Blog – Page 41 – The Designer Monologues

February 18, 2018

30 Day Book Challenge, Day 18

Better late than never! Today’s challenge: A book that disappointed you.

The first one that immediately leaps to mind is Clive Barker’s The Scarlet Gospels.

The reason why this disappointed me so much is that I had been looking forward to it so much. Barker hadn’t written a horror novel in quite some time (since Coldheart Canyon in 2001, in fact). He had jumped over to doing Young Adult fantasy via his Abarat series…and then, as he had some health issues, the spaces between even those books grew longer. So when I heard that he was going to be returning to horror, I was thrilled. Even better: The book was going to feature the first ever meet-up between two of Barker’s most famous creations! His occult investigator, Harry D’amour, was going to encounter the Cenobites from the novel The Hellbound Heart (both creations appeared more famously in films based on Barker’s work — the HELLRAISER series, and LORD OF ILLUSIONS). I found out about the book in 2010. It was finally released in 2015.

…and I was majorly disappointed.

First of all, it was SHORT. Barker’s last few horror novels had been doorstoppers. Big, chunky books full of detail and character. When Barker announced The Scarlet Gospels in 2010, he said it clocked in at 243,000 words. The book that arrived on my doorstep 5 years later had apparently been ruthlessly edited down to nearly HALF that.

Second: possibly as a result of the trimming, the book read like Clive Barker fanfiction, not Barker himself. Characterization was minimal, and the plot whizzed from point A to point B, almost summarizing the events occurring in between.

It certainly wasn’t worth the five-year wait from announcement until release… much less the 14-year wait since Barker’s previous horror novel. So disappointing.

February 17, 2018

30 Day Book Challenge, Day 17

Today’s challenge: Favorite quote from your favorite book.

I don’t have a single favorite book, but earlier this month I named Casino Royale as my favorite book in my favorite series, so I’ll go with that.

The last line of the book is a doozy, no doubt: “The bitch is dead now.” But it’s not my favorite. My favorite has to be the first line of the book, and therefore the first line of the entire Bond series, which I find to be a marvelous bit of scene-setting:

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul erosion produced by high gambling — a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension — becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.

February 16, 2018

30 Day Book Challenge, Day 16

Today’s challenge: Favorite female character.

No hesitation here. My favorite female character is Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise.

Modesty was born in a post-ware refugee camp as a “Displaced Person”, gave herself her own name, and eventually takes control of a criminal gang in Tangier, which becomes known as The Network, specializing in heists and cons. After amassing a vast fortune, she retires from the criminal life, and now occasionally uses her skills and contacts to do “special favors” for the British Secret Service (her adopted country).

The character was created as a newspaper comic strip in England, where it ran for nearly 40 years from 1963 to 2002. Collections of those strips are still published as graphic novels, yet it was not the medium where I first discovered her and became a fan. In 1966, at the height of Bondmania, the strip was adapted as a film. Unfortunately as was the case in the late 60s with so many great properties, the producers decided to play it for camp. The film bombed. (It’s seriously awful.) During this time, the creator of the strip, Peter O’Donnell, was hired to write the novelization of the film, and it was released a year before the movie itself. Without the knowledge of the film’s terrible nature to drag it down, and buoyed by the popularity of the strip itself, the book, MODESTY BLAISE, became popular.

O’Donnell took advantage of this popularity and continued to write Modesty Blaise novels, most of which featured original stories, although with some elements appearing from the newspaper strips (usually greatly expanded upon)– and in some cases plots originating in the novels would later be adapted in the strip. In the end, O’Donnell wrote eleven novels and two short-story collections featuring Modesty — and it was these books that were my introduction to the character (initially hooked by marketing text which described her as “a female James Bond”).

I’m a full-on fanboy. My most prized Modesty Blaise items are a complete run of the paperbacks produced in 2008 in English by Penguin Books in India (a friend on a business trip indulged my begging), the spines of which combine to create a silhouette (in spot-gloss on the covers), and digital copies of three audio dramas based on the novels which have been produced by BBC Radio 4 since 2012 (so far they’ve done A Taste For Death, Modesty Blaise and The Silver Mistress.)

If you’re interested in diving in, the 50th anniversary edition of the first book (whose original paperback art I used with this post) is available from Amazon.