Catching up on the genre classics: Necroscope

I've been seeing them since I started getting into horror fiction back in Junior High, while looking through the horror section at bookstore for the newest Stephen King or Clive Barker, they've always been patiently sitting on the shelf, knowing that at some point I would inevitably get around to trying them out.  Well, today is that day (or yesterday, to be more precise).  I've finally started reading Brian Lumley's horror series, Necroscope.

I'll happily admit that a big part of what has kept me away but interested all these years is the bizarre cover art by George Underwood (see left), which shows both a skull with tendrils moving through it and a man lit in blue in the background with his eyes closed.  As a kid, the cover images for the series (almost twenty titles), were both fascinating and horrifying, so much so that I could never quite give the series a chance, even while I was picking my way back and froth through some other pretty horrific stuff as the mood took me.

Last year while on a used-bookstore trip with my BFF Mike I finally picked up the first book as a trade for some titles I was getting rid of, and it's sat on my "to be read" shelf ever since.  Until yesterday when I decided to finally give the book a shot.

So I'm now about 200 pages into the title and it's pretty great - the whole thing is a strange Cold War era battle between agencies in Britain and the USSR between psychics - kind of a proto-Nightwatch if you will, and follows two psychics with some pretty disturbing abilities as they make their way through life.

Oh yeah and those skull tendrils on the cover the unnerved me so much as a kid?  Yup, that's actually a pretty good representation of something one of the psychics in the book can do - Yikes!

I'm not finished book one yet, but so far it's a pretty fast and fun read, so there you go.

Genre Character of the Week: Anton Gorodetsky

As a guy who grew up on Role Playing Games (RPGs) I am a big fan of spending experience points. Basically, for all of you who had better things to do in your teen years, a character in a RPG would get experience points for doing stuff and then you, the player, could spend those points to make your character faster, stronger, or able to speak French. I honestly believe that it was the hard work that went into gaining experience for my character that gave me serious respect for a good character arc in a story. One of my favourite characters which show this phenomenon in genre fiction is Anton Gorodetsky.

Anton is the protagonist in Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch, series of books. Basically he is a lower level wizard (tech support, really) in Moscow's Night Watch, an organization which guards the city from the members of the Day Watch, who claim they do the same thing - the series has a real Russian Cold War feel to it. Anyway, in the first novel Anton is given his first field assignment, to track down a vampire and of course it all goes horribly wrong - otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story.

Throughout the four novels that comprise the series, Anton grows in his abilities, meets a girl, marries her, is promoted, becomes a dad and eventually goes much farther both professionally and personally than he ever imagined. I love when this happens to characters in genre fiction. Rather than simply solve the problem, move on and repeat, Anton learns from each major event in his life, which causes him to grow as a person. I find that far too often, the characters in genre fiction simply don't change from one book to the other, the same awesome guy shows up, kicks ass, and leaves. Character growth is good - it is what keeps me coming back for more.

*One quick note about the movies - I had already read the books when I saw Night Watch, and I really liked the movie. I have been told that if you haven't read the books, the movies don't make much sense. I will say this though, Konstantin Khabenskiy (pictured above), who plays Anton in the films is really, really good. I totally bought him as the character and that's pretty tricky when the character in the novels is such a favourite.

Things I've Noticed: World-Wide Genre books are definitely worth a look

Looking over my bookshelf this morning, I notice that I'm actually starting to get a noticeable collection of genre books that come from around the world. In addition to books from my own country, I have a lot of British and US fiction (remember, I'm from Canada) but today I'd like to focus on the books I've got which were written in other languages and translated into English. These three books are definitely genre fiction, but the fact that they come from entirely different cultures adds to their appeal for me.

Battle Royale, by Koushun Takami (Japan)

Sometimes when I read the premise of a book, I think - that's pretty cool, I'd like to check that out sometime. Every once in a while though, the premise itself demands that I find and read the book. Battle Royale's premise: In a dystopian future where youth gangs were once a serious problem, the government takes one grade 8 class (13 and 14 year olds) from the country out to a secret location once a year, and forces them to kill each other until only one kid remains as an object lesson for the Nation. Think about that a little, imagine all of your friends in junior high (or middle school), and think about how difficult it would be to decide what you would do in that situation. The novel took me less than a day to read because I could not put it down, the tension was simply too high.

Blindness, by Jose Saramago (Portugal)

It begins with one man. Sitting in his car waiting for the light to change, his vision simply fades to a milky white. Blinded, he is taken by a not-so-good Samaritan (the man ends up stealing his car) home, and then to on Optometrists office by his wife. The doctor can find nothing wrong with his eyes, but wants him back in the morning for tests. The next morning, The Doctor, the nurses, the not-so-good Samaritan, the wife and all of the patients from the doctors office are also blind, and this is just the beginnings. The novel shows us, through this plague of blindness, how quickly society can fall apart. When you read Lord of the Flies, there is a part of you that thinks - yeah, but they were kids, in a real emergency things would be better. The speed with which society falls apart in this book chilled my blood.

The Night Watch (Watch Series #1), by Sergei Lukyanenko (Russia)

This book is packed with different supernatural creatures and moves effortlessly from a personal to an epic scale. I would best describe it as Russian Urban Fantasy. In it, we follow a young wizard, Anton, as he is promoted from research to field work in the streets of Moscow. Basically this world has the concept that the supernatural forces of good and evil are locked in a cold war, and both work to maintain a balance until one side can figure out a way to completely take over the world. The theme of the importance of balance is brought up again and again in this book, as well as in the remaining three books in the Watch series. Each novel is broken up into three shorter stories, usually connected by the main character or a main event. They are definitely dark, definitely Russian, and definitely some of the coolest Fantasy books I've read in a while.

All three of these books were adapted to film, Blindness being the best, Battle Royale being freakiest, and Night Watch being hard to understand if you haven't already read the book (kind of like David Lynch's Dune). As far as genre fiction from other countries go, all three of these books are a great place to start and definitely get me thinking that I've got to find more.