Strontium Dog: Search/Destroy Agency Files 01 by John Wagner & Alan Grant

Strontium Dog was one of my favourite characters from the pages of the weekly British sci-fi comic 2000 A.D., which originated in the early 1980s and continues to flourish today. I read the comic erratically in my youth, so until now I’ve only been scratching the surface of the amount of Strontium Dog strips that have been published. In fact, you could say I’m still only scratching the surface, since this mammoth 330-page tome is merely one of four.

The comic is set in the 22nd century, some years after an atomic war on earth - a war that left many people mutated because of a radioactive isotope in the fallout called Strontium 90. Fear of mutants became the new racism among “norms.” Mutants lived in poverty, unable to get jobs. As a solution, the government offered one job to all mutants - a job that no norm would take: Search-Destroy Agent. SD Agents are bounty hunters, scouring the galaxy for the the worst of humanity - sometimes to arrest and sometimes to terminate. But the public don’t call the bounty hunters SD Agents; they call them Strontium Dogs.

Johnny Alpha is one. His mutation left him with the ability to see into men’s minds. He also carries an assortment of weaponry, including a blaster that can fire bullets through solid matter, set to detonate at a specific range, and a range of bombs that can manipulate time itself. Johnny works with a partner, Wulf, a viking warrior from the past.

The stories are wild and wacky, even going as far as sending Johnny on a mission to earth’s past, to bring back Hitler to pay for his crimes against humanity. The one thing I noticed, as an adult, reading this stuff, is how unafraid the writer was to wreak havoc. Often, the innocent are slaughtered along with the guilty, with reckless abandon. If memory serves, I think that’s something you would rarely see in 2000 A.D.’s 1980s rival The Eagle. Heroes were also allowed to have a darker side, seen in Johnny’s willingness to fulfill a contract without asking too many questions about the target.

The writing credits in this volume go to T.B. Grover and Alan Grant (I’m assuming T.B. Grover is a pseudonym for John Wagner). Both writers are highly imaginative. Carlos Ezquerra quickly finds his feet as the principal artist. (I think this trio are also responsible for a lot of early Judge Dredd, too.) The only place the volume falters is with the inclusion of a few Strontium Dog strips that came from 2000 A.D. annuals of the period. These were written and illustrated by outsiders, and are amateur by comparison. But I guess they had to be included for the sake of completeness.

I wasn’t awed by Strontium Dog, but it was an entertaining and imaginative set of stories, worth reading.

Domain by James Herbert

I read James Herbert regularly as a teenager, and hardly ever after that. My one regret between then and now is that I never read Domain, partly because it was the third book in a trilogy of which I had read the first two (The Rats and Lair), and partly because the book belongs to my favourite sub-genre: post apocalypse.

Domain was written in the 1980s and is set in the same political climate, where it seemed that nuclear war might really happen. I can remember the vague anxiety associated with the time, even though I was a child. Back then, it always seemed like World War III would be a battle between the USA and Russia. How times change. The book is set in London and gets straight down to business with five nuclear missiles decimating the city. Most people above ground perish in the inital blast. For those more fortunate, the most convenient haven is the nearest tube station - get as far underground as possible before the nuclear fallout arrives. Unfortunately, there’s another threat lurking below: rats. Not regular rats, but a mutant strain throught to have been wiped out in the previous book. Instead, they have been hiding underground, breeding. Some of these rats are as big as dogs. And they’re as mean as rabid dogs. The people who took refuge don’t stand a chance.

The story is mostly told from the perspective of Steve Culver, a helicopter pilot, who is lucky enough to find himself in the company of a Government executive, a man called Dealey, when the bombs fall. Dealey is, unfortunately, blinded by the flash, and he needs Culver’s help to get to a secret Government fallout shelter that he knows about. From there, the story follows one survival escapade after another: battling the rats, battling floodwaters, battling rats in the floodwaters, battling people-gone-bad, battling more rats, etc. I started off enjoying the novel, but after a while I started to get the impression that there really wasn’t much of a story to tell. Towards the end, I was truly sickened by tunnel after door after tunnel after door.

I felt further frustrated by Herbert’s manner of storytelling. He’s quite verbose, tossing in unnecessary words and being vaguely repetitious:

He hacked their pink bodies, ignoring their faint cries, striking, pummelling, crushing their tiny bones, making sure each one was dead, beating any small movement from them, shredding them from existence, sundering them of all form, of any shape.

What is intended as dramatic is padded out to such a degree that all I can feel whilst reading it is tired and impatient. The story is further padded out with lines of dialogue between the characters that often serve no purpose except to slow everything down and bulk up the page-count. Many of the characters themselves are cardboard cut-outs. In one scene, there were several survivors travelling, and four of the men felt completely interchangeable to me; it didn’t matter who spoke. With the exception of Culver and Dealey, I couldn’t tell the difference between the men.

It’s not all bad. The novel does have its moments. From the sublime …

Ignore the old woman sitting on the floor rocking her blood-covered head backwards and forwards. Forget about the kid clinging to his mother, yelling for her to take out the horrible pieces of glass from his hands. Don’t look at the man leaning against the wall vomiting black blood. Help one and you had to help eveybody. Help everybody and you were finished. Just help yourself.

“Those people this morning didn’t look desparate. They looked as if they were enjoying themselves.”
“Let’s just say we’ve been knocked back a few thousand years to a time when other tribes are the enemy and certain breeds of animal are dangerous. We got through it then, we’ll do it again.”

To the ridiculous …

Sharon opened the door a fraction, just enough for her slim body to slide through, the tips of her breasts brushing against the edge.

As a teenager, I might have detected a degree of eroticism in the above paragraph. Now it reads like pure cheese to me. Sharon, a survivor among a group holed up inside a cinema, is heading to the toilet in the middle of the night. Every time Herbert deviates from the central group of survivors, you know he’s simply setting up a predicable scene where he gets to revel in death and destruction. Predictably enough, a horny bloke follows the girl, intent on raping her, and the rats break in and eat them both.

I recall generally enjoying Herbert’s novels as a teenager, but always feeling there was something a little cold about them in comparison to the likes of Stephen King. Almost two decades later, I can now put some words to those feelings. I think Herbert is purely a career writer, uninterested in creating art, just looking to earn a wage. I think he has an idea about what he thinks his target audience wants, and he simply aims to fill the gap. That’s why most of the books I’ve read by him have a typical and unnecessary sex scene. That’s why there’s so much gratuitous violence and gore. That’s why the characters are like puppets moved along a stage. Herbert’s books are product rather than art.

My frustration with this book boils down to this: I’m not as easy to please as I was when I was a teenager. Well, now that I’ve read the book that I always regretted not reading, I can finally put the ghost of James Herbert to rest.

It by Stephen King

This is the story of a town, King’s infamous Derry, under seige by a malevolent entity that often manifests itself as a clown. Only children can see it (rather, It) - something to do with a child’s open-mindedness. To grown-ups, Derry is a normal town, but to a particular group of kids (known as the Losers’ Club), Derry is the feeding ground of a monster that lives in the sewers. These children - Bill, Richie, Eddie, Stan, Ben, Mike and Beverly - must do battle, to end the terror that stalks their town. Worse still, in later life they learn that their efforts back in 1957 were incomplete. It is back with a vengeance, determined to avenge Itself. Bill has his own personal axe to grind: he knows that It is responsible for the death of his younger brother George, while George sought to retrieve a paper boat that had accidentally swam into a storm-drain. The two stories - the children in 1957 and the adults in 1985 - are told concurrently.

I first read this massive one-thousand-page tome when I was about fifteen years old. It was quite an undertaking, and it probably took me a couple of months, but the experience was no chore. This was my first oh-so-rare experience of never wanting a story to end. Although I found the “grown-ups” sections of the novel a little tiresome, the childhood parts were pure magic. They were so good that I didn’t even care about the horror story in the background. I just loved feeling like I was a part of the lives of these children, as they played down in the Barrens or faced off their bullies. If anyone had asked me, from the time when I was fifteen to when I was twenty, what my favourite novel was, I would have instantly replied, “It.”

My, how times change. I’m now thirty-five. And what took me two months to read in my teens took two years in my thirties. The novel is far less impressive to me in adult life. Interestingly, one of the major themes of the novel is the manner in which children view life differently from adults. Their minds are more open to ideas like magic. It’s perhaps not so surprising, then, that an adult (this adult, anyway) finds a story that clings to the notion of magic far less interesting than he found it as a teen. I even found it a tad pretentious at times.

Stephen King has always demonstrated a considerable strength at portraying child characters. This is where the novel still holds up well. But the horror story that these terrific characters inhabit isn’t really up to much. It’s far too wacky to be scary. After reading a few hundred pages of this, I realised that it was failing for me. The magic had gone. I persevered, hoping that it would return, but it didn’t. And so, over two years, I slogged my way to the end in fits and starts, reading other novels in between, because this one was just too darn big and just not good enough to captivate me for commitment of time and energy required to read it.

King’s most frequent “failing” is that he has a tendency to go into detail overkill. Whilst this has the effect of slowing down a story’s pacing, it also adds a richness to the drama in later parts of a story. So, it’s maybe not correct to call this a failing. Many of King’s novels walk this uncomfortable line that risks a reader becoming bored, and if there was ever a King book that was in need of a substantial haircut, it’s this one.

Unreal! by Paul Jennings

I became interested in Paul Jennings recently as a result of revisiting an old TV series called Round the Twist on DVD. The series is about a family that lives in a lighthouse around which all manner of weird things happen. The episodes are often hilarious, especially when the humour gets a bit, well, filthy. And by that I mean, for example, losing your false teeth down the toilet and having to collect them at the sewage works, then having the clean and wear them. Ugh! This is typical Jennings story material, and it’s a lot of fun.

I believe Unreal! is the author’s first published book. It contains eight stories, five of which I recognise as episode of Round the Twist from seasons one and two, although the television versions have been significantly reworked to revolve around the Twist family. The versions in the book are stand-alone tales. I heard that seasons three and four of Round the Twist weren’t as highly appreciated as the first two, due to Jennings leaving the show. Having just watched season three, I can attest to that. There were a few excellent episodes, but most of them lacked the imagination Jennings brought to the show.

The first story, “Without a Shirt,” is about a boy who can’t help himself adding the words “without a shirt” to the end of every sentence he speaks. Filmed as “Without My Pants” in the TV series.

“The Strap-Box Flyer” is about a travelling con man selling glue that sticks anything … but stops working after four hours.

“Skeleton on the Dunny” is about a boy who uses an outdoor toilet cubicle on which he sometimes finds a ghostly skeleton sitting. Filmed as the pilot episode of the TV series.

“Lucky Lips” is about colourless lipstick that will make any girl kiss you. As you can imagine, it will not be a smooth ride for the wearer. Another one of the TV episodes.

And so on. I enjoyed this book to the degree that it motivated me to attempt writing my own children’s stories. Full of outrageous fun. As an adult, it occasionally made me think, “I can’t believe he just wrote that,” but always with a smirk.

The Thousand Eyes of Night by Robert Swindells

The more Robert Swindells novels I read, the more I realise that he has two modes of writing. When he’s writing for young adults, he writes like he’s talking to equals; he talks about the world the way it is; few, if any, subjects are taboo; and bad things can happen to good people, as can happen in the real world. When he writes like this, his fiction is gripping and, I would dare to say, important. Then comes the other mode, writing for children, where the realistic drama disappears and everything turns one-dimensional; the kiddies get safely wrapped in cotton wool.

I know there are some classic novels that are very “safe” books for children, such as Tolkien’s The Hobbit and C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. The characters in these novels are far from realistic, and yet I still enjoyed them. So what exactly is the point I’m trying to make? I can’t put my finger on it, but something vital is missing from Swindells’ novels, when writes for children. Everything just turns to cardboard.

Sadly, The Thousand Eyes of Night was written with kids in mind. It concerns an abandoned railway tunnel, within which killer mice reside. Actually, they’re not real mice; they’re tiny aliens from a doomed planet in orbit around Betelgeuse. I’ve got no problem spoiling that for you, because Swindells spoils it in the first paragraph of the novel. Yes, hiding that fact might have added a sinister air of mystery to the whole story, but Swindells puts all his cards on the table at the start of the game.

The story moves along at a fairly slow pace. Tan (short for Tristan) is the central character. The tunnel is the play area for he and his friends, and the discovery of a dead body with its flesh picked clean to the bone leads them on the trail of the weird mice. The story is padded out with parent troubles and a sub-plot about the local bully. Around page 175 we get to the final showdown, which is practically summarised in only ten pages. It seemed as if the author got bored and wanted things finished quickly.

A disappointing children’s novel from an author I’ve grown to respect a great deal for his contribution to literature for older readers.

Brother in the Land by Robert Swindells

In stories which start with the end of the world, the protagonist is usually a person who escapes the cataclysm by some unusual twist of fate. However, this novel dares to break the pattern - teenage boy Danny Lodge, around whom this story is centred, is forced to live in the direct aftermath of a nuclear war, with a band of fellow survivors from his town, right in the middle of the devastation … and the radiation.

The book packs plenty of punches. We read about the loss of loved ones, ever-increasing hunger, radiation sickness leading to death, man’s inhumanity to man in the fight to survive, and worst of all, fears about mutation - whether mankind will be able to give birth to normal human beings again.

On the brighter side, there’s a love story that runs through the book. Also, an interesting sub-plot involving a second surviving community, one dressed in anti-radiation suits and carrying guns.

Swindell succeeds in painting a very gloomy picture, and I found myself wondering how this book was going to come up with an ending that would make the telling of the story worthwhile. It does manage to, but only just. Make no mistake, this is bleak stuff, almost disturbing stuff, and I don’t think I’ll ever read it twice. However, I am glad I read it once, and Swindells is to be admired for daring to write something of such depth for a teenage audience.

Spellbound by Christopher Pike

Christopher Pike has managed to do a rare thing as a writer - to bridge the gap between the adult and teenage fiction markets. He has said that he doesn’t so much write for teenagers, but he writes about teenagers, for adults. The result is a novel with bit more character depth and a bit less candy coating than some of what passes for teenage fiction.

It’s a “murders in the forest” story; we’ve all came across them before. This one, however, strays into some very strange territory that you won’t expect. Although original, the mystical side got a bit too complex for my liking. The characters in the story are nicely drawn, but at times they do things that are totally unbelievable - like going back to the woods to confront your fears, knowing full well that the killer hasn’t been caught. It’s this kind of harsh plot-advancement that spoils the book to some extent. That said, I did enjoy this, and I’m sure I’ll be back for more from Pike.

Watchers by Dean Koontz

I first read this book when it was published in the late 80s. I was about fifteen at the time and I recall being captivated by it. It’s tragic therefore that, fifteen years later, when I decide it’s time for a re-read, I find the novel somewhat tiresome.

The story begins by introducing Travis Cornell, a depressed widow out trekking the barren foothills of Orange County, California, trying to recapture the happiness of his childhood. A dog comes into Travis’s path - but it’s no ordinary golden retriever; it escaped from a government laboratory. And the dog is not alone; something is coming after it - a creature which leaves a trail of bloody corpses in its wake. Other principals characters in the tale are Nora Devon (Travis’s love interest), Vince Nasco (a serial killer) and Lemuel Johnson (a government agent).

The one thing I really liked more than anything about this novel was the idea of a creature that is out there somewhere in the wilderness, gradually moving towards you, homing in through some kind of psychic connection. And no matter how far you travel or where you hide, it knows where you are, and it keeps on coming until it finds you. Did I mention that it hates you and wants nothing more than to kill you? Yep, there’s something pretty chilling about all that. But what I didn’t like was the way I was forced to read reams and reams of Travis, Nora and Einstein (the dog) playing happy families. Fair enough, character development is a good thing, but there’s such a thing as overkill. In fact, it’s the characters that kill this novel for me.

Travis’s personal history, involving the death of his wife, initially brought the character to life, but then Koontz had to drop in the everyone-I-love-dies-so-I-must-be-cursed syndrome. I’ve seen this in too many of his novels, and because of that, I just can’t take it seriously any more. In addition, the good guys were far too moral to be real; the serial killer was too strange to be believable, even in a screwed up kind of way.

When I went to grab the graphic for this review from Amazon, I couldn’t help but notice that the novel was rated 5 out of 5 on the basis of eighteen reviews. I hate to disagree with such a unanimous public opinion, but I can only tell ‘em as I see ‘em. Make of my review what you will. Watchers worked when I was fifteen, but with a good dose of adult cynicism in my blood, it doesn’t have the same charm.

The Dark Wheel by Robert Holdstock

This novella, whose publication dates back to the mid-1980s, is not only hard to find now, but was even then, given that it never graced the shelves of any bookstore. Instead, it would have been found in computer game shops. The Dark Wheel is a companion story to one of the greatest videogame experiences ever.

Elite was a game of space trading and combat set in a galaxy full of populated planets. We can all say ho-hum to that statement now, in today’s saturated market, but when Elite first emerged, there had been nothing like it before. For the first time, when you sat in front of your rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum, you felt like you were not just playing a game but immersed in a futuristic fantasy life. You’d start off in a poorly equipped Cobra Mark III spacecraft with a few hundred credits at your disposal to buy some materials from one planet, which you would hopefully carry to another world and sell for profit - that is, if you could avoid the pirate ships, who were always eager to attack you and steal your cargo. Alternatively, you could adopt a pirate lifestyle for yourself, shooting down innocent traders and scooping up their jettisoned cargo - that is, if you didn’t mind getting “fugitive” status, and the cops on your tail in their Viper ships. Elite had total non-linear gameplay; you had a thousand routes to success or failure, and all in a mere 48 kilobytes of memory. Ah, those were the days!

The Dark Wheel, which shipped with every copy of Elite, certainly added an extra dimension to the game. What the old 8-bit computers lacked in graphical power was more than made up for by Holdstock’s powerful storytelling. The novel perfectly captures the mythology of the game and expands upon it, fleshing out traders’ lifestyles, as they buy and sell and engage in combat. The core of the story revolves around a young trader, Alex Ryder, who loses his father at the hands of a pirate ship, and is determined to avenge him. Along the way he discovers that his father was more than just an ordinary trader; he belonged to a secret society of elite combateers known as The Dark Wheel.

The novella gets a little bogged down in detail at times, telling us all about docking procedures, fuel scoops, pulse lasers, beam lasers, etc. Describing the things that you find in the game made playing the game all the better, of course, but thinking of The Dark Wheel as a stand-alone novella, it doesn’t really enhance the story itself. No harm done, though.

If you’re interested in reading this, you could get lucky chasing down a copy of Elite on eBay. I was able to find an online version of the novella on the net using a search engine.

The Dark Wheel is an entertaining tale, set in a very interesting and original universe. Shame it’s the only one.

The Demon Headmaster by Gillian Cross

Dinah, an eleven-year-old girl who has spent her whole life in a children’s home, gets fostered by Hunter family, which already sports two young boys, Lloyd and Harvey. Things get off to a rocky start, but the three eventually become loyal friends when forced to confront something terrible that is happening at their school. All the pupils, bar a handful, are the neatest, tidiest, brightest, most well-behaved children you could ever meet. You could also say they’re the most joyless bunch of kids you could ever meet. And what can Lloyd and Harvey do when Dinah starts becoming just like them?

Being a horror movie veteran, my first thought was this is The Stepford Children for a child audience. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, eh? The novel doesn’t score many points on the originality front, but there’s no denying it’s an enjoyable ride. Something dramatic and interesting happens in every chapter. The prose is very snappy and easy to read. Descriptiveness is at about the right level for kids, though sometimes Cross is a little too free with her adverbs. Call me a nit-picker but I wince every time I see an adverb which describes something already glaringly obvious, e.g. “Right, Smart Alec,” Eddie Hair said sarcastically.

Briefly discussed within the story is the idea of there being two kinds of teaching. One, where we are taught to remember a bunch of facts and figures so that we can regurgitate them later, zombie-style. The other type, where we are actively encouraged to think for ourselves and solve problems.

In terms of the characters, I was pleased to see some realistic childhood shortcomings coming through. There was Harvey, the easily scared one, often to the point of tears, and Lloyd, a natural leader constantly jealous for recognition amongst his friends. However, I found it hard to believe any kid would come out with an exclamation like “Suffering crumpets!” or “Scarlet sausages!” or “Plum-coloured pumpkins!” Young Lloyd had a seemingly never-ending supply of these witticisms, which I thought only served to make him a less realistic child.

Despite my niggling criticisms, I found this to be a enjoyable light-hearted read. It’s definitely one for the sub-teen market though, where I have no doubt it will be much loved.

On the Edge by Gillian Cross

A teenage boy, Liam Shakespeare, is kidnapped by terrorists and held to ransom in his own house in London. Far away in Derbyshire, a girl called Jinny stumbles across strangers (two adults and a boy), arriving at a cottage in the middle of the night. Are they merely tourists, or something more sinister? And is Liam Shakespeare really being held in London, as it says on the news, or is he in fact the boy in the cottage?

This kidnapping story is made particularly interesting by the fact that it’s not merely about a couple of crooks wanting to make money. Gillian Cross invents a terrorist organisation called the Free People, which is intent on the abolishing of the family unit as a way of life. That might seem like laughable goal, but Cross expounds the views of the organisation in detail, and the Free People become all too realistic.

The book is not without its faults. Liam Shakespeare, who is cooped up in a room for much of the story, starts to lose his sense of identity, as he is fed a load of lies by his kidnappers. That’s all well and good, but the fact that it only takes a few days for the boy’s mind to play tricks on him seems a little forced. By the end of the story, the identity crisis is taken to a pretentious extreme; the author gets a little philosophical, but I couldn’t figure out what she was trying to say. The words looked good on paper, but felt empty, and made for an unsatisfying ending.

On a brghter note, the characters are great - especially the bad guys, who are by no means stereotypical villians, but damaged people with real problems and believable motives.

Overall, quite enjoyable - an average thriller.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Ender Wiggen, a young boy of six, has the nickname “Third” at school. What this means is he’s the third child born into his family, in an overpopulated future world where it is only lawful for parents have a maximum of two children. Legal permission was granted to the Wiggin family by the military, because their first two kids were very nearly the ideal candidates to save the world - but not quite. What the military needs is a boy genius whom they can shape and train to become the most brilliant military commander the world has ever known.

The reason they need him so much is because earth is under threat by an alien race known as the “buggers.” This nickname was coined because of the insect-like appearance of the creatures and also because all attempts at communicating with them have failed - we simply don’t have anything else to call them. Countless thousands of humans died in the first invasion. Humanity now prepares to send troops to the bugger homeworld before the aliens can launch a second. And if Ender Wiggin’s training is successful, he will be the one to lead the battle.

By all appearances, this is a fairly standard alien invasion yarn that doesn’t seem to be saying anything startling, but what makes this book great is that it is told from the perspectve of a young boy. We get to share in and empathise with all his fears and hopes. Emotionally he is much like any other boy, but intellectually he is on another plane. A large part of the book is taken up with Ender’s training in the anti-gravity Battleroom; the strategies he comes up with for beating his opponents are simple yet brilliant, and a joy to discover.

To cap it all, the novel finishes with the most unpredicatable ending to a galactic-scale war that I could ever imagine.

Ender’s Game has, over time, become the first volume in a quadrilogy. All of the books are worth reading, but this one is without doubt the best. More recently the novel has spawned a spin-off series called the Shadow saga, which is concerned with Ender’s friends from Battle School.

It’s good to see this edition of Ender’s Game repackaged as a young adult novel. This is a wonderful adventure to be read and enjoyed by all ages.

Different Seasons by Stephen King

These days Stephen King releases books with such a regularity that it’s a rare opportunity to be able to invest the time in reading one of his older works. As I write, his latest books Everything’s Eventual and From a Buick 8 are sitting on the shelf waiting. And no doubt he’ll have another on the market before I get those finished.

I would hazard a guess that a few lesser known facts about Stephen King are that the films Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and Apt Pupil are all based on novellas written by the “master of the macabre” himself. And lo and behold, those three novellas are to be found here in Different Seasons, along with a fourth, The Breathing Method - one for each season of the year.

The book kicks off with The Shawshank Redemption (more fully titled Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption). It’s always a pain when you’ve seen the movie before reading the book, but Shawshank happens to be one of my favourite all-time films. The novella covers pretty much the same ground as the film, with some elements omitted. In fact, this is one the extremely rare occasions when I would dare to say that the film excels the book. Still, a great prison break story from Stevie.

Apt Pupil comes next and was for me the highlight of the collection. It’s a story about a teenage boy blackmailing a Nazi war criminal who’s living incognito in modern-day America. Uniquely, there are no especially likeable characters in the tale, not even the teenager, but it works wonderfully because we can all relate to the boy; we all know something about being corrupted by bad things and how hard it can be to free ourselves. This is the story of one boy who goes too far.

The Body is the original title of Stand by Me. I get the feeling that this is a very personal tale by Stephen King, and it pains me to have to say it’s my least favourite. It’s essentially a nostalgia trip to childhood. Four eleven-year-old boys journey through the woods to locate a dead body - the unwary victim of a passing train. And whilst there’s a lot of fun and laughter along the way, the inital premise just isn’t interesting enough to carry the story. Worse still, there a terrible sadness running through the core of the tale that I found hard to bear. We learn about damaged family relationships and abusive parents, about how friends can hold you back, about feeling trapped in a dead-end town. It’s all stated very matter-of-factly without any hope of change. This novella depressed me.

The Breathing Method is the shortest novella in the volume and is the story of an unmarried pregnant woman determined to give birth despite the most immsense of obstacles. A little heavy on background info and short on action, it’s nevertheless an enjoyable read. Interestingly, the story finishes with what could be interpreted as a reference to King’s The Dark Tower fantasy series. Whilst King has made reference to this series in many novels, I think this is the earliest one I have ever encountered, and I believe The Breathing Method was written long before much of The Dark Tower. Isn’t that strange?

The Folk of the Fringe by Orson Scott Card

I bought this novel many year ago, not knowing who Orson Scott Scott was, nor having read his excellent Ender’s Game. I found The Folk of the Fringe in a bargain bucket at my newsagents, and purchased it because I was in the mood for an end-of-the-world story. The cover illustration showed a band of scruffy travellers walking along a path towards a ruined city - right up my street. Expecting a decent read, little did I know that this would turn out to be an absolute gem of a book. And, having re-read the book recently, I enjoyed it even more the second time round.

This is a collection of five tales - technicially two novellas and three stories. They take place in a slightly future America in the aftermath of a limited nuclear strike. Limited is the important word, because there are still survivors. They fall into two categories: those who wish to rebuild civilization and those who wish to fill their own pockets. I won’t give you synopses of the stories, but I will say that they are all about the theme of belonging - about the bonds we form with other people and about what we suffer without those bonds. Jamie Teague, the protagonist from the first story, is a loner who makes a living by travelling all across the country and scavenging for items to trade. Everything changes for him when he encounters a group of naive travelling Mormons; he decides to help them before some mobbers arrive and help themselves. Deaver, the protagonist of the second story, is a non-Mormon coping with live in a society of Mormons. Carpenter is a man who feels like an outsider, not because of personal choice or location, but because he has cerebral palsy. These are stories about people who live on the “fringe,” whether literally or figuratively.

These stories are only loosely termed science fiction. They are strongly character-driven tales. In fact, they contain some of the richest depictions of characters I have ever read. The author himself is a Mormon and he mentions his religion a lot. This might be off-putting to the potential reader, but you should persevere. It’s clear the author is not out looking for converts, and the characters in the stories are made all the richer because Card is drawing from his own understanding of life. As a Christian, I related to the mind-set of many of the characters.

I can see how people might dislike this book - an athiest who likes ideas-driven fiction, for instance. For me, The Folk of the Fringe is the strangest, most beautiful, collection of post-apocalyptic stories I’m ever likely to find. They are full of heart.