| Page Contents | ||
|---|---|---|
| Matt Black | Deeper than Black | 2008 |
Crime fiction. This is one of the Matt Black series of standalone, reality-as-fiction, semi-autobiographical novels about the eponymous Fife detective. Semi-autobiographical? Is life in Fife half as exciting as this? Let's go there! Also recommended: "Singed Black". Black also wrote a sly self-help guide: "Out with the Garbage"; one PhD student who set out to disprove Black's thesis ended up in hospital.
"Listen to this, chief." Gloosber had a full, rubbery face, like a balloon that has lost some air.
"Where did you get it?"
"Gullivan, the fat guy I told you about."
"The conspiracy theorist?"
"Yeah, and obsessive archivist. He wanders about St Andrews, sidles over to strangers, but not too near, takes out his phone, holds it to his ear, points the other side towards them, picks up their conversation at nine to twelve feet in a fifteen degree arc."
"Is that legal?"
"I don't know."
"I don't suppose that's all he does, either. You better let the 'lec boys check you over."
"I did."
"And?"
"There was a transmitter in my top pocket."
The CD whirred into life. Black turned up the volume.
| Bartholomew Braithwaite | Ring the Bell | 2001 |
Horror fiction given that there's no such genre as campanological fiction. Another slice of intellectual chill from the man who brought us "Bell-bottomed Trousers". This time the villagers, when dazed by the bell, need to draw blood. The author's picture is gross. Someone that old and ugly getting a publishing contract flies in the face of the "young is beautiful is publishable" adage. But then, youth as beauty couldn't write something as twisted as this, and the market for gore is a pit of blood-stained stakes like monolithic teeth. The book's hard to get. The conspiracy theory runs that the campanologists bought most of them in order to conceal their secrets, so only a few copies are still at large. Try the specialist web sites.
| Naomi Cole | Leaves Me Out | 2006 |
This romantic fiction sensation is so replete with natural imagery of the "moist orchid" variety that a botanic guidance counsellor endorses it for frustrated gardeners.
| Sarah Deurnoch | Two Times Table | 2007 |
Romantic fiction for psychopaths. No one who finishes this disturbing novel gives it away, you'll infer when you note the uncreased spines of copies in second hand bookshops. If your relationship's buffeted by turbulence, read this together for a vicarious confrontation that'll clarify your minds one way or the other or both.
| Raymond Earl | Vampire Harvest | 2002 |
Horror fiction. Once you sense that this strange novel is autobiographical, you start profiling the author, then depression sets in in both the lay and clinical meanings of the term, and you look for someone, anyone, to talk to, after which the book trembles when you look at it, burns your fingers when you touch it, and impacts on part of your brain that you haven't needed since you dropped out of the trees and formed a small social group with fellow psychopathic australopithecines. It's that powerful. It never got into the bookshops, of course, but the national library has to have a copy, so, assuming you want to read it anonymously, you'll need to forge a library card, say in the name of someone who died aged three, and get ready for a hike into the mind from which there is no recovery.
| Derek Flear | The Vampire Fairground | 2004 |
Two shy teenage girls in low red tops think the man in the tuxedo in the ghost train is a prop. Even when his head moves. That's not a spoiler: that's page one. Comfort horror for sado-masochists. Flear's only book, unless he wrote under other names. Out of print but copies appear on web sites.
| Lucas Lukinski | The Undertaker | 2000 |
Horror fiction. Where better to set an unsettling chiller than the work rooms of a crematorium? Fascinating background detail detracts from the story on first read. Families and friends get an urn containing the ashes of the previous person so that they don't have to wait half an hour for theirs to come through. The crematorium keeps a little ash from each corpse so that they've got something to hand out when the oven breaks down. Pacemakers that get left in bodies explode in the oven. Obese bodies have to be sawn in two. One in ten thousand corpses wakes up and screams. Deaf people make good crematorium attendants. Crematorium attendants usually elect for burial. Seasoned crematorium attendants warm up their lunch in the oven while it's cooling down. Environmentally responsible crematoria rig up the oven as the boiler for the central heating system, so the departed warm more than your memories.
| Oliver Simms | Vampire Campsite | 2005 |
Comedy fiction. A rare thing, vampire humour. You can pretty much guess everything that happens from the title. One book like this is really enough, but if you want more, the follow up, "Vampire Campus", repeats the jokes in a college biology department.
| Sanayed Tagore | Forest Clearing | 2003 |
Historical fiction. The good thing about setting a novel in prehistoric times is that no reader can write to you and tell you that you've got the background details wrong. That being said, somehow it's harder to picture vampires marauding the savannah plains when the first humans were preparing to leave Africa than it is, say, to imagine the phenomenon in an emotionally derelict modern city. Or maybe it's just harder to care. The unpronouncable names don't help. Okay, they probably did refer to each other as what look like grunts and groans. The sex scenes have a certain piquance once you realise they're expressing their feelings and speculate on the possible origin of names. Available for download for a donation - no minimum, no maximum - from www.sanayedtagore.com.
© Stephen Balmer