Miranda July was accomplished in other fields before she turned her hand to writing. I knew of her two films, Me and You and Everyone We Know (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes in 2005) and The Future, before I read her books, but she is also a performance artist and singer. I read her short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You in 2016 and while I was somewhat underwhelmed, I was intrigued by her unique style and voice. The First Bad Man is her debut novel, published in 2015, and I’m happy to report I liked it a lot more.
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Wivenhoe is billed as a climate change novel, but it’s also a Brexit novel, and a pandemic novel in that it depicts a global event that fundamentally alters the way we live. It’s a slim volume, clocking in at just 150 pages, but packs a lot into that short length. It takes place over the course of a single day, following a murder that shocks the town’s inhabitants.
Richard Marsh’s The Beetle was a success when it was published in 1897. At one point it even outsold Dracula, which came out in the same year. However, unlike Dracula, it hasn’t remained as popular in the years since. This is a shame, because it’s a rich slice of late-Victorian Gothic fiction, with well-drawn characters, an exciting plot, and atmosphere in spades.
Children of Dune is the third book in the Dune series, but feels like more of a sequel than the second, Dune Messiah. Messiah was much smaller-scale than its predecessor, with comparatively less at stake (the fate of Paul Atreides vs the fate of the Fremen, Arrakis, and the Empire in Dune). Children, on the other hand, has the same kind of epic scale as the first book, with the planet and the future of the universe once again under threat.
Michael Ende, the author of The Neverending Story, wasn’t happy with the film adaptation. The film was only adapts half the book, and in his view was made for commercial rather than artistic reasons. He called it ‘a humongous melodrama of kitsch, commerce, plush and plastic’, and even went to the extent of removing his name from the production. Although I’m a fan of the film, it’s not hard to see why. The book carries with it a sobering message of not losing yourself in fantasy, which the film not only ignores but puts across the exact opposite message instead. It’s a shame, because there’s a lot of ideas in the latter half that would be interesting to see in a film.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, From a world more full of weeping than you can understand. So wrote Yeats in his famous poem The Stolen Child (this version of which by The Waterboys is one of the most beautiful combinations of words and music I’ve ever heard). It’s not a spoiler to say that Foxglove Summer, the fifth book in Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series, centres around two children who may or may not have been stolen by the faeries. The action in the series normally takes place in London, but in this book our boy Peter has to brave the English countryside in his search for the missing girls. On the 15th January 1947, a young woman was found dead in the southern region of Los Angeles. Her name was Elizabeth Short, but she soon became known as the Black Dahlia. Her murder has never been solved, although several theories have been put forward (which we won’t be going into here. This case forms the basis of James Ellroy’s novel, the first of a series known as the L.A. Quartet, simply titled The Black Dahlia.
Folk horror is a term that’s been applied to films more than books. The so-called ‘Unholy Trinity’ of folk horror films (1968’s Witchfinder General, 1971’s The Blood On Satan’s Claw, and 1973’s The Wicker Man) were the first to codify the genre, though it’s since been applied retrospectively to a number of other works. More recent examples include The Witch (2015), Midsommar (2019), and Kill List (2011). The Fiends in the Furrows: An Anthology of Folk Horror is an attempt to redress this balance, collecting nine short stories that each have their own fascinating take on the genre.
Book Review: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami (2013)3/4/2022 I have an interest in the books that authors write after completing a masterpiece. Dickens wrote Hard Times, China Mieville wrote Kraken, and Haruki Murakami wrote Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. What these have in common is interesting. While not their best books, they are almost perfect examples of the authors’ own specific tendencies. This means that Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki features a listless male protagonist, strange quasi-magical incidents, pared-back writing style, philosophical dialogue, and much discussion of classical music. But to reduce it to a mix of the author’s cliches would be reductive, since there’s a lot more going on than that.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is one of my favourites. The long-running comedic fantasy books are set in a flat world held up by four elephants on the back of a giant turtle, and feature a recurring cast of characters including the inept wizard Rincewind, the witch Granny Weatherwax, and the Grim Reaper himself. Small Gods is the thirteenth book in the series, and follows Brutha, a novice who finds himself destined to become the newest prophet of the Great God Om. The joke is that Om has, for the past three years, been trapped in the body of a turtle.
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