The Woodcutter

Courtesy of an Amazon Kindle deal, my next read is Kate Danley's debut novel, The Woodcutter.

A girl lies dead in the forest, cracked glass slippers on her feet. A beast stalks innocent hearts through the shadows of the trees. The Woods lie at the junction of Twelve Kingdoms ruled by magic and the law of story, but someone is changing the endings and the balance of power is shifting. Only one man can set things to rights, a man at one with the Woods who knows the law and knows the stories. He is the keeper of the borders and defender of the Kingdoms; he is the Woodcutter.

Danley plays with fairy tale conventions to create an intricate web of stories, where all is connected, from the blood on Snow White's hands to the giant beanstalk and the travelling hall where twelve ladies dance each night away in shoes worn ragged. Holding much in common with The Book of Lost Things or Reckless, The Woodcutter remains its own thing, not least through its protagonist, a stoic man rooted in the earth even as he walks in wonder, and shielded by the ordinariness of his own life.

The Woodcutter is one for anyone who loves fairy tales with the claws still on them.

The Man from UNDEAD: The Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist

Agent Ward works for UNDEAD, the United Nations Department for the Enforcement and Apprehension of Demons, a vast international agency responsible for magical law enforcement in a world where the Magic Circle is a global conspiracy capable of enforcing world peace and environmental legislation, but generally preferring to stay in the background and do their own mystical thang.

It is thus a shock when the Circle sends a specific request for Ward to investigate the disappearance of a brilliant, but very ordinary chemist, but the circumstances turn out to be anything but ordinary as Ward and his informal partner, the chemist's sister Miranda, travel from Oxford to Wales to Egypt on the trail of a potentially world-shattering conspiracy.

I picked up The Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist as part of a trawl through the urban fantasy available on Kindle. As the start of a primarily epublished series, it has the advantage of being a full length novel available for a pittance as a hook for the books that follow, and it's a pretty good hook. Don't get me wrong; it's not exactly replete with surprises or nuanced characters, but then again it's essentially a fantasy/horror homage to The Man from UNCLE, so treacherous blondes, eccentric - often doomed - experts and insane plans for world domination are not merely expected, they are pretty much de rigueur, and on that standard it's a fun read, well worth the 77p.

This Book is Full of Spiders (Seriously Dude, don't touch it)

It's rare that I start a book review worrying about how to write the title. It doesn't have a colon, but neither does it have brackets, but it seems wrong not to parenthesise at all. I also worry about the title of the film adaptation - if any - because most of the available options are slightly confusing.

About a year after thwarting an interdimensional plot to destroy the world, David and John are back to their old lives. They work dead-end jobs, John runs a website devoted to the weird, people with strange problems misguidedly come to them for help, and David continues a middle-distance relationship with his girlfriend Amy. Sometimes, very strange things happen to them, like the largely invisible, spider-like monster that bites David in the leg, possesses a cop and ends up sparking off an outbreak which threatens all human life and is mostly John and David's fault.

The sequel to John Dies at the End is a more coherent narrative, but retains the same mix of cosmic horror, conspiracy, fourth wall busting metafiction and crude, stoner humour that marked out the earlier book. David Wong - the author, rather than his pseudonymous alter-ego - mixes up the narrative a little more, adding several sections from Amy's sober, slightly Pollyanna perspective, alongside David the character's primary narration and the bits in which John, bereft of other witnesses, is purely awesome. There's even a chapter told from the PoV of Molly the dog.

It is, when you get right down to it, a poorly-written mess of a book, as spectacularly recreated by someone who is actually a pretty impressive writer. Every coarse joke, every cliche, every section of mangled, self-aggrandising or self-pitying prose is actually something that has been artfully and knowingly crafted as part of a novel that is by turns disturbing and hilarious; and often both at the same time.

A word of warning: I don't like spiders, but was able to cling to an early description of the creatures not really being spiders. Your mileage may vary, so if you're a big arachnophobe then seriously dude, don't touch it.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

A brief return to print books for Neil Gaiman's quasi-autobiographical cosmic horror fantasy, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. This is the result of my receiving a copy - well, actually three copies - for Christmas.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the story of an unnamed protagonist; an adult, recalling long-forgotten events in his childhood which revolve around a suicide and the three generations of Hempstock women who live on Hempstock Farm, where a duckpond might be the ocean at the edge of the world.

Drawn from events and places from Gaiman's childhood and peopled with recurring figures from his fiction (the Hempstocks have, he says, been with him a very long time), this is cosmic horror at its most intensely personal. The narrator is more lost than the reader throughout, and the fears of childhood - not of death, but of isolation, abandonment, disbelief and the confusions of the adult world - are evoked to sometimes chilling effect through the combination of the young protagonist's memories and his older self's commentary.

The book is not long and the plot not involved, but the prose is wonderful and the imagery compelling throughout, even at its most repulsive. If most of the characters are more archetypes than individuals, this is a consequence - and a deliberate one - of employing a child's viewpoint, through which things are simple and people are essentially who they are, with the possibility that they might not be mined as a rich source of horror.

Doctor Who: Nothing O'Clock

And here is my last review of the 11 Doctors, 11 Stories sequence - just in time for the much cheaper compilation to come out - and it's the Eleventh Doctor in Nothing O'Clock, but TV scribe and international bestseller Neil Gaiman.

After a handful of adventures, Amy Pond is looking forward to seeing her fiance again, but they arrive on Earth to find him gone... along with the rest of the population. An ancient Time Lord prison has failed and now the Kin are free, stalking the universe in search of the one thing they need; the last of the Time Lords.

Say what you like about Nightmare in Silver, Gaiman knows his Who and isn't afraid to play with it a bit. Here, he creates a foe both epic and personal. The Kin can destroy worlds, but they'll do it by coming and dealing with you one at a time. They are eerie and repulsive in their bizzare masks, and their vast power is all the more horrid for the pettiness of its employment.

A good end to a good series, with that one blip at the beginning. I recommend the cheaper compilation, 11 Doctors, 11 Stories to any Who fan.

Doctor Who: The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage

The Tenth Doctor gets a story from the pen of Derek Landy, prolific scribe of the Skulduggery Pleasant series.

The Doctor and Martha materialise in a white void, but stepping from the TARDIS find themselves in the English countryside. Where are they really? Who are those precocious children? What are the strange lights in the trees? And what are the smugglers up to in the caves under the woods? More importantly, is anything what it seems to be?

Landy makes a fine fist of writing the Tenth Doctor at his best; slightly lost, racing through the landscape with a machine gun stutter of words and theories instead of striding like a lonely god, and captures both the spark and the tragedy of the relationship with Martha (which, it occurs to me, has some rather striking parallels with the relationship between the Joker and Harley Quinn; there's a sobering thought). The weird fictional world is incomplete, but fantastically realised in its incompleteness.

So, yeah; I like this one.

Sometime at the start of next week, I shall finish this series of reviews with relative veteran Neil Gaiman's Nothing O'Clock.

Doctor Who: The Beast of Babylon

Charlie Higson, author of the Young James Bond novels and veteran of The Fast Show, takes up the reins for the Ninth Doctor.

Technically set at the very end of Rose, between the TARDIS vanishing and returning seconds later to take Rose Tyler away, we find the Doctor chasing Starmen; godlike beings which feed on stars. Can he neutralise them before they destroy another world, and will his new companion, Ali, help or hinder.

Higson writes the Ninth Doctor well, but there is a hiccup in the simple story here. Ali is, although concealed at first via the medium and reader expectations, a giant scorpion-creature with poisonous stingers and deadly, scything claws. She is obnoxiously bright, but also possessed of an instinctive defensive rage, and kills several people in her efforts to protect the Doctor. Regardless of species predisposition, it is hard to accept that the Doctor would be as okay with this as presented here.

This is a shame, because the book is otherwise well-written and the adventure rattles along nicely. The idea of exploring the Doctor's singular preference for human companions is an interesting one, but not quite explored enough, especially given the amount of treatment that the more vexed question of companions who kill have received through Leela and her spiritual successors.