Some reviews
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darkling_talesHere are a couple of book reviews I made a little while ago on my own journal - I meant to cross-post them here but forgot all about it. The usual apologies to those on my Friends List who have seen all this before...
The first is Robert Westall's supernatural novel The Scarecrows.
I enjoyed the novel, which certainly earnt its Carnegie Medal. The teenage hero, Simon Woods, is a troubled soul who suffers from bouts of violent anger, and when he finds out that his dead father, Major Woods, has finally been replaced in his mother's affections by Joe Moreton, a civilian caricature artist, he is far from happy. Simon is forced to spend the Summer holiday at the well-meaning Moreton's house, along with his mother and sister, who both love the man. To escape his own anger, Simon takes refuge in a deserted mill across the fields from the house, and after an unfortunate series of events causes him to fall badly out of favour with the entire family, he calls upon the memory of his dead father for help. But something altogether nastier answers his call...
As a horror story the novel is a success, with a great climate of sustained and deepening menace, and I shall remember some of the scenes and turns of phrase for a while - the snapshot of Major Wood's desert grave, for instance, and the description of the psychopathic Ray Starkey, whose essence remains a mystery throughout the novel, a man whose evil is impossible to pin down and whose very face somehow seems to blur and dissolve when looked at in an old newspaper picture. Westall also excels at the "daylight ghost" - horror that is only enhanced by bright sunlight and the chatter of the journalists that flock to the mill when Moreton decides to involve the National Trust in the building's preservation. Modern technology, such as television, and echoes from the past (yellowing, vomit-stained pages torn from a policeman's notebook, or decaying coats on a peg) are skilfully blended in a tapestry of terror. As is always the case with Westall's novels, The Scarecrows is much more than a horror story about a bunch of scarecrows - although I haven't been a teenager for a while, I remember how unforgiving, uncompromising, lonely and downright angry you can be during those years, and the misguided purity of Simon's wrath is perfectly rendered. Beyond merely describing anger, Westall shows how seductive it is, and portrays the pleasures of losing yourself in a blind rage very well. The uneasy, often explosive dynamics of the stepfamily are spot-on too.
The Scarecrows doesn't quite find Westall at his best, in my opinion - the writing is at times a touch too blocky and ungainly, the sentences a little too elliptic. Though this could be partly due to the fact that Simon is a younger character than the heroes of my favourite Westall novels (The Wheatstone Pond and The Devil On The Road), I also had the slight suspicion that the author was writing down a little, maybe pitching the work at a young audience, whereas his best work appeals to all ages and never smacks of teenage fiction. I was also a bit bothered by Simon's worship of his father - though Westall overall does a good job of showing both sides of the war/pacifism argument and exploring the horrible downsides of being born into a dynasty of trained killers, Simon constantly finds succour from an image of his father mowing down some rebels in a jeep. Worse still, the rebels are described as "Flossies". Couldn't Westall have found something a bit more heroic as an example? One of the book's morals is "make straight for your enemy", but the way this is illustrated is a little crude and literal-minded, by Westall's standards.
Still, I had great fun reading this book, which was sad and frightening by turns, with occasional glimpses of mild humour and a lot of kindness (Simon rescues a mother cat and her kittens from the mill, and they gambol and frolic about the book in a charming manner.) I would definitely recommend it to anyone, including people over 18 ;) Especially if, like me, you find that scarecrows freak you out.
And here are my thoughts on the recent addition to Stephen Jones' Dark Terrors anthology series, Dark Terrors 6.
Most of the stories are examples of that all-too-prevalent style of Americana which involves spreading gore and insanity all over the shop, writing in short clipped sentences, and starting the tale with a 'hard-hitting' line like "It had been ten years since Jay shot his family." I don't always mind that sort of thing, but with two-thirds of the anthology falling into this category one soon begins to tire of it. That said, there are a handful of real jewels in this collection.
My favourite story is Midday People by Tanith Lee. Although Lee seems best-known for her dark fantasy and childrens writing, her shorter fiction can be very striking and scary, and this tale of an unhappy drunken yuppie's wife who falls prey to a seductive and mysterious pair of youths during an otherwise unbearable holiday in Rome is a slow-burning work of lyrical beauty and uneasy sensuality. It is also an expert post-mortem of a failed, wretched marriage. This is unfortunate for another author anthologized in this book, Nancy Kilpatrick, whose tale of catacomb shenanigans Your Shadow Knows You Well seems heavy-handed, generalizing and unduly depressing in its sociologial message (that women have always been the victims of men, and will always remain so), especially when compared with Lee's damning and razor-sharp portrayal of a woman caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea. And look at this great aytays picture of Lee as a young woman! She reminds me of Linda Hamilton in The Terminator.
I also loved The Receivers, by Joel Lane, in which a policeman investigating a bizarre wave of petty theft in a grim Northern city finds himself drawn into a world of dreamlike horror underpinning the terrors of everyday urban life. In just a few pages Lane manages to say a lot about modern British society, class war, corruption and nostalgia, and the final scene is truly nightmarish and imbued with a poetic but crazed and nasty sense of justice - like all the best ghost stories from M R James onwards.
Other stories I enjoyed included the atmospheric We're Going Where The Sun Shines Brightly, by Christopher Fowler - about a gang of young men who take a Cliff Richard-style bus holiday down through France in search of love and adventure, but find something rather less pleasant waiting for them when the bus breaks down in a Provencal pine forest one night - Retrospective, by the ever-reliable Ramsay Campbell, and Kim Newman's amusing story A New Drug On The Market, about a bunch of Victorian entrepreneurs who decide to make a fortune flogging a diluted version of Dr Jekyll's infamous "tonic". Newman is one of only a tiny handful of authors able to successfully combine horror with humour, and his Victorian narrator is very convincing too.
The first is Robert Westall's supernatural novel The Scarecrows.
I enjoyed the novel, which certainly earnt its Carnegie Medal. The teenage hero, Simon Woods, is a troubled soul who suffers from bouts of violent anger, and when he finds out that his dead father, Major Woods, has finally been replaced in his mother's affections by Joe Moreton, a civilian caricature artist, he is far from happy. Simon is forced to spend the Summer holiday at the well-meaning Moreton's house, along with his mother and sister, who both love the man. To escape his own anger, Simon takes refuge in a deserted mill across the fields from the house, and after an unfortunate series of events causes him to fall badly out of favour with the entire family, he calls upon the memory of his dead father for help. But something altogether nastier answers his call...
As a horror story the novel is a success, with a great climate of sustained and deepening menace, and I shall remember some of the scenes and turns of phrase for a while - the snapshot of Major Wood's desert grave, for instance, and the description of the psychopathic Ray Starkey, whose essence remains a mystery throughout the novel, a man whose evil is impossible to pin down and whose very face somehow seems to blur and dissolve when looked at in an old newspaper picture. Westall also excels at the "daylight ghost" - horror that is only enhanced by bright sunlight and the chatter of the journalists that flock to the mill when Moreton decides to involve the National Trust in the building's preservation. Modern technology, such as television, and echoes from the past (yellowing, vomit-stained pages torn from a policeman's notebook, or decaying coats on a peg) are skilfully blended in a tapestry of terror. As is always the case with Westall's novels, The Scarecrows is much more than a horror story about a bunch of scarecrows - although I haven't been a teenager for a while, I remember how unforgiving, uncompromising, lonely and downright angry you can be during those years, and the misguided purity of Simon's wrath is perfectly rendered. Beyond merely describing anger, Westall shows how seductive it is, and portrays the pleasures of losing yourself in a blind rage very well. The uneasy, often explosive dynamics of the stepfamily are spot-on too.
The Scarecrows doesn't quite find Westall at his best, in my opinion - the writing is at times a touch too blocky and ungainly, the sentences a little too elliptic. Though this could be partly due to the fact that Simon is a younger character than the heroes of my favourite Westall novels (The Wheatstone Pond and The Devil On The Road), I also had the slight suspicion that the author was writing down a little, maybe pitching the work at a young audience, whereas his best work appeals to all ages and never smacks of teenage fiction. I was also a bit bothered by Simon's worship of his father - though Westall overall does a good job of showing both sides of the war/pacifism argument and exploring the horrible downsides of being born into a dynasty of trained killers, Simon constantly finds succour from an image of his father mowing down some rebels in a jeep. Worse still, the rebels are described as "Flossies". Couldn't Westall have found something a bit more heroic as an example? One of the book's morals is "make straight for your enemy", but the way this is illustrated is a little crude and literal-minded, by Westall's standards.
Still, I had great fun reading this book, which was sad and frightening by turns, with occasional glimpses of mild humour and a lot of kindness (Simon rescues a mother cat and her kittens from the mill, and they gambol and frolic about the book in a charming manner.) I would definitely recommend it to anyone, including people over 18 ;) Especially if, like me, you find that scarecrows freak you out.
And here are my thoughts on the recent addition to Stephen Jones' Dark Terrors anthology series, Dark Terrors 6.
Most of the stories are examples of that all-too-prevalent style of Americana which involves spreading gore and insanity all over the shop, writing in short clipped sentences, and starting the tale with a 'hard-hitting' line like "It had been ten years since Jay shot his family." I don't always mind that sort of thing, but with two-thirds of the anthology falling into this category one soon begins to tire of it. That said, there are a handful of real jewels in this collection.
My favourite story is Midday People by Tanith Lee. Although Lee seems best-known for her dark fantasy and childrens writing, her shorter fiction can be very striking and scary, and this tale of an unhappy drunken yuppie's wife who falls prey to a seductive and mysterious pair of youths during an otherwise unbearable holiday in Rome is a slow-burning work of lyrical beauty and uneasy sensuality. It is also an expert post-mortem of a failed, wretched marriage. This is unfortunate for another author anthologized in this book, Nancy Kilpatrick, whose tale of catacomb shenanigans Your Shadow Knows You Well seems heavy-handed, generalizing and unduly depressing in its sociologial message (that women have always been the victims of men, and will always remain so), especially when compared with Lee's damning and razor-sharp portrayal of a woman caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea. And look at this great aytays picture of Lee as a young woman! She reminds me of Linda Hamilton in The Terminator.
I also loved The Receivers, by Joel Lane, in which a policeman investigating a bizarre wave of petty theft in a grim Northern city finds himself drawn into a world of dreamlike horror underpinning the terrors of everyday urban life. In just a few pages Lane manages to say a lot about modern British society, class war, corruption and nostalgia, and the final scene is truly nightmarish and imbued with a poetic but crazed and nasty sense of justice - like all the best ghost stories from M R James onwards.
Other stories I enjoyed included the atmospheric We're Going Where The Sun Shines Brightly, by Christopher Fowler - about a gang of young men who take a Cliff Richard-style bus holiday down through France in search of love and adventure, but find something rather less pleasant waiting for them when the bus breaks down in a Provencal pine forest one night - Retrospective, by the ever-reliable Ramsay Campbell, and Kim Newman's amusing story A New Drug On The Market, about a bunch of Victorian entrepreneurs who decide to make a fortune flogging a diluted version of Dr Jekyll's infamous "tonic". Newman is one of only a tiny handful of authors able to successfully combine horror with humour, and his Victorian narrator is very convincing too.
