The world has felt quite strange this week. Often we hear things in the news that sound huge, but which it is hard to tie back to our daily lives. I guess we are privileged when that is the case. Waking up this morning to see that TikTok really had gone dark for users across the US felt very weird and unsettling. Being in the UK, I’m not personally impacted by it, but the fact that many of the creators I followed there are gone from the platform, for now at least, is alarming. It’s a reminder of how fragile things are in a world where we rely so heavily on big tech and the whims of governments.
I was also deeply saddened to learn of the death of David Lynch. I had an Eraserhead t-shirt as a teenager and a Blue Velvet poster on my wall long before I saw the film. Clearly Lynch’s vision was unique, but what’s really amazing about his work is how many people connected with it despite how driven it was by his own obsessions. It’s a rare and wonderful thing when an artist manages to be completely uncompromising and also commercially successful.
Books I’ve Read This Week
Smitten by Janet Evanovich
A mostly entertaining romance novel from Janet Evanovich that is gently amusing and sweet at times, slightly spicy at others, but which suffers from a lack of romantic tension. The set up is simple and appealing, a 30-something single mother applies for a job on a construction site because the hours work well for the school run. The hunky owner of the building company takes a shine to her and gives her the job and romance follows. The problem is that the romance follows almost immediately and is only ever very vaguely threatened. I like lots of obstacles to the happy ever after in my romance novels and this had hardly any. Throw in a weird subplot about a local flasher that dominates the latter part of the book and you have a story that feels out of balances. The individual scenes were often charming, but it didn’t really hang together.
The Green Man of Eshwood Hall by Jacob Kerr
This seems to be a book that gets widely varying reviews from readers. I suspect that’s because it’s somewhat misleadingly marketed as folk horror, publishers’ desire to constantly pigeonhole books is often unhelpful. There is some horror here, but only enough to fill a thimble. What you get instead is a charming, affectionate and engaging written story of a 13 year old girl from a loving but slightly dysfunctional family trying to negotiate life in a new environment. She and her family move to a country village when her father gets a job at the local Manor House. The book is set in 1960 and packed with lovely detail of the rural northern England of the period. It’s cosy and amusing and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The elements of horror (focusing on a haunting and the Green Man of the title) are fun too, but I think this is a book best enjoyed as a nostalgic coming of age tale. To put it another way, this is a horror story I think my mum would like.
TNT #3: Spiral of Death by Doug Masters
God only know why I read another TNT book after not enjoying the first one. But I did and it wasn’t any better.
In this one super agent TNT goes up against a fascist group and attempts to find El Dorado. Along the way there’s a smattering of not very exciting violence and a LOT of slightly weird sex. TNT is literally insatiable and proves it a number of times.
If I was to compare the books to anything I suppose it would be to some kind of salacious 70s Euro comic, only without the diversion of sexy pics.
Do not recommend. Need to resist the masochistic urge to read the other one I have.
The Crucifix Killer by Chris Carter
In many ways (in fact in most ways) this is a terrible book. It’s ludicrously cliched, to the extent that at times it reads like a parody of a tough LA cop hunting a serial killer novel. I guessed the twist half way through (and I never guess twists!) and the prose is awful. The book has so much unnecessary description of irrelevant details that it could probably have lost 100 pages without losing any story.
And yet it is kind of fun. It’s so easy to read that you could do it when you were asleep and it has the same kind of pulpy appeal as a Doc Savage book. You know it’s stupid but sometimes that’s alright.
CriminOlly 
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