Breakfast At Libraries: April 2014

Friday, 18 April 2014

Half Bad by Sally Green

Half Bad is a young adult urban fantasy novel that seems to have been released amid an awful lot of hype. So much, in fact, that its release was marked at my nearest railway station by the author giving away copies accompanied by an actor in a cage playing her main character. The book also seems to have been marketed as a book with 'crossover appeal' that will be enjoyed as much by adults as its target audience of teenagers.

Unfortunately, I don't think Half Bad either lives up to its hype or works particularly well as an adult read.

The book is the first in a planned trilogy about Nathan Byrne, a young boy born into a family of White witches in present-day northern England. The complicating factor is that Nathan is the illegitimate son of a Black witch, and the White and Black witches despise each other to such an extent that the Black witches are tracked by 'Hunters' for imprisonment or execution. The ruling Council of White witches has decreed that all witches of mixed blood must be monitored and assigned as 'half-code' until they can be designated as Black or White when they reach adulthood.

To complicate matters, Nathan's father isn't just any Black witch, but Marcus, apparently the most powerful and evil Black witch of all, prone to cannibalism and able to stop time. This makes Nathan not only despised by White witches, including his own half-sister Jessica, but also a valuable commodity as either a spy or a bargaining tool for the Council. Moreover, it's also essential that before he reaches the age of 17, Nathan must receive his three gifts in the traditional magical ceremony that all witches go through: if he doesn't, he will die.

One of the main problems with all this is that none of it is anything like as exciting as it sounds. Nathan spends an awful lot of time brooding and moping and being sensitive and angst-ridden and tortured, but for what is supposedly an adventure, surprisingly little time actually taking action. At the start of the book he goes to school, where he can't cope because he can't read (despite this being a normal modern-day comprehensive school rather than some archaic magical establishment, nobody thinks to suggest that he might be dyslexic) and falls in love with a pretty blonde-haired girl called Annalise who doesn't have any discernible personality but is, naturally, a White witch whose brothers are intent on beating Nathan half to death. Nathan also spends a lot of time being taken for assessments by the Council, going on the run, and looking for various different people who are never as exciting as we hope they will be. Sometimes he's captured, and when he is, he escapes with implausible ease for more hiding and moping.

I might have been able to deal with all this had Nathan himself not been such a teen-idol cliche of a character. Nathan is the archetypal misunderstood outsider, the brooding, hot-tempered bad boy who doesn't fit in. Essentially, Nathan, with his unique powers and his identity struggles and his apparent attractiveness to almost everyone of either gender who happens to meet him, is a teenage girl's wish fulfilment fantasy, and as such, is about as interesting to most adult reader as Twilight's Edward Cullen. There are times when Half Bad reads like fan-fiction of itself, particularly when Nathan decides to rebel against one of his captors by shaving his hair into a mohican and piercing his lip like some sort of suburban emo kid. Neither does subtlety seem to be Nathan's strong point, as he regularly cuts off his nose to spite his face by making smart remarks to the authorities at times when he'd clearly be far better off feigning compliance, apparently simply to show how cool and rebellious and individual he is. Despite this, he is, of course, a sweet and sensitive soul underneath who regularly talks of his profound love for his brother Arran in a way I can imagine no teenage boy ever doing.

Half Bad leaves a lot of questions unresolved - if Nathan could potentially be so useful to the White witches, why do they treat him so appallingly rather than attempting to win him over, for instance? Why do the White and Black witches actually hate each other so much in the first place? - but as it's the first instalment of three I'm sure there's a reason why many things are left unexplained. It's made very clear that both sides are as bad each other and that the lines between good and evil are heavily blurred, and there's certainly plenty of potential for make this into an epic saga of a magical civil war, full of intrigue and in-fighting and interesting revelations from the past: I found the back-story in Half Bad far more interesting than the plot.

Sadly, though, I simply can't care enough about Nathan, or any of the other characters, to make the effort to seek answers, and I won't be bothering with the rest of the trilogy.

Thursday, 17 April 2014

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

Although I read a lot of horror and speculative fiction, it's actually quite rare that I come across a book that I'd call genuinely frightening (I'd say the last one that caused me to lose sleep was Michelle Paver's Dark Matter). Bird Box, however, was certainly in that category.

Bird Box, Josh Malerman's first book, is a dystopian horror novel. The basic premise is a relatively familiar one: a disaster has rapidly wiped out civilisation as we know it and a few survivors are left struggling in isolation and constant danger. What sets Bird Box apart here is the uniquely terrifying and brilliantly conceived cause of this apocalyptic scenario: people are being driven to violently insane and suicidal rages by something they have seen. Which means the only way to stay alive is never to see the danger.

They hear it. The sense it. Sometimes, they almost feel its touch, its tangible presence passing by or lurking with them in an enclosed space. But if they are to survive, they can never, ever see it to understand what, or who, it is - and as such, are locked in a constant fearful, desperate stalemate.

Bird Box begins with a young woman, Malorie, striking out from an abandoned home full of reminders of past terrors, with two unnamed children, 'trained' to navigate their way around the outside world by hearing alone. The children have never seen sunlight, and Malorie must guide them, all three of them with their eyes covered by ever-present blindfolds as they feel and stumble their way to what might not prove to be safety anyway. The novel then alternates between past and present, detailing the build-up to the children's births and the fate of the small group of survivors of which Malorie was once a part.

Both narratives are full of nerve-shredding tension and slow, creeping terror - not just from the threat of the unspecified something that lurks outside, but also from the inevitable claustrophobia and unease of a community of mismatched individuals living together in a single house with limited resources. Bird Box certainly drives home the message that sometimes, as one of the survivors suggests, 'we do it to ourselves ... man is the creature he fears'.

The premise of Bird Box alone is, frankly, quite terrifying enough in itself, but Josh Malerman's ability not only to build suspense but also to deliver climactic shocks is exceptionally effective. Moreover, Malerman never lets genre compromise the quality of his prose: every sentence is tautly constructed and the variations in pace and structure are spot-on throughout.

There is also far more to Bird Box than horror. The moral difficulties Malorie faces when it comes to bringing up her children, for instance, and the elements of motherhood that she's forced to sacrifice for the sake of their survival, are subtly expressed but no less heartbreaking for it. Bird Box isn't just a great piece of speculative fiction: it's a great piece of fiction, full stop, and it stands out a long way from the crowd.

Sunday, 13 April 2014

Mother, Mother by Koren Zailckas

Part mystery, part family drama, Mother, Mother is the first novel by Koren Zailckas, formerly best known for Smashed, a memoir of her years as a troubled teenage alcoholic. As you might imagine, then, Mother, Mother's Hurst family is a far from functional one. Eldest daughter Rose has abandoned a promising acting career to run away with a secret boyfriend, younger daughter Violet, 16, has been committed to a psychiatric ward, and 12-year-old Will has epilepsy and Asperger's and has to be home-schooled. Father Douglas Hurst is mild-mannered and ineffectual, so it's mother Josephine who appears to hold the family together. It's only as the story unfolds that it becomes obvious that Josephine is the problem, not the solution.

In some ways Mother, Mother reminds me of Gone Girl, in that it's one of those books where few relationships are healthy and nobody can be trusted. It's clear early on that Josephine's motives are twisted and even sinister, but is she the only one in the family with secrets - who is the 'Carrie' who has clandestine phone conversations with Douglas? How much does Will really remember about the incident in which he was injured while Violet was high on homemade hallucinogens?

Zailckas tells the Hursts's story from the alternating points of view of Violet (volatile, self-destructive, antagonistic) and Will (anxious, immature, dependent). The directions their stories take are fascinating and sometimes unexpected, although at times I did feel as if I was reading extracts from a psychology textbook, particularly in Violet's scenes with her therapist and fellow inmates in a mental hospital. I also didn't feel especially surprised by a couple of the major revelations in the story, and I think it's fair to say that towards the end of the book, everything gets just a little overblown and borderline camp: at times Josephine strays dangerously to close to Mommie Dearest territory. This is, admittedly, highly entertaining, but the novel is strongest not at these moments. It's most effective when Josephine's behaviour is just sufficiently 'off' to make us question our own judgement - particularly when it comes to her relationship with Will.

While she's wholly memorable, Josephine is actually the least three-dimensional character in the book, simply because her life is so full of artifice, calculation and self-delusion. Even Douglas, fundamentally weak as a parent but nonetheless apparently keen to do his best, is curiously more 'real' to me than Josephine, however terrifying (and, by-and-large, plausible) she might be.

The publisher's blurb compares Mother, Mother to the work of Daphne Du Maurier and Shirley Jackson, and while I see where they're coming from, I don't think Koren Zailckas is competition for those two mistresses of suspense - not yet, anyway. But Mother, Mother is always gripping and often chilling, and is full of shrewd psychological insight that makes it a fascinating and entertaining page-turner.

Saturday, 5 April 2014

The Sleep Room by FR Tallis

This will be quite a difficult review to write, not because The Sleep Room is a difficult book (it isn't; it's an easy-peasy piece of quick-reading genre fiction that I picked up in Waterstone's because I wanted something to read while I had lunch in their cafe) but simply because I didn't really have any strong feelings about it whatsoever. I don't feel as if I wasted my time reading it, but equally I don't think I really got a great deal out of it either.

The premise of The Sleep Room is that of 1950s doctor taking up a residential post at a psychiatric hospital under the supervision of Hugh Maitland, a famous psychiatrist well known for his media presence and for his dismissal of 'couch merchants' and psychoanalytical techniques in favour of purely physical treatments such as antidepressants, sedation and ECT. His latest project is the experimental treatment of six disturbed women by, essentially, keeping them permanently asleep, except for short periods when they're woken for feeding, washing and the unpleasant-sounding 'voiding'.

If you think this treatment sounds slightly creepy, it is, and so is the hospital in general, with its isolated location and strange secrets. It's not long before Richardson, the narrator, finds himself spooked by odd noises, the peculiar agitation and unease of the patients and nurses alike, and by his observation that all the sleep room patients mysteriously enter the 'dreaming' stage of sleep at the same time each day.

And to be honest, that's really pretty much it. The horror elements are fairly low-key, except for one entertainingly gruesome showpiece with a self-harming patient, and there is a twist which should be gobsmacking but which I just found anticlimactic. It's not that The Sleep Room is bad - it really isn't. FR Tallis' prose is clear, precise and matter-of-fact in a way that befits the scientifically-minded narrator very well and contrasts nicely with the peculiarity of the events he experiences; the book's post-war setting is one I always enjoy, works perfectly for this story and is convincingly realised by the author; the feeling of isolation experienced by Richardson is suitably claustrophobic. But overall, The Sleep Room struck me as a book that is less than the sum of its parts. None of the characters are particularly memorable, and there is something lacking when it comes to the building of atmosphere, something that should be essential in supernatural fiction.

I really would like to be more enthusiastic as it's rare that I'm indifferent to a book and there were plenty of things about The Sleep Room that I thought were well-executed and enjoyable. But there just wasn't anything about it that really stood out. Oddly, I can see it working well as a film or a TV drama, however, and I would happily watch an adaptation of it - perhaps some arresting visual interpretations of the supernatural goings-on could lend The Sleep Room the sense of atmosphere I felt it lacked. And despite my misgivings I would almost certainly pick up another book by FR Tallis and give it a go.

NB: I've included pictures of both the UK (top) and the US (bottom) covers of this book. The only reason I've done so is because I find the difference between the quite interesting - the UK cover seems to suggest an out-and-out horror novel, whereas the US one is much more subtle and much less suggestive of genre fiction. As well as being less naff, the US cover is probably more indicative of the type of book The Sleep Room is.