This sounds interesting. I have always loved both supernatural fiction and
thrillers, though good specimens of the first are very hard to come by.
(Peter James has some competition from a couple of other James's in that
department.) My own recommendation for a thriller-writer bordering on the
fantastic is Jerome Charyn. His War Cries Over Avenue A is another
intriguing treatment of Vietnam. A tremendously original and prolific
novelist. And thanks to whoever it was who recommended Jake Arnott's The
Long Firm on this list a few months ago. I thought it was excellent.

I am also a great admirer of John Clute and John Grant's Encyclopedia of
Fantasy. Much more than a reference book, a source book for literary ideas,
with its entries on woods and borderlands and the changed time-frames of
people who've been kidnapped by fairies. The only problem with it is that I
don't altogether trust their verdict on the authors they've written about -
and I must admit that sword-and-sorceror stuff strikes me as incredibly
naff. So I'm always on the lookout for good literature of the fantastic that
doesn't overstretch my credulity. Any suggestions?

Best wishes,


Matthew Francis
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Visit my website at http://www.7greenhill.freeserve.co.uk



-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 15 January 2001 21:24
Subject: Re: unfashionable thought


>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
>