Who is the nun in the mask and what is everyone hiding?

I’ve been working with the editorial team to get the last of the changes made before ‘the small print’, is sent off to the printers. Alan Campbell has kindly supplied the intro and the book will be on sale at the Edinburgh Book Festival 2009 as well as being sold on the street during the Fringe.

An open night has been planned at The Mound for late August. I’ll let you know dates when I get them.

This week I get to see John Connolly and Alan at Waterstones. I’ll do a write up for this blog later in the week.

A new short story of mine, ‘Pastoral Effect’, has also been released in New Horizons. Get it whilst stocks last.

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Ronin has been claimed by many to be Miller’s greatest work. I’m not so sure. I like it and the story and visuals are interesting but it just doesn’t hold my attention as much as his Sin City books. It tells the story of a 13th century samurai who is born into the future to resume his age-old battle with a daemon. The art work is a little understated for my liking and the story leaves more questions hanging in the air than it settles. It’s good, but not brilliant.

The Ninth Circle obviously refers to Dante’s version of hell, and in this novel by first time author Alex Bell (female not male), the lead character finds himself pulled towards this final circle. Waking in a flat in Budepest with concussion Gabriel Antaeus finds himself battling daemons and talking to angels as he tries to work out who he is and where he came from. It’s a good idea but I found the narrator somewhat infuriating plus he makes some leaps of deduction that don’t make sense (he realises early on he’s speaking English to himself. How? Surely any first language makes sense to you when you’re thinking in your own head. How do you know what language you think in?).

Fell Vol. 1. by that gruff exterior (but I secretly believe him to be rather nice), hard drinking comic genius Warren Ellis is brilliant. Detective Richard Fell finds himself banished to Snowtown (part London, part New York) from the more affluent city across the waters. Here he starts about rehabilitating himself whilst taking down the criminals of this strange and dark city. Who is the nun in the mask and what is everyone hiding? Who knows, but it’s fun guessing. Ellis is working on more Fell stories and I can’t wait.

The Prisoner of Zenda is a Ruritanian Romance novel, a series of books that were popular in the 1890s. The book focuses on an idle English gentleman who visits the eastern European country of Ruritania and just happens to resemble the king. Thrust into a deadly plot where he must impersonate the monarch the book is a roaring adventure that feels very dated today. It also has some laugh out loud statements about women that would have your local feminist up in arms.

Read this week:

Fell: Volume 1 Feral City by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith

The Ninth Circle by Alex Bell

Ronin by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley

The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope

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