Review: The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School

Yes. Yesssssssssssss.

Oh, my blog was having its hiatus when the last one of these came out. The one where I bought half a dozen copies, gave them to all of my friends for Christmas and went, "Look, look! IT'S US!"

So: Did you go to a single sex school? Did you fucking hate it? Or, did you love it, but find yourself the 'red headed stepchild' all the same? Are you still mates with some of the weirdos you met there?
 
Okay. You need to read Drearcliff Grange. 

How to describe this? Superpowers and eldritch abominations at St Trinians? Rip-roaring adventures, jolly hockeysticks, defeating facism, and overcooked swede? These books are nuts and it's fucking marvellous. Newman is the King of Pastiche and he owns this totally.

I need to calm down.

The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School is the second in the Drearcliff series, and expands both the world and the themes that Newman developed in the first novel. It suffers a little from being a transitional piece between the self-contained first book, and the wider series - but it is still an immensely satisfying read. Moreover, Newman addresses that aspect of it thematically, taking Amy, Frecks, Kali, and Emma from the plucky girlhood and simple moralities of The Mysteries... to a adolescence, and a reappraisal of what it is to be a hero.

Certainties are challenged, characters change, and we explore the awkward ground between the broken and the malevolent, balance law agaisnt lawlessness, explore the dangers of privilege, the worth of trust, and the harm that can be done by the simplest of actions. At the heart of the novel is Amy, whose role as the benevolent Kentish Glory is reconsidered as she wonders if she might not do better as the more terrible Death's Head Hawkmoth.

Of course, its all terribly referential, both to adjacent literary worlds and Newman's other works, but that's all part of the fun. If that isn't your sort of thing then... honestly, you might want to find another book review blog.

More seriously, Newman's great strength as a writer is that he manages to drop every name under the sun without ever detracting from the story he is telling at that moment, and this book carries off that trick admirably. An absolute joy.

I loved it so much, I did cosplay.

Review: The Quorum by Kim Newman

Aaaah. Nobody does nasty like Newman.

Meet Derek Leech, a less-than-sly stab at Murdoch type press barons, who oozes from the Thames like an eldritch entity slipping through the gaps between worlds. Able to read the future, he harnesses pain to his own ends, building a media empirein London's Docklands. To fuel this, he promises three teenagers the fulfilment of their youthful dreams if they begin an annual campaign against Neil Martin, the absent member of their clique. Between New Year's Day and Valentine's Day, they pool their efforts to destroy his life further each year, ensuring their own success.

Enter Sally Rhodes, P.I. and single mother, paid by one of the group to keep an eye on Neil before New Year's Eve. With this, the stage is set for a deal-with-the-Devil, black magic thriller.

This is not what Newman delivers.

I admit to being something of a fangirl, and will cheerfully say this is the most uncomfortable of Newman's books that I've read. I also suspect it will probably be one of those I reread the most. Like his short stories, this is one that slips into your head and twists, not letting you escape. While his social commentary is more subtle here than in his other works (more reminiscent of An English Ghost Story than things like Bad Dreams) its views the political through the personal, dealing not with global movements, but human nature.

Because, in The Quorum, Leech is a liminal figure and the focus is less upon ruthless, captitalist bastards, as amusing, geeky artists. Michael, Mark and Mickey are all flawed, selfish, prejudiced, but they are familiar. Worse, they are horribly, fascinatingly, likeable (although I struggled a bit with Mickey.) Meeting at school, they are outcasts who revel in their strangeness and make it serve them. Their conversations are clever, full of references dropped and running jokes about the world that is agaisnt them. They put on anarachic am-dram productions and play life-or-death boardgames that are far more relevant to them than the real world. Even into adulthood, quickly revert to their old bantering style.

As a member of a similar clique myself, I sympathised, I empathised. Knowing how hard it is to succeed in creative industries, I wished them well. Even their early pranks had an air of playfulness to them, of the score settling contemplated on a lazy afternoon as friends egg each other on to ever greater excesses. I've never really taken revenge, or played a cruel trick, but, oh, the plans I have laid.

Then, of course, you remember. Then you look at Neil, scraping by in a pitful, wounded life, paying for their success.

No-one does nasty like Newman.

(Also in the edition are a series of short stories featuring the characters from the novel in very different worlds and situations. They are like little hooks in the mind, small nightmares to keep you awake, the sort of jokes that have you cracking up even as you scream, "I should not be laughing at that!" I've always been very fond of Newman's shorter fiction.)

Review: An English Ghost Story, Kim Newman

More in the mood of Jago than the Anno Dracula books, An English Ghost Story sees us returned to the West Country as the wonderfully named Naremores flee city life, attempting to escape the tensions and neuroses that almost destroyed them. Coming to the idyllic Hollow, they begin to rebuild their relationships, aided by the strange, magical atmosphere of the house. Yet, as they grow closer and more confident in their magical surroundings, things take a rather more sinister turn.
First things; this book is addictive. Newman is a master of pace, and An English Ghost Story has a real nightmarish intensity. It sneaks into your head, making a world both treacherous and real. What's more, as one would hope from the title, it is very English. The first 'movement' as the family discover and fall in love with the Hollow captured all the wonder and mystery of an ancient house, and succeeded in being distinctly eerie without ever being openly menacing or distractingly twee. For me, it recalled Lucy M Boston's Green Knowe series, where fear was balanced with magic, so that a child reader suffered anxiety as to the benevolent intentions of the house's other inhabitants,whilst feeling cared for and protected by the narrative - and indeed the house - itself. Newman taps into this vein of national consciousness, conveying the confidence which the protagonists have in their story, whilst our more adult awareness renders their hopefulness creepy in the extreme.

However, as the novel moves into its second and third phases this slow build of anxiety, this hat-tip to the traditional ghost story, is dispelled by Newman's trademark focus on characters, and the self-destructive tendencies of the human mind. The drama leaves the dream-house itself and refocuses upon the hell apparent in the human mind. This section has all of the strengths and weaknesses of Newman's work; his characters are alive, brilliantly realised and compelling. However, the text is at times difficult to follow, the sudden changes of mood and behaviour a little jarring. There is madness here, and it is powerfully portrayed, but sometimes off-putting.

As I would have expected it is also gloriously nasty. This is not going to be everybody's thing, but I found some laugh out loud moments, as well as a couple of sly jokes that were at once hilarious and devastating. Artfully gruesome, Newman takes no prisoners with either his prose or his themes. His characters are not especially likeable. They are (to quote another novel) strugglers rather than saints. Jordan is the best of the bunch, but she is still a teenage girl with all that entails. Speaking of characters, there is at least one familiar face - as I would expect - but in a much more minor role than in many of Newman's other cross-novel references.

If I had any major complaints, they would be structural. While it hangs together better than last year's Johnny Alucard and is more cohesive than Jago, the different sections of the book don't always gel perfectly, and the reader is at times bombarded by with information, subjectivity and events. Things leap and lurch in places, the p.o.v. and narrative focus shifting as often as the territory inside the characters' minds. I feel like I need to give it a careful rereading, which for me is a plus, but might be annoying for others. The ending, which obviously I won't spoil, left me uneasy - but I'm not entirely sure as to why.

Generally, though, yes. A quick, affecting and occasionally vicious novel about the flexibility of identity, about the roles we play and the ways they can control and destroy us. A fabulous read for Hallowe'en - just as I expected it to be.

What I've Been Reading: The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt and Bad Dreams, Kim Newman

It appears there has been some controversy about this month's book group selection. No, not the more interesting kind of controversy where people get very shouty and use words like 'immorality', more the sarcastic and passive-aggressive controversy that confines itself to the literary establishment. If you yawned and missed it:

While some heralded The Goldfinch as the literary smash hit of last year, it has left some member of the ancien regime rather less convinced. For the hardline snobs, the novel is "further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture", it is a simplistic, hackneyed, unremarkable book. It lacks that certain special something (*ting*) which separates popularist, middle-brow, genre-dross from Art.

And, well, high handed and out-of-touch as such a condemnation might be... I kind of agree with them.

Don't get me wrong, The Goldfinch isn't a bad book. I quite enjoyed parts of it, even though it wasn't really my thing. Yet, while I don't think any less you if you found it one of those worldbendingly fabulous novels that reaches inside your head and rearranges things, it failed to satisfy. To damn it with faint praise, it was okay. Readable, but not compelling; the characters weren't uninteresting, but it never moved me. It was probably a bit longer than it needed to be. It was a little predictable.

You see, here's the thing that I and the head-in-fundament, genre defying Literary types have in common; we don't always feel books should have a payload, a message, a reveal. We know that plot, that compulsive readability is not the mark of quality. We know that sometimes artistry, or exquisite craftspersonship, can be an end in itself. They just make the mistake of assuming a marker of this is slavish realism.

The Goldfinch falls into the rather sizeable crack between our world-views. In terms of 'Art', of Literarty accomplishment, it is lacking. Its subtext is swamped by plot before being finally hammered out in tedious exposition. It slots together too neatly for a literary novel, but for a genre novel the plot is insufficiently realised to make this moment like the pleasing assembly of jigsaw pieces. It felt a little careless, gave the impression of a writer with literary spurs genre-slumming. It missed on both counts.

And here comes the sting, you see, because so many of my favourite authors have been doing what this book attempts for years, without being given the mainstream legitimacy that Tartt takes for granted. If The Goldfinch is neither fish nor fowl, then the works of John Crowley, Poppy Z. Brite and Robert Holdstock (to name but three) are glorious chimeras. Yet, outside of genre circles, you don't see their work heralded as 'Book of the Year'.

Okay, that turned into something of a rant. Now, for something shorter, sharper and sweeter, if - to pinch a metaphor - a peach on the brink of rotting can be called sweet. Genre time, and that genre is horror of the finest, gross-out variety.

 Published in 1990, Bad Dreams isn't a Newman novel I'd encountered before, and while parts of it have dated somewhat, much of it is depressingly relevant. An indictment of the '80s establishment and its exploitative denizens, much of it will seem familiar to those who've read Newman's other work - vampiric entities, left-wing principles, pop culture and vicious satire. Some of the names used appear in later novels, too, (notably, Jago) and the character of Anna Nielson channels both Geneviève and Katie Reed. While it isn't as accomplished as the better Anno Dracula novels, it's well worth a look in its own right. A tightly plotted, skilful little novel, it strikes hard and viciously in all the right places. Great fun.