Books: The Antipope By Robert Rankin (1981)

 

“You could say it all started with the red-eyed tramp with the slimy fingers who put the wind up Neville, the part-time barman, something rotten. Or when Archroy's wife swapped his trusty Morris Minor for five magic beans while he was out at the rubber factory. On the other hand, you could say it all started a lot earlier. Like 450 years ago, when Borgias walked the earth. Pooley and Omally, stars of the Brentford Laboiur Exchange and the Flying Swan, want nothing to do with it, especially if there's a Yankee and a pint of Large in the offing. Pope Alexander VI, last of the Borgias, has other ideas.”

A lot of this off-kilter book reads like a collection of stories, linked by a framing device. Which in some ways, it was. The Antipope, originally released in 1981 (and reissued in 1991), was Rankin’s longed desired effort to get his loose collection of short stories published. The book details the rogues, madmen, shysters, and others average citizens of the small English town of Brentford who all frequent the local pub known as The Flying Swan. There is also a subplot that involves some end of the world Revelations, the good vs evil stuff that seemly takes place in small English villages. Still, that plot meanders and Rankin seems more interested in dealing with a lot of silliness that Brentford seems to exist in. So Rankin’s writing is very similar to Douglas Adams, with doses of Monty Python’s off-the-wall humor added for good measure. But it’s also real hard to pin down what genre this book belongs in, though it would most likely end up in the sci-fi section of any bookstore. But it’s enjoyable, a little slow (and the whole Pope plotline does not kick in until about halfway through), but there are some carefully constructed lines here, and you get the sense that Rankin –in his desire, again, to get his writing published- knows people won’t be getting what they expect from what it says on the tin.

Interestingly, this started out as a trilogy that eventually expanded to at nine novels over the years. In 2017, he began the final Brentford trilogy. A prolific writer, his other books include the Armageddon trilogy, Armageddon: The Musical, They Came and Ate Us: Armageddon II: The B Movie, and Suburban Book of the Dead: Armageddon III: The Remake. The Cornelius Murphy Series: The Book of Ultimate Truths, Raiders of the Lost Car Park, and The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived. 

I would say that Rankin is a writer most in America has never heard of, but should read. Yes, it's not a broad comedy, but satire of the highest order and something the British are very good at. 

Books: Last Exit By Max Gladstone (2022)

“When Zelda and her friends first met, in college, they believed they had all the answers. They had figured out a big secret about how the world worked and they thought that meant they could change things. They failed. One of their own fell, to darkness and rot. Ten years later, they've drifted apart, building lives for themselves, families, fortunes. All but Zelda. She's still wandering the backroads of the nation. She's still fighting monsters. She knows: the past isn't over. It's not even past. The road's still there. The rot's still waiting. They can't hide from it any more. Because, at long last, their friend is coming home. And hell is coming with her.” 

While I kind of liked this book, I felt Last Exit was trying to say something, but using a sort of real-life issues juxtaposition with some fictional evil made the book a chore to get through. It became less an escapist novel and more of tale about a bunch of STEM kids obsessed with their college days, the errors that they made and how doing what they’re doing will solve all those problems. A Big Chill, in many ways, with science fiction, fantasy, and horror thrown in. But no great music score.

While Gladstone is clearly channeling Stephen King here – the book plays out like a extended riff on his Dark Tower series, as well as IT (especially the part where Zelda sends out the letters to get the gang back together, and we see their back stories)- it lacks a lot of the charisma King brings to his magna opus universe. The vaguely designed explanation of how these characters can jump between universes and we see many, but none are really spectacular. Most are Mad Max style, so it made me feel he really didn’t want to alienate certain readers by giving us a really weird world (though towards the end, Ramon asks if any the “alts” Sarah had visited contained alien invaders). They also have something they called a “knack,” which seems like a heightened sense of knowing certain things, like Zelda’s ability to alter probability. How these “powers” are developed is never clearly explored or explained.  

Beyond Ish and even Ramon, I found most of the characters dull and uninteresting. Zelda’s fixation with saving Sal grows weary. Yes, I understand Zelda loves Sal and would rewind, rework, replace the world to save her, but it eventually borders on a mania I could not understand. But I grew bored with all the characters bemoaning about their past issues, so I struggled through the book.

One final aspect that did not help was the dialogue. I mean nobody talks the way these folks do outside Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the end, It became a bit too clever and unfunny.

Books: The Final Girls Support Group By Grady Hendrix (2021)

“In horror movies, the final girl is the one who's left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her? Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she's not alone. For more than a decade she's been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynnette's worst fears are realized--someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart again, piece by piece. But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.”

While The Final Girl Support Group pays homage to the last four decades of slasher films, the books themes writer Grady Hendrix trots out gets lost in the seemly torpid James Patterson inspired dialogue and Hendrix’s attempt to appeal to a certain sub-group of teens who came of age in the late 1980s and early 90s. It wants to be a clever dissection of the genre, but can’t get over what is an essentially B-film horror schlock.

I caught early on that this book was also a sort of attempt to explore male misogyny and a lot of women’s obsession with true crime books and local murders. We get the men who hate women and women who become enamored of popular male killers –and how they can be easily manipulated, these impressionable teens. Then he tries to use those tropes and themes to give women the ability to fight back.

My biggest issue was keeping all the characters straight –I mean all the women in most of these horror films are essentially the same character. There is really nothing to separate them, to make them stand apart from each other. And it didn’t help I felt no emotional connection to even the main protagonist, Lynn. I can’t understand anyone, let a women, who suffer such trauma, but Lynn never made anyone, even herself, remotely likable.

Another mixed bag for me, an interesting (maybe brilliant) dea but executed in an only half interesting way. Which is funny, considering I’ve had the basic same issues with his two previous novels, My Best Friend’s Exorcism and The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires.

I don’t know, maybe this may have worked as a novella more than a novel.

Books: Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By by Dan Abnett (2011)

 

“For centuries the Maintainers have worked. With no help from other worlds, they subsist on the food they can grow and that's little enough. But their purpose, their whole life is to maintain the machines that will one day make their world as habitable as old Earth. Life used to be hard. Now as their crops fail, livestock sickens, and the temperature drops, it's becoming impossible. This year's Winter Season Feast won't be the usual celebration. It's not a time for optimism or hope - and it's not a time to welcome unexpected guests. The Doctor, Amy, and Rory find a society breaking apart under the strain. Tensions are mounting, old rivalries are coming to the fore, people are dying...and then the Doctor's old enemies, the Ice Warriors, make their move. With the cold-hearted threat of invasion, the real battle for survival begins. Or does it? The Doctor begins to suspect that behind everything lies a deadlier, and even more chilling danger.”

The Silent Stars Go By is a fine, often fun tale involving the 11^th Doctor, with Amy and Rory Williams Pond. Abnett is a prolific writer of comics (for both Marvel and DC) and novels set in the Warhammer universe, but this is not his first dealings with Doctor Who universe. He wrote a Torchwood novel in 2007 and contributed the framing device to the 2011 anthology novel, The Story of Martha.

The first half is a bit soft, with ill attempts at humor that often make Amy look dumb, but the book does pickup after a bit to become an exciting and well-thought tale about terraforming, and (harking back to the Classic Doctor Who serial The Face of Evil) use of the way language, words, and ideas morph over the generations. So the world building and this well thought out language drift make up for the slow and predictable start. While the reader knows the Ice Warriors (or Martians) are involved with the plot, it takes way too long for them to become useful –and maybe that was done because what happens (including then the startling original Transhumans) would’ve shaved a lot of pages off the book, so Abnett added a lot of the unnecessary running around. Still, as has happened before, the Ice Warriors are not really proper villains.

Books: Double Whammy By Carl Hiaasen (1987)

 

"R.J. Decker, star tenant of the local trailer park and neophyte private eye is fishing for a killer. Thanks to a sportsman's scam that's anything but sportsmanlike, there's a body floating in Coon Bog, Florida -- and a lot that's rotten in the murky waters of big-stakes, large-mouth bass tournaments. Here Decker will team up with a half-blind, half-mad hermit with an appetite for road kill; dare to kiss his ex-wife while she's in bed with her new husband; and face deadly TV evangelists, dangerously seductive women, and a pistol-toting redneck with a pit bull on his arm. And here his own life becomes part of the stakes, for while the "double whammy" is the lure, first prize is for the most ingenious murder.”

This was Hiaasen’s second solo novel. He had written three more traditional thrillers with William Montalbo, but with his first tale, Tourist Season, it became clear that Hiaasen was going to bring a new voice to thrillers, one more silly and outrageous, yet still ugly and violent. In essence, he created a whole new subgenre of mysteries that writers like Tim Dorsey and Janet Evanovich would draw success years later. As much as Hiaasen loves Florida, he clearly loves showing its dark side, the juxtapositions of rich, influential white conservative fake Christians who must deal with the white trash, and POC, and the other crazy denizens that populate his books.

It does get off quick start, even with the boggling down of facts about bass fishing. Decker is a likable guy with a short temper, but who clearly is trying to live a better life. But he does come off a bit weak. The deaths are violent and worthy of noir-style tales. The difference here, much like Donald E. Westlakes Dortmunder tales, some of the villains are dumb as a box of hair.

A fun, inventive book, even if mystery mixed with farce doesn’t work all the way through.

Books: Lily and the Octopus By Steven Rowley (2016)

 

“Ted—a gay, single, struggling writer is stuck: unable to open himself up to intimacy except through the steadfast companionship of Lily, his elderly dachshund. When Lily’s health is compromised, Ted vows to save her by any means necessary.”

As Ted explains, “It’s Thursday the first time I see it. I know that it’s Thursday because Thursday nights are the nights my dog, Lily, and I set aside to talk about boys we think are cute.…We get into long debates over the Ryans. I’m a Gosling man, whereas she’s a Reynolds gal.” The thing Ted notices that fateful Thursday is an octopus (which, of course, is a metaphor for a tumor). For most of the novel, the thing over Lily’s eye remains an octopus, because Ted (through writer Steven Rowely) cannot fathom the reality that he will be losing his faithful companion. Ted’s friends and his therapist do call him on this, but eventually they know this is Ted and Lily’s journey. The plot falls into magical realism, which works for a good percentage of the time. It can be laugh out loud funny as well. For lover’s of animals, this book may make them weep, and non-animal lovers will continue to be baffled by how these pets become so in grained in our lives.

Lily and the Octopus is defiantly a quirky book and while I love quirky tales, I did feel the book could’ve worked more as a novella than a full blown novel. But I liked Rowely’s The Guncle, so I thought I give this a whirl. It’s a rather quick read, as well. I'll read his second novel, The Editor, sometime in the coming weeks.