John Metcalfe, The Feasting Dead
***
Exhumed from the Arkham House archive, this vampiric ghost story is billed as a criminally overlooked horror classic. That's going a bit far.
If it was bundled with other novellas and short stories in an anthology of obscurities, there's a good chance it'd be one of the stand-outs. If it had been adapted for a murky seventies TV anthology, it'd be fondly remembered. But as a stand-alone volume, it doesn't do much to justify a place on your classics shelf.
Roger Zelazny, Isle of the Dead
1969 / Audiobook / 190 pages / USA
***
Zelazny's anachronistic future has some unique touches that make it stand apart from your standard Silver Age sci-fi setting. So it's a shame he cheapens it by making it the story of an unenlightened 20th century businessman who made his way to the future the long way round and ends up doing preposterously well for himself in this brave new world. What's the male equivalent of a Mary Sue?
It might just be that I've watched a lot of Red Dwarf recently, but from prolonged suspended animation to psychic terraforming, I have a feeling this slim volume had a place on Grant Naylor's collective bookshelf.
Iain Banks, Dead Air
2002 / Audiobook / 408 pages / UK
**
There are some differences though. The author stand-in's monologues are now more tedious (even if he's basically right, I found myself siding with the interfering squares questioning the point of it all), his irresistibility to women comes off like wish fulfillment, the jeopardy's entirely his own fault, so he deserves what's coming to him, and Complicity wasn't turned around with ambitious haste to provocatively position itself as a landmark of Post-9/11 Literature.
It's not my least favourite Banks book, but that's only because he wrote Canal Dreams.
Various, Dead Funny Encore: More Horror Stories by Comedians
2016 / Ebook / 256 pages / UK/Australia
****
This feels like a more consistent collection than the first one, mainly because all the contributors understood what it was this time, and again it's mostly entertaining. The comedians don't all feel pressured to be funny, but it's better when they do.
Faves: Stewart Lee's 'Test Pressing,' Rufus Hound's 'Date Night,' Alan Moore's 'Cold Reading.'
Worsties: Alice Lowe's 'Carnival,' James Acaster's 'To Do,' Natalie Haynes' 'The Basement Conversion.'
