I received an ARC copy of this book from the indie publisher, Big Thinking Publishing.
Paraplegion, as befits a book about people who don’t quite fit in, is a long novella, or maybe a very short novel. I enjoyed it, and it would be fine for a teenage or YA audience.
The story starts with a well used sf trope, the young soldier preparing to be the pride of the unit, interacting with their peers and their mentor. The set up could lead in several different directions, but Barker definitely knows where she’s taking her heroine, on a voyage of self discovery that sails through choppy seas and finally finds the perfect harbour.
The main protagonist is well drawn and easy to identify with, and the supporting characters are beautifully scripted for their roles in the story.
December 2025 was not a month that was characterised by reading. It was more of a month that was characterised by binge watching five seasons of ‘Angel’ on the telly. I regret nothing. This isn’t a telly blog, but spending so much time with Cordelia, Harmony, Fred, Dru, Darla, Lilah, Kate and Eve, with guest appearances from Faith, Buffy and Willow, really fired up my desire to get back to writing again. Spike and Doyle were their immaculately brilliant selves, Lindsay was great eye candy, Gru was the saddest character ever … why was he never mentioned again after he walked away? (sob). As for Angel and Connor … oh the brooding dark silliness of it all. Loved it.
And, back to the books. I went to the library to look for a Scalzi book to end the year with, but they had none. I did, however, find a non-sf Cory Doctorow book. ‘Picks and Shovels’ I enjoyed this, it’s a fast paced story set in the early days of Silicon Valley, exploring the thrill of the start up community, the growing confidence of the gay community, the horror of AIDS and the sheer joy of a young man embracing the power and intelligence of a group of highly motivated women.
It’s the third book in the Marty Hench series, which I didn’t realise when I picked it up, but we all know that when you’re in the library, you get what you can. I’ll probably have to reserve the other two books. Luckily, chronologically, it’s the first book. I think I’ll definitely be reading the others.
A few weeks ago I’d borrowed Starveacre from the library, and found it to be a great short story stretched out into a short novel. Then I had several conversations with other readers who had been fairly unimpressed with both Starveacre and The Loney. Me being me, all of this pushed me to search our shelves for ‘The Loney’ and read it. I was prepared for anything.
I bought this copy for my husband years ago, he read it and wasn’t very impressed. Because Hurley is a fellow Lancastrian, and writes folk and gothic horror, I decided that I’d try it at some point, so it stayed on the shelves.
So, this is a more than decent slow burn horror novel with that great vibe that you get from a desolate setting. The Loney itself is a place, one that I’m familiar with but had never seen as desolate, more as beautiful. Still, nobody reads horror stories about beautiful places do they, and we’re all different in our responses to people, places and, of course, stories. And this story is a good one. The characters might be a bit clumsy and stereotyped, but they’re used to great effect, and the climax of the story is truly horrific, revealed partially in that matter of fact, mercenary manner that underlies the nastiest things in the world.
So yes, I enjoyed ‘The Loney’ and will definitely read more Hurley when I get the chance.
Just two December books then. Ah well, I’ve started another, and will tell you more in my January 2026 blog.
I began the month with a Terry Pratchett book, because why the hell not.
The Fifth Elephant is the companion book to Carpe Jugulum. It’s the other Uberwald book, with vampires and werewolves up to no good, but instead of Granny Weatherwax, the plotters and fascists have to deal with Sam Grimes, who has been ambassadored by Veterini
Loved it. Not quite as much as I loved CJ, but loved it all the same.
My next book was a library book. I love sf / fantasy / horror. My local library has lots of crime, thrillers, romance and historical novels. So, when I spotted a folk horror book on the shelf, I grabbed it.
Andrew Michael Hurley’s ‘Starveacre’ is an interesting folk horror story, obliquely told.
I was still feeling in need of comfort, so I went back to the Pratchett shelf and grabbed ‘Monstrous Regiment’.
This was a lovely warm read with fire at the very heart of it. When Polly Perks pretends that she’s a boy and joins the army to search for her vulnerable big brother, she finds herself in the company of the very best and the very worst that the army has to offer.
In a country that has lost everything, she finds friends and allies, kicks the enemy in the goolies, and in the space of a week, she helps to change an entire nation.
Very much and always recommended.
My last book of November was the fifth book in Joan Slonczewski’s ‘Door Into Ocean’ series. ‘Minds In Transit’.
An interesting fifth book in the ‘Door into Ocean’ series that further explores two main themes. The first is personhood, and the rights of sentient beings. The second is more interesting, contrasting the right to breed and multiply against the right of the environment not to be exploited. This is a particularly interesting theme when the environment itself is a sentient person.
At times, the story moves slowly, and I admit that this book took me a while longer to finish than most, but it was a satisfying and enjoyable story.
The last few months have been a bit scrambled in my head, and I didn’t always log the right dates when I read a book, but I’m pretty sure that October was the month that I re-read Dennis Etchison’s ‘Cutting Edge’ horror anthology.
Dennis Etchison introduces this book with a fervent essay about the value of horror in the literary world, specifically the world of genre fiction. He takes a swipe at several sub genres including popular fantasy. Bear in mind this was back in 1986.
The anthology is divided into four themed parts.
Part One is ‘Bringing it all back home’ and includes ‘Blue Rose’ by Peter Straub, ‘The Monster’ by Joe Haldeman’ and ‘Lacunae’ by Karl Edward Wagner. ‘Blue Rose’ is the story that ‘Koko’ is built on, and gives us a glimpse of Henry Beevers’ childhood. ‘The Monster’ allows Haldeman to take us back to the horrors of the Vietnam war, and what may have been brought back from there. ‘Lacunae’ tells a story of sexual identity and drugs.
Part Two ‘They’re Coming For You’ has seven stories. The first, ‘Pale Trembling Youth’ is a short story about youth culture, music and alienation, I enjoyed it a lot. ‘Muzak for Torso Murders’ tells the story of a serial killer and his loving mother. ‘Goodbye Dark Love’ is a very dark tale indeed. ‘Out There’ is a beautiful little story about a possessive building and its residents. I loved it. ‘Little Cruelties’ is another dark tale about family and home that really gave me the creeps. ‘The Man with the Hoe’ is not recommended for anyone who loves cats. Not my thing. ‘They’re Coming For You’ is a perfect creepy story that I’d love to have written myself.
Part Three ‘Walking the Headlights’ also has seven stories. The first ‘Vampires’ is a freeform poem by Richard Matheson. ‘Lapses’ by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is one of my favourite stories in the book, with a brilliant sense of terror and loss. William F Nolan’s ‘The Final Stone’ is one of my favourite Jack the Ripper stories, I’ve read it a few times and I always enjoy it. Nicholas Royle’s ‘Irrelativity’ is a weird urban horror story that deserves to be read two or three times. Ramsey Campbell’s ‘The Hands’ is a thoroughly creepy story about a hapless traveller who makes the wrong decision. ‘The Bell’ is a well written monkey’s paw / deal with god story with a predictable ending. I enjoyed Clive Barker’s ‘Lost Souls’, a fun story about a demon hunter.
Part Four, ‘Dying all the Time’ only has three stories. Robert Bloch’s ‘Reaper’ is a long story by the standards of this collection, and features a horror writer making a deal with Death. It’s funny and creepy and I liked it. Ed Bryant’s ‘The Transfer’ is a nicely weird story about a woman with an unusual gift, and a desire for revenge. Whitley Streiber’s ‘Pain’ ends the book with a paean to masochistic delights.
Overall, the stories feel dated now, a collection that’s almost forty years old that has a disconcerting number of male writers and far too few diverse voices. It’s becoming a part of the history of dark fiction, but it’s interesting because Etchison drew together so many of horror’s great writers of the time.
I followed this with another re-read from my shelves, a lovely old sf anthology ‘Out of This World 9’ edited by Amabel Williams-Ellis and Michael Pearson.
A re-read. A re-read after a long time, but my feeling of familiarity with the book shows that I’ve read it several times before. It was published in the early 1970s, but the ‘Barnados’ sticker on the front cover means that I bought it after 1988. See, I coulda been a detective. It’s an ex library book – Bramhall High School Library, to be exact. It still has the index card and date stamp, which suggests it was taken out of circulation in or after 1984. It still has its plastic library cover. I love a book with history. The book consists of nine stories … two of them in translation … curated by the anthologists Amabel Williams-Ellis and Michael Pearson. A two page preface ponders the nature of sf and the puzzling scarcity of stories that originate outside the USA and Britain. The first story is ‘The Diamondwood Trees’ by James H Schmitz. It’s a hugely satisfying story about colonisation, what it means to be human, and the importance of respecting the local ecology. Frank Russell’s ‘Allamagoosa’ is a straight faced study of rules v reality and what happens when they collide. I love this story, it could have been written at almost any point in the last century. Gerard Klein’s ‘A Message for Zoo Directors’ allows sf to meet horror in this translation from the original French. It’s a tale of messages from an unusual source and the men who went in search of the truth. ‘The Vanishing Man’ by Richard Huges is a very short story describing what has become a trope of modern sf … interdimensional travel and the physical dangers thereof. It reminded me of the premise of Pratchett and Baxter’s ‘Long Earth’ series. ‘At Daybreak’ by Italo Calvino is the other translated story in the book, a gentle tale of physics, creation, and a First Family that deserves the name. ‘Rich and Strange’ is the only original story in the book, and is by the anthologist, Amabel Williams Ellis. It’s a story very much of the earlier part of the twentieth century, and concerns scientists young and old exploring an interesting theory from two very different viewpoints. John Christopher’s ‘Blemish’ has a Twilight Zone vibe to it. Earth is heavily civilised, developed, and run on very strict principles. It has one blemish, a village that runs on older ideas. An inspection from an alien civilisation arrives to decide if Earth is fit to join the galactic culture. The Expected happens. The really sad thing about this is that what read as a dystopian Earth forty years ago now reads as something I would happily trade for the dystopia we’re living in now. John Rackham’s ‘Catharsis’ was originally published in ‘New Writings in SF 11’. It’s a simple story of a man who is so focussed on his work that he is dying because of it. The solution, as envisaged by another highly focussed man, is drastic and very troubling. ‘Mantrap’ by Kathleen James is my favourite story in the book. Following the capture of a colonist from a rogue planet, the authorities send back a spy who has been surgically altered and trained to impersonate the colonist and to send back regular reports. Blending in becomes far too easy a task. ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ brings in the big guns. Kurt Vonnegut’s story is an amusing and fun take on extended life and youth, and the implications for later generations. Going back to Pratchett (I wonder if he ever read this story) I’m reminded of Nanny Ogg and her constant rearranging of the family portraits in the living room. I loved revisiting this book. At only nine stories long, it’s a nicely curated study of sf in the early seventies, reaching back in style as far as the forties but also reaching forward to the feminist sf that was beginning to make its mark.
And from a lovely anthology to a deeper dive into a thick novel. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ‘City of Last Chances’ I have two copies of this book. The first is a hardback, signed by the author at an event in Lancaster. It was the second time I’d met him, but the first time that I’d met him after reading … ahem … a couple of dozen of his books. I also have a paperback copy that was a gift from my husband, who hadn’t noticed that I had the hardback on my shelves. Ah well, he knows what I like.
I love Tchaikovsky’s books, I seem to read a lot of them, but I also seem to have four or five of them lying unread on my tbr pile. Does this man ever stop to eat?
So, I read this within a year or so of enjoying China Mieville’s ‘The Iron Council’ and the parallels are fairly clear in terms of world building, although Tchaikovsky’s prose is definitely more accessible to the average reader. I enjoyed both books immensely.
I’m looking forward to reading the sequels and finding out who the Tyrant Philosophers actually are. What we have in this book is an industrialised city with a large population of downtrodden denizens including several distinct immigrant groups who have fled from difficult situations. There’s also, quite brilliantly, a haunted sector of the city that is the last resort of the desperate. Finally, for fun, there’s a copse of trees that occasionally becomes a portal to somewhere far away and strange, a portal that is guarded by monstrous creatures and a band of guardians. Next to this copse is an inn, and inside the inn, there’s a card game where the stakes are always high and the players are always looking for their next mark.
The characters are richly drawn and interesting, and I cared about them, even the silly ones who made some very bad decisions.
By the end of the month, I needed some comfort food, so I headed for the Pratchett side of town. I was a generous and community minded reader of Terry Pratchett. I gave away most of my copies after reading them because I genuinely want everybody to read them. I did keep four or five though, and for a couple of weeks I took a deep dive into three of them. My last read of October was Carpe Jugulum, which is still one of my favourite book titles of all time, as well as being my favourite Pratchett and one of my favourite books.
You know, I didn’t even write a proper review, probably because I’ve read it so often I kind of assume that I don’t need a reminder. Anyway, this is what I said.
I kicked off the month with ‘The Burning Girls’ by C J Tudor. Having read and enjoyed a book by this author fairly recently, I leapt at the chance to buy this book at a fundraising event. Honestly, I didn’t enjoy this one nearly as much. I think it was the vampires in the last book, and the main character, that drew me in.
The Burning Girls has a lot going on, with an increasingly obviously unreliable narrator, lots of murders and suspicious deaths, and a very dodgy chapel. By the end of the book I still hadn’t found a character I cared enough about to be invested in. Perhaps that’s the norm in murder mysteries, I don’t read enough of them to know. Anyway, don’t pay any attention to me, this is not my genre, I only bought the book because I thought there might be vampires in it …
Five stars because I’m sure this is a great book if you like this genre.
September was a difficult month, I was spending a lot of time providing hospital transport to a close family member, and my mind wasn’t really working along its usual lines. My book notes for September and October are fairly sparse. My next read was Emily St John Mandel’s ‘Sea of Tranquillity’ which I noted as ‘A slim volume, as they say, but a pleasant and interesting read that drew me in with each turn of the page.’ Looking back, the book deserves more, it’s beautifully plotted and I loved the technique and the characters.
My next read was Geoff Ryman’s ‘Him’, a book that I’d been looking forward to reading since it was published two or three years ago.
I blog my reads primarily for my own benefit, to look back and remember what I’ve read. Hence, this will be spoilery. You have been warned.
Firstly, I loved this book more with each chapter. The characters glowed, they dug into reality with every passing paragraph and will live on in the minds of the readers. The superficial premise is simple, God has been born on earth to a virgin mother. It’s a familiar tale. The twist is that God is born into the body of a girl child. The second twist is that the child, understanding who she is, rejects the life of a Jewish peasant woman and assumes the life of a boy. It’s easier that way.
The mother of God, a well born and intelligent woman in exile, is none too pleased about losing her daughter, who is, of course, the image of her. She grows cold towards the child and finds comfort in her other children, the younger half siblings of God on earth. She thinks of the child as her Eldest, struggling to accept them as male, reluctant to get into yet another fight with them when she refers to them as female. We follow the life of the family in exile, living in poverty in Nazareth, but also finding joy and culture and a growing understanding of the nature of the Eldest. The childhood and adolescence of the son of god is beautifully written, God is learning to be human, to work and sweat, to lose friends, to understand death.
As the child becomes adult, the death of their foster father precipitates an understanding of what is needed from them. They must spread the word of God, and then they must die, because God needs to know what death is, what pain is. The Son must teach the Father, and in doing so, they will change the Universe.
‘Him’ tells a very human story, whilst touching on the the nature of the universe become incarnate and conscious. It refers to multiple universes, in each of which God learns something different from its incarnation in a human body. Sometimes God is even born into a male body. In at least one universe God lives a pleasant life and dies painlessly of old age, surrounded by family. But in this universe, the end comes with pain and anguish.
From a very recent book to one written almost ninety years ago … I read ‘Jamaica Inn’ and it seems that this year was the year that half the people I know discovered this book. I have no recollection of buying it, but it was on my shelves, and I’ve always intended to get round to reading it, so …
Oh My God
The gothicness, the romance, the dark moors, the horror …
Loved it to bits.
Another slice of gothic goodness, heavily disguised as a story about hedgehogs. I bought this one (Great Hedgepectations) directly from the author at a Telling Tales event at Chorley Theatre. It’s the third book I’ve read by Pete Hartley, and I can definitely recommend his books. They’re very diverse in their subject matter, and consistent in their excellence.
My reading in September really was all over the place, but Kelly Link’s ‘The Book of Love’ was absolutely the kind of book that I look for and enjoy.
Five stars, because Kelly Link is one of the best short story writers around and even though this is a loooooong novel, it’s still a pretty good story.
I hate to say it, but it would have been a better story if it had been a hundred or maybe even two hundred pages shorter. I liked the characters, I loved the universe building, even though it was fed to us in tiny bits throughout the book, but … well … remember in Buffy, where there was some kind of connection between Ben and Glory? It’s that vibe, and I found myself getting irritated. Irritated is not what I want from a nice thick fantasy book from a very, very good author.
I can’t really say much more without getting spoilery, but basically three teenagers come back from the dead, and the world has been magicked so that nobody really remembers that they went missing, except for the incredibly cool sister of one of the dead kids, she’s kind of got an inkling …
Meanwhile, magical people fight over who gets to have the most power and live / give up their immortality / eat dead souls.
I read a LOT of books this month. Looking back, it was mostly driving, sitting in hospitals and reading. A lot of reading. One of my last books of September was ‘By Light Alone’ by Adam Roberts.
I’ve been reading Adam Roberts books since SALT came out, so … about twenty five years. I always get the impression that they’re pearls before swine, with me being the swine who doesn’t deserve the clever prose and the myriad of references that are probably way over my head.
Still, I enjoy his books, which is why it’s such a mystery that this novel sat unread on my shelves for over a decade.
So, decades ago, some clever person invented some kind of virus or bacteria or maybe even a fungus that allows humans to photosynthesise directly from the sun via their hair. An end to world hunger! But of course this doesn’t lead to heaven on earth, it leads to even greater inequality. We get the chance to see the world from several points of view as a wealthy family suffer the kidnapping of their eldest child.
So, seven books in a month. Looking at the rest of 2025’s reading, I definitely slowed down after this.
Monday 24th November, 2 pm. Talk and book signing at Nelson Library, Market Square, Nelson, Lancashire, BB9 7PU
Tuesday 25th November, 5:30 pm. Guest appearance at the Lancashire Relay Team poetry and song show at Kingsfold Library, Hawksbury Drive, Penwortham, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 9EJ
Thursday 27th November, 4 pm. Lancashire Day talk and book signing at Fleetwood Library, AddressNorth Albert Street, Fleetwood, GB FY7 6AJ Unfortunately this event has been postponed due to an issue at the venue. I will let you know the new date when I have it.
Sunday 7th December, 10 am – 4 pm, stall and book signing at the Watersports Centre, Fairhaven Lake, Ansdell FY8 1BD
Sunday 14th December, 10 am – 3 pm stall and book signing at New Longton Village Hall, Boundary Close, New Longton, Nr Preston. PR4 4BD
My reading list in August was pretty diverse, and consisted only of new reads. I read two books that I’ve been anxious to read for a while now, a Datlow anthology that I bought last year, three books by indie authors from a book fair that I was selling at, and an absolutely massive classic sf collection that should really count as three books.
I kicked off the month with that huge Datlow cat based anthology. ‘Tails of Wonder and Imagination’. It’s rare that I don’t give a Datlow anthology five stars, but I can’t, in all conscience, give five stars to a book that contains two of the nastiest stories I’ve read in a long time. Look, if you love cats, or even if you’ve ever loved A cat, don’t read ‘Catch’ or ‘Life Regarded as a Jigsaw Puzzle of Highly Lustrous Cats.’ I will say no more about either story.
So, what we have here is an anthology of short stories, all of them a little weird, about cats, or cat adjacent beings. Some of the ‘cats’ in the stories are manticores, smilodons, jaguars, sphynxes, pumas, lions and tigers, but that’s close enough.
The collection starts most charmingly with an extract from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’ with Alice’s conversation with her cat, Dinah. It’s lovely. So is the next story, ‘No Heaven Will Not Ever Heaven Be’ by A R Morlan, which is a gorgeous Americana tale of a barn painter and his cats. I’d like to re-read it one day. The third story is by Neil Gaiman.
Charles de Lint’s ‘Dark Eyes, Faith and Devotion’ is a hero story, and I loved it. More like this please. And then we get to a real treat, a Michael Marshall Smith story about a cat. I love MMS stories about cats …
Jeffrey Ford’s ‘The Manticore Spell’ is a straight fantasy story, with mythical beasts and wizards and magic, or not. Kelly Link’s ‘Catskin’ is exactly what you’d expect from this marvellous writer, a story so well constructed and written that it drags you into its strange little world and makes it feel … normal … Look, we all need to read more Kelly Link stories. And then we have ‘Mieze Corrects an Incomplete Representation of Reality’ by Michaela Roessna, another brilliant little story that concerns Schrodinger’s cat. I loved it.
George R R Martin’s ‘Guardians’ is a nice little sci-fi story about colonisation, ecocide, and cats. GRRM clearly has a lot of respect for our feline friends, this is another great story. Peter S Beagle’s ‘Gordon, the Self Made Cat’ is a lovely treat a third of the way through the book. Gordon isn’t exactly a cat, but he fakes it until he makes it. Lucius Shepard’s ‘The Jaguar Hunter’ takes a darker turn, diving into myths and legends and the loss of cultural identity. ‘Arthur’s Lion’ by the great Tanith Lee is another high spot of the collection, I enjoyed this story immensely.
Mary A Turzillo’s ‘Pride’ concerns the rescue of a young lab animal by a hapless young man. The rescue has consequences, but the love between the creature and its rescuer makes the story an absolute delight. The next story, by Lawrence Block, ‘The Burglar Takes A Cat’ concerns a bookshop cat. It’s a nice little story that fits in well and allows a short change of pace. The next story is something of a special gift, Joyce Carol Oates ‘The White Cat’ is a warning to anyone who finds themselves jealous of a loved one’s cat. Jack Ketchum’s ‘Returns’ broke my heart. Imagine loving a cat and not being able to protect it. I can’t stop thinking about this one.
Reggie Oliver’s ‘PussCat’ is a classic dark tale of a theatre cat and an actor who deserves everything that he gets …
Nancy Etchemendy’s ‘Cat in Glass’ is a full on gothic tale of a cursed ornamental cat and three generations of grief, horror and misogyny. It’s followed by a complete U turn of story with Carole Nelson Douglas’s ‘Coyote Peyote’ about a hard bitten feline detective in the desert city. The story is huge fun and I’d like to read more stories about the protagonist. Elizabeth Hand’s ‘The Poet and the Inkmaker’s Daughter’ is a great little story set in China concerning a romance, an evil stepfather, and a guardian angel cat.
Ellen Datlow has bagged a Stephen King story for this anthology. It’s an oldie but a goodie, and it’s lovely to see ‘The Night of the Tiger’ again. King was just 16 years old when he first wrote this one. It’s been rewritten and edited since then, and at over fifty years old, it’s wearing well. It doesn’t yet have that ‘Stephen King’ feel to it, but it’s a good bit of dark fiction, all the same. The closest King I can think of is ‘Needful Things’ in terms of the characters.
John Kessel’s ‘Every Angel Is Terrifying’ is a continuation of a Flannery O’Connor story which I confess that I haven’t read. This is a very dark story indeed. It’s followed by Graham Joyce’s ‘Candia’ which is a fever dream of a story. Nicholas Royle’s ‘Mbo’ is a classic ‘White Man In the Jungle’ story that twists when our hapless would be hero is rescued by the local wildlife service. Loved it. Ed Bryant’s ‘Bean Bag Cats’ is another nasty little tale of consumerism and cruelty that would make perhaps a scene or two of a Black Mirror episode. I don’t mind if the cats die, because we’re talking dark tales here, but wholesale cruelty isn’t for me when cats are in the sights. John Crowley’s ‘Antiquities’ also addresses a wholesale situation, but with humour and a sense of fun, as well as a nod to a little known historical factoid. It’s nice to read a story set in Cheshire.
Catherynne M Valente writes beautifully, and her ‘The Manticore’s Tale’ is a perfect little fantasy story. From there, we move to Nancy Springer’s ‘In Carnation’ which I really enjoyed. If only all romantasy was like this …
David Sandner’s ‘Old Foss is the Name of his Cat’ relates to Edward Lear and the true horror behind the Jumblies. Recommended. Carol Emshwiller’s ‘A Safe Place to Be’ concerns a woman who leaves home with her cat, heading for a place that feels safer, and trying to escape a world that wants to KEEP her safe … but she knows better. It’s a nice companion piece to the Sandner story. Sharyn McCrumb’s ‘Nine Lives to Live’ is a reincarnation / revenge fantasy … how would a cat go about killing a human? The next story, Kaaron Warren’s ‘Tiger Kill’ has a real feel for the old ‘Pan Book of Horror Stories’ tales from the 1970s.
Lucy Sussex’s ‘Something Better than Death’ dances with the idea of the Musicians of Bremen as characters in a love story gone wrong. Christine Lucas goes back to the Beginning with ‘Dominion’, a tale of Eden where the Serpent’s first creation is a pair of kittens. And that’s where the trouble starts, because when God banishes the cute little rascals from His Garden, the Serpent realises that someone is going to have to look after them … another great story.
Daniel Wynn Barber’s ‘Tiger in the Snow’ is one of the standout stories of the collection for me. And it’s a great collection. The story and the denouement aren’t stunningly original, but the execution is lovely and the ending is satisfying. It’s sad, but very enjoyable. The next story, Susanna Clarke’s ‘The Dweller in High Places’ introduces us to a mythical creature in a mundane place, and romps along to a fun finale.
Coming to the end of the collection now, and Dennis Danver’s ‘Healing Benjamin’ is a perfect little wish fulfilment story for cat lovers. I’ll carry this story in my heart forever now. The anthology ends with a sequel to ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’. Theodora Goss explores the fate of the island’s survivors and introduces a very special exotic young woman to rural England.
So, lots and lots and lots of stories, mostly about cats. As I said, there are a couple that I wish I hadn’t read, but there are many of them that brightened my day.
This is a book that I’ve wanted to read since it was published. I bought it with my December book money, and it joined a huge tbr pile. I know, I’m lucky. So, was it worth the wait? Yes.
This is a great English myth story, told as a series of slowly interconnecting vignettes. It’s masterfully written and at the end of it I wanted to go and re-read some early Alan Garner books (and also to re-read some Gwyneth Jones books, but I’ve just done that …).
So, a place, a myth, a song, a painting.
Very highly recommended.
OK, a quick musing, why aren’t Brookmyre’s books filling shelves at Waterstones any more? I’ve looked for this book on three recent visits, and eventually resorted to an online purchase.
So, as I’ve said before, I’m a sf / fantasy / horror reader. Crime isn’t my genre, although I’ll dip into it now and again. The big exception to this has always been Brookmyre, because he’s funny and clever and I like his references. I went into ‘The Cracked Mirror’ without any previous knowledge of the plot or the theme, and soon figured out that this isn’t the crime novel that it’s pretending to be. I’ll say no more, other than the warmth showed to and by the main characters is absolutely lovely and their relationship will stay with me for a while.
’10 Years of Unpicking’ by Jennifer Futter was one of books that I swapped for one of my own at a book fair in Scorton earlier this year. It’s a memoir of a young Scots woman who travelled to Africa to seek her fortune. It’s definitely not my usual kind of read, but I found it interesting all the same.
Another of my book fair swaps – ‘Joe with an E’ is a well plotted YA story with engaging characters and a measured pace.
The story takes the familiar SF idea of conflict between gendered and ungendered societies (see Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, amongst many others) and brings it to a near future UK, just a few generations away from the present day. I enjoyed the way that the author handled the exposition, explaining exactly how an ungendered population had come into existence. In some ways, the journal of the 21st century scientist was my favourite part of the book.
Parenthood, friendship, love and teenage romance themes are all explored sensitively and carefully.
A great sequel to ‘Joe with an E’ that wraps up the story. No spoilers here, but I enjoyed the character development and exploration of different relationships.
OK, this is a biiiiiiiggg looonnnng book. It’s three books in one binding, so yeah, it took a while to read it.
Book one examines how a single soldier would experience a centuries long interplanetary war if he was being shipped around at interplanetary speeds for relatively short postings. How would he cope with new colleagues born centuries after everyone he knew has died? How would he cope with massive changes in Earth culture and economics? It’s a fun concept, and the story covers it well. Book two follows that same conscript after the end of the war, how he copes with a quiet life far from the challenges of the last few years. The ending is, pretty literally, deus ex machina for fun and frolics. Book three backtracks to a version of earth in approx 2040 that is approaching two major scientific pinch points at the same time. Our hero is another smart conscript soldier who finds himself looking for better answers than his country is giving him. ‘Forever Peace’ was published a couple of decades after ‘The Forever War’ and is kinder to the female characters.
Handily enough, I finished this book on August 31st. Tune in next time for my September reads.
Lauren groaned theatrically. Ellie was consulting her phone again. It was a new and expensive model that came with an advanced personal assistant. It had been marketed as ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and Lauren had been very vocal about her insistence that it was more like ‘Artificial Incompetence’. Two weeks into the holiday of a lifetime, and Lauren was thoroughly irritated by FLASH.
‘Please don’t trust that slop.’ Lauren complained. ‘Come on, we’re travelling, we’re supposed to be finding out about different cultures, meeting interesting people, exploring islands and cities! That thing just sucks up the commonest stuff and pukes it out again. Follow its advice and we’ll just end up doing what everyone else does.’
‘FLASH is better than that. It’s not like the other assistants. It’s trained to challenge me, to be an extension of myself. I’ve just uploaded our dietary preferences too. It knows I’m vegan and about your … ’ Ellie ignored Lauren’s eye rolling. ‘It was FLASH’s idea to get the ferry to this island. It’s quieter here.’
Lauren had a different view. ‘Hmm, the place needs more tourists, I reckon someone’s paid FLASH HQ to push people here. It has nothing to do with your personal development you know? You’re just paying a lot of money to be advertised at. Come on, leave that thing at the hotel, let’s just wander.’
Ellie sighed. ‘Just give me a minute …’
She consulted her phone and smiled. ‘Right, I’ll put FLASH away. I promise. But it did recommend a good restaurant in the next village, and it’s ordered a taxi. That’s it, for the day, we’ll do things the old fashioned way for a while. It’s your holiday too.’
Lauren smiled, relieved. She’d been getting worried. The taxi ride was uneventful, and the restaurant was, she admitted, very nice. The food was good too, tasty and plentiful, washed down by a jug of peach flavoured sangria.
At first, she thought she’d just drunk too much, her lips were numb, and she felt pleasantly buzzed. She didn’t start to get worried until her tongue started to swell. ‘What’s in the punch?’ she asked the waiter.
‘Orange juice and peaches, some spices. Nothing on your allergy list. I’ll go and check.’
He came back quickly. ‘I’ve called an ambulance. It’ll be here very soon. The orange juice is fresh, squeezed today, but we got an order an hour ago for pureed strawberries for a special customer. I’m so sorry, there must have been some cross contamination.’ Ellie watched the air ambulance leave. Lauren would be OK, another customer had found her epipen and jabbed her. It hadn’t occurred to Ellie, and when she’d demanded advice from FLASH, it had merely suggested that Lauren should drink some milk. It looked like the holiday was over. She checked her phone. ‘Ideas for the single traveller …’ popped up.
I kicked off the second half of the year with a re-read from the bookshelves. Pamela Zoline does not write accessible stories. She’s a writer, an artist, an activist and a caretaker, and her words reflect the complexity of her thoughts. Perhaps that’s why she’s one of the lesser known sf writers of the 60s, 70s and 80s, when women’s sf was enjoying a brief period in the sun.
‘Busy About the Tree of Life and Other Stories’ was published by The Women’s Press in the late 1980s, but not under its science fiction imprint. Luckily for me, it was shelved as such in the indie bookshops and I got a copy. It’s quite rare now, and if my copy hadn’t had a squashed bluebottle between the cover and the first page for the last fifteen years or so, it might be worth something … let it go.
‘Busy About the Tree of Life’ is an entertaining look at a very unusual family tree, and the ultimate and single fruit of it, via a series of historical catastrophes. I’d forgotten how much I love this story.
‘The Heat Death of the Universe’ concerns, as many great stories do, the life of a great, hugely intelligent woman who is exhausted and destroyed by her lonely existence as a mother. The repetition of the idea that our protagonist isn’t even sure how many children she has, got to me at a very basic level.
‘The Holland of the Mind’ concerns a couple and their child who move from the USA to Holland, maybe for a few weeks, maybe for longer. They feel a need to change their lives, but as we know, we can’t escape ourselves. Against a background of collapse, they play out their inevitable future.
‘Instructions for Exiting this Building in case of Fire’ is now, and has been for decades, one of my favourite short stories. I have another copy of this story in the Women’s Press SF collection ‘Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind’ edited by Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu. So, credits aside, this story concerns the ends justifying the means, even when the means are cruel. The beginning of the story, in which the reader is invited to imagine a specific child, is one of the hardest hitting things I’ve ever read. Imagine how she looks, the sound of her voice, her weight in your arms, imagine her scent, the way she turns her head …
The final, and the longest, story in the collection is ‘Sheep’, in which the counting of sheep is interwoven with several other stories in a complex web. It’s hard to follow in places, and although there is obviously a depth of meaning to it, I struggled to fathom what it was. Zoline is smarter than me, and it shows. Still, I read to the end.
So, from a much underappreciated genre writer to probably THE most appreciated one. Never Flinch. It’s King, of course I bought the hardback … and yeah, I know he doesn’t need the sale and I should wait for it to turn up in a charity shop, or read the library book … but I wanted it NOW.
So, book 4 in the Holly Gibney series, or book 7 if you include the Bill Hodges trilogy where she first made her appearance. Holly and her friends face up to not one, but two antagonists as a serial killer takes a twisted revenge on behalf of a falsely accused murder victim, and an indoctrinated church goer goes after a celebrity feminist. By and large, I enjoyed the book, but there were two points that bugged me. The first one was that it was hard to work out the identity of the serial killer. Admittedly I’m not a fan of murder mysteries but I do watch them on tv, and I would have appreciated more early hints at their identity … surely that’s where the fun of the genre lies? The second point is that there’s an unnecessary and unacknowledged red herring in the book, which lies in the name of one of the characters. All through the book, I thought it was a clue, but no …
None of this, of course, will stop me from re-reading the entire Hodges / Gibney series when I start my King re-read binge very soon.
‘Never Flinch’ has a great cast of very human characters, and a slight supernatural kick at the end that will please fans of more traditional King novels.
Next, another much anticipated read … ‘The Fates’ is a change of direction for Rosie Garland. Historical fiction with a wave to the weird comes naturally to her, but this is her first dip into actual mythology (to my knowledge).
This novel concerns the Fates, and their desire for a gracious retirement from the affairs of humanity. It tells a tale of Atalanta, a great huntress, and Meleager, a hero. It’s a great read, with an absorbing storyline and vivid characters. Zeus and his court are portrayed as a squabbling, terrified playground ruled by a nasty boychild with more powers than he can safely handle. I quite liked that, and I LOVED Zeus’ self reinvention at the end of the book.
Next – Jyn and Tonic, by Pete Hartley. In my review of ‘Ice and Lemon’, the previous book in this duology, I wondered if there would be a sequel. Silly me, of course there was, I just didn’t look hard enough. I found it almost by accident, when Pete Hartley and I had stalls at the same book fair in North Lancashire earlier this year. We did a swap and I hope that he was as happy with my book as I was with his.
‘Jyn and Tonic’ continues the story of the survivors of the global catastrophe and mass die off chronicled in ‘Ice and Lemon’. Our hero and his increasingly malignant ward travel around England and Wales, dealing with unsympathetic communities and narcissistic military units. Eventually, Lemon’s plans become clear, and a change of name heralds a change of tactics. Meanwhile, in France, a new force arises.
My next read was also an indie read, from the lovely Dan Forrester.
‘Havock’ is basically slapstick sword and sorcery. A fun light read with an absolutely massive body count and the funniest elf slaughter scene I’ve read in a long time.
I did start a Datlow anthology before the end of the month, but as I finished it in August, I’ll leave it until my next book blog.
