like. This location is in the partition between two railway carriages. What is not clear is how this fixed point in time and space should be on board a train, which of course passes along many physical points in the real world. Maybe it’s to do with other dimensions. Maybe it’s a state of mind. Maybe it is all complete and utter rubbish.

Paulo is married, and although he loves his wife it is clear that the Turkish girl is not unattractive. She’s 21 or so, and Paulo is in his late 50s. She comes into his room, and they cuddle together in his sleeper carriage. Sometimes she is naked. Paulo is tempted but it’s made clear that Paulo desires spiritual communion, not carnal. At this point, I almost cast Aleph into the sea. You’ll believe a book can fly.

I shall say no more about the plot, if there is one. What frightens me most about this book is that the events in it, ignoring the spiritual world for a moment, may actually have happened. They are certainly packaged that way. If they did, then I should say in all sincerity that Paulo Coelho should think very hard about inviting strange people on tour with him ever again. Paulo, mate, there are a lot of nutters out there. It’s got nothing to do with negative energies, the hand of fate, or anything else – stay safe, fella. I mean that.

Two things stop me from slaughtering this book. First, Coelho is a persuasive, refreshing writer. There are clean lines in his prose which hint at the truth he is searching for, or looking to impart. When he is at his absolute best is when Paulo is walking with other characters – the elderly translator, Yao, in particular - and sharing a dialogue with them on what life is all about. There’s a meandering, Platonic tone to these exchanges and they’re enriching and engaging.

Then, God forgive me, the mumbo jumbo comes in and from there on it’s all about tolerance, or perhaps open-mindedness. If you’re a cynic, or if you believe that we amount to no more than a coordinated mess of matter making its way through the world, surviving as best we can and reproducing before physical dissolution brings down the curtain, then Alephis best avoided.

This leads me to the second point which prevents me from putting this one on the “not even sure I should loan this out to people” pile. Any worthwhile literary endeavour points out – even Hemingway’s leanest, most spiteful efforts – that we are quite patently not just lumps of flesh, bone and nerves, blundering through the jungle of life. Art is one thing that sets us apart from the beasts. Since the dawn of history, humans have wondered what it’s all about, and have sought to express it, question it, give it meaning. We will continue to do so until we have an answer.

We can be cynical about the spiritual world - and to be honest, I could scoff at it all day long. But we don’t have all the answers, and life does throw up strange coincidences and ironies which we are at a loss to explain. There are moments which even the most rational of us cannot just explain away by waving in the general direction of chance or chaos. I’ve always held that it’s arrogance of the most extreme kind to assume we have all the answers. And belief isn’t nothing – it can spur people on to amazing feats… and it can also corrupt and manipulate.

In universal terms, it’s only a wink of time ago that we were running around in caves and thinking fire was the work of the supernatural. In the millennia to come – to appropriate Arthur C Clarke - many of our current concerns will be indistinguishable from the gibberings of cavemen to our descendants. In an increasingly well-educated, secular, and yet still troubled age, agnosticism is the only sensible point of view when it comes to that which we cannot fully explain.

If there was no more to it than just breathing, drinking, eating and shagging, we wouldn’t put down a single keystroke as writers; we’d never even cast a glance at a book. As Borges might agree, we’d never have written things down – the act of transmuting a thought into a symbol on a page - in the first place. What would be the point? Just as George Orwell insists that everything he ever wrote concerns a political belief which he denotes as democratic socialism, then Paulo Coelho wouldn’t have so much as lifted a pen if he didn’t want to follow his own codes, systems and spiritual governance… no matter that many of them are patently batshit.

If this was the X-Factor, you might say that Paulo is on a journey - and, despite everything, despite my own deep-rooted meanness, I wanted to believe in it.

We want romance and mystery and strangeness in our experience – what a boring life it would be without them. We want to believe that ultimately, as our existence ends, it was all worth something, not just a matter of taking up time and space, a lump of cells serving an earthly sentence before we bequeath our energy to the earth or the air.

Paulo in this book doesn’t espouse any particular philosophy, although he does give us some theories which err on the side of “f*cking crackpot” – he’s pleasingly vague, open to possibilities and wholly mesmerising. Unfortunately, this kind of charisma is very similar to the sort you might encounter among snake-oil salesmen, corrupt clerics, televangelist fraudsters, grifters of all rank and hue and, worst of all, politicians. You will need to put a lot of things on hold in order to read this book, and still more to enjoy it. Staking one’s finances on mysticism is usually a mug’s bet. But you’d remember your conversation with Paulo at the dinner party, and you’d probably Facebook him anyway.

I started reading this book on a plane, during mild turbulence. For me at least, it is in these conditions when I am at my least cynical, and the ideas of spiritual benevolence, deism or supernatural agency become palatable. Much moreso than when I am back on the ground, when I should say such ideas are negligible. No atheists in a foxhole, they say – very few on a wobbly plane, either. I’d say that, coincidentally, these are the optimum conditions for reading Aleph. Paulo Coelho would say there’s no “coincidentally” about it. I will read more of his stuff.

THE THINARA KING

2012-05-05T08:41:00.000-07:00

Child of the Erinyes
by Rebecca Lochlann
286 pages, Erinye Press

Review by Melissa Conway

I am acquainted with the author via social networking, which should in no way be construed as an admission that the following review is biased. If I don’t like a book, I won’t finish reading it no matter who wrote it. And, just so you know, there was never a chance that I might not finish this one, and not because of any sense of obligation. This is the second book in the Child of the Erinyes series, the first of which, The Year God’s Daughter, I reviewed here - and you can see by my enthusiasm I was eagerly awaiting the sequel.

We take up where the first novel left off (and it would be a major spoiler for the first book if I told you exactly where that was), but the brief idyll in princess Aridela’s young life is to be short-lived. With the violent suddenness only a mega-burp in the earth’s crust can dish up, her lush and peaceful home island of Crete is assaulted by a deadly pyroclastic blast from the volcanic island of Callisti, seventy miles away. Aridela and the newly crowned bull-king Chrysaleon barely survive, and to make matters worse, she believes she is the one who caused the devastation by angering the goddess Athene.

Author Lochlann does a fine job describing the destruction: inescapable waves of blistering heat and choking ash; the endless series of earthquakes and resulting tsunamis. The survivors are soon subjected to even more horror at the hands of a vengeful and opportunistic conqueror from the mainland, whose soldiers overrun the embattled island and pillage what little is left of the once proud and mighty civilization.

These are dark days for Aridela - sometimes graphically so; what she endures is not euphemistically portrayed - but deep inside she clings to the hope that she can withstand the abuse and prevail in order to appease Athene and restore freedom to her remaining people. Chrysaleon, too, endures much. On the verge of death, he has visions of an out-of-body journey to the heavenly land of the gods that enlightens him to his new status as The Thinara King - the one man with the power to change the destiny of everyone in the mortal world. But will he choose the right path?

I don’t want to give too much away. Let me just say in closing that this series is my new addiction. Lochlann is a meticulous writer, and I predict that the outpouring of accolades she is already receiving from her readers will eventually give her a well-deserved boost onto the best-seller lists.

THE LAST WEREWOLF

2012-04-28T21:59:00.000-07:00

by Glen Duncan

346 pages, Canongate

Review by Pat Black

A while back, when I was reviewing a compendium of vampire short stories, I lamented the fact that we already have the ultimate vampire novel in Dracula, but not its lycanthropic equivalent.

I do have a theory about this: werewolves, much moreso than vampires, are cinematic creatures, their bloody horrors and fuzzy outfits tailor-made for the big screen. Creating these monsters can have a much more spectacular outcome than putting plastic fangs in actors’ mouths and daubing heaving bosoms with blood (with all due deference to Ingrid Pitt, the naughty nightied Twins of Evil and many other femmes tres fatale in Hammer’s gloriously garish undead wankfests).

Shapeshifting is a common part of most cultures’ mythologies, from the heart of Africa to the long grass of the Sunderbans and stretching across the great American plains. But, while werewolves have been a part of European folklore for centuries (such a beautiful word at its blunt etymological roots, werwulf), our understanding of these creatures comes from modern times.

In 1941, the Universal Studios movie, The Wolf Man, tied together many ancient myths to make the beast we know today. Cursed to become a monster every full moon; having it passed on to you, like rabies, by being bitten; fatal allergy to the element silver, especially if it’s moulded into a bullet and fired at you; these were all tied together nicely by the screenwriter Curtis B Siodmak.

It’s all about the change. In the early 1980s in particular, make-up artists like Rick Baker, Rob Bottin and others vied to out-monster each other with the most eye-popping practical effects ever seen. It’s becoming something of a lost art now, in these days of increasingly seamless computer effects. But for films like An American Werewolf in Londonand The Howling, the transformation scenes were almost the centrepiece of the films themselves; they became legends in their own right, myths that your older brother and his friends slavered over, which you then pretended to school friends that you’d seen yourself. This is something best lent to the visual arts, rather than literary. The moment man becomes beast.

Sure, there are werewolf novels, some of them very good indeed. Robert R McCammon wrote a real cracker, a doorstopper called The Wolf’s Hour which managed to blend shafeshifting horrors with Nazi villains. I utterly devoured it one day as a teenager when I really should have been outside vandalising phone booths and beating people up. Historically, there are a few classic texts, too, from Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris to GM Reynolds’ penny dreadful classic Wagner the Werewolf. But nothing definitive. No stuffed, mounted head which you could point to in the study and say: That was it. The biggest and best of them all. The granddaddy.

In Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf, it could be that we have at last tracked an elusive beast down. If not the greatest werewolf book of all time, then certainly the greatest of the modern era.

For a book which features giant, hybrid-style wolfmen and vampires, this is a brilliantly lyrical, even literary, novel. We come to our narrator, 260-year-old Jacob Marlowe, in a bit of a pickle. He’s the last werewolf on earth, hunted by the anti-paranormal human agency WOCOP, with a man called Grainer at the helm. Marlowe killed and ate Grainer’s father 40 years before, and the man is obsessed with leaving Marlowe to the last. Marlowe, an old dog happy to learn new tricks, must employ every means necessary to stay ahead of the pack… but he’s getting old, and weary. He knows his next full moon could well be his last. And part of him relishes the fact.

What could be more uplifting for a lad with his tail between his legs than a new girlfriend?

Marlowe is a wonderful creation, and he rolls around in Duncan’s baroque prose. He’s put his time on earth to good use, amassing a fortune and garnering all the survival skills he needs to avoid WOCOP ever since he was bitten by a werewolf at the foot of Mount Snowdon in Wales. He comes across as a louche, Byronic semi-aristocrat with a prodigious sexual appetite and a wicked tongue; the fact of his lycanthropy is almost incidental.

With the Curse, Marlowe becomes a werewolf every full moon, when he goes through several hours of hunting, killing and eating humans in as messy a fashion as he can. He has to be quite systematic about selecting victims, modern crime detection rates being what they are. Dispatching them is not quite so scientific a business, though. He’s unabashed about how he does this, completely in thrall to the insane lusts of the Curse. I guess after 200-odd years of anything, you get used to it. When you find out who his first victim was, you can understand why; you can’t get too much more appalling than that.

He isn’t quite immoral, and in his human form he does lend himself to good causes, but every full moon Marlowe surrenders to the bloodlust. There’s not much choice involved – he has to. Hunting animals just won’t do; the most dangerous game of all is where it’s at for wolfies.

Marlowe isn’t just wanted by WOCOP; it turns out the vampires – here painted as sublime supernatural beings who nonetheless cannot have sex (Marlowe titters, Muttley-style, up his ripped sleeves) – have designs on owning themselves a dog, something to do with their search for the ability to walk in the daylight. He has an ally, though: Harley, an insider at WOCOP whom he once saved from a gay-bashing as a wolf. Through his agency and information Marlowe is able to stay one step ahead of Grainer and his protégé, Ellis.

It’s a wild ride, and Duncan tickles behind our ears as the debauched, dilettante man-beast follows through his mission statement: f*ckkilleat. It’s an almost densely sexual novel, infused with Duncan’s rip-snortingly florid descriptions. One comparison in particular between a woman’s anus and the smirk of a coquettish secretary of the Third Reich had me howling with laughter. Indeed, there’s a knowing chuckle employed all the way through, here, a low growl in the background. An altogether different “transformation” Marlowe undergoes in order to throw his pursuers off the scent was one of many nods and winks to the audience.

The narrative does show a few fleas through some story weaknesses. In the near-affable stoner Ellis we have a terrific villain, and in his boss, Grainer, an “off-the-page” head honcho whom we barely even meet until the conclusion. The latter was sparingly used to the point of being wasted - the Darth Maul of the tale, if you will. There were also too many loose ends in this story, little plotlines here and there which weren’t developed – deliberately so, you feel. The Macguffin of an ancient text which Marlowe has been obsessed with is dangled in front of our nose like a dog biscuit, then snatched away. The journal structure also gives us a problem in the conclusion, where another character takes the reins, leaving us a bit shellshocked by the resolution (and mistrustful of it).

Having the Curse being a once-a-month deal also gives us a distinct lack of wolf time. Although there are plenty of recollections of previous attacks and action replays of the sensations and benefits of being a dog, there’s little of it taking place in media res. Also, key characters are dropped with almost indecent haste, and things are left annoyingly open for a sequel on several fronts. Consider, for a non-spoiler start, what became of the character Marlowe furnished with a lovebite.

It’s all made up for by the sumptuous prose, the positively filthy contemplations and a mordant sense of humour. Part of me would have preferred to read about Marlowe’s day-to-day bump and grind, just a series of episodes in the life of a charming dirtbag with the inner wolf kept straining at the leash in the background.

But isn’t a sense of restraint part of the appeal of the werewolf story? The idea that something wicked lurks within, just waiting for an excuse to burst into life and enslave you to your own base instincts?

If you absolutely must do it, please don’t be biting at the curtains – they were very expensive, you know. And leave the postie alone, those boys work hard.

ARE WE STILL ON FOR TONIGHT?

2012-04-25T21:18:00.000-07:00

Dating During the Zombie Apocalypse
by Evelyn Lafont
Kindle Edition

Hereward L.M. Proops

I bought this book on a whim. Perhaps it was the title? Maybe it was the fact that I'm currently devouring (no pun intended) as much zombie-related fiction as possible in anticipation of the upcoming re-release of the novelisation of George A. Romero's “Dawn of the Dead”. Perhaps it was the fact that this sweet little novella has not yet been shown much love on Amazon's UK website and I had a good feeling when I read its tag line “Not everyone who survives the zombie apocalypse should”.

Sorry... did I call “Are We Still On For Tonight” sweet? That should have read “brutal”.

Evelyn Lafont's little novella is a first for me. I've seen countless novels of the zombie apocalypse before. I've seen zombie survival guides, novels told from the point of view of the zombies, even seen Jane Austen's world overrun by the undead. “Are We Still On For Tonight?” is chick-lit with zombies.

The novella's central character, thirty year old Rachel Finnikin, is one of the least likeable characters I've seen since Tom Cruise's Maverick in “Top Gun”. She's vacuous, utterly self-absorbed and unashamedly materialistic. Her total lack of self-awareness, mean-spirited nature and blinkered world-view also means that she provides the book with an enormously funny narrative voice. When the zombie apocalypse kicks off, triggered by a toxic gas spread by an unnamed foreign power, Rachel is less concerned with the survival of the human race than the possibility that her dream-date with a good-looking doctor is going to be cancelled.

With an utter disregard for anything and anyone who gets in her way, the repellent Rachel embarks on a cross-town journey to the restaurant where she hopes her date is waiting for her. Funnily enough, her determination to bag herself an ideal husband gives her the inner strength and resourcefulness to stay alive in a city overrun by the living dead. She proves surprisingly adept at killing zombies with whatever tools are close to hand, whether they be letter openers, umbrellas or works of modern art. Rachel also discovers that there are advantages to a zombie apocalypse too. There are no queues in the museum and she can go shopping in all the best stores without spending a penny. Indeed, her shopping spree midway through the story is one of its funniest moments as she gushes enthusiastically about her new shoes and clothes without once wondering whether there will be anybody left alive to see them.

Of course, a zombie apocalypse wouldn't be a zombie apocalypse without lashings and lashings of gore and “Are We Still On For Tonight?” has an abundance of the red stuff. Rachel describes the horrific slaughter of her co-workers with a pretty dispassionate tone but she goes totally ballistic when she gets some blood on her high heels. It's the incongruity of Rachel complaining about a broken nail whilst stabbing an ex-colleague through the eye socket with an umbrella that makes this novel so laugh out loud funny.

Any complaints? Well, just one. It's too damn short. At less than 17,000 words, “Are We Still On For Tonight” is more of a novelette than a novella and readers should be aware of this when purchasing from the Kindle store. I could quite happily have read a lot more of Rachel's adventures and whilst the ending made me nearly drop my Kindle because I was laughing so hard, I couldn't help but feel that her character could be taken on a more satisfying character arc in a longer story.

Despite its brevity, “Are We Still On For Tonight” is tremendous fun. Laugh-out-loud funny, shockingly violent and very, very silly. It won't last long, but fans of splatter-horror, zombies and luxurious camel-coloured Donna Karan cashmere leggings are guaranteed to be heartily entertained.

Hereward L.M. Proops

CARTE BLANCHE

2012-04-23T20:24:00.000-07:00

by Jeffery Deaver

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

The last official James Bond novel was released back in 2008. Sebastian Faulks' “Devil May Care” was released in a tidal wave of hyperbole and became Penguin UK's fastest selling hardback novel – shifting 44,093 copies in the first four days. However, true fans of 007 were not impressed. Whilst the novel took the secret agent back to a 1960s setting and Faulks made a fair stab at imitating Fleming's writing style, it was a pretty poor book. The villain was laughable, the plot was dull and Faulks proved that even the most highly acclaimed literary author can struggle when writing action.

“Carte Blanche” is a very different beast. Penned by veteran thriller writer Jeffery Deaver, the novel relocates Bond to a modern setting and gives the secret agent a new lease of life by rebooting the franchise. Bond is no longer a veteran of the WW2; he's now a Royal Naval Reserve officer fresh from the war in Afghanistan. Recruited by the Overseas Development Group, a covert operation independent of MI5, MI6 and the Ministry of Defence, whose sole aim is to protect the state by any means necessary.

The novel features all the usual Bond tropes but Deaver tinkers with them ever-so-slightly. The result is that that “Carte Blanche” feels like a James Bond book without being over-familiar. There's the usual blend of sex, violence and glamour which one would expect but Deaver brings a very modern, dynamic edge to the book. M, Miss Moneypenny and Mary Goodnight are all present and correct but Bond appears to have a bit more respect for his female colleagues, even turning down a rebound-shag with one of them. Bond still has very hot then very cold showers and a taste for fast cars but now drives a modern Bentley Continental GT. Q Branch still provides Bond with gadgets but they come in the form of special apps for his hi-tech mobile phone, dubbed the iQphone. Deaver sticks fairly closely to the details of Bond's childhood, with references to his Aunt Charmain and his expulsion from Eton, but a sub-plot revolving around his parents' untimely death has the potential to be the most contentious addition to the canon.

The plot involves Bond's investigation into a potential terrorist atrocity dubbed “Incident Twenty”. Bond dives into the mission with his customary zeal and finds himself up against the sinister Severan Hydt, the owner of a waste disposal corporation with a passion for decay that borders on necrophilia. Assisted by the technically-minded but emotionally cold Niall Dunne, Hydt leads Bond on a globe-trotting adventure from Serbia to Dubai and then on to South Africa. Bond's mission is, of course, not as simple as catching up with Hydt and putting a bullet between his eyes. Deaver manages to handle the increasingly complicated plot with consummate skill whilst maintaining a breakneck pace throughout.

“Carte Blanche” is significantly longer than Fleming's bond novels and it is testament to Deaver's talent as a thriller writer that it doesn't feel much longer. Opening with an attempted derailing of a train carrying toxic chemicals in the first chapter, the novel hammers along for over 400 pages of relentless thrills. Set-pieces abound, from Bond's breathtaking escape from a condemned building set for demolition to a high tension gunfight at the book's climax where the hero's ever-diminishing supply of ammunition is coldly and calmly counted down as he eliminates bad guy after bad guy.

But it's not all action. Deaver also shows himself to be highly accomplished at cranking up the tension during the novel's quieter moments. Whether Bond's methodology is bringing him into conflict with other security agencies or he's indulging in some complex undercover activities to ingratiate himself with Hydt's organisation, the author manages to maintain a sense of danger and urgency throughout. Indeed, the novel is almost frustratingly enjoyable as each chapter ends with a teasing cliff-hanger that leads to “just-one-more-chapter-then-I'll-sleep” style insomnia.

Deaver is clearly a fan of James Bond and this enthusiasm comes through in his writing. One of the criticisms levelled (quite fairly) at Sebastian Faulks' effort was that the author perhaps felt he was “slumming it” by lowering himself from his literary heights to write a work of popular fiction. Bullsh*t and snobbery, I say. Faulks fell flat on his arse in his attempt to emulate Ian Fleming's stylish thrillers. “Carte Blanche” doesn't try to imitate Fleming, Deaver's own style being perfectly suited to an action-adventure thriller.

“Carte Blanche” is a fine return to form for the world's most famous secret agent and a worthy addition to the 007 canon. James Bond is a character that has undergone numerous reinventions and interpretations. Like the 2006 adaptation of “Casino Royale”, Jeffery Deaver respects Fleming's original novels by taking the elements which work and transplanting them into a plausible modern-day setting. Highly recommended. Hereward L.M. Proops

4AM

2012-04-21T22:44:00.001-07:00

by Nina de la Mer
250 pages, Myriad

Review by Pat Black

I used to dread the idea of nineties nostalgia art. If something from your youth comes around again, then by default you are no longer young. Nineties compilation CDs. Youngsters in tartan shirts. Blur coming full circle as a novelty act. It tends to put a date on me, just as surely as that brown suede jacket and slightly too-tight polo shirt. A reminder of the ineluctables. Time. Age. And the other thing that follows. And now, with Nina de la Mer’s 4am, it’s finally here.

As well as that transitory time between intoxication and sobriety for anyone on a night out, 4amrefers to the title of a rave song by Orca. This is the perfect soundtrack to a novel looking at the lives of two lads in the British Army’s catering unit as they party in Hamburg during their posting at Fallingbostel.

Cal and Manny are aged about 20, full of beans and just about everything else you can think of as they escape their day-to-day lives on the base. As the epigram at the start of the book informs you, the army’s catering course is the toughest in the world, because “no-one has passed it”. The reality is that the “Cookie Monsters” in charge of the spuds and puddings are well down the macho pecking order of the military world – in Cal’s case, because he’s far too nice, and in Manny’s, because he’s usually off his nut on chemicals.

The narrative shifts between these two men, and de la Mer captures their voices well. Cal’s from Very Glasgow, so prepare yourselves for a few glottal stops and apostrophes, while, strike a light me old china, Manny sounds like he’s from South London. The two are best mates, and although united by their love of pills and raves, different characters; Cal very religious and conscientious, Manny more up-for-it and devil-may-care. Along the way we meet some other important characters, including Iain, a boorish thirty-something officer who does not care who or what he wrecks in pursuit of pleasure, and Steffi and Emma, a pair of students who attach themselves to Cal and Manny’s crew.

Along the way, hearts are broken, recreational drug-taking spirals into addiction and karma works its magic. The Rieperbahn’s charms are well-essayed, although as I’ve never been there I can’t comment on how well it comes across. But the foaming broth of spangled cheesy quavers and battered squaddies was spot on, as was the endless early-20s tour of crappy nightclubs and the desperate souls looking for the sublime within their sticky-carpeted confines.

Thank god, I was a little bit younger than Cal and Manny around the time this book takes place, 1993-94, but the world as it was and its events are clear as day to me. The night Kurt Cobain’s death was revealed; the Bosnian conflict; even Arsenal winning the Cup-Winner’s Cup, are all horribly fresh in my mind. And yet we’ve now got young people making their way through the jungles of nightlife who weren’t even born then. Time, people. Time time time.

What time is love?(bass drops back in)

Where de la Mer is particularly brilliant is in exposing the thought processes and feelings of young men. Although these creatures are not especially complicated (a Venn diagram might contain “women” overlapping with “getting wasted”… and that’s about it), she gets that hard-to-spot nuance, too. That wanting to be loved is normal, even for stuttering, block-headed boys, and turning away from that isn’t. She also points out that the people who are good-natured do, usually, end up the happiest in life.

They have to suffer before they get there, though. I felt for poor Cal all the way through this. As he himself notes at a latter stage, there’s not one bit of suffering meted out to him that you can’t see coming a mile off; this does nothing to alleviate our own pain when it finally arrives. The torment isn’t all on-the-page, either. Indeed, there were some subtle parts in this book, with a deft commentary on how young men from broken homes find a family they always lacked in the Army - and how the Army in turn exploits this, occasionally through the agency of psychopaths.

4am made me cringe in places, but not for the sake of being off-beam or getting anything wrong. Rather, because it gets it spot on. A more cynical version of me looks at my own adventures in younger days, filtered through the prism of Cal and Manny and the mistakes they make, and can see how easily it is done. Because in those years, it’s quite difficult to get your head down and do the hard yards; to take responsibility and to work hard. A stern, somewhat patrician part of me winces at the things I passed up for the sake of partying and having fun in that crucial time. But back then, that’s what it was all about – your whole life was spent building up to the weekend, and each one more wasted than the last. Part of me wonders if these grubby rites of passage are hard-wired into us, as if it’s a genetic stage we must pass through – and if we’re lucky, we’ll contribute to society at the end of it.

And most tragic of all, you truly believe in love. You really do.

What can I tell you? It was the nineties, man. A strange time in our culture, particularly from a British point of view. It feels laughable even typing this, but one unseen character in this book is Ecstasy. Even for pommes de terrelike me who were usually interested observers at raves rather than gurning participants, the drug was everywhere, an inescapable part of nights out whether you were taking it or not.

I think that a key component of any time capsule from the early 1990s must contain a couple of eccies. It’s odd that during the time when everyone and his dog was reading Trainspottingand mainlining Irvine Welsh’s skag likesay nu-porn adventures, the drug of choice was in fact something far more positive; a substance that, while being vilified in the press, actually blunted the hard edges and at its very best provided a quasi-religious, intense feeling of spiritual belonging. It’s precisely what you were looking for in the first place. Everything you imagined the drugs your parents did in the 1960s was supposed to do.

That’s unless wee Jimmy sold you half an aspirin, of course, and you sat there looking at sweating wall tiles for most of the night and waiting for something nice to happen. Hey, I said it was the nineties. That actually happened, too.

Nina de la Mer gets to the core of this odd time, as well as the occasionally brittle hearts of prima facie brutal young men. The fact that we now have a full generation of squaddies who’ve served in a time of war way beyond any beasting her characters encounter make this an important book, with an altogether different face lurking behind the smiley one on the cover.

THE TINY WIFE

2012-04-19T19:22:00.001-07:00

by Andrew Kaufman
80 pages, Friday Project

Review by J. S. Colley

I had to go through a lot of trouble to buy this book. At the time, I wasn’t able to purchase it through Amazon.co.uk, so I had to go to The Book Depository website and buy the hardcover. When I received it in the mail, I have to admit that my first reaction was dismay at how “tiny” the book was. I was a little annoyed. I thought I was buying a full-length novel, not a novella. But, after reading it, I wonder if this wasn’t done on purpose. I “get” why it is so small—in length as well as physical size. Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but I prefer to think it was and, therefore, my irritation is diminished. (Please don’t excuse the pun.) And, now, when I see it among the 6x9’s on my bookshelf, it makes me smile.

The Tiny Wife begins as a flamboyant thief, wearing a purple-feathered hat, walks into a bank and demands the most sentimental object from each of his victims. After the robbery is complete, he claims he has taken 51% of their souls, and they must fight to get it back, or else they will die. An explanation is never given for what motivates the thief to interfere with their lives. He’s like a Bizarro World Robin Hood, stealing parts of souls to make them whole again.

While the thief reminded me of Robin Hood, the overall theme of the book reminded me of The Wizard of Oz. In that novel, everyone yearns for something they already have: intelligence, compassion, courage, the love of family. In The Tiny Wife, the characters are not living up to their potential, not facing their demons. Going through life with less than half their souls, even if they don’t realize it. The thief forces them to either sh*t or get off the pot. Find a way to get your soul back—or die.

The effect of the theft is different for each of the victims. I won’t go into a lot of detail but one manifestation is that a girl’s lion tattoo comes to life and chases her for days. And, of course, some of the victims never figure out how to get their souls back.

The heart of the novel is the story of the narrator—the husband of one of the victims. The object his wife gave the thief was a calculator. She had calculated every significant event of their lives with it—from the date of their child’s birth to the amount of their mortgage. They are having marital problems, he feeling he has to “carry” her, and she is feeling “diminished.”

One day, the wife discovers that she is shrinking in precise increments. Even without her calculator, she predicts how long it will take for her to disappear altogether. She keeps this to herself, but her husband and son watch as she gets tinier every day.

At one point, the thief says to the husband:

“Perhaps one of the hardest things about having kids is realizing that you love them more than your wife. That it’s possible to love someone more than your wife. What’s worse is that it’s a love you don’t have to work for. It’s just there, indestructible, getting stronger and stronger. While the love of your wife, the one you do have to work at, and work so very hard at, gets nothing. Gets neglected, left to fend for itself. Like a houseplant forgotten on the windowsill.”

Ultimately, this novel is about a couple rekindling their love for one another, but the individual stories of each of the victims is a tiny parable all its own.

The Tiny Wife is heartbreaking, heartwarming, thought provoking, and quirky. And worth the price.

And it seems I’ve written quite a lot for such a tiny book.

SELFSAME

2012-04-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

by Melissa Conway
Kindle Edition

Review by J. S. Colley

To get the technical stuff out of the way, I’m required to state that I am acquainted with Melissa Conway through social networking. This is not an admission that my review is biased in any way. I read a pre-publication copy of this book (although I ended up purchasing a copy for my niece to read!).

I have read several books written by Melissa Conway. I feel this is one of her best—or maybe a close second to Xenofreak Nation. If I had to categorize it, I would call it a YA paranormal romance with a hint of historical fiction.

Selfsame is an apt title for this novel; it is about a girl whose soul has been split in two. At birth, Enid’s skin turns “the color o’twilight.” Her grandmother calls on Bear Talker, a Moheconneok (Mohawk) medicine man, to try and save the child. He succeeds, but not entirely. He claims that half of her spirit was left in another place and time. Enid would be forever “nesche—two” and she would have two lives to live.

When Enid goes to sleep in colonial America, the other half of her soul, Sorcha, wakes up two centuries in the future. Each girl is affected by what happens to her counterpart in the other world. Each feels, and remembers, what the other experienced while she was asleep. Sorcha hates the hardships and discrimination Enid must face every day, and Enid is frustrated by knowing what advances there will be in the centuries to come and not yet available in her world. She does use what knowledge she can to help those around her.

With all the danger that Enid encounters, the reader wonders what would become of Sorcha if something happened to Enid. Would her soul survive? Just when things become increasingly dangerous in Enid’s world, Sorcha meets Ben Webster in hers. He tells Sorcha that his family has been desperately searching for her for over two hundred years. What is the connection? Why is the Webster family so interested in Sorcha? They know something that they won’t—or can’t—tell Sorcha.

The author does a superb job of building the tension by alternating chapters between each of the girls’ stories. There are some heartbreaking, as well as tender, moments. Even though this story is classified as “paranormal,” Conway makes it all seem very believable.

I found myself eagerly turning the pages, anxious to know what was going to happen next. This book will appeal to young adults as well as older readers.

AURARIA

2012-04-15T21:14:00.002-07:00

by Tim Westover
398 pages, QW Publishers

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

The Weird West is a fantasy sub-genre that is sadly overlooked. We've seen countless incarnations of the Tolkien-inspired sword and sorcery kingdoms. In the past few years, the paranormal romance bubble has swollen to such vast proportions that the fact it hasn't yet burst is a source of wonder to many of us. Although there have been some minor forays into the Weird West such as the roleplaying game “Deadlands” or B-movie classics such as “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula” or “The Valley of Gwangi”, the general public didn't really seem to warm to the concept. However, the huge popularity of the videogame “Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare” (cowboys versus zombies) and the recent movie adaptation of comic book “Cowboys and Aliens” is an indication that folks are beginning to come round to the notion of mashing horror, fantasy or science fiction with the mythology of the old west.

“Auraria” is the latest addition to the steadily growing canon of work that can be described as “Weird Western”. Written by Tim Westover, whose previous books were written in Esperanto (stop laughing at the back, it is a real language!), “Auraria” isn't your prototypical Western story. There are no gunslingers or bandits. Hardly any moonshine whiskey is drunk (though some unfortunate characters in the story manage to get themselves completely smasherooed by consuming a concentrated blast of real moonshine) and virtually no tobacco is spat. Instead, Westover weaves a very strange, often rambling narrative about Auraria, a Georgia town which sprang up during the gold rush but didn't exactly prosper or recover from gold rush fever.

James Holtzclaw, the novel's protagonist, is sent to the isolated community by his boss, Hiram Shadburn, with a case full of money and the instructions to buy up as much land as possible. Shadburn, you see, has designs upon the town but he isn't the least bit interested in the gold which lies beneath it. Having grown up in Auraria, he's seen far too much time and effort wasted in the pursuit of the town's elusive treasure. Instead, he plans to build a great dam with which the valley can be flooded. Once the valley is submerged beneath the newly-formed lake, Shadburn intends to build a holiday destination which will bring real money to the area.

Holtzclaw's task isn't as easy as it would first seem. The town and the outlying areas are populated with a vast array of eccentric characters and strange places. The town's saloon has a piano-playing poltergeist called Mr Bad Thing. The numerous freshwater springs are tended to by a mischievous spirit called Princess Trahlyta who is understandably wary of Holtzclaw's activities. There's an ice-shed from which a blizzard perpetually blows and beneath the mountain lives a massive, invincible terrapin with a fondness for telling long-winded stories. Shadburn's ambitions to transform the area don't really sit comfortably with its supernatural elements. Though one might expect the local spirits to wreak brutal, bloody revenge on the capitalist newcomers, “Auraria” is a much more playful novel. Vengeful spirits in a horror novel would get the walls of the hotel to drip with blood but Westover's spirits instead cause showers of peaches to fall on the newly-built resort. It's precisely this sort of whimsical, playful tone which makes “Auraria” stand out. At times I was reminded of Susanna Clarke's “Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell” (and anything which reminds me of that fantastic book is definitely doing something right) whilst on other occasions (particularly those involving the semi-sentient sheep-fruit) I felt we were firmly in Terry Pratchett territory.

Unfortunately, the novel's lighthearted, quaint character comes at a slight cost. “Auraria” isn't a particularly long novel, but there are times when it feels like one. Westover's narrative ambles along at a very leisurely pace, perhaps too leisurely for some readers. Whilst I adored the charming, often bizarre details which are liberally scattered through the novel, I couldn't help but feel that it was lacking in narrative drive. It was only towards the end of the book when Shadburn's dam is threatened, not by the direct actions of the spirits but by the greed of the resort's guests, that I felt the novel was finally going somewhere. This is, of course, just a personal opinion and I'm sure that many readers will thoroughly enjoy the story's gentle, meandering pace.

“Auraria” is released on the 10th July and those looking for a charming, playful read will do well to check it out. It might lack the directness that one might expect, but Westover's English language debut is beautifully written and manages to bring to life the rich folklore of the Appalachians.

Recommended.

Hereward L.M. Proops

THE HALO REVELATIONS

2012-04-13T21:23:00.000-07:00

by J.S. Colley
Kindle Edition

Review by Melissa Conway

I am acquainted with J.S. Colley through social networking, and was privileged to be a beta reader of this manuscript. She is also the most recent writer to have been invited to be a Booksquawk contributor. Neither of these facts should be taken as an admission that the following review is biased; I strive to be objective when I write reviews for the books of people I know.

The Halo Revelations is an intellectual thriller that blends fact and fiction on a grander scale than the works of Dan Brown. Here we confront the science fiction (or, depending on which conspiracy theorist you ask, the science fact) of our planet’s denizens having not only been visited on numerous occasions in the past by aliens from outer space, but guided by them throughout civilization. To persuade the reader to accept this notion, Colley offers up popular alternative extraterrestrial interpretation of the meaning behind items of ancient artwork such as the Drōpa stones and structures like the pyramids and Nazca lines.

The story is told through multiple points of view. We are most often in the head of young Nick, son of an archaeologist whose body has finally been recovered ten years after his disappearance in the Himalayan Mountains. Nick’s reactivated sorrow is tempered by his mortification when someone posts a video of his father that makes him seem like a raving UFO lunatic. His father had been dabbling in the dubious art of archeo-astronomy, plus, he was working with Henry Applegate, the infamous alien-conspiracy-theory author. Nick’s mother Liz doesn’t want anything to do with Henry, and doesn’t know that Nick has secretly been friends with the reclusive old man during the ten years his father has been missing.

Without giving out too many spoilers, Bad Things Happen and the NSA (National Security Agency) becomes involved. Our second main protagonist (or antagonist from Nick’s perspective) is Agent Ronnie Vagnetti, whose job specialty is to “gather intelligence on unusual archeological discoveries and phenomenon - discoveries that might have a profound effect on society.” Vagnetti and Nick are in search of the same thing: the strange object seen in the video with Nick’s dad before he disappeared.

Rumors and speculation about the object abound and it’s soon clear that the bulk of these conjectures are deliberate misdirection by one or more unknown, powerful entities with a keen - and dangerous - interest in the object and the information it may or may not hold.

The characters in this, Colley’s first novel, are well-drawn and sympathetic. One of the central themes - that of history itself having been manipulated by the powers-that-be in any given timeframe - is convincing. If you’re a fan of Dan Brown, I recommend you give The Halo Revelations a try.

DJIBOUTI

2012-04-11T20:42:00.001-07:00

by Elmore Leonard
288 pages, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Review by Paul Fenton

This is hard.

God, I want to give this a good review, I so want to. This is Elmore Leonard, for God’s sake. He doesn’t write duds. His stories are tight, his characters are direct and their motivations grow and solidify as they develop through the story ...

Usually. This time, not so much.

Djibouti provides a very different premise to the more typical “let’s make some money and kill a few people while we’re at it” story. We have a cast of characters who aren’t exactly off-piste for an Elmore Leonard book – Dara the documentary film-maker, Xavier her older streetwise assistant, Harry the playboy diplomat, Idris the pirate king, and Billy the billionaire rogue. A potentially volatile mix of personalities and backgrounds, and when they’re all thrown in together in the small African port town of Djibouti, well, they ...

They ... um ...

To be frank, they hang around town waiting for someone (I’m looking at you Mr Leonard) to tell them what to do.

At first I thought this was going to be a departure from the usual kind of gritty crime story Leonard writes, as we follow Dara while she plans her documentary of Somali pirates, securing a boat and supplies while Xavier arms himself with a pistol. This all seemed promising. I felt their excitement, the anticipation of their quest to film the exploits of the pirates. I thought, how is Elmore Leonard going to handle this kind of story?

Answer: by skipping all that stuff. I turned the page and bam, they’re already back from their month-long voyage. It was jarring. We get a few verbal recollections of some of their encounters as they watch video material they’ve gathered. That’s it. It turns out that Somali pirates are not what Djibouti is about. No, it’s about al Qaeda. Kind of. And making a Hollywood movie. I think.

I’m not sure where to stop describing the story, where the spoilers might creep in, because it ambles along at such an apathetic rate. Sure, there’s some shooting and killing and great dialogue and all that good stuff, but my reaction to a lot of that was: big whoop. I just didn’t care what was going on. The characters themselves didn’t seem to care what was going on either. The only one of them who seemed to act with any kind of motivation was the al Qaeda baddy, James Russell AKA Jama Raisuli, but even he can only make half-hearted attempts at killing the cast. He also has ambitions to blow up an LPG tanker anchored in the bay for little other reason than it’s there, and wouldn’t it be cool to make it go kablooey? None of this action is helped by the telling: often one of the cast telling the others what just happened, not giving the reader a look-in when it actually is happening. It was like listening to someone describe a movie they’ve just seen.

Djibouti could possibly make a good movie with the right treatment, but as a novel it’s poor by Elmore Leonard’s usually high standards. He‘s still awesome, and I will still read anything else he writes, but Djibouti djiblows.

THE THIRD PAN BOOK OF HORROR STORIES

2012-04-09T22:00:00.000-07:00

edited by Herbert van Thal

Pan Books

Review by Pat Black

It’s time to cackle, it’s time to snicker, it’s time to shiver – here we are, then, with the Third Pan Book of Horror Stories.

Your Yucky Cover: This is one of the fluffier ones, depicting some sort of hairy beast sticking its head out of a crypt. It is not in the least bit scary or repulsive, and looks like something a child would cuddle into during a thunderstorm.

Herbert van Thal’s series had sold well into seven figures by the time volume three hit the shelves in 1962. The times were a-changing, though – this was the year of the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy predicting man would walk on the moon, four boys from Liverpool releasing their first hit single and a former milkman from Fountainbridge starring in a film called Dr No. For all these world-changing, banner events, the Pans didn’t quite reflect the zeitgeist. As in the previous two volumes, the fog of post-war austerity enshrouds the contemporary tales. Not helping in this matter is the fact that many of these stories were reprints from the “golden age” of Edwardian horror tales, several decades beforehand.

And to be honest, that’s the way I prefer it. Herbert van Thal isn’t interested in reflecting the times. It’s fun to give the book a bit of context, coming as it did at a time when Britain was shedding the tough skin hardened during the war. But all Mr van Thal wanted were the scares, and this is a fine addition to the series.

Horror stalwart Algernon Blackwood opens up with “The Strange Adventures of a Private Secretary in New York”. This is a lengthy piece, and none too straightforward either as the secretary in the title travels to a remote American country house to carry out a bit of underhanded business for his boss. The man of the house has some strange habits, though – not least of which is eating raw meat like an animal – and he has a manservant who is clearly up to no good. Not unlike the work of Ambrose Bierce, Blackwood’s stories sometimes require a bit of close reading. Sometimes you’ll wonder what it is you’ve just read, or whether you missed something, once you’ve reached the end. The atmosphere, as is so often the case with stories featuring strange old houses, was spot-on, although there was a whiff of anti-Semitism about the character of the Jewish servant.

Charles Birkin’s “The Last Night” looks at a tormented mental patient on her final evening at the facility, and a slightly unhinged psychiatrist who has unusual theories about the cause of pain in humans. What could go wrong?

“Meshes of Doom” by Neville Kilvington features a show-stopper of an opening line, but segues into a killer plant story after a botanist installs a rather nasty piece of foliage in spite of the blindingly obvious risks.

As a former owner of a feline friend I was jarred by “The Yellow Cat” by Michael Joseph. Here, a down-at-heel gambler finds his luck changes for the better after he takes in the scrawny creature in the title. He just can’t stop winning – and a gold-digging female admirer ups the ante. She doesn’t like the beast, and so, one drunken night… The cruelty on show here freaked me out far more than the almost psychedelic conclusion.

Charles Lloyd’s “Special Diet” looks at what happens when you let granny go mad in the attic, and leave her to try out special, iron-rich foodstuffs in her own time.

N. Dennett’s “Unburied Bane” puts us on a classic ghost story footing, and is one of the most atmospheric entries in the book. Here, a playwright and his wife check into an ancient farmhouse in the countryside, where all manner of awful things have transpired. The cackling old crone who lives there tells them about the skull of the witch they will find in their room, and how terrible things happen if the object is moved. And so…

The best title, next – “The Shifting Growth”, by Edgar Jepson and John Gawsworth. Shifting growth! Another medical horror, this one looks at an unusual tumescence which seems to have taken residence in the colon of a young girl, a champion swimmer and an otherwise healthy specimen. Her man implores his friend, an eminent surgeon, to have a look inside to see what’s there… It’d be wrong to spoil this one, but it’s a classic, with the tones of a really gloopy urban myth.

Shifting growth!

“Two Bottles of Relish” by the honourable Lord Dunsany – a big influence on HP Lovecraft and other writers of the weird and macabre – adds its own special sauce for the goose next. Our shifty, unreliable narrator tells us the tale of a local murder inquiry where a man seems to have done away with his girlfriend. Except, there’s no body to be found anywhere – no blood, nothing. The narrator’s flatmate, a chess-playing man of learning, is intrigued by the case and decides to carry out inquiries. The title of the story is a bit of a giveaway, but the conclusion is a little more subtle than you might expect.

We go all Southern, Gothic and thank-ya-ma’am now with “A Rose For Emily”, probably William Faulkner’s most famous short story. Wonder how he would have felt about that? Anyway, this is all very mannerly and spiteful as we wonder whatever became of poor, childless Rose in her big lonely old house. Surely she’s bought that big old load of poison to do away with herself? No?

Charles Lloyd bags a brace for himself with his second entry in this collection, “A Poem and a Bunch of Roses”. Here, a lass accepts an invitation to spend an evening with the widow of her lover. In her big house, in the middle of nowhere. Along with her crazed houselady and her giant, deformed son. Devilment, meet Darwinism.

The best-written tale followed next: HH Ewers’ “The Execution of Damiens”. A very Dunsanian “fireside chat” story here, featuring a German bloke recounting to his friends how he seduced the wife of the English country gentleman whose big, spooky house he’d been staying at as an eighteen-year-old student. The gentleman, a famous rake, doesn’t seem too bothered about this young buck squiring his lady – but issues the gravest warning to beware the room with the window…

This had florid, romantic stretches as the young man follows the object of his obsession. It might have worked just as well as a straightforward bodice-ripper, but it’s countered well by the ugly implications of the conclusion.

Lovecraftian hero Frank Belknap Long appears next with his sea monster story, “The Ocean Leech”. The horrid beast dragging the seamen to their doom in this one appears to be a giant squid at first; but there was a strange kink in the tentacles owing to the weird rapture the translucent blood-sucker induces in its victims.

“An Eye For An Eye” sees yet another return to medical horror. Lord, these 1930s chappies didn’t trust their quacks. Say “Aaarggghhh” for me, will you? Charles Birkin’s own second story in this collection looks at how a servant manages to avoid a murder sentence for doing away with the daughter of his employer, a famous surgeon. When the piece of evidence which the court didn’t hear about lands in his lap, linking the acquitted man with his daughter’s ghastly murder, the surgeon gets himself to work.

If you’re wondering why the Charles Lloyd and Charles Birkin stories seem so similar in their tone, their themes of revenge and also their slight medicinal tang, then wonder no more – it seems that they’re the same guy. Four stories for the same anthology, all spread out like that, does seem a little excessive to me. There were a few other writers who would have given their eye teeth for a shot at publication in the Pans – possibly in as clean and clinical an environment as you could wish for, of course.

More Edwardian ghost trickery follows with William Hope Hodgson’s “The Whistling Room” – a case for his pulp hero, Carnacki the ghost finder. This was a rollicking adventure featuring a lot of the spiritual and supernatural concerns of the age… as well as a dash of absolute bollocks, as our hero sets up his equipment, casts spells and scientifically categorises a whistling demon which bedevils an Irish castle. Later, in an unintentionally hilarious scene, it manifests itself as a giant pair of lips in a pile of dust.

But now, my own lips smack, as we come to Sidney Carroll’s “A Note For The Milkman”. This perfectly nasty study looks at the world of a small, meek man with a plan – to do away with his pecky wife. But he has a rather unique way of going about it, relying on an ancient text which allows him to produce an untraceable, indestructible poison. But he can’t use it on the missus straight away, as that would draw too much attention. No, what he needs is a bit of a diversion… This one got to the nasty, sadistic heart of the Pans, and it did so with the minimum of grue. A tasty treat, and one to savour along with a nice refreshing cup of tea.

A celebrity cameo now from Edgar Allan Poe, in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”. This is the one where a mesmerist thinks it’ll be a good idea to hypnotise his friend, who is on the cusp of death, just to see what happens. The creepy intonations of the dying man are spooky enough, but Mr Poe has an almost triumphantly grim finale in store just before the curtain falls. Bravo!

Elliott O’Donnell’s “The Mystery of the Locked Room” was a little bland – well written enough, and no harm in it, except for the one meted out to the luckless servant girl who gets far too curious about her mistress’s locked room at the far end of the house. And going into a locked room is never a good idea in these stories.

Your mad scientist will see you now, in “Doctor Fawcett’s Experiment” by Raymond Ferrers Broad. Here, a bloke engages in a bit of murder and experimentation in order to create – I think – life from lifelessness, or a completely new species out of a big mix of, I dunno, let’s call it tissue. In all truth I’m not really sure what the doctor’s point is, and by the end of the story, neither is he, although we do know in advance that he is in a world of shit.

“The Caretaker’s Story” by Edith Olivier looks at a curious trope in the horror stories genre – the convention of a doomed person writing down their thoughts and feelings as death approaches, often in media res. We see this in the previous story, where Doctor Fawcett notes down his insane ramblings before confronting oblivion. In this one, where an old sailor with a guilty secret contracted to look after a seaside cottage meets a ghastly end, we go a stage further, with the man actually writing down what’s happening to him, presumably while it’s still happening. An idea that works beautifully in theory, but not in practise, you suspect. “Argh, I’m in agony, help! What’s that? Oh I got a fright there, goodness me!”

Reaching something of a crescendo in the old infidelity-revenge-mad scientists-bad medicine themes which dominate this collection, we have “Lover’s Meeting” by John Ratho. Here, the bored wife of a driven, determined scientist invites a man from her past to visit - “one that got away” before she was married. Awkward!

Anyway, the scientist husband seems to be the perfect gentleman, even going so far as to retire for the evening so as to allow the two old friends to catch up. But alas, the lover is a little far gone with drink, and pushes himself onto his old flame. The scientist husband doesn’t take too well to this, as you may imagine, and decides to involve the visitor to the house in exactly what he’s been doing in the basement.

Ringing the bell for us at the end, there’s HG Wells’ “The Cone”, a beautifully written story if we lay aside the sadism of the situation. Another cuckolded husband, an industrialist who owns some clanking, blazing hell-hole, comes across his friend and wife, whom we know are having an affair. The implications of the situation smoulder between the trio, with no-one having the nerve to state the obvious; this reminded me of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo movie, where the baddie ruminates on how easy it is to lure someone to their death, through a simple manipulation of the fact that some people cannot bear to be impolite. The industrialist then decides to take the philanderer for a wee tour of his facility, including a massive cone which can reach temperatures of 300C. Why, you wouldn’t last a minute if you fell on that… To me, this story was saying something about the rape of the land and the kind, poetic feelings it inspires, by the hellish-seeming fires of ugly but necessary progress, the clanking iron and choking fumes of turn-of-the-century heavy industry. That there’s a sticky end involved should surprise us none, though it pleases us plenty.

I’ve enjoyed this tip-toe through the (toothed) tulips for the third Pan. In a fit of pure booklust, I sourced volume four at the same time as I picked up number three. So stay tuned… and beware!

I SHOT BIGFOOT

2012-04-07T21:57:00.000-07:00

and Other Stories
by Michael Wells
Kindle Edition

Review by Pat Black

I come from the city, but I’m a country boy at heart. There are few fully-clothed activities I enjoy more than getting away from the grey and into the green.

If the only fresh air you desire is from the air con, then it may be difficult to explain what it is I enjoy so much about the wilder places. That moment when the trees close in. When the only sound you can hear is the birds and the stirring branches. The blast of a gale as you stand on top of the mountain on a clear day.

Or slapping Yogi’s hand as it creeps towards your pickernick basket.

I Shot Bigfootand Other Stories has these sentiments close to its heart, although it is chiefly a work about cryptozoology. The author, Michael Wells, hails from Valley County, Idaho, where most of these stories are set. His own private Idaho concerns many of the myths and legends which have grown up around the wilderness and forest trails close to his home and heart, and the bizarre, often dangerous creatures they conjure.

The biggest legend of all, not to mention the biggest sneaker size, comes from the chap referenced in the title story. Sasquatch, to give him his Sunday name, doesn’t quite appear in “I Shot Bigfoot”, but his footprints are all over it. This is a smart courtroom drama looking at a famous writer who guns down a strange creature from his porch one night. The author in the story has been charged with unlawfully killing a grizzly bear, an endangered creature. But he contends that what he killed wasn’t a bear at all – and that the authorities know this all too well.

Wells is an award-winning journalist in Idaho, and this story showcases an often unremarked skill in public life – that of the court reporter. “I Shot Bigfoot” bears witness to the to-and-fro drama of cross-examination involving the prosecution and defence. On top of this, we also have the nuances common to most big court cases. Implication and suggestion are powerful tools during exchanges in court, gaps between statements which give the jury – and the reader – room to play around in. Corruption among officialdom, something a journalist is naturally attuned to (or should be), is also explored.

“The Dog Man of Poverty Flats” examines a strange contagion breaking out amid remote woodland, with the police and other authorities battling to contain an escalating crisis. I liked the rapid-fire approach to this tale and the swift action taken by shadowy figures to halt the outbreak which turns people into howly, hairy things during the full moon.

“Bad Off” is a survival tale with a twist. The narrator has a day he won’t forget in a hurry, no matter how much he wants to, when he visits a friend after being unceremoniously fired from his job. The friend has a two-seater plane and invites the narrator on a journey by air to a remote spot where they can go fishing and forget their troubles. But if there’s one thing my time spent working in the news tells me, it’s that these tiny little planes have a nasty habit of crashing. So it proves here. The two men survive a terrifying plunge, with scant provisions and terrible injuries, in the middle of a vast forest miles from anywhere.

And they’re not alone.

Let’s do that again, this time in italics. And they’re not alone.

By the time “Who Will Stand Up For The Hermit?” begins, it’s clear that the stories are all interconnected, however slightly. In this, we return to the story of Jack Lafayette, the man who shot Bigfoot (allegedly), as he decides to turn hero and ride to the rescue of a deaf woman who’s totally unaware of the huge forest fire making its way to her door.

“Murder at the Tubs” begins with a lovely piece of misdirection, but fleshes out the characters we’ve met before in subtle, tongue-in-cheek ways. Jack the novelist is taking part in a movie shoot, a retelling of his experiences on the night he blasted Sasquatch. There are not a few laughs on offer here as Jack and the cunningly named cryptozoology monster-hunting team, B.I.G.F.O.O.T, head out into the forest to try and capture some footage of the elusive creature. But vindication of the kind Jack craves is already out there, it seems…

Part Two of the book moves away from this world, if not the location. There is no cryptozoology here, unless you count some insights into that strange organism, the human heart. “Alive” and “The Dish” are primarily concerned with fishing, and how you can get to know people during this pastime. “Alive” wears its heart on its sleeve while giving us some good, lean Hemingway-style prose and descriptions of the land, looking at the lifelong lessons a man learns when he’s a cheeky teenager. “The Dish” looks at three generations of one family as they prospect for trout in a lake. It’s idyllic and haunting, and also touches on elements of family hierarchy and sibling rivalry. This latter story is the best in the book, and was as fine a portrait of a place as it is of people.

Last up, “The Promises We Make”, a story in the tradition of Elmore Leonard’s early western tales as a white man makes good on a pledge to return a Native American friend’s body to the land of his fathers in 1877. It’s a modern day parable as well as an exciting adventure story.

I Shot Bigfoot is big on thrills, but it’s also a love letter of a kind to the land, the clear water that runs through it and the creatures living there. If they should include a hairy critter with a size 25 shoe, well, don’t be too hasty to take aim at it. There are bigger monsters lurking in the courts, after all…

Read the author interview, here.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW:

2012-04-07T21:56:00.001-07:00

Michael Wells, I Shot Bigfoot and Other Stories

Interview by Pat Black

Booksquawk: I Shot Bigfoot is as much about a place as it is about people and legends. Can you talk a little bit about how Idaho influences your work?

Michael Wells: You are right about that in that it is as much about a place as it is about characters, though I'm not the most descriptive writer around. I'm very economical due to being a journalist for so long. The other transplant Idaho author Hemingway may have been right about staying too long in journalism affecting your ability to write novels. I live in a lovely spot of the world, and that typically means not many people came to stay, which is definitely the truth about this lovely spot.

I've always viewed Idaho as kind of Minor Leagues for Alaska; if you can't make it here, you have no chance in the last frontier. Where I live, McCall, is on the western edge of the largest area of designated wilderness in the lower 48. We have some of the greatest rivers few have heard of and some that most have heard of and dreamed about.

We also have the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, the Payette, Boise, Nez Perce, Salmon-Challis and Sawtooth national forests all within reach. And all of these places invite the willing to wanted adventure and the unwilling to unwanted catastrophe. I had noticed that this county, Valley County, was leading the way with Bigfoot sightings.

(There have been) something like seven "bona fide" Bigfoot encounters over the past 40 some odd years. McCall also sits on the shore of Payette Lake, which has had "sightings" of a lake monster all the way back into at least the 1930s, but the Native Americans also viewed the lake with caution long before that. But the lake monster legend already had plenty of press. The bigfoot encounters had largely gone unnoticed by the public.

We are also on the western edge of the federal government's 1990 reintroduction of wolves into Central Idaho and of course the most prevalent Idaho attitude about this reintroduction certainly played into one character's makeup and possibly the premise of “The Dog Man of Poverty Flats”, which mixes what once would have been science fiction (using DNA from extinct creatures to create born-again species) and mythology (Native American shapeshifting) to come up with a werewolf or dire wolf campy horror story.

Of course, the use of game cameras is pretty common this day and age, especially in Idaho. I always wonder how many of those things take photos of me while I'm out hiking. So, I used that reality to come up with some things that locals do when they come across them.

I think I've talked too much about how Idaho influences my work. In short, topping any ridge in Idaho or traversing down any canyon out here and your eyes are filled with beauty and wonder and naturally the imagination is a bit jealous that it allowed you to be surprised by something real. So, your imagination has to go on overdrive, but I always try to make it as real and plausible as possible and apply the brakes to the imagination so that something that sounds outlandish on its face, "I Shot Bigfoot", can seem plausible if you look into it.

Booksquawk: The courtroom scenes in the title story had the ring of authenticity to them (Bigfoot aside). What skills were you able to bring to bear here?

M.W.: I grew up in Mayfield, Ky., 2,000 miles away from here. My mother worked as a secretary for the county judge executive (chief executive officer of the county who presides over the commission). So, she worked in the courthouse and I spent a lot of time in the courthouse and occasionally I would walk into the courtroom and it was something out of To Kill a Mockingbird, in that it was an old courthouse and seemed more extravagant than these new courthouses that are built for utilitarian purposes.

So I spent a lot of time in a courtroom catching hearings and trials, I had more law classes than the usual journalism grad in college and then later as a reporter I spent a whole lot of time in court learning many of the things that might seem authentic in "I Shot Bigfoot".

Probably the biggest fiction in this story is that it went to a jury trial, which are so rare these days. Most people plea bargain whether guilty or not guilty to save money or face these days that trials with a jury is a rare thing. It is a shame, though, especially for those who are not guilty.

Booksquawk: Bigfoot's a great topic to explore. Were there any other myths and legends you're interested in, and can we look forward to reading about them in the
future?

M.W.: In I Shot Bigfoot & Other Stories, I explore the bigfoot legend, though mostly I explore the typical ridicule anyone receives if they are deemed to be at all serious about a bigfoot sighting or investigating the North American Ape, and I also use one story to explore the creation of dire wolves or the presence of shapeshifting Native Americans in the form of werewolves.

I do plan to tackle the local lake monster, though I plan to use its name in the 1940s instead of the name given to the lake monster in a contest in the 1950s. The town decided to call the lake monster Sharlie in the 1950s, but before that its name was Serpy Sam or Slimy Slim. So, I do plan a campy horror comedy about Serpy Sam and have written a little bit about that, but it is on the back burner so to speak. Though, I probably should move it up, you can get away with so much with that type of story.

Booksquawk: The stories in part 2 were much closer to the heart, it seemed. Can you talk about your inspiration for these stories? The western story in particular was striking - is this a genre you have experience in?

M.W.: It is a sad reality that just when the American Western was starting to become interesting the general public began losing interest. Elmore Leonard was penning some of the best, most gritty western stories there in the 50s and 60s and some of those were making it into film. He was doing a lot of unconventional things and getting away with it because people were tiring of the riding off into the sunset endings that seemed to end almost every story and accompanying film. He was exploring racism, violence, greed and so many other things and doing a great job, and so were others, but soon western stories and western movies were disappearing from the consciousness (I blame Mel Brooks - Blazing Saddles was probably the greatest lampoon ever and arrived at about the time the Western was DOA at the box office).

That is not to say there haven't been great westerns since then, but as a major genre in America and the world, it doesn't rank very high these days. And I would like to change that. Because it does seem that when we have western stories in the past 30 years they have been very good, Lonesome Dove, Deadwood, Cormac McCarthy's work and a few others.

So, I do like to write a good western story and focus on it. I have one close to completion, The Guerrilla Corkscrew, which is about salmon fishing, miners, greed, racism and revenge. It will take in "The Promises We Make," story, though poor Caleb isn't the focus of the story.

And that story in particular, I wanted to be somewhat cruel in that the last line could be considered cliche, except for the circumstances of the characters. It was a sad tale of how even those who were friends of the Native Americans could be swept up by the circumstances around them and not deliver on a most sacred promise to a friend. The other stories, I just wanted to incorporate fishing into stories that tell us something about our lives and our pursuits.

Booksquawk: Finally - for $64,000 - Bigfoot... real or not?

M.W.: I'm a lot like that poster in Fox Mulder's FBI office, "I want to believe." Bigfoot was real, we know that because there is fossil evidence unearthed in China of a large ape. I want to believe because I want to live in a world that still puts my imagination on notice once in a while. You thought you knew everything that was out here? SMACK! Well, you don't - meet the big hairy beast who outmatches you physically and mentally.

Wouldn't that be great? We need wild places and wild things and they disappear every second of every day, so deep down I want to believe, but the evidence of bigfoot's existence in our world today is rather suspect.

Read the Booksquawk review of I Shot Bigfoot and Other Stories.

EMBASSYTOWN

2012-04-04T10:24:00.006-07:00

by China Mieville
405 pages, Pan Macmillan

Review by Marc Nash

Those regular Booksquawk readers will know that I have battled with 3 of Mieville's previous 7 novels and always lost. I implored him on these very web pages to write a disciplined, grown-up novel. Not ones chock-full of fantastic, imaginative creations thrown onto the book's canvas like Jackson Pollock paint drips. And blow me down, but in his eighth novel "Embassytown" I do believe he has finally delivered. This is a fabulous novel that still retains his breathtaking ability to enthral through the power of image and idea alone.

Embassytown is a fully-realised world within a well-drawn solar system. It's his most coherent piece of world-building since "The City And The City", a book that otherwise fell down on its narrative aspects. The Ariekei are a biped race of insects with immense strength and advanced bio-technology, who host their human and other Exot(ic) races on their planet in peace and tranquility. They have a complex language which demands it is spoken simultaneously by two human voices. Hence the humans have bred special twin-headed Ambassadors who are the only representatives of our species who can communicate with the Hosts. The problem arises when a new Ambassador arrives on the planet, whose twin voice has an alarming effect on the Hosts. Language as virus, just as William Burroughs wrote of.

It is a fascinating treatise offered throughout the pages of the book. Its heroine Avice was offered up as a child to the Hosts to serve as a simile. That is she demonstrated certain actions for them, which they continued to pore over trying to debate the finer synecdoches of what she represented. For the Arikei cannot tell lies, therefore they have no symbolic or representative language. Actual human bodies have to stand for figures of speech as close as they can get to shades of meaning. Once the Arikei become addicted to the sound of the new Ambassador's voice, the tantalising prospect of a rebellion through discovering symbolic language offers them a possible cure.

The book is politically astute too. It offers a cogent portrayal of an empire and colonial relations. Of potential rebellions being pre-empted and successfully cut off at the head. Of civil war and factions, within both the human and the Arikei communities. The infected Hosts have a chilling way of trying to go cold turkey, to snap off the addictive effect of the Ambassador's voice on their bodies, akin to voluntary eunuchs.

The book skillfully interweaves its political and linguistic analysis with a narrative and character interaction and intrigue that stands up in its own right. The ending might have a touch of deus ex machina at Avice's hand about it, but I can forgive it that. This truly was a fascinating and stimulating book of ideas, with language itself at the very heart. Language is shown to be both the problem and the key to its own solution: "Language is the continuation of coercion by other means". Mieville has finally delivered.

PERIODIC TALES

2012-04-02T19:51:00.000-07:00

The Curious Lives Of The Elements
by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
398 pages, Penguin

Review by Marc Nash

As a kid I used to train my mind by memorising lists of things. The 50 US States (but not the State Capitals), bridges over the River Thames and the 105 elements of the Periodic Table (now risen to 118). And while I veered towards the Arts side subjects, I always loved Chemistry. So when I was rewarded by Penguin Books for participating in a reading habits interview with a free book of my choice, this was the one I plumped for over a range of contemporary novels that didn't strike me as terribly appealing. In doing so, I had a ready-made gauge for the success or otherwise of this book: would I have paid for it with my own money?

Periodic Tales is pitched not as an academic tome, nor even a comprehensive study, but more of a fun and slightly off-kilter look at the elements. Williams considers the weight that each element has in our culture, such as lead being associated with death (lining of sarcophagi), leaden skies and gravity itself. He looks at where their names originated from, those metals known to the Ancient civilisations having counter-intuitive letter symbols, because they drew on their Latin or Greek names; stannum meaning tin's symbol is SN, aurus for gold's AU. Then there are those elements discovered (or maybe uncovered would be more accurate, originating largely from mined ores and isolated) between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and the surprisingly central role that Swedish scientists had in this. And their diffidence in claiming credit for their finds, unlike the contests between French and British scientists. Cobalt was named after 'kobald', the mythical German miners.

The book is full of etymological gems like this. But I was uncertain as to whether every element was covered. Several were named in passing but not elaborated on, which I found disappointing. The organisation of the elements is not by their group on the Periodic Table, but the author's fanciful labels of "Power", "Fire", "Craft", "Beauty" and "Earth". This lends to the subjective feel throughout the book, so either you buy into the author's perspective the subject as a whole and his take on certain elements individually, or you don't. He starts off with offering testimony to his youthful quest to collect samples of each element, but this enthusiasm somehow fails to be transmitted by the adult him even when he makes pilgrimage to sites where elements were discovered. Many of the sites bear no memorial to their historical importance and have slipped from collective memory. Including the Swedish Ytterby mine where six elements emerged from.

For me there were tantalising gobbets of information here, including the treatment of how elements give off different colours under a spectroscope and where the word 'limelight' comes from. But ultimately I felt frustrated, left with the compound ore rather than being able to bear down on the individual elemental knowledge within. The final chapter sees Williams asking a German scientist why they bother synthesising new elements with half-lives so brief, that the elements cannot be used for anything before they decay and disappear. The scientist gives him an answer that I found as unsatisfying as Williams' own attempts to justify his quest. Would I have paid my own money to buy this book? No, probably not. Right, well I'm off to learn the names of the 13 elements discovered since I learned the Periodic table at school.

ABIDE WITH ME

2012-03-31T21:08:00.000-07:00

by Ian Arys
160 pages, Caffeine Nights Publishing

Review by Bill Kirton

This is a triumph. Books which you ‘just can’t put down’ come along all too rarely and, for all the pleasure that my other reads this year have given me, I haven’t been able to say that of any until now. If the need to sleep hadn’t intervened, I’d have read it in one sitting. In the event, it took two.

It’s a first person narrative, conveyed by John and featuring the bunch of people around him as he grew up in London’s East End in the 70s and 80s. The voice is haunting and has the power and authenticity that made such huge hits of Catcher in the Rye and Vernon God Little. It establishes right from the start John’s familial and social situation, and the minute to minute shifts in mood that convey the fact that he’s capable (like the rest of us) of loving his parents, sister and friends (including the strange new neighbour Kenny), and hating them at the same time. It’s solipsism without narcissism. What he writes is exactly what he’s feeling at the moment he writes it.

And yet, as the remarkable descriptions of going to and watching football matches with his dad demonstrate, it’s not egotistical. He’s aware of being part of a clan and of the community to which he belongs, its good and bad aspects. He sees his own elations and depressions shared by others.

Arys has done a terrific job of giving his narrator a clear moral perspective and the ability to judge and be compassionate towards others while at the same time showing how his own impulses and the circumstances in which he finds himself turn him into a time-served criminal. And yet, for all that, John is NOT one of the bad guys. Some of the characters are but even then, the moral climate in which they all live can’t be easily reduced to a set of formulae.

And, to make the achievement even more remarkable, the voice not only maintains its consistency (even as the moods of the character shift back and forth), it also ages as the narrator does. In the early pages, he’s at primary school, being thrilled by getting a bike for Christmas, experiencing the pettiness and pains of playground games but, as he grows into manhood, the language and his emotions mature. Which is not to say that the language ever escapes from the lousy grammar which is characteristic of the particular London vernacular he uses. The authenticity of the whole depends on that being maintained. ‘Bad’ English is an essential part of the fabric of the novel. It’s the way Arys conveys mood, setting and, most of all, character.

But all I’ve said so far is ‘reviewer-speak’. It’s the sort of analysis we do when we tease out a novel’s component parts to try to explain why it works. It conveys nothing of the way Abide With Me pulls you into itself, makes the world of John and the rest an intense experience and involves you in its tensions, its laughter and its losses. I think the author’s only problem is how on earth he’s going to follow it up.