Broken Monsters - Lauren Beukes

The Blurb: IN A BROKEN CITY, A DISTURBED KILLER IS TRYING TO REMAKE THE WORLD IN HIS IMAGE.

Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies. But this one is unique even by Detroit’s standards: half-boy, half-deer, somehow fused together. And it’s only the first.

As winter closes in on Detroit, strange and disturbing corpses start turning up in unusual places, pulling several lives into the killer’s orbit.

Gabi has to juggle the most harrowing case of her career with being a single mom to her troubled teen daughter Layla.

Layla, egged on by her best friend Cas, is playing a dangerous game with an online predator.

Broken Monsters is a dark and gripping thriller about the death of the American Dream, online fame, creativity, compromise and the undercurrents of the world we live in right now.

First off, hot damn what an awesome cover. It really jumps out at you and stands out pretty nicely on a bookshelf. Really stunning work by the stupendously talented Joey Hi-Fi.

Bliksem, this really is a damn good book. Really really good. If something interrupted my reading time, I got pretty cross because I wanted to find out what happened next. This rarely happens, but this book really grabbed my attention and had my imagination going into overdrive. Some real brilliant storytelling.

The book is set in Detroit in all it's decaying glory. I think the setting really mattered to the story, seeing as the crumbling city trying to get back on it's feet, trying to get a new identity, really set the tone for the characters. 

This is a multiple POV story, and each has it's own distinct voice and character. TK, the ex con just trying to help people. Jonno, the asshat wannabe journalist looking for some direction in his life, Clayton the misunderstood artist who devolves beautifully during the story and Detective Versado and her daughter, Layla.

This book has quite a bit about the plodding side of policework present, which is pretty refreshing to read. How they plan, assign tasks and start chipping away at the problem in front of them.  How normal police work and procedure helps to insulate the poor bastards that needs to deal with the horrific on a daily basis. 

Gabi is a single parent to a teenager, Layla. Layla is a theatre nerd, in love with the stage and thus awkward as hell. Her relationship with her best friend Cas is one of the few light and uplifting pieces of the book, and really well placed between all the darkness and problems. Gabi just want to keep her daughter and her city safe. She's hard, uncompromising and brilliant.

Jonno really is a whiney bastard. It's easy not to like the little turd. He feels the world owes him for some hardships he's suffered in his life, and he latches onto anybody that can help him. Easily my least liked character in to book, but I think that's what was needed from the clown.

TK and Clayton are broken men. TK trying to do the best he can with the shitty hand he's been dealt by life, and Clay getting crazier and crazier as the book progresses. They are both awesome. 

Some freaky shit happens in this book.  Supernatural magic freaky. And it's the sudden shock of it introduced into the real world that makes it great and makes it stand out. It's violent and shocking and it gave me chills in a good way.

I think it's the ability of Beukes to give each character such a distinct personality on the page that really makes her a brilliant writer. It doesn't matter if it's a  teenage girl or the killer himself, they stand apart and distinct. It makes the reading part much easier and a boatload of fun.

This book is brilliant. I rate this as her best work yet. Stunning.

9/10

The Shining Girls - Lauren Beukes

The Blurb: Chicago, 1931. A strange house gives serial-killer Harper the power to travel through time; to hunt and kill his ‘shining girls’. They’re bright young women full of spark – until he cuts it out of them, leaving clues from different times behind to taunt fate. Kirby, the 90s girl, survives his attack and turns the hunt around. Tracing Harper’s bloody trail of victims – from a glowing dancer in the 30s to a tough welder in the 40s and a bombshell architect in the 50s – Kirby is running out of time trying to solve an impossible mystery. And Harper is heading towards her once again.




This is the first time that I've included the book trailer, since it's a doozy and damn well done.

To the book!

First off, Joey Hi-Fi is a damn magician when it comes to book covers. The black one up there is the limited edition hardback of which only 1,000 was printed. I was lucky enough to receive number 541. I also attended the book launch in Johannesburg, but was too much of a fanboy to ask anything of worth. I apologise for this and will do better next time.

The premise of the book is helluva interesting. A time travelling serial killer kills his Shining Girls. He feels drawn to them, drawn to something they possess. He visits them throughout their lives and then, when he cannot contain himself any longer, kills them. And not quickly. The killer is Harper, a 1920's degenerate who stumbles upon a time travelling house which allows him to travel up to 1993 and back.

The story is based in Chicago, and the amount of research that has gone into the historical city is purely perfect. There's no infodump, just an interesting observation now and then about the technology, fashions or state of the city in the different eras to make them stand out beautifully. 

Harper is a sick bastard of a human being. He is clearly insane and getting worse throughout the book. He takes a deserved pummelling from the world in general and from his victims, and I must say it felt good reading how his ass gets handed to him. He's a monster of the worst order as all serial killers surely are. He possesses no redeeming quality, but then if their was any he'd have been a much shallower character. I'm not sure if I believe in pure evil, but his insanity makes him come pretty close.

Kirby is the only victim who survived the attack, and her story primarily happens in 1993. She is most definitely not one to sit back and accept her fate or swallow the hurt and move on. She dedicates her life to finding her attacker and to stop him from hurting anyone else. She enrols to study journalism for the sole reason to get to Dan, a burnt out homicide Journalist who is currently covering sports,to get him to help her in her investigations. She is driven, foul mouthed and distrustful of most people. Hell, she's fun to read. The relationship between Dan and Kirby is really uplifting in the book, as it introduces a nice touch of humanity into a pretty dark story. 

One of the interesting things about this book is the chapters. Since it's a novel that involves time travelling, they aren't close to chronological. Harper is all over the place and it made reading interesting, seeing as it made me look at the chapter header for possibly the first time in my life. It adds a touch of chaos to the novel, and it works well.

Time travel is well known for the paradoxes it can create, and those are skilfully handled. The more I think about it the more impressed I am. Harper screws up quite a bit as you'd expect him to, and all these are brought into the story without a hitch. I do not want to spoil anything, so I won't elaborate.

The ending is elegant. I can't think of a better word to describe it. It was surprising and pure perfection. 

So, if you would like to read a dark, twisted, beautiful, damn close to perfect novel, read this one. 

10/10

Zoo City the Movie

Via www.angryrobotbooks.com. Well done for one of South Africa's best writers!

TOP SOUTH AFRICAN PRODUCER WINS COVETED FILM RIGHTS IN INTERNATIONAL “BID FEST” TO MULTIPLE AWARD-WINNING AND BESTELLING NOVEL ZOO CITY BY SOUTH AFRICAN AUTHOR LAUREN BEUKES

“Beukes’ energetic noir phantasmagoria, the winner of this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award, crackles with original ideas.” (Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times Book Review)

South Africa, November 22nd
Helena Spring, widely regarded as one of South Africa’s most accomplished motion picture producers, has just been awarded the highly sought-after film rights to Zoo City, the Sci-Fi thriller penned by South African author Lauren Beukes – who garnered the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best Science Fiction novel. In the wake of whopping sales figures, multiple awards and critical acclaim Beukes’ book generated fierce interest from numerous bidders in the entertainment industry, putting Spring alongside major US and UK producers eager to tell Beukes’ unique tale.

Zoo City was published first in South Africa by Jacana Media and thereafter internationally by by Angry Robot.

The urban fantasy is set in a futuristic, gritty and hard-core Johannesburg where the eponymous ghetto has been colonised by society’s outcasts – like criminals, drug-dealers and psychopaths, and their animal companions. Like the other residents of the Zoo City slum, Zinzi, the anti-heroine, is “animalled”, but she is also a shrewd, street-smart girl with the gift (or burden) of finding lost things. Zinzi wears her power animal, a sloth, on her back. When she is hired to find a missing teenybopper star, she hopes that it will be her ticket out of Hell’s waiting room.

“I’m delighted to have secured the film and television rights for Zoo City,” commented Helena Spring. “It is a groundbreaking, magical novel begging for a life on the big screen. Lauren’s storytelling is masterful – edgy and futuristic, unique yet universal. It is high in entertainment value yet emotionally charged, a dream project for any producer.”

Beukes positively acknowledges the choice of the winning producer. “Every novelist dreams of a movie deal – but you actually want more than that. You want to find a producer of great vision and integrity and experience who fundamentally gets the book and understands how to transform it into an entirely different creature based on the same genetic material. I’m thrilled that it’s being produced in South Africa – for an international audience.”

Spring’s career in the entertainment industry spans nearly three decades, during which time she has produced over twenty motion pictures – including the first ever South African film to receive recognition at the Academy Awards®: Darrell Roodt’s Yesterday earned a Best Foreign Picture nomination in 2004.

Spring, who has worked with some of the foremost filmmakers in the world – such as Paul Greengrass who helmed the box office smash hits The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, and Academy Award® winner, Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech), will soon be putting the project out to a select party of directors, while Beukes has first look as screenwriter to adapt her novel for the screen. “Lauren is perfectly placed to do this. The characters are alive inside her,” says Spring.

Julian Friedmann of Blake Friedmann (the literary agency that reps Beukes), says that: “Helena outbid all the others in a spirited auction for film rights to this extraordinary book. She had an extremely proactive, writer-friendly approach to working with Lauren and offered an imaginative and creative proposal that was irresistible.”

Lauren Beukes’ meteoric rise seems unstoppable and recently a new megabucks book deal was announced. The working titles of the two novels – due in 2013 and 2014 – are The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters. They were picked up by publishers in the US, the UK, South Africa, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany.