So back in 2016 I happened across a copy of Grady Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism in my local book store and after reading it was delighted to find a new voice in the horror genre that felt like a bridge between YA horror and the adult stuff.
A few months later I tried his first book Horrorstor and although I didn't like it as much, I loved the layout and design of the book and there were some really great bits in it that I saw coming more together with My Best Friend's Exorcism.
Finally, last year I read his non-fiction work Paperbacks from Hell and I have to say it ranks quite high in my favourite non-fiction about the horror genre.
So last weekend when a copy of his latest, We Sold Our Souls came into my local library I was thrilled to dig right in. And three days and 330 pages later - I absolutely loved it.
The book follows a has-been heavy metal guitarist named Kris who begins the book in a dead-end job in a small town, and on a quick side-note, I was thrilled the lead of this story was a woman in her mid-forties, rather than a nineteen year old kid - I'm always happy to read coming of age stories, but shake it up a little people!
The story moves from small town nightmare to the truly epic and does it with a great love of the music it glorifies. It bounces from humour to terror to gross-out horror and back again, and honestly, I simply couldn't put it down.
The next-to-last book on my survey of Ancient Greece through historical fiction was Gillian Bradshaw's The Sand Reckoner (2000). The novel tells the story of Archimedes of Syracuse, the inventor most famous these days for the whole water displacement discovery (Eureka!).
The book begins with a young Archimedes returning home from Alexandria to Syracuse which is in a war with Rome. A mathematical genius, Archimedes hopes to find work as an engineer for the city and perhaps help out his family, and very quickly his value to the city becomes apparent to its current tyrant, Hiero, a surprisingly positive example of the type of leader we classify as a tyrant today.
The story parallels it's main narrative with that of Marcus, Archimedes personal slave, and for me, the much more engaging character in the story. Archimedes is interesting, but so in-his-own-head, it can sometimes be frustrating to watch him. Marcus, on the other hand, is much more aware of the world around him, both in terms of the city itself and the larger world.
I had never read Gillian Bradsahw before and honestly just loved this book, it reminded me a little of L. Sprague de Camp's The Arrows of Hercules (1965), but I found it much more engaging.
I'm really looking forward to next month when i complete my list and get to do it with another of Bradshaw's books!
Having read my way through all the Bram Stoker Award winners for Best Novel a few years ago, I look forward to the new winner each year as a way to see what's going on with the Horror genre lately, and the 2018 winner; Christopher Golden's Ararat was a pretty intense story of survival and mountain climbing, mixed with some aspects of both The Exorcist and The Thing.
The novel follows two adventurers Adam and Meryam, who together have made a business of archeological discoveries and adventure tourism over the years on what might be their greatest discovery yet, the discovery of an ancient ship entombed in Mount Ararat in Turkey, the biblical end point of the story of Noah's Ark.
Without going into too many spoilers, the novel nicely mixes aspects of mountain climbing with sheer survivalist horror tropes as the adventurers and their guides end up exploring the ruins with two other teams and end up finding more than they had bargained for.
Although I felt the story was a little too long and had a much bigger cast of characters than was necessary for my tastes, it was a thrilling story that seemed to care about the secondary characters and didn't rely too much on jump scares.
A fun read!
