I was in Forbidden Planet with my husband last summer. He was looking for a couple of indie comics and I was idly browsing the shelves of trade paperbacks. The cover of the first collected volume of Ice Cream Man caught my eye. I picked it up and read the first few pages of the first chapter. I liked it enough to take a chance on it. I haven’t read a comic series since I finished The Sixth Gun and thought that Ice Cream Man might be a series I could get into.
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Lucie McKnight Hardy’s debut novel weaves together a smattering of personal experience with folk horror tropes to create a quiet novel about revenge, belonging and control. It’s an unsettling coming of age story that paints a picture of a particular time in British history, drawing together themes of witchcraft and suspicion of strangers, folklore and religious certainty, and grudges that are centuries old and more recent.
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I’ve had this short story on my e-reader for a while and have kept meaning to read it sometime around Hallowe’en. I failed to do that again this year, so instead it has become an end of year read, something quick to see out the old year.
Ted and Dawn Weston have recently lost their parents, who briefly lived at 17 Ashley Avenue in Toronto’s exclusive Rosedale area. Charles Courtney and Sally Wakefield go to the house as insurance investigators subcontracted by the City council to put to bed any suggestion that the Weston house might be haunted. The Weston siblings, having heard rumours of this nature and being nonplussed by the accidental nature of their parents’ deaths, have called in a psychic to contact the recently deceased.
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Tomato Cain and Other Stories, from Manchester’s independent publisher Comma Press, is a reissue of Nigel Kneale’s fiction debut. It brings together the 31 tales that appeared in the original UK and US collections plus two stories not previously included in any collection, and previously thought lost.
Kneale is better known for his television and film scriptwriting than his fiction, and was responsible for the creation of the Quatermass series of films and television programmes, as well as a group of six eerie tales shown on ATV in the 1970s, collectively known as Beasts. He is associated with the genres of science fiction and horror, something that did not sit well with him in his own lifetime.
The first edition of Tomato Cain and Other Stories was published in 1949 and the stories have an otherworldly feel to them as much for that reason as for their subject matter. There’s a certain tone to them, a sense that the old world hasn’t quite been shaken off yet, or the modernism of the mid-century fully embraced. Kneale conjures a world where chapel on Sunday is still part of the fabric of life, but for some has begun to represent an unwanted ritual without meaning. For others, the old ways are more important than the Bible. There are morality tales that fix on human weakness, stories that are science fiction in their fascination with engineering and strange technologies, and yarns that play on a sense of dread wrapped up in the peculiarity of a situation.
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Like a Bryan Adams song, Verdigris takes place over a single summer; the summer of 1969. Unlike a Bryan Adams song, Verdigris squirms with horror and questions what makes reality. In that summer of ’69, the novel’s narrator Michelino is 13 and a half years old (the half year is important to him) and spending the holiday with his grandparents in Nasca, Italy. Neither grandparent takes an interest in the boy, and he is left to entertain himself. That entertainment doesn’t include buying a guitar and starting a band. Michelino is far too esoteric for that.
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After finishing Volume 8 of The Sixth Gun, I couldn’t wait to complete the series, so jumped straight into Volume 9 on New Year’s Day. The final volume brings together the three concluding chapters in this epic, marshalling all the forces with an interest in The Six together for the final battle.
The Six are an ancient force, forged in the early history of mankind. They have taken many forms, and have been used to end and recreate the world many times. Over the centuries, they have evolved, becoming near sentient, able to manipulate their bearers to ensure that, with each remaking of the world, they remain active within it. But their existence is the cause of wars, enmity, power struggles and misery for those caught at the edges of conflict. In Volume 9, Drake Sinclair and Becky Montcrief have set themselves the task of remaking the world without The Six in it. But first they must stop the Grey Witch, Griselda, from remaking the world in her image.
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It has been a while since I last read a volume of The Sixth Gun. September 2017, in fact. I needed to skim through my review of Volume 7 to remind myself of what had happened. Quite a lot, as it turned out.
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A paragraph that almost shares its title with that of Ray Bradbury’s short story collection The October Country introduces this place as
Continue reading… that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain …
In a similar way to Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata’s second novel Earthlings examines the worlds created by people who find that the standards set by wider society don’t quite fit with who they are. It casts a light on the tendency in Japanese society towards rigid compliance and formality over feelings, contrasting the instincts of childhood with the conformity and regulation of adulthood. It also shows up the double standards in society, with a blind eye turned to some behaviours but not others. There are moments of humour and tenderness, but this story is much darker than Murata’s previous book.
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Wasteland by Keith Crews came free with the first Kindle e-reader that my husband bought me in 2010. This edition was self-published by the author but has since been reissued in paperback and is seemingly the first in a series. It follows hitman Angelo Marchetti as he crosses a place known as the Wasteland armed with two guns he calls Thunder and Lightning.
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What I Think About When I Think About Reading 