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The Bad Book
Hit is eight years old. He's this kid who looks like he's been hit. But he never was. He was born like it, with a slight swelling on his left temple. Bulging. His father is writing a journal which Hit found when he broke into the shed where his father hides each night after work. The journal talks of bad deeds, very bad deeds. Hit doesn't know if his father actually does these things, or just writes about them. So, he follows his father on his late night walkabouts. Hit's a sweet kid but he's also a kid that's not quite right. He has juvenile insomnia. He is somewhere floating between me and e-number hyperactivity. He's not lazy, just a little sluggish. Which is fine because his speed comes from the computer screen, and the lights moving in a thousand miles an hour across his eye balls. The problem, as the bad book reveals, is that hit's grasp of everyday life is actually slipping away. The Bad Book follows hit's bizarre life, an odd mix of his own fantasy, his father's seedy reality and a confused, dark place somewhere in between. It is a desperate tale, depraved, frightening and shockingly disturbing.
124 pages, Paperback
First published March 28, 2000
5 people are currently reading
7 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Jones
277 books344 followersStephen Jones is an eighteen-time winner of the British Fantasy Award.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 16, 2018
I'm a huge Babybird fan and I really wanted to love this one by the man himself. Sadly, despite a few nice turns of phrase here and there, this was mostly disappointingly unfocused and felt rather half-finished, as if he got distracted and then couldn't be bothered. I wasn't really expecting much more but I was hoping to be proved wrong.
March 28, 2012
Book #27 for 2012: Head trip.
Interesting lines:
He sat back down, shaken and stirred, his head a molotov cocktail of deep black coffee. His heart was beating at 2000 bpm, like someone had torn out his heart, poured the strongest coffee known to man into his aorta, and popped it back in. And it pumped up into his head, banging the pulse on the side of his neck. His face was all warm. Radioactive.
Insomnia wasn't an ancient place. It was a modern place with far too many distractions. There were no simple pleasures, no just drifting off to sleep and dreaming of the new day, when people would plough fields so they could afford enough wood to sit in front of the fire and enjoy the silence. Insomnia wasn't even a word back then. Insomnia was a place where TVs and roads, skyscrapers and cars, all added up into this big awful din. Then BANG.
Hit and Ruby never grew tired of her bullshit. She planned to have a taxidermist scrape out her insides and stuff her when she died, with the pages from the diary. She wanted all her organs dried out and put into cigarettes and sold.
Interesting lines:
He sat back down, shaken and stirred, his head a molotov cocktail of deep black coffee. His heart was beating at 2000 bpm, like someone had torn out his heart, poured the strongest coffee known to man into his aorta, and popped it back in. And it pumped up into his head, banging the pulse on the side of his neck. His face was all warm. Radioactive.
Insomnia wasn't an ancient place. It was a modern place with far too many distractions. There were no simple pleasures, no just drifting off to sleep and dreaming of the new day, when people would plough fields so they could afford enough wood to sit in front of the fire and enjoy the silence. Insomnia wasn't even a word back then. Insomnia was a place where TVs and roads, skyscrapers and cars, all added up into this big awful din. Then BANG.
Hit and Ruby never grew tired of her bullshit. She planned to have a taxidermist scrape out her insides and stuff her when she died, with the pages from the diary. She wanted all her organs dried out and put into cigarettes and sold.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews