Review - The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Bewitching

Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Arcadia, date, 
Available as: HB, 354pp, audio, e   
Source: 
ISBN(HB): 9781529441703

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Bewitching  to consider for review.

In The Bewitching, Silvia Moreno-Garcia deftly blends three timelines to produce a clever and suspenseful New England horror which is also fully aware of, and reflects on, the tradition of New England horror. It's not just, here is a seemingly innocent country of coasts and little towns where lurk horrors. it's, here is a country whose horrors have been written about. The implicit warning - Don't go into the scary place! - is turned inside out from the start, because for Minerva, the scary place is the point. (A point driven home by Moreno-Garcia's deployment of many modern horror authors' names as background: look out for the names of student halls, faculty, positions, awards and honours. See how many you can spot!)

In 1998, Minerva is a young graduate student at Stoneridge College, making ends meet by doing teaching jobs and supervising student accommodation. She's looking forward to some peace and quiet over the summer months to develop her thesis about cult horror writer Beatrice Tremblay, who herself studied at Stonebridge in the 1930s.

In 1934, Beatrice herself recounts the events which led up to the disappearance of her beloved Virginia - events which, decades later, she based one of her most celebrated stories on. 

And in 1908, Minerva's great-grandmother, Alba, who lives on a dull backwater farm looks forward to a visit from her beloved uncle Arturo and yearns to return with him to the bright lights of Mexico City.

Each of the three women - Minerva, Alba and Virginia - will learn dark truths about the hidden world and will have to find strength to face a haunting evil. To that degree, they're in a sense the same story, though with varying outcomes. Of course Minerva's and Beatrice's stories take place ion the same setting, with direct connections between the horrors they confront. But the stories are also very different, interestingly different, featuring women in quite varying situations.

Alba is at first naive, on the edge of womanhood and yearning for a life of glamour, as she perceives it. There's something a little too trusting about her, perhaps. Her natural rebelliousness at the chaffing rules imposed by her mother may, one feels, lead her into trouble and it's hard to be sure who her real friends are as a string of grisly calamities begins to hit the farm. To whom can she turn for help?

Minerva seems at first a more solid personality, her main difficulties when we first encounter her being a severe case of thesis block and her difficulty in accessing the private archives she needs to explore to learn more about Beatrice. When - through a fortuitous chain of events, even if one foreseen in a hint of not entirely usual powers - Minerva succeeds in persuading their dour guardian to led her read the notebooks and manuscripts that will open the way, Carolyn Yates still imposes a myriad of restrictions and limits. Carolyn, matriarch of the distinctly "old money" Yates family, also appears in her youth in the 1930s section of the book as a friend and confidante of Beatrice, albeit not perhaps the witness to events that Minerva would really have sought.

The third protagonist, Beatrice herself, is more of a witness, her later life writing horror perhaps an attempt to testify, to piece together just what happened in December 1934. (Or to atone for her part in it?) The disappearance of a young woman from college wasn't looked into particularly at the time, the blame, if blame there was, being directed at a young Mexican man. Historic prejudice joins the mix here alongside class attitudes and gender norms in twisting the direction of events (one wonders whether, if the love that may have been possible between Virginia and Beatrice had been able to develop, events would have taken quite the same turn).

To understand what is happening in each of the sections, you need to stand back and see the picture as a whole, to look for patterns. Minerva. once she realises the stakes, does just that, piecing together present day events with the wisdom of her Nana to meet the threat. Alba herself draws on reserves of courage to behave in ways her society wouldn't expect. And Beatrice, well, in her witness Beatrice warns and provides vital information.

As the threats mount in all three time periods, there is a feeling of doom - we know some of the outcomes, and there have been hints about some of the rest, so it can feel as though this is a predetermined road to death and loss. But Moreno-Garcia is adept at misdirecting the reader, or perhaps, letting their own assumptions disguise the truth, resulting a thrilling ending (or, endings) though with just a little room for doubt as to the future. 

She, herself, writes in the last sentence of her Afterword "I wear my bracelet against the veil eye pin my left hand."

Wise.

A gripping and exciting story. 

For more information about The Bewitching, see the publisher's website here.

Blogtour review - Downlands by Norm Konyu

Downlands
Norm Konyu
Titan Comics, 13 May 2025
Available as: HB, 292pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781787743328

I'm grateful to Julia at Titan Comics for sending me a copy of Downlands to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the blogtour for this excellent graphic novel.

I hadn't read Norm Konyu's work before but now that I've seen Downlands I'm a fan. To this 70s child there's a haunting fusion of form and content here, not so much dreamlike as "memories you had forgotten like". And that's even before you add in the folk-horror vibe and rich historical depth.

Set in the ancient countryside and the villages of Sussex, Downlands is centred around James and his 14 year old sister Jen, who dies suddenly at the start of the book. I think it's fair to say the story is centred around James and Jen because her absence is itself a presence that haunts this book. It is (as well as being many other things!) a powerful evocation of loss and dislocation, as James and his parents struggle with their grief and the unfairness of a life lost so young. ("Tea again. I was constantly being offered tea as if it would make everything right.") The supernatural events that flit around the subsequent story reflect that dislocation, but they are clearly intended here as more than a reaction to it - there is something amiss.

Jen's absence isn't the only one. Through the book, Konyu also gives us, via retold stories, fragments of history, postcards, extracts and countless other sources, the stories of the houses in James' street. These include many losses. There have been deaths. There have been disappearances. Young men march away to war, to return changed, it at all. One unfortunate woman is committed to the county asylum. A family perish in a road accident. A cottage burns down and is never rebuilt. 

Other events are also touched on - a famous writer lodged in the street while working on her masterpiece. The local vicar struggles with his sermon. A woman whispered to be a witch has some answers. And, through all of it, a mysterious black dog that only some can see steps in and out of the tale.

It's a puzzle of sorts. James tries to understand what happened to Jen, but discovers that is linked to other, older mysteries. It's not "ancient evil" territory but there is a sense of malevolence, or perhaps, of human twistedness warping a natural ineffableness to darken and taint the lives of those who live in The Street (and especially at one particular address). In the course of sketching this out, Konyu blends many powerful themes, both historical and mythic - excavating the "ghost soil" as it were (and helpfully describes some of the sources at the end)

The story is, as I mentioned, conveyed in a very distinctive style, naturalistic yet stylised, the angles and often muted tones often gorgeous yet chiming with the slightly awkward feelings and sense of disjunction being felt by James and his family. Grief, guilt and disbelief will do that to how you see the world, I think. I have no learning in graphical styles so may be making some huge faux pas here, but to me it also recalled a strand in book illustration from the 60s and 70s - something overlapping between the sparseness of Dick Bruna and those intricate line drawn pictures in 70s Puffin books. I felt very at home with these pages. (That's especially useful since the book encourages you to turn back and forward, making connections between things as later pages shed new light on earlier material).

All in all, a ravishing read, perfect whether as something spooky to send shivers through you in summer hear or autumn fog, as a powerful episode of nostalgia, or as a comforting companion in grief. Or, just if you want a good read!

For more information about Downlands, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Downlands from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, or Waterstones.

#Review - Nobody's Angel by Jack Clark

Nobody's Angel

Jack Clark
Titan Books, 13 February 2024
Available as: HB, 224pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781803367477

I'm grateful to Titan Books for sending me an advance copy of Nobody's Angel to consider for review.

Nobody's Angel is a gritty crime novel set among nighttime cab drivers in 1990s Chicago. Eddie Miles, the focal character, crashed his family and destroyed all he loved. He ended up scrabbling for work in what is obviously a waning sector. All the talk is of the glory days of the cab trade, but the present day reality is reflected in many scenes where Eddie cruises for business amongst abandoned building and rundown malls, glad to get a trip that yields a few dollars. 

Written only a few decades ago, it's sobering how much of this book is now effectively a period piece - depicting a world with no mobiles, no Uber, one where smoking in cabs or cafés is unremarkable. And a world - consider this a content warning - where racial epiphets which would be unthinkable today are casually deployed. For example,  the n-word is used in the cab drivers' banter, as is the p-word (although I think the latter may be less taboo in the US than the UK). There are also sexist assumptions about women (we see no women cab drivers). This is where the plot kicks off. Amongst the bleak depictions of nights spent driving round the city, avoiding certain districts, avoiding passengers from certain groups, jostling for trade with the other cab drivers, Eddie ponders two series of killings - one of young women, another of fellow drivers. The drivers are seen as victims deserving of sympathy, the women as sex workers who no doubt got what was coming.

Despite that, Eddie does show some humanity (and to his own cost) when he comes across the aftermath of an assault, and this draws him into a desultory attempt to investigate both series of murders. He is, though, as he points out at the end of the book, nobody's angel and redemption seems in short supply on the hostile streets of Chicago with Eddie walking away form one opportunity (though perhaps he will still make some progress in locating his estranged daughter?)

A raw book about, often, bitter, damaged people, and one I enjoyed as giving an insight into a world very alien to me. What I enjoyed was the detail, the war stories told by the cabbies in the back room at the Golden Batter Pancake House and the scenes depicted by Clark - stories of eccentric passengers and their bizarre behaviour, stories of feuds and conflicts between the drivers, hair-raising driving and all the variety of life that a teeming, diverse city holds. These are interspersed with extracts from the Chicago Department of Community Services rulebook for cab drivers, showing just how close to the line the drivers come (and how often they cross it) in their professional lives. All of this, unfiltered, is perfect slice-of-life stuff (my favourite episode was Eddie's visit, with a customer, to a heavily shuttered dive bar in a part of town he clearly regards as a dangerous ghetto but where he and his customer find fellowship and a warm welcome).

I'm so glad I read this book, I would point out that the rather raunchy cover isn't actually representative of the content (for the most part) though it will get you some glances reading on your morning commute!

For more information about Nobody's Angel, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Silver Nitrate
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Jo Fletcher Books, 18 July 2023
Available as: HB, 318pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529418040

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Silver Nitrate to consider for review.

Silver Nitrate is a smart, scary and complex horror novel drawing on the legacy of classic films and books - but with a sense of edginess all of its own as it unspools around the legacy of a (fictitious) Nazi occultist who flees to Mexico following WW2.

In Mexico City, Montserrat works as an editor at Antares, a firm specialising in audio for low-budget horror films. She loves her work and is good at it but times are tough in 1993 with new techniques coming along and her pig of a boss favouring male editors, so she has time on her hands and a need for new projects.

Montserrat's childhood friend Tristán, a disgraced soap star, is in a similar situation with work hard to find since he was involved in a scandal some years before - a scandal that left him, at least in his own eyes, disfigured. So both friends are ready for some distraction, and perhaps the prospect of redressing their misfortunes - although they often don't see eye to eye.

The bickering that ensues between Montserrat and Tristán is just wonderful. These are people who know each other really well; who met in school; who got up to mischief as kids; who fell out and made up repeatedly; whose careers overlap and parallel one another; and yet who still don't understand each other - or themselves. In one sense it's Montserrat and Tristán against the world, in another it's Montserrat and Tristán against each other in a death match. All of that is further complicated when Tristán's new neighbour turns out to be famous director Abel Urueta, who stopped making films in the 60s with a particularly notorious horror production that is rumoured to have been suppressed. Now he wants to finish his movie - and this is the project that will transform everyone's lives.

So, a director whose career spiralled downwards, a dead occultist and a washed up actor. Only Montserrat seems to be active in the industry, and the others need her help. But will she be able, and willing, to do what they want of her? And what might it do to her?

I loved this beautiful book. Whether evoking subtle, crawling dread, conjuring monstrous horrors, exploring the relationship between the Nazi past and the (slightly more) subtly prejudiced present, or just showing us 90s Mexico City in all its glory as we follow Montserrat and Tristán about their day-to-day (and less day-to-day) business, Silver Nitrate just shines. In making literal the idea of the magic of cinema it modernises the whole apparatus of traditional horror (though I loved the take on MR James where a character is attacked by a murderous tablecloth) as well as portraying a full gallery of noir figures - the washed up actress, the director determined to come back none final time - and giving proper time and respect to all the figures you'd see before the camera.

Moreno-Garcia could well be a magician herself here, transmuting base elements of plot and character, and the conventions of horror and noir (look out for the trench coats!) into something that is unique, valuable and - while chilling at times - actually a powerful evocation of stubborn friendship and unwitting love.

STRONGLY recommended.

For more information about Silver Nitrate, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Dashboard Elvis is Dead by David F Ross

Dashboard Elvis is Dead
David F Ross
Orenda Books, 8 December 2022
Available as: PB, 300pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781914585401

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for sending me a copy of Dashboard Elvis is Dead to consider for review and to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

In Dashboard Elvis is Dead, David F Ross hacks into the secret history of the early 1980s music industry, giving us an inside account of the rise and spectacular fall of The Hyptones, a band of young Glaswegian hopefuls for who everything goes wrong on a fateful tour of the US.

A tour which is a downfall for Ross too, because David F Ross appears in the book as the failed writer who documented the band's experiences and was badly burned by doing so. (So fact, fiction and identity are blurred form the start with real musicians, actors and artists appearing with and - one suspects, sometimes without - approval throughout the book).

Thirty years later, in the wake of the Scottish independence referendum, Ross picks up with Jude Montgomery, a revered photo journalist, who's arrived in Glasgow. What they seem to have in common is a love for, and a fascination with, the Hyptones and their one hit, An Independent State of Mind, which has become an anthem for the Yes campaign.

It will take the rest of the story to explain how everyone's paths cross, and especially how Jude, who was running away from her Texas trailer park home when she came across The Hyptones the first time, fared in between. That story is an amazing saga of growth and suffering, of finding identity and seeking redemption, that frankly could have driven a whole sequence of novels. I loved Jude's honesty and her self-analysis. I loved Ross's evocation of the racially divided, tense Texan town from which Jude starts. I ,loved the portraits of 1980s San Francisco, of gentrifying New York later in the decade and in the 90s. Most of all I loved Jude. She is a well realised and sympathetic character who just has an awful habit of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Generally driven by good intentions, Jude makes mistakes, burns bridges as if she had shares in the ferry company, and generally leaves a trail of damaged and more or less resentful (or, in one case, dead) friends, mentors, exes and employers across the USA. Nevertheless, she perseveres, and through this story she's visibly growing, exploring her own identity and, in a somewhat twisted way, trying to make amends. (Ultimately it's down to her that An Independent State of Mind isn't wholly forgotten). 

I wouldn't say the same of Jamie, a tragic figure who is the other focus of Dashboard Elvis. Jamie is at the centre of The Hyptones, and he's the one who takes the fall when things go wrong. At his core he believes I think that he deserves that - the band has its own secret history - but really that isn't fair. Everyone deserves a chance, or a second chance, but ultimately Jamie's guilt robs him of that, leading him mon a destructive path that only reinforces the guilt. 

In describing the trajectory of the band, Ross brings the same sensibility to the lives and aspirations of young working class Scots in the 70s and 80s as he did in his Disco Days trilogy and in There's Only One Danny Garvey. Their voices ring true, lighting up the pages of the book in expressive Scots, albeit slightly indignant, as though being exhibited in a novel wasn't how they expected to spend the evening. (The exception is Jamie's girlfriend, the enigmatic AFB, 'Anna F*****g Belle' who in contrast uses standard English, a slight marker of class or privilege that prefigures her role in the later parts of the book).

There's an interesting contrast between the lives of Jude, who did manage to "get out" but, as her story makes clear, had to sacrifice a lot along the way, and the band members who as I've alluded to above, are basically on a downward slope throughout the book. Especially Jamie. Like Jude, Jamie makes many bad decisions and ends up with lots of regrets. But he's less in a position to try and put things right. The parallels and differences between Jamie and Jude are fascinating, posing a whole series of what if questions revolving around gender, racial identity and social setting. Both deserve a way out.  Jude gets one, Jamie doesn't, a fate he shares with most of his bandmates. 

This is eventually portrayed in a brilliant piece of non-writing. After sections dealing with the two fairly evenly, eventually Ross sort of has Jamie just... fade away, again contrasting with Jude whose climactic scenes are vivid and consequential. While Jamie's location and eventual fate are key plot points, we don't actually see them, and this building absence of a character is an eloquent way to express what he's become in the lives of those who knew him and those who don't. His absence is almost a more pointed depiction of him than his presence could be.

Oh I could go on praising this book but really, if you don't want to read it by now then what's the point of you? Just take my advice and read Dashboard Elvis is Dead. It's so many things. A very funny book. A sharp examination of young lives, of origins, identity and the complications of living, ageing and "growing up". A bit of a satire on dependence and independence. And a complex, engaging story set where music, crime, social aspiration, lust and politics overlap and mutate. 

Just pure brilliance.

For more information about Dashboard Elvis is Dead, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Dashboard Elvis is Dead from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

 

#Review - Nightshift by Kiara Ladner

Nightshift
Kiare Ladner
Pan Macmillan, 18 February 2021
Available as: HB, 256pp, e, audio
Source: advance e-copy via NetGalley, purchased audio and HB
ISBN(HB): 9781529010381

I mainly listened to this book as an audio, finishing the hardback as I got close to the end and needed to see how it all turned out.

Nightshift attracted me because it promised a story of nighttime, of dark streets, of people at work in the silent hours while the world sleeps (a slight obsession of mine). In fact that isn't quite its focus, but nevertheless, it made a complex and satisfying story, still one with something of the dark about it - albeit spiritual rather than literal.

Meggie, a young woman from South Africa, is living and working in London around the turn of the Millennium. Holding down a boring office job while she attempts to complete her English degree, she meets and falls under the spell of the exotic Sabine - and her life becomes an adventure.

Twenty years later, suffering from insomnia as she recalls those events, and after discovering new and unsettling facts about Sabine, Meggie decides to set everything out in a book, to try to work through it - to understand what was really happening.

It's a story of intoxication, of abandon - familiar in some respects. Meggie sees herself as ordinary and Sabine, unconventional, mysterious, cool, Belgian (a nice touch - maybe it would have been too much of a cliche if Sabine were French) becomes an obsession. Meggie's in her restless years, coming to terms with having left home, in a rather pedestrian relationship with Graham and waiting for her future to happen.

The two young women begin by having lunch together, not-quite going out but with something between them. There's a will they, won't they to the whole relationship, Sabine holding herself slightly elusive, coming and going and eventually, eventually making herself even less available by switching to the night shift. Meggie has a boyfriend, but her preoccupation with Sabine makes her wonder if she might be gay or bi, setting her off on a path of exploration before she finally concludes that no, she's neither. This is typical of the relationship - Meggie not so much doing things with Sabine but bouncing off her, considering new and different ways of being, perhaps projecting on Sabine more than really understanding her. 

Still, Meggie doesn't hesitate to follow Sabine to the night shift - although in predictable fashion it isn't straightforward to actually find Sabine. Nevertheless, Meggie does meet a gallery of eccentrics and free spirits who work three weeks on, three off, spending their work hours compiling press clippings in a seedy warehouse next to London Bridge. (If you worked in London in the late 90s, the book captures the atmosphere perfectly - the peak Blair years, just ahead of the city assuming its easy glamour in the Noughties). There are heroic sessions of drinking and drug taking, lots of clubbing, philosophical conversations on the roof at end of shift, shared cigarettes, episodes of poverty, break-ups and always, always Sabine.

Sabine is a thumpingly interesting character but to be honest, at times, can be a bit annoying. She is - or at least as seen through Meggie's eyes she is - an embodiment of the idea that what matters in life is to live, to the full, for the moment, feel strongly, go places, experience things. An approach to the world that scares me, frankly, and in all the encounters between Sabine and Meggie there's a slight sense of danger, of being on the edge of something - sometimes closer, as when they go to the opera with Sabine's lover (or is he?) and someone suggests a threesome, or when, off their heads with coke in a car going to Brighton, the two women are stopped by the police.

It's a mark of how good Ladner's writing is that the reader connects with all the possibilities here, with the richness of them while at the same time, the reader understands just how much Meggie is... what word should I use? Bewitched? - by Sabine, and why she is (though it's hard to put into words, you just need to read the book). 

Meggie is bewitched enough to drop Graham, to start trying to be like Sabine, to act like her (though plagued by doubt over whether she's getting it right), to dress like her. Meggie's obsession with Sabine gets in the way of any clear perception by her of what Sabine might really be like - of the risks of being close to her, yes, but also of what Sabine's own needs might be. Meggie both takes Sabine too seriously, revelling in the details of her life (her brother's tragic death, the missing father, the glamorous older lover) and fails to take her seriously enough, being quite, quite heedless of mundane details that might - in hindsight - matter a lot. 

So the dance whirls on, the two women existing in the same spaces with each other but really, I suspected, living out two quite different stories of what is happening.

Until a final, awful event which changes everything. A shocking event, which Ladner does not try to explain. Is it a betrayal of one by the other? Is it a reckless attempt by one to demand attention, rescue? Or both?

It's something that leaves Meggie wondering about everything she had known, believed, assumed, about Sabine - and still wondering years later.

A complex, atmospheric read, capturing so well a certain sort of relationship and its aftermath.

#BlogTour #Review - There's Only One Danny Garvey by David F Ross

There's Only One Danny Garvey
David F Ross
Orenda Books, 21 January 2021
Available as: PB, 256pp, e, audio
Source: Advance PB provided by the publisher
ISBN: 9781913193508

I'm grateful to Orenda Books and to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for a proof copy of There's Only One Danny Garvey to consider for review - and for inviting me to take part in the blog tour.

I really shouldn't have enjoyed this book!

I'm not a great follower of football, which is a thing integral to the lives of the characters here, especially Danny and his "uncle" Higgy. Moreover, it's - designedly - obscure, lower league football taking place in the drizzle between tiny, lower league clubs in the unfashionable mid years of the 1990s, before the game turned into the slick money and marketing driven engine it is now. There's no glamour here.

But - I knew from Ross's previous writing - especially his Disco Days trilogy - how he can weave a spell, conveying the nuances of his protagonists' lives through their passions, whether for music or - as here - football. He could probably do it equally for stamp collecting or train spotting - a joke Danny would appreciate here. The utterly compelling writing succeeds totally in getting over that passion, in making it alive because, rather than despite, the flailing state of the central club, Barshaw Bridge, to which one-time high flier Danny has been called back in the hour of the team's need. 

Bluntly, Barshaw Bridge is almost done, and Danny is its last hope. The club has been brought to its knees, or perhaps lower, by a combination of bad luck, stupidity, criminality and economics, but the tendency of its games to end as punch-ups didn't help. The description of the club's state is humorous and recalls the tone of the Disco Days books, but despite this and a couple of other moments, the mood of this book is generally much darker. Danny and his half-brother Raymond (neither of their dads stayed around long) had difficult childhoods, Raymond has been in and out of prison (he's currently residing at Barlinnie) and their mother, Libby, is dying. Danny returns to Barshaw reluctantly but with some idea of making amends: he ran out on his team on the eve of a vital cup tie, which they lost (it's a while before we discover why he did that), he is obsessed with the disappearance of a girl from his class in primary school in the 70s, and Higgy, who comes after him to return, is probably about the only positive figure in his life.

The story is told largely from Danny's point of view but - crucially - each section of the book is intercut with comments from another character - Higgy; Damo, Danny's nephew; Nancy, demo's mum (and Raymond's girlfriend); Raymond himself. They are generally brief comments, but enough to give insight into those people and insight into Danny himself. There's only one Danny Garvey? Rather, there are at least four, perhaps others besides.

Behind the football, then, behind the sinking town and its sinking club, is a web of relationships intersecting in Danny, which Ross slowly reveals. While this is quite a short book at just over 250 pages, Ross never gives the impression of rushing things. Rather we see Danny, Higgy, Nancy and the rest speaking for themselves and we sense - rather than being told - the kind of people they are. The distinction between the spoken language and the interior monologues reinforces this. The speech is mainly Scots dialect (and yes, fellow English people! It is perfectly comprehensible! Live a little!) while the "interior" stuff is pretty much standard English, giving the two aspects quite different voices. You might read the interior bits as having some kind of additional authority associated with being in a more "prestigious" dialect. Or you might read them as blander, more considered pronouncements contrasted with the vernacular used in the actual speech. There are so many shades of potential nuance here to be navigated by the reader trying to work out who and what, at a given moment, to believe.

There are also contrasts between three timeframes; the unavoidable "now" in which we're reading this story; the mid-90s - recent, but still a weirdly foreign time when pubs were filled with smoke and people bought newspapers; and the mid-70s when kids could be beaten in school and play out alone after dark. (A subplot concerning Damo, who is clearly a troubled child, in need of extra support which he isn't getting, struck this point home very forcefully. I hope that in the 2020s things would be a bit easier for his family). We range back and forth between Danny's adulthood and his younger days, as Ross deftly forges the chain of events leading to where things are, leading ump to Danny's reasons for wanting to put things right. 

I don't think that, in the end, one can doubt his sincerity, but equally, as the story unfolds, I had a profound sense that some things bare etter left alone and that Danny might be rushing in where angels fear to tread. 

This is a brilliantly evocative, captivating story, the more so for having moments so deeply sad that at times I just had to put the book aside. It is certainly a story that will remain with me, and one I continue to think about. 

I'd heartily recommend it.

For more information about There's Only One Danny Garvey, see the Orenda Books website here. And take a look at the stops in the blogtour - see poster below.

You can buy There's Only One Danny Garvey from your local shop, if they're doing click-and-collect (or phone-and-collect, or email-and-collect). Or you can order online from UK Bookshop dot org, Hive Books,  Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - Scabby Queen by Kirstin Innes

Scabby Queen

Kirstin Innes

4th Estate, 23 July 2020

Available as: HB, 385pp, e, audio

Read as: PB advance copy

ISBN: 9780008342296

Snap verdict: Just wow!

Scabby Queen is a beautiful patchwork of a book, told from multiple points of view and in multiple ways, covering a period of fifty years. It's a maze, a kind of intellectual (and emotional) pinball machine, bouncing back and forward, sometimes predictably, sometimes not. But it does all fit together - and the impact isn't so much from the glittering, zinging concept as from the warm, intimate, portrayals of people and relationships which Innes does with aplomb.

The book is about Cliodhna (Clio) Campbell, musician, activist, resident of a squat, Twitter warrior, a shooting star who blazes through peoples' lives to varying effect: inspiring, exasperating, exhausting. The one thing you can't do is ignore her. Springing to fame in the early 90s with her anti Poll Tax anthem, Rise Up! she's then written off as a one hit wonder but comes back again and again.

Clio's life is seen mainly through the numerous women and men who she touches. Some of the encounters are one offs - a nurse in a hospital, a passenger on a train - while some repeat (journalist Neil, Sammi - an ex-comrade in a Brixton squat and later in other settings, Clio's dad's friend Donald). Some are wholly positive: others reflect a wariness both on Clio's part and on those whose lives fall into her orbit. It sounds complicated (and must have been fiendishly difficult to write) but Innes orchestrates everything with great skill and the book carries the reader along through highs and lows, revealing, concealing, stripping layers back, adopting different viewpoints to give new perspectives on all these same relationships - and an ever richer, ever rounder, view of Clio herself. The book is  restless, like Clio, a woman who compels attention even in death: Scabby Queen opens with her suicide - not a spoiler, we learn this almost immediately - but mostly revels in her fierce and blazing life.

There are surprisingly few occasions in which we see Clio gives her own perspective: a desperately sad monologue to her husband as their short lived marriage folds; a self-justifying email; a couple of impassioned speeches. Apart from these we're left to build our picture of Clio from those around her - those who love and those who hate her. It's not a simple picture, but we get a powerful image of a charismatic woman, always in motion, always seeking. She has a hard time, with a fractured family background and an entry into the music industry at the height of the Loaded culture. (There are a few convincingly sexist articles by ubiquitous journal Pete Moss - wasn't that the name given to a prehistoric body found  in a Cheshire bog? That seems just about right.) There is also a touching scene where Clio tries, unsuccessfully, to warn an up-and-coming young female singer of the dangers (though it's very do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do). 

It's a typical scene for Clio, who would I think say if you asked her that she tried to live a life in solidarity. Of course that's easy to say - but life is messy and there are plenty of examples here where Clio's solidarity is misplaced, unwelcome or just badly timed. Innes ranges wide, following Clio's campaigning career. We see Poll Tax protests, Iraq war protests, the Scottish independence referendum, a squat in Brixton, weddings, parties, parties and more parties and the backstage view of band tours. There are so many stories here, so many threads - it isn't only Clio who comes to life but a host of other characters as well, with their regrets, traumas and compromises - and a whole generation of political activism (I loved the portrayal of the nurse who had come alive with the Referendum campaign). The book has a sharp eye for detail. There are insights on the politics of smoking, the class implications of presenting oneself well (it's OK for middle class crusties in a squat to look untidy: the working class, at least working class women in the west of Scotland circa 1990, can't afford it. Being allowed to be scruffy is just another manifestation of privilege), Clio's accent shifting from one social setting to another, and the differences in the way that women and men living unconventional lives are judged (the women will be judged, the men won't).

That, in the end, is at the heart of this book. There's an unspoken question, a judgement, hanging over Clio throughout - how would a man doing similar things be seen? Clio is constantly assessed, measured, weighed up by everyone around her - even those who are devoted to her - in a way that the men doing similar things aren't. Even men who do worse - awful - things (the book gets very dark in places). 

Clio gets frequent criticism. I suspect in real life she'd often be very annoying (ask Xanthe or Sammi) and she makes terrible mistakes. She is impulsive, she isn't following a plan and she sometimes scorches people who get too close. She is, though, in the end palpably, a person of integrity. And many near her, palpably, aren't.

Scabby Queen (the story refers to a card game which stands as something of a metaphor for Clio) is often sad, a story of missed chances, no, expired chances, a story of time bearing things away before we even know they were there (the backwards and forwards between the years makes this very poignant, giving us endings and beginnings commingled). It's also, and paradoxically, often gloriously uplifting. 

An enthralling book both creating a vivid portrayal of Clio and committing a wonderful hack into the backstage, backstreet underpinnings of the last three decades. Never sentimental, but with a whopping emotional punch, Scabby Queen is a great read.

For more information about Scabby Queen, and an intro from the author, see the 4th Estate website here.

Review - Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

Universal Harvester
John Darnielle
Scribe, 2017
PB, e-book 214pp

This is another book I finally managed to catch up with, and 'read' as an e-book. I think my experience of this book was really added to by listening to it, by the sense of complicity, Darnielle himself reading the story in an almost - almost - deadpan voice, making the most of its asides, its speculations.

In places, he refers to alleged alternate versions where something different happened and characters had quite distinct lives as a result and this gives the story a breathing, almost alive quality as do the hints that what we're told is the knowledge of an all seeing, all knowing observer with access to secrets, records and facts. (For example, in one place his characters decide to report something to the police - but, he then just in, we no that no such calls were received that evening - almost as though he had a file of evidence open on his desk).

That all-knowingness contrasts with the teasing, leisurely unwrapping of the central mystery here. Jeremy is a young man working, in the mid 90s, in a small, local video rental store in Iowa. So recent, and yet a different world, a world of clunky analogue technology on the cusp of being swept away.

One day, customers begin to return tapes to the shop, complaining that the films they rented contain... other material. Disturbing, strange material that it is hard to watch through. Gradually, Jeremy and then store owner Sarah-Jane, begin to be pulled into investigating just what is going on. We too are drawn in, learning nothing quickly but happy just to absorb Darnielle's prose: allusive, conversational, looping, deeply rooted (I think) in the prairies, the lives of ordinary people living in small towns and on grey farms and in the snows of Midwest winters. The story is as much about how Jeremy, Sarah-Jane and their immediate friends and family react to what seems a sinister mystery - how they avoid knowing and circle round the issue: the dynamics of groups of people not seeing or saying things. A lot of this book is about choosing not to know things about other lives.

And then the pitch rises and something bad happens - and Darnielle is away into the history of a certain character, taking the story into a wholly new direction, employing the same rapport, the same easy style and leveraging the trust built up with the reader to tell a rather different tale, that itself loops back and becomes relevant.

It's a book where you feel that little details count, although there is never a complete picture in which you can see how they fit. A story where the present feels very indebted to the past - whether the unknown past of the Native people who gave their names to places like Tama and Sioux City and Iowa itself, or the more recent past of which Emily wonders '...what shed'd already missed, what had gone missing from Iowa before she ever got there'.

If you ever listened to those Lake Wobegon monologues in A Prairie Home Companion and thought, 'Surely there must be something darker there?' then here it is, a breathing out, almost, of the Gothic.  It is in many ways a perplexing book, a tricksy book and I see that many reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads have confessed to not understanding it. I don't think I really understand it, either, but I do get it - if that makes sense. It's one of those rare books where 'understanding' is beside the point, you simply need to experience it.

Deeply weird but also deeply satisfying.

Blogtour - The Man Who Loved Islands by David F Ross

The Man Who Loved Islands (Disco Days No 3)
David F Ross
Brenda Books, 30 April 2017
PB, 302pp

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for an advance copy of this book - and proud to be starting off the blogtour.

First, full disclosure: I've read and reviewed the two preceding books in this series, The Last Days of Disco and The Rise and Fall of the Miraculous Vespas, and indeed am quoted at the front of the book. I can't pretend to be disinterested: I loved the earlier books and Islands is one of my eagerly awaited books of 2017.  Ross's trilogy is one of the most interesting and original recent publishing debuts and as someone growing up in the late 70s and early 80s, I find it nostalgic - but also tender, realistic and hopeful.

The third volume is just as good as the first two, bringing the series to a close (perhaps) but also back full circle. In The Last Days of Disco we saw Bobbie Cassidy and Joey Miller launch Heatwave Disco at the weddings, private functions and, indeed, discos of early 80s Ayrshire, and their subsequent entanglements with local hard men and police, alongside the tragedy of Bobby's brother, Gary's, involvement in the Falklands War.

Then, in Miraculous Vespas, Ross told the story of the eponymous band, a parallel tale dominated by the awful - and Mesmeric - impresario Max Mojo. The Vespas were apparently deeply influential on the music scene of the 80s and 90s, despite fading from view, and were due a revival. But it didn't exactly go as planned...

Now, everything is brought together, brought home.

The Heatwave boys, once the closest of friends, have scattered, seen success, seen heartbreak - and are now on the slide. Bobby made a successful career as a DJ on Ibiza but is now fading, haunted by guilt and being edged out of the classier venues. Joey is a successful architect but seems doomed just to wander the world's airports and corporate hotels, always jet lagged. He, too, is being pushed towards the door by the younger partners in a firm he helped to found.

So when Joey, drifting in China, gets a message from Bobby's - and his - old friend Hammy May, warning that Bobby is very ill, he sets out for a last goodbye. Thus begins a fresh roller-coaster ride of misunderstandings, bonkers plans, double crossing, embezzlement and, of course, music, music and more music, culminating in one of the most remarkable concerts Ayrshire will ever have seen.

I enjoyed the way that Ross took the two friends - or ex-friends - and showed what had become of them in later life. While there are some flashbacks, especially to explain Bobby's career ('the following decade passed by in a drugs-fuelled, hedonistic, self-indulgent blur') we don't see that much of the Disco period, nor, as the Vespas' story parallels that,  much of that book either book. Yet everything still dovetails with the earlier stories, picking up characters and plot strands one might not even have realised had been left unresolved and taking them to a conclusion (mostly).

The Ayrshire dialect is as thick as ever, and the characters as foul mouthed; I realised how much I'd missed Bobby especially, indeed, from the very star, while the action may be set in Ibiza or China we're home, as it were, even if the international angle gives Ross chance to skewer a much wider range of human folly and absurdity that the setting of the earlier books allowed or to indulge in comic sub plots (such as Hammy's encounters with the secret society of middle aged women on Ibiza...)

And there's the tender way Ross brings the two boys together again, older, flabbier, less fit and suffering from broken relationships and stupid misunderstandings but - inside - the same starry eyed chancers they always were. And then we also meet other old friends, until in the end it's almost like the best sort of school reunion (I imagine that s school reunion in Ross's retelling would be a wild affair to say the least).

There is nostalgia - Bobby's obsession, in his Ibizan villa, with that old black and white version of Robinson Crusoe that used be shown by the BBC every year in the summer holidays; a sharp dissection of the glory days of club music; recollections of school dancing lessons - 'a brutal and hideous experiment in child cruelty by way of state-promoted embarrassment'. Simply marvellous evocations of times and places gone, for better or worse.

There is also a strand of hope and redemption, with some scores settled, new relationships, and some bad business from the past sorted at last. All in all a satisfying (yet spectacular - you'd expect that) conclusion to the trilogy, and all immensely readable (Ross has some great turns of phrase - 'It was a goodbye kiss from a Goodbye Girl'; 'they also indulged like it was the last days of Caligula'; 'It is beginning to sound like the worts blues song ever').

It was, in the end, sad to part again from the Heatwave boys - but great to see them at their best again.

A book I'd strongly recommend, great summer reading or just great reading, if you don't want to wait.
(And if you haven't read the earlier books - why not? - start with those, you've got a treat in store).