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It's been a long time since I've read a book from cover to cover in a single sitting. Every once in a blue moon, there comes a book that makes doing so a necessity.

Which brings me to The Finite.

No spoilers, the clue is in the title. There's no square-jawed superhero muscling in to save the day, no magic bullet, no 'it was all a dream' style revelation. The minimal characters are normal, they're human, as human as you and I.

As gripping as it is heartbreakingly inevitable. Read it. Just read it.

Hammer's 1960s Quatermass and the Pit is quite probably among my favourite movies, so I'll keep it short.

Nigel Kneale was a genius, it can't be argued otherwise. The themes explored in the story are as thought provoking as they are relevant; the melding of science and religious belief, the concepts of ethnic cleansing and race riots, that these should be explored so explicitly in a teleplay from the 1950s is almost mind-blowing. I won't provide a synopsis. While others here have done so, I'll refrain. Better that you should just read it for yourself.

A thing of rare depth and intelligently-crafted beauty.

What are you waiting for?

In the interests of full disclosure, I went into this not fully knowing what to expect. I haven't read that much in the way of extreme horror/splatterpunk. For every Woom or The Girl Next Door, there's a greater number of works in which the author seems to settle for slapping together a bunch of gore-strewn scenes, lurching from one atrocity to the next, mistakenly trying their best to gross out the reader and foregoing the telling of an actual story. I don't shy away from gore, but I like something concrete to hold it all together.

Which brings me to Gone to See the River Man.

It's my first time reading Kristopher Triana, and, holy shit - the man can write! It's extreme horror done right. There's depravity (human depravity, I hasten to add), violence, and gore, but there's an actual solid story in there, too. Triana's prose is nothing short of poetic, a thing of beauty that allows the reader to be transported, to feel, smell, taste the surroundings that he conjures. While reading, I could almost hear some swampy, Delta blues soundtrack scratching away in my head as an accompaniment to the visuals. Yes, Gone to See the River Man is grimy, it's dark, and it's at times uncomfortable. But the way the story flows, pitching the reader into a slow descent into Hell, had me hooked to a point where it felt like the book was glued into my hands.

Bring on the next one!

Where can I start? Where the hell can I even start?

This novel is, for want of a better word, devastating. Yeager's prose, his use of often almost poetic language to create an almost hallucinogenic, dreamlike atmosphere, puts many other writers to shame. He captures every emotion using a technique that, at times, seems almost stream of consciousness in its execution.

Of course, it isn't for everyone, there is perhaps an expectation on the reader to fill in some of the gaps, and we live in an age where, far too often, we expect everything to be spelled out for us. But if you want something to challenge your senses, a blend of transgressive, downer, dark cosmic horror, you can't go wrong. It may take a while to process, but once finished, Negative Space will linger somewhere in your head, leaving its mark long after the final sentence.

Flawless.

I wanted to love this book. I consider myself a fan of Robert Bloch, one of the masters of the twist in the tale and almost definitely the master of the dark, sometimes sick pun ending. I know about the backstory to this novel; about how he wrote it primarily out of anger and the feeling of being maligned by a movie studio that decided to take his creation and expand it without his input. It comes across in this novel clearly enough, the vitriolic bitterness covered tissue-thinly at best. It just came across as a slog though, reading it became more a chore rather than a thing of enjoyment, and that made me sad. The characterisation is stereotypical at best, the ending is as predictable as it is abrupt. The mechanics of the story itself are almost spitefully obvious: "You want to take my intellectual property? Here - take THAT!" Bloch seems to almost be screaming at anyone prepared to listen. Like I said, Bloch is one of my favourite writers, I feel let down by this. It's a shame.