Quick Recommendations List!

I’ve fallen behind in this blogging lark due to being too ADD to function, and now I’ve hurt my hand in a deeply mysterious esoteric fashion that makes everything either achy or MASSIVELY PAINFUL. So I’m not blogging, no. I have lots to talk about – Cherie Priest’s Dreadnought, some thoughts on girls and action and adventure in YA, and a report on this weekend’s MCM Expo as well as a fantastic tour around the British Library’s Out Of This World exhibition – but I’ll get to all that when I’m fitted with my bionic arm.*

I promised a friend a list of Things To Read, which I have taken the liberty of expanding from general fantasy/sci-fi/horror/genre funky stuff to include YA, graphic novels, web comics and things that may blur the lines a tad. It is definitely not comprehensive. If I ever post a comprehensive list we’d be here for DAYS and everyone has too much life to live so I will not inflict such dread upon you fine souls.

So this isn’t blogging. This is just me posting a list.

This list begins with the assumption that the reader has read George RR Martin‘s ongoing ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series, the first book of which – A Game of Thrones – has been turned into a tv drama currently showing on HBO. It is amazing. If you want to watch the tv series before reading the book, do so for it is expertly executed, but do not get spoiled. The books are tremendous feats of world-building and character development (Sansa Stark, love, I am looking at you) and take the usual fantasy tropes and feed them to dragons for breakfast. Shocking and touching and brilliant in a way few books have managed since GoT first came out. I envy anyone who gets to read them for the first time.

Guy Gavriel Kay – Tigana, Under Heaven, The Lions of Al-Rassan
Fantasy based on real events in history (Lions is based on El Cid, for example) with incredibly beautiful writing and heart-wrenching storylines, with romance that never gets soppy and characters that resonate with everyone. Wonderful, beautiful, epic storytelling in the truest sense. GGK is also a poet; you can feel it in every part of his writing.

Scott Lynch – The Lies of Locke Lamora
The best thief in the world, and then some. Locke Lamora is an amazing invention (Iwanttomarryhim), and the world is so well-realized and brilliantly written it’s a jarring experience to put the book down and continue with your day. Exciting, violent, funny, ingenious, addictive. It’s swashbuckling with cunning and intellect; witty and entertaining one minute, dramatic and engrossing the next. Easily one of my top 5 favourite books of the past ten years.

Joe Abercrombie – The First Law trilogy
Heroic fantasy without the heroes. A balance of harsh brutality – a fantasy world as it would be, darker and even gritter than George RR Martin (far more body parts littered about for one) – and crippling hilarity. Inspector Glokta is one of my favourite characters ever, and Abercrombie is yet another writer who can pull the literary rug from beneath your feet while cracking a joke and making a wry aside about the state of modern fantasy. Best for those who’ve read some classic fantasy works (ie, Feist).

Jacqueline Carey – Kushiel’s Legacy trilogy
Sex, religion, espionage, betrayal, romance, murder. You have to have an open mind to deal with Phedre’s exotic tastes in the bedroom but these three books are Carey’s best work to date, and feature a female main character unafraid of her sexuality as well as a brilliant alternative Earth with countries descended from angels and mysterious sea monsters and a very alternative take on religion. Even if you’re not sure about the sex scenes, or her “Love as thou wilt” take on Christianity, Carey’s sumptuous world and resonant writing are well worth picking up these books. It is very easy to fall in love with Phedre, Joscelin, Hyacinthe and the rest – Carey has a warmth to her writing it’s hard to find elsewhere.

Bryan Lee O’Malley – Scott Pilgrim
If you liked the film, the six graphic novels do the same thing but crank it up to 11. If you didn’t like the film so much, the graphic novels go into more detail and fills in the characters a bit more. If you read these and see the film and still don’t like any of it, I genuinely do not understand you.

Derek Landy – Skulduggery Pleasant
Twelve-year-old Stephanie’s beloved eccentric writer uncle dies in mysterious circumstances. The type of mysterious circumstances that introduce her to Skulduggery, a skeletal detective. Has an actual skull as a head. Marvellous, marvellous adventure with jokes for adults as well as children, with a main character that appeals to girls AND boys as well as the dashing Skulduggery who I admit I love even though he’s a skeleton because what can you do? He’s hilarious. Influenced by Lovecraft, Landy has a superb adventure with dark touches and incredibly funny moments sprinkled liberally throughout, and Stephanie is exactly the sort of heroine YA needs more of.

Margaret Mahy – The Changeover
Sod Twilight. This is what YA romance should be. Yes, it should have witches! Exactly! No. The supernatural/fantasy elements are almost incidental to the characters and the menace – this is a book about the weirdness of being a teenage girl on the cusp, of those first deep pangs of romance (no, not fangs of romance, none of that please (unless you’re Richelle Mead)) and the responsibilities as well as power inherent in becoming a woman. I wish I’d read this as a teen.

Elizabeth Marie Pope – The Perilous Gard
Another book I wish I’d read as a teen. Fairies, abductions, darkness, a monstrous love interest and here words fail me because I can’t really say too much about it other than it’s so wonderful and relevant and I was very sad to see the author didn’t write much more. It’s a lyrical, ethereal novel with relationships and romances that feel completely genuine in a way that few popular YAs manage these days – it was one of those books where you finish, close the book, and miss everyone in it immediately.

John Allison – Scary Go Round/Bad Machinery/Giant Days
People have tried to get me to read SGR for years, but Liam got me reading Bad Machinery and from thereon in, my friends, it was CRAZY, the snowball that triggered the avalanche or whatever the analogy is. I’ve read Bad Machinery for a while but I spent two days re-reading the entire seven-year run of SGR in the run up to meeting the man himself at MCM Expo – it’s imaginative, witty and dangerously compulsive reading. Set in the fictional Tackleford in West Yorkshire, where much supernatural weirdness abounds, SGR is the rather more anarchic storyline set around the lives of twenty-somethings where BR is a more tightly plotted series about two groups of schoolchildren solving mysteries and being utterly awesome. The art is marvellous, there’s much hilarity and many touching moments with quality character development making it worth the time it takes to read the SGR archives and catch up with BR. It’s excellent work and should be more widely recognized, and BR is more than suitable for younger readers.

My wrist is now HELLACHEY and I should probably end this and go rock in a corner cradling my hand and sobbing like a child until I can type without wincing. I have so many more I want to mention – Lackadaisy is amazing, anyone who isn’t reading Kate Beaton is insane, Yuko and Ananth at Johnny Wander are wonderful, etc etc etc MY LIST IS EPIC GUYS.

I have provided you with much goodness for the eyes here. Go, revel in this haute cuisine menu of visual deliciousness, and tell me how awesome my taste is.

This is longer than I intended. Oh dear.

*I will not be fitted with a bionic arm.

Deanna Raybourn’s Lady Julia Grey Mysteries

I was in a charity shop a few months ago when a set of book covers leapt from the shelf and viciously attacked my person.

Well, in a nice way.

It was the most random book purchase I’ve made in months. Rarely do I buy a book that someone hasn’t recommended specifically, or that I’ve seen reviewed, so buying a book just because the cover looked cool felt all risqué and flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants and all that. It was a risk. Three books were there and I bought just the first, in case it turned out awful. I regretted that; the next two books were difficult to get hold of in the right editions, but I’m so glad I did!

The book was Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn and good heavens did I devour it. It might as well have come with a knife and fork and some ketchup, that was how fast it went. Raybourn has an excellent way with opening lines (I’d like to leave those for future readers to discover) and although certain aspects of the book felt too modern to fit properly into a Victorian setting, it was a vastly entertaining read that included great characters, wonderful writing and a murder mystery that I guessed ahead of time, but in doing so didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the book in the least. Lady Julia Grey – the protagonist – develops wonderfully as the murder of her husband is suspected and then investigated by herself and the dark, mysterious Nicholas Brisbane; she goes from a mousey, elegant, typical Victorian ideal of a wife to someone who is unafraid to show her intelligence and faces up to the rather grim task at hand with great courage. Her family is a madcap lot that offer some entertaining asides (Perdita, her sister, probably the most recurring and scandalous of her many siblings) and all elements together made the story a winsome mix of amusing, exciting, tragic and intriguing.

Silent in the Sanctuary, the second book, continued in the same vein, albeit away from London, at the family seat. It’s a stronger book with a murder that did fox me more than the first book’s mystery did, and the more we see of Julia’s family the Marches the better – they’re a fantastic, chaotic crowd – and I was laughing out loud in various parts. These books are witty and smart, and yes, they have sizeable romantic elements too. At times I found it a tad soppy but the rest of the story – the murders, the family, the other entanglements – was so strong it barely registered.

The third book, Silent on the Moor, was rather oddly the weakest of the three in everything but plot. Without the marvellous March family to give it a bit of levity and character, the setting of a bleak, windswept, barren moor with a dilapidated grand manor and a properly gothic storyline felt too heavy and plodding, though it suited Raybourn’s writing. The humour was sparse, but as a gothic tale it was quite nice and creepy and satisfying in the way that gothic stories usually are. It was a convoluted crime, and the scene in which they uncover the contents of an ancient Egyptian coffin lingered in my mind for some time after. I finished it a couple of days ago and I’m glad to see there’s another book continuing the story as it did feel like despite the tidy resolution, there were enough loose ends for Raybourn to work her magic and conjure up another wicked plot.

It’d be a mistake to read these books hoping for Georgette Heyer levels of historical detail and precision. They have patches of being a bit dodgy in that respect but not so much that it disrupts the flow of the story – rather, it feels a slightly fantastical when considering the gypsy element, and I rather appreciated the pure escapism it offered (I really don’t consider escapism negative in the least).

Basically, my random book purchase that day was an absolute joy and I recommend the books to anyone who likes a good romance, a good murder mystery, a good bit of wit and intelligent plotting. There is a touch of the supernatural about the books, which I felt detracted a bit from the plots and the characters, but I can’t deny that as a plot device it was well (and in the first two books, sparingly) used.

Easily a 4/5. I enjoyed them so much.

MD Lachlan’s ‘Wolfsangel’

I have no interest in werewolves. Most modern depictions seem to involve bad special effects, stupid love triangles and random pointless blood spatter and, weirdly, some sort of vampiric involvement for no good reason. Werewolves hold no interest for me, less even than vampires, which at least have Bram Stoker and Polidori to give them some merit (and that said I do like the Sookie Stackhouse books and Vampire Academy for being moreish and highly entertaining, but that is another matter entirely).

Now, though, I’ve seen the light. There IS a point to werewolves. They CAN be brilliantly done.

MD Lachlan’s Wolfsangel is a take on werewolves that draws in threads of Norse mythology, dank, dangerous witchcraft and brilliantly pitched mythic language to create a book that felt otherworldly and convoluted in a way I didn’t expect from what I’d heard about it beforehand. King Authun, a mighty warrior, seeks the child that a witch queen’s prophecy has told him will bring his people glory – only he finds twin boys instead. One is brought up as his son, a prince, while the other is brought up, wolf-like, in the wilderness. The witch, easily one of the most unsettling characters I’ve read, sits in her dark caves and spies through hallucinatory, mind-expanding visions on the boys as they grow and on the world around them; and there’s so much more to it, a mixture of classic fantasy coming-of-age in the prince Vali and his relationship with Adisla, a lot of horror as well, and even a little bit of political intrigue and betrayal.

It’s hard to explain exactly what this book is but it’s very much the kind of novel that crosses genre boundaries, and although I freely admit that it was hard-going at times as I’ve discovered that I’m quite squeamish when it comes to people being eaten (it was described brilliantly, I will point that out) but well worth the effort. There are gods and monsters and witches and quests and long-lost brothers and love triangles in which the emo-angst isn’t the focus (YES!) and it’s all worked together with excellent writing.

Wolfsangel is one of those rare things – a novel with an epic storyline in line with the epics of old, complete with epic language and characters drawn from mythic tropes and seemingly controlled by fate that still manage to act independently and surprise you. It feels so ancient, so steeped in age and old magics, filled throughout with a deep unease and visceral authenticity, that it was hard to pull myself out of it and enjoy the impromptu early summer we’ve been having.

It’s not a fun read, but it is a great one. I’m very interested to see how the series develops from here – it can be read as a standalone work, but I get the feeling that the internal mythology MD Lachlan is building will have some excellent pay-offs.

Solid 4/5, because I’m not as comfortable with the violence as I once might have been, and it is a harsh book, but it is very, very good.