OK, so I decided reviewing serious and worthy stuff was boring. As is trying to give balanced and professional reviews. So here's a review of a truly awful film, hailed by some as a rival to 'Troll 2' and 'The Room' in badness quotient.
I refuse to accept that 'The Room' is a filmic troll, but this...well, for the sake of my sanity, it has to be. And given I've seen films of a similar quality (such as 'Hell Asylum') played entirely straight, I will treat this as a serious endeavour to make a genuine tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds'. 'Birdemic' has got quite a lot of press for being so dire that it has reached the attention of the real world rather than just the geek community. And...well, it lives up to it. This isn't 'Death Nurse' levels of squirmingly they-just-didn't-care bad, this is a 'Troll 2' for our time, though it lacks anything to rival the sexy corncob scene. I'd say it's on a level with 'The Stuff' for bad and 'The Room' for the sense that this was a film the director genuinely cared about and wanted to make (assuming it's played straight for the sake of argument).
Its place in the canon considered, 'Birdemic' has the potential for being an OK scholocky horror film. If you replaced its script, actors, director and CGI with...you know...something a lot better, it might even be a passably funny B-Movie. But the acting is...well, wooden really is the right word, but we use it so casually now that we need a much stronger, more precise word to cover the hilarity of this. I suggest 'paralytic'. The main character has stock options. Which he tells us about at great length. He is incredibly successful at some kind of cubicle-based cold-calling job which somehow nets him a deal for millions of dollars. He practically stalks a girl he fancied at school who, instead of doing what a normal person does and getting a restraining order, agrees to go out with him. And she's a model.
'Birdemic' spends an awful lot of time setting up the relationships between the protagonists. Like, a lot. We didn't have a hint of horror until the hero (I use the term loosely) had asked the girl out, made his company lots of money, gone out with said girl, had sex with said girl, developed a brand new form of solar panel that makes solar power sensible as an energy source, and has told us and his girlfriend about his stock options at length. The whole thing felt like a really boring and amateurish green aesop, even referencing and talking about Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth'. Then badly-CGI'd eagles start attacking people and the hero, his girlfriend and assorted random helpers have to try and escape the...I guess, city?...by shooting eagles with automatic guns one of the supporting characters just happens to have and driving away. I honestly don't know what they expect to find, but it gives much opportunity for awful CGI-eagle attacks, shooting with a ridiculous amount of ammo, explorations of how crazy and evil people get when they're in a bad situation and a scientist who provides exposition and I swear was behind the whole thing. Seriously, if I had made this movie, he would have been controlling the eagles with tiny hats in revenge at humanity for laughing at his crackpot ideas.
Oh, and there's a survivalist hippie who looks like Christopher Walken having a weird day while strung out on dope. Apparently the eagles don't attack people who aren't near the trappings of civilisation or something. At this point we were shouting at the screen for the heroes to kill the hippy and take his treehouse, but alas the forst burns down randomly and they flee. Eventually for no reason the eagles just go away. Like they got sick of the slaughter or something. I guess they were trying to do the vague thing that Hitchcock did with 'The Birds' and not actually explain why the birds attacked, but they just fly off into the distance. For no reason. It's not creepy, it's dumb. Like this movie.
I mean, seriously, nobody could have set out to make a film that was this bad. It's the beauty of bad fiction and film - those who try to make a 'bad' film or novel rarely succeed because they're always winking at the audience. To believe that 'Birdemic' is a self-consciously bad film is to restore one's faith in humanity, but it also denigrates the people who are in it. After all, if they made a bad film, it'll become cult for being bad. If they made a parody, it's so bad it's not even funny. It couldn't have ended up that bad by artifice, so it must have had intentional jokes that were badly-done to the point of becoming really bad. The meta of this explanation breaks my brain, so I'm going to go Ockham's Razor on this and say the simplest explanation is that they really thought they were making an OK movie, and that they ended up with something so hilariously bad it's now secured a spot as something all new comers to our bad movie nights has to see.
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Productivity
I like that site, dailyprompt. Yesterday it spontaneously produced over 5400 words from a single prompt, "Rest in peace" (also now the title of a reasonably extensive Daniel Creed story).
Today's looks pretty promising too: "Don't you ever get sick of this?" My dour demon hunter, sick of killing? Never! But the scene involving that line could be interesting.
That's four completed Daniel Creed stories, each longer than the last. Sigh. I really don't get this whole 'short story' thing, do I?
I'm not quite confident enough to post my completed story on dailyprompt as it suggests, though, or up here. Alas, my work is destined never to see the light of day. *flounces dramatically*
Today's looks pretty promising too: "Don't you ever get sick of this?" My dour demon hunter, sick of killing? Never! But the scene involving that line could be interesting.
That's four completed Daniel Creed stories, each longer than the last. Sigh. I really don't get this whole 'short story' thing, do I?
I'm not quite confident enough to post my completed story on dailyprompt as it suggests, though, or up here. Alas, my work is destined never to see the light of day. *flounces dramatically*
Friday, 16 April 2010
'Cirque du Freak' and 'Lord Loss' by Darren Shan
Darren Shan is an interesting phenomenon. He's been on and off popular for years with his 'Cirque du Freak' series, and now with the current vampire craze, kids' books taking off and the film based on the first three books of 'Cirque de Freak', he's regaining his title of king of YA horror. It's kind of sweet seeing kids half my age discovering Shan's books when, nearly ten years ago, I did the same thing. Also, it makes me feel old. This post will be spoilerful because 'Lord Loss' especially has some very dark twists that could do with exploring. Be ye warned: the full impact of 'Lord Loss' will not be felt without the shock factor, so if you're planning on reading it, do so without reading this review first.
'Cirque du Freak' is the first novella in a series by the same name. It features a normal kid named Darren Shan (self-insert? Never) who lives his life and then becomes a vampire through a slightly twisty-turny contrived set of events. That's the entire plot of the first book. It's short and sweet and leaves you wanting more. I certainly recall reading these at a startling rate when they came out, but the waiting period between the books meant I got bored and wandered off. The shortness of them means that they're not really worth the...*goes to look it up*...bloody hell, six quid (!) this costs. Ok, the Angels Unlimited/Agent Angel books are shorter on the whole, but they have so much more substance. These would, however, be a nice undaunting way of getting a kid who is not easily freaked out (especially not by spiders!) and likes a good child-friendly gorefest into reading.
Darren isn't actually much of a Gary Stu. He may have traits in common with his creator, but Darren is a very normal kid (apart from his love of spiders, which frankly I can sympathise with). His friend Steve is much more skilled, smart and knows a helluva lot more about vampires. And he's set up to be a major antagonist. I was, I will happily admit, a very tomboyish teenager. I had long hair and didn't run about climbing trees and playing football, but I have always much preferred books by male writers or about male protagonists. So Darren is pretty sympathetic, but Shan's style of writing irritates me a lot. He's billed as YA now (possibly due to a later occurrence in the 'Cirque du Freak' series or its association with 'The Demonata') but 'Cirque du Freak' is much more aimed at 9-12, imho. The writing style is immature (I assume deliberately), with far more exclamation marks than are strictly necessary, but if I was allowed to tip-ex out 90% of the exclamation marks, it would be pretty much OK.
'Cirque du Freak' starts out slow as most of these kind of books do. We're introduced to Darren's parents, his friends, his sister, his best friend (see above), his teacher, see him at home and school. There is mild mystery when the titular 'Cirque du Freak' is mentioned. It, like the Carnival in Ray Bradbury's 'Something Wicked This Way Comes', is condemned and forbidden by the adults, making it immediately interesting. There is some helpful exposition by the teacher on why freak shows are banned and evil, so at least Shan can't be accused of encouraging kids to attend them, but the real treat is with the 'Cirque du Freak' itself. The descriptions of the 'freaks' are as visceral and shocking as any kid could wish, and the gleeful anticipation is definitely paid off, even if older kids might be blase about the whole thing. The plot continues, a bit oddly, and the pacing kind of totters around a lot, but the book is so short that scenes must be quickly dispensed with and it all leads up nicely to the set up for the rest of the series: Darren becomes a half-vampire to save his friend from the bite of the tarantular from the freak show, and goes off with the delightfully nasty Mr Crepsley to become his apprentice. And in this timeframe comes a beautifully observed scene that had me choking back tears, even at the age of twenty-two. See, the reason we had so much detail on Darren's family and friends? We get to see the funeral from his perspective. As he is in a deathlike but conscious sleep. The pain he feels for making his parents and sister believe he is dead is very affecting, and something rarely explored in vampire fiction beyond a nod.
Of course, he then gets dug up by Mr Crepsley, far and away my favourite character, and taken off to be a vampire. Larten Crepsley barely appears in this book, but he's pretty cool. And don't worry, we'll be seeing lots and lots of him in later books, with a decent amount of character development too. He's not a nice person by any means (as in 'Lord Loss', the adults involved with the supernatural, and therefore the people the protagonists must rely on, are on the whole quite unpleasant), but he grows more likeable as the series progresses. I haven't seen the film of 'The Vampire's Assistant', which is based on the first three books, but John C. Reilly, while a fantastic actor, is a very wrong choice for Mr Crepsley, in my opinion.
So, overall, highly enjoyable, much more suitable for 9-12 year olds than they make out in bookshops, as long as they like big hairy spiders, what is described as 'peril' on those lovely patronising movie ratings and creepy freak shows. I did, and I loved these books. Best to get them out of the library, though, as they're very quick to read.
So, after that (rather longer than intended) summary of 'Cirque du Freak', on to 'Lord Loss'. 'Lord Loss' solidly belongs in YA. It's dark, it's nasty and it's got gore in it that would make some horror writers blush. The setup is the same: ordinary kid of two chess-obsessed parents, sister he has a mildly antagonistic relationship with but actually cares for, friends, school, homework, etc. There are two major differences: this seems set up as a more comedic horror novel, like a zany horror thriller for 9-12 year olds. The main character is called Grubitsh 'Grubbs' Grady, there's a character later called Bill-E Spleen, it all promises zany adventure. The other difference is that the darkness level is set to eleven. Shan says he doesn't write horror but characters in extreme situations, and while these characters are in extreme situations, there's a healthy dose of horror here too. Grubbs, for a start, is already kind of a sociopath. In revenge for something fairly mild his sister verging-on-OCD sister did, he rubs rotten rat guts all over her towel while she showers. Now, I only have one shower a day where she has two or three, and I would find that horrible. If my kid did that to anyone, I'd be putting them into therapy. Grubbs' friend, Bill-E, collects dead animals in a black bin liner as evidence of a werewolf (or so he claims...it might be he just likes collecting dead things).
Of course, none of this matters soon, because Grubbs returns home after being sent off to a friend for some mysterious reason to find his parents and sister horribly mutilated by a demon called Lord Loss and his two hellspawn servants, Vein and Artery, one a demonic wolf with human hands and the other a freakish child monster. Barely escaping with his life, he mans up, goes on wacky adventures and hunts down the demon that killed his parents. Wait, no he doesn't. He goes insane. Like, properly insane. The extended section where he's locked in an asylum is harrowing and creepy, and he doesn't just snap out of it either. Seeing his family gutted, dismembered and hung from the ceiling haunts him for the rest of the novel, and as for Lord Loss, Vein and Artery, he can't even look at pictures of them without being freaked out but he still has to fight them, even as they rip his legs to shreds, and play Lord Loss in a chess match he is almost certain to lose. Yup. It's not just Shan's style that's matured: his realisation of character and the 'extreme situations' he puts them in are so much more monstrous. Sure, it's not subtle: gore's splashed around and it's almost horribly funny when Artery puppets Grubb's sister's corpse from behind, but goddamn if it isn't effective. There's a rather dull subplot about a werewolf in the village Grubb goes to stay in with his uncle, but it turns out to be vital to the main story. And, of course, Dervish Grady, Grubb's uncle, has a more than slightly weird sense of humour. You'll see what I mean at the end of the novel.
This is a gory horror novel on the border of what can class as YA, but it's something that kids will read and will enjoy. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, it's part of a natural progression towards reading adult horror. Still, I always warn people when they buy this book in the shop, and I'll warn you now: it's violent, gory and dark. If it was a film, it'd be an 18, but people are much more willing to accept a violent book than a violent film. Still, it's worth a read, and in many ways better than the 'Cirque du Freak' series.
'Cirque du Freak' is the first novella in a series by the same name. It features a normal kid named Darren Shan (self-insert? Never) who lives his life and then becomes a vampire through a slightly twisty-turny contrived set of events. That's the entire plot of the first book. It's short and sweet and leaves you wanting more. I certainly recall reading these at a startling rate when they came out, but the waiting period between the books meant I got bored and wandered off. The shortness of them means that they're not really worth the...*goes to look it up*...bloody hell, six quid (!) this costs. Ok, the Angels Unlimited/Agent Angel books are shorter on the whole, but they have so much more substance. These would, however, be a nice undaunting way of getting a kid who is not easily freaked out (especially not by spiders!) and likes a good child-friendly gorefest into reading.
Darren isn't actually much of a Gary Stu. He may have traits in common with his creator, but Darren is a very normal kid (apart from his love of spiders, which frankly I can sympathise with). His friend Steve is much more skilled, smart and knows a helluva lot more about vampires. And he's set up to be a major antagonist. I was, I will happily admit, a very tomboyish teenager. I had long hair and didn't run about climbing trees and playing football, but I have always much preferred books by male writers or about male protagonists. So Darren is pretty sympathetic, but Shan's style of writing irritates me a lot. He's billed as YA now (possibly due to a later occurrence in the 'Cirque du Freak' series or its association with 'The Demonata') but 'Cirque du Freak' is much more aimed at 9-12, imho. The writing style is immature (I assume deliberately), with far more exclamation marks than are strictly necessary, but if I was allowed to tip-ex out 90% of the exclamation marks, it would be pretty much OK.
'Cirque du Freak' starts out slow as most of these kind of books do. We're introduced to Darren's parents, his friends, his sister, his best friend (see above), his teacher, see him at home and school. There is mild mystery when the titular 'Cirque du Freak' is mentioned. It, like the Carnival in Ray Bradbury's 'Something Wicked This Way Comes', is condemned and forbidden by the adults, making it immediately interesting. There is some helpful exposition by the teacher on why freak shows are banned and evil, so at least Shan can't be accused of encouraging kids to attend them, but the real treat is with the 'Cirque du Freak' itself. The descriptions of the 'freaks' are as visceral and shocking as any kid could wish, and the gleeful anticipation is definitely paid off, even if older kids might be blase about the whole thing. The plot continues, a bit oddly, and the pacing kind of totters around a lot, but the book is so short that scenes must be quickly dispensed with and it all leads up nicely to the set up for the rest of the series: Darren becomes a half-vampire to save his friend from the bite of the tarantular from the freak show, and goes off with the delightfully nasty Mr Crepsley to become his apprentice. And in this timeframe comes a beautifully observed scene that had me choking back tears, even at the age of twenty-two. See, the reason we had so much detail on Darren's family and friends? We get to see the funeral from his perspective. As he is in a deathlike but conscious sleep. The pain he feels for making his parents and sister believe he is dead is very affecting, and something rarely explored in vampire fiction beyond a nod.
Of course, he then gets dug up by Mr Crepsley, far and away my favourite character, and taken off to be a vampire. Larten Crepsley barely appears in this book, but he's pretty cool. And don't worry, we'll be seeing lots and lots of him in later books, with a decent amount of character development too. He's not a nice person by any means (as in 'Lord Loss', the adults involved with the supernatural, and therefore the people the protagonists must rely on, are on the whole quite unpleasant), but he grows more likeable as the series progresses. I haven't seen the film of 'The Vampire's Assistant', which is based on the first three books, but John C. Reilly, while a fantastic actor, is a very wrong choice for Mr Crepsley, in my opinion.
So, overall, highly enjoyable, much more suitable for 9-12 year olds than they make out in bookshops, as long as they like big hairy spiders, what is described as 'peril' on those lovely patronising movie ratings and creepy freak shows. I did, and I loved these books. Best to get them out of the library, though, as they're very quick to read.
So, after that (rather longer than intended) summary of 'Cirque du Freak', on to 'Lord Loss'. 'Lord Loss' solidly belongs in YA. It's dark, it's nasty and it's got gore in it that would make some horror writers blush. The setup is the same: ordinary kid of two chess-obsessed parents, sister he has a mildly antagonistic relationship with but actually cares for, friends, school, homework, etc. There are two major differences: this seems set up as a more comedic horror novel, like a zany horror thriller for 9-12 year olds. The main character is called Grubitsh 'Grubbs' Grady, there's a character later called Bill-E Spleen, it all promises zany adventure. The other difference is that the darkness level is set to eleven. Shan says he doesn't write horror but characters in extreme situations, and while these characters are in extreme situations, there's a healthy dose of horror here too. Grubbs, for a start, is already kind of a sociopath. In revenge for something fairly mild his sister verging-on-OCD sister did, he rubs rotten rat guts all over her towel while she showers. Now, I only have one shower a day where she has two or three, and I would find that horrible. If my kid did that to anyone, I'd be putting them into therapy. Grubbs' friend, Bill-E, collects dead animals in a black bin liner as evidence of a werewolf (or so he claims...it might be he just likes collecting dead things).
Of course, none of this matters soon, because Grubbs returns home after being sent off to a friend for some mysterious reason to find his parents and sister horribly mutilated by a demon called Lord Loss and his two hellspawn servants, Vein and Artery, one a demonic wolf with human hands and the other a freakish child monster. Barely escaping with his life, he mans up, goes on wacky adventures and hunts down the demon that killed his parents. Wait, no he doesn't. He goes insane. Like, properly insane. The extended section where he's locked in an asylum is harrowing and creepy, and he doesn't just snap out of it either. Seeing his family gutted, dismembered and hung from the ceiling haunts him for the rest of the novel, and as for Lord Loss, Vein and Artery, he can't even look at pictures of them without being freaked out but he still has to fight them, even as they rip his legs to shreds, and play Lord Loss in a chess match he is almost certain to lose. Yup. It's not just Shan's style that's matured: his realisation of character and the 'extreme situations' he puts them in are so much more monstrous. Sure, it's not subtle: gore's splashed around and it's almost horribly funny when Artery puppets Grubb's sister's corpse from behind, but goddamn if it isn't effective. There's a rather dull subplot about a werewolf in the village Grubb goes to stay in with his uncle, but it turns out to be vital to the main story. And, of course, Dervish Grady, Grubb's uncle, has a more than slightly weird sense of humour. You'll see what I mean at the end of the novel.
This is a gory horror novel on the border of what can class as YA, but it's something that kids will read and will enjoy. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, it's part of a natural progression towards reading adult horror. Still, I always warn people when they buy this book in the shop, and I'll warn you now: it's violent, gory and dark. If it was a film, it'd be an 18, but people are much more willing to accept a violent book than a violent film. Still, it's worth a read, and in many ways better than the 'Cirque du Freak' series.
Wednesday, 14 April 2010
'Tithe' by Holly Black
'Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale', by the author of 'The Spiderwick Chronicles' (which I have never read, but intend to at some point), is a Dark Romance novel I'd be proud to recommend to pretty much anyone.
It concerns Kaye Fierch, a girl who has always been...well, a bit different, in that magic happens around her and she can see fairies. Like every faerie romance, there's an attractive and tormented supernatural love interest, and some slightly confusing court politics, but this is pure stardust. Black has written a fairytale with roots in concrete - Kaye's world is one of very mundane glitz and glamour, with her wannabe-singer mother dragging her from city to city and passing down a sparkly catsuit to her daughter. The crossing place to the fairy world isn't some mystical glade but a creek filled with old, broken bottles. This is Neverwhere with fairies, baby, and it's as down-and-dirty as you want.
When she comes across a man wounded late at night and helps him, Kaye can't possibly understand what she's starting. He's gorgeous, but this isn't a normal love story. For a start, the good and evil fairy queens he's enslaved to are equally nasty in their own way. Practically no one in this is pure good. Also, (spoiler warning!) when Kaye finds that she's actually a changeling, her skin peels away and she is green all over. Quite a contrast to, say, the shiny shimmery vampires of 'Twilight', but charmingly weird.
Black clearly knows her myth (Janet, Kaye's friend, is hopefully a reference to the Janet who saves Tam Lin in folklore, and there's a depiction of a kelpie that is perfect and chilling) but she doesn't use it as a way to avoid making up her own. The spider-spinning dressmaker is a memorable example, as is Nephamael, the Unseelie knight, who exemplifies the twisted pleasures of the Unseelie court with his cloak covered with thorns on the inside.
Kaye is not always sympathetic, and she often has a resonance of that feeling that all imaginative young teenagers get, that they are somehow out of kilter with the real world, but she's got a good reason for it at least. 'Tithe' itself feels like a dream, swerving between a real world that verges into magic and Faery, beautiful, fascinating and terrifying. Kaye has a distinct character, but when I came to the end of the novel, I felt like I had lived the dream myself rather than through Kaye.
It's a difficult novel to take, darker than most of the vampire 'dark' romance for YA out there right now, and definitely a change from the pretty fairy and angel stuff, but it's enchanting. This, along with 'The Stolen Child' by Keith Donahue, is the closest fiction has come to the World of Darkness roleplaying game 'Changeling', that I've found. Gritty and weird, but beautiful at the same time.
It concerns Kaye Fierch, a girl who has always been...well, a bit different, in that magic happens around her and she can see fairies. Like every faerie romance, there's an attractive and tormented supernatural love interest, and some slightly confusing court politics, but this is pure stardust. Black has written a fairytale with roots in concrete - Kaye's world is one of very mundane glitz and glamour, with her wannabe-singer mother dragging her from city to city and passing down a sparkly catsuit to her daughter. The crossing place to the fairy world isn't some mystical glade but a creek filled with old, broken bottles. This is Neverwhere with fairies, baby, and it's as down-and-dirty as you want.
When she comes across a man wounded late at night and helps him, Kaye can't possibly understand what she's starting. He's gorgeous, but this isn't a normal love story. For a start, the good and evil fairy queens he's enslaved to are equally nasty in their own way. Practically no one in this is pure good. Also, (spoiler warning!) when Kaye finds that she's actually a changeling, her skin peels away and she is green all over. Quite a contrast to, say, the shiny shimmery vampires of 'Twilight', but charmingly weird.
Black clearly knows her myth (Janet, Kaye's friend, is hopefully a reference to the Janet who saves Tam Lin in folklore, and there's a depiction of a kelpie that is perfect and chilling) but she doesn't use it as a way to avoid making up her own. The spider-spinning dressmaker is a memorable example, as is Nephamael, the Unseelie knight, who exemplifies the twisted pleasures of the Unseelie court with his cloak covered with thorns on the inside.
Kaye is not always sympathetic, and she often has a resonance of that feeling that all imaginative young teenagers get, that they are somehow out of kilter with the real world, but she's got a good reason for it at least. 'Tithe' itself feels like a dream, swerving between a real world that verges into magic and Faery, beautiful, fascinating and terrifying. Kaye has a distinct character, but when I came to the end of the novel, I felt like I had lived the dream myself rather than through Kaye.
It's a difficult novel to take, darker than most of the vampire 'dark' romance for YA out there right now, and definitely a change from the pretty fairy and angel stuff, but it's enchanting. This, along with 'The Stolen Child' by Keith Donahue, is the closest fiction has come to the World of Darkness roleplaying game 'Changeling', that I've found. Gritty and weird, but beautiful at the same time.
Monday, 12 April 2010
'Skulduggery Pleasant' by Derek Landy
'Skulduggery Pleasant' has become quietly popular in the past year. It's a horror-fantasy series in 9-12 with a good dash of comedy and lighthearted jibing. The idea is pretty standard: girl's kooky and significant caregiver (well, uncle, in this case, as her parents are a bit distracted) dies and she inherits a house/mystery/power which will lead her on adventures/trials/quests as nasty men try and take it away/use it for evil/kill her for the fun of it.
Same old same old, but the selling point with this series is its panache. The cover of the first book proclaims 'And he's the good guy!', referring to Skulduggery Pleasant, the eminently likeable, sharp-dressing, Bentley-driving wizard-skeleton of the title. As might be suggested by the entire book being named after him, this is Skul's show. He's a memorable character with a good backstory and a suprisingly complex set of characteristics, once you get past the wise-cracking. I'm skeptical of overt attempts at zany comedy in children's books, as very, very few can manage it well. If it doesn't happen naturally as part of the style, injecting it artificially can be disastrous. Luckily, Derek Landy is pretty good on the whole. The conversations are zingy (though they do at times feel like a screen play) and zany antics never lessen the importance of the plot or jarr too badly with the action. There are things that don't work: Stephanie's petty aunt and uncle are caricatures on a level with the Sackville-Bagginses, but not anywhere near as subtle and Stephanie's father is so absent-minded that it makes you wonder if Landy is trying to foreshadow a later revelation about an early-onset cognitive degenerative disease, in which case making jokes about it is entirely inappropriate. The ongoing jibes about the canary-coloured car were a little random and seemed to exist purely to give fuel for snarky conversations.
Despite Skulduggery being a pretty awesome character, he doesn't actually dominate too much. He's mostly there as a memetic tag - if you remember one thing about this book, you'll remember the walking, talking skeleton who's one of the good guys. Stephanie, the heroine, is surprisingly well-drawn, not too idealised, but spunky enough to root for. She makes mistakes, but remains pretty indomitable, and Landy manages to draw us into sympathising with light but careful gestures. The one criticism I had is that she seems a bit older than twelve. I don't think I was as confident and worldly at sixteen as Stephanie is at twelve, and she's had a pretty sheltered life. I'd have preferred her to be maybe fourteen, at which point it's more good sense than precociousness. Still, that's a minor niggle.
The plot is roughly as it is mapped out above, but that would be underselling it. The Macguffin that's going to destroy the world is a sideline to our exploration, through Stephanie's eyes, of an interesting new fantasy world, in which magic isn't always pretty and the lines of battle aren't always straightforward. There were memorable characters I wanted to know more about: Mr Bliss was decidedly cool, for instance. China Sorrows' library is lovely (but then, give me a magical library in a fantasy world and I'm sold) and the Cleavers are genuinely creepy, though that might be because they had uncomfortable resonances of Pyramid Head about them. This is a fantasy world I'm eager to read more of, and I'm glad it's as popular as it is. Not necessarily for everyone, and so missing the elusive Harry Potter mark, but something I'm wholeheartedly enthusiastic about. It's well-written, action-packed and just plain fun, kind of like an iced party ring biscuit - it won't fill you up or give you something to chew over, but it's light and bright and sweet, and damnably tasty with a grounding of biscuit to anchor it down. Maybe that metaphor stretched too far...
Same old same old, but the selling point with this series is its panache. The cover of the first book proclaims 'And he's the good guy!', referring to Skulduggery Pleasant, the eminently likeable, sharp-dressing, Bentley-driving wizard-skeleton of the title. As might be suggested by the entire book being named after him, this is Skul's show. He's a memorable character with a good backstory and a suprisingly complex set of characteristics, once you get past the wise-cracking. I'm skeptical of overt attempts at zany comedy in children's books, as very, very few can manage it well. If it doesn't happen naturally as part of the style, injecting it artificially can be disastrous. Luckily, Derek Landy is pretty good on the whole. The conversations are zingy (though they do at times feel like a screen play) and zany antics never lessen the importance of the plot or jarr too badly with the action. There are things that don't work: Stephanie's petty aunt and uncle are caricatures on a level with the Sackville-Bagginses, but not anywhere near as subtle and Stephanie's father is so absent-minded that it makes you wonder if Landy is trying to foreshadow a later revelation about an early-onset cognitive degenerative disease, in which case making jokes about it is entirely inappropriate. The ongoing jibes about the canary-coloured car were a little random and seemed to exist purely to give fuel for snarky conversations.
Despite Skulduggery being a pretty awesome character, he doesn't actually dominate too much. He's mostly there as a memetic tag - if you remember one thing about this book, you'll remember the walking, talking skeleton who's one of the good guys. Stephanie, the heroine, is surprisingly well-drawn, not too idealised, but spunky enough to root for. She makes mistakes, but remains pretty indomitable, and Landy manages to draw us into sympathising with light but careful gestures. The one criticism I had is that she seems a bit older than twelve. I don't think I was as confident and worldly at sixteen as Stephanie is at twelve, and she's had a pretty sheltered life. I'd have preferred her to be maybe fourteen, at which point it's more good sense than precociousness. Still, that's a minor niggle.
The plot is roughly as it is mapped out above, but that would be underselling it. The Macguffin that's going to destroy the world is a sideline to our exploration, through Stephanie's eyes, of an interesting new fantasy world, in which magic isn't always pretty and the lines of battle aren't always straightforward. There were memorable characters I wanted to know more about: Mr Bliss was decidedly cool, for instance. China Sorrows' library is lovely (but then, give me a magical library in a fantasy world and I'm sold) and the Cleavers are genuinely creepy, though that might be because they had uncomfortable resonances of Pyramid Head about them. This is a fantasy world I'm eager to read more of, and I'm glad it's as popular as it is. Not necessarily for everyone, and so missing the elusive Harry Potter mark, but something I'm wholeheartedly enthusiastic about. It's well-written, action-packed and just plain fun, kind of like an iced party ring biscuit - it won't fill you up or give you something to chew over, but it's light and bright and sweet, and damnably tasty with a grounding of biscuit to anchor it down. Maybe that metaphor stretched too far...
'The Toymaker' by Jeremy de Quidt
I read 'The Toymaker' as part of my quest to keep up with interesting YA and 9-12 books now coming on the market, and was drawn to it because of the extraorinarily creepy picture on the front. Goddammit, I wanted to know the story behind that. 'The Toymaker' exists in a kind of in-between world in which it is nastier and darker than I'd feel comfortable recommending for a 9 year old but has a writing style (and appropriately aged characters) more fitting for 9-12 than for YA. This book is grim. Everybody exists in a morally grey area that I find both refreshing and depressing: the characters react like people, unrestricted by the kind of morality adults want to present to kids. Jeremy de Quidt has written a dark fairy tale reminiscent of Philip Pullman's wonderful 'Clockwork', especially as the settings and subject matter are so similar, and it is very dark indeed.
The storyline follows Mathias, a boy living with his conjurer grandfather in a travelling circus, but a sudden death, a dangerous secret and a mysterious man who will stop at nothing to get it throw him into the company of a girl called Katta, who has her own secrets, a 'Burner' boy called Stephen and Koenig, a calculating man whose motives are less than obvious. The writing style is pacey but picturesque, letting us really feel the frozen Germany-esque country in which the story takes place. There are engaging details, such as the culture of the 'Burners', gypsy-esque figures who burn wood to make charcoal in the forests and are shunned by society, and the carnival/celebration of a local legend in the main city.
I'd class this as bordering on horror, as Marguerite, the doll with a human heart and sharp needle teeth, is deservedly the subject of the front cover, and there is a fantastically creepy sequence near the beginning as Mathias is pursued by a small, quick assailant in the darkness. It's just a pity that as the story unfolds, there is more of a creeping sense of dread than genuine horror, as Marguerite appears only a couple of times (though to great effect on the second occasion) and the figure in the beginning is a bit of a one-trick pony, a deformed dwarf with supernatural strength, senses and a penchant for torture. That's not a spoiler - the revealed presence of this figure is supposed to be the scary part for 90% of the novel. It's sort of disappointingly mundane.
Like I said, this isn't a nice book. It's not a rip-roaring adventure where everyone's home for tea and crumpets by the end. People die. People are tortured. There's a calculated attempt at squirmifying mutilation by one of the child heroes of the book. No Mcguffins to save the world, no Deus Ex Machina to make everything right. And, honestly, I think it's better for it. I liked this book a great deal - it's like the evil version of a Secret Seven mystery, or the spiritual successor to something like 'The Wolves of Willoughby Chase'. De Quidt doesn't talk down to children, and the illustrations by Gary Blythe, while lovely and soft-edged, can be truly chilling.
On the other hand, I would honestly have liked this book to be a bit longer. There were some sections which were perfectly executed - it rarely dragged on, partly because of de Quidt's writing style - and some of the character development (especially Katta's) was top-notch, but the Toymaker of the title barely appeared, I'd have liked to know more about Koenig, and there was no satisfying resolution at the end. The latter point is not necessarily a bad thing, perhaps showing that things aren't always so neatly tied up as in most novels, and I applaud de Quidt for not feeling that he has to push his story into a given shape, but when I can't even remember fully what happened at the end (I have a pretty bad memory, and I only finished it two days ago), more resolution might be required.
Overall, it's a damn fine book, but somewhat forgettable due to a lack of explanation and resolution. I can look back and pick out instances that will probably stick with me forever, but the overall shape of the thing is fading fast. I personally wouldn't recommend this to a kid below fourteen or so unless they had a pretty strong stomach, but then I read worse things at a younger age, and I genuinely believe it made me grow up a lot (in a good way). Still, if you liked 'Clockwork' (and if you haven't read it, everyone should, since it's one of the only things I've ever read by Philip Pullman I genuinely loved), this is definitely a good pick-up, and speaks of a writer who isn't afraid to show children the horror in fantasy.
The storyline follows Mathias, a boy living with his conjurer grandfather in a travelling circus, but a sudden death, a dangerous secret and a mysterious man who will stop at nothing to get it throw him into the company of a girl called Katta, who has her own secrets, a 'Burner' boy called Stephen and Koenig, a calculating man whose motives are less than obvious. The writing style is pacey but picturesque, letting us really feel the frozen Germany-esque country in which the story takes place. There are engaging details, such as the culture of the 'Burners', gypsy-esque figures who burn wood to make charcoal in the forests and are shunned by society, and the carnival/celebration of a local legend in the main city.
I'd class this as bordering on horror, as Marguerite, the doll with a human heart and sharp needle teeth, is deservedly the subject of the front cover, and there is a fantastically creepy sequence near the beginning as Mathias is pursued by a small, quick assailant in the darkness. It's just a pity that as the story unfolds, there is more of a creeping sense of dread than genuine horror, as Marguerite appears only a couple of times (though to great effect on the second occasion) and the figure in the beginning is a bit of a one-trick pony, a deformed dwarf with supernatural strength, senses and a penchant for torture. That's not a spoiler - the revealed presence of this figure is supposed to be the scary part for 90% of the novel. It's sort of disappointingly mundane.
Like I said, this isn't a nice book. It's not a rip-roaring adventure where everyone's home for tea and crumpets by the end. People die. People are tortured. There's a calculated attempt at squirmifying mutilation by one of the child heroes of the book. No Mcguffins to save the world, no Deus Ex Machina to make everything right. And, honestly, I think it's better for it. I liked this book a great deal - it's like the evil version of a Secret Seven mystery, or the spiritual successor to something like 'The Wolves of Willoughby Chase'. De Quidt doesn't talk down to children, and the illustrations by Gary Blythe, while lovely and soft-edged, can be truly chilling.
On the other hand, I would honestly have liked this book to be a bit longer. There were some sections which were perfectly executed - it rarely dragged on, partly because of de Quidt's writing style - and some of the character development (especially Katta's) was top-notch, but the Toymaker of the title barely appeared, I'd have liked to know more about Koenig, and there was no satisfying resolution at the end. The latter point is not necessarily a bad thing, perhaps showing that things aren't always so neatly tied up as in most novels, and I applaud de Quidt for not feeling that he has to push his story into a given shape, but when I can't even remember fully what happened at the end (I have a pretty bad memory, and I only finished it two days ago), more resolution might be required.
Overall, it's a damn fine book, but somewhat forgettable due to a lack of explanation and resolution. I can look back and pick out instances that will probably stick with me forever, but the overall shape of the thing is fading fast. I personally wouldn't recommend this to a kid below fourteen or so unless they had a pretty strong stomach, but then I read worse things at a younger age, and I genuinely believe it made me grow up a lot (in a good way). Still, if you liked 'Clockwork' (and if you haven't read it, everyone should, since it's one of the only things I've ever read by Philip Pullman I genuinely loved), this is definitely a good pick-up, and speaks of a writer who isn't afraid to show children the horror in fantasy.
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