Oh lor', when the literary blurbs, and this has a lot of literary blurbs, tell you what an hilarious piece of literature you are about to read, then seriously consider ripping out those pages and pages of literary blurbs and making paper aeroplanes out of them and sending them flying to Antarctica. Sin Killer is funny, make no mistake, but, as is often the case with certain types of literary comedy, it's the sort of humour that involves somewhat grotesque characters slipping on banana peels and injuring themselves horribly and dying a long slow painful death crying pitifully for their mothers so that you come to hate yourself for ever having laughed at them in the first place.

Death stalks the American West of Larry McMurtry in many and varied forms, from sheer accident to Indians, slavers, weather and geography, plucking at the fringes of the party of the appalling Lord Berrybender, over from England to shoot lots of things, drinking claret and pleasuring himself on his mistress and either neglecting appallingly or verbally abusing his varied offspring. Elder daughter, Tasmin, spirited and spoiled, has a chance encounter on the banks of the Missouri Rover with the fierce but taciturn young trapper Sin Killer, leading to a tempestuous union where physical desire overmatches any sense of personal compatibility. As the Berrybenders and entourage voyage up the river, Tasmin and Sin Killer's relationship is the centrepiece around which swirls comings and goings, conflicts and fights, blunders and captures, torments and murders; and you know by the time you get to the end that there must be more books to come because, somehow, there are still plenty of characters left to kill.

It is brilliant, though. Nobody demytholigises the West like McMurtry, and this comic tragedy of the aristocracy of old Europe clashing with the democratic chaos of the Western Frontier, an advance party of the civilised despoilation of the great wilderness, leaves no myth standing. Arguably, of course, he replaces it with potentially enduring myths of his own, but whether these myths are closer to the truth, as if such a thing were knowable, is hard to say. Great to read, though.

An interesting, complex debut novel from George RR Martin, Dying Of The Light is an old-school planetary romance that reminded me quite strongly of both Cordwainer Smith and CJ Cherryh, oddly enough, though the setting is pure Jack Vance. Worlorn is a wandering world that enjoyed a brief heydey when, passing near a specatcular star system, it was transformed into a festival world where all the primary centres of human civilisation built cities to house thousands and even millions of inhabitants in an extravagant display of wealth and technology. Now the planet is drifting back into the dark and the cold is closing in and only a few last remnants of the festival throngs remain.

One of those remnants, a former lover, summons Dirk t'Larien to Worlorn. Gwen is caught in an odd marriage to a Kavalar, a marriage that in the eyes of Kavalar society, reduces her to the status of property. Furthermore, a particular faction of a die-hard conservative Kavalar holdfast are on Worlorn hoping to revive a forbidden tradition: the hunting of humans for sport. Caught between his love for Gwen, his growing respect for her husband, who is on Worlorn to thwart the hunters and his troubled search for his own sense of self, Dirk becomes enmeshed in the struggle and the divided loyalties and the battle between the old and the new, haunted by the spectre of death on a dying planet.

Martin's strengths as a world-builder and a story-teller are on full display here. The universe he creates is far bigger, richer and deeper than the planet of Worlorn, though nearly all the action takes place there. Did he ever revisit it, I wonder? Did he intend to? His facility for conjuring history and romance and mystery out of a few brief asides and suggestive comments and names is part of what makes him such a pleasure to read. His frank examination of a martial culture, bound by codes of honour and formal bonds and the attraction it holds for both the romantically inclined and the aimless and the lost prefigures the proud medieval chivalric culture of the Seven Kingdoms, as does his unflinching study of its dark side: the horrifying misogyny and the violence inflicted on those deemed unworthy or outside that culture.

The books ends oddly: after a frantic, edge-of-the-seat hunt, there is a period of waiting and then an anti-climax, followed by a coda that ends without a resolution, though not without resolve. It fits the setting and the theme perfectly, though, and speaks to Martin's integrity as a writer and fidelity to his vision. I hope that once the Song is finished he might consider a return to science fiction. It's clearly his first love.

Lacks resolution, doesn't move the main plot forward significantly, and it's a big, big book. On the other hand, it is incredibly well written and hugely enjoyable and does all sort of cool things. Great stuff.

So, after surviving whatever it was they survived at the end of Red Seas, far too long ago to remember - except for the bit about the cat and the ship and the old sailor guy, that was hilarious - Locke is near death, Jean is near exhaustion and the Bondsmagi are back and this time they're looking for someone to rig an election! That's right! We've gone from Donald E Westlake in Fantasyland to Ross Thomas in MadeupPlace! Except for the flashback half of the book! Which is Some Theatrical Memoir I Haven't Read in ConjuredCountry!

I know people were down on Red Seas, but I enjoyed it. Lynch turns his heists and long cons into epics by sheer dint of throwing mischance, setback, betrayal, complication, catastrophe and impossible situations by the dozen at our lovable rogues. I thought it showed flair to interrupt a complex robbery by despatching the robbers on ship to the far side of the world for a whole series of piratical adventures which they have to survive, extract themselves from and then somehow make their way back to the scene of the soon-to-be-crime where more disasters and unwinnable stand-offs await their tired selves. Hm. Remembering more of it than I thought.

Anywhoo, no setback quite so epic happens to either of the storylines here, but that doesn't mean that massive logs don't get dropped every ten yards on the tracks ahead the Good Train Gentlemen Bastards. In the past, Master Chains sends his troublesome charges for a bit of seasoning to a far-off city to help run a theatre troupe for a season. When they get there, the troupe has fallen apart, and the director is in prison for a year. Things generally go downhill from there. In the present, Jean and Locke are inveigled to rig an election in the home city of the Bondsmagi. Nobody really cares who wins, it's just a sort of hands-off competition to entertain the magicians. Much to the shock of absolutely no-one except our doughty heroes, the opposing side have brought in the love of Locke's life, ex-Gentleman Bastard Sabetha, who has a had start on them and uses it with admirable ruthlessness.

So the past story we know everyone survives, but they're also thoroughly engaged in what they're doing and the GBs must pull of unlikely miracles to keep the show on the road. In the present story, no-one really cares about the politics, but they have to put on a good show, with plenty of tricks and schemes and corruption and bluffs and double-bluffs and, not incidentally, a crucial revelation about Locke and more vague hints about threats that will, no doubt, feature in volumes to come.

Thus Lynch makes a big book out of two smaller, tighter, leaner narratives than in either Books One or Two. Clever. I enjoyed it. What more do you want?

The Passage is very much the book of the moment, promising to be as successful as The DaVinci Code or Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. It’s a big, thick blockbuster that harks back directly to Stephen King’s The Stand, and it’s every bit as fun and scary, while also being exceptionally well-written. Vampires stalk the earth! But these aren’t your teenage sparkly Twilight vampires, these are savage, hungry beasties who... but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Amy Bellafonte, in a wrenching opening section, is abandoned by her mother in the care of some nuns. Unfortunately, Amy has come to the attention of some government scientists experimenting on condemned prisoners, and a pair of FBI agents are sent to retrieve her. Despite himself, one of the agents bonds with her and decides scientific and experiments and Amy are two things he doesn’t want to go together, so he takes matters into his own hand. Unfortunately for him, the organisation he works for has a long reach.

The Passage has it all! Drama! Pathos! Science gone mad! Underground lairs! A doomed world! Flawed heroes battling against hopeless odds! It’d all be hopelessly derivative and a bit boring if it weren’t for the fact that Cronin writes like an angel and knows his pulp fiction inside out. so despite the 700 plus page count, he keeps you hanging on every word, right to the bitter-sweet end.

This is epic, world-shaking adventure, and the first in a trilogy that promises to set the trend for blockbusting literary entertainment in the future. No doubt there will be a film version along shortly, but trust me, it won’t be as good as the book. Try it for yourself and see. You won’t be able to put it down.

A massive, sprawling horror epic by a writer who seemed to bob along in the wake of the likes of King, Straub and Koontz, delivering books that at first glance seemed derivative, particularly of King, but which were consistently well-written novels of high-concept horror. Vampires descend on Los Angeles under cover of a massive dust storm; an alien bounty hunter rips a small town apart; a werewolf battles Nazis: I remember them all as being rippingly entertaining books, and it's always struck me as a bot odd that I never read this one. Well now I have.

It's terrific! Boom the world blows up! Billions die in the first chapter, and the living come to envy the dead in the radiation-scorched landscape! Evil stalks the wasteland in the form of the many-faced demon who seems to have a vested interest in the extinction of humanity for reasons that are never made precisely clear other than he's that kind of asshole. Hope also stalks the land in the form of Swan, an innocent young girl who may be the salvation of humanity! Humanity stalks the land also in the form of homicidal warmongering lunatics who build an army and go around killing and robbing people!

Violence! Horror! Supernatural evil! Fragile regeneration of life! It's all up for grabs and obviously the purest of popcorn nonsense, but McCammon writes well enough and intelligently enough to make it all read splendidly and smoothly. Oh, it makes you all nostalgic for the days when we lived in the shadow of nuclear annihilation! It sucked, but at least it gave us groovy post-apocalyptic horror of a surprisingly high standard!

So, at the end of the last volume, we found ourselves filled with deep and terrible misgivings for the future of our vulnerable band. Turns out I had nothing to worry about! Absolutely nothing bad happens to anyone in this book. All journeys are brief and easy. All sojourns safe and comfortable. All dilemmas resolved with wisdom, all heart's desire fulfilled, all children grow strong and beautiful and above average, all disputes settled with civilised words over cups of hot tea. The buffalo roam, the Mexicans prosper, the Indians thrive, the Europeans bring peace and plenty wherever they settle.

All amazingly unexpected developments in a Larry McMurtry novel! One would, perhaps, have anticipated further hardship and cruelties to plague our adventurers, to have the heart torn out of the novel and out of the reader in one flat, brief page of devastating mortality right at the dead centre of the book, from which there can only be long, lingering, spiraling fall towards an ending. Even that's not enough, and random horror begets an explosion of bloody, vengeful, sin-killing violence that lays grief on grief. Or it would if McMurtry had written more or less true to form and not produced the passages of bucolic bliss and happiness, instead of delivering the surviving frail and ravaged community of people, united in sharing a brimful of human suffering, to a more or less safe end, forever altered by their experiences of America in her birth-pangs and a landscape in its death-throes.

Lalalala.

A funny thing happened yesterday. I decided to stop reading a Gene Wolfe novel. Yup, I decided An Evil Guest just wasn't worth my time. I love Wolfe. Soldier of Sidon and The Wizard Knight were amongst my favurite reads last year, but this? Nope. It's set in the future but drenched in the past, and so triangulates on the present. Consequently, stuff that passes fine in his science fiction and fantasy becomes unbearably grating, specifically his patented 'dialogue as spoken by no living person, ever, not even bad old pulp stories.' The way characters bring Sherlock Holmes style razor sharp deductive reasoning skills to bear on stuff that at first looks trivial, and then later turns out to actually be trivial. People telling each other exactly how many points they're about to make. Vacuous female characters.
It all feels like a subtle joke, (and I suspect this book is supposed to be humourous,) not necessarily on the reader, but it just doesn't seem terribly funny, and if there's all this stuff going on in the background or hidden, then why does the stuff up front have to be so boring and stodgy? Never a badly written sentence, mind you. Maybe I'll pick it up again later in the year and it'll be better.