Book, Line and Thinker

“It goes by many names: 'The Crisis,' 'The Dark Years,' 'The Walking Plague,' as well as newer and more 'hip' titles such as 'World War Z' and 'Z War One.'”   The zombie genre is amazing. 'Shaun of the Dead' is hilarious, 'The Walking Dead' is one of the best shows on TV, and 'The Last of Us' is the closest you can get to a movie within a video game. However, all of these examples leave a lot of  unanswered   questions about the worlds which they try to create. That’s not their fault! But by following a single group or a single person in a single area of the world, we're inevitably left with a restricted perspective of the overall conflict. We never find out how the rest of the world is coping with the outbreak. 'Pandemic' and 'global' are words which we take for granted, but we never get to see the true scale of the disease.  However, in 'World War Z', there is no such pro...

“I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me.”   'The Wasp Factory' takes the reader on a slow and horrifying journey through the mind of a child psychopath. Frank is just sixteen years old, but has already killed his younger brother Paul, his friend Blyth, and his little cousin Esmerelda. We're told this from the outset of the novel, but we don't know  how or why he killed them   - this suspense is what will pull you into the book. In fact, at times 'The Wasp Factory' does just feel like a long series of hooks and reveals, in an attempt to pull us deeper and deeper into the mystery. Frank constantly alludes to names and events, 'the Factory' or 'the reason why my brother went mad', but doesn't expand on them until later in the book. It's a very basic literary technique, and can occasionally feel like an easy p...

“On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.”   'I am Legend' follows Robert Neville, the last man on Earth - he's the sole survivor of a global disease which has turned all other humans into monsters. This may sound like a cliched premise, because the zombie genre is now widely represented, but in 1954 this was groundbreaking writing. It popularised the concept of an apocalyptic pandemic, and was hugely influential in the development of dystopian fiction. It has rightly been included in Orion's list of Science Fiction Masterworks, and fuses sci-fi with horror to devastating effect.  In many ways, 'I am Legend' remains superior to the majority of its successors in the field. Most writers in this genre have used zombies as their premise, but Matheson's disease turns its victims into vampires instead. These monsters display many of the same symptoms as vampi...

“Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital.”   Marina is seven years old, and when her parents are killed in a car crash, she’s left with nothing but a scar and a doll. At the orphanage, the other girls are quick to notice both. Marina soon transfixes them, and their dark obsession becomes increasingly disturbing with every page of the book. 'Such Small Hands' is too long to be a short story, and too short to be a novel... but size doesn't matter when a book is as brilliant as this one. The novella, translated from Spanish, is a chilling work of horror. It excels in its depiction of childhood, capturing the frightening hyperrealism of a child’s imagined world. Mundane moments become chilling rituals, whilst trivial signs take on dark and significant meanings. The girls are feverishly serious in the face of the absurd, and in this Barba’s style is reminiscent of William Golding. His descriptions of childhood are not just disturbing, however, but also...