Hello St Marks

Another book written for the movies. There's a flavour to these last two books: very visual, of course, fast-moving, multiple story threads interwoven. 'The Repossession Mambo' is by far the better book, sardonic and cool, but Guillermo del Toro's 'The Strain' is still a cracking read. It's a vampire virus story, wonderfully topical. Written by the creator of 'Pan's Labyrinth', this is a sexy book, bound to get a fair bit of press. It is the first of a trilogy (even that sounds so considered, so marketed), so this book has a great set-up, accelerates to a final confrontation, and ends with a cliff hanger. I don't think it justifies the cover line, "Haunts as much as it terrifies", at all. The first third of the book was teriffic: a jumbo lands at NY airport and immediately shuts down. Every passenger dead, no signs of struggle, very Twilight Zone. Once we meet the vamps it's not as fresh, but still carried me right to the end.

This is a great set-up: when artificial organs become available, people live a very long time. But most people can't afford the organs they need, so they get a mortgage. It's not hard to get a loan when the goods are readily recoverable, which is where the Bio-Repo Man comes in. Defaulting on an artiforg loan has very bloody consequences. Eric Garcia's 'Repossession Mambo' has a gun Repo Man on the run after defaulting on his own body debt. Best part of this very good book: the essay at the end, in which Garcia describes how the book came about. He's written a few books which became movies, and wrote the screenplays. In this case he wrote 'Reposession Mambo' as a longish novella then set it aside, sending it out to a few friends. The friends thought it would be a good movie, so it was optioned, and Garcia wrote the screenplay - 36 or so drafts later, it has been made into a movie coming out later this year. Towards the end of writing the movie, Garcia re...

I read my literary vampire horror novel: 'Let the Right One In' by John Ajvide Lindqvist. It was a cracker. I haven't seen the movie but I can taste it from the novel. Creepy, horrifying writing with not a single sympathetic character to cling to. It was quite wonderful to read a beautifully crafted novel, vampires notwithstanding, and an embarassing contrast to the Sookie Stackhouse series. I'm reading the ninth Sookie right now. Ninth. There's something to be said for the allure of vampire soap opera.

Iain Banks is one of my favourites. I love that he writes in two voices: brilliant sci fi and left-field literature. His sci fi is literary, his literature is often fantastic, but when you choose an Iain Banks you choose one or the other. I had read 'The Business', from the liyterary camp, twice actually, and loved it's wry wit and cynicism. But this one, 'The Bridge', didn't work for me at all. The protagonist is in a coma following an accident. He travels his unconscious to The Bridge, a swarming quasi-Victorian world built on and within a seemingly endless and architecturally eccentric bridge. He's the amnesiac patient of a ambitious Doctor, then falls from his position of privilege and heads off on a journey which maps his return to consciousness. In this clever clever structure I have no clear recollection of the main character, Orr (clever clever name) and Banks doesn't offer any opportunity to connect with the secondary characters of the novel at ...