Looking for the real monster...with guest blogger Daniel Grasso!

The adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed,
Reviewed by Daniel Grasso.
Spoiler Alert!
Score: 9/10
This book is one of the fastest reads I have ever encountered, taking me roughly 5 to 10 minutes to read through fully. It has three alternate endings: happy, horrible, and true. Depending on which ending you chose to stop at determines the story; this book is like three different stories. As the disclaimer points out, this is not a children’s book, at least not the last two endings. Throughout the story there are many illustrations, that when observed closely hint to some more adult content, or at least link the content with a more mature audience; some of the things illustrated, a small child would not understand. One example of this is the battle that the Princess and Mr. Whiffle have against “Black Duke” (a stuffed lion and his merry group of stuffed animals). I should point out that Mr. Whiffle is a teddy bear. Anyway, the battle is won by the Princess, however she is injured and Mr. Whiffle must take revenge, the illustrations speak for themselves. Later, she performs CPR on her almost drowned Mr. Whiffle, and in the background you can see the heads and bodies of the stuffed animals they battled impaled on spikes. A Thing lives under the Princess’ bed, this Thing is afraid of the light, so it cannot come out; even candle light will deter it from coming out. In the first ending of this story, the Thing’s arm comes out and tickles the Princess. Now this is the happy, children’s book ending. The last two are a bit more “adult”. The second ending involves a package arriving containing a kitten which is later names MM or Emmy. This kitten is lost and one night when the Princess’ candle burns out, the Thing raises its hand containing something that drips warm liquid. Now you may think that this is the worst ending; it may be, however the final and true ending is by far the most disturbing. The thing in the Thing’s hand turned out to be a piece of Marzipan. The Thing finally reveals itself; it looks like a weird velvety salamander with two elbows on each arm. With the Thing, is the kitten. The story ends with the Princess reunited with the kitten and not afraid of the Thing anymore. So, she eats them leaving behind only the sticky bones. Yes, this was by far the most disturbing ending; not only does she eat the Thing and the kitten, she also builds a fort out of their bones and has tea with Mr. Whiffle in it. I enjoyed the story, however there where only a few words per page. I guess you could say the theme is, as cliché as it is, don’t ever judge a book by its cover. The Princess is the real monster. If a child read this they would most likely laugh, however an adult would most likely, if not too ignorant, notice the pictures and realize the morbidity of it. Other illustrations include: Black Duke in a hanging cage being torn apart by a crow and later his head being made into a nest. Also, if you “analyze” the text and illustrations you would notice that the Princess was in fact looking for the kitten to eat it in the first place; when it comes to dinner time her plate is empty and later her stomach hurts, a sign of hunger. Other hints that only adults or very mature children may have picked up was the naming process of the cat. The Princess wants to name it Mr. Muttonchop (which I believe is referring to the animal and not the facial hair), Mr. Whiffle wants to name it Moloch because of his claws. Moloch, which was a demon worshiped by some Israelites; they sacrificed children to him. The name the Princess picked could hint to her true intentions of what to do with the kitten, while Mr. Whiffle just must not like the kitten. All in all, this story was very amusing I rambled quite a bit in my review.

This YA by Zafon is a quick read. It is actually the first book he ever published, and it shows. It is not as polished as Shadow of the Wind or Angel's Game, and obviously written to a very different audience. Still, it is puts Harry Potter and 99% of the genre to shame. If you hate clowns and love pseudo-religious horror, this one is for you.

8 / 10

Ok, so I finally finished China Mieville's Kraken. It was a fantastic, smart, and difficult read. It reads at first like an H. P. Lovecraft tribute, but then slowly begins to twist into a shape as convoluted and closed-up as the hallways of a schematised housing project. The novel is full of tributes to Neil Gaiman's American God's, but continues and expands on London's Mievillian prefixes: un, ab, non, and aus. It is about krakens, bottles, angels, evolution, serial killers, and living tattoos. I can't recommend it enough.

Cons: The American edition may be a bit different, but in my UK copy there is quite a bit of London slang (only some of it rhyming), which may prove difficult to the uninitiated.

9 / 10

If you enjoyed Neuropath...

Bakker's new mystery/thriller.

The blurb:

Imagine being able to remember everything you've ever experienced. This is the lonely world inhabited by Disciple Manning. He is able to recall every conversation, meeting and feeling he has ever had, making him an extremely dangerous private investigator. When a young woman disappears, not from her home, but from a religious cult, her parents turn to Manning for help. Manning accepts, but with a chilling sense of foreboding. Heading into the heart of the cult, he encounters the beguiling intelligence of its leader, obsessed with the idea that the world is a fantastical theatre, in which we merely act out our roles, ignorant of our true existence beyond; a belief he is intent on protecting, at any cost. Manning's investigation causes him to clash with the cult's eerie air of detachment and leaves him fighting for survival and elusive answers, before they are swallowed into the town's shadowy pool of secrets. Meanwhile, it's only a matter of time before the missing girl risks being abandoned forever to the depths of our collective forgotten memories...

Bitter Seeds

This is the first novel that I read after finishing Winter 10 grading. Think alternative historical fiction in which Nazi's invent supermen and the Brit's pull their warlock's out of retirement. I was pleasantly surprised; Bitter Seeds is an outstanding debut.

Blurb:

It’s 1939. The Nazis have supermen, the British have demons, and one perfectly normal man gets caught in between

Raybould Marsh is a British secret agent in the early days of the Second World War, haunted by something strange he saw on a mission during the Spanish Civil War: a German woman with wires going into her head who looked at him as if she knew him.

When the Nazis start running missions with people who have unnatural abilities—a woman who can turn invisible, a man who can walk through walls, and the woman Marsh saw in Spain who can use her knowledge of the future to twist the present—Marsh is the man who has to face them. He rallies the secret warlocks of Britain to hold the impending invasion at bay. But magic always exacts a price. Eventually, the sacrifice necessary to defeat the enemy will be as terrible as outright loss would be.

Alan Furst meets Alan Moore in the opening of an epic of supernatural alternate history, the tale of a twentieth century like ours and also profoundly different.


I give this one an 8.5/10

Check out an excerpt!

Here is another fantasy writer who gets rave reviews, especially from my brother Troy. I'm sure he will be happy to know that Pat's second novel Wise Man's Fear will finally be released on March 1st, 2011

A link to Patrick Rothfuss' blog.

Prediction - Book of the Year

This is going to be one of the best books of the year. My UK copy is in the mail and I will be reviewing it shortly.

Here is the dust jacket blurb:

With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of All Things.

In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.

As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and otherwise—are adept in magic and murder.

There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanity—and beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRC—the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit—a branch of London’s finest that fights sorcery with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers, who read the future in the city’s entrails. There is Grisamentum, London’s greatest wizard, whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who, together, constitute a terrifying—yet darkly charismatic—demonic duo.

All of them—and others—are in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.