The Chemist, book review. (Stephenie Meyer)

Oh boy!

I read Twilight a few years ago, way after everyone else did, and it was really rather good, good enough to get me through the series at least, (books three and four were like wading through treacle). Then, I read, The Host, and after the first hundred pages or so, I got really bored - which is how I felt whilst reading, the Chemist.

Alex (the main character), used to work for a secret government organisation, where she was their top torturer, their 'Chemist', but when they tried to bump her off, she had to go undercover, deep, deep, deep undercover.

A few years later and her former boss offers her a job, which she believes is a trap, but when she learns that millions of people might die if a certain school teacher, Daniel, isn't intercepted, and if necessary, tortured for information, she reluctantly accepts.

So far, so good. Fast paced and believable, but then it all starts going rapidly downhill.

After Alex has brutalised Daniel with her excruciating cocktail of barbiturates, his brother (who is supposed to be dead), attempts a rescue, which fails, so Alex has them both at her mercy and the truth is revealed. There is no plot to kill millions, Daniel is innocent; he also happens to be an identical twin! So, is it the brother, Kevin, the government wants, Alex, or both?

If it wasn't for Daniel inexplicably falling in love with his torturer, about five pages after she's tried to kill him, we might have found out a little sooner, but as it stands, we have to spend the next two hundred and fifty pages, (half of the book), holed up in a remote ranch, talking about dogs, food, and how much Daniel loves the woman he's only know for a few days!!!

It's just really weird!

Their relationship is the sort of thing you'd expect in a YA/teen novel - vampires or not - but here it's just silly, and to top it all, the dialogue between them is pathetic. It never once felt like they were having a realistic conversation, it was like watching a low budget movie with a naff script.

The good bits: The action is fast paced, and when it comes, it moves the story along nicely. Val, (Kevin's high end prostitute friend), turns out to be the most believable character in this whole charade, (even though she seems to be richer that Bill Gates), but in the end, the bad outweighs the good.

I know that millions of copies of this book will have been sold already, and maybe others will like it more than me, but, after, The Host, the last two books in the Twilight series and this, I think I'll leave Stephenie Meyer's books in the bookshop from now on.

Unimpressed. Two stars.

Dracula, book review. (Bram Stoker)

Dracula, one of the best and most influential books I have ever read!

Quite a statement that, so let’s look at it in a little more detail.

The book is written as a series of diary and journal entries in the first person, and from several different perspectives. The characters are both male and female, one being a solicitor, one, a Doctor who runs a lunatic Asylum, and then there's Dr Val Helsing from Amsterdam.

Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra's diary entries, add both intrigue and passion, we have the somewhat delicious English language, (as it was in late Victorian England), a love quadrangle, rather than a love triangle, desperation, sadness and remorse, but above all, we have Count Dracula.

We all know the story of course, or do we?

I first read this book over twenty years ago and in that time I'd forgotten most it, remembering just the bare bones.

I had a vague recollection of Renfield and the asylum, the predicament in which Johnathan Harker found himself in, in the depth of the unforgiving Carpathian mountains, but I'd forgotten the pace of the book, the shear depth of fear the poor souls experienced, as they battled their way to Carfax Abbey, and then across Europe, to confront what must be, one of literature's most revered villains.

And let us not forget one of the all-time best chapters in literary history, chapter 7, where the description of the storm and the landing of the Demeter, (Dracula's ship), at Whitby Harbour, is told as a news article in a local newspaper.

Reading this book again, got me thinking about how many stories, films, television programs, cartoons, and comics there must be out there, that have been influenced by this book? Hundred, thousands maybe, who knows! From the obvious like, Salam's Lot and the Twilight saga, through Richard Matheson's sublime, I am Legend, to Justin Cronin's less obvious but equally exquisite, The Passage, to count (pun intended) but a few. (My own short story, Lycanthrope, would never have materialised without this book).

So, a solid five stars for Bram Stoker's Dracula then, and what a better time to start reading it, than on All Hallows’ Eve.

Enjoy my fiendish friend, read deep.