The Running Man, by Richard Bachman

(so, Stephen King then, really) - 4 stars

read in Oct 2011

Stephen King usually speaks to a small, scared and helpless part of me that hopes everything is going to be alright. It seems that as Bachman he whispers to a smaller cynical, angry, and violent part that knows nothing will.

I assumed that I was more than familiar with this story thanks to having seen the Ahhnuld movie a thousand times or more. Turned out that, apart from the main character's name and the Games concept, I knew an entirely different beast altogether. 

Ben Richards isn't the muscle-bound 'Butcher of Bakersfield', framed for a crime he didn't commit. He's a normal, desperate man, unemployed and watching his 18 month old daughter die of pneumonia while his wife attempts to earn money for medicine on her back, whose only way left of providing for his family lies in becoming a contestant for one of the Network's many shows for people desperate enough. These range from Treadmills to Bucks, where the ill can earn cash by running until they conk out...

...all the way up the The Running Man, where potential troublemakers are weeded out by being hunted down and killed, with the amount of time they stay alive discerning how much cash their dependents can look forward to. Thanks to his intelligence and contempt for the unfair society around him, Richards is picked for the latter and here the Hunters out to get Richards aren't the gaudy Buzzsaws and Dynamos of the film but could instead be any one of the people around him, while the ones who aren't are still potentially well-rewarded informers.

What's really scary is how plausible the world created is, being not so far from our own, depending on your viewpoint. As the rich are rewarded with tax breaks, the bankers who nearly ruined us get yet more bonuses and our utility companies tell us they have to put up prices to cover their costs while at the same time posting record profits, our MP's talk about the poor of this country who survive on benefits as though they're morally bankrupt, grasping and lazy scum who ought not even have that small financial safety net and huge chunks of the country believe the party line regardless of the evidence in front of them. Entertainment-wise we already get such gems of television as To Catch A Predator, where paedophiles are lured into televised confrontations, Cheaters where we get to see the direct emotional fallout of your partner betraying you, and I have personally tuned in weekly and watch Ronnie physically and emotionally abuse everyone around him on Jersey Shore, half-horrified and half hoping someone will appear and pummel him into the pavement (so I'm really in no position to judge, but that never usually stops me). 

The world within The Running Man has, just like Ronnie, simply had a steroid injection and become meaner and King (Bachman) plucks my strings as masterfully as usual, until I was almost egging Richards on to his violent conclusion.

Great stuff - and I should probably leave it there before someone calls MTV and puts me on some sort of watch-list.

Tis the season for shit music...

Tis the season…for not being able to escape Christmas music. Blasting out of every shop, radio, and now even in my office, there is no escape. I’m feeling a little bah-humbug today (what do you want? It’s Monday) so why not take a look at my most hated Christmas songs? I’d suggest a shot every time you heard one of these in the run up to the big day, but you’d probably end up in intensive care:

Santa Baby

Let’s get something straight. Christmas is not sexy. Christmas is about eating and drinking so much that you put on at least a stone, wearing awful but cosy jumpers and flinging tiny houses at one another when the latest round of Monopoly goes sour. So whichever Breathy Bint decides to get sex-kittened up and purr Santa Baby at us goes immediately on my shitlist.

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Mary’s Boy Child

I mostly hate this song due to a painful childhood memory – being forced to sing it, with my primary school classmates, at a bunch of confused looking elderly folk from the Home close to our school. Now whenever I hear it I just think of all the lonely oldies who have no family to visit them. Depressing much?

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Walking in the Air

Everyone’s supposed to love this, probably as it comes from The Snowman. I don’t (and I don’t love The Snowman that much either).  Instead, I’d like to find the choirboy that squawked this and punch him in the Adam’s Apple. Try singing now, ya spod!

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A Spaceman Came Travelling

I hate Chris De Burgh’s Lady In Red. I hate his eyebrows. And I hate that it apparently went ‘lalalala’ in this bloody awful Christmas song.

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Do You Hear What I Hear

Is it a cloying and sickly song that pretends Kings hearing news from shepherd boys about newborn babies want to spread peace and goodwill instead of murdering all the first-born babies in the land? Then yes, you hear what I hear.

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Last Xmas

There’s always one, isn’t there? You’re all full of the Christmas spirit (or lager) but every time you head to the bar for a re-fill you get clobbered by a depressed and bitter bloke who spends the evening whining about the dumping he’s just received. Wham’s inexplicably popular Last Xmas encapsulates said whininess and, just like our depressed bar-hugger, is just as  impossible to avoid.

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Silent Night

I’m not a fan of hymns. Especially po-faced ones that carollers murder every time they try to reach the high notes.

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When A Child Is Born

“All across the land dawns a brand new morn’, this comes to pass when a child is born.”

This person has clearly never given birth. Judging from the stories of my mom-friends, when a child is born you’re too busy trying not to shit yourself and screaming for more gas and air to notice any dawns.

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Mistletoe & Wine

The nan’s favourite, and my most-hated, nothing is guaranteed to get me in a temper quicker than a quick burst of Cliff.

Here’s some rollerskates Cliff, now piss off , and take your bloody mistletoe with you.

For iPhone/iPad click here.

Indulge your inner Scrooge, and let me know what else you think should have made the list...

Monsters Live In Ordinary People, by Heidi Strengell

3.5 stars

For as long as I can remember I've been one of Stephen King's Constant Readers. A habit started early - my mum was once called to my primary school (pre-11's, for the non-Brits among us) during Reading Week to be asked if she knew I was reading Pet Semetary (she did) - it's a habit that's stuck with me into adulthood.

I was bought this book a couple of years ago (thanks, Is!) and, as is my wont, I've been dangling it in front of myself like a carrot, having wanted to read everything of his that I could before getting stuck in (and therefore avoiding spoilers). Goodreads now tells me that, having read 33 of his books (really? Bloody hell) Stephen King is my most-read author. However, at the pace I've been getting through them it would still be a number of years before I get to read this if I stick to my own rules and so I've decided to stuff them, and dive in now.

A rather academic and scholarly look at the huge body of King's work (particularly, but not limited to The Stand, The Shining, Salem's Lot, It and The Dark Tower series), his influences, style, themes and characters, and particularly focusing on the blend of genres that mark his work, this one's probably not for the layman but the serious fan, with the emphasis on serious.

Interesting and at times insightful, even when I didn't agree with it, the most interesting bits for me were usually when quoting King himself, and the biggest things I've taken away from this are that I probably shouldn't read any criticism by some fellow named Bloom (who provides the most scathing critiques on King and then goes on to call Anne Rice sadistic and tedious - them's fighting words!) and that I now really, really want to read Danse Macabre.

The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester

5 stars

Gully Foyle is my name
Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination

Slightly hungover after attending back to back Christmas parties (I know, I know, it’s still early yet) I was stumbling around the flat looking for something to distract me while I waited for NikNak to return from a weekend away. Six hours later, after becoming so engrossed that I’d barely managed to grunt on NikNak’s return, my tiny little mind had been blown.

Gully Foyle is nobody special. He’s almost spectacularly unspecial, in fact, a slightly thuggish less than average Joe. Mechanic’s Mate 3rd Class, his attributes are listed in his official records:

Education: None
Skills: None
Merits: None
Recommendations: None

He’s also been adrift in space for one hundred and seventy days, running out of air and rations, when salvation arrives in the form of a spaceship, Vorga. But the Vorga abandons Gully to his fate, and:

“So, in five seconds, he was born, he lived and he died. After thirty years of existence and six months of torture, Gully Foyle, the stereotype Common Man, was no more. The key turned in the lock of his soul and the door was opened. What emerged expunged the Common Man forever.”

And we’re off, dragged in Gully's wake as he blazes a searing trail of vengeance, hunting down those who left him to die. Fizzing with ideas and hurtling along at a breakneck pace that had my heart beating wildly, I’m incapable of saying much more about this one (that always happens with the ones I adore), other than that this a truly stunning and vital slice of sci-fi, and one you must read. Now. Go on...

The Iron King, by Julie Kagawa

2 stars

Continuing my splash in the shallow end and still away with the faeries, this time we're in the company of Meghan Chase, a forgettable heroine in a book that is packed with action but that, despite a few notable bright spots, mostly made me feel a bit...

When we first catch up with Meghan she's eagerly awaiting her sixteenth birthday and the getting of her driver's permit. Instead, her little brother gets swapped for a Changeling, sending her on a quest to retrieve him from the Nevernever while confronting a few truths about her parentage on the way. Oh, and falling in love with a fae/fey/whatever prince of the Unseelie Court too.

Despite Meghan's quest, the inclusion of more fey than you could shake a stick it and a couple of nice touches (I loved the bogey's that haunt closets and Grimalkin, a talking cat, was always going to appeal to me) the real focus of the book is on the budding romance between Meghan and her prince, Ash.

Sadly, it's not this Ash:

Instead, Ash the faery prince fails entirely to live up to the awesomeness of his namesake, preferring to be barely discernible amongst the never-ending parade of this genre's love interests who all seem to be the same character, whether they be fey, vampire, werewolf, warlock or whatever. A romance is only ever going to be as strong as the chemistry between our lead and their love interest, and to be honest I didn't find much between Meghan and Ash, and had been far happier when the book was trying for creepy rather than gushy.

That said, the intended audience of teenaged girls (rather than grown women who really ought to know better) may well feel differently.

Halfway there...

It's Wednesday! We're halfway there. I'm almost doing a victory dance.....almost.

Wicked Lovely, by Melissa Marr

2.5 stars

Wicked Lovely is neither wicked, nor lovely. It is, however, exactly the sort of simple and undemanding refuge from real life that I need at the moment.

Although usually invisible to mortals, Aislinn has always seen faeries and so has lived her entire life following a few simple rules. The first rule of Faery Club? You do not talk about Faery Club. Sorry, that's not it at all. The rules are these: Don't stare at the faeries, don't talk to the faeries, and don't attract their attention.

But despite a life-time of practicing the first two rules, the faeries are suddenly paying attention anyway. The Summer King has been bound by the Winter Queen, and will only be freed on finding his Summer Queen. Keenan (the Summer King) thinks Ash is special - and not just because she seems to be suffering from some weird disease that means she's unable to sit or stand without leaning against Seth, the mortal boy with whom she's in love (and who's too good to be true - protective without being overbearing, strong yet sensitive, more in tune with her needs than she is and devoted to serving them, and who lives in a converted train car like most teenagers of no apparent means and no visible family do. At least, I think he's a teenager, although thinking about it now he doesn't go to school with Ash and so could just as easily be in his early twenties, in which case what the hell is he doing hanging around with high school girls? The creep).

Unluckily for Ash, once she's been chosen she can't be unchosen. Instead she's left with a choice. Become one of Keenan's Summer Girls, the vapid nymphomaniac fey that warm the beds of Keenan and his Court, or risk lifting the Winter Queen's staff to see if she's really the Summer Queen as Keenan believes (or, as has happened with all of Keenan's past loves, be condemned to carry the Winter Queen's cold instead). Not much of a choice when you'd rather hang out with your human boyfriend instead, eh? But luckily for Ash, it turns out that she's the kind of heroine who can have her cake and eat it too.

Reading this on any other week could have seen me far more bugged by the book's flaws, but for now I'm too busy licking my own wounds and instead found it pleasantly distracting, without ever becoming so engrossing that I'd be tempted to retreat into the book entirely, or posing any real danger of stressing me out (cough, cough, Harry Dresden) or making me emotional (I'm looking at you, Robin Hobb).

That said, I'm also not particularly bothered about continuing with the series.