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nigellicus's reviews
1566 reviews
Ghost Story by Peter Straub
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
5.0
I always had a bit of a preference for Peter Straub over Stephen King. Both superb writers, Straub did not have King's tendency to clown around with his writing, to splurge words all over the page. I realised, rereading this, that the difference beteween Straub and King is like the difference between classic ghost stories and pulp horror. It's clear from this that Straub reveres the old-school styilings of Hawthorne, James and James. It's centred around a group of old men who sit around in formal evening wer telling each other ghost stories for God's sake, and the example we get is an homage to The Turn Of The Screw. Straub is conservative, intellectual, formal, and it shows through in his writing and his structure, but at the end of the day it's still a massive town-besieged-by-evil story that became the mainstay of eighties doorstop horror.
It opens, of course, with that eerie, unsettling image - a man driving somewhere with a child he has just taken. The air of mystery and dread surrounding this is unmatched in anything else I've ever read. The rest of the book delivers on the promise of this opening, but I will say there's one part set on a college campus that made me want to punch the character when he started interrogating a young woman he had only just met about her love life - we may have dodged a bullet in not losing Straub to what I think they call The College Novel, or maybe he just exorcised that literary inclination here. Yuk. Maybe it was the Evil Influence Of Evil (because she turns out to be Evil), or maybe men talked to women like that in the 70s?
Anyway, classic, brilliant horror novel, full of heart and atmosphere and occasional splatters of blood.
It opens, of course, with that eerie, unsettling image - a man driving somewhere with a child he has just taken. The air of mystery and dread surrounding this is unmatched in anything else I've ever read. The rest of the book delivers on the promise of this opening, but I will say there's one part set on a college campus that made me want to punch the character when he started interrogating a young woman he had only just met about her love life - we may have dodged a bullet in not losing Straub to what I think they call The College Novel, or maybe he just exorcised that literary inclination here. Yuk. Maybe it was the Evil Influence Of Evil (because she turns out to be Evil), or maybe men talked to women like that in the 70s?
Anyway, classic, brilliant horror novel, full of heart and atmosphere and occasional splatters of blood.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
5.0
This is a genuinely weird book, on a conceptual level, like a careful experiment that produces a mutant creation that is compelling, but with nothing useful to actually say. It's well-written, for sure, full of great ideas and brilliant scenes. It has no plot as such, until more than halfway-through. It has a central character who, no matter what he thinks or says or does, is never actully a protagonist. Even in the climactic battle, he's sidelined, and the person who could have emerged as the real protagonist wins through by sacrificing herself, reducing her to yet another emotional burden for Quentin.
Mostly, the central character keeps getting what he wants almost despite himself, and then remaining unhappy and even sabotaging his happiness. (A Secret History gets invoked a lot, but I'd put good money on Infinite Jest being much more of a model for Brakebills and its students.) He wanders through a series of updated childrens' fantasy stories, rich and gifted and priveleged and entitled but ridiculously disstisfied, and every now and then somone points out how terrible that is, actually, and yet it never seems to matter. It's infantile young people wallowing in infantile fantasies and only intermittently showing glmpses of something more grown-up and mature, but doomed to remain mired in unhappy unstaisfying nostalgia, commenting ironically and caustically on the obviously Narnian/Potterian/D&D nature of things and failing completely to create a new type of fantasy where they would actually fit in, rather than constantly being in a state of unresolved mismatch between characters and settings. Once they graduate from their amazing magical school, they literally have nothing to do with their secret magical abilities until one of them blunders on a plot coupon and they go rushing off to have a dumb childhood adventure in another world and become kings and queens over a presumably agreeable and gratfeul populace. It's actually pathetic, and it's supposed to be, I suppose, but the irony has nowhere to go except to eat itself.
There's a gesture towards something more real and scary and challenging in the final confrontation with the Beast, but then it resets to wallowing in mllennial discontent that cannot be allieviated by the wonders of magic and adventure, most of which are in forms that belong to a previous century, but incapable of finding forms that are actually meaningful to them, and to which they are meaningful. I suspect the rest of the trilogy reiterates this over and over again. Not sure I'll bother.
The Bright Sword was MUCH better.
Mostly, the central character keeps getting what he wants almost despite himself, and then remaining unhappy and even sabotaging his happiness. (A Secret History gets invoked a lot, but I'd put good money on Infinite Jest being much more of a model for Brakebills and its students.) He wanders through a series of updated childrens' fantasy stories, rich and gifted and priveleged and entitled but ridiculously disstisfied, and every now and then somone points out how terrible that is, actually, and yet it never seems to matter. It's infantile young people wallowing in infantile fantasies and only intermittently showing glmpses of something more grown-up and mature, but doomed to remain mired in unhappy unstaisfying nostalgia, commenting ironically and caustically on the obviously Narnian/Potterian/D&D nature of things and failing completely to create a new type of fantasy where they would actually fit in, rather than constantly being in a state of unresolved mismatch between characters and settings. Once they graduate from their amazing magical school, they literally have nothing to do with their secret magical abilities until one of them blunders on a plot coupon and they go rushing off to have a dumb childhood adventure in another world and become kings and queens over a presumably agreeable and gratfeul populace. It's actually pathetic, and it's supposed to be, I suppose, but the irony has nowhere to go except to eat itself.
There's a gesture towards something more real and scary and challenging in the final confrontation with the Beast, but then it resets to wallowing in mllennial discontent that cannot be allieviated by the wonders of magic and adventure, most of which are in forms that belong to a previous century, but incapable of finding forms that are actually meaningful to them, and to which they are meaningful. I suspect the rest of the trilogy reiterates this over and over again. Not sure I'll bother.
The Bright Sword was MUCH better.
Judge Dredd: The Pit by John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra
adventurous
dark
tense
fast-paced
5.0
John Wagner doing long-form street-level stories of pure sci-fi crime drama, if you know you know, but he really is criminally underappreciated, it sometimes seems.
The Possession by Michael Rutger
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Walls! Walls walls walls! Walls everywhere! Mysterous inexplicable ancient walls! They're all around you! Also, a girl has gone missing and an ex-wife is on the case so YouTube personality Whatsisface Thingummy - can't remember names, sorry - takes his crew to a small town surrounded by mountains and trees and things start to get spooky. Very spooky. Almost excessively spooky, one might say. Reminded me a lot of the sort of horror Charles Grant used to write, and that is not a bad thing at all. Atmospheric and creepy and suspenseful. Couldn't ask for more. WALLS!
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
dark
emotional
tense
5.0
Beginning and ending with beheadings, and packed in between with the minutiae of royal government, from international intrigues with France and the Holy Roman Empire to noticing the boy who brings in the candles when the king's chambers get dark. This is a magesterial work, never flagging in its exhaustive drive through the mind and soul and heart of Thomas Cromwell, and, through him, the world of Tudor England and the whims and desires of a monarch with absolute power.
Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 21 by Dan Abnett, Chris Standley, John Wagner, Alan McKenzie
adventurous
dark
5.0
Got this mostly for the Wilderlands serial which appeared some time after I stopped collecting 2000AD. I was always fascinated by it, since it was another tale of Dredd and a bunch of hapless supporting characters travelling through a relentlessly hostile landscape that kills most of them in various gruesome ways, a 2000AD staple. The red palette of Ezquerra's epsidodes are amazing, how come it wasn't also used in Trevor Hairsine's? Anyway, fun stuff.
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
5.0
So these may be two stone-cold literary and popular classics of the 21st century, fully and deservedly so. In Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell rose from nothing to one of the most powerful men in Tudor England. Now he holds and consolidates his power having learned his lessons well. And the lesson was this: give Henry what he wants. Start giving it before Henry even knows he wants it. And what Henry wants is this: a new wife. Anne Boleyn must go, and Thomas Cromwell, intelligent, adaptable, genial and even liberal must ensure justice is done the way justice must be done. That he will avenge himself on old enemies is part of his elegant design. Cromwell becomes truly terrifying here, even more so than the petulant child of a king or the arrogant and presumptuous queen. We like Cromwell. We see he does good. We see he tries to minimise the damage. he is realistic and compassionate without being sentimental. It is best to be ruthless and, having chosen a course, pursue it without question or apology. And so the queen falls, and others fall with her. And what are we to make of this?
A masterpiece of historical fiction, a humane portrait of a man written off as a monster, but which does not flinch from his bloody deeds. An amazing piece of work, and presumably, one that, like the life and work of Thomas Cromwell, has yet to be concluded.
A masterpiece of historical fiction, a humane portrait of a man written off as a monster, but which does not flinch from his bloody deeds. An amazing piece of work, and presumably, one that, like the life and work of Thomas Cromwell, has yet to be concluded.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
5.0
Beautifully written, fiercely intelligent, epic in scope, intimate in range, this is a note-perfect study in character and period, a compelling tale of the son of a brutal blacksmith who rises to the highest office in the land and sets about breaking down the old entrenched power structures and remaking a society in a more egalitarian fashion. That one of Thomas Cromwell's chief adversaries should be Thomas More, author of Utopia, is entirely apposite, and it is not unexpected that more romantic hindsight should cast him as a villain.
The tawdry soap opera of Henry VIII's second marriage becomes a painful, sometimes blackly comic, sometimes wrenching, always divisive political drama where lives are ruined and power shifts dramatically. But it is Cromwell's lively extended family and his affection for his boisterous household that keeps the story, and the character, grounded.
This won the Booker, and I'm slightly relieved after my previous Booker winner this year, The Sea The Sea, which certainly had its charms, but whose qualities as a year's best literary work escaped me, unless it was a particularly off year. Wolf Hall is superlative, a supreme achievement and a worthy winner.
The tawdry soap opera of Henry VIII's second marriage becomes a painful, sometimes blackly comic, sometimes wrenching, always divisive political drama where lives are ruined and power shifts dramatically. But it is Cromwell's lively extended family and his affection for his boisterous household that keeps the story, and the character, grounded.
This won the Booker, and I'm slightly relieved after my previous Booker winner this year, The Sea The Sea, which certainly had its charms, but whose qualities as a year's best literary work escaped me, unless it was a particularly off year. Wolf Hall is superlative, a supreme achievement and a worthy winner.
Hot Money by Naomi Klein
dark
informative
5.0
Ever want a glimpse of the true obstacles stacked against tackling climate change? Here you go. Good luck.
The Throat by Peter Straub
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
5.0
Dense, multi-layered, complex, rich thriller, a murder mystery, a hunt for a serial killer, an investigation into memory and the past, into guilt and trauma and history, a ghost story, and the conclusion to the ever-shifting meta-textual Blue Rose Trilogy. These are amongst my absolute favourite books of all time, and this revisit has been overdue and most enjoyable.