Really Bad Writing - By Gaslight - Steven Price...

So, I do have a penchant for stories based in Victorian England, probably because of my love for Charles Dickens and other English classical authors. I also like to try out new authors, to see how they fair in that genre.  What I don't like is to find an untried author who believes they are so good already that they can take egregious liberties with the grammar of the language, with the result that what would have been a promising and entertaining tale is ruined by their foolish "author's license"!

 

Such a book is By Gaslight by Steven Price.

 

 

Now, I do know well the American - or, even more sadly, in this case, Canadian - philosophy over the English language that runs along the lines of "we need to change it so much so that it's American, not English", but sometimes the need to be different leads to such a bad result that it makes a story unreadable.  The apparent love-HATE relationship that they have with the humble comma, for instance, leads to situations where sentences lose their structure and cohesion, and become minefields of re-read, re-read just to get their meaning clear, causing the reader to struggle to get a flow in the writing, thereby destroying their ability to enjoy the tale.  Some times writers do this out of ignorance, but most often they do it because some other writer/mentor fed that attitude to them. In either, and/or any other case, it is wrong! Commas serve distinct purposes in the language, and to wilfully (a) neglect and (b) remove them only leads to sloppy, and often incomprehensible writing.  In By Gaslight, in an attempt to be too artsy-fartsy than he has the skill for, Mr. Price takes this to the Nth degree, and any child in an English primary school would have had their knuckles rapped for such bad work.

 

But as if that weren't bad enough, Mr. Price has, either through ignorance or yet another puerile attempt at artsy-fartsiness, also chosen to TOTALLY ignore the use and function of quotation marks! While I know, through editing the books of a number of North American authors, that they do have trouble with the rules of dialogue, I had never thought that totally ignoring them was part of their repertoire!  Mr. Price proves me wrong, alas!

 

The result is that the narrative runs continuously, and the reader is not aware of the fact that words are supposedly being spoken by a character until they happen to meet a (often correctly used!) comma, followed by a dialogue tag - ', Steve said.' or ', Paul hissed!'  This is not only distracting, it, again, causes the reader to often rethink or recast what they have just read, making the flow of the narrative very choppy and cumbersome.

 

I'd like to think that this was totally Mr. Price's fault, but I really do believe that his publisher and their editors are also to blame for these atrocities, as no editor worth his or her salt that I know would allow such depravity to be visited upon their readers.  The sad thing is - the book is actually a damned good yarn, and I wouldn't persuade any reader not to read it just because of the incompetence of the author, his editors, and his publisher.

 

Taking the abuses of the English language that American (and Canadian writers) like to think they are good at to such an extent in the name of art is really nothing more than a failure to understand why there are rules to the language in the first place. Otherwise, it is just a jumble of words!

 

The Scarlet Gospels - Clive Barker

I have been a huge Clive Barker fan ever since I first stumbled upon The Hellbound Heart back in the late 1980's. (Showing my age now! LOL) While the majority of people, it seemed, learned of Clive through the scintillating horror films of the Hell Raiser series, which are based on the Hellbound Heart novella, my own route was through his novels and short stories. I avidly devoured The Great and Secret Show, Weaveworld, Imajica, Everville, Coldheart Canyon, etcetera, etcetera, through to Mister B. Gone, enjoying each and every one for Clive's detailed and superbly grandiose narrative style.

 

And now we have The Scarlet Gospels, the long-awaited and desperately anticipated conclusion to the Tales of the Cenobites, in particular the greatest Cenobite of them all - the great Hell Priest himself, more commonly (and unflatteringly) known as Pinhead.

 

 

The novel tells the tale of the final confrontation between Pinhead and the great saviour of humanity from many of Clive's other stories, Harry D'Amour, the tattooed avenger of evil. I don't intend to recount much, if any, of the plot or details of the story, as I'd rather you read the book for yourself.

 

What I really want to blab on about is the style of Clive's writing in this book, which has continued to improve like fine wine. In this novel, the detail and imagery, in both breadth and execution, are absolutely phenomenal!  We are taken on a journey through Hell that makes Dante's Inferno look like the tentative scribblings of a miscreant child. Seriously! The scope of Barker's world of the damned is  incredible. The sojourns of both Pinhead and his associates, and D'Amour and his team of Harrowers, pulls us through vast, colourful (or colourless) lands, seas and forests, as well as crowded cities and demon-clogged roads, and temples that take us back to the unhallowed lands of the Old Ones as depicted by H.P. Lovecraft, and magnificent, endless cathedrals that the mind finds hard to comprehend and visualize because of their very vastness!

 

And the language Barker uses to describe these vistas and the events that unfold within them is so rich and detailed, and impeccably varied, that I ended every chapter with a "Wow! That's amazing!", and the thought, once I had finished the book, of "How did he fit so much into only 361 pages?"

 

 

And, yes, while I have read some of the comments by readers of the book complaining that it was too short, I find that kind of remark really only shows how ignorant they are of Clive's skill as a writer. Sure, I would like the book to be longer, but if that's how many words it took to write the novel, who are we to complain in the face of a master like Clive Barker?  Certainly there is nothing missing from the book in the way of completing the tale, and does every Clive Barker book need to be as long as Imajica or The Great and Secret Show? In that case, Mister B. Gone would be woefully short! And no writer worth his or her salt starts a story with the statement, "I am going to write an 80,000 word or 200,000 word novel!" or "I am going to write a 40,000 word novella!" That's just not the way it works, dear readers! A writer writes a story until it's finished, whether that takes 10,000, 100,000, or 500,000 words!

 

Rant over, my recommendation is - buy a copy of The Scarlet Gospels and read it. If not for the fact it is destined to become one of the classic horror stories of all time, then do it simply for the fact it is a beautifully written story.

The Children of Rarn - redux

Can't believe it's been so long since I posted here. Just goes to show what a busy year 2015 has been, and how much time I have spent NOT writing, but working at what modern-day authors call the RLJ - or Real Life Job!

 

But 2016 has started with a different tack. At the beginning of 2015, Gollancz, a well-established and venerable publisher of science fiction and fantasy, and now an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, put out an call for direct submissions that was, apparently, so successful, they repeated the call for 2016, and, taking advantage of their opportunity, I submitted my fantasy novel The Children of Rarn, which is based on the song cycle developed by Marc Bolan in the late 1960's and early 1970's.
 

 

 

The Children of Rarn tells the tale of a race known as the Peacelings, and their arch-enemies, the Dworns.  The Peacelings, guided by their High Priest, Agadinmar, and ruled by the Swan King, live in relative peace and prosperity in the haven-realm of Beltane, while the Dworns, along with their thralls of trolls and "dragonbreed", live outside Beltane, hidden away, and commanded by their demonic lord, Lithon the Black.

 

Marc wrote a small number of songs, intending to build these into a full fantasy rock concept album, but failed to complete the project in his lifetime.  All that was left were the original demo version that he recorded with Tony Visconti, and a few re-recordings of some of those songs in his catalogue of unfinished works.  Even The Children of Rarn theme became the bookends of the first T.Rex album, simply titled T.Rex.  All-in-all, these were the very bare bones of the potential album.  Shortly after Marc's death, Tony hunted out the demo version and applied some light production to it, so that it could be subsequently released on the album "MARC - The Words and Music of Marc Bolan 1947-1977", as The Children of Rarn Suite.

 

 

Taking these as the spine, and adding in a few characters from many of Marc's other songs of the same time period, and including some characters and events based on Marc's real life, I built a fantasy novel, which has topped out at around the 100,000 word mark.  I originally started the story way back in the late 1980's, and submitted it, with varying success, to a couple of publishers.  But then I let it lie, even though I discussed the project with Tony Visconti, who was very supportive of developing the novel.

 

And now I have submitted the project to Gollancz for consideration in their 2016 Direct Submissions call.  It arrived there on Tuesday, so I am now in that purgatorial limbo that authors go through, between submitting a novel and waiting for a response from the publisher.  In the meantime, I still have to rescue around three-quarters of the novel from the WordStar files I wrote them in - yes - WordStar!!  And the whole thing could really do with a good re-edit and maybe a partial re-write, as I am definitely not the writer now that I was then - by which I mean my style and voice are much stronger now than at that time back in the days of mystery!

 

With my fingers crossed, I will keep you informed of updates and progress, and, with a good - nay - great stroke of fortune, maybe I will hear something wonderful back from Gollancz.