The Lone Ranger

I used to love the TV series, so tempted by this:-

Filler content with skinny deities

First things first, the 4th section of my interview with the good people at This Is Horror has just been posted to their website.

And in other news, This review was posted to the old TTA Press website on 28th June 2007:-

THE SKIN GODS by RICHARD MONTANARI
William Heinemann trade paperback, 395pp, £10.99

A blistering hot summer in Philadelphia, and detectives Byrne and Balzano are set on the trail of an unusual killer, one who recreates murder scenes from the movies, which he tapes and splices into videos from rental stores. Psycho and Fatal Attraction are just two of the films which he tampers with. But as they dig deeper into the case, eliminating all the obvious suspects, the detectives come to believe that there is some link, not only between the victims but with Byrne himself, who may well be the next target in the madman’s line of fire.

Montanari is being touted as a possible next big thing in thriller circles, but while this book certainly entertained me it didn’t quite convince. The author does an excellent job of bringing his characters to life; Balzano, a woman with a lot to prove, which she does by boxing as well as police work, and with a marriage in jeopardy; Byrne, recovering from a gunshot wound and thinking of giving it all up, the survivor of a broken marriage and father of a deaf and dumb girl, a man who feels deeply for the victims of crime (one of the sub-plots involves the release of a child killer he gaoled, and Byrne’s concern for the girl’s family). Montanari over eggs his pudding though, giving Byrne a psychic gift, an ability to sometimes tune in to past events, feelings etc, which doesn’t add anything at all to the plot, is a needless contrivance that undercuts the verisimilitude of the whole enterprise.

And verisimilitude is the crux here. Novel as the killer’s modus operandi is, with a plot that takes numerous twists and turns, all to good effect, there is no getting past the fact that there isn’t really any need for him to act as he does, and the impression left in the mind is of a writer desperately casting round for yet another change to ring on the serial killer trope, with the narrative mired in Hollywood hand me downs and eventually disappearing up the fundament of its own pretension. Worst of all, the killer when caught, is somebody completely out of left field, a very minor character, with little or no foreshadowing of his identity, and so this book, with all its insights into police work and the human craving for the sensational, entertains but doesn’t provide enough substance to still the nagging doubts as to whether it could ever have taken place.

Filler content with vampire hunting

A review posted to the old TTA Press website on 9 August 2007:-

INCUBUS DREAMS by LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Orbit paperback, 736pp, £7.99

The vampire has always exercised a strong attraction for female writers, with Anne Rice and her Vampire Chronicles the most obvious success story. But with the Queen of the Damned’s discovery of Jesus competition for her crown is intensifying, and Laurell K. Hamilton seems to have edged ahead of the pack.

Hamilton is the creator of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, described by some as what Buffy will be when she grows up. The series is set in a reality where vampires have legal rights just like everybody else and are protected as long as they stick to the rules, but when they fall off the wagon retribution is swift and deadly, which is where Ms Blake comes in, her job to deal with lawbreakers in a manner that doesn’t allow for repeat offenders. Blake is also a registered necromancer and romantically involved with various supernatural beings, which makes for an interesting life.

The character first appeared in 1993’s Guilty Pleasures. Incubus Dreams is the twelfth in the series, and by now bloat has set in, with almost three times as many pages as her first outing and more padding than a DFS sofa.

The plot concerns a group of rogue vampires murdering strippers, or at least that’s what the back cover blurb would have us believe. Blake visits a murder scene early on, but then her investigation is put on the back burner for nearly five hundred pages, after which it is quickly brought to a head with copious bloodshed but no real resolution. There are plenty of subplots, most of which are still hanging by the end of the book. The excitement, the borderline hard boiled feel of Guilty Pleasures, with its snappy dialogue and taut plotting is gone, and in its place we have something akin to soap opera and with an emphasis on relationship stuff, as each and every character takes time out to analyse and critique Blake’s one on one dealings with a whole host of other people, while she doles it out to them with a similar largesse, which might have been interesting at less length, but as is comes over as tedious and repetitive.

And then there’s the sex. Lashings of it.

Regardless of what they put on the back cover, the heart of the book concerns Blake’s learning to deal with the new powers she has gained as a result of forming a triumvirate with werewolf Richard and vampire Jean-Claude. Specifically, she has to learn to curb something called the ardeur, a passion which can only be controlled by regular bouts of orgasmic sex (say every six hours). There is a metaphysical side to all these sexual shenanigans, which is why Blake can’t simply use a vibrator but has to cut a swathe through the male characters, adopting some novel living arrangements (not just one, but two ménage a trois). To trivialise, the moral seems to be, if you’re a guy and an associate of Anita Blake, stick close cause it’s only a matter of time before you get lucky.

Eroticism, of course, has long been a part of the vampire’s appeal, so no surprises there, but the sheer volume of copulation here is something of a distraction, while Hamilton seems uncertain how best to deal with this material, veering between soft focus vanilla sex and more graphic interludes, wanting to be both explicit and coy at the same time. She writes a blow job like nobody’s business, but regardless of the occasional feminist subtext I can’t recall any incidents of reciprocity by Blake’s lovers, a curious omission, albeit my attention did wander at moments. She gives us a detailed exposition on the discomfort women experience copulating with men who are well endowed, but never actually uses the word penis, while people spill rather than ejaculate, which makes everything sound somewhat accidental to me.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of good stuff here. The action scenes are gripping. Hamilton is rigorous in delineating a world where vampires have legal status, working out all the ramifications of that and filling in the fine details, such as the CSI who measure bite marks on a victim or the moral implications of a vampire church. And a lot of the characterisation is excellent, Blake having to deal with prejudice from all quarters – resentment because she’s a woman, because she sleeps with ‘monsters’ and because she is so goddamned sexy. She struggles with her own inner demons too, the questions she has about her role as Vampire Executioner and the guilt she feels about her sexual liaisons (Anita is an old fashioned girl, conditioned not to sleep around, and so is constantly led to question values she long took for granted). By such roundabout means the novel addresses issues of prejudice and attendant matters in our own world, the intolerance and judgemental attitudes that affect far too many people.

But the good stuff is lost in the great sprawl that is Incubus Dreams, a novel crying out for a skilled editor to whisper in the writer’s ear the publishing world’s equivalent of ‘Remember thou art mortal’, to get Hamilton to cut the fat and focus on the essentials of storytelling, to strike a finer balance between the action sequences and the emotional elements.

Never thought I would say this, but less sex would have been nice too. You know, sometimes less really is more, even when it’s metaphysical.

Song(s) for a Sunday – Father and Son

Two versions of the same song:-

 

 

Anyone have a preference?

Filler content with added Lumley

Here’s a triple whammy of reviews that was posted to the old TTA Press website on 3 July 2008:-

HARRY KEOGH NECROSCOPE AND OTHER WEIRD HEROES by BRIAN LUMLEY
Torpaperback, 319pp, $14.95
THE HOUSE OF CTHULHU by BRIAN LUMLEY
Tor hardback, 253pp, $23.95
SCREAMING SCIENCE FICTION by BRIAN LUMLEY
Subterranean Presshardback, 166pp, $35

The publication of the first Necroscope books in the late 80s saw Brian Lumley transformed from one of the best kept ‘secrets’ of the Horror genre into an internationally bestselling author, an ‘overnight success’ that, as the author himself allows, was twenty three years in the making. But the very popularity of Necroscope and subsequent books set in the same reality has tended to overshadow the early Lumley, a situation that now looks to be rectified with the release of several short story collections that shine a light into lesser known corners of the author’s oeuvre.

For those unfamiliar with Lumley, Harry Keogh Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes is the ideal introductory volume, containing stories from various periods of his career.

The first third of the book is devoted to Titus Crow, a psychic detective in the tradition of John Silence and Solar Pons, and perhaps the most overtly Lovecraftian of what is on offer. In the beautifully written ‘Inception’ we get an evocative account of the background to Crow’s birth and magical power, while in ‘Name and Number’ Crow reveals how he thwarted a plan to end all life on Earth masterminded by the Anti-Christ himself. It’s the middle story though that is the gem, ‘Lord of the Worms’, an almost textbook example of how to write this sort of fiction. A young man, still relatively new to his psychic heritage, Crow goes to work for an older occultist, a master magician with a plan that doesn’t bode well for our hero. This is a meticulously plotted supernatural thriller, each step fitting neatly into the overall scheme, every detail carefully rendered to further the plot, with the reader sucked in, and realisation dawning gradually, as it does for Crow himself, until the horrible fate prepared for him becomes shockingly obvious.

For the second part of the book, Lumley relocates to a dream dimension which name drops Lovecraft’s Dunsany period in such destinations as Cephaias and Ulthar. Hero and Eldin are two men from our world, transported to this other dimension where they make a living as enforcers for King Kuranes. In ‘The Weird Wines of Naxas Niss’ they tackle a cheating merchant while ‘The Stealer of Dreams’ brings them up against a vampire who feasts on men’s memories. These are light hearted pieces, packed with invention and wit that brings to mind the fantasy work of Fritz Leiber, with more than a hint of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser in the two leads, but it’s a comparison that doesn’t flatter as Hero and Eldin never seem like more than pale copies of those larger than life figures while, enjoyable as it is in a pass the time sort of way, Lumley’s attempt seems forced compared to the casual and easygoing joy in creation of Lankhmar.

Harry Keogh is Lumley’s latest hero. He has a gamut of supernatural powers including the ability to communicate with the dead and transport himself anywhere in the world at the speed of thought. His adventures have been chronicled in the bestselling Necroscope series, and two previously unpublished novellas provide the incentive for fans of that series to purchase this volume. In ‘Dead Eddy’ Harry helps a murdered gambler get revenge on the crooked casino owner who killed him, while ‘Dinosaur Dreams’ sees him investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of an amateur palaeontologist. Lastly in ‘Resurrection’ Harry’s attempt to restore his dead mother to life goes terribly awry. These are engaging stories, with well drawn characters and an interesting backdrop, holding echoes of a whole new universe waiting to be explored, one in which the dead are the Great Majority and, through Harry Keogh, have just as important a role to play as the living, though I have to admit on occasion finding them slightly overwritten, almost as if Lumley deliberately set out to produce something at novella length.

The Lovecraft influence is more readily identifiable in The House of Cthulhu, which is billed as Tales of the Primal Land Volume I and contains ten stories, most written in the 1970s, though actually the Lovecraft attribution is a bit of a red herring. A more accurate description would be to say these stories contain Lovecraft elements picked up and plonked down in a pastiche of Howard’s Hyperborea (complete with map) and are written with a not entirely successful attempt at Clark Ashton Smith sensibility. Lumley takes the familiar framing device of the discovery of an age old artefact, containing documents that when translated challenge our understanding of history, so much so that the only way to get the truth out there is by masquerading it as fiction.

‘How Kank Thad Returned to Bhur-Esh’ is the story of a killer sentenced to death by scaling the ghost cliffs that surround the city of Bhur-Esh and what befell him, the drama laced with an amusing comic thread as officialdom is lampooned and inescapably bringing to mind Smith’s ‘The Testament of Athammaus’ with its unkillable miscreant. The mighty wizard Mylakhrion seeks to take on apprentice and sets the most likely candidate the task of bringing him ‘The Sorcerer’s Book’ in a story packed with invention and subtle psychology. In the title story a pirate chief attempts to rob ‘The House of Cthulhu’, with suitably dire consequences, and there’s a similar reversal of fortune in the tale of ‘Tharquest and the Lamia Orbiquita’. ‘Lords of the Morass’, the story that to my mind most obviously echoes the work of Howard rather than Lovecraft, has two adventurers falling foul of a hidden tribe and their witch doctor, with the result that they are sacrificed to giant snails who serve as the tribe’s gods. ‘The Wine of the Wizard’ is about a city’s downfall at the hands of a necromancer and the volcano he controls, but with consequences for the present day translator of the text also.

And so on and so forth, in four similar stories, all of which are pleasing to some extent. There’s nothing startlingly original here – Lumley strikes his own grace notes and has enough ability to deliver more than mere pastiche, but ultimately he is building on the foundations laid by other hands – but the stories are entertaining and worth a few hours time of any lover of the weird and fantastic.

By way of proof that Lumley is a jack of all genres, Subterranean’s Screaming Science Fiction brings together nine of his SF stories, ranging in time from 1975 to the previously unpublished ‘Feasibility Study’. But of course terror is never far away with Lumley, as the book’s title suggest and subtitle, Horrors From Out Of Space, confirms. We have reached The Outer Limits.

Some of the themes will be overly familiar to seasoned SF readers, as with ‘Snarker’s Son’ which presents the old genre chestnut of a person from another dimension lost in our own, as a policeman tries to reunite a young boy who speaks strangely with his father, and encounters a terrible fate. The story has some nice touches towards the end, but is nothing special, and the plot is more or less reprised in ‘No Way Home’, with a man who helps one of the lost ending up adrift in a world where he does not belong, the story slightly silly but compensating with a powerful and horrific end note. More challenging than either of these is ‘The Man Who Felt Pain’, whose astronaut protagonist falls prey to a condition that lets him experience the torment of other people. His plight is regarded by some as the next step in evolution, Nature’s way of making us kinder to each other, but such philosophical concerns are overshadowed by the agonised fate of the test subject. ‘The Strange Years’ is a simple account of events leading up to the unravelling of mankind’s hegemony over the Earth, poignant and unsettling with its matter of factness, almost like a text from one of those other dimensions and a snapshot of what could so easily be our own fate. There’s an intriguing concept at the heart of ‘The Man Who Saw Spiders’, the idea of a reality shift as the prelude to an alien invasion, but however fascinating for me the story was rendered unconvincing through the narrative device of a psychiatrist who seems totally oblivious to such things as non-disclosure, confidentiality and medical ethics.

‘Feasibility Study’, the longest piece here and the most recent, neatly turns the tables on human beings, on the one hand having us visit another world where we gleefully eat the local fauna, and on the other falling victim to aliens who see Earth as nothing but a source of tasty protein. The irony won’t be wasted on vegetarians, and the story addresses issues of moral culpability adroitly, combining some squirm inducing alien experimentation with a tongue in cheek ending. ‘Gaddy’s Gloves’ is another highlight, as a young man who prides himself on his ability at computer games is handed his comeuppance by a war vet with alien technology in his gloves, a cleverly structured story that seems to offer an oblique perspective on Ender’s Game. Finally there’s ‘Big “C”’ with an alien infestation resulting in a cancer growth that wants to take over the world, a variation on The Blob that manages to be both sinister and enthralling as the story unfolds.

An eye catching, full colour cover, complete with spaceman and many tentacled thingie, plus several excellent interior illustrations by artist Bob Eggleton make this an attractive showcase for the less well known work of a writer whose first priority is always to give the reader a good time, something at which he seldom fails.

 

Filler content survives zombies

I believe the World War-Z film is out soon, so here is a review posted to the old TTA Press website on 21 March 2008, which would seem pertinent in the circumstances:-

THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE BY MAX BROOKS
(Duckworth paperback, 254pp, £8.99)

This book has an intriguing concept. Subtitled “Complete Protection from the Living Dead”, it operates under the premise that zombies are real, the victims of a virus called solanum, albeit their existence has been covered up by the authorities, and that an outbreak could happen near you at any time. In themed chapters Brooks details how to recognise when an outbreak is occurring, the best weapons to use against zombies, how to run from them and hunt them down, the difficulties posed by various types of terrain, the best structures to offer protection from zombie attack, surviving in a zombie world, should the worst case scenario ever come to pass. And so on and so forth, all of this delivered deadpan and with a potted history at the end of various zombie outbreaks during the course of history

It’s hard to know how to take the book. From the back cover blurbs, it appears most reviewers have approached it as humour, but given the deadpan delivery that reading doesn’t hold water for the long haul. Rather I’d classify it as some bastard offspring of a whole slew of no nonsense survivalist manuals and publications like the Star Trek Encyclopaedia, books that take you deeper into a fictional world by pretending that, yes Timothy, it is all real. On that level The Zombie Survival Guide is a lot of fun, certainly, and I enjoyed reading it, at the same time regarding the book as an ideal companion to Brooks’ World War-Z: this book dealing with theory and that one showing the theories put into practice. Brooks is a convincing guide, two parts Ray Mears to one part George A. Romero, and able to fake the necessary urgency for the message he is endeavouring to put over. He does an admirable job of infusing the zombie archetype with verisimilitude by thinking the unthinkable, making the ultimate ‘what if’ scenario seem not only credible but a done deal. If there ever is a zombie outbreak, I want him to have my back.

Writing a Fantasy Novel in 19 Easy Steps

While looking for my earliest book list last week I stumbled across many interesting things, including a chapter by chapter blueprint for producing the first volume in an epic fantasy series that I planned to write in my late teens, but fortunately there never seemed to be enough time.

I thought it might be interesting to reproduce it here (yes, it’s a slow news/Pete’s busy kind of week), and if any of you do feel inspired to go and write it yourself please do so with my blessing:-

1) Becomes a man. Is told of the strange circumstances of his birth.

2) Parents killed. Swears vengeance.

3) Confrontation with overlord. News of war.

4) Enlists in King’s army. Training as soldier.

5) Army life. Friendship with mercenary.

6) Battle of the pass.

7) The journey to the capital city.

8) Life in the city. Quarrel with the mercenary.

9) The siege.

10) Escape from city with royal prince.

11) Shipboard life.

12) Taken prisoner by the Sea Wolves.

13) The Prince betrayed. Storm.

14) Washed up on island. Taken prisoner.

15) Sacrifice to Bella Nostra. Fight with monster.

16) Escape from island.

17) Journey overland.

18) Journey through forest.

19) Arrival in Younger Kingdoms. Knighted by King.

It all seems relatively straightforward to me. I really don’t see why fantasy readers make such a fuss about that Martin chap and all his Game of Thrones malarkey.

So any of the rest of you ever take a look back at literary plans and abandoned/unstarted projects and wonder where the heck your heads were at, or is it just me?