2007 books

80) Roger Zelazny, Damnation Alley, 1969
I'm sure I recently read on an SF list somewhere that Damnation Alley drew its inspiration from the 1925 Nome Serum Run on the Iditarod Trail. Or is that a popular myth? Hell Tanner's journey across a post-armageddon America to deliver a plague-eradicating drug is now the stuff of Mad Max cliché, and the mutant and rabid giant bats, spiders and gila monsters are pure skiffy. There's a tramline structure to the idea which Zelazny never really veers from and he uses small episodes from the lives of otherwise irrelevant characters to plot the course of the story (much like Poul Anderson used to do), and it only really gets interesting towards the end when the writing flowers like a strange mutation itself as Zelazny shows what he could really do with words. Enjoyable enough, I suppose, but rather too straightforward (and I see the 1977 film, which Zelazny did not like at all, is also about to be released on DVD).

2007 books

81) Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers, 1981
McEwan has been a glaring omission from my fiction shelves for far too long, and The Comfort of Strangers is probably a good place to start as it captures that almost gothic, spiking sense of unease for which he's become famous. Set in Venice, the English holidaymakers Colin and Mary encounter the dangerous Robert and his genteel wife Caroline. I found Colin and Mary's initial emotional distance from each other to be brilliantly done, as if McEwan is somehow able to draw the spaces between them, and the way they then get closer to each other after their first encounter with the sadistic Robert becomes the emotional heart of the story before they're then drawn back to Robert's dangerous mind games like moths to a flame. Robert has an unsettling combination of sheer mysogyny and power that overwhelms all other characters; the way in which McEwan takes the wraps off Robert's concealed evil, and by simply discarding all he has created for Colin and Mary, is genuinely unsettling.