Coming Attractions | The Superpowers That Be

This week on The Speculative Scotsman... superheroes!

I don't know quite how it happened - I didn't plan it, except for a single addition when I saw how things had come together - but there you go: superheroes.

Bookending the week, then, just as they bookended the summer in cinemas, expect reviews of Thor and Green Lantern, two tentpole comic book movies that I tend to think the critics initially misjudged.

Between times, you can also look forward to one last Coming Back to Comic Books on the baffling Batman: RIP by the madman Grant Morrison; one last Coming Back to Comic Books for reasons I'll go into at a later date. Good reasons.

Last but not least, a beast of a piece on The Book of Transformations by friend of the blog Mark Charan Newton, who attempts, in his latest, to get to the heart of the question begged by every idiot who imagines it's acceptable to prance around in a kevlar cape the better to punch dudes in the face and elsewhere.

Honestly... superheroes. Who'd have 'em?

Well, I would. And I will! So, Avengers assemble? :)

The Scotsman Abroad | On An Island

So the latest of my reviews for Strange Horizons went up a week or so ago.

It's of The Islanders by Christopher Priest, which you may recall was one of my most anticipated new releases of the year.

Turns out I wasn't wrong to be so excited about it. Here's a snippet, from the very beginning of the article:

Whatever you think The Islanders is, think again. 

That is unless you think it's the first new novel by Christopher Priest in almost a decade; it is that. But none of the other things you may or may not or may yet imagine of it are even close, to be sure. 

Actually... strike that. The Islanders isn't even a novel in the conventional sense, because despite appearances to the contrary, or else precisely because of them, The Islanders is not so much a narrative, with a plot and characters or any of the usual storytelling accoutrements, as it is a travel guide — a work of reference — purportedly written by and for tourists en route to or through the Dream Archipelago, which is to say "the largest geographical feature on our world" (p.8): an elusive arrangement of some several hundred thousand islands, large and small, scattered about a single vast ocean and enclosed on the north and the south by two gargantuan continents entrenched in perpetual warfare with one another.

I say that. But in truth (not that there is truthfully a single truth to be arrived at throughout this astonishing testament to Priest's much-missed mode of magical realism, unless there is), these too — these broad, whispered, hand-me-down physical characteristics — are called into question on more than one occasion as we track the seemingly meandering ley lines of The Islanders. For various reasons, you see, foremost amongst them gravitational anomalies known as temporal gradients which make aerial navigation practically impossible — and this is very much par for the course in Priest's latest — "There are no maps or charts of the Dream Archipelago. At least there are no reliable ones, or comprehensive ones, or even whole ones" (p.14). 

(continue reading)

Ladies and gentlemen, be my guest: click on through to read the rest!

And if you're still on the fence about this beauty of a book, I'd also point you towards Adam Roberts' excellent review of The Islanders over on Punkadiddle. Adam writes that The Islanders is "a magnificent novel, one of my books of the year," and I'm not at all inclined to disagree.

The Best Things In Life | Murakami Comes

The world is about to change...

Least, it is if this website is to be believed.

It's not come up much in all the time I've been blogging, but I am a huge Haruki Murakami fan - it doesn't get much better than Kakfa on the Shore - and now that The Islanders is behind me, the book I've been getting all googly-eyed thinking about, without a shadow of a doubt, is IQ84.

In the UK, Harvill Secker will be releasing all three parts of this massive novel (his first since After Dark in 2007) in two editions due on the 18th and the 25th of October. That's this month! Meanwhile, back at the ranch - ie. in America-ca-ca - Knopf have assembled IQ84 into a single vast volume, due on the Tuesday before Halloween.

Me... I kinda wish there was an English-language edition divided as this book was upon its initial release in Japan, into three individual volumes - the better to look all pretty-like in my library - but I'll take what I can get, and gladly.

IQ84 been called Murakami's magnum opus by those in the know, and before now, all I've had it in my power to do is hope that that's the case. Today, praise the publicists, Harvill Secker have made my hopes that much more material, releasing a free sample of IQ84 for your Kindle device and mine.

Grab it here.

Bear in mind that if you don't have a Kindle, or the Kindle app for your phone or tablet or whatever, you can still download the reader software for your PC... so there's really no excuse to pass up on this delightful little glimpse of what wonders I imagine there are to come in IQ84.

Here's the book trailer, in case you're still not convinced:

Roll on the 18th of October, right?

So. Anyone else hyped for new Haruki Murakami, or is it really just me?

Film Review | Red State, dir. Kevin Smith

I came up on Kevin Smith... on Clerks and Mallrats and Chasing Amy. Insensible stoner comedies they may have been, to a one, but I loved them. For me, the downturn began with Dogma, and though Clerks 2 didn't entirely suck, and Zack and Miri Make a Porno showed some modicum of promise - not to mention rather more of Jason Mewes than I'd counted on seeing - hindsight insists that these are exceptions to the frankly embarrassing trend Smith has established in the interim, rather than evidence of some upswing. 

Red State is basically Mallrats meets Hostel: torture porn with so many self-serious soliloquies as to rival every word spoken throughout the entirely of the SAW franchise. It begins with three horny teens whose names you needn't even stress about... though one is played by Kyle Gallner, who's impressed me before, and surely would do again had he or any of the other impressive bit-part players (among them Michael Parks, John Goodman and True Blood's Stephen Root) had but the slightest chance to shine in this unfortunate affair.

Anyway, there's these three dudes, right? And they've been offered sex on a platter. They need only go to a trailer somewhere out in the sticks and drink two beers before they get theirs... and oh, they do get theirs. Just not in the way they might have imagined. Instead, they're drugged, gagged and captured, and when at last they awake, they find themselves in the barnyard church of a little Christian cult with a lotta God's guns.

Unusually, what follows is not in fact the narrative of their attempts to escape the clutches of Pastor Abin Cooper and his unwaveringly faithful congregation. Actually, as distasteful as that sounds, that might have been better. Instead, Smith tries to do action (again), and fails (again), because when word gets out that the bloodthirsty minister has himself a holy trinity of hostages, the ATF get involved, and not a little predictably, a shoot-out ensues. And ensues. And ensues.

I guess that'd have been all well and good if the shoot-out had been in any sense tense or engaging or exciting. It isn't. Though it is, I'll say - and do pardon the pun - stylishly shot; faint praise which I think it's safe to attribute to cinematographer David Klein in any event, rather than writer/director (not to mention editor/distributor) Kevin Smith, whose most notable contribution to these long-winded sequences - namely a series of absurd pauses to allow for the deeply dippy dialogue that is typical of his work - quite undercuts the kinetic quality Klein otherwise achieves. 

Red State is in every other sense a mess. Maybe if it had had a few dick jokes I would've been able to look upon it more kindly, but no... no suck luck. In fact it is written with so little coherency and so little interest in - or even seeming awareness of - pace, character, narrative and the like that it seems defiant; positively transgressive - which, to be sure, has been Smith's business all along - but against what? Church? State? Common sense? Only Smarties have the answer.

I've been a Kevin Smith fan through thick and through thin, but the thick has been thin on the ground of late, no doubt about it. Here I was thinking at least it couldn't get much worse than Cop Out.

It can.

Book Review | Black Light by Patrick Melton, Stephen Romano & Marcus Dunstan

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

If you have a supernatural problem that won't go away, you need Buck Carlsbad: private eye, exorcist, and last resort. Buck's got a way with spirits that no one else can match, and a lot of questions that only spirits can answer.

Buck has spent years looking deep into the Blacklight on the other side of death, trying to piece together the mystery that destroyed his family and left him for dead. It's dangerous, but it's his only hope of finding out what happened to them - and what made him the way he is.

But then Buck takes a call from a billionaire, and finds himself working the most harrowing case of his career. One that will either reveal the shocking secrets of his life, or end it forever...

***

Black Light by Patrick Melton, Stephen Romano & Marcus Dunstan will do decent business, I expect, but not because of its content. Either that, or precisely because of its content.

We're three quarters through it already, so I think it's safe to say, from my vantage point, that 2011 was roughly a year long, contained almost exactly a year's worth of stuff - good, bad and butt-ugly alike - and will surely go down the in history books as the year between 2010 and 2012. A year, then, in many senses like any other -- except, for the first time since America vs. Iraq began, there was no SAW film!


Not the greatest of tragedies, truly. But I won't pretend there hasn't been a little hole in my soul since it transpired the franchise really was taking a break. The SAW films have been terrible, by and large - I'd recommend none but the first one - yet against my better judgement, I've watched every annual installment with a silly grin, a barely-suppressed snigger, and a fizzy drink so very vast I could probably take down everyone's favourite dearly-departed serial killer with it myself.

And I'll kinda miss that feeling. The Paranormal Activity films which appear to have picked up where SAW left off have just been too good to date to fit Jigsaw's slippers in the inimitable, awful way he wore them. So when news of Black Light broke - not so long ago at all, in truth - I admit it: I breathed what must have been the strangest sigh of relief I've ever experienced.

Black Light is for its part almost exactly what you'd expect from a first novel by three dubious screenwriters variously behind the most execrable of all the SAW movies (from SAW IV through last year's "final chapter," if you must know), Piranha 3DD, the monster nonsense of the three Feast flicks, and an episode of Masters of Horror, may its much-maligned memory rest in peace: it's silly, horrible, set-piece driven torture porn... just with ghosts instead of puppets, or hunchbacks, or whatever.


So I enjoyed it, obviously.

Buck Carlsbad is a freelance ghost hunter a la Most Haunted riddled with token affectations: he's a cat-napper, a self-mutilator, and he carries a Walkman everywhere... because iPods, right? They're just too cool for school. Mysteriously, however, Buck doesn't remember any of his first seven years, except that he emerged from that dead zone in his head down two parents but up the gift-come-curse of second sight. He can peer into the Blacklight, you see; where the lost souls roam, dead but not yet gone.

"We call it the Big Black. It might be where they all go in the end. Might be heaven and hell, all rolled up into one endless stretch of nowhere. Not that heaven and hell were ever real to being with. That's another thing people don't understand. Everything you think you know about life and death and some sort of God that loves you or a devil that hates us - well, guess what. You're wrong about all that. And what I do ain't about blessings or rituals or holy symbols, man." (p.43)

Oh no. What Buck does is slice and dice and grind and pulp and generally kick the living you-know-what out of the myriad malevolent spirits he hunts down like lice. He's practically Batman. And the Dark Knight seems to have fallen on hard times, as of the moment Melton, Romano & Dunstan deign to introduce us, so when a call comes in from billionaire extraordinaire Sidney Jaeger offering our capeless crusader employment tailored to his area of expertise - and linked somehow to the disappearance of his folks so long ago - Buck swallows his suspicions and jumps at the chance to exorcise the Jaeger Laser, a bleeding-edge bullet-train to Vegas, of the nine horsemen of the apocalypse. Or something.


Black Light is a lot of nonsense, needless to say, and it needs focus like the hole in its head it wears so unashamedly; a relatively slow start gives way to a lot of attention-seeking antics (a single page references Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia) with tips of the hat over the duration to everything and everyone from Elvis to Paranormal Activity, To Live and Die in LA through the continuing adventures of Scarlett Johansson. Black Light is proudly and at times desperately self-referential, ludicrous enough as to beggar belief on numerous occasions, and so bloated as to seem in dire need of a take-no-prisoners line edit. I started to miss proper paragraphs very early on, I'll say. And in light of the pointed absence of descriptive prose, the screenwriting heritage of these three kings is laid bare as a hairless babe.

As a pop. horror novel, however - particularly one so beholden to its torture-porn cinema lineage - it has its moments, and in those moments it is poised to chill and thrill in the mode of early John Connolly or middling Michael Koryta. Fans of another of Mulholland Books' imported authors - namely Duane Swierczynski of Fun and Games fame - will find lots to like in Black Light, I think, if they, as we, can find it in themselves to overlook the same self-seriousness in the face of absolute farce that was such a plague on SAW.


I did. And I'll be doing it again next October, no doubt, because you know what? "Cheese works if you mean it," (p.252) and Melton, Romano & Dunstan surely do.

Though that may not be a pearl of pasteurised wisdom applicable to all things...

***

Black Light

by Patrick Melton, Stephen Romano

& Marcus Dunstan

UK & US Publication: October 2011, Mulholland Books

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Books Received | The BoSS for 02/10/11

In The BoSS this week: to bid a warm welcome to the spookiest month of the year, returning favourite October, at least two spooky books! Also, one strictly embargoed book, which may or not be spooky. Who could possibly say? Not I.

Let's just do this thing before I get myself arrested.

(+10 credibility to anyone who can correctly identity the obscure British band I just referenced.) 

***

11.22.63

by Stephen King

Vital Statistics

Published in the UK

on 08/11/11

by Hodder & Stoughton

Review Priority

5 (A Sure Thing)

The Blurb: WHAT IF you could go back in time and change the course of history? WHAT IF the watershed moment you could change was the JFK assassination? 11/22/63, the date that Kennedy was shot - unles ...

King takes his protagonist Jake Epping, a high school English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, 2011, on a fascinating journey back to 1958 - from a world of mobile phones and iPods to a new world of Elvis and JFK, of Plymouth Fury cars and Lindy Hopping, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake's life - a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time. 

With extraordinary imaginative power, King weaves the social, political and popular culture of his baby-boom American generation into a devastating exercise in escalating suspense. 

My Thoughts: Talk about starting the show with the show-stopper.

11.22.63 is of course the next novel by Stephen King. Not unlike last week's Reamde, it's about 1000 pages long. Very much unlike the latest from Neal Stephenson, however, 11.22.63 is about time travel, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and how the past makes us who we are in the present... maybe. I wouldn't know. Leastwise, I signed a thing which says I couldn't tell you even if I did, which I don't, so that's, uh... that.

What I can tell you - what I can assure you of, in fact - is that you can count on a review of 11.22.63 from me, whether it ends up here or elsewhere, pretty much the minute the embargo on this gorgeous, gargantuan thing lifts. Only five weeks to go!

Pure

by Julianna Baggott

Vital Statistics

Published in the UK

on 02/02/12

by Headline

Review Priority

4 (Pretty Bloody Likely)

The Blurb: We know you are here, our brothers and sisters. We will, one day, emerge from the Dome to join you in peace. For now, we watch from afar, benevolently.

Pressia Belze has lived outside of the Dome ever since the detonations. Struggling for survival she dreams of life inside the safety of the Dome with the 'Pure'.

Partridge, himself a Pure, knows that life inside the Dome, under the strict control of the leaders' regime, isn't as perfect as others think.

Bound by a history that neither can clearly remember, Pressia and Partridge are destined to forge a new world. 

My Thoughts: I should note that that there is actually the US cover of Pure. The design of the proof I have - stark and white and slightly reflective in the right light - would be practically impossible to capture as a still image, but suffice it to say, it's an eye-catching thing.

Of course I'm not so keen to read Pure simply because the proof is nicely put together. Primarily I'm interested in this new series because of the blurb Justin Cronin's given the first volume -- that is to say, Justin Cronin of The Passage fame... or infamy depending upon your perspective.

Me? I loved The Passage. And I don't think that Cronin is the sort of author who'll blurb anything that crosses his desk, so I'm cautiously optimistic about Pure. I think it's safe to say we'll talk more about it closer to its due date... next February.

The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

Vital Statistics

Published in the UK

on 01/09/11

by Hodder & Stoughton

Review Priority

3 (We'll See)

The Blurb: Randall Haight has a secret: when he was a teenager, he and his friend killed a 14-year-old girl.

Randall did his time and built a new life in the small Maine town of Pastor's Bay, but somebody has discovered the truth about Randall. He is being tormented by anonymous messages, haunting reminders of his past crime, and he wants private detective Charlie Parker to make it stop.

But another 14-year-old girl has gone missing, this time from Pastor's Bay, and the missing girl's family has its own secrets to protect. Now Parker must unravel a web of deceit involving the police, the FBI, a doomed mobster named Tommy Morris, and Randall Haight himself.

Because Randall Haight is telling lies... 

My Thoughts: Lucky number thirteen in the long-running series of books starring paranormal PI Charlie Parker, discussed here on The BoSS before, The Burning Soul has had a great reception to date - everyone seems to love it, in fact - but sadly I've got ten or so of Charlie Parker's adventures still to read before I'm halfway caught up enough to discuss it with any authority.

I will say, though, to those of you who recommended I give this series a shot: you all were right. I adored Every Dead Thing.


But it's getting difficult to talk around this book without even glancing at the synopsis, for fear of spoilers ten books hence, so let's move along.

The Darkest Part of the Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

Vital Statistics

Published in the US

on 30/08/11

by Tor

Review Priority

4 (Pretty Bloody Likely)

The Blurb: The inmates of Mercy Hill in England have visions -- the remnants of their 1960s experiences with the hallucinogens growing in Goodmanswood, to which Dr. Lennox Price, intending to study them, fell victim instead.

The rest of his family wasn't immune to the woods' allure, either. His younger daughter, just returned from the Americas, went there ostensibly for research for her next book... his grandson discovered himself unable to leave the area, even for a job interview... his ex-wife wandered the woods in search of objects for her art and, after Lennox's death, saw him in the woods' shadows.

His elder daughter, though, seems resistant to the madness that plagues the family, yet something in Goodmanswood awaits her, too. At the woods' heart stand the ruins of a tower that once belonged to an alchemist contemporary to the infamous Elizabethan magician John Dee, and there is something far older and more powerful there, as well.

My Thoughts: You know, I remember lusting after this book when it was released here in the UK as a strictly limited edition by the good folks at PS Publishing, some ten years ago. In the end the price of entry was too high for a teenager on minimum wage, and not even that with any regularity... so I waited.


In actual fact, I hadn't even realised I was waiting till I heard that Tor would be re-issuing The Darkest Part of the Woods in a more affordable format -- and just in time for Halloween, too!

Hmm... how terribly, terribly timely.

End of an Aeon

edited by Bridget & Marti McKenna

Vital Statistics

Published in the UK

on 15/07/11

by Fairwood Press

Review Priority

3 (We'll See)

The Blurb: Bridget McKenna and Marti McKenna published fourteen issues of Aeon, an e-book magazine, between 2004 and 2008. End of an Aeon collects the unpublished stories and poems from their final inventory.

Now, seven years after the magazine began, we come to the end of an aeon.

My Thoughts: There've been quite a few short story collection in The BoSS of late, haven't there? Well, this one's a different kettle of fish, I expect; an anthology of short speculative stories by an array of authors by and large entirely new to me.


Saying that, I see Lavie Tidhar, Jaine Fenn and Amanda Downum on the list of contributors to End of an Aeon, and that's enough of a comfort that this anthology could be the perfect opportunity for me to broaden my horizons a bit. At the very least I'll pull a Short Story Corner or two from the pages of this lovely little book.

***

Right-ho, folks... I've gotta go.

I think you can all imagine what I'll be reading this week. Probably all week, at that, but by the dead, that's not a thing you'll hear me complaining about.

Not even if I wanted to! :)

But what about you guys? Anything shiny and new on your towers of books to be read?