Author League Part 4: Horror and Action

It seems strange grouping “horror” and “action” into the same part, but this is really a way of scooping up all the other authors I read regularly. In truth, although I enjoy the action books, I rate them far below the other books in terms of standards. Maybe next month, I will bring all four parts together and do an overall table. Without further a do lets begin:

Stephen King (U) A+

Total books read: 18 (The Dark Tower series, The Stand, IT, Dolores Clairborne, Cujo, Pet Sematary, On Writing, Eyes of the Dragon, Just After Sunset, Skeleton Crew, Under the Dome, 11/22/63)

Total books written: 54 (roughly)

Out of all the authors I read, Stephen King is easily the most well known. He has been at the top of the horror profession for decades and rightly deserves the accolades awarded to him.

Apart from a brief fling with IT when I was young, my first experience of a Stephen King book was “The Stand.” It blew me away. For a book I read almost 15 years ago, I can still vividly remember some of the scenes in the story such as:  the prison, the tunnel and Trashcan man. In fact each character is strong and of course you have the excellent villain in Randall Flagg. The only slight negative regarding the book and a common flaw many people comment on with King’s work is that the ending is weak. After such a huge built up the pay-off didn’t work for me. Having said that for many years this was the best post apocalyptic horror novel I have read.

Despite my love for “The Stand,” it is only in recent years that I have really started reading King in a big way. I haven’t come across a bad book by him yet. Many of his books I grew up hearing so much about, maybe even seeing glimpses from the films as they have been on TV, and so I often formed an impression of what the book was about prior to reading them. however, with every one I’ve read I have been pleasantly surprised.

Of his back catalogue, “Pet Sematary” and “IT” are stand outs for me. Whilst “Cujo” has a special place in my heart as I am a lover of dark endings and “Dolores Clairborne” is remarkable bit of story telling focussing on only one character.

King gets horror. More importantly, he gets that most of the time the real horror is not the monster under the bed, but human nature. No one does characters like Mr. King.

He has been criticised in the past for being too verbose (as I check the word count of this article so far and cringe). I don’t necessarily agree with these statements but there is something to them when you look at how superb his short stories are. Just look at “the Mist” for proof if you need it. King’s short story collections are always a must read rather than a, “Oh I like the author so I might as well check them out at some point.”

Not content with horror though, Stephen King has also dabbled with fantasy in the form of “eyes of the dragon,” a very good story that has left this reader wishing he would return to the more “swords and sorcery” side of things as some point.

His big fantasy epic is the 7 book “Dark Tower series.” As a rule, I dislike it when fantasy worlds cross over into our real world. With this series, I did not even notice it. The Dark Tower series is an outstanding achievement. They focus around Roland of Gilead, the last Gunslinger on his quest for the Dark Tower. The series features my favourite opening line of any series,

“"The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed"

Some say the last 3 books are lacking, but I couldn’t disagree more. Book 5 is my personal favourite and although I think book 6 is the weakest of the series (it would have benefitted from having the first third of book 7 tacked on the end), I was very satisfied with the ending. In fact I thought it was perfect. King also makes reference to several other of his books in this series nicely implying that all his work is linked.

In addition to his work on fiction, King has written a “how to” type of book entitled, “on Writing.” For any budding authors out there, I would highly recommend this book which is largely appreciated as one of the best of its type. The book is semi autobiographical, but the tips in there are invaluable.

I could ramble on about King all day but I will stop there as already this feature is longer then any I have spent on other authors. I will say that the popular conception is that following his car accident at the turn of the century, Stephen King no longer possesses the tools to write stories like he used to. I have read 6 of the books following the accident (3 of them dark tower books) and I refute this strongly. His last couple of novels, “Under the Dome” and “11/22/63” are excellent and if anything, like a fine wine King is getting better with age. With the Winds through a keyhole due for release on April, Mr King is on the up.

Robert McCammon (U) A++

Total books read: 7 (The Matthew Corbett series, Swan Song, Boy's Life, Gone South, The Five)

Total books written: 18

If you felt I gushed over Stephen King you haven’t seen nothing yet. Robert McCammon is quite simply my favourite author at the moment. George R R Martin and King are not far behind but this man has not written a book below “excellent.”

I discovered him by accident really. I was watching something about women being burned at the stake for being witches and as you do decided on a whim to “Google” to see if any books covered this topic. It turns out to have been one of the best things I did. The results came up with, “Speaks the Nightbird.” The blurb on the back of the book seemed to cover everything I was looking for. A young woman accused of being a witch in a small village that had its own mysteries. The book also marked the triumphant return from self imposed retirement from the author. Intrigued I ordered the book and was promptly blown away.

“Speaks the Nightbird” marks the start of the excellent Matthew Corbett series set in the Colonial times. Young Matthew is a problem solver, bright but green, we follow his progress as he develops into quite the celebrity.

The best thing about these books is, like John Connolly has done with the Charlie Parker series, they are all slightly different in themes, whilst staying inherently true to Matthew’s character. “Speaks the Nightbird” is more of a mystery novel setting the historical context, whilst the sequel, “Queen of Bedlam” was more your psychological mystery. The third book in the series, “Mister Slaughter” was action tempered with a cat and mouse style affair. All three have been excellent and I simply cannot wait for “the Providence Rider” due out in May.

Aside from this series, Robert McCammon has written several standalone books. “Swan Song” is his take on the post apocalyptic world and is quite simply the best book I have ever read. I mentioned above how “the Stand” used to be my favourite post apocalyptic novel, this is the one that trumps it and then some. Please read it.

Apart from horror McCammon has written a few other novels. “Gone South” is a fun read about two bounty hunters. It is quite humorous in places and McCammon does a magnificent job of making the reader like characters that aren’t altogether very pleasant. “The Five,” his most recent work, is a contemporary novel following the life of a rock band. McCammon’s love of music shines through the pages and the novel is a very solid entry into his portfolio.

However, the best non horror book is “Boy’s Life.” I mentioned in my review of “IT” that King gets the life of children like no other. I meant to say no other apart from McCammon. It seems unfair to compare this book to the film, “Stand by Me” (based on King’s short story “the Body”) but I do so only as the latter is well known to many, whilst (in the UK at least), McCammon is criminally relatively unknown. “Boy’s Life” eclipses “Stand by Me” in every way. It is a fantastic coming of age story. Up there with Harper Lee’s “To kill a mocking bird.”

I find myself holding back on reading Robert McCammon quite simply because I don’t want to exhaust all of his back catalogue and have to wait for his next book. The man is that good though. Following “the Providence Writer” is another contemporary story containing the supernatural. If it is 1/10^th as good as Swan Song we are all in for a treat.

Brian Keene (d):  B-

Total books read: 4 (the Ghoul, The Rising, Dark Hollow and Dead Sea)

Total books written: 18

A quick Google search when looking for new horror authors led me to Mr Keene. I started with his latest book at the time which was “the Ghoul” and thoroughly enjoyed it. As I mentioned earlier with Stephen King, Brian Keene realised that the horror element is much scarier when dealing with the evil nature of humans rather than the ghosts and ghouls.

His most popular book is perhaps, “The Rising,” this is the first of two zombie books in the Rising series. Personally I found it the weakest book of his that I have read. Maybe that is due to my aversion towards talking zombies but I found I never took the book that seriously. Considering it ended on a cliffhanger of sorts I have had no inclination to read the second one so far.

“Dead sea” is your more traditional take on zombies and is a much more solid entry. It doesn’t break any new ground but it is enjoyable. It is “Dark Hollow” that I think is the strongest book I have read. The novel tells the story of a struggling author slowly uncovering the source of an ancient evil residing in his town.

It may seem compared to the praise I have heaped on the King and McCammon, that Brian Keene is poor in comparison. There is some truth in that but Keene is still a very enjoyable read. His novels are short and perfect if you are in the mood for some good old fashioned scares.

I have marked Brian as on the way down in my league as I believe recently he had some trouble securing a publisher. His books are hard to come by in the Uk and I am not in any major rush to buy them. Having said that, I think I might have been a bit harsh on him and so will try to read one of his books soon.

Steve Alten (-): B

Total books read: 4 (The MEG series)

Total books written: 15

Steve is the author of the MEG books. MEG is short for Carcharodon megalodon, a prehistoric 75 ft great white shark. Basically, these books are Jaws but on a bigger scale. I’ve never read Peter Benchley’s book but I loved the films. Well 1, 2 and even 4.

I read MEG expecting it to be a cheap imitation of Jaws. I was pleasantly surprised. Whilst these books do not contain the character development that Benchley’s reportedly do, they do contain good characters, in particular the protagonist Jonas Taylor.

Alten handles action sequences well, but is careful to ensure that the book is not all about them. There is enough content contained within the novels to make them interesting and not to be dismissed as “fluff.” I’ve read the first three books and the origin short story and have loved every one. They are my perfect summer read. I haven’t read any other novels but I certainly plan to, especially his books on the Mayan Prophecy – it is 2012 after all.

Steve has an excellent website as well. I would recommend checking it out.

Matthew Reilly (d): d

Total books read: 7

Total books written: 10

How can an author I rate so lowly be included in your top author league? How have you read 7 of his books? All valid questions my fine feather friends but the truth is Matthew Reilly is my guilty pleasure.

When I go on holiday, I take the books I am plan to read, but always save space for one extra book. It is a tradition of mine that one extra book will be a new author I will select at the airport. In 2005, that author was Matthew Reilly and the book was the “Contest.” A book where a man was taken and transported into a contest against other sample aliens from around the galaxy. I read it and loved it. Don’t ask me why, I just did. I leant it to my brother-in-law who hated it with a passion. His review surprised me, as we have very similar tastes.

Unperturbed, I moved on to “Ice Station,” again, I loved it. The novel introduced “Scarecrow,” a cool man if ever there was one.  This was closely followed by the “Temple,” another triumph as far as I was concerned. In fact, if I had stopped there, I would probably grade Matthew Reilly around the B+ region. “Ice Station” and “Temple” are great reads, Indiana Jones esque. The action sequences are second to none, in fact no one can write them better than these novels in my opinion.

The next book, “Area 7” saw the return of Scarecrow and was the first time that maybe the blinkers had been lifted off and I started to see what my Brother-in-law saw. The writing was far from great. The characters all one dimensional (at best) and the action sequences although exciting were a bit too frequent and very unrealistic. By the time Shane “Scarecrow” Schofield had his third outing in the unimaginatively titled, “Scarecrow” I began to question my sanity. I still enjoyed it, but by that time I was reading real quality stuff and in comparison the book was not up to standard. Looking back, I wonder why I enjoyed “Contest” so much. I read "Hell Island" as part fo the quick read promotion and the book worked well in such a short format, that is maybe more suited to Reilly.

When I read “Seven Ancient Wonders,” I was speechless and disgusted as to how bad the book was. The writing was lazy, characters survived improbable scenario after improbable scenario. Any effort to develop characters was a token effort at best. In short, considering the quality of “Ice Station” and the “Temple” I felt the books had gotten sloppy and lazy.

I will not give up on Matthew Reilly but I’ve heard “Six Ancient Warriors” is even worse. There is another Scarecrow novel coming out soon, maybe I will go straight on to that one. However, next time I revisit this league, I fully expect James Rollins to have overtaken Mr Reilly.