But I Digress | Guilt by Amazon Association

I dare say everyone will be talking about the J. K. Rowling reveal today—I certainly will in Wednesday's edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus—but I wanted to take this time to talk about a topic that didn't quite make it into the column.

In a recent blog post for The Bookseller, you see, Keith Smith had a bit of a righteous rant about how certain authors—including Joanne Harris, Julia Donaldson, Alison Weir, Ian Rankin, Kate Morton and Patrick Ness—seemed to back Amazon and various other chain retailers despite having vouchsafed their support for smaller stores. For instance his:

“As someone who owns two independent bookshops I feel angry that these authors, unthinkingly or by design, have chosen to support Amazon, W H Smith or Waterstones without giving a fig for independent bookshops. Many of these are authors who, when asked, will say they couldn’t imagine life without their local bookshop. But words need to be matched by deeds if they are to make a difference.”

In principle, I agree with this part of Smith’s argument entirely—and so, it seems, do many of the authors he specifically took to task.

But Smith draws a hard line later in the originating article that I can’t quite get behind, by insisting that “the Booksellers Association should contact all authors immediately and ask them to stop supporting Amazon directly.”

Which strikes me, at least, as rather tyrannical. And a number of authors responded to Smith’s comments in kind. Alison Weir, for one:

“Linking to Amazon does not mean that I do not support independents. [...] The fact remains that publishers can shift large quantities of books through Amazon, W H Smith, Waterstones and the supermarkets, which are their main clients. Amazon also pays authors on their associates programme fees based on the number of books sold. Authors do have a living to make and Amazon can provide a great source of income which, sadly, independent book shops could not possibly meet. I understand the concerns of independent booksellers, and I think that there is a case to be made for Amazon to pay corporation tax, so that there would be fairer parity between its prices and those which independents with overheads have to charge. But accusing authors like me [...] of not 'giving a fig' for independents is not only ignorant but untrue; I think my deeds over the years give substance to my words."

Here’s Diana Kimpton, co-creator of the Pony-mad Princess picture books, speaking by way of The Bookseller again:

“I sympathise with small independent bookshops struggling through a recession, but authors are struggling too. Only a few get the high advances mentioned in the press. The rest earn much less, and many don't even get the equivalent of the minimum wage. As a result, the fact that the Amazon Associate scheme pays commission on sales resulting from links is very important. Because I have to split the royalty on my picture books with the illustrator, I actually earn more from the Amazon commission on a sale than I do from the publisher.”

Ultimately, I think Smith’s anger is a mite misplaced. Though it’s certainly the case that authors should be squarely behind independent booksellers, let’s face it: these days, most books are bought from the bigger names in the business, and to simply sever a supplementary source of income because Amazon and its ilk are, you know, completely evil, seems... well, selfish.

Let me be clear here. I sympathise with the plight of independent booksellers, but to ask for authors to support said stores solely goes against the real issue here: our right to choose where and from whom we buy our books. Why deny readers that? That they’re buying literature to begin with is, I think, the most important thing.

In one respect, then, Keith Smith is spot-on: authors should be seen to support choice.

But so should he, surely.

Book Review | The White Forest by Adam McOmber

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Young Jane Silverlake lives with her father in a crumbling family estate on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Jane has a secret — an unexplainable gift that allows her to see the souls of man-made objects — and this talent isolates her from the outside world. Her greatest joy is wandering the wild heath with her neighbors, Madeline and Nathan. But as the friends come of age, their idyll is shattered by the feelings both girls develop for Nathan, and by Nathan’s interest in a cult led by Ariston Day, a charismatic mystic popular with London’s elite. Day encourages his followers to explore dream manipulation with the goal of discovering a strange hidden world, a place he calls the Empyrean.

A year later, Nathan has vanished, and the famed Inspector Vidocq arrives in London to untangle the events that led up to Nathan’s disappearance. As a sinister truth emerges, Jane realizes she must discover the origins of her talent, and use it to find Nathan herself, before it’s too late.

***

I've never been a particularly religious person, but even I am struck, sometimes, with the conviction that there must be more to the world than this. Some power greater than ours.

I don't mean to say that the world is not enough — that would make me the Bond villain of bloggers, after all. Nor do I intend to imply that the power people wield is at all paltry — to be sure, that too would be very far from the truth. But in the face of nature's creations, not to mention its infinite variations, it's hard to avoid being awed, is it not?

Be that as it may, I am content to live in a wonderful world and know that it is so, yet many demand more. To each their own, of course; I wouldn't dare discriminate! But from time to time, men like Ariston Day emerge from the many aforementioned. The antagonist of Adam McOmber's darkly fantastic first novel believes with every fibre of his being that there is somewhere a door to be opened; a membrane, maybe, to be teased — or torn — apart. And Day is determined to do so. At any conceivable cost.

The charismatic leader of a sensational sect known as the Theatre of Provocation, which has its headquarters deep beneath a tavern called the Temple of the Lamb, Day exists primarily on the periphery of McOmber's magnificently measured debut. His tempestuous presence, however, is felt from the first.

That's not the case for our narrator, Jane Silverlake, who has lived a lonely life. At once shunned by the poor and rejected by the rich, she seems set aside from society entirely at a time and a place, specifically Victorian-era England, which values nothing else as highly. To make her existence still more maudlin, she's been haunted by objects ever since losing her mother to an eerie fever — an uncanny talent that takes a telling turn during The White Forest's first act. Rather than simply singing to her, the things she sees start to speak; if not in words then courtesy increasingly crystalline images:

It was as if every object had become a curtain, and behind that curtain lay a new realm. The realm was not of simple colour and sound — it was an actual place. Had I read any of the burgeoning literature of scientific fiction, I might have called the place a "parallel dimension," but I had no word for what I saw. It was a landscape — a white forest, pale as paper, clearly a vision of some alien landscape. In the forest there was a stream of milk-white water that did not flow but remained still, as if frozen. There were flowers in the undergrowth — blossoms that appeared to be lit from within, like Chinese lanterns. I recognised the place. As a child, I'd seen it in dreams inside the mouths that opened in Mother's flesh. (p.90)

Jane tries to keep these surreal experiences a secret, but when she is befriended — quite out of the blue — by a beautiful young woman, Miss Madeline Lee, and a dashing gentleman-in-the-making named Nathan Ashe, her abilities inevitably become apparent. A powerful bond forms between the three thereafter, brought on by this shared knowledge, and the years elapse happily.

For a long while, we triangulated, and there was energy in that. I sometimes felt myself to be the center of our group, a project for both of them. It wasn't until Nathan discovered the Empyrean itself that everything truly got out of hand. The triangle was broken by that strange vision, and it was then that we began our free fall. (p.87)

Nathan's fascination with the Empyrean ultimately leads him into the arms of Ariston Day... and then he disappears completely. Quite literally, he is lost. An Inspector Vidoq — the model for the main character of many of Edgar Allen Poe's most notable short stories — is called in to investigate this locked room mystery of sorts, but Jane and Maddy only cooperate with Vidoq to a point. To preserve the sanctity of the secret they share, the ladies resolve to unravel the strange circumstances surrounding their dear heart's vanishing act themselves.

Little do they realise where the case will take them, and how it is bound to break them.

The White Forest has an absorbing plot, compelling characters and an exceptionally well-rendered setting, assuming you can get past a few factual and geographical inaccuracies, meanwhile McOmber imparts an abundance of exquisite imagery in pristine prose that often comes close to poetry. Little about this book is anything less than impeccable, in fact — let me state, out of the gate, that it's great; positively phenomenal for a first novel — but what impressed me most about The White Forest was its incremental descent into dark fantasy.

At the outset, the author plays it perfectly straight. His Hampstead Heath feels nearly real. His lords and ladies are far from the caricatures that tend to populate these sorts of novels; they're authentic individuals, flawed and self-absorbed, but not tortured or hysterical or wholly heroic. Our central characters are similarly convincing, which is to say, for all that they're the good guys, they do some despicable things.

In short, it's all awfully ordinary. But the extraordinary is never far away. Even the banality of the beginning is punctuated by moments of sudden, shattering violence. Confronted by Maddy's beauty in a mirror, for instance, Jane wonders:

What would it feel like [...] to crack the brush against her skull? An awful notion. She was mine, and I was hers. And yet she had a lovely face — I could not stop myself from thinking this — certainly lovelier than my own. But what did Nathan think? A horrid question. If Nathan ever chose one of us, the fantasy would be broken. Flood-waters would rise. (p.175)

And indeed they do.

But these are only isolated moments, initially. By the end, however, the unknowable notions that formerly suffused the fringes of the fiction have supplanted its earlier reality entirely; the last chapters don't even take place on our planet! Suddenly The White Forest is like Lovecraft come Among Others, Caitlin R. Kiernan meets The Croning, yet somehow McOmber makes the whole his own.

At once weird and wonderful, The White Forest is an uncanny confluence of magic and mystery, and over its controlled course, Adam McOmber paints a picture both beautiful and terrifying, exhibiting his mastery of both the fantastical and the practically factual. To come full circle, The White Forest is the sort of book that makes one wonder whether there mightn't be something more to the world than we're aware of, and it's my pleasure to recommend it unreservedly.

***

The White Forest
by Adam McOmber

US Publication: July 2013, Touchstone

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Book Review | The Sleep Room by F. R. Tallis

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When promising psychiatrist, James Richardson, is offered the job opportunity of a lifetime, he is thrilled. Setting off to take up his post at Wyldehope Hall in deepest Suffolk, Richardson doesn't look back. One of his tasks is to manage a controversial project – a pioneering therapy in which extremely disturbed patients are kept asleep for months.

As Richardson settles into his new life, he begins to sense something uncanny about the sleeping patients – six women, forsaken by society. Why is the trainee nurse so on edge when she spends nights alone with them? And what can it mean when all the sleepers start dreaming at the same time?

It's not long before Richardson finds himself questioning everything he knows about the human mind as he attempts to uncover the shocking secrets of the sleep room...

***

It's no slight on life, but what an exhausting enterprise existence is!

If a single day goes by without some occurrence of angst, anger, regret, fear or frustration, we count ourselves lucky. But let's face it: this is a rarity. Life is full of strife. From time to time, horrible things just happen to happen, and on other occasions, we simply wake up on the wrong side of the bed.

That said, it doesn't much matter what's bothering or annoying us, what's upsetting or distressing us: everything tends to look better after a good night's sleep. Better, or at least very least different. Taking your recommended daily allowance of eight hours under the covers can help us see almost anything in a new light.

And why not extrapolate that out? If a short snooze can essentially obliterate the blues, why not assume that a longer period of unconsciousness might stand a chance of addressing much more serious and ingrained issues and conditions than those we face on a day-to-day basis?

People have, in the past. Yet there are very real reasons why this species of treatment isn't commonplace in our age — complications that The Sleep Room by F. R. Tallis in part examines.

"The precise mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of narcosis were not understood; however, in his paper, Maitland had proposed that prolonged sleep might result in the disintegration of personality, allowing — at some later stage — for a healthier reconstitution. He likened the process to breaking and re-setting a leg. His advocacy of ECT as an additional component of treatment was based on the idea that it could hasten recovery by obliterating unpleasant memories." (p.52)

Whatever his methods, Dr. Hugh Maitland is a hugely respected figure in Britain in the 1950s of this fiction. The head of the department of psychological medicine at Saint Thomas's, he also consults for three other hospitals, and somehow finds the time to nurture something of a pet project as well.

Welcome to Wyldehope: a tiny countryside clinic revolving around a chamber wherein six disturbed women — variously  "orphaned, disowned, forgotten [and] lost" (p.290) — have been kept chemically sedated for a number of months. When Maitland offers James Richardson a position at the far-distant facility, he practically jumps at the chance. He parts ways with his casual companion and takes the first available train.

From this point on, Tallis's tenth novel is all atmosphere. Here's our aspirational protagonist arriving in Darsham:

"I stepped down onto a platform shrouded in mist. Stressed metal groaned, flashes of firelight emanated from the cab, and glowing cinders formed chaotic constellations above the smokestack. The effect was vaguely diabolical." (p.13)

And this is Richardson reflecting on his first impressions of the sleep room:

"I was reminded about something I had read many years before about the healing rituals of the ancient Greeks. The sick and troubled in those remote times were frequently instructed by a holy man to spend a night in an underground temple. There, they would have a dream that would cure them. It seemed to me that the sleep room was a modern-day equivalent. 

I was familiar with sleep laboratories. I had studied and worked in Cambridge and Edinburgh and they all had in common a strange, unreal atmosphere. But the sleep room at Wyldehope was different. The atmosphere was more intense, almost religious. It evoked feelings in me that I associated with certain churches—experienced in solitude and usually at dusk. In the hush and the shadow that enveloped those six beds were unexpected registers and suggestions of something beyond the reach of the senses." (pp.36-37)

Ever the rationalist, Richardson wonders whether what he's heard and felt is all in his head, but when one of his most promising patients takes a sudden turn for the worse, and a troubled nurse goes missing in the mist, it becomes abundantly clear that something as sinister as it is inexplicable has made Wyldehope its home.

Tallis makes the absolute most of this section of the text, obfuscating the other that haunts the property for as long as humanly possible. It is out of sight, certainly... but out of mind? Not quite. The ghost of Wyldehope exists strictly on the periphery of The Sleep Room, an unknowable entity which slowly but surely worries its insidious way into our subconscious.

The author handles all this wonderfully well, with measure and gentle suggestion. Even when the spectre takes centre stage, it is a thing "half seen, half imagined." (p.228) In fact, to repurpose our protagonist's reaction, "I am still not sure what it was that I saw [...] A shape behind the glare, an outline that encouraged the brain to supply missing details." (p.226) No more than that, and no less, neither now nor ever again. Yet it — whatever it is — feels as real to the reader as Richardson.

In the interim, intrigue and mystery are made manifest; Tallis creates and maintains an impeccable sense of suspense which alternately thrills and chills. It's no surprise that The Sleep Room comes from an Edgar Award nominee — the Edgars honour the finest mystery fiction in the business, and though Tallis's text has a speculative edge, it's best-in-class by most any measure.

There is talk of positioning this author as the Doctor of Fear, and indeed, Tallis is well qualified to take to task the arts of "somatic psychiatry." (p.156) His day job is as a clinical psychologist — with, I presume, a PhD — and he's clearly researched, in depth, the subjects here addressed. But this calculated phrase is apposite in other ways. Very much in the mode of a medical professional, Tallis induces a state of controlled tension early on in The Sleep Room, doses us appropriately, and proceeds to carefully monitor and moderate our exposure to any external stimuli that stand to affect our experience adversely.

When we awaken, it's as if nothing dramatic has happened. But something has. Something shocking.

The Sleep Room is a short novel — with a few cups of coffee and something soft to hold onto, you could reasonably read it in a single session. And you should, because this new book is as satisfying as it is alarming.

***

The Sleep Room
by F. R. Tallis

UK Publication: July 2013, Macmillan
US Publication: October 2013, Pegasus

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Trailer Trash | The Walking Dead Summer Special

Well, I know what I'm going to be doing this weekend.

You guys too?

400 Days is apparently a bridge between seasons one and two of Telltale's take on The Walking Dead. You'll recall that the phenomenal first season won any number of game of the year awards, including mine, and though this special standalone episode doesn't look to follow it directly, given the creative team's talent for character building — and for fashioning fascinating narrative out of a milieu which is, if we're honest, a lot like hundreds of others — I expect nothing less than excellence from 400 Days.

Incidentally, it occurs to me that the Microsoft Points card I bought to purchase this DLC with will probably be the last Microsoft Points card I ever have to buy. In part because the company are going with real money for marketplace transactions on the Xbox One, but largely because I'm still on Sony's side — never mind Microsoft's dramatic back-tracking after this year's E3. By then they'd made it crystal clear where there loyalties lay, which is to say, nowhere near me... or any other consumers, in truth.

I've pre-ordered a PS4, obviously. Knowing my proclivities, I'll probably cave and get an Xbox One eventually, but only once I'm sure Microsoft aren't planning to pull a fast one with DRM delivered via dashboard update or some similarly insidious bait-and-switch.

Either way, I won't miss Microsoft Points.

Book Review | This River Awakens by Steven Erikson

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A time to escape.

Twelve-year-old Owen Brand and his family move to Middlecross, a riverside town in rural Canada, hoping to leave poverty and unhappiness behind.

A time for innocence.

Owen meets three local boys, and they soon form an inseparable band. Over the summer holidays they create their own world, a place apart from the adults who watch over them. Owen also grows close to Jennifer, a fascinating but deeply troubled girl.

And a time to grow up. Then the gang stumble across a body in the river — a discovery with unimaginable consequences for them and the town, from which there is no going back.

***

There are no gods in This River Awakens, only monsters — and the monsters of this novel are real as its readers. They are fathers, brothers and sons; they are sisters, mothers and lovers; and their lives, like ours, have little meaning. Their destinies are not manifest. Their actions, be they right or wrong, calculated or careless, kind or cruel, won't change the world. And the river around which Steven Erikson's indescribably dark debut revolves will run on regardless.

First published in 1998 under a cover bearing Erikson's other name, Steve Lundin, This River Awakens is far from the sort of narrative you might be inclined to expect from the Byzantine mind behind the ten volumes of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. That said, this novel could have been written by no other author. It bears many of the same traits that made Gardens of the Moon and its many successors such an immense and intense pleasure: the prose is painstaking; the characters incredibly complex; and though its themes lean towards the obscene, there's a real sweetness to them, equally.

What This River Awakens doesn't have is a whole lot of plot. Still, we've got to give it a shot.

It's 1971, and spring is in the air. Twelve year old Owen Brand and his family have just moved to Middlecross, a small town in the countryside of Canada. There, they hope to leave behind the hardships of the past, but over the course of the four seasons Erikson chronicles in this revised edition of his first novel, it becomes clear that real change must begin within.

Something of a serial new kid, Owen has little difficulty fitting in with the kids of Middlecross. He takes up with three other boys his age — Roland, an old-fashioned farmhand; a mean-spirited miscreant called Lynk; and Carl, the butt of every bad joke — and goes about insinuating himself into the dynamic they have established. They're a fearsome foursome before you know it. Of children, admittedly:

But it was our world and our time, when the earth loosed its secrets, staining our hands, our knees. The river birthed our cruel laughter, as it did our pensive silences. It carried pieces of the city half submerged past us, a barbaric pageant, a legion burdened with loot. Dead dogs and tree branches, tricycles frozen in bobbing ice, a water-filled wooden boat with pieces of dock still trailing from nylon ropes, a television casing — show endless scenes of flooding — and small, bedraggled clumps of feather. The booty of a strange war. 

The scene remains vivid in my mind. Four boys, aged twelve one and all. What lay before us was the river, remorseless like thought itself, in its season of madness. (pp.15-16)

These cryptic messengers hardly fill Owen with hope, however. He's merely making the best of a bad lot whilst waiting for the other shoe to drop. He's been here before, of course, so he struggles to see a possible tomorrow any different from today:

I did not imagine the future to be in any way different from the present. There would still be station wagons for the kids, washers and dryers in the basement, double beds and dens cluttered with the efforts of haphazard hobbies. And there would still be summers stained with motor oil and sweat. Nor did I think that we'd be any different: Lynch's quick grin and the stick in his hands; Carl fumbling behind us and wiping his nose on his sleeve; and Roland, silent and full of life, with dirt under his nails and calluses on his palms. And somewhere, there in the future, I'd still be the unknown with the darting eyes, his face an unreadable mask. (pp.136-137)

Owen does not think the river will touch him, but it will. It will affect all of the boys, because one day, in the course of their random rambling, they come across a bloated body on the shore: the rotting corpse of a giant man. For reasons none of the kids can articulate, they make a pact to keep this secret between them — and for a time, it binds them. It both preserves their innocence and promises a significant shift, as and when they are ready to accept certain adult realities.

In the interim, the thought of the body obsesses Owen especially:

He'd had a name once, and a life. He'd had dreams, fears, maybe even loves. Now, all that had been wiped away as completely as his own face. A man, a giant, a nobody. We owed him something — I wanted to give him back his face, his name, his history. I wanted to put him back in his rightful place. At the same time, he had come to exist only for us, and that made us more than what we'd been. He'd come to open our eyes, but they hadn't been opened enough. Not yet. He had more to give us. 

Even as I thought those thoughts, I felt uncertain, uneasy. We'd made a pact with a dead man — he could only speak to us with what he had left, and he now existed in each of us and life and infection he spread his silence through us, until we hardly ever spoke about him any more. Any yet, I sensed that we all felt the words piling up behind that silence. One day the dam would break, I suspected. (p. 249)

And one day it does.

All this unfolds at a pace I'm afraid many readers will call ponderous, to put it politely. "This was my first novel, and people said 'it's a bit long,'" (p.527) Erikson jokes in the acknowledgements, but though This River Awakens falls far short of the length of any of the author's massive Malazan novels, there's a whole lot less going on, and a problematic proportion of what we are treated to is of secondary interest at best.

The thing of it is, a surprisingly large cast of characters exist on the fringes of the fiction, and though some add to the scope of the story, offering alternative angles on Owen, Middlecross and more — particularly our precocious protagonist's love interest Jennifer, and Gribbs, the yacht club watchman who takes an unlikely interest in him — several other threads stand to contribute little more than mood. Fisk, for instance — a monstrous mink farmer who masturbates over the bodies of the wide-eyed beasts he breeds — is utterly repugnant, yet narratively redundant.

Which brings me neatly to another of This River Awakens' issues: as brilliantly written as it is, and it is — if the passages excerpted earlier haven't convinced you of this, I don't know what will — there's a discomfiting abundance of ugly in this novel. As such, readers of a sensitive disposition would be well advised to steer clear of Erikson's deeply disturbing debut. A lot of it is, in a word, disgusting. In addition to the aforementioned man and his mink — and the giant's rotting corpse, of course — a troubled girl is sodomised by her father in full view of the neighbourhood, one woman has her jaw destroyed by her drunken, hateful husband... and I could go on.

Indeed, I did; I kept reading, through all this awfulness and any number of other instances of trangressive violence and sexuality. In fact, that's a telling testament to the raw power of this novel — of Erikson's hypnotic prose in particular — for as sickening as it is, This River Awakens is bold, and indisputably beautiful, too.

In its way, I dare say. But Erikson's way is one Malazan fans will be familiar with. And in the same vein as the start of that series, this debut demands a lot of its readers early on. To be sure, it takes too long to get going, but as hard as This River Awakens is to get into, it's roughly twice as tough to get out of. So engrossing is this author's first fully-fledged work of fiction that the world itself feels unreal on the back of such a bleak and revealing dream.

Assuming, then, that you can get past the horrifying darkness at the heart of This River Awakens, a longing and lovingly lyrical coming of age tale awaits. A truly revelatory read, excepting the occasional digression.

***

This River Awakens
by Steven Erikson

UK Publication: January 2012, Bantam
US Publication: July 2013, Tor

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Status Update | Reading After Reader

Well, today's the day. Google Reader is officially no more.

And you know what? I don't miss it one whit!

Many thanks to everyone who commented on last week's You Tell Me, or took to Twitter to advise me on my options. On Tuesday I started testing two of the recommended feed readers: Feedly and Bloglovin, with Netvibes and The Old Reader on standby if neither one worked out.

The trouble is, both did.

I'll say that Bloglovin seems like a great way to get your blog out there. To social network it a bit. But I'm a grumpy old man, and I begrudge social networking at best — hence my sporadic record on Twitter and Google Plus.

I suppose I gravitated more immediately towards Feedly, which I really appreciate the look and feel of — especially the tablet app... though I dare say it still has a way to go, and no widget support for the moment.

What sealed the deal for me, at the end of the day, was that I couldn't find an easy way to save or favourite single posts for later through Bloglovin, and that's an integral part of how I keep up to speed with the folks I follow.

So Feedly it is, I think. At least for the time being. If the widgets don't do what I want them to on the appointed day, perhaps I'll go back to Bloglovin, or take the temperature of the other options you all took the time to inform me of.

In conclusion, choice is awesome. Thanks again for reminding me of that, readers.