| Author | Message | ||
     Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 79.77.26.14 |
Just finished reading Ramsey's book shop horror and found it very good. Plot-wise it's very simple, a siege story with a supernatural pay-off, but the delivery is complex and deeply unsettling. Like Ramsey, I used to work in a book shop but, unlike Ramsey, I had the boss from hell and deeply deeply hated my job. My boss was a bit like Woody in that she kept insisting I bloody smile all the time and, as the company was Scottish owned, it seemed to be policy to have bloody fucking Texas (not their full name but I didn't want to use the C-word) and Travis on a constant loop. It's like water torture, it really is, when shop workers are forced to listen to the same shit day in day out. I actually prefered working in a call centre to working there. Anyway... back on subject. Woody has to be one of Ramsey's most convincing monsters. An absolute bastard and a phenomenal waste of space. I'm not sure who are more horrifying in this novel, the supernatural entities or the people who work in the shop. Ramsey builds up the tension beautifully until you realise that something other than the characters themselves are playing them. The last hundred pages or so are deeply claustrophobic. The lift scene with Agnes (Anyes) was perticularly horrifying. I loved the description of the lift descending slowly like a spider. The mindlessness of the entities themselves makes them even more hideous. Ramsey's novel is as a powerful as any supernatural piece I have read recently, if not more so. It's great that Ramsey's love of this form of literature is still going strong in a market that's being swallowed my supernatural crime and Buffy clones. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.24.122.40 |
Yeah, in the bookshop in which I worked, we had Ella Fitzgerald and The Carpenters on a constant loop: arrrggghhhh!!! | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.249.146 |
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant... THE OVERNIGHT is a masterpiece. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.249.146 |
brilliant...but THIEVING FEAR is even better, | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.159.156.247 |
You finished it then, Zed? | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.249.146 |
Not yet... | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 79.69.60.204 |
I love Ella Fitzgerald. But the Carpenters can fuck right off. Mind you, anything on a loop will drive you mad. Towards the end of my time there I tried to rebel a bit. On the boss's days off I'd play Tom Waits on the stereo and tell people to go and buy books at a decent book shop. It must be pointed out that this was a remainders book shop. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.159.156.247 |
I love Ella too, but I also have a soft spot for the Carpenters when I'm in the right frame of mind (which admittedly I'm not often) - and I even saw them live when they hit the Palladium in the 'seventies! Hurrah for me! | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 212.97.200.24 |
I loved the Overnight. My copy of Thieving Fear has arrived, but it is out in the countryside where I usually have stuff sent, so I have to wait two weeks to get a hold of it! ahhgh I remember we used to have a Bus driver in grade school who would play 'No Sacrifice' by Elton John, every single day on a constant loop for six months. Even 3rd graders on the bus were coming to school with walkmans. | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
You have stuff sent to a tree? A bush? A field? |