Random Thoughts

What a horrible cover design!

I’ve read this before, but it’s been decades. I remember nothing about this except that I think it’s one of the better Barnard books?

But once I started reading it, I realised that it has the best twist of any Barnard books. Barnard always has a twist of some kind, but they’re frequently twists in bits you don’t expect to get twisted, if that makes any sense. That is, instead of a normal mystery twist, it’ll be something totally different — and this book carries that off in the most extreme manner: First we get the solution to the mystery in the normal way (pretty good mystery), and then in the very, very final sentence of the book we get a twist so momentous that you can’t help laugh out loud.

Unfortunately, it’s so memorable that I remembered it several decades afterwards… on the other hand, the mystery itself was OK, so whatevs.

(The book also does display Barnard’s tendency to bloviate about Society And All Its Ills, but it’s not too bad in that dept. I guess you could shave off about 50 pages here, and the book would have been better, but it’s fine.)

A Scandal in Belgravia (1991) by Robert Barnard (buy used, 3.79 on Goodreads)

Wow, that’s a kinda passive-aggressive pull quote for the cover… “Cat lovers”, “prolific” and “cozy”. I think the subtext here is that no sane people would ever read this kind of churned-out rubbish.

“Enjoyable”. Wow. High praise indeed.

Anyway, I wanted to read something that’s easy on the brains, once again, so here we are.

I guess you could say that the setup here is pretty original. A murder has taken place, and there’s an accused at a trial, but the point-of-view character is a cousin who has returned, and is totally stressed out and exhausted for reasons we’re not told until late in the book. She’s not trying to investigate, either, but is instead just whirring around wringing her hands.

So that’s original, but it’s also really annoying. So while this is a short novel, it feels like it could have been half the length, really — there’s a deadly stasis to the book… until we get to the last quarter, and things start happening. The ending is so eyeroll inducing that it almost makes up for the rest of the book.

The Cat Next Door (2002) by Marian Babson (buy used, 3.54 on Goodreads)

When I grow bored of an author, I have a tendency to buy one more book by them. This usually happens when I’m at a sale in a book shop, and I go “oh, well, it’s cheap; perhaps…”

So this is classic — I’d been kinda into Storm Constantine in the late 90s (as was a friend of mine), but I found them books less and less enthralling. But this book was apparently 50% off, so I bought it (in 2010, I think). And then, of course, I never read it.

Now’s the time!

Hm, yes, exactly… This book is set between two previous books that I’ve read, but I read them back in the 90s and I don’t remember much about them. It’s about… Hermaphrodite Vampires From Spaaace? Or something? But this all feels familiar — the extreme amount of fantasy jargon: Not just unfamiliar names like “Wraeththu”, but also words like “nohar” instead of “nobody” (because this species is also called “har”), and so on.

Which is all fun and stuff, but this is combined with a certain slipperiness — we get pages and pages about savage tribes and strange rituals, and then on the next page they’re making tea in the kitchen and having some cookies. That is, it’s hard to get a handle on what this world looks like; it’s like a half-imagined feverish dream.

It’s a bit of a brick of a book — after I’d read a hundred pages, I went “no, I’m not reading four hundred more pages of this”, and then I carried on, and “no, I’m not reading three hundred more pages of this”, until I reached the end. It’s not entirely successful, but I liked it enough to carry on, almost despite myself. But it took me a week to read the book, so I wasn’t very enthusiastic about it…

It’s very much a “well, I have all this backstory I figured out while writing the other books, so I might as well just put all that down on paper”. So structure goes out the window — it starts off following three different plot threads, but then two of them peter out and the last half of the book is just one of those plot threads”.

But it was also nice to read one of these big fantasy books again? Quantity has a quality all of its own.

I’m going to go ahead and guess that this is a well-liked book on Goodreads, but that there will be people who hated it. Let’s have a look!

Yes, that’s a very high score.

But the second-most liked review is a negative one.

Yes, it’s written in a more straightforward way than the original books.

So there you go. While I didn’t hate this book, I definitely won’t be picking up any further books in the series.

The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure (2003) by Storm Constantine (buy new, buy used, 4.23 on Goodreads)