Review: The Little Paris Bookshop, Nina George

Oh, dear.

One of the hardest lessons for readers to learn is that not all books are written for people like you. And, when I encounter books that are very much not for people me, I try to dodge the question and say nice things about how well they would suit the kind of people for whom they were written. I will speak at length about how clever the writer was being, how the they really hit what they were going for here. I will say anything, anything to avoid communicating the deep sigh of boredom as I turned each page, the way my face arranged itself into an expression of wry resignation.

Look, I like books. I don't actually like saying nasty things about them. Still, with that in mind...

The Little Paris Bookshop is a novel that needs to be reviewed in two parts. The first regards its borderline magical realist premise - that the protagonist, one Jean Perdu, has the remarkable gift of being able to see into people's souls and thereby styles himself a 'literary apothacary' - prescribing appropriate fiction to suit the malaise of his customers. The second concerns Perdu's own journey, and is an intense and personal exploration of grief, healing, blame and love.

This second part basically tried to be this song, and didn't quite manage it:

I'm not saying it's bad, alright, just that it isn't as good or profound as it wants to be. Going for emotion, it fell into saccharine, trying for the slow gradient of healing, it just went on far too long. All the same, it was heartfelt and it did have some nice bits.

The first bit? Oh. The first bit.

Yes.

I fully agree with the premise that books are magic. I am on board utterly with the way they can heal us, move us, create us. To a great extent, I'm a person who has built myself from books; every experience in my life has had invisible hands holding mine, friends and enemies walking alongside me. Whether I am grieving, healing or changing, they have given me support, comfort, medicine.

But that is only a fraction of the magic of which books are capable.

The best books I have read had ripped me apart and left me to reconfigure the shattered, bloody pieces. The best books I have read have set me aflame, have argued with me, left me sleepless and wrangling with myself. These were not cures, they were crises, challenges. Books should not, art should not 'soothe our souls' - or not solely.

Perdu's literary apothacary, with its tender coddling of the sweeter side of human nature, deeply troubles me. He administers books like a sedatives, or as a course of treatment to send a life back along its correct course - a course which is parternalist, conservative and tends towards comfort over ecstacy, 'self-care' over revolution.

Furthermore, Perdu is a purest. He insists that there is a 'right' way to read to get the best effect, that gluttons like me who tear through novels at breakneck speed, high on literary thrills, are missing the point entirely. Yet, despite this, the 'cures' suggested in the novel (and the appendices) are exercises in critical laziness. However 'tongue-in-cheek' the intention, it is a model which situates readers as the passive recipients of the 'medication' - one does not argue with the writer, one merely absorbs. It is not possible that these books can cause anything other than readerly submission to authorial intent. Moreover, the authorial intent which is assumed is the kind that can only arise from a shallow, unquestioning appraisal of the text. Take this example: 

Pullman, Philip. His Dark Materials trilogy.
For those who occasionally hear imaginary voices and believe they have an animal soulmate.

'kay.

... did we... did we even read the same books? Why even include it if that's the best you can do? To get even so far as the barest surface reading, how about, "For those who prone to blind obedience to ideological causes"? or, "For children with a tendency to lionise the adults in their life"? Or even, "For those lacking faith in their own strength."

To suggest that books are solely designed for comfort, solace and escapism is to shut down the real worth of reading - that it allows us to imagine better worlds, that it permits us to see what is wrong with our own. Reading is dangerous - that's why facists burn books.

So, if Perdu's motives are suspect, his methods are rank with snobbery - he gives an elderly neighbour craving a disposible bonk buster The Picture of Dorian Grey, which - while yes, racy, sexy and as glorious as hell - is a book of such ambiguous, delicious poison that I would be very careful to whom I recommended it.

Actually, the more I think about that example, the more sinister it seems to me.

Yes. So, can I say anything nice about this one?

Alright: in among all the eye-rolling, the tedium and the fact that, Jesus Christ, why are there no women in this book who aren't just shining beacons to guide the men, there's actually a nice little bit on nascent polyamory. It's never called by that name, and it gets lost among an awful lot of heteronormative glowing love-sex suggesting that the reality of our gender identity is directly proportional to the state of arousal of our genitals. (Seriously, if I never read that snogging someone and getting a hard on makes someone 'a man again', that will be quite soon enough). All the same: there it is.

Manon, Perdu's ethereal-manic-pixie- extraordinare, is a woman who seems quite capable of loving more than one person and making it work for herself. When she finds two men she actually loves, she even wants to introduce them, hoping the three of them can be friends, that they can lay altogether the sense of rivalry, jealously, the expectation that this must be a case of either-or. In a book that is so conservative and unchallenging in almost every other way, catching just a tatter of radical pragmatism is something like a jewel glimpsed briefly in the gutter as you're nodding off at the end of a long, awful day.

I'm quite alright to leave it there - it wasn't meant for me - but it might just catch someone with a glance, a bright edge, a possibility that may just help them. And that, Nina George, is how fiction cures people. By serendipity.

Review: The Talisman, Jonathan Aycliffe

I've been on a bit of a horror bender lately. Not going to stop any time soon. So, once again, courtesy of the glorious local library we have The Talisman by Jonathan Aycliffe, a book which is in equal parts M R James, H P Lovecraft and ... the Omen.

What seems to be one of Aycliffe's quirks as a writer is to write a little note introducing his novels to long time readers. These notes are conversational, endearing and really quite bewildering to someone who has only stumbled upon his work recently. The one that prefaces The Talisman warns that his publisher suggested he try to caputre a slightly younger audience, so it might be a bit different to his other work.

Now, I admit that when this was first published, although I was indeed still in the literary equivalent of short trousers, I probably wasn't the 'younger audience' to whom he was pitching, however I have to ask: this novel is about Tom - a middle aged museum employee and academic - attempting to protect his adoptive son and disabled wife from the nefarious influence an ancient Mesopotamian artifact. The plot takes us to Iraq, the British Museum, and the hell that is organising a small child's birthday party.

What kind of younger audience was he trying to capture?

That said, I loved this book. It was a perfectly well constructed, effective horror novel. The stakes were just right, the air of foreboding impressive. It would make a fabulous television - maybe a BBC adaptation featuring one of their less-cheekboney male stars and released in time for the doldrums of the Christmas holidays.

Yes, the appearance of a token spiritual Sufi character was perhaps not as well handled as it could have been, and one must ask if the premise of 'ancient evil from dread temple in Old Babylon' is perhaps a trope that we could do without, but in terms of story - and indeed, research - Aycliffe acquits himself well. It doesn't surprise me to learn he's well qualified in Persian, Arabic and Islamic studies.

What's more, his portrayal of Nicola's blindness was quite refreshing. Aycliffe's narration deals quite pragmatically with the adjustments that need to be made to one's life to cope with long-term disability, and the frustrations often attentdent upon it, without ever undermining her intelligence and independence. Aycliffe even plays upon society's ableism in the reactions surrounding Nicola's pregnancy. Not being disabled myself, I can't comment on the precise pros and cons of the way it was handled, but it felt both realist and sympathetic, and that was a really nice touch.

That said, this isn't a world shattering novel, or even one I'll revisit very often. It was merely a well put together and very enjoyable piece of horror - and there's nothing at all wrong with that.

Review: Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

I've been reading a fair few children's books lately as a means of keeping a half-eye out for things the Sprogs are going to enjoy in a few years. (Yes, my children are both unrepentent bookworms. Are you surprised?)

It's a bit of an odd sensation, tbh, reading by proxy in this way. One of the reasons I moved away from children's books was because they weren't exactly satisfying me. When I found one I enjoyed, even loved, there was always the creeping disappointment of wanting more - more rigour, more darkness and emotional insight. Now that I'm not merely reading for myself, it feels as though I'm looking with two sets of eyes, one pair belonging to a jaded adult, and one pair that are trying to reconstruct how this story might have made me feel then. 

Take Meggie, for example, Inkheart's protagonist and an archetypal 'good kid'. As an adult, I find her and her worldview more than a touch saccharine. Sure, you root for her, but you wish she'd have a dash more ruthlessness and pragmatism. She's like a butterfly guaranteed to get her wings crushed.

As a child, I would have loved her.

Likewise, Capricorn lacks the ugliness I would expect from a truly impressive villain. Sure, he's monstrous and capable of some supremely cruel acts - but most of these are merely hinted at, contained within the back story. The specific evils he commits seem a little lacklustre in human terms -  and there is very little real sense of his victims to give threat to the protagonists. As someone who binged A Song of Ice and Fire last year, I can assure you: Gregor Clegane he is not.

Well, of course he's bloody not. THIS IS A CHILDREN'S BOOK, ALYS.

See what I mean?

Once I can get past that weirdness, it's quite an astonishingly adult read. I've read some of Funke's other works and I'm always impressed by how utterly ruthless and forthright she can be in many ways. In Inkheart you have a motherless child who is dispassionate about her father's wild hunger to save his wife, a mercenary who made himself a monster to gain approval from an abusive father figure, an older woman who has been stunted by her parent's inattention. Without ever slipping from the warm, slightly reassuring prose of a children's adventure novel, Funke lifts a stone on a whole world of human pain and darkness. Her touch is incredibly light, letting naïve readers slip over some of her finest work - the ugliness of the adult world and complexity of the human character.

More than that, she holds her compassion intact. Writers are murderous bastards, after all, much known to cackle over the demise of their most beloved characters. But by blending the real and the fictional in the way that she does in this novel, Funke over-writes the the blasé attitude some of us have towards fictional death. The conceit of the novel helps with this - sure, the death scene was a real tear-jerker, you were very proud of it. Now look into the eyes of the character you wrote out, and explain it to him.

As such, there is a real integrity to the relative gentleness of the novel. By heightening the internal stakes in the way she does, there is less need for the death and mayhem that other writers use - the threat of it is enough. If an adult reader is left unconvinced that there was ever any real threat, that seriousness of her writing makes it clear that this decision is not one she took lightly. That if she choses to kill a character, believe me, she will do it.

And it will devastate you.

Sympathy and Consent: The problems of vampire love

The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion.... In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. -Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

"Resembling?"

I remember reading it the first time. I put down the book, stared up, frowning at the ceiling (light green, artex. My adolescent bedroom), rubbing the tattered paper of the spine.

"Resembling?"

After all, I was a Buffy fan, had seen enough of Angel's brooding, heard Spike's immortal line:

I wasn't surprised to find the idea of vampiric obsession, the idea that vampires were capable of strong, even affectionate, emotion towards humans and each other - what bothered me was the line being drawn. "Resembling."

The affection Carmilla has for the narrator is evident, her passion clear - why, then, the reluctance to call it by it's name?

Dracula, too, is charged with an inability to love, and answers, "Yes, I too can love. You yourselves can tell it from the past." What's more, the person accusing him is one his 'wives' - another vampire, suggesting that love is valued by the Undead, that Dracula's lack of it is an aberration. However, context is important; the 'love' to which the wives are refering involves eating the object of their desire. What's more, Dracula counters their criticism by claiming that he had once loved them in the same fashion - three women whom he seems to ignore when he isn't indulging them with a baby-in-a-bag, women he is in the process of abandoning.

The Dracula we see in the novel is alone, almost tragically so.

Vampiric love, then, is one which it is difficult to seperate from appetite, from death. After all, Carmilla talks of love and passion without reservation, but it is clear she means something a lot less sanitary than chocolate boxes and billet doux. She recalls "a cruel love - strange love, that would have taken my life," believes, "Love will have its sacrifices." Even in Buffy (which was my teen-relationship textbook) vampire romance is never healthy - there's Angel's painful impossible love of Buffy; there's  Spike and his glorious, dysfunctional infatuation with Dru; and there's Dru swooning over Angelus, the monster who drove her insane.

Perhaps that's what Le Fanu was getting at - we can recognise the strength of the feeling, its passion, its realness - but ultimately it either fickle, self-serving, or destructive. It is not a wholesome, it offers no support or strength, can only kill one or both parties. Although similar to love in many ways, it cannot be love because, by definition, its focus, its practicioners are perverse.

Transgression, Perversity and Otherness:

Hmmm. Yes.

Hopefully it is news to no-one that vampires are often used as a sexual metaphor. However, the sex they represent is seldom normative, sanctioned sexuality - monogamous, heterosexual, vanilla, and focused on reproduction. Vampires are used to explore Otherness, and one way to do that is to present them as sexually 'transgressive'. This holds true, even at a surface reading: Carmilla is a lesbian, Spike a male submissive, Dracula a bigamous foreigner. If I started to list the gay vampires out there, we would be here all day.

And one of the ways that Othering dehumanises a figure is to present their emotions and reactions as deviant, immature, perverse. Because they are different to us, because they are 'less' than us, their emotions and motivations can never be as real, important, or respectable as the feelings of mainstream groups.

So just an Other cannot be forthright, but rather is shrill or beligerant, what they believe to be love is not really love. It is merely lust, infatuation, obessession. Their relationships are perversions and inverstions of the ones that 'we' practice, the 'real' relationships. When they run against us, their attentions are clinging, embarrasing, unwelcome. Their influence is corrupting by default.

Yes, this fits the metaphor of vampirism rather nicely, doesn't it?

And metaphors are powerful. If these stories show, over and again, that the only 'right' love is male-dominated, heterosexual monogamy, then anything which falls outside of that, which is represented by vampires, is dangerous, evil, corrupt.

And, like many things didactic moralists preach against, it also looks kinda fun.

Take me away from all this death.

"Make me into one too," said the boy. "Please? I want to be one. I want to walk the night with you and fall in love and drink blood. Kill me. Make me into a vampire too. Bite me. Take me with you." - Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls

 Oh, who hasn't at least thought about it? About being eternally beautiful, unbreakable, strong?

Sympathy for the vampire is not an uncommon reading, or indeed response to the genre, and the reaction against such sympathy it is always strong, morally guided and didactic.It's well known that the British Board of Film Classification pushed for censorship of Hammer's vampire films because of the sexual element of the biting scenes, especially Mina's almost gleeful acceptance of Dracula's advances.

Even today, there are no shortage of people who seem to want to drag vampirism back into the realms of 'good, clean horror'. But these currents have always been there. The real power of vampirism is neither in its desirability, nor its horror, but in the ambivalence it raises. As the narrator of Carmilla says:

In these mysterious moods, I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her... but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrance. - Carmilla

We are aware of the moral failings of vampires, even as we are drawn to them. They may be tragic and lovely, but they cannot be saved.

Something in him ached for that boy. For the sadness in his face, for his eyes yearning to stay young. He wanted to grab Nothing away from his companions and tell him that sometimes, everything could be all right, that pain did not have to come with magic, that childhood never had to end. And yet he wondered whether Nothing had not known all those things when he made his choice.  - Lost Souls

Writers do fascinating gymnastics to navigate this problem, but ultimately, it will always be as Carmilla says, "I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so." It is a mad love, is amour fou - another thing which is belittled, mocked, denegrated. It is another thing that is often described as not 'really' being love, only 'resembling' it.

But, oh, it is so very real, and so very tempting. It is a love which transgressive, morally ambivalent, one that can bring with it an entire world of pain. And many vampire writers chase so hard after it, trying to bring it to a happy ending. But tidying away its danger, its nastiness, its utter disregard of morality, it is very difficult to maintain its white-hot intensity. If a vampire is prepared to call your father, 'sir' and wait until marriage, passion can hardly be consuming him that badly, right?

Well, maybe. There is such a thing as self-control. And, after all, Le Fanu speaks of an "artful courtship" of longing for "something like sympathy and consent"?

Take me away from all this death!

That "like" again.


The Boundaries of Metaphor, the Limits of Consent:
 

As mentioned above, the sympathy is easy. It's the heart of the vampire's allure, after all. It is precisely that balance of attraction and disgust. The idea that something about you is being admitted that you would never have owned before. It is about a sense of transgression, of non-normativity. It's about self discovery - and the ensuing shame, ambivalence, emergence.

The reinvention of the vampire as a romantic hero comes from that longing, that desire to put away all the weakness and uncertainty, to have your secret desires unfolded, to be lifted up on a love that is actually forever. So, of course it appeals, it is so tempting to leave it at that. 

But consent? Oh, how on earth do do we negotiate the morality of this?

After all, this is not coming out or getting laid. It's not asking your partner to spank you: we are talking about a vampire. This is someone who kills humans in order to live. So, yeah, you might sympathise, but that won't stop you reaching for the stakes and the communian wafer.

Besides, even if it didn't, can a word like consent actually be used in these circusmtances? The watchword of the BDSM community is SSC - safe, sane and consensual - and if consent is the most discussed, it does not exist in isolation. The three are interdependent - without consent and safety, it cannot be sane; without consent and sanity, it is not safe; without safety and sanity you cannot be said to have consented.

Also, legally, certain things are out of bounds, no matter how much you might want someone to do them to you. Being eaten, for example.

How can vampire romance ever be unproblematic?

So people tidy things up. They removed the Otherness of vampires,  stop them being killers, make them just humans with better hair and super-strength. But this overlooks the power of that Otherness, the importance of vampire mythos to groups who have been Othered, told their desires are dirty, immoral, or just worthy of mockery.

Contemporary vampire novels are frequently queer, or kinky, or else the dream relationships of lonely women of various ages*. To love a vampire is to desire to turn outsider status in to the ultimate in-group, to rewrite loneliness and frustration in to endless pleasure, to cast off low self-esteem nd find body confidence, beauty and sexual agency.

So we write stories where there are 'good' vampires, where they have souls and don't eat humans, and it becomes all about the metaphor. These are good people, just like us, facing unfair discrimination. The fact they must live in secrecy is unjust. The huge taboo surrounding vampire love is misguided.

However, as an idea of 'devaint love reclaimed as permissible', vampirism is a flawed model. To be able to embrace it wholeheartedly involves tidying away the ugliness, the whole vampire bit of vampirism. Female sexual agency isn't actually fatal, and lesbianism is does not cause aneamia. There is a lacuna between the metaphorical truth of vampirism-as-sexuality and its narrative reality. A young queer person may be justified in feeling that coming out will get them treated like a monster - it happens far too often - but they will never become one. Kinky sex (or, honestly, just sex) may feel dangerous, furtive and transgressive - but it should never actually be so.

Vampirism is. Its whole draw is the idea of being wanted so badly by someone that they will devour you. But this isn't a brutal slash and hack job - it is tender, loving, slow. It is romantic, sensuous, arousing.

And it will kill you.

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* Mine is, arguably, all three. 

Review: Lost Boy, Lost Girl - Peter Straub

I do like a bit of Peter Straub. His books have a kind of freshness and intelligence that I enjoy seeing in horror novels. Although dealing with the classic tropes, there's a deep humanity that keeps them clinging in your head, somewhere in the back. Even years after reading them, I'll sit up with a shudder, suddenly remembering a line of his description, a scene he painted, the angle of light you imagined in a house he described.

He's one of those writers who you need to read a couple of times to get in to the heart of his books - you'll skittle along on a surface reading, maybe unaware of the cloudy, terrible depths beneath you. But the depths are there all the same, and they're very dark.

 So, Lost Boy, Lost Girl - for those of you familiar with Straub's work, it's a Millhaven novel (for those of you who aren't, don't worry) and it gains a lot of power from the inhabiting that liminal space between human horror and supernatural horror which Straub always exploits so well. It's good, very good, and generally, I have to recommend it to readers with a strong stomach and a taste for the disturbing.

Something which caught me about it, though, is that it felt a very American novel. I'm not saying this as a criticism of any kind. It's not to say, either, that his other works lack a sense of a specific place. It is rather that the horror he explores elsewhere has a universal, almost antique, feel. You can taste the air of the place the horror it occurs, but the horror itself could find you where ever you stood. The places, too, have a parallel to places I have been - the location is very specific, but it is not specifically American.

Lost Boy, Lost Girl could be set nowhere else. The basis of the plot revolves around the gridlike street structure of American towns. The relationships are defined by the landscape in which they are set; the concerns of the characters, their demographics, even their physical interactions with each other seem defined by the very American-ness of the setting. As I say, this isn't a criticism, nor  does he present  a generic, airbrushed Hollywood America that someone from this side of the pond will know from imported sitcoms and teen movies. No, it felt very genuine, but it brought a pronounced sense of foreigness, almost an exoticism, that made the whole experience a little unreal and defamiliarising.

This was only heightened by the somewhat American concerns of the novel. This is not vampires, or black magic, not an imported horror. No, it exists in a area between urban legend and historical fact that seems uniquely American: fascination with the serial killer. America does not have the monopoly on murder, or even on sadistic mass murderers - but it is only in America that they seem to hold that kind mythic cachet. As the Corinthian says:

Almost, however, this specificity gave the book its power to unsettle, upset and captivate. It ran headlong into the promise of the American dream, and the darknesses beneath it. Anyway. Very good. One for horror fans.

Thunder in her Veins - the sacredness of geekdom

Some bits of childhood never do make sense.

Look: I grew up in a village with an unreliable bus service and two shops - that became one shop, and then none, and that's where it's settled. It was the sort of place where there were enough people who wore petticoats for the expression "Charlie's dead" to be part of my childhood lexicon. My elder sister was the first - the only - girl on the school's football team. It was a place where 'comic' meant the Dandy and the Beano, or - if you were really lucky - an old copy of Bunty*.

So how I ever came to read Marvel's Thor line is something of a mystery to me. I think I had a Spiderman annual once, and there was the X Men and the Fantastic Four on telly on a Saturday morning, but… Thor? Seriously? I might have been able to get it at the comic book store in the nearest town (seven miles and, apparently, a twenty year timeslip away) but, well, I always knew places like that weren't made for people like me**.

All the same, Thor I did read. A fair few, actually. Mostly the early ones, with Donald Blake in them. I remember being caught by something about them - the disabled man whose vocation was easing others' pain, his walking stick actually the hammer Mjolnir. I still can't really express why, but something about them felt very beautiful, very true.  Maybe it was the overtones of the Fisher King? Maybe it was just the myth connection.

Because I was a myth junkie, devouring folklore and fairytale. If a story was old and epic and glorious, then it was my kind of story. I grinned at the pranks of tricksters, railed at monsters, wept for Prometheus chained to his rock. Raised as both an Anglican and a Baptist (don't ask) I was used to God being male, ineffably right and absorbingly loving. My contact with the grim, problematic stories of the Bible was one sanitised by a Sunday school framing which repackaged them into a reassuring scholasticism where faith (read:goodness) was rewarded, and the wicked (read: unbelievers) were punished.

Noble failure...

Myths weren't like that. In myths, all bets were off. And that made for grandeur and for tragedy. It made for fatal flaws and noble failure. It made for Gods who were tricksy, passionate, even petty. They could be deceived, could deceive. They could be wrong. 

And yet despite all that, they were honourable, powerful, righteous.

It's probably fair to say that I found myself through reading Norse legends. Yes, I was too young, too uncertain, to call it 'faith', yet all the same something in me ran to those myths with a more intuitive open-heartedness than my parents' religion could ever call from me. More, they seemed to understand me. I craved them, the way you crave salt when dehydrated: dread, beautiful Freyja; bright, lost Baldur; Loki - quick, cunning, dangerous; and Thor.

Of course, Thor.

I always feel faintly ridiculous using the word 'sacrilege' in anything other than ironic hyperbole. All the same, there does need to be a word for that hurt that is located somewhere against your heart, behind your ribs, when the things you hold sacred are treated slightingly. As a Pagan who honours certain Norse deities, there is something wrong in seeing the stark, terrible beauty of your mythic landscape re-envisaged into slick, commercial print, complete with hulking villains and so. much. spandex.

Thus it was that, for years, I was embarrassed by the association. Marvel's Thor was not my Thor, their Odin not my AllFather. Drawing that distinction was important, remains important still. But scorning the former overlooks something vital, something powerful, something old. The memory of it came back to me with the release of the MCU film. A sense of struggle, of soaring glory, of a rightness at the very base of something. And, yes, it was more slickly packaged, and sexier than a fireside story about Sir Gawain, but it spoke of something grandiose and sweeping on that same, gut-deep level.

Something sweeping and grandiose

People tend to associate the numinous with a sense of peace, of silent wonder, but sometimes it is more a sense of your heart being pried apart with grinning exuberance. Sometimes, it is that twisting, cathartic need that comes with the raunchiest choruses of folksong, the catchiest reels of the Morris. Sometimes it was what we feel when we hear stories about heroes, about people in extremity, about villains we love to hate, and sometimes just love, despite ourselves.

And that feeling is sacred. Some narratives speak to something deep in us, something more real than anything we enounter in our daily lives.When they are slighted, undermined, mocked, we feel that little wince that cries out 'sacrilege!'. It is one of the reasons why feelings are running so high around this 'Hydra Cap' debacle. Some heroes should be held high, above baseness, above the taint of cynicism.

Yet, collectively, we disown these stories. Heroism, self-sacrifice, betrayal, need - the bright, bold colours of traditional stories - are things we insist upon shutting out as we become 'grown-up', 'critical', 'literary'. But these things are still nestled in us, occupying a space in what I can only call our soul.

My engagement with this comic was not adult. It was not smooth, questioning, probing. It was not the 'refined' tastes that I have spent years cultivating. No. It was the wild joy that got me into stories in the first place. It made me air punch, made me grin, made me arch my feet and press my eyes together. I cared from a place of total, unironic absorpsion. I felt this book, felt the way I once felt as I tore around the playground pretending to be the Human Torch.

(Flame on!)

But, as such, an actual review is beyond me. Is Mighty Thor: Volume 7 great art? Will it change the shape of Literature as we know it?

Is the story any good, even? Should you read it?

I have no fucking clue. Sorry.

Also: Malekith the Accursed - just too FABULOUS for your morality.

There are some books out there that make you realise the futility of reviewing books, that make you see there is no helpful, universal rubric to define whether something is worthwhile. Yes, you can analyse craft and effect and technique, but sometimes a story speaks to something that is too pronounced and personal, its power over you too great to allow you to reach for your wonted pose of critical objectivity.

I have to admit that, while I tend to enjoy what I read, I'm not especially immersed in Marvel 616 stuff. As an adult reader, it's rare they provide me with more than an entertaining stopping post for an insatiable bookworm. Mighty Thor: Thunder in Her Veins went so far beyond that faint praise that there is no comparison - but those feelings are so subjective that I cannot extend to any of you.

As such, I really can't recommend it. Do you like stories about honour and righteousness, about family and longing, about war and good and evil, and some things that you just can't categorise? Then maybe read it. You might get something from it.

But, while we're on the subject of recommenations, what I have to say is that  it isn't really this comic you need to read. No. Don't seek out a specific story or book, don't listen to anything else. Instead, shrug off your irony. Ignore the cheap, headline grabbing shots, the 'risky' takes appealing to the part of you that wants to tarnish and tear down.

No. Reach into your heart and find those embarrasing remnants of unmitigated joy - however commerical, low brow or melodramatic they may be. Find your heroes - your glorious and impossible heroes - and cling to them. Celebrate them.

We are readers. We are better than that.

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*What? The stories were better.
** Shout out to 'The Grinning Demon' and 'Whatever Comics' of Maidstone, which (when I finally plucked up the courage to slip inside) were absolutely lovely. But you know what I meant.

Review: Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? By Paul Cornell

YES!

I've raved a bit about the Shadow Police before, and have been waiting for this sequel for a good old while. The earlier books are bloody good. This is... It's… Well, it's more or less flawless, actually.

I try not to give too many flat out, positive reviews, try to pick out the problems in the book, the failings, because otherwise this blog just turns into a long episode of me going YAAAAY! BOOOOOKS! But sometimes, it's justified.

Cornell is a writer of rare talent and compassion, and in Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? the concept of The Shadow Police finally fulfils the promise of the first two books. Opening it, I was lost, captured entirely. The unevenness of the shock-brutality that could be seen to mar London Falling has been replaced by a creeping weight of horror, a sense of real struggle and danger. The possibly-too-fast pace of The Severed Streets has levelled out in to the gripping, but measured, almost painful intensity of the plot.

DI Quil and his team are still breakable, still wounded, and Gods, the stakes are as terrifyingly high as every they were, but in Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? there is a sense of movement that The Severed Streets did not have. There is a touch of playfulness. A sense of hope.

That does not mean terrible things do not happen - none of the Shadow Police books are for the faint hearted - but balancing the horror, there is as good an old-fashioned mystery as the title demands. Honestly, I could laud this book all day. From Cornell's creation of a magic beneath London - which feels less like invention, and more like channelling - to the pitch perfect emotional beats, it is a triumph and an utter delight to read.

If, however, you forced me to level one criticism, it would simply be that it is a little crowded. With five fully realised central characters and their relationships, one gnarly mystery and the overarching plot of the Smiling Man, there is an awful lot to fit in to 350 odd pages. It is intense to read, and the sheer quantity of information the reader is presented with is overwhelming. Cornell handles it admirably, and I honestly think that goes to make up some of the richness of the book, but it is somewhat full on.

So, clear your weekend before attempting it, because you won't be putting it down