Wondering what three books you should have bought last year? Then wonder no more. Come with us, dear listener, and you can scoff at our choices, and point out that you wrote something far better. Or complain that we failed to mention Eric Pumley’s Bumper Book of Chainsaw Maintenance for Girls, which your Aunt Edith absolutely adored. And where is Uncle Harold these days, anyway?
2017, huh? Only seven years after Helen Mirren escaped from Jupiter, and a transfigured Dave Bowman announce that ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT BELGIUM. By luck, Arthur C Clarke’s novel 2010 was written in 1984, and Orwell’s 1984 was itself written in 1948. Nine years later, my mother gave birth and said “Right, I’m not doing that again.”
So this year will bring my sixtieth birthday, if I make it. Never take anything for granted, I say. I’ll be writing very fast this year, just in case. In the meantime, we like to do some sort of review of the year gone by, so we will. In bits.
This first bit, dear listener, is bookish, as you might have guessed from above. But we’re not going to reel off a long gabble of the great stuff that came out in 2016. When you’re our age, a) You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to on your own blog, and b) You can’t remember half of what you read anyway.
Instead, we’ll praise three peculiar books from 2016 that we do remember, and thus we shall remain typically idiosyncratic. It’s always unfair, of course – we had bleak dystopian horror from Rich Hawkins, warped Orford Parish whimsy from Tom Breen, cracking paranormal adventure from Willie Meikle, and we discovered Sword and Soul through the energetic Milton Davis. And we thoroughly enjoyed works such as Michael Wehunt’s collection Greener Pastures, Ted E Grau’s novella Sometimes They Don’t Come Home (both excellent), and many others. Decisions, decisions. But “Thirty Seven Books We Liked” would merely be a list to be checked off or ignored.
We chose to bite the bullet, and so here are our picks of the year, in no especial order.
Purchase links for all three can be found on the right-hand sidebar
Creeping Waves
by Matthew M Bartlett
Building on his earlier Gateways to Abomination, this year Bartlett (as he is known to his tax inspector) gave us something which brooded and spat and oozed. Why is it here on our tiny list? Because this exploration of the author’s twisted Leeds, Massachusetts is both a collection and a single inter-related story in its own right. It is horrific and yet wryly funny, coherent and yet fragmentary. The author draws with enormous skill on a dark and troubled psychogeography, the trivia and banality of daily life, and the kind of history which sucks you down into the blackness. The result is a small wonder.
Creeping Waves is, in short, its own beast (possibly some sort of goat). Whether you like this sort of thing or not, it’s hard to forget. We absolutely loved it. You can read Gateways first, because Creeping Waves does have the same roots, but you don’t have to. Dive in, and be worried…
(We interviewed the author, along with Tom Breen, here tag team horror , and also wrote our own warped response from Leeds, Britland, on Brian O’Connell’s site The Conqueror Weird here conqueror weird )
The Surgeon’s Mate: A Dismemoir
by Alan M Clark
An entirely unusual animal, and as memorable as Creeping Waves, but for other reasons. Alan M Clark has a history of writing history, and is very good at marrying a sense of humanity with the bones of what did happen (or may have happened) in the past. So, for example, despite our doubts about the overuse of Jack the Ripper as a literary theme, he chose to walk another path and brought new light to bear on the subject. Instead of re-visiting tired tropes, he portrayed the private and tragic lives of those women who died in Whitechapel, in an excellent series whose latest book, A Brutal Chill in August, emerge last year.
A Dismemoir is different again, and such a dark fancy that it stuck with us. This time we have the author’s genuine autobiographical notes, covering such issues as his marriage, alcoholism and almost fatal brain lesions, and yet we also have a work of Victorian fiction. Or is it? Delusion is explored as hospital monitors beep and troubled relatives call, while a century before, a man creeps through fog-bound streets, dragging his own psychopathic needs along with him. Perhaps, for us, the surprise page-turner of the year. We started it for mundane review purposes and finished because we really needed to. Odd, and well worth a visit.
(We interviewed Alan here, and also talked about his award-winning artwork – dark arts, dark lives )
Corpse Roads
by the Folk Horror Revival
Our last book is here because there’s too much inside to leave it out. Over five hundred pages of classical verse, new poetry and stunning photography from the Folk Horror Revival movement (edited by Andy Paciorek and Katherine Beem). Unlike the other two, it’s a browser (although oddly enough you could probably browse Creeping Waves and probably still get the same effect as you would from linear ingestion). The sheer range of the musings in Corpse Roads makes it a recommended work – you can go for the Yeats and Spenser, Poe and Keats, or dive into the work of dozens of modern poets. This includes many works specifically written for the collection.
In addition to individual works on loss and darkness, it includes themed sections such as The Poetry of the Dead, The Poetry of War, and The Poetry of the Living. You can go poetical for hours, or you can just enjoy the evocative black and white photography, which adds so much to the verse and the impact of the collection.
(We provided an outline, with some choice illos and extracts here, on corpse roads bound, and went into the subject of corpse roads themselves here corpse roads again.)
Now we must go and write notes of apology to authorial friends who we didn’t include or highlight. And explain why there’s no science fiction, no fantasy and so on in our top three. Back soon, and don’t forget to pretend to vote for greydogtales in the Critters awards…