I am not a massive Dean Koontz fan. I am a big fan of the horror(/thriller?) genre (hello!! homosexual here!) but somehow Koontz never really did it for me. David and I tend to pop him into the same basket as James Herbert, or Ramsay Campbell. He is certainly not of the same calibre as Stephen King or Clive Barker (or Poe or Lovecraft for that matter) of that I was never in any doubt.
I've always found that Koontz always came at the supernatural from a very base level - the whole "if it's different then it's evil" kind of attitude. Small town minds from small town folk who like their colloquial little ways to remain unchallenged and their traditions unchanging, filled with their worries and fears that there is always somewhere else, somewhere foreign, something alien out there which could destroy everything if it gains a toehold into their lives. I just felt he was too old school and never really scary enough for my liking.
"Goosebumps for grown ups," I said to David before I started reading what I thought was a one-off book about an apocalypse that the Barbican library was promoting in it's latest display featuring popular horror writers throughout the ages (yup, you guessed it, all of the books in the display are now on the list - well, they're popular, quick turnaround titles and were chosen by librarians... all of the elements that allow them to be included are there!).
After a few chapters it becomes clear that Dean has been writing a series. In truth, I probably already had heard of it before as my cousin is a big fan of this particular genre and devours similar series quite regularly via her kindle. I vaguely remember her telling me about how she was enjoying a series about a man who can see dead people and keeps in touch with Elvis.
I didn't think this book was terrible. It was typical Koontz work in that it is filled with cliches and yet still manages to weave in some weird science and Nikola Tesla to boot that makes it worth your while reading it until the end. It will not tax you.
Having come in at book 5 and I will now go back and read some of his earlier segments so I won't go into too much detail about the series now, suffice to say that the book is about a man, Odd Thomas, who comes from a small town and who has a unique ability to see dead people. Odd can communicate with them, although the spirits have to convey their words via a bizarre game of charades every time.... Koontz, having clearly exhausted this as a plot direction has introduced Odd, along with his traveling companion to a house where very strange things are going on indeed.
Every now and then as I was reading I would stumble into a spoiler from the previous books, and I was quite fascinated to see how adept Koontz is in massaging the series narrative into the main plot, giving just the right amount so fans of the series would be sated with their regular dose of Oddness and newcomers could still enjoy the book as a standalone story. Prolific writer that he is, I now see that Koontz is more than just a hack when it comes to churning out his many many works.
I've got the first three books on order now. They'll take me a day or two to read each one (as I said, they're really not that taxing) so I look forward to getting to know this character a little better. I'm sure it would have helped carry me through the more formulaic parts of this particular work, which you can get from here if in the UK, or here if you're reading in the US.
Both sources are selling for penny + postage so clearly this is one of those throwaway titles that won't date very well (it is filled with so many popular references that will become meaningless within a decade or so for any future readers) so I highly recommend that you borrow these from a friend or a local library if you can to avoid the clutter.
That's about all I need to say, really. That, and go read his latest book.
Another new addition to the list via the local libraries "Hot Pick" table, David and I devoured this book over the course of a week and managed to return it the following Sunday without any trouble whatsoever.
It is, simply put, a gorgeous fairy tale of a story - but in this work, Gaiman does what he does with most of his books - he manages to weave the fairyness into the modernity with such ease you actually start to SEE the story unfolding before you like you were the main protagonist within it. Not that he is writing a screenplay, in fact, most of Gaiman's vision is just way too elaborate to ever truly be captured as a series of photographic images - his works require massive canvasses with multiple layers applied with detailed brush work - whole exhibition halls would fill up with image upon image upon image that you would spend days wandering about and even then you wouldn't be able to see them all.
So I've loved Gaiman probably from before I started reading John Constantine comics (many, many years ago for all those non-geeky folk out there who have no idea who John Constantine is). I think the first actually novel that made me truly fall in love with this Gaiman's work was Coraline - but of course so many of his works have become movies (some of them even quite good considering my earlier comments about how impossible it is to truly do his work justice via this medium) but there is something truly magical about his writing that just makes me want to gush like the fan that I have now become.
Clive Barker once made me gush like this. I'm hoping he will one day again (soon I am hoping as I hear a new novel is being published as I type) but for the moment, Gaiman is King of the fantastical mixed with the mundane, the bizarre world seeping into the ordinary via the lost collective memories, now long since forgotten, allowing us to briefly glimpses the realms much much larger than any of us currently can imagine ever existing within.
For EU customers, order The Ocean At the End of the Lane from
Amazon EU here.
For US customers, order it from Amazon US here.
Or borrow it from your local library, you'll find it on the "Hot Picks" table :-)
Books Read: 10
So that was Summer eh?
As I come in from the drizzle I realise that it has been some time since I actually wrote an entry, in this or any blog. My life has, of late, been filled with all things work. I even had to give up Facebook for a while there. Sadly, I also had to give up reading.
I'm not sure if the "work project", as we'll call it, actually allows me to postpone the timing of this little reading project or whether I should just cancel the whole thing and just start reading any old book that crosses my path. Either way, I probably won't stop blogging about it. I will try to read 100 books though, before April next year. I think it's possible, especially now as the darkness descends upon us. Winter is coming, and it's probably time to finish those George R R Martin books (now hereby decreed added to "the list" because of necessity - the televised series has actually passed the place I got up to in the book!).
I've found another addendum to the list, a regular one that is give by our local library in Watford. I love this place, it's a pretty darn fine library to have on your doorstep and one of the positives about moving house is that we'll probably move closer to it. I've always wanted to be close enough to a large enough selection of books. Anyway, I've decided that any item that is marked as a "hot pick" is allowed on the list automatically. These are books that are (a) popular (b) reasonably short and (c) only allowed a 1 week loan. I have technically found a way of getting around this problem (by using the libraries automated return system one can simply re-borrow the book approximately 2 seconds after returning it) but I've also found another way of getting around this short loan period which is just to read the books very quickly. As quickly as possible.
Last week I borrowed Ian Banks' latest (and last, very sad to have to say) book - it really was fantastic and I will be sure to write a review about this beauty before long.
This week I borrowed a couple of books and I'm now well into the second one, so maybe next week I'll go for three of them and see if I can manage that for a few weeks. I've kind of lost count of how many books I've read so far, I'm sure a few will come back me, I know I didn't review all of the ones that I had read before I stopped and started spending every spare moment working (or simply relaxing and spending some time with our boy Zack, whose year with us is coming to an end now), but I wouldn't be surprised if I've still got about 80 books to read in just under six months if I'm to read 100 as I had originally planned to.
Anyway, it's late, I need to sleep because I'm about to change my shift again and start to work normal hours so my mornings won't be sleep filled but caffeine filled instead. I'll get to that review shortly.... Neil Gaiman.... yeah.... that was probably the one that broke the ice. A "hot pick" at the library - David spotted it as I was off paying my late fees at the library for all the books that I'd stopped reading because work was taking up all of my time. He read it in a day and I took about three but we managed to return the following week without need for a sneaky re-borrow.
But I digress again. It's late, I need to sleep. It was good though, that Gaiman book. REAL good - nay, pretty much excellent.
More on that later.
