pornokitsch

New Releases: The Skybound Sea by Sam Sykes

It is fair to say that this, Sam Sykes' The Skybound Sea (2012) is a review I've been trying to write for almost five months. It isn't a straightforward one, so, with that in mind, I'd like to ask two favours, gentle reader:

• Bear with me, as this will be even more wibbly and discursive than usual
• Read the whole review (or at least skim it), as any single thought or line won't work out of context
• (Bonus favour: don't stomp on me when I use phrases like "gentle reader", as much as I deserve it)

The Skybound Sea is the conclusion of Sam Sykes' debut trilogy, The Aeons' Gate. Lenk, Kataria, Gariath, Asper, Dreadaleon and Denaos are adventurers - a profession quickly (and repeatedly) established as lower than pondscum. At the beginning of Tome of the Undergates, Lenk & Company were tasked with retrieving the titular tome. By the end of that book, they had managed to embroil themselves in an island-hopping apocalypse, with beasties of all sizes and planar origins competing for the prize. This is still the situation as The Skybound Sea opens - the adventurers are now in an extreme state of (for lack of a better word) decay, and evil is everywhere. 

Physically, the group is utterly delapidated. They're injured, hungry, bruised, battered and miserable. Emotionally they're no better off - at some point in the trilogy, everyone has been captured, knocked unconscious, horrendously violated, betrayed or left for dead. They've got some mental wounds - deep ones. Lenk, for example, has been wrestling with nothing short of demonic (or is it angelic?) possession. He's got a lot of little voices in his head, and they'd really like him to kill stuff. His enemies. His friends. Anyone to hand. To top it off, his uncomfortable thing with Kataria has gone volcanic (not in a good way) - they've got smouldering red hot lust, boulders of shame and, uh, ash clouds of weird racial issues. 

New Releases: Blood Song by Anthony Ryan

Blood Song (2013) is the first volume in Anthony Ryan's Raven's Shadow series, a new epic fantasy saga published by Orbit. Blood Song has been lurking around as a self-published ebook for a while (gaining insane reviews) - now it is being released as a book-book. 

Blood Song is the story of Vaelin Al Sorna. As a child, he's abandoned at the gates of the Sixth Order by his father, Battle Lord (sort of "high marshal" to King Janus). The orders are monastic organisations - each has its specific focus (2: philosophy, 5: healing, 6: kicking ass), and joining one is pretty much a life long commitment. You forget your family, forget your past - do nothing but train, learn and study. The curious thing is that the Orders are devoutly irreligious - the "Unified Realm" (four kingdoms squished together) has long eschewed belief in gods and myths. When the Orders are rooting out "heresy" (the Fourth Order's task), they're persecuting faith of any sort. A nice little twist.

Of course, forgetting one's past is easier when you join the Order as a street urchin. When you're Vaelin, heir to a noble family and child of a Big Name, it is harder to shed the outside world. In the epic fantasy tradition, much of Blood Song focuses on Vaelin's training years. As well as all the anticipated difficulties that come with joining an organisation of lethal lunatics, Vaelin's also got his own issues to deal with. Why did his dad dump him here? Who was his mother, really? Are people trying to kill him (that is, people besides his classmates and instructors)? Why do some of his fellow students hate him so much?

I don't think it gives too much away to say that the answers to most of these questions are wrapped up in revelations of Vaelin's Chosen One-ness. Vaelin's destiny has been predetermined by a lot of different players - his mother, his father, the king, the princess, the Order, the other Orders and forces even more esoteric than that. It doesn't help that, as Vaelin stumbles through his training and his first combat experiences, he keeps bouncing against other prophecies. Prophecies that, in a resolutely secular world, ought not exist.

Review Round-up: Jesus, Bridesicles and New York City

Three recent releases with very little in common.

Will McIntosh's Love Minus Eighty (2013) is coming this June. I've not read him before, but from what I understand, Mr. McIntosh is sort of an ebook/indie sensation, not in the "sells like Hugh Howey or Amanda Hocking" way, but in the "there's this guy quietly making great books in the corner" kind of way. Love Minus Eighty is his first UK print publication and it is a corker.

A hundred years in the future, death isn't... conquered, but it is beat-up a bit. Cryogenics and medicine have both advanced spectacularly, so if you've got the cash, you can hang on for quite some time. If you don't have the cash, but you do have insurance, you can freeze yourself - give yourself that tiny bit of hope that someone, someday will pay to bring you back. And if you don't have the cash or the insurance? Well, look both ways before crossing the street.

One pervy side-effect of this brave new world is the idea of the "bridesicle". Beautiful women in fatal accidents - and without insurance - are carefully preserved. Rich men drop by, interview them, and, if they like what they see, the 'suitor' pays to thaw/fix the young lady in turn for marriage (and all that entails). It is... horrible. Mr. McIntosh lets us know exactly how horrible it is - prostitution, grinding misery, the soul-crushing loss of all agency. It is one of the most grim and least titillating visions of the future ever committed to print. 

Love Minus Eighty is the story of how this premise impacts a half dozen people: a frozen young woman (thawed and killed and thawed and killed over and over again with each interview), a struggling musician who inadvertently kills someone, the woman he kills, a slightly neurotic writer who runs a dating service and a host of minor characters. Love Minus Eighty is a love story, I suppose, but less about people than an ode to love itself: natural, messy, serendipitous, ungainly love. Everyone in the book is busily trying to programme or direct something that refuses to be tamed. Love can't be purchased, wrangled, controlled or predicted - a lesson that everyone in the book learns, occasionally to their own detriment. It should be romantic, but Mr. McIntosh is wisely even-handed. For every couple that wins, there's also one that gets away.

Underground Reading: The Girl with the Long Green Heart by Lawrence Block

This is the latest installment in our scheme to review each and every Hard Case Crime publication, one every week. You can follow along here. 

Well, one week after my least favourite Hard Case Crime (so far), I get to review one of my favourites (so far) - Lawrence Block's The Girl with the Long Green Heart.

Originally published as a Gold Medal paperback in 1965, The Girl with the Long Green Heart was reprinted a few times - an Abebooks search finds it in 1985, 1994, 1999, 2005. And, having read it, with good cause. This is a brilliant stand-alone novel of a faded con man, a beautiful woman and one very, very complicated scheme.

Johnny Hayden is out of prison and living a good, clean life. He works at a bowling alley, saves every penny and takes correspondence courses in hotel management. There's a broken down roadhouse at the edge of town, and Hayden's got his eye on it. At the current rate he's saving money, he thinks he could purchase it in the next nine years. Maybe. A man needs a dream, else he can't get out of bed in the morning.

Enter: Doug Rance. Doug, like Johnny, is a con man - just not retired. Doug's particular art is the smile. Whereas Johnny is naturally trustworthy, Doug's unnaturally charming. Together, Doug suggests, they'd make an unstoppable team. And Doug's got the target for them already prpped - a wealthy (and greedy) small town millionaire named Gunderman. Johnny does his best to resist Doug's pitch but Doug uses the dream against him. Johnny could sweat out a decade in a bowling alley... or make thirty grand in one fell swoop.

Underground Reading: The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

This is the latest installment in our scheme to review each and every Hard Case Crime publication, one every week. You can follow along here. After a slight hiatus, we're back with #13 - Stephen King's The Colorado Kid.

This is going to be a very structured review - a bit like a middle school book report. Here's how it'll go:

• What happens in The Colorado Kid
• What I like about it
• What I don't like about it
• The greater significance 

There's a method to my madness (or, to be more accurate, a madness to the method), in that I've got a fairly complicated emotional relationship with it. Not that, like, this book once shot my dog, but that, between the author and publisher, there are a lot of big weighty "brands" here, and it is important to (try to) treat the text itself as a discrete entity.

So, here we go. What happens in The Colorado Kid?

Well, without being funny, not much. The Colorado Kid is a story within a story. A young reporter, Stephanie, fresh out of college, has the unenvious position of intern to a local paper on a tiny island off of Maine. It is now late in the summer and, much to her surprise, she's fallen in love with the town and the two elderly goofballs that run the paper.  

During the course of one day, Dave and Vince (the goofballs) test Stephanie on her powers of observation and deduction. Why don't they tip the waitress more? Why didn't the visitor from Boston trust them? Etc. Stephanie impresses them (she's clearly impressed them the whole summer), so they reward her with a real story - an unsolved mystery that took place on the island in 1980.

Review Round-up: Vintage Classics (and Not-So-Classics)

We've just returned from a long weekend in Lyme Regis, our favourite escape. Dinosaurs and literary landmarks! Bakeries on every corner! We spent most of our stay buying delicious foodstuffs and eating them on the terrace (which had a sea view if you stood on the table). Occasionally inclement weather forced us to nap. It was exhausting. To make things worse, the trip was bracketed by train rides to and from London, during which we could only... read. 

Lyme Regis has an amazing bookshop, and after 4? 5? vaguely-annual visits, I think the owner kind of recognises me. At the very least, he sees me walking out with most of his "Pulps" section every year. This year was the perfect sort of bookish travel: go down with a Kindle and an empty bag, come back with a few dozen new treasures. (A future Post-Scripts, I think.)

Anyway, my travel slides aside ("click-click" Here's us at the pub! "click-click"), a long list of short reviews follows:

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920). Before this year, the only Fitzgerald I'd read was The Great Gatsby, and that was high school and I've already forgotten it. Recently, prompted by some book research, I've been plowing through all the Fitzgerald I can find and loving it. Sarcastic, funny, touching, witty, straight-forward language and wonderfully complex eddies under the surface - pretty much made to order for My Taste. Who knew? This Side of Paradise is Fitzgerald's debut which a) bloody hell and b) like the vast proportion of debut novels is b1) a little too much about the author, b2) clearly based on post-event philosophical rendering of the author's own experiences and b3) slightly wanky. That said, back to a) - bloody hell. Astounding book and a fascinating look at an era and class that I don't know anything at all about. An amazing combination with all the Westerns I've been reading lately - hard to think of all this happening in the same country at the same time. 

The Fox by Conrad Williams (2013). A really nice little chapbook from the folks at This is Horror, who, understandably, know their horror. A family go camping and things start to get creepy. There's a long slow build and then the reveal and payoff all hit at the same time - as a mystery, it is a bit clunky. As an atmospheric bit of horror, it is smothering (in a good way). You just know horrible things are happening, pitter-patting around in the background, and the bits of mundane detail only make it worse when it finally kicks off. I'm glad it ends when it does, a bit of a new Scary Story to Read in the Dark, rather than any sort of greater parable. A nice book, and well worth a fiver.

[Seventeen more after the jump!]

Cover Reveal and Interview: Charlie Human's Apocalypse Now Now & Joey Hi-Fi

Baxter Zevcenko is your average 16-year-old-boy. If by average you mean kingpin of a smut-peddling schoolyard syndicate, and a possible serial killer who suffers from weird historical dreams. He’s the first to admit that he’s not a nice guy, but then, in high school, where’s the percentage in being nice?

That is until his girlfriend, Esme, is kidnapped and all the clues point toward strange forces at work. Faced with navigating the increasingly bizarre landscape of Cape Town’s supernatural underworld to get her back, Baxter turns to the only person drunk enough to help: bearded, booze-soaked, supernatural bounty hunter, Jackson “Jackie” Ronin.

✧

I've been a fan of Charlie Human's bizarro-poignant (new word!) sense of humour since we first laid eyes on his work. His debut novel, Apocalypse Now Now, was picked up by Random House last May and I've been impatiently awaiting this novel for aaaaages. August can't come a day too soon...

As if Charlie's writing weren't already exciting enough, Apocalypse Now Now boasts not one, but two Joey Hi-Fi covers - one for the UK edition, one for South Africa. We caught up with the man himself to ask very serious questions about what goes into two extraordinarily apocodelicious covers... (another new word! I'm on a roll!)

Apocalypse Now Now (UK)

Pornokitsch: So - the contents of Apocalypse Now Now are a (frustratingly) closely guarded secret. As one of the few that have read it - what's the book like?!

Joey Hi-Fi: It's insane. The good insane tough. Although it did make me worry about Charlie Human's mental state. Lauren Beukes did a great shout for the book -“Mad, dark, irreverent and wonderfully twisted in all the right ways". I think that sums it up quite well.

Last Week's New Releases: Farnsworth, Ness & Smythe

The week of filler continues with three books that all deserve better treatment. But Farnsworth, Ness and Smythe sounds a bit like a Dickensian lawfirm, which is some small comfort.

Normally I'm not so bothered about shirking my frontlist duties, but last week was one hell of a week for new genre books, and I'm a little upset that I'm slack in reviewing. Whatever sort of science fiction you're in to, last week was packed with red letter days.

I did review Christopher Farnsworth's Red, White and Blood earlier, so this is more a "Hey! Out now!" sort of reminder. Red, White and Blood is the third in the Nathaniel Cade series (which began with Blood Oath and The President's Vampire), but there's certainly no barrier to starting with this installment. Backstory: the President has a vampire. Now you're caught up.

Mr. Farnsworth's series is a cross between Wes Craven and 24 or, uh, True Blood and Tom-Clancy-before-he-jumped-his-own-shark. Funny, witty, silly, smart, the series just keeps getting more and more entertaining - modern pulp at its finest. Read the earlier review for more complete thoughts. 

Meanwhile, James Smythe.

Mr. Smythe came from seemingly nowhere to publish two of last year's most thoughtful, most challenging science fiction thrillers. This year he knocks it up a notch, Elzar-style, and, with The Machine, has written one of the darkest novels - of any genre - that I've ever had the nightmarish 'privilege' of reading. And don't get me wrong, this is a corker, well worth reading and suspiciously, disturbingly easy to read. But the entire book is keyed at a slightly unsettling note that keeps the reader perpetually aware that THINGS ARE NOT RIGHT. And, nor should they be... in a fairly ruined world (the casual apocalypticism is handled with an unbelievably light touch, and, I hope will join Jessie Lamb in benchmarking the post-Wyndhamism contemporary cozy catastrophe) a young wife is experimenting with the Machine. The Machine is a thing - a big scary mechanical thing -  it looks suspiciously like your office's scary server closet crossed with the screen that you have to plug the presentation into but you can never get to work on the first try - that does stuff to your memories. Initially used as a cure for PTSD, it does... stuff. 

The Machine pokes all the tender places. There are beleaguered teachers and menacing students, long walks across abandoned estates at night, crucifying loneliness, creepy 'friends', oppressive bureaucracies, social isolation, tinkering with minds... all building up to the big question: what is it that makes us human? What's the line? When do we become so lost in ourselves that we aren't people any more? Mr. Smythe clearly refuses to be confined to an easy description, and like its inspiration, Frankenstein, The Machine makes a nonsense of genre definitions. The Machine takes the best of horror - claustrophic, personal terror - and combines it with the frenzied imagination of science fiction and the thoughtful, unanswerable questions of literature. 

Speaking of which...

Week o' Filler: Noir Recommendations

[Disclaimer: on the road for most of the week plus wrapping up SpecFic. This week's posts are going to be filler cursory discursive.]

Great authors I've appreciated recently – Christa Faust and Megan Abbott – so I figured I'd look for recommendations for more great female contemporary noir authors. 

Fortunately, Twitter had some answers:

Hard Bite by Anonymous9 (@FaustFatale) (er, q.v.)

Hilary Davidson (@GregMcCambley)

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (the Guardian - backed by @SamsykesSwears, @hollierendall, @zola_the_gorgon, @JoLidds and @tudorstuart)

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (@willhillauthor)

Meg Gardiner (@RobHBedford)

Dope by Sara Gran (@NMamatas, @KatWithSword)

Vicki Hendricks (@NMamatas) 

Camilla Lackberg (@tomhpollock)

Asa Larsson (@tomhpollock)

Donna Leon (@tomhpollock)

Sissel-Jo Gazan (@tomhpollock)

Carol O'Connell (@JonCG_novelist)

Sara Paretsky (@KingElfland2ndCuz)

Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes (er, me - I love this book)

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (me again, mostly because I was looking for an excuse to get this)

Cathi Unsworth (Google!)

Fred Vargas (@JonCG_novelist, @gavreads)

The Secret Lives of Married Women by Elisa Waid (@FaustFatale) (Not out yet, dammit. But this looks like another brilliant Hard Case Crime) 

Who else?

Underground Reading: Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Dragonlance. 

I'm afraid this isn't going to be a conventional review, more a series of, er, discursive notes, all rather indelicately glomming together to form one of my more specious arguments.

As far as an actual review: 

I think the Dragonlance Chronicles - Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984), Dragons of Winter Night (1985) and Dragons of Spring Dawning (1985) - is of a time and a (hand-wavey, theoretical) place. I've reread the three books recently, and that's not really an experience I'd recommend to anyone else. 

For the sake of this blog post/ramble, I'm more interested in the Chronicles influence, which I believe has been criminally downplayed.

So... what makes a book an influential fantasy - and by that, not just having an impact on one author, but across the entire genre? For the sake of some sort of structure, I'd argue that the answer is a combination of both innovation and ubiquity.

The former is pretty straightforward. Unless there's something innovative or new involved, there's no change to measure. Reiterating the status quo may be a type of influence, but we can't measure a negative. A book needs to do something different for us to track how those changes promulgate.

Similarly, without ubiquity - not just presence, but omnipresence - we can't assume that a book had the opportunity to make an impact. Arguably, for something to be an influence on this scale (genre-wide), it needs to be so large that it doesn't even matter if another author has read it. We can assume that someone in the publishing chain (from the rights team to the commissioning editor to the sales director to the copy editor to the agent) has read it and we can assume its presence is so vast that, even subconsciously or indirectly, its innovative presence has been somehow communicated.¹

One example - just to set a benchmark. George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is a major influence. It is the best-selling series in fantasy, and its presence on HBO has brought more new readers to genre fiction than anything since Harry Potter. Martin's work is a mainstream success, it has recognisable reference points that can be found in the fantasy books that followed and it is very, very good (that latter point isn't actually relevant in this context, but still a Nice to Have). It is hard to make any sort of claim that Martin's books aren't influential on modern fantasy.² 

Ground rules established.³ 

Which brings us back to another series, predating Martin's by ten years, that possesses the same critical combination of ubiquity and innovation: Dragonlance.