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 ...

Boldly invested a share of a book voucher on a punt: the first 'Firebirds' anthology. 'Firebirds' is a fantasy collection, which promised to be interesting and was, in parts. Anthologies are taste tests, samplers of writing styles and story flavours. The problem was that if I liked a story it was over too soon. If I didn't like it, I'd skip it and feel a bit cheated. Overall, a reminder that most fantasy isn't for me. To predictable, too girly. One find: Nancy Farmer. One old favourite: Garth Nix. Queued in my reading list is 'Let the Right One In' by John Ajvide Lindqvist (literary vampire horror, really), Bill Bryson's 'A Short History os Nearly Everything', Iain Banks' 'The Bridge' and one from W: 'The Reposession Mambo' by Eric Garcia.

A fantasy, perfectly forgettable, perfectly good. 'The Spell of Rosette' by Kim Falconer, first in a trilogy I have no urge to pursue. The premise is good: Earth in the near future is decimated by climate catastrophe sped along by human technical 'fixes' applied beyond reason by a power-hungry elite keen to retain a grip on the few remaining resources when the Earth goes to hell. The novel follows two threads: Earth, where a magical resistance bides its time through generations, and Gaela, a classic fantasy pre-tech world of warriors and witches. A sentient super-computer with the power to return Earth to rights is embodied in human form in Gaela, teaming up with the usual suspects to... the usual. To Kim's credit, the book stands alone and is neatly finished. I have just about enough patience for Sookie Stackhouse but can't be bothered with classic fantasy; brain the size of a gnat at the moment.

Only reading junk at the moment. More Sookie Stackhouse: books 5 and 6 now done and dusted and I'm craving more. K has a milder case, sufficient for us to organise a postal service swap of books (my number 5 for her library copy of number 6) and back again. I baulked today at spending $32.99 on book 7, so I've not entirely lost my senses. But how long will I hold out?

This is what has occupied me for the past 2 weeks, to the detriment of all interruptions (work, mothering, vacuuming): Charlaine Harris' "Sookie Stackhouse Vampire Mysteries". It's a humiliating admission, but began innocently enough with K bringing the first 2 books home from the US. P and I have been watching the HBO series "True Blood" on Foxtel, and loving the dirty white trash deep South vibe and nutty vampire plot. Book 1 of this series (9 books strong and still coming) is the plot of the entire first season of True Blood, and it's doubly engaging working out what the TV people decided to change (introducing a sassy black girlfriend and a fabulously camp black chef/drug dealer - recognise a theme, here?). Sookie is a telepathic waitress in a deep South bar, who falls for a vampire for the blessed relief of not being able to hear his thoughts, and his dead-cool sexual magnetism. It's 2 years since vampires came out of the closet (coffin?) and en...

It's odd that a blog read by no-one is still a burdensome responsibility. Here's an odd book read in May: 'The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation', futher subtitled 'Volume I: The Pox Party', by M T Anderson. What a title. The back blurb is enthusiastic but uncommunicative: "A tremendous read" - Nicholas Tucker, TES (what's TES?). I read the first page or so in Kinokuniya and came away with the impression that it was a fantasy borrowing its aesthetics and idiom from the 1800s. It's not. This is a book about slavery in Boston just before the Revolutionary War, human scientific experimentation, about racism and child abuse. A boy and his mother are raised and educated in a bizarre Scientific Society in an extended experiment to resolve the truth or otherwise of Negro intelligence. It was an odd read because for most of the book I was reading it as wonky fantasy with a Gothic tone, not political parable (parable? more a ti...

Here's the joy of second hand bookstores, well proven. I would never have bought Dan Simmon's 'The Terror' in a bookstore - it's a block of a thing, 935 pages, horror title, gory splat of blood on the cover, and I've never heard of him. But in the low-risk world of a second-hand bookstore, I was seduced by two things: it's about the Franklin expedition to find the North-West Passage in the mid 1800s, and Stephen King declares on the cover: "I am in awe of Dan Simmons", which, perhaps oddly, I find persuasive. This is a teriffic book. I was thoroughly engrossed and felt bereft when it was finished. The Franklin expedition was a well-equipped pair of boats, 130 British naval men and marines, the height of seafaring technology of its time. The expedition was lost. Rescue expeditions eventually found traces of the Franklin effort, and it is generally thought that the crew was icebound for 3 winters, savaged by starvation, scurvy, lead poisoning and bot...