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Post by dem bones on Dec 24, 2007 6:45:12 GMT
Christopher Fowler - Breathe (Talos, 2004) Everyone has to do it ...All is not well at SymaxCorp. The work is piled high, people are toiling overnight to meet deadlines, and the supervisors are keeping their beady eyes on everyone. But staff are complaining of feeling sick, and the last health and safety officer mysteriously disappeared one evening, never to be seen again. It's down to new boy Ben, together with temp Miranda, kick-boxing Meera and overweight June to try and get to the bottom of the problem. As colleagues are unexpectedly transformed into mindless, blood-crazed zombies, Ben and his friends discover that there really is something in the air ... Just when I'd given up hope of seeing the like again, a contemporary horror novella that gets its business done in just under 100 pages. The tagline, The Office meets Night Of The Living Dead, makes any attempt at a review redundant, so her goes. Ben thinks he's struck gold when he lands the job on the back of a moody CV cooked up by a pal, but a few hours into his first day in the ultra-modern, entirely soulless, thirty story SymaxCorp dungeon soon disillusions him of that one. His immediate supervisor, Clarke, an evil bastard in an orthopaedic shoe, denies him access to the previous Health & Safety guy's files. Clarke has no intention of allowing him to compile an accurate report on the troubling level of sickness among the demoralised workforce. It wouldn't do for it to get out just exactly how innovative the Symax Air-Condition system really is: the potent crack-cocaine cocktail being pumped through the building does wonders for productivity, but it's playing havoc with the sanity of the work-force. And a further ingredient - a corpse left to rot in the main ventilation shaft - can't be helping matters. As the contaminated air kicks in, SymaxCorp descends into anarchy and our heroes are trapped on the upper floors, stalked by Clarke, his loyal hench-woman Fitch the receptionist, what's left of the tenacious Mr. Swan and sundry "identikit corporate drones'. Can they escape with their lives or will they too succumb to living death? Very funny and very angry.
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Post by scissorman on Feb 8, 2008 23:48:58 GMT
I've followed Mr Fowler for a while (not in a stalking sense, you understand) and he seems to get better with each book.
Didn't this start off as a single short story in a recent collection?
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Post by Johnlprobert on Apr 4, 2008 11:40:31 GMT
I actually thought this was a bit of a comedown after the highs of collections like Sharper Knives, Flesh Wounds, & Personal Demons, and novels like Disturbia & Psychoville. If anything it feels a bit like something that didn't make it into one of those collections. It's not really 'The Office Meets Night of the Living Dead' as the blurb would have you believe, but it does feel rather derivative as opposed to his other stuff.
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Post by franklinmarsh on May 23, 2008 8:32:26 GMT
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Post by Calenture on May 23, 2008 12:56:04 GMT
I'm glad I didn't recognise any quotes from either of the Black Books in that review, Franklin! I'm certainly wondering what anthology Chris Fowler read. |
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Post by franklinmarsh on May 23, 2008 13:07:29 GMT
I have a feeling that it was reading stuff like that that made him appreciate the Black Books, Rog!
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Post by dem bones on May 30, 2008 7:25:16 GMT
Chris is too much of a gentleman to name and shame. Me, I'm a horrible bastard.  John C. Pelan (ed.) - Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium (Darkside: 1996: Roc, 1998) Be prepared for a chilling excursion to the dark side of fiction through the most frightening places that linger just beyond the imagination. With its haunting tales of dread--30 of them--that will stab an icy shaft of fear straight into one's very soul, this is modern macabre fiction at its very best.Robert J. Levy - Skinwriters
Elizabeth Massie & Robert Petitt - Ice Dreams
Lauren Fitzgerald - Wasting
K. K. Ormond - Backseat Dreams & Nightmares
Edward Lee - The Stick Woman
Wayne Edwards - The Soul of the Beast Surrendered
Sean Doolittle - October Gethsemane
Lucy Laylor - Scars
Brian McNaughton - ystery orm
Caitlín R. Kiernan - Tears Seven Times Salt
S. Darnbrook Colson - One-Eyed Jack
Steve Rasnic Tem - Elena
Adam-Troy Castro - Family Album
Sue Storm - Having Eyes, See Ye Not?
D. F. Lewis - Sisters in Death
Roman Ranieri - Window of Opportunity
Christa Faust - Envy
Alan M. Clark - The Man of Her Dreams
Jeffrey Osier - For the Curiousity of Rats
Yvonne Navarro - The Stranger Who Sits Beside Me
Deidra Cox - In Pieces
David B. Silva - Voices Lost & Clouded
Jack Ketchum - If Memory Serves
James S. Dorr - The Tears of Isis
Brian Hodge - Stick Around, It Gets Worse
Larry Tritten - Voices in the Black Night
Roberta Lannes - Stealing the Sisyphus Stone
Thomas Ligotti - The Nightmare Network
Wayne Allen Sallee - Fiends by Torchlight
t. Winter-Damon & Randy Chandler - ...& Thou Hast Given Them Blood to Drink... |
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