Alex Bell - fantasy author

I was complaining about summer on Twitter this morning. I am, at heart, a winter girl. Winter is my favourite season for a number of reasons. However, it occurred to me that complaining about summer wasn’t really the right attitude. There are lots of things I like about summer, so, in the interest of positive-thinking, I thought I would list a few of my favourites.

First up, it’s Pimms:

Is there anything better than sitting in the garden on a sunny day enjoying a nice tall glass of Pimms? It’s refreshing, it’s tasty, and it’s served in a glass chock-full of ice and fruit and sprigs of mint.

Invisible Stockings:

My new summer must-have are these invisible stockings from Tess Daly’s beauty range at Marks and Spencers. Not only are all the products in this range reasonably priced and beautifully packaged, but the invisible stockings are scented with jasmine and sweet vanilla. For someone like me who has naturally pale skin but no desire to sunbathe, this product is perfect. Not as heavy as a fake tan, it just adds a little bit of bronzed shimmer to legs whilst making them smell really good at the same time. A bronzer and a body butter all in one.

Tortoises:

My third reason for loving summer is that the tortoises come out of hibernation. You know summer has arrived when you see them stumping about in their pen, mashing up their food and getting it all over their faces. Pompey and Hannibal are both in their sixties – and very grand old men they are too.

Minx pedicure:

Clearly, there is no point paying out to have your toes look like this if they are hidden away in slipper-socks and boots the whole time. Summer, with its flip-flops and open sandals, is the perfect excuse to get a Minx pedicure. It would be a shame to ruin an outfit with plain feet, after all.

Bubbles with Moose:

Anyone who follows me on Twitter will know that I love my Great Dane very, very much. And during the summer we get to spend more time playing bubbles in the garden. They’re a little hard to see in this picture but the bubbles are there, and she is catching them. Bubbles is Moose’s favourite game – she never really got the hang of chasing balls, and will give me an evil look if I throw one of her toys across the lawn. The only downside to the bubble game is that, sometimes, after I’ve blown them for her, the wind changes and they come right back towards me. And Moose doesn’t really see me when she’s intent on the bubbles. You can get knocked right off your feet that way . . .

Summer Reads:

You know the books I mean. Something that’s fast paced and easy to read. Something to take on holiday with you. Something to read whilst drinking Pimms. These books are sheer, unadulterated pleasure that has nothing to do with anything. I usually read novels for a reason – like I’ve heard good things about the author and want to see what the fuss is about, or I’m trying a different genre, all the time with my own writing in mind. But, during the summer, it’s nice to treat yourself to a book you know you’re going to enjoy. There’s often an element of guilty pleasure in this as well. My top summer read indulgences would be anything by Victoria Holt, Madeleine Brent or Deanna Raybourn.

Travel treats:

You know when you go on holiday and decide to buy yourself some little thing that you don’t need but really, really want? This hydrating face spray by Evian was my holiday purchase this year. Yes, I know. It’s a little bit much. I acknowledge the foolishness. But it’s the perfect size to take on the plane with you and it has a pink lid and pink bubbles on the packaging and it did make me feel more refreshed after the long flight. And pure mineral water is much better for your skin than hard tap water. Go ahead and laugh at me - I don’t care - I will still love my dinky tube of face spray and I will still take it with me every time I travel.

And, finally, Starbucks frappucino:

A little piece of chilled blended heaven in a cup - ahhh! My favourite is the peppermint mocha frappucino. I could drink it all day.

So – there are some of my favourites. Now that I think about it, there is quite a lot I like about summer. So perhaps I will focus on the good stuff and try to make the most of it rather than wishing summer away.

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.

Regular readers of my blog will know that about once a year I grudgingly praise another writer’s work. I do not like to do it too often because I am greedy and grasping, and I despise the thought of people out there spending hard-earned money on books that were not penned by me. But every now and then, I enjoy reading a book so much that it enables me to rise above my natural, in-built pettiness.

So, up next is Tome of the Undergates – from the Next Big Thing ™, Mister Sam Sykes:

I think we can all agree that this cover is wicked, and the man on it is sexy as anything, and the water is . . . well . . . sort of mesmerising. It’s also a very big book (600 pages plus), and, as Amanda at Floor to Ceiling Books has already pointed out, if you were so inclined, you could, feasibly, beat a man to death with this thing. I don’t like to put it too close to any of my books because it makes me feel insecure, and I start wondering whether my efforts are just novellas, rather than actual novels . . .

Anyway, there are, basically, three main reasons why I love Tome:

1. The monsters. Heretofore (eek! I just said ‘heretofore’! The ol’ legal training creeps in when you least expect it!) – heretofore, I would have said that the estimable Chris Wooding was the undisputed king of fantasy monsters, but now I would have to say that Chris and Sam are pretty much on a level with each other on this, for there are several really cracking monsters in Tome. I don’t want to give any juicy details away, but the highlight for me were the Omens – these creepy monsters with bodies of birds, and heads of old women who parrot the words of dying men.
2. I have a special soft spot for characters who are at least a little bit mad/unstable/unhinged etc. Anyone who’s read The Ninth Circle will know this to be true (see what I did there? Sneakily got the post back onto my books, ah ha). And Lenk, who is the leader (in the loosest sense) of the mismatched band of adventurers in Tome, is haunted by a voice inside his head that only he can hear. More often than not, this urges him on to greater bloodshed and so on. It’s not clear where this voice comes from, or what its purpose is, but I’m an absolute sucker for this sort of internal conflict.
3. The similes. I know it seems a bit of an odd thing to highlight, but they really jumped out at me all the way through the book. From now on, I might have to refer to Sam as the King of Similes (he is, after all, yet to be christened by me with an appropriate nickname). I’ve never complimented an author on similes before – that’s how freakin’ great they are.

In addition, I think I would probably enjoy any adventure story that involved a rich fantasy world; a band of companions who are constantly at each other’s throats; and a heck of a lot of blood and gore. It’s true: I like my fantasy novels to be just a little bit filthy (hence my gushing love for anything written by Mr Abercrombie).

So for anyone looking for a thoroughly entertaining read, I would whole-heartedly recommend Tome. Sam is also an active Twitterer (is this a word?), but please don’t follow him because he already has more Twitter followers than me, despite having been around for only a fraction of the time, and that just isn’t right. Perhaps if I made my tweets a bit angrier, I would get a sudden influx of followers . . . ?

Finally, and most vitally, I must add that whilst Mr Sykes may write books that practically eclipse mine in size, my dog could eat his dog in one bite, because Moose is a Great Dane, and Sam is the owner of a teensy-tiny, ludicrously adorable pug by the name of Otis who, I believe, is soon to feature on the shiny new Gollancz blog.

Tome is released in the UK on 15th April, available in all good bookstores, etc etc.

Right, I’m really going to have to stop reading books, I think, because amazing ones keep coming to my attention and then I feel compelled to write about them and then my blog starts becoming about other talented people rather than all about me. First it was the resplendent Deanna Raybourn, and now this.

So, here it is, Amazing Book, Part 2:

Eagle Rising, by David Devereux:

This is the second of David’s books featuring Jack - magician by profession and bastard by disposition. As well as being a mate of mine, Dave is one of the funnest (yeah, I know it’s not a real word - I am hereby creating it) guys I have ever had the pleasure of meeting - and he stays up until the early hours at the author parties with me, rather than going to bed early like all those other wimpy Gollancz peeps (although having office jobs/small children on the side may have something to do with that, I suppose).

Anyway - whilst reading Dave’s book I tried to put aside the fact that I know him to be a Multi-Talented Genius Party Man so that I could judge the book objectively. But even then I still thought it was awesome.

I don’t want to give away any of the juicy bits (and believe me, there are juicy bits), but I can certainly say that there are very few books that make me both laugh and gasp (in the oh-my-God that sounds painful sort of way).

I even took this book to the spa with me (and sort of dropped it in the Jacuzzi, which explains why the pages are now crinkly and scented - unless Gollancz actually scent them?? In which case why don’t my books smell of vanilla too?!). I’m afraid I may even have snapped quite viciously at the schmoozy couple in the Jacuzzi who asked me to press the button to get the bubbles going again but - in my defence - I was in the middle of the eyeball removing scene, and it’s really not one in which you want to get interrupted because of something to do with bubbles.

Another thing I particularly love about this book is all the Neo-Nazi, Hitler stuff. I studied Nazi Germany at both GCSE and AS level and it’s a historical period that I’m particularly fascinated by. The scene where the crazy fanatics are trying to bring Hitler back from Hell was one of the most spine-tingling I’ve ever read. I had goose bumps and everything.

I fully intended to save this book for my trip to Florida in two weeks (tomorrow and counting!), but then I read the first page, and then the first chapter, and it all went downhill from there and now it’s all finished and I wish I’d had more self-restraint. So I am putting my request in now to Dave/Simon/Gollancz Inc./whoever, that Dave’s next book must come out the exact day before I go away on holiday in order that I may keep myself thoroughly entertained on the plane instead of irritating the hell out of everybody around me by complaining that I’m cramped, bored and unreasonably paranoid about the possibility that the stewardess might give someone else my pre-booked vegetarian meal by mistake, thereby condemning me to nothing but over-salted peanuts for the next seven hours.

Yes, indeed, it seems that there are some amazing books out there that were not written by me (I know it’s hard to believe). I don’t intend to point these books out too often here because this is my blog and, really, it should be perpetuating the myth that I am the centre of the universe.

But this book is so fantastic that I am making a special exception for it.

The book in question is: Silent In The Grave, by Deanna Raybourn:

I picked this up in an airport Waterstones on my way to Washington even though I already had with me a suitcase stuffed full of books. First, I was attracted by the unusual front cover - it is very turquoise. But what really clinched it for me was the way the book begins. It’s the best opening I have ever read and it goes like this:

“To say I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband’s dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor.”

Seriously - how can you not want to read on from that?

The book is a historical murder mystery type story but what really made it for me was the generous dash of quirkiness. That and the fact that I want to marry Nicholas Brisbane. And bear his beautiful, brooding, mysterious children. Seriously, though, it seems to be a rare thing nowadays to get a genuinely charismatic, intelligent, sexy, mysterious male lead. They all seem to be one-dimensional cheap Darcy imitations rippling with muscles and oil in a way that makes me feel slightly sick. A leading man should have intelligence and, preferably, a neck that isn’t thicker than his head. This is definitely the case with Nicholas Brisbane.

All in all, the murder mystery works, the romantic tension between Brisbane and Julia Grey works, the humour works and the setting works. Murder, poison, intrigue, a genuinely charasmatic male lead and gypsy curses . . . what’s not to like? It ticked all the right boxes. I also really enjoyed the sequel - Silent In The Sanctuary, and have pre-ordered the third book - Silent On The Moor. I hardly ever do this. The only other books I’ve ever preordered have been Harry Potters but I’m looking forward to it so much that I stuck it in my basket on Amazon even though it’s not even out yet. If the publication date is correct, it should be delivered just before I go on holiday to Las Vegas. Which means that I might have to snap quite viciously at anyone who interrupts me during that flight.