The Disassembled Man by Jon Bassoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Disassembled man was my third read from author Jon Bassoff and his debut novel, from his other two stories the darkly disturbing Corrosion and the instantly forgettable Factory Town it would be interesting to see where this one would go. The Disassembled Man is told in a brash, maniacal first person narrative in true psychopathic style with lashings of dark and dirty humour.

Frankie Avicious is a man with a plan, one that's creeped up on him over time, shitty job at the slaughterhouse and a wife who has loads of potential in the wealth department but has let herself go somewhat over the years. Change is coming, he's making promises he can't possibly keep but that's not going to stop him trying and once you take the first step there’s no going back.

First off, he's in love with a stripper who sees him more as a stalker than a love interest, he hates his obese wife with a passion but her father is the big knob on the hill, a man with serious money. Now how can he get his hands on all that money and run away with the stripper of his dreams? It's gonna take some careful planning, or maybe not, let's just kill the old man, wife will inherit the money and then kill her, simple as.

Prepare yourself for a ride of carnage as possibly the most morally repressed man you've ever come across dives into a killing spree that would make psychos are us extremely proud.

Ruth is the wife and it would be fair to say that Frankie's love for her has waned just slightly over the years.

'She had more rolls than a bakery and more chins than a Hong Kong phone book.'

Tongue in cheek humour and violence follow after an argument.

'I should tell you now that Ruth suffered from a rare psychological disorder called insanity. The doctors gave her medication to stabilize her moods, but she must have forgotten to take her magic pills that day. In the wink of a con artist’s eye, she went from behaving like a loving housewife to a wild-eyed psychopath.'

And the punch that changes everything.

'but in all my life I don’t think I’d ever landed a better blow than this one. My fist vibrated, and she just stood there for a moment— the way a cartoon character remains suspended after walking off a cliff— then her knees gave way, and she collapsed to the floor.'

Frankie then has to win his Ruth back after she storms off, with money at the forefront of his mind, when he finally manages to convince her of his love it comes at a cost. A steamy night of passion and some hilarious scenes as Frankie in his mind goes to battle with a sexual tyrannosaurus.

'Then, like a Japanese kamikaze pilot, I readied myself for destruction. I dove into bed and was quickly smothered by the beached whale that was my wife.'

A mysterious traveling salesman named Jack Marteau takes an interest in hard drinking Frankie's fate as it becomes just a matter of time before he gets what's coming to him.

The Disassembled Man is a cringingly entertaining trip that has plenty of laughs, a war zones worth of violence and slaughter, some deranged family moments including incest and more than a fair share of depravity. All for money, the root of all evil but it's never that easy or we'd all have plenty of it. If moral fortitude and goodness of heart is what you're after then you're knocking on the wrong door with this story, prepare yourselves is all I will say.


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The Devil Gave Them Black Wings by Lee Thompson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Devil Gave Them Black Wings is a supernatural tinged thriller that resides in the aftermath of the falling twin towers.

Jacob walks a life of misery and despair, his wife lost in the disaster and he seeks closure, if it can ever be gained in the loss of a loved one, by burying her ashes at the house she grew up in. He can't find the house though and spends his time drinking in the park, sinking into the depths of depression.

This is where he meets Nina, a thirteen year old girl who recognises the sadness in him and also the goodness, he's broken and she needs to fix him.

'Her heart was pounding because he looked so goddamn lost, so in need of help, but she couldn’t help him, even at thirteen she knew that no matter how much somebody else needed you, you couldn’t change a thing in their lives: you could only listen if they spoke, and you could only hold them if they leaned on you.'

At the same time a little girl goes missing from the park, an abduction and a frenzy. People search for Jacob, the authorities, his wife's brother, Nina is desperate to see him and to warn him. Amidst the search for an abductor there's a dark, shadowy figure with names tattooed up his arms, a guardian or something much worse, a sheer nightmare.

'Only his features seemed to pulse, one moment blurry, the next razor sharp, then they’d blur again and for the life of him Jacob knew that if he looked away he would never be able to describe the man to anyone.'

A reporter toys with more depravity as she figures the abduction forms a pattern, a police officer looking for revenge and in the middle, one man grieving and one morally perceptive young girl deeply troubled by those around her.

'How much grief did you have to suffer, he wondered, before your mind shattered and you couldn’t keep anything straight.'

The Devil Gave Them Black Wings is a beautifully written tale of anguish, despair and immense sadness. A story of depth that is heart rending in places, the loss of a young love, a child not yet born and if that wasn't enough, a girl kidnapped in broad daylight. The parents distraught and burdened beyond measure with the knowledge that blame will never be far from thought.

Emotional just doesn't seem to cover it, there is darkness in people just as there is light and Lee Thompson expresses it better than most, flips between the two in the blink of an eye and you can't help being gripped by it all. I highlighted that many quotes that I actually found it difficult to pick the right ones for the review and that just about says it.

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14

14 by Peter Clines
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When broke and directionless Nate Tucker finds an extremely affordable apartment, things quickly take an odd turn. Why does the light in Nate's kitchen always act like a black light? What's with the seven legged cockroaches? And why are all the other apartments as quirky as his? That's what Nate and the other tenants of the Kavach building aim to find out. But will they survive what they find?

After reading The Fold, I had the fever and the only cure was more Peter Clines! 14 has all of what I loved about The Fold and was quite an engaging read.

14 is the tale of an apartment building that has more mysteries than the entire run of Murder, She Wrote. As Nate compares notes with the other tenants, the Kavach building slowly gives up her secrets. I could easily see 14 being an episode of The Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits.

When the purpose of the Kavach building was finally revealed, I was one happy monkey. To prevent spoilage, I'll only say that I didn't see it coming and I was really glad the direction the book went in after that.

Clines' writing is very suspenseful and the way he gradually revealed the history and purpose of the building was masterfully done. If the book has one weakness, I'd say it was the characters. Nate, Tim, and Veek were the only ones I was terribly attached to. The others were immigrants from Clicheville, if you ask me.

All the tie-ins to The Fold made me glad I read that book first. Actually, now I'm waiting for Clines to write another book to tie in with them.

That's about all I have to say. 14 has everything I look for in an odd read and was very enjoyable. Four out of five stars.

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Over The Wild Blue Yonder

The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45 by Stephen E. Ambrose
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Slow down with that zipping and zooming about, whipper-snapper! This is a far tamer tale. Like the planes Stephen E. Ambrose is describing herein, his prose plods along at a steady, satisfying pace. These are not jet fighters, these are workhorses carrying out a task.

The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45 is just as much the story of George McGovern as it is of the pilots and crews of those famous World War II bombers. McGovern is most famously known as the Democratic candidate who lost to Nixon in the 1972 election, the year the Democratic National Headquarters was raided by Republican operatives in the dead of night during a little incident you may have heard of called Watergate. Prior to that, he piloted one of these finicky, taxing aerial beasts.



Ambrose wisely uses McGovern's wartime experience as a template and as the narrative thread for his treatise on the B-24, infusing a dull, non-fiction text with a human element, a technique in vogue with popular, modern day historians. The people like a good story. McGovern's life is perfectly entertaining in this context, but Ambrose heightens his book's readability by adding in the stories of other pilots and those of McGovern's flight crew. All of which turns a book about a plane into something much more humanistic. The reader can't help but develop an attachment to these courageous men.

The Wild Blue is a solid niche book for those familiar with WWII, but who want to have a deeper understanding of this specific facet of the war.

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True Grit

Charles Portis
Simon & Schuster
Reviewed by Nancy
5 out of 5 stars

Wow, what a great story! Mattie Ross is just 14 years old when she hooks up with Rooster Cogburn, the “meanest” U.S. Marshal, to avenge her father, killed by an outlaw who took advantage of his good nature.

Mattie endures bad weather, illness, grueling hours on horseback, runs into outlaws, and fights off rattlesnakes. She’s tough-talking, honest, loyal, fearless, and I enjoyed every moment with her. I also loved the realistic historical details and well-drawn secondary characters. The gruff and unkempt Rooster Cogburn was a perfect match for the stubborn and willful teenager.

Mattie’s thoughts and exchanges with Rooster were hilarious.

“Nature tells us to rest after meals and people who are too busy to heed that inner voice are often dead at the age of fifty years."

“I had hated these ponies for the part they played in my father’s death but now I realized the notion was fanciful, that it was wrong to charge blame to these pretty beasts who knew neither good nor evil but only innocence. I say that of these ponies. I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces?”

The story is told by Mattie 50 years later. She is wealthy, unmarried, churchgoing, and as spirited as she was when she was a teen.

Though I’ve never been a fan of John Wayne films, I really enjoyed this classic. The remake, directed by the Coen brothers and starring Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, is also well worth watching.

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Half the World

Half the World by Joe Abercrombie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thorn's a girl touched by mother war who fights every day to become a warrior. She finds herself bruised, bloodied, and named a murderer by her teacher. Thorn becomes indebted and oath bound to serve Father Yarvi as he schemes to find allies against the High King. She crosses half the world in search of allies for Gettland while making some of her own like Brand a warrior who wants to do good more than anything.

Half the World is a strong sequel to Half a King. Half the World has politics, conflict, and battle galore.

While being a sequel and seeing many familiar characters such as Father Yarvi, Queen Laithlin, and King Uthil, the story changes it's point of view. Instead of having one point of view character in Yarvi we get two point of view characters in Thorn and Brand. This change strengthens the story and the mystery because Thorn and Brand are young and don't know much of what's happening at any given time unlike Father Yarvi who's pulling many of the strings.

I really enjoy the characters particularly Father Yarvi, Thorn, and Brand. I must admit that I miss the younger Yarvi from Half A King. Father Yarvi is a harder man who isn't afraid to do what's necessary for the greater good of Gettland. This Yarvi is a deep cunning man who seems like the type who rarely jokes or even smiles. He's a man that's seen too much of the darkness in the world and will never be the same because of it. Father Yarvi is a stronger more determined man than Yarvi from Half a King.

Thorn is interesting because of her personality. Thorn starts out as a fiery young woman who has trained with the young men her entire life. She is fierce and stubborn while being quite capable in battle against the young men of her age. She goes from being an arrogantly proud annoyance who thinks too highly of herself and her skills to a fairly humble woman who has skills worth bragging about. It's also interesting that despite being a warrior woman Abercrombie gave her some insecurities. It's good to see heroes and heroines who are far from perfect. Thorn's vulnerability made her more relatable.

Brand is interesting because of his convictions. Brand desires to be warrior like the ones in the songs. He wants a band of brothers to stand shield to shield with while earning glory and riches. Above all Brand believes he desires, he wants to do good. Brand is constantly striving to do good throughout the book despite the consequences. Brand is the character I find myself relating to the most.

The biggest surprise to me was to see Abercrombie put together a love story in the midst of all the conflict. The author captured perfectly that awkward excitement of being a teenager in love. The characters uncertainty, desire, and misunderstandings mixed into a quite familiar feeling of being a teenager who has developed romantic feelings for someone. I have to say it even had me remembering my own awkward teenage infatuations.

Joe Abercrombie truly captures the futility of war. His characters talk of the songs sung, the scars earned, and the reputations won all the while showing how different the truth is from a song. He doesn't make it seem glorious, but rather haunting.

One of my favorite parts of reading Half the World and all of Joe Abercrombie's work is his powerful quotes. Joe Abercrombie is one of the most quotable authors in fantasy today. One of my favorite quotes from Half the World was, “Those with bad luck should at least attempt to balance it with good sense.” Another quote I particularly like was this one on relationships, “I always thought of being together as the end of the work. Turns out it's where the work starts.”

Half the World isn't exactly what I expected in a sequel, it's even better. The new characters Thorn and Brand carry the story in a way I never expected and that made it a memorable sequel. I excitedly look forward to the trilogy's conclusion.

4 out of 5 stars

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Half A King

Half a King by Joe Abercrombie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have to admit I wasn't sure what to expect with Half a King. Having Lord Grimdark himself Joe Abercrombie write a young adult novel didn't fill me with confidence regarding this book...but I was wrong.

Half a King is another strong book from Abercrombie about a boy with a deformed hand who should have never been king in Yarvi. Yarvi was training to be a minister when disaster struck in the form of his father and brother being killed. Yarvi then becomes king, gets engaged to his cousin, and vows to get revenge on those who killed his father and brother. Things go downhill for Yarvi quickly after that.

Yarvi strikes me as a young Tyrion Lannister before having the first of Tywin's sharp lessons. Though he's clearly intelligent he's a bit naive which leads him into the trouble that is the bulk of Half a King. The parallels between Yarvi and Tyrion are clear. They most clearly each share a physical deformity that makes others overlook them in a world where warriors are more important than basically everyone else.

My only complaint is I found the books major twists quite predictable. It's a shame because I love being unsure of the major twists, but I figured out the ending half way through the book.

In most ways this book seemed normal for a Joe Abercrombie book except there aren't any sex scenes or even described nudity. So if anyone likes Abercrombie, but dislikes the sex scenes this is probably a book for that person. Also anyone who is a fan of Abercrombie will find plenty to enjoy in Half a King.

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SHIPWRECK BY LOUIS BEGLEY

Shipwreck by Louis Begley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”The conclusion I reached came down to this: none of my books, neither the new novel nor any I had written before, was very good. Certainly, none possessed the literary merit that critical opinion ascribed to them. Not even my second novel, the one that won all the prizes and was said to confirm my standing as an important novelist. No, they all belonged to the same dreary breed of unneeded books.”



The trouble with John North, as it is for most of us, is in his head. It is the spectre of self-doubt that begins to violate his normal sensibilities regarding himself and his work. Every award he has ever won has been pandering. Everything he has ever created is far short of where he wishes it could be. He is in the midst of a full blown mid-life crises.

We first meet John North when he encounters a man in a café called L’Entre Deux Mondes. Over numerous hours and too many bottles of whiskey North relates what he calls the story of his life to this man. It isn’t his entire life for he is mostly obsessed with only a few months of his life. In this short span he learns more about himself than he has in all the rest of the years of his life put together. Louis Begley leaves it up to the reader to determine if the man in the bar is really there or a doppelganger. I like to think that North is slowly getting completely smashed and telling his story back to himself. He is a writer after all. He naturally must analyse what he knows. How could he possibly help but change the narrative?

As doubt is wrapping itself around all that he believes about himself, he meets a journalist in Paris. He is there to do some interviews around the coming film based on his first book. Léa, works for Vogue, but fashion isn’t really her game. Her main preoccupation seems to be in collecting interesting, successful men. ”I had taken stock of her skin, nose, and pouting lips. Now with her opulent blond mane so close to my face, as I stared at those fabulous legs and imagined the shape and heft of her breasts, I became aroused. There was no doubt about it: she was truly beautiful. And seductive beyond what I had imagined.”

Beauty, so easy to come by when one is still blooming. Lust, so easy to inspire when one is unhindered by the passing of decades. Desire, so easy to achieve when genetics gives one universal appeal. A word of caution though, everything in this world is on a lend lease contract.

North is old enough to be Léa’s father which is immaterial to anything, after all he doesn’t want to marry her. He only wants to borrow her exuberance, her taut skin, and feel the allure of youth again. The point is that this is to be an affair, a short lived affair.

No one need find out.

He is, after all, happily married to his accomplished, desirable, and devoted wife Lydia. He is reassured by the fact that Léa tells him about all the ongoing affairs she is having with various men she has met while doing her job. This can all be justified.

”People are most often wrong about sex. As you have probably guessed, I opened this parenthesis, which I will soon close, to demonstrate that, contrary to ignorant middle-class prejudice, which holds that men become ‘fucked out,’ intense and inventive lovemaking with a woman who is a great lay...rebounds to the sexual benefit of the wife. The husband’s interest in women, and in the unbeatable pleasure to be found in fornication, rises sky-high.”

So really he is having sex with Léa to improve the already (he admits this) wonderful sexual relationship he has with Lydia. I would have more respect for North if he would just admit that he wants his cake and be able to eat it, too. He wants to feel more alive. He wants to steal some inspiration from Léa and hopefully improve the way he feels about himself.

Of course, there is guilt; it is hard to escape the gloom of remorse. There is also fear, the nerve jangling anxiety of Lydia finding out. Léa, as it turns out, knows a lot of people that know him. How quickly the jubilation over his conquest is replaced with the trepidation over the possibility of being caught. Misgivings are flooding his mind even before the soiled sheets of his hotel bed can be changed.



Part of the attraction of the luscious Léa is her easy availability. North didn’t have to chase. He simply had to take advantage of her enamored view of him. He had to allow himself to be collected, to become a notch on her bedpost, a small part of her unpublished memoirs of the men she had seduced. Another calculating aspect to this situation is that this is a woman who is used to men cumming coming and going out of her life.

She won’t be any trouble.

In his overall assessment of the situation, his own arrogance may have miscalculated the possibility that she might become obsessed with him.

North is brimming with arrogance, hopeful, blessed arrogance that he will manage to extract himself with his superior wit mingled with a heavy dose of dumb luck. As it turns out, he may have to resort to much more sinister scheming as his desperation becomes more acute.



Skimming through a few other reviews, it seems that people are struggling with the fact that North is not a likeable character. I must say he can’t help that... he “was drawn that way.” Of course, that was Begley’s intention to create this man so truly misguided, so bored with his own successes, so deluded by childish logic, and so unbelievably self-centered that by the end of the novel whatever sympathy or dollop of respect you might have for the man will easily float in the neck of a freshly opened bottle of whiskey. The Begley writing, as always, is superb. You want to like North just because he is allowed to express himself so well. He might even convince you, briefly, that his rationales are...well..rational. North is a wonderful character study that might even convince a few men to not put their pet bunnies at risk of being found on the kitchen stove in a hot pot.

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Black Cat Mojo by Adam Howe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Black Cat Mojo, how best to describe this collection of 4 short stories, well I had more fun than a tornado in a trailer park, its just graceful as a pig on ice, lower then a mole's belly button on digging day and hotter than two hampsters farting in a wool sock.

If your mind regularly trips or even gets pushed down to gutter level and don't we all occasionally, then you'll be in heaven with these tales off debauchery and immoral wickedness.

First up is Of 'Badgers & Porn Dwarfs' staring Rummy the famous porn star dwarf with the foot long schlong. A thoroughly twisted, funny as fuck journey into redneck land where Rummy the tripod is kidnapped by a couple of hillbillies after killing their prize badger. Recompense is required and they're going to film him doing the nasty with their Momma.

I could go quote mad here.

'Momma made a gurgling noise, deep in her throat. She started teasing up the tarp, flashing Rummy some leg. Literally: one leg. She’d lost the other leg above the knee, probably to diabetes. All that remained was a gnarly stump, baby’s ass-pink at the sawed-off end. The leftover limb—and the other leg, for that matter—was rashed with bedsores and bristling with coarse black hair. She was naked below the waist. Her leg and stump led to a bush like a verminous haystack. The old hag’s labia grinned at Rummy through a rat’s nest of wiry hair, the withered brown lips glistening like something gone spoiled in a fishmonger’s window. Yolky yellow mucus oozed down her inner thighs, pooling on the bed.'

Nasty.

"Just to warn you,”Troy said. “Momma’s a squirter, so hold on tight."

Seriously I'm so tickled I can't get my leg down.

There's more of course, comparisons to a fisherman's bait box, you get the idea it's all deep down dirty humour and refreshing in a way it really shouldn't be.


The second story is 'Jesus In a dog's Ass', Hank and Marsha live in a trailor, Hanks just bought a video camera with the intention of filming their sexual shenanigans and selling it. Big bucks, he thinks, while Marsha is completely unaware of his plan. So he sets about getting some practice in by filming the dog taking a dump.

'Hank started filming the dog doing his business . Hank was sure other folks would find it just as funny as he did. He figured he’d film a few weeks worth of shitting, then edit the footage together with a music track playing— Duelin’ Banjos, say— put it up on YouTube with a catchy title— SCOOTER TAKING A SHIT.’

Then something amazing happens, watching the footage they see Jesus in the you know where. This starts an avalanche that can't be stopped, there's queues at the door and people are paying 5 bucks to spend time looking at Scooters ass.

Now this story goes in tandem with two of the finest crooks you'll ever come across, if stupid could fly then these guys would be the fastest jets on the planet. I mean these guys rob the piss wagon so a sample doesn't make it back to the lab to be tested, there's more to it but this really is fucking priceless. And then another genius plan.

Now the other two stories were ok but I was just blown away with the first two as you can probably tell. Well worth giving this a try it's near to the knuckle and very well written.

This was provided by the author in return for a completely unbiased review and I'm pretty fucking glad he did.

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The Ghosts Of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms

The Ghosts Of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms by Connie Barlow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Ghosts of Evolution is an account of fruits and their missing seed dispersers.

Ever wonder what eats crazy-looking fruits like the Osage Orange? It could be that nothing living does, that the preferred organism for spreading the seed has been lost to the sands of time. Connie Barlow investigates fruits from around the world and points out the probable ecological anachronisms.

For instance, the avocado seems to be intended to be devoured whole by some megafauna, possible a ground sloth, but no such megafauna exists in its range. Fortunately for some of the tastier species, mankind has taken on the role of seed dispersement but some species aren't so lucky.

The Ghosts of Evolution was one of the more interesting non-fiction books I've ever read. It made me harken back to my pre-teen days of wanting to be a scientist, several years before deciding having friends was more important than being the smartest kid in the room. What was I thinking?

Anyway. The Ghosts of Evolution is a fascinating exploration of the ecosystem and what happens when it gets disrupted. Four out of five stars.

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