In Victorian London, Jane Silverlake is a young woman with a singular talent: she can discern the ‘voices’ of inanimate objects, and can also pass thiIn Victorian London, Jane Silverlake is a young woman with a singular talent: she can discern the ‘voices’ of inanimate objects, and can also pass this ability on to others by touching them. The plot revolves around the disappearance of Jane’s friend Nathan, his involvement in a cult known as the Temple of the Lamb, and Jane’s attempts to find him (with the dubious ‘help’ of their mutual frenemy Madeline). This book is the most similar thing I’ve read to The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters and its sequels; while not exactly steampunk, McOmber’s version of London, filled with obscure folk heroes and festivals, always feels vaguely skewed. I had some problems with The White Forest: the pacing is off, with the story repeatedly gaining momentum and then suddenly grinding to a halt; the plot is definitely overstuffed. Reading it feels a bit like inhaling a cloud of floral perfume. Overall, though, it’s simply so imaginative and ambitious and weird that it won me over. ‘Too much’ in a good way....more
Penpal apparently started life as a series of creepypasta posts on Reddit. Through chapters that skip back and forth in time, it tells the story of a Penpal apparently started life as a series of creepypasta posts on Reddit. Through chapters that skip back and forth in time, it tells the story of a boy who’s seemingly stalked throughout his life. The writing occasionally betrays its origins: the dialogue ranges from average to awful, and many sections feel over-described to pad out the narrative, a typical weakness of the from (i.e. serialised fiction posted online). The early chapters are the strongest, with a good sense of place and an engaging articulation of the narrator’s background. I could’ve verged on giving this 3.5/rounding up to 4 in the first half, but the sub-Point Horror climax and the ending are a bit of a mess; the timeline becomes too muddled for the emotional aspects to have any oomph. I still found it likeable, though, and I can see why it rose out of the morass of Creepy Reddit Stories to become a book. And for a self-published work, it's pretty impressive – mostly well edited, with decent pacing.
I always struggle to condense my thoughts about Joel Lane’s fiction into a review; there’s just so much to say about the layers to his work. Where FurI always struggle to condense my thoughts about Joel Lane’s fiction into a review; there’s just so much to say about the layers to his work. Where Furnaces Burn is the last of Lane’s books to be published before his death in 2013, now reissued – like five others before it – by Influx Press. It’s at once distinctly different from his other collections, and a perfect expression of the mood that runs through all his writing. The stories here are quite unusual: crime/detective fiction with supernatural and weird elements, with each story told from the perspective of the same character, an unnamed police officer working in and around Birmingham (of course).
I have adored Lane’s prose since I first discovered it, but I initially found this book more difficult to love than his novels and earlier collections. The banality and drudge of urban policing sometimes make for an odd combination with supernatural horror. The main character seems at times aggressively heterosexual, which is not something I associate with the men Lane typically writes. The book is also unusually long, consisting of a daunting 26 stories. The first four are among the weakest – another thing that prevented me getting into the book at first. But I’ve always liked ghost stories that include some element of investigation, and the concept becomes more persuasive the more you read, as a tangible world is created.
The settings in Lane’s stories are always bleak. Rot and mould bloom like flowers in spring. Here are eerie images of urban decay, ruined towns reclaimed by nature, infected houses. The narrator’s work repeatedly takes him to the margins of society: depressed and depressing places, divided communities, people nobody cares about; crime used as an excuse for prejudice. The book is full of unexplained disappearances, thefts and deaths, and often, ‘solving’ or stopping these crimes seems both impossible and futile. These have the texture of police stories written by someone ambivalent about the role of policing. The vague, enigmatic titles sound more like tracks on an album of gloomy post-punk instrumentals. Lane’s sentences are as unique and observant as ever: ‘in the half-light his face was a mask with holes for eyes’; ‘the sky was written over with the blank message of autumn’.
Probably my favourite from the book, ‘A Mouth to Feed’ takes the narrator to ‘the valley of broken stones’ and the clutches of a sinister family; it has a distinctly Aickman-esque bent (something underlined by its title). ‘Black Country’ brilliantly exploits the disturbing possibilities inherent in the unpredictable behaviour of children. ‘The Victim Card’ is an excellent story about a man with many facets who disappears, leaving several obsessed people behind. I loved the atmosphere of ‘Point of Departure’ and ‘The Receivers’ (the politicised violence of which is reminiscent of Scar City); ‘Wake Up in Moloch’, which feels original and uniquely of its place; and ‘A Cup of Blood’, more of a traditional mystery/ghost story than the others.
What I read, I’m still not sure. Maybe I fell asleep and dreamed I was reading. It was some kind of story about the canals rising, the city underwater. Rats and people swimming, silver bubbles escaping from their mouths, the mystery of their breath painting a terrible blue-red sunset. The houses changing underwater, becoming the ruins that their occupiers had always dreamed of. The dreams themselves rotting, bringing people and vermin and weeds together in a morass of toxic desire that would churn and corrode forever in the darkness.
Taken from ‘The Sunken City’, these lines describe the contents of a killer’s notebook – a strange and terrible story with obscure links to (yet more) mysterious deaths. But they could easily be referring to a missing story from Where Furnaces Burn itself. Motifs repeat throughout: cults appear in ‘Blue Smoke’, ‘Wake Up in Moloch’ and ‘Blind Circles’; portals in ‘Quarantine’, ‘Still Water’ and ‘Point of Departure’. We stumble across ‘anti-people’ and places that don’t officially exist. Dreams bleed into reality in violent ways.
With so many stories, there’s a little too much room for repetition: while the recurring themes are mostly effective, creating the impression of a rich text, a weaker entry like ‘Slow Burn’ is at risk of reading like a rehash. There’s a sense of time passing as Where Furnaces Burn progresses: it spans a big chunk of the unnamed protagonist’s life, but it’s not just that; the stories feel like they have space between them, somehow, and I wasn’t surprised to learn they were written over the course of more than a decade. We see Lane’s concerns as a writer shifting and evolving along with the narrator’s career and relationships. The final story, ‘Facing the Wall’, provides a poignant conclusion, bringing the book full circle....more
Was this a book I read or a dream I had? With echoes of Ice,Twin Peaks and several Grimm fairytales, The Taiga Syndrome feels like Martin MacInnes' Was this a book I read or a dream I had? With echoes of Ice,Twin Peaks and several Grimm fairytales, The Taiga Syndrome feels like Martin MacInnes' Infinite Ground as rewritten by Carmen Maria Machado. It follows a woman, identified in the blurb (and only in the blurb) as 'the Ex-Detective', as she tries to track down a couple who have gone (deliberately?) missing in the Taiga. (The Taiga – always capitalised here – is Earth's largest biome, a coniferous forest that spans continents.) The narrator, accompanied by a translator, visits a strange village; she doesn't find what she is looking for. Scenes often seem to repeat or loop, with minor adjustments to the perspective. Everything is displaced.
Something like that, yes. An arrow plunged into the left shoulder. A hole. And suddenly that moment produced the window. And the window produced the spectator. And those three elements together made the romance real. The passion. Someone longed for a freedom that was really an infernal abyss. Someone placed hands, now motionless, on the window. Someone who wanted to escape but couldn't escape and could only watch.
The story is broken down into pieces of story and then into fragments of language. The Taiga Syndrome, in the end, is not so much a novel as a disassembling of the novel. The fact that it concludes with a suggested soundtrack only seems to emphasise this – it's like the essence of the story has now become something so ephemeral it can only be communicated through music. Accordingly, the book leaves you with little more than a vague, unsettling feeling of hauntedness, the characters seeming to fade out of existence.
Josh Harris was a 90s internet entrepreneur who founded the influential early streaming site Pseudo, briefly enjoyed spectacular success and an extravJosh Harris was a 90s internet entrepreneur who founded the influential early streaming site Pseudo, briefly enjoyed spectacular success and an extravagant lifestyle, then went bankrupt when the bubble burst. At the beginning of the book, written in 2008, Smith finds him living in a meagre house in Awassa, Ethiopia. From here, Smith goes back to the beginning – the very beginning: he summarises the invention of the ARPANET, then the internet, and the later introduction of the World Wide Web and browsers; the state of US economics in the 1980s; and Giuliani's reign as mayor of NYC, all to set the scene.
Nominally, this book is about 'The Wild Rise and Crazy Fall of the First Dotcom Dream', but it could just as easily be framed as a biography of Harris. I'd read about him before – he pops up in Olivia Laing's The Lonely City, with specific reference to his early experiments in webcasting and the 'We Live in Public' art project – but this is a truly in-depth study. Smith is fascinated by Harris, and frequently changes his mind about whether the man really believes his own stories. Is he insane, a visionary, or just a prankster? Harris claims his ex-partner was actually hired to play his girlfriend; later, he implies Pseudo itself was a kind of performance art. There are repeated references to 'Launder My Head', an animation Harris made in 1993 and which several interviewees (including the man himself) suggest is somehow real to him.
Totally Wired is interesting, but also exhausting. Both in content and execution. Many of the main players come off as total dicks, 'Silicon Alley' is very obviously a rich-white-male-dominated environment, and all the supposedly wild parties sound dreadful, full of people trying way too hard to be quirky and outrageous. No matter how much Smith insists the New York dotcom scene of the 90s was where everyone wanted to be, I couldn't envision it as anything other than tawdry and vapid. The writing is dense: Smith is seemingly intent on including every tiny detail along with rapid-fire, hard-to-follow explanations of financial concepts. Sentences often run to 15 or 20 lines. Sometimes he switches to a jarringly informal tone, peppered with dated slang ('natch') and smug namedropping, throwing ellipses and italics around randomly. Thinking about it, this is probably reflective of the way his subjects talk/write.
While Smith provides a comprehensive breakdown of what led to the dotcom bubble and what became of those involved, the book also sees him essentially chasing a series of myths about and/or created by Harris; trying to create a definitive account of someone who continually, compulsively fictionalises himself. The effect is disorientating, labyrinthine. I can't say I really understood Smith's obsession with Harris, or felt that anything he had to say was any more stunningly prescient than any number of predictions made by those who recognised the internet's potential at an early stage. (Not to say his work wasn't ahead of its time, but he's hardly unique in that, and the glut of failed ventures in his more recent career suggest he's someone who was in the right place at the right time and got lucky, rather than a genius.)
The author was, unfortunately, unable to persuade this reader to share his fascination with his primary subject. (Many tangentially mentioned figures and projects seemed more intriguing to me, and I often paused to google a person, company or article.) For the first half, I would have said the book was worth reading in spite of that, but the second half became a struggle; I had to make myself sit down and read it, like it was homework. There is a good and important story here – buried beneath heaps of unnecessary minutiae.
I received an advance review copy of Totally Wired, revised for the US publication of the book in 2019, from the publisher through Edelweiss.
If I had to choose a single word to describe Radio Iris, it would be ‘ambient’. This is a meandering novel about Iris, a young woman who works for a rIf I had to choose a single word to describe Radio Iris, it would be ‘ambient’. This is a meandering novel about Iris, a young woman who works for a rather strange business, whose purpose is entirely unclear, in (I think) Los Angeles. She suspects there’s a man living in an office adjacent to hers, and becomes determined to communicate with this elusive figure. This situation becomes increasingly surreal as the story progresses. From the blurb, I was imagining something like a cross between The New Me by Halle Butler and The Room by Jonas Karlsson. The quotes on the book’s jacket make grand comparisons – Kafka, Ballard, Calvino – but it’s much more easygoing and ephemeral than that suggests.
Iris is a blank character who appears to have no real personality. We see her making observations, and being curious about things, but she doesn’t seem to feel anything. She forgets her own birthday; there are big gaps in her backstory. At one point, a friend asks her, ‘God, can you retain anything?’. I wondered for quite some time if she was a ghost. (And maybe she was?) In a good novel, the characters feel like fully-formed people who existed before this story began, and will go on existing afterwards. Here, it is impossible to think of Iris as anything other than a person who started existing on the first page. Which is not to actually say this is a bad novel, as I think Iris’s blankness is intentional; I just don’t know to what end.
The ending is very weird – I mean, genuinely, detached-from-reality weird – but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing either! I like weird endings. Again, though, nothing is resolved. I’m still wondering what the perspective of Iris’s brother Neil was supposed to add, something I had assumed would be clear by the end.
Two books Radio Iris reminded me of: Helen Smith’s Alison Wonderland for its odd aimlessness, and Amina Cain’s Indelicacy for its detached, cold protagonist... as well as the sense that perhaps the point of the entire thing had flown over my head.
I got more than I bargained for with this. I was drawn in by the initial setup (almost everyone in the world hears deafening static, followed by severI got more than I bargained for with this. I was drawn in by the initial setup (almost everyone in the world hears deafening static, followed by several proclamations from a voice that seems to have no source) and the storytelling technique (an oral history with lots of different voices, reminding me of The Three and FantasticLand). It actually goes much deeper than I expected, with what becomes known as ‘The Broadcast’ only the jumping-off point for a novel about politics, faith/belief and war, and the interplay between them. For some reason, I thought The Testimony had been published way more recently than it was (2012). It surprises me that it’s pre-2016; the plot feels ahead of its time, even prescient in parts.
The four parts of Four New Messages are described in the blurb as ‘audacious fictions’ – definitely a more accurate label than ‘short stories’. Cohen The four parts of Four New Messages are described in the blurb as ‘audacious fictions’ – definitely a more accurate label than ‘short stories’. Cohen writes brilliantly as Cohen always does, but there’s little to connect with in these pieces other than the style. What style it is, though – language to make you gasp, sentences that seem to reinvent what sentences can do. I don’t know if I will remember the people or situations depicted in these fictions, but they consolidated my faith in the author as a master stylist.
(Mild spoilers in this review, but nothing, imo, that would sully the experience of reading the book.)
Camelia's father died in December – in a car acc(Mild spoilers in this review, but nothing, imo, that would sully the experience of reading the book.)
Camelia's father died in December – in a car accident, sat beside his hitherto-secret mistress – and it seems to Camelia that bleak, frozen month never ended. She was about to start a degree in Chinese, but now she's dropped out of university and exists in a permanent state of grief and rage. Her mother Livia, once a famous flautist and renowned beauty, has become mute, doesn't leave the house, and shambles around in pyjamas or a stained tracksuit. The two women drift through their home in Leeds like ghosts, never speaking but instead inferring one another's feelings through glances and gazes.
The novel opens with Camelia finding two unworn dresses among some rubbish. They're weirdly distorted, with overlong arms or swathes of extra fabric, and Camelia starts slashing and stitching and adding to them. By bizarre coincidence, she's later spotted wearing one of these creations by the man who originally threw it away, Wen. He's Chinese, and offers to help Camelia start learning to write and interpret ideograms again. When Wen turns down her advances, Camelia becomes entangled with his strange brother Jimmy – the creator of the mutant dresses. But while all this is going on, she loses sight of changes in her mother's life.
The writing is beautiful and the translation virtually seamless. Which is a good job, as this is arguably a story about language. Camelia, an Italian living in England, learning Chinese, communicating wordlessly with her mother, is linguistically displaced several times over. She invents her own ideograms, tracing them on her own and others' skin, eventually tattooing herself with one. Life with Livia has left her so accustomed to silence that when she does have to speak, she graphically describes herself vomiting and choking out her words. Camelia's train of thought often switches between her imagination and reality rapidly. Her exaggerations can be indistinguishable from the actuality (does the distinction matter?) Some passages are like prose poems. After enduring the pain of Wen's rejection, Camelia runs home in tears, her thoughts flooding with mounting despair:
It's called life, this game that all humans play but me. They're called houses, those places on Woodhouse Street bursting with contented boyfriends and girlfriends eating peanuts and cheesecake who, when they see me, start laughing. It's called candlelight, the glow coming from the neon signs, Nino's pizza joint and Tom's fish & chips for only three pounds, that light up the windows of these houses as if it were daytime. Tonight these lovers will party until they drop, so they can break my heart into little pieces and sew it onto their old clothes, the clothes they give to their cleaning lady, who then throws them into the garbage. They are called parties and laughter and all-nighters. They are called marriages. Children. Grandchildren. Photos and memories and souvenirs brought home from trips. Sweet little words magnetized on the fridge. Affectionate phrases in the obits.
I love the heartbreaking authenticity of Camelia's jump from the pain of unrequited love to the destruction of her whole future happiness, right up to people missing her when she's dead. I love the image of a candlelit glow coming from neon signs.
There's something about 70% Acrylic 30% Wool that makes me want to place it next to works of magical realism. Perhaps it's the fact that the characters and their situation are quirky, but their story intersects so often with tragedy that such a label seems completely wrong. If you were to describe it to someone in a nutshell – the mother and daughter who communicate solely through expressions, the girl obsessed with making ludicrous modifications to clothes she finds in a skip, the mute woman whose hobby is taking Polaroids of holes – it might sound like it was going to be funny and feelgood, one of those novels about weird people who get a happy ending. While it does have its own brand of humour, it skews much darker than that. In Camelia's sexual encounters with Jimmy, the narrative actually teeters on the edge of nauseating. Wen initially describes his brother as 'retarded', and while it becomes clear this is an insult born of resentment rather than an offensive reference to any actual disability, there are still questions surrounding Jimmy's odd, childlike behaviour, and Di Grado avoids answering them.
Maybe 70% Acrylic 30% Wool is not traditionally gripping, but once I had started it, I had to finish it the same night. The blurb characterises it as 'bittersweet', but I'm not sure that's quite strong enough: this is a raw and furious evocation of depression and grief; the howl of a young woman carrying too much on her shoulders for too long. Certainly more bitter than sweet, yet it left me so hungry for more of this distinctive style that, upon finishing it, I immediately ordered a copy of Di Grado's second novel, Hollow Heart.
When I started the first story, 'The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon', I thought I knew what I was getting. The protagonist, Robbie, begins byWhen I started the first story, 'The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon', I thought I knew what I was getting. The protagonist, Robbie, begins by reminiscing about his first job, as a security guard at a museum of aviation, and remembering a particular gallery in which a projection of a disembodied head was the main attraction. But the narrative quickly moves away from the obvious creepy angle here and instead weaves a detailed and character-driven tale around Robbie and two of his ex-colleagues; it's certainly uncanny, but evasive about exactly how. The characters – like most of the characters in most of the stories collected here – are middle-aged, not inclined to fantastical speculation, and many of the most effective moments are touching rather than unnerving. 'The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon' is unusually lengthy for the first story in an anthology, almost a novella in itself, and it sets the tone for a collection in which the 'strange' is often not what you expect it to be, and the longest stories are the most rewarding and surprising.
'Winter's Wife' is told by a boy whose neighbour, the eccentric Winter, suddenly brings home an inscrutable young Icelandic woman as his wife. Winter meets her on the internet, and our narrator thinks she looks like Björk – it's these humanising touches that make Hand's stories so effective; we identify ourselves in the backdrops, if not the mysterious cloud of hummingbirds in the forest, or the character with an apparent ability to bend nature to her will. 'Uncle Lou' spends so much time establishing the relationship between the main characters, a woman and her flamboyant uncle, that the ending has powerful emotional clout, despite taking a real turn for the fantastic. The brief 'Cruel Up North' is memorable chiefly because it doesn't explain its mysteries – what, for example, might the 'lava fields' be?
There are missteps – or, at least, some stories are weaker than others. 'Hungerford Bridge' – a short scene in which an old friend introduces the narrator to a fantastic creature – feels too thin against the richness of many of the other tales; 'The Far Shore' contains some beautiful moments but goes in a predictable direction, the opposite of the clever feints performed by the strongest stories here; and 'The Return of the Fire Witch' is an oddity, the one slice of high fantasy among a set of what might otherwise, per the subtitle, be termed 'strange stories' in the Robert Aickman sense.
But the jewel in Errantry's crown is 'Near Zennor', a flawless work of art that has to be one of the best short stories (strange or otherwise) I've ever read. It starts with a discovery: Jeffrey, a 'noted architect', is organising clutter belonging to his late wife, Anthea, when he finds a tin containing a bundle of letters and a cheap locket. The letters are in Anthea's hand, all returned to sender; when he investigates the recipient, Robert Bennington, he discovers the man was a children's author later vilified as a paedophile. Disturbed by references to a meeting between Anthea and Robert, and tortured by the idea that she could have been a victim of abuse she never told him about, he journeys to her native England to meet with one of her childhood friends. There, he hears a story that will lead him on a journey through the places of Anthea's past; to Padwithiel farm, near Zennor, and to Bennington's abandoned home.
Everything about 'Near Zennor' is absolutely pitch-perfect. The Cornish landscape is lovingly described; there is a true sense of reverence, and an awareness of the power – and menace – of nature runs throughout the whole story. The revelations about Bennington's crimes and reminders of his pariah status mean there's also an underlying current of real horror that has nothing to do with unexplained phenomena. Hand captures the force of a disquieting experience endured in childhood, how the memory can magnify it, give it the status of a legend. Jeffrey's ordeal at Golovenna Farm induces pure terror without resorting to anything as prosaic as an explanation. And there is a final twist that is shocking, and almost grimly funny, but not histrionic. All in all, it achieves the strange, wonderful duality of feeling perfect and complete but also leaving you wanting more, and more, and more, and it feels so real that I was tempted to google Bennington's Sun Battles books and the Cliff Cottage B&B. (This short interview with Hand gives some fascinating context – not just the fact that she deliberately set out to write an Aickmanesque story (an aim at which, in my opinion, she has absolutely succeeded) but that the three girls' peculiar adventure was, in fact, based on an inexplicable childhood memory of her own.)
'Near Zennor' is the second story in the book, and after finishing it, I had to take a break – to absorb its greatness, and because I was so sure nothing else could even begin to live up to it, I wasn't sure I wanted to read on. It's one of those stories that's so good, it's worth buying the whole book for it alone. Errantry is a strong, unpredictable collection of stories, but 'Near Zennor' is a masterpiece....more
The title pretty much says it all - Priestley continues his Tales of Terror series with seven stories set around Christmas. These are meant for childrThe title pretty much says it all - Priestley continues his Tales of Terror series with seven stories set around Christmas. These are meant for children, so they're unlikely to actually frighten you (and they aren't as scary as some of the previous installments in the series...) but the author's style is masterful, and there's always a ghoulish twist. Perfect as an easy winter read....more
The Lola Quartet is one of Emily St. John Mandel’s three pre-Station Eleven novels, only made available in the UK after the success of the aforemeThe Lola Quartet is one of Emily St. John Mandel’s three pre-Station Eleven novels, only made available in the UK after the success of the aforementioned book. It’s about four friends who play music together as teenagers, and what becomes of them ten years later. Gavin – the main character, as far as there is one – starts a journalism career in New York but, increasingly desperate to hold on to his job, invents some splashy quotes and is eventually found out. When he returns to his hometown in Florida, he becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to his childhood sweetheart, Anna, who disappeared after the quartet’s final performance at a school concert.
The story has a couple of things in common with the author’s later work: a narrative that flips back and forth through time, and characters who turn out to be connected in unexpected ways. There the similarities end. Most of the characters remain frustratingly obscure, the description is perfunctory, and the plot comes to nothing.
It all hinges on the fact that Anna (who is, aside from anything else, incredibly boring and unlikeable) once stole more than $100k from a meth dealer. However, the exact circumstances are concealed until the story is almost over; this made me assume (understandably, I think!) that there was going to be some interesting reveal or twist regarding how/why Anna ended up with the money. (view spoiler)[There isn’t. She just takes it one day, and she doesn’t even have a good reason for doing so! She’s just an idiot. The end. It also feels like the only reason Paul is a meth dealer is so we can safely assume he is a Bad Person, and therefore rest assured that his life matters less than the others’. Ugh. (hide spoiler)]
Station Eleven is one of my favourite books, and I really liked The Glass Hotel too, but I wouldn’t recommend wasting any time on this one.
3 stars is perhaps a slightly stingy rating: I enjoyed all of this, but collections of short stories are always a bit patchy, and I was hoping for mor3 stars is perhaps a slightly stingy rating: I enjoyed all of this, but collections of short stories are always a bit patchy, and I was hoping for more variation in style/tone. There's a good range of subject matter though: ghosts on the internet, an Elvis impersonator who's also a private detective, an unconventionally haunted mansion, two rebellious old ladies in a retirement home, gods of rain and fire running around Manhattan, a house where it's permanently Christmas (will seem more sinister than it's supposed to if you've read NOS4R2). My favourite, 'The Game', is about an all-consuming computer game which leads its devotees to ruin, and reads like a particularly good creepypasta. I liked the ways in which the stories intersected and overlapped: many seem to be set in the same town, and characters from one story frequently show up in another. This was an easy to read, consistently enjoyable compilation, if not enormously memorable. I'd certainly read more....more
This was my first venture for quite some time into buying a cheap Kindle book (it's £1.53 here, should you be interested). I haven't had much success This was my first venture for quite some time into buying a cheap Kindle book (it's £1.53 here, should you be interested). I haven't had much success with this kind of thing in the past, having read (well, tried to read) something that was so catastrophically, laughably bad that it nearly put me off for life. Thankfully, Telling Stories was a much better experience.
I found this book by browsing the books and authors previously included in Amazon's Rising Stars, but it was the description that really caught my eye: 'The Secret History meets The Life and Loves of a She-Devil in a gripping thriller that subverts chick lit clichés in a trail of blood and jealousy'. That sounds GREAT, right?
Lizzy (the narrator), Cora and Mike (a couple who have been together since their teens), and Stevie are a close-knit group of friends who meet at university. The group comes back together seven years later when Cora and Mike, now married, move back to Cardiff, where Lizzy and Stevie have lived and worked since graduation. They fall back into their old routine, spending all their free time together and going on hedonistic nights out. It's on one of these nights that events take a fateful turn when Jenny, a girl who seems to know who they all are but isn't familiar to Lizzy or Cora, latches on to their party. Jenny's intervention has far-reaching effects on the relationships between all four of the friends, and particularly impacts on Cora and Mike's marriage. But things aren't quite what they seem to be, and as Lizzy's narrative unravels, the reader is drawn further and further into a web of lies, betrayal, infidelity, blackmail and murder.
I found Telling Stories gripping from the start, and I was drawn in by everything about it. The group's seemingly picture-perfect university experience, Lizzy's unglamorous but intriguing job as a local reporter, the note of uncertainty and possible dishonesty running through the narrative, the gradual reveal of secrets. The story twists and turns, making the reader like Lizzy and then throwing something in that completely distorts that view. If I had to complain about one thing, it would be that I sometimes felt the characterisation was inconsistent - I struggled to build an impression of either Cora or Mike because I felt that various aspects of the way they were described were in conflict with each other - and a lot of the descriptions of things like food, decor and clothes sounded oddly dated.
I liked the ending, although I did have a few reservations. (view spoiler)[I wish it had been properly established once and for all whether Mike had actually been having an affair with Jenny. I think it would have been a good further twist if it had turned out he had no interest in her and she'd just been completely obsessed with him, had stolen the books and pen, etc. That said, I was very glad Lizzy didn't kill Cora, get found out and end up in prison, which is what I thought was going to happen towards the end. Despite everything - and as I always do with these dark, unreliable characters - I really liked Lizzy and didn't want her to have an unhappy ending. I kind of wish the book had ended before the 'Afterlife' chapter, really. (hide spoiler)]
This book is not perfect, but it is absolutely, definitely, 110% worth £1.53. A compelling, dark and sexy mystery which kept me guessing, conjured up a great atmosphere and made me want to read on....more
Mother-of-three Cathy is recovering from two terrible events: the death of her best friend Eloise from breast cancer, and a bout of serious depressionMother-of-three Cathy is recovering from two terrible events: the death of her best friend Eloise from breast cancer, and a bout of serious depression which led to a nervous breakdown. When she starts having vivid dreams about Eloise and even seeming to see her in real life, her family believe she is heading for a relapse, but Cathy is convinced the 'visions' are real and that Eloise really is trying to tell her something. In order to convince her sceptical husband and protect Eloise's children, Cathy starts researching her friend's past, and finds she didn't know her anywhere near as well as she thought.
From my holiday notebook: Tremendously silly but quite enjoyable story about a woman coming to terms with her best friend's death, some possibly supernatural dreams about said best friend, and what may be the onset of clinical depression, or worse. Endearingly daft, but probably still better than you would expect for something 'written by' a TV presenter. I would probably have given this a lower rating if I hadn't read it on holiday: it has 'throwaway beach read' written all over it. It's best not to think too deeply about the plot, and the emphasis on ~the importance of motherhood~ is hammered home so frequently it becomes extremely comical. However, I still got caught up in the story and wanted to know what would happen, and was quite pleased with the ending. Definitely a bag of donuts kind of book.
Additional notes: With hindsight, three stars is probably quite generous... But in the spirit of treating this as nothing more than a light holiday read, I'm going to be nice and let it stand. This is the kind of book with which I could read through all the negative reviews on Goodreads and agree with absolutely every criticism, yet somehow I still think it wasn't that bad. The fact that I found certain things about it so ridiculous they were funny actually added to my enjoyment, if anything - laughing at it made the reading experience more entertaining. The allusions to Daphne du Maurier's work make it more bearable, and I actually quite liked all the rambling descriptions of Cornwall, which a lot of other readers hated. The bottom line is, nobody is going to pick this book up expecting a literary masterpiece, and it delivers on what it's supposed to be: a quick, fun read with some captivating ups and downs....more
So I read the blurb for Girlchild - the one that says Tupelo Hassman's debut 'crafts a devastating collage' of her protagonist's world - but I didn't So I read the blurb for Girlchild - the one that says Tupelo Hassman's debut 'crafts a devastating collage' of her protagonist's world - but I didn't expect the book to literally feel like a collage of only loosely interconnected scenes, which is essentially what it is. The narrative flips back and forth through time as it recounts the life of Rory Dawn Hendrix and her working-class family, stuck in a trailer park on the outskirts of Reno. Touching on the cycle of abuse and failure the characters are trapped in, the narrative skirts a lot of subjects but never really gets to the heart of any of them. There's too much hyperbole and theorising, not enough plot, and this doesn't feel at all believable as the voice of a trailer-park teenager. I cared about Rory, but not as much as I should/could have done, and I found Hassman's prose beguiling, but lacking in emotional impact and occasionally a bit confusing. This could have been a really meaningful, significant story but it felt curiously inconsequential....more
A short story which acts as a prequel to the author's Barcelona quartet, giving some background on the origins of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. I eA short story which acts as a prequel to the author's Barcelona quartet, giving some background on the origins of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. I enjoyed the story but, as always with this kind of thing, it was very slight and I wish it could have been longer. ...more
A darkly entertaining first-person narrative about Anais Hendricks: a lively, intelligent, witty fifteen-year-old girl who has spent her life in and oA darkly entertaining first-person narrative about Anais Hendricks: a lively, intelligent, witty fifteen-year-old girl who has spent her life in and out of care homes, has been arrested hundreds of times, has been doing every drug possible and having sex since she was a child, and may have put a police officer in a coma. At the beginning of the book, she's being transferred to the Panopticon, a home for young offenders housed in an old, gothic building. This is a good read - energetic and funny - but it deviates from what the blurb and cover seem to suggest: there is much darkness to the story but the tone is light, and despite an implied sense of mystery, it's really more of a plotless portrait of the protagonist's life. It felt to me a lot like one of those YA books for older teens that always cause loads of controversy because they're full of swearing, drugs and sex (such as Junk by Melvin Burgess, which I absolutely loved when I was an actual teenager and really, really need to re-read). It is shocking in places, mainly because of what Anais has already experienced at such a young age: however, there were some aspects of her character I found a bit unbelievable, almost too good to be true (her anti-bullying attitude, the extent of her reading/cultural knowledge, her obsession with vintage style). I enjoyed The Panopticon, but I didn't find it as remarkable as many readers have, and I don't find myself with an awful lot to say about it now it's done....more
After managing to avoid the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon completely, an erotic novel wasn't at the top of my reading wishlist. I was intrigued by aAfter managing to avoid the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon completely, an erotic novel wasn't at the top of my reading wishlist. I was intrigued by a couple of reviews I've read of this on book blogs I follow, though - one absolutely tore it to pieces, the other was very positive. Then it was reduced to 99p in the Kindle sale and I just thought, why not? It's always interesting to give a different type of story a try, and the first couple of pages grabbed my attention as I immediately liked the narrator's voice.
Monsieur is ostensibly the story of an affair between Ellie, a twenty-year-old student, and 'Monsieur', a married plastic surgeon who is twenty-six years her senior. It may have been widely described as an erotic novel but it's only really erotic in the sense that a) the sex scenes are very graphic, and b) the narrator is always thinking about sex. The majority of the story is actually about the aftermath of their affair - Ellie angsting and wringing her hands over why Monsieur is ignoring her and how things could have been different. Oh, and (because he's told her to) she is also writing a book about their time together, which is called, you guessed it, Monsieur.
I loved the very beginning of the book: Ellie encounters Monsieur's eldest son unexpectedly, thinks about all the ways she could potentially introduce herself to him but doesn't dare to speak, and ends up sobbing, alone, on the train. I was instantly captivated and wanted to know the backstory, the whole messy tale of how Ellie had ended up here. Unfortunately, I didn't really get that. Instead I got some detailed sex scenes (most of which aren't very sexy), pages and pages of Ellie and Monsieur texting each other (!), and long interludes in which Ellie just spends a lot of time thinking about and analysing... well, not a lot. It's clear that Ellie has an unhealthy obsession with Monsieur but rather than addressing why, the story throws up so many questions that just don't get answered. Most importantly, why is she even bothered about him? He treats her pretty terribly, is always either patronising her, manipulating her, or ignoring her - often more than one at the same time. On top of that, he doesn't even satisfy her sexually, and she has a (bewilderingly large) collection of other lovers who she seems to be getting more enjoyment out of. Obviously, she wouldn't be the first woman to fall in love with a horrible man, but I didn't feel like the book was doing anything to explain to me why this would have been the case here.
It's hard not to see Monsieur as partly autobiographical when you learn that the author is in her early twenties - and she's given the narrator the same last name as her (as well as a very similar first name). Given that knowledge, it's hard to tell whether certain aspects of the protagonist's character have been created deliberately - which would make it a better book - or whether this is the author talking about herself - which would make it worse. On top of the problems with how the relationship is portrayed, Ellie isn't a very likeable person. She's unbelievably self-centred and her naivete is extraordinary, all of which makes her seem more like a spoilt child than a woman in the throes of a meaningful affair. Of particular note is the fact that she seems to take Monsieur calling her 'my love' to mean that he's in love with her, and she is bizarrely naive about some aspects of sex and relationships for someone who seems to think of nothing else. If the character's identity didn't seem so close to the author's then I would assume we were supposed to see Ellie as almost comically gullible and childlike, but I could never be sure.
I really like stories about all-consuming affairs, difficult relationships and the marks they leave on the people involved. For example, Anna Raverat's Signs of Life, one of my favourites of 2012, would fit into that category, and it's this kind of story I was hoping for from Monsieur. I was never all that bothered about the sex scenes either way - it wasn't the promise of erotica that drew me to this book, although if they'd been good they would have added some much-needed spice to the story. As it happened, they were okay: not quite Fifty Shades levels of bad, but they often strayed into cringeworthy language, and after a while they became unsurprisingly repetitive. Becker actually seems to be better at portraying sexual tension and anticipation, most evident in the scenes between Ellie and Lucy, a female friend she finds herself attracted to, but sadly there wasn't enough of this.
Becker definitely has talent: when I re-read the beginning of the book to write this review, I could still see exactly why I was sucked into it, despite knowing that I didn't much like what came after those first few chapters. It's just a shame those glimmers of good writing weren't put to better use. If you want a brilliantly written story about a destructive affair, read Signs of Life. If you want a good erotic novel, well, I'm not really sure what I'd recommend, but it wouldn't be this. ...more
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