tony talbot

by

Tony’s review: The 5th Wave, Rick Yancey

 1

3/5

Cassie Sullivan may be one of the last humans left. The alien attack has wiped out most of humanity in four waves of increasing destruction.

It took me just over four days to read this. I started on Thursday night, and would have gone straight through the night if I didn’t have to get up the next morning. By the time I’d put it down, I was 20% of the way through, thoroughly hooked, and I finished it over the weekend.

It didn’t matter that the first part of the book was all back-story. What grabbed me was how compelling and plausible that back-story was. The aliens weren’t dumb enough to land and start with death-rays and city busters; instead taking out humanity in four swipes from orbit. Score: seven billion to zero.

The book split into two converging stories about 25% way through, which led to some twists that I could see coming a mile away (Although for a page or two, I did wonder if I had one of them pinned down). The second story strand was the brutal boot-camp training of teenage (and younger) soldiers for the fight back against the aliens. Or are they aliens? Trust and the destruction of trust is one of the themes of the book, a call back to fifties sci-fi films where the aliens (ie communists) look just like us.

Short, snappy chapters, tumbling stream of consciousness sentences stripped to the bone – Yancey’s writing style is fantastic, tripping along, ripping away everything but the most essential details. I wish THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy had been this good.

Where Yancey seems to struggle is with his social interactions. Conversations that don’t make much sense to the reader and some convoluted syntax didn’t give me much insight into their relationships. Cassie immediately falls for the first handsome boy she comes across, despite her mistrust of him and his motives, and despite warning herself not too. Although for a pleasant change, there isn’t a love triangle going on between Cassie and the two main male characters in the story.

An excellent book where it comes to action and the end of the world, but it falls off when the characters have to talk to each other.

by

Tony’s Review: Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/43/Clockwork_Angel_1.jpg/220px-Clockwork_Angel_1.jpg

3/5

Tessa Gray descends from a boat from New York to Victorian England, expecting to meet her brother, but a very strange and sinister pair of sisters kidnap her instead. Tessa finds herself pulled into a “Downworld” of magic, spells, vampires and demons, as she searches for her brother. Rescued by an organisation calling itself The Enclave, Tessa discovers she’s the focus of some very unwelcome attention, beings that will stop at nothing to possess power she didn’t know she had.

I’ve never read any Cassandra Clare before, and the book starts off really strongly. I can see why people like her writing. I felt immersed in Victorian London, smelling it and tasting it along with Tessa. For the first few chapters, the book rattled along.

Then it all fell apart for a while. There must be close to a hundred pages of exposition after Tessa is rescued by The Enclave. She sits and wanders around The Institute, while everyone tells her what sort of world she’s fallen into.

And there’s a chapter which really bugged me: Two of the main characters interview a businessman to see if they know anything about Tessa’s brother, and other matters. It could have been covered with a reported speech conversation about as short as this: “We went to see Mortmain. He doesn’t know where your brother is, but he seems to know more than he should about Downworld.”

It didn’t need a chapter. It didn’t need a chapter that head-hops out of Tessa and into two other characters. Nowhere else in the book does it do that. It was about this point that I realised I was reading exposition and nothing much else was going on apart from Tessa falling in love with the (obligatory) two boys at the same time.

Hmmm, love triangle with supernatural creatures, where have I seen that one before? At least these two are the best of friends and don’t let Tessa come between them.

However, the pages of exposition were quite subtly done – It did take me seventy pages to realise there wasn’t much else going on – and by then the pace was picking up again, enough to keep me reading until the end of the book. There was a neat twist close to the climax that reverberated right back to the start of the book that kept things interesting.

One of the joys of the book is its strong sense of location and atmosphere. Clare writes wonderful little details – moonlight streaming through a window, the stench of The Thames, long shadows and dark corners – to wrap you up in the world. Although she does need to know that in England in summertime, twilight goes on for hours. She has Tessa looking out of a window at sunset and a page of dialogue later it’s dark. At least, I hope Clare thinks it’s summertime – we don’t get much daylight at eight pm in winter.

The characters are another of the strengths of the book. Will and Jem flash witticisms off each other like a comedy duo, lightening the mood with comic relief; Tessa gives as good as she gets back at them, refusing to back down when faced with the moody Will.

Will…he’s an interesting character, a brooding Heathcliff and a Byronic hero, a wastrel like Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. Yet, like Sydney, you know his heart beats with passion and fire. I kept seeing Sydney Carton in every description of him – he does lean against things a lot, and has the same subtext of vulnerabilities, you sense. A 19th century Han Solo, waiting for his princess.

Jem was the yang to Will’s ying – sensitive, caring, passionate. Fragile to Will’s indestructible.

I never got the impression there was any contest between which of them Tessa would choose, so I couldn’t call the relationship they had a love triangle. Maybe a right angle one if it was; Tessa was always going to choose…ahh, but that would be a spoiler.

I knew going in that this was book one (Thanks for telling me on the cover – I hate books without a resolution that turn out to be trilogies), so not all of the questions were answered, not all of the villains dispatched or the threads wrapped up.

All in all, a skilful tale, filled with a great sense of place and atmosphere and witty dialogue. The exposition let the book down for me…it could have been fifty pages shorter.

I believe I read this is a prequel to The Mortal Instruments series, but I haven’t read them and didn’t need to to enjoy this one.

I’m in no rush to read Book Two or Three  (Why does everything need three books these days anyway?), but if I stumble across them one book-bereft day, I’ll probably pick them up.

by

Tony’s Writing Tips: Ignore that Elephant in the corner

Adam yawned and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, blearily taking in the empty place at the breakfast table. “Morning, mum. Where’s dad? Did he leave for work already?”

His mum didn’t turn away from the eggs she was scrambling. “We had an argument last night, so after he fell asleep, I shot him.”

Adam yawned again. “Extra butter in those eggs?”

“Of course.”

Adam poured himself some juice. “Is this orange? Did they change the ingredients?”

This silly piece of writing is an example of what writers call “The Elephant in the Room”.

Elephants, are of course, very hard to ignore. Unless your characters are wearing blinkers or earmuffs, having someone throw something major into your story and then not have anyone react to it is generally not a good idea.

Your character got up last night and shot someone, and all you want to know is if there’s extra butter with those scrambled eggs. At which point, your readers will start to wonder what the gubbins are you talking about, and why aren’t you talking about what’s really going on here.

Think of the facet of your story as a spotlight aimed at a darkened stage. There it is, shining away on the box on a table. The thing you want your characters to talk about is in that box – why Adam’s mother shot his father. And what are you doing? Shining your spotlight wayyyy over there, talking about scrambled eggs. Why do we care about scrambled eggs? We keep looking back at the box, no matter how hard you don’t want us to.

The other side of this is where magic and misdirection comes in. When you dim the lights to shine it on the eggs, we don’t see the stagehands swooping away the box and bringing the elephant on stage until the lights come back up – in my example, perhaps Adam pulls his own gun while we look away. Then we want the characters to talk about something else, while we do some magic in the dark.

But, the thing with “EITR” is that this misdirection is never given to a reveal. In my example, no one would ever mention the shooting again. If you cut away to focus on something else, fair enough; but remember to cut back to what your readers are thinking about:

Adam yawned and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, blearily taking in the empty place at the breakfast table. “Morning, mum. Where’s dad? Did he leave for work already?”

His mum didn’t turn away from the eggs she was scrambling. “We had an argument last night, so after he fell asleep, I shot him.”

Adam yawned again. “Extra butter in those eggs?”

“Of course.”

He poured himself some juice. “So you shot dad, huh? About time.”

“I thought so too.”

If you don’t do this, you’ll have a pachyderm of problems on your hands.

by

Tony’s Review: The Rainbow Maker’s Tale, Melanie Cusick-Jones

13448440

3/5

The sequel to Hope’s Daughter follows Balik’s storyline through the same events of the first book, told from his POV.

It’s an interesting choice for a sequel, and it fills in a lot of the blanks from the first book. I really liked Balik’s logical self-sufficient approach to life, and his approach to solving problems. He learns that trusting someone isn’t a weakness, but a strength – indeed, towards the end of the book, Cassie has to save him.

The world building was as strong as Hope’s Daughter, and this time we got to see more of the way the station worked. At the climax of the book, there’s a brutal torture sequence that makes me glad I’ve never upset the author enough to be interrogated by her!

It’s obvious Cusick-Jones has done her homework on medical and technological procedures – all the technology and biological information seem logical and consistent with what’s going on.

The pacing was good as well, the characters always on the move and the chapters never lingering too long.

It did suffer a little though, from knowing what was going on in Hope’s Daughter, and knowing how it played out. Although the books can be read in any order, you really need to read Hope’s Daughter first. For instance, the characters mention The Collective, which won’t mean anything if you hadn’t read HD.

There were a few typos that caught my eye as well – the most jarring was when Cassie says her friends have gone to the retirement quarter, not the marriage quarter, and there were a few run-on sentences that needed full stops and not commas – but nothing too major.

Looking forward to seeing where Cusick-Jones goes with the next book in the series!

by

Tony’s Review: Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

4/5

In fighting monsters, do we become monsters?

It’s the theme of this gripping book from Card. The writing is fluid and the characters dynamic and evolving.

Taken from his home at the age of six, Ender Wiggins is trained to be a killer against an alien race, a killer without remorse or pity. Terrified of turning into the bullying brother he hates, Ender is able to turn his anger to fighting mock battles in battle school, where a generation of children and teenagers are being trained to fight for the survival of humanity. At any cost to themselves, psychologically and physically.

The battles are fake and no one gets hurt, but that doesn’t stop Ender from being bullied and suffering psychologically – his brilliance is the target of envy, an envy fostered by his teachers. He responds brutally, without mercy…only feeling remorse when he’s finished.

In some ways, Ender reminded me of the literary James Bond. Bond would kill quickly and efficently; not enjoy doing it, but doing it because he had to in order to survive, and doing it to the best of his ability. Only Ender is a child, and the stress nearly pulls him apart.

One of the problems of the book is that Ender never sounds like a child. We’re told he’s a super genius, but I don’t think any super genius would be that mature. There’s a political subplot dragged in involving Enders sister and brother, but mostly it seems to be there for padding. What’s interesting about it is the way they go about it – they go online (The book was written in 1985) and set up sock-puppet accounts, each holding different opinions and written in a different style.

The biggest problems with the book start when Ender graduates to proper military training. I won’t give away the spoiler ending, but it seems rushed.

Also, 95% of the way through the book, a super weapon is mentioned in passing that has never been talked about before. It’s dropped so casually in the conversation, I thought I’d skipped a page. Half a page later, it happens again. “It will go straight through the Ecstatic Shield.” Oh, that’s all right then. So what is an Ecstactic Shield, since no one has ever talked about one before?

The epilogue seemed a little strained and too long as well. If the book had ended a chapter after the climax, it would have worked better. Instead Card seems to struggle to shoehorn extra plots in to work up to a sequel, and the book drags its feet to the last page.

by

Horrorfest Short…Ooze

Ooze

by
Tony Talbot

The last candle is nearly burned out now; I don’t have long to finish this letter. I only hope to G— that someone finds it before the thing is too late to stop.

The slithering has begun from the apartment next door again. It’s louder this time; hungry again, no doubt, after the ingestion of the landlord. I can see the wall to my left – the one that abuts the neighbouring room – bulging and heaving with it, and a little more of The Ooze comes through the wall every time, suppurating like a sebaceous cyst with its greased creamy whiteness, sliding down to the floor and writhing there, tendrils reaching with a blind hunger towards me.

But I must not look at the thing, or it will drive me to Bedlam or beyond, seduce me with its awful power until I am unable to resist. It wants me, and I am unable to resist for long. Write on, write on, and only sweep the candle flame to those pseudopods that quiver too close to me.

If I leave nothing else to this world but a memory of me on this parchment, then I had better start at the beginning.

Or as far back as matters, anyway.

***

My name is not important; nor how I came to be dragged so low as to require such a sordid lodging as this. Enough for me to say: I was important once, called upon by leaders and thinkers; but fortune blew my vessel into a reef and shipwrecked me on an island of misfortune, washing away all I was and all I held dear.

It was all I could do to flee my life and its burdens with a few pennies and a shirt upon my back, and for a while, I stumbled from friend to friend and home to home until my welcome was as worn out as my spirit. I took myself from the last of them…Lor, only two days ago! So long it seems, when one does not dare sleep.

I found myself, after a blank wandering of hours, down at the edge of the detritus of the river, staring at the black abyss that rolled by me, contemplating its cold waters while rats scurried by and other nameless insects crawled over the sorry remains of my boots, seeking the taste of my skin as though I were already a feast for the eaters of the dead.

 Would that I had jumped into the seething darkness! So quick it would have been, so painless. Instead, some aboriginal survival instinct recalled me to myself and I stumbled on, following the river downstream, past broken warehouses and slattern houses that stared at me with unseeing eyes, into a heathen wasteland far beyond civilised man.

So I found myself here, the last boarding house on the last street; decrepit, worn down, leaning into the river that was ready to claim it, much as I was. I banged on the miserable excuse for a door until the landlord appeared, his appearance a broken mirror of the building he kept.

His odiferous stench repulsed me, until I realised my own body smelt no better. He held a weak lantern to his face; it was half eaten away by a pox, the cavity of his nose and mouth a gaping hole of black shadow, one eye a sightless storm of albumen. Mangy tufts of white hair, matted and yellowed, spun from the scaly desert of his scalp.

“Waddawant at this ‘our?” He shouted, his breath sickly with weak gin and rotting meat.

“I…I want a room. Any room. For a few nights, at least,” I stammered.

The landlord looked me up and down. “You look like a gent, but can ee pay though, squire? Can ee?”

I held out the limp remains of my coin purse and he snatched it from me with superhuman speed, opening it with rapacious hunger.

“Just one room left. Right over the river.” The landlord turned and showed me his hunched back, taking the circle of light with him as he retreated into the house, his slippered feet slapping the floor with a dull, irregular thwap, thwap, thwap. I followed him with alacrity; he had not returned the coin purse, after all.

Along leaning and twisting corridors of mould and damp we walked, the naked boards beneath my feet warped and twisted with river rot, walls off kilter and bulging like a boiled body with gas gangrene. Multi-legged black and grey shapes on the walls scurried away from the feeble lantern, whispering feet returning after we had passed. I bit my lip as we walked deeper, trying to still the urge to run from this place. Only the thought that I had nowhere else to go kept me from taking to my heels.

Eventually, we came to a feeble threshold, an excuse of a door. A few slats of wood with gaps large enough for my arm to fit through, a frame that had probably never been straight. The landlord waved the lantern at the door and left without another word, the halo of light and weak warmth departing with him. Before the light fled entirely, leaving me in unutterable darkness and the thrall of its insectile minions, I leapt for the door and barged my way through it.

The single room consisted of one bed, one table and three unlit candles with a lone Lucifer match and striker. A high window shone a small square of olinaceous wan moonlight upon the floor, or all would have been nothing but shadows. Prodding the bed, I shifted the larger rats from it before I sat down; they went sulkily enough off to the corners of the room, plotting their revenge on me, no doubt. Then I noticed the yellowing pieces of parchment and the pen and ink beside them; but having no reason to write (at least then) I ignored them and lay on the bed, presently to sleep.

 ***

It must have been three or four hours later, in the deadest hours of the night, when the chanting woke me.

At first, it slid into my dreams of the better life I had left behind as a low moaning. As H— and I sat on the riverbank again (in my dream) and picnicked, the singing began from nowhere; I was not alarmed at first, but then the stridency and immediacy increased until I awoke in a cold sweat.

That was when I heard the first woman scream.

I rolled instantly out of bed, my impulse to rush to the high window and see if I could raise the alarm. Then another scream, rising from the room beside mine. I had taken a step towards my own door, intending to offer my aid, when another scream stopped me. A different timbre, I realised; a different woman.

And something else I realised as well, with a start that made me colour. The women had not cried in terror, but in the extreme pleasures of a sensuous release; and as the screams reverberated around me once more, I felt myself stir from their intensity. Drawn against my nature and my will, I placed my ear to the parboiled flesh of the wall, feeling its slippery fecundity intimate against my cheek.

The cabalistic chanting began again, a low sound, getting louder and faster, pulsing in a fevered heartbeat, and then the screams came again and again. My eyelids fluttered and my brain submerged in a miasma, drowning in the primal sounds. I felt myself tugged and pulled towards the carnal noises, seeing the vile street-women who must be screaming with such abandon; certainly, no lady would permit herself such pleasures!

I saw them ravaged and writhing beneath their brutish men, submissive to every whim; and suddenly I could see myself standing over them, engorged as never before, eager to pleasure them and myself, my essence splattering their bodies, eyes, lips, tongues, hungry and longing. I shuddered and shook with an ague, a hunger to be among them more intense than any I had ever known.

Disgusted with my base instincts, I ripped myself away from the wall and lay down again, seeking a solace in slumber. But the chanting and screams of pleasure did not cease, and as I lay on my bed, only the thin wall between us, my body conspired against me, my sanity fighting against the primal throbbing, pulsing, lure of the song. I bit my knuckles until they bled, until the pain shouted down my tumescent loins, and I covered my ears with my hands until the muscles locked and they ached for surcease.

Suddenly, without realising I had moved, I found myself outside my neighbours apartment, my fist raising to demand entry; but the instant I knocked, the noises ceased and silence crashed around me and swept over me. Only a low hooting of some riverboat passing on the river outside broke it as I stood there, irresolute.

My body slowly returned to my cold control, and I began to imagine I had dreamt the whole incident. So, feeling emboldened and now willing to complain, I raised my hand to knock again at the rude door, but it swung open as if pulled before I could touch the rotting wood.

 ***

The room was larger than mine, stripped bare of all furniture and fittings, nothing more than a box of mildewed walls and low ceiling. I recoiled, my eyes wide, when I saw that on the floor in the centre was a large chalk circle and heathen star of some kind, surrounded by extinguished black candles.

Some pagan mass, I thought, stepping across the threshold. Ungodly thing that the circle was, I felt my eyes and my body drawn to it again as I studied the room. I managed to look away long enough to study the floor and walls, but the weak moonlight conspired against me; it was several minutes before I saw the bodies.

Three women and a man, all bereft of clothing, huddled in the corner. The women were of the low sort my imagination had thought them, their nakedness shocking, their pale white skin torpid and flaccid with the look of death. The man was slumped over them, a rough brute of a creature, obscene, with body hair as thick as a hound.

Despite my revulsion I went to them, but as I suspected, all three were dead by some means unknown. I backed away from them for a step, but then came back, puzzled. I pushed my fingers against the arm of the man. I was able to squeeze it completely flat; there was no resistance, as though the bones and flesh had been sucked out of him, leaving only a bag of skin; but there were no other injuries I could detect.

While I pondered this, there was a movement at my feet. Suspecting one of the women to be still alive, I tugged the man out of the way. Sliding over the skin of the woman was a turgid off-white cream, about a pint, that slithered and roiled over her breasts and pudenda. Naturally, my mind associated it with a masculine discharge and my expression twisted in disgust.

But as I watched, The Ooze thickened and groped blindly towards me, somehow aware of my presence. I felt my brain slipping; I should have been repulsed, but felt myself pulled to it, feeling myself stir and thicken as I had when I heard the women scream in pleasure.

I longed for its touch on my bare skin, for its silky creaminess to possess me and devour me. Observing The Ooze slide around the body of the naked dead woman aroused me as much as the carnal chanting. I longed to shed my inhibitions and cavort with it and her as I would with a Bohemian lover, to pleasure myself with them both in a total moral abandon. I shuddered, and not from revulsion.

A tendril reached my hand and I turned it over so it could fill my palm with its smoothness. Entranced, I watched it slide along my wrist, titillating the nerves along my fingers with a lovers touch, stimulating every nerve ending with intense pleasure.

For luck, some part of me broke then; some part of me recalled my failing sanity. I gagged and flicked The Ooze from my hand with a violent gesture, and it splattered against the wall. It rose towards me, hungry blind fingers seeking my skin. I turned and fled from it in a terror of madness, noting as I did that more of The Ooze rose from the centre of the chalk circle from wherever these foul people had called it, writhing and pulsing, seducing and repelling.

 ***

I found the landlord asleep at his desk, his feet raised and his head back, the gaping maw of his mouth and nose a black hole in his face. I shook him awake without preamble and recounted the events of the evening in a hurried remembrance.

He was unimpressed. “Bloody gent, knew I shouldna let you ‘ave a room.” He leaned back in his chair, his arms folded, obviously unwilling to move as he studied me with his eye.

“For the love of G— man, come and look! If nothing else, for the poor souls who died tonight,” I implored.

He rolled his eyes towards the heavens and hauled himself slowly from his chair, taking up his lantern with a sullen slowness, lighting it from the spluttering gas, grumbling to himself under his voice. I bade him hurry only once, and he gave me the short side of his tongue, threatening to sit down and sleep again if I said another word. I bit my lips shut and said nothing more.

I followed the feeble halo of light as we walked with sulky slowness towards my room. I pointed mutely along the corridor, the door down there now shut again.

“Bloody gents,” he ejaculated, stumbling the last few steps with me behind him. He raised the lantern and knocked once. Receiving no reply, and about to give up, I pushed the door open for him; it was not locked and swung open easily. The landlord took a step into the room and then stopped, swearing once. My body locked up behind him, cold terror unmanning my legs and arms.

He waved the lantern outwards to each corner of the room and then spun back to me. “Don’t think much of yourn sense of fun, mister. Good mind ta arsk you to leave.”

“What…what do you mean?”

“This rums empty as your ‘ead.”

I pushed past him and stared at the corner where the bodies and The Ooze had been a few minutes earlier. “No…they…they were-“

The landlord had stopped listening to my rantings, and was studying the chalk markings on the floor behind me. “That’s bloody queer. What’s…wazzat stuff in the middle?”

Cold water poured down the back of my neck and circled my waist, my legs turning to ice. “Don’t look at it. For G— sakes man, look away.”

“Nowt to be ‘fraid of is there…it looks…looks-” His voice trailed off, his eye growing wide. A leer grew and stretched his cheeks upwards. “Oooaye, nowee, ‘ow about that. Mmm, thar’s nice.” His free hand stretched slowly down to the creamy albumen at the centre of the circle and he cackled with a low lascivious need. “Oooh, thar’s…thar’s…lovely, lovely darncing stuff.”

I turned towards the circle myself, and then felt the pulse in the back of my head start to rise, and my body start to rise with it. Smashing myself on the nose with a fist, I broke the spell of the thing before it had me, turning away from it, trying to drag the old man away.

He fought me every step, the lantern cavorting wild shadows on the walls. “Lemme go, lemme go to it, it won’t hurt ee,” he moaned, his eye glued to The Ooze as it writhed towards his feet.

In desperation, I snatched the lantern from him and hurled it at the circle; a ball of yellow flame rose to the ceiling and was gone, and I had to hold my sanity with both hands when I realised it was contained within the circle and nowhere else.

The effect of the flame upon The Ooze was instant; it recoiled and retracted on itself, hissing with a sound of pain that penetrated to the back of my brain. But the effect was only temporary. It gathered itself and spat a tendril to the landlord’s hand and wrist, encasing them in a foetid grip. The old man’s eye rolled back and he groaned in what I took to be pain; but as the ooze spread along his arm, I could clearly see the pleasure etched in his crude face.

I tugged against him, pulling him away from the growing ooze, but the struggle was an uneven one; not only was I fighting The Ooze, but the old man’s twisted intentions. The old man hauled me backwards, and when he bit me viciously, I had to release him. I made it to the door and hung on to the frame with a death grip, turning at last at the scene in the room.

The Ooze had the old man up to the shoulder now, and with his free hand, he was divesting himself of the last of his clothing, tearing at his skin in his eagerness, his excitement obvious. As I watched in a mute, fascinated horror, compelled to watch, The Ooze fastened itself upon his member and began to slowly pulse. The old man shuddered with intense pleasure and his eyes rolled up and closed.

Then around his arm, the grey goo grew red, a red flecked with white; it seemed to squeeze his body in a lethal embrace; as it did, it grew and swelled, pulsing as it sucked the very blood and shattered bones from his body through his very skin. Now I understood the injuries of the hirsute heathen whose body I had examined earlier; and thence it must have devoured the remains of the bodies while I had sought out the landlord, as a spider will devour its prey from the inside out.

When the old man screamed for the last time, a high note that shook the rafters of the old building, my nerve snapped and I ran for my life back to my room without thinking. I flung myself upon the floor and berated my weak nerves; thrashing my fists and head against the floor until I fell into a welcome stupor.

It must have been an hour before I came to myself again; when I did, the eternal damned night had at last ended and feeble daylight shone upon me. My first impulse was to flee, and I staggered to my feet and to the door.

I had taken but one step when I saw The Ooze, coiled at the base of my weak threshold of a door, quiescent for now, throbbing with a slow torpid life. I felt myself begin to slip into its foul erotic mesmer, and tore my eyes away while I could.

Hastily I looked around the room, retreating to the high window. I forced open the frame and shouted across the dank river, my voice lost in the vastness of the empty vista it revealed. I shoved my shoulders against the lathe, but came not even close to being able to squeeze myself through the tiny gap.

Trapped! I realised. It must only be the daylight that had saved me so far; I reasoned as The Ooze reacted so strongly to fire, that perhaps it must sleep during the day.

Fire! I groped for my three candles and the Lucifer match, my hands shaking with palsy so badly I had to strike the match four or five times before it caught. My fingers danced to the first candle, and I wafted it to the door, waving away the turgid grey pseudopods; but alas the flame wasn’t sufficient to ward them off completely; and I could not look at them for more than an instant without feeling myself fascinated by them, entranced by their wretched beauty.

I retreated again to my bed, husbanding the candle; too late, I realised that when darkness came again, the candles would be the only protection against it. I contemplated setting fire to the room, but the dampness of the wood around me divested me of the notion. In this rot, nothing would burn.

I had been on my bed but an instant when the wall beside me bulged with a foul life and tendrils slid through the growing cracks; I realised The Ooze must be filling the room next door, straining to escape its confines. I retreated to the desk, holding the candle out as a benediction, waving away the pseudopods that reached for me.

And having nothing else to do but wait for death or salvation, I took the pen and started to write.

***

The light has faded again, and the last candle is at the smoking end of its wick. Around my feet, The Ooze has covered the floor, sliding tendrils across my ankles and up my calves, questing upwards. Oh, the sensation of it, the longing I have to feel its light touch against my skin! I shall not be able to write much more without succumbing to it; I grow tumescent again, aching and aching for it. Already it curls around my fingers, tugging my pen away.

Anon, I shall blow out the candle – and with it my life – but I must resist for as long as possible; I thought I heard voices on the river an instant ago, an alarm raised, but I do not have the strength or desire to rise to the window and find out.

I look back upon the last few months, at the ruin of my life, and The Ooze offers me a peaceful solution to all my problems if I go quietly. I can almost hear it, whispering to me with a lover’s voice, promising me peace. Is it too much to ask for a last kiss in the dark, even if the kiss means certain death?

The Ooze promises me something I had never thought I would feel again, a sensation I thought I would never experience.

I can only hope.

by

Horrorfest Post…Why Stephen King missed his calling

This post by Tony T orginially featured on the blog in October last year, but I thought it fitted well with this event and so have re-posted it today 🙂

——————————————————————–

I’ve read quite a few Stephen King books. Not all of them by any means – I believe the list is now up to sixty two, – but I’ve read enough of them to know his writing pretty well.

We all know the genre: Joe Average (who has a habit of being a writer) finds himself in a supernatural situation, gets himself out of it – though doesn’t always survive mentally.

And fair enough, some of them are gruesome to the max – I believe all aspiring writers should read Misery, just as an object lesson to run from anyone who tells you, ‘I’m your Number One Fan’, and as a delve into the writing process.

But I digress, and back to my point.

I put it to the world: He missed his calling. The man was born to write YA.

I came across the review Em posted on here for The Long Walk, and flicking through my shelves of King today, it occurred to me that the works I think are his best are all, at heart YAs: IT. The Long Walk. The Body (Stand by Me, for those who only know the film). The Talisman. Christine. Carrie.

But what about the horror? What about the profanity? Some might ask. I’d ask if they’d read any YA recently. I’d pick up a Bali Rai and point out the profanity in there. I’d pick up a Darren Shan and show you the gore inside. He’s not written anything in the books I’ve mentioned above that couldn’t be handled by a teenager.

The simple fact is Stephen King works best when he’s writing about teenagers and children.

He knows on a fundamental level how they tick, the elemental fears that move and shake them. He knows how a dark cellar scares the lunch out of them, how sunlight gleaming from the ankle bracelet of the first girl you ever love melts your heart.

And he knows the value of childhood friendships (The Body: I never had any friends later on like I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did anyone?), the easy pain cruel parents inflict on their children – and not always physically.

That’s why his horror works so well…he knows the fears of childhood and knows we’ve all been there. Who’s never been frightened by a clown like Pennywise in IT? Personally, I don’t remember a time I didn’t find clowns scary.

Even Christine, which is perhaps a borderline case for YA, is all about the losers in high school, full of teenage angst and anger. Breaking the rules for the first time to get what you want, breaking away from your parents.

Stephen King missed his calling. He’s wasted on all those adults! YA’s should take him as one of their own!

So I put it to the world: Start a campaign. Stephen King should write YA!

by

Tony’s Review…Tomorrow When the War Began, John Marsden

5/5

Tomorrow was one of the first YA books I read as an adult. My wife had read them, and kept telling me to read it. I bought Tomorrow When the War Began, and was blown away by it.

Re-reading it, it’s got me hooked all over again.

Marsden has an uncanny ability to get right into the heads of his characters, to make you think and feel exactly as they do. Every emotion and sensation, every smell and nuance comes alive on the page. Although a story about teenagers going through a war isn’t new, Marsden brings a new angle to it. If you ever want to know how shooting someone – even an enemy of your country – would really feel, it’s right here. How the vomit would rise in your throat, how the cold fear would lock up your legs and your brain as bullets fly towards you. How watching your best friend for life get shot would make you feel.

This is no Hollywood film where death and emotion are cheap. We go through everything the main character goes through, the highs and the lows.

The YA field and the world have moved on since this was published in 1993, so none of the characters has a cell phone or smartphone (A scene they changed in the movie with good comic effect), and oddly, the characters feel at first like a 1950s bunch with their dialogue. None of them swear – even the ‘bad kid’ never utters a profanity. Not that they need to; just a reflection on how YA evolves.

One of the things I noticed on a re-read is how Marsden lets our imaginations fill in what the characters look like. Beyond describing them in basic details, like the colour of their hair and their eyes, everything else is left to us. I didn’t realise until the re-read that Ellie the main character is stocky, for instance.

Every character starts as a stereotype, simple for the effect of blowing those stereotypes out of the water. Lee the quiet boy becomes a killing machine. Homer the clown becomes a leader. Fi the gentle becomes brave and utterly fearless. Never judge by appearance, Marsden shows us, and here is why.

It’s more of a character driven story as well, I now realise. In some ways, the war is secondary to the characters and how they evolve. Marsden wants us to see them change, and the agent for that change is not really important.

Simply superb. Marsden should be regarded – and in some places he is – as one of the best YA writers there is, and it’s books like this that make you realise why.

He really is that good.

by

Tony’s Review…Mice, Gordon Reece (Spoilers)

4/5

Shelley and her mother are mice, hiding away from the world in one of its corners. Both of them carry the scars of their battles with predators – Shelley’s at the hands of school bullies who nearly killed her, and her mother emotional scars from fights against her father and her bullying bosses.

So being mice, when a burglar breaks into their home and threatens them, they do what mice do: They hide, they accede, they submit. But Shelley snaps, pushed past the limit. And she discovers that mice have teeth, and what sharp little teeth they are. Shelley kills the burglar in self defence, but her mum realises that the police won’t see it that way…they’ll see it as murder.

They decide to hide the body, to bury the burglar in the rose bushes. The act of defiance becomes a waiting timebomb beneath them, waiting to explode. Every knock on the door makes Shelley think of police, of prison bullies who will make the ones at school look like nursery teachers.

But gradually, the two women come to realise that the teeth they used to kill the burglar are still sharp. They begin to take control of their lives, to come out from the shadows. To fight back against the people they submitted to.

And when a note from a blackmailer arrives, the two women decide to use those teeth again, this time to kill…

A fantastic premise and a wonderful idea.

I loved this book. The two characters come alive and evolve, transformed by what they’ve been through. Every stage of the plot proceeded from it’s tense (all be it slightly unrealistic) first encounter with the burglar and shot off without a pause, pulling me along with it. Will they be caught? What will happen next? What will trip them up? It kept me flipping the pages and I zipped through it.

The descriptions and world building were first class, lending the book a real sense of atmosphere and place. I had no trouble visualing the world they lived in, and I breathed in the smell of the flowers through their windows, felt the terror and the tension as they did.

I did wonder at the end if Shelley was becoming a sociopathic monster, desensitised to the violence she’s lived through. She urges her mother to shoot the blackmailer, screaming at her to do it, do it. And at the end, when she wants to return to school, she almost seems to relish the thought of a confrontation with her former bullies.

I wonder: What becomes of a mouse when it realises that it enjoys how sharp it’s teeth are?

by

Tony’s Review…Breathe, Sarah Crossan

3/5

Sometime after the world has starved itself of oxygen and humanity has retreated to sealed domes, our three main characters find themselves bound together in an adventure. Alina, resistance fighter, who knows the pods are an excuse for the elite to hold on to power; Quinn, the son of one of those elite; and Bea, the daughter of one of the working classes, lovelorn for Quinn who never notices her (at first, anyway).

It’s a wonderful premise of a book, the world suffocating without oxygen, and the world building and descriptions of the wastelands outside the pod are great. It’s the characters that let the book down a little. We shift from one perspective to another every chapter, first person every time, and perhaps that’s the problem. I would have liked to have stayed in Quinn’s head for longer to get to know him better, for instance. The characters voices are quite similar as well, such that I had to check the chapter headings to see who was speaking and thinking a few times.

I would have enjoyed the book more if it had been about the end of the world, the time called “The Switch”. Watching humanity fall apart into ruin was what pulled me into the book and the little flashbacks are what kept me interested. It would have been grim reading, I’m sure, but there are glimpses of the lost world that I felt needed exploring more. A character talks of when she was a death nurse, killing people who asked rather than let themselves slowly suffocate. Tell me what that was like rather than focus on the long-after. Write a prequel, maybe.

Unusually, the love triangle is between two girls and one boy, rather than the other way round. I liked that. I liked there was a character who was gay and it was the least interesting thing about him. It’s mentioned once and not again. He isn’t defined by it as though it were his only attribute.

There are inevitable loose ends – this is book one of at least two – and it felt like there was a slow build that will continue into the next book, and I never felt cheated out of the unanswered questions.

Will I read book two in autumn 2013? I think I will, just to see where it all goes and how it all ends.