Review: The Best British Fantasy 2013 (Salt Publishing)

I'm grateful to the publisher for letting me have a copy of this book.

"The Best British Fantasy 2013" is an engaging collection of 17 stories, with "fantasy" being interpreted generously - I've seen endless nitpicking discussions about the differences between fantasy, SF and other genres. If you wanted to you could argue that some of these stories are equally SF, or horror, or ghost stories, or... but really that misses the point. They all feature the fantastical. The stories are all well chosen and - while inevitably in a collection like this, different stories will appeal to different readers - I'd give most of them, individually, four or five stars: five for the collection as a whole to reflect its breadth and the overall curation which manages to produce a slight air of bleakness, menace and claustrophobia.

While it's perhaps not wise to pick out favourites, I have to say that the stories I enjoyed most were "Dermot" by Simon Bestwick in which the police strike a very nasty bargain with an informant, and "The Island of Peter Pandora" by Kim Lakin-Smith which manages to combine JM Barrie's, HG Wells and steampunk in a single carefully observed story. But there's something in each of these stories.

In "Lips and Teeth", Jon Wallace imagines a prison camp in (I think) North Korea, where a prisoner has a strange ability (and a strange, talking tool).

"The Last Osama" by Lavie Tidhar is a strange, myth laden blend of the Old West and Middle East with a quest not unlike that in "Heart of Darkness" / "Apocalypse Now".

"Armageddon Fish Pie" by Joseph D'Lacey is less about the coming destruction - we never learn for sure what is to happen - but about how one might behave and respond if such a thing threatened.

"The Complex" (EJ Swift) is very SF, telling the story of a time served convict on a distant penal colony.

 "God of the Gaps" by Carol Johnstone is rather weird - a student, mentoring a younger pupil, gets into something very dark ('Try the manacles, Miss Daisy!') while accompanying him on a school trip.

Cheryl Moore's "Corset Wings" again has steampunk overtones, imagining the plight of a young woman exploited in an alt-Victorian London, and how she might dream of escape.

"The Wheel of Fortune" by Steph Swainston also has, as its main protagonist, a woman, an apothecary (I think) in a metropolis (but a fantasy one, this time) who has made a bargain with a bunch of scoundrels, and wants out of it.

"Too Delicate for Human Form" (Cate Gardner) concerns a dead aunt and some fish.

"Imogen" by Sam Stone has a twist - it would give too much away to say any more.

Alison Littlewood's "In the Quiet and in the Dark" induces the kind of shudders one would expect from her: very creepy.

"The Scariest Place in the World" by Mark Morris really brings the fear home, as does Simon Kurt Unsworth's "Qiqirn".

In "The Third Person" by Lisa Tuttle, another Imogen unwillingly helps out a friend who wants to conduct an affair, but things get out of hand.

"Fearful Symmetry" (Tyler Keevil) reads like the opening of a series: at some unspecified point in the near future, the earth is mucked up, with "the cough" spreading and mutant animal species emerging.

Finally, Adam G Nevill's "Pig Thing" reminded me somewhat of The House on the Borderland in the way that it bleeds the fantastical into the lives of the unsuspecting.

All great stories, and a good way to sample authors you might not otherwise pick up.

I've read an ebook! And I’ve reviewed “The Ocean at the end of the Lane”!

I’ve always been stridently anti e-book. I want to fill my shelves with hardbacks: I don’t recognise the idea of “too many books” and I want to support local bookshops.

But - I’d ordered the new Neil Gaiman book (review below, but in short, it’s super) and moreover I’d ordered a signed, slipcase edition from Goldsboro because I felt like indulging myself.  Once I’d unwrapped it from the yards and yards of bubble wrap, I thought: you can’t take this on the train.  You can stuff it in your pannier and cycle across London with it. I’m not normally that precious about my books – I buy hardbacks and I open them and read them, I don’t usually keep them pristine on my shelves.  But.  This one was different.  (I think it was the slipcase.  The thought of taking the book out of it and putting it on the seat next to me, which some stranger had been sitting on…)

So I had to get a reading copy.  And I thought, why not, this time, try e-reading it?  If I’d bought a second physical copy I’d then have to argue with myself about keeping that or giving it away, so I downloaded it onto my iPad.  And read it. In public.

That was interesting.  It wasn’t a jolt to read on screen, but there were aspects of it that felt different – some good, some bad.  Yes, it was handy that the iPad kept track of my place. On the other hand, it felt very slight in my hands.  Coming home in the evening there were no spare seats so I sat on the floor (that happened 2 or 3 times a week).  Without the familiar bulk of a hardback I found it hard to hold the thing in the right place.  There was also the lack of feedback from turned pages to know how far I’d got – the pagecount told me, of course, but I had to look at that deliberately.

There was one real positive, though.  That day I went to give blood.  I found the iPad much easier to read while lying down, left arm tubed up and having to wiggle my hand – especially as I could turn the pages one handed, and the “book” didn’t keep trying to close itself.

Overall, I think I can see the attraction of these devices.  I don’t think they’re for me – I just like paper more – but they have their uses. 

Now, turning to the book itself, it is a deceptively simple story. The unnamed narrator relates, some 30 or 40 years later, experiences that happened to him as a boy aged seven. Meeting a girl slightly older (or a great deal older - "how long had she been eleven?") he is drawn into a strange reality, somewhere outside this world, and encounters a threatening presence (in a nod, perhaps, to M R James, this appears as a mass of dirty, flapping cloths) which then disrupts his secure family. The threat is eventually dealt with, but there is, of course, a price to be paid and a sense - possibly - that things are never the same.

While things may be told from an adult's recollection, this book is excellent at conveying a child's experience: the arbitrariness of the adult world which makes magical goings-on down the lane and the weird behaviour of one's parent equally expected (or unexpected), the aloofness of an unhappy child who takes refuge in his books. There is, at the same time, a mythic quality - as I've said, the narrator isn't named, but nor are his sister or parents, or the lodger - "the opal miner" - who sets off the chain of events described here. Indeed, the only people who are named here are those with connections to that mysterious, otherly world - in particular, the Hempstock women, grandmother, daughter and granddaughter Lettie who are definitely "otherly", and dangerous, but as friendly and comforting as fresh-baked bread. (Food is important here. The boy goes hungry because he will not eat the food provided by his unsettling governess. The opal miner's appearance is associated with powdery instant coffee. When our hero appears at the Hempstocks' farmhouse, he is, like Mole seeking refuge with Badger in the Wild Wood, restored with hearty, basic food - honeycomb, porridge and cream).

Being told from a child's perspective, a great deal else is hinted at but never detailed - money troubles and parental chilliness, a sense of suspended loss about what came after the story ended. Even the adult life of our grown up narrator is vague - he's come back home for a funeral, but we never learn whose. Women are important - powerful, though not always benevolent - men absent (there were Hempstock men, but they have gone away) or troubled (the miner, the boy's father).

While about a child, it isn't a children's book. It has some scenes, including aspects of horror, that wouldn't suit a child at all. But it does have deep compassion - for the boy, his parents, even for the "monster" which has to go back but isn't, despite its streaks of malice, essentially evil.

An absolutely superb book - Gaiman balances fantasy and reality deftly, playing them off against one another and producing a wonderful synthesis.

Review: The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty

Zoe is out of a job after becoming involved with her married boss, and has returned to her home town. In a nice twist, said home town isn't Nowheresville but is New York City itself. Answering an advert she sees in a café, Zoe finds about a new job editing a city guide - a job for which she is eminently qualified. But this is a guide with a difference - it's aimed at visiting monsters - vampires, zombies, fey, minor deities. (But you mustn't call them "monsters", they are "coterie".)

Mur Lafferty spins this premise into an entertaining take on urban fantasy. The plot, once it begins, is actually paper thin - someone, or something, is coming to New York to do Bad Things and upset the balance between humans and coterie - but this doesn't matter much as the book is so entertaining. Also, it's the first in the series, so Lafferty is doing a great deal of setting up and an undemanding plot is probably fair enough. The setting up, by the way, is done very well. She's taken great pains to make the characters and their situation credible (there is a calculated balance between humans and coterie, not a zombie apocalypse; the interactions between Zoe and her colleagues are credible, up to and including the problems of having an incubus on the team; the "economics" of how coterie find their food without (generally) hunting down humans are done convincingly). The only flaw was that, perhaps, there are rather too many different types of coterie in Zoe's office and for a few chapters I had trouble remembering who was who.

A couple of loose threads are left to be developed in future, notably, what is the source of Zoe's ability to remain cool and collected in the face of coterie?

I'm looking forward to the next book, The Ghost Train to New Orleans.

Review: You, by Austin Grossman

As a teenager, Russell ran with a pack of geeks - Lisa, Darren and Simon. The were the ones who, given 15 minutes on a shiny new Apple II at school, news what to do - knew that this was going to be the future. Together, they created a game world. But Russell drifted away, looking for an ordinary career, and Simon died. Years later, Russell returns to the company founded by Lisa, Darren and Simon, a company still developing games that have at their core the fruits of those long, after hours sessions in the computer lab.

There's a reassuring shakiness about Russell's narration. A great deal in hinted at but never spelled out. The story of the four friends is told in short highlights, intercut with play from the sequence of games they made over the 80s and 90s - games that feature four heroes, "the same four heroes you found in any video game that featured four heroes, anywhere" - a fighter, a magician, a thief and a princess. As the pressure of game development deadlines increases, Russell also has to embark on a quest through the successive games to track down a bug that could threaten not only the company but even the wider world - a bug built in from the start and propagated through every successive build and update since. Delving to the source of this means coming to terms with what he ran away from all those years ago.

It also means interrogating the whole lifestyle of gaming, in debates which Russell holds increasingly frequently with the four heroes themselves - Brennan, Lorac, Prendar and Leira. As Grossman cuts back and forth between straight narration, ongoing gameplay, dreams(?), debate with the heroes, flashbacks to the 80s and extracts from game manuals and helpfiles, it becomes less and less clear what is "real" and what is a "game". As a games designer, Russell's job is to make games that confine and chivvy the player along the chosen narrative. But he and his friends set out originally to make the ultimate game, in which the player can do whatever he wants - a totally lifelike experience. So when is life a game, and a game life?

It's an intoxicating read, leavened by humorous interludes such as Russell's experiences demoing a game at a trade fair, when everything goes wrong, and for me there was a glow of nostalgia in the D&D language and early 80s computers. It all stops in the early days of the Web, which is right, I think, because then it can celebrate an age before the really big corporations began to throw their weight around again.

I'm so glad I read this book. For me, it was touching, nostalgic and - despite concluding in 1998 - modern. I wrote my first computer program in about 1979 or 1980, in BASIC, on a Nascom 2 computer with 32kb of RAM. It was a Space Invader clone. I thought at the time I was very clever: to make it work I had to add a realtime keyboard reader routine which I got from a photocopied fanzine. I never made a career out of programming, but I can relate to the sense in this book that Grossman describes of coding as a creative act, insane fun, and something newly and wholly unexpectedly within reach.

The nearest book I can think of to this would have to be Cryptonomicon but "You" is less of a thriller, while still more weird than other books which use game conventions and insights such as Christopher Brookmyre's Bedlam or Charles Stross's Halting State - though it recognisably shares something, an outlook, an aesthetic, with them.

Highly recommended.

Review: The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

There are so many good things about this book that I've actually found it hard to marshal my thoughts into a sensible review. At one level I just want to say "buy it, call in sick to work, switch your phone off and READ". And I do say that. But just saying that wouldn't be very helpful.

Trying again, I think there are three really good things about this book.

First, and most obviously, the concept. Harper Curtis, a drifter and ex soldier, stumbles into a mysterious house in 1930s Chicago. He emerges from this into various different times over the succeeding decades to carry out murders, like some form of evil Doctor Who in an anti TARDIS. One of Harper's victims, Kirby, survives, and sets out to hunt him down. That alone would be a really sweet SF concept, but Beukes uses it to do so much more. It is clear that, somehow, the house is more than a passive time machine. It is somehow driving Harper to commit the murders, at least in his mind (not that he was an innocent beforehand, as the book makes clear). So at one level the existence, and the properties, of the house provide a kind of explanation for what he'd doing, for the evil he carries out. That might be thought a cop-out, but it's not - the entire idea of a time travelling house existing at all is itself just... bonkers. So one that leads a man to kill is not actually much weirder. But we accept the idea of time travel in this kind of book, don't we... just as we accept books about serial killers. Beukes seems to me to be posing some questions here about what we read, what stories we buy, what we like to here, and not always in a comfortable way - just as she starkly depicts the brutality of Harper's murder (and torture).

Secondly, the characters are all magnificent. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, is portrayed so vividly. Kirby is so real, with her scars and her traumas, as is Harper, but Kirby's mother is made so real, as is Dan, a journalist at the Chicago Sun-Times, who tries to help Kirby. They are the main characters. But also the succession of "shining girls" that Harper kills are brought alive, even if there are only a few pages for them, their hopes made real, their ambitions made real, their fears made real. They are not just victims. Beukes shows real humanity, even respect, in creating them. And as if that isn't enough she has a way of making even passing minor characters vividly real. Here's Victoria, pictures editor at Dan's paper: "She's wearing her usual uniform of a button-up men's shirt and jeans with heels, a little bit shlumfy, a little bit f***-you"

That leads me to my third thought - in many respects this book is a tribute, almost a hymn, to the idea, to the era, of print journalism. There is a barely hidden thrill among all the journalists talking about the place of their paper in the world. It's the people's paper, unlike the snooty, rival broadsheet. Maybe TV has diminished its reach, but what is printed still matters. Beukes has said in interviews that the book had to end in the 90s because any later, it would be too easy for Kirby to solve the mystery via the Web. That may be true, but I also wonder if it was because of the sad dwindling of those distinctive local US papers in the face of faster online news?

All in all, a tremendous book, deviously plotted, well written, bold in concept and - despite the subject matter - not exploitative. Now go and get a copy and read it.

Review: Path of Needles by Alison Littlewood

Alison Littlewood is clearly very versatile. Her last book, A Cold Season. was out-and-out supernatural horror. "Path of Needles" is more ambiguous.

The book centres on two women, Cate, an ambituous police constable and Alice, a university lecturer specialising in fairy tales. When a serial killer begins to leave victims posed like fairy tale characters, Cate, temporarily attached to the enquiry and desperate for a chance to move on, goes out on a limb to involve Alice in the investigation. Soon, though, she begins to have doubts. Alice, meanwhile, is conscious of danger as the stories she loves, but which have always been safely trapped in books, become real. And what does the mysterious blue bird signify? All Alice's stories exist in multiple, variant texts, and once you start to interpret them - or to interpret real events in light of them - it seems as though there are no rules, as though anything goes.

I enjoyed the way that Littlewood captures both main characters, including the rivalries and undercurrents among the police, Cate's desire to get on in her career and her relationship with her old mentor. There's a strong thread in the book, playing, of course, into the overt fairytale them, of parent-child relationships (good and bad) especially mothers and daughters. The book walks a narrow line between becoming merely a police procedural and tipping over into the outright weird. We always suspect there may be more here than a serial killer, yet at the same time the crimes are explored as crimes and aren't inexplicable.

Littlewood is also good at evoking landscape - a particular patch of Yorkshire - using real places yet managing to give them an unearthly aspect (this reminded me of Graham Joyce's Some Kind of Fairy Tale.

Overall, a gripping read, something a little different, definitely a writer to watch.

Review: Poison by Sarah Pinborough

Disney won't like it, but who cares about that?

Pinborough takes "Snow White" and applies a little twist... make that a few little twists. For one thing, nobody is quite what they seem. Evil the Wicked Stepmother, while being VERY wicked and VERY stepmothery, gets some sympathetic backstory. She's portrayed as a real person, and with some sympathy - as is Snow White herself, not just a cut out Good Girl but more of a real, actual person with real desires and appetites.

So while this book has dwarves, castles, magic, princes and poisoned apples, it also has some acute dissection of the place of women in a kind of fairy-tale land (it's all joined up round the back: we learn the true nature of that unpleasant boy Aladdin, and a couple of rather PTSD characters turn up who have apparently wandered in out of other stories). And sex - which Pinborough is rather good at describing (no danger of this getting a Bad Sex award, I think).

It's quite a quick read, very enjoyable, actually quite thought provoking. Definitely recommended.