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Brit-Creep
Aug. 5th, 2011 10:07 amOver last weekend I accidentally discovered that Sarah Rayne (author of Roots of Evil, Spider Light, A Dark Dividing and The Death Chamber) had written a couple of new books, and picked them up; yesterday, I did much the same thing with F.G. Cottam (author of The House of Lost Souls and Dark Echo). (In retrospect, I think I'll look for them both at Britcentric places like Nicholas Hoare from now on, not Chapters-Indigo.) Both are what I'd call firmly mid-list writers; at their best, they approach the creep factor of people like Susan Hill (when she's in ghost story mode) or John Connolly, but Cottam has a tendency to very direct exposition and weird flights of fancy--in Dark Echo, for example, he at one point has the ghost of Michael Collins intervene to save a protagonist from unemployment, and repeatedly warns of ratcheting arcane influence through references to Prefab Sprout's Paddy McAloon--while Rayne has specific, id-tastic patterns of interests, like consensual adult sibling incest, genetically-coded sociopathy, and the twist that one of our rotating POV characters has been Batshit Insane(tm) throughout the entire narrative. I once told my Mom that I thought Rayne was the model of a modern Sensation novelist, and I stand by that.
At any rate: The new Raynes were The House of the Lost and Ghost Music, both of which flirt with greatness without ever really reaching it, and one of which (...Lost, in case you're wondering) sports a massive plot lacuna that never really gets ret-conned away. Neither ever quite scale the demented heights/depths of the first book I ever read by her, Roots of Evil, which combines the looming shadow of the Holocaust with lost Weimar Republic silent films, evil kid ghosts and the legend of Alraune. OTOH, Cottam's The Waiting Room is probably his best work yet, revisiting his obsession with WWI and cross-breeding it with A) a strikingly unique haunting-ground (the still-standing waiting room of a demolished former railway station) and B) an M.R. Jamesian background narrative involving bringing someone back from the dead in truly spectacularly unsatisfying fashion.
Otherwise: Made some headway yesterday with A Tree of Bones (800 words, roughly), which I hope to replicate today. OTOH, this is the third day I've woken up contorted in a really weird position, and I'm cold. Hope to go see Attack the Block tonight, but I guess we'll have to see.
Amended to add: All this reminds me that at some point (right around my Prince of Foxes post, no doubt) I need to talk about Thomas Boyle's Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead, an incredible book tracing Boyle's cross-referencing of twenty years' worth of Victorian tabloid journalism with the rise of Victorian Sensation literature. He manages, for example, to pin down the RL scandals that might have given rise to books like Wilke Collins' Uncle Silas and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, which is cool beyond belief. (Sarah Rayne pulls similar tricks, though I think I see the hand of Google in her work--she has a tendency not to fixate on genuine specific cases so much as to get interested in an area, do research, then drop it all in a bag and shake it.)
At any rate: The new Raynes were The House of the Lost and Ghost Music, both of which flirt with greatness without ever really reaching it, and one of which (...Lost, in case you're wondering) sports a massive plot lacuna that never really gets ret-conned away. Neither ever quite scale the demented heights/depths of the first book I ever read by her, Roots of Evil, which combines the looming shadow of the Holocaust with lost Weimar Republic silent films, evil kid ghosts and the legend of Alraune. OTOH, Cottam's The Waiting Room is probably his best work yet, revisiting his obsession with WWI and cross-breeding it with A) a strikingly unique haunting-ground (the still-standing waiting room of a demolished former railway station) and B) an M.R. Jamesian background narrative involving bringing someone back from the dead in truly spectacularly unsatisfying fashion.
Otherwise: Made some headway yesterday with A Tree of Bones (800 words, roughly), which I hope to replicate today. OTOH, this is the third day I've woken up contorted in a really weird position, and I'm cold. Hope to go see Attack the Block tonight, but I guess we'll have to see.
Amended to add: All this reminds me that at some point (right around my Prince of Foxes post, no doubt) I need to talk about Thomas Boyle's Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead, an incredible book tracing Boyle's cross-referencing of twenty years' worth of Victorian tabloid journalism with the rise of Victorian Sensation literature. He manages, for example, to pin down the RL scandals that might have given rise to books like Wilke Collins' Uncle Silas and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, which is cool beyond belief. (Sarah Rayne pulls similar tricks, though I think I see the hand of Google in her work--she has a tendency not to fixate on genuine specific cases so much as to get interested in an area, do research, then drop it all in a bag and shake it.)
