This has been the summer of Preston Child. A friend recommended the novels because of their co-authorship and because he knew I would love Preston Child’s hero. The FBI protagonist Pendegrast, is part Holmes, part Dracula and more than a little Oscar Wilde. I love Preston Child’s confidence in letting scifi fantasy unashamedly run riot amongst Police procedurals, usually in the middle of New York’s labyrinthine Natural history museum. Relic, Reliquary, Cabinet of Curiosities and The Book of the Dead, all play with horror amongst the dusty artefacts! Things resurrect themselves in Preston Childs novels and the past always returns to taint the equilibrium of the present.
Like John Connolly’s thrillers, the Gothic is never far away in Preston Child and the reader is never insulted by overly pragmatic solutions or limiting, rational explanation. Things are left unfinished or are rarely finished with, an imaginative truth that keeps me on ebay buying the next in the series!
Dickens is my hero. I started to reread Our Mutual Friend on kindle on holiday and there I was again scared to be out at night on a River that seemed as much the river Styx as Thames. Love Dickens’s visual imagination. He creates settings that tell you everything about the psychology of his characters. I loved the Lean film of Great Expectations as a child (truly a behind settee moment) and think the graveyard opening the most thrilling I have ever read. He takes his child protagonist and exposes him to topsy turvy terror whilst surrounded by his already dead family!
Fred Vargas writes like no other thriller writer I have come across. She is idiosyncratic and tender, yet sinister too. The opening of The Three Evangelists when an opera star is unsettled by the unexplained presence of a new tree in her garden overnight, gripped me straight away. I couldn’t compare it to anything except Alice in Wonderland! Then in another novel, dismembered feet are left in shoes and in Highgate cemetery in the opening chapter. Very refreshing to read something original in its oddity without being force fed cleverness.
Last but not least, I am reading Von Daniken’s Chariot of the Gods. My dad loved it and I remember I bored my teacher rigid with an epic school project on all those tracks from space ships landing somewhat mysteriously in Ancient Peru! .
