William Boyd Stars and Bars A rare mis-step by a usually reliable author who ventures into slapstick comedy of the uptight-Englishman-in-America variety. If it’s satire about America you’re after, Dickens did it first (and better) in Martin Chuzzlewit, which — perhaps worryingly — reads as incisively today as it presumably did way back when.

Shirley Jackson The Haunting of Hill House I am told that this is something of an American literary classic. A student of the paranormal selects a few guests to inhabit and study a notoriously haunted house. There is very little actual haunting of the ghosties-and-ghoulies variety. It is, though, a disturbing psychological study of the descent of one of the protagonists into madness.

Stephen King Pet Sematary I hadn’t read a Stephen King since Needful Things. That was many years ago, and at the time I thought it over-rated… though something about it has remained with me ever since, in the sense of an itch in the back of my mind I can’t quite scratch. As for Pet Sematary, King has said himself that it is the most disturbing of his novels. The plot is easily summarised. A young family moves into a house in Maine next to a highway that has claimed the lives of many pets and not a few small children. The children  (the live ones) bury the pets in the Pet Sematary of the title (the mis-spelling is deliberate) but there is another burying ground, deeper in the woods, founded by the indigenous Micmac, where things that are interred don’t stay buried for very long, and you can guess the rest. King manages to sustain an over-long tale (as someone said of Wagner, he has wonderful moments and dreadful quarters-of-an-hour) solely by his skill as a writer, and, believe me, the boy will go far. In the same way that Bach (to invoke another shade of classical music) invented the rules of fugue and then systematically broke all of them, thereby creating something transcendent, King breaks – nay, obliterates — all the rules of creative writing and succeeds in their despite. I’m not putting him up there with Bach, or even Wagner (though there is an unpleasant taint of antisemitism in Pet Sematary that might have struck a chord with Baron Bomburst of Bayreuth), but in many places he tells rather than shows (so making the set-pieces where he shows all the more arresting). There is probably far too much exposition (done so well that it only enhances one’s sympathy for the characters). And there’s the error known as ‘Squid-on-the-Mantelpiece’. The Turkey City Lexicon (a primer for intending writers of SF) says of this trap for the unwary that

It’s hard to properly dramatize, say, the domestic effects of Dad’s bank overdraft when a giant writhing kraken is levelling the city.

Suffice it to say that Pet Sematary has an aquarium of squid on several period features, probably by Adam. But there was one big, big problem. If you live next to a busy highway that claims the lives of pets and small children, why don’t you build a decent fence?

Adam Kay A Particularly Nasty Case You’ll remember Adam Kay from the darkly hilarious memoirs of a doctor This Is Going To Hurt and The Nightshift Before Christmas if not for his post-healthcare memoir Undoctored, which is just dark. A Particularly Nasty Case is a whodunit featuring Jewish, bipolar and promiscuously gay Eitan Rose (rule 1: write what you know) trying too work out who’s popping off colleagues at the decrepit London hospital in which he works. But hey, I’m telling you the plot. How we laughed on the way to the Emergency Room.

Malcolm Bradbury Doctor Criminale Cast your mind back to that heady time at the end of the 1980s when the Berlin Wall was falling, politics was changing almost by the hour, anything seemed possible, and serious people were declaring that history was at an end. Bradbury evokes that era in this satire about fame, fortune, and the merry-go-round of academic conferences. Francis Jay is  a literary critic who makes a fool of himself at the Booker Prize ceremony and wakes up to find that the Sunday newspaper he works for has folded. He is hired by a TV production company as a researcher for a programme about Bazslo Criminale, philosopher of the Zeitgeist, who seems to be everywhere but is frustratingly hard to pin down. Is he for real or just a front? And what exactly is his philosophy? Bradbury sure can write, but it could be that for many readers unschooled in the controversies over Derrida and so on (I include myself here) the jokes rather go over one’s head. And what with history picking up with a vengeance since the Twin Towers the age of glasnost seems so very long ago now.

Alastair Reynolds Eversion Imagine my joy on discovering something by SF author Reynolds I hadn’t already read. This is a stand-alone piece, unrelated to his sprawling ‘Revelation Space’ universe or any of his other series, and in tone is more like the playful metafiction of the faux-noir Century Rain. Eversion starts with Dr Silas Coade, surgeon on the sloop Demeter, nudging its early nineteenth-century way along the coast of northern Norway in search of a mysterious and gigantic structure at the end of an unexplored fjord. It’s all very Boy’s-Own-adventure and reads — perhaps deliberately — like something by Rider Haggard (note: ‘metafiction’). But it all ends rather suddenly to be replaced by a similar tale only with a steamship… and then a 1930s-style exploration by an airship to a hole in Antarctica that leads to a gigantic cavern inside the Earth. That part is wonderfully steampunk (note: airships). There are other pastiches, including one short version that reads exactly like a SF story from a Golden-Age pulp. Gradually the real situation dawns. Or does it? But hey, I’m telling you the plot. Hugely enjoyable.

Steven Strogatz The Joy of x I love maths. My ardour is, however, unrequited. Hence my joy at coming across books about maths by mathematicians who actually know how to explain things in plain English, for they are few in number (I am so familiar with Ian Stewart, Brian Clegg and John Gribbin that I know them personally, and I have heard good things about Hannah Fry). The Joy of x (he must have thought of the title first, right? Like the late Tom Lehrer’s fictional maths bestseller Tropic of Calculus) is an all-too-brief tour of maths from simple counting all the way past calculus (differential, integral and vector) to group theory and linear algebra, topology  and some statistics, ending up with a suite at the Hilbert Hotel. But it was all too whistle-stop for me. I’d have liked to have had a more leisurely exploration of some of the topics to ensure I had a really good grasp before moving on.  I had a similar sensation after reading Tom Chivers’ book Everything is Predictable (reviewed here)  on Bayesian statistics — I could appreciate why it was important, and useful, but still couldn’t quite grasp it. Perhaps what I need is a maths textbook written in the same friendly way but which goes into more depth and detail. Maybe such things exist. If they do, well, answers on a postcard please…