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.