Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

It sounded good and I dived into it, but I quickly bogged down in the intricacies of half-explained politics,
murky motivations and the irresistible feeling that far more was going on than appeared on the surface.
I couldn't finish it. I've had this problem with every Cherryh book I've ever tried to read. I simply don't
understand what's going on. I think this must be a fault in me rather than a fault in the writer -- too
many people whose opinions I respect love her books. But not me. Sorry.
Tiring of SF and mindful of the crime wave, I read Pretty Boy Floyd, part of my ongoing Larry
McMurtry marathon. This is a thinly fictionalised account of the life and death of the eponymous
gangster and it is vintage McMurtry, funny, tragic and peopled with a vast set of eccentric characters.
Sometimes, in between fortifying houses, I like to read horror novels. They give me ideas of what to do
to housebreakers, should I ever be lucky enough to get my hands on one. The Tooth Fairy opens up
quite quietly. It could almost be a novel by Richmal Crompton -- it concerns a gang of scruffy kids doing
all the things that scruffy kids do. But one of them wakes one night to find a tooth fairy sitting at the
edge of the bed. Both are somewhat surprised that he can see the fairy. Apparantly it violates some rule
or other, and someone is going to have to pay...
The fairy is not the gentle myth figure that we normally associate with teeth, but a malevolent,
nightmarish presence who opens up the dark side of the child. Things go rapidly downhill and the cosy
world of childhood is left far behind. Murder is committed. And worse.
The book is nerve-wrackingly tense and I read it in a sitting. I simply couldn't stop and didn't go to bed
until 3am. That's how good it is.
One of the weirdest books I have ever read is Only Forward. It is totally indescribable, so I won't even
try -- but I will say that it starts out hyserically funny. But by about half way through the humour is
becoming progressively blacker and it is downhill all the way from there on. The humour dies and
tragedy replaces it, but the pace and the invention never flag. It is irreal and surreal and very, very
peculiar. If Michael Marshall Smith ever writes anything else I'll be at the head of the queue to buy it.
For no other reason except that it was cheap, I bought The Secret Life Of Laszlo, Count Dracula at
a sale. I didn't really know what to expect, except that I knew from the blurb that it wasn't a common or
garden vampire story. It turned out to be a psychological study of a deeply disturbed (some might say
sick) Hungarian aristocrat. The book follows him from his life as an impoverished medical student in Paris
through to his degenerate (and degenerating) life as Count of the ancestral estates in Transylvania. Part
detective novel, part horror story, utterly fascinating from beginning to end, this novel gets completely
inside the mind of a psychopath (and even succeeds in making him seem almost sympathetic). It is
utterly brilliant.
Paul J. McAuley is an up and coming young British writer. Secret Harmonies was his second novel (it
dates from 1989) but already it shows the promise of things to come. It is a subtle, complex novel set
on a planet called Elysium. The planet is seemingly a paradise, beautiful and bountiful, inhabited by a
primitive and enigmatic native race.
Political machinations in the colony cause a lecturer from the colony's university and a man who has
gone native and is living wild in the outback to ally in a revolution. Perhaps the alien aboriginals will finally
wake up and notice that there are strangers on the planet...
The depth of this novel is awesome. It is an adventure story in the traditional mould, but it is also a
sociological parable, a psychological thriller, and an anthropological study all in one.
The Aachen Memorandum is a satirical novel set in 2045. Waterloo Station has been named
Maastricht Terminus, Nelson is gone from his column and the United States of Europe has all but
snuffed out British Nationalism. But Dr Horation Lestoq, sniffing through the archives, discovers
something a little odd about the referendum that joined Britain to the United States of Europe. Then he
discovers a dead body.