Okay, so here is my much considered and pondered over list of favourite films of 2009.
Please note I say ‘favourite’ and not ‘best.’ I make no claim that any of these films are definitely better than other films released last year, only that I personally preferred them. And I make no apology for being populist in my tastes. I saw a fair bit of stuff last year, which included Oscar winners and indie/art house films. And while many of those were great I have to remain honest about what I loved most and what connected to me either emotionally, thematically or just on a pure unabashed entertainment level. Films that, for whatever reason, had an instant rewatchability factor. Or, better still, films that gave me the feeling while watching them of being totally transported away, of simply hoping for them never to end. That last feeling is one that doesn’t happen very often. Normally no matter how good a film is after a couple of hours have passed in a cinema I'm ready to go home. But sometimes movies come out that so captivate me that I become instantly lost in the world they create, so engrossed that I don’t ever want to leave that world. That happened twice last year with Let The Right One In and The Dark Knight and twice again this year with my top two choices. So, without further ado, here goes:
10. District 9
Peter Jackson produced, Neill Blomkamp directed sci fi tale of aliens as refugees in South Africa and the ensuing cultural and civil strife caused. A brilliant allegory for race relations and apartheid with excellent FX by WETA and an affecting and star making central performance by first time actor Sharlto Copley. Sci fi doing what sci fi does best – holding a mirror up to society and asking us who we are and why we do the things we do.
9. Zombieland
An inspired, zany, inventive zombie comedy (zomcom?) with a great script and a great cast headed up by the never better Woody Harrelson as nutty zombie killer 'Tallahassee.' Opposite him Jessie Eisenberg as the nerdy, insecure college kid ‘Columbus’ is just as good. And the movie is filled with tons of very funny sequences and lines of dialogue all brilliantly played and delivered by the spot on cast. This flick is a whole lot of crazy, clever fun that had me laughing hard while admiring the gruesome zombie mayhem, which wasn’t skimped on one bit with the blood and gore is still there, as you’d expect from this sub-genre.
8. Inglorious Basterds
Tarantino is back! Basterds is a gruesome WW2 fairytale, historical accuracy be damned. I loved the inventive cinematic style on show here. Basterds is gorgeously photographed and designed employing everything from captions, insertion of old film clips, narration, flashbacks and gloriously shot imagery - especially around the beautiful Melanie Laurent as Shosanna and her lovely old style cinema. The performances are all very good with two being great: Christophe Waltz as the Nazi Jew hunter Col. Landa and the aforementioned Laurent. Waltz is charming and brutal while Laurent is lovely and calmly compelling. Of the Basterds, Pitt is thuggish and funny and Til Schweiger as ex-German soldier turned Basterd Nazi killer is quietly psychotic. A great movie with QT back on top form.
7. Paranormal Activity
A genuinely scary, tense, creepy and unsettling mockumentary film where atmosphere and tone is everything. A young couple, Katie and Micah, have become isolated in their own home. Sleep deprived, paranoid, terrified, they are being persecuted by an unseen supernatural entity. Nobody will come and help them and they can't run, as it is Katie who is being haunted and not the house. There is something most unsettling about watching people sleeping through a locked off camera while you scan the screen tensely awaiting the next freaky incident - be it a moving door, ghostly footprints appearing, a moving bed sheet or a nasty sudden and violent attack. Yes, a couple things make you jump like any decent horror film should, but it is the hopelessness and the relatability of the situation that scares the most. Brrr!
6. Valkyrie
Bryan Singer makes a tense, old fashioned and highly skilful adaptation of the real life attempt by high-ranking German officers to assassinate Hitler in the hopes of preventing the destruction of the fatherland in the later days of WW2. This is great stuff with a solid and commanding central performance by Tom Cruise as Von Stauffenberg, the leader of the plot. Cruise is excellently supported by a top-notch cast including the always wonderful Bill Nighy and Kenneth Branagh. But it is the true story itself and the meticulous telling of it along with the brilliant recreation of the period that impresses most. It was also shot on location using the real places where the events actually happened lending a genuine sense of grim reality to the whole thing. Excellent.
5. Drag Me To Hell
Or ‘When Sam Raimi stopped messing about with Spider-Man and dramas and went back to what he does best.’ Drag Me To Hell is a crazy, inventive, scary roller coaster of over the top horror. Sam pulled out all his favourite Evil Dead/Army of Darkness tricks and made a really loud, intense, scary spookablast of a film. It's ninety minutes of earsplittingly loud sound effects, yucky gloop, superjumptastic scares and tons of zany black comedy. Watching this I was jumping out of my skin one moment then laughing so hard my sides ached. Drag Me To Hell is huge fun and is one of those films that really does deserve to be seen in a theatre with an audience. It's a proper movie going experience. Screams and laughter all around. Popcorn flying. Great stuff!
4. Up
Once again Pixar knocked the ball way out of the park with Up, a gloriously entertaining adventure that’s also a bittersweet tale of life, love, loss and life again. Up has a wonderful, layered, intelligent script packed with so much depth, honesty and meaning. The entire film is brilliant but the first act transcends brilliant to become something quite special. It is genuinely moving in a way most films can never hope to be. The montage of Carl & Ellie’s life together is simply one of the most beautiful pieces of storytelling put on screen. But the emotional story never overshadows the humour. Up is consistently very funny in smart and inventive ways. All the characters are fab but I especially love Doug the Dog, "SQUIRREL!" Pixar is something to treasure. They are not driven by selling merchandise but rather by creating art that generations will come back to again and again long after the likes of the Ice Age’s and Monster’s vs. Aliens have been forgotten.
3. Watchmen
Director Zack (300) Snyder pulled off something pretty darn special here: an incredibly faithful film adaptation of beloved source material.
The story of Watchmen poses the question what would society be like if masked vigilante heroes really did exist as they do in comics? What would these heroes really be like and what would that choice to don a mask and ‘do good’ actually do to them - physically and mentally - as well as to the world around them? My overriding memory of the book is of Rorschach - the streetwise, moral absolute and unbalanced vigilante with the ink blot shifting mask who narrates a lot of the story by writing in "Rorschach's journal". It has to be said that Jackie Earl Haley who plays him in the film is perfect. The character has come direct from the page to the screen intact. The rest of the cast is also great - especially Nite Owl/Dan Dreiberg played by Patrick Wilson. Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Edward Blake aka The Comedian is also very good. The character is a vile, misanthropic, murderous nutcase and Morgan plays him disturbingly well.
The whole film looks stunning and captures the feel of a nihilistic and hopeless time just counting down the hours until its own end. Watchmen is also extraordinarily violent with a lot to say about the often depressingly vile nature of humanity and our unending capacity for cruelty and (personal as well as global) self destruction shown by nuclear demigod Dr. Manhattan's gradual disconnection and eventual isolation from humanity. Towards the end of the film there is a small hopeful note of beauty amidst all the horror and chaos as the doomsday clock eventually hits midnight, but the story finishes on a final bleak note; a last truthful, moral absolute which could still destroy everything.
I loved the book and I thought this adaptation was note perfect. It is a great movie that looks fantastic and makes you think.
2. Star Trek
JJ Abrams movie is exactly what this franchise needed - a reboot/sequel that relieved it of the intolerable weight of over forty years of canon. Star Trek went back to the beginning and returned the idea to its original concept: Kirk, Spock and the USS Enterprise. Above all, though, it just made Star Trek fun again.
The new cast is perfect. I was initially concerned about Chris Pine as Kirk as I wasn’t familiar at all with him as an actor. And with Shatner as such an iconic presence in this role, how could anyone else capture the essence of James T. Kirk without just descending in to parody? But to his enormous credit Chris Pine doesn’t do that. He’s done his own thing as Kirk with just a few tiny classic Shatner/Kirkesque poses creeping in. Pine just exudes charisma like a young Harrison Ford and also has excellent comic timing. The sequence with Kirk charging around trying to convince everyone of the Romulan trap while McCoy is running after him and injecting him with various hyposprays is hilarious. In short Pine is amazing and delivers my favourite male performance of the year. A big time movie star was born right here. Karl Urban inhabits Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy completely. His take on the irascible doctor and extremely reluctant space traveller is awesome. It’s almost as if Deforest Kelley is back with us. Zachary Quinto is also very good as Spock, although he is quite a different Spock than I remember. He’s far more emotional and easy to rile. He’s even having a full on romantic relationship with a certain lovely young communications officer. And speaking of…
Zoe Saldana as Uhura. What a year she’s had starring in two of the biggest and best films of 2009 with her being one of the very best things about each. I love this girl. She is a damn good actress and just so natural, charismatic and likeable. She has real presence. Her Uhura is immensely intelligent, wise, emotionally sensitive and supportive. Another big time movie star was born right here.
To sum up, Star Trek is enormous ear to ear grin making fun, a wonderful adventure with a great cast who brim with charisma and talent. Star Trek manages to be both nostalgic and modern and is just tons of rip roaring, space faring fun.
1. Avatar
Nobody makes films like James Cameron. He makes very few, but when he does they are huge in scope and cost more money than the GDP of a small nation while always pushing forward new technologies and methods of filmmaking or just inventing entirely new ones. Every time the naysayers and doom mongers predict his latest film will be rubbish and unsuccessful. And (almost) every time they're wrong. Hugely wrong. Okay, so The Abyss was financially not so successful, however it was still a very good film. But apart from that (and Piranha 2) every film Cameron’s made has been either awesome or a classic and been embraced by audiences worldwide. His last, Titanic, was twelve years ago and is a great movie. If you haven’t seen it (how come?) then do so. Don’t believe the haters. Since Titanic rewrote the books on box office success it has taken JC a very long time indeed to get around to making his next film and to develop the technology to a point where he could make that film exactly how he wanted, to do it justice and to give audiences something special.
And, boy, did he ever.
I love Avatar. A lot. It may not be perfect or the most original story ever told but that really misses the point as similar stories to this have been told and retold for as long as people have told stories. They are just reinvented and retold in different ways. It is not what you do it is how you do it. And nobody has ever told this story like Cameron has with Avatar. He has created an entire world called Pandora with an eco system based on sound science and come up with great sci fi ideas within that eco system that bring to life many similar real life concepts here on Earth such as the Gaia hypothesis. But Cameron’s genius is to present it all in a quasi fantasy/pulp sci fi romantic adventure style that harkens back to the otherworldly tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Frank Herbert. Plus it has real emotional weight and is chock full of relevance to our current world. For instance the destruction of Home Tree is a fabulous and terrible sequence that carries a huge visceral and emotional wallop. It is awful to behold and reminds us of real life atrocities – none more so than 9/11. And Cameron has not lost his touch in directing action and spectacle either. The sweeping vistas of Pandora are stunning, as are the intense, violent and perfectly choreographed battles.
So the story is familiar but great and the world created is perfectly constructed and stunning. That brings me to the single best thing about the film. The Na’vi. They are simply amazing. The level of performance capture and CGI realism is far beyond anything previously managed. But the technical side of their creation would mean nothing without the performances of the actors playing them. And they all do great work but especially the fabulous Zoe Saldana as Neytiri. It astounds me. Neytiri is incredible, a wonder to behold every time she is onscreen. She lives and breathes. She is the single greatest synthespian character ever. Zoe’s gestures and movements - be it subtle look, a twitch of a cheek muscle, a trembling lip, a ferocious snarl, a tiny giggle - are all captured perfectly. Neytiri is a brilliant character and Saldana nails it perfectly.
It was a close run thing this year between Star Trek and Avatar for my fave movie and truth told there is not much in it at all. They could easily be swapped. But I think Avatar just edges it for the sheer scope and scale of James Cameron’s imagination and creation, for the utter mind boggle I get every time Neytiri is on screen, for the incredible use of 3D, for the emotional wallop I get when Home Tree falls. For the nerve jangling animal howl of rage and grief Neytiri gives as her father dies in her arms. Gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.
As I write this, Avatar has been a strong critical success and a huge financial success with it looking likely that James Cameron will end up being writer/director of the two biggest grossing films of all time. Nice going JC. So can we have Avatar 2 please? Just not in another twelve years.
I see you.
Showing posts with label 2009. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2009. Show all posts
Saturday, 2 January 2010
Friday, 25 December 2009
My Favourite Books of 2009
Being an avid reader I’ve worked my way through a few paper and ink tales this year. I’ve counted up and have read twelve new (to me) books since Jan 1st 2009 and four rereads of ones I love. Also this year I purchased Necronomicon: the best weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. It’s a huge hardback book of around nine hundred pages with all Lovecraft’s stories including the famous Herbert West: Re-Animator, From Beyond, At The Mountains of Madness and The Unnameable. I bought it back in the summer and keep dropping in to it to read a short story here and there with still plenty left to go. Creepy, weird and freaky good it is too.
Of the new (to me) books I’ve read this year, my top five are:
5. Go Ask Malice: A Slayer's Diary by Robert Joseph Levy (2006)
A Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel about rogue slayer Faith Lehane, Go Ask Malice is presented as a journal written by Faith herself as a form of therapy encouraged by her social worker. The journal chronicles teenage Faith's troubled life in the few months leading up to her becoming a Slayer and then the first few months after. It ends with Faith, alone once again, making her way to Sunnydale. All Buffy fans know what happened next.
This is pretty dark stuff. Poor Faith had a horrible life as a kid ending up in foster care and finally in a mental institution. It's at that point that a Watcher finds her and takes her in, telling her of her destiny. Faith's Watcher, Professor Diana Dormer, is caring and protective of her new charge and the two, though very different, form a bond. But Faith is having bad dreams and blackouts. Something is trying to take control of her. Something is looking for revenge from beyond the grave. Revenge against the worst of the worst, the beast who still lives. And it is looking to use Faith, a brand new Slayer, as the instrument of its vengeance.
Go Ask Malice is a very good read and a spot on rendering of my second favourite character in the Buffyverse. The author really captures Faith's speech and attitude on the page. I found myself grinning quite a bit at some of the things she says and does with the journal approach allowing for revelatory and confessional insights in to the mind of this tough and smart yet emotionally and psychologically fragile girl. Oh, and we also find out where she gets her saying “Five by Five” from as well. Go Ask Malice is a must for Buffy fans and utterly essential for Faith fans like me while being a very good book in its own right.
4. Frostbitten by Kelley Armstrong (2009)
Frostbitten is book ten of Canadian Author Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series of supernatural drama/thrillers. The series started back in 2001 with the werewolf novel Bitten, but progressed to other interconnected tales of ghosts, witches, demons, half-demons etc. Bitten was told first person by Elena Michaels, the world’s only female werewolf, turned against her will by her (then) ex-lover Clayton Danvers. At the start of Bitten, Elena had already run away from Clay and the werewolf pack that he’d brought her in to and was trying to make a new life for herself while struggling to cope alone with her lycanthropy. However she was soon pulled back in to pack affairs when a full-scale bloody conspiracy threatened to erupt. Elena reluctantly rejoined the pack and over the intervening years she and Clayton have become a couple again and she has had two young twins by him.
Frostbitten is Elena’s fourth book and is set in the snowy wastes of Alaska, where, as the packs chief investigator and enforcer now, she has gone with Clayton to investigate rumoured wolf attacks and the disappearance of several young women. It could be just wild animals with the women’s disappearances a coincidence, but Elena suspects foul play by possible rogue werewolves. The investigation takes a few unexpected turns including dredging up faces from Clayton’s past as well as terrible memories of Elena’s childhood. And soon she discovers that there is something else is out there in the Alaskan wilderness, something previously unknown that stalks the ancient, frozen land. Something so old, primal and ferocious that it terrifies even the most powerful of werewolves.
Frostbitten, as with all Kelley’s books, is a fun read with lots of great characters thrown in to twisty plots and deadly circumstances while struggling with their own personal relationships. It also has some fun with werewolf mythology while delving deeper in to Elena’s psyche and exploring her complex relationship with Clayton as well as her troubled past and her likely future with the pack. There are mysteries to be solved, some steamy sex and plenty of chases and violent, bloody clashes both in the city and out in the snowy wilderness. Kelley’s prose is not particularly flashy but it is firmly character based and crisply descriptive and she has a knack for dry, witty dialogue. This is partly the reason she was brought in last year to write an arc for the new Angel comic at IDW. She is a Joss fan and he a fan of hers. She has the ability to really get deep inside her character’s minds and make them come alive on the page. Reading them (especially Elena, Clay and the rest of the pack) is just like catching up with old friends you haven’t seen for a long while.
But in the end, when all’s said and done, Frostbitten is just a darn good lycanthropic yarn.
3. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (2002)
On 6 December 1973 fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon was raped and murdered by her neighbour. In The Lovely Bones, Susie tells us her story in first person narration while watching over her family and friends from her own personalised heaven, ‘the in-between’, watching as they struggle to come to terms with her most awful of deaths.
The Lovely Bones was hard going. Don’t get me wrong, it is a very good book - solidly written, always intriguing and never boring. The problem is the almost unending emotional gut punches it delivers to you. For a parent reading this book I’d imagine it would be one hell of a gruelling experience. I’m not a parent and it was pretty tough for me at times. But, thankfully, despite the horror of Susie’s murder, there is a warmth and hopefulness around the tale. The Lovely Bones is primarily about discovery, growing up and moving on. It’s a unique coming of age story about someone who will never come of age - at least not as she should. It’s a love story about life and about family.
While not the best-written book ever, The Lovely Bones is always fascinating in its telling of a sad but also hopeful tale in a tough and emotionally challenging way. It is quite simply the most emotionally affecting book I’ve ever read. But it didn’t come across as sentimental or manipulative. It didn’t need to. The subject matter; the realistic way characters behave; the ponderings on love, life, loss, family, guilt, childhood - they all ring true. Powerful stuff.
2. The Travelling Vampire Show by Richard Laymon (2000)
It’s a hot August day in 1963 and three sixteen year olds - narrator Dwight and his two best friends Slim, a tomboy girl, and Rusty, an overweight boy, are determined to go and see the titular Travelling Vampire Show coming to their town that very night. The carnival show promises the only real vampire in captivity: the beautiful, seductive and utterly lethal Valeria. To get to see the show at the notorious spot outside of town called Janks Field, the three friends must overcome various obstacles as well as an unfolding mystery that someone or something may actually be out to get them. This all leads up to one heck of a thrilling and blood-curdling finale, which doesn’t go quite where you’d expect it to go.
The Travelling Vampire Show is not just a horror story. It’s also a coming of age tale much like Stephen King’s The Body (filmed as Stand By Me) - only bloodier and sexier. Getting to the Travelling Vampire Show and overcoming the many obstacles in doing so (rabid dogs, parents, troublesome siblings, arguments, accidents etc.) is the main narrative backbone. But supported by that backbone is an affecting story about three kids’ lives, the bad things some of them have had to endure and the friendships and first love that comes out of it all. This is quite a wonderful little tale with characters you can emphasise with and really care about. Slim in particular is a great creation. She’s a total tomboy and the brains of the operation but is a girl with a troubled family life and an identity crisis. She changes her name every few months depending on what book she’s been reading and what character in it she identifies with most. All three teens are on the cusp of adulthood and their relationships are changing - with each other as well as with family and peers. This is one of the main themes of the book: Change. Along with growing up and maturity in what you do and how you behave.
Along with The Stake this is, in my opinion, the late Richard Laymon’s best work. It is very well written, subtle and sensitive where needed and all out bloody, nasty and gross where you’d hope it to be. I’ve been a fan of his work since the early eighties reading his Beast House books. His style of uber-violence, sex and gore, though never very popular in the US, found a willing audience here in the UK. His books were always such wonderful titillation for a young eager horror-loving mind like mine. But the man could also write character and drama with equal amounts of depth and sensitivity when he wanted. He just didn’t do it that often. A shame really.
1. Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar (2007)
Lonely Werewolf Girl is my favourite new (to me) book I’ve read this past year and the past several years. It does everything exactly right. The characters; the story; the tone and mood; the themes and most of all the humour are all utterly perfect. I’ve never laughed out loud so much while reading a book as I did with this one. It’s like Martin Millar reached in to my brain, scooped out my weirdest, deepest thoughts and wrote this novel just for me. This is most excellent. My only complaint is that the version I have (self-published by the author in the UK for various technical and legal reasons) has quite a few silly typos – something he has apologised for explaining he had no editor or beta reader at the time. The book did have proper publishing deals overseas and has been a big hit. So much so that Martin is currently writing the sequel and a movie is allegedly in the works. A ‘proper’ UK edition of Lonely Werewolf Girl is being published in March 2010, which will have fixed all those typo problems. But to be honest it didn’t really bug me that much as the book is otherwise so well written and wonderfully funny and creative that you just take the typos as a quirk rather in keeping with its punk style.
I won’t bother with a plot synopsis as I’ve already written about this book at length in an earlier blog.
Lonely Werewolf Girl blog post
A great excerpt:
Upstairs, Thrix was shocked at Sarapen’s sudden appearance. She didn’t understand how he could have arrived without her receiving a warning. It was impossible. But there he stood, in his full wolf form, huge and menacing. Vex was nearest to him. She giggled.
“A big wolf! He’s so cute,” she said, and started to pat his head.
Malveria spoke sharply to her niece.
"Agrivex. Please do not pat the werewolf. He is a deadly enemy."
"But he's so cute!"
“Step away this instant.”
Vex withdrew, grumbling that her aunt never let her do anything.
The bottom line is Lonely Werewolf Girl is a fabulous book by a gifted writer who can weave a big, complex tale with a myriad of distinct and interesting characters while juggling drama, action and humour exactly right. I’ve since bought two other books of his to read - Lux the Poet and The Good Fairies of New York. I shall be diving in to The Good Fairies of New York next. A tale about rebellious Scottish fairies going to New York and getting mixed up with a fairy civil war, some oddball humans and The New York Dolls’ Johnny Thunders (?) Sounds bonkers. Yay!
So there you go, my most favoured reading material of 2009. In 2010 Kelley Armstrong has two new books out and Martin Millar has his Lonely Werewolf Girl sequel. Bring it on.
Of the new (to me) books I’ve read this year, my top five are:
5. Go Ask Malice: A Slayer's Diary by Robert Joseph Levy (2006)
A Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel about rogue slayer Faith Lehane, Go Ask Malice is presented as a journal written by Faith herself as a form of therapy encouraged by her social worker. The journal chronicles teenage Faith's troubled life in the few months leading up to her becoming a Slayer and then the first few months after. It ends with Faith, alone once again, making her way to Sunnydale. All Buffy fans know what happened next.
This is pretty dark stuff. Poor Faith had a horrible life as a kid ending up in foster care and finally in a mental institution. It's at that point that a Watcher finds her and takes her in, telling her of her destiny. Faith's Watcher, Professor Diana Dormer, is caring and protective of her new charge and the two, though very different, form a bond. But Faith is having bad dreams and blackouts. Something is trying to take control of her. Something is looking for revenge from beyond the grave. Revenge against the worst of the worst, the beast who still lives. And it is looking to use Faith, a brand new Slayer, as the instrument of its vengeance.
Go Ask Malice is a very good read and a spot on rendering of my second favourite character in the Buffyverse. The author really captures Faith's speech and attitude on the page. I found myself grinning quite a bit at some of the things she says and does with the journal approach allowing for revelatory and confessional insights in to the mind of this tough and smart yet emotionally and psychologically fragile girl. Oh, and we also find out where she gets her saying “Five by Five” from as well. Go Ask Malice is a must for Buffy fans and utterly essential for Faith fans like me while being a very good book in its own right.
4. Frostbitten by Kelley Armstrong (2009)
Frostbitten is book ten of Canadian Author Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series of supernatural drama/thrillers. The series started back in 2001 with the werewolf novel Bitten, but progressed to other interconnected tales of ghosts, witches, demons, half-demons etc. Bitten was told first person by Elena Michaels, the world’s only female werewolf, turned against her will by her (then) ex-lover Clayton Danvers. At the start of Bitten, Elena had already run away from Clay and the werewolf pack that he’d brought her in to and was trying to make a new life for herself while struggling to cope alone with her lycanthropy. However she was soon pulled back in to pack affairs when a full-scale bloody conspiracy threatened to erupt. Elena reluctantly rejoined the pack and over the intervening years she and Clayton have become a couple again and she has had two young twins by him.
Frostbitten is Elena’s fourth book and is set in the snowy wastes of Alaska, where, as the packs chief investigator and enforcer now, she has gone with Clayton to investigate rumoured wolf attacks and the disappearance of several young women. It could be just wild animals with the women’s disappearances a coincidence, but Elena suspects foul play by possible rogue werewolves. The investigation takes a few unexpected turns including dredging up faces from Clayton’s past as well as terrible memories of Elena’s childhood. And soon she discovers that there is something else is out there in the Alaskan wilderness, something previously unknown that stalks the ancient, frozen land. Something so old, primal and ferocious that it terrifies even the most powerful of werewolves.
Frostbitten, as with all Kelley’s books, is a fun read with lots of great characters thrown in to twisty plots and deadly circumstances while struggling with their own personal relationships. It also has some fun with werewolf mythology while delving deeper in to Elena’s psyche and exploring her complex relationship with Clayton as well as her troubled past and her likely future with the pack. There are mysteries to be solved, some steamy sex and plenty of chases and violent, bloody clashes both in the city and out in the snowy wilderness. Kelley’s prose is not particularly flashy but it is firmly character based and crisply descriptive and she has a knack for dry, witty dialogue. This is partly the reason she was brought in last year to write an arc for the new Angel comic at IDW. She is a Joss fan and he a fan of hers. She has the ability to really get deep inside her character’s minds and make them come alive on the page. Reading them (especially Elena, Clay and the rest of the pack) is just like catching up with old friends you haven’t seen for a long while.
But in the end, when all’s said and done, Frostbitten is just a darn good lycanthropic yarn.
3. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (2002)
On 6 December 1973 fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon was raped and murdered by her neighbour. In The Lovely Bones, Susie tells us her story in first person narration while watching over her family and friends from her own personalised heaven, ‘the in-between’, watching as they struggle to come to terms with her most awful of deaths.
The Lovely Bones was hard going. Don’t get me wrong, it is a very good book - solidly written, always intriguing and never boring. The problem is the almost unending emotional gut punches it delivers to you. For a parent reading this book I’d imagine it would be one hell of a gruelling experience. I’m not a parent and it was pretty tough for me at times. But, thankfully, despite the horror of Susie’s murder, there is a warmth and hopefulness around the tale. The Lovely Bones is primarily about discovery, growing up and moving on. It’s a unique coming of age story about someone who will never come of age - at least not as she should. It’s a love story about life and about family.
While not the best-written book ever, The Lovely Bones is always fascinating in its telling of a sad but also hopeful tale in a tough and emotionally challenging way. It is quite simply the most emotionally affecting book I’ve ever read. But it didn’t come across as sentimental or manipulative. It didn’t need to. The subject matter; the realistic way characters behave; the ponderings on love, life, loss, family, guilt, childhood - they all ring true. Powerful stuff.
2. The Travelling Vampire Show by Richard Laymon (2000)
It’s a hot August day in 1963 and three sixteen year olds - narrator Dwight and his two best friends Slim, a tomboy girl, and Rusty, an overweight boy, are determined to go and see the titular Travelling Vampire Show coming to their town that very night. The carnival show promises the only real vampire in captivity: the beautiful, seductive and utterly lethal Valeria. To get to see the show at the notorious spot outside of town called Janks Field, the three friends must overcome various obstacles as well as an unfolding mystery that someone or something may actually be out to get them. This all leads up to one heck of a thrilling and blood-curdling finale, which doesn’t go quite where you’d expect it to go.
The Travelling Vampire Show is not just a horror story. It’s also a coming of age tale much like Stephen King’s The Body (filmed as Stand By Me) - only bloodier and sexier. Getting to the Travelling Vampire Show and overcoming the many obstacles in doing so (rabid dogs, parents, troublesome siblings, arguments, accidents etc.) is the main narrative backbone. But supported by that backbone is an affecting story about three kids’ lives, the bad things some of them have had to endure and the friendships and first love that comes out of it all. This is quite a wonderful little tale with characters you can emphasise with and really care about. Slim in particular is a great creation. She’s a total tomboy and the brains of the operation but is a girl with a troubled family life and an identity crisis. She changes her name every few months depending on what book she’s been reading and what character in it she identifies with most. All three teens are on the cusp of adulthood and their relationships are changing - with each other as well as with family and peers. This is one of the main themes of the book: Change. Along with growing up and maturity in what you do and how you behave.
Along with The Stake this is, in my opinion, the late Richard Laymon’s best work. It is very well written, subtle and sensitive where needed and all out bloody, nasty and gross where you’d hope it to be. I’ve been a fan of his work since the early eighties reading his Beast House books. His style of uber-violence, sex and gore, though never very popular in the US, found a willing audience here in the UK. His books were always such wonderful titillation for a young eager horror-loving mind like mine. But the man could also write character and drama with equal amounts of depth and sensitivity when he wanted. He just didn’t do it that often. A shame really.
1. Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar (2007)
Lonely Werewolf Girl is my favourite new (to me) book I’ve read this past year and the past several years. It does everything exactly right. The characters; the story; the tone and mood; the themes and most of all the humour are all utterly perfect. I’ve never laughed out loud so much while reading a book as I did with this one. It’s like Martin Millar reached in to my brain, scooped out my weirdest, deepest thoughts and wrote this novel just for me. This is most excellent. My only complaint is that the version I have (self-published by the author in the UK for various technical and legal reasons) has quite a few silly typos – something he has apologised for explaining he had no editor or beta reader at the time. The book did have proper publishing deals overseas and has been a big hit. So much so that Martin is currently writing the sequel and a movie is allegedly in the works. A ‘proper’ UK edition of Lonely Werewolf Girl is being published in March 2010, which will have fixed all those typo problems. But to be honest it didn’t really bug me that much as the book is otherwise so well written and wonderfully funny and creative that you just take the typos as a quirk rather in keeping with its punk style.
I won’t bother with a plot synopsis as I’ve already written about this book at length in an earlier blog.
Lonely Werewolf Girl blog post
A great excerpt:
Upstairs, Thrix was shocked at Sarapen’s sudden appearance. She didn’t understand how he could have arrived without her receiving a warning. It was impossible. But there he stood, in his full wolf form, huge and menacing. Vex was nearest to him. She giggled.
“A big wolf! He’s so cute,” she said, and started to pat his head.
Malveria spoke sharply to her niece.
"Agrivex. Please do not pat the werewolf. He is a deadly enemy."
"But he's so cute!"
“Step away this instant.”
Vex withdrew, grumbling that her aunt never let her do anything.
The bottom line is Lonely Werewolf Girl is a fabulous book by a gifted writer who can weave a big, complex tale with a myriad of distinct and interesting characters while juggling drama, action and humour exactly right. I’ve since bought two other books of his to read - Lux the Poet and The Good Fairies of New York. I shall be diving in to The Good Fairies of New York next. A tale about rebellious Scottish fairies going to New York and getting mixed up with a fairy civil war, some oddball humans and The New York Dolls’ Johnny Thunders (?) Sounds bonkers. Yay!
So there you go, my most favoured reading material of 2009. In 2010 Kelley Armstrong has two new books out and Martin Millar has his Lonely Werewolf Girl sequel. Bring it on.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)