Fraternal Fragments - my review of Road Brothers by Mark Lawrence

My goodreads target of 42 books to be read (and reviewed) in 2015 continues to mock me, supremely confident in its inevitable victory as - even now - I just crawl over the halfway line. However, I am determined to go down fighting and Mark Lawrence's latest publication - an anthology of short stories about Jorg and his brothers - is an easily digested morsel which nonetheless packs quite a punch.

Jorg bestrode the Broken Empire trilogy dominating his stage as completely and charmingly as Shakespeare's Richard III.  With a central character of captivating brilliance, I found that the brothers sometimes struggled to illuminate and define themselves. It is like the search for planets orbiting distant stars (exo-planet) where the planet's characteristics must either inferred from the effect they have on the central star, or can be observed directly only when the central star is obscurred.

Photo by Gemini Observatory - an exo planet (Brother Makin perhaps) outshone by a central star (Jorg of course)

This collection of short stories offers plenty of opportunity for individual brothers to showcase the subtle nuances of their own pasts, free from Jorg's dazzling light.  We see Makin (twice), Red Kent, Brother Sim, the Nuban and of course Rike operating alone, driven (mostly) by their own motivations.  It is interesting to see, in Makin and Kent's stories particularly, how slim is the line between the bandits and those that they prey on.  Jorg's rampaging band of brothers, after all, was not a single abherration in the midst of a perfect civilisation (it's not called the broken Empire for nothing).  They were one band amongst many in an era reminiscent of the 12th century turbulence of King Stephen and the Empress Matilda - a time when it was said that God and his Saints slept.

There are also two stories specifically about Jorg - "Select Mode" and "Sleeping Beauty" - which I have a particular fondness for having read both when they were previously published.  As a result of one of Mark's many competitions, I got to do a sound recording of  Select Mode while the author Richard Ford did  a recording of Sleeping Beauty. I liked the economy of Select Mode - an insight into a young man still near the start of his road career.  Sleeping Beauty, a longer piece, has all of Mark's inventiveness, more of Jorg's cussed refusal to lose, and an entertaining take on some familiar fairy tales.

You can listen to both audio recordings here.

Select Mode - read by T.O.Munro

Sleeping Beauty - read by Richard Ford

Right up until the end of this collection of short stories, I was unsure which would be my favourite.  I had always liked Sir Makin and the Nuban so their tales - filling in back stories in a way which made sense of their behaviours in the main trilogy - had a head start insecuring my affections.

But then I read the last story that of Father Gomst, and here perhaps I return to my initial observation for - intriguing as Father Gomst is - this is a story of the Ancraths - dazzlingly dark as they outshine all others.  Gomst appears in their lives with all the hope but none of the power of a Mary Poppins figure put in charge of a murderously rebellious nursery of two young brothers. In this story we see Olidan - instinctively cruel. We see Jorg aged six and you may, like me, be reminded of the Jesuit saying, "Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man."  We also see William aged four and see how even the very young can manipulate and control adults, snaring them in a mesh of their own threats and promises.  It is this story too, where lines of Lawrence's prose most readily leapt out of the page at me.

"Clergy, no matter their station, do not bow to crowns, but Gomst felt the pressure on his shoulders even so."

"Gomst had told bigger lies for worse reasons.  One could hardly rise in Roma's church these days without a crooked tongue."

"Lies are soft and accomodating.  The truth is hard, full of uncomforatble angles. It rarely helps anyone."

In this venture Mark Lawrence joins the ranks of the self-published authors - or at least hybrid authors - ably assisted by Pen Astridge's wonderfully professional cover.

Within all the stories and their footnotes, there are massive spoilers for the Broken Empire trilogy, fateful forecasts and promises - enough to make those of us who have read to the end of Emperor of Thorns, smile at a circle completed, while others new to Jorg would find the trilogy denuded of some of its biggest twists.

But then, although these stories mostly precede the trilogy's bifurcated chronologies,  they were not intended as an introduction to Jorg's tale, so much as an opportunity for those of us who loved it to revist some old acquaintances an ambition it fulfils splendidly.


I might also mention at this point that I too have found some inspiration in Jorg's tale, having twice used him as the subject of entries in fan-fiction themed short story competitions at Fantasy Faction, so for those still hungering for Jorg related short stories, my own offerings are here.

The Road to Arrrow (Feb 2014 Fanfic entry)

Kittens, always the kittens (Feb 2015 Fanfic entry)

 

 

A Dark Light shines - My Spoiler Free Review of Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu

Well... what can I say.  I started this book (a Novella it is true) last night and finished it 21 hours later in two sittings separated by the necessity of 5 hours sleep and the irritation of an 11 hour working day - a day incidentally when my thoughts strayed several times to Montessa Tovar and Lu and what must still lie ahead of them.

The book naturally falls into two parts - two acts in an electrifying drama, well suited to my bifurcated reading schedule. It is difficult to write about either half without littering this review with spoilers, but then a book is far more than its plot.  Characters drive a story's beating heart and quality writing is the lifeblood that courses through its veins.  It is this which transforms the bare bones of a story, the nuts and bolts of plot and scene, into a haunting reading experience to send ripples of shivers down your spine. 

Mercedes M Yardley has deftly drawn a mesmerising pair of deeply damaged people in Montessa and Lulu.  Montessa is a young woman doing exotic dances in a seedy bar so that an ungrateful boyfriend can be kept supplied with the means to abuse her.

Lu?  Well Lu is a truck driver.  To be honest it took a little while for me to work that out - the "semi" being an idiom that does not cross the Atlantic well.  I mean I could tell it was a vehicle but in the UK a semi is a house, a semi-detached house -  one of conjoined pair that populate housing estates and suburban streets across the land. 

In essence Lu and Montessa meet and what follows is a road trip of sorts - but Thelma and Louise it most definitely isn't.

Yardley writes dark stories, stories that delve into bleak corners of human existence. Like the spot beams of those deepwater submersibles probing ancient wrecks, her writing shines unaccustomed light on dark creatures slumbering within the human psyche. It can make for an uncomfortably convincing read - desperate people, desperate circumstances rendered with such vivid credibility.  And even in horror something beautiful can flower - like the poppies in the Flanders fields.

Yardley's stories always challenge the reader, flirting with violence but never indulging in it. For Yardley it is always about what the mind thinks more than what the body feels - it is about the experience of being human while perched on the brink between life and death. And that evocative theme is always well served by Yardley's elegant economical prose while the reassuringly surreal touches that augment her characters remind us it is only a story.

I dare not say more, it is too short a book to risk spoiling with the merest hint of what might happen.  I will just quote one short early passage which struck me with the powerfully simple insight into  Montessa's working life as she packs up at 3.a.m.

"She put her six inch stilettos in her purse, along with her dancing costume. It didn't take much room."  

When I read Yardley's work I am put in mind of the opening verse of Don Maclean's soft lyrical tribute to Van Gogh

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul

Though maybe it is the darkness in everyone's soul which she captures in those quick short sentences as she paints a page in red and black.

A Walk on the Dark Side - my spoiler-free review of "Without Light or Guide" by Theresa Frohock

I treasure ARCs. Those advance review copies which can be procured by attracting attention through virtuously diligent blogging, or perhaps just by whining in the right ear like a plaintive five year old with sufficient tenacity to crumble all resistance. I leave you to guess which approach has secured me two ARCs in as many weeks. 

Without Light or Guide is part two of Teresa Frohock's new series "Los Nefilim" where angels and daimons do battle in the mortal realm against the backdrop of the looming Spanish civil war and with the greater horror of the Second World War casting an even darker shadow over the plot.

These are short books, purposely so.  Ms Frohock describes them as novellas and at 128 pages each, so far, they are easily digested reads.  The impression is not so much of a sequence of books rather than a series of episodes.  The parallel that sprang into my mind was "The Sopranos" though I must confess to never having seen an episode. Los Nefilim are most definitely a "family" of secrecy, power and influence - though in a more virtuous service than the Tony Soprano - and each story is a self- contained bead on a longer and as yet indeterminate story thread.

In this second outing we get more insight into the workings of Los Nefilim and the minor factions and inner strife that besets any organisation of more than two people.  Diago is set loose on his first mission for Los Nefilim, some three weeks after the events described in "In Midnight's Silence" when he is still not fully recovered from his injuries. In particular he is afflicted by chromesthesia, a disorientating dizzying condition where sounds appear as colours.  The detail appealed to the physicist in me having used pitch and colour as similes for each other through years of high school teaching.

Miquel and Rafael are the ones keeping the home fires burning in this episode, forging a tight knit family unit, while Diago struggles to prove his value and his loyalty in his new sworn allegiance. But there are those amongst his new friends who do not trust him and, to be honest, I am not sure how far he should trust them. 

Lurking outside Los Nefilim are the panoply of angels, not a homogenous host in the service of a single purpose, but a group that seems to be tottering on the brink of a schism such as has split many faiths and churches over the years.   And daimons and angels alike have an interest in the unique unmatched duality that is Diago, born of daimon and angel. To some he is an opportunity for power, to others an aberration beyond trust or comprehension. It is these twin perspectives on Frohock's intriguing hero which drive the story forward.

As with In Midnight's Silence, this is a lean spare story which indulges in little overt world building or exposition.  What we learn of the world we learn through the character's words and actions and these hint at a deeper plot, a darker but important conspiracy which ebbs and flows beneath the present urgent crises. I am sure there are things of great importance which I have been told as a reader and yet whose long term significance I have missed - but then I am sure it has escaped the central characters as well.

In this episode we see more of Guillermo leader of the Nefilim and others of his kind like Inspector Garcia Los Nefilim's grumpy plant within the local police force and Suero Guillermo's trusted driver. We begin to see how the Nefilim operate and interact with the world walking alongside mortals, sometimes spying on them, sometimes steering them yet all the while as invisible as the Rowling's wizards are to the muggles of Harry Potter's world.   One might wonder at why Spain is such a nexus for these powerful agents. When angels from other countries put in an appearance I found myself asking if there were Nefilim in those countries too and did they owe the same allegiance to Guillermo that Diago did.

In "Without Light or Guide" Frohock continues to carve out a unique path for herself through the hinterland of horror with an digression towards fantasy.  There are angels, daimons and vampires, there is magic of a different type woven with music, notes turned into weapons (I can only weakly guess that they are sharps rather than flats, though my ear is too dull to tell the difference).  I am not as widely read as I would like - though one might ask (with  a glace at most people's tottering TBR piles) who amongst us is. However, within my limited experience I struggle to find a comparator, a benchmark to set Frohock's work against and say - "It is like this but with a bit of that." 

And that has to be a good thing, we need works that defy categorisation for how else would we define new categories.

I Don't Write Steampunk, but SS Great Britain Might Just Inspire me to start

 After Bristolcon back in September, I had the chance to visit SS Great Britain, a magnificent piece of maritime heritage housed in the dry dock that built it over 150 years ago.  I hadn't realised that the ship had come back home from its resting place in the Falklands as long ago as 1970 and I cannot imagine how much work was involved in restoring the battered hulk to the glory of its heyday but I have to say it was worth every loving hour and penny exerted on it. 

 I will confess to a certain damp eyed moment as I looked at the pictures of the battered hull being brought up the River Avon to the dock that birthed it.  

In the gift shop I toyed with buying a book of all the preserved old ships around the world, and was pleased to find how many of them I had visited myself - having something of a fondness for tangible maritime history.





I have seen

HMS Gannet,
HMS Ocelot,
HMS Cavalier,
HMS Victory
HMS Warrior
HMS Belfast
The Cutty Sark,
The Mary Rose (well half of it)
The Medway Queen
The Kingswear Castle
as well as a working facsimile of HMS Endeavour.


Wonderful and intriguing as all those great ships were, I have to say that none of them quite come up to the total quality of exhibit that is SS Great Britain.

This was the Titanic of its day, pushing the boundaries of technology with an iron hull that lasted so well parts of it could be used to patch up a battered second world war cruiser nearly a hundred years after they were first forged. 

With the quality of restoration and the variety of exhibits in the accompanying museum it was like journeying back in time and Ash, my reluctant companion on a trip to see "another bloody boat" was quite won over by the experience even if she struggled somewhat to tell one end of the ship from the other and stood staring majestically over the stern in the mistaken belief that the steering wheel must be at the front.


The history of the ship's voyages, brought to life through an audio commentary and brilliantly evocative settings,  made me itch to write a story.  Forget all those authors obsessed with Victorian airships.  Take a stroll down the companionways of SS Great Britain and like me you may find your head filled with inspiration for a steampunk fantasy ocean voyage. 

If ever there was a ship ready to carry a disparate collection of desperate passengers and crew into adventure, then this was it. Murder, mayhem and monsters could stalk its elegant decks, who knows maybe some mad scientist's man-eating machine could be lurking in the hold.  It is a setting so powerfully complete that the whole idea of a steampunk novel has not just leapt onto my "to-be-written" list, but is leapfrogging several other stories along the way towards the top.

For those visitors of a bold (and vertigo-free) disposition there was even the opportunity to climb into the rigging (after appropriate safety training) and walk out on the yard arms like the sailors of old used to.









The interiors were gorgeously restored and my only regret is that I have so few photos to share, partly from pressure of time (we had an airplane to catch) and partly from a desire to savour the moment rather than record it, to soak up the atmosphere.  The steerage cabins up forward, the great galley kitchen, the bath and the "heads" complete with torn sheets of paper for the necessities. It is a marvellous experience and I guess that leaves just more for you to discover if you choose to visit yourselves.  I don't suppose every visitor has to be inspired to contemplate a steampunk novel by the experience, but I would be surprised if I was the only one.  

It's Complicated - a spoiler-free review of "Half a War" by Joe Abercrombie.

Joe Abercrombie draws his first foray into Young Adult genre fiction to a conclusion with another performance so pacy it smacks of blitzkrieg, or at least half a blitzkrieg,

As with the second book of the trilogy there is a shift of view point.  In Half the World Yarvi faded from being the point of view reluctant heir and story teller that we followed in Half a King to being an eminence grise, the puppet master pulling the strings to forge Thorn Bakhu and Brand into key pieces for his game of diplomacy. In the same way, Thorn and Brand step out of the limelight in Half a War to let a new trio of heroes lay claim to the stage.  (Is it only me who sees an arithmetic progression in the one hero for book one, two for book two and three for book three?)

In Half a War Abercrombie gives us Skara, princess and grand-daughter of a king, yet thrown on hard times and forced to argue her case with all the political and military might that Luxembourg might exert in a dispute between France and Germany.  Still, as the title of the first part of the book attests, "words are weapons" and Skara wields them with a skill that belies her years (after all this is a young adult novel)

Then there is Raith, fierce warrior or unrepentant murderer depending on which end of his sword you are looking from. A man raised to dizzy heights at the right hand of the hard to please, impossible to satisfy, Grom-gil-Gorm. 

And finally there is Koll - who we saw scampering up masts to his mother's dismay in Half the World and who is now Father Yarvi's heir apparent, committed to the ministry by duty and tempted from it by love.

With these three we can follow the complex political and military machinations of a national struggle for survival.  It is a tale well told and, in Skara we have a heroine who is no ass kicker as Thorn Bhaku was in Half the World. Perhaps that makes her more relatable? certainly it makes her different and different is always interesting.

And against them Abercrombie sets a new nemesis - Bright Yilling - captain of the High King's armies carving his way around the coast with skilful cruelty and a caustic wit.

The story swirls ferociously like a whirlpool on the Shattered Sea, toying with the reader through juxtapositions of success and failure, of threat and security, of love and despair. As the plot not so much unfolds as rollercoasters, I was left wondering at the rationale behind Abercrombie's bid for the YA readership.

Was he seeking to colonise a new genre? to invade it? or perhaps, more in keeping with the warlike Gettlanders and Vansterlanders, this was a raid into enemy territory to drag a new clutch of readers kicking and screaming back into the bowels of Grimdark fiction proper (if such a thing exists).  Certainly as the story progresses, happy endings and fine romances drift ever further from reach like a will-o-the-wisp.

This is after all a war and, not withstanding the book's title it is a total war where the stakes are raised so high no-one can afford either to leave the game or to lose it.  Battle lust and mendacious diplomacy compete to commit crimes of the most villainy and nobody's hand is entirely unstained by sin, save perhaps the fragile form of Skara and the worthy mountain that is Brand.

The love interests (for they are multiple) are complex like the politico-military backdrop.  Happy endings are for fairy tales and this is no fairy tale, even the elves -we discover - are not what we thought they were.  And when dust and lust has settled and a calm descends once more upon the shattered sea, we are left wondering how much has really changed, how much is ever changed through war? It is a grim business after all. 

Individuals do not win a war, they survive it, and not everyone can survive.  And that is where the YA readership splutter their last protests as Abercrombie drags them in triumph across the border of Grimdarkland.


 

Grimm Mistresses - a review of a collection of 5 dark tales edited by Stacey Turner

I'll be honest, I seized this book as a new formed Mercedes M Yardley addict.  A second read of "Pretty Little Dead Girls" left me so hungry for more I'd probably pay to read Ms Yardley's shopping lists. A quick trawl through the amazon pages threw up this anthology as the best (indeed in the midst of a publishing hiatus the only) source of my next fix. To see a novella length short story lurking in this admirable anthology of fairy tales would have been enough to lure me in to the purchase, even if every other short story in it had been Fifty Shades of Grey fan-fiction. In fact the other four stories were of an extremely high and enthralling quality so that the whole volume comfortably fitted into a working week of rather dark bedtime reading.

The premise of Grimm Mistresses is to have five female authors put an unconventional spin on some much loved Grimm's fairy tales.  The result is a handful of very diverse stories that are most certainly not for children (unless perhaps the child in question was Wednesday Addams). 


With some the original Grimm inspiration is more obvious than others - though it is possible that some picked a more obscure tale than others.  For example, The Leopard's Pelt - fascinating and well written as it was - triggered no tremor of Grimm resonance in my admittedly under-read mind - unless that is, the Swiss Family Robinson were a Grimm tale.  With all that, the stories still twist in quite convention defying ways. 

 

Little Dead Red by Mercedes M Yardley

But let us start with the story that brought me to this book.  "Little Dead Red" by Mercedes M. Yardley.  Ms Yardley said of the story "I think that's the darkest thing I've ever written. It was tough to write..."  This is a woman who routinely writes of serial killers, of death and mayhem all in a light lyrical prose that teeters on a tightrope above the abyss of hell.  A woman who coined a term not so much convention defying as convention defining in the phrase "whimsical horror." So if this is the darkest thing she has ever written then know it will send shivers so deep your bones will tremble for days.


That is not to say this is horrific, there is no gratuitous gore, only a glimpse of real credible people, broken people who a cruel fate has not yet finished with.  Marie is a guilt laden parent in a harrowing search for redemption at any price.  The writing is perfect.  Economical lines that build vibrant pictures in the reader's mind, images that remain long after the story is finished - burned into the retina of the imagination.  "...the flash of red Converse looking like fire flowing up the steps."

There was a film my wife and I watched once and she swore she could never watch it again.  The film was Wolfcreek, set in the Australian outback and based on true events. It centred on a very bad man and the three foolish young backpackers who fell into his power.  It was brilliantly convincing, the bad guy's contempt for humanity horrifically credible.  It was just too good at doing what it did to bear a second viewing.

Little Dead Red evoked for me that same intensity of emotion in a story that haunts me as few others have, though I will tease and torture myself by picking at a few lines here and there and maybe, one day, I will be brave enough to read it all again. 

Nectar by Allison M. Dickson

Henry goes on an unwise double date with his co-worker Greg. The fairy tale reference begins with the choice of names and becomes more overt as the date descends into and beyond a strangely depraved disaster.

The writing conjures up the jaded faded echo of a man that is Henry.  His bleak black outlook on life bleeding out with every cynical thought we share.  "I can tolerate a friendly dinner and head home, where Netflix, the only partner yet to disappoint me, awaits." This is a man who contemplated putting a bullet in his head but in searching the internet for the best shot to take instead "became distracted enough by irrelevant YouTube videos that the idea of suicide lost most of its allure."

However, when his unusual date draws him into a bizarre kind of honey trap, he finds a desire to carve out a new life for himself, before somebody does it for him ... or to him.  

 

The Leopard's Pelt - S.R.Cambridge

This has the feel of a fairy tale, a promise extracted under duress which condemns a stranded sailor to an impossible quest.  Henry Lowry, with his ship sunk beneath him by the Japanese, washes up on a deserted island haunted by something so dark that even the trees would have fled if they could but move.

Not since Tom Hanks was Cast Away with just a painted volleyball for a co-star has a story needed such a compelling central character to sustain it, and Cambridge delivers in the person of Henry Lowry. The shipwrecked sailor is vividly portrayed in the opening segment of this compact three part story.  His childhood poverty; his love of stories heard through the charity of a kindly librarian; an unspent coin; the sadness of his last liaison before he went to war - a woman who never intended to wait for him.  A man unlucky in all ways who deserves a better chance and a better mistress than the one fate gifts him.

 

Hazing Cinderella - C.W.LaSart

We are used to the wicked step mom with her dreadful daughters who persecute and enslave the poor little Cinderella.  But what if Cinderella were the step-mom's daughter or indeed something older and more primal than a mere daughter.  Neil Gaiman's "Ocean at the End of the Lane" had a charming trio of women possessed of strange powers, in communion with other worlds and in someway ageless.  They too were woman whom you crossed at your peril, but Step-mom Diane and her daughter Katie are definitely two women you would not want to fuck with.

LaSart treads the line between sex and violence with the steady footedness of many a teen horror flick.  The author darts to one side and then the other as a night heady with lust and vengeance goes decidedly tits up.

The Night Air - Stacey Turner

The anthology ends with another story about parenting.  Marla the graphic designer and husband Nick are moving out of Chicago together with their three children. 

The town of Hubble seems at first like a kind of Amish Stepford - an abhorrence of technology and an adherence to secret ways by its leading citizens foster suspicion in the reader, if not in the lead character.  But then, as readers of such fiction, we are more conditioned to doubt, to seeing malignance in the benign, than the characters we read about.

Like a good horror story, the little pebbles of disaster are dislodged piece by piece until there is enough to trigger an avalanche and in the end, for all that she left the Windy City behind her, it is the wind which haunts Marla with its soft whispering breath.

A second look at Bryony Adams - "Pretty little dead Girls" by Mercedes M Yardley

I am not a great re-reader of books.  There are too many books and too little time.  Even those great books which have moved me to tears, The Time Traveller's Wife, the Book Thief, The Lovely Bones, Before I Die, The Girl with all the Gifts got just the one chance for my entire and complete attention. But this week I have re-read and re-lived the short bright story of Bryony Adams in its totality



The late great Sir Christopher Lee may have re-read Lord of the Rings cover to cover once a year every year, and I might even claim the same book as my all time favourite, but I have never re-read it as he did.

That is not to say that, once read, I ignore these literary gems.  It is more a matter of dipping in and out, of picking up those moments that piqued me so much that I replay them over and over.  (Like Henry the eponymously referenced time traveller in Audrey Niffenberger's great book finding his curse/gift drags him back to frequently revisit key nodal points in his life.) From Lord of the Rings who can forget the lines that captured the moment

"Begone foul dwimmerlaik, Lord of Carrion, leave the dead in peace"

Or

"I am an emissary and may not be assailed"
"Where such laws hold it is customary for ambassadors to use less insolence."

Or even

"I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are an evil."

But at the same time I have never revisited the mysterious enigma that was Tom Bombadil and the digression of the hobbits' time with him.

To that extent I have treated the books I loved like the sporting events I most admired, be it a great test cricket match, or a brilliant game of football.  I will re-watch and savour the highlights, the goals, the wickets and the near misses but I do not replay the entire game.

There are of course those childhood books, the bedtime favourites which are endlessly read and re-read - "Amy Said"  "Each Peach, Pear, Plum"  "We're going in a Bear hunt"  Books  so ingrained in my mind by repetition that I barely need the book to re-read them.  There are also a very few short stories, consumed at a gallop which bear a line by line word by word rediscovery - most notably Mark Lawrence's "During the Dance."

But until I met Bryony Adams, the delightful heroine of Mercedes M Yardley's "All the Pretty Dead Girls" I am sure that I have never re-read anything of more than a few thousand words cover to cover.

And such an exceptional circumstance merits an appropriate response.  A second read, deserves a second review. Not just to consider what drew me back again following Bryony on the life long journey towards her tragic fate, but also what new discoveries I made.

My original review is here  My later thoughts as follows

While I do not re-read books much, I do listen to certain songs over and over again.  There is something about music, and especially familiar music, which envelopes me, shrouding out the rest of the world in a mix of sound and poetry and symbolism. And there is a similar part musical, part poetic quality to the whimsical writing of Pretty little dead Girls.

The writing is unashamedly surreal.  There is fate personified as a hissing malevolent desert. There is a sadistic killer who is a scrupulously polite indeed good young man in all things except in the matter of murdering people, and even then he views the perceived evil in his actions as a matter of personal perspective rather than moral absolutes.  There is the impossibility of everyone's knowledge that Bryony is destined to be a murderer's victim and the struggles they experience in coming to terms with that.

The great sad songs are not just beautiful sounds, but have words which touch on deep themes of love, of loss even of death and it is that blend which turns beautiful into great, which makes the harmonious also moving.  It is that which makes us listen not just inspite of, but because of knowing the ending. In the same way Pretty little dead Girls resonates, for me at least, because it holds up a surreal mirror which does not distort so much as highlight what it is to be human.

There is throughout the book that fragility of human existence which we forget at our peril, along with the evil inhumanity which lurks within humanity.  A picture taken this week of poor Alyan Kurdi on a beach is another poignant reminder of these simple truths.  It is perhaps when we are in the shadow of death that we value and appreciate life most of all, maybe even it is only then that we are at our most alive.

Bryony Adams lives her entire life in the shadow of a horrific death and it is that which makes her possibly the most alive heroine I have ever read. It also makes her a potential Mary-Sue (or as I once thought it Pollyanna), a character of such unblemished virtue, such saintly forbearance, that she might be considered an irritation to read about - just too good.  But it is not flawed virtue which makes a character interesting, it is the compassion they engender in the reader, which Bryony draws out aplenty. And in any case Bryony is flawed - a flaw that clouds her relationships and constrains her lifestyle.

Bryony is of particular interest to me, as a writer, because my current work in progress features a virtuous and kind heroine who, to some might seem a Mary-Sue/Pollyanna cross.  It is at once reassuring and humbling to see Mercedes M Yardley manage so deftly a heroine with so many perfections.  But then, like Bryony my Persapha too is flawed.

• Bryony's flaw is that destiny that stalks her - she is fated to become a serial killer's victim.
• Persapha too is stalked by unkind destiny - she is fated to become a serial killer.

In the re-read there were parts that I remembered and others that had not registered so deeply.

I had entirely missed the significance of Jeremy in my rapid first read, or at least forgotten it in the intervening months.

I discovered and smiled at the line "They stopped by the first Starbucks..."  I mean how many Starbucks does any one market need to have, and I thought of a Simpsons shot of Bart walking along a shopping arcade where every shop closed and re-opened as a starbucks as he passed it.

Even the cover offers itself for rediscovery, the innocent white capitalised text of the first and last words PRETTY GIRLS bracketing the horrifically coupled adjectives "little dead" in subtler lower case red which lie between them. A motif repeated in the author's name, with the middle initial M in red, should we read M for Murder?

And then in the later pages, when the omniscient narrator speaks directly to the reader, I picked up the reference to jonquils and googled them as instructed.

So here, we leave for the time the addictive story of Bryony Adams with an image of her favourite flowers.  This is the book, of all that I have read, which is most like a song and I have need of books like that, maybe we all do at times.  It is, as far as I can recall, the first book I have entirely re-read; it is possible it may also be the second, the third and the fourth.

Source Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_jonquilla