My Life in Reviews

So, this page here is a list of the many reviews I wrote for Write Away (now Just Imagine) when I was teaching. I stopped when I stopped teaching; having begun in my first English Lit training class with a copy of Across the Nightingale Floor and another of Shadowmancer, which I never even managed to finish, I think it was too tied up in my mind with being a teacher.

NOTE: Well, apparently Write Away doesn't do reviews anymore, so that link is a dead duck. Ah well; brief was my glory.

A Madness of Angels

In a continuing vein of urban fantasy, I moved on from John Dies at the End to the slightly more accurately named A Madness of Angels. I'd tried it before and been turned off early by some pretty minor grammatical and stylistic flaws, which on a second reading proved quickly to mask a quirky and adept use of narrative voice. In fact, I suspect that part of the problem was that the accidental errors hid the deliberate beats.

Having got over that, I was able to engage with the book on its own terms and discover a really new and exciting vision of an urban-fantastic landscape, where sorcerers draw their power from the tiny magics of everyday life and the turnstyles of the Underground make the finest hermetic pentagram look like a welcome mat; where the quirks, fears and frustrations of everyday living are writ large as the spirits and gods of a new pantheon and the symbolism of the everyday becomes the language of modern magic.

Ultimately, the greatest failing of the book is the protagonist, a first person narrator who manages nonetheless to be a cypher. In part, this is deliberate, he is a mystery even to himself for much of the book, but for me it went further than that and, even as he became more realised, it was hard to connect with him through the layers of magic and weirdness.

This niggle aside, I enjoyed the book very much and shall be reading more of the series... when/if the price for the Kindle editions drops a bit.

Next up, China Mieville's The City and the City.

John Dies at the End

I read kinda slow these days. As the weather gets nicer, I walk more often, which takes out my bus ride reading time, and at home I spend as much time as I can with the baby. Except when I'm right near the end of a book and become this shamefully neglectful lunk trying to finish.

I mention this largely because a distracted stream of consciousness seems the right way to review David Wong's 'comic horror' novel, John Dies at the End, which is sort of what you'd get if HP Lovecraft had done a lot of really relaxing medication and spent most of his life sitting around on the couch playing video games while August Derleth took notes and published them, only not actually like that at all.

What the book takes most of all from Lovecraft is a sense of cosmic futility. While our protagonists David and John battle monsters and gaze into the abyss with blithe disregard for standard Neitzchean safety protocols, they lack the triumphal surety of later Mythos heroes (if such a pair of words can ever be allowed). What they take from those later figures is the desire to fight instead of just fainting. To borrow a phrase from the movie I was watching yesterday - and honestly, that also feels like an appropriate thing to do in a review of this book - they are the guys who don't know what they should do, only what they can do, and choose to do it.

And the result is a lot of fun, and the kind of fun that keeps on giving. Hell, it was only looking out the image above that I came across the author's description of the book as a 'comic horror' and realised that this might be a pun on 'cosmic horror'; maybe I'm wrong, but it is apt.

I am excited to see the movie, if only to see how someone might make this book into a movie, let alone how well.

Fearless

Fearless is the second book in Cornelia Funke's Reckless trilogy, following the adventures of Jacob Reckless, a young man who escapes from the burdens of his life through a magic mirror, entering a parallel world of fairy tales.

Reckless introduced our hero and his partner, Fox, a young woman who can shapeshift into a vixen with a magical fur coat, but at the price of aging in fox years while transformed. We learned of Jacob's life as a treasure hunter, seeking mystical trinkets out of fairy tale, and of the changes wrought on the mirror world by his father's introduction of 'real' world inventions for his own profit.

Rescuing his brother from the Dark Fairy cost Jacob dearly, and as Fearless begins he is dying from an inescapable curse. With all of the standard curatives proving useless, he seeks a dangerous last chance: a weapon of terrible and destructive magic that might just possess the power to heal if wielded in love.

What follows is an adventure story with heart and guts. The fairy tale mirror world is a dark and dangerous - one might say Grimm - place, and while the central story stands on its own, it also links into a wider narrative. The central characters are likeable and convincing, with their courage and their fears, their strengths and their failings. I have had a lot of time for Funke's work since I was introduced to Inkheart, and for me at least, Fearless is Funke at her best.

Retrolective: From the Ashes

This was, barring a couple of Spider-Man comics I stumbled on as a young boy (I was unimpressed, although largely because anything with Black Cat in is too predicated on the UST between Spidey and not-Catwoman to appeal to a six year old), my first brush with Superhero comics. I was fourteen or fifteen (I know, right, but seriously for years I had literally no idea that either Superman or Batman had been in comics first) and I found it in the library. I wasn't new to comics - I'd been reading Marvel UK's slightly expanded Transformers run for years and read through most of Judge Dredd: Cursed Earth during rehearsals for Oliver! - and I knew of the X-Men in passing from a choose-your-own-adventure book I'd picked up - also in the library - which hadn't been very good, but which had intrigued me enough to check out this comic, or rather trade paperback.

I must have read it cover to cover three or four times in a couple of days.

Having no background with the ongoing series, I had no idea what the Phoenix Force was or who Jean Grey had been, but that was part of what intrigued me; the fact that this seemed to be part of a much larger world. Part of the reason I read and re-read was to pick up on as much detail as I could. It also contained challenging storylines - Madeleine Pryor might just be confusing, but the same volume has the introduction of the Morlocks, including Storm's fight to the death against Callisto, one random mention of Colossus's sister having been kidnapped by demons and, best of all, Rogue's original face turn.

The latter begins with Rogue - short hair, modest green outfit - showing up at the Mansion after absorbing Ms Marvel's powers and conscience, only to get punched out through the roof by Marvel (now called Binary), which is awesome, followed by a clash with Silver Samurai's minions alongside a highly doubtful Wolverine which contained such a critical mass of sparky, antagonistic banter (ending with Rogue testing her newly-gained invulnerability almost to destruction and Wolverine thanking her with a super symbolic kiss to transfer his healing factor to her temporarily) that I've never entirely forgiven either Gambit or Jean Grey for being their official main crushes in the wider narrative.

The conclusion of the main storyline (a wizard did it, or at least a mutant with illusion powers) was actually a bit weak compared to the rest of the book, but this was still the one that got me into superheroes and comics in a big way.

I should probably write something about Transformers at a later date, as that was a big influence, and possibly the X-Men cartoons on My Life as a Doge...

The Man Who Was Thursday

The Man who Was Thursday: A Nightmare is a surreal and semi-philosophical ramble by GK Chesterton, he of the Father Brown stories and the hardcore Catholic conversion, which tells of a man named Syme who embarks on a great and wondrous adventure in the name of law and order and poetry.

It's hard to say more without giving too much away, but it really is a splendid read, full of whimsy and excitement, two things that are not often enough mixed.

I'm currently in the middle of reading it to my girlfriend and baby, because I find the dreamlike rhythm of the writing to be rather restful.

Reckless

Reckless is the first novel in German author Cornelia Funke's follow up to the acclaimed Inkheart trilogy, also called the Reckless series and intended, so they say, as a pentalogy. The second book came out recently and is on my Kindle and to-read list, because Reckless was a book that I very much enjoyed. I got back into young adult fiction, especially fantasy, during my teaching years, when I reviewed books for a site called Write Away. (Oh look; a new Marcus Sedgwick - no! Be good! You already bought Fearless today.)

Reckless takes place in the fairy tale setting of Mirrorworld, so called because it can be reached from the ordinary world by way of a mirror. Jacob Reckless first passed into this world after his father disappeared (possibly vanishing into the Mirrorworld himself) and has spent half his life using it to avoid the responsibilities of reality. Responsibility comes crashing into his existence however, when his brother Will follows him and is afflicted with a terrible curse.

In part a retelling of various Grimm's fairy tales, Reckless is also an adventure story in its own right, and the two are cleverly woven together, not least in the presentation of Jacob as a hunter of the precious objects of fairy tales, some of which he keeps and uses as tools of his treasure-seeking trade.

Notably, the book is listed as written in English, whereas Funke's previous work has been written in German and translated. I'm looking forward to cracking into Fearless in the coming week.