BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

Salem's Lot (1975)   The Stand (1990 Revision of 1978 Edition) Night Shift (2008 collection of stories from the 1970s) Stephen King     Song of Kali (1985) Carrion Comfort (1989) Dan Simmons    Supping with Panthers (1996) Deliver Us From Evil (1997) Tom Holland Salem's Lot was Stephen King's second novel. It has the feel of a man who wants to make his mark with a best seller. What he does is to take Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', rethink it from top to bottom and position it within contemporary (1975) American culture. In the edition I have (2006) this is made clear in a useful short Afterword where King (still in his twenties when he wrote the book) also refers back to his childhood reading of EC comics. The book is replete with references to the horror canon from Poe-like cellars to graveyard whippoorwills. He seems to have two alter agos in the book which recur throughout his career in a sort of dialectic: Ben Mears, the writer, and Mark Petrie, a young

The Anubis Gates (1983) Declare (2000) Three Days to Never (2006) My first reading of Tim Powers' classic The Anubis Gates was to enjoy a 'suspension of disbelief' romp through a quasi-steam punk literary time travel fantasy with Egyptian mythological themes. A second reading made me understand better why Powers can be frustrating as well as worth reading. The secret to Powers is (as he has articulated in an interview on his working methods) extremely dense plotting in advance of actual writing in which events that happen in one part of a book are flagged up indirectly in others. Everything is supposed to hang together logically and in detail by the end but this can be very demanding on the reader and possibly a little self-indulgent on the part of the author. One does not always have time to work out for oneself whether everything really does hang together but a second reading (with the basic story already loaded into the brain) permits the reader to