Night Chills by Dean R Koontz

Koontz opens his book with two strange dangerous looking men emptying some kind of chemical into a reservoir in the isolated logging town of Black River, they return to their motel, one drives off, one stays in the motel, both receive odd phone calls about locks and keys.  One drives himself into a wall at 100 mph, the other opens his femoral and ulnar arteries with a razor and bleeds out in the motel bath.  All over Black River people experience night terrors, and then to the town comes the sinister Ogden Salsbury, a pathological misogynist genius with a terrible hold over the people of the town.  Widowed Paul Annendale comes to the town to camp with his two children Rya and Mark and is connected, too coincidentally, with the only two people not to suffer night terrors, his girlfriend Jenny and her father Sam, the only person who can decipher the events unfolding in Black River.  A cracking start to a good story by Koontz, but it does creak a bit in places and the bad guys are too simply drawn.

Demon Seed by Dean Koontz

Interesting book about the dangers of AI, about a computer that is so intelligent it develops consciousness and desire.  Most of all it wants embodiement and invades the automated systems of beautiful self isolated Susan Harris.  Chilling, but not his best.

500 Essential Graphic Novels by Gene Kannenberg

A definitive book that I will buy for myself and keep and dip into whenever I want inspiration for what graphic novels and comics to order from the library and buy for myself, a brilliant selection divided into easy to use categories with a simple scoring and age suitability system.

Twelfth Night Manga Shakespeare by Nana Li

Well illustrated and using the conventions of Manga expression to bring out the nuances in Shakespeare's text this is a great introduction to Twelfth Night for anyone who finds reading a play text difficult.  Li brings to life the comedy of the play, graphically showing the anarchic sense of fun that was current in Shakespeare's time.   The drawing is achingly beautiful, I'm not sure who I'm more in love with!

Great British Comics by Paul Gravett & Peter Stanbury

A lovely coffee table book celebrating British comics from their inception to the present day.

Have You Any Wool: The Creative Use of Yarn by Jan Messent

Good and inspirational but quite dated, although some great ideas about using crochet, knitting, needleweaving and wool wrapping to create.

Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma

Lochan is an unwanted child, his mother married her father after she fell pregnant and had four more children to please his father before he abandoned them and left for America to have a new family.  As she didn't want her family Lochan's mother takes no responsiblity for them, acting as if they don't exist, spending her time money on clothes to impress her latest boyfriend rather than on food and clothes for her children.  17 year old Lochan is highly intelligent and deeply introverted, opening up only to his beautiful sister Maya, 13 months younger than him, his brothers Kit, an angry mosher rapidly getting in with the wrong crowd, 8 year old Tiffin, a complete tyke with genius for football and the baby, 5 year old Willa, an angelic faced cherub with a talent for art and a quiet goodness.  Out of this horror of neglect and emotional abuse comes love as Lochan and Maya quietly and desperately parent their younger siblings.  Suzuma deliniates each character perfectly and this is one of the few books lately I have actively cried while reading, so very very sad.

The Best of Battle by Titan Books

A great selection from the Battle war comic, including a wide range of different types of comic, World War I, II and Vietnam along with some from the German and Russian viewpoints.

Chase by Dean Koontz

Great vintage Koontz, tightly plotted, full of twists and well written. Ben Chase is a Vietnam vet, feted as a war hero but fighting traumatic memories with drink and social withdrawal.  When he stops at the local lovers' lane he cannot but intervene when he hears screaming, and disturbs a vicious attack on two teenagers, the boy dead from multiple stab wounds, the girl curled with fear in the other seat.  But the killer has carefully selected the couple, does not appreciate Chase's intervention and starts making threatening phone calls naming himself only as 'Judge'.  The killer makes it clear that he knows a lots about Chase's past and is prepared to hurt him and those he cares about to punish him.  The police don't believe Chase, believing him delusional after consulting with his psychiatrist, and when Chase meets the beautiful Glenda and suddenly has a lot more to lose he turns the tables and the hunted becomes the hunter.  Really good, satisfying and makes you think about judgement and the lack of right we have to judge others.

Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz

This is not one of Koontz's best books, there are jarring cliches and technical failings throughout but that doesn't matter.  Twilight Eyes is a nostalgic book, set in 1964, the year of Kennedy's death, and has a haunting melancholy for a lost time of certainties, a world beginning to fracture with the Bay of Pigs.  Carl Stanfeuss is a 17 year old boy on the run, going by the name of Slim MacKenzie because he killed his Uncle Denton with an axe, believing he could see through his Uncle's skin and see inside another evil creature, that he calls goblins.  He breaks into the Sombra Brothers Carnival at night looking for work, and encounters another goblin sabotaging the dodgems, he kills this creature but when he comes to dispose of it the creature is gone.  He joins the carnival as a caller and falls in love with his boss, and finds he is not alone in seeing the creatures that pass for human.  As the Carnival travels to the mountain town of Yontsdown Slim finds himself in a nightmare world where the figures of authority, police, judges, clergy, are goblins and that something terrible is being created.
I love this book because of its place in my own personal history, I read it as a teenager and it soothed the sorrow inside of me.  I may not have been aware of goblins as such, but they can be read as a metaphor for the evil within humanity and its potential for horror, balanced against the courage of people who cannot just stand by and let even unkindness be the dominant force in the world, let alone terror and pain and fear.  It set me on a hard but worthwhile path, that standing by is not an option, however tempting that may be.

Re-gifters by Mike Carey, Sonny Lieu and Marc Hempel (Minx)

Korean American teenager Dik Seong Jen, Jen to her family, Dixie to her friends, lives in LA and has a talent for Korean martial art hapkido, until she is distracted by a crush on her school and hapkido classmate surfer boy Adam.  A great story of how Dixie comes to terms with her feelings, her sense of identity and has a great feel good happy ending.

Seeing Things by Oliver Postgate

Postgate was the wonderful man who made my childhood a place of magic and safety with Bagpuss and this autobiography is just wonderful.  Postgate was an extraordinary man, born to socialist parents whom he called by their first names and who worked from first principles without any engineering expertise to solve any mechanical problem, ending up in animation via a wide range of jobs from stage, farm and charity work in post war Germany.  He speaks of his worlds as something that came through him rather than from his imagination, as having a life outwith him, and his philosophies had a lot to teach me.

The Spider Moon by Kate Brown, Book 1

Fascinating and beautifully drawn fantasy but much too short!  Bekka is a young girl, a diver with webbed hands who collects oil-bearing sea urchins which her community trade with the bird folk, the ruling elite.  When her mother, a village elder, is arrested for failing to trade with the oil company Bekka and her mentor Kaye go after them. 

Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds

Narrated by Raymond Joubert, baker in the little Normandy village of Bailleville, this is the story of Gemma Bovery, her affairs, Joubert's obsession with her and the parallels between her life and that of Flaubert's eponymous Madame Bouvery.  An acute observation of the gulf between what we think we want and what actually makes us happy and brilliantly illustrated.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson (AUDIO)

AZ: "Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder - and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet's disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vangers are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves".  Really well written and atmospheric, evocative of the island nature of Sweden

The Wild Things by Dave Eggers

 

Eggers imagines a full length story based around the wonderful childhood companion that was Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.  Like many young boys, Max is imaginative, energetic and misunderstood by his teen sister and hard working mother, and after a confrontation with his mother's boyfriend runs away into the woods.  There he finds a boat on the lake shore and sails away 'in and out of days and nights' until he reaches the fantastic island where the Wild Things live, massive savage beasts that change their mind about eating him and instead crown him as their king.  But kingship and responsibility for these great sad creatures with their complicated relationships to each other becomes increasingly fraught.  Full of longing and a plea to remember what children are, and to let them be lost in their wild world.

Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie

Poirot murder mystery listened to on BBC iPlayer.  Elinor Carlisle stands in the dock accused of the deaths of her aunt and the lodge man's daughter Mary Gerrard, the only one with clear motive and opportunity, but Poirot reveals the unseen

Lowboy by John Wray. 

William Heller, aka Lowboy, is on the run after breaking his conditions of release from Bellevue psychiatric hospital.  He travels the subways and subterranean tunnels, off his medication and becoming increasingly psychotic as his paranoid schizophrenia takes over tipping the human need to find patterns in the chaotic into madness.  Wray writes the novel from two points of view, Lowboy's increasingly disturbed perspective and that of Detective Ali Lateef, searching for Lowboy with his mother Yda, aka Violet, their tale too becoming unspooled as Lateef reflects on his altered identity, name changed when his father converted to Islam, and that of Yda.  Very good, but I prefer Tabitha Suzuma

Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment by Bryan Talbot

A lengthy comic version history of Sunderland framed through the experience of a single slob like audience man making up the entire audience of a surreal production at the Sunderland Empire.  Interesting but I did feel like I was just being lectured to, and found the repeating mentions of Lewis Carrol / Dogson's links to Sunderland and the life of Alice Liddel a little repetitive.  Learned lots though

Grandville by Bryan Talbot

One of my favourite graphic novels of all time is Talbot's harrowing tale of homelessness, child abuse and Beatrix Potter, One Bad Rat. Grandville doesn't disappoint, an amazing tale of a future with reference ton the works of French charicaturist JJ Gerard, science fiction illustrator Robida, Conan Doyle, Rupert the Bear, Tarantino and Herge.  In this dystopia Napoleon won, the French rule Britain as a backwater annex and the 'people' have mostly animal heads, with the exception of a few humans, an underclass known as 'dough faces'.  The badger faced Detective Inspector Lebrock of Scotland Yard stars with his Watson type Detective Ratzi, a return to Talbot to his love of the intelligence and talent of rats as seen in One Bad Rat.  I loved the use of animals to denote character or the surface appearance of, and his use of Snowy Milou is genius, particularly his opium addled dreams in the Blue Lotus house of Tintin's trip to the Moon.

The Hell of it All by Charlie Brooker

Wonderful to find someone so misanthropic he makes me look permanently cheerful.  This is a collection of Brooker's columns for The Guardian including my favourite, a piece so bleak (on the subject of why everyone doesn't just go and commit suicide) that the paper wouldn't print it on a Monday morning and he wrote on on arachnophobia instead. 

Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime Collection by One City Trust

Great little collection of crime stories based in Edinburgh written by a variety of writers, some such as Lin Anderson and Ian Rankin known for their crime fiction, others such as Margaret Atwood and James Robertson less so.  For me, the best definately saved til last with AL Kennedy's contribution although the quality of Rankin's piece was superb.

Breathless by Dean Koontz

Grady Adams and his Irish wolfhound Merlin have an encounter with two large white creatures which bear no resemblance to any creature seen before on earth.  Vet Cammy Rivers witnesseses a room of traumatised puppy farm retrievers spontaneously become still and then release all their suffering and become like normal happy dogs, and a field full of horses and assorted ducks, goats and other animals stand fixed in one direction for 15 minutes and then revert to normal.  Henry Rouvray brings death to the house of his twin Jim and his wife Nora but it is soon him that is being stalked.  Good but ends far too quickly, feels like the issues contained within with regard to the subject of evolution are not properly worked through.

HG Wells The Science Fiction Volume 1

Absolutely fascinating, collection of four of HG Wells' novels, great to read and see how someone from over 100 years ago saw the future.

The Time Machine. 
As with most of Wells' stories, this is in Victorian fashion a story within a narrative.  The story is narrated in first person by a unnamed narrator who relates the adventures related to him by the Time Traveller who builds a device that takes him into the far future to witness the destiny of humanity, who have devolved into two separate species, the white skinned fearsome Morlocks who live underground, are photosensitive and who feed on the feckless beautiful Eloi, who lead a blithe daylight existence on the surface.  An imaginative reflection on the future of our species based on the contemporary split of society into the indolent elite and the work burdened proletariat.

The Island of Doctor Moreau
The narrative of Charles Prendick, gentleman and scholar, is prefaced by an introduction stating that Prendick's written account follows but that the said gentleman subsequently lost his memory and did not remember the events given in his written account, and that the narrative has been released after his death by his nephew, again giving it the unreliability of a second hand account whilst also allowing it to be presented as a document of curiosity, something present writers don't often do and which adds a fascinating layer.
Prendick is shipwrecked and picked up by the Ipecacuanha where he meets Montogomery, a strange man accompanying a menagerie including a puma, several large fierce dogs and rabbits on their journey to an unidentified island.  Prendick is thrown off the ship by the captain at the island and is allowed ashore to meet Dr Moreau.  The horror of the island is slowly unfolded via Prendick's first person narrative, that Moreau cuts up animals and makes them into human-like beasts which haunt the island and in the end kill Moreau and revert to the beastial natures of themselves.  Truly chilling

The War of the Worlds
Just as thrilling as when it was written, but also really interesting to reflect on Wells' narrative of how the coming of the Martians would have affected people at the turn of the century and how things had to change for Steven Spielberg's 2005 film.  In Wells' book the news of the coming of the aliens travels slowly and the rise of the tripods comes as a shock to a society unused to horror and human slaughter, in the film the news and panic travels instantaneously via the mass media and the horror is communicated via the destruction of the innocence of Dakota Fanning's slow withdrawl from screaming hysteria into catatonic silence.

The First Men in the Moon
I hadn't heard of this one before and I think it's overlooked, very brilliant thinking and again a reflection on the nature of society.  Mr Bedford, a gentleman with debts who has fled to the south coast to escape bankruptcy and to write a play which he hopes will restore his finances, meets Mr Cavor, a brilliant scientist who is working on a substance that will block all forces, including gravity.  The difference between the purity of Cavor's scientific mind and Bedford's avoricious nature are revealed by Bedford's quick realisation of the potential of a substance that can block even gravity but after Cavor succeeds in his creation and almost destroys the entire atmosphere of planet earth he instead creates a spaceship which via anti gravity takes Cavor and Bedford to the moon.  Here Wells' imagination creates a fascinating world where the answer to the Moon's low night temperatures and airlessness is a society that lives beneath the surface in caverns stretching down to a core lunar sea.  These Selentites shepherd the wonderful Mooncalfs on the surface during the lunar day and return at night, and each Selenites is individually physically and mentally tuned to their individual purpose, books replaced by Selenites with enormous brains that are repositories for knowledge, workers with great arms designed for their individual job, presided over by the Grand Lunar.  Wells is pretty damning about human nature, Bedford's bloody humanity comes to the surface and he kills a number of the Selenites and escapes back to earth, but Cavor is recaptured and manages to communicate his experiences of Selenite society to earth by radio before making his own fatal mistake. 

Leviathan by Paul Auster

Auster's book is written from the point of view of Peter Aaron, writer, and is his biography of his friend, political writer turned activist, Benjamin Sachs.  Aaron uncovers Sachs' life, their shared history in New York, lovers, friends, and what drove his friend to become so alienated from and opposed to corporate America.