Tag: Bits

Spike Milligan – A Celebration | Review

September 22, 2020
Authors K-O (By Surname)FictionPoetry

Title: A Celebration

Author: Spike Milligan

Type: Poetry/Fiction

Page Count: 160

Rating: 3.75/5

This book was pretty cool because it covered quite a wide variety of Spike Milligan’s career, including little snippets of TV and radio shows, doodles and drawings and bits and bobs of poetry. Milligan was also a huge influence on a whole range of different people, from John Lennon to Monty Python, who admittedly isn’t actually a person.

It’s essentially almost a best of book, with highlights from a bunch of Milligan’s different works, as well as reminiscences from people like Dennis Norden and Jim Dale. That in itself makes it an interesting read, but the humour itself is spot on as well. It’s even missing most of the casual racism that eked its way into Milligan’s stuff, which is a bonus for me with my hella woke modern sensibilities.

Would I recommend it? Yes, if you like silly humour and stuff.

Learn more about A Celebration.

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.