Next Episode

Next Episode
By Hubert Aquin
Published: 1965
Translaited by Sheila Fischman: 2001

Written in 1965 by Hubert Aquin well he was in prison for his involvment with terrorists in Quebec, Next Epsiode, appeares to be largely autobiographical. The novels unnamed narrator is in a Montreal prison and writes down his experiances in Switzerland on a mission to murder a Swiss banker working with the RCMP, for the FLQ. The basic plot is farely straight forward yet Aquin appears to spend most of the novel rambling on about his love for a woman or his love for Quebec and his longing for revolution mixed in with several musings about suicide (ironic as Aquin shot himself in 1977), rather then bother to move the novel forward. Mayhaps it reads better in French or speaks to seperatists but this was one novel that can be passed over.

* out of *****

Weaveworld

Weaveworld
By Clive Barker
Published: 1987

Clive Barker creates an epic fantasy in Weaveworld. The story begins in Liverpool when a man named Cal chases down a runaway bird to a delapidated house, whose owner lies dying in the hospital. There the old womens granddaughter, Suzanna, will learn a secret that will force her and Cal into a journey to a world hidden in plain sight, into the arms of a people hidden for decades possessing power beyond there imagination, and into battle with evil. For this hidden people has enemies, the greedy salesman Shadwell, the zealous police inspector Hobart, the exiled sorceress Immacolata and her dead sisters The Hag and The Magdalena, and half a world away, in the most desolate place on Earth, an ancient creature begins to stir, possesed of a power and madness that threatens them all.

In Weaveworld Clive Barker abandons traditional horror to create a modern fantasy about the power of imagination, courage and hope. Written with his usual mixture of poetry and grit, Weaveworld is a unique imaginative work that should find a place on every readers shelf

***** out of ***** Polemarch's Pick