Book review

Book review: Fairy Tale by Stephen King

14 June 2025
Edoardo
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Fairy Tale by Stephen King

In the introduction, Stephen King tells us, his constant readers, how he came to write his Fairy Tale in the middle of the stultifying restrictions of the covid crisis. He says how, when he was trapped in his house, he imagined what would make him happy and the answer was a tunnel from a shed in his garden to another world.

To be honest, that would make me pretty happy too, covid or no covid.

Unfortunately, the story followed and that didn’t make this reader happy. For a start, the other world that we reach through that tunnel isn’t all that wondrous: a few fairy tale tropes – giants, mermaids, etc – but it’s done in the trademark Stephen King style where the fairy tale signatures include elements of 50s Americana such as tram cars and the Wizard of Oz.

The story itself is sadly predictable: our hero, a high-school lad called Charlie Reade who spends most of the story telling the reader that he’s really not as perfect as his actions suggest he is, follows the quest and succeeds in the quest, without too much trouble.

But really, where on earth did Stephen get the idea that a suitable name for the villain of the story, the man who is literally greying out a fairy tale world, should be ‘Flight Killer’? I mean, come on. If the villain was a striking air-traffic controller, maybe. Presumably that’s an allusion to how Flight Killer is busy killing butterflies but, frankly, even ‘Butterfly Killer’ would have been better than ‘Flight Killer’. It suggests someone who delays your holiday, not someone of unlimited depravity and evil, intent on destroying a world and everyone in it.

However, Charlie manages to dispose of ‘Flight Killer’ without too much difficulty – turns out his evil minions, who killed all the opposition previously, can be killed by chucking a bucket of water over them. Just as well they didn’t try to take over the world when it was raining.

I’m glad writing the book got King through the misery of lockdown. Unfortunately, it rather brought that misery back to this reader.

Book review: A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley

14 June 2025
Edoardo
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A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley

This is, by some margin, the most atmospheric book I have ever read.

It’s quite extraordinary. On one level, not very much happens. A young girl, Penelope, at the start of the 20th century goes to stay with relatives in the country to help her health (you can tell it’s set a long time ago as Penelope’s relatively poor family are living on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea!). The relatives live in an old farm house that was once part of a larger manor house.

While staying at Thackers, Penelope slips into the past, meeting the people who lived in Thackers in Elizabethan times. She slips backwards and forwards, between past and present, a traveller but never a settler. She is witness to an abortive attempt to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots, who was being held in a nearby house. And that is about it, as far as story is concerned.

But that really is the least of it. In the introduction, Alison Uttley tells how she herself, as a young girl, lived in the Derbyshire valley where the story is set and how, as that young girl, she travelled into the past.

“Many of the incidents in this story are based on my dreams, for in sleep I went through secret hidden doorways in the house wall and found myself in another century. Four times I stepped through the door and wandered in rooms which had no existence, a dream within a dream, and I talked with people who lived alongside but out of time, moving through a life parallel to my own existence. In my dreams past and present were co-existent, and I lived in the past with a knowledge of the future. I travelled into that secondary dream world, seeing all things as if brightly illuminated, walking in fields and woods dazzling in their clarity. I sat on the stone walls in the sunshine of other times, conscious of the difference, knowing intermediate events. The painted room, the vision through the windows of the house, and many another incident came to me in dreams, and I have woven them into this story.”

That is how Uttley describes it in her introduction and, reading the book, we are taken into a past dazzling in its clarity yet suffused with the logic of dream, where none of the characters that Penelope meets are surprised at her reappearances after long absence.

It is a book that cannot be adequately described, only read, but if you too would walk in those times and see everything as brightly illuminated, then read this book: no other conveys better the reality, and the strangeness, of this type of experience.

Book review: The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell

18 May 2025
Edoardo
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The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell

Whoops! Chalk this one up as a top contender for brilliant marketing idea gone disastrously wrong. Suppose you’re a writer, you’ve set your first novel of paranormal detective fiction in a version of London really quite similar to the London of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. The book has done well but obviously you want the next in the series to do better. Then an amazing possibility presents itself: you meet Neil himself and tell him about your book. You get friendly with him. You think about asking him to read your book and write a cover comment and he’s happy to do that but he’s done that for a fair few other writers and you want your book to stand out.

Then you get that brilliant idea. Your vision of London owes so much to Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Would he…? Might he…? After all, the idea plays into Gaiman’s own use of metafiction. So you ask him and he says, “Yes.”

“Yes!” You are beyond delighted. This will really make your book stand out.

Neil Gaiman has agreed to appear in your novel as one of its characters, a writer navigating on the borders between this world and Neverwhere, dipping his writerly toes into the supernatural world of your own creation.

A more perfect, more arch, tribute to Gaiman’s vision of London that has inspired your own book is hard to imagine.

What’s more, Gaiman doesn’t even ask to be the book’s hero, or even heroic: he’s happy to be a morally dubious figure, skating the boundaries of self-interest and altruism, right in line with your overall vision.

Yes, this is brilliant, this is really going to work…

Then, ten years later, Gaiman goes and gets accused of all sorts of horrible behaviour by various women. He denies it, obviously, but then sues one of the women for breaching a non-disclosure agreement. What was your book’s biggest selling point suddenly becomes an albatross of Me-Too proportions.

The most brilliant selling idea of modern metafiction gets undone by the fiction ceasing to be meta.

Book review: London Falling by Paul Cornell

18 May 2025
Edoardo
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London Falling by Paul Cornell

If, like me, you started off really enjoying Ben Aaronovich’s Peter Grant supernatural police detective fiction but then found the series tailing off, then this new series, featuring police detectives investigating supernatural murders, might seem like an obvious new avenue.

And it is. But perhaps a better reference point would be the London of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere but with more murders and the police involved. The story takes a while to get going, and a bit longer to successfully differentiate the main characters, but after about 50 pages Cornell hits his writing stride, the characters start breathing and moving, and the pace picks up.

Definitely one worth thinking about in the growing genre of London based paranormal fiction.

Book review: Oathbreakers by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry

18 May 2025
Edoardo
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Oathbreakers by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry

Historians, when writing for the general public, don’t normally draw back the curtains on what they do. They tell the story of what happened, when it happened and who did what, but they don’t spend ages going through the painstaking work that allowed them to tell this story.

In Oathbreakers, Gabriele and Perry do something different: they pull back the historical curtains. While the book sets out to tell the history of the bitter civil conflict between the children and grandchildren of Charlemagne that tore apart the Carolingian Empire, it’s a book that also reveals how historians interrogate their sources to try to get at the real story of what happened.

While the history of the falling out between the heirs of Charlemagne is dramatic in itself, just as much of the tension in the book comes from the authors’ treatment of their sources. As Gabriele and Perry examine the sources of their history, the writers’ description of their methods also allows the reader to evaluate what they are doing. For, of course, just as the original annalists were telling a story with a view to its effect, historians work with their own set of assumptions and presuppositions. It’s just rare for these to be presented to the reader, explicitly and implicitly.

As such, Oathbreakers is both an excellent history of the division and conflict that, eventually, produced France and Germany but also a chance for readers to understand how historians come to these conclusions and agree, or disagree, with their conclusions.

Book review: Crafting Stories from the Past

2 May 2025
Edoardo
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Crafting Stories from the Past

I’ve been writing books for fifteen years now, with seventeen published, so I was a little dubious that this new how-to book about writing historical fiction would have much to tell me.

Turns out, I was wrong! It has loads for me to learn, in particular about the research side of historical fiction and different ways of organising and remembering all that material so that you can apply it where needed in the writing. I had never even thought of keeping a spreadsheet of historical data. The chapter on what horses can and can’t do, what they need, how far they can travel, and all the other bits of information you need as a writer writing about horses while actually riding around in cars and buses was also invaluable.

The book is written by a collective of writers, with different writers contributing different chapters, so the reader gets the benefit of the distilled experience of many voices. There’s also an excellent appendix with links to further resources for research and writing.

I would genuinely say this is the most useful one-volume guide to historical fiction on the market today.

Book review: Rupert of Hentzau by Anthony Hope

30 March 2025
Edoardo
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Rupert of Hentzau by Anthony Hope

I read Anthony Hope’s most famous novel, The Prisoner of Zenda, more years ago than I care to remember but I only recently found out that he’d written this sequel. Although its titled for the dastardly villain, Rupert of Hentzau, Rupert doesn’t really appear in the book as often as one would like, as he really is a thoroughly good villain, but Hope does ramp up the conflicts of the first book hugely. In the Prisoner, our hero, Rudolf, has to impersonate the king of Ruritania. In the second, he has to become the king, while impersonating the king, because the king has gone and died, after faffing around in a humiliated tiff that everyong preferred Rudolf as king to him. It’s a book of its time, and I mean that in a good way as it manifests the best of that era while showing few of its failings. A worthy sequel to the original.

Book review: The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour

30 March 2025
Edoardo
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The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour

I was a little non-plussed on first picking this book up: I had no idea that Pink Floyd’s guitarist had so intense an interest in Italy that he’d written a book about it. But then, I remembered the famous Pink Floyd concert at Pompeii and it all made sense. After all, having made ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, Dave Gilmour would have had more than enough money to buy a house, or houses, in Italy. But I did expect some sort of mention of Pink Floyd somewhere in the text.

Then I realised that it was a different David Gilmour, a journalist rather than a musician. I was, at first, a little disappointed as I was looking forward to learning how an extended Italian lunch had been the inspiration for ‘Comfortably Numb’ (at one family lunch in Italy when I was young I was reduced to tears by the refusal of my uncle to believe me when I said that I was full and I really, really, really couldn’t eat any more). However, it turns out this other version of David Gilmour is very knowledgeable, and opinonated, about Italy, so I gave up on hoping for Pink Floyd reminiscences and settled down to read his tour through Italian history.

Italy’s history is famously long but Gilmour only takes half the book to get to the 19th century: this is swift run through a rich story. It turns out, Gilmour is most interested in the Risorgimento, the movement in Italy that forced unity onto an Italy that was previously divided between different states, and what has happened since. My mother is from Piedmont so it’s interesting to see the Piedmontese, and in particular King Vittorio Emanuele, cast as the villains of the piece for straitjacketing a reluctant assortment of independent cities and statelets into a unified state.

Gilmour’s basic point is that Italian loyalty is more local and regional than national (except when the Azzurri are playing) and in this I think he’s right. Other countries spent centuries unifying, slowly assembling the sentiments and assembleys necessary to make a truly unified country; in Italy, they did this all in a couple of decades. As such, it’s no surprise that Italy remains a collection of regions forced into a country. And Gilmour’s book is a very good place to understand how that happened and its consequences.

Book review: The Silent Land by Graham Joyce

9 March 2025
Edoardo
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The Silent Land by Graham Joyce

A good friend of mine, Yossi Brain, died in an avalanche. He was climbing El Presidente, a 5,700-metre mountain in Ecuador’s Apolobamba mountain range with a climbing client, Dana Witzel, and two other climbers when an avalanche caught him and Dana. It wasn’t a big avalanche. Not one of those tides that sweep half the mountain away, just a slide of snow. In fact, it was so negligible that the other two climbers were unaffected. They scrambled over to Yossi and Dana as fast as they could but it was too late: they were both dead.

In the mountains, you can do everything right, take all the recommended precautions, and still end up dead. Just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was what happened to Yossi. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Silent Land is about a husband and wife who are also in the wrong place at the wrong time. Skiers, they wake for the early snow, only to be caught in an avalanche. They survive, however, but when they return to their village they find it entirely empty. There is no one there. Nor are they able to contact anyone outside. And their attempts to escape end with them circled back to where they started from.

They are good couple: Jake and Zoe love each other. In some ways, The Silent Land is a portrayal of a marriage, a marriage that works. Yes, there are the usual compromises and irritations, but it’s a marriage that is the making of both of them. And then it is tested – and found strong.

The Silent Land is a story of love, and loss, and the silence between the worlds. It’s a mystery and an unveiling and an invitation. It’s a story that stands on the borders of dream and verity, where we stand too although we think ourselves on solid ground. It’s a story that lingers long after the reading.

Highly recommended.