I’ve read more than a thousand books since I started this book blog back in 2011. By now, I’ve forgotten what I wrote in most of the reviews and am left only with an residual emotional memory of the books, like cooking smells clinging to my clothes after a meal. So, I’ve decided to do a little time travelling by book blog and re-read some of the reviews I’ve posted.

This month I’m travelling back ten years to June 2015. I reviewed a dozen books that month. I’ve excluded the ones that were good but part of a series and focused on the standalone novels that made an impact on me.

One was a werewolf novella by an author best known for long books with dragons in them. One was a hard-hitting mainstream novel about a troubled teen. One was a long but impossible to put down horror novel.

I’ve shared my impressions of them below. If you’d like to time travel with me, follow the links to the original reviews.

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When a string of grotesque killings begins to strike her small town, private detective Randi Wade becomes suspicious. The grisly murders remind her all too much of her own father’s death over 20 years ago. Now there is a killer in town who not only slays his victims, but also takes their skin. Undaunted, Randi prods the police as the murders continue, each more brutal than the last. When a close friend suddenly becomes a target, he is forced to reveal a startling secret about himself and Randi is quickly pulled into a dark world within her own town where monsters exist and prey on the living.

‘Skin Trade‘, was first published in the ‘Night Visions 5′ anthology in 1989. It won the World Fantasy Award for best novella.

‘Skin Trade’ was a short, brutal, noirish, vision of an American city secretly governed by werewolves. It was a story that reeked of blood and fear. It also contained a number of references that “Game Of Thrones” fans will recognize: strong, dangerous women, Dire Wolves, flayings, heroics from apparently weak/disabled characters and cryptic references to dark forces from another world that come to hunt the hunters.

Even though ‘Night Visions 5‘ contained three stories by Stephen King (including ‘Sneakers‘ and ‘Dedication’) and three stories by Dan Simmons, I wasn’t able to find a copy, so I listened to the 2002 audiobook version which turned out to be three and half hours well spent, even though the cutting between the two narrators was a little rough by current standards.

My original review is HERE

Fifteen-year old Anais Hendricks is smart, funny and fierce, but she is also a child who has been let down, or worse, by just about every adult she has ever met. Sitting in the back of a police car, she finds herself headed for the Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders where the social workers are as suspicious as its residents. But Anais can’t remember the events that have led her there, or why she has blood on her school uniform…

‘The Panopticon’ (2011) was a dark, disturbing book that was powerfully written and brutally honest. A decade after I read it, this book still comes back to me from time to time. Astonishingly, it was a debut novel, although you’d never guess that from the prose or the storytelling.

This was a books that was an easy read that becomes a painful experience.

Here’s an extract from my review:

It’s about what officialdom would call “children in care” and who are shown here as young people, robbed of childhood, not yet given the privileges of adulthood, and “cared for” by being kept in a Panopticon prison where they can be observed and prevented from disturbing the rest of us. The women in the Panopticon are not female Oliver Twists, waiting to be rescued from delinquency by being welcomed into a good middle-class home. They have nothing but the respect they earn from their peers through the notoriety that they gain.

If ‘The Panopticon‘ was a PS3 game, it would have Parental Advisory written all over it, because these are not the kind of young women that parents want their kids to spend time with. They swear, fuck, wank, drink, take drugs and smash the people and things around them.

The main character has named herself Anais after the erotica writer Anais Nin because the whore, who was the only woman who ever took her in an looked after her, liked her books. She describes herself as “a girl with a shark’s heart”. She is full of rage that she cannot always contain and which escapes through acts of destruction but she has not lost her compassion for her peers or given up hope for herself.

Very bad things happen to Anais in this book. Brutal, awful things that leave scars on the body and the mind. Things that will break your heart but which Anais does her best not to allow to break her.

The Panopticon’ is written in Scottish English, filled with terms like didnae and wisnae,  that I often hear but seldom see written down. Actually that’s a good summary of much of this book, it is filled with things I often see but that are seldom written down. The title, Panopticon  literally means “seen by all”. I think Jenni Fagan wants to make us look at how we treat our young and to feel ashamed.”

My original review, including a video of Jenni Fagin talking about her work, is HERE.

Victoria McQueen has a secret gift for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. On her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a rickety covered bridge that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to go, whether it’s across Massachusetts or across the country.
Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing – and terrifying – playground of amusements he calls “Christmasland.”
Then, one day, Vic goes looking for trouble—and finds Manx. That was a lifetime ago. Now Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx’s unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx never stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. He’s on the road again and he’s picked up a new passenger: Vic’s own son.

‘NOS4R2′ (2013) blew me away. It is a 995 page novel. The audiobook version is nearly twenty hours long. I consumed it in a little under four days. Even so, ten years later, I remember the sadness, the fear and the sacrifice that was my constant companion thoughtout this book, offset on by a sliver of hope that was just enough to keep me reading. Most of all, I remember Kate Mulgrew’s magnificent narration. She brought power and passion to the voices of her characters and performed every moment of the twenty-hour read with complete focus, giving the book the impact it deserved.

Here’s an extract from my review:

“I was living in the shadow of how bad things were going to get but I couldn’t move away, not because I was fascinated by the evil in the book in some kind of ghoulish, car-crash-rubber-necking way, but because the book never extinguished the hope that good might win out and I passionately wanted that to happen.

The book also never left me in any doubt that there would be a toll. In this book, nothing comes for free, there is always a toll.

Perhaps it was because I listened to this book during long drives, but I began to feel that the book was the Rolls Royce Silver Wraith and that I was trapped inside it, paying for my ride by having my emotions twisted until the only option was to cry.

NOS4R2 spans decades and is all the more intense for that. We see the main character, Vic, short for Victoria, grow from a young girl through to an adult mother and share all her traumas along the way. We watch Bing, a simple-minded man with an instinct for evil, evolve into someone truly monstrous over years and years. We see characters, once full of youth and promise, fall from grace and become the flawed adults so many of us are.

Joe Hill understands that good heroes have flaws but the best heroes have their flaws worsened by the heroics they perform. Vic’s heroics are slowly eroding her sanity. Maggie’s heroics cost her the thing she values most, using words well. In Hill’s world, “with great power, comes great sacrifice”.”

My original review and link to an extract from the audiobook is HERE.