In The Absence of Miracles by Michael J Malone

Michael is a prolific author and I’ve read a few of his titles down the years. He’s always guaranteed to produce a tightly plotted tale and in recent years he’s moved from more crimes titles to more psychological suspense tales, oftentimes with a touch of the supernatural about them. In The Absence of Miracles is very much in this territory. 

When John Docherty’s mother is taken into nursing care having suffered a stroke, he has no choice but to sell her home. Of course, to do so he needs to clear it of its contents and it is in doing so that his world is turned upside down. For John finds in the attic a box, and in that box, he finds proof that he had a brother he knew nothing about, one who disappeared when he was young. This discovery forces John to reevaluate his life, everything he thought he knew, everything he thought he could remember. John starts to investigate and find answers but finds it difficult to get to the truth, for inadvertently he has uncovered a secret that threatens his emotional and mental well being. 

I don’t really want to give away much more about the plot, but will say that this novel deals with issues of neglect, abuse, mental health, and much more. These are difficult subjects to write about but Malone does so with real sensitivity. The result is a beautifully written novel and one that is both touching, gripping and disturbing. 

Both the plotting and characterisation in this novel are very adeptly done and In The Absence of Miracles is a poignant book that will stay with the reader long after the last page has been turned.

4 out of 5 stars

Fuck Yeah, Videogames by Daniel Hardcastle and illustrated by Rebecca Maughan

I have to admit to having a love/hate relationship to videogames and gaming. At points in my life I’ve been a gamer. My early teens in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s (yes, I really am that old) were spent playing Dungeon Master, a Dungeons & Dragons type of role-playing game, on a machine that I can’t even recall. But then I discovered girls, underage drinking and worse, and stopped playing. Years later, after graduating from university, I played out my god-complex with Sid Meier’s Civilisation, a game which had you guide a tribe of cavemen through the stages of civilizational development, all the while battling and conquering other tribes and cities, until they were the most advanced and powerful on earth. But I got bored of that and besides, responsibility in the form of work and family got in the way. In recent years I’ve dabbled with my crime fiction tendencies, fancying myself as an assassin and hitman, and playing games with those titles (Assassin’s Creed and Hitman). But again, I’ve eventually got bored and found they just take too much time. The point is that I’m not a videogames aficionado in the true sense of the word, I don’t share the author’s love and affection for them, these days preferring books or film. But I certainly can understand their appeal.

Fuck Yeah, Videogames is a peon to gaming and the games that Daniel Hardcastle has played, an ode to them, an extended love letter if you will. He’s clearly younger than me (there’s no Dungeon Master here, nor Sid Meier’s Civilisation) and those that do cross with my later period of gaming differ from my choices (no mention of Assassin’s Creed or Hitman) but that’s ok, you don’t have to agree with his choices, or even to have played the games at all. In fact, you don’t even have to be a gamer to enjoy this book, the author’s enthusiasm is infectious and with entertaining illustrations courtesy of Rebecca Maughan, this book is really brought to life.

I very much enjoyed Fuck Yeah, Videogames. It’s not my usual type of read or my preferred genre, but one can’t help but get caught up in his enthusiasm.

4 out of 5 stars

The Devil’s Aspect by Craig Russell

I’m not a massive fan of serial killer fiction, preferring my crime fiction to be noir and/or touching on issues of corruption. But occasionally a serial killer thriller comes along to break the mold, or at least bring something fresh to it. 

The description of The Devil’s Aspect was intriguing. On the cusp of the Second World War, Dr Viktor Kosárek takes a new job at a remote castle in Czechoslovakia that has been converted into a high-security asylum. Its inmates are the Devil's Six, six of the worst mass killers in Central Europe. With names like The Woodcutter, The Clown, The Glass Collector, The Sciomancer and The Demon, there’s more than a little of The Silence of The Lambs to this novel. But that’s not all, Prague is being terrorised by yet another serial killer, dubbed Leather Apron, and this is a further thread that runs through the narrative.

Dr Kosárek is a Jungian and believes that myths and legends are archetypes common to all humanity. Thus, he has a theory that one’s evil, a person’s Devil’s Aspect, is to blame for all that is wrong in the world, and that the killers housed in the asylum did their wicked acts thanks to their Devil’s Aspect getting out of control. To prove his theory, he intends to use narcotics to put his patients into a suggestible state where he can identify and confront their Devil's Aspect. But what he finds is far more frightening than he suspected.

This is a long novel, running to approximately 500 pages, but the pages fly by. It touches on the madness of the Third Reich and Nazism that is about to engulf Europe, the paranormal – the devil and demons – and the hunt for the serial killer, Leather Apron. While Viktor Kosárek is the main character, there is a strong supporting cast. Most notably of all is the Prague police detective, Kapitan Lukáš Smolák, who is in pursuit of Leather Apron and seeks Kosárek’s help and advice, and Judita Blochová, an asylum administrator of Jewish extraction who Kosárek develops feelings for.

This is a great novel and one that I read very quickly. If I have one criticism, it’s that there are a couple of gruesome scenes where Leather Apron’s victims are found. I’m not a prude but I do find the gratuitous violence in serial killer thrillers a little off-putting. Luckily, however, there are less than a handful of these scenes and the author resists the temptation to tip into prurience, something that some other writers of serial killer thrillers do.

The Devil’s Aspect has already been snapped up by Hollywood for adaptation, which is no surprise. This is actually the first novel of Craig Russell’s that I’ve read and on the strength of this I might well dig out his earlier work.

4 out of 5 stars  

November Road by Lou Berney

The assassination of John F Kennedy has created a mini-genre all of its own down the years. Movies such as The Parallax View, though heavily influenced by the tragedy, used it as the inspiration for a fictional assassination, while others fictionalised the assassination, elements of it, or the circumstances surrounding it. Amongst these are Charles McCarry’s novel Tears of Autumn, Don DeLillo’s Libra, and of course, perhaps the best of them all, James Elroy’s Underworld USA trilogy. 

Of course, this is is just a taste of the JFK assassination’s treatment in film (I haven’t even mentioned Oliver Stone’s film, JFK), television, and literature and the canon includes works which focus entirely on the assassination, to those that use it more as a backdrop. Lou Berney’s November Road is very much of the latter. While the assassination of Kennedy is integral to the plot, it is not central to it in the same way that it is to some other works. This isn’t a JFK conspiracy thriller as such, more one that uses the assassination and the conspiracy that surrounded it (in the novel there was a conspiracy, Lee Harvey Oswald having been a patsy) to drive the narrative forward.

Frank Guidry is a fixer for the New Orleans mob, a go-to guy for fearsome mobster Carlos Marcello. Guidry was asked to drive a car to Dallas. After the assassination, he puts two and two together and realises that the car had been used as a getaway vehicle for the real assassin. Guidry is scared, the assassination being audacious even for the mafia, in fact, it borders on the recklessly dangerous. When others who know about the plot start to die, Guidry guesses that Marcello is tying off loose ends and goes on the run.

Guidry meets a woman and her daughter who have fled a life of suffocatingly cloistered domesticity. He charms her so that he can travel with them, reasoning that whoever Marcello has sent after him will be looking for a man travelling alone, not a man with a family. But as they travel across America, he starts to develop real feelings for them.

November Road is in actual fact a road trip novel. The Kennedy assassination, Marcello’s determination to sew up loose ends, the hitman he sets on his erstwhile employee’s trail, all drive the narrative forward and give momentum to Guidry’s journey. The characterisation in the novel is top-notch. The contract killer is chilling, the mother and daughter touching and vulnerable, though not in a saccharine clicéd way. But most of all this is Guidry’s story. Much is said in creative writing workshops about a character’s arc, and November Road is a study in how to craft such an arc well. Guidry goes from selfish womaniser to caring partner and father figure, though tragedy is signposted from the start and its obvious that things can’t end well. This is all done incredibly adeptly and this change in Guidry’s outlook, this transformation he experiences, is convincing.

November Road is a brilliant novel. Part JFK conspiracy thriller, but mainly a road trip undertaken by a desperate man, this is a definite five star read.

A River of Bodies by Kevin Doyle

This is in reality a review of two books, A River of Bodies being the second in a projected trilogy, and a sequel to the author’s first novel, To Keep a Bird Singing. When I was invited to review this title by the publisher, they were kind enough to send the first title as well and I read both back to back. 

Ireland is a country with a turbulent recent history and as someone of Irish descent (my father was from the north, my mother from the south) I have a great interest in its affairs. There was The Troubles in the north, which dominated much of the latter half of the last century, and which impacted the Republic in the south as well. The south is an independent country but the north remains a part of the UK and the IRA ran a deadly campaign of independence which only ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1999. Then there is the Republic’s relationship with the Catholic Church. Until recently, the Republic was a deeply conservative country. The Catholic Church was not to be questioned and sin was something to be punished. There were many abuses which have only recently been revealed. For example, unmarried mothers were forced into Magdalene Laundries (as famously exposed in the 2002 film by Peter Mullen, The Magdalene Sisters) which in reality were little better than prisons or asylums, where they were forced to work and where abuse was rife. More recently, the worldwide child abuse scandal to hit the Catholic Church has impacted Ireland, with child abuse found to be rife in some Irish Church institutions. All this tragic history forms the backdrop to Kevin Doyle’s Solidarity Books trilogy. 

Noelie Sullivan is an aged, unemployed ex-punk. he’s something of a community activist, having been involved in many campaigns down the years. In the first book of the trilogy, To Keep a Bird Singing, while perusing a charity shop he happens upon a rare collection of punk records. Its his own, he having lost them in a burglary years before. Amazed by this discovery, he buys the collection and asks the woman serving at the till where they came from. After finding out, he tracks down the seller and confronts him. This is where Noelie’s troubles begin, for hidden in the collection is notes on the identity of a high level informant in Sinn Fein (the political wing of the IRA), a man who throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s was feeding information to Garda Special Branch. The plot takes off from here and soon the IRA/Sinn Fein angle is tied up intricately with child abuse in the Catholic Church, and even touches on fascism in Spain. Book 1 ends on a cliff-hanger and book 2, A River of Bodies picks up from where it left off and continues on. 

Some books in a series can be read as a standalone and some can’t. This is a trilogy of the latter kind, and A River of Bodies really shouldn’t be read without reading its previous title. The second book is a slightly slower moving instalment, as Noellie and the friends helping him in his investigation (all introduced in the first title, bar one newcomer introduced in the second book) consolidate their findings and press on unearthing the truth. That said, A River of Bodies is still a tense and enthralling read and it sets the stage for what I imagine will be an explosive finale.

One thing that should be said is that the characters are under real threat and one never knows who is likely to survive. Without giving away spoilers, major characters are killed off in both titles and I really liked that about these books. In some novels you know that however much peril a character is under they will be ok in the end, but like the fantasy television series Game of Thrones (which regularly shocked fans and kept them on their toes by killing off a major character) this trilogy does the same. It’s a very effective technique and keeps one guessing.

I really enjoyed both these books. The characters are engaging and have real pluck, they’re ordinary people who dare to take on the might of the state (Garda Special Branch) and the dangerous child abuse ring which has tentacles into the Catholic Church establishment. While the plot is convoluted and labyrinthine, the author handles it well and the reader never gets lost. This is an entertaining and engaging thriller series, but one with real punch and one not afraid to shine a light on real social issues. I’m very much looking forward to the third title in the series and can’t recommend these books enough.

5 out of 5 stars

The Deaths and Afterlife of Aleister Crowley - Exclusive extract!

Today I host an exclusive extract from The Deaths and Afterlife of Aleister Crowley, by Ian Thornton and published by Unbound Digital:

The Blurb:

Aleister Crowley, also known as the Great Beast, is one of the most reviled men in history. Satanist, cult leader, debauched novelist and poet, his legacy has been harshly contested for decades.

Crowley supposedly died in 1947, but in Ian Thornton’s new novel, set in the present day, the Great Beast is alive and well and living in Shangri-la. Now over 130 years old, thanks to the magical air of his mystical location, he looks back on his life and decides it is time to set the record straight.

For Crowley was not the evil man he is often portrayed as. This was just a cover to hide his real mission, to save the twentieth century from destroying itself and to set humanity on the road to freedom and liberty.

The Death and Afterlife of Aleister Crowley is an epic novel that will make you see this notorious figure in a completely new light, as he encounters an impressive cast of real-life characters including Timothy Leary, The Beatles, Princess Margaret, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock.

The Extract:

One

The Father, The Son & The Ghost Love is the only principle that makes life tolerable. – Aleister Crowley

I sit in an ancient amphitheatre cut into the slopes of the valley, weeping willows below and above, a stone wall of pungent, bloomed white gardenia to our right, a meadow of daisies and horseflies to the left as this man looks out across his adopted and quite beloved homeland. The morning is unreasonably beautiful. It would be a shame to leave this sanc- tuary, especially given that the odds of returning are so slim. 
I breathe in deeply and gratefully, while I observe with immeasurable fondness the humble decency of this, the most unchallenged, the most unchallengeable and surely the finest spot on the planet. Shangri-La. 
On the flanks are sweeping stone terraces dotted with some young children of touching and eviscerating beauty. Behind me on the hillside, higher up, are many more rows, reaching to even more rarefied air. This crucible possesses a soothing tran- quillity and palpable serenity. It is used for their Buddhist ceremonies, for performances and song by young and old. I have many happy memories here. 
The knowledge, smiles and serenity of all of those here lend weight to Buddhism. A logical mind rightfully struggles with reincarnation, but one finds it easy to forgive them. 
Adorned in my sack-cloth simplicity, I look at the skies and tell three young lasses of shaven head, who eye me with rever- ence as they pass, ‘The taking of pleasure in such minutiae might only be achieved by a man who is at peace with his world. Remember, we are the blue-lidded daughters of Sunset; we are the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.’ 
They giggle and shuffle off. 
I digress! Let us speak vastly important nonsense and then let us visit those depraved and vulgar young goats of mine. 

 1.1 Holy 
You have all seen me before. There I am on the cover of Sergeant Pepper, back row, second from the far left between Sri Yukteswar Giri and Mae West. My fine boy John knew precisely who the puppeteer of that frazzled century was. 
There was surely a time when I would have boasted that you are only here because of my intentional nudges on the axis of the twentieth century, as I squeezed and fondled her centre of gravity. Those days of bluster are largely over. I shall instead approach the claim from a more modest position. Without my meddling as part of British Intelligence, some- times intentional, sometimes utterly cack-handed, it is perhaps possible none of us would be here. I only bring this up as, since I may or may not have interfered with history that allowed the very specific conditions for this, our world to be, we might as well get the pronunciation of my name right. Crowley. It rhymes with Holy.
 And it was not always Aleister. As a boy, I was Alick, though when I barrelled into this realm, on October the twelfth 1875, I The Father, The Son & The Ghost 9 was to be baptised, under the Lord’s font water, Alexander Edward Crowley.
 I was born in one of those sturdy town houses in Clarendon Square, number thirty, in the Cotswolds town of Royal Leamington Spa, where the miraculous waters from font, tap or stream, allegedly healed and cured as if one were in the presence of a Christ. That Nazarene and I would have been marvellous chums; I so adored Him as a boy. I wonder whether I would have been dumbstruck, like the sodden auto- graph hunter at the stage door, had we met? Perhaps I might have been, for the minutest of moments, and long before even He would have chance to peer into my eyes of coal black in search of a soul. My father spoke of Him with much reverence and respect, but also with the proximity of a mind- ful and nurturing elder brother, who would shield us from any harm, as the days of pristine youth sparkled and the midges danced at dusk, until the final strides of another ambrosial day tripped over a gnarled, tangerine sun. 
Or at least, that is how I recall them. Though these early years will always suffer from the patchiness of a childhood memory, it is naturally occurring in the atomic structure of the life story. Please bear this in mind as we hone in on the adult days, where I am able to tell you the exact slant of a morning shadow with the precision of a sundial. Some details shall always be meticulous, however. Papa, for example. 
My father was Edward, a tall, handsome, lithe, dark-eyed brute with fine teeth and cheekbones like spanners in a sock. He carried a married tang of light oak from his subtle cologne and a stark, almost medical, soap. He was in his forties when I arrived. He was already retired. He had inherited a vast for- tune from his family’s shares in a London brewery, Crowley’s Alton Ales. The rhythmic and perpetual soaking to the back teeth of pie-eyed and staggering swathes of the population of 10 The Deaths and Afterlife of Aleister Crowley London in his family’s underwhelming booze allowed my dear father to do the great Lord’s work at his leisure, though Papa chose to do it quite tirelessly. We went from village to village with gusto, as we spread the joy of our Gospel. I was a plump little boy, so father was convinced the exercise and the fresh air were good for me. 
We relished the different accents that the countryside would bring. If Professor Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion could locate the birthplace or current street of residence of a chap outside a West End theatre, then Father was equally as capable with the wretches and bumpkins of the Midlands, the Cotswolds and the eastern edges of the West Country. When he dozed after a meagre lunch under Gloucestershire or Warwickshire trees, I read the Bible, Longfellow’s ‘Excelsior’ or Martin Rattler Adventures of a Boy in the Forests of Brazil by R. M. Ballantyne. He taught me, as a school would have, but with- out the harshness of those vicious martinets in charge. 

Father had been born into the Quakers. As a young man he left them over a minor difference of opinion in the Scriptures. He became a Plymouth Brethren until he then splintered from the main corps of that lot as well. The differences become minute at this stage, and barely worth considering, but for the record, 2 Corinthians was the bone of contention. His interpretation was at the core of his disagreement with the Plymouths. The issue was with whom one was permitted to eat. Father believed we should be allowed to dine with the poor, the uneducated, the unfortunates and the lepers; the Plymouths did not. We were now to be known as the Exclusive Brethren. 

I would mimic such strops and such splintering with my own religious pursuits many decades later. Our lengthy and daily exertion of saving souls, from hamlet to village to town, aided the maintenance of Father’s fine The Father, The Son & The Ghost 11 physique, but only seemed to aggravate my fat ankles and force my chubby toad neck to sweat like a squeezed teabag. When we were not marching in search of the next door upon which to rap or seeking some poor soul trimming his lawn or awaiting his tennis partner in the park, he would be preaching and I would be stood erect by his side, not permitted to slouch or shuffle from foot to foot. I listened to the word of God. In my heavy black suit cut of the same cloth as his, and with the same heavy application of starch on my upright collar, I believed myself to be the happiest and freest boy in England. I did not see the inside of a school until I was eight years old.

 I was a hard-boiled and applied lad, fascinated by the truth of evidence and proof, though this was still submerged by the wonder I saw in my old man and in the Scriptures. Once as we traipsed through a field to the next village, my father advised I circumnavigate a clump of over-green and erect nettles. I pushed him on why I ought to be so concerned.

 ‘Will you learn by experience or will you take my word for it?’ 

‘Learn by experience, of course, Father,’ I said before I dived in.

In Truth, Madness by Imran Khan

As a former journalist myself, I have always had a bit of a soft spot for novels that feature the Third Estate. I wasn’t a foreign correspondent like the author and the protagonist of his novel, but rather a current affairs and political journalist, but I traveled to my fair share of dangerous places (albeit not as dangerous as Iraq or Afghanistan) and have nothing but respect for those who do so.  So it was that I came to In Truth, Madness by Imran Khan, a journalist who most recently has been a foreign correspondent for al-Jazeera English and who has reported from amongst other places as Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, and Libya.

In Truth, Madness is published by Unbound, the crowd-funding publisher, rather than a traditional publishing house. I’ve read a number of Unbound titles and they’ve all been extremely good, but they’ve all been a little quirky too, which might explain why they’ve been crowdfunded rather than found a home with a traditional publishing house. This goes for this title also. For while it could have been a story about a jaded journalist reporting in a war zone (and would have been perfectly good as such, a number of journalists have written very good novels along these lines) Khan does a little bit more. 

The protagonist of In Truth, Madness is Malik Khalil, an experienced and brilliant journalist. He's been the world over, reporting on wars and natural disasters, witnessing more than his fair share of strife and misery. But unsurprisingly, it's taken its toll and all that trauma is catching up with him. As the story unfolds and he starts to unravel, he begins to argue with a God that he doesn't believe in.

I'll refrain from giving away more of the plot, for this is an excellent novel that needs to be read. It's a story that tells of what it is like to work as a war correspondent and the plot addresses the situation in the middle east. But In Truth, Madness also covers myth and religion, history, and much, much more. Another reviewer drew comparisons with the novel Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, another novel that I’ve read and reviewed, and with its touch of magical realism, I have to agree that In Truth, Madness does indeed share many similarities with that work. There’s an increasing number of novels coming out of the Middle East and being translated into English, and while I’ve only read a few, magical realism is a way these authors try to make sense of the violent maelstrom that all too often wracks the region. While the author Imran Khan is British, his novel In Truth, Madness is very much in the tradition of these Middle Eastern novelists, and its narrative is a rich and compelling examination of a multitude of subjects.

In Truth, Madness is a beautifully written novel and has much to say about the troubles that plague the region, the reality of journalism, and humanity’s place in the world. This is a novel that addresses both earthly matters and the metaphysical such as belief in God. A thoughtful, compelling and original piece of literature, this is a fine read.

4 out of 5 stars