The Passage by Justin Cronin

Although it is always wise to avoid being drawn to a book by its cover there is something hypnotic about the picture of the young girl on The Passage by Justin Cronin. 

The child, meant to represent the book’s main character Amy Harper Bellafonte, stares at you through the strands of hair which are covering half her face. The freckles on her cheeks and nose evoke the innocence of childhood, and she is unsmiling which at first glance suggests that she is afraid of you.

Yet it is her pupil, a black colourless circle that locks into you from across a crowded room of books, which suggests otherwise.

Needless to say before I turn off the light at night and go to bed, I turn the book cover over...

Within the first few pages of The Passage you are greeted with accolades shining down on Justin Cronin’s gifts as a writer, even counting one from master of contemporary horror himself, Mr. Stephen King. Yet discounting all the hype and the Waterstones bargain price tag of £2.99 it would be wrong to describe this book as anything else but wonderful. 

Set in the hazy heated landscape of North America The Passage is the perfect blend of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Richard Matheson’s I am Legend and every horror film and survivalist colony fiction of the twentieth century.

Justin Cronin cleverly plays with the modern trend in horror of making nightmare monsters which crawl under your bed scientifically viable by giving them biological legs to stand on and walk the earth. Without giving too much away, it seems the US government have been very very naughty. 

As you’re reading there are parts of The Passage that feel familiar, almost knowable, yet being that Cronin’s creation is a product of some of the best horror fiction written this only makes it deliciously rewarding and in turn the book delivers everything you would want from a modern classic of the genre. 

What also drives this novel along is Justin Cronin’s dedication to every character. Here he takes notes from King when even considering minor characters; each is given their own back-story, an ex-wife perhaps or hidden past, habits and dreams. This makes it hard to disconnect from the book when the terror grows in force and devours its world.

Simply put The Passage is the ideal companion to the sunny days which have been creeping in towards the beginning of May.

Read, read, read and let the comfort of your home fall away.

My Library: Some of my Favourite Children's Books

Illustration by Quentin Blake in Roald Dahl's Matilda (Penguin Group, London) p.12.

"It was pleasant to take a hot drink up to her room and have it beside her as she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village."

Roald Dahl, Matilda, (Penguin Group, London) p.21.

Sometimes I feel that the time when a book could capture my imagination the most was in my childhood. In childhood books were full of possibilities and magic and the belief in a writer’s story was at its strongest. I have taken a trip down memory lane and brought out a few of my favourite childhood books to share with you…

Matilda by Roald Dahl 
Always to be a favourite among children for generations to come, I think I have read and owned every book written by Roald Dahl at one point. However when coming to make this list the tale of the four year old who loves reading and develops telekinetic powers instantly sprung to mind. 

 

The Indian In The Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks 
The story of boy who is given a cupboard for his birthday that magically brings to life a plastic toy model of a Ironquois Indian. I loved this story so much that I even begged my parents for my own cupboard and key, although my one never did seem to work. 

 

Quick, Let’s Get Out Of Here by Michael Rosen and Quentin Blake 
A collection of poems recounting hilarious family incidents and memories, illustrated by Quentin Blake, who also illustrated for Roald Dahl. My favourite is “Chocolate Cake”, a poem written by Michael Rosen recounting a memory of when as a boy he snuck into his kitchen at night to have a taste of chocolate cake.

 

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery 

Originally written as a story for all ages the tale of a talkative young red head has now fallen into the category of children’s literature. This is probably one of my all time favourite books from my childhood.  Scenes evoked by the cover are Anne begging her guardian for puffed shelves on her dress, the nosy neighbour Mrs. Rachel Lynde and the blossom trees in Prince Edward Island.

Horrible Histories by Terry Deary, Peter Hepplewhite and Neil Tonge 
Revealing all the glory, slimey, and gruesome bits teachers left out in lessons this series brought history to life for me as a child. The books are full of illustrations, quizzes and funny facts about different periods and events in history. My favourite fact was always that Elizabeth I was considered the cleanest person in England as she had four baths a year!

The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst

A few months ago Weidenfeld & Nicolson advertised that they would be giving away a free book to anyone who signed up to their mailing list. Not saying no to a book and having never read a spy thriller the option I decided on was Alan Furst’s The Spies of Warsaw. 

The book was a nice surprise in the post after a few weeks and proved to be a bargain at the small fee of giving out my email address.

Set in 1937 Poland, the thriller follows a deadly game of espionage played out between French and German operatives. Easy to read and thoroughly engaging, I completed it in less than a week and enjoyed being transported to the Europe of pre World War II. 

What was most entertaining about The Spies of Warsaw was Furst’s grasp of the time. In the book he displays a knack for placing a character directly in the political turmoil of the 1930’s and eliminating any evidence that it is in fact a work of fiction. The main protagonist is free to circle the cocktail parties and hotel bars of Berlin, Paris and Warsaw and engage the subtle art of information trafficking. The job is at times a perilous one: as you will see the military attaché enjoying ponczkis at a local café one day and fighting SS men the next.
 

Yet behind all the merriment and excitement a central question preoccupies The Spies of Warsaw, placing it under a cloud of mournful retrospection: “What will become of these people?”  

All characters are set under the glooming dark shadow of the First World War and the apprehension of the next.

The first espionage novel I’ve ever read, I enjoyed Alan Furst’s blend of fact and fiction and the mixture of action and melancholy. What’s more I’ve now got the bug to go and visit Europe again. 

The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones by Jack Wolf

I first heard about The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones when I was browsing the Vintage Books website and I stumbled upon blog posts written by the author Jack Wolf. In them the writer described the influences behind his debut novel and his choices to combine malignant folk tales of goblin kings and bogeymen. These posts, which continued on to cover the topics of Madness and Sexuality, ran alongside weekly bulletins from the book’s Facebook page supplying titbit facts on madhouses and medicine in the eighteenth century. As a sucker for publicity and anything of the gory historical nature I pre-ordered my own hardback copy before its January release date.

The book arrived, its cover evoking imagery not dissimilar to the Headless Horseman Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but its pages revealed a heavily researched delve into the world of mid-eighteenth century England. A world Jack Wolf lovingly assembles with painstaking detail right down to the whitelead faces of the female characters and ole time language which reveals the tale of the younge protagonist Tristan Hart. 

At first the language presents a difficultly in achieving a flow while reading, but as the pages turn your mind ceases to stumble over the words and the Yeares of Tristan are laid out before your eyes. 

The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones is the account of a young budding anatomical student’s study of pain and his descent into madness. 

The story opens in the pastoral setting of Berkshire, where Tristan grows up as the son of a squire, free to room the slopes of the chalk horse and create mischief in the neighbouring apple orchards. Yet despite his privileged background, and bountiful opportunities to fool around with the local tavern maids, Tristan is unsatisfied, and craves for something more beyond the idle pursuits of pleasure.

What he craves lurks underneath the pale surface of skin, and can only be sought out in candlelit dissecting rooms of London's academia and furthermore whispered of in the darkest rooms of city's illicit brothel dens. 

On the outer surface Tristan Hart is a bright young man who is dutifully studying medicine with the aim of uprooting the causes of humanity’s Ills, but below this visage is a sadistic monster who seeks out scalpels, whips and chains to cure the drumming hallucinations inside his head…

For his debut Jack Wolf has warped an uncomfortable concoction of folk tales with the Scientific Revolution and used the settings of stuffy vivisection laboratories and haunts of sexual depravity. While one can admire the depths which Jack Wolf goes create this twisted fairytale, any hope for a breather fails, and even a flight through the fields of Tristan’s Berkshire homelands cannot avoid disorientating hallucinations of gnomes, fairies and bat children. 

The verdict simply reads: not for the faint of heart. Pumping through the veins of this debut is an antithesis what the scientific thought of the time were trying to achieve. In the vessel of Tristan Hart Jack Wolf delivers an unnerving study of extremity assembled with a gruesome poetic fibre.