Book Review - Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King

Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King

London: New English Library, 1994               ISBN 0450610098


Ever since scaring myself silly reading Salem's Lot when I was a teenager, I've had a soft spot for the works of Stephen King. Not the grandiose later works, but the early, scary stuff. His first collection of short stories - Nightshift - is a particular favourite of mine, and well worth reading.

Nightmares & Dreamscapes is not as strong as Nightshift, with some stories being a little formulaic, but there are definitely some good ones. The collection varies between outright horror, sci-fi, and the fantastic, according to the whims of King's mind. And what a mind it must be, fizzing with thoughts that most other people would not enjoy having. In the Introduction King suggests that he doesn't necessarily enjoy all of them either, feeling compelled to write. There is no doubt King is at his best dealing with horror: he is the master of the build-up; of evoking a "normal" neighbourhood and people, and then inserting the terrifying. In a collection such as this though, the normalcy tends to look the same in each story, so by the end of the book you can at times see through the construction of the tale, which bits are formula, which bits are building plot etc. None of which takes away from the pleasure of enjoying his ideas.

And there are some great ideas. Killer toad-storms, houses that are space-ships, and a great zombie story too. There are two vampire stories, both of which are good, and a couple of ghost stories, which are less strong. Also less strong are the stories that King writes as homages to other writers - in this collection there is a story in homage to H.P. Lovecraft, a Raymond Chandler homage, and a Sherlock Holmes story. When King attempts these stories they are very close to becoming parody or pastiche rather than what I'm sure he intends. The Holmes story in my opinion shouldn't have been included - the language is not right, with the story merely reminding the ready how much better the real thing is.

Nightmares & Dreamscapes is a great book for having on hand during the holiday season: not too much thought required, and entertaining enough.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The edge of running water by William Sloane

The edge of running water by William Sloane

New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1955 (1st ed. 1939)

(Digitised copy access via openlibrary.org)

As an avid reader of the New York Review of Books, I keep an interest in, and am notified about, the books released by their publications arm New York Review Books. I recently came across a blurb for their recently published omnibus of William Sloane's novels, which intrigued me enough to scout out one of his works, which I fortunately found as a freely borrowable ebook on openlibrary.org.

Fortunate being an appropriate word, as this book rises above the ruck of the run-of-the-mill SciFi and Horror written in the '30s. In fact this book crosses a few genres: SciFi, Horror, Mystery, Detective Novel and even a bit of Romance thrown in to spice up the mix.

The nuts and bolts of the story: Psychology Professor Richard receives a letter from a former mentor and electrophysicist friend of his Julian, to come to his country retreat to help him on a problem he has been working on for some time. Julian dropped out of Richard's life after the death of Julian's wife Helen, a woman Richard also loved.

Richard arrives in small-town Maine to find Julian shacked up in a remote house working on a mysterious apparatus, with an even more mysterious assistant, Mrs. Walters. Helen's younger sister Anne is also in the house, having just arrived back from Europe. Richard soon sees that all is not well, with Julian clearly ill. At first Julian will tell Richard nothing about his experiment, which is carefully locked away in one room of the house. The novel revolves around Richard's piece- by-piece unveiling of Julian's purpose, which then becomes tied up in the death of his housekeeper Mrs. Marcey, who apparently dies in a fall at the house.

The true horror of Julian's mania, and his genius in unveiling a new power to science come together in a final scene, which I won't reveal here.

Where Sloane has succeeded beyond the hack writers, is in his effective and efficient character building, and in the way builds the horror of what might be happening without revealing too much until the end of the book. Mrs. Walters remains an ambiguous character until very far into the book, and even after the last page it is unclear if Julian had succeeded in what he had set out to accomplish.

The readability and page-turning nature of this book is evinced in the fact that I knocked if off in a little over three hours. This isn't great literature, but for the type of book it is, it rises above the ruck.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The man in the high castle by Philip K. Dick

The man in the high castle by Philip K. Dick

(Read in Four novels of the 1960s, New York :  Library of America, 2007 ISBN 9781598530094)



I saw this book listed in the Book Depository's list of "Best books ever", and given the subject and the fact that I'd never read any Philip K. Dick, thought I'd give it a go.

Philip K. Dick is a well known Science Fiction writer, but unusually perhaps better known for the film adaptations of his works than the works themselves - the most famous being the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, which is an adaptation of Dick's novel Do androids dream of electric sheep?.

This book is one of his earliest, and runs on the premise of a huge counterfactual; that is, that the Axis were victorious in World War II. Counterfactual history has had something of a vogue lately, and is something that I normally loathe when presented as scholarly work, but, as fiction can quite often produce something worth reading. In this case, I'm not so sure.

The book follows a few characters who live in the USA, which has been divided into three by the conflict - a Nazi dominated East Coast, an ambiguous Centre and the Japanese dominated West Coast. The Nazi's insane racist ideology has led them to destroy Africa with nuclear weapons, but at the same time develop the technology to travel to Mars. The Japanese have not become as technically advanced, but the belief of their superiority over their White subjects is no less than the Nazi's over their Slav, Black and Jewish ones.

The story revolves around Tagomi, a ministerial attache who is the unwitting host to a meeting between German and Japanese intelligence operatives, Frink, who has lost his wife and is trying to start again, Childan, a high-end dealer in "authentic American antiques", and Frink's wife, who has moved to the Central Zone from the West Coast.

There are two other "characters" in the book - the I Ching, the ancient Chinese astrological text, and the novel The Grasshopper, which is a semi-secret (banned in the Nazi zones) counterfactual book that posits that the Allies won the war.

These various strands entwine around each other - Tagomi likes to buy "authentic American antiques" (mostly faked) from Childan, Frink worked in a factory that faked the antiques and then striikes out to produce something new and authentic, and Frink's wife thwarts a Nazi attempt on the life of the author of The grasshopper, who is rumoured to live in a very highly fortified house in Colorado (i.e. the man in the high castle).

The book tackles themes of authenticity, collaboration and art, and uses the I Ching quite heavily, to the extent that readers who aren't familiar with it (i.e. me) can get a bit lost. Much of the counterfactual material in the book is intriguing, but not well-developed.

There is a curious dis-jointedness in the style of this book: it is very episodic and the episodes are not necessarily well connected to each other. The language is very artificial, I think to convey that the characters were not necessarily speaking in their native tongues. The result adds to the disjointedness of the writing and becomes distracting after a while. The ending has a feel of being rushed.

Overall the sum of this book is less than the collection of its parts. Certainly not one of the "Best books ever".


Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell