Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (46 page)

Bloodlines

by Marian Veevers

Gollancz, 272 pages, hardback, 1996

This haunting novel has three intertwined strands set in three different times.

(1) In the 11th century Lady Macbeth, who has inherited witchery (of the Goddess rather than the broomstick kind), infatuated with her brutal and largely uncaring husband, plots in both mundane and occult ways to bring him glory. Among Macbeth's servants is the vile rapist Seyton, who is told by the three weird sisters that he will never be a king himself but will father kings. Macbeth later awards him the title Steward (which will become Stewart and then Stuart). One of Lady Macbeth's powers is that she knows the secret of seeing the weird of the Stewarts; i.e., she can see the future of Seyton's line, and all its tragedies.

(2) In the early 17th century a peasant girl called Jennet is being interrogated and is condemned to death for witchcraft and for killing her newborn baby, one of her interrogators being the man who raped and thereby impregnated her. She has inherited the knowledge of the Stewart weird: the real reason she must hang is that the newly crowned James VI & I, paranoid about witchcraft, has learnt of this.

(3) In 1996 actress Abigail West must play the part of Lady Macbeth in a production designed to relaunch the career of her faithless husband; among the cast is a certain Alan Stewart, who still bears a vengeance because of what West's line of witchery has, as he perceives it, done to his family.

To give much more of a synopsis would be to give the game away. Veevers's prose falters in the first fifteen or twenty pages, but thereafter settles into an elegant, understated smoothness; she captures the distinctive voices of all three threatened women with very great skill. This is a book that is hard to put down as it accelerates towards a resolution of the three connected lives. Veevers, whose first novel this is, is an author to watch.

—Samhain

Golem

by Greg Vilk

Ricochet, 172 pages, paperback, 2005

The author of this short novel has been a visual effects technical director for companies like DreamWorks, and unfortunately it shows.
Golem
is less a novel, more a treatment for a screenplay, complete with lots of explosions, cardboard subsidiary characters introduced seemingly for the sole purpose of meeting a gruesome end, unexplained (if not inexplicable) plot progressions whose illogicality a moviemaker might reckon would escape the notice of the thrilled audience but which leap out only too starkly from the printed page, the sense, as with so many modern action movies, that you're seeing bits and pieces jigsawed together from earlier action movies ... Combine all this and more with a prose style that not so much graces the page as lurches and staggers across it, and you'll understand why it took your reviewer an inordinately long while to plough his way through the novel's mere 170 large-print pages: much of the time was spent repeatedly thumbing back through previous sections in a desperate effort to find out what the heck was supposed to be going on.

It's World War II, and the Nazis have kidnapped archaeolinguist Professor Benedict and taken both him and the secret he has discovered, that of raising the Golem, to a secret base in Greenland in hopes of learning how to make lots of lethal, indestructible clay soldiers. Sent after them are a bunch of US special-ops malcontents who could well, with their exaggerated but forgettable characteristics, be the Dirty Dozen except that I never came up with the same answer twice whenever I tried to count them.

With these lovable toughs goes token female May, who's both linguist daughter of the abducted boffin and Equity-registered hot babe; from the moment she and good-guy leader Leash clap eyes on each other it's pretty obvious that he's going to be getting (a) over the fact that he's been previously Unhappy In Love and (b) into a tangle of limbs with Ms. Benedict about two sentences after the end of the book. Similarly, as soon as the troop's watery-eyed, morphine-addicted sawbones appears on the scene, it's a dead cert he's going to betray our heroes to the nasties, and our author does not disappoint.

The Golem itself is quite a fun creation, seemingly designed so the special effects crew will have a whale of a good time when the movie's made. It's capable of whipping up whatever happens to be lying around and putting all these bits of debris together into a man-like shape, in which form it can pulverize people. Further, with each such "incarnation," it gets BIGGER, so that by the time it gets its inevitable comeuppance in the face of a solid hail of American grit, pluck, determination, resourcefulness, raw testosterone and probably apple pie, it's stomping across the icy wastes like Godzilla with a hangover, its limbs being made up of assemblages of stuff like tanks and artillery.

As for that prose ... well, let a quartet of examples suffice:

• She was comely; a slight skew of the cheekbones only lent her face a stronger punch.

• The air grew so thick with tension that even the wind outside backed off to a safe distance.

• He whispered under his nose.

• May furrowed her brow. Her pupils jittered side to side, as if her frontal lobes were doing heavy lifting. Her gaze was so intense, it looked like her skull could blow up in a puff of hot steam at any moment. Then her face lit up with a divine epiphany.

—Crescent Blues

The Reunion

by Sue Walker

Morrow, 320 pages, hardback, 2004

Reading Sue Walker's
The Reunion
I couldn't help but be reminded of the enormous influence Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine has exerted on the modern British psychological thriller, just as she has profoundly influenced British detections (although Ian Rankin has rapidly come to be a more important figure in this latter context). This is not to say that other writers set out imitate her (although some obviously do), more that the pattern Rendell developed has come to be seen as a standard style. Nor is it to say that the influence does not extend well beyond the shores of Britain: one can very easily read books like Donna Tartt's
The Secret History
as psychological novels in the Rendell mould. The influence has in general been an extremely beneficial one: there were British psychological thrillers of depth, literacy and interest before Rendell came along to transform the scene, but they now almost approach the norm in this subgenre.

The Reunion
is smack in the Rendell/Vine mainstream. In general beautifully written (despite some odd Americanization), it has a story that occupies three timelines: now, the recent past, and the distant past – twenty-seven years ago, to be precise – when a bunch of dangerously maladjusted teenagers were brought together for group therapy in an Edinburgh (Scotland) clinic, the Unit, under the aegis of an R.D. Laing figure, Dr. Adrian Laurie. The group members have made a conscious effort to avoid each other since their "cure," although three of their number exchange brief notes once a year, every November 8.

Innes is not one of those three. She's alarmed to receive an answerphone message one day from another group member, Abby – her best friend back in the days of the Unit – who sounds desperate. Innes cannot bring herself to respond, and the next she learns is that Abby has committed suicide by drowning. Delving deeper, she discovers that Danny, another group member, a few months ago likewise suicided by drowning. Two similar deaths recorded as suicides might instead mean a pattern of murder. As much concerned for her own safety as anything else – is someone purposefully setting out to drown Unit "alumni"? – she makes an amateurish effort to uncover the truth.

Meanwhile Simon, now a successful psychologist, suffers the agonies of his young daughter being abducted and sexually molested. He is convulsed by guilt, regarding this as a punishment for what he and three of the others once did when they were in the Unit.

But what
was
that "something"?
The Reunion
is primarily a slow revelation of the dreadful secret.

Although the novel is certainly gripping, and the handling of the characters is splendid, the overall effect is not as satisfying as it should be. Its problem is that the only thing standing between the reader and the exposure of the secret is an artificial one: the author's deliberate refusal to tell us what went on. Most of the novel's central characters know the secret; but, any time they start to reveal it, the action shifts or they go all coy. This becomes eventually just plain annoying, rather than tantalizing. The only central character who's in the same state of ignorance as we are is Innes, and it would be reasonable if we were following in her footsteps as she unravels the truth. However, Innes's little burst of detection takes her almost nowhere, and, although eventually she does discover the secret, that is only because other characters choose to tell her.

The Reunion
is undeniably worth your time, and I'm certain you'll enjoy reading it. At novel's end, however, you may feel that you've tasted a lot of delicious foodstuffs but your stomach's complaining that it's never been allowed to eat any of them.

—Crescent Blues

Journeys into Limbo

by Chananya Weissman

Infinity, 118 pages, paperback, 2001

Time was, a few decades ago, that a prominent element of the paperback racks consisted of single-author (almost always American) collections of short stories that happily occupied a territory overlapping sf, fantasy and horror; these collections were epitomized by authors like Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch and Fredric Brown. Every now and then one of the stories would be a real knock-your-socks-off blockbuster, but that wasn't what you expected when you bought the collection; what you were expecting was good, solid light entertainment.

This first collection by a new young author harks back to that era, and quite consciously – in one of his sporadic auctorial glosses Weissman states:

I generally don't get too involved in characters, since my primary goal is simply to tell a good story. I think this can be achieved without creating complex characters that the reader feels he knows intimately; besides, real people are far more complex than can ever be portrayed in a work of fiction ...

It's a statement that may come as something of a shock to many more experienced short-story writers, but in fact it concords perfectly with the Mathesons and Blochs and Browns of yesteryear: the tale is the thing. The statement also of course, through its cockiness, reveals that this is a young man's collection – which is probably, on the whole, no bad thing.

A few of the fifteen stories in this slim volume (some are short-shorts, all but one are hitherto unpublished) are fairly humdrum – "Solitary", for example, has a narrator who proves, exactly as one had guessed with a yawn by about the fifth line, to be an unborn fetus – but none fail to meet the basic standard of adequate light entertainment, and some achieve more than that. I liked especially "Dream Slave", the recurring dream of whose central character features a dream creature who has become so established as to be a fully independent entity and in fact to dominate and control the dreamer's dreams. "Cogs" is a nice multiple-universe story. And "Rent-A-Friend" strays into early-Bradbury territory, albeit without the sensitivity of language, in its tale of a company that rents Best Friends to the friendless.

In short, this is a very promising first collection. Once Weissman has perhaps lost a little of that awestruck sense of exploring for the first time virgin domains that have in fact been well trammeled by others before him, we can expect great stuff; in a few years' time the contents pages of
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
may well be peppered with his name. In the meantime,
Journeys into Limbo
serves as an intriguing taster of what may well be to come.

—Infinity Plus

The Psychotronic Video Guide

by Michael J. Weldon

St Martin's Griffin, 672 pages, paperback, 1996

I have to confess to one thing immediately: despite the description on the back of the cover of this huge paperback and despite knowing Weldon's
Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film
, I'm still not 100% certain what the word "psychotronic" actually means. Let me make a stab at it. There are some movies you watch because they're good, improving stuff, and there are some you watch because they're crap. They may be good crap (they're well made and you really enjoy them) or bad crap (they're badly made but still you may enjoy them, if not always for the reason intended by their makers). Both categories of crap seem to fit into Weldon's definition of "psychotronic". Perhaps all would be clearer if I took
Psychotronic Video
magazine, which Weldon founded and edits. Perhaps not – because among the movies listed here is, to take just a single example, Peter Greenaway's
Prospero's Books
.

But forget all the stuff about definitions. This is a glorious book, and it should be on your shelf if you're remotely interested in movies. Here are synopses and basic data about over 9000 movies, of which getting on for half are horror or horror-related, and of which probably more than half – the two categories overlap – are either the kind of movies which the more orthodox sources (Halliwell, Elliot, etc.*) are too snooty

[* 2011 note: Again, how things have changed in a decade and a half. Thanks largely to the internet and especially sites like Allmovie and the IMDB, those "orthodox sources" have, so far as I'm aware, essentially disappeared.]

to list or are direct-to-videos. Do not buy the book on a day when you've got a lot of work to do: it is addictively browsable.

Weldon's synopses are usually succinct, cutting to the heart of the movie concerned, and very frequently display a sly wit, taking the mickey out of the material yet in such a way that his affection for it shows through. There are minor errors in the synopses – for example, Chris Sarandon in
Fright Night
moves in next door with just one sidekick, not several, as stated here – and there are some curious omissions. Some of the omissions are only apparent, because videos can often sport a bewildering variety of alternative titles, and Weldon's cross-referring of these is not as complete as it could be: I looked, for example, for the pseudo-feminist Western
Wanted Women
, and found no mention, but eventually discovered it was a variant title of
Jessie's Girls
; René Clair's classic
Paris Qui Dort
is listed only as
The Crazy Ray
; etc. Other omissions are genuine: I was startled to discover that the Virginia Madsen/Tommy Lee Jones vehicle
The Dead Can't Lie
wasn't listed. Also, I would have much preferred the book had it given running times.

But these are small carps. This is a vast book (646 approximately A4 pages of three-column setting, including an index that is almost too comprehensive) and, leaving aside its very considerable reference value, it is certain to give hours and days of fascinated enjoyment.

—Samhain