Book Reviews

[Sock Monkey]

House Of Leaves has been one of those books I've been meaning to pick up for years. It seems to be a rather demanding read, but also sounds right up my alley. Thanks for posting the review!

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House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski
“Darkness is impossible to remember.”

Johnny Truant, party-hound, wastrel, discovers the unfinished manuscript of the recently deceased Zampano containing details of The Navidson Record, a kind of found footage film released by Miramax containing, along with much more, the two underground short films “The Five Minute Hallway” and “Exploration #4.”

“The Five Minute Hallway” shows a man facing an open doorway in his house, the hallway extending perhaps 10 feet past the threshold of the door, and with full continuity on camera the man exits a window to left of the door, crawling outside the house, and enters another window on the right side of the door, thereby revealing a spatial anomaly. The hallway should not exist; the wall should be solid. Investigation by Navidson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer in the video, reveals the interior dimensions of his new house exceed the exterior dimensions. Navidson checks, rechecks, checks again, then starts calling people to help investigate. “Exploration #4” is part of the investigation.

The wider, longer release by Miramax contains much more extensive footage captured by Navidson during the handful of explorations, and Zampano’s manuscript is an in-depth study and breakdown of the whole affair. Johnny Truant is attempting to put together and understand the loose pages of Zampano’s studies, and his own story is told in tandem with Navidson’s as he follows the incredible tale down the rabbit-hole with his sanity challenged in the process.

You move through the parallel stories containing nearly 500 footnotes of both vital information and references and dozens of pages of appendices, all the while reading backward, upside down, even holding the 700-page-plus monstrosity up to a mirror and repeatedly flipping all around the book while Navidson attempts to protect his family and Johnny learns and reacts to what happened. When it gets weird the writing style mimics the story, although it is mostly linear. If you find yourself tempted to just move on instead of rooting around for the information the author wants you to find don’t do it! Trust me on this, payoffs abound if you stick with it and dig and you won’t get the satisfaction if you don’t put in the work, so take the red pill.

Even considering the monsters lurking around here I wouldn’t expect everyone who picks this up to finish it. It’s more than worth it if you do, but you may end up leaving a little of your own sanity behind. House of Leaves is a maddening, labyrinthine spiral of frustration and awe.

“Do not entrust your future to the limits of your stride.”

5 stars

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From Hell – Alan Moore

“Knight of the East, you stand accused of mayhems that have placed our brotherhood in jeopardy, before your peers, masons and doctors both.”
“I have no peers here present.”

1888 saw a series of murders and mutilations that shocked the world and gave us one of the most infamous killers in history. There are five main murders associated with Jack the Ripper, and this book details each. Extensive research was obviously done to write this story, with liberties taken as well.

One of the first things revealed in this book is the identity of the killer. As the police and the media speculate, the perpetrator was indeed a man of immense skill, no less than the Crown’s Royal Surgeon, though he is promoted to the position near the beginning of the work.

William Gull, a high-ranking member of the Masonic order, is mixed up in the story after Queen Victoria’s son is found to have sired an illegitimate child with a local prostitute. The ‘working girls,’ destitute, learn the true identity of the father and resolve to blackmail a man close to the Crown with the information in order to stay alive. The Queen learns of the blackmail, promotes William to Royal Surgeon after he saves her son from illness, and tasks him with dispatching the women involved.

We soon begin to see cracks in the formidable Gull’s armor, as his explanations to his sadistic but frightened driver border on ravings, but as the Doctor goes about his work he gets closer to personal enlightenment, to God, even becoming unhinged in time and traveling to the future.

Gull’s ties to the Masons complicate his endeavor, as instead of quickly killing the girls he decides to mutilate them, purportedly to ward off the encroaching Order of the Golden Dawn, which William claims was responsible for the French Revolution. The Masons learn that the doctor is working under royal decree, but also that he is out of control and hatch plans to mitigate the damage and throw smoke on the issue. By the time a local detective, with the help of a psychic investigator, gets close enough to identify the killer, the murders have finished and the entire situation is on lockdown, and the few who know the truth are forced into silence.

STOP! This may all sound like an interesting, complicated story, but this is a graphic novel. The following page spread is one of the most gruesome but gives a good idea of what you can expect. Even among horror fans, this is not going to be for everyone and I want you to know how bad it gets if you're thinking about picking this one up:

Spoiler!

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Other controversial parts of the books will be the frequent sexual situations displayed, usually seeming dirty and depraved. This is not due to female prostitution, but has more to do with the men involved. While they have hard lives and are treated poorly, the prostitutes in the story come across as mostly victims of the world, a point I won’t argue.

It’s a long book by graphic novel standards, and is told in the vernacular of the time which may slow the reading down a little further, much like we Americans need to concentrate harder to understand dialogue in films like Lock, Stock and Trainspotting. The story takes some time getting properly rolling, but by the halfway point you are wide-eyed and glued to the page.

From Hell examines murder, magic and conspiracy, is exhaustively researched, and takes an unapologetic look at the human condition.

“Do you understand how I have loved you? You’d have all been dead in a year or two from liver failure, men, or childbirth. Dead. Forgotten. I have saved you. Do you understand that? I have made you safe from time, and we are wed in legend, inextricable within eternity.”

4+ stars

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[Theli]

Those "Mammoth Books" never seem to get limited editions. Would be quite a coup though.

[bugen]

I wish someone would produce a limited hardcover, quality paper and binding, etc. I think the book deserves some nice treatment. I really liked the cover too, but no art inside the TP.

[Theli]

Sounds like a killer anthology!

[bugen]

The Mammoth Book of Dark Magic – Mike Ashley (Ed.)

“Insanity is not what you see, but what you admit to seeing. … Craziness is the compulsion to explain.”
-Esther M. Friesner, “In the Realm of Dragons”

This one’s big, as the more astute may have gleaned from the title. Clocking in at nearly 200,000 words this book had one story drop into the ‘poor’ territory, had two instances of average or slightly above average stories, and most of the rest range from ‘good’ to ‘excellent.’ There are two masterful stories here, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Bones of the Earth,” marking the first time I’d read the author and she receives the award for best story, and David Sandner’s “The Wizard of Ashes and Rain,” marking the first time I’d ever heard of the author, as the runner up. I’ll be improving my familiarity with both authors.

Many of these tales are of the sword and sorcery type, not necessarily evil magic, so the British title for the book is, as usual, the more apt. But horror exists here as well as fantasy, as might not be better represented than by Tim Lebbon’s tale, “Forever.” Jesus.

The quality of the authors and range of the stories within the theme is superb. Ursula K. Le Guin and Tim Lebbon as mentioned, Steve Rasnic Tem, Tom Holt, Tim Pratt, Clark Ashton Smith, Michael Moorcock, Robert Weinberg, Darrel Schweitzer, my first Ralph Adams Cram (awesome), Mike Resnick and Peter Crowther, among many others stuffing the book full with 23 stories of sorcerers, witches, dragons, gods and monsters. Mr. Ashley provides some insight prior to each story, explaining a little about the author and why the tale was included.

It took a long time for me to complete the book, probably over a year, but there is a ton of great material here. The Mammoth Book of Dark Magic is absolutely recommended for that occasional pickup and a slow progression through the dark.

4 stars

*Please note the U.S. version had its title changed from Dark Magic to Black Magic.
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Boy’s Life – Robert McCammon

The years of a boy’s life pass so fast, Cory.” She smiled faintly. “Boys want to hurry up and be men, and then comes a day they wish they could be boys again. But I’ll tell you secret, Cory. Want to hear it?”
I nodded.
“No one,” Mrs. Neville whispered, “ever grows up.”

In the tiny town of Zephyr, mid-1960, Corey and his father witness a body being dumped in the lake of a bottomless quarry. Since no perpetrator can be identified, the body cannot be recovered and no one seems to be missing, the crime is shelved and life continues in town. But Corey and his father have not forgotten.

Our narrator is the 11-year-old Cory Mackenson, but large portions of this book might as well be narrated by us, telling our young lives back to ourselves. Much of this reads as slice-of-life, not necessarily an adventure story, and it’s these sections many folks will most strongly identify with. Mr. McCammon strikes the chord of youth and holds it throughout, and while many parts are the somber, life-lesson variety, it’s much more often an uproarious whirlwind of activity, imagination and fancy in a towering coming-of-age novel.

You’ll be hard pressed to recall a book that makes you laugh as long, as hard and as frequently as this one does–bellowing, stomach-cramping laughter. And it’ll make you cry, too, once you find that one particular experience that meshes with your own boyhood, bringing something back with it. It’s an emotionally charged novel all the way through.

The book’s tremendous humor works at least partially because the boy is narrating events with a straight face, just telling us what happened without even a glint in his eye. Because we know what we do about life the situational absurdity gets ratcheted up to another level. It works because Cory doesn’t yet know how funny it is and how his experiences will ring when he’s acquired adulthood. But we know. How could we forget?

SubPress has an excellent synopsis on their website, and in it are the three perfect words for the book. Combined with the title, what you really need to know is:

Magic, and astonishingly moving.

5 stars

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[bugen]

Happy to help! I really, really wanted that updated Monstrous Manual. Hit points and everything I still have my old one on the shelf and poke around in it here and there for some interesting monster stats.

[TacomaDiver]

Thanks for that review. I was hoping that it would be like the old Monster Manual so to find out it's not, my need for this book has gone down quite a bit.

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The Bestiary - Ann VanderMeer (Ed.), various authors

“All the same, it may be maintained that since, at the time of Creation, the Creator was altogether lacking in prior experience in this sort of thing, all kinds of errors, actually, were made. And these went unnoticed until the work was finished, as is so often the case. Ask any writer.”
-Michael Cisco, “Figmae”

I’d heard about The Bestiary quite a while back and had been following with much interest, thinking it would be a modernized compendium put together by Weird royalty and play out as a highly researched, ultra-cool version of the Dungeons and Dragons Monstrous Manual.

Except that’s not the case. This book makes no attempt to document any strange creatures of myth or magic from history or fable, instead asking its authors to create entirely new creatures of their own design with an assigned letter of the alphabet beginning its name. Artwork is heavily featured throughout the relatively small book, with a new illustration for almost every entry. Results vary greatly, but this assembled talent bent toward the purpose of creating new life has done exactly that.

One of my favorites was “Bartleby’s Typewriter,” a story by Corey Redekop about a creature that changes its physical shape, including bone structure, to blend with its environment. “Daydreamer by Proxy” by Dexter Palmer and “The Vanda” by Rikki Ducornet I also found as standouts, as well as “Ible” by Brian Evenson and “Orsinus Liborum” by Catherynne M. Valente, but Michael Cisco knocks it out of the park with his “Figmae,” a creature that folds into our universe perfectly.

Another feature of each of the sections is small piece at the end of each, where the author creates another creature in a paragraph or so, often humorous, and usually a variation on the author’s name. For instance, after detailing her new creature, “The Karmantid” Karen Heuler concludes with: “The Heulertwit is a bird with a nattering squawk and an exact number of feathers which never seem to be the exactly the feathers she thought she had.”

In spite of the positive elements the book presents a challenge in that its creatures and ideas are so far out there. It’s very difficult to read the book story to story because each is so abstract, requiring a new mental gear with every new creature. It’s got a nice spot reserved on my shelf; this is exactly the book you reach for when blocked, or when you think you’ve seen everything already and need concrete evidence that the boundaries can be pushed further still. Having arrived at the conclusion this was the proper place (for me) for this book, I skipped the last 4 creatures (X, Y, Z and The) in order to be able to pull this book off the shelf for something new in the future.

It’s a very different collection, but has its place.

3- stars

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Summer of Night - Dan Simmons

“Nothing was as simple as stupid people assumed it to be.”

When it’s all stripped away, are there stories we like more than coming-of-age? I’m considering my favorite books, most of which are not of this type, and still having a hard time answering the question. These stories, well done, resonate with us because we partially believe. We’re no longer children susceptible to monsters and boogymen, but we never really forgot the magic of childhood. Not all the way.

Mr. Simmons didn’t forget either. He captures this so perfectly that you become lost in your own childhood while reading about his characters’ lives. Very few authors can move from rip-roaring adventure to sickening dread, to full-blown terror, and then leave you fighting back tears all within a few pages. This is rich, intelligent storytelling at its finest, and I’m saddened to have finished the book. A comparison to Stephen King’s IT can be made, not because it’s the same story, but because it’s also a coming-of-age monster tale, it’s also a humdinger in length, and it’s also about a good as a story can get.

A small-town group of kids is forced to confront an unspeakable evil. The plot. The plot of many coming-of-age books in the genre. Except it’s not. Is it ever when holding real quality?

"There had to be many intellectual puzzles that could not be solved by a visit-or many visits-to a good library, but Duane McBride hadn't found one yet."

5 stars

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Indian Summer – Rick Hautala

“What?” Billy was flabbergasted and started thinking maybe he couldn’t handle all of this “adult world” stuff. Maybe he should go find his friends and just be a kid.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Mr. Hautala never had a pretentious thought in his life. He didn’t seem to be trying to impress anyone, he just wrote a lot of true fiction. And if his story wanted to tell you that Joe ran, he wouldn’t waste the next 350 words flowering up the prose with his thesaurus; he’d just tell you that the sumbitch ran. In a storytelling environment where language is often more important than storytelling I can’t tell you how much I respect that.

In this novella a young boy named Billy hears town’s fire alarm and investigates the source in the surrounding woods along with his friends, despite knowing the trouble he’ll get in with his folks. Locals are already fighting the fire and hand out some gear to the kids, and in order to get the better of the fire and become a hero, at first opportunity Billy heads into the woods to come at it from the other direction.

Lost in the woods, Billy happens upon the house of the mysterious Ellie, who’s traumatized by a gruesome murder from her past. Billy becomes a kind of reluctant fried to Ellie and begins to learn the nature of the recent forest fires and the danger that may be present in the woods as he balances his old friends, his new friend and his parents while trying to do the right thing and be a grown-up.

This is a good story, but not quite on the level of some of his other shorter works, many which I hold in the highest regard. I have his career retrospective of short stories (Glimpses) on the shelf in the direct company of Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, and if I could compliment the guy any higher than that I don’t know how.

Mr. Hautala was one hell of a writer, and Indian Summer is a quick and enjoyable read.

3 stars

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“Two’s Company” - Joe Abercrombie

“Are you two idiots really going to fight over where you fight?”

Two female traveling companions, both fighters, are engrossed in a conversation about the more ridiculous aspects of mens’ anatomies when they come across an extended bridge with the other end obscured by mist. They begin to cross, but in the middle are met by a group of male fighters traveling in the opposite direction.

Introductions are made, chests are puffed, and each party demands the other step aside to make passage.

What follows is a hilarious, escalating battle, filled with great action and a few instances of Lord Grimdark’s trademark wit and wisdom. This story does not carry the traditional weight of Abercrombie tales, and while it’s still got some grit it’s the most lighthearted I’ve yet seen from him.

It’s a short story of about 7,000 words and anyone interested can read it for free online at the following link:

http://www.tor.com/2016/01/12/twos-c...e-abercrombie/

4- stars

[bugen]

Thank you guys for pointing out Finney's book. I just picked it up.