What are you reading?

[cwoy2j]

14 minutes ago, OSJ said:

I would concur. Kim sets up a great world but then sort of loses steam (no pun intended) as he goes along. If his plotting and pacing in the later books were equal to his world building in Anno Dracula you would really have something cool.

I thought the books dropped off when he made Kate the main character. Beauregard and Geneviève were way more interesting. Kate just isn't as engaging. I wish he'd have explored Winthrop's character more after the events of the Bloody Red Baron. I thought he was intriguing and then he was sort of relegated to the background after that story.

[OSJ]

36 minutes ago, cwoy2j said:

I thought the books dropped off when he made Kate the main character. Beauregard and Geneviève were way more interesting. Kate just isn't as engaging. I wish he'd have explored Winthrop's character more after the events of the Bloody Red Baron. I thought he was intriguing and then he was sort of relegated to the background after that story.

You certainly have a good point there. Kim has strange ideas about what makes for an interesting character so I usually look to his books simply for the big picture and world building which he sets up very well. 

Don't know if you know this about Kim, but he is to horror film pretty much what I am to horror literature, a walking encyclopedia. That said, his knowledge of the literature of the genre is right up there with me, guy is just amazing. I've probably got the edge on US stuff (particularly the pulp era) but he blows me out of the water on the UK material.

[cwoy2j]

Honestly don't know much about him except for Anno Dracula. That series is good enough to make me want to check out more stuff by him though.

[odessasteps]

I really like the Night Mayor. Also a lot of his old film criticism from the 80s. He wrote a couple things with Gaiman about the 100 best horror books which was a great resource tool.

[OSJ]

9 hours ago, odessasteps said:

I really like the Night Mayor. Also a lot of his old film criticism from the 80s. He wrote a couple things with Gaiman about the 100 best horror books which was a great resource tool.

There are actually two books,  few years ago Kim and Stephen Jones put together Horror: Another 100 Best Books. I'm in there with an essay on Charles Birkin's A Haunting Beauty. I can't emphasize strongly enough what great resources both books are, both volumes turned me onto a couple of things that I hadn't read or caused me to revisit books with a new eye. Since knowing this stuff is what I do for living, I can only imagine that most readers will find as many as a dozen or more new things to check out.

The premise of the volume is pretty cool, instead of the editors picking 100 books and assigning essays to their friends as would be the expected procedure, they chose no books, but instead selected 100 professional writers tasking each with coming up with a favorite that they could highlight using the book as bully pulpit to put something over that might otherwise fly under the radar. @Odessasteps, thanks for bringing this one up.

[Roman]

From Arkady Babenchko's One Soldier's War:

Spoiler

He came to us when we had only two days of food supplies left. A handsome, smart face, fluffy coat and a tail that curled in a circle. Amazing eyes, one orange, the other green. He was well fed, but not as much as the other Grozny dogs that went out of their minds as they gnawed on corpses in the ruins. This one was good-natured.
We warned him. We talked to him like a person and he understood everything. Here, at war, everyone and everything seems to be at one with their surroundings, be it a person, a dog, a tree, a stone, a river. It seems everything has a spirit. When you dig a foxhole in the stony clay with an engineer’s shovel, you talk to it as if it were a loved one: ‘Come on my dear, just one more shovel, just a tad more,’ and it yields to your entreaties, gives another chunk, hiding your body deeper. Everyone and everything understands and knows what their fate will be. And they are entitled to make their own decisions – where to grow, where to flow, where to die.
We didn’t need to reason with him, just one word and it was all clear. We warned him and off he went. But later he came back anyway, because he wanted to be with us. It was his choice, no one forced him.
Then our food started to run out. We stretched it another day, thanks to some beef given to us by the 15th regiment, which was stationed a little way off from us. Then it was all gone.
‘I’ll skin and gut him if someone else kills him,’ said Andy, our cook, stroking Sharik behind the ear. ‘I won’t kill him. I love dogs, and all animals really.’
No one wanted to do it. We agonized for another half day while Sharik sat at our feet and listened to us discuss who would kill him.
Finally Andy took it upon himself. He led Sharik off to the river and put a bullet behind his ear. It killed him outright, not even a whimper, and his skinned body was soon strung from a tree branch.
Sharik had plenty of meat on him and the fat on his side glistened. ‘That has to be cut off, dog fat tastes bitter,’ Andy told us.
I did as he said and then cut up the warm flesh. We boiled it for two hours in a pot and then stewed it in some ketchup left from the dry rations. It tasted pretty good.
Next morning they brought us supplies of oats.

That's fine! I didn't need this happiness, anyway!

There was another short chapter like that about a cow, which was at least as depressing, but because I'm such a lover of dogs, this one hurt me more. Although the cow chapter included the haunting sentence, 'The cow staggered, looked at us, realized that we were killing her and lowered her head submissively.'

[SirSmUgly]

I don't know about Kim Newman's other work, but Life's Lottery is fantastic. I am a sucker for CYOA-style books and have been since childhood, but even with that bias in mind, it's such an intricate examination of the seemingly innocuous choices (and choices that clearly matter) that human beings make.

Plus, you can also just read it straight through and get something totally different out of it.

[Shane]

Started the new John Darnielle novel, Universal Harvester. Though it's a far more conventional book so far, I'm getting really similar vibes to something like House of Leaves. Like, everything in that world is just slightly...off. I like books that make me feel uneasy in a way I can't necessarily express. 

Brought the new Gaiman book on Norse Mythology home as well. That's likely the next thing I'll read. 

[AxB]

7 hours ago, Smelly McUgly said:

I don't know about Kim Newman's other work, but Life's Lottery is fantastic. I am a sucker for CYOA-style books and have been since childhood, but even with that bias in mind, it's such an intricate examination of the seemingly innocuous choices (and choices that clearly matter) that human beings make.

Plus, you can also just read it straight through and get something totally different out of it.

Yeah, I remember after my Dad read it, and I told him there were secret pages that you can't reach from any option tree he was really jealous that he'd not figured that out. Everyone check it out, it's really good.

[OSJ]

On 2/11/2017 at 1:54 PM, Roman said:

From Arkady Babenchko's One Soldier's War:

  Reveal hidden contents

He came to us when we had only two days of food supplies left. A handsome, smart face, fluffy coat and a tail that curled in a circle. Amazing eyes, one orange, the other green. He was well fed, but not as much as the other Grozny dogs that went out of their minds as they gnawed on corpses in the ruins. This one was good-natured.
We warned him. We talked to him like a person and he understood everything. Here, at war, everyone and everything seems to be at one with their surroundings, be it a person, a dog, a tree, a stone, a river. It seems everything has a spirit. When you dig a foxhole in the stony clay with an engineer’s shovel, you talk to it as if it were a loved one: ‘Come on my dear, just one more shovel, just a tad more,’ and it yields to your entreaties, gives another chunk, hiding your body deeper. Everyone and everything understands and knows what their fate will be. And they are entitled to make their own decisions – where to grow, where to flow, where to die.
We didn’t need to reason with him, just one word and it was all clear. We warned him and off he went. But later he came back anyway, because he wanted to be with us. It was his choice, no one forced him.
Then our food started to run out. We stretched it another day, thanks to some beef given to us by the 15th regiment, which was stationed a little way off from us. Then it was all gone.
‘I’ll skin and gut him if someone else kills him,’ said Andy, our cook, stroking Sharik behind the ear. ‘I won’t kill him. I love dogs, and all animals really.’
No one wanted to do it. We agonized for another half day while Sharik sat at our feet and listened to us discuss who would kill him.
Finally Andy took it upon himself. He led Sharik off to the river and put a bullet behind his ear. It killed him outright, not even a whimper, and his skinned body was soon strung from a tree branch.
Sharik had plenty of meat on him and the fat on his side glistened. ‘That has to be cut off, dog fat tastes bitter,’ Andy told us.
I did as he said and then cut up the warm flesh. We boiled it for two hours in a pot and then stewed it in some ketchup left from the dry rations. It tasted pretty good.
Next morning they brought us supplies of oats.

That's fine! I didn't need this happiness, anyway!

There was another short chapter like that about a cow, which was at least as depressing, but because I'm such a lover of dogs, this one hurt me more. Although the cow chapter included the haunting sentence, 'The cow staggered, looked at us, realized that we were killing her and lowered her head submissively.'

That page bothered me much more than the ending of "A Boy and His Dog" by Harlan Ellison; is that wrong?

 

 

[bobholly138]

On 2/10/2017 at 8:38 PM, OSJ said:

You certainly have a good point there. Kim has strange ideas about what makes for an interesting character so I usually look to his books simply for the big picture and world building which he sets up very well. 

Don't know if you know this about Kim, but he is to horror film pretty much what I am to horror literature, a walking encyclopedia. That said, his knowledge of the literature of the genre is right up there with me, guy is just amazing. I've probably got the edge on US stuff (particularly the pulp era) but he blows me out of the water on the UK material.

IIRC I first saw Newman's name in some review or article he wrote for the sadly now gone Video Watchdog magazine.  Wasn't he also in that BBC made documentary about Ken Russell's The Devils?

[OSJ]

22 hours ago, bobholly138 said:

IIRC I first saw Newman's name in some review or article he wrote for the sadly now gone Video Watchdog magazine.  Wasn't he also in that BBC made documentary about Ken Russell's The Devils?

Yep, sure was. Were he not busy enough under his own name Kim also wrote the Dark Future series, the Diogenes Club series and a bunch of Warhammer stuff as "Jack Yeovil", to say nothing of having some fun with a couple of B-movie style novels, Bloody Students and Orgy of the Blood Parasites, neither book to be taken seriously... I hadn't known that a lot of the Diogenes Club stories had been collected in book form, this goes right to the top of the ol' wantlist...

 

 

 

 

[Roman]

On 14-2-2017 at 2:18 AM, OSJ said:

That page bothered me much more than the ending of "A Boy and His Dog" by Harlan Ellison; is that wrong?

Well, it's non-fiction so I suppose having that knowledge makes it hit harder.

Also, Unloved by John Saul was atrocious. Fortunately I got it for only 0,03 USD.

[Kuetsar]

Read a bunch of books lately, but just finished the Ghosts of Manila, about Frazier and Ali, and it just demolishes most of the myths around Ali.Essentially he was a simpleton that  was led around by the Black Muslims. There's a lot more to it than that of course, but its well worth a read. . . .

[EVA]

On 2/13/2017 at 6:36 PM, Shane said:

Started the new John Darnielle novel, Universal Harvester. Though it's a far more conventional book so far, I'm getting really similar vibes to something like House of Leaves. Like, everything in that world is just slightly...off. I like books that make me feel uneasy in a way I can't necessarily express. . 

I just finished this today.  I thought Part 1 was really creepy and captivating, but it really loses steam in Part 2 and never gets it back imo.  And I'm still not sure what the fuck was going on or why I should care.  Ultimately disappointing.

[Control]

I'm reading THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler. I might actually prefer Dashiell Hammett.

[OSJ]

7 hours ago, Control said:

I'm reading THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler. I might actually prefer Dashiell Hammett.

The debate rages on years after both men have passed away...  There's your Frazier/Ali of detective stories right there... Chandler was a far better writer, but Hammett was a much better storyteller. 

[Matt D]

There's so much more heart and humanism in Chandler's work. When shit goes bad, he makes you feel disappointed even though you should know better. With Hammett, you're never in the least surprised. 

[supremebve]

On 2/26/2017 at 11:48 AM, Kuetsar said:

Read a bunch of books lately, but just finished the Ghosts of Manila, about Frazier and Ali, and it just demolishes most of the myths around Ali.Essentially he was a simpleton that  was led around by the Black Muslims. There's a lot more to it than that of course, but its well worth a read. . . .

It's not a perfect book, but I think it is the only book that paints Frazier in the correct light.  Ali has become such a cultural hero, that we spend so much time worshiping him we forget some of the other interesting characters from his era.  Joe Frazier is one of the 5 or so best heavyweights of all time, and pretty much won two of their three fights (Ali was trying to quit when Frazier's corner threw in the towel.).  History has remembered him as Ali's greatest opponent, but that is pretty much the only thing people remember about him.

[AxB]

Joe Frazier got a statue put up in Philadelphia in 2015. Only 35 years after Rocky Balboa did. It's a bloody disgrace.

[AxB]

On 02/02/2017 at 4:37 PM, CreativeControl said:

My man! I'm working my way through the Underworld USA trilogy too.

I read American Tabloid in 2007, loved it, but didn't have any inkling it would be a trilogy and pretty much forgot about Ellis (had only read LA Confidential prior to it).

Anyway, been working my way through all his novels over the past year or so (fave book - Big Nowhere, fave character - David Klein or Pete Bondurant) and got around to rereading Tabloid over Christmas. I'm just about finished with The Cold Six Thousand (which has been a bit of a slog and reads like nothing but an outline in parts) and am looking forward to the final installment. Probably gonna wait Perfidia out until the whole saga is complete before I dip in again

Just finished Cold Six and started Blood's a Rover. Glad I re-read the whole trilogy rather than skipping straight to the unread one, because there was much that had slipped my mind. I see what you mean about bits of Cold Six reading like an outline, there are bits of it where it looks like he wrote a list of what would happen in a scene intending to turn it into actual prose with adjectives and that later, but forgot and it was published as a list of sequential events.

I'm glad I did read Perfidia though, because there's a character from that (he was 18 in 1942) who turns up in Rover (he's 44 in 1968) having not appeared in any of Ellroy's work in between. Which makes sense on one level, if he was forever somewhere else (and very little of the first two thirds of the Underworld USA trilogy takes place in California, and he was still in the Army during the events of the LA Quartet).

When Ellroy was getting loads of mainstream press in the 90s (between the LA Confidential movie and Cold Six book) I saw him saying in an interview he couldn't wait for all the Clintons to die so he could write about them, because they're worse (more corrupt) than the Kennedys were. But reading the Underworld USA books, the Kennedys don't look that bad (except Joe), and the real villains of the piece are J Edgar Hoover and the mafia bosses, right?

[BurningBeard]

@AxB Yeah pretty much, the basic gist of the trilogy IMO is 'we were so close to getting it right but the prejudice and greed of Hoover and the mafia et al fucked it up for everyone'. I just finished Blood's A Rover and really enjoyed it for what it was but I do have some issues with it. Will wait til you're done before discussing anything though.

[Roman]

I read Cold to the Touch by Simon Strantzas... Eh. I'm not a fan. I think I prefered his other collection, Burnt Black Suns, and I wasn't exactly a fan of those stories either. There was some good potential in two stories or so, but it never really came out. Oh well. I think it's time to dig a little further into Richard Gavin instead, who's been a real revelation so far (although I've only read one collection of his so far, Sylvan Dread, but it's brilliant).

[OSJ]

18 hours ago, Roman said:

I read Cold to the Touch by Simon Strantzas... Eh. I'm not a fan. I think I prefered his other collection, Burnt Black Suns, and I wasn't exactly a fan of those stories either. There was some good potential in two stories or so, but it never really came out. Oh well. I think it's time to dig a little further into Richard Gavin instead, who's been a real revelation so far (although I've only read one collection of his so far, Sylvan Dread, but it's brilliant).

Re: Simon Strantzas... Welcome to the post-Internet world of micro-presses. It's going to be hard for me to do this without sounding like a hypocrite, but these micro-presses are a real mixed blessing, on one hand there can be venues for highly specialized work that might never see the light of day if left up to the big NY houses. On the other hand, there's an awful lot of material that I would characterize as "fan writing", which simply doesn't cut the mustard as being of professional caliber. Okay, the hypocrisy part, I ran a small press for years doing small editions (500 copies) of books targeted to the serious horror fan. However, while there's little demand in NY for short story collections by mostly dead authors, there's no disputing that Fritz Leiber, Charles Birkin, Joseph Payne Brennan et al, were professional writers (and pretty damn good ones at that). But then you have something that comes along like Ex Occidente in Romania. The press is funded with government grants they do ridiculously small editions by new writers like Simon (and a few people who should know better), charge like $150-$200 for these books,pay the author a royalty and the publisher pays himself a nice salary. Quite simply, this is fan writing that thirty years ago would have appeared in xeroxed fanzines that cost around five bucks an issue.

What it isn't is professional caliber fiction. A lot of people have said that Simon's first book was considerably better than his second and it was. There was a damn good reason for that, there are still a lot of fanzines or "little magazines" that have pretty high standards, often edited by a professional who is giving back to the field by helping new writers develop their craft. That first book was the result of something like a decades worth of work that had been crtiqued and edited by top-notch people in the field. Left to his own devices, Simon isn't of professional caliber yet and as long as he has someone stroking his ego by publishing whatever he turns in, he's not going to get any better.

I think it may have been Brian W. Aldiss who said that you need to know the rules of writing before you start breaking them. Very true that.

 

 

[Ramsey]

Currently a bunch of Legion of Super Heroes from the early 80's Levitz/Giffen run. Perfectly juggled a cast of of thousands while creating a unified vision of the DC Universe a thousand years from now(then.) Really very good stuff.