Review: Full Dark No Stars by Stephen King

Stupidly, I always forget to review audio books. I go through quite a lot of them, as although they can be an expensive indulgence, facing a day weeding in the garden or cleaning the house from top to bottom is much more appealing if I've got a great new story to help pass the time.

I bought Stephen King's latest collection of four novellas several months ago and although it was one of the pricier ones, at about 15 hours long it's also good value. And I've listened to it numerous times - or at least, to one of the stories.

In any compilation, you'll always have favourites and the one that you tend to skip. Of these four offerings, there is a clear stand-out in my opinion. The other three are perfectly fine and entertaining enough, but two of them suffer from the curse of the audio book - a bad narrator.

Now, I don't mean to be critical, as Jessica Hecht's telling of Big Driver and A Good Marriage is serviceable, but it's irritating, I'm afraid. Her style is very mumsy and cute, with each word spoken as if she was smiling broadly, a technique they teach to call centre operators in order to butter up hostile customers. And this grates very quickly.

It is also strangely incongruous to the subject matter. Maybe that was deliberate, a way of underlining the horror that each of her protagonists suffer and how it changes their cosy little worlds. In both stories, the lead characters are women who are very comfortable with themselves and their lives, until something terrifying turns everything upside down.

Big Driver sees a successful, single novelist making a very ordinary trip to speak at a women's meeting, only for her journey home to descend into nightmare. Suddenly, a lady who is smugly content with her easy, well-paid work, her quaint home and a sickeningly cutesy relationship with her sat nav, finds that the safety of her little car is invaded. The experience leaves a gentle woman with a yearning for bloody revenge; an examination of how we can never truly know ourselves until the shit really hits the fan.

This is a hard story for any woman to listen to - rape is possibly the most distasteful thing to be explored in any literature and this depiction would turn anyone's stomach. I would not accuse King of being gratuitous with it - after all, the reader must understand a character's suffering in order to relate to their reaction - but it wasn't an enjoyable episode.

The theme of making unpleasant discoveries, both about yourself and those close to you, is continued in A Good Marriage, in which a similar happy housewife makes a discovery about her husband that shatters her world. Of course the real interest comes in what she chooses to do about it, and the question that it inevitably raises in your own heart - what would I do in her place...?

Craig Wasson, the narrator of the two male-led tales, acquits himself better in Fair Extension, the brief story of a terminally ill man who meets a charismatic market trader just when he is despairing about the unfairness of Life. Given the opportunity to change his luck if he can bear to pass the bad fortune onto someone else, he finds old resentments rising to the surface, in a story that feels like you've heard it before, even though the spin is fresh.

But the main attraction, the first and longest of the novellas, is my favourite by a mile. I haven't read all of King's work or even most of it, but I would say that 1922 is one of his best short works in my experience. Brilliantly told with curmudgeonly conviction by Craig Wasson, this is a gruesome and captivating tale of grisly murder and its sinister consequences.

Set in the year of the title, 1922 follows the moral unravelling of Wilf, a dyed-in-the-wool farmer whose cherished family tradition is threatened by the pretensions of his feisty wife. When Arlette inherits a substantial amount of land, she wants to accept a corporation's large cash offer and flee to the city, an idea that doesn't go down well with her husband and their teenage son.

Along with Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger and Michelle Paver's Dark Matter, 1922 is one of the stories I've listened to (or read) over and over again, more for educational purposes than anything else. Others might disagree with my reverence for these works, but there is something about them that fills me with admiration and, as an aspiring writer myself, they strike me as being fantastic examples of a simple story well told. I crave the authors' technical expertise and devour the novels as a kid might cram frantically for an exam, trying to identify the secrets of being an extraordinary storyteller.

Maybe it's like trying to pick out individual sparkles in a chunk of gold - ie. impossible. Or maybe it's wishful thinking, that I'll absorb their brilliance by some sort of osmosis. Either way, I can't leave them alone.

So, It's a No Then...

(I make no apology whatsoever for the excessive swearing in this post. It's for medicinal purposes.)

Jesus. You massive, heaving collection of absolute bell-ends.

The next person who whines to me that they can't shift the Tories out of their district council is going to get punched in the windpipe.

Yeah, you might have stuck two fingers up to Nick Clegg - in retaliation for the way he's annoyed every Lib Dem voter over the last year - but you've also just spat on your own cornflakes. Not so much cutting off your nose to spite your face, as tearing off your head, drop-kicking it into the path of an oncoming truck and shitting down your own neck.

Knobbers.

Review: Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit by PG Wodehouse

Reviewing a PG Wodehouse book is like scrutinising a clear night sky and trying to pick out which of the bright, shining, wondrous stars you like the least. Or the best. So basically, it's impossible. And pointless.

Because you see, Wodehouse operates in a different universe to us all. Try and find a way in which his tales of upper-class toffs pratting about in country mansions might relate to the disaffected youth of 21st century Britain, and you're going to draw a blank. It doesn't. It doesn't relate to anyone or anything, because the world these glorious characters inhabit probably never existed.

The adventures of Bertie Wooster, Freddie Widgeon, Psmith and the Blandings crew should really be stocked in the fantasy section of your local bookshop, because this is truly a fairytale world. A world where everyone is stinking rich, they all dress for dinner and 'problems' extend as far as someone's embarassing memoirs being published, or accidentally getting engaged to someone who's ditched a former fiance but will be back in their arms before the day is out.

Some people pick Terry Pratchett's Discworld or JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth as their 'escape all this shit' destination. I choose Totleigh Towers, Brinkley and Market Snodsbury, for Wodehouse's pre-war England is as mystical and alluring a place as any of these fantastical creations.

I unashamedly confess that Bertie Wooster and the fabulous Jeeves are my favourite characters and a few hours spent in their company is never wasted. In this particular novel - which I know I read before as a kid, but am now enjoying afresh in my new deluxe Everyman edition (dust jacket removed before reading, obviously) - Wooster is under threat of unwanted marriage once again, when the formidable Lady Florence Craye suffers a break-up from the fatheaded Stilton Cheesewright. With his liberty at risk, Bertie must try to reunited the star-crossed lovers while helping Aunt Dahlia to get out of a fix concerning her husband Tom, a pearl necklace and her ever-present weekly women's magazine, Milady's Boudoir.

As fast as Bertie screws everything up, Jeeves shimmies in to set things straight again, to happy endings all round. Ahh, bliss.

(For me, there is always at least one 'laugh out loud' moment in every Wodehouse novel and this one concerned the rather tiresome life of oysters. I won't repeat it here - you need to be there, really - but look out for it.)