The Stand (1978)
by Stephen King
Saying that you like Stephen King will instantly polarize some of your readers. After all, he’s the horror guy to all the people who don’t read horror (or don’t read in general books at all but watch movies), to the horror of the horror-reading readers. But there’s nothing like polarizing more if you then dish out seconds with adding that you’ll think that The Stand is not really the best thing King has written. I would even go as far as saying it was one of my most disappointing King reading experiences. Maybe because it all started so well.
There’s nothing as funny as taking out most of humanity in a ghastly way (in fiction). The first part of The Stand went from strength to strength, the outbreak of the virus, the killing and dying, the survivors trying to flee and to gather. An apocalyptic novel at its finest. All still in the domain of science fiction, but some hints had already foreshadowed that the book might also go in the supernatural direction. Okay, I thought, I’m not too uncomfortable with that. After all, it’s a King novel, it would be strange to be entirely without these elements.
And then the survivors heard God, and he wasn’t amused. Lazy bums, all of them. Someone had to die. Go to Mordor and destroy the dark fucking lord Sauron.
I understand the rut King was in. The apocalypse lay behind. The best thing of the book over. What to do? It might have seen like a smart solution to let all survivors fight the last conflict between good and evil, to top the apocalypse of the first part of the book. It might have, but to me it just looked like a desperate attempt, as if the author had no fucking clue what to do with the survivors. So they went to Vegas to destroy the evil lord Flagg. Who, unlike many of King’s heroes and villains in other novels, is completely generic, a second class villain (I’m evil because I’m dark because I’m evil, hohoho) who is not the least believable or interesting. And the ending. Ouch.
I hate books that start so well, hide their incompetence for such a long time until the whole thing starts to fall apart.
Rating: 2/5
Song of Kali (1985)
by Dan Simmons
If a book gets the World Fantasy Award, you expect it to be good. Sure, awards have been given out for any kind of crap, but somehow deep down some part of your brain still thinks: Awards = Goodness. And there’s the fact that Dan Simmons has written some of my most beloved stories and books. He can’t do wrong.
Well, he did. I understand, on a conceptual level, what he tried to do with it and why probably many were so impressed with the book. There are those adherents of horror that say real horror has nothing to do with monsters jumping out of the dark and slowly devouring you, but some nameless horror that has no face. SoK is about the real horror of losing your child and never knowing what happened to her. And the danger of not being able to let go and go on with your life, devouring yourself every day in her absence.
As I said, I understand it conceptually. Doesn’t mean I like the book based on that concept even an iota. It’s boring, it’s tedious, it goes on far too long for its own good and at the end the only thought I had was: It’s finally over, I can sell it on ebay. I understand why it got the award, I just don’t like it as reading material. Writing a thesis on it would be probably much more entertaining than sitting down an afternoon to read it for fun.
Rating: 1/5
Righteous Blood (2002)
by Cliff Burns
Righteous Blood is a sort of mini-collection, bundling two of Cliff Burns’s novellas into one package. While I thought the first one lacked a bit of narrative resolution in the end, I prefer it over the second story. Kept has a tight plot with a good resolution, but I thought Phil was the better realized main character. Both Maxine and Phil do nasty things, but in Phil’s case these naturally evolved out of the context of the story, while in Maxine’s case they are just established from the get go with a thin explanation.
Living with the Foleys (5/5)
A homeless man, Phil, is living in the garage of the Foley family, something the Foley’s aren’t aware of. Through the venting systems, sounds travel easy there, Phil has intimate knowledge of the going ons of every family member. And so he is the only one who can see the slow unraveling of the Foley family. But Phil has taken a liking to them, and especially to his place in the garage, and isn’t going to let the family go kaput.
Living with the Foley’s has a truly original and weird set-up, presenting a completely normal situation from a truly strange viewpoint. And all that is just a playground to trace the life of a man who has withdrawn from his former life, only to realize that until you’re dead you’ll always hurting, always caring for others, even if you live at the bottom. But there’s good stuff too. What’s the meaning of life? That’s a hard one. Or not at all.
Kept (4/5)
Maxine is the caretaker of a house where strange people dwell. Her job is to make the house secure and, well, take care of everything, from plumbing to dealing with outsiders. Maxine is also a women with a peculiar hobby. She picks up men who want to fuck her, takes them home, drugs them, straps them on a bed, and slowly tortures them to death for a nebulous movie project. But her last subject turns out to be as nasty as she is. After he has freed himself he begins to kill the inmates of the house, one after another.
Kept is a classical hunt-the-hunter action piece, a relentless story that always keeps the reader on the edge about what happens next, brimming with tension until its gory resolution.
Rating: 5/5
What You Make It (1999)
(Okay)
written by Michael Marshall Smith
I came to this collection expecting strange and mindbending stuff, something similar to what Smith did in his first three novels. There’s only one story that was like that, “Hell Hath Enlarged Herself”, a brilliant story that mixes nanotech and ghosts. The rest of the stories have much fewer fantasy elements. Many of them could be classified as horror, but less in a supernatural way than in a psychological. It’s not that they are complete without it, but the supernatural things are very downplayed. Smith seems more interested to get into the head of his characters, probing questions of reality, showing characters who are slowly losing it. Whether this is because of something that’s just in their head or external isn’t really important. The writing is accessible and absorbing throughout the whole collection, despite that most of the stories are rather uncomfortable, none of them are happy reading material. My overall problem with the collection is that I prefer fiction that has more weirdness at the surface and packs more oomph.
More Tomorrow
Everybody Goes
Hell Hath Enlarged Herself
A Place to Stay
Later
The Man Who Drew Cats
The Fracture
Save As…
More Bitter Than Death
Diet Hell
The Owner
Foreign Bodies
Sorted
The Dark Land
When God Lived in Kentish Town
Always
What You Make It
The Quorum (1994)
by Kim Newman
Synopsis: Three of a quartet of four friends get a hellish offer. If they make the life of the fourth hell on earth, they will always be successful in life, money, power or love guaranteed. They accept, and while the three achieve everything they have dreamed of, their friend fails, always and every time, thanks to their help. But if they should somehow fail to make their part of the bargain, they have to pay the price for it.
Great concept and good writing, yet the book wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be. The ending was rather weak, without a good solution of the story, or better said, it was very anticlimactic, more like a moral lesson. Also I disliked that in the end it wasn’t really important who of the four was the victim, since all of them would have taken up the offer to destroy their chosen friend in exchange for wealth and success, says the one who has made the offer. Since we don’t know whether the victim in another situation had chosen like his three friends to torment for personal gain, it takes away from the novel to say that he would have. If the ending of the book had been better I might have liked it more than I have.
Rating: 2/5
Bad Dreams (1990)
by Kim Newman
Synopsis: Anne Nielson tries to find out more about the strange suicide of her sister, but what she finds is much more than she had bargained for. Something old and evil had once destroyed her father during the Hollywood HUAC hearings during the McCarthy era, and now he tries to kill the rest of the family of the man he destroyed in the past. Anne’s sister was the first, but the monster isn’t satisfied yet.
The writing was good, Newman is very capable, but two things made this book hard to like for me. First, the main character never came to life in my eyes, I never cared what happened to her. Second, since parts of the novel were told from the perspective of the monster, there was no real mystery about him. The parts in the past that told the reader about the backstory of the monster were interesting, sure, but I think they backfired, because they made the monster less scary and mysterious. The end had some clever bits, like who came to help Anne fight the monster in the end, but overall I thougth this was one of Newman’s weaker efforts.
Rating: 2/5
Only Forward (1994)
by Michael Marshall Smith
Backcover Synopsis: Stark is the hero the future is waiting for - God help it. He’s smart, alarmingly cool, and has immaculate taste in shirts. He’s a troubleshooter in the City, a lawless sprawl of Neighbourhoods which covers the country from coast to coast. Each is totally geared to the desires of those who live in it, from can-do corporate types, through deranged criminals, to people who just don’t like loud noises. Stark accepts a job from Zenda Renn, the human face of the Action Centre - where people who have to be doing something all the time hang out. Someone’s missing. Zenda needs him found, and soon.
The debut of Smith is almost a flawless novel. It’s a strange mix of elements from horror, science fiction and detective fiction. The story has some very neat twists that are nearly impossible to foresee. Smith’s future is highly inventive, even if it often sounds implausible, Smith makes it somehow work while it lasts. It’s as if you read a strange dream and you know, when you wake up it won’t make any sense, while you’re dreaming it does.
Rating: 5/5
Spares (1996)
by Michael Marshall Smith
Backcover Synopsis: Spares - human clones, the ultimate health insurance. An eye for an eye, but some people are doing all the taking. Spares - the story of Jack Randall: burnt-out, dropped out, and with a zero credit rating at the luck bank. After five years lying low on a Spares Farm, looking after inmates that can’t even spell luck, he is finally faced with a chance at redemption … if he, and spares, can run fast enough.
The second novel of Smith deploys nearly the same mix of genres (fantasy, science fiction & detective fiction) as the first did, and is equally successful. Which of the two novels is better is hard to say, but I though Spares had a slightly better pacing, but overall the two are nearly perfect books. All that was true for the first is true for the second, it’s as if reading a dream, it only works if you can get into it, but then it’s a truly magnificent ride.
Rating: 5/5
Demons (2002)
by John Shirley
Backcover Synopsis: In a future uncomfortably close to the present day, the apocalypse has surpassed all expectations. Hideous demons roam the streets in an orgy of terror, drawing pleasure from torturing humans as sadistically as possible. Ira, a young San Fransicso artist, becomes invovled with a strange group of scientists and philosophers desperately trying to end the bloody siege. But the most shocking revelation is yet to come….
The book has two parts, the first is after the demons have appeared and overrun the world (this has already been previously published as a stand-alone book), the second happens some time after this apocalypse has been dealt with, and involves again the same demons. I liked both parts, the characters were okay, the plots moved swiftly and were interesting. The revelation about where the demons came from and why was really good, something I hadn’t seen coming.
Demons (4/5)
Undercurrent (4/5)
Rating: 4/5
Patterns (1989)
by Pat Cadigan
This is a steady collections in terms of quality I’ve ever read. The problem at least for me is that most of those stories are more horror than SF, and since I was introduced to Cadigan’s writing through her SF novels, I hoped that her short fiction was more of the same. I was wrong, these stories show another side of Cadigan’s writing. The problem was that they were at times too predictable and that Cadigan, in my opinion, needs space to develop appealing or interesting characters. Only two stories, “Angel” and “Two”, made me care for the characters, the first story is about a unique alien and the second about a telepathic girl who searches for people like her. If you already read some of Cadigan’s stories and liked them, you might appreciate this collection, but if you expect something similar to her novels be warned.
Patterns (2/5)
Eenie, Meenie, Ipsateenie (2/5)
Vengeance is Yours (2/5)
The Day the Martels Got the Cable (2/5)
Roadside Rescue (3/5)
Rock On (2/5)
Heal (3/5)
Another One Hits the Road (3/5)
My Brother’s Keeper (3/5)
Pretty Boy Crossover (3/5)
Two (5/5)
Angel (5/5)
It Was the Heat (4/5)
The Power and the Passion (3/5)
Rating: 3/5
