The BoSS for 11/04/10

This week in The BoSS, a fascinating non-fiction novel about El Dorado, zombies run amuck, nightmarish magic and pussy cats, the apocalypse happens - again - and there's some very personal fallout from the Arctic exploration of old. A fantastically diverse lot of proofs, the highlight of which, for me, has to be The Lost City of Z.

All that, and much more besides!

Click through to read Meet the BoSS for an introduction and an explanation as to why you should care about the Bag o' Speculative Swag.

Read on for a sneak peek at some of the books - past, present and future - you can expect to see coverage of here on The Speculative Scotsman in the coming weeks and months.

***

White Cat
by Holly Black

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

17/06/10 by Gollancz

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "Cassel is cursed. Cursed by the memory of the fourteen year old girl he murdered. Life at school is a constant trial. Life at home even worse. No-one at home is ever going to forget that Cassel is a killer. No-one at home is ever going to forget that he isn't a magic worker. Cassel's family are one of the big five crime families in America. Ever since magic was prohibited in 1929 magic workers have been driven underground and into crime. And while people still need their touch, their curses, their magical killings, their transformations, times have been hard. His granddad has been driven to drink, his mother is in prison and his brothers detest him as the only one of their family who can't do magic.

"But there is a secret at the centre of Cassel's family and he's about to inherit it. It's terrifying and that's the truth. White Cat is a stunning novel of a world changed by magic. In this world only 1% of the population can work magic but they have the power of nightmares."

Commentary: Holly Black, of The Spiderwick Chronicles fame, gives us book one of The Curse Workers, which sounds, despite my knee-jerk opposition of most anything that's popular, kind of interesting. I'm confess to some uncertainty as to whether White Cat is pitched at adults or an all-ages audience, but truth be told, I'm not picky, and there's enough potential in the premise - a mafia of magicians! - to ensure I'll give this a shot sometime before its release in June.

 

The Lost City of Z

by David Grann

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

08/07/10 by Pocket Books

Review Priority:

4 (Very High)

Plot Synopsis: "Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, the inspiration behind Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, was among the last of a legendary breed of British explorers. For years he explored the Amazon and came to believe that its jungle concealed a large, complex civilization, like El Dorado. Obsessed with its discovery, he christened it the City of Z. In 1925, Fawcett headed into the wilderness with his son Jack, vowing to make history. They vanished without a trace. For the next eighty years, hordes of explorers plunged into the jungle, trying to find evidence of Fawcett's party or Z. Some died from disease and starvation; others simply disappeared. In this spellbinding true tale of lethal obsession, David Grann retraces the footsteps of Fawcett and his followers as he unravels one of the greatest mysteries of exploration."

Commentary: I recall hearing New Yorker columnist David Grann discussing The Lost City of Z on an episode of Alex Telander's intermittently excellent Book Banter podcast, and though I'm more often drawn to fiction than non, this short novel sounds absolutely fascinating. What better excuse than this to indulge my irrepressible boy's-own fantasies of adventuring into the unknown? Not only that: there's a mystery afoot, too! Really looking forward to this.

Plague of the Dead
by Z. A. Recht

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

13/05/10 by Pocket Books

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "The Morningstar virus. Those infected suffer delirium, fever, violent behaviour ...and a hundred per cent mortality rate. But that's not the worst of it. The victims return from the dead to walk the earth. And when a massive military operation fails to contain the plague of the living dead, it escalates into a worldwide pandemic. On one side of the world, thousands of miles from home, a battle-hardened general surveys the remnants of his command: a young medic, a veteran photographer, a rash private, and dozens of refugees -- all of them his responsibility. Meanwhile in the United States, an army colonel discovers the darker side of Morningstar and collaborates with a well-known journalist to leak the information to the public..."

Commentary: Zombie fun! Although, I'm sad to say, zombie fun rather overshadowed by the death in December of '09 of its 26-year-old author, Z. A. Recht, who completed only this, volume one of The Morningstar Strain, and a single sequel, Thunder and Ashes, before his untimely passing. That aside - and I don't mean to be at all dismissive - I've had mixed reactions to the undead in literature in the past, so though Plague of the Dead looks by all rights to be a great read, I'll be approaching it with some measure of trepidation.

Day by Day Armageddon
by J. L. Bourne

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

24/06/10 by Pocket Books

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "May 16th. 1201 hrs. We are now under siege. Beyond the silo access doors, we have a small army of beaten and battered undead to contend with. They only want one thing... Day by Day Armageddon is the handwritten journal of one man and his struggle for survival. Trapped in the midst of global disaster, he must make decisions that could mean life, or which could condemn him eternally to walk as one of them. Enter, if you dare, into his world. The world of the undead."

Commentary: A few weeks ago it was two-year-old hard sci-fi, a few weeks before that it was second novels in several series whose initial entries I hadn't read, and this time out, the book fairies have conspired to make epistolary fiction the theme of this edition of The BoSS. I should say, though, that there's a wealth of difference between the pulp - and zombies (again) - of Day by Day Armageddon and the restrained, intellectual character of the other epistolary book that fell through my letterbox this week. Still, as wont as I am to indulge in such literary treats as The Sorcerer's House promises to be, I'm no snob. I like fun, too, and with a little luck, J. L. Bourne's novel should represent exactly that.

The Still Point

by Amy Sackville

Release Details:

Published in the UK on
04/02/10 by Portobello Books

Review Priority:

4 (Very High)

Plot Synopsis: "At the turn of the twentieth century, Arctic explorer Edward Mackley sets out to reach the North Pole and vanishes into the icy landscape without a trace. He leaves behind a young wife, Emily, who awaits his return for decades, her dreams and devotion gradually freezing into rigid widowhood.

"A hundred years later, on a sweltering mid-summer's day, Edward's great-grand-niece Julia moves through the old family house, attempting to impose some order on the clutter of inherited belongings and memories from that ill-fated expedition, and taking care to ignore the deepening cracks within her own marriage. But as afternoon turns into evening, Julia makes a discovery that splinters her long-held image of Edward and Emily's romance, and her husband Simon faces a precipitous choice that will decide the future of their relationship."

Commentary: Ooooooh... did someone say Arctic exploration? I'm an absolute mark when it comes to that particular subject. Take The Terror - one of favourite novels of all time. And even without the supernatural element of Dan Simmons' narrative, there's something about the polar regions that strikes me as otherworldly enough to tickle my fancy for fantasy. Better yet: inhospitable environments, impossible climates, mystery, tragedy and adventure - The Still Point has it all. And the perhaps more relatable tale that is its other half. I know I just got through saying I wasn't a snob, but all that, taken together with the fact that Amy Sackville's narrative was Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 not so long ago, I'm --- well... Totally sold.

Dimiter

by William Peter Blatty

Release Details:

Published in the US on
24/12/09 by Tor

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "Albania in the 1970s. A prisoner suspected of being an enemy agent is held by state security. An unsettling presence, though subjected to unimaginable torture he maintains an eerie silence. He escapes - and on the way to freedom, completes a mysterious mission. The prisoner is Dimiter, the American 'agent from Hell.'

The scene shifts to Jerusalem, focusing on Hadassah Hospital and a cast of engaging, colorful characters: the brooding Christian Arab police detective, Peter Meral; Dr. Moses Mayo, a troubled but humorous neurologist; Samia, an attractive, sharp-tongued nurse; and assorted American and Israeli functionaries and hospital staff. All become enmeshed in a series of baffling, inexplicable deaths, until events explode in a surprising climax."

Commentary: I didn't like The Exorcist. For starters, I didn't like the film, but it had been built up in my mind to such a dizzying height that I was sure I'd simply missed the point. So I read the book. I didn't like that either. Dimiter, however, is William Peter Blatty's first full-length novel since Legion in 1983, and what advance praise I've come across thus far has convinced me that the quarter-century Blatty took off has honed his horror instincts to a fine point. "A beautifully written, haunting tale of vengeance, spiritual searching, loss, and love" sounds vastly more interesting to me than that other nonsense. To hell with spider-girls and the improper use of crucifixes, I say!

The Sorcerer's House

by Gene Wolfe

Release Details:

Published in the US on
04/03/10 by Tor

Review Priority:

4 (Very High)

Plot Synopsis: "In a contemporary town in the American midwest where he has no connections, an educated man recently released from prison is staying in a motel. He writes letters to his brother and to others, including a friend still in jail. When he meets a real estate agent who tells him he is the heir to a huge old house, long empty, he moves in, though he is too broke even to buy furniture. He is immediately confronted by supernatural and fantastic creatures and events. His life is utterly transformed. We read on, because we must know more and we revise our opinions of him, and of others, with each letter. We learn things about magic, and another world, and about the sorcerer Mr. Black who originally inhabited the house. And then, perhaps, we read it again."

Commentary: The publicity boasts that The Sorcerer's House is "told entirely in a series of letters," and though epistolary novels has always been hit or miss with me, at the end of the day, were you to stamp Gene Wolfe's name on anything, given the chance, you could be damn sure I'd read it. The Book of the New Sun has to be one of my most revelatory experiences with literature; in recent memory and in all memory. It wasn't always easy reading - hence I still haven't dug into the loosely related sequences which follow it, both sequentially and on my shelf - but it pried open my eyes to the possibilities of genre, struck down those limitations I'd thought would always restrain it. On the other hand, I've heard tell that since those classic novels, Wolfe turned his attention to religion, with diminishing returns, and while The Sorcerer's House doesn't on the surface seem at all God-fearing, it's something I'll be bearing in mind when it comes time to crack this baby open.