Married to a Cave Man

Married to a Cave Man by Damien Owens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There you go, see? THIS is how you combine humour with real human drama and emotion. Here it is.


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The North Water

The North Water by Ian McGuire
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thanks to Paul and Alice for getting me this book for Christmas, following the unerring logic of "well, it has a whale AND a ship on the cover". Once I picked up The North Water, I couldn't put it down, and raced through it as befits a book that's all told in a kind of breathless present tense, and is full of action and incident, not to mention Arctic shipwrecks and other things I'm very fond of.
I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that the book is not a murder mystery, despite what the Saturday Review people said about it.
I was unpleasantly unsurprised, though, to see that it is one of Those Modern Historical Novels, which have to tell you on every page how much everything reeks. Nobody can have a conversation without hacking into the dangling jawbone of some unfortunate animal, and everyone within a six-mile radius is vomiting, getting buggered, contracting a venereal disease, or witnessing the death of some terrified and hollow-eyed child. It's all a Bit Much, and very bleak.
Still, fairly clips along, and if you want to read a Cormac McCarthyesque story set on a Greenland whaler, well, this is the book for you.


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Nicole Cliffe's Favourite Horror Films of Recent Years

I'm just going to park this list here, and hope that Nicole does not think better of it and delete the whole thing.