Nobody True by James Herbert

Sometimes I pick up books because I read the premise and I just know instinctively that I need to read the book proper to find out what the author has done with that scenario. Nobody True was one of those books. Considering that my last encounter with James Herbert was mixed at best though, I was somewhat wary going into this, regardless of my enthusiasm for the premise. 

Nobody True follows Jim True, a man who is ordinary in all but one way: he has had incredibly vivid out-of-body experiences ever since he was a young boy. While he is on one of these out-of-body experiences, he returns to his body to find that he has been murdered and his body horribly mutilated while his spirit was away. He finds himself searching for his killer, but first he must figure out whether he was the victim of a serial killer who had similarly mutilated their victims, or whether his murderer was someone he knew and was close to. But even if he can figure that out, is there anything that he can actually do in his now-permanent incorporeal state if he does discover the culprit. 

I really wanted to like Nobody True, but I knew that it was a dud when the first seven chapters or so focused on his childhood from the age of 3 onwards and his career in advertising. If anything was an example of the importance of judicious cutting when writing a second draft, then this is it. I did not pick up a horror novel because I wanted to find out how the everyman protagonist started up his advertising business in excruciating detail. I want to see the everyman protagonist struggle with their own impotence and lack of importance within the universe. That fact that Herbert then proceeds to add footnotes that are both long-winded and almost wholly unnecessary to the actual plot only makes the proceedings all that more infuriating. 

I could have coped with that if the characters were half interesting. They really weren't. I mean, your main protagonist is a guy who actively wanted to be in advertising. There isn't really much you can do to save that character. Honestly, this is the most boring, white-bread character I've seen in a long, long time. I really couldn't care less who actually killed him. The fact that the serial killer that I mentioned previously is only evil because they have a physical disability is also really intensely uncomfortable and not in the manner that I had willingly signed up for. 

Having read Nobody True, I have come to the conclusion that James Herbert was an author that had a great eye for a book premise, but didn't seem to understand that the reader doesn't need to know everything about the main character's backstory. The whole book feels in need of a brutal but necessary trip to an editor, and the main character couldn't be more boring if he tried. A swing and a miss on pretty much every count, which is a shame because I really wanted this to be good. 1.5/5 

Next review: The Fire Thief by Terry Deary 

Signing off, 

Nisa. 

Dark Moon by David Gemmell

It's been a long time since I've read Dark Moon from start to finish, so I thought that it would be nice to revisit something for once. I think I must have gotten this at a time where I wanted to branch out into more adult fantasy books than I had previously tried reading. Quite possibly I just wanted to save Dark Moon from an ignominious fate at the bottom of a bin, as it would appear that I bought this from my high school library, sans barcode for scanning. If anything made me realise just how long I've owned this, then that stamp on the front plate was it.

In the world of Dark Moon, there were once three ancient races. The last of them, the Eldarin, vanished only a few years before, leaving behind only a fist-sized pearl, a magical artifact of great untapped power. It falls into the hands of a Duke name Sirano, a sorcerer determined to unlock the secrets of the Pearl and the power that it wields, even as the other city-states are consumed in a war to possess it. But the Duke's experimentation comes at a heavy price, as it causes the return of the most bloodthirsty and war-like of the ancient races, the Daroth, who will stop at nothing to wipe out all other species.
When I think of your prototypical '80s-style sword-and-sorcery novel, Dark Moon pretty much ticks all the boxes. Lots of violence and detailed battle scenes? Check. A legendary hero or two that the rest of the cast rally around? Check. Sex that is both unabashed and yet almost chaste in its sheer lack of detail? Check. The fact that it was written in 1996 is almost immaterial. There's just something about a book like this that has me scanning the text to find the biggest, most thick-set warrior in the cast and paste a young Arnold Schwarzenegger's face onto him, only with better acting. I'm not saying that as a bad thing. There is something about the setting and the style of writing that I find I can settle into with little to no effort, even if the efforts are somewhat less than stellar. It's surprisingly comforting. Thankfully, Dark Moon is nothing if not a real solid example of decent sword-and-sorcery, with some decent character depth that brings it above the rank and file.
Primary among those characters are three (technically four) main heroes. First, there is Duvodas, a musician whose childhood living amongst the Eldarin has given him great power in healing and peaceful magics, but who must keep his distance from negative emotions and impulses in order for it to continue working. Second is Karis, the warrior-woman known as much for her flawless record as a strategist as she is for her many lovers. Finally, there is Tarantio, the solitary swordsman whose deadly reputation is built largely on the talents of Dace, the violent soul with whom he shares a body. There are a great many other members of the cast, but those are the three that are probably most important to the plot overall. And for the most part, I am pretty impressed with their character arcs, with nothing feeling grossly out of place. I will say that the interactions with love interests do feel a bit rushed and truncated, but really that could be said of any of the romantic relationships presented here. I would have preferred some more development on that front, but it's never really the main focus so I find that I don't really mind the oversight so much.
The battles come surprisingly thick and fast, so it's probably a good thing that they are by-and-large really skilfully written. The Daroth are an enemy that are nicely judged in regards to threat level. They are difficult enough to kill that superior numbers cease to be a big factor in how evenly the two sides are matched, but not so powerful that the heroes cannot conceive of defeating them. Combined with their alien biology, they make for a fascinating foe. Plus I have a soft spot for siege weaponry, so their inclusion was a nice thing to see.

I may have a soft spot for fantasy, sword-and-sorcery specifically, but this is a book well-written enough that I am happy to recommend it to those looking for a comfortable read. The characterisation is solid, only marred slightly by a tendency to rush the more romantic scenes. And the battles are well conceived and executed, which is a blessing considering how often they turn up. 4/5

Next review: Nobody True by James Herbert.

Signing off,
Nisa.

Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King

Hearts in Atlantis is one of those books that has been on my shelf for so long that I can't really remember when or why I got it in the first place. I seem to have a fair few Stephen King books that have cropped up in my collection, so I can only assume that I must have had a period where I picked up any of his books that peaked my interest, only to never get around to reading them. Hearts in Atlantis in particular may well have been picked up because I found out that there was a film version of it made starring Anthony Hopkins, an actor whose work I admire immensely. In any case, it had been sitting on my shelf long enough for me to feel guilty about it.

Hearts in Atlantis is a collection of five interlinked stories set between 1960 and 1999. The first "Low Men in Yellow Coats" follows a young boy named Bobby as he befriends a new neighbour who asks him to keep an eye out for strange and unpleasant individuals that he only names as Low Men. "Hearts in Atlantis" follows Pete Riley in his attempts to win the heart of a fellow student, all while trying not to flunk and avoid the draft for Vietnam despite a crippling gambling habit. "Blind Willie" follows Willie Shearman as he cons busy New Yorkers out of their money by pretending to be a blind Vietnam vet. "Why We're in Vietnam" follows Sully-John revisiting the past following the funeral of a fellow veteran. And finally, "Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling" focuses on a grown up Bobby revisiting his childhood hometown and brings together all the tales that had come before it.
Apart from the first story in the collection, there isn't really much in the way of supernatural goings-on in Hearts in Atlantis, which was a bit unexpected but not really a bad thing. Considering that the last book by King that I'd read before this was The Stand, it was actually kind of nice to read a novel where the main bad guy wasn't the Antichrist. Much as I like The Stand, there needs to be variation in terms of stakes, and I certainly got it here. It was nice to read something where in the end, even if the good guys don't win completely, the world doesn't have to come to a screeching halt. It was good to read a book where the consequences were all so close to home, and the recurring characters really hammered that home, as you can see just how all of these events affect them all while the world continues on as normal.
I will say one thing though that I wasn't so sure about. I can't say for certain, not having read any of the Dark Tower series of books, but I feel like there's a lot of context from that series that would make the supernatural elements of "Low Men in Yellow Coats" make a lot more sense. It certainly isn't essential, as the important points come across just fine and don't actually need to be explained in full. I just feel that, having seen the use of terms like "breakers" and "te-ka", there is a lot of context that would take on a lot more meaning if I had already read at least some of the Dark Tower books. Probably not a huge issue, but it might well tip the balance of which you read first.

A superb look at a small group of characters, seen at various times throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Definitely one to pick up if you're looking for some more low-key, personal stakes after all these books with world-changing consequences. There may be some context about the supernatural elements that would only really make sense if you've already read the Dark Tower series, but it's not something that is going to completely ruin the novel if you're ignorant of the context like I was. 4/5

Next review: Dark Moon by David Gemmell

Signing off,
Nisa.

The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis

After I, Lucifer, it seemed somehow appropriate to balance out something that cynical with the epitome of Christian parables masquerading as children's fiction. Hence I am starting my third attempt at reading the Chronicles of Narnia, see if I can get further than The Horse and his Boy this time.

The Magician's Nephew follows Digory and Polly, two young children who find themselves in a strange other world after Digory's obviously evil Uncle Andrew tricks them into helping with his magical experiments. They soon find themselves stuck with the Evil Empress Jadis and must find a way to send her back to her original world.
This is a book that was written in a style much more succinct than I remember. When I mentioned that Polly and Digory are soon saddled with Jadis, I really mean soon. It really doesn't take long for the plot to get rolling and for both magic and Empress Jadis to be introduced. Additionally, it is quite straightforward when it comes to language and character intent. On the one hand, this is quite refreshing after a lot of fantasy novels that need a lot of build-up for the actual plot to begin. Also, the straightforwardness makes surprisingly clear the sort of lies that adults will tell to make themselves sound reasonable or morally right. On the other hand, it means that the first meeting between Digory and Polly goes more or less like this:

Polly: You look like you've been crying.
Digory: Oh really? Maybe because MY MOTHER IS DYING! 

I don't know about you, but there is something about that subject matter that requires a touch more subtlety and build-up than it's really afforded. What should be solemn is made more absurd than anything.
The other thing that struck me reading The Magician's Nephew was that there are two sequences that really stand out from the rest of the book. First is the scene where Aslan creates Narnia, and second is the scene where Digory fetches the magical apple for Aslan. These scenes are noticeably prettier than the rest of the novel, where the pace doesn't feel quite as frenetic and the writing has a little chance to breathe. I can't help but notice that these are the passages with the most obvious parallels to Christian narratives, Creation and the Garden of Eden respectively. Considering how much better these passages are compared to the rest of the book, I can't help but wonder whether these were the scenes that Lewis wanted to write in the first place, with the rest included as a token attempt to give it some context. It does make the rest of the novel feel kind of disappointing.

The Magician's Nephew is a seriously unbalanced book. It's quite obvious that it was only really written as an excuse for Lewis to write his own version of the Creation and the Garden of Eden plot-lines. The rest of the novel seems rushed and absurdly unsubtle by comparison. But, I would still be tempted to say that it's worth reading for those scenes alone. 2.5/5

Next review: Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King

Signing off,
Nisa.

I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan

I remember that I read I, Lucifer as a teenager, but honestly my recollection of it wasn't especially clear. So I decided to take a re-read of it to see if it I could remember more as I went along, and to see if my mixed opinion of it had changed.

I, Lucifer focuses primarily on, you guessed it, Lucifer. Fallen angel and Heaven's Enemy Number 1. The novel starts when Gabriel is sent to offer him a deal from God: if he can live a virtuous life as a human, then he can earn the chance for redemption and being accepted back into God's good graces. He manages to reach a compromise where he has a month's try before you buy period, for lack of a better term. One month to see what being human is truly like. Having no intention of taking up God's offer permanently, he takes up residence in the body of an author, Declan Gunn, who was midway through a suicide attempt and decides to use his new body's status to tell his side of history. And in the process, he comes to understand how humanity works.
I'm still mixed about I, Lucifer. On the one hand, Duncan's grasp of how Lucifer would present himself is startlingly convincing, with just that right balance of charm, ribald humour and unrepentant immorality. And it does take an interesting look at where freedom and free will sits when you assume that God has an overarching plan for the universe. There are several points in the narrative that are incredibly entertaining and/or thought-provoking and that's always a plus in my books. On the other hand though, there isn't really much story going on. Lucifer takes over Gunn's body, has a few sensory overload moments, then the book pretty much sticks to drug-fuelled debauchery right up until the last thirty pages. I don't know about you, but I find the whole drugs and alcohol, Hollywood debasing itself thing to be really boring. In small doses, yeah, it can add some tension to a novel. But for a large chunk of a 260 page novel? It just starts to drag and it makes you wonder whether the Devil would really be quite so obvious. The parts where he was exploring the senses, taking inordinate pleasure in 99 ice-creams, getting overwhelmed by the range of colour in flowers, that I liked. The hookers and blow? It was cliche and went on way too long. I mean, kudos for including the negative consequences of it in a kind of matter-of-fact way, but still.

A character study that makes some interesting points and has a suitably persuasive and charming narrator, but spends way too much time on the hookers and blow to keep the interest going. I'm disappointed that it didn't do some more interesting things with the premise. 3/5

Next review: The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis

Signing off,
Nisa.

Blood Work by Michael Connelly

I think that Blood Work was probably one of several crime novels that I have picked up during my trawls of the second-hand book stalls while staying with my grandparents. As such, this was probably more or less a whim purchase, picked up for a striking blurb.

Blood Work follows Terry McCaleb, a retired FBI agent who is taking time out to renovate his late father's boat whilst he recovers from a heart transplant. The last thing he is looking for is someone knocking at his door asking him for help. But when the sister of his new heart's donor comes by, he finds out that he is only alive as a result of a murder and he cannot bring himself to refuse the woman's request for help in finding the killer.
I wanted to like Blood Work more than I did. At its core, there is a solid enough mystery with some interesting turns and some genuine surprises worked into the mix. My main problem with it is that there are some pretty big departures from reality that are difficult to ignore, for me at least. You see, in my day job I work as hospital administration. So when the book makes all these errors about how hospital systems and security works, it makes me more than a little antsy. Firstly, there's the fact that Graciela, the victim's sister, meets up with McCaleb a mere two months after he's had his transplant, but only a couple of days since she actually started looking for him. Considering how much emphasis healthcare systems put on keeping donations private, you would think that it would take her years if she could figure it out at all. But nope. One article and the knowledge that he got a heart transplant right around the time that her sister was murdered and she rushes out to meet this guy on a hunch and just completely bypasses a system of anonymity set up in order to protect patient confidentiality. Later on, there's a particular system at the hospital that McCaleb needs to take a look at, and since he can't get an official warrant due to being retired, he manages to persuade two separate healthcare professionals to completely ignore their duty to protect their patients' confidential information and gets them to pull both patient and donor records. I'm sorry, but I call so much bullshit here. It's quite funny really, because mere paragraphs later he feels guilty for committing a crime by briefly impersonating a police officer, when he's already made his friends do far worse. I read this and had to conclude that Connelly either didn't know much about how hospitals work or just didn't care to be accurate, because I can't think of a single consultant or nurse who would risk being struck off or be stuck with a civil/criminal lawsuit all on the word of one civilian working on their own with no court order. He'd be kicked out before he could even finish introducing the idea. Considering that the law enforcement bit seems to ring more or less true, it disappoints me that the healthcare system is written so poorly. I appreciate that this may be a minor thing to most readers, but after two years in the NHS this stood out like a sore thumb and it just pissed me off to no end.
My other issue with Blood Work is that the ending seemed a bit clunky compared to the rest of the novel. For the majority of the book, there's a nice consistent pace that's fast enough to be gripping, but not so fast that it becomes exhausting. Then with about 40 pages to go, it has a moment where everything screeches to a halt, lull you into thinking that it's ending, then start up again. The last 30 pages didn't fit right because the pace seemed so uneven compared to what had gone before. More of a minor quibble for me, but for people not pissed off by basic misunderstandings of how hospitals work, I would imagine that this is the more pressing issue.

Really, I think I would have enjoyed this a hell of a lot more if Connelly had put the same effort that he puts into depicting law enforcement into his depiction of healthcare systems. As someone who works in a hospital, the liberties that he takes with patient confidentiality and the consequences of breaching it are glaring enough to completely distract me from the narrative itself. Not a bad crime thriller, but it has a lot of creative liberties taken that don't pay off. 3/5

Next review: I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan

Signing off,
Nisa.

Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi

I've read Vampire Hunter D before and I remembered rather liking it the first time. So I decided to find out if it stood the test of time.

Vampire Hunter D follows Doris Lang after she is bitten by the vampire lord Count Magnus Lee. Desperate to avoid the fates of the average victim, she enlists the services of a dhampir vampire hunter known only as D. They find that the vampire may not be their only obstacle to overcome however, as they must contend with the Count's elitist daughter, Doris' jilted suitor and a beautiful but sadistic bandit.
Wow, rereading this put into stark detail just how low my standards used to be. There is a decent enough story buried in here, but there are just so many issues that make it really kind of incompetent. Where to start. I suppose I would start with the writing style, which just struck me as really stilted and overblown. How much of that is the fault of the translation or whether it was like that in the original Japanese I don't know, but it gets really distracting really quickly.
Second, there is some fairly detailed world-building, involving a pretty decent mix of high-tech and medieval as part of its post-apocalyptic setting, and an interesting origin of supernatural creatures as a result of widespread nuclear war. Unfortunately, the author has decided that the best way to get that across is in huge chunks of information dumping text. I don't mind detailed back-story, but it tends to come across better when it isn't squeezed into as little a space as possible.
Third, there are the characters themselves, who are more than a little unbalanced. On the one hand, we have our heroine Doris, who is meant to be both strong and independent with experience fighting the supernatural, but also have moments of vulnerability due to her relative age. What we actually end up with is your standard damsel in distress, whose combat abilities are so massively dwarfed by basically everyone they meet that she might as well not have them. Additionally, it is intensely aggravating for the narrative to basically imply that following the experience she is now totally defenceless and entirely dependent on her eight-year-old brother. On the other hand, we have the stoic vampire hunter D, who must battle with his own vampiric tendencies as a trade-off for his superior skills. What we actually get is a hero who is so massively overpowered that it removes any tension whatsoever from any scene where he is present. In particular the climactic final battle between him and the Count is sapped of any tension that it may have had earlier in the novel, seeing as the reader sees him bring himself back to life after being stabbed through the heart. If death can't stick for more than a couple of hours, then there are no stakes, it stops being interesting.

Honestly, nostalgia goggles made me want to like this, but it was just so poorly written. The language is overblown and stilted, there is far too many sections of solid unimportant background setting information, and instead of a hero and heroine battling as equals against the dark, the reader gets a heroine so underpowered that she may as well not bother and a hero so overpowered that it saps all tension from his battles. I wouldn't bother with it. 2.5/5

Next review: Blood Work by Michael Connelly

Signing off,
Nisa.