Book review: King of Hell

The seventh book in Christopher Golden's "Shadow Saga" series is also the final one; of course the third book was meant to be the last one as well and Peter Octavian still came back so you never know. After a sixth volume that didn't do much for me this conclusion is a lot better, as Peter travels across dimensions to free the friends who got trapped in Hell in previous installments, and in the process finds out who the titular King of Hell is.

Golden's been writing fantasy and horror novels for decades, and the twist here is that he uses the conceit of multiple universes to mix together every other novel or series he's ever created, each having taken place in a different dimension that Octavian and his newest companions go through. A couple of them become quite central to the plot, like characters from Soulless, his zombie uprising novel from a few years ago, and there's major players from one of his series that I haven't read, the "Menagerie" books; while others are more fleeting, like a tongue-in-cheek reference to his early novel Strangewood. It probably doesn't matter if you don't know any of the other series, although this being the last in the Shadow Saga it'd be a bit silly to read it without having read the previous six. I enjoyed this one more than the last couple but I think it's probably the right time to leave this particular universe be.

Book review: The Bones Beneath

First order of business after clearing the pile of Song of Ice and Fire books was to catch up with Mark Billingham, and a look on Amazon shows that the 12th Thorne novel hasn't been popular with everybody. I guess people's complaints that there's not much action are technically accurate, but that's not how it felt to me reading it. The Bones Beneath goes back to Stuart Nicklin, the killer from one of the earliest Tom Thorne novels, a psychopath with a particular talent for getting others to do his dirty work for him. He reveals that one of his first-ever murders took place on a remote Welsh island when he was a teenager, and he's willing to take the police to the body. He obviously has an ulterior motive but Thorne knows Nicklin will be able to attract bad publicity to the police if they refuse to find the bones for the sake of the victim's family, so they're stuck with taking the prisoner on an extended trip.

Cutaway chapters reveal early on that Nicklin's accomplices have a captive somewhere, and it's true that I did figure out early on who that would turn out to be, but I still thought this was an effective thriller: The fact that so little happens until near the very end means there's a horrible tension as we wait to find out what the real plan is. Definitely something of a format-breaker which obviously hasn't been a hit with everyone, but for me The Bones Beneath worked.

Book review: A Dance with Dragons II: After the Feast

It's taken me nine months - admittedly including taking breaks to read things that aren't A Song of Ice and Fire - but I've finally got to the end of the 5 volumes published so far. I did kind of expect George R.R. Martin to announce that The Winds of Winter would suddenly be available today and I'd be behind again, but I'm all caught up now with the second half of A Dance with Dragons. I can certainly see why people complain about the action stalling quite a lot, and by this stage there's too many characters to keep track of some of the time, but there are some significant developments going on. Although there's still two novels to go, finally the Epilogue of After the Feast has a bit of a twist with the return of a major character who's been gone for a long time, and which suggests that the story is getting ready to start wrapping itself up - although in a typically messy way, I'm sure.

I've still been enjoying the ride, or I wouldn't have read all the books more or less continuously, but I'm looking forward to getting back to reading something different as well.

Alumni day

I kept waking up in the night so remembering bits of dreams; I dreamt that I'd gone back to Exeter to visit my old university drama department. The current students included a middle-aged Italian woman who was accompanied everywhere by several elderly nuns; she also spoke no English so took a male interpreter with her everywhere, including to the toilet. There were also two Quidditch teams, one of which all had dyed purple hair and carried broomsticks, the other were all blind. I turned to whoever I was there with* and said "the current students aren't as good as our year, our eccentricities were nowhere near as contrived."

*I always seem to have someone to talk to in dreams but no idea who it is, so it might just be me doing a Miranda turn to camera.

Potter Spotter

It's been far too hot lately to try and do anything sensible, so I'm doing this instead: I last made a list of all the Harry Potter actors I'd seen on stage two years ago, and now seems a good time to update it, what with the news of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child coming to London next year. That'll properly bring the worlds of Potter and theatre together, but in the meantime this is my version. Weez, revstan and trpw all have their own lists.

We're using the Wikipedia cast list, which also includes actors whose entire performance ended up on the cutting room floor, which means Jamie Campbell Bower's young Grindewald has now joined Toby Regbo's young Dumbledore; sadly the similarly-deleted Peeves will not be joining them as Rik Mayall has died.

I've added 12 more names to the list since 2013, and I've highlighted them in blue. There's bound to be performances I've missed but from the ones I've found or remembered, Harry Melling seems to be the Potter actor I've seen in the most different shows. Given that some of the actors on this list I first saw more than twenty years ago, it shows you just how much stage work Melling, whom I only first "collected" in 2009, has done. Kathryn Hunter is close behind him, and although her stage career has been a lot longer I've only been following it for a similar period of time, and have Potter to thank for introducing me to one of my all-time favourite actors.

I've linked to my reviews of the shows where possible; any title that isn't a link means it's from before I started reviewing online.

Book review: A Dance with Dragons I: Dreams and Dust

Well I've been reading them on and off since last October but I'm now almost up to date with George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice books, at least those published so far. But not quite, as A Dance with Dragons is another one of those so long it had to be split into two parts. Reading them more or less continuously has meant individual installments haven't always stood out, and I do sometimes wish the story would move on a bit quicker. But Dreams and Dust does have one interesting development in that Melisandre has become a POV character; there's only been one chapter from her perspective so far but it's a bit of a twist to have one of the most mysterious and scary characters become the nearest thing to a narrator the books have. Already we see a bit more insecurity from her once we're in her head, but there'll need to be a lot more twists in the rest of the story if I'm going to sympathise with her. After all, she's still a religious loony whose default response to any problem is "let's burn someone alive!"

Book review: Mrs Danby and Company

Like Paul Magrs' other novel series featuring Brenda and Effie or Iris Wildthyme, Mrs Danby and Company - which also has the feel of the first in a series - takes its characters or situations from classic stories by other writers then gives them a different twist. This time three characters who seem rather familiar from Victorian adventure stories are thrown together a few years after their biggest triumphs, on a journey to New York in the early years of the 20th century: It's not hard to see who Mrs Danby, former housekeeper to a great detective, or vampire killer Abraham van Halfling could be based on, while Professor Zarathustra is every Jules Verne character in one. After an adventure on a sinking ocean liner and a voyage to an underwater city (including battle with the inevitable giant squid) the trio arrive to both unexpected celebrity, and more vampires in New York. In the usual crossover with his other series we get a brief insight into what all the fuss about Sheila Manchu's husband Mumu was, as he sends the characters into even more peril through a series of magical doors. It doesn't quite have the campness of Magrs' other series but the fun touch in Mrs Danby and Company is that the narration switches between the three lead characters, giving us a view into how differently they all view their situations, and especially each other - the unstoppably arrogant Zarathustra unable to take a honking great hint about what the other two really think of his self-proclaimed greatness. It's a fun and funny bit of steampunk but it does seem as if Magrs keeps kicking similar off new series about adventurous old ladies rather than focusing on one.

Ad break for sociopaths

Been a while since I blogged a dream but I nodded off a little while ago and ended up with a two-parter, both parts set in a dark conference centre with maze-like corridors. To start with I was there for a job interview, but after six hours of waiting it was announced that the interviewers had seen the minimum amount of people they had to so would be packing up now - there followed a frenzy of people in suits, the interviewers, trying to get out, clearing all their things and locking up behind them. I realised I'd left my bag behind, and needed to shoulder my way into the doors to get them to unlock them and let me back in.

I managed to find my bag but on the way out, although the location was the same, now I was starring in a TV advert for a hit-man service, playing the victim. A doorbell rang and I walked through a number of corridors to answer it, while a calm American woman's voice narrated "Problems with your staff? Osama & Papa Enterprises can help. This worker made jokes at work and reduced productivity." As I went through one corridor, I saw a waitress with a trolley of tinned food, all with cheap-looking labels that said "Osama & Papa Enterpises," she said to me "New supplier!" I kept going to the door where another waitress was waiting, but woke up before I found out whether she was the one who was going to kill me, or if the tins of food were poisoned or a bomb.

Book review: Trigger Warning

The third of Neil Gaiman's short story collections, Trigger Warning includes a couple of novellas set in existing fantasy universes - there's a Doctor Who story, "Nothing O'Clock," set during Eleven's first season, which comes up with some new monsters whose entire existence is based on screwing with time, so it's a satisfying little addition to the Doctor Who canon; and the finale is an enjoyable American Gods sequel, "Black Dog," with some creepy moments. Of the rest of the stories as usual I wasn't a fan of most of the poetry, and a number of the short stories did very little for me, but there's a few very strong ones in there as well: A Sherlock Holmes story, "The Case of Death and Honey," wonders why a character so easily bored chose beekeeping as his retirement pastime, and comes up with a bit of a wild answer; a pair of stories, "Observing the Formalities" and "The Sleeper and the Spindle," give different twists to the Sleeping Beauty fairytale; "The Return of the Thin White Duke" is an origin story for how David Bowie came to Earth; "The Thing About Cassandra" would make you a bit concerned if you ever had an imaginary friend. The most old-fashioned spooky tale is "Click-Clack the Rattlebag," but the one I found creepiest, and probably the one most worthy of an actual trigger warning, was "Feminine Endings." What's maybe even creepier is that in his introduction he says this is the story he wrote for his wife when he first met her.

Book review: The Silkworm

After The Cuckoo's Calling, the second "Robert Galbraith" novel is The Silkworm. J.K. Rowling has said that one of her ideas behind writing this series of crime novels was to do stories about fame - hence a detective whose father was a famous rock star, which brings him a lot of celebrity clients but also unwanted attention. This time she really goes for her specialist subject as Cormoran Strike is hired to find a missing author, so the pool of suspects and witnesses is drawn from the publishing world. Strike's assistant Robin gets increasingly caught up in the action, and the book gets a running subplot of her enthusiasm for her new job getting in the way of her relationship with her fiancé. I enjoyed the first novel but thought this was better - there were a couple of gasp-out-loud moments, and a major clue nicely disguised as a character note.

Book review: A Feast for Crows

Now this is just a wild stab in the dark here, but I think George R.R. Martin might have a thing for women with big dark nipples.

I wonder if the "generic landscape" covers for A Song of Ice and Fire have gone down like a cup of cold sick because I was browsing in Waterstones the other day and they all seemed to have vanished, with the old covers back. At least using the Giant's Causeway for A Feast for Crows is on-theme for the book, as a lot of it starts to concentrate on what's going at the Iron Islands.

As well as this shift of focus this is a particularly female-led instalment, with only two main male point-of-view characters (Jaime and Samwell) and the women really starting to take power for themselves - Cersei doing so increasingly dementedly, which is always fun. And there's a lot of Brienne of Tarth, so I was always going to like this one.

As I understand it the next season of the TV show will mix this book and the following one, but as that's another two-volume mammoth (as well as being the last of the books so far published) I'm going to take another break for something a bit different before tackling A Dance With Dragons.

Twitaceous Era 53: 21st century urchin

This week on my Twitter feed, that accent is apparently called "Multicultural London."

You know the accent Harry Melling does in peddling? What do you reckon actors call that on their Spotlight page?
10:46 AM - 11 Mar 2015

@Weez I'm basically asking what the Charmian Hoare-approved, non-offensive term for "chavvy accent" is.

11:03 AM - 11 Mar 2015

 

@Weez "21st century urchin."

11:06 AM - 11 Mar 2015

Twitaceous Era 52: Like in Tom & Jerry

This week on my Twitter feed: Some kind of mouse caper.

Pffft, he's not even wearing his pants over his trousers #intervaltweets #RalphAndSuperRalph
8:42 PM - 4 Mar 2015

Turns out what my life was missing was a Japanese cover of Shake It Off #intervaltweets
8:32 PM - 6 Mar 2015

"Sorry Ben, but I don't date men whose eyebrows are more tweezed than mine" #reveeeeenge
8:39 PM - 7 Mar 2015

Twitaceous Era 51: Am I in the queue now?

This week on my Twitter feed there were some particularly starry sleb spots, while Coveney's articles featured a particularly heavy dose of insanity.

Weirdly specific typecasting #2759056: Oliver Coopersmith, gay Jewish schoolboys #straightthroughnointervaltweets
9:34 PM - 25 Feb 2015

BREAKING: Madonna to star in remake of A Cream Cracker Under The Settee.
11:02 PM - 25 Feb 2015

I don't even know where to start on Coveney's "the lost art of disability acting" comment, so I'll just assume he's trolling.
12:25 PM - 26 Feb 2015

Book review: A Storm of Swords II: Blood and Gold

As I suspected when I read the first volume, A Storm of Swords volume II, Blood and Gold, does indeed contain a lot more action, including both the red and purple weddings. As someone who started with the Game of Thrones TV series first and then went back to the books, what's most exciting here for me is getting to parts that haven't turned up on TV yet. I'm ploughing straight on with the next one now, the only worrying thing being that I've been getting through these books a lot quicker than I expected, and there's only two more published novels (albeit another one of those is so long as to have been split into two volumes) left. Then I have to join everyone else who's grumbling to George R. R. Martin to get books 6 and 7 finished.

Twitaceous Era 50: Ooh, haze effects!

This week I was ill so my Twitter feed is likely to make even less sense than usual.

Pearce Brosnan thinks Idris Elba should be James Bond. Or Colin Salmon. Or Daniel Craig. He doesn't care, stop asking him about James Bond.
8:19 AM - 18 Feb 2015

The people who can answer any question except the one they've been asked are out in force today.
3:46 PM - 18 Feb 2015

Last night's fever was so bad my legs stopped working. Scary. But slightly like a fairground ride.
12:12 PM - 19 Feb 2015

Twitaceous Era 49: The wrong sort of terrible

This week on my Twitter feed I end up at some bad theatre I should have been able to avoid.

Things my followers might care about slightly: Simon Darwen's in The Armour at the Langham Hotel. (Also Finty Williams and Hannah Spearmint)
Retweet 1
2:48 PM - 11 Feb 2015

Appalled at man on train in lipstick, rouge and blue eye shadow. I mean, blue eye shadow? In 2015?
Favorites 2
6:46 PM - 11 Feb 2015

If this show's the wrong sort of terrible I'm blaming @OughtToBeClowns for saying I shouldn't skip it.
Retweet 1 Favorite 1
7:24 PM - 11 Feb 2015

Twitaceous Era 48: Most sharks jumped

This week let's call my Twitter feed "minimalist" or something, rather than admit I have nothing to say.

I've just noticed that Gemma Whelan's wearing a shirt with butterflies on it in the Radiant Vermin poster #RidleyMemes
Favorite 1
1:58 PM - 4 Feb 2015

Slept for 15 hours. I might be turning into a cat. Which would make me allergic to myself.
11:29 AM - 7 Feb 2015

Is Supernatural trying for some kind of "most sharks jumped" record? Why yes, I have just watched the one with the talking dog.
6:44 PM - 8 Feb 2015

Book review: A Storm of Swords I: Steel and Snow

After a break I'm back to George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, hoping to get ahead of the Game of Thrones TV series. I've still got a way to go though, and the third novel A Storm of Swords is the first that was so long it got split into two volumes. The first half, Steel and Snow, comes in the wake of all the big battles at the end of A Clash of Kings, so rather than a huge amount of action there's a lot of politics and scheming. So I can see why the TV series didn't follow the same order but personally I enjoy reading about intrigues more than I do descriptions of action sequences, so I really liked this installment. I'm going straight on to the second half for the consequences of everything set up in this one.

Twitaceous Era 47: Paging Dr Morissette

This week on my Twitter feed, I'm feeling a bit sleepy.

Today I found out that the Council workers call the head office the Death Star. Which is fair enough.
6:45 PM - 28 Jan 2015

Theatres! Best avoid giving a character the line "it's so boring!" unless you're DAMN SURE the audience don't feel the same way.
Retweet 1 Favorite 1
11:06 PM - 28 Jan 2015

It's especially awkward when you say it just as @OughtToBeClowns is leaning over to look at my watch.

Favorite 1

11:08 PM - 28 Jan 2015