City-eat-city

Book Review: PREDATOR'S GOLD
Written by: Philip Reeve
Released in: 2003
Published by: Scholastic
316 pages
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[SPOILERS] He may currently be shaggy beard-deep in Tintin and Hobbit shiz, but on the horizon Peter Jackson has an adaptation of the first book in Philip Reeve's bestselling Mortal Engines Quartet – that's the Hungry Cities Chronicles, as it is known in the US of A – in his bespectacled sight. This is the primary reason I sought out the introductory volume (Mortal Engines) last month; to get clued-up super early so I can pretend to know what the 'eck I'm talkin' bout when (or indeed if) the movie ever gets made.

Set on a post-apocalyptic Earth where entire settlements have uprooted from the nuclear-ravaged land they once occupied and gained themselves a set of wheels in an attempt to out-run one another for fear that the larger city-sized colonies will devour the smaller towns and villages and strip them of their much sought-after materials, commodities – even inhabitants!

“A City-eat-city world?!” I can imagine newcomers questioning. “You're taking the piss, surely?”. It's certainly a high concept pill to swallow, and I will admit to being *slightly* dubious as I read Mortal Engine's opening page – but, trust me, it isn't as ludicrous as the synopsis makes it sound, and I enjoyed this first dip into the bustling, ever-expanding steampunk-esque future-verse.

That being said, I can't claim to being unequivocally bowled over by it. I liked it, yes, but I didn't consider it sublime, faultless or unputdownable literary perfection and I was stumped when it came to conjuring up enough words to write a decent sized CR@Blog review (hence why you've never seen one). Nevertheless I was still satisfied – and curious – enough to seek out part two in the series: Predator's Gold. I'm pleased to report I've got plenty of opinions to wheel your way this time around ('cos if I hadn't there'd be nothing here for you to read, duh!).

Commencing two years after the first entry ended in spectacularly world-altering fashion, Predator's Gold sees our everyboy protagonist, ex-apprentice historian Tom Natsworthy, and his facially-disfigured girlfriend, Hester Shaw, pick up a famous literary hitch-hiker in their “inherited” airship, the Jenny Haniver. Seeking refuge on the once-thriving “Traction City” of Anchorage, the trio are in equal parts excited and disquieted by the level of disrepute that has befallen this once proud mecca, left devastated after a plague wiped out most of their population and left the inexperienced teenage margravine Freya Rasmussen in charge.

Seeing the arrival of bestselling histo-adventure writer Professor Pennyroyal as a sign that Anchorage must make its way to the long-believed radioactive wasteland that was once America, Freya asks the author, Tom and Hester to be her guests on the fanciful journey to discover surviving pockets of civilisation and enduring fauna. But all too soon relationships prosper and sour as secrets are kept and lies are told, and Anchorage is unaware that the predator city of Arkangel has been enlightened to their course and is closing in, hungry for resources – and that isn't even their biggest threat...

If Mortal Engines fell marginally fowl of origin story drudgery, Predator's Gold was free to soar into bold new territory, and this is a mighty inventive and colourful world. With an expansive range of characters who encompass every class from orhpaned royals to, erm, orphaned pickpockets, Reeve revels in a cast of full-bodied, three-dimensional players. Tom may be brave beyond his years, but he is by no means the angelic innocent hero figure you may expect from a young adult novel. He questions those around him and is unreserved in his judgements – even stooping so low as to wish his unfortunately-disfigured girlfriend wasn't so ugly, while encouraging unfaithful thoughts towards plump, pretty Freya.

Hester, meanwhile, is a bitter and understandably unconfident soul who makes horrendous snap decisions which I couldn't help but scream in disbelief at – she's hardly a prototypical fairytale princess, rather a real person, and it's refreshing to see a role model sulk and make mistakes. Devious shadow burglar Caul, too, is a complicated and well-rounded individual – a thief with a heart! Conversely, Pennyroyal was, unfortunately, a far too predictable red herring of a yellow belly, reminding me from the very outset as a Gilderoy Lockhart-type fraud (he of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets).

Published by Scholastic but clearly aimed at a more mature teen audience than their usual school-age output, I was pleasantly surprised to see Predator's Gold push the boundaries – scarcely 17 years of age, Tom and Hester don't hide the fact that they are lovers who share a bed and enjoy drinking wine, while Reeve also gets a kick out of painting many a disturbing and unexpectedly violent picture. It's never unnecessary or offensively heinous, but it certainly packs a winding narrative punch.


In a CR@B Shell: A rolling stone may gather no moss, but a rolling city definitely gathers gloss. A step-up from an inspired but satisfactory origin story, steampunk action sequel Predator's Gold is an exhilarating, unpredictable and emotionally diverse adventure which left me eager to pick up part three.
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Vampirate

Book Review: OCEAN OF BLOOD
Written by: Darren Shan
Published by: HarperCollins
Released: April 2011
231pages
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Buoyed by a courteous comment from Darren Shan himself posted beneath my review of the first novel in his latest vampiric series, Birth of a Killer (see HERE – I was well chuffed!), wherein he promised more carnage to come in the saga’s forthcoming instalments, I persisted through a rather weak opening to this recently released second adventure charting the (comparatively) early years in the afterlife of Larten Crepsley before I hit the juicy stuff.

As the orange-haired sunlight-dodger wades half-heartedly through his second “life” like a directionless graduate who isn’t sure what the future holds, drinking himself into oblivion while partying with as many of the opposite sex as he can, I couldn’t help but feel like the opening clutch of chapters in Ocean of Blood were meandering filler; taking a looooong time to say not very much at all. By the sixty-page mark years had passed and I was deep into the hardly mammoth read, yet it felt like the ground covered could have been summed up in a single killer chapter.

That said, it isn’t as if Shan’s nimble prose style is a struggle to read. Granted it isn’t as wickedly poetic as Chris Priestley’s similarly macabre delights (see my reviews HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE and prepare to be hooked), but Shan’s chapters are brisk and punchy and the content easily digestible, so I never considered it a chore to read, just lacking any substantial meat to sink my teeth (or should that be fangs?) into.

For personal reasons, I felt blurring reality and fiction with the inclusion of a cameo from a certain Abraham Stoker, a scribe researching a certain novel on the undead inspired by Vlad the Impaler, was a cheesy misstep. Less cringeworthy than Elvis – sorry, “Bub” – in Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse series, but far too reminiscent of The Undead, the dire twenty-first century “official” Dracula sequel penned by Stocker’s descendant Dacre, which also utilizes the iconic author as a character inspired by “real” bloodsuckers.

Returning to the big picture, and mirroring my thoughts on Book 1 (which opened with a horrifyingly brutal punch which would forever shape young Larten’s afterlife), Ocean of Blood – which is rather tame in the horror department for the bulk of its length – accumulated all its firepower for a staggeringly ferocious climatic 30 pages aboard the high seas.

Prior to the finale I was beginning to question what relevance the book’s title had to the land-based narrative, but then Larten and his lovestruck apprentice Malora board the Pearly Tornado bound for Greenland with Larten sick with vampire flu, delirious and desperate for a feed… Much to my morbid delight, the voyage doesn’t end happily for the suspicious passengers or crew, but it certainly convinced me to stick around for book three, Palace of the Damned, set for release in September: There will be blood...


In a CR@B Shell: Still a flitting and narratively insubstantial beast which fails to remedy Birth of a Killer’s flaws, but much like its protagonist, Larten Crepsley’s sophomore adventure is flamboyant and gushing confidence; wearing its scars with pride. Reach the gruesome climax and your jaw will hit the floor; your perseverance justified.
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Ghost Train

Book Review: TALES OF TERROR FROM THE TUNNEL’S MOUTH
Written by: Chris Priestley
Published by: Bloomsbury
Released: 2009
260pages
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And so I have reached the end of the line: the third and final (to date) portmanteau Tales of Terror anthology from modern master of the macabre Chris Priestley. What a bittersweet joy it was to disembark from this scenic journey; I really could read these wicked little yarns all day long! I just hope that more instalments are forthcoming following the release of Priestley’s Frankenstein-esque novel, Mr Creecher, in October.

Despite recycling the same storyteller-and-audience framework established in Uncle Montague (click HERE for my review) and Black Ship (HERE), I was still enraptured by the ambiguity which surrounded Tunnel's Mouth's peculiar story time: who is this detail-reluctant Woman in White who has boarded the train to Kings Cross, why is schoolboy Robert Harper so quick to submit to her spectral stories despite his uncertainty towards his curious carriage companion, and what is keeping Robert's neighbouring passengers in such a deep trance-like slumber?

As the train draws to an unexpected stop at the mouth of a foreboding dark tunnel, its steep enbankment cloacking the carriage in an unnatural twilight, the mystery surrounding the strange, unrelenting storyteller steams forward undeterred as logical Robert senses supernatural forces are at work: why else does he keep having such vivid dreams of the make-believe yarns she spins, why else do his legs feel weak and his eyes so heavy at this time of day, and why else can he not rouse the dozing commuters around him?

Priestley shrewdly works in a delightful correlation to the dreadful events in Uncle Montague – making it feel like Robert inhabits the same shared, nightmarish universe as the eccentric teacher from hell – and while the pay off at the climax isn’t as bone-chillingly ghastly as Black Ship’s startling sting in the tale, it is nevertheless a well-worked – and finely set-up – twist even if we all anticipated a twist by this stage in the series anyway.

The short stories themselves are a stronger and more twisted batch than Black Ship’s castrated selection, but then they aren’t restricted to sea-themed scares this time around. From malicious mannequins (“Gerald”) to botanical beasts (“The Glasshouse”) and ferocious fairies (“The Little People”), I was particularly impressed by the variety of imaginative devices employed, even if they are all familiar tropes of the horror genre.

My personal favourite chapter was “A New Governess”, which really captured the creepiness of Victorian-era ghost stories such as The Turn of the Screw and genuinely made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “Gerald”, too, was a devilish voodoo delight at making the innocent deadly, and “Sister Veronica” shocked me in its tortuous brutality because it was the only story which didn’t imply supernatural phenomena (rather juvenile malevolence) in its all-too-plausible horror.


In a CR@B Shell: A strong end to a superb trilogy; Tales of Terror from the Tunnel’s Mouth makes the horrific entertaining without sugar-coating the frights, and I don’t care if it’s meant for a teen audience – I loved it, and I’m exceedingly jealous of Chris Priestley’s effortless knack for sumptuously poetic and evocative prose!
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To the Manor Dead

Book Review: THE DEAD OF WINTER
Written by: Chris Priestley
Released in: 2010
Published by: Bloomsbury
217pages
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In an attempt to temperate my ravenous consumption of the marvellous “Tales of Terror” series from Cambridge’s own young adult horror author Chris Priestley (click the links for my reviews of Uncle Montague and Black Ship), I decided to jump forward to his latest release; once again a ghost story with a young protagonist, but this time a singular extended story rather than an anthology of quick-fire yarns.

Newly orphaned Michael Vyner is this tale’s diminutive narrator, recalling the “heartbeat hastening” events of the last Christmas, where he was obligated to leave behind the life he knew to spend the holidays in the desolate and shadowy Hawton Mere, an ancient East Anglian abode which is home to his enigmatic and aloof guardian – the sickly Sir Stephen Clarendon – and a solitary woman in white who wanders the snow-covered fens…

The Dead of Winter could quite easily have been reduced to a 20/30 page short story from a “Tales of Terror” compilation, which is not to say it is an agonisingly drawn-out or humdrum affair when spread over a novel’s length, only that a lot of the time is spent accumulating a chilling ambience – shadows in the darkness, knocking behind walls, ghosts in the mist, etcetera – while the plot is never thick or complex. But then this is horror aimed at a teen audience.

Priestley’s descriptive prose is his greatest creative strength – he has great fun with his graphic and evocative imagery and metaphors, conjuring up a truly fearful vibe from the slightest of actions or most sensitive of sentiments. Par exemple:

“As I recoiled in horror, her face shone with a light of pure evil. Her eyes
that had been so bright in life were now white marbles, as if the fire had
licked all colour from them. She was like some spider who had waited for this
moment, and now the moment came…”

While the climatic clarification of the ghoulish goings-on did fall a little short of Uncle Montague’s extreme depravity (a wonderfully creepy faceless boy with just a mouth for shrieking in agony and the supernatural ability to morph into a giant arachno-lizard creature was sadly underused) and the solution to the overriding mystery of how Sir Stephen’s beloved wife died was all too predictable, what did impress me about The Dead of Winter was how well Priestley handled the increasing cast of supporting characters.

Cooks, lawyers, coachmen, servants, guardians, sisters; all play a part – for better or worse – in Michael’s sorrowful secluded stay at Hawton Mere, and none are given short shrift in the narrator’s first-person account. Even if they depart for extended periods of time, their presence is always felt by their absence, most notably Sir Stephen’s lawyer, Tristan Jerwood, who Michael gradually warms to and comes to see as a confidant, missing this new-found friend who must leave on business for long periods at a time. Of course this desire for companionship is only natural when your parent’s have died and you are imprisoned in an alien environment.

This kind of continuity may seem insignificant to some, but it is crucial to producing a consistent and relatable chronicle (particularly as Michael is only a child and – no matter how brave – still dependant on support from his elders), and it impressed me as proof that Priestley – an author who I have become acquainted with as a short story scribe – and his compellingly lurid shocks can translate to longer stories. I fervently await Mr Creecher, which is due for hardback release in October.


In a CR@B Shell: While not as vividly distasteful as the gloriously grotesque Uncle Montague, The Dead of Winter still succeeds as an old fashioned gothic yuletide nightmare in the fashion of Dennis Wheatley and Henry James ghost stories; not least because of Priestley’s slow-building tension and disturbingly macabre ambience.
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