Book Review: Mister B Gone by Clive Barker

‘Burn this book,’ our narrator orders at the start of Clive Barker’s 2007 novel (actually, it’s surely a novella). ‘Don’t look at another word.’

Part of me thinks I probably should have taken this advice.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy parts of Mister B. Gone. It follows minor demon, Jakabok Botch who escapes from the 9^th circle of hell and ends up in fourteenth century Europe on a series of escapades, which culminate a century later at the birth of the Gutenberg printing press.

I have to be honest, I was quite worried at first. Botch narrates his tale in first person and spends an awful lot of time going on and on at the reader, persuading then threatening them to burn the book in their hands. Then he lets slip, ‘Yeah, I’m a demon.’ Hmmm.

Anyway, I clearly didn’t burn it. Instead I read on and was quite captivated by the scenes in hell (pissy demon parents and ‘parasite-infested wastelands’ of rubbish dumps) as well as glimpses into mediaeval Europe.

But that’s the problem—we only get glimpses. The central bromance between Jakabok and his demon pal Quitoon is barely developed. Their adventures, which cover 100 years, are paraphrased in a few pages.

It reminded me a lot of Marlow’s Dr Faustus—the buddy bromance between Mephastophilis and Faustus, their dastardly hi-jinks, the raging battle between supernatural forces of good and evil…even down to Faustus’ terrified offer to ‘burn [his] books’ if he might be spared damnation.

Mister B. Gone feels way too rushed, which is a shame. Barker is a skilled and intriguing writer, but this felt like a quirky concept which would have been served better as a short story (and in fact doesn’t it re-explore ideas from the title story from Books of Blood?).

Book Review: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Danny Torrance, the kid in Stephen King’s The Shining, is all grown up. And, perhaps, not surprisingly, he’s a bit screwed in the head. And who could blame him? Hearing voices, seeing dead people, getting throttled by a fishy dead woman, being chased by hedge animals, having to wear those flares (sorry – onto the movie) – poor Danny’s had a rough ride. That’s not even taking his alcoholic, wife-beating, murderous father into account.

Initially it looks like the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. Danny—now Dan—has become everything he hated. A drifter addicted to booze and fights, he stumbles from one car wreck to the next, until he ends up stalling for a while in Frazier, New Hampshire – a sleepy small town where he discovers the Twelve Step Programme.

Add in a young girl, Abra who also “shines” with psychic powers, like Dan’s, and a bevy of vampiric “RV people” who spend their preternaturally long life shuffling across America in a convoy of motorhomes and feeding off kids who shine, and you can see where this novel is heading.

Doctor Sleep is typical fare in many ways. King has always been gifted at grabbing you straight away with detailed characterisation combined with increasingly spooky hints of nastiness to come. It’s generally later that things tend to fall apart (Cell anyone? 22.11.63?). And Doctor Sleep does grab you. That’s probably because King is cruising in his comfort zone. Anyone who’s read On Writing will know about his battles with addiction. Apparently at his worst the guy couldn't even remember writing Cujo, and would just wake in the morning to discover pages and pages he’d produced the night before. So Dan reads, well, very authentic. He’s engaging, you’re invested and there’s even a kind of horrific primal adult scene (no, not one of those) that you know is going to come back and bite him on the behind. Dan’s the "Doctor Sleep" of the title by the way, so called as his shining gives him the knack for ushering old folk in the hospice over the final threshold and into the great unknown.

These sections are well crafted by King, with just the right amount of sentimentality to make them moving rather than cheesy. And then there’s the True Knot--that herd of RV folk. They’re kinda creepy and certainly a bit odd. To keep young, strong and beautiful they must murder young children with the shining in the most horrific ways imaginable and then feed off their “steam”. Their leader is a nubile and alluring woman called Rose, with a freaky single long tooth (that as far as I can work out only appears when she’s feeding. Yummy). The True Knot meander to NYC in all readiness for 9/11 and hang out in Sinatra Park, feeding off the steam. Bleurgh.

I've got to be honest—I was worried when I first bought this book. And let’s face it, Doctor Sleep is a dreadful title (yes I know it refers to Dan, but it’s still abysmal. It sounds like something from the deliberately cheesy House of a 1000 Corpses). But I was pleasantly surprised (well, a little bit). It’s certainly not classic King, but it’s a reasonable length, has solid characterisation, is pacey, has some evocative passages and does tie everything up.

Okay, this ending might be a bit too neat, too tidy and too convenient – with no real sense of danger or urgency. A bit like it’s going through the motions. There’s some unconvincing later scenes with Abra’s parents and it all seems a bit like King is trying to race to the end, while some aspects of the plot that you’re just sure will develop into something, amount to nada. And I'm not sure how much you’d get out of it if you hadn't read or seen The Shining.

But on the whole, Doctor Sleep was a generally enjoyable read, even without being one of his greats. IT WAS OKAY. OKAY?

The Horror...The Horror... Best Halloween Movies

There's not much I like more than a good horror film.  Well, actually, there's a lot I like more, now I come to think of it.  But I do like horror an awful lot.  For the month of October The Hollywood News did a run-down of top terrors, and I wrote about five of my favourites.

The list goes as follows:

Halloween
Suspiria
The Exorcist
Candyman
Trick 'R Treat
The Haunting
Kwaidan
Scream
Carrie
Don't Look Now
An American Werewolf in London
The Descent
[REC]
Let the Right One In
The Innocents
The Devils
The Woman
House of 1000 Corpses
Friday the 13th
The Wicker Man
Antichrist
The Blair Witch Project
Misery
Audition
Evil Dead II
The Omen
Eden Lake
Magic
The Thing
The Shining
Psycho

You can read the complete run-down here.

Incidentally my choices were Antichrist, Suspiria, Eden Lake, The Devils and Don't Look Now.

Book Review: The Stand by Stephen King

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Stephen King.  He has a special place on my bookshelf as he was one of the first writers I really got into when I was around eleven or so, (plus we share the same birthday!).  I devoured pretty much all his stuff up until about 1995.  I think it was Needful Things (1991) which broke the spell for me.  Hundreds of pages leading up to the most ridiculous, Deus ex Machina ending ever.  But every now and then I have another bash at a Stephen King, just for old time’s sake.  In recent years I’ve tried Insomnia (94), Cell (06), Just After Sunset (08), Dreamcatcher (01).  They were all, without exception, complete turkeys.

The way I see it, the early ’90s were the turning point for King.  Before then, his books were quite addictive: good pacing, in depth characterisation, unsettling and (often) a decent ending (not always though - endings are definitely his weak point.  King is really an ideas man.  You get the sense that he has so many and sometimes just doesn’t know what to do with them once he gets to the end).  After that, I don’t know what happened really.  Maybe it’s something to do with his prolific nature, his fame and status and his lack of a good editor.  Who’s going to really edit a King book these days?  He’s a bestseller, regardless of how unwieldy and bloated his novels become.  He can do what he wants.

So whilst searching around on my bookshelf for something to read which wasn’t too taxing in the Christmas wallowing period, I thought I’d re-read an older one and see how it holds up under scrutiny.  I decided to go for The Stand (78/90) - the reworked 1990 edition of course!  I last read this on holiday in Mallorca with my family; I was probably twelve-ish.  At the time I loved it.  But would I still love it?  And how would it, ahem, stand up to scrutiny?

Pretty well actually.  First I noticed loads of literary references which I simply didn’t get aged twelve.  King is an intelligent bookish man; he majored in literature and I’ve read interviews where he explains how he struggled for years with his desire to be seen as a ‘literary’ writer yet he produced pulp fiction.  But it’s all here: Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’, The Scarlet Letter, and um…The Lord of the Rings.  The influence of Tolkien is really obvious throughout, but hey, we all love a good quest of good vs evil don’t we?
What King is really good at is characterisation.  Backstory is dropped in with subtlety and we actually care about (well most) of the characters.  Except Frannie.  God she’s annoying.  I would say his female characters are actually less convincing here (and there’s fewer of them anyway).  The pacing keeps us engaged throughout - even at the ending.  Here’s something to note - a King book which doesn’t have a lousy ending!

True there are areas of style which could do with tightening up and some inconsistencies, but overall it lived up to my memory’s recommendation.  It linked in with his Dark Tower series too.  For some reason I managed to bypass these and have been picking at them every now and then for the past six months.  And I loved the reference to Christine.  Of course that’s nothing new - King is uber intertextual and that appeals to my slightly geeky nature.  But one thing I would say is some parts of the narrative are actually quite experimental (for mainstream fiction).  Stream of consciousness, second person voice, present tense, interspersed diary entries…

I think you could really compare The Stand to Cell to see how far he’s changed (for the worse).  Both have an apocalyptic theme.  But whereas The Stand, despite the horror/fantastical elements remains firmly rooted in reality and character, Cell descends into farce.  The Stand takes small steps and remains wholly believable and true, whereas Cell just made me laugh.  Zombie type creatures created by mobile phones, who are in fact, batteries, who recharge by listening to M.O.R?  Eh?  Instantly forgettable characters, who I care about even less when one dies?  Yup.  I kind of remember some weird levitation thing happening at the end too.  Cell is a cash-cow, plain and simple.  The Stand is the real deal.

Daybreakers

Daybreakers is a vampire movie which owes its heritage to The Matrix and 28 Days Later equally.  It’s not horror; it’s sci-fi with a bit of blood-sucking thrown in, before ultimately descending into action.

Ethan Hawke plays Edward (why Edward?), a vampire with the tendencies of Anne Rice’s Loius who has a real problem with the human red stuff.  Instead, just like Angel, he favours pigs’ blood. 

But Edward’s problems don’t end there.  He works for this Vampire Big Business in the haematology department, trying to create a synthetic substitute because there are like, 20 humans left or something.  I’m still not sure why they weren’t breeding the remaining few. Instead they seem to hook them up in cells: all very Matrix-y.  Anyway, Edward falls in with the Human Resistance, who have discovered a cure for growing fangs.

I admit, I quite enjoyed this film.  Sure, the plot has some yawning craters, but it looks stylish, almost neo-noir in places.  You can guess mostly where it’s going to end up, but it looks pretty along the way. 

 It’s got some great touches - the newspaper headings about the pandemic and how vampire society seems to be mainly a load of white collars.  Plus it’s got Willen Dafoe in it.  What more could you want? 

Not so hot are the almost painfully obvious parallels it’s trying to draw with current issues - genocide, oil shortages, blah blah blah.  But I’m a sucker for vampire films (BOOM BOOM) and Daybreakers does the trick without giving us the wow factor.

Stylish fangs with no bite; but who cares?

Film Review: The Human Centipede

There’s a buzz in town and it’s all about Dutch horror The Human Centipede which received a general UK release this August.  It’s directed by Tom Six, who says he got the idea from discussing what punishments should be meted out to paedophiles.  Worried yet?  You should be…

Dr Heiter is a man with a vision, a man with a dream.  ‘A cure for AIDS?’ I hear you cry.  Pah.  Our doctor has much more lofty heights to scale.  He’s going to create…O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible…the…er…well, the clue’s in the title.  And create it he does, out of two unsuspecting American gals who’ve clearly never watched a horror film and an unlucky Japanese guy.

The three segments never amount to much by themselves.  The acting is so hammy I thought I was watching a porn film for a minute.  But they get more interesting once they are, ahem, joined.  That’s joined mouth to anus in case you didn’t know.  The doctor is a demented blend of Bela Lugosi, Klaus Kinski and Sunset Beach.  I don’t know if making him German and calling him Josef Heiter was a deliberate ploy, but all I could think of was Josef Mengele and his twin studies.  The Japanese segment was also clearly thinking the same when it yells, ‘You crazy Nazi bastard!’ or some such sentiment.

But is it any good?  Well, it had a certain funny aspect to it.  Watching a human centipede being trained to fetch papers or whatever the doctor wanted it for is always going to elicit a few giggles.  But my overriding thoughts were for the segments.  Who’s got the best deal? I thought.  If I HAD to be a human centipede, which segment would I be?  Well, the front one’s got the best deal clearly.  It gets to lead the way, to eat food and it keeps its teeth.  But the middle or end?  Dr Heiter thinks the middle is the worst section and uses it as punishment.  I suppose you’d feel a trifle constricted.  But the end segment is last in everything, shuffling along behind, always the bridesmaid, never the bride.  So I guess I’d be the front segment.  If I absolutely HAD to be a human centipede.

But…is it any good?  Well I chuckled a few times, got grossed out by some scatology and mused on the life of a segment of a human centipede.

It’s a joke - right?