More (very) random reading
I've been off on a horror and weird fiction kick lately, starting with F. G. Cottam's The Colony, a cheerful tale of a newspaper magnate who sends a team of self-described "experts" to a remote island whose inhabitants all vanished in the 19th century. There is a mystery, and all the various experts have their own ideas - natural causes, alien abductions, what-have-you. Most of them are wrong, and several of them end up dead, before the truth is finally unravelled by a haunted child and a determined amateur historian.
I won't get too specific about the actual answer, because, hey, spoilers. It's all reasonably well-done, with a good sound explanation and a lot of eerie supernatural frissons along the way. It has its flaws, I suppose; the book has a large cast - OK, starts off with a large cast - and they don't all justify their existence, and the denouement feels a little rushed to me. But no book is without flaws, and this is a workmanlike horror thriller and a good fun read. If you like horror. The messy bits will not appeal to everyone.
The same is true of A. R. Morlan's The Amulet. A prolific writer of weird fiction and erotica, Morlan died, reportedly by her own hand, only recently; she seems to have been a troubled and reclusive character, living alone in rural Wisconsin with a huge herd of cats. The Amulet is prefaced by a description of just how much of it is drawn from Morlan's own life - while the ancient Egyptian amulet which gives the protagonist's wicked grandmother supernatural abilities is, presumably, fiction, the grinding poverty - financial and spiritual - of her existence, and the toxic relationships she has with mother and grandmother alike, ring very true and make for uncomfortable reading. The villain of the piece is not so much the evil grandmother - nasty piece of work though she is - as the unremitting awfulness of the small-town environment that keeps protagonist Anna Sudek down. Like much of Morlan's stuff, it's grim, evocative, and effective. (Well, much of her horror and weird fiction, at least. Haven't read the erotica. I would assume it's not relentlessly grim, as the market for relentlessly grim erotica has got to be kind of limited, hasn't it? Please don't write and tell me if I'm wrong about this, I would like to keep some of the few illusions I have left.)
Lastly, I've been working through a fat collection of stuff, Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction, Krohn being a Finnish writer of quite notably weird stuff, not much of which has been widely available in English up to now. This collection includes a number of... fictions... including Tainaron: Mail from Another City, possibly her best-known (to Anglophones) book, and typical of her technique; a series of vignettes written by an unnamed narrator visiting a surreal city of insects. Others in the collection are... equally weird. A young boy befriends a pelican who is passing for human. A subeditor on a fringe-science magazine loses touch with reality through taking a herbal asthma cure. Multiple versions of the same character experience a wide range of dystopias and apocalypses. It's all beautifully written, the stories are made up of short, intense scenes with a dream-like quality about them, and it takes a good deal of thought to make the narratives coalesce inside your mind. Well, OK, my mind at least. It's thoughtful stuff, with many allusions to both science and mythology. Krohn is a writer who makes you think. Which is a good thing. (Like that J.G. Ballard collection a little while back, though, Krohn's collected works might be better tackled in stages, rather than as one big lump.)
I won't get too specific about the actual answer, because, hey, spoilers. It's all reasonably well-done, with a good sound explanation and a lot of eerie supernatural frissons along the way. It has its flaws, I suppose; the book has a large cast - OK, starts off with a large cast - and they don't all justify their existence, and the denouement feels a little rushed to me. But no book is without flaws, and this is a workmanlike horror thriller and a good fun read. If you like horror. The messy bits will not appeal to everyone.
The same is true of A. R. Morlan's The Amulet. A prolific writer of weird fiction and erotica, Morlan died, reportedly by her own hand, only recently; she seems to have been a troubled and reclusive character, living alone in rural Wisconsin with a huge herd of cats. The Amulet is prefaced by a description of just how much of it is drawn from Morlan's own life - while the ancient Egyptian amulet which gives the protagonist's wicked grandmother supernatural abilities is, presumably, fiction, the grinding poverty - financial and spiritual - of her existence, and the toxic relationships she has with mother and grandmother alike, ring very true and make for uncomfortable reading. The villain of the piece is not so much the evil grandmother - nasty piece of work though she is - as the unremitting awfulness of the small-town environment that keeps protagonist Anna Sudek down. Like much of Morlan's stuff, it's grim, evocative, and effective. (Well, much of her horror and weird fiction, at least. Haven't read the erotica. I would assume it's not relentlessly grim, as the market for relentlessly grim erotica has got to be kind of limited, hasn't it? Please don't write and tell me if I'm wrong about this, I would like to keep some of the few illusions I have left.)
Lastly, I've been working through a fat collection of stuff, Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction, Krohn being a Finnish writer of quite notably weird stuff, not much of which has been widely available in English up to now. This collection includes a number of... fictions... including Tainaron: Mail from Another City, possibly her best-known (to Anglophones) book, and typical of her technique; a series of vignettes written by an unnamed narrator visiting a surreal city of insects. Others in the collection are... equally weird. A young boy befriends a pelican who is passing for human. A subeditor on a fringe-science magazine loses touch with reality through taking a herbal asthma cure. Multiple versions of the same character experience a wide range of dystopias and apocalypses. It's all beautifully written, the stories are made up of short, intense scenes with a dream-like quality about them, and it takes a good deal of thought to make the narratives coalesce inside your mind. Well, OK, my mind at least. It's thoughtful stuff, with many allusions to both science and mythology. Krohn is a writer who makes you think. Which is a good thing. (Like that J.G. Ballard collection a little while back, though, Krohn's collected works might be better tackled in stages, rather than as one big lump.)