Review Category: Books

AUTHOR: TIM MAJOR | PUBLISHER: TITAN BOOKS | RELEASE DATE: JUNE 6TH

There’s a dash of John Wyndham and a soupcon of The Wicker Man in the richly-atmospheric latest novel from Tim Major that weaves an eerie, esoteric supernatural mystery into a story of troubled familial relationships in an isolated, insular off-shore community. Workaholic English TV producer Nina Scaife travels with her teenage daughter Laurie to the remote Hope Island off the coast of Maine to spend some time with her estranged partner Rob’s parents. But the tension between them all becomes obvious almost immediately. Nina and her daughter do not enjoy the close relationship of a typical mother and daughter, and over the years Nina has spent little time in the company of Rob’s parents Tammy and Abram. Nina’s situation is exacerbated by the secret she knows she has to share; she and Rob have split up, and he is settling into life with his new partner and her own children. Nina just needs to find the right time to break the news to her daughter and to Rob’s parents, but she is distracted by the strange, unsettling behaviour of the island’s tiny population, especially its unearthly, distracted children, one of whom Nina almost runs over soon after arriving on the island. Nina quickly becomes entranced by a commune of bohemian artists, but is jolted back to a savage reality by the discovery of a body on the beach, its head brutally smashed open…

Hope Island is a gritty and compelling page-turner, and with its coterie of cold, apparently emotionless children it’s difficult – especially in the latter chapters – not to draw comparison with Wyndham’s memorable Midwich Cuckoos with their hypnotic blue eyes and blonde hair just as Hope Island itself brings to mind The Wicker Man’s off-kilter Summerisle. Both cast long, distracting shadows across Major’s book. There’s always something disconcerting about any story featuring scary dead-eyed children, and there are a couple of skin-crawling sequences here in which we fear for Nina’s life (and perhaps even her sanity) as she sees the children apparently committing terrible atrocities before turning on her and hunting her down across a savage, storm-swept landscape. The adults of Hope island are an odd bunch too, inward-looking and wary of outsiders, and Major does his best to avoid the “we don’t like strangers ‘round ‘ere” genre cliches by the introduction of the kindly Clay and a handful of other denizens of the commune who, frankly, we could have done with spending a little more time with as they often seem to be entirely peripheral to the main storyline.

Hope Island, unfortunately, wobbles a little as it races towards its denouement. The resolution underscores the book’s maternal themes of nature vs nurture, but the last few chapters drift into a slightly messy surreal fantasy as Nina battles with strange preternatural forces which threaten not only the lives of her and her daughter but also everyone on the island. Major populates his book with well-drawn, believable characters and the action rolls along agreeably, building up a decent sense of creeping dread and foreboding. But Hope Island is a book compromised by the nagging sense of overfamiliarity engendered by its setting and its storyline and a wilfully obscure climax that aims for the metaphysical but tumbles instead into a gabble of hokey metaphor leading to a slightly flat and underwhelming conclusion. However, it remains a powerful and generally well-considered work that might well haunt you a little more than you might expect.

 

AUTHOR: LAVIE TIDHAR | PUBLISHER: HEAD OF ZEUS | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

The legend of King Arthur has been told and retold for hundreds of years. The tale of a noble King and his trusted and incredibly powerful companions have been done endlessly and in pretty much every possible way, to limited success. Enter Lavie Tidhar, an accomplished master of the narrative remix. Tidhar’s previous work is filled to the brim with new and interesting takes on history and myth, and the results are always mesmerising. And of course, he’s taken something that’s been done way too many times and found a way to make it look new and interesting while still keeping its classic appeal.

By Force Alone is the version of the Arthurian myth that imagines every single one of these heroes as absolute bastards. The Sopranos meets Excalibur, by way of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The main characters are vicious gangsters, and Camelot is not some miraculous paradise, rather it’s a grimy dive that people love to tell tall tales about once they’ve left the place.

However, this isn’t a tawdry grim-dark remix of the well-known stories; rather, it’s a refreshingly honest and brutal look at human nature and power. Just one that has some rather memorable bits of fantasy action mixed in. It would easy to dismiss By Force Alone as a modern political allegory, but it’s certainly there if you want it; Arthur is presented as a thoroughly unlikeable chap who gets away with horror by playing to the crowd and telling them what they want to hear. He’s a pure demagogue, but also a sword-wielding bravo and maniac. Merlin is both a cunning master of magic but also a skilled spin-doctor and weaver of lies. He’s also a mystical parasite of sorts. Myth serves to amplify the commentary on the human condition.

Both Guinevere and Lancelot get a similar merciless treatment, with the latter being a blend of crime-boss and master social-manipulator, while Lancelot feels more parody than man, being something of a ninja-assassin maniac than anything else. The incredibly hyped nature of these characters leads to some explosive scenes and some truly staggering writing.

The narrative does tend to flit around a lot. Tidhar clearly wants to get as much of the myth into one volume as he can, and so the story does tend to bounce around a bit. We flash from one moment of brooding monarchy to incredible violence to crime-powered shenanigans quite rapidly. As such, this isn’t the sort of book that’s great for a single-sitting read.

By Force Alone isn’t for everyone; if you haven’t enjoyed Tidhar’s previous work, then this won’t appeal. But if you’re looking for a new take on King Arthur and chums, then check this out.

 

 

AUTHOR: WADE ROUSH | PUBLISHER: THE MIT PRESS | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Given the size of our galaxy and the Universe beyond, there should be hundreds or even thousands of advanced civilisations out there trying to communicate with us. After World War II, the new science of radio astronomy inspired Cornell University physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison to write a paper on ‘Searching for Interstellar Communications’. They believed that radio technology would be capable of detecting and joining in with the galactic community. Since then, except for a few false alarms, no sign of extraterrestrials has been discovered.

As Wade Roush observes, the famous Drake Equation was formulated to take into account all the factors that determine how many alien communicators might be out there. This considers the number of stars and planets that might support life, the fraction of planets where life might emerge, those that might evolve into intelligent organisms and develop technology, and the length of time an intelligent civilisation might exist. The result very much depends on our current expectations, on the one hand we can be more optimistic due to the discovery of exoplanets and organisms that can live in extreme habitats, yet our thinking about life-expectancy of civilisations might be coloured by the current Covid-19 pandemic (whereas in the past nuclear annihilation was a bigger influence on this equation).

Even the most pessimistic calculations indicate that our Milky Way galaxy should be rife with civilisations, giving rise to the Fermi Paradox that begs the question ‘why are we seemingly alone’? One brutal answer is that we are so rare there is no one else, or that the aliens are ignoring us, or we do not have the right technology to detect their signals.

Wade entertainingly provides chapters that look at the history of ideas and beliefs about the existence of aliens, how SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) became a scientific endeavour, where primitive alien life forms might exist in our Solar System or on exoplanets, and the various reasons why there is the ‘great silence’. 

We found ourselves agreeing with his conclusion that, ‘There isn’t a single example of a UFO or an alleged alien visitation or abduction for which an unbiased scientist would resort to an extraterrestrial explanation sooner than a terrestrial or psychological one.’ That is fair enough, but Wade then goes on to note that SETI research has persisted very much in the style pioneered in the 1960s and that we should try to sidestep our anthropocentric assumptions about how aliens might think and cast our net wider. It would be ironic that flying saucers and the madness surrounding them really are ET visitors that blindside our scientists because they do not conform to their expectations.

Whatever your viewpoint, this is an excellent guide and introduction to SETI with plenty of insightful anecdotes, glossary, notes, further reading list, and index.

AUTHOR: S.K. TREMAYNE | PUBLISHER: HARPER COLLINS | FORMAT: PAPERBACK | RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 6TH (AVAILABLE NOW ON KINDLE)

It sits there in your kitchen or in your bedroom or in your living room. It’s a little plastic disc and it lights up and perkily responds to your every demand, whether it’s finding the nearest takeaway restaurant, playing your favourite music, or updating you on the weather forecast. It gets a bit sniffy sometimes; ask it to tell you an off-colour joke and it’ll haughtily respond “I don’t know any of them, I don’t think they’re very funny”. So we’re told. The likes of Alexa and Siri have changed our lives… but what if they suddenly started behaving a little more sinisterly? What if they started making threats, encouraging you to kill yourself because “I know what you did”. What if your handy little device suddenly decided to ruin your life and turn everyone you know and love against you and used a foolish mistake you made in the past to completely destroy your comfortable 21st-century existence?

In S.K. Tremayne’s latest enjoyable, if slightly hysterical, page-turner, struggling recently-divorced journalist Jo Ferguson, sharing a flat in upmarket Camden with her best friend, finds her life disintegrating when the flat’s Electra devices start tormenting her with memories she has tried to consign to history. Her life becomes a living nightmare, and it’s only a matter of days before she has no idea who she can turn to and who she can trust as Electra conspires to push her over the edge by completely dismantling her existence and forcing her to question her own sanity.

It’s tempting to dismiss The Assistant as a ‘guilty pleasure’ pot-boiler, the sort of book you pick up and thunder through for a bit of undemanding light relief, but there’s actually a bit more meat on the bones than you might expect. Tremayne’s writing is urgent and compelling – if a little histrionic at times – and Jo is a believable, deeply-flawed but ultimately likeable and sympathetic protagonist. The same can’t be said of many of the supporting characters, irritating self-obsessed London-centric egos with names like Arlo, Gul, and Tabitha and they quickly become as unbearable and unlikeable as Jo is endearing despite her own pretensions and shortcomings. Tremayne clearly knows the book’s real-world locations well, and they’re brought vividly to life (even though the book takes place in the sort of Antarctic, blizzard-bedevilled winter we just don’t get in this country these days), and there’s a stifling sense of Jo’s world collapsing around her as Electra – or whoever is manipulating Electra – closes the net and closes down Jo’s life.

The Assistant is a brisk, busy read, an old school thriller with a determinedly modern world setting and you’ll quickly find yourself revelling in the twists and turns of the plot (however unlikely) and groaning at the slightly perfunctory tying-up of certain loose ends (especially one which very much drives the novel, wrapped up with an offhand ‘Oh well, it was a long time ago, why rake over the past?’). Flawed but fun, The Assistant is ideal summer reading guaranteed to help you while away a few lazy summer afternoons.

WRITER: DAVID QUANTICK | PUBLISHER: TITAN BOOKS | RELEASE DATE: JUNE 9TH

It would be difficult to herald the premise of David Quantick’s new fantasy thriller Night Train as groundbreaking. A narrative that opens with a character waking up aboard a moving vehicle, with no memory of how they got there, or even of who they are, will win few awards for originality in genre fiction.

That sense of familiarity is offset in part by the atmospheric and intriguing setting. The story unfolds aboard a mysterious train, thundering along the tracks through an endless night, rarely slowing or stopping. The train is littered with corpses, explosions erupt in the skies above and a monster tries to tear its way into the carriages to slaughter the remaining passengers.

Trying to make sense of this bewildering situation is a young woman who comes to know herself as Garland. As she begins to make her way through the train, in the hope of finding answers and other survivors, Garland encounters a series of bizarre, macabre and alarming sights. Each carriage appears to have a unique layout and purpose, although the train designer’s intent remains unclear.

Quantick has clearly had fun thinking up the different freaky phenomena that Garland uncovers. He ensures that what’s hidden behind each new door remains genuinely hard to predict. There are some well-evoked surprises along the way, as Quantick reveals the on-board shenanigans with a good deal of creative ingenuity.

Yet even as Garland learns that she is not alone, many of those discoveries come across as somewhat arbitrary – distracting attention from the business of solving the central mystery.

The book’s setting is intentionally claustrophobic and, as the train clatters along the tracks, there’s a rhythmic sense of motion towards some final destination. All of which gives the story a strong sense of drive and of tension. But Quantick seems determined to continually slow the pace. Too much time is spent depicting his characters’ reactions to the endless succession of weird and dysfunctional rolling stock they’re passing through. The three flashback ‘interludes’ tease at a wider backstory, but there’s still too little urgency about moving this railtrack conundrum towards an endpoint. Some 250 pages in, there is a settling of accounts through some careful exposition. This unearths some inventive world-building shocks, but at a point when there’s no time left to make anything much out of them.

Quantick’s novel is very far from being a train-wreck, but as anyone who’s found themselves endlessly wandering through the carriages of an InterCity 125 in search of the buffet car or the ticket inspector will attest: sometimes it really is about the destination and not the journey.

MEXICAN GOTHIC / AUTHOR: SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA / PUBLISHER: JO FLETCHER BOOKS / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 23RD

When Noemi’s father receives an unexpected letter from her cousin, Catalina, all does not seem well. Little did she know what she was getting herself into when Noemi agreed to visit her cousin and her newly-wed husband to investigate…

Inspired by the classic American Gothic genre, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest novel certainly wears it’s gristly, bleeding heart on its sleeve. A tale of madness, intrigue, and unspeakable horrors, set against the backdrop of mid-century Mexico. It should have been a fairy tale wedding for her cousin, Catalina. Being swept away to a romantic, old mansion to live out the rest of their lives. But what she found was a creaky, old, forgotten Victorian house, full of secrets and curious family rituals.

When Noemi arrives at the Doyle house to investigate this mystery she comes to discover far more than she could ever have imagined. As she encounters tales of a curse amongst the family, a terrible rot that befalls upon those who inhabit the decaying mansion. As she begins to dig deeper, she discovers that this once prosperous family have endured loss and grief over the decades. From the closure of their silver mine, to the curious deaths that have greeted their nearest and dearest. But when visions of this grim past starts to haunt her dreams, she begins to wonder if there’s something far darker behind those stories. What hidden horrors lay deep inside the Doyle household? Could her nightmares hold the key to the mysterious secrets? It’s almost as if there’s something that keeps her tied to this place, is it her longing to help her cousin, or something far deeper than that.

This is a story that’s teeming with darkly twists and turns, which will certainly give you goose bumps and a few good scares along the way. A fitting example of a new American Gothic novel, as Silvia Moreno-Garcia re-imagines this classic genre. You’ll certainly find yourself caught between gasps of horror as you start to unravel this mysterious story, just remember to leave the light on as you sit down for a good read.

THE ALCHEMY PRESS BOOK OF HORRORS 2: STRANGE STORIES AND WEIRD TALES / EDITORS: PETER COLEBORN, JAN EDWARDS / PUBLISHER: ALCHEMY PRESS / RELEASE DATE: APRIL 16TH

Whether your favourite place on the horror spectrum is the unnerving and sinister or the outright gory, there will be something to scare and intrigue you here. In this way this second outing for The Alchemy Press Book of Horrors delivers on what it sets out for itself: a selection that showcases horror as the broad church it is. With a preference for the spooky and psychological over the outright bloody, there is plenty of treasure here for the digging. If there’s sometimes a bit too much digging involved, where more aggressive editing could have made that treasure shine brighter, it’s still very much worth the effort.

Expect strong voices and memorable storylines and characters – I Remember Everything by Debbie Bennett and Footprints in the Snow by Eygló Karlsdóttir are particularly satisfying, and the latter is all the scarier for being very relatable right now. For exquisite moments of good old ghostly imagery, The Hate Whisperer by Thana Niveau is an impressive psychological picture; another is The Secret Place by Samantha Lee: a moving portrait of childhood friendship that is as amusing as it is sinister, sad and spooky. Hydrophobia by John Llewellyn Probert, a deeply claustrophobic underwater nightmare that starts leaking into the waking world, is a particularly cold and powerful tale.

In a world where short fiction, small presses, and horror itself have to work that bit harder for their shelf space, the importance of assertive editing for momentum and effect is all the stronger if the horror genre is to show it has the same (if not more) potential for depth and richness as any other. While there is a pervasive sense of words that are too often an end in themselves rather than the conduit for meaning, atmosphere, character, and story they need to be for maximum effect and momentum, the images themselves and the societal what-ifs they represent will stay with you long after you put the book down.

BINOCULAR / AUTHORS: NICK SIDHU, KELLY SMITH / PUBLISHER: MUTANT HOOF BOOKS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

‘One very unpleasant story’ boast the quote on the back cover of Binocular; ‘and then another one’. True to its word, the two tales in this self-published work are deeply unpleasant, but that’s where the fun is.

Both stories involve married couples and an outside influence, neither that go in a happy direction. Nick Sidhu’s Six tells of a handyman worming his way into the lives of a happy couple, while Kelly Smith’s Selkie has a more fantastical edge as a pair of close school friends who have developed a nocturnal bond get reacquainted in later life with devastating consequences.

Each story is ably written, with natural characters and relatable situations that grow uncontrollably dire. We can understand the protagonists’ anger with the circumstances, but only up to a point. Despite the otherwise mundane lives of the characters, we’re drawn into the situations and can’t help but feel sympathy with the frustrating happenings. Particularly in Selkie, in which the main character goes to extreme lengths to try to get his old friend back to who he thinks she should be. As one might have gathered by the title, it has elements of sea creature legend, but this isn’t where the diabolical aspect comes in. This second story is the stronger of the two, but each are disturbing in their own ways.

Self-published books tend to be a struggle, but fortunately, Binocular has enough going for it to recommend for fans of macabre kitchen sink horror.

WRITER: RAE CARSON | PUBLISHER: DEL REY | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW 

Whatever you may think about The Rise of Skywalker, there is no denying that this book is… certainly a thing that exists. In time for the home media release of the film, Rae Carson brings us the ‘Expanded Edition’ of the last instalment of the Skywalker saga (for now). In cases like this, the role of the novelisation artiste is to make the best of a bad job. She’s done that, and there are two major advantages that this book has over the film: hearing the thoughts of the characters, and the much-touted extra content that you didn’t get to see in cinemas. 

Where the novelisation shines is the chance to get into the character’s heads. The one clear improvement over the film is seeing things from Leia’s point of view. We learn that the act of saving herself from space in The Last Jedi just postponed her death rather than avoided it. Something that we didn’t get in the film was Luke calling to Leia, urging her to join him in the Force. This builds up her final sacrifice and makes it clear that by reaching out to her son, she knows and is accepting her death. 

The extra content mostly boils down to things that should’ve been in the film to begin with to stop the viewer asking questions. Bits of gap-filling information, like ‘Emperor Palpatine’s child is actually an imperfect clone’, or that Finn is in fact Force-sensitive. It’s not a reason for the book to exist by itself, but it definitely improves the experience.

The actual writing is strong; Carson moves the plot along quickly and adds some real texture to the worlds seen on screen. If it’s a choice between buying the Blu-ray or the book (and the price might mean you can only afford one), you might as well support the author making the best of a bad job.

THE ART OF ONWARD / PUBLISHER: CHRONICLE BOOKS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

The Art of Onward is the latest in the hardcover Pixar book and truly something that it need by both art lovers and film aficionados alike. The introduction by the film’s director Dan Scanlon is particularly insightful as it gives a very personal and quiet in-depth look into his though process and what he set out to do when making the film something that is very rarely found in art books. This then leads into a look at Pixar’s internal screenings progression it describes how each Pixar film goes through eight screenings every three months there is a chart that attempts to explain this.

We then move into more of the art side of things. What’s particularly noteworthy is that the art in the book is in order and follows the plot of the film there is a ton of images from the finished product as well as concept and unused art. One of the many stand out pages, we learn how the Lightfoots (main characters) pet dragon Blazey was created. They used the director’s own dog; when viewing the images side by side, it becomes very clear as to where they got their base material from – his face, in particular.

One of the first pieces of concept art for Onward was that of a talking tree, which the director thought summed up the film beautifully. Unfortunately, it did not make it into the movie which we do feel was a missed opportunity.

Another thing that becomes apparent when you are going through the art work is how some of the concepts of the fantasy based inhabitants look a lot like some of the citizens from Monstropolis, the city where Monsters, Inc. is set. One of the things that’s very easy to miss when watch the film is the side gags and how clever they are on some of the products in the film two of the writer’s favourites are a parody of Mountain Dew (Mount Doom) and the other is Cheese Puffs (Gorgonzola’s Cheese Puffs).

All told this is one of the more in-depth art books to be released with text to accompany the imagery and gives some insightful looks as to how a Pixar film is made.