THE DRAGON FACTORY By Jonathan Maberry – Reviewed

When a colleague asked me what I was reading I had to describe this book as an action-thriller with SF overtones. But that’s like describing the Boeing A380 as a big plane. It barely scratches the surface of this taut sci-fi action thriller.

The DMS (Department of Military Sciences) is the secretist secret government agency there is, and the Vice-President of the United States is tricked into trying to close it down in the belief that the head of the DMS is blackmailing the President (who is currently enduring heart-bypass surgery, leaving the VP in charge). Homeland Security are raiding DMS headquarters across the country and picking up agents.

Joe Ledger, former cop, and DMS agent, is at the grave of his former girlfriend when the agents turn up to collect him. But Joe doesn’t plan on going quietly.

The Jakoby twins are rich and powerful geneticists, turning nature on its head to create their rich customers unique pets, ultimate soldiers and legendary creatures (unicorn, dragons, etc) to hunt.

Cyrus Jakoby, the twins’ father, is also working on a large-scale project. A secretive scheme behind the twins’ backs, adapting existing diseases and blights for use in his Extinction Wave that will wipe out seven eighths of the world’s population. Everything is in place, the one hundred hour clock begins its countdown. Is it too late for anyone to stop it?

This book is just so much fun! Ledger is a broken hero, insightfully fragmented in his reality, in love with his colleague and running hell for leather from crisis to crisis in his attempts to find out what’s going on and stop the murder of several billion people.

The action is intense, half way through the book the climax begins to build with wave after wave of attacks against larger and nastier opponents.

The science is used incredibly well. Maberry makes you believe this could happen.

His first book Patient Zero was a rip-roaring zombie-fest with a brilliant science-based twist that made you believe, and was massively readable, edge of the seat stuff, that I thought would be difficult to follow-up. But Maberry has done us proud, creating another SF-twisted reality that’s equally (and scarily) plausible.

Brilliant devised, intelligently written. A book that you sweeps you up in its evil and twisted reality.

RED By Jack Ketchum – Reviewed

Avery Ludlow is an old man fishing with his dog. When three teenagers try to rob him he offers them all the cash he has, barely twenty dollars. The teenagers aren’t happy and shoot Ludlow’s dog, blasting off its head with a shotgun and laughing as they make their escape.

So far, so Ketchum. I was expecting a huge and hideously violent revenge tale.

Erm, that’s not what happens. Instead, we get Ludlow trying to get justice, but by traditional, conventional methods; visiting the boys’ parents, going to the police, appearing on TV. But Ludlow’s efforts come to nothing and each time he tries something new, they retaliate against him, with bricks through his window, and burning down his store.

This isn’t really a violent book, it doesn’t make your squirm. It’s a quiet novel from Ketchum, who doesn’t deliver the nastiness he normally does. This is a nice book, more subtle than regular Ketchum readers are used to. It’s good, Ketchum still provides the goods, but not in the way you expect. It’s a nice horror novel, more like a Richard Laymon or Dean R. Koontz book. A horror novel that turns out right in the end, not the bloody massacre of Off Season.

Obviously the publishers have realised that what Ketchum readers want is blood, violence and nastiness, and so they’ve provided us with the novella “The Passenger” in this edition. Classic Ketchum. When her car breaks down late one night Janet is pleasantly surprised to be picked up by a former classmate. So she wasn’t exactly friends with Marion, but she doesn’t have too far to get home. Then they crash into a group of murderers and rapists after Marion refuses to let Janet leave the car, and things start to get really nasty.

When humans goes bad, it could be the tag line of most of Ketchum’s work, and “The Passenger” is no exception. Think of all of the evil possibilities and them throw in some more and then ramp it up a notch, and that’s what Ketchum delivers.

Red isn’t Ketchum at his best, but it’s still a good novel, and nice and short. But “The Passenger” is classic Ketchum, and classic Ketchum always delivers. It’s not like reading, it’s like experiencing pain and torture. Somehow, you don’t know how, you managed to survive and you know that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Ridiculous Reviews, Fascist media, and Antichrist

I was on a British Airways flight back from a weekend in Stockholm, lovely city by the way, plenty of museums, clean, efficient, and loads of ice cream; when I picked up the Daily Mail, a traditionally English tabloid, often lambasted for its view on johnny-foreigner, who are obviously to blame for all the ills of England.

The paper was free so I thought I’d flick through, the new is invariably bad so I tend not to watch or read it often, I find the several stabbing a day, rising crime, cheating and fraudulent politicians, all rather depressing. Most of the articles I barely read, more exciting staring out the window and waiting to get off the plane, it’s only just over two hours away.

When I got to the media reviews I found an article on Lars Von Trier’s new film Antichrist and read that with interest, and then rising disgust. The film is apparently sexually graphic, but that’s not what I found completely repugnant. It was the fact the reviewer had never even seen the film or intended to, he started off the article saying that he wouldn’t bring himself to watch such filth (I should have stopped right there), and then proceeded to say how evil, wrong, and corrupting the film was. How the film was not only a moral hazard, bound to turn even the most angelic of children into rapists and murderers, but also a sign of the liberal attitude of British Board of Film Classification. A Board which banned the erect penis from all films and kept hardcore pornography illegal until only a few years ago, British still has one of the strictest classification systems in the world, and certainly the strictest in Europe. Barring Albania obviously.

I don’t mind a film being completely ridiculed or critically torn apart, if it deserves it all the better. What I can’t stand, really can’t stand, is when someone gives an opinion, which will be taken seriously by many of the Mail’s readers, without one ounce of knowledge.

You cannot and should not be allowed to write a review of anything without having actually seen or read or heard some of it. Fair enough if the whatever is so bad you couldn’t make it all the way through, I wish I hadn’t wasted two hours of my life sitting through the hideousness that was Crank. But you must try, you must, with all integrity, attempt to watch the film.

To review it after reading what sounds like a brief plot summary from the publicists aimed at stirring up controversy, is prejudice of the highest order and really shouldn’t be allowed.

The fact that this non-review, a basic, hypocritical, bullying tirade is allowed to be published in a daily newspaper just makes me cringe. It makes me angry that such idiots, I say this without ever having met the reviewer, but obviously that isn’t important in making an informed decision about their intelligence, are allowed to spout such nonsense in a legitimate avenue of so-called journalism.

I haven’t watched Antichristso I won’t try to defend it or review it,  although I might get it on dvd, all that sex makes it sound very much like home-viewing material.