Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service: Do Yourself a Service and Read This Series!

A Review By: Amelia

I’m a huge fan of Dark Horse and–conveniently for me–they frequent English adaptations of one of my favourite kinds of manga: anything darkly humourous. That’s how I stumbled upon Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service–funny characters mixed in with a dark plot–what’s not too immediately love? 

The story behind The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a simple one that gets a lot more complicated the further into the series you get. Put simply it’s about five recently graduated university students who have formed a company which specializes in dealing with the dead and their last wishes.

The author of the series is Eiji Ōtsuka and the illustrator is Housui Yamazaki. I couldn’t dig up much on Yamazaki, but Ōtsuka is a social critic and novelist that has a degree in anthropology, women’s folklore, human sacrifice, and post-war manga. In addition to his work with manga he’s a critic, essayist, and author of several successful non-fiction books on Japanese popular and otaku (a Japanese term for people with obsessive interests) sub-cultures. Aside from Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service he writes Multiple Personality Detective Psycho.

The characters this manga series follows are a rag-tag group of young, Japanese adults that–for one reason or another–have a strange talent or connection to the dead. There’s Karatsu who is able to speak to recently deceased people by touching their bodies. Sasaki is the brains of the operation with excellent hacking skills and a general computer expert. Numata is the heavy lifter (the one that lugs bodies around) and uses dowsing with a pendulum to locate dead bodies. Yata is a timid guy who channels a rather crass alien through a puppet on his had and has a vast knowledge of things like math and literature/urban legends. And last, but not least, there’s Makino who is a licensed and very talented embalmer–which is a rarity in Japan as most are cremated and not buried.

This colourful cast of characters are all so good: I could gush about them forever! They’re all very human and, even though they all have such weird and peculiar talents and lives, they’re very relatable. Numata and Karatsu are my favourite pair because they’re hilarious together! All the characters will give you a good laugh here and there, but these two are consistently comical. Of course that makes their tragic back stories all the more heart breaking when you learn of them (Numata’s especially, at least by my standards of seriously tragic).

The art in Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is great. It’s a realistic style of art, and when I say realistic I mean the characters are proportioned like actual human beings and buildings and landscapes aren’t stylized. Some of the characters expressions can be a little wild but they’re not at, say, Sailor Moon manga level. Besides, it’s a manga after all–allowances have to be made!

One of the creepiest story lines featured this thing here!

Everything this manga does is just right. The art style? Just right. The characters? Just right. The ‘monster of

the week’ formula? Just right. The number of creepy things this manga presents its readers? Just right. This is a seriously dark, creepy, funny, compelling manga series and–even though I just said it, I’m saying it again! Everything this manga does is just right!

My final thoughts on Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service are that it’s great. It’s so super disturbing and gross and for mature audiences only–I can’t stress that point enough! Despite being one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever read, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is also one of the funniest, saddest, most touching manga I’ve ever read. If the gore puts you off, please–I beg of you!–stick with it anyways; this is a manga that should not be missed or ignored. Trust me, you’ll want to read this before the corpse delivery service comes for you!

Let Me Off At The Top!: Stay Classy? More Like Stay Away!

A Review By: Amelia

Anchorman is one of my favourite movies. There’s just something about it that’s so ridiculous and over the top that it’s perfect. I mean the part where all the different news teams fight in an alley is cinema gold! All in all, fans of Anchorman had much to look forward to in 2013–the sequel to the film was announced and Ron Burgundy wrote a book! Well, according to critics and fans alike, the second film didn’t go over all that well and–after I raised my hopes that the book wouldn’t let me down–I’m sorry to say that it did. Let Me Off At The Top: My Classy Life and Other Musings was a huge disappointment, and below, I’ll tell you why.

Let Me Off At The Top is the memoirs of the number one news anchor in America: Ron Burgundy. He writes about his humble beginnings in an Iowa coal mining town through his whirl-wind career as the top anchorman ever.

It’s hard to tell you about the author of this piece. It’s a book written as a memoir by a fictional character from a movie. I don’t know if Will Ferrell (who played Ron Burgundy in the film) wrote it himself as he pretended to be Ron Burgundy or if it was a ghost writer pretending to be Will Ferrell as he pretended to be Ron Burgundy! For lack of a better way to say it, I’ll just refer to the author as Burgundy from this point out.

So, as stated before, this book is a memoir written by Burgundy and it’s all about his life (although most of the time it’s so off topic that Burgundy himself plays very little into it at all). After about the first chapter, Burgundy’s writing voice comes off as nothing but arrogant and annoying. And (if we’re going to be honest) if the movie Anchorman had been any longer than it was, he probably would have come off arrogant and annoying there too, but the movie was just enough of him and his news team (of which he has the highest respect for but hardly mentions at all in his memoirs) so to not become overbearing. In the book, it was all him. It was obnoxious to begin with but almost unbearable after about half the book. Everything that made him charming in the movie is forced and awkward in the book and just not fun to read. There’s no humour because it’s so forced–this book was about as natural as the polyesters that make up Burgundy’s suits.

I had such high hopes for this book but unfortunately, it fell short. It fell way short. Burgundy comes off charmingly stupid in the film, but in the book, he quickly becomes the worst person to ever have written a book (and yes, saying that a fictional character wrote this book IS killing me!). There are some great one-liners that came off naturally in this unnatural/forced piece and they made me stop to think if they had been in the movie, but most of it was just mindless filler, unfunny nonsense, and just plain bad material. Honestly, there’s a whole ten pages on Ron Burgundy’s interpretation of the history of Mexico and it’s awful. It’s truly awful. If this book were a stand-up bit that Will Ferrell performed as Ron Burgundy, it might stand a chance. But as a book that you sit and read, well, let’s hope most people don’t waste their time.

My final thoughts on Let Me Off At The Top: My Classy Life and Other Musings are to save your money. If you’re a fan of the first Anchorman movie and want more Ron Burgundy I suppose you could risk it, but for the love of Odin’s raven, borrow it from a library and completely skip over the Mexican history chapter! Ron Burgundy, I’m afraid to say, has not followed his own motto and stayed classy.

How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting To Kill You: Cat Comics From the Internet Now In a Book… And It’s the Best!

A Review By: Amelia

I usually don’t go for websits / blogs / Tumblrs turned into books but there have been exceptions. Stephen Fry’s twitter turned book Mrs. Fry’s Diary is one such book (which I have reviewed and posted here before). Another exception is the book How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You. It’s a comic website turned book and since it’s about cats, there was literally no way I could pass up reading it!

“If your cat is kneading you, that's not a sign of affection. Your cat is actually checking your internal organs for weakness. If your cat brings you a dead animal, this isn't a gift. It's a warning.” How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You covers all this and more with the wit and humour of Oatmeal comics and even includes never before posted comics about–you guessed it–cats!

The author of How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting To Kill You is The Oatmeal. The Oatmeal (aka as Matthew Inman) is an online comic site that’s been around for years drawing comics about cats, sriracha hot sauce, and really anything else that comes to his mind. He’s a pretty funny guy and you should check out his site: http://theoatmeal.com/. If you’d like a certain genre of comic of his all lumped together–like, say, CATS–then this book is right up your alley!

The art style of the book is that of The Oatmeal. It’s a unique style that’s simple and minimalistic (most of the time). It’s not an overly attractive style of art–some of it is down right ugly–but that’s kind of the point… at least, I think it is. Either way the cats are drawn adorable so don’t worry yourself about the art!

If you’ve never read Oatmeal comics, the art is what’s going to put you the most off. The writing in the comics though is what’s going to keep you coming back to read more!

My final thoughts on How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You are that it is amazing! I do admit that I might be a bit biased as I love cats, but cat lovers are who all these comics were drawn for in the first place!

sTORI Telling: Bear With The Obnoxious Use Of Her Own Name And You’ll Find An Addictive Read

A Review By: Amelia

 

I love to read tell-alls. There’s just something about troubled lives that draws my attention and doesn’t let go until the last page is turned. With Tori Spelling’s book I figured I get some juicy gossip from the set of Beverly 90210 and spoiled brat stories. Much to my surprise, sTORI Telling gave me only got a little bit of gossip here and there and there were absolutely no spoiled brat stories, but her book was still interesting and definitely a compelling read.

sTORI Telling, as I mentioned above, is Tori Spelling’s memoir. This memoir was Tori's chance to finally tell her side of the tabloid-worthy life she's led: parties and plastic surgery that she’s had, her fairy-tale wedding to the wrong man, her so-called feud with her mother, how she always wanted to do nothing but comedy but found it hard to find any openings due to the stigma attached to her name. She tells all and with the sometimes self-deprecating, always witty prose she writes with, it’s hard not to be enchanting by her mostly less-than-enchanting life.

A regular Halloween in the Spelling household

Tori Spelling–television producer Aaron Spelling’s daughter–is known, honestly, for her name. Her first major role was portraying Donna Martin on Beverly Hills 90210 and, in doing so, became the world’s biggest case of nepotism. All through her teenage years she had a not-so private private life and was one of the most recognizable women in show business. Or at least B-list show business. Over the course of her life she’s had plastic surgery, a clumsy and awkward love life, a complicated relationship with her parents (and that’s putting it lightly), and ultimately, a hard time overcoming the nepotism that got her into show business in the first place!

My final thoughts on sTORI Telling are that it’s a surprisingly good read. Tori Spelling might not have lived a life of drug addictions or being a bitch on set–I’m waiting for Shannen Doherty’s book for that topic–but it’s still a compelling read, especially for all the passages about her over-bearing yet under-caring mother. You might believe that you already know everything there is to know about Tori Spelling because of the things you’ve read on magazine covers; I thought I did anyways. When I came upon her autobiography on the shelves of my local library I thought ‘what the hell?’ all the while believing that everything I was going to read, I would already know. But, really, everything I knew was only half truths. Her memoirs tell her side of the story and, as it turns out, it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than anything you can read in a rag magazine!

Parasyte: A Manga That Sucked The Life Out Of Me

A Review By: Amelia

I’m going to start off this review by saying that I’ve never really been into science-fiction–it’s not my cup of tea. That being said, why did I choose to read a science-fiction manga? I wish you could see my shoulder shrug because after reading Parasyte, my opinion of science-fiction remains the same.

Parasyte is an action/science-fiction/horror manga about a super invasive alien parasite that invades a host body and then becomes a horrible cannibalistic being that can morph the form of its host body to devour its prey. The series focuses around one teenage boy - Shinichi Izumi – whose body was invaded by a parasite with complications to the process. Shenanigans ensue. 

Parasyte is a twenty-four year old series–having started in 1990–and the author and artist of all ten volumes is Hitoshi Iwaaki. His primary work is Parasyte and he’s won numerous awards for it.

The main character of the piece are Shinichi Izumi, who is an average high school student, and the alien parasite that possesses his hand and gets nicknamed Rightie. They’re pretty balanced characters and, surprisingly, they work well together. Shin is kind of a lovable goofball and Rightie is a super-intelligent parasite that doesn’t understand sarcasm. As I mentioned before, shenanigans ensue. I’d love to say more about them, but honestly, there isn’t that much.

The art style in the manga is two completely different things. The alien designs for the grotesque way the parasites morph and change the human body were highly original and a visual feast for the imagination. However, the art style that it’s drawn in is kind of bland. It’s a realistic style in terms of human body portions and attractiveness (unlike some mangas, this one is filled with average looking people) but with it being a science-fiction story, I felt the art was just really lacking.

With bland artwork and a plot that’s supposed to be filled with action and itsn’t the only thing that really made me keep reading Parasyte was the plot, and even that became tiresome about three volumes in. I’m sorry to say it–because I seem to be the only one who is saying it–but Parasyte just isn’t worth it. At least not if you’re only a casual science-fiction fan like myself.

My final thoughts on Parasyte are that it’s a little dull all things considered. A strange alien parasite infects humans and changes them into horrible cannibalistic monsters and the only thing I can think is ‘when is this gonna get exciting?’ It’s got an interesting premise, but with actions sequences few, far between, and over too quickly, shallow characters, and a somewhat bland art style, Parasyte’s premise just wasn’t enough to keep me interested.

The Hidden Life of Humans: An In-Depth Look Into Nothing

A Review By: Amelia

 

I judge books by their cover. I try not to do it all the time, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Sometimes it’s a great experience, sometimes it leaves me just feeling shallow for having been so stupid as to fall for a pretty cover in the first place! The Hidden Life of Humans is a book whose cover I judged and decided to read because of it. With a close angle shot of a big dog (who is, frankly, adorable) I figured it would at least be an experience. Unfortunately, it was a rather boring one.

Single and on the downhill side of forty, Dana Jaeger isn’t exactly where she thought she would be with her life. Her ex-husband is slowly dying, an unlikely romance with a P.I. is testing any limits she believes herself to have, and a dog she’s agreed to dog-sit–a mutt capable of consuming lawn movers–she begins to look a little deeper and see that maybe this is not entirely where she should be. She looks past who is she to try and find the promise that lie between who she is, who she claims to be, and who she might yet become.

Erika Ritter, the author of the piece is a Canadian playwright and humorist. She writes from experiences that she’s had but she also studied drama at McGill and the University of Toronto so she knows how to embellish and tell a good story. She’s written and hosted programming for CBC Radio, two of her plays have been produced at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, and she has several published novels.

The two main characters of the piece are Dana, a forty year old, unmarried woman who’s a hack writer for a corny television show and the only relationships she has are weekend affairs with married men (a group she’s dubbed The Marrieds), and Murphy, an untrained dog that’s big enough to use a lawnmower as a chew toy but also has a mired of deep, undog-like thoughts that he needs to contemplate. They’re an interesting pair in premise, but together in the novel they always felt a little disjointed from each other. I guess that’s what the author was going for as Dana contemplates her life from her point of view and Murphy contemplates his from his. They also contemplate each other’s lives which could have been hilarious. Personally, I just felt it all a little hackneyed, like Ritter had thought about the jokes a little too much and gone with her sixth choice instead of her first.  

The whole novel takes place in Montreal, Canada in Dana’s rented, slovenly town house. There are a few parts where there’s a dream sequence in a strange place, or a car ride with one of Dana’s few friends or many ex-lovers but those are few and far apart. It’s actually kind of disappointing to have such a beautiful and lively city as Montreal be so misused by an author. Dana’s place is fine–it fits her character well–but to have so little else in the story, well, it just seemed like a waste to me. It, like the humour, felt hackneyed. Here’s a character that doesn’t know what they’re doing with their life so let’s make sure they live in a dirty apartment and don’t venture out much. It’s a character archetype that’s hard to do anything new with, if you know what I’m saying.

The novel’s main selling point was a supposed to be a poignant look at the “human condition” through Dana’s eyes and that of straight-forward, no-nonsense Murphy the dog. Through these two characters we do get a glimpse of human nature that maybe we hadn’t thought about before, but beyond Dana and Murphy, the path gets a little muddled. There’s Carl, a lying lover, Mark, the gay and dying ex-husband, Karen, a loud-mouthed, multiple personality stand up comic that doesn’t get comedy – it all just felt really extreme. Dana’s character was very low-key and these other characters (especially the insufferable Karen) get in the way and never really add anything of their own. They’re kind of just mindless space filler to make the book appear more alive than it really is because, although this is a book that appears fleshed out (for lack of a clearer or more concise way to put it) it really isn’t.

The Hidden Life of Humans is a strange book. I didn’t like it all that much, but I didn’t hate it either. My main problem was that it didn’t really offer anything profound to how I look at the world around me and that was the book’s whole selling point! It kind of tricks you into thinking it is with a human protagonist that’s–quote, unquote–not doing so well so she appears a lot more insightful than she really is, and a dog protagonist which is just ridiculous enough a concept to keep you from realizing that what he’s saying, isn’t exactly philosophical.

My final thoughts on The Hidden Life of Humans is that it’s bland. Readable, but bland. You’ve got characters that have “real-life problems”, but those real-life problems are just so plain. Dana is a forty something who sleeps with married men, yeah, well, so what? None of her actions ever come back to bite her in the ass so all those unsavoury affairs are just useless details implanted to make her feel more fleshed out than perhaps she really is. The book is kind of just a big in-depth look into nothing. But, I suppose since it’s a book about life for a mostly average person, an in-depth look into nothing rings pretty true to form.

Gotham After Midnight: A Feast For The Eyes, But Not For The Soul

A Review By: Amelia

Batman is my favourite superhero–anyone who has read any of my previous reviews knows that–and I’m always looking for new and interesting Batman comics to jump into. Gotham After Midnight is a comic that’s been on my shelf, unread, for years that I finally decided to sit down and read. Although not as enthralling as some other Batman pieces it still had its charms.

Gotham After Midnight is about a new psycho is terrorizing the streets of Gotham. He goes by the name of Midnight and he’s killing in the name of his own warped sense of justice all the while recruiting other villains and pushing Batman to the brink of his being.

The author of Gotham After Midnight is Steve Niles who has co-created 30 Days of Night, its sequel, and the Criminal Macabre series. His artistic partner in this piece was Kelley Jones’ who has lent his talent to pieces such as Aliens, Deadman, Conan, and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

Now, like all good Batman comics, Niles and Jones wrote and drew Gotham After Midnight with a wide array of many of Batman’s greatest enemies–Joker, Scarecrow, and Killer Croc just to name a few. In addition to the regular cast a new character named Midnight makes his debut and he’s a pretty creepy character. His face is hidden under a veil, his glowing red eyes the only things that are visible, and his trademark is ripping out or staking through people’s hearts. Unfortunately the many characters, both old and new, are not put to good use. They come in quickly, perform some trivial act of destruction and/or mayhem, and then leave just as quickly. It’s disappointing and pretty anticlimactic for a Batman comic.

A technicolor dream of a comic!

The art style in Gotham After Midnight is very unique. It’s minimalistic and has the feel of first-draft sketch about it with very little detail in the faces of people. The angles and lines are very irregular and haphazard in their appearance too. However, at the same time as being minimalistic, it also has an insane amount of detail. The creases in people’s clothing, how Midnight’s face appears in everything from spilled liquid to the scarred face of the moon. But what stands out most in Gotham After Midnight’s art is its colouring. It is absolutely fantastic! All in all, the art may be a little off putting at first but, on the whole, it really lends itself to the erratic and chaotic story line.

The detail is staggering

Gotham After Midnight is a good Batman comic. The story is a little weak in comparison to say Batman Hush, or Superman Red Son, it it’s still original. Likewise, the art style may not be everyone’s cup of tea but it’s unique, the colouring gorgeous and it fits the story’s plot well–much better than a hyper realistic style of art would have. The only thing that’s truly awful about this piece is the dialogue. It’s clunky and unresponsive and just plain awkward in some spots.

My final thoughts on Gotham After Midnight are that it’s pretty good–a six out of ten stars. The art style, which had initially put me off, was what made this piece so good in the end. The plot is shaky and rushed near the end, but that doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining. At the very least it’s beautiful and comic books are 70% art after all!

River Monsters True Stories of the Ones That Didn’t Get Away: A Book That Proves That Jeremy Wade is Boss At Everything!

A Review By: Amelia

Before accidentally stumbling upon the nature/fishing documentary show River Monsters on the channel Animal Planet I had no idea that I should be so scared to go into fresh water lakes, nor that there was as perfect a human as the show’s host Jeremy Wade! Each episode of the show is brilliantly edited and really comes alive as part horror/part mystery/part thrilling drama! After becoming hooked on the show I looked for everything else I could find concerning Wade and found his book River Monsters True Stories of the Ones That Didn’t Get Away and, compared to the show, it does not disappointment as Wade goes even further beneath the surface and discloses the full details of how he tracks and catches some of the deadliest creatures on Earth.

The author of River Monsters, as mentioned above, is also the host of the television show by the same name: the undeniably amazing Jeremy Wade. Wade has a degree in zoology and spends his life travelling the world fishing, which is his one true passion. Wade’s journeys around the world have not been restricted to fishing though. Throughout his world travels he’s been detained as a suspected spy, caught malaria, been threatened at gunpoint, and survived a plane crash. He’s also fluent in Portuguese, as he spends so much time fishing in Brazil, and in French. He has true passion for what he does and is a talented television personality and writer.

River Monsters is in an essay type style with each fish Wade has chosen to talk about getting its own story. Each chapter unfolds an enthralling detective story, where fishermen’s tales of underwater man-eaters and aquatic killers are subjected to scientific scrutiny. Within each story he talks about, not only fishing, but experiences from his past, preparations for the journey, and really anything else that Wade wanted to include–his eloquent writing style blends everything together beautifully and in the end, it hardly matters what he’s talking about because it’s all just amazing! His life has been full and extraordinary and he has more than enough stories to fill this book and many more (which as a Jeremy Wade fan I really hope he does)!

My final thoughts on River Monsters: True Stories of the Ones That Didn’t Get Away are that it’s amazing! It’s written very thematically and Jeremy Wade is truly a gifted writer as his prose always comes off very cleverly, consciously, and–more often than not–just plain poetically! Wade’s writings are much more than just stories, River Monsters explores the real mysteries that still exist in the world and captures Wade’s obsession and his relentless pursuit of the truth within beautifully written prose.

Ookū The Inner Chambers: An Inspired Story Told In An Uninspired Way

A Review By: Amelia

Alternate histories are something that I’ve really come to enjoy looking into: it’s like fanfiction for real-life history and if there’s two things on Earth that I love indefinitely it’s history and fanfiction! An alternate history of Japan is what Ookū The Inner Chambers is all about and it’s what drew me to the manga series. It really is a shame that I didn’t like it at all!

Ookū: The Inner Chambers is an alternative timeline of feudal Japan, a strange disease that only affects men has caused a massive reduction of male population, thus women have to pick up men's jobs, changing the social structure. Now, after 80 years of the initial outbreak, Japan has become completely matriarchal, with women holding important political positions and men being their consort.

Fumi Yoshinaga is both the writer and the artist of Ookū. She attended the prestigious Keio University in Tokyo and she writes/draws her mangas on the simple premise that she “wants to show the people who didn’t win, whose dreams didn’t come true. It is not possible for everybody to get first prize”. This rather depressing outlook is a prominent feature in her work, especially Ookū.

The characters of Ookū change from volume to volume, each one featuring a new set of people with a new set of problems. Unfortunately with this frequent role over of characters I wasn’t able to really get to know any of them or find a reason to care about them. I know a lot of people out there will disagree with me on this, but I thought the characters were flat and lifeless. They were there only to progress the plot–they didn’t bring anything to the plot.

Ookū is a manga that has more words than it does pictures. The speech

bubbles are large–very large–and as the story is told through them, little of the story is told through pictures. The art style is second to the story and it definitely shows throughout the different volumes of the piece. The art is simple and is the bare minimum that it can be. The faces are plain and mostly bare of any emotion (it certainly doesn’t show the characters with the level of emotion that other mangas do!), and the locations are mostly unfilled white space, the exception being outdoors when trees and drawn with leaves and flowers and so on. The one thing in the whole manga series that has consistent detail are the clothing: the many kimono that the characters wear are always beautifully detailed.

I choose to read Ookū because of the story it was presenting: an alternate history of Japan told through the form of manga and after having read great reviews about it online, I was completely sold. Unfortunately after reading four volumes of it, I was left longing for more. The story is such a great idea, but it was executed poorly with visuals that are sorely lacking–and when you use the manga volume, shouldn’t the visuals be 65% of how the story gets told?

My final thoughts on the manga series Ookū The Inner Chambers are that it’s okay. It wasn’t really my cup of tea with its heavy, dry storyline and lacklustre art style, so I couldn’t get into it. I read four volumes of it–each time expecting to be drawn into the story and find something about it that I really liked–and each time I was left disappointed. I guess what it comes down to is that I prefer my mangas to be light and fluffy or, at the very least, have humour in them. Based on that alone, Ookū was sure to leave me disappointed: it was just way too deep for whimsical-little-me!

The House of Doors: A Sub-Par Horror But An Alright Thriller

A Review By: Amelia

As far as horror writers go, there’s one that raises far above all others: H.P. Lovecraft. In his day he wrote bizarre landscapes and horrifying monsters from the depths of time and space. Nowadays, the British author Brian Lumley draws his influences from Lovecraft and creates many a bizarre landscape of horror himself: The House of Doors being just one of many.

The House of Doors’ main plot revolves around the Thone–a highly evolved species of aliens that are looking to terra-form new planets to their own ends. The Thone have found Earth and have planted a monstrous device on our planet's surface. The device is a test to see if humanity has evolved past the point where the Thone will have to leave them be, but the Thone named Sith running this test has become corrupted and will do anything to stop the group of people trapped inside the House of Doors from winning.

The author of The House of Doors, as I stated above, is the famous English horror writer Brian Lumley. Lumley has, over the years, made his name synonymous with the horror genre. He’s added to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, written the huge series of books Necroscope that has many spin-off titles come from it, and, in 2010 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the World Fantasy Award. All in all, the man knows his way around a horror novel!

The characters of the piece are a rag-tag group of people thrown together into the nightmare world that is the House of Doors by nothing more coincidence. There’s Spencer, the hero of the piece, who is able to empathetically connect with machines. Turnbull, an ex-secret agent. Varre, a claustrophobic Frenchman who is only out for himself. Anderson, an arrogant politician who is also only out for himself. Claybourne, an overly-religious, fanatical occult zealot. Haggie, a brash, back-stabbing, two-bit criminal, and Angela, a woman running from an abusive drunkard and is mostly defined by her sexuality (Lumley never misses an opportunity to describe how most of her clothes have ripped off or put her in a situation that might end with rape). All these characters are varied and vivid but after a while, they stop adding to the storyline and just start bogging it down. It’s the same with the locations which are often expunged under the gravity of all the conflicting personalities and neurosis’s when they should be the highlight of the piece.

Speaking of locations, the setting of this novel is that of an alien machine nicknamed The Castle (only later being called the House of Doors by the group trapped inside) that mysteriously appeared on a hilltop in Scotland. Within the strange alien machine there are doors upon doors upon doors that each lead to a different place be it a lush forest filled with horrible monsters or a desert crawling with werewolves and Hell fire. Depending on who goes through the doors first depends upon what’s waiting for them–each door and world within that door is a construct of the person’s worst fears and anxieties. That being said the worlds are always very human in their construct: there are no strange alien atmospheres or fantastical magic landscapes, just things that humans are scared of and all in all, that’s a little bland after a while (although I will say that Spencer’s world is pretty creepy when you really think about it).

The House of Doors is not a horror story–at least not by the standards that Lumley has set with his other works. It’s a science-fiction thriller about alien invasion and the old stand by that comes with invasion: triumph against all odds. It’s an interesting look at the characters’ psyches and some of the worlds that they find themselves in are creepy and imaginative, but it falls short of the horror mark as the humans trapped within the alien machine–the predictable human element–are put through things that humans are scared of but aren’t necessarily all that scary to read about–the worlds that Varre and Anderson create, for example, are just plain boring!

My final thoughts on The House of Doors is that it’s alright. If you’re looking for horror along the lines of Lumley’s Necroscope series or his writings on in the Cthulhu mythos, you’re looking in the wrong place but The House of Doors is still an interesting read if you’re a science-fiction/thriller fan, a Brian Lumley fan, or are just looking for a break from the usual things you read.