The Scarlet Gospels

                  

                  I waited nine years for this book, and I'm still not completely sure it was worth it.

                   It's a good book, to be sure. And I didn't give up on it the same way I gave up on, say, Abarat (which is a huge rant I will deploy at another time. Maybe for post 200) by the same author. And, let's be honest, any meeting between Harry D'amour (the detective from Great and Secret Show and Lord of Illusions*) and the being people can't help but refer to as "Pinhead" (Him what was in the Hellraiser series**) would be final for one of them, if not both. But I couldn't help feeling like this was possibly a tired and annoyed farewell to his work, melding the dark, beautiful fantasy of his later works (D'amour's dominion) with the brutal, gruesome horror of his earlier works (you know who) in an effort to put them all to bed for good. 

                   I'm not quite sure if it's just because I expected a four to five hundred page doorstopper about the ultimate battle between the reluctant champion of humanity and Barker's most terrifying agent of change, or because it dealt a final blow to stories I hoped would continue and I'm being entitled and pissy. Maybe it's that Barker took one of my favorite characters and flung them in a new direction. But either way, the book annoyed me. 

                   If you're in the mood for a vivid, twisted fantasy involving a team of occult investigators in Hell, great. If you're in the mood for some of the most fucked-up scenes in horror outside of maybe the Edward Lee crowd***, you're in the right place. But I don't believe this'll go on the shelf next to Imajica, The Great and Secret Show, Books of Blood, and Everville. 

More, as always, below. 

The Talisman

           

       

             I really was going to review The Orange Eats Creeps, I promise. It's actually a pretty cool book from what I've read of it. But I realized something: This past Friday was Halloween, marking my fourth year writing for Geek Rage/Strange Library. And this past month? Stephen King month. And these two things led me to remember something I've said again and again, something I should have scheduled into the month, and something on which I should finally deliver. I've been saying "I'll get around to it" for years. Four years, to be exact. I think anyone would want me to, well, finally get around to talking about it. So I decided, emergency executive decision, first to do a video review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon because I have an awesome collector's-edition pop-up book of that, and then, after that, on the spur of the moment, to finally talk about the book that gave Stephen King and Peter Straub my undying respect. The book that made me a King fan to begin with. A book that has stayed with me for a little under an entire decade now. 

I think it's finally time, dear readers (all two of you) to talk about The Talisman.

                      I think it's brilliant. It's a book I've read more than Harry Potter, topping out somewhere around the mid-double digits. Even though I know the plot, even though every twist and turn in the novel is one I've already experienced, even though I know how the story's going to end. It's lurid at points, yeah. It's really dark at points. There's one section that still really disturbs me, and a section that grossed out my dad when he read it to make sure it was okay for me. The villains are despicable, the heroes are severely underpowered, and the plot-- while a little formulaic-- seems fresh and insane enough to be well worth the read.  It's a book that has affected my life in a great number of ways, and it's a book I couldn't see my life being the same without. While not particularly complex and while the individual elements aren't particularly impressive, this book has affected me in a way that few books have managed to. And I know, it sounds like I'm overselling it here, and maybe I am. But if I wanted to talk about books that have affected me (and I do), I would have to talk about The Talisman, and it would be high on the list. 

Why? 

Well, more, as always, below.

Rose Madder

   

                  

        During the Nineties, there was a phase Stephen King went through. It might have been a convergence of various factors, it could have just been that certain dangerous habits were instead replaced by a certain amount of mysticism and an interest in telling stories about abused women after he'd essentially put his wife through the emotional wringer with said dangerous habits. Either way, it resulted in a series of loosely-connected novels involving abusive and just asshole husbands known colloquially as "The Abused Wife Trilogy". The first two of these books were more closely connected, with Gerald's Game having a strange empathic link with Dolores Claiborne. The third, Rose Madder, is more closely linked in theme than in any other way, and doesn't appear to have anything to do with the solar eclipse. At best, it's a Lifetime movie someone devised whilst on hallucinogens,

Rose Madder is also Stephen King's weakest book, barring maybe The Tommyknockers. 

                             Certainly one of the weakest I've ever read. This may be under bias, as I had the damn thing for well over nine years without reading it (I picked it up with a few others, including Christine, the fate of which is still left merely to my imagination. I think I gave it away)

                         Now, this is not to say it's a bad book. King can still tell a good story even on a bad day. Needful Things proved that just last week. But it's weak. Compared to the literary canon of King, including books that made me think more about the world I lived in and the interconnectedness of everything in the universe (Yes, The Dark Tower is what first got me interested in Taoism. Shut up.), made me afraid of bathrooms for the duration of my reading (It), and swear off reading any of his short stories ever again (Night Shift, and it didn't last, because Skeleton Crew and Nightmares and Dreamscapes are full of awesome shorts), Rose Madder comes up surprisingly short. If this is your introduction to King, it might be worth a read. If it's something you get out of the library on a whim, sure. Go ahead. If you want my copy of the book, and have something to trade, I might consider it, though I'd feel like you were being robbed. But honestly? Borrow this. Please don't buy it. It's a good book, but there are better out there.

More, as always, below.

Preacher

   

       

         
                           The first time I'd ever heard of Preacher, I didn't know what to think. It was described to me as "A preacher, his gun-toting ex-girlfriend, and an alcoholic Irish vampire set out to find an absent God". That didn't exactly light a fire under me to read it, no matter how highly it was praised by The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror for that year, nor how it was doing in the numerous comics publications that got the word out about Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's lurid and highly mature American heroic epic (very well, despite the backlash Garth Ennis now enjoys for writing lurid and highly mature works). It just sounded kind of...well, not quite my thing. So I let it go until two years later the brilliant minds of Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum brought it up in their well worth the read webcomic Unshelved. Then, because I'd had multiple sources confirm that yes, this was worth reading, I fired up the Inter-Library Loan client at Maplewood Library, and...

                          ...promptly looked at the sheer number of books and trades and side-stories, and promptly ordered Sandman, because at least I knew where to begin with that. It wasn't until years later where, jaded into apathy by Joss Whedon's utterly depressing run on Astonishing X-Men, I wandered into a comic book store looking for a pre-screening ticket to Grindhouse and decided (being completely flat-out skint) to talk comics with the guy at the counter while my friends browsed around the store. When he mentioned Preacher, I said something dismissive about that I didn't really feel like reading about a minister, only for him to jump in with "with the Voice Of God! He's a preacher with the voice of God!" And now that I knew that, the comic became intriguing. I wondered how anyone could get sixty-eight issues out of a preacher with the voice of God travelling around to find his creator when He abandoned the throne. So I looked into it, and what I found...

                  What I found blew me away. I have yet to encounter something like Preacher before or since-- a loud, brazen assault on the senses; a tale of a world gone mad in the absence of its creator, and the bluntest solution to the problem of theodicy I have ever seen. And yet...there's a softness to it. A humanity. These are people trying their hardest to put the world back together in spite of forces literally beyond their control. And for this reason-- as well as others-- it is one of the best comics I've ever read before or since. And I will defend it beyond reason and sense, tooth and nail, because of this. It's nasty, insane, brutal, lurid, and at the same time incredibly touching in its own way. It's vulgar, but with a heart. And I love it. Read this. Or try to. It'll probably be too graphic and sick for most people, but if you can see past this, there is a book with a lot of heart and a lot of heavy subjects in here. 

More, as always, below.

Dreams and Shadows

"You always assume we must have fallen, that we were thrown out of heaven. Some of us just jumped."

- Bertrand

                     

                       I admit that going into this book, I didn't have a lot of high hopes. It was recommended to me by sources who also really dug perennial Geek Rage/Strange Library whipping boy The Magicians*; the writer's bio points out that he wrote the screenplay for Sinister, a film with an awesome premise and not a whole lot else going on; and the sources I used to look up the book had a lot to say about its rich setting and not much to say about the plot or the characters. Everything about Dreams and Shadows sent up a red flag that, after being burned on such "classics" of modern literature as City of Dark Magic, The Night Circus** and (again) The Magicians among others, made me hesitate to pick it up and give it a read. 

                                   So I went with my gut, and turned it aside. I read other things. I tried time and again to batter through the literary Great Wall that is Gravity's Rainbow. I read an interesting biography of National Lampoon. But finally, when I saw a sequel had come out to Dreams and Shadows, and said sequel was on the shelf at the local library, and it seemed like it was actually a series worth reading. "Okay," said I, "We'll give this Cargill guy a proper shot, then." And while I could not get Queen of the Dark Things because the new books section at my libraries exist solely to taunt me with the option of books I cannot check out due to living so impossibly far away from the libraries that even if I were allowed I could not check them out, they did have a copy of Dreams and Shadows. I'd done it. I'd decided to go against my gut in the service of possibly picking up something that was at least in part still part of the zeitgeist. 

                                      My lesson for you today is this: DO NOT trust your fucking gut. Because your gut is good, but when you have nothing to risk but time and another book you have to read because it's due back to the library, you can't afford not to take a chance on a book. And while you may be dragged through your Catherynne M. Valentes, your Max Freis, your Lev Grossmans and the like, there's a chance you're passing up a heartbreaking work, a work that could damn well be a favorite. Read everything and discard the stuff you didn't like as much, because that's how your taste stays killer. But never tell yourself "I won't like this book", because screw you, you have no freaking clue whether you'll like it or not until you try. Experimentation. Discovery. Risk. It's what makes life fun.

                                      And Dreams and Shadows is the perfect argument for why not to do this. It's a beautiful book, packed full of characters and setting and interesting dialogue and some odd interludes about anthropology and existentialism. While you may not enjoy it as much as I did, C. Robert Cargill's first novel is a book that does not simply grab your attention, but then shakes it back and forth while shouting at it. I need to buy this. I'm surprised I haven't yet. 

Minifiction Reviews: The Night Whiskey

   

      

           I've had a lot of trouble with Jeffrey Ford in the past. I think part of it was his writing style. The best way I can describe his writing is "doom-laden, melancholic magical-realism" which is just using a lot of stupid labels to say this: The man writes dark. In fact, because of the strange surrealist-painting quality of his work, it's actually easy to mistake his work for a lighter work, only to suddenly realize you've made a terrible mistake. But, for whatever reason, I've never been able to get into Jeffrey Ford. And, given that every time I talk about him people go "...who?" and finding a copy of his fiction debut The Physiognomy is like trying to find a sewing needle in a haystack used as a stash by heroin junkies, not many other people have, either. I get the impression Ford is a "writer's writer", someone who writes their books and is lauded by all the 'heads in the know, but doesn't see nearly as much mainstream recognition. Similar to Ford in this aspect is another fantastic short story writer, Kelly Link, whom I cannot recommend enough, but who does not seem to get read half as much as she should.

                   Getting back to the subject of Jeffrey Ford, though, I recently picked up a collection of his, The Drowned Life. I didn't quite know what to expect from the collection, I'd just picked it up because I'd gotten the itch for Ford's work lately, having forgotten my previous attempts to read The Shadow Year (six of those), and The Physiognomy (two, maybe three). And, as luck would have it, my library had The Drowned Life and The Girl in the Glass right there on the shelf. So I picked them both up and took them home. Because I didn't feel like reading any of the things I'd taken out of the library right away, I sat down and started looking through The Drowned Life. Three stories later, I was hooked.

                     But while all the stories in The Drowned Life are good, one stands out above all the rest, and that one is "The Night Whiskey". Seriously, I recommend the book as a buy just for this story and "Ariadne's Mother" alone. Why? Well, read on...

Shadowland

"Long ago, when we all lived in the forest..."

                And Peter Straub Month is brought to a smashing close with Shadowland. There is one sentence I can use to describe this book, one that I'm surprised I'm using, but one that makes perfect sense:

Shadowland is what would happen if Lev Grossman hadn't failed when he wrote The Magicians. 

                  Now, that's a bold statement. And as a bold statement, it deserves some backing up, so here goes: With Shadowland, Peter Straub takes a few traditional concepts-- children growing up, an elderly magician teaching young people real magic, an enchanted forest visited by the young where the rules of reality don't exactly apply, and all the other conventions of things young adult fantasy novels love to use-- and he twists them around. Where he succeeds is that he never once condescends to the reader or blatantly disrespects them. He just shows them a new perspective on what they know, almost as if having a discussion of it. Shadowland begins pretty dark, that's a certainty, but most of the novels it's riffing on do as well. The difference is that the other novels do get somewhat lighter. The danger seems like it comes from outside the world, not from within. And that is where Shadowland differs. Because in Shadowland, the danger seems like it might come from within, too. Even the rules of magic sound fairly sinister, including such items as "The physical world is a bauble". But just why is it worth reading Shadowland, and why does it stand tall against all comers? 

Well, read on...

The Rook

   
                 Okay, so the rundown is as follows: The Rook by Daniel O'Malley may not be a great titanic work of literature, but it is fun. The dialogue is witty, the detail is in overload mode, the creatures are frightening, and it's one of the few books with sentient religious fungus that I can also describe as "a hilarious read". And for a first novel, while it shows the wear and inexperience of its author, it's one hell of a debut. 

                  The bad is a few pacing issues, a tendency to over-info-dump while simultaneously delivering loads of detail, and the fact that there are loose ends to be tied up and the falling action seems to be setting up a sequel. 

                  But all in all, I suggest finding this book, taking possession of it, and clearing space on both your shelves and in your weekend for it, because if nothing else, it's too interesting a ride to pass up.

More, as always, below.

The Thin Executioner

           Okay, so the rundown is as follows: The Thin Executioner by Darren Shan is a brilliant, violent coming-of-age novel about a young man's attempt to gain power through a human sacrifice ritual so he can become an executioner. It is very well-written and even unnerving in places, and while just falling short of a place on the bookshelf, is at least worth the time it would take to read it.

            The good is a plot that moves very quickly and contains some unexpected twists, some vivid and disturbing passages that serve as a sort of commentary on culture, and a well-kindled glimmer of hope stuck between all the brutal passages about nearly dying from mosquitoes and cannibals. 

            The bad is a number of irritating recurring characters and that the protagonist is pretty much a loudmouthed ass for the first third of the book, before changing into a decent human being somewhere along his journey.

              But in the end, this is a highly-readable volume, and one well worth your time. Go. Find it. 

More, as always, below.

Hell's Horizon

     

            Okay, so the rundown is as follows. Hell's Horizon is a damn good detective story. It's a creepy mystery novel full of the surreal horror and unnerving violence that marked its predecessor. The dialogue and atmosphere are top-notch, and even if you can guess some of the plot twists before they hit, the way they're presented makes them feel newer and fresher. 

                     Unfortunately, if you're squeamish, this is not the book for you. When the violence comes, it comes in loving detail and some truly grisly scenes. 

                          But in the end, I highly recommend this one. Both as part of the City Trilogy and as a book on its own. Please do check it out. 

More as always below.

Procession of the Dead

    

      

      Okay, so the rundown is as follows: Procession of the Dead by Darren Shan is a brilliant, brutal, twisted crime story set in a massive nameless city full of green fog, strange characters, and enigmatic plots. The story follows the rise of Capac Raimi, a small-time gangster in The City who is taken under the wing of The Cardinal, an eccentric crime lord with an interest in fate, puppets, progress, and possibly world domination. 

               The book is strongest when talking about the city, with vivid descriptions backing up the insane cast and rapid dialogue. In particular, the characters of Conchita and Paucar Wami are excellently done, though The Cardinal deserves a special place for being convincing even at his most unhinged (and he gets pretty unhinged). 

                 But the book is weakest with a climax that more stops than ends, and ties everything up into a bow that wasn't completely needed. Furthermore, the main character's weird mood and behavioral swings, while they make sense given the trajectory of the book, are just a little distracting. 

                  This does not stop the book from being incredibly high-quality. Anyone who enjoys a good mystery and can get past the violence and general weirdness of the premise is strongly suggested to buy this and start reading immediately. 

More, as always, below. 

Doctor Sleep

                     Okay, so the rundown is as follows: While Doctor Sleep is among the better written books I have read this year, that does not make it one of the better books I have read this year. While intriguing in places, overall the book falters as it is of two minds and comes up the better for neither of them. It's a book with a lot of heart about an older man and a young woman and their attempts to stand on their own but with help from others, and for that it gets some of my praise. But the way the book weighs itself down and seems unable to make up its mind about which story it wants to tell until the very last page make it one to take out of the library rather than buying it. Read it if you must, but I won't tell you you must read it. More, as always, below.

The Bone Season

         

         

               Okay, so the rundown is as follows: This is not a good book. It is well-written, but it is a bad book. The characters aren't really that compelling, the world isn't strong, the only thing that seems to work for it is the worldbuilding, which is both plot and character-agnostic. Stay away from this one, though watch Samantha Shannon, because she could very easily become an author of some renown if she fixes her issues with pacing, characterization, and all the rest. 

                   Don't believe the hype, don't buy into the curiosity, just leave this one where you found it, and maybe look for Shannon's next book. She's got seven books planned and this is the first one, so hopefully she'll get better. More, as always, below

The Half-Made World

    Okay, the rundown is as follows. Felix Gilman has written an amazing book here that is dragged down at the end of its length by characters that don't completely matter and a plotline that stops instead of ends. While a "no ending" ending can be pulled off well, this one isn't, and makes me question how many of the reviewers read the book to the end.

              However, it is brilliantly written (if disappointing in places), and if you can enjoy the journey more than the destination, I'd recommend this to anyone with a love of weird fiction and steampunk/dieselpunk narratives. Take it out from the library and give it a whirl, maybe you'll find more here that's cool than I did in the end. 

More, as always, below. 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

          

            Okay, so the rundown is as follows: This is my book of 2013. The year isn't over, but I'm feeling pretty good about this one. The good parts are that it's an amazing book, though a little depressing (especially in my current state), a fantasy that mixes fairy tale with childhood memory in a way that's both familiar and entirely unique. The descriptions are fantastic, the dark bits are frightening, and it goes everywhere it can in the relatively short page length it does. 

                The bad parts are that it can sometimes be too on the nose, and when it telegraphs the bad things that happen to its heroes later, it does so in a little of an overwrought fashion. But neither of these are particularly strong reasons. Read the book already. It deserves it and so do you. 

NOS4A2

                  

                Okay, so, the rundown is as follows: Upon opening this book and reading the first two chapters, I immediately thought "Oh, this is Joe Hill doing a sort of Stephen King thing." By two or three hundred pages in, I thought he'd gone soft, gotten kindly in his success. Then his story proceeded to bite me when I was unawares and hang on with razor-sharp teeth. There have been a lot of books that approached the idea of "stolen childhood" and the nature of innocence when it comes to monsters. Few have been as gleefully and delightfully nasty about it as this. This book subverts the usual plotline of childhood magic winning out against adult monsters, turns it inside out, and makes it a hand puppet. And it does it with style and grotesquerie to spare. 

               The bad parts are a tendency to lose itself in its own language a little, some nods and name-checks that I didn't really think fit well, and the way it sort of feels too loose. Like it's trying to cover too much ground, or trying too hard to be like something else. But these are very minor nitpicks, and the book is a relentless, nasty, but still fantastic read. 

           This is a book people should be recommending, and if they are, this is a book people should recommend for many years. It'll stay with the people who read it, I guarantee.

The Great and Secret Show

"What would he write, anyway? I'm killing myself because I didn't get to be King of the World? Ridiculous."

In my line of work, epic novels tend to be a rare thing.

              Well, maybe not rare. But when you don't specifically do high fantasy or space SF, they become a rarer thing than most, and since this blog has more of an urban fantasy/strange horror/modern-day SF bent, they tend to be something I don't run across very often. On this blog alone, I can really only think of two actual epics I've done off the top of my head, those being Fool on the Hill and (in its own way) The Neverending Story. And when I find one, it's usually a book I enjoy more than anything in the world, a book I have to buy and re-read over and over again. Which is a nice segue to The Great and Secret Show.

             I found The Great and Secret Show in the library's fiction section about a month after reading The Thief of Always. The first time I'd tried to read it, I got disgusted by parts of it* and then bored by the rest, and went on to give Weaveworld a try instead, and Imajica, and then others**. However, later on in life, when I had decided maybe reading a chapter and a half of a book and tearing it down was maybe not giving it a fair enough shake*** and picked it up again. And maybe it was because I was reading it at an older age, or maybe because it was the first book in a proposed trilogy that actually had a second part, but I actually got through it and finished it that time. And wondered why I'd ever hated it in the first place. It intrigued me, drew me deeper, and made me wonder where it was all going to end. It was the rare kind of book that actually made me believe it was a question of if the forces of good would succeed, not how the forces of good would succeed. And it held my interest all the way to the end, too.

              The Great and Secret Show starts with a murder and a slow slide into insanity for one Randolph Jaffe, who stumbles upon the true inner workings of the universe while sitting in a dead-letter office at "the crossroads of everywhere". Jaffe becomes obsessed with finding a way to somehow harness these inner workings for himself, being a man of great motivation but little work ethic. After a brutal murder sends him away and off on his quest to harness reality, he meets a drugged-out scientist named Fletcher who, under duress, helps him work on a way to harness "The Art" used to work on the engines that govern our universe. 

And then things get weird.

             And I mean really weird. You see, in no time at all, two characters in the first section of the book are raised to near-divine status and start fighting it out over the United States for control of the forces that govern our reality, becoming Good Man Fletcher, and The Jaff, able to draw power and minions from dreams and reality. What follows is the stuff of myths as the angel and devil figures of our story fight it out in dreams, in the bodies and minds of the people of Palomo Grove, and finally in a realm beyond reality itself. But the forces of The Jaff and Fletcher may only be a small sample of a larger conflict, and as more and more is revealed, their fight may be a simple petty struggle in a war encompassing all of existence itself. 

           I think what I like most about the book is the fact that when you get through all the modern-day trappings and some of the horror-movie style tropes, the book is in fact an epic myth in its own way. A crazy epic myth, an epic myth that involves love, death, demonic possession-induced impregnation, demigods, a ghost army, incest, and a scene in which a man is forced to run for his life with a Giger-esque parasite clamped to his spine and eating him, but an epic myth nonetheless. It has tragedy, and heroes, and heroic journeys, and somehow never seems to really lose momentum. Barker has created an entire mythology in a single book, from the creation to the eventual final battle between good and evil, and while it's not tight or claustrophobic or fast-paced, it does the job amazingly well. 

         The plot moves along, unfolding new ideas about the world as it goes, and working in more and more characters, all of whom seem like they're supposed to be there, from audience-surrogate Nathan Grillo and his slightly better-connected partner Tesla Bombeck to Harry D'amour, a private detective who seems to find his way into and out of Clive Barker's work almost at will, and seems to be at the center of more and more paranormal events because of it****. Somehow, the plot manages to juggle a staggering amount of characters and plot elements without ever feeling too overstuffed, which is also a major plus. Even in its looser, less-together moments, the story still feels like it's in control and going somewhere, even if it's not clear exactly where somewhere is*****.

         The descriptions are also intensely detailed, but that's not really a surprise to anyone, especially when Clive Barker is known more for the films he directed (Hellraiser and Nightbreed) than his written work. The Jaff's "army", known as "terata", are fiendishly detailed and disgusting, though one wonders exactly what they have to do with the people themselves. Still, the descriptions are fantastic, allowing you to actually see the action and the horrifying monsters...even if they're repulsive beyond what I'd be able to describe here, and even if some of the events are a little unnerving. 

        And finally, the voice is also important. While there is more or less an omniscient narrator, he does keep a consistent voice for each character. Jaffe is terse, snappish, and often nasty prose. Fletcher takes a more unhinged, desperate, slightly clinical tone. Grillo's story sounds like the usual beleaguered reporter narrative, and D'amour (as befits a private detective) has a gritter, bleaker, Chandleresque tone (though delivered in the third-person, as the narrator does). The voice serves the narrative well, and when it starts to break apart, it's sad to see that it all sort of falls down the way it does.

         And that's the issue with the book. It breaks down. Barker does a great job of handling it all, of course, and the breakdown makes sense within the narrative, but when the last third of the book is wrested back by forces beyond the ones we've seen in the book thus far, leading to an ending that, while it makes sense, does kind of fracture the narrative somewhat, as the idea of "a bigger fish" is brought up, but isn't introduced in full force until then, making the entire struggle between the forces of good and evil seem, well, a little trivial, to be honest. Knowing that these titans are small does push the story into a kind of overdrive, but it completely sidelines the story we'd been following for the whole book.

          But that's a trivial point. This is an epic book, and not "epic" in the overused way we use the word now. It's about the forces of Good and Evil clashing over a small California town, it's brilliant in a way books need to be, and it manages to wrap itself up in a way that while having to salvage a breakdown in narrative, manages to tie up as many loose ends as it can while leaving bits here and there open. I own this book, and for a very good reason. Find this book. Read this book. Hell, buy this book. The Great and Secret Show is well worth the price of admission, possibly even more. It outdoes King's epics, it matches Gaiman (it may even outdo him, but that's a matter of opinion), and it's stood the test of the eight years since I've read it. Seriously, read the damn book already.

Next week: 
- The Town that Forgot how to Breathe

And sometime in the near future
- LARP 2012
- Batman Trilogy
- The Demi-Monde: Winter
- A return to Stephen Hunt with Secrets of the Fire Sea
- K.W. Jeter's Noir

And more to come




*In particular, the description of a character's breath as smelling like "a sick man's fart"
**...I'm not sure I actually found a Clive Barker book I could get through until I read Coldheart Canyon, though I could be wrong. His YA books and short stories are a little tighter, usually, from what I know.
***Or maybe I just wanted to read Everville, a mistake I'll get to at some point.
****The Scarlet Gospel, Clive. The Scarlet freaking Gospel! Where the hell is it?! I've only been waiting six bloody years.
*****You will not guess the ending. I'll try to get around it without spoiling it.