BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

The Behemoth (2016)/The Behemoth 2 (2017)   Scotch (2016) Is There Anybody Out There (2018) Pixie (2018) In the relatively early days of the podcast boom, Rick Coste Productions produced some above average short 'weird fiction' narrative series geared largely to younger audiences but which are listenable for anyone else. The wierdness is often, although not always, explained in more realistic ways than usual but every series has been well written enough to carry that off. The Behemoth is the single voice (mostly) story of an unusual and weird road trip. A 'monster' (a mysterious stone man) arises out of the sea at Cape Cod and walks in a straight line across the United States. A lonely teenage girl, Maddy, makes her way to him and decides to walk with him. In the event she is a protective force for her silent friend as the usual suspects in a disturbed society insist on seeing the 'monster' as a problem rather than as a natural force to be respected and

I came to this with great expectations because it is written by a 'literary figure', albeit that it is an early work (1987) and only the first in a series of 11 science fiction 'culture novels'. Those expectations were too high but it has to be said that Iain M. Banks (aka Iain Banks) writes infinitely better on a technical level than the vast majority of science fiction writers. There are moments where his talent for precise description make the novel almost filmic. There are also times where an intelligent writer's sensibility comes through. He makes you think about the types of psychological adaptations our species might make to the world of the space opera. His aliens are not so unbelievable in terms of thought processes either. And yet, and yet ... the sensibility is a hybrid between the intelligent and the adolescent. Long bone-crunching battle scenes might have come off Playstation 3 if it had been invented (one stifles the occasional yawn) while

The Mask of Cthulhu (1939-1957 coll. 1958)  The Trail of Cthulhu (1944-1951) August Derleth.   The Taint and Other Novellas (1971-1983 coll. 2008)   Necroscope (1986) Necroscope II: Vamphyri (1988) Brian Lumley August Derleth saw himself as H.P. Lovecraft's natural heir, weaving his stories into the Cthulhu Mythos and incorporating the 'dreadful events in Innsmouth' and other incidents from the original corpus. He will suggest, in a fit of in-joke paranoia, that Lovecraft and others died young because they knew too much - a nice little conceit. He has been much and rightly criticised on two grounds - for being derivative (and even thieving and manipulating Lovecraft's unpublished drafts for his own purposes) but, more seriously, for attenuating the raw cosmic horror of the original (as if he had failed to understand its essential bleakness). Both accusations have merit. He constructed a mythological fantasy of good and evil much closer to religious tradition a

** spoiler alert ** No Country for Old Men is a great book at two levels - style and content. You have to engage with the laconic vernacular of the US Southwestern border country and observe how McCarthy uses it to show how a few words in the right context can get you far deeper into the emotions (or lack of them) of the main protagonists than any long-winded description of feelings. In forty years McCarthy has honed his art far from the excessive literariness of The Orchard Keeper to create a linguistic realism that is great literature. He manages the rare feat of showing how a basic decency, a sentimental decency, triumphs morally over cunning and intellect. He reminds us that 'sentiment', that is feeling one's values as givens without too much analysis, is not to be despised by those whose default mode is knowing irony. There is nothing post-modern about this book. As for the content, this is a deeply political book, without once mentioning politics as most re

The Pendragon Legend (1934) Antal Szerb   Amusing and ironic inter-war Hungarian take on occult themes - post-modern well before its time - The Pendragon Legend is no masterpiece but remains very interesting with some affectionate insights on how educated others saw the British in the 1930s - their class system, their literature, their national character, their empire and their 'stiff upper lip'. Szerb has been re-introduced to London by Pushkin Press. This is recommended as a pleasant amusing read that is a cut above the conspiracy schlock that has appeared in the wake of the Da Vinci Code. It is sad to note that he died in a labour camp in 1945. The witty irony of this book shows that a man who could laugh at himself and create a nice anti-hero also died that day. 

The Deep Vault (2016) Life After/The Message (2016) The Blood Drawn Chronicles (2016-2018) The Switchboard (2017)   The London Necropolis Railway (2018)    The Echo Protocol (2019)     Arca-45672 (2019)   Confessions from the Nocturne Nebula (2019)     The Deep Vault is rollicking dystopian science fiction. A band of youngsters escaping some unknown apocalypse find themselves navigating a bunker that appears to include a government project that breeds monsters and has two squabbling competing computer systems as well as a mad scientist. This is the excuse for some gruesome body horror as well as a move through levels that will be familiar to any games player. It is dark but fun stuff, the darkness alleviated by the mildly comic and satirical treatment of the leading characters.  Life After and its sequel The Message adopt a method that is usually tiresome and has become hackneyed already in the fictional podcast space - the dependence of narrative on the detritus of technology (usuall

This is the first in a series that looks at the first novels of authors who would go on to publish usually more accomplished work. Sometimes the reviews might seem overly critical but it is important to treat each work without hindsight and see how a writer learns from early mistakes and hones his or her craft. For context, the square brackets after the title give the age of the author at publication although a book might have been germinating from a much earlier age. Such works should not be neglected even when it is clear that an author may cringe later at their own early efforts (even in a few cases try to suppress it). These put 'genius' into perspective as a hard learned craft (even if some authors manage to come out with masterpieces at their first attempt), remind us that persistence can pay if the right publisher is there to support the writer and that themes found in later work might sometimes be uncovered early - and so give insights into an author's psychological

Jamaica Inn (1936) Rebecca (1938) My Cousin Rachel   (1951 )   What a remarkably good writer Daphne du Maurier was - flawless in these three classics.    Jamaica Inn is a rollicking good story. It picks up on Du Maurier's grand theme - that people are complex, unknowable until the end and almost impossible to judge. Doing the right thing is never clear when you do not have all the facts. She is mistress of story-telling and writing. The book is a deserved classic.    Rebecca is another Du Maurier classic - although hard to disentangle from the 1940 Hitchcock movie with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine which was that rare phenomenon, a film worthy of the book.   My Cousin Rachel is the stuff of standard romance but, like Jane Austen, can be read with profit by any man for its simple story telling. It has you hooked to the end even though you are not sure why. This is not just 'women's literature' from a past era. It is a clever woman writing about