Archive for horror

Carrie Cuinn and KV Taylor (eds) – FISH

cuinntaylor-fishWhat secrets belong only to a fish? Dive in and find out.

Mannetje, mannetje Timpe Te,
botje, botje in de zee,
mijn vrouwtje die heet Ilsebil,
ze wil niet zoals ik wil.
Van de Visser en Zijn Vrouw in De Sprookjes van Grimm,
Van Holkema & Warendorf, 1984

O man of the sea!
Come listen to me,
For Alice my wife,
The plague of my life,
Hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!
The Fisherman and His Wife in Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
Puffin Books, 1971

Before I started this blogging lark, if you’d come to me and said ‘Listen in three years you will read a short story anthology filled with nothing but stories inspired by the concept of fish AND you are going to really enjoy it,’ I would have thought you’d lost your mind. Indeed I hardly read anthologies and come on, an entire anthology pf fishy stories? Who would think of that and then publish it? Well, Carrie Cuinn would and did. And what’s more, I really did enjoy this anthology tremendously. Who knew, past me, who knew?

So, 33 stories inspired by fish, what do those look like? Perhaps not unexpectedly, there are several stories inspired by the fairy tale of the fisherman and his wife and several folk and mythological tales from around the world. But there are also fish in space, magical fish familiars, adventure fish and even a narcissistic eel. All of the stories are surprising, even if not all of them worked as well for me. To shake my anthology reviewing format up a little, I’m going to review my favourite stories individually.

Paul A. Dixon – One Let Go
A layered story about choices, crossroads, and wisdom that resonates down the years. I love the separate stories Dixon manages to fit into this gem of a story. At the heart of it is the history of a magical talking salmon, how he chose to stay out to sea instead of traveling upriver to the spawning grounds to procreate and die, how he’s seen the world’s oceans and has finally found his way back to his birth river. But it is also the story of the boy Ian, who catches the salmon together with his grandpa and the choices they make when the salmon offers them a deal: release him in exchange for wisdom. But it is also the story of the man Ian, who has to decide whether he’ll settle down to raise his son or get back out on the highway and freedom. All three stories end in choices, but only one of those choices is revealed to the reader, the others are implied only and how the reader interprets them is largely up to her. I loved the thoughtfulness of the story, its layering and its build-up to the end. I know what I hope Ian chooses to do in the end, but the fact is I’ll never know and my hopes are based on the person I am and how my life looks. I think others might wish him to make a different choice.

Andrea Zup – Maria and the Fish
A variation on the magical, boon-granting fish, I loved the prolonged interaction between Maria and the Fish. There is an absolute smugness to Maria, which instead of making her unsympathetic, is rather endearing and the Fish’s vindictive interpretation of her wish is fabulous. There is a sense of fun and whimsy to the story and a snarkiness to the dialogue that is highly entertaining. It ends on a perfect note and left me with a smile on my face.

Corinne Duyvis – The Applause of Others
I adored this story almost as much for its setting as its narrative. It’s set in Amsterdam and is written not with the eye of a stranger but someone familiar with the city and its character, who knows to look beyond its tourist trap façade to its everyday magic. I loved how Duyvis incorporated details about Dutch life and culture without signposting them, dropping in names and features. The connection between Floor and the narcissistic eel is fascinating and disturbing and its ways of seemingly taking revenge on those who ignore it, threaten it, or take attention away from it is very fitting both as its a fish and due to the eternal Dutch struggle against the encroaching sea. This is the first time I’ve read a Dutch speculative author and I can’t wait to read more from Duyvis.

April L’Orange – Quick Karma
Orange’s Quick Karma may just have been my favourite story out of the bunch. I adored the characters and the premise. Wizards and familiars, a reincarnated gold fish, a wizard-in-training, a roller-derby playing roommate, and that only covers half of it. The tone and pace of the dialogue was quite snappy and the pacing overall was very good. I really enjoyed the story and the resolution. Quick Karma also felt as a fantastic set-up for a series and I’d love to read more about Merritt, Davey, and Susan!

Andrew S. Fuller – A Salmon Tale, 2072
This is a gorgeous, post-apocalyptic tale, cast in the mould of a mythological origin tale. I absolutely adored it. From the glimpses of society’s collapse to the rebuilding of life in a new setting and the importance of traditions therein, it struck a perfect note. It’s also a tale of man helping nature reclaim her natural state, taking down man-made structures and setting her free. I loved the cadence of the writing. I actually read this one out loud to my daughter as she was fussing and despite stumbling on the pronunciation of the Native American words and names, the rhythm of the sentences carried beautifully. It’s a beautiful story with quite a hopeful ending.

Suzanne Palmer – Lanternfish in the Overworld
Sometimes the journey is as important as the destination and for the little lanternfish who needs to deliver a massage to the Overworld it’s a big journey indeed. I loved the richness of Palmer’s ocean setting and the way the different fish interacted. The eventual moral of the story was beautiful and the ending lovely. It felt like a fairy tale, a tale you could read to children too and I really loved it.

These six were my favourites, but all of the stories were interesting, even those I didn’t end up liking much. The idea behind FISH is an interesting concept and the stories found within show the versatility of the genres collected under the umbrella of speculative fiction. Cuinn and Taylor have gathered together an interesting and talented bunch of authors and created a memorable reading experience. As with their previous release, In Situ, Dagan Books have published another interesting and beautiful anthology; one that doesn’t just contain beautiful words, but beautiful art as well. If you like short fiction and are looking for a quirky and unique collection of stories, you can’t go far wrong with FISH.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.

By Mieneke Published 8 March, 2013 Posted in fantasy, horror, review, science fiction Tagged: , | 1 Comment

Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon (eds.) – Dark Faith: Invocations

frontcover_02Religion, science, magic, love, family–everyone believes in something, and that faith pulls us through the darkness and the light. The second coming of Dark Faith cries from the depths with 26 stories of sacrifice and redemption. Sublet an apartment inside God’s head. Hunt giant Buddhas in a post-apocalyptic future. Visit a city where an artist’s fantastic creations alter reality. Discover the deep cosmic purpose behind your office vending machine. Wield godlike powers and suffer the most heartbreaking of human limitations.

Join Max Allan Collins, Mike Resnick, Jay Lake, Jennifer Pelland, Laird Barron, Tom Piccirilli, Nisi Shawl, and a host of genre’s best writers for an exploration into the things we hold dear and the truths that shatter us.

Faith is a strange thing. It’s at once deeply personal, but in the form of religion, very much institutionalised. It can be a well spring of strength and hope, but is also one of the main reasons for conflict in the world. Every religion, every splinter sect within those religions, holds to its own truths, and every person of faith has their own version of what faith entails. As such, the idea of asking for stories exploring the notion of faith is intriguing and would have to result in 26 different visions. As someone who isn’t sure what to believe, let’s say an agnostic leaning to the atheist side of things, having a look at people’s interpretation of faith is fascinating. And even beyond the usual fact that not every story in an anthology is going to work for every reader, in Dark Faith: Invocations I found that I had about a one in three chance to truly connect with a story. This isn’t to say that those were inferior stories; but that they just didn’t resonate with me due to the direction they took the faith in their story.

What did become apparent is that there were some obvious themes, despite the fact that these were 26 unique stories, within in this collection. One is that faith equals love; that one of the strongest faiths people have is their faith in their parents (The Divinity Boutique by Brian Hatcher); that having one’s beliefs proved or disproved, having the truth revealed is the death of faith (The Revealed Truth by Mike Resnick, Thou Art God by Tim Waggoner); and that the God or gods people put their faith in aren’t always benign or infallible (The Cancer Catechism by Jay Lake, Kill the Buddha by Elizabeth Twist, God’s Dig by Kelly Eiro). There were also a surprising number of funny stories in the anthology, my favourites of which were Subletting God’s Head by Tom Piccirilli and The Revealed Truth by Mike Resnick.

Stories that touched me deeply, perhaps due to their inclusion of an important parent-child bond were Night Train by Alma Alexander, The Sandfather by Richard Wright, Starter Kit by R.J. Sullivan, The Divinity Boutique by Brian J. Hatcher, and Little Lies, Dear Leader by Kyle S. Johnson. I loved the fragility of Alexander’s story, the way that faith in oneself is so important and how much that can be bolstered by becoming a parent. It helps you plumb new depths of strength, because there is now this new life depending on you. A little person that believes you can do anything and it’s incumbent on you to keep that faith unbroken for as long as you can. I love how in this story that faith is reflected by the lost souls on the train and that the protagonist’s unborn child is that which saves her dying lost personal god. In both the Wright and the Johnson story unconditional love and faith is the power that drives both of these relationships. The imagery of the Wright story was beautiful and I kept wondering what would be behind the door. The Johnson story is perhaps not truly speculative fiction, as the idea that in totalitarian countries dissidents are made to disappear for not complying with the institutionalised groupthink is frighteningly real. But the willingness of the father to die for his ideals and the willingness of the mother to lie to keep her child safe touched me deeply.

Three stories that don’t truly fit any one category, but that I really liked are A Little Faith by Max Allan Collins and Matthew Clemens, Magdala Amygdala by Lucy A. Snyder, and I Inhale the City, the City Exhales Me by Douglas F. Warrick. A Little Faith was a story about trust poured into a crime/thriller story mould. I’m a sucker for crime stories be they in book format, on TV, or on the big screen, so no surprise that this story piqued my interest. But I really did like it beyond the setting and the style, as it showed how much strength can be derived from the belief that there is always someone at your back, someone who won’t give up on you. Snyder’s story, which was nominated for a Stoker award last week, is properly horrifying and best not read over lunch or dinner. It was horrid, but also fascinating and the SF-nal ideas behind it well-conceived. My last highlight, the Warrick, was a strange as it was wonderful. I loved the concept of interdependence, that whatever Megumi put out there to influence the world changed it and this changed world in turn influenced how her story progressed. It’s also man as the author of his own destiny, in control of his own actions as shown in the American journalist’s refusal to act according to her expectations when confronted with the victim-virgin-slut doll-girl she drew for him. I found it quite a visual story, which is fitting for a story about an animator, but the ending leaves the reading guessing and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

While I didn’t connect as strongly to all of the stories, most of them did make me think, about their concept or about my reaction to it. And I think that is the ultimate goal for this anthology, so job well done. If you aren’t easily offended in matters of religion – not that the stories are really offensive, but I can see how they might disturb some – and find philosophical musing about matters of faith interesting, Dark Faith: Invocations is a good, thought-provoking read, containing some really amazing stories by great writers.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.

By Mieneke Published 27 February, 2013 Posted in fantasy, horror, review, science fiction Tagged: , | Leave a comment

Emily McKay – The Farm

emilymckay-thefarmFor Lily and her twin sister Mel there is only the Farm. . .

It’s a prison, a blood bank, a death camp — where fear and paranoia rule. But it’s also home, of sorts. Because beyond the electric fence awaits a fate much, much worse.

But Lily has a plan.

She and Mel are going to escape — into the ravaged land outside, a place of freedom and chaos and horrors, Except Lily hasn’t reckoned on two things: firstly, her sister’s ability to control the horrors; and, secondly, those out there who desperately want to find and control Mel.

Mel’s growing power might save the world, or utterly end it. But only Lily can protect Mel from what is to come . . .

When I received my review copy for The Farm I’d already seen some buzz and reviews around the blogosphere and those while quite positive didn’t do the book justice at all. They made the book out to be a bit of fluff reading, with vampires, teenaged protagonists, and the obligatory romance. So while I planned to read and review the book, I went into it with medium expectations thinking I’d probably like the story well enough, but my overall reaction would be meh. Honestly, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead I found a well-written, well-developed world, with three interesting main characters, and a really exciting plot. The Farm utterly won me over, despite my expectations.

To start off with, there is the excellent characterizations. The Farm is told from three different perspectives: Lily, her twin sister Mel, and Carter, past-crush and would-be-saviour. I really liked the three very different voices McKay created for these characters, especially that of Mel. McKay switches point of view at the start of chapters, not every other chapter, but each chapter is told from one perspective. Lily’s chapters are told in first person past simple, while Mel’s are first person present, and Carter’s is told from third person limited past simple. This doesn’t just make it easy to distinguish between view points, but it also helps build the way we see the characters. We get really close to Lily, because we are literally in her head, while Carter is kept at a bit of a remove. Mel’s viewpoint was brilliantly done. Mel suffers from Autistic Spectrum Disorder, and while quite high-functioning in the Before as they call it, she’s regressed quite a bit into herself. Her chapters reflect that, by showing us how Mel interprets the world around her through a musical lens and how in her own circuitous way she’s actually quite often spot on in her observations. McKay keeps Mel’s chapters few in number though, so they don’t lose their impact, both on the story and as a device.

Beyond the writing aspect of the characterizations, there is the excellent character development. The character we spent most of our time with is Lily. She’s very protective of her sister and quite distrustful of the world in general and Carter in particular, something which manifests in an extremely prickly and antagonistic attitude. Over the course of the story, she softens and she comes to realise that Mel is not just a burden; she’s also what’s kept her going on the Farm. I loved this arc, though its eventual consequences at the end of the book, took me completely by surprise. The development of her relationship with Carter was fascinating as well, both because of their interactions based on their belief that she is an abductura – a person who can control other people through their emotions – and their history together. I really enjoyed the push-pull of their attraction. Carter is a lovely lead, trying to balance both his feelings for Lily and his need to get her to safety because of the role she could play in the rebellion against the forces behind the Tick-manifestation. These three are joined by three others on their flight from the Farm: Sebastian, Carter’s vampire ally, Stoner Joe, and McKenna, who were both at school with Lily, Mel, and Carter. Each of these has their own character arc and role to play in Lily’s development and I found them all to be interesting in their own right.

Beyond the characters, what surprised me most was the wonderful world McKay created. Not that the world is such a happy place, far from it, but it was well-thought out and quite frightening. I was glad of the fact that there weren’t many info dumps beyond the initial set up at all. We got more information as it came up and was relevant to the story, in other words this was showing not telling, which I really appreciated. The events after the Tick outbreak and the way government reacted are frightening, even more so when you think about its plausibility. Not so much the Tick outbreak, as I don’t expect there to be a mass vampiric creature manifestation any time soon, but the rules and regulations and the ‘protective’ incarceration of teens in camps might not be as far-fetched as one would like.

The Farm was an engrossing read, and while fun and thrilling, it’s very much not just a bit of YA fluff. The Farm is a thoughtful exploration of what it means to love a sibling with special needs, how it’s not just a burden, but can be a gift as well. It examines why some people choose to fight and others choose flight instead of cooperation. It’s a surprising book and one that cleverly mixes dystopia, horror and vampires into a story that is as compelling as it is touching. The Farm, thus far, is the surprise of the year for me and I’m looking forward to reading the sequel The Lair hopefully later this year.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.

By Mieneke Published 7 February, 2013 Posted in horror, review, YA Tagged: , | 1 Comment

Anticipated Books (Winter/Spring) 2013: Science Fiction and Horror

2013Fear not! For on the third day of Anticipated Books posts there will be horror – well, one horror book anyway – and science fiction. Both SF and horror were genres I managed to explore further in the past reading year with success, so this year there are more books in this list than last year. For some of these I already have an (e)ARC or review copy, so they’ll definitely be read and reviewed. And for the rest, I’ll have to see whether I get the chance to get my hands on them!

Science Fiction

January
Natsuo Kirino – The Goddess Chronicle (Canongate)natsuokirino-thegoddesschronicle
In a place like no other, on an island in the shape of a tear drop, two sisters are born into a family of the oracle. Kamikuu, with creamy skin and almond eyes, is admired far and wide; Namima, small but headstrong, learns to live in her sister’s shadow.

On her sixth birthday, Kamikuu is presented with a feast of seaserpent egg soup, sashimi and salted fish, and a string of pure pearls. Kamikuu has been chosen as the next Oracle, while Namima is shocked to discover she must serve the goddess of darkness. So begins an adventure that will take Namima from her first experience of love to the darkness of the underworld. But what happens when she returns to the island for revenge?

Natsuo Kirino, the queen of Japanese crime fiction, turns her hand to an exquisitely dark tale based on the Japanese myth of Izanami and Izanagi. A fantastical, fabulous tour-de-force, it is a tale as old as the earth about ferocious love and bitter revenge.

rameznaam-nexusRamez Naam – Nexus (Angry Robot Books)
Mankind gets an upgrade
In the near future, the experimental nano-drug Nexus can link human together, mind to mind. There are some who want to improve it. There are some who want to eradicate it. And there are others who just want to exploit it.

When a young scientist is caught improving Nexus, he’s thrust over his head into a world of danger and international espionage – for there is far more at stake than anyone realizes.

 

James Smythe – The Explorer (HarperVoyager)jamessmythe-theexplorer
When journalist Cormac Easton is selected to document the first manned mission into deep space, he dreams of securing his place in history as one of humanity’s great explorers.

But in space, nothing goes according to plan.

The crew wake from hypersleep to discover their captain dead in his allegedly fail-proof safety pod. They mourn, and Cormac sends a beautifully written eulogy back to Earth. The word from ground control is unequivocal: no matter what happens, the mission must continue.

But as the body count begins to rise, Cormac finds himself alone and spiralling towards his own inevitable death … unless he can do something to stop it.

February
MadScientistsDaughter-144dpiCassandra Rose Clarke – The Mad Scientist’s Daughter (Angry Robot Books)
“Cat, this is Finn. He’s going to be your tutor.”

He looks and acts human, though he has no desire to be. He was programmed to assist his owners, and performs his duties to perfection. A billion-dollar construct, his primary task now is to tutor Cat. As she grows into a beautiful young woman, Finn is her guardian, her constant companion… and more.

But when the government grants rights to the ever-increasing robot population, however, Finn struggles to find his place in the world.

Naomi Foyle – Seoul Survivors (Jo Fletcher Books)naomifoyle-seoulsurvivors
A meteor known as Lucifer’s Hammer is about to wreak destruction on the earth, and with the end of the world imminent, there is only one safe place to be.

In the mountains above Seoul, American-Korean bio-engineer Dr Kim Da Mi thinks she has found the perfect solution to save the human race. But her methods are strange and her business partner, Johnny Sandman, is not exactly the type of person anyone would want to mix with.

Drawn in by their smiles and pretty promises, Sydney – a Canadian model trying to escape an unhappy past – is an integral part of their scheme, until she realises that the quest for perfection comes at an impossible price.

karenlord-thebestofallpossibleworldsKaren Lord – The Best of All Possible Worlds (Jo Fletcher Books)
The Sadiri were once the galaxy’s ruling élite, but now their home planet is unlivable and most of the population killed. The few groups living on other worlds are desperately short of Sadiri women, and their extinction is all but certain.

Grace Delarua is assigned to work with Councillor Dllenahkh, a Sadiri, on his mission to visit distant communities, looking for possible mates. Delarua is garrulous and fully immersed in the single life; Dllenahkh is controlled and responsible for keeping his community together. They both have a lot to learn.

April
Ian Whates (ed.) – Solaris Rising 2 (Solaris)ian_whates-big
Having re-affirmed Solaris’s proud reputation for producing high quality science fiction antologies in the first volume, Solaris Rising 2 is the next collection in this exciting series. Featuring stories by Allan Steele, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kim Lakin-Smith, Paul Cornell, Eugie Foster, Nick Harkaway, Nancy Kress, Kay Kenyon, James Lovegrove, Robert Reed, Mercurio D. Rivera, Norman Spinrad, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Liz Williams, Vandana Singh, Martin Sketchley, and more. These stories are guaranteed to surprise, thrill and delight, and maintain our mission to demonstrate why science fiction remains the most exiting, varied and inspiring of all fiction genres. In Solaris Rising we showed both the quality and variety that modern science fiction can produce. In Solaris Rising 2, we’ll be taking that much, much further.

Jared Shurin & Anne C. Perry (eds.) – Pandamonium Fiction: The Lowest Heaven (Jurassic London)
The Lowest Heaven explores the furthest reaches of the Solar System with help from the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Today’s greatest science fiction authors set out on missions of discovery, with new stories inspired by our closest celestial neighbours.

May
eric-brownEric Brown – Serene Invasion (Solaris)
THEY ARE HERE… AND WE ARE NOT READY It’s 2025 and the world is riven by war, terrorist attacks, poverty and increasingly desperate demands for water, oil, and natural resources. The West and China confront each other over an inseperable ideological divide, each desperate to sustain their future. And then the Serene arrive, enigmatic aliens from Delta Pavonis V, and nothing will ever be the same again. The Serene bring peace to an ailing world, an end to poverty and violence but not everyone supports the seemingly benign invasion. There are forces out there who wish to return to the bad old days, and will stop at nothing to oppose the Serene.

Wesley Chu – The Lives of Tao (Angry Robot Books)Wesley-Chu
When out-of-shape IT technician Roen woke up and started hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumed he was losing it.

He wasn’t.

He now has a passenger in his brain – an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Now split into two opposing factions – the peace-loving, but under-represented Prophus, and the savage, powerful Genjix – the aliens have been in a state of civil war for centuries. Both sides are searching for a way off-planet, and the Genjix will sacrifice the entire human race, if that’s what it takes.

Meanwhile, Roen is having to train to be the ultimate secret agent. Like that’s going to end up well…

al_ewing-bigAl Ewing – The Fictional Man (Solaris)
Niles Golan is writing a remake of a camp-classic spy movie. The studio has plans for a franchise, so rather than hiring an actor, the protagonist will be ‘translated’ into a cloned human body.

It’s common practice – Niles’ therapist is a Fictional. So is his best friend. So (maybe) is the woman in the bar he can’t stop staring at. Fictionals are a part of daily life now, especially in LA.

In fact, it’s getting hard to tell who’s a Fictional and who’s not…

June
Alan Averill – The Beautiful Land (Ace)alanaverill-thebeautifulland
Takahiro O’Leary has a very special job working for the Axon Corporation as an explorer of parallel timelines—as many and as varied as anyone could imagine. A great gig—until information he brings back gives Axon the means to maximize profits by changing the past, present, and future of this world. If Axon succeeds, Tak will lose Samira, the woman he has loved since high school—because her future will cease to exist. The only way to save her is for Tak to use the time travel device he “borrowed” to transport them both to an alternate timeline.

But what neither Tak nor Axon knows is that the actual inventor of the device is searching for a timeline called the Beautiful Land—and he intends to destroy every other possible present and future to find it.

The switch is thrown, and reality begins to warp—horribly. And Tak realizes that to save Sam, he must save the entire world…

stephaniesaultergemsignsStephanie Saulter – Gemsigns (Jo Fletcher Books)
For years the human race was under attack from a deadly Syndrome, but when a cure was found – in the form of genetically engineered human beings, Gems – the line between survival and ethics was radically altered.

Now the Gems are fighting for their freedom, from the oppression of the companies that created them, and against the Norms who see them as slaves. And a conference at which Dr Eli Walker has been commissioned to present his findings on the Gems is the key to that freedom.

But with the Gemtech companies fighting to keep the Gems enslaved, and the horrifying godgangs determined to rid the earth of these ‘unholy’ creations, the Gems are up against forces that may just be too powerful to oppose.

Guy Haley – The Crash (Solaris)
The Market rules all, plotting the rise and fall of fortunes without human intervention. Mankind, trapped by a rigid hierarchy of wealth, bends to its every whim. To function, the Market must expand without end. The Earth is finite, and cannot hold it, and so a bold venture to the stars is begun, offering a rare chance at freedom to a select few people.

But when the colony fleet is sabotaged, a small group finds itself marooned upon the tidally locked world of Nychthemeron, a world where one hemisphere is bathed in perpetual daylight, the other hidden by eternal night. Isolated and beset, the stricken colony members must fight for survival on the hostile planet, while secrets about both the nature of their shipwreck and Nychthemeron itself threaten to tear their fragile society apart.

Frank Schätzing – Limit (Quercus)
2025. Entrepreneur Julian Orley opens the first-ever hotel on the moon.

But ORLEY ENTERPRISES deals in far more than space tourism: it operates the world’s only space elevator, connecting the earth with the moon and enabling the transportation of helium-3, the fuel of the future.

Now Julian has invited twenty-one of the world’s richest and most powerful individuals to sample his lunar accommodation, in the hope of securing the finances for manufacturing a second lift.

Meanwhile, on earth, cyber detective Owen Jericho is sent to Shanghai to find a young female hacker, Yoyo, on the run since uncovering information that someone seems very determined to protect.

As Jericho closes in on the girl, and the conspiracy surrounding her, he finds increasingly concerning links to Julian Orley – and his enemies and competitors – that suggest the lunar expedition is in real and immediate danger.

Horror

alisonlittlewood-pathofneedlesAlison Littlewood – Path of Needles (Jo Fletcher Books, January)
A murderer is on the loose, but the gruesome way in which the bodies are being posed has the police at a loss. Until, on a hunch, an expert in fairytales is called in. And it is Alice who finds the connection between the body of Chrissie Farris and an obscure Italian version of Snow White.

Then, when a second body is found, Alice is dragged further into the investigation – until she herself becomes a suspect. Now Alice must fight, not just to prove her innocence, but to protect herself: because it’s looking like she might well be next.

By Mieneke Published 18 December, 2012 Posted in article, horror, science fiction Tagged: , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Jason Jack Miller – Hellbender

Although the Collins clan is steeped in Appalachian magic, Henry has never paid it much attention. But when his younger sister dies mysteriously Henry can’t shake the feeling that the decades-old feud between his family and another is to blame.

Strange things are happening at the edge of reality, deep in the forests and mountains of West Virginia. Let Jason Jack Miller take you to a place where love is forever even when death isn’t, where magic doesn’t have to be seen to be believed, where a song might be the only thing that saves your soul.

Hellbender came as a complete surprise. I’d expected an urban fantasy with some supernatural elements and all that entails; instead I got a beautiful gothic story which mixed lyrical descriptions with some downright bloody dialogue and action. It was a pleasant surprise from an author I hadn’t heard of before. While it was a great story, I did have some issues with the book.

The setting is key in Hellbender, I don’t think the story would have worked even half so well if set in any other place. It is set in the Appalachian Mountains – a region I don’t know much about except that it’s a mountain range in the Eastern part of the US – but in Hellbender the Appalachians are so much more than just a mountain setting. They create their own seemingly rather isolated communities, which often have a history going back for over a hundred years, and which grown a people unique to their ranges. However large the places named in the book maybe, they always felt like they were small, and everyone knows everyone, their grandfather and their aged horse. It’s that kind of small, rural village feeling, though there seems to be more logging and mining going on than farming. Miller creates an incredibly atmospheric setting – that at times seems almost otherworldly – that leaves the reader enchanted and creeped out at the same time.

Dropped into this environment is a cast of great characters, though I did have one or two complaints in this department. Actually all complaints boil down to same source: motivation. There were several characters whose motivations weren’t really clear to me. Mostly this applied to the bad guys in the story, the Lewises, and their cronies, but there were a few good guys as well. To start with the bad guys, I didn’t get why they were still keeping on with the feud. I understood the basis of the dispute, but why did it go on after all this time? And why were some ‘outsiders’, such as Lucinda Tesso, so invested in the fight? Similarly, on the Collins’ side, there are Greg and Preston. While I could kind of understand Preston’s motivation, his fiancée is a Collins, I didn’t see why Greg would get himself mixed up in it. However, I didn’t get hung up on these questions, mostly because Miller swiftly moves on with the action and I kept telling myself that blood feuds aren’t logical and reasonable anyway.

What I did like was that the protagonists were both awesome and flawed. And Miller has no problem letting his female protagonists take care of themselves and has them taking physical damage just as much as his male protagonists. Henry, the main character and the narrator of the story, is very much a sceptic when it comes to the Appalachian magic and I appreciated his struggles to accept the reality of his situation. I also like his reluctance to get drawn into the feud after his sister is killed to the point of taking off and not getting in touch with his family for over six months. However, when he does decide to do something about the Lewises, he fully commits and there is no going back. As for his love interest, Alex, I loved her spirit. When she initially re-enters his life, I was all set to go, oh no, not another damsel-in-distress, but she turned out to be far more interesting, even if there were some oblique Romeo-and-Juliet vibes going round. I liked that she decides to act for herself and not rest in the bosom of the Collins family and wait till the menfolk finish the feud. She’s not the only one, Rachael and Katy are similarly strong females and I really enjoyed Miller’s characterisation of these women.

Overall the plot worked well, though in conjunction with my questions about the motivations for some of the characters, there were also some things in the plot that had my raising my eyebrows in wonder. For example, how on earth can there be so many bodies and no one gets arrested? I know the Lewis family have bought off the local sheriff, but I’d expect with those numbers, outside law enforcement would come into it at some point? What about the families of the Lewis workers that get killed? Also, the way the object that started all the problems gets passed down didn’t make sense to me. How come Alex gets to have it? Why doesn’t it pass to Ben, the eldest son’s eldest son, or to Katy, the daughter’s eldest daughter? But as with the motivational questions, these thoughts quickly got lost as I was swept on by the action. Hellbender is a very fast-moving book. There are moments where Miller allows his characters and his readers to breathe, but these never last long and are always followed by more and even more serious action.

Despite my reservations, I really enjoyed my time spent in the Appalachian Mountains, courtesy of Hellbender. Miller succeeds in drawing the reader into his setting through loving description and the atmosphere wafts off the page. Hellbender is a great example of a modern gothic horror story and makes for a wonderful read.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.

By Mieneke Published 27 November, 2012 Posted in fantasy, horror, review Tagged: | 1 Comment

Edwina Harvey & Simon Petrie (eds) – Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear

When I was approached about reviewing Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear, I’d just reviewed (and loved) Joanne Anderton’s first two novels, so her name was the one that convinced me to accept the review request, together with that of Brenda Cooper, whose writing I’ve encountered previously in several Valdemar anthologies and which I’ve always enjoyed. It turns out however, that this anthology holds far more attractions than just those two stories. As the anthology isn’t based around a hard and fast concept – from the introduction it becomes clear that the editors strived to evoke the same sense of surprise and wonder you get from watching fireworks – I thought I’d try something different this time and look at each story individually.

Joanne Anderton – The Bone Chime Song
As I had expected after reading her novels, I loved this story, as I really enjoy Anderton’s writing. Dealing with a murder mystery, this story explores the cost of war to those who have to perform unspeakable acts in its fighting, the way it leaves them damaged and hurting. It’s also a story of quiet love, constant in the face of societal disapproval. I really enjoyed the narrator’s voice for this story, he’s interesting and seems a man given to deep emotion and devotion, both to his craft and to those he loves.

Sue Bursztynski – Five Ways to Start a War
This was another hit. I loved this alternate look at the start of the Trojan War, which takes Helen firmly out of the role of faithless seductress and makes both her and Paris pawns on several playing boards. The structure with the different narrators and points of view was well-done and quite interesting. It’s also very funny and irreverent, a playful look at one of the world’s original epics.

Dave Luckett – History: Theory and Practice
The Truman Show: fantasy edition. That’s actually a rather flippant and not quite accurate description, as this story goes a little beyond that and it rather straddles the line between fantasy and SF. I loved the fact that it starts out reading as straight up fantasy, with some hints as to something not exactly adding up, but the eventual twist and reveal is awesome. I really liked this one.

Adam Browne – The D____d
Dante’s Seven Circles of Hell are being colonised by the British Empire in this steampunk-flavoured story. In addition to its steampunk vibe there are some definite overtones of horror to the tale. I like the conceit of the tale that everything in Hell is formed out of bodily components, such as rivers of blood, mucus rain drops, and trees made of fleshy limbs. It also makes the story rather icky, though, and if you have a vivid imagination, you might want to steer clear.

Katherine Cummings – The Travelling Salesman and the Farmer’s Daughter
A full on SF story with a delicious twist at the end, what more can you ask for? After being out of contact for two centuries due to civil war Earth is trying to re-corral all their colony planets. In the story we follow one of their forward scouts cum ambassadors on his mission on a rather curiously run planet. I really loved the twist ending, even if I’d partially seen it coming. Still, it made me rethink the entire story and made me doubt everything about the setting.

Thoraiya Dyer – Faet’s Fire
Faet’s Fire is a lovely little story about regret, wishes and the desire to turn back time to take a different path. I liked this one, especially its rather melancholy and sad ending, because for all its sadness, the reader is left with hope for Faet’s future.

Anna Tambour – Murder at the Tip
The story starts with a fun excerpt from a journal article, which also touches on the story’s main theme, which asks the question where and when we draw the line at giving artificial beings rights. The protagonist’s frustration with his hardware will be quite recognisable for anyone who’s ever fought with their computers. Still, while well-written, the story didn’t completely click for me and was one of my least favourites.

Rob Porteous – The Subjunctive Case
Brilliant! The Subjunctive Case was easily my favourite of the bunch. The story is a noirish paranormal detective in which our protagonist can split himself in two and have different aspects of himself conduct investigations simultaneously. I really liked the voice of this story; it’s strong and confident. The actual case is interesting too, as it combines good, old-fashioned sleuthing and legwork with paranormal aspects in an environment – the story is set in Melbourne – not usually the backdrop for urban fantasy. I also liked the eventual resolution of the story, as it might not be what you’d expect. I really enjoyed this story and I hope to see more from Rob Porteous in this setting in the future.

Ripley Patton – Mary Had a Unicorn
Another very cool premise in this story about a drug-abusing teen who is given a drug-sniffing and destroying unicorn as a companion to get her back on the straight and narrow. I really liked the development of Mary, the protagonist, from someone who isn’t very sympathetic at all, to someone from whom all hope hasn’t been lost that she might turn into a decent human being after all. It’s a story of change and redemption. I really enjoyed the story and the writing.

Brenda Cooper – Between Lines
Cooper’s story is excellent. I really liked the story within a story and the way the build up to the apocalypse was done. I loved the conspiracy theories galore and the mind trick played on the protagonist.

Ian McHugh – The Godbreaker and Unggubudh the Mountain
A lovely secondary world story about loyalty, belief, religious diversity, and love. I really enjoyed it, though it took me a while to get into the writing style and the world.

Sean McMullen – Hard Cases
A political SF story set in an undated future, Hard Cases didn’t really work for me, as the politics seemed muddled and there wasn’t really a clear resolution.

Kathleen Jennings – Kindling
While the protagonist’s power is interesting and her desire to play a larger role in the world universal, I just couldn’t achieve a click with her and couldn’t get into the story as a result. In addition, Jennings uses an intertwining narrative structure, mixing a narrator telling Minke’s story with scenes of Minke’s day-to-day life, which worked rather confusing for me, as I couldn’t relate the overarching narration with the scenes at the bar. While the story premise was interesting, its execution just didn’t work for me.

With Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear, Harvey and Petrie achieve what they set out to do: compile an anthology that would make the reader sit up and pay attention, to delight and surprise them as much as a fireworks show might. This collection of stories is a delightful surprise, and even if there were two or three stories that didn’t work as well for me, I had a really good time reading these stories and have discovered some new names to look out for in my reading.

This book was provided for review by the editor.

By Mieneke Published 21 November, 2012 Posted in fantasy, horror, review, science fiction Tagged: , | 9 Comments

Richard Salter (ed.) – World’s Collider

The Collision is the worst disaster in human history. So far…

In the near future, an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider causes an enormous explosion, known as the Collision. The blast flattens a huge chunk of central Europe and punches a massive hole in the Earth’s surface. Over the next decade, unspeakable horrors pour from the rift: vicious creatures with a taste for human flesh, a terrible scream that drives all who hear it insane, a phantom entity that feeds on fear and paranoia, and a nightmare train from the pits of hell, to name but a few. This onslaught of terror causes the collapse of civilization and threatens to wipe humanity from the planet.

World’s Collider is a unique concept in short fiction, where all eighteen original stories are part of a common narrative, recounting the disaster and its aftermath. A true novel by many voices, including Steven Savile, James Moran, Aaron Rosenberg, Trent Zelazny, Jonathan Green, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Kelly Hale, Richard Wright and a host of new talent.

Fifty million people died in the Collision. They were the lucky ones…

World’s Collider is an interesting experiment in which eighteen short stories tell one continuous story. It’s a largely successful experiment too. While the narrative is formed from a host of disparate voices, it creates an intricate whole and Salter’s made sure that the main characters’ personalities don’t shift too much between the stories and that there aren’t too many inconsistencies. The premise of the story – what if we discover what in essence are wormholes using the Hadron Collider in Geneva – is interesting and the vision of the slow apocalypse that follows is quite frightening, showing both the best and worst mankind has to offer.

The stories are told in different formats, via blog posts and comments, in journal format, as flashes of vision, in first person and third. This creates a dynamic feeling and also allows for the different writing styles to blend, so the narrative doesn’t feel too choppy. The characters are quite interesting too; the different authors capture the different ways humans cope with disaster quite well. There are several main returning characters, that of Scott Fletcher, Natalie Murphy and Joseph Tern. If Scott and Natalie are on the side of the angels – not literally, though some would have you believe differently – then Joseph Tern is the devil incarnate. He’s a full-blown psychopath, who kills people for pleasure and forms a conduit for something that is even less pleasant. Their development across the stories is not as completely as one might like, but it went further than I had expected. I would have liked to have seen more of how the years after the Collision had affected Scott and where Natalie came from before she became the hardened soldier we meet in The Coming Scream. Scattered about the narrative are several returning characters with larger or smaller parts and it’s fun to spot the connections.

Even if World’s Collider is one narrative, as with any anthology there are bound to be stories that click better with each individual reader than others. In my case, my favourite stories were Keep Calm and Carry On Parts I-IV, The Rise and Fall of the House of Ricky, What Little Boys Are Made Of, and Caught. The Keep Calm and Carry On sequence was a great look at how social media, in this case blogs, might function in an apocalypse, but also how tenuous a link it is to the outside world—once WiFi and electricity goes, you’re lost. I also liked how it gave us snap shots of the same people not at the heart of the narrative, at different points of the apocalypse. The Rise and Fall of the House of Ricky was just very fun, as I love Project Runway – yes, I watch horrible reality TV shows to turn my brain off – and I can so see this happening, a fashionista giving up their soul for fashion. It’s a creepy story, but despite that fun! What Little Boys Are Made Of broke my heart. Not just the fact that these two small children were left alone, but the way the eldest tried her best to care for her little brother knowing full well that it was almost beyond hope. One might say it was an easy play on sentimentality, but I found it well-written and I loved the voice of this little, six-year-old boy. Caught was a mixture of dread and paranoia shaken with a good bit of suicide mission and served on ice-cold cubes of creepy. I’m quite afraid of spiders and the fact that the ‘enemy’ here had taken the form of a spider gave me chills, but despite this I liked the way the relationships and interactions between the characters were drawn.

The ending is of the narrative is nebulous. While it might be the happy ending humanity hoped for, it never explicitly says so and there are some loose ends which make me wonder about a possible sequel. Because if they are not there to serve as plot hooks for a further novel, they are just very glaring loose ends. Still, as it stands World’s Collider is an engaging read, which is both scary and encouraging; humanity sinks deeply, but also shows its resilience and rises above itself. The book might not work for everyone, as it is not quite fish nor fowl due to its experimental nature, but I appreciated the concept and its execution, even if it wasn’t completely flawless. If you’re a fan of anthologies and would like to see what the form can stretch to, World’s Collider is well worth a read.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.

By Mieneke Published 9 November, 2012 Posted in horror, review, science fiction Tagged: , | 1 Comment

Jared Shurin and Anne C. Perry (eds.) – Pandemonium: Lost Souls

Lost Souls is a collection of forlorn and forgotten stories, carefully selected by the editors of the Pandemonium series.

The anthology brings together tales of woe and angst, loneliness, redemption and humour, featuring starving artists, possessed Popes, damned kings and hopeful prisoners. Lost Souls is an exploration of what it is that makes us human – and what happens when that’s stripped away.

Earlier this year I was blown away by Jurassic London’s first two Pandemonium anthologies, Stories of the Apocalypse and Stories of the Smoke, making their two other anthologies shoe-ins for anticipated books of the second half of 2012. Lost Souls is the first of those and I can tell you the anticipation was well-deserved. As I received an e-copy of the print version, I can’t attest to the veracity of the claims about its gorgeous exterior, but I did get to see Vincent Sammy’s stunning artwork and that alone would be worth the price of entry!

It is important to note, however, that unlike their previous anthologies Lost Souls isn’t a speculative fiction anthology. Or rather it doesn’t exclusively contain speculative stories. In addition to ghost stories, a fairy tale and a myth-inspired story, there are stories without a hint of the fantastic, though they might still be horrific, especially those stories set in the First World War. The anthology is divided into five sections, each depicting a different form of lost souls. In Lost we meet the ones who lost their way in life, the homeless, the unfulfilled, and the obsolete. Power shows us how power and influence can lead one astray and to lose faith in our fellow man. Stories allows us to figuratively and literally get lost in fiction, while War details the loss of life, of innocence, and an entire generation of young men in the Great War and a wholly different fight inside a prison’s walls. But what was once lost can also be found and in the section of the same title we are shown stories of redemption, justice and love in the strangest of places.

Lost Souls contains too many stories to touch on all of them, so I’ll pick my favourite from each section and point out the ones that didn’t work for me. John Galsworthy’s Quality (Lost) is a haunting story of a cobbler specialising in boots, whose vocation is becoming slowly obsolete and who withers away piece by piece until one day he’s just gone. I loved how Galsworthy slowly severed all of the old man’s moorings until he just couldn’t hang on any more. From the second section, Power, my favourite was the first one included, Mary Coleridge’s The King is Dead, Long Live the King. This is a somewhat more traditional ghost story where the King in the title has entered into a deal with Death and learns about the true shape of his life. Coleridge, great-grandniece of the famous poet, writes of heart-breaking discoveries in a lyrical tone and while I wished the King to live to right the wrongs he’s left behind, I found the ending both fitting and bitter. George Gissing’s Christopherson, which can be found in the Stories section, is a story that any bibliophile can relate to, even if we might never put our books before our loved ones. I certainly can understand the reluctance to give away your books. But at the same time, I loved the narrator, his impatience and exasperation with Christopherson and his determination to help Mrs Christopherson escape her unhealthy situation. Marooned, Robert W. Chambers’ World War I story, was a straight-up horror story, from the claustrophobia, to the sense of isolation, to the final disastrous release of our protagonists’ desperation. And while showing many, if not most, of the emotions of those soldiers sentenced to the trenches, Chambers succeeds in showing us not just what forced inaction does to an honourable man’s psyche, but also gives us an entirely different setting in the Great War. My favourite from the final section, Found, was Amelia B. Edwards’ The Four-Fifteen Express, which is both a ghost story and a mystery. I loved the way Edwards set the mystery up and how in the end everyone gets what they deserve.

Two stories that didn’t really work for me were Calista Halsey Patchin’s The Professor and John Reynolds’ The Prisoners. Patchin’s story just didn’t grab me and the final twist just broke any suspense of disbelief for me, as I thought it would be unlikely for the widow to show up like that. Reynolds’ The Prisoners wasn’t uninteresting, but the fact that Osgood Vance had to edit it to make it readable was clear, as it still felt repetitious at times and for me the story just lost its impact after the third or fourth inmate.

With the exception of the introduction written by Shurin and Perry and the two stories adapted and written by Osgood Vance and David Bryher respectively, none of these stories was written before 1919, with the oldest of them, Benjamin Disraeli’s Ixion in Heaven first published 1853. In spite of their age, most of these stories remain eminently readable, even if at times their prose is a little dated. Taken together, this resurrection of these out-of-print stories makes for a rich reading experience as well as a reminder that love, loss, sorrow and all the other human emotions displayed herein are timeless. With Lost Souls Shurin and Perry have not only delivered another wonderful anthology, but have shown themselves to have a great eye for what makes a good story, be it speculative or not.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.

By Mieneke Published 2 November, 2012 Posted in fantasy, horror, mainstream, mystery, review Tagged: , | 3 Comments

Jonathan Oliver (ed.) – Magic: An Anthology Of The Esoteric And Arcane

They gather in darkness, sharing ancient and arcane knowledge as they manipulate the very matter of reality itself. Spells and conjuration; legerdemain and prestidigitation – these are the mistresses and masters of the esoteric arts.

As a hardcore fantasy reader magic is part and parcel of my reading and I consider a well-thought-out and realised magic system as a thing of beauty. So an anthology based around the concept of magic had to be something I enjoyed. So, you’ll probably be unsurprised to discover that I did enjoy Magic: An Anthology Of The Esoteric And Arcane quite a lot. What surprised me was that, while magic is the common denominator in all of these stories, no two forms of magic are the same and in some of them it’s more pervasive than in others. There is also a rather amazing diversity of settings and not all of these are fantasy, some are horror! Most, if not all, are set in the ‘real’ world, even if that world is pervaded by the magical or supernatural.

I first learned of this anthology when Solaris announced they had snagged Audrey Niffenegger to be one of its contributors. Her name drew my attention, not because I’d read any of her work before, but because she’s one of those rare genre beasts, an author who is embraced by the mainstream. So much so, that I hadn’t even realized that she was a genre writer. I do hope her inclusion here will prompt some non-genre readers to pick up this anthology and discover that speculative fiction isn’t as scary a ghetto as they might think. Niffenegger’s story The Wrong Fairy was inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s father and, while enjoyable and well-written, it isn’t my favourite out of the bunch. Another author with an outside-genre draw is Christopher Fowler. His story The Baby – about a teen girl that gets in over her head and her struggle with her unwanted pregnancy after being raped – was eerily timely given some of the utter bile that was spilled during the US Presidential campaign recently. Liz Williams’ Cad Coddeu was a lovely fantasy, with mythical overtones, which I enjoyed very much. All three of these were solid, enjoyable stories, but they kind of stuck around in the middle for me.

Every anthology has hits and misses. Often these differ from reader to reader. The misses in this one for me were Will Hill’s Shuffle, Thana Niveau’s First and Last and Always, Gemma Files’ Nanny Grey, and Robert Shearman’s Dumb Lucy. Hill’s Shuffle just confused me and while I liked the cards angle and the prose, I didn’t get drawn in enough to try and make sense of the story. Robert Shearman’s Dumb Lucy had a similar effect, though this time I liked the atmosphere and the characters, but was completely confused by the setting – was it Earth or second-world? Past or future? – and the ending. Thana Niveau’s story had an interesting concept with its idea of love charms gone wrong, but it just didn’t ring my bell; for some reason neither Tamsin nor Nicky made me care and thus the story’s ending lacked impact for me. The one story that just didn’t do it at all for me was Gemma Files’ Nanny Grey. It just left me cold, the characters were unsympathetic and the twist in the story just turned into a knot for me.

Then there were several stories I connected to but where the ending just let them down, either because I wanted more from that final scene, I didn’t want to leave the characters or the ending just confused me. Steve and Melanie Tem’s Domestic Magic rather broke my heart and Felix got under my skin immediately, with his quite crackpot mum and his handful of a little sister, who he feels is very much his responsibility. I really loved this story and I just didn’t want to leave Felix and Margaret. I wanted to follow along and find out that they were safe and they would have a happy ending. So Domestic Magic wasn’t a bad story at all. On the contrary it did its job too well and didn’t let me go. The ending to Alison Littlewood’s Art of Escapology similarly left me wanting. I really enjoyed the premise and the haunting, but the final scene ended rather on a fizzle than a bang for me and I kind of felt deflated by it. Dan Abnett’s Party Tricks played off its prestige too well. I thoroughly enjoyed the politicking and the rather old-fashioned feel of the writing, though that might be due more to the fact that our narrator is one of the upper class old-boys network and this is reflected in his manner of speech, than to the fact that Abnett meant it to feel old-fashioned. I was really drawn into the story and while I understood the twist end, it just left me going uh what? How did he do that? And this feeling of confusion stayed with me rather than the enjoyment I got from the rest of the story.

For me, the hits of Magic were the stories written by Sarah Lotz, Storm Constantine, Lou Morgan, Sophia McDougall and Gail Z. Martin. Lotz’ South African crime scene cleaners were awesome and the story was many-layered, from the straight-up mystery itself, to the underlying themes of rejecting one’s own heritage for another, to the wish to protect the innocent, in this case the cat. I think If I Die, Kill My Cat is a story that will lend itself to rereading beautifully, revealing more with repetition. Storm Constantine’s Do as Thou Wilt is a gorgeous story of traditional witchery, a lover’s revenge and a philanderer’s just deserts. I really enjoyed Leah’s cynical outlook on love and her way of making Carol’s wish come true. From what I’ve read from Lou Morgan, I loved her novel Blood and Feathers, but her short story in Stories of the Apocalypse lost me with its ending, so I was curious to see how I would enjoy Bottom Line. This story of addiction, redemption and self-sacrifice was amazing and this time I followed Morgan all the way to a hallelujah. From the same Pandemonium anthology previously mentioned, came my only previous encountering of Sophia McDougall’s writing. I fell in love with her story there and I loved her MailerDaemon here. McDougall reinforces her first impression of being a superb writer with a distinctive turn of phrase. Lastly I was taken by surprise by Gail Z. Martin’s Buttons. What an absolutely charming story, that I couldn’t help but love. I was pleased to read an interview with Martin on the Solaris’ blog where she reveals having written numerous short stories in her Deadly Curiosities universe, which means there’s more to discover with these characters and I can hold out hope for a Deadly Curiosities collection or even novel!

Overall the hits outnumbered the misses and I really enjoyed the time I spent with Magic: An Anthology Of The Esoteric And Arcane. Jonathan Oliver delivers a great collection of stories, that forms a great introduction to these writers and I know there are several whose other works I’ll seek out given half a chance! For a diverse take on the idea of magic in all its incarnations, Magic: An Anthology Of The Esoteric And Arcane is as far as you need to look. It ranges far and wide on the thaumaturgical scale, but it has magic in spades.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.

By Mieneke Published 30 October, 2012 Posted in fantasy, horror, review Tagged: , | 2 Comments

John Ajvide Lindqvist – Little Star

A man finds a baby in the woods, left for dead. He brings the baby home. The man’s son, Jerry, teaches the child music. Deciding he can’t let the girl’s uncommonly beautiful voice go unheard, Jerry enters her in a singing competition. Miles away another young girl sees the performance on television. When the two girls meet, a terrible force is ignited that catapults this duo to a top spot in the horror Hall of Fame.

Last year I decided I needed to man up (woman up?) and get over my wussiness regarding horror. One of the books I read in that pursuit was John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Harbor. To my utter surprise I loved it. Yes, it was scary, yes it was utterly, dreadfully creepy, but I loved it to pieces. At the time, Little Star had already been released in the UK – I had read the US edition – and from some of the reviews I’d already read and some conversations on Twitter, I knew that at some point I really wanted to read this book. Imagine my excitement when I received an ARC for the American edition in the mail earlier this year! Since I always try to put up reviews close to their publication dates – and the past months have been busy for various reasons – I put off reading the book until last week, when I finally dove in to the strange and twisted tale Lindqvist has spun in Little Star. It was everything it was promised to be and more.

Lindqvist doesn’t rely on gore to make his tale horrific; he gets there by masterfully displaying the deepest and darkest foibles of human nature. In the case of Little Star, there is nothing quite as scary as the mind of a teenage girl – oh lord, grant me strength in ten years time! – and  Lindqvist plumbs the depths of said teenage psyche to great effect, playing off a completely strange and unrelatable teen girl against one that is eerily familiar if taken to the extreme limits of plausibility. This contrast between the two storylines in roughly the first half of the book is created with consummate skill and one has to look closely to see the seeds that the author plants in them; seeds that he’ll later use to entwine two to a whole that only amplifies the horror of the situation and left me feeling powerless because the reader can’t intervene in Teresa’s descent into madness, even if she might recognise the signs of what is going on with her.

The titular Little Star is Theres. She’s a fascinating and contradictory character; how can you not sympathise with an abandoned baby – an innocent, discarded – found and raised in captivity and isolation in a situation reminiscent, but quite different, of that of Natascha Kampusch and Elizabeth Fritzl? At the same time there is something off about Theres, or Little One as she’s called for much of her early life, from the beginning, and it’s hard to put a finger on what that is and on whether it’s inherent to her genetic makeup or created by the way she is brought up and the lies she’s been told by Lennart to keep her in line. I loved the way she transforms herself into something resembling a guru to this tribe of teenage girls, by empowering them in the most frightening of ways, by indoctrinating them to the way of thinking she’s been taught by Lennart and the experiences of her early life.

If Theres is alien to the human experience, Teresa is all too familiar with it. As such, Teresa’s journey in the book is the scarier of the two. She starts out a seemingly normal child. One that asks somewhat strange questions, but children are wont to ask the weirdest and sometimes deepest questions out of the blue. Still, she seems normal, if shy, until puberty and then her slow descent begins. It starts with her best friend moving away, just as she reaches the cusp of puberty and her body starts changing. These changes are unkind to her to say the least – Teresa turns into a bit of an ugly duckling it seems – and combined with the loss of her best friend and the move to secondary school, it serves to isolate her and make her the prime target for the class bullies. What makes Teresa’s story scary is that it’s so believable, it’s easy to see how a young girl could get so isolated and depressed at that age—we hear or read about teenagers like that all the time. It’s also easy to imagine the kind of idolising devotion Theres inspires in Teresa; one has only to think of the screaming girls at any given Bieber concert to prove the point. I connected more to Teresa than I did to Theres, as Theres was too other to comfortably form an attachment too, and I kept hoping against hope that she’d come to her senses and see what was happening to her.

Throughout the novel Theres personifies control. Despite everything, she is in control of first Laila and Lennart, the people who keep her, by dint of their fascination with her vocal gift and later of Jerry, her ‘adoptive’ brother, who feels a kinship and love for her he hasn’t felt for anyone else. Ultimately she controls Teresa and their pack of girls by giving them a sense of control over their emotions and their lives, a sense which is ultimately an illusion. Lindqvist plays with Theres’ apparent and real positions of power; for most of the novel she seems submissive and powerless, even if she is subconsciously pulling everyone’s strings. She exudes a weird sense of fascination, enthralling everyone who comes into her sphere.

At the close of Little Star two questions remained for me: what happens to Jerry and why was Theres dumped as an infant? Was she inherently flawed, even evil, and did her upbringing just (re)enforce this or was she made into what she was by the way she was treated from infancy? It’s the age-old discussion on nature versus nurture and once again, inevitably, we are left without the answer. In the end, I think I prefer not knowing Jerry’s fate and the truth behind the mystery of Theres’ nature; it leaves us the space to hope–hope for a happy ending for Jerry and hope that Theres wasn’t just a product of her upbringing, that there has to be a crack for abuse to shatter someone’s humanity so completely. Little Star leaves us with plenty of gristle to chew over and Lindqvist’s tale will haunt me for a while longer. I think I can now also safely say that Lindqvist has single-handedly cured me of my horror of Horror. Little Star is another stunning novel and Lindqvist is truly a name to be reckoned with in his field and beyond.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.

By Mieneke Published 5 October, 2012 Posted in horror, review Tagged: | 3 Comments

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