Basically an Ace Doubles of interlinked stories, and it's fine, quite clever, though I felt the mystery in the 1880s was more involved than that of the 1930s. If the 1880s story had been interwoven with the 1930s, I wonder if the effect would have been the same? Anyway, I suggest reading the 1880s story first as it gets referenced a lot in the 1930s story. 

In his afterword the author talks about complaints he received about voices other than Jade's narrating in the first two books, so he decided to make this all Jade all the time (mostly) which I think was a mistake. Lovable though Jade is her trademark coping mechanism of turning everything into a slasher movie reference is unremitting if uninterrupted, and the habit of wandering down mental digressions of speculation and self recrimination and the nature of final girls and imagined motives and imagined acts, often while standing beside two or three people in the process of being brutally murdered, can actually get in the way and even confuse the complicated-enough actions and mysteries of the unfolding story. There's a self-indulgence to the self-flagellation and the dissociation which threatens to overwhelm the story, and they do profoundly effect the flow and the pacing. She came by them honestly, they're part of her character, but there's a tendency to wallow while the reader really wants to find out what the walking dead guy is going to do next with the golden pick-axe. This effect might have been diluted with a few other POVs, is all I'm saying. 

For all that, the book is a fine capstone to the trilogy, insane plot twists and insane amounts of bloody murder, and insane amounts of punishment inflicted on the protagonist and her friends. Will they be tempered in the fires of all this horror, or will they succumb to the curse of Prufrock? This is Indian Lake and this is Stephen Graham Jones: no-one is safe. 

Jonathan Carroll has been writing novels a lot longer than Neil Gaiman, and is still producing confident, baffling little boxes of wonders and terrors like his latest: The Wooden Sea. Returning again to the setting of Kissing The Beehive and The Marriage Of Sticks, town Chief of Police Frannie McCabe buries an ugly old dog that comes back to life, meets a younger version of himself and goes to experience the last week of his life somewhere off in the future. They’re all clues in an elaborate riddle, clues he must decipher, and decipher quickly, if he’s to have a hope of saving the world, from what he doesn’t know, but there are those who want to stop him and those who want to help him, and it’s kind of hard to tell which is which.

If you read Jonathan Carroll, you’ll know what to expect, if you don’t: it’s well written, painfully human and profoundly mischievous. 

someone gave me the new 10th anniversary edition, and I haven't read it since it originally came out and I don't know if it's just the sort of book that needs to be reread to be properly appreciated or if it's the nearly 12,000 extra words restored from an earlier draft, but I went from, 'yeah, I liked that,' to 'that is a brilliant piece of work.' It's a great novel, period, and I did not want it to come to an end. A great companion piece to Sandman, too, oddly enough, playing variations on themes and characters touched on there. This also includes the terrific novella Monarch Of The Glen as an extra, and now I'm really looking forward to the sequel.

2021: listened to the audio book becuase I am wallowing in comfort listening DON'T JUDGE ME

Found my original review, in a self-published zine, from, presumably, 2001:

This was a good month for books, which was a relief, considering the deteriorating state of what passes for content on our television and cinema screens. I’m not even going to bother with a Telly Visual review this issue, and if I were to tell you now that the closest I come to a wholehearted recommendation in the film section is that I didn’t hate Jurrasic Park 3, then you might throw your hands in the air in disgust and possibly cause an accident if you’re driving or cycling or directing landing aircraft or semaphoring to ships on the briny deep or holding a hot beverage in your hand. So I’ll leave that depressing revelation for later.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman is a book I probably should have been anticipating with great fervour, but seeing as I quite frankly no longer expected anything from Gaiman save for the odd short story (always welcome: one of the few writers whose short stories I actively seek out) and even if he did write something longer, well, sad thoughts of Neverwhere would put an end to any excitement. But it turns he’s been working on American Gods for the last few years and boom, here it is and it’s everything you could hope a Neil Gaiman novel would be. It has myths and stories and old, old ideas turned to skilfully catch new light. It has mysteries and secrets, it has pain and horror, it has humour and pathos, it has a hero that’s somewhere between a holy fool and an enigmatic cipher, and just when you think he’s letting it all end in futile (but entirely appropriate) anti--climax, he hits you with a resounding sucker-punch.

Shadow is our passive, shell-shocked hero, let out of prison early after the ugly death of his wife in a car accident. The mysterious Mr. Wednesday hires him as bodyguard, chauffer, straight man and general dogsbody and they embark on a fitful journey through America as Wednesday tries to rally support from a succession of bizarre characters for a desperate cause: these are the old gods, carried by immigrants from other lands to the new continent of America where they have struggled to survive with dwindling followers and smaller scraps of belief to keep them real, while the new gods of television, the internet and the media reign supreme. But are the new gods out to destroy the old? Wednesday thinks so, and is attempting to organise a unified resistance. The old gods, however, are cantankerous and individualist to a fault and the new gods aren’t too inclined to let him wander about gathering support for his cause, either. What follows is a sly, dreamy, scary trip through the more eccentric tourist spots of America and we discover something about the nature of belief, and why America is not a good place to be a god. This was one of those rare instances where I consciously slowed down my reading to prolong the experience. Partly because I wanted to savour the well crafted, finely balanced, highly atmospheric prose and absorb the meaning and import of the nested stories scattered around the book like seeds, but also because, as a long-time Sandman reader, it’s just so good to read Gaiman back on top of his form again. He writes books and comics and stories you could hang around in forever. It does read like a first novel, though, and sometime the great ideas overbalance the story, and sometmes the cool story clouds the development of the great ideas. He clearly prefers the obscure old gods and dwells on them agreeably for some time. The new gods of the internet etc. get short shrift, however; a few superficial passes, like Shadow’s coin tricks. They catch your eye, you never get a good look at them and then they’re gone. This is slightly frustrating, because they sound quite interesting and could have done with further development. Perhaps this reflects Gaiman’s prejudices: the new gods are slick, fleeting, and, once you get to know them, actully quite dull.

Still, American Gods is a good book, a great addition to the fantasy genre and with a bit of luck we can expect more like it. Hopefully, though, we won’t have to wait as long.

It's like a motto: you don't read Crumley for plot, you read him for... everything else. It's true. the rhythm of a Crumley novel is utterly unlike that of any other crime novel. The story stops and starts, drifts, twists, turns, wanders, pulls over by the side of the road to light up a doobie and enjoy the stars, then crashes through a bar and wrecks everything and kills everyone. Along the way there are great characters, strange incidents, powerful insights, substance abuse, astonishing violence, poetry and writing as beautiful as anything. Most other crime books are what I read while waiting for the next James Crumley to come along.

The last Graham Joyce book I read was The Tooth Fairy and I can't believe I waited this long to read another. This is just so damn good. Set in the early sixties, rural England, the daughter of a traditional midwife, herbalist and occasional abortionist has to cope with suddenly coping all be herself, caught between the demands of the old ways and the modern. That makes it sound a bit worthy and dull, frankly, and it isn't. It's magical and funny and scary and it evokes time and place beautifully. Brilliant.

You know, I think this is the first book I bought for Eddie new. He was just gone one at the time, and believe me, he had no shortage of books. Some were presents, the rest were picked up at assorted car boot sales and sales of work and such. But this one appealed to me because of the title, which was of the loud and raucous old campfire call-and-response poem we’d chanted in scouts, and the illustrations, which are gorgeous. 

The story has four children and their Dad heading off on the titular bear hunt, steadily marching through the assorted obstacles which confront them (grass, river, mud, wood) with attendant sound effects. There’s a chorus repeated, a description of the obstacle and then the noisy march, all to be chanted rhythmically until finally the bear is found and the family flee back through each obstacle until they get safely back under the covers of their bed and the bear goes back to his cave.

I’ve heard more than one parent complain about Going On A Bear Hunt. ‘Oh yeah it’s great,’ they say, ‘Until you’ve done it about a hundred times.’ And, well, yes, it’s the sort of thing that can get old fast for a grown-up while remaining a perpetual favourite of the child. At first the repetitive nature of the words are mitigated by the beautiful illustrations, full of charm and personality, but even that’s got to pale for after a while.

Eddie and I certainly read Bear Hunt A LOT, and we did so loudly and quickly, especially at the end when the pace can get quite breathless. Casual visitors were often startled by the energy we put into it, but that’s what made it fun. I never really got sick of it, though, because it was never Eddie’s only book, though for a long time it was his favourite, so if you really didn’t want to read it to him, there were always plenty of others to choose from.

He’s two and a half now, and almost never asks for it, though he’ll take it if it’s offered. Lately he’s become a bit more ambivalent about the role of the bear. Now he has a slightly better grasp of stories and how they work, the realisation has dawned that the bear is the villain of the piece, and I don’t think he entirely approves. Between Goldilocks and The Three Bears, Jill Murphy’s Peace At Last and a few others, including Bear in the Big Blue House, bears, as far as he’s concerned, are the good guys. Certainly, when he gets to the last wordless double page spread of the bear trudging along the moonlit beach to his cave, head bowed, all alone, his sympathy is definitely with the bear.

‘Poor bear,’ he said when I read it to him today. ‘He lost his dinner.’

Taylor Five is the story of Tay Walker, a teenager born and raised on a wildlife Refuge in the jungles of Borneo. Tay is also a clone, a fact which has had all sorts of ramifications for her and her relationship with friends and family, but she’s just beginning to cope when her home is raided by rebels and she is forced to flee through the jungle to the coast. Halam pulls no punches: in one terrible swoop, Tay loses her family, her friends, her home, all the things we use to define ourselves, all the things whose relationship with Tay were in flux because of her identity as a clone. Stripped of these things, alone but for the support of the Refuge’s mascot, an orang utan called Uncle, Tay’s struggle to survive is not only a physical one but a mental one as she tries to keep her fraying sense of self together. 

This was almost as good as Dr Franklin’s Island, except the latter had the element of surprise which is what pushes it ahead by a beak. Oddly enough, for me at least, the book doesn’t really kick off properly until Tay reaches safety, about halfway through, meets her clone-sister and tries to rescue Uncle from being sent to a zoo. In fact, it’s fair to say that Tay goes a bit mad at this point and the reader is carried along on a wave of pure sympathy as we urge her to get through this and find some sort of peace of mind.

Taylor Five has the same sort of concerns Dr Franklin’s Island did, about scientific endeavour and the very human consequences thereof. Another unputdownable book.

Well, I’ll be looking out for more Ann Halam books. In fact, I think her new one, Siberia, is in one of the shops in town and I do believe I’ll be investing in that on Friday.

Crying in the Dark was more problematic, but only in very small ways. Growing up, I had two sisters and lots of female cousins and we all got weekly comics from our parents. I hungrily devoured Battle and Warlord and Bullet and the Beano and the Dandy and the rest, and when I’d finished them I had no compunction about grapping Bunty and Mandy and Misty and reading them, too. Heck, I even read Twinkle until my sister got too old for it. Callow and all as I was, I soon came to recognise one common staple of the girl’s comic story: the saintly orphan abused by cruel relatives, the Cinderella story.

And here we have Elinor, living with her Aunt and Uncle. Bullied by her cousins, scapegoated by her Aunt, just plain ignored by her Uncle, life is tough. The sheer familiarity of the situation as ‘girl’s fiction’ grated a little, but this was amply overcome by Halam’s skills as a writer. As was the rather glaring coincidence upon which the resolution of the story hinges, grouch grouch. So Crying in the Dark isn’t quite so perfectly formed as Dr Franklin’s Island. But that was science fiction and this is a supernatural ghost story, so maybe standards are different…

On holiday in the country, Elinor begins to see visions of an old lady, hear the crying of a young child and has vivid dreams of the life of a serving girl. There’s a strange and tragic story here, one that leaks into the present and finds parallels with Elinor’s own life. She unwittingly makes a bargain with the evil to revenge herself upon her foster family, a deal she regrets but which she may be powerless to prevent. She is drawn deeper into the world of the past and the awful crime which she may be forced to re-enact.

It’s a wonderfully spooky read, and poor old Elinor’s psychological breakdown is quite compelling. Lots of great observational stuff and for all my complaints, the foster family are a wonderfully nasty bunch, not necessarily evil, just incredibly selfish. The historical mystery is sad and horrible and in the end, it was nothing at all like Twinkle. 

Ann Halam is also Gwyneth Jones, which is what prompted me to grab a brace of her books from the Children’s Library on Grand Parade (I have a small child with a library card which gives me license to plunder. Some of these teen books are good, and teenagers are far too silly to appreciate them. Also they are small and weak and easily pushed aside.) Anyway, Jones now has now acquired that coveted title of My New Favourite Writer, see review of Midnight Lamp in the nether regions below.

Dr Franklin’s Island was first and best, a sort of distaff Island of Dr Moreau, though it should be noted I’ve not read The Island of Dr Moreau, so we won’t mention that again, although the title’s evocation of Frankenstein is also worth noting. Three teenagers are stranded on a remote Pacific island after a terrible plane crash: Miranda, Semi and Arnie. Semi, shy and myopic is the narrator. Miranda is more outgoing, taking charge, finding solutions and refusing to give up hope. Arnie, the token boy character, is a prickly sod, but like the others quite vulnerable in his own way. It’s the friendship between the two girls that takes centre stage. At first they seem like polar opposites, but later we come to see they are mirror images.

The island is not as deserted as it first appears, however. Arnie disappears and the girls soon fall into the hands of the terrifying Dr Franklin who, basically, turns Semi into a fish and Miranda into a bird, using genetic engineering. It’s a painful process, but a weirdly liberating one. As transformed creatures with human intelligence the girls lose many of their physical and mental limitations, with the downside being that they are still prisoners of a man who likes to play games to test the psychological state of his subjects. Dr Franklin isn’t a sadistic villain, but a detached genius, a sociopath who cares more for his experiments than for human beings, even when the subjects of his experiments are human beings. To the girls he becomes something akin to a god.

After reading a bunch of thick hefty epics this was… liberating. Short, fast paced, with writing as smooth as ice with sympathetic, human characters all round. It has interesting, quite sophisticated things to say about science, the horrors of its misuse and the sometimes ambiguous consequences of even the most perverse abuses. The title traces a conscious literary line of scientific perversions, but the girls exult in their new forms despite their mistreatment.

I read Dr Franklin’s Island in a single day and it cut right through me. I’m still chewing over some of the issues raised, and still wondering about the lives of the characters and what happened after the final pages.