Delusion's Master by Tanith Lee

Nothing good can last forever, and sequels or series tend to degrade exponentially as they go on. I was quite let down by this book, after the glories of Night's Master and Death's Master. It's quite good, but it's just not that good. I was happy that the demon prince Azhrarn is still at the centre of the tale, but he was much less interesting in this book. He was delightfully wicked in the first book, but in this one he falls in love randomly with a completely colourless priestess (who might be a magical sun-child, but is also extremely boring) and decides to produce a child, whom he doesn't care about. I kept thinking of this book as an Onion headline, like 'In a Development That Surprises No One, Demon Prince Turns Out to be Terrible Father'. Most of all, I was annoyed that Azhrarn wasn't being evil enough, while Chuz (the lord of insanity) is too straightfowardly evil. My disappointment isn't going to stop me going straight for the next book, in the hope that there will be an improvement, but I have the distinct feeling that this is going to be like watching those shows that you love for the first season, and wondering what the hell you're doing still watching them five series later.

Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This book reminded me a lot of Tipping the Velvet (unsurprisingly, since Sarah Waters constantly praises Sylvia Townsend Warner), because they're both wonderful historical novels about lesbians (or at least women having a sexual relationship) and are both ruined by the ending, where communism is suddenly the magical solution to everything. I've actually read this novel before, but didn't really appreciate it fully. It's a beautifully written story about a woman who falls in love with her husband's ex-mistress and gets involved in the French Revolution of 1848. Sylvia Townsend Warner has a really fresh, strong and original style, when I'm reading her it feels like she's looking at the world from some angle that no one else can. All the events and people she describes assume a fascinating and unique aspect. She captures character exquitely through the description of gestures, movements, dress, and manner rather than dialogue, which seems almost random at times. I feel like a story about a woman whose children have died and who starts an affair with a Lithuanian Jewish adventuress would have been quite enough material, and I wish there hadn't been all the stuff about the Revolution and communism. I get really bored by novels about political ideology, and personally have no belief in communism. It's unfortunate (for me) that a lot of great women's writing of the early 20th century is often imbued (and, for me, ruined) by communist ideology and various left-leaning political beliefs (South Riding by Winifred Holtby comes to mind). But I really loved the first two-third or so of this novel, the parts that aren't as political and focus more on the relationship between the two female characters and their stories.

The Favourite (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

Despite my fondness for TV shows, I go to the cinema about once in an eternity, in fact, I think seeing this film was my first visit in 4 years. Cinemas tend to be too loud and flashy and huge for me, and I'm usually extremely irritated by the formulaic films I see advertised. I know this film had really great reviews, so I decided it was worth a trip, and I wasn't disappointed. I think it's definitely the best movie to come out in the past few years (I haven't actually been able to sit through a newly-released movie in about five years, due to either uncontrollable nausea or boredom). It's a very clever and visually arresting film, it's not something I would watch over dinner or at night for easy entertainment, because it's intellectually challenging and compelling. I loved almost everything about it; the camerawork, the editing, the writing, the acting (Olivia Colman completely deserves all the praise she's receiving), the relationships between the characters. I really loved the disjointed and discontinuous nature of the story, told in almost-disconnected, starkly formatted chunks. I loved the soundtrack, with the nearly-constant baroque music helping produce a dizzying, bizarre atmosphere. The film definitely pays tribute to 80s-90s sophisticated almost-art house period dramas, such as Peter Greenaway's work and Sally Porter's Orlando. The choice of subject (the much-neglected last Stuart Anne) is unusual and works very well in this extremely original film, since it deals with so many unexplored areas of the past. I've seen reviews that complain about the lack of historical accuracy, which I think is a completely ridiculous objection. The film is a sort of fantasy or improvosation on a historical theme, and historical accuracy is far from its objective. There's a dance scene with blatantly 80s or 90s dance moves, no one's actually suggesting that people danced like that in Queen Anne's court. It has a really bleak and odd humour, which made me both laugh and feel extremely uncomfortable, such as the scene in which Abigail's admirer sneaks into her room and she asks if he's come to rape her or seduce her, to which he responds 'I'm a gentleman' and she says 'oh, so it's rape.' One of the central themes of the film, which was extremely well-presented and explored, is the complex interaction between politics, desire and emotion. Sexual desire and power (political and social) are constantly being played off against one another, forming an inextricably tangled web. I have to say that all the positive reviews of this film are richly deserved, and I'm extremely impressed. Also, Emma Stone is officially the first American actress to actually manage an English accent.

Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler

I found this book on a list of urban fantasy novels, but it's fantasy element is much more minimal than I expected, which annoyed me because I spent the entire book thinking 'okay, is this where the magic happens?' but it never was. I guess it works as a good detective story, but I sort of ruined it for myself by constantly waiting for the fantasy bit to happen. Some parts of it are really violent, which put me off, and I had a hard time getting into it and visualising what was going on. However, it's a pretty clever book, which explores theatre, psychological damage, and the layers of history in London. The solution to the mystery was a bit of a letdown, though it was really grotesque and disturbing. One of the central themes of the book is how London during the Blitz maps onto and compares with present-day London and urban crime. I really liked the connections between the two, and I also enjoyed the relationship (quickly becoming a friendship) of the two central characters, detectives Arthur Bryant and John May. The highly eccentric and socially blundering Bryant was especially endearing, and many parts of it were quite funny. The ending tied the whole story up neatly, and was pretty satisfying. However, much of the plot was unnecessarily meandering, and included a bizarrely improbable red herring that took up way too much space and mental energy. I have no intention of reading any more books in the series, but this one was fairly enjoyable.

The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories by Marjorie Bowen

These are some really delightfully creepy ghost stories, set mostly in the various eras from the 17th to the 19th century. I wouldn't say they're very exceptional, but they're well-written and exciting. They reminded me a lot of Vernon Lee, especially because some of them remain really vague at the end. They also have some of Lee's carefully crafted style. Some of them are not really ghost stories at all, but have explicable solutions, which are still really creepy and horrifying. I don't think Bowen ranks first in early 20th century horror, but she's quite entertaining.

The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett by Compton Mackenzie

There's nothing really wrong with this novel, except that it would not stop. It's so long, and there's just too much in there. The plot just rushes on, and there's no sustained mood. I wound up just giving up in despair when I was really close to the end. I've noticed before that Compton Mackenzie does an excellent job of writing female characters (which almost no male writer does), because he actually depicts women as human beings rather than mindless sex objects. Parts of the novel reminded me a lot of Tipping the Velvet because Sylvia is pretty clearly having affairs with women, and moves through different classes exceptionally easily, as the narrator of Tipping the Velvet does, and like, Sylvia is occasionally a performer (a singer in a cabaret). What was interesting to me was how easily Sylvia made friends and moved from one circle to another, forming connections with and affection for a very wide range of characters, some of whom are fairly bizarre, such as an over-zealous and eccentric clergyman and the ex-ballet dancer former mistress of an army captain. Sylvia is also exceptionally mobile for a woman of the time (late Victorian-Edwardian era). Besides travelling all over Europe, she makes it to Africa, South America, the USA, Russia and Eastern Europe (and this is all before I gave up). I always had a vague idea that women at the time couldn't go anywhere further than 10 metres away from their home unaccompanied by a male, but this novel shows how women could be adventurous and independent, travelling very far afield with great ease. But unfortunately, Sylvia contacts typhoid fever in Russia and upon recovery, develops a disgusting religious fervour, and spends forever in metaphysical contemplation, which is incredibly annoying. The book kept me interested when Sylvia's lively personality and wonderful sense of humour were predominant, but after her Easter European religious mania, she suddenly becomes really boring and starts endlessly moralising. It was at that point that I had to chuck it, before Sylvia could find true love in the arms of the rather confusingly personality-less Michael Fane (though I believe Mackenzie wrote other books about him, so I guess he has more substance there). The book is also really frank about sex, and is definitely relevant to studies on sexuality and attitudes towards it at the time.

Death's Master by Tanith Lee

So I loved Night's Master so much that I did what I usually never do and immediately dived into the next book of the series because I was devastated that it was over. This novel won a bunch of awards, but I can't say that it's better than the first novel, it's a natural continuation in terms of style and inventiveness, and I actually think I might have liked the first one better. The main difference between them is that while Night's Master was a series of interconnecting stories, this one more or less follows a single narrative, though it branches off in a million directions and can be very fragmented (in a good way). Since I have something of a preference for the picaresque, I probably enjoyed the separate stories of the first book more, but Tanith Lee does a wonderful job of weaving a complex narrative. I liked the characters in the first book more than the ones in this one, especially because Azhrarn, the demon who is the connecting link of the first book, is so much cooler than Uhlume, the lord of Death, after whom the book is named (maybe). Azhrarn appears in this one too, but I liked it when he did more. The two sort-of-main characters, the magical hemaphrodite Simmu and his/her friend/lover Zhirem, weren't really that interesting. By far the best character in this book was Narasen, a lesbian queen who makes a bargain with death, knows how to hold a grudge and destroy everyone, and winds up by kicking Death out of his own kingdom and living there with her witch lover (who killed her when they were alive). Unfortunately, Narasen appears and disappears throughout the novel, and I would have liked it better if she had been the focus of the whole novel. This book is considerably longer than the first, and I thought some of the parts dragged slightly, like the underwater kingdom. There's just too much of everything sometimes, it's like Tanith Lee was just trying to stuff all of the produce of her clearly overabundant imagination in there. But overall, the book was absolutely amazing. Something that struck me as particularly unusual was the way the characters transform. Normally, character development is combined with some sort of consistency, but Tanith Lee goes absolutely, bizarrely wild on transformations. Characters become the polar opposite of what they were before, they forget their pasts (sometimes by magic, sometimes not), renounce and destroy former lovers. One of the main characters gets physically almost completely obliterated and remade as a demon, and his memory of the past and who he was is completely erased. I think this is a really bold and scary view, in which there is no inner essence, everything is subject to change, and selfhood is radically unstable. I don't think I've ever read a book that goes so far in this direction. I'm torn between grabbing the third book immediately and saving it for later so that I don't exhaust all the delights of this life at once.

The Flight from the Enchanter by Iris Murdoch

After the large amount of average and substandard fiction that I've encountered, I really wanted to read something really good again, and this book did not disappoint. I had read it before, about five years ago, so I didn't remember it very well. It's not my favourite Murdoch novel, but it's a really outstanding early one. As usual, I was completely enchanted by her mixture of realism and the fantastic or bizarre. She creates such a magical atmosphere, writing in such a seemingly grounded and even matter-of-fact way, but everything she describes seems like a fantastic world. Some parts of this novel were even grotesque and I found them somewhat disturbing to read. As often in Murdoch novels, the whole story is presided over by the mysterious figure of Mischa Fox, the enchanter, who exerts an inexplicable fascination over everyone around him. It's left ambiguously unclear whether he drives the plot and engineers all the relationships in the novel, or whether he himself is caught up in them. I know that probably, it's a sort of philosophical example for Murdoch, the result of which I can't understand due to being incredible dense about philosophy, but I don't really care, I find the mystery of the events and characters highly satisfying. I love the way Murdoch balances all the interweaving plots, and creates the elaborate internal worlds of her characters.

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

I decided to read this book because I read a review comparing it to The Name of the Rose, and I honestly have no idea why I even finished it. Iain Pears clearly knows his history, but I have grave doubts about his ability to write a balanced novel. There are just so many twists to the plot, that I couldn't keep track of them at all. It's a sort of Restoration-era murder mystery, told by four unreliable narrators, but they're unreliable to such a degree that disentangling their stories is almost impossible. The first part is the seemingly innocuous record of an Italian merchant's son travelling in England, and is so boring that I immediately forgot all the events in it that proved significant later. The other accounts involve endless conspiracy theories and political power grabs. One person thinks an assassination on the king or one of his ministers is being contemplated, the other believes he is uncovering evidence that was fabricated against his father, another thinks Charles II secretly converted to Catholicism, and if any of these are actually 'true' is impossible to say by the end. Maybe that's the point, but trying to understand what was going on and which of the endless array of characters was which gave me a headache. I didn't really like the way any of the characters were written either, they all turned into a disgusting, indistinguishable mess in my brain, except the mysterious Sarah Blundy, who may be a Quaker, a prophetess, or perhaps Christ. I did say this was confusing. I find reaching about political machinations extremely tiring, and this novel is full of them; half-implications in coversations, reading too much into what everyone says, Biblical allusions that act as a kind of code between various characters, actual code in secret letters. While someone like Dumas in The Three Musketeers can make this kind of thing incredibly exciting, this book just felt like the paranoid rambling of this lacklustre collection of characters. By the end, I really didn't care what the truth was, I just wanted the book to be over. I know that it's a clever book, with great historical insight and whatever, but honestly, I wish I had never picked it up. But I guess trying to use various scientific methods of the early modern era to attempt to solve a crime is pretty cool.

Night's Master by Tanith Lee

So imagine if Oscar Wilde was female and decided to rewrite The Arabian Nights in a fantasy universe, and you'd get this book. I cannot believe how good it was, and I cannot believe that Angela Carter is still being forced down people's throats when Tanith Lee exists. I'd say that Tanith Lee writes the way Angela Carter thinks she writes, and the fact that everyone's heard of Carter but very few people have heard of Lee just testifies to the utter, absurd unfairness of the universe. This book comprises several tangentially interconnecting stories concerning a demon prince, who is delightfully both evil and able to love, and spends considerable time seducing human men and women alike. The writing is absolutely entrancing and almost obscenely gorgeous, I literally could not put this book down. Lee strikes a wonderful balance between originality and tradition; her stories feel somehow right and fall into a beautiful pattern, yet at the same time are highly inventive and unusual. My two complaints about the book are that some of the sexual stuff is simultaneously disturbing and too flowery (and can get a bit cringe-worthy), and also that there are too many weird names to keep track of. But other than that, it's an incredible fantasy, with the flat world of the book's universe masterfully executed and compellingly presented. I also love the constant blurring of distinctions between 'good' and 'evil' (Oscar Wilde would have been proud), and the wonderful yet somehow beautifully simple and seemingly effortless characterisation.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Even though I generally don't like alternate universe fiction and dislike Jane Eyre, I enjoyed this book a lot. It's a quirky, fast-moving, fun adventure in a well-developed and creatively constructed alternate universe. It's a real treat for anyone who loves 19th century fiction (as well as most other classics, really), since it takes place in a universe where people are obsessed with books and their characters. It was really hilarious in parts, and so much fun to read. I've always thought that the bit in Jane Eyre where Jane just randomly hears Rochester's voice calling to her was stupid, and this novel provides a great explanation for it. It's got quite a bit of lovely postmodern mixing of stories and realities, and general shuffling of narratives, which was really delightful. It's also fairly madcap, as people go diving through time distortions and enter books through weird portals. And one of the villains gets imprisoned forever in a book of Poe's poetry. I may have liked it if the style was a bit denser, it felt too easy to read, but it was great fun, and I'll definitely be back for more of the Thursday Next (main character) novels.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

I usually get a headache from trying to understand time travel stories, I remember watching Doctor Who and having to lie down from thinking too hard about the Doctor and River Song's movement through time. So of course, I wound up trying to think too hard about how time works in this book, but I always feel there's a certain poetry to tangled time narratives, so I enjoyed it at the same time. I don't think this book was particularly well-written or innovative, but it just kept me reading because it was a very entertaining and easy read. I'd say it was more promising than well-executed; some parts are well-written and there are interesting ideas, but it's all a bit of a mess. I felt like no part was fully flushed out, because the author was rushing to get too much in there. I thought the time travel or parallel universe element in this book was pretty original, but that might be because I don't read many books like this and have little to compare it to. I think what I liked best was the way it considers all aspects of 20th century history from different perspectives and from different countries, while I feel like most books get stuck in one country and one perspective. It seems to bear out what I always feel; that the more you know, the harder it is to believe in anything or be wholeheartedly devoted to any cause. Some parts also had a really nice, dry humour. I would have really liked there to be more emotional depth, and I found the style in which it's written deeply irritating. It uses that really-short-sentences-for-maximum-impact style, sometimes with just one word in a paragraph to really get the reader's attention. I find that very obnoxious, and when the prose got more bulky (longer sentences, more complex paragraphs) I thought the writing was much stronger.

The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst

I actually picked this book up a couple of years ago and couldn't get past the first few pages, but I decided to give it another go, since I loved The Stranger's Child so much. I've never read a book that's so simultaneously filthy and terribly clever. It was a really hard read for me because I found it very hard to connect with it emotionally. I felt totally desensitized by the extremely graphic descriptions of sex, and couldn't really engage emotionally because I had sort of distanced myself. But this is a problem with me as a reader, not with the book, which is really very good. I was also bewildered by the main character's seemingly utterly insatiable sexual appetite. And I didn't realise until about three fourths of the way through the book that it takes place in 1983, so every time people were having sex, my mind was screaming 'why are you not using protection?!?!' since I didn't realise that it took place before the AIDS epidemic. I was also quite uncomfortable with descriptions of random hookups and spontaneous sex between strangers, because I can't understand why people do that. So even though I found the main character often sympathetic, I spent a lot of the book thinking 'what are you doing and why??' There were some parts that had me absolutely crying with laughter and cringing at the same time, for example, when describing the showers in a gay sports club, the narrators talks about how 'in a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine'. I mean, what am image!! But most of the book was quite sad and extremely thought-provoking. It would probably take a 5000+ word essay just to start discussing all the deep, important, etc themes of this book, so I won't do it here, but it deals a lot with the shifting experiences of homosexuality in England throughout the 20th century, the patterns of persecution, secrecy and exploitation repeating through the years.

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

I enjoyed The Moon and Sixpence so much that I was really excited to read this book, since apparently it's considered Maugham's 'masterpiece'. However, I must say that I liked The Moon and Sixpence much more. This book is way too long, and rather obviously autobiographical, in that there doesn't seem to be any sustained theme, the story lacks any tension or real interest. I mostly enjoyed the style, but it's somewhat lugubrious, it feels like a real Edwardian monster of a novel, with nothing very innovative (except some rather frank talk about sex, which today is utterly unremarkable). Some parts are gorgeous and dreamy and lovely, but a lot of it is just plain. I kept reading it because I hugely identify with the main character, Philip Carey. I wouldn't say I like him (because he's a lot like me and I'm very irritated with myself), but it made me feel better to read about someone who is so exactly like me (extreme shyness and reserve, propensity for falling obsessively in love with worthless people, spends way too much time pointlessly philosophising about life and drawing depressing conclusions). Funnily enough, I also, like Philip, am rather good at art, but I also feel that I lack any remarkable talent, and don't want to pursue it because I will never be anything other than mediocre. However, I found a lot of views about women in this novel fairly repulsive (the way they're always dismissed as inferior and stupid, good for nothing but having children), and I actually had a lot of sympathy with Mildred, a working-class girl Philip falls hopelessly in love with and also despises. Philip often blames Mildred for not responding to his advances enthusiastically, for not being passionate enough, for using men for her own entertainment and advantage, but I felt like it was her response to a world that uses all women, especially working-class ones, cruelly, so why should she be enthusiastic and obliging? I felt like Mildred was a case of a Thomas Hardy-type female character; specifically written by Maugham as stupid, shallow and selfish to associate these qualities with female independence, self-assertion, and violent responses to the way they are treated. In another Thomas Hardy-like instance of a sort of masculine 'poetic justice', Mildred ends up as a prostitute and (presumably) dying of syphilis, while Philip manages to carry on and assert his masculinity elsewhere, rather than learning some damn humility from his experience with Mildred. However, there are some really well-written and interesting parts, especially Philip's torturous adoration for Mildred, which often spills over into violent impulses (which he doesn't act on) and hatred. It's also a really interesting documentation of the details of late Victorian and Edwardian life of a large variety of classes, ages and places. Philip is, at various times, a schoolboy in a fairly elite school, a sort of 'study abroad' student in Germany, an art student in comparatively bohemian Paris, a medical student in London, and a worker in a shop, and all of these places and situations, the daily life and overall tone of the places, are described in great detail, which I found interesting, but I think people who aren't interested in the period would find it rather tedious.

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

I have recently again been at the long, arduous, and mostly thankless task of finding fantasy books that are actually well-written, and have in the last few weeks discarded a very large number of really bad ones that I didn't even bother recording here because I never managed to get over 50 pages in on account of the terrible writing. But finally I dredged up this absolute gem. I don't know why, when searching for fantasy novels, I come up with a million and one horrible series about kingdoms called Gazithor peopled by creepy elves, while amazing books like this are just never mentioned. This is a hilarious and lively story about a training police officer who gets recruited into the supernatural division of the Met. I saw some review of it that said it was like if Harry Potter had joined the police, and that is NOT what it's like AT ALL, it's ever so much better. Especially seeing as the main character is a mixed-race man in his 20s from a north London council estate with a hysterical sense of humour, not to mention super smart (very much unlike Harry Potter, possibly the stupidest protagonist in history). I'm not very interested in plots, but the story was pretty good (basically, if you ever thought Punch and Judy shows were creepy, Ben Aaronovitch agrees with you), however, what really pulled me in and kept my attention was the narrative voice. The main character/narrator is really funny and has a lot of great comments to make about London, the police, and people in general. The dialogue is lively and engaging, fully of wonderful exchanges like this one:
              'I'm just going to have a chat with this troll,' said Nightingale.
              'Sir,' I said, 'I think we're supposed to call them rough sleepers.'
              'Not this one we don't,' said Nightingale. 'He's a troll.'
I honestly couldn't stop laughing. Incidentally, the narrator's childhood home is located literally a few hundred meters from where I currently live. Aaronovitch also uses the narrator, who apparently hadn't paid a lot of attention in school, as a way to keep the readers informed about London's locales and history, but I didn't really like this, because you would have had to pay not only zero attention in school, but literally not ever have seen London to somehow not know what the River Tyburn is or that St Paul's Church is called the Actor's Church. This is just basic London 101. But for the most part, I absolutely loved all of it. I got a bit confused in some of the characters (because they have really long names and I was reading really fast and there are a lot of them) and I wasn't really clear on how the magic world works, but that might have been me not paying enough attention because I was laughing so much and so eager to read more. I was just torn between not wanting to put it down and trying to make it last for as long as possible. Luckily, there are a lot more books in the series, which I will definitely be looking into.

Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture by Paul Hodkinson

I picked this book up while waiting in a queue in the library because I thought it looked really quirky and interesting, and I really enjoyed it. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting, I've recently been listening to a lot of 1980s 'goth classics' (Bauhaus, Sisters of the Mercy, The Mission, etc, etc) and thought that the book would be about that time period, but it's actually about the goth scene of the late 1990s and doesn't focus on the music very much. It's a very specific ethnographic study and is written in a very clear, coherent and convincing way. The second chapter lays out critical approaches to subcultures very well and avoids confusing jargon, which was very helpful for people like me, who don't have a lot of experience in reading sociological works. I found that chapter particularly good because it's both a challenging read and actually understandable (there are so many scholarly works where I read the same sentence ten times and it still makes no sense because of the endless jargon and lugubrious grammar). What makes this book particularly interesting is that the author, unlike most people who theorise subculture, has actually been part of one. I get the impression, when I read books about modern communities, that the people writing see themselves as greatly superior to the participants, who they seem to think can't analyse their own involvement. It feels like there's some annoying old man who thinks he knows everything, going around and judging from observation, and just making up ridiculous theories. This book didn't feel like that at all, because the author shows how his experience of being part of the goth subculture contradicts or undermines a lot of subcultural theories and calls for a revision of them. It also made me feel really happy because a lot of the time I feel like people who participate in subcultures or even are enthusiastic about cultural events are perceived as stupid, so for example, I feel ashamed of having been a regular concert-goer in the past when I'm around other people who are pursuing MA or higher degrees. So I thought it was amazing that the author used to be a goth and is now a professor and used his participation in the subculture as research. And it reminded me of Noel Fielding on the IT Crowd with this 'Goth 2 Boss' thing about how goths can succeed in the workplace.

From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth by Matthew Beresford

I grabbed this book as soon as I saw it in my local library because I thought 'a scholarly book about vampires! where can you go wrong?!' Well, apparently, almost everywhere. For some reason, the author seems to regard the existence of actual vampires as a possibility, arguing that there are many elements of stories concerning vampires that cannot be explained by science. He claims that the similarity in stories and superstitions in rural communities when 'it would be nigh on impossible for communication between the isolated rural villages, is indicative that the phenomenon of vampire belief has undiscovered causes'. Contemporary scholarship is continually finding more connections and networks of communication in the past that people have not previously suspected, and the argument that Eastern European villages were completely isolated from one another in the 18th century (and even earlier) is ridiculous. The book doesn't really have any academic argument besides the idea that there is no coherent image of the vampire on which the modern one is based and that applies to all vampires at all times and in all cultures. The most profound statement seems to be 'the vampire reflects an ever-changing being that bears relevance to the culture it exists in'. Wow, amazing insight there. Though formatted like a serious study, it lacks any academic merit, and has no arguments that would not be completely obvious to anyone. It's also really sloppily written, with not-very-good grammar and overuse of certain words. A lot of room is taken up by summaries of various stories, novels and films, which weren't really analysed in any detail. There were interesting facts about superstitions and various marginally vampire-related beliefs, but that was about it. I don't actually know why I read this book to the end, except that it was absurdly easy to read. Also, not enough room given to the incredible creepyness of Nosferatu: Phantom der nacht, which is one of my favourite films ever. And my beloved kitschy vampire action flick Underworld (starring an unexpectedly sexy Michael Sheen) was mentioned only in passing.

The King of Elfland's Daughter by Edward Plunkett, Lord Dunsany

There are some fantasy books that can fully immerse you in their world, and then there are some that hit you over the head, kidnap you, and never let you leave. And this is one of the latter. It's incredibly beautifully written, fantastically poetic and fanciful. I have a hard time finding fantasy that is actually well-written and interesting, so this was an absolutely delightful read. I especially loved the way it describes how magic works, it's somehow both realistic and supernatural. All the descriptions make sense and feel really true, but at the same time magical and startling. I guess maybe what I'm trying to say is that it has a profound psychological truth to its fantastical happenings. Like many of the best fantasy books, its plot is not at all interesting, and not particularly well-structured, but it's so gorgeous and beguiling that I didn't even remember that books are sometimes expected to have a plot at all until I finished it. It meanders a lot, which is what I really like about many fantasy books. Also, I looked up a bit about Dunsany's life, and he seems completely crazy, in the best way possible, and I kind of want to write his biography.

The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor

This is genuinely one of the most disturbing books I've ever read, I found it deeply unsettling and incredibly well-written. It has a bit of kitchen sink drama about it and I kept feeling that Morrissey surely must have written a song inspired by it at some point. It's about a teenager named Timothy Gedge poisoning the lives of various families in a placid seaside town, revealing secrets that he has somehow managed to uncover. There's constantly a sense that something is deeply wrong with Timothy, who is creepy beyond words, but we never find out what it is. It seems like he has some sort of mental disorder, but no one treats it as such. Some characters think that he's been neglected by his family, or 'dropped on his head', or is just like that. One girl thinks he's possessed. What really drew me in was the way truth and lies become increasingly indistinguishable as the story goes on; at first it seems like Timothy is blackmailing people with the truth about them, which they attempt to deny, but then he invents what is proven to be a lie, but if effects people like the truth. There are so many layers of lying, denying, etc, that the very idea of an objective truth starts to crumble. I also loved the style the whole book was written in and the way the characters were portrayed was very vivid. I'm pretty sure this book has been largely forgotten (I had to ask the local library to dig it out of their storage), which is a shame, because it's a very strong work, which does the same sort of thing that the much-praised Ian McEwan was doing at the beginning of his career, only it's much stronger and subtler.

Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

Even though I'm a huge Peter Wimsey fan, this book was a disappointment. I have two main problems with it; the prolonged period of uncertainty and the lack of Lord Peter actually doing things. Every detective story has a period where the main characters are confused, bewildered, uncertain how to proceed, etc., but in this book, I think over half the book was taken up by sorting through dead ends and following up clues that lead nowhere. I absolutely love the character of Lord Peter, but the majority of investigating and general exciting stuff was done by Miss Climpson and Miss Murchison, two approaching-middle-age women whom Lord Peter employs at typists and secretaries doubling as spies. Most of the action and unravelling of the mystery happened at a fake seance and during a session of pushing secret panels and picking locks in an office, both of which I didn't find particularly interesting. What I love about the Peter Wimsey novel is usually the hilarious contrast between him and the practical, hard-working Inspector Parker, as well as the earnest, faithful butler, Bunter. There wasn't enough of it in this novel, and there just wasn't enough of Lord Peter's usual hilarious banter. I had been looking forward to reading this novel because Harriet Vane (detective writer on trial for murder and the love of Lord Peter's life) appears in it, but I didn't really get a good idea of her character. Lord Peter was adorable in the way he saw her on trial for murder and immediately proposed to her, but I wasn't very impressed with her.