Tag: Volunteers

Oli Jacobs – Wilthaven | Review

May 31, 2020
Authors F-J (By Surname)Fiction

Title: Wilthaven

Author: Oli Jacobs

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 396

Rating: 4.25/5

I’ve read about a dozen of Jacobs’ books by this point, and all of them have been worth reading. This one is cool because you can read it as a standalone but it also still functions as part of a wider realm. It’s almost King-like in that respect, and indeed I think King would approve of it because it lives up to his saying that “there are other worlds than these”.

Wilthaven follows the BPD, the Bureau of Paranormal Detectives, and essentially documents their investigation into this strange, eldritch, Lovecraftian town called Wilthaven where nothing is quite as it seems. It’s almost reminiscent of Jay Kristoff’s Illuminae series in the way that it plays with layout, except I didn’t finish Illuminae while I tore through this one and had a blast while I was at it.

What’s quite cool here is that there’s a nice little range of genres, with a lot of Lovecraftian creepiness, some dark humour and some honest-to-goodness horror. One of my favourite bits was when a bunch of limbs just appeared out of nowhere. That was actually pretty brutal and not for the faint-hearted, but at this point I’m pretty sure there’s nothing I can read that will properly shock me. I’m immune.

There was also a pretty cool little subsection in it which was kind of a book within a book, and I think that it worked really well in context here. Because the book itself is presented as a dossier of documents, it makes sense that there’d be a book within a book. It worked better than Paul Sheldon’s book in Misery, in any case.

So would I recommend this one? Oh, absolutely, especially if you’re looking to read some more indie authors and to help to support the ecosystem. I’ve always enjoyed Oli’s stuff and this is him at his best, at least in my opinion. I’d take this over Kirk Sandblaster any day, and probably over another installment in the Filmic Cuts short stories series.

Oh, and did I mention that there’s a photo of yours truly in there? Oli was looking for volunteers to be featured in the Wilthaven files, and I of course jumped at the opportunity. Even though it’s a super old photograph. At least it’s heavily stylised though.

Learn more about Wilthaven.

Joe Hill – Strange Weather | Review

May 31, 2019
Authors F-J (By Surname)Fiction

Title: Strange Weather

Author: Joe Hill

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 440

Rating 4/5

 

 

I picked up this book because I’d read and enjoyed some of Joe Hill’s stuff before and because my cat picked it out for me when I filmed a video of my cat picking my TBR. I thought it was a novel going into it, but it turned out to be a collection of what Hill calls short novels. I’d argue that it’s actually three novellas and one short novel, but that’s just semantics.

The interesting thing about this collection is that, as the title suggests, each of the stories relates back in some way to the weather. There’s a hail of crows, an out of control forest fire, a solid cloud and a rain of metal shards that wreak havoc on anything beneath them. With weather like this, you might want to stay indoors.

I suppose the most logical way to review this book would be to tackle each of the stories in order, so let’s start with Snapshot, which is the least memorable of the lot and which reminded me a little bit of The Sun Dog by Stephen King, Hill’s father. I didn’t think much of that story either, but I do like the idea of using a creepy polaroid camera as a plot device.

 

 

Up next we have Loaded, the longest piece, which started a little slow but which suddenly went nuts and which went on to have one of the bleakest endings I’ve ever come across. I liked it though, and I was impressed by what Hill had to say on the subject of guns. His opinion definitely comes across, but it doesn’t feel preachy. He just lays it out like it is and then leaves the reader to make up their own mind.

Then there’s Aloft, which follows what happens when a man volunteers for a charity parachute jump, immediately regrets it and ends up stranded on a cloud. There’s a lot of jumping backwards and forwards through time, which kind of annoyed me a little bit, but I can also see how it was necessary for the way that the story was told. I wasn’t the biggest fan though.

And then finally we have Rain, a sort of parody post-apocalyptic novel that works well on one level and not so well on another. I actually thought that the premise of it was pretty good and wished that Hill had run with it for real, but hey ho. All in all though, it was a great collection and I’d definitely recommend it. Enjoy!

 

 

Click here to buy Strange Weather.