BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2004) Victor Pelevin Linger Awhile (2006) Russell Hoban   The Poe Shadow (2006)  Matthew Pearl    The Mephisto Club (2006) Tess Gerritsen    Black Magic Woman (Morris & Chastain #1, 2008) Justin Gustainis    Two cautions about Pelevin's The Sacred Book of the Werewolf . Waterstones put this on their horror shelf but it is not a horror novel and it adds nothing consequential to the werewolf genre. It might just slip into the dark fantasy category but only at a stretch. It should sit nowhere else but under general fiction.    The second is the claim on the dust jacket that it is 'very funny' or 'outrageously funny'. It is not - in English. It can be mildly amusing at times but I think you have to be a post-Soviet Russian to get this book. I would bet that it probably is 'funny' in Russian to Russians, though perhaps not 'very' or 'outrageously'. It is like that type of joke where the teller loo...

The Supernatural and English Fiction (1995) Glen Cavaliero Cavaliero's book is an occasionally academic and dry but very useful review of what he chooses to define variously as the supernatural, the paranormal and the preternatural in English fiction. Like the donnish figure that he is, he implicitly privileges the supernatural as the numinous in literature over the attempts (as he seems to see it) of those who want to give you a good jolt or who see magic as just undiscovered science - but it has to be said that his own use of language is hardly inspiring when he moves beyond his judgements on particular authors to a consideration of theory. This is what they might call a solid performance. There is serious value to be gained from it - if only the introduction of new names to the non-specialist in literary studies. He has made me want to read Charles Williams. He brings out of the closet a number of women authors like Phyllis Paul who have been long and probably (on hi...

The Black Spider (1842) Jeremias Gotthelf I have a general rule that, once I have started to read a book, I must continue with it to the end before I can claim the right to comment on it. In the case of The Black Spider , I was beginning to get depressed by page 20 of this classic early nineteenth century Swiss horror novella. One fifth of the tale gone and I had been treated to a lengthy, rather dull and wholesome account of a christening feast for the child of a prosperous Swiss peasant in the first half of the nineteenth century. But Gotthelf knows what he is doing. He has set the reader up for a multi-layered morality tale that loosely bases itself on pre-modern folk interpretations of the causes of the plague. He weaves, from the security of the first section, a genuinely horrific and disturbing tale of a demonic black spider that punishes all those who have defied God and who have tried to short-circuit authority with an appeal to the Devil. The spider, a truly nasty ...

The Black Dahlia (1987) (L.A. Quartet #1) James Ellroy   Devil in A Blue Dress (1990) (Easy Rawlins #1) Walter Mosley   Out of Sight (1996) (Jack Foley #1) Elmore Leonard    There is a great book and a not-so-great book in Ellroy's The Black Dahlia . In fact, it seems like two successive books - the first is an atmospheric but realistic police procedural bringing to life the Los Angeles of the late 1940s and the second is a piece of 'grand guignol' in which sexual obsession and the noir morals of James M. Cain's characters surge their way through a plot out of Raymond Chandler with a dash of Hammett's political cynicism.  We will come across the legacy of Chandler again in Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress . It certainly cannot be said that the two 'books' merge perfectly seamlessly. The use of period slang at the start can confuse rather than enlighten so that we have to contend with some linguistic confusion as well as the plot confusion essentia...

Kraken (2010) China Mieville We are definitely not into spoilers so it is hard to go too far into the story of this dark fantasy on a scientific theme. A preserved and valuable giant squid disappears from the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Musum and one of its staff, Billy Harrow, discovers a world of cults and magic that threaten apocalypse. So far, so very obviously dark fantasy, but China Mieville adds, with Kraken , a major work to a genre that owes a great deal to the psychogeographical cult of London as the world's most magical city. Its fault is that of all modern creative fantasy - far too many ideas for a basic story line that could be culled from any urban thriller. Although resolved satisfactorily, there are moments when you feel that greatness has eluded Mieville because of an inability to develop fewer ideas in more depth. In the end, despite hints of something deeper, and some remarkable invention and (in places), yes, ideas, it ends up being an ente...

The Alchemist (1908) The Cats of Ulthar (1920) H P Lovecraft Cthulhu's Reign (2010) Editor, Darrell Schweitzer The Lovecraft Anthology: Volume I (2011) Editor, Dan Lockwood   The Black Wings of Cthulhu (2012) Editor: S. T Joshi   I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H P  Lovecraft (2013 Edition) S T Joshi At some stage, we should review all of Lovecraft's stories but we mention two only to start the ball rolling, the first only to dispose of it as juvenilia. The Alchemist must be regarded as o ne of Lovecraft's weakest stories but then he was only 17 or 18 and it was his first. The basic story line is fairly trite (which we will not repeat for the sake of spoilers although it is barely worth the effort). However, Lovecraft is good at absorbing Gothick memes and replaying them effectively. In other words the story is worth reading for its 'atmosphere' as an antiquarian throw-back to the world of 'The Castle of Otranto' or of Ann Radcliffe over a cen...

The Lady of the Shroud (1909) Bram Stoker  Midnight Tales  Bram Stoker (Ed. Peter Haining, 1992)   Who Is Dracula's Father? And Other Puzzles in Bram Stoker's Gothic Masterpiece (2017) Jon Sutherland Dracula (1897) is a seminal cultural text - brilliantly written. There is little more to say other than to advise that you read it and enjoy its dark pleasures - but what of the later Bram Stoker? The Lady of the Shroud (1909) is a truly dreadful book in so many ways - theatrical, sentimental, nonsensical, militaristic, imperialist, patronising (to women and to the peoples of the Balkans) and often leaden. Beyond being one for Bram Stoker completists - and the early failed promise of creepy thrills - it is nothing but a fraud designed to inveigle the reader of the 1900s into a conservative political tract. So why bother reading it? Two reasons make this worth it (although only for the dedicated): the psychological insight into the fantasy world of an aging Edwardian ...

The Sandman: The Dream Country (Volume 3) (1990) American Gods (2001) Interworld (2007) - With Michael Reaves Neil Gaiman The Dream Country is third volume of the acclaimed The Sandman series but is stand-alone. This edition also contains the original script for the first of its four stories, Calliope, which might be of interest to students of illustration. Much of The Dream Country has been translated to film very effectively as part of a Sandman TV series shown on Netflix. If we are to be honest here, Neil Gaiman was engaged in a project to bring Tales from the Cryp t up the literary and artistic food chain. There is no doubt that he succeeds admirably in his task, aided by a series of excellent illustrators, but the stories, with the exception of his re-thinking of the origins of Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream', are not complex - poetic and suggestive perhaps but not complex. The first story, Calliop e, tells of a writer's abuse of an incar...

Divine Endurance (1984) Spirit: or, The Princess of Bois Dormant (2008) Gwyneth Jones One of the themes of my reviews is the 'first novel' especially in genre fiction. Sometimes these show remarkable ability. Sometimes they demonstrate immaturity. Sometimes the immaturity lasts for several early novels (as in the case of Grahame Greene) before the genius breaks through with practice and experience. Gwyneth Jones is an interesting science fiction/fantasy cross-over writer (where what appears to be fantastic is grounded in future science). We can compare here an early with a mature work separated by a near quarter of century. In fact, Divine Endurance was something of a disappointment even allowing for it being a first attempt largely because it was self-indulgent experimentalism in high science fantasy by someone who was clearly intellectually way ahead of the bulk of genre writers but who missed the point about narrative - out there is a reader who must comprehend. In her ...