| Page Contents | ||
|---|---|---|
| Philip K Dick | Do Androids Dream? | 1968 |
Science fiction; full title: "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Imaginative, paranoid, funny in parts and refreshingly untainted by gender correctness. Dick also wrote many short stories. Seek out the one with the equally long, weird title "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale".
Black-haired and slender, wearing the new huge dust-filtering glasses, she approached his car, her hands deep in the pockets of her brightly striped long coat. She had, on her sharply defined small face, an expression of sullen distaste.
| James Herbert | The Fog | 1975 |
Horror fiction. Fabulous vignettes of minor characters who are out of kilter. Flawless English. Also recommended: "Lair".
Jessie looked across the road and just caught sight of the terrified face of Mr Papworth as he and the whole row of shops and houses on his side were swallowed up by the earth.
| Stephen King | The Stand | 1978 |
Horror fiction. For two decades, King has filled two shelves in the bookshops, because after you read a good one, you want to read a few more. In telling a story - and he's a master storyteller - he arouses emotional tremors in deep, unfamiliar parts of your psyche. Ordinary characters too: petrol pump attendants and cleaners. This huge novel, "The Stand", sprawls across a desolate America. Other fine Kings are: "Carrie", "Firestarter", "It" and "Dolores Claiborne"; no doubt there are others.
He went over to the stove, scratched a match on the sandpaper nailed to the wall beside it, lit the front gas ring, and put on the coffee. Then he sat down and waited dully for it to boil. Just before it did, he had to scramble his snotrag out of his back pocket to catch a big wet sneeze. Coming down with a cold, he thought. Isn't that something nice on top of everything else?
| Ursula Le Guin | The Tombs of Atuan | 1971 |
Fantasy fiction. This is the second of a series of novels set in Earthsea, a place composed of, well, earth and sea. Classy fantasy: seems to be about a world, but is really about your mind. Le Guin is one bright dame: no slumming for the intellectuals. Poets welcome too. If it would horrify you to read out of sequence, you'll need to read "A Wizard of Earthsea" first. None of the Earthsea novels are bad.
The three highest steps ... were so thick with dust that they looked like one slant of grey soil, the planes of the red-veined marble wholly hidden by the unstirred, untrodden siftings of how many years, how many centuries.
| H P Lovecraft | The Colour Out of Space | 1927 |
Horror fiction; short story. Lovecraft makes you think you're reading things he either believes or wrote to make sense of nameless horrors behind the veil of existence, perceived as a speck in a hostile cosmos. His beguilingly portentous, dry, word-rich, creepily precise sentences are marvels in themselves.
There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were sickly and stunted and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight.
| Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons | Watchmen | 1985 |
Graphic fiction. Moore - words; Gibbons - drawings. A graphic novel gives you the essence of a story and lots of dialogue. With Watchmen, you get Moore's terrific, multi-layered story and Gibbons' peerless artwork.
"A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?"
| Haruki Murakami | Hard-boiled Wonderland | 1991 |
Literary fiction; translated from Japanese; full title: "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World." This weird tale makes you think you could write a weird tale yourself, since it's constructed from everyday images and a little bit of psychology, but you also need skills that match Murakami's reflective outsider imagination and elegiac sense of structure. Stashed under literature in the bookshops, because not all of his books are weird. Also fine are: "A Wild Sheep Chase" and the collection of short stories "The Elephant Vanishes".
On the whole, I think of myself as one of those people who take a convenience-sake view of prevailing world conditions, events, existence in general. ... For instance, supposing that the planet earth were not a sphere but a gigantic coffee table, how much difference in everyday life would that make?
| Taichi Yamada | Strangers | 1987 |
Literary fiction; translated from Japanese. The more this supernatural tale roots itself in the everyday, the weirder it gets, and the more poignant its observations and reflections. A few strong images give "Strangers" an edge over Yamada's other translations, "In Search of a Distant Voice" and "I Haven't Dreamed of Flying for a While", which otherwise are similar in length (nicely short!), style and effect.
This feeling of too much quiet first came over me on a night near the end of July as I sat working at my desk a little after eleven. A chill ran down my spine, and I felt as though I were suspended in the middle of a vast dark void, utterly alone.
© Stephen Balmer