To The Last Page

Having previously read Turton's fascinating puzzle mystery The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle , I was quite used to the idea that he proposes in his latest novel, another little enclosed world that is shrouded in mystery with no apparent means of escape other than death, or deaths in the case of Evelyn Hardcastle. Here in The Last Murder at the End of the World however things seem even more detached from any familiar real world situation, the small community here on an island apparently the only people left alive on the planet. And judging by the prologue, there is not even long left for humanity on the planet, unless Neima can pull off a daring scheme. Judging from the title however, someone is going to be murdered before then. There are only 93 hours left before the human race becomes extinct. The remaining population of 122 people are on an island, by chance the only place on earth that has escaped from a deadly fog that kills any living thing it touches. Ninety years ago fo...

Now 87 years old and retired for a few decades, Kazuo Umezz is considered one of the most important and influential of Japanese manga artists in the horror genre, a master recognised by current leading artists in the genre including Junji Ito , but until relatively recently little of his work has been translated into English. One feature that is becoming common now that more works are being published in the West, is the question of how children relate to the the world their parents have created for them, whether it's the apocalyptic landscapes of his masterpiece The Drifting Classroom or the legacy faced by a child twisted by her mother's complex with her appearance in Baptism . The first volume of My Name is Shingo , now being published by Viz, is another major Umezz work that points in the same direction. The subject that influences 12 year old Satoru Konma and sets him apart from his parents appears to be their relationship to new technology, but inevitably the situation is...

When I read Armand Delpierre's first novel Paris se lève last year it clearly looked like the opening shot fired on a new Paris police department series, but now that I reflect upon the title of that book and having read this second installment, it also appears to be a series that represents a kind of awakening for modern-day Paris connected with real-life incidents. Although the SRPJ 92 department cover the comparatively quiet business district of La Défence and suburban Courbeyvoie, Commissioner Lenfant's team soon found themselves caught up in the events that shocked everyone in Paris in January 2015. If that was a wake up call that the city's problems were becoming more extensive and creeping into all parts of the capital, the second book in the series Peine capitale (Capital Punishment) seems to bear that out. Peine capitale retains a structure and drive similar to the first book, following a sequence of days broken up into morning, afternoon, evening and night and ...

Published in 1973, Barbara is one of Osamu Tezuka's mature adult comics, which means that it has some nudity and sexual content, but it actually means more that it deals with different themes and approach from his more obviously children-oriented comics. It's also quite a daring subject, an adventurous one rather than a political one, dealing in some ways with the idea of art and craft, but in a more serious way than how the artist sometimes inserts himself self-effacingly and self-critically as comic moments in his other books. Barbara the character is something of an enigma, a muse perhaps, one that Tezuka recognises as being influenced to some extent by Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann . Unlike Nicklausse however who tries to keep her master on the right path, Barbara is a more inconstant companion to her sensei. Yosuke Mikura is a "popular Symbolist writer' who picks Barbara off the streets, a drunk, delinquent, with a shady background. There is a literary bent t...

Created in 1972-73, Ayako is one of Osamu Tezuka's dark exploration of people and society, specifically dealing with the significant post-war years from the 1950s, right up to the present day in the 70s. It's not a pleasant story to say the least, the American occupation giving rise to enormous upheavals that Japanese society is incapable of adjusting to. More than that, but seen through the eyes of one family, who represent many aspects and attitudes of Japanese society, it even seems to bring out the worse in the Japanese character. Ayako opens with Jiro Tenge returning from the war, the country defeated, its impact shock to the whole nation. He returns to his home village in the country, Yodoyama, to the grave disappointment of his tyrannical father who is ashamed that Jiro didn't die honourably in the war like so many others. Jiro finds that much has changed in the time he has been away, as much with Japan as his family. His teenage sister Naoko is secretly part of a l...

Osamu Tezuka's 1965 science-fiction hero team adventure Wonder 3 is aimed at a younger audience and with Tezuka's imagination, style and dynamism there's plenty to enjoy. If you want you could maybe even find a little bit of broad social commentary, but if not, it still seems fairly on the money in respect of its traditional SF theme of showing the planet Earth in decline and in need of outside intervention if it is to be saved. Things are so bad however that the Milky Way League aren't even sure the Earth is worth saving. They decide however to send a superhero Space Patrol Squad team The Wonder 3 to monitor the planet for one year and if it doesn't show any sign of being worthy of redemption, they are to use their Antiproton bomb to destroy the place. It's too much of a risk to the rest of the universe. Arriving on Earth the three decide to disguise themselves as animals in order to blend in (the idea of taking human form too disgusting to contemplate). The t...

At the end of Blood Crazy we were left with the grim acceptance that the situation the world had been plunged into was irresolvable. With the adult population having been altered in a way that would drive them to tear their own children apart, everything had changed and the world wasn't ever going back to the way it was. Without giving away any spoilers, while some interesting theories were proposed to explain what had happened to trigger this apocalyptic situation overnight, it still meant that it would be up to small communities of survivors to rebuild society and find a way of defending themselves from the ever present threat of the “Creosotes”. That doesn't mean that there aren't more stories to tell and new revelations to be told, but it has taken almost 30 years for Simon Clark to get a sequel in print. It's a long time for some fans of the original novel (recently republished by Darkness Visible), but by the end of Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia , I'm sure fa...