Read a book called
The Ghost Writer by John Harwood. This is an immensely frustrating book that gets so much right for so long that I almost have an impulse to go and read the last bits again to see if they really sucked as bad as they did. A young kid in Australia lives under the yoke of an oddly distracted father and over protective mother who has some grim family secret. He becomes pen pals and later 'invisible lovers' with this crippled girl in the UK who herself remains elusive sending no photos and being very evasive whenever he wants to meet. Along the way, our hero keeps coming across ghost stories written by his grandmother (some of which are fucking brilliant) which seem to have an odd relevance to his life. It's trundling along just great after a brief slackening in the middle when suddenly the entire fucking book goes to hell.
Warning: Spoiler! The way the book was progressing, the only sensible way to end it would have been to throw in a supernatural element. But Harwood seems to have developed a sudden distaste for the supernatural and so comes up with absurd contrivances like hidden rooms and one ancient character who is his evil aunt, who survives radiation poisoning, has seemingly unlimited resources AND is his mysterious pen friend. It doesn't make a lick of sense. If you want to, you can just imagine the narrator has gone totally insane by the end of it but seriously. What a KLPD way to end an otherwise great book
Also finished The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Vol 20. When I started this off, I was seriously wondering just what happened to Jones generally high standards of fiction. There were some really bad amateurish stories early on - the worst offender being Gary McMahon's 'Through the Cracks'; a story so badly written and so idiotic in conception, I was frankly amazed at its inclusion. Also Simon Stranzas 'It Runs Beneath The Surface' was insipid in the extreme. Many of the generally dependable writers totally phoned it in: Ramsey Campbell on
the Long Way a story featuring a character who I suspect was modelled on young Campbell himself - a sensitive wussy child who is into horror fiction and under the yoke of autocratic parents. This read less like a horror story and more like a rant against parents (Campbell's own I'll bet. I also suspect the only reason he wrote this now is because they are probably dead). Christopher Fowler totally fucks up Arkangel after an interesting beginning. There were still good stories - a surprisingly good entry by Stephen King for instance which while nowhere near his best, is some indication that the old dog still has some life in him. And Tim Lebbon's Falling Off The World and Michael Bishop's The Pile - stories that while not perfect had some points of interest. But given most of these anthologies start strong, the clunkers in the beginning had me worried. I needn't have actually - the bulk of BNH 20 is staggeringly good. Tanith Lee comes up with a story that in both conception and language starts off from where Clark Ashton left off. It's slightly overexplained but a beautiful morality/revenge tale about a tribe that lives by luring ships to their destruction and then looting them. Other standout stories include 'The Oram County Whosit' a brilliant Lovecraftian tale by Stephen Duffy; 'The Overseer' by Albert E Cowdrey a darkly comic tale about the malign influence of an evil spirit set in Civil War era America; the terrifyingly perverse and strangely moving 'The Beginnings of Sorrow' by Pinckney Benedict (best story in the collection IMO) - a story in which a dog devolves into a human being - a fantastic re-imagining of the werewolf myth set against the backdrop of a world where this is definitely not the worst or most disturbing thing to be happening; and Lynda E Rucker's 'These Things We Have Always Known' which seems to be set in a different part of the same universe as Benedict's story. Overall totally worth the 400 bucks i forked out for this.
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