Doug Barbour wrote:
>b) I'd sort of agree that Anne Rice's first novel had style, but she's been
>going downhill ever since, and I found, say, her last couple unreadable,
>and especially boring in the extreme. She has fallen into that worst of
>states, believing that her thinking is more important than her
>storytelling, that she has something to SAY! There are far more writers, I
>believe, even in supernatural fiction, who write with far finer style than
>she does...
Agreed on Anne Rice, although I found the second novel (_The
Vampire Lestrat_) as interesting as _Interview_, if already marred
by some latent signs of the fatal overwriting that became so florid
in her subsequent books.
I agree too that there's better to be had in supernatural fiction:
Peter Straub is a very good novelist, not just a competent genre
hack, and he's not afraid to get political--as in _The Throat_,
where Vietnam is "horrified" and bears the novel's antiwar burden.
Just bought _Mr. X_ (has anyone else read it yet?). And among the
current Brit novelists of the supernatural, Peter James is very
good, I think.
Brit novelist Gwendolyn Butler's Coffin series is also good, horror-
enhanced detective fiction, the vaguely horrific atmosphere of the
City/Docklands area of London worked by her detective, John Coffin--
a historical urban setting where many buried bodies still are--
lending itself to an eeriness that deepens Butler's genre meditations
on evil. Crime is also dramatized in and as its performance in the
same space that was once a theater district, the resurrection of which
via ongoing restorations to an old playhouse by the detective's wife,
a former actress and current producer, "naturally" turns up some of
those buried bodies at the various historical layers and levels of
which this urban socioarchaeology-cum-detective fiction is composed.
Candice
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