[book - review] Duma Keys (2008)

The King is always the King...

After a really long career and a huge list of books (many of them masterpieces, really few the bad ones) he is still able to pull out from his hat a wonderful book written in a simply amazing way.

By now all the people who were criticizing him are quiet, impossible to still confine him inside a single genre : he is complete and he create masterpieces outside horror's fences too, touching sides like fantasy, science fiction and even adult novelty like in Stand By Me.
There are also people who accuse him to be verbose... well, I must admit that happens quite sometimes but it's a venial sin.

Like Duma Key's beginning... for the first 50 pages I have been in  complete ecstasy for the prose and the unfold of Edgar Freemantle's story (for everyone of you who is a Kingophile this name summons something, right? ;)), and it seems also kinda of autobiographic : an horrible accident is near taking the main character's life, leaving him alive but without an arm and with a blind eye; King has been more dead than alive after a tremendous accident with his motorcycle, undergoing 7 surgeries and months of therapies.

The book is a sort of diary of Freemantle himself and talks about all the stuff that happened (fantastic/mysterious/tragic) after his move to the Keys for a rehab after the accident. And in Duma Keys he will receive a gift, but the prices will be truly high.

As always the characters are truly exceptionals, like the story that will reveal the paranormal side really far deep into the plot.
One of his masterpiece for me!

[book - review] Cryptozoic (1967)

There's something that I think is essential when I'm reviewing a scifi book : its verisimilitude.
Obviously in a gender like Sci-Fi to work with feet strongly bound to earth or to not claim wonderful technological inventions or astounding evolutions would be nonsense, but I can't completely leave aside the fact that explanations should have a logic (within the book's microcosm) and a verisimilitude that the writer should have given to it.

And this is the biggest lack of this Aldiss' work.
The writer talks about mind trips, flowing of time and begin/end of the world by giving to us a really interesting theory on time itself but, other than being really extreme (a thing that it's not such an invalidating thing for scifi stuff) lay its basement on a lists of theories and conjectures that have the same stability of a cards castle built upon an awaken cat!

The book itself, although, is enough enjoyable but some paragraphs are a bit hard to follow, both for author's writing style and for the notions ("realistic", so based on our world like description of mental illnesses, or "imaginary", like those previously mentioned theories on time and stuff) they're filled with.
The characters are not badly described but none of them have that sparkle of genius that will keep it in your mind after the book's end.

[book - review] Enclave (Razorland book #1 - 2011)

This is a book about a world after an holocaust, with survivors that is now divided into tribes with different kinds (and levels) of societies ancient-style and with dangers that comes from mutations and violent behaviours.
All these things rang more than a bells in your mind?
Indeed, there are plenty of books that tells similar stories : some are good, many are fair, some are really bad.

Well, here we're talking about the first kind because Aguirre's post holocaust world is alive, deep and full of interesting stuff and situations.
The story caught me from the beginning, kept my eyes on the pages word after word, eager to discover what Deuce and her friends will face after the next corner, waiting to see how the things (and characters) will develop.
Talking about the characters... they are well and deeply defined but not still. They grow pages after pages, shaped by the events and absolutely well written by the author, most of the times with just few well chosen words.
Can't wait to go on with the series!