Alex Bell - fantasy author

What’s more important – that a book is well written or that it has an engaging story? I’ve always been firmly on the side of story. If the story isn’t compelling then it surely doesn’t matter how beautifully it’s been written. That’s what I’ve always thought, at least. However, I am now reading a book that’s making me rethink my position. I managed to get my greedy fingers on not one, but two, of the titles for World Book Night, one of which was Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is 348 pages and I am up to page 116, and I am completely and utterly gripped – not by the story, but by the writing. It is one of the most exquisitely written books I have ever come across – and I do consider myself to be pretty well read. There is an effortlessness in every sentence and I feel like this book is showing me just how great the written word can be.

So far this year I have read a lot of just-released books, and have found many of them to be insipid and bland, and now that I am reading Marquez, those other books seem even more insubstantial and unsatisfying – like having a glass of water for dinner as opposed to a three course meal. Time of Cholera is something to really get your teeth into and, right now – just over 100 pages in – I feel like the book is nourishing my reader’s soul. I am not massively engaged with the characters or their story (although I suppose that could still change), but, with this book, it honestly doesn’t matter. I feel almost hungry for Marquez’s words. How refreshing to read a book that is not a fast-driven frenzy of activity from beginning to end. What a welcome change for there to not be some sort of fight scene or car chase on every page. This is a book that allows itself to breathe – and is all the better for it.

Pace is something I am painfully aware of with my own writing. I’m aware of a constant pressure to make sure the action doesn’t slow down, even for a second, in case – God forbid – the reader gets bored, and the reviewers begin baying for your blood etc etc. Surely we have not sunk so low as a society that all we want to see is pretty people running away from explosions? It is a notion that I dislike intensely. Not so much for Lex Trent or other comic fantasies because they’re naturally more fast-paced – but for serious adult books I find it very frustrating that there should be such a single-minded focus on grabbing the reader’s attention by doing the writing equivalent of bashing them over the head with a heavy object. Personally, I generally dislike books that start with action scenes or fights or chases. They bore me. If I don’t know the characters yet then I couldn’t care less what happens to them as they run madly through the house whilst being pursued by a werewolf/man with gun/love-sick sparkly vampire. Still, I am told that this is what most people want in an opening chapter.

In the story versus style debate I would hold up Dan Brown as a brilliant example of the former. I realise it’s dreadfully unfashionable of me to like Dan Brown, and many people (some of whom openly admit to having never even picked up one of his books) seem to almost fall over themselves in their eagerness to proclaim that the man cannot write, or that his writing style is clumsy at best. I do not accept this. I think Dan Brown is a very skilled and intelligent thriller writer, and no aspirations to literary snobbery will make me say otherwise. Dan Brown does not write beautifully but the stories he tells do not require that he should. I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code but I absolutely loved The Lost Symbol. I devoured it because every time I got to the end of a chapter I couldn’t wait to learn what was going to happen next. It gripped me very differently from the way Time of Cholera is gripping me now.

I am in awe of Marquez’s writing – literally, I am in awe of him – but I’m still more likely to take a Dan Brown book on holiday with me, or reread a Dan Brown book, or rush to the cinema to see a film adaptation. I am still more likely to eagerly seek out other work of Brown’s that I have not yet read – not because I think his books are better than Marquez’s but because, for me, story is still more important than style. I read Brown’s books – and others like them – for a different reason. Fundamentally, I read those books to enjoy them as a reader, whereas a book like Love in the Time of Cholera I’m reading mainly as something to aspire to as a writer – a fondly nurtured dream that perhaps if one worked at it solidly for fifty years or more, one might become even half as good.

And now, as a post script to this post, for anyone who hasn’t heard about this yet, my good pal, and blogger extraordinaire, Amanda Rutter, along with several other very fine people, have organised and set up an auction in aid of the Red Cross Japanese Tsunami Appeal. I’d like to encourage you to head on over to http://genreforjapan.wordpress.com/ where you can bid on all manner of exciting things, including rare signed books, critiques from authors and the chance to have your name in an author’s upcoming book. There is some super exciting stuff up for grabs – and, as a genre fan, some of the lots have left my fingers itching to reach for my credit card. As an example, if you’d like to be a baddie who dies horribly, but has some great powers (and who wouldn’t?!), in my friend Suzanne McLeod’s upcoming Spellcrackers novel then go here http://genreforjapan.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/item-27-appearance-in-the-next-suzanne-mcleod-novel/ and place your bid. I’d bid on this myself if I hadn’t just donated to Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue and Support. Sadly, animals tend to get overlooked in natural disasters of this type but they are just as much in need of aid as their human counterparts. If I and my whole family were killed in an earthquake and my spoilt, pampered pets were left to fend for themselves I would hope to God that there would be someone there to help them. If you’d like to donate to their ongoing efforts on behalf of animals in Japan then you can do so here: http://japanearthquakeanimalrelief.chipin.com/japan-earthquake-animal-rescue-and-support/

The dark gods and goddesses at Headline Towers have worked their magic to give you a sneaky peek into your future. Want to know whether great riches or great doom or great foolishness lie in store for you? Just go to http://www.lextrent.co.uk and play the Lex Trent game, if you dare. This is not a game for the faint of heart. These are guaranteed fates, guaranteed to come true, guaranteed.*

*Please note, that neither Alex Bell, nor the Headline Gods, can be held legally or morally responsible for any consequences, reasonably foreseen or otherwise, of someone’s reaction to learning their fate. These include, but are not limited to, unwise investment decisions, making premature funerary arrangements for oneself or for one’s friends, refusing to leave the house, or running away to sea or space in despair.

It seems hard to believe now that I never used to wear heels. I think I was frightened of them – frightened that I’d fall over, or that I wouldn’t be able to walk in them, or that the heel would snap as soon as I put my weight on it. I remember my friend at college sternly lecturing me when I was seventeen about the fact that I only ever wore ugly trainers. So, one day, I took the plunge and bought a pair of ankle boots. They had the smallest heel you could imagine but they seemed pretty daring to me at the time and I felt immensely proud of myself as I wobbled into college the next day.

I’ve moved on from that since then. I can even navigate heels when I’m drunk now - a fact of which I am immensely proud. At the Lex Trent launch party in October, I left the bar at 5am (4am if you count the clocks going back), and walked all the way back upstairs to my room in 10 cm heels without falling over once! That’s the mark of the true professional, that is. No more bruised knees for me (I’ll never forget the look of horror on the faces of my Mum and Aunt the time I got undressed at the spa only to give away that both my knees were black – an unfortunate consequence of trying to navigate a cobbled street in heels outside a pub after a night of drinking). Here is the fantastically named Jezebel shoe:

Yep, I’m a dab hand at the high heel thing now. I’ve got a weakness for a pretty shoe. It tends to play out like this:

But then, just as I’m reaching for my wallet to buy the shoes, I realise that they’re made of leather or suede or that they’re almost vegan but not quite because they have leather soles. And I have to put them back on the shelf and weep because my ethics prohibit me from buying the shoe no matter how pretty it is. So, for a long time after discovering my love of heels, I had to stick to ugly flat shoes because there were no pretty vegan heels. That’s not the case anymore, however. The Jezebel shoe above is entirely vegan and came from Dune, which is a great place to find dressy animal-friendly heels. I also got the shoes for my Jasmyn party there, as blogged about here.

Sadly, many of my shoes have met a messy end since I got my Great Dane (sob! I had to learn to keep my shoes away from her the hard way) but one of my favourite pairs to have survived Moose are these Vivienne Westwood Melissa Lady Dragon heels, made entirely from rubber plastic that smells like bubblegum:

And then, of course, there is Beyond Skin, which makes the best selection of the most beautiful vegan shoes I have ever seen anywhere. I have never seen an ugly shoe on their website.

I went to a baby shower last weekend and was going to buy a babygro or something but then I found these:

A teeny tiny pair of Ugg lookalike booties. So, so cute. I couldn’t stop taking them out of the bag and looking at ‘em once I got home. And whilst browsing the Vivienne Westwood website today I found these:

Are they not gorgeous? The Vivienne Westwood Mini Melissa. I feel like I must have a baby at once in order to be able to buy these shoes. Still, perhaps that’s taking the love of high heels just a little bit too far. Splashing out a week’s wages or suffering from toe blisters is one thing - a proportionate sort of sacrifice. Getting knocked up for the sake of a shoe is probably in a different league of shoe obsession altogether. A slippery slope into madness, no less. And if you’re going to go crazy then it ought rightly to be for reasons a bit more lofty and impressive than the love of a baby Viv Westwood shoe, no matter how fabulous it is.

As part of our ongoing plan to Take Over the World, I have recently read fellow Chainsaw Sam Enthoven’s book Crawlers:

The cover, I believe, tells you what you most of what you need to know about the book - there’s a dreadful, spidery thing attached to his neck! Arghh! Nightmare-inducement commenced! Crawlers is the story of four boys and four girls who find themselves trapped in the Barbican Theatre when a horde of these horrible, squidgy, slimy Crawlers (and Mr Enthoven is immensely skilled at describing, in exquisite detail, just how nasty these things are) descend upon the building. Once attached to the back of the neck of the people there, they are able to control them and make them do their bidding zombie-style. Thus a kindly teacher trying to help the protaganists one minute might be trying to bash their heads in the next. And the real killer of it is that the Crawlers don’t have to attach themselves to a person’s neck. Meaning that anyone in the theatre, no matter how normal they might appear, might have a Crawler on them somewhere - which makes for a lot of mounting paranioa within the group.

The action is all confined to a theatre, which is very well-utilised as a creepy Doom-esque setting - disconcertingly quiet and deserted when it shouldn’t be. This also contributes to the increasingly claustophobic atmosphere, especially as the paranoia and terror mounts. In parts it’s almost a little bit reminiscent of a classic Twilight Zone episode: ‘ Four boys and four girls are on a trip to the theatre. Little do they know that they will never see the play. They’re about to be plunged into a nightmare. Beneath the theatre lies a secret. And now she has been released…’ There’s also a good dash of classic horror films, video games and old-school Goosebumps in the mix as well. This is a very visual book that feels more like a film - in an enjoyably, toe-curling horrible, way. If you like your horror creepy, freaky, fast-paced and a little bit gross, then Crawlers is definitely the book for you.

This is Sam, looking rather sinister:

And here’s his take on the Chainsaw questions:

1. What’s your favourite book?

No: impossible. The effort of narrowing it down to one would make blood
hose out of my eyeballs. But I’ve listed my favourite five hundred at
www.librarything.com/profile/othersam if that’s any help.

2. What’s your favourite monster?

The Thing, from John Carpenter’s The Thing. Everything after the husky’s
muzzle peels like a banana: now. /that/’s a monster.

3. Who’s your favourite bad-ass monster slayer?

Monkey’s been kicking &rse in China since the sixteenth century and he
shows no signs of stopping now. Have you played Enslaved: Odyssey to the
West? That transplants him and his story to a post-apocalyptic future
USA. Monkey fits right in, smacking robots instead of demons, just as if
he’s lived there all his life.

4. If you could make a pact with the Devil, what would you want in exchange for your immortal soul?

The original Sam Enthoven, the fool, swapped his paltry soul for mine
long ago. We wrote a story about it, you can read if you like, here:
www.theblacktattoo.com/thenewdeal.html

5. The Chainsaw Gang are all trapped on a desert island with no food. Who would you eat first and why?

I would eat myself: a leg first I think - mine are reasonably well
toned. I don’t like strange meat, and it doesn’t come much stranger than
The Chainsaw Gang.

Finally, if you haven’t heard about it already, we’re offering one lucky winner the chance to win a complete set of latest signed books from every single one of the Chainsaw Gang in our Blog Tour Competition.

Here’s how it works:

To win the Chainsaw Library you need to score votes. Each vote goes into a vast hat at the end of the competition and one winning name will come out. The great thing is you can enter per blog: that’s nine chances to win! So make sure you visit each and every blog on the tour. Votes are scored as follows:

+1 if you link the blog/website to yours

+2 if you stick our Chainsaw banner up somewhere

+1 if you’re a Facebook fan/friend - here’s the link to my fan page.

+1 if you comment on this blog post

+1 if you reTweet this competition.

+1 if you follow us on Twitter – here’s a link to my twitter page

The closing date of the competition is Friday 5^th November and the competition is open to UK residents only.

Finally, the Chainsaw Gang will be out in force at the Crystal Palace Children’s Book Festival tomorrow. Myself, Sam Enthoven, Jon Mayhew, Alexander Gordon Smith, Steve Feasey, Alex Milway and Sarwat Chadda will all be there so come along and say hello to us if you can. We don’t bite. Much.

I have a longstanding adoration for Basil Rathbone, not just because he is – very probably – the sexiest man who’s ever lived, but also because I love his performance as Sherlock Holmes:

I have a box set of the fourteen Sherlock Holmes films Rathbone made with Nigel Bruce between 1939-1946, and it is the most oft-watched box set I own. House of Fear and Terror by Night are my all time favourites, and I have watched both those films over and over again.

For many people, Jeremy Brett is the definitive Sherlock Holmes and it is, indeed, the case that the Brett version is far more true to the books than the Rathbone one. Rathbone’s Holmes is warmer – there is no evidence of a cocaine addiction, or much in the way of Holmes’s depressive nature. Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes lacks the cold asceticism Jeremy Brett brings to the part. These films are done with a much lighter touch, and there is much more of a sense of very close friendship between Holmes and Watson:

That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the Jeremy Brett version – I do, very much, and have the box sets for that one as well, but I would not be able to watch them over and over again the way I do with the Basil Rathbone ones. This is partly because the Rathbone films have a much greater air of nostalgia. Most of them are set in “modern day” – meaning the 1940’s, which, I think, gives them a sort of sophisticated elegance that the Victorian setting lacks. Plus the fact that they’re filmed in black and white, which makes them even more effective, especially in the spookier films, such as The Scarlet Claw.

Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes may not be as cold and clinical as Arthur Conan Doyle’s original, but he is still a master of deduction, and ferociously intelligent (you can tell just by looking at him!):

Inspector Lestrade and Dr Watson are both portrayed as bumbling – if good natured – fools in these films which, of course, is not accurate to the books, but allows for plenty of fine, surprisingly understated, comic moments. There is also the odd bit of accidental comedy when the story runs into the most delicious melodrama that seems quite over the top by today’s standards but - I won’t lie - I love a bit of thunder and lightning, and villainous laughs, and da da da theme music from time to time.

In short, the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films may not be the most accurate portrayal, but I think they bring something very special to the stories in terms of style, warmth, cosiness and nostalgia.

Anyway – what sparked this blog post was that it was my birthday yesterday and my lovely Mum bought me a Basil Rathbone bracelet and matching necklace from the utterly fabulous Alternative Boo Teek (for whom I have already expressed my love here):

How unbelievably cool? The photos really don’t do these pieces justice – they’re both literally stuffed with all manner of ghoulish charms – but they are totally gorgeous and combine two of my favourite things – Basil Rathbone and the macabre. Jewellery doesn’t get any better than this.

And - because it’s beyond awesome - here’s a snap of my birthday cake, lovingly baked for me by my Mum. As anyone who knows their nursery rhymes will recognise, it is the notorious pie from sing a song of sixpence:

Yes, indeed, one of the only things that can come close to Basil Rathbone + macabre, is cake + macabre. Where possible, I always prefer my birthday cake to be just a little bit macabre, ghoulish, sinister or otherwise disturbing.