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Post by andydecker on Oct 27, 2015 14:29:59 GMT
Read about the winners and the only category I am a bit interested is the winner of the Best Horror Novel. Adam Nevill No One gets out alive. The writer is new to me, even if he has an impressive backlist under his belt. Anybody know his work?
The rest leaves me baffled, frankly. I guess pickings must have been slim indeed if the best anthology in a Fantasy Award is an SF-Collection. This seems more to be about gender politics then about genre. Same goes for best fantasy. A Young Adult? Is there not one adult fantasy novel on the market with enough literary merits? This is all a bit underwhelming, frankly. Oh, well, at least best movie was good for a chuckle. Guardians of the Galaxy? Really? |
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Post by Dr Strange on Oct 27, 2015 15:24:14 GMT
Well, I've been banging on about him on The Vault for ages.
His first novel, Banquet For The Damned, is a sort of Jamesian/Lovecraftian tale of occult goings on in a Scottish University;
Apartment 16 is a haunted house story (of sorts) with a heavy dose of urban paranoia, vaguely reminiscent of the likes of Rosemary's Baby;
The Ritual is a pagan/wilderness horror, inspired by the likes of Blackwood and Machen - but with a very modern twist (Scandinavian black metal);
Last Days is about a "film crew in peril" who are making a documentary about a mysterious and sinister religious cult;
House of Small Shadows is a very strange, hallucinatory story involving creepy dolls and taxidermy; and
No One Gets Out Alive is urban folk-horror (with a social conscience) and one of the most disturbing things I've read for a long time - definitely worthy of a Best Horror Novel award (IMO).
I would recommend each and every one of these - although The Ritual is possibly my favourite, I'd have to say that No One Gets Out Alive is what I can really only describe as serious horror, both in terms of the subject matter and the effect that it had on me. I even made it my best novel for 2014 (in the Vault's round-up for the year), thus proving... well nothing at all, really.
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Post by Mike Brough on Oct 27, 2015 18:13:45 GMT
I'd have to agree with Dr S: No One Gets Out Alive is the most unrelentingly bleak novel I've read. Or tried to read... I had to give up a few chapters in as it was starting to affect my mood!
I'll try again but I think I'll wait until the summer.
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Post by David A. Riley on Oct 27, 2015 19:44:12 GMT
Read about the winners and the only category I am a bit interested is the winner of the Best Horror Novel. Adam Nevill No One gets out alive. The writer is new to me, even if he has an impressive backlist under his belt. Anybody know his work?
The rest leaves me baffled, frankly. I guess pickings must have been slim indeed if the best anthology in a Fantasy Award is an SF-Collection. This seems more to be about gender politics then about genre. Same goes for best fantasy. A Young Adult? Is there not one adult fantasy novel on the market with enough literary merits? This is all a bit underwhelming, frankly. Oh, well, at least best movie was good for a chuckle. Guardians of the Galaxy? Really? Must admit the results bemused me too, apart from Adam Nevil. Although I have yet to read his winning novel I have read others of his and have been greatly impressed with them, especially The Ritual. Guardians of the Galaxy as best movie, though? Was that really the best last year? I thought it was utter tripe myself. Amusing tripe, but tripe nevertheless. Perhaps it's time for the BFS to go back to a vote of the membership, rather than by committee. |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Oct 27, 2015 20:54:59 GMT
I'd have to agree with Dr S: No One Gets Out Alive is the most unrelentingly bleak novel I've read. Or tried to read... I had to give up a few chapters in as it was starting to affect my mood! Yeah, I found NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE a little too miserable for the mood I was in when I started reading it and packed it in after a few chapters. Daresay I'll give it another go, as I rate Nevill very highly as an author. THE RITUAL is the only horror novel to have actually scared me in the last fifteen years or so (the previous holder of that title being NAOMI'S ROOM by Jonathan Aycliffe). I'm hoping there's an element of the supernatural to it, though, as I find person-on-person horror hard to get on with, especially in squalid settings. Of the others, I really liked APARTMENT 16. LAST DAYS had a lot of good, scary moments but the structure was a little repetitive and I wasn't convinced by the ending. Sorry to say I didn't get on with THE HOUSE OF SMALL SHADOWS. The story just felt too slight for a novel, although the atmosphere was fantastic. His short story FLORRIE, in the HOUSE OF FEAR anthology, was excellent. I'd love to see a collection of his short fiction one day. |
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Post by andydecker on Oct 27, 2015 22:24:10 GMT
Thanks for the answers. Sounds really interesting.
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Post by ramseycampbell on Oct 28, 2015 10:53:07 GMT
The Frances Hardinge is a remarkable novel, and I'm delighted that it won. We also had it on the short list for the James Herbert Award.
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Post by Dr Strange on Oct 28, 2015 11:34:19 GMT
I found NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE a little too miserable for the mood I was in when I started reading it and packed it in after a few chapters. Daresay I'll give it another go, as I rate Nevill very highly as an author... I'm hoping there's an element of the supernatural to it, though, as I find person-on-person horror hard to get on with, especially in squalid settings. There very definitely is a supernatural element to it and, in fact, it ends up going somewhere quite unexpected (by me, at least) in the final third or so. |
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Post by ramseycampbell on Oct 28, 2015 11:51:11 GMT
"A Young Adult? Is there not one adult fantasy novel on the market with enough literary merits?"
Surely the question is rather whether the other eligible novels outdid Frances's novel in those terms. They would have to be considerable indeed.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 28, 2015 18:26:14 GMT
I found NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE a little too miserable for the mood I was in when I started reading it and packed it in after a few chapters. Daresay I'll give it another go, as I rate Nevill very highly as an author... I'm hoping there's an element of the supernatural to it, though, as I find person-on-person horror hard to get on with, especially in squalid settings. There very definitely is a supernatural element to it and, in fact, it ends up going somewhere quite unexpected (by me, at least) in the final third or so. Ah, splendid, I'll nudge it closer to the top of the list and keep my fingers crossed that I won't come out the other end too depressed. |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 28, 2015 18:37:21 GMT
It's probably helpful in these situations to treat 'young adult' as what it is -- an offensively meaningless marketing tag. Consider some of the stuff that would have been published as 'young adult' if they'd come out in the last ten years: Bradbury's SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, John Christopher's TRIPODS trilogy, LORD OF THE FLIES, probably. It's a bucket for lazy publishers to chuck books into then gardy-loo them over the public, and not in and of itself a badge of quality or otherwise.
I've read a few 'YA' (spit) novels over the last couple of years that roll over their adult counterparts, Patrick Ness's CHAOS WALKING trilogy being a case in point.
The problem is that, as with any popular genre or trend, you'll get a flood of authors trying to grab a slice of the pie -- so you end up with hundreds of novels that consist of nothing more than codified tropes: the plucky and downtrodden teenage heroine, the evil dystopia, the love triangle and on and on. The current proliferation of those novels are probably what's causing this YA backlash, much as the King imitators of the 1980s put people off horror.
I haven't read the novel under discussion, but I guess what I'm trying to say that slapping something with the Young Adult label doesn't necessarily mean it's somehow lesser than books marked for an 'adult' readership.
I still think it's a bollocks term, though. Christ, young adult reading for me was James Herbert and Shaun Hutson!
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Post by ramseycampbell on Oct 29, 2015 7:03:56 GMT
It's probably helpful in these situations to treat 'young adult' as what it is -- an offensively meaningless marketing tag. Consider some of the stuff that would have been published as 'young adult' if they'd come out in the last ten years: Bradbury's SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, John Christopher's TRIPODS trilogy, LORD OF THE FLIES, probably. It's a bucket for lazy publishers to chuck books into then gardy-loo them over the public, and not in and of itself a badge of quality or otherwise. Indeed! To come at it another way, I'd say Alan Garner is one of our finest fantasy writers, and he was certainly writing for young people. Philip Pullman is another such, and Frances too. |
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randy
Crab On The Rampage
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Post by randy on Nov 6, 2015 17:46:05 GMT
Just another voice in favor of Adam Nevill. I've only read The Ritual and thought it one of the best horror fantasies I've read in a long time, good enough to inspire me to pick up four of his other novels.
Now to find time to read them ...
Randy M.
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