The Jewel in the Crown – Paul Scott (1966)
The Jewel in the Crown (1966) I was forty or fifty pages into this book when it penetrated my little brain that it wasn’t going to be a straightforward novel about the last days of Imperialist Britain in India. Consequently, I laid it aside for a few days and then started it again from a different perspective. I’m glad that I did. Perspective is what Paul Scott’s 1966 novel The Jewel in the Crown is all about. We start off...
Nemo: The Roses of Berlin
Nemo: The Roses of Berlin As with Heart of Ice, the first of writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill’s Janni Dakkar/Nemo outings, the slim (52 pages) volume at hand is enjoyable enough, even though it feels lightweight next to its big brothers in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen universe. Nemo: The Roses of Berlin moves forward thirty-five years to find Captain Janni nearing fifty, still plowing murderously away at...
Lady Stanhope’s Manuscript and Other Stories
Lady Stanhope’s Manuscript and Other Stories Well now, here’s an odd one: an anthology that is not only very good indeed, but also comes damned near to being totally satisfying. And let’s be honest here, I’m not ever going to be to objective about a book that reintroduces me to Sibelius’s ‘Tapiola’ as well as to the music of John Tavener. Yep. For some weird reason Tavener has gone under my radar all these years; and how...
Stephen King’s The Dark Half
Summoning Demons: Revisiting Stephen King’s The Dark Half “Kull meditated a while, then spoke. ‘Can you summon up demons?’ “’Aye. I can summon up a demon more savage than any in ghostland – by smiting you on the face.’” –Robert E. Howard, The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune Fittingly for a novel that deals so obsessively with the subject of twins, doubling and mirror images, Stephen King’s 1989 novel The Dark Half is...
View from the Madhouse: Revisiting Stephen King’s Misery
View from the Madhouse: Revisiting Stephen King’s Misery Loosely sandwiched in between two novels with truly enormous casts – It and The Tommyknockers – King’s 1987 Misery was a stripped-to-the-bone two-hander. Yes, there really are only two people featured over the 350-odd pages. One is writer Paul Sheldon — famous for his money-spinning bodice-rippers starring heroine Misery Chastain. The other is his isolated,...
The Legend of Batman Volume 3 Born to Kill
The Legend of Batman Volume 3 Born to Kill Admittedly, with a title like that one, I should have known better than to expect something uplifting or life-affirming. OK, that I could live without, but how about entertaining? A bit of that, maybe? Not a chance. Born to Kill is simply unremitting ugliness. It is a near-enough unredeemed black and sickening vision of life that makes you want to scrub yourself clean after...
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