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Wednesday reviews round-up for 7th October
Posted by Paul Raven on October 7th, 2009 at 11:35
Wednesday rolls back round again, like some tenacious temporal version of Sisyphus’ rock… the weather is resolutely gloomy and autumnal, and reasons to leave the house are few and far between. All the more reason, then, to make sure you’ve got some decent reading material salted away for the lengthening nights ahead – so let’s have a look at what people have been saying about PS titles in the last week or so, eh?
First off, Ray Olson at Booklist is utterly unstinting with his praise for the stories to be found in Patrick O’Leary‘s new collection, The Black Heart:
To three acclaimed novels (Door Number Three, 1995; The Gift, 1997; The Impossible Bird, 2002), O’Leary adds a book of fanciful to fantastic short stories in various modes. Flat-out stunning are the monologue “Yo-Yo, Stradivarius & Me”—a 50-year-old, newly wife-left classical music fan explains why he swiped a cello—and the two dialogues “The Verge of a Pucker,” in which two guys in a lounge, later joined by a waitress, mull over the love life of one of the guys, and “The Me after the Rock,” the testy, post-landing-quarantine exchange between the first two astronauts returning from Mars. Very funny, very humane, seemingly very performable, these tours de force unambiguously develop personae and immediate situations without using a single word other than those the characters speak. “The Whole Schmear,” cast in the form of diary entries by a preadolescent boy, is another small miracle of character realization through perfectly managed vocabulary and tone. And the other 10 more conventionally structured stories are fresh, frequently surprising essays in humorous horror, surreal fantasy, and satiric sf.
The October 12th issue of Publisher’s Weekly seems quite taken with Ramsey Campbell‘s latest novel, Creatures of the Pool:
… Campbell uses his native Liverpool as the setting for this unnerving suspense novel with supernatural overtones. One day, while Gavin Meadows of Liverghoul Tours is guiding a group around the city, his eccentric father, Deryck, disrupts the tour. When Deryck later goes missing and the police show little interest, Gavin undertakes to track Deryck down himself, bolstered by text messages indicating that his father is still alive, somewhere. Gavin’s relations with the official force further deteriorate after he reports seeing a body that vanishes before the cops show up. Various characters explore the theory that Liverpool merchant James Maybrick was actually Jack the Ripper, but this concern with crimes committed in London never fuses satisfactorily with the main story line, which suggests that a hidden truth lies behind Liverpool’s myths and legends.
Keeping the Liverpudlian connection for a moment, wandering reviewer Mario Guslandi finds much to love in Ramsey Campbell‘s new collection, Just Behind You, this time reviewed at The Zone:
“Fear The Dead” is a fine psychological study of the effects exerted on a young boy by his grandma’s death, while “Unblinking” is the masterful depiction of the gradual descent of an university teacher into the abyss of paranoia. In the disturbing “Double Room”, a widower experiences unnerving disturbances coming from the adjoining hotel room, whereas in Direct Line a man is tormented by a cell phone which seems to possess a life of its own.
A mobile phone is also involved in “Breaking Up”, a puzzling piece about a failed relationship now lost in the cold of a snowy evening. “Skeleton Woods” is a deeply unsettling tale featuring two quite different brothers whose lives are doomed and linked forever, Laid Down the brief but downright chilling portrait of a very difficult mother and son relationship, and the excellent “One Copy Only” at the same time a supernatural tale and a tribute of love to books and literature.
The superb “Respects” describes how the death of a young car thief chased by the police comes to affect an innocent bystander. My favourite tale remains, however, “Digging Deep”, a great story which already scared me stiff when first appeared in the anthology Phobic, where a man buried alive tries to get rescue by means of his cell phone, while an even worse nightmare is going to reach him.
[ Don't forget that we've got a special offer running all October on Ramsey's latest PS titles, with deeply discounted deals available on both the trade editions and the traycased specials. Place your order now, before Pete sobers up comes to his senses! ]
Meanwhile, over at Strange Horizons, Andy Sawyer takes to Grazing The Long Acre by Gwyneth Jones. As always with SH reviews, there’s lots of detail, which makes it hard to grab an excerpt that speaks about the book as a whole without losing the nuances. But here’s a little snippet:
Reading these stories gathered as a collection, you realise how many of Jones’s characters are on journeys, or travelling. Not just the “Buonarotti device” stories, where space travellers are in flux in a weird limbo between “here” and “there,” but in stories such as “Balinese Dancer”, in which Anna Senoz, later of Life (2004), and her husband and son are driving around Northern France, cut off from home by something which may be a science fiction-like catastrophe or simply mundane industrial/social disruptions; or in the title story, in which an American dropout is cruising the motorways of Poland observing the prostitutes whose life is a much more squalid (and dangerous) analogue of hers.
Luckily, the final paragraph contains the sort of blurb-collector’s gift that always makes my week:
Grazing the Long Acre is a rich, rewarding collection by a writer at the height of her powers.
Badda-bing!
And finally Jeff VanderMeer – the mighty frog-beast himself – has lovely things to say about us at his Amazon/Omnivoracious blog:
… for those in the know in genre, the news just confirmed what many have been saying for years: PS Publishing may be the best SF/Fantasy/Horror publisher you’ve never heard of. Over more than a decade now, they’ve published some extraordinary finds–like the first edition of Joe Hill’s award-winning short story collection. Names like Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, and Gwyneth Jones are typical releases for them, along with many newcomers. Among other strengths, PS Publishing isn’t afraid to take a chance on unknowns.
VanderMeer seems especially taken with Sebastien Doubinsky‘s Babylonian Trilogy:
The novel’s chapters rarely are longer than a couple of pages, and the reader has the enjoyable job of piecing together the narrative from these fragments. Because of Doubinsky’s writing style, the variety of characters, and an underlying playfulness, The Babylonian Trilogy is a quick, often exciting read. As Michael Moorcock writes in his introduction, “Doubinsky is…a personification of the best modern French literature.” Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if, just like Hill’s short story collection, The Babylonian Trilogy wasn’t picked up by a North American publisher soon.
And there you have it! As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.
Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!