The Small Print

A short short entitled 'Pastoral Effect' is out in this months copy of New Horizons which I believe can be purchased from The British Fantasy Society. I've got two short stories ('Heart of Glass' and 'The Museum of Human Experience') plus a poem ('Singing the Low Down Geek Blues') in the book The Small Print which should be out in August and available from the British Heart Foundation. 

'Pick-up 57' (which I now think is completely the wrong name for the book), is coming on slowly. It's a complex work as I'm trying to strike a balance between what the narrator knows and what is really going on. I have about thirty pages done so far but that should increase rapidly once I get back from holidays at the end of June.

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Mind the Gap is the first in a series of novels called 'The Hidden Cities' written by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon. The story follows Jazz who is on the run from the mysterious 'Uncles' who have just killed her mother. Racing across London she enters the underground and then disappears further into the abandon tunnels and secret place deep below the city. Taken in by a 'family' of petty thieves Jazz must learn her about her own past if she is to deal with her future.

Drawing influences from Neverwhere, the novel is magical, but it's a very mundane magic, rooted as it is in the history of London. The underside of London is seen as somewhere dark and foreboding, holding hidden secrets and a violent history. The story itself is a little weak and could have done with more interesting characters particularly the bad guys who come across as enigmas and not really that threatening. That said, it's a good book and one that further enhances the sub-sub-genre of Subterranean fiction.

My second recommendation this week is the book that started Subterranean fiction off. A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne has a professor and his future son in law following the guidance of an old parchment written by a Viking that leads them deep into Mount Sneffels and a world hidden below ground. Unlike all the film versions, the book is more interested in the journey than the hidden world, and though it is a world of palaeontology, lumbering dinosaurs such as the Tyrannosaurus Rex do not make an appearance. 

By today's standards the book is slow, and being told by a character recounting the story as if to a diary, feels old fashioned. But this is where it starts. The world is opened up and the hollow Earth theories are turned into fiction.

Read this week:

Mind the Gap by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon

Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

Heart of Glass

A short story entitled 'Heart of Glass' and a poem entitled 'Singing the Low Down Geek Blues' are being sent to the review committee for the charity book tomorrow. The book is to be called  'the small print' and will be for sale at the Edinburgh Festival and via the internet. We are trying to get a writer and /or celebrity to write the intro, unsure who it will be so watch this space.

Working on a new story now set in a museum that might not exist.

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Some links. The underground world of Naples, I haven't been here but now want to. Stephen Smith has put together a list of Subterranean novels. I've got his 'Underground London' to read and I'm working through 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' on my phone right now.

Over on Suvudu China Mieville talks about his latest novel 'The City and The City' which sounds thrilling and I hope to enquire soon.

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Audition by Ryu Murakami is a novelette that works best as an understanding of middle aged Japanese male desires. It's a fast paced read that builds towards a dark and disturbing climax. This climax is obvious from the start, but that sort of helps to build the tension. As always with Murakami when it comes the horror is human centred and bloody.

Black Hole is a classic graphic novel (one that Neil Gaiman has been working on a film adaptation of for some time). Burn's presents teenagers as disenfranchised and lonely, and though set in the 70s it feels modern, perhaps because the raging hormones of young people are the same now as then. The back story is a STD that results in strange mutations in the kids, but in truth the story is about love, belonging and alienation, something that is heightened through the use of the wood block like black and white drawings.