Review: Dark Visions by LJ Smith

Dark Visions comprises three novels, The Strange Power, The Possessed and The Passion, all of which were originally published back in the mid 1990s. Now they have been repackaged into a single 730 page paper-back volume and released back to a public whose taste for this kind of urban fantasy has been rekindled by the ubiquitous Twilight books.

And here comes the apology.  I know you’re all sick of references to La Meyer and her magnum opus but in the case of Dark Visions I really must draw the analogies. Why? Because reading these three novels you cannot help but be struck by the similarities and as this volume has only just been published (September 3^rd) you may fall into the misapprehension that Smith had been influenced by Meyer.  The truth, however, given the original publication dates, would seem to be the opposite.

But let me tell you a little more about the novels themselves.

The Strange Power introduces the main characters. Kaitlin is an artist, whose drawings have the uncanny habit of coming true. She is invited by the mysterious Dr Zetes to join his group of psychically talented teenagers in a purple building in California. (The significance of the building’s colour is never explained but it’s such a super detail, I thought I’d mention it!) There she meets the two other major characters in the three novels: golden boy, Rob, the healer, and brooding but gorgeous Gabriel, the telepath.

By the end of The Strange Power the three teenagers, along with the two other psychic teen residents of the purple house, Anna and Lewis, have discovered that Dr Zetes isn’t quite the philanthropist they thought, fought him off and in doing so created a psychic bond between group members that cannot be broken.

The Possessed opens with the group on the run. They have escaped Dr Zetes and are desperately working their way up the west coast of America looking for the beach that Kaitlin believes houses their salvation. As they hide out together they grow closer and Kaitlin finally discovers Gabriel’s secret: he’s not just a telepath, but a psychic vampire who has to drain others of their psychic energy to survive.  Now, ordinarily you might run from this. But not Kaitlin. No, she decides that she’s strong enough to control Gabriel and offers herself up as a source. And at this point I can hear you all screaming Bella and Edward at me. So I shall say no more. 

The novel ends with an apocalyptic battle between the Fellowship (the good guys) and Dr Zetes and his bunch of psychic freaks (you guessed it, the bad guys), the outcome of which proves to be not entirely satisfactory for either side. And Kaitlin is not happy either, torn as she is between good old Rob and scary but sexy Gabriel!

The third novel, The Passion, brings both the love story and the battle between good and evil to an end.  This is the one where Kaitlin grabs hold of her life, takes risks and emerges triumphant. She also gets the boy, but I won’t reveal which one.

So, what did I make of the books? Well, they’re a lot shorter than the Twilight opus and the read far more quickly.  The style is leaner and the pages turn rapidly.  Watching the relationship between Kaitlyn and Gabriel ebb and wane is a joy and those readers who criticised Bella for being too sappy, will find for more meat on the bone in Kaitlyn.

The minor characters in the group, Anna and Lewis are less clearly defined. This is only natural given the sheer dominance of the romantic triangle, but, for my money, I could have done with a bit more colour.  Still, that criticism aside, if you liked Twilight, then you will like Dark Visions and it is amazingly good value at only £7.99 for all three books.

As to me, I’m off to read Scott Westerfeld’s latest. I’ve read too many books about American teenagers recently and I really can’t face them again for a while!

Dark Visions by L.J.Smith, published by Simon and Schuster, September 2009

Review Mr Mumbles by Barry Hutchison

I read Invisible Fiends: Mr Mumbles on the train to a children’s writers’ event in London and then on the way back again, and so engrossed was I that I had to carry on whilst walking in the dark from the station to my house. It wasn’t an easy task, trying to catch the light from the sparsely arranged streetlamps and, as you will realise when you read on, it wasn’t an entirely sensible thing to do either.

Mr Mumbles is the first of what will become a series of Invisible Fiends books.  And it is not for the faint-hearted. It is 250 pages of fast-paced, spine-tingling fun with a dystopian vision that is truly horrifying. Shall I tell you more?

The eponymous, Mr Mumbles, (hero, he is not) was Kyle’s childhood imaginary friend.  He was a skinny little man with friendly eyes who made up for his lack of intelligible speech by a wide range of slapstick and mime.  He wore a high-collared overcoat and a hat pulled down too far and he had big ears and bushy eyebrows.

But that was then.  The new Mr Mumbles isn’t friendly at all. He looks like he has been through Hell and he wants to bring it back with him.  Here’s a flavour:

‘The lips were grotesque: thick, bloated, and sewn tightly together with grimy lengths of thread. Each stitch crossed over its neighbour, forming a series of little Xs from one side of his mouth to the other, sealing it shut. The holes the threads passed through were black and infected, the flesh rotting away from within.’

Perhaps I should have mentioned this is not a book for the squeamish either?

Mr Mumbles blames Kyle for what has happened to him and he is out for revenge. In the chase that ensues, Kyle is helped by the mysterious and resourceful Ameena and discovers powers he never knew he had.  He also finds himself thrust into The Darkest Corners, the dystopia from which Mr Mumbles has come, and where he find an even more mysterious, and, it turns out, significant, figure.

Invisible Fiends is part good old-fashioned quest. There are some great fight scenes and a real sense of danger as Mr Mumbles comes back from everything that Kyle and Ameena throw at him.  Kyle’s quest, therefore is to find a way to overcome and destroy him.

This is all fairly straightforward, if exciting stuff. The horror, however, lies in what feels like the sub-plot for this novel, but is more likely the story that underpins the series as a whole. Kyle has never met his father and his mother will not tell him anything about him. Nan might, but she’s long since lost her marbles. By the end of this novel, Kyle has some idea who his father is, and that brings me back to the reason why it wasn’t a very good idea to finish this novel walking down a dark road. The denouement is truly, spine-tinglingly creepy. I’m not sure if a ten year old would get it, but it left this grown-up with some very disturbing thoughts on which to go to bed.

And maybe that’s the point. Little boys will love it: fast action, sassy dialogue, gruesome imagery and a scary ending.  Just don’t read it to them at bed-time. You may have trouble getting to sleep afterwards.

Invisible Fiends: Mr Mumbles by Barry Hutchison, published by Harper Collins on 7 January 2010

Review: Volcano Roads by Peter Tonkin

Every so often I have a break from reading (and writing) young adult fantasy to read something else and this time it was the latest in Peter Tonkin’s Richard Mariner series. Volcano Roads is due for publication in late November and will be the 21^st, yes 21^st, Mariner novel. But before you stop reading this review on the basis that you couldn’t possibly find the time to read the previous 20 in the next two months, let me reassure you: each of the Mariner novels is self-contained. It may add to your enjoyment if you have read others but it really isn’t necessary.

So, for Mariner virgins, let me tell you a little about the books. The eponymous Richard Mariner is a sea captain who gets himself and his indomitable (and sexy) wife, Robin, into all sorts of scrapes involving boats and ships all around the world. He’s massively wealthy, extraordinarily well-connected and has a better-toned body than any middle aged man deserves. He’s also reliably practical around boats, guns and women and more than a bit of a polymath. All of which comes in handy when he’s fighting off pirates, terrorists, mercenaries and any other ne’er-do-wells the modern world can throw at him.

Which leads me onto Volcano Roads. The novel opens with the striking image of a young woman diver hanging motionless and near-dead in the Java Sea. Below her is the dead body of her diving buddy. Above her is the dead body of the boatsman. She has less than an hour to live.

Into this scene sails the Tai Fun, Richard Mariner’s state-of-the-art four-masted cruise liner, en route to the grand opening of the Volcano Roads hotel on the nearby island of Pulau Baya and the marriage of the island’s ruler, Prince Sailendra, and Inga Nordberg.  I did mention that Richard is rather well-connected and wealthy didn’t I? So it won’t come as a surprise that he co-owns the hotel and that his guest on the Tai Fun is none other than the bride.

Needless to say, Richard saves the diver, kicks off the investigation into the deaths, and still succeeds in getting the bride to the wedding on time. Just.

But that isn’t the last of it and what follows is a complex and fast moving tale involving a truly evil businessman, weak-minded and greedy princelings, double-crossing nice guys and rather of lot of well-researched geography and science. Indeed, the amount of research involved in a Mariner novel is one of their more striking features.

Another striking feature is Tonkin’s style. I rather expect this sort of novel to involve a lot of punchy dialogue and short sharp sentences and paragraphs. But Tonkin’s is a more literary style. At first it seems a bit slow. There’s a languorous description of the diver on the opening page, for example.  Let me quote a little:

Her arms were thrown wide, but bent inwards at the elbows as though she was hugging the slow, warm current like an invisible lover. A lover who ran slow fingers across the redness of her cheeks, past the yellow frame of her face-mask,  over the silver circle of the regulator between her carmine lips and up through the spread black cloud of her hair.

You fear at first that such exquisite description will slow down the pace of the book. But as you read you realise that it’s quite the opposite. And that is because of the way Tonkin uses the descriptive passages to create atmosphere, suggest character and leave hints and clues for the reader to decipher. It has the effect of making you feel more involved with the characters, and the hints put the reader in the privileged position of being to solve the mystery alongside the protagonists.

If I have any criticisms of Volcano Roads, it’s that it finished just a little too suddenly, as if a final, short, chapter was missing. But maybe that was just because I had got used to luxuriating in this book and didn’t want it to finish.

So, watch out for the publication of Volcano Roads and give it a try. Only be warned, if you like this one, there are 20 others to read too!

Volcano Roads by Peter Tonkin, published by Severn House on 26^th November 2009

Review: Wicked: Witch and Curse by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguie

Wicked:Witch and Curse is something of a double whammy of a book. For starters, it comprises the first two novels, Witch and Curse, of the Wicked series. And then there is the small matter of the novels having two authors.

Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié met at a Maui Writers’ Retreat some years ago. Holder will be familiar to many of you as the writer of no small number of Buffy, Angel and Smallville books. Viguié was her student at the retreat. They clearly hit it off and the five novels (to date) of the Wicked series are the result.

Witch was first published in 2002, and Curse the following year.  The next two novels in the series, Legacy and Spellbound, also came out in 2003 but readers have had to wait until this July for the fifth novel, Resurrection. In the meantime, no doubt in an effort to drum up a little interest, the first four have been re-packaged into two two-novel volumes which were issued in late 2008. Still, I shouldn’t be too churlish about that: two novels for £6.99 is a pretty good deal by anyone’s standards and when the novels are this readable...

But I’m getting ahead of myself. So back to business.

Witch opens with turmoil. Holly Cather’s parents have taken Holly and her best friend on a white water rafting trip on the Colorado river. They have also taken their argument; one of those weeks-long arguments that can only end in catastrophe. So it doesn’t really come as a huge surprise when the weather starts to imitate Holly’s parents, turning the river into a swirling hell from which Holly alone emerges alive.

Orphaned, and best-friendless Holly finds herself dragged from her beloved San Francisco to chilly, and infinitely wetter Seattle, to join two cousins, Nicole and Amanda, and their mother, and Holly’s father’s sister, Marie-Claire.  These are relations she never knew she had and as the novel progresses we realise why her father had cut all ties with his family: the Cathers are witches, descended from the ancient family of Cahors in France and the sworn enemies of the equally ancient and French Deveraux witches. And therein lies the problem, because the leading member of the 21^st Century Deveraux family, Michael, is alive and well and living around the corner in Seattle.

In Witch, Holly starts to discover her heritage.  She begins to settle into her new family, slowly becoming aware of her own and their abilities. At the same time she also starts to understand the powerful link that exists between herself and her 13^th century French ancestor Isabeau de Cahors, an understanding which is enhanced when she meets  Michael Deveraux’s son, Jer, who is himself drawn back to the 13^th Century through his links with Isabeau’s lover, Jean de Deveraux.

What follows is partly the traditional battle between good (female) and evil (male) and partly a Romeo and Juliette style love story. (The reference is deliberate, by the way. Nicole is actually starring as Juliette in the school play during the ferocious final battle of the novel!) On the way there’s also a fair bit of self discovery (not just on the part of Holly and Jer) and challenge to the stereotypes, most notably the ‘male=bad’ one, you’ll be glad to hear.

Curse picks up from Witch a year later. By then Jer is a physical mess hidden away on a mythical island and kept awake by goodness knows what magic, Nicole has run away to Europe to escape her destiny (yes, you knew that would be a mistake) and Holly has become Coven Mother back in Seattle. Needless to say the battle between the Cahors and the Deveraux reaches a further stage, this time accompanied by pyrotechnics that leave the reader gasping for breath. The two harbour scenes are stunners and would look great in CGI.

I won’t say more about the plot, for to do so would take me into spoiler territory. These are both fast paced, page turners of books and I was left at the end of Curse wanting more. This is not just because so many questions are left unanswered, nor because of all the hooks into the next novels. I had also grown fond of the characters and I want to know whether they survive and in what mangled emotional and physical state.

And so, you may ask, was there anything I didn’t like? Well, yes, actually, there was. You see Holder and Viguié consistently use a particular collective noun for a group of covens. It’s Coventry! I can’t imagine that bothers the original American readers a jot, but every time I hit it, an image of a dull Midlands city would swim before my eyes. And apart from wet weather I really could not see what Coventry had to do with anything.

But that’s a pretty niggling criticism. I found both Witch and Curse hard to put down.  You may have the same problem.

Wicked by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié, published by Simon and Schuster, September 2008

Review: The Demon's Lexicon, by Sara Rees Brennan

Stephanie Meyer seems to have plunged us all into a craving for YA Urban Fantasy with brooding, mysterious  males and teenage misfit heroines, and The Demon Lexicon delivers all this for us in a concise ( by Twilight standards) 322 pages.

As the book’s blurb tells us:

Sixteen year old Nick knows that demons are real. Magicians call up demons in exchange for their power. The demons can appear in any shape, show you marvels, promise you anything – until you invite them in and receive their mark. What happens next? First you get possessed. Then you die.

Nick’s been on the run his whole life, ever since his mother stole a charm from the most feared magician of them all, and the only person he trusts is his brother Alan. Alan’s just been marked by a demon. Only Nick can save him, but to do so he must face the magicians – and kill them. The hunt is on. And Nick’s going to discover things he never dreams were out there...

Nick is the original dangerous male: he has impenetrable, dark eyes and a lithe, muscular body and he can do things with knives and swords that would strike fear into a Samurai’s heart. Worse still, he feels no fear. Or pity. So, when his soft-hearted brother agrees to help pink-haired Mae and her demon-marked brother Jamie, he is disgusted.

Mae, however, is no Bella. She is a tough, feisty number, whose ability to look after herself is only marred by her inexperience in wielding weapons.  Indeed, the reader senses that she grows in stature as the novel progresses. And this may explain why the follow-up, The Devil’s Covenant, gives her the major role.  

From the beginning, you know that these two are destined for each other. But as the blurb indicates, this is no love story, rather a quest to save Nick’s brother Alan (and Mae’s brother, Jamie too). And as a quest, it works well. There’s no shortage of action, a fast pace and plenty of spooky, even stomach-churning scenes. (A particular favourite is when someone’s eyes turn to black beetles and run out of his eye sockets, down his body, and across the room to take a closer look at Nick!)

Nevertheless, love, in all its forms, is a powerful theme in the story. Alan’s love for Nick governs all his actions. Mae’s love for Jamie enables her to undertake tasks that horrify her. And clearly, love is the key to rescuing Nick when he discovers the secret his mother and brother have been keeping from him. 

And this was the one thing that bothered me: it seemed to me that Brennan had set up her world of magicians and demons so well that it is impossible to see a way out of Nick’s predicament at the end.  She has set herself a huge task in the sequel and I will be very intrigued to see if she can pull it off.

On set with Invasion of the Not Quite Dead

Date:                     Sunday 16^th August 2009

Place:                    A fruit farm in deepest Kent

Present:                AD Lane, 16 crew members, 4 actors, 11 extras, 1 actor’s girlfriend, and me

The weather could not have been better: the sky a deep azure blue, and the sun glistening on the newly applied fake blood.  A number of inhumanly pale farm labourers pick apples for their co-worker to sell to equally sickly-looking passers-by. Another labourer, in a boiler suit, gazes into the distance, the smoke from his cigarette swirling around his head and momentarily masking his peeling flesh.

And Vincent de Paula, Director of Photography, glides slowly past with his camera.

This is the first time AD Lane has sat in the director’s chair since graduation and you might have expected him to look a little nervous. Instead he seemed totally at ease, chatting happily with crew, and cast during the breaks, and introducing himself to each and every extra to ensure they felt comfortable. This is my only experience of a real shoot but I was struck by the overwhelming calmness of the proceedings. I had expected the long periods of hanging about, whilst equipment was set up, or cast walked through their part, but I was surprised by how polite everyone was even during the actual filming. It was all please and thank you and there was the most delightfully gentlemanly discussion between Director, Assistant Director and Director of Photography at the end of filming before the Assistant announced, almost apologetically, ‘I think that we have a wrap.’

Maybe this was the reason why Antony brought the filming in under budget and in less time than expected.  Another might be the commitment of everyone involved. You only had to listen into a tiny part of the chatter to realise that everyone there was a zombie freak. Take the young couple who had driven over two hours from Hertfordshire just to be extras. They get married in early September and yet they found time to take part. They get married in September and yet they have already invested £450 in the film and want to invest more when they know how much they have left after the honeymoon! And they didn’t even want a speaking role; they just wanted to be part of a zombie film. Now, that is true dedication and you have to believe, with that sort of support, Antony can’t fail.

So what of the trailer itself? I’m sworn to secrecy, and anyway I didn’t see the morning’s filming. But I can tell you it will feature the film’s heroes in Leslie Simpson and Efisia Fele (otherwise known as Fangoria’s Penny B Dreadful) along with the cigarette smoking zombie, Frank Jakeman.  Antony is hoping to get it out in time for Hallowe’en, preferably previewing it at a festival and you can be sure that it will raise more questions than it will provide answers. The intention is to keep the punters guessing right to the film’s release.

I’ll let you know when the trailer is available, but if you want to get a preview then you will have to dig into your pocket and sign up to one of Antony’s producer packages (http://www.theindywoodproject.com/). You too could be a zombie then, since all producers will be invited to be extras in the film itself.  Oh, and don’t think you need to be a zombie freak to be involved either. It turns out they really are a very friendly bunch with more than a slight penchant for Nice biscuits!

Tunbridge Wells Strikes Again

The idea for Strife was sparked off when I wondered what might follow if the bandstand disappeared overnight. Now a short story based on another of my Tunbridge Wells musings has been accepted for publication in an anthology for adults being published in November. The story, called the Rock House, is about a spooky house built into the rocks on an area of common land and the even spookier old lady who lives in it.

Tunbridge Wells common has a number of houses that are half built into the rocky outcrops that occur in the area and they have always struck me as incredibly magical-looking buildings. I'm sure no-one like my fictional old lady lives in any of them but I do wonder what sort of person could live in a house that seems to grow out of the living rock. Any ideas?