Lost Book Library Reading Round-Up no. 6

A summary of my latest attempts to actually read the things before the Lost Book Library goes on its Christmas break.

Alton Douglas's Celebrity Recipes

Status: Flicked

Obviously, I'm not going to read a recipe book all the way through. I will, however, be shortly beginning a spin-off blog where I cook each of the recipes and rate them for tastiness, nutritional value and aroma.

The Landsbird by Colin Dunne

Status: Completed

This is exactly the sort of book the Lost Book Library exists for, even though it nearly didn't make it in due to its truly dreadful cover, and only a recommendation from the Nivenator himself saved it.  Too much of a soapy melodrama to be 'literary', too loaded with a vivid sense social reality to be a straight romance, this tale of doomed love between a couple brought together, and driven apart by the Sexual Revolution's slow crawl into England's remote areas falls between the cracks beautifully.  Although featuring such seventies stock characters as the businessman with the mistress in the city, and the nagging housewife, as well as those Lost Book Library stalwarts, the troublesome bikers, it also has a fantastic realness to it when it's attention turns to the fishing folk whose livelihoods are slowly, inexorably winding down to nothing.  There are some plot twists towards the end which are so unexpected, bizarre and problematic my brain refuses to process them, but overall, a very enjoyable and surprising read.

A New History of Torments by Zulfikar Ghose

Status: Abandoned, p. 99

This novel from B.S. Johnson's former writing partner comes with the most impressive list of recommenders - John Fowles, Edna O'Brien, Michael Moorcock, and it is indeed sporadically dazzling, with characters being flung on their own individual adventures in a manner that is positively Tarantino-esque.  It is also, unfortunately, irredeemably silly.  Beginning with a wealthy middle-aged man's affair with a younger woman (as all novels set in Latin America are - no exceptions), its attention soon turns to his children, who have very short memories, and think nothing of doing things like spending several days on a stranger's farm in order to see if there are any agricultural techniques they can apply to their own business, in spite of the fact their sibling has mysteriously disappeared after being knocked unconscious in a car crash.  I suppose this might be some magical realist device, but I couldn't be bothered with it, and after three characters in a row experienced such amnesia, I gave up, annoyed at such a potentially brilliant novel being capsized in this manner.

A True Romance by Jacky Gillott

Status: Abandoned, p. 19

A story about a romance writer getting over her mother's death that was simply too dreary to bother with, but as promised, here is another shot of the amazing fur-and-knitwear combo featured on the cover.

Kick Turn by Anthony Glyn

Status: Completed

This coming-of-age tale from the early sixties turned out to be an unexpected delight.  A young man is torn between following in the footsteps of his pretentious uncle into the fruit import trade or returning to the bosom of the family of his godfather, a truly terrifying bunch of outdoorsy religious nuts.  Along the way, he is irritated to have to stop listening to opera in order to lose his virginity to an older woman, and meets a free spirit who shows him a possible way out of his dilemma.  As ever in the Lost Book Library, the ending is a mess, and fan though I am of rambling, near-plotless post-war novels, the elements aren't ever set in motion in the way they should, and so a potential lost classic is instead an enjoyable curio.  Still, well a worth a read.

Dangler

Title: Dangler

Author: Charles Gaines

Year of publication: 1980

Inner cover blurb: 'In Dangler Charles Gaines has created a character as emblematic of America as Jay Gatsby.  On one level is is a carefully orchestrated - and often extremely funny - novel of manners and a cautionary tale of the dangers of male pride.  On another it is a superbly gripping adventure.
   A wealthy, boundlessly energetic autocrat who is unable to resist the most demanding tests of his physique and his courage, Kenneth Dangler builds a luxurious sporting centre in the wilderness of northern New Hampshire, through which he hopes to revive the lost spirit of frontier America in an age of cultural and physical decadence.  To the accompaniment of gourmet meals and daily stock exchange quotations, his clients pay exorbitant fees to take part in realistically staged outdoor adventures - shooting fearsome rapids in canoes mounted on rails, or grappling in the woods with a bear whose claws have been conveniently drawn.
   Dangler's effect on people is hypnotic.  His patrons are mesmerized by his enthusiasm, and flattered by his attentions.  His beautiful wife, Erica, has a craving for the dramatic and the terrifying, and together the Danglers form a magnificent, troubling image of all-American confidence and recklessness.
   As Dangler's obsession with the camp grows and his visions take shape, the simulated adventures become frighteningly real.  Play escalates into reality, until finally he leads his group into a climactic confrontation - a final test of manhood he has willed himself to face.'

Quick flick reveals: Cross between the Great American Novel and Westworld, as written by the inventor of Paintball (true fact).

Random paragraph: '"Have to see a fella about a dog," said Bigelow after another silence.  "You guys want to join me?  It's a beautiful night out there, and there won't be mnay more when we can walk outside together and take a leak."'

Purchase

A Chemical Romance

Title: A Chemical Romance

Author: Jenny Fabian

Year of publication: 1971, Corgi edition 1973

Back cover blurb: '"I think Jenny Fabian should be taken for what she is - a very clever girl who can actually write quite clever books about rather self-indulgent young people.  I hope this book is very successful.  I hope it shocks lots of people and sets the whole of the middle classes revolving in their tasteful graves."
   Jilly Cooper

"Fabian's portraits are lightning silhouettes cut by a master with a very sharp pair of scissors... everything is captured accurately in the black comedic outline."
   Time Out

"The new book is as revolting as the last one.  I didn't get beyond the first three pages but that probably means it's bound to be a best-seller."
   Over 21

"It permits a look into a world most of us don't know and feel secretly fascinated and horrified by.  We enjoy, through Jenny, illicit pleasure we would not dare enjoy ourselves."
   Liverpool Daily Post'

Quick flick reveals: Fabian is renowned for her first novel Groupie, a work that will always draw attention to itself as one of the characters is clearly based on Syd Barrett and offers a fictionalised, informed account of his breakdown.  Less well known are Fabian's follow-up novels.  I suspect this one might be a bit about taking drugs.  And sex with rock stars.

Random paragraph: '"I can't stand chicks with smelly cunts", he continued, "too many chicks have smelly cunts.  I like to go down on a chick, but I've got a very sensitive nose and can't stand the slightest odour.  You'd be surprised how many chicks have smelly cunts."'


Purchase

The Actress

Title: The Actress

Author: Henry Denker

Year of publication: 1978, WH Allen edition 1979

Inner cover blurb: Henry Denkler, author of The Physicians, The Experiment and The Scofield Diagnosis, has now written a new and irresistibly exciting novel, The Actress.

The actress is Kit Lawrence - one of the most talented stars the theatre has known.  She is beautiful, sensitive and possesses a magnetism and sexuality which drive men crazy.  But she is a patient in an expensive psychiatric hospital having suffered a mental breakdown after several suicide attempts and a self-inflicted abortion.  Kit, we learn, is the victim of an unhappy childhood and she is crying out for help.

The Actress is a gripping psychological drama of the attempt to bring Kit back to life by starring her in a play about her own life and problems - a play that will allow her to act out the innermost secrets and passions that have driven her to the brink of madness.  Rehearsals are going well, and Kit's performance is going to be brilliant, but why is she unable and unwilling to act out the last scene?

As the tension mounts, the reader will become absorbed in the characters as a real-life drama is acted out on-stage.  The ending is bound to touch the heart, too, as Henry Denkler skilfully portrays one woman's struggle to overcome emotional strife.

Quick flick reveals: Some serious melodramatic shlock.  There's a very particular craziness you get from male authors writing primarily for the women's fiction market, and this book looks like it has it in spades.

Random paragraph: 'Winging that whole scene, from the moment we caught her bare-breasted.  Covering up only when she saw me.  Making up so beautifully just to walk back to the hotel and go to bed alone.  If that's sick, I'd like to be sick."'

Purchase

Man In White

Title: Man In White

Author: Johnny Cash

Year of publication: 1986, Hodder and Staughton edition 1987

Back cover blurb: 'Once notorious for his wild living and then his dependence on drugs as he tried to cope with his rise to fame in the American music scene, Johnny Cash, the 'Man in Black', discovered he was persecuting his own body.
   Saul the Pharisee, expert in Jewish Law and bitter opponent of the 'followers of the Nazarene' discovered he was persecuting the body of Christ when he met the 'Man in White' on the Damascus Road.
  Cash sees himself mirrored in the apostle Paul: when he came off drugs, 'it was like a new birth, a new lease of life.  My mind was renewed... I was transformed and identified with the Apostle.'
   A decade's research into ancient Judaism and the New Testament resulted in this powerful novel - a testimony to Christ's changing power in St. Paul, and in Cash himself.'

Quick flick reveals: A novel by Cash is an exciting prospect, but this very much comes from the Bible-bashing, Holy Land-visiting, Billy Graham rally-attending side of the man that fans tend to keep quiet about.  Like Cash's lyrics, the prose is stripped down and to-the-point.  Just hoping it's closer to I Walk the Line than it is to Chicken in Black.

Random paragraph: 'He moved among the people with a loving, gentle grace.  He was followed by many little children, some of whom pulled at his robe.  He reached down and, smiling, picked up a boy in one arm and a girl in the other.  He held them close against his face, rubbing his coarse beard against them and leaving them laughing with merriment.'


Purchase

Punish Me With Kisses

Title: Punish Me With Kisses

Author: William Bayer

Year of publication: 1980, Severn House edition 1981

Inner cover blurb: '"Someone rushed from the poolhouse, then paused just in front.  Penny blinked and in that moment the figure disappeared into the shadows of the trees..."
   For Penny Berring that was also the moment that would change her life forever.  Obsessed by Suzie, her elder sister by three years, by Suzie's beauty and by her flamboyant sexuality, she had been an envious onlooker on her sister's insatiable love-life.  Now suddenly all that was over, for Suzie had gone - murdered, almost certainly by that dimly-seen figure at the pool side.
   But who had that been?  Who was the killer?  Jared Evans, dark-haired, sensitive, loved by Penny and by Suzie?  The dour gardener, Tucker, whose shears had been the instrument of death?  Or... someone else?
   As the novel draws us closer and closer to the truth, so it develops an increasingly profound insight into Penny's mind.  Fascinated, we watch her delve further into the mystery of her sister's death to find the murderer.  In doing so, she encounters a multitude of unsavoury scandals involving herself, her parents and her boyfriend.  Penny appears to crack under the strain, and seeks comfort from a sinister psychiatrist with a passion for cats.
   William Bayer's is an astonishing achievement - at one level dazzling entertainment, at another an illumination of the darker places of the soul.  A major success in the USA, this novel is stimulating and passionate.  Its descriptions of New York and its life are vivid and exciting; its conclusions eye-opening and convincing.'

Quick flick reveals: You had me at 'sinister psychiatrist with a passion for cats'.

Random paragraph: 'After Penny read this passage she felt filled with sadness and shame.  There were many pages like it, tales of orgies and self-debasements, scornful references to inadequate lovers, shrieks of discontent.  The diary upset her, but not because of sex.  It was the pathos of it, Suzie's misery, that filled with despair.'


Purchase

The Killing Gift

Title: The Killing Gift

Author: Bari Wood

Year of publication: 1975, Heinemann edition 1976

Inner cover blurb: 'This is more than a novel about a lonely woman with a deadly power who becomes the quarry of an obsessed detective.  It is more than a gripping psychic suspense story that holds the reader right down to the last sentence.  THE KILLING GIFT reaches into one of the most telling areas of the subconscious: the core of violence and aggression in all of us.  It explores the question that sooner or later most civilized people ask themselves: What would I do if I had the power to kill just by thinking about it?
   A man dies violently.  Stavitsky, the police chief in charge of the investigation, finds himself face to face with a real mystery - an 'impossible' killing.  All the evidence points to the quietly withdrawn research physician Dr Jennifer List Gilbert, yet how could this fragile woman kill a heavily armed man without leaving a mark on his body?
   Stavitsky pursues Jennifer, his initial curiosity turning into an obsession.  Nothing can stop him from finding out everything he can about her.  And everything he uncovers deepens his confusion.  Jennifer has almost no friends.  Although she is married her husband seems remote, and despite her vast wealth, she lives modestly - somehow unreached and unreachable.  But Stavitsky begins to sense her aloneness, and he finds himself beginning to love this strange woman almost as much as he fears her.  Ultimately Stavitsky's compulsion to unravel her dangerous secret leads to a final confrontation in which hunter and hunted meet as lover-antagonists in a harrowing struggle for survival.  THE KILLING GIFT is a bizarre love story with a unique psychic twist.

Quick flick reveals: An efficient-looking supernatural thriller from the editor of Drug Therapy Magazine.  Answers the questions most civilized people ask themselves about killing someone just by thinking about it.

Random paragraph: 'Kate jumped out of bed and almost ran to Jennifer's room.  She was still asleep, not heavily, but peacefully, her breathing light and easy.  But today in the morning light her face looked ghastly.'


Purchase 

Lost Book Library Reading Round-Up no. 5

Another update on my attempts to actually read these damn things.  Not a bumper crop this time round, unfortunately.

The Fate of Mary Rose by Caroline Blackwood

Status: Completed

Another book that I read before I started the library.  How this book initially pleased, but ultimately failed me has already been documented.

The Girls by John Bowen

Status: Completed

This tale of a lesbian couple who engage in a spot of murder has a number of things in common with The Fate of Mary Rose.  They both are set in a genteel English village.  They both are initially driven by a quiet control that draws the reader in and directs them towards their inexorable conclusion.  And they both dodge their inexorable conclusions at the last minute, and instead deliver piss-poor endings that seem like the author has just given up.  This is a shame, because The Girls was full of nice touches, such as a conversation between the main characters where they debate whether they have been visited by the Greek god Pan or just a bloke on a horse, and a flash-forward where a supporting figure's life after the story's end is documented.  Come on, authors of short, quiet, novels set in genteel English villages written in the mid-eighties with pastel-shaded Modigliani-influenced covers, buck your ideas up!

Prehistoric Germ Warfare by Robin Collyns

Status: Abandoned, p. 40

Author Collyns is convinced that humanity originated in outer space, and absolutely anything appears to him to be proof of this.  What a human hair looks like under a microscope, alleged Bigfoot prints, satsumas, anything.  It all points to his central thesis that we were part of some extraterrestrial genetically-manipulated breeding programme.  I think I read enough to get the gist, and while I could have gone all the way through looking for LULZ, the ultimate point of this blog is not to make fun of bad books (that's what Robin Ince is for), but to dig up good books that have been forgotten.  So I moved on to...

The Searing by John Coyne

Status: Abandoned, p. 59

I was hoping this would turn out to be an enjoyable slice of second division horror, but it wasn't quite good enough to be good, or trashy enough to be trash.  There was a clue that Coyne wasn't exactly pushing the imaginative boat out in the first few pages when an old Indian burial ground makes a menacing appearance.  That and the fact he uses my least favourite phrase in the English language, 'fetal position', over and over again (what's wrong with saying someone's legs are tucked up under their chin?) turned me off.  The story seemed to be firing into all sorts of different directions involving mysterious orgasms and baby killing, none of which interested me greatly, so I bailed.

The Injured Party by Elaine Dundy

Status: Abandoned, p. 122

Dundy hit big with her first novel The Dud Avocado, but this final one is obscure, and in all honesty it's not hard to see why.  It starts off well enough with a screwball comedy feel as two magazine employees attempt to uncover a conspiracy in their own office, but then gets derailed by a bad marriage storyline that feels suspiciously like the author unloading baggage.  By the time I gave up the protagonist was a faux-naive caricature of the person we started off with and it felt like pretty much anything could happen.  Which means, of course, that it didn't matter what did happen.  A case of a good author losing control of their story.

Disappointing, but I have a feeling the next batch will contain some gems, so stay tuned!

The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker

Title: The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker

Author: Charles Webb

Year of publication: 1970, Penguin edition 1972

Back cover blurb: 'The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker is much like other young American marriages.  After eighteen months of it, Lisa leaves Bill during their summer holiday by the sea.  Not that both parties wouldn't like to make their marriage work according to the ideal American formula.  But what is that formula?  If they could only discover why they got together in the first place, they might make a start, though Lisa's sister, Nan, would be determined to foil them...'

Quick flick reveals: I'm not a fan of Webb's The Graduate.  To me it reads like the treatment for a film, which is perhaps why the film based on it is so good.  Having said that, I am more than happy to give this a go because it has Richard Benjamin's face on the cover, and I like looking at Richard Benjamin's face.  Depressingly, in the author biog, written five years after The Graduate movie was a hit, can be found the line 'he is employed as a stockroom help at a department store in California.'  What has a writer got to do to actually make some money round here?

Random paragraphs: '"Would you say I'm not fun to be with?  Would that express it?"
   Lisa nodded.  "That's as close as I could come to expressing it."  She walked past him and into the kitchen.'


Purchase

Seventeen Part One

Title: Seventeen Part One

Author: Soya

Year of publication: 1953, Sphere edition 1969

Back cover blurb: 'Jacob wanted to learn about sex.
   He knew the theory all right but he wanted some practical experience.  Fortunately his attractive cousin, Vibeke, was only too willing to help him end his virginity.
   And once initiated in the mysteries  of sex, Jacob couldn't practice enough.  But Hansigne, the buxom maid, and Miss Rosegod, the housekeeper, were both eager to further the young man's education.
   With a Rabelaisian sense of humour and a wealth of erotic detail, SEVENTEEN describes the sexual awakening of a teenage boy, and his encounters with the women who teach him the delights of love.
   Anneliese Meineche's film SEVENTEEN is one of the most sensational box-office successes ever.  Granted an 'X' certificate by the Greater London Council, the film has been playing in London continuously for over 50 weeks.'

Quick flick reveals: Yet another perfectly sensible novel packaged as borderline porn, as was the fashion at the time.  Soya was an acclaimed Danish writer of the post-war period, although the film version kick-started the Danish sex comedy genre.  Originally published in three parts, part one is is a slim volume.  Why they couldn't have just put all of it in one volume for the English edition, I'm not sure.  I expect the spine would have just about taken it.

Random paragraph: ' Should you tickle the girl under the chin?  Should you put your hands on her cheeks and give her a kiss?  Or should you slide a hand under her dress and try to get it up between her legs?  What would Maupassant have done?'


Purchase