I refrained from posting at 5am when I finished this last night, because sitting at the computer is rarely a good sleep aid: the book was excellent, though, I really couldn't put it down, it's The Wine of Angels, the first in Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins series. I really like these books! They verge on junky but are actually very high-quality. Good characters. It's amazing how much material this guy can get out of the "creepy old village on Welsh border" theme, BTW; I've just read 5 (6?) of them all in a row & will happily read the others the minute I get my hands on them. I don't know, Britain has this thing that's hard to get away with in American horror fiction unless you are really steeped in Native American lore and natural landscapes; that long history of Celtic stuff and ancient Roman days and Norman Conquest and religious persecution in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries etc. etc. makes it plausible to write about haunted places and ancient legends with a creepiness that is more likely to become kitschy in the American context.
Before that I read Bram Stoker's Dracula, good but just as trashy as I'd remembered. Prompted by my reading of Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, which I loved. I'm going to blog about these elsewhere, and will link when the time comes.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I just finished my sixth Phil Rickman, read them all in a great rush so they have sort of run together in my mind. Some are definitely weaker than others. Sometimes Merrily is so passive I want to slap her... and don't even get me started on Jane. If I had ever called my mother a fucking cow the screams would still be echoing. I liked Crybbe,(or Curfew) the best of all.
ReplyDelete