The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is, in my opinion, an underrated Stephen King. It’s one of his shorter books, clocking in at only 216 pages, and I polished it off in a single morning. While it doesn’t rank alongside the all-time classics like The Shining and Pet Sematary, it’s a gripping little tale about a girl lost in the woods.
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John M. Ford was an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer who wrote novels, short fiction, poetry, and a number of role-playing games. He is less-known today than some of his contemporaries because after he sadly died in 2006, almost all his work was out of print (fortunately, his works are being reissued now by Tor Books). The Dragon Waiting was his third novel, and earned him the 1984 World Fantasy Award.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s family moved to England in 1960, when he was only six years old. He has said that growing up in England with a Japanese family was ‘crucial to his writing’, and that perspective surely feeds into The Remains of the Day. Though nobody in the novel is Japanese, only someone both in and out of English culture can spear it with the precision he does in the novel.
Echopraxia is a semi-sequel to Peter Watts’s 2006 novel, Blindsight. The key event that links the two books is the Firefall, an event in the year 2082 – thousands of alien objects called ‘Fireflies’ suddenly appeared in Earth’s atmosphere and burned up instantly. Several years later, a ship called the Theseus was sent to investigate a comet giving off a radio transmission, in the hopes of finding out more of whoever was behind the Firefall. Echopraxia picks up back on Earth some time afterwards, with no word from Theseus.
Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World is a terrible book. By this I don’t mean it’s bad. Far from it – it’s a visceral, intense thrill ride into a true heart of darkness. When I say it’s terrible, I mean in the sense that a storm can be terrible, or a warlord, or a god. I mean that it inspires a frenzied mix of fear and awe, the kind that makes you want to run screaming, but also roots you to the spot, unable to tear your gaze away for even a second.
Ursula le Guin is best known for her ‘soft’ science fiction novels (a term I dislike, but I use for lack of a better one). So-called ‘soft’ sci-fi focuses more on characters, relationships, societies, psychology, and sociology, as opposed to ‘hard’ sci-fi which focuses on scientific accuracy and plausible future technology. Le Guin typifies this approach in her examinations of future societies and how they might affect human psychology and behaviour, for example Winter in The Left Hand of Darkness and Annares in The Dispossessed. Always Coming Home is no exception to this, but goes one step further: it is less a novel than an anthropological document of a culture that does not yet exist.
Hannibal Lecter is probably the most famous fictional serial killer ever created. Ever since his debut in 1981’s Red Dragon, he has captured the imaginations of millions worldwide. It’s unlikely he would have been as popular, though, had Thomas Harris not followed it up with The Silence of the Lambs. In this novel, Lecter took centre stage, after his comparatively small role in Red Dragon, and met his match in FBI trainee Clarice Starling.
Marcus Sedgwick was one of my favourite writers as a teenager, so when I learned he’d written a book for adults, I was keen to check it out. A Love Like Blood retains many of the elements of his YA fiction – a Gothic feel, a historical setting, and elements of the supernatural – while delving into more adult themes such as desire, grief, and obsession. I thought it was a smart, literate, and gripping delve into a disturbing and violent underworld.
Disgrace has become something of a contemporary classic since winning the Booker Prize in 1999. J.M. Coetzee’s searing novel of a man who’s lost his way in a changing South Africa was in 2006 named ‘the greatest novel of the last 25 years’ by The Observer, and made it onto BBC News’ list of the 100 most influential novels in 2019. It’s a short book, but Coetzee makes every word count as it builds to its shattering conclusion.
The genesis of Under the Pendulum Sun came from Jeanette Ng’s MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. It was there she gained an interest in missionary theology, which forms the backbone of the novel, though it’s set in the Victorian era. Other influences include the Brontës, namely Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and Paradise Lost. This is to say that it’s a heady cocktail of the Gothic, religious, and fantastical. It has a very simple premise, which she used to pitch the novel: Victorian missionaries in fairyland.
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