Book Review: The Instruments of Darkness by John Connolly

THE INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS by John Connolly

Hodder & Stoughton 2024, 450 pages

Available in hardcover

I am a big fan of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker novels, all of which I have read. This, unbelievably, is the twenty-first!

You would perhaps expect after so many tales for there to be a gradual lessening of originality but believe me The Instruments of Darkness reads as fresh as ever. With its subtle blend of crime and the supernatural, you are never quite sure where common criminality ends and worse takes over. And believe me however bad common criminality is the other is far, far worse. 

This is certainly the case here where Parker is hired to look into the guilt or otherwise of Colleen Clark whose young son has disappeared, either kidnapped or murdered. The local district attorney, out to make a name for himself in an upcoming election to higher office, and his equally ambitious assistant, out to take his place when he steps up, are determined to prove Colleen is guilty of murdering her son and hiding his body. Compounding how bad things look for her, her estranged husband finds a bloodstained blanket in the boot of Colleen’s car and is outspoken in his belief his wife is their son’s killer. Things, indeed, look bad for Colleen, but she is lucky in having recurring character Moxie Castin as her lawyer, who wisely asks Parker to investigate what happened.

And so begins a darkening tale of mysteries, intrigues and malign influences.

Connolly has again given us a great cast of vividly depicted characters, whether they’re people you love, pity, despise or hate. Plus plenty of action. And we also have other recurring characters we are used to expect in any Charlie Parker novel, such as Angel and Louie.  

The last Charlie Parker book, The Furies, was made up of two novellas, which I found less satisfying. Thankfully The Instruments of Darkness is one long, full-blooded novel, into which it is easy to become thoroughly absorbed. The only problem for me, despite being well over four hundred pages in length, is that I found it such a page-turner it didn’t take me long to finish it! Now I have at least another year, perhaps more, before I can dip into another.

 

This review was first published in Phantasmagoria Magazine Summer 2024 

Book Review: Germanicus, Lord of Eagles by Adrian Cole

GERMANICUS, LORD OF EAGLES (WAR ON ROME BOOK 2) by Adrian Cole

DMR Books 2023, 336 pages

Available in hardcover, paperback, and kindle

First of all I must make an admission of being a huge fan of anything to do with Rome, especially in the first century AD, during and after the emperor Augustus. One of my favourite series of novels are of Centurion Macro and his friend Cato by Simon Scarrow.

So you can imagine how much I was looking forward to reading this. And I was not disappointed. With Germanicus, Lord of Eagles Adrian Cole has embarked on an ambitious rewrite of Roman history in the early empire, in which events have been derailed from those we know by the sinister machinations of two competing secret cults steeped in sorcery, the Via Sinister and the Via Tenebrae, whose plots are as mysterious in their objectives as they are blatantly malevolent.

Our first glimpse of their malign intervention comes in the opening pages when the man who would have otherwise become Emperor Claudius in years to come is brutally murdered while still only a young man. As a result of these plots other players in Roman history either manage to live far longer than they did or meet different, sometimes horrifying fates.

Germanicus, Lord of Eagles has an impressively large cast of characters spread across the length and breadth of the Roman Empire, from the rain-drenched forests of Germania to the sun-baked cities of Egypt and Judea. As the plot has already deviated from historical fact there is, of course, the added tension of now not knowing what will befall anyone. Being rather pro-Roman I must admit to feeling concerned about the plot to assassinate Germanicus, next in line to be emperor after the aging Tiberius, so as to enable Caligula to succeed him instead. I won’t give anything away, as it’s all in the lap of the gods, so to speak. Or at least in the lap of Adrian Cole, who knows how to create wonderfully vivid characters and intriguing plots and has obviously made a thorough study of this period.

I won’t give away any plot details as this would spoil reading this book, except to say that it is eventful, vivid and thoroughly credible once you accept the involvement of the supernatural behind the scenes. There are many really likeable characters – and no shortage of the opposite, including the ever scheming, massively ambitious Sejanus, prefect of the praetorium guard, who I still remember from the BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, in which he was brilliantly portrayed by a young Patrick Stewart.

Germanicus, Lord of Eagles is a far cry from Adrian Coles’ Elak stories, with much less use of the supernatural, but when it occurs it certainly makes an impact. With so many individuals’ storylines still ongoing, and with the plotting of both Via Sinister and Via Tenebrae deepening I am looking forward to reading the next in this brilliantly conceived series. 

 

This review was first published in Phantasmagoria Magazine Summer 2024 

Book review: Ramsey Campbell, Certainly edited by S. T. Joshi

RAMSEY CAMPBELL, CERTAINLY

ESSAYS AND REVIEWS, 2002–2017

Edited by S. T. Joshi

Published by Drugstore Indian Press, an imprint of PS Publishing Ltd 2021

Over the years Ramsey Campbell has written knowledgeably, often humorously, but always with sincerity on a range of subjects from other authors, artists, films, books and, quite honestly, about anything and everything to do with weird literature and beyond.

This book includes those written over a fifteen-year period from 2002 till 2017. I was pleased to see it included the article I commissioned for The Fantastical Art of Jim Pitts which I published in 2017 under my Parallel Universe Publications imprint.

Included in this collection of articles and essays are reminiscences of many important genre people. One is about the American literary agent Kirby McCauley who was partly responsible for creating and organising the first World Fantasy Convention and its awards. Though I never met him, he did provide me with my first American sale (to issue one of Whispers magazine). This had a double benefit for me as, when Whispers won a World Fantasy Award that year my story from issue four was included in the hardcover book produced to commemorate the event, edited by Gahan Wilson, who designed the famous award caricaturing Lovecraft’s head. Other reminiscences include such legendary figures as Fritz Leiber, Nigel Kneale, Manly Wade Wellman and Richard Matheson, as well as contemporary writers too, such as David Case, Gary Fry, Mark Samuels, Thana Niveau, Joe Hill and Joe R. Lansdale amongst quite a few others.

Campbell will always be associated with H. P. Lovecraft and there are five articles about the master himself: ‘Lovecraft Analysed’, ‘Lovecraft in Retrospect, in Retrospect’, ‘Influences’, ‘He Was Providence’, ‘Glimpses in the Dark’, and ‘Lovecraft’s Monster’, all of them brimming with insights. 

As anyone who follows Campbell on Facebook will know, over the years he often catches the attention of any number of cranks, trolls, and other miscreants that prowl the internet, though woe on those who mislead themselves into thinking they can get the better. Nor is he adverse to taking on those he believes have taken a step too far in attacking writers whose work he admires. Here we have two articles, ‘Plagued by Plagiarism parts 1 and 2’, in which he takes to task his old adversary Chris Barker over accusations against M. R. James in a booklet titled ‘Plagiarism and Pederasty: Skeletons in the Jamesian Closet’. Campbell is succinctly impressive in the way in which he playfully yet factually debunks Barker’s ill-informed contentions, which give the impression he fired them off in a scattergun attempt to at least hit the target once. Thanks to Ramsey’s critique he fails completely. Both articles are not only critically observant but a joy to read.

There is, in fact, a great deal to enjoy in this book, which covers an entertainingly wide number of subjects. The good news, of course, is there’s a six year gap since the last article published in this book and now, so there must already be quite a few new ones for another book.

 

 

 

My review of Stephen King's Billy Summers

Today Trevor Kennedy read out my review of Stephen King's latest novel Billy Summers on his weekly radio show on Big Hits Radio UK. It will also be published in the next issue of Phantasmagoria.

For those who missed the radio show and would like to read my review now, here it is: 

BILLY SUMMERS by Stephen King

Hodder & Stoughton, 2021, 432 pages

Despite some references to the Overlook Hotel towards the end, Stephen King's Billy Summers is not horror but a complex and violent crime story. And, I would add, for all his reputation as a horror writer, it is one of the most satisfyingly well-rounded Stephen King novels I have read for a long while, with a poignantly bitter-sweet ending that works exceedingly well (one of his better endings by far). Additionally, as you would expect from King, it has some memorable characters. Though few have long sections of the book devoted to them, they nevertheless make an impact, which is a sign of just how good a writer King is.

A veteran of America’s long involvement in Afghanistan, Billy Summers has been trained by the army to become one of their best snipers, responsible for multiple hits against enemy insurgents. When he leaves the army, though, and returns to the States he finds himself rootless and struggles to find a decent job until his army training brings him to the attention of organised crime. After that it isn’t long before he is in high demand for long distance assassinations, though he scrupulously sticks to one stipulation: that whoever he shoots must be a “bad man”. It’s a bid to salve his troubled conscience for the murders he commits – and for years it works until his biggest job yet, the one that will pay him enough to retire. His last job.

Unfortunately for Billy, it is not as straightforward as he originally thought. Though his target is a “bad man”, (a first-degree murderer due to go on trial for his life, who has some undisclosed but highly sensitive information that might lessen his sentence) it isn’t long before Billy begins to suspect there is more to it than he has been told, especially when he suspects he is being set up to be murdered himself afterwards.

The details King puts into Billy’s past life are fascinating and are cleverly fed to us through Billy’s cover story for the assassination.  As he needs to rent an office overlooking the courthouse where the hit will take place, his reason for being there week after week, waiting for his target’s trial to take place, is that he is writing a novel. I know, yet another character who is a writer, a trope I am sure we are already all too familiar with from King, yet it works well here. Though Billy has never tried writing before he finds he has a talent for it. The novel is a thinly disguised account of his life, going back to when his baby sister was brutally beaten and kicked to death in front of his eyes. Only a boy at the time, he managed to shoot the man who murdered her at the end of a scene as horrific as anything King has ever written.

All of this is just for starters. It isn’t long before the complications of a double-cross and other factors come into play, leading Billy into a journey that grows darker and more bewildering, with newfound friends, unexpected responsibilities, and fresh dangers - and yet more violence.

I must confess to having become engaged with Billy, who is a likeable anti-hero, full of flaws, doubts and troubled dreams, and for the girl Alice, who he helps after she has been brutally assaulted by three young men. Young and vulnerable yet surprisingly resilient, Alice plays a pivotal role in the events that follow, though about these the less I reveal the better. I wouldn’t want to spoil what is a great story, with plenty of twists and turns and unexpected revelations and an ending I am sure will leave no one unaffected.  

Reviewed by David A. Riley

 

Death on the Arkham Express by Byron Craft - review

This is my review of Death on the Arkham Express which will appear in the next issue of Phantasmagoria, issue 14.

DEATH ON THE ARKHAM EXPRESS

Book 5 of The Arkham Detective Series

Byron Craft

A Lovecraftian story written relentlessly in the style of a pulp fiction hard-boiled detective novel straight from the pulps, Death on the Arkham Express is the Cthulhu Mythos as I have never seen it before.

On his way home from New York aboard the Arkham Express, the “Arkham Detective”, as tough a detective as you could find within the pages of any pulp novel, is soon thrown into a violently bloody mystery, which takes passengers and crew one by one till the horrific climax.

Not letting the grass grow under his feet, by page three we have our first murder on the passenger train: “Blood contains iron, and the metallic smell was extremely strong when I entered. The red painted cookery reeked of the odor. A crimson body fluid spray marred the narrow galley layout of gloss white walls. Staring at me was my waiter. His head lay grotesquely upon a stainless-steel counter. The features were twisted and torn and mangled. His dead black eyes conveyed a combination of terror and revulsion…” And this is just a foretaste of the horrors to come.

Bryron Craft manages to sustain the hard-boiled detective style with admirable glee in a tale that I doubt Lovecraft would have ever imagined, whilst sticking pretty damn close to the mythology. Fast-paced, racy, with nary a quarter given to PC niceties, this is an enjoyable jaunt that gives the Cthulhu Mythos a good old Spillane type kicking with the tongue firmly, but somehow respectfully tucked in the cheek, and at only 75 pages far from outlives its spirited welcome.

The great artwork on the cover is by Marko Serafimovic. 

Besides my book review, issue 14 will also include one of my stories (Terror on the Moors) plus some artwork.