As a genre reader since childhood, I’m all-too-familiar with the tropes of the Chosen One, the Prophecy and all those things that lead the unsuspecting child of humble birth to fulfil their Great Destiny. I’ve no complaint against it, it’s been the source of many rich and inventive stories, but I find myself increasingly drawn to stories where the protagonist is an ordinary Joe (or Jo), sucked into uncommon events beyond their normal lives and forced to find a way to survive. It’s easy to grab attention with the threatened destruction of the galaxy. How much more satisfying, then, to make a reader care about the soul of one character.
My journey with this book came at a young age, recommended to me by my older brother, and was a formative experience. Not only was it an early experience with a more adult version of the fantasy literature I’d grown up reading but it also built a bond between my brother and I, it was a shared literary experience that became special because of who I shared it with.
It opened my eyes to the idea that you could write this kind of stuff for grown-ups, and therefore, a whole new world of reading was opened to me.
Brendan Doyle is a twentieth-century English professor who travels back to 1810 London to attend a lecture given by English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This is a London filled with deformed clowns, organised beggar societies, insane homunculi and magic.
When he is kidnapped by gypsies and consequently misses his return trip to 1983, the mild-mannered Doyle is forced to become a street-smart con man, escape artist, and swordsman in order to survive in the dark and treacherous London underworld. He defies bullets, black magic, murderous beggars, freezing waters, imprisonment in mutant-infested dungeons, poisoning, and even a plunge back to…
Primarily, I love this because of how it takes something that’s more than a trope, more of a culturally shared fantasy–who hasn’t daydreamed about living their life again, but with all the knowledge they have now?–and yet wrings an original, exquisitely-crafted story out of it.
I found it both narratively gripping and emotionally satisfying, a rare combination. And all from such an elemental premise. Apparently, he was writing a sequel when, like Replay’s protagonist, Grimwood died of a heart attack, so I like to think he’s alive again back in the sixties, finding a way to get that sequel written second/third/fourth time around…
At forty-three Jeff Winston is tired of his low-paid, unrewarding job, tired of the long silences at the breakfast table with his wife, saddened by the thought of no children to comfort his old age. But he hopes for better things, for happiness, maybe tomorrow ...
But a sudden, fatal heart attack puts paid to that. Until Jeff wakes up in his eighteen-year-old body, all his memories of the next twenty-five years intact. If he applies those memories, he can be rich in this new chance at life and can become one of the most powerful men in America.
The Strange Case of Guaritori Diolco
by
Bill Hiatt,
Guaritori awakens from a coma to find that he's lost twenty years--and his entire world.
Fiancée, family, and friends are all missing, perhaps dead. Technology has failed, and magic has risen, leaving society in ruins. Most survivors are at the mercy of anyone who has strong enough magic. Guaritori has…
Moorcock is, of course, a legend of genre fiction, but even as I acknowledge this, I have to say my own journey with him as a reader has had its ups and downs. This book, though, finally sealed the deal for me because it is just that good.
Provocative and challenging, especially for readers of faith like myself, it succeeds because it’s so well-crafted that there’s no choice but to acknowledge its genius. I found its alternative portrayal of the life of Christ startling, but played as straight as it is, it never comes over as shocking for shock’s sake. Instead, by reframing the familiar as something totally other, it becomes a jumping off point for critical reevaluation and even reaffirmation. The Greatest Story Ever Retold?
In the title story readers are introduced to Karl Glogauer, time traveller and messiah. In "Breakfast in the Ruins", Karl is the central character once again, in the setting of Derry and Toms's roof garden. "Constant Fire", set between the other stories, continues the quest through time.
For me, the perfect blend of format and content. While I am in awe of the way Burgoyne stitches her story together in non-chronological order, no idle conceit but one that serves her story, introducing characters and themes when it makes most sense for the narrative rather than the chronology, it’s the emotional heart that resonates. Her protagonist is a heel, but I found myself rooting for him because of the emotional authenticity of his heartbreak.
I also relished the concept that, having paid the devil (or what stands for the devil in this tale) to remove every memory of the woman that broke his heart, his journey to try and recover those memories isn’t based on their loss, but rather the realisation that if he doesn’t know who she is, any new woman he meets could actually be her, ready to break his heart all over again. It’s a genius twist in a book that made me want to be a better author.
'I do not have a future, and I do not want dreams. My dreams are stories, written by a machine.
And I will not think of her.'
Luke Kierley has visited the writer and asked it to exorcise from him all memory of her. Now he has no idea who she was and he must try to find a way to live with a bleeding hole in his memory.
Told in a unique voice that recalls southern gothic, classic horror, and frontier literature, Writer is like nothing you have read before. JM Burgoyne's debut brings her virtuosic voice alive in…
The Strange Case of Guaritori Diolco
by
Bill Hiatt,
Guaritori awakens from a coma to find that he's lost twenty years--and his entire world.
Fiancée, family, and friends are all missing, perhaps dead. Technology has failed, and magic has risen, leaving society in ruins. Most survivors are at the mercy of anyone who has strong enough magic. Guaritori has…
For all the highly enjoyable shenanigans around using time travel to prevent JFK’s assassination, I came away loving this book for reasons I don’t normally associate with King–I genuinely loved his characters. Jake Epping is a sympathetic lead, and I became far more invested in his love for Sadie than in the assassination-thwarting.
I’d hesitate to say this is King’s finest book, but of those I’ve read, it’s definitely my favourite. I found the climax so emotionally satisfying; it genuinely moved me.
Now a major TV series from JJ Abrams and Stephen King, starring James Franco (Hulu US, Fox UK and Europe, Stan Australia, SKY New Zealand).
WHAT IF you could go back in time and change the course of history? WHAT IF the watershed moment you could change was the JFK assassination? 11.22.63, the date that Kennedy was shot - unless . . .
King takes his protagonist Jake Epping, a high school English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, 2011, on a fascinating journey back to 1958 - from a world of mobile phones and iPods to a new world of…
In the present day, Jeff is lost, struggling to find his purpose in life. In the near future, Jezz is fighting for his life as part of Earth’s defences against an alien invasion. Both men are suffering from blackouts, experiencing hallucinations of the other’s life. But who is the hallucination, and who is real? What, if anything, is reality? And who is the Pale Woman that appears to each, harbinger of their psychoses?
Thrown into a situation that has them questioning their own existence, both men strive to make sense of a world they feel increasingly disconnected from, confronting them with questions about what is really important to them, and who.
