Karsa Orlong

Oh dear. Sorry to hear that. I don't remember any of that in any detail, but I guess I'm more used to it from movies like The Thing and such

I keep waiting for Vinculus to shout "VICTOR!"

I'm sure I'll get to it eventually I got so caught up in The Silence that I've had real difficulty choosing what to read next. Looked at the first page of four or five different books and couldn't decide, nearly plunged straight into Lebbon's The Hunt but figured I should give myself at least a day or two's breathing space before doing that. Eventually settled on Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds.

Speaking as someone whose family is from Guernsey, of course we couldn't! I thought she did splendidly well Left ear, forehead, nose, right ear, shorts out of arse crack. Right, I'm ready to serve. Just need to bounce the ball eight times, hang on a minute or so.

Oops! At least it's only £2.99 (assuming you bought the Kindle version . . . . ). Hope you enjoy it!

In the darkness of an underground cave system, blind creatures hunt by sound. Then there is light, there are voices, and they feed... Swarming from their prison, the creatures thrive and destroy. To scream, even to whisper, is to summon death. As the hordes lay waste to Europe, a girl watches to see if they will cross the sea. Deaf for many years, she knows how to live in silence; now, it is her family’s only chance of survival. To leave their home, to shun others, to find a remote haven where they can sit out the plague. But will it ever end? And what kind of world will be left? In many ways The Silence is an updating of classic science fiction and horror stories of the past. I thought it had the feel of a modern John Wyndham, with a dash of The Day of the Triffids, and also latched on to the success of The Walking Dead - or any other tale that sees a small group of people fighting to survive against insurmountable odds. Lebbon's brilliance is in making it all feel fresh. The characters are fantastic. He focuses tightly on Ally - a fourteen year-old girl who has been profoundly deaf since being in an accident some years before - her mother and father, Kelly and Huw, her ten year-old brother Jude, and her grandmother Lynne. He tells the story in third person from Huw's point of view and - brilliantly - in first person from Ally's perspective. He uses 24-hour news channels and social media extracts at the start of chapters to show what's happening elsewhere and to fuel the urgency and fear that pervades the story. All around Ally there is an initial sense of disbelief which quickly turns to panic and terror, and Lebbon creates the atmosphere beautifully and his style is very easy to read. The pacing is fantastic. Starting with the incident in Moldova, he gives you a chance to get to know the family, slowly building the dread of an impending cataclysm and a race against time. It eventually becomes a breathless exercise in terrifying set pieces, made all the more intense because he has made you care about these people. Coupled with some heartbreaking moments, as well as showing the kinds of horrors people will inflict upon each other out of sheer desperation as society breaks down, Lebbon pleasingly manages this without resorting to shock tactics or overly explicit violence and gore. This is the scariest book I've read in years - in a good way! Full review here Other reviews: http://matthewscottbaker.com/blog/2015/03/book-review-the-silence-by-tim-lebbon/ http://gingernutsofhorror.com/4/post/2015/04/horror-fiction-review-the-silence-by-tim-lebbon.html https://horrorhothousereview.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/the-silence-by-tim-lebbon-book-review/ http://www.welovethisbook.com/reviews/the-silence

Definitely! I've just finished it - I feel completely worn out Reviewed it here.

The Silence by Tim Lebbon 2015 - Titan ebook - 368 pages You're sitting at home watching a live broadcast on the Discovery Channel as a group of scientists head into a newly discovered cave network in Moldova. You get called away from the tv to have dinner. When you return you find that something has gone very wrong. At least one of the scientists is dead, the others are running in fear and are cut down before your eyes by a swarm of flying . . . monsters. It's like a horror film but it's real. You wake up the next morning and the news channels are awash with footage of cities in flames and people fleeing thousands of these creatures. Social networks come alive with tales of terror as the swarm spreads across Europe heading for the Channel, for England, for you. This is what happens to Ally in Tim Lebbon's The Silence. She is a fourteen year-old girl, profoundly deaf since a car accident several years beforehand which killed her paternal grand parents. She lives in Monmouthshire with her mother and father, Kelly and Huw, her ten year-old brother Jude, Kelly's mother Lynne, and the family dog, Otis. Lebbon tells the story in two different ways: in third person from the point of view of Huw and - brilliantly - in first person from Ally's perspective. At first, I found it quite odd, jumping from third person to first person and back again, but once I got into the rhythm and saw how well the author had worked this out, I loved it. Huw's sections allow him to show a father's determination to protect his family, whilst Ally's sections steadily ramp up the atmosphere in most alarming ways, as the family flee their home in a race against time, the clock ticking as the monsters - the so-called 'vesps' - draw closer, and especially when a lot of the conversations are passing her by. The Silence is, to all intents and purposes, an updating of classic science fiction and horror stories of the past, like The Day of the Triffids or The Body Snatchers, even throw in a bit of The Walking Dead or any other tale that sees a small group of people fighting to survive against all the odds. Yet Lebbon's brilliance is in making it all feel fresh. The characters are fantastic - all of them - and the use of 24-hour news channels and social media extracts at the start of and during the chapters is a masterstroke, illustrating what's happening elsewhere whilst fuelling the family's sense of urgency and fear. The sense of initial disbelief, falling into the rising sense of panic, then twisting into outright terror is quite superb. The pacing is also superb. Perfect, in fact. It starts with the incident in Moldova, introduces the family, gives you a chance to get to know them, all the while steadily ratcheting up the sense of an impending cataclysm and a race against time and then, from around the halfway point onwards, it becomes a breathless, terrifying exercise in tension and heart-stopping set pieces, made all the more real and intense by the way he had made you care about this small group of people. There are some truly heartbreaking moments in this book, too, as well as showing the kinds of horrors people will inflict upon each other out of sheer desperation as society breaks down. And he does all this without resorting to the tedious kind of shock and gore tactics I've encountered in other horror stories (that's not to say that there isn't any gore, but it's never gratuitous or explicit). Atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere - this book's got it in spades. It took me a little over a day to read - maybe six hours in total. For me, for a 370 page book, that's very fast. I just couldn't get enough of it. When I had to put it down to do other things I couldn't wait to get back to it. It's the first book I've read by Tim Lebbon, despite having had him on my radar for some time. It's the kind of book that makes me want to read everything he's ever written (I've immediately bought The Hunt). It's my favourite read of the year barring Patrick O'Brian. It's the scariest book I've read in years. It's also one of the best. Somebody has to make a film of it. Has to. I can't recommend it highly enough. Memorable Quotes:

Yeah, this book had an actual plot and stuff

Yeah, they should, all of them, and Laura Bassett especially I thought we outplayed Japan, too. I can't remember them posing much danger at all, apart from the penalty. Oh well. Still not as bad as losing to Germany on penalties in the semis at Italia 90 and Euro 96. Good luck to USA in the final.

Gutted

Talking of albums I bought 35 years ago . . . Debenhams in Harrow, that one

ETA: can't believe it's 35 years since I bought that album Got it from Loppylugs in Edgware one Saturday afternoon. Jeez where has the time gone . . . ?

It'll be interesting to hear what you make of it. I've no idea how much they're missing out in the show - five episodes to adapt the first book, then the five remaining episodes to do books 2 and 3. Sounds like it might be a bit rushed but we'll see

Yeah, my Kindle is always twisting my arm, too

I was going to make a start on Beowulf's Children, but I got distracted by The Silence by Tim Lebbon. Nearly missed my stop on the tube this morning because of it

Yeah, it's not bad at all. Nothing to do with Carla Gugino being in it, of course I don't normally like these 'event' type series, like Lost or whatever, but apparently this is going to be a one season and done affair. It's based on a trilogy by Blake Crouch and all three books are going to be covered by the ten episodes of this season so, unless they make up some way of spinning it out beyond that, it shouldn't overstay its welcome

Read it next! Read it next!

Sandstorm (Sigma Force Book #1) by James Rollins 2004 - Orion ebook - 474 pages I was going to do my usual and post the blurb first, but when I read this one on goodreads it was too funny not to comment on beforehand. If ever a blurb perfectly summed up a book, this is it: "Sigma Force "brains and brawn" agents Painter Crowe and Coral Novak head to London, then lost city of Ubar. His last partner Cassandra claims her master, "The Minister", is US government, and opposes them. Blue ball lightning, usually harmless, wrecks Arab antiquities wing of the British Museum. Founder Lady Kara Kensington enlists best pal curator Safia al-Maaz and student Clay, Safia's ex Omaha Dunn and brother Danny, in Oman expedition. Black-clad women with special powers intervene as sandstorm descends and uranium decays to set off antimatter time bomb." :lol: I'm just imagining whoever it was writing that sighing, having read the book and been bored to tears and now facing the prospect of having to make it sound enticing - and failing miserably The good news is, I thought it was a lot better than that makes it sound. It's far from the greatest book I've ever read: the writing's pretty basic, the characters never really come alive, and it takes suspension of disbelief to Roland Emmerich 'Independence Day/Godzilla/2012' levels, but it's exciting and fast moving in an action movie kind of way, and attempts to build its story around actual history and some dodgy science. Apparently Rollins's books weren't published in the UK until after Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code had gone stratospheric and publishers decided to try and cash-in with anything that seemed vaguely similar. And this is only vaguely similar, thankfully. It starts in the British Museum rather than the Louvre, but after that it felt more akin to Indiana Jones - without the wisecracks, bullwhip or Fedora - as various parties good and bad converge on a lost city that holds the key to unimaginable power. It's full of problems, the aforementioned lack of real character being the main one. It was fine for the first two thirds but by the end I didn't really care about any of them - which is indicative of another problem: it's too long and overstays its welcome a little (not much, just a little). It's missing that vital spark of (intentional) humour that would've made the characters come alive for me. Also, by trying to explain the nature of the mystery with science I felt that it robbed the story of a sense of the supernatural or mystical (which were vital to the Indy films) and the passages where characters explained why things were happening tended to slow the pace and become very dry to read. I think it takes a specific skill to write action scenes. Among the authors I've read, Lee Child, Patrick Lee, and Alastair Reynolds have all got it. Rollins is pretty good, too. There is a lot of action in this book and - as I was specifically looking for an edge-of-seat, white-knuckle thrill-fest - I thought for a long while that this was the book I was looking for. The weird thing is, in the end there was almost too much action, and the law of diminishing returns came into effect. Even though there were quiet periods in the story, and a decent plot (moreso than you'd find in a Matthew Reilly book, for example), I knew that those parts would sooner or later get interrupted by the next chase scene or ambush scene or kidnap scene. It's odd how finding what I was looking for turned out not to be quite what I was looking for Patrick Lee this ain't. He's got this corner of the market nailed at the moment, for me. Still, Sandstorm was a reasonably enjoyable book, daft as hell, and I'm reliably informed by those in the know over on the Malazan forums that there is much better to come in the series. The next book is called Map of Bones, and I shall definitely give it a go

Started watching the first episode of season 2 of True Detective but it sent me to sleep (much like the first season did!) so gave up on that. Then watched ep 5 of Wayward Pines. I like that it's started revealing answers to the mystery already, instead of waiting right till the last couple of episodes. Then I watched the second episode of Dark Matter. Badly acted, terrible dialogue, by-the-numbers story. But apart from that it's not bad. Don't think I'll be watching any more of it, somehow

Yeah, it's probably down to her. Do you remember if she made the noise when she first appeared on the scene? ETA: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/10/02/maria-sharapova-surprisingly-is-against-grunting-in-tennis/ " The four-time grand slam winner told Reuters her grunts were a habit formed when she first started playing tennis."

You really should get some science fiction then

I'd vote for Abercrombie on principle. Anything to stop Sanderson winning And because I haven't read any of the others

Defiance 3x01 I can't remember the last time a tv show took me completely by surprise like that. I really have no idea what's going to happen now. Me like