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Wednesday reviews round-up for 4th November
Posted by Paul Raven on November 4th, 2009 at 14:03
Last week was one of those rare occasions where we had no fresh reviews to mention, but this week has seen enough come in to balance out the lack. So let’s get straight to it, shall we?
First of all, MonsterLibrarian tucks into Terry Lamsley‘s R.I.P.:
Conrad is an elderly man who stands on the brink of something extraordinary – a gateway between life and death. The gateway is a construct of his friend Gwillam’s genius, a theory that has obsessed him, forcing him to give up his family and life. The payoff is seeing what is on the other side of life. Unfortunately, Gwillam didn’t completely understand everything and the gateway winds up consuming him. As a strange fog thickens in the streets, it threatens to bury everything in Conrad’s little town if something isn’t done about it.
R.I.P. is an intriguing novella that is hard to put down once it is started. Mr. Lamsley draws the reader in with tidbits of information, almost like a mystery novel, until the story is unfolded before him near the end. R.I.P. is a unique ghost story that combines technology with mysticism for a satisfying result. I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a short ghost story that will keep them glued to the pages.
Then Adam Groves of Fright.Com takes a look at PostScripts #19: Enemy Of the Good, finding it satisfactory overall:
The contents are varied enough in style, quality and subject matter that it’s difficult to render any sort of overall verdict–to some of you I’m sure that fact will be off-putting, while others will take it as a strong recommendation. As for me, I’ll say this: I didn’t actively dislike any of the stories, which should be recommendation enough.
Groves picks out some pieces for more detailed discussion, such as Chris Beckett’s story:
“The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9″ [...] concerns a cosmonaut writer who travels to a distant planet whose primitive inhabitants live underground, wherein a series of cave paintings lead to intriguing speculations on the nature of religion and reality itself. I found the story a bit overwritten, but it has a powerfully haunting air.
There’ll be more from the award-winning Chris Beckett here at PS in the near future, by the way – so watch this space, won’t you?
Groves also takes a look at Gilbert & Edgar on Mars by Eric Brown, which…
… begins with [G.K.] Chesterton leaving a meeting with his colleagues George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, and running into an odd little man he takes for a leprechaun. The latter mistakes Chesterton for Wells, and invites him back to his abode, allegedly to inscribe some books. What the man actually leads Chesterton into is a portal that deposits him on the planet Mars.
[Gilbert & Edgar on Mars is] a spirited romp, opulently written and full of old world charm. It references Mars-friendly writers like Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick as well as the fiction of its reality-based protagonists, and does so without sacrificing the sense of fun and adventure that’s part and parcel to all good pulp fiction.
And finally there’s a Ramsey Campbell double-header from Carl Hays of Booklist, who enjoyed Creatures Of the Pool:
For his latest novel, Campbell explores some stranger features of Liverpool’s background in a pleasurably unsettling fusion of fiction and history. Gavin Meadows gives eclectic and occasionally tiresome—especially for disruptive American tourists—guided excursions highlighting Liverpool’s arcane, watery history. During a summer of heavy rains and a renaissance of city construction, Gavin’s research into Liverpool’s underground tunnels begins to reveal some surprising and unnerving information. An excavation for an office-building foundation, for instance, unearths coffins lined with lead, and postal workers become loath to use a tunnel linked to Lime Street Station. The most disturbing revelation, however, is that underground construction workers are hearing someone running ahead of them in the dark where no one or no thing should live. Another gem from one of the genre’s finest stylists.
Hays also luxuriated in Campbell’s latest collection, Just Behind You:
The 18 [stories] cover the full spectrum of Campbell’s sometimes gruesome, sometimes more supernaturally inclined imagination. An old man mistakenly or deliberately buried alive by his children discovers his cell phone buried with him but can’t get anyone to believe his predicament is anything more than a Halloween prank. A music lecturer takes refuge from a gale in a Liverpool pub and gets lured into a fatal trap by the pub’s musically inclined patrons. In the title story, a teacher attends a party at a school he attended as a boy and encounters the ghost of a child killed in a tragic accident there years ago. As usual, Campbell remains at the cutting edge of the genre’s continuously evolving creativity.
And there you have it – not a bad haul for a fortnight, wouldn’t you agree?
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.
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