pornokitsch

Golden Tentacle Finalist: The Samaritan by Fred Venturini

Horror isn't about fear of death, not really. Horror is about something more primal, more basic: fear. The best horror novels (and the worst, and a lot in between) are steaming with fear: fear of death, yes, but also fear of pain, fear of anger. Of rejection. Incompetence. Meaninglessness. Vulnerability.  Sex. Society. Identity.

Fear of one's self.

Is it any wonder that so many horror novels feature teen-aged or college-aged protagonists, characters who are of an age when those concerns are totally consuming?

Fred Venturini's The Samaritan begins where a lot of horror begins: middle school. Thirteen-year-old Dale finds himself at the mercy of a group of really awful, but attractive, girls; going along with whatever humiliation they're inflicting on him is terrible, yes. But it also makes him the center of their attention, however briefly, and (being a horny 13-year-old boy), that's exactly where he wants to be - again, however briefly.

[A few unavoidable spoilers from here - sorry! To be safe, skip the next few paragraphs.]

The experiment yields unexpected results when Dale winds up making friends with a guy called Mack, an all-around awesome, athletic, funny, boys-want-to-be-him girls-want-to-do-him type, who tries to teach Dale about self-respect. Their friendship continues through high school, though Dale's self-hatred never quite allows him to buy what Mack is trying to sell him. A series of testosterone-fueled run-ins with a violent senior (high school senior, not senior citizen) named Clint leads to tragedy, when Clint rapes the girl Dale's in love with and murders her and four other students. He also gives Mack a career-ending wound and shoots Dale through the hand. And possibly the head.

The day Dale removes his bandages, he finds he's wholly healed - everything that had been shot off has regrown.

Inky Tentacle Finalist: A Monster Calls

A Monster Calls
Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd
Illustrated by Jim Kay
Walker Books 

Although the entire book is a work of art, it's the cover - that hulking, not-quite-human thing striding over the moonlit landscape, across the furrows and toward an isolated farmhouse - that says everything you need to know about A Monster Calls. It's a horror story, of a sort; an invasion, an assault upon the safe places and the quiet moments; monstrous in its pitiless and inexorable progress. The viewer cannot help but be overwhelmed by that invasion, overtaken by that image. It's gorgeous, horrible, and utterly haunting. [Anne]

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From 16 January to 3 February, members of The Kitschies' judging panel will be discussing all of the 2011 finalists. Each review only reflects the view of that judge, and should not be taken as representative of the panel's collective opinion or final selection.

You can find the complete list of Inky Tentacle finalists on The Kitschies' site. Please join in the discussion below and on our Facebook page.

Red Tentacle Finalist: Osama by Lavie Tidhar

The best advice I ever got about photography was that you shouldn't ever try to photograph the thing itself: the fireworks, the touchdown, the sunset. Instead, turn around and take your pictures of the way the world looks when it's looking at those fireworks, that sunset. Try to capture the way a crowd responds to something, or the way the colors of that sunset bleed across the horizon. The way to access a moment is to try to capture its effects.

A decade after the events of 9/11, it's almost easy to talk about terrorism: suicide bombers and the war on terror and Homeland Security and full-body airport scans. But the thing itself, the event, hasn't lessened in impact; it's no easier to watch footage of the Twin Towers falling now than it was to see it live on television, more than ten years ago. And so, with Osama, Lavie Tidhar isn't writing about the moments of horror that make up the connect-the-dots of modern terrorism. He's writing about their reflections.

Golden Tentacle Finalist: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children might be the most structurally interesting (peculiar, even) of all the books on the Golden Tentacle shortlist. Superficially, it is an extremely traditional young adult fantasy. But the author, Ransom Riggs, uses elements beyond the text to build additional layers of meaning. As a story, Miss Peregrine is enjoyable, as a book, it is distinctive.

Jacob is a your typically normal boy. He plods drearily through his middle American suburban life, going through the paces until he starts his job at the family business (an ubiquitous drug store chain). His father adds a touch of a Burtonesque – a constantly-scheming failed naturalist, Jacob’s dad sublimates his own familial pressure by taking endless notes on birds.

The real loon, however, is Jacob’s grandfather, Abe. Abe is filled with crazy old stories, the memories of which dot through Jacob’s youth. Stories of monsters and magic, escape and mayhem, nightmare and fantasy and wonder. Like a young Fred Savage, Jacob loves the stories but, as he grows up, learns that the “mature” thing to do is reject them.

Inky Tentacle Finalist: Equations of Life

Equations of Life
Simon Morden
Design by Lauren Panepinto
Orbit

It's the sort of image that might cover a stylish reissue of a sci-fi classic, and thus lends this very new book a preemptive air of cult cool. There is nothing that gives the plot away, nothing so explicit as the post-Armageddon landscape that the novel itself might have called for. I can see this book being a knackered old paperback in twenty years time, still being passed around between friends like a Ballard, an Orwell, or a Burgess: a timeless backpack mainstay. Where it succeeds uniquely is that it hurts your eyes so much you simply have to open the cover and read the thing to make the screaming stop. [Hayley]

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From 16 January to 3 February, members of The Kitschies' judging panel will be discussing all of the 2011 finalists. Each review only reflects the view of that judge, and should not be taken as representative of the panel's collective opinion or final selection.

You can find the complete list of Inky Tentacle finalists on The Kitschies' site. Please join in the discussion below and on our Facebook page.

Red Tentacle Finalist: The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers

One of the great pleasures of adulthood is learning to enjoy anticipation. As a kid, waiting sucks. Remember Christmas, and how you would go to sleep under the tree every night because you just couldn't wait for the morning you'd wake up surrounded by presents? (Or was that just me?)

Waiting takes on yottagrams of angst-filled misery when you're a teenager, though. Thought waiting sucked as a kid? At 16, it sucks even more than you could ever have imagined. Often because whatever you're waiting for is clearly the last key to fulfilment/coolness/adulthood/getting laid, but also because everyone else has had it or been doing whatever it is for a billion years while you just sit there, on your loser pizza-faced teenaged butt, waiting. Waiting is the worst thing ever. Waiting is the end of the world.

And then, one day, you wake up old and boring and looking forward to things like, uh, looking forward to things.

This may seem like a strange introduction to Jane Rogers' lovely novel The Testament of Jessie Lamb, but, at its heart, Jessie Lamb is a novel about a teenager, waiting. Waiting for boys and kissing, waiting to be understood, waiting to be trusted to be able to make her own decisions. Waiting for freedom. Waiting for autonomy. Waiting for adulthood. And waiting for the end of the world.

Golden Tentacle Finalist: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

One of the guiding principles behind The Kitschies is the idea of transparency – which is why we much a big deal out of these pre-decision reviews. And, in that spirit, I don’t think there’s a problem with confessing that I love The Night Circus.

Earlier, Anne referenced that one judge compulsively read The Enterprise of Death while vacuuming. Similarly, I read The Night Circus while walking to the corner pub - and then resented the fact that our friends were already there to meet us. Magical competitions, sparkling detail, gruelling training sequences, exquisite use of language, tragic romance and villainous bureaucracies… all some of my favourite things. All wrapped up in one volume, it makes The Night Circus one of my favourite books. 

Which leads tidily into another of the prize’s guiding principles: the use of criteria. (If it helps, right now I’m imagining my high horse as looking like something straight off the Night Circus’ carousal). “Hug it to your chest and coo” isn’t actually what we’re looking for – we’re out for “progressive, intelligent and entertaining” instead.

This is all the more important when it comes to books like The Night Circus, works that are carefully crafted to trigger an emotional response. True, the book makes me all verklempt. That’s a sign of its success in some area. But is it an area we’re looking for?

[There are a few mild & woolly spoilers below the jump. If you're concerned, please pick this up at the final paragraph.]

Inky Tentacle Finalist: The Prague Cemetery

The Prague Cemetery
Umberto Eco
Design by Suzanne Dean / Illustration by John Spencer
Harvill Secker

The Prague Cemetery’s cover successfully draws upon the typography, style and composition of the 1890’s. With its muted two colour palette the cover alludes to pulp fiction or early pamphlets and periodicals.The illustration draws the reader in with simple silhouettes: a shadowed “gentlemen” walks away from view, a line of smoke weaves stillness and silence into the atmosphere as the crow flies from image to intrigue.

For me it’s the costumed figure that is most fascinating, a “Coffin Joe”-like character disguised by in the cover of night. We are uncertain of his purpose for our view is distorted by the effects of smoke and Shadows. We are following him into the back streets of our imagination where logic and black magic play a game of cloak and dagger, a classic trait of noir - that of trust and betrayal. [Darren]

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From 16 January to 3 February, members of The Kitschies' judging panel will be discussing all of the 2011 finalists. Each review only reflects the view of that judge, and should not be taken as representative of the panel's collective opinion or final selection.

You can find the complete list of Inky Tentacle finalists on The Kitschies' site. Please join in the discussion below and on our Facebook page.

Red Tentacle Finalist: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd

The painfully witty elevator pitch for Pornokitsch is something about finding genre fiction that we can share with our mothers. That is, the search for books that contain the imaginative weirdness that we enjoy, but come wrapped up in enough gravitas and obvious depth to be taken seriously by our dracophobic anti-robot parental units. (This is a pretty good variant of the “would you read it on a train?” test of cover art.)

Anecdotally, A Monster Calls passes the mother test with flying colours. This is a book we’ve both recommended to our mothers. In fact, it is a book that many of our friends have recommended to their mothers. Were I to hazard a guess, this is the most commercially successful of all the books on the Red Tentacle shortlist. A lot of readers have given it to a lot of mothers. And fathers. And brothers and sisters and friends and so on and so forth...

What is it about A Monster Calls that makes it so successful – so shareable?

Golden Tentacle Finalist: God's War by Kameron Hurley

A never-ending war rages on a far-off world. While battles rage at the front, hardened mercenaries and bloodthirsty assassins stalk the outskirts, doing the conflict's really dirty work: bounty hunting, kidnapping and murder. In the shadows, magicians manipulate a form of advanced biotech (now thought of as wizardry), perfecting their sinister arts in bloody ways. While two vast, implacable powers compete in unending war, most people focus only on the grubby mechanics of survival. 

God's War's protagonist, Nyx, is a perfect example of the hardened mercenary. And as a former bloodthirsty assassin, Nyx is two science fictional archetypes in one. When a mysterious alien ambassador interferes in the planet's political scene, and then goes suddenly missing, Nyx is hired (blackmailed, really) into hunting her down. Nyx soon realises that no one, on either side, can be trusted.

That all forms an enticing package, and Ms. Hurley is no slouch when it comes to writing a convoluted plot and crafting explosive action scenes. But God's War goes an extra mile or two with its hard-boiled female protagonist and its non-Western setting.