Chloe Thurlow's Blog, page 27
August 24, 2013
Review: Electronic Gags
Electronic Gags by Kudakwashe Muzira
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The world is in crisis – banks, unemployment, poverty, drones, spy satellites, greedy corporations, democracy sinking beneath a flood tide of corruption, dishonesty neglect and incompetence. It’s hardly surprising that the dystopia concept appears in so many new novels.
Thus it is with “Electronic Gags” by Kudakwashe Muzira, who sets his novel in the present dystopia where people are being spied upon and repressed in new and unimaginable ways. Enter the hero of the tale, an overweight, hamburger munching biologist by the name of Freddie Young. Accused of ratting on his best friend, Michael, Freddie must prove his innocence and save his pal now sitting on death row. At a time when civil rights have gone back 100 years and the all-powerful government (now a purely fascist regime) has the eyes in the sky to watch everyone (Orwell’s 1984 projected forward 100 years), Freddie Young has only one option – bring down the government.
A fast-moving page-turner, I won’t ruin the rest of the plot. Just get this book
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August 22, 2013
Naked Cleaning
Sexuality is a multi-faceted crystal ball spinning above a shadowy place picking our glints of passion and moving on. We are not one of those facets, a solitary reflection, but many. Potentially, we are the crystal ball. A friend of mine who likes to keep a tidy house and whose sex life had grown stale always takes off her clothes to do the housework. Naked cleaning is not uncommon. Girls are guided by the moon. We are all lunatics. We adore being naked.
Anyway, this friend of mine happens to have an enormous black trash bin that had become stained on the inside. She decided to give it a good clean. After half filling the receptacle with hot soapy water, she discovered that she couldn’t reach the stains on the bottom. So, she got a chair, hooked her leg over, and stepped inside. She was merrily scrubbing away when her boyfriend appeared unexpectedly. She was naked, wet, soapy and standing waist high in the dustbin. He threw off his clothes, they flooded the kitchen floor and the last time I saw them they were in Old Compton Street buying a maid’s costume. For him.
With one turn of the crystal ball we will see a gleam of light guiding us to another aspect of our sexuality, another perhaps unknown facet of who we actually are. Once we set out on this course we are on the road to the erotic. The erotic isn’t a quick whip through human desire and fantasy. It is a journey into our deepest yearnings, a search for that place where all feelings and emotions become refined, exquisite, illuminated and enriched. Naked cleaning may just be the first step.
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August 19, 2013
Helen of Troy: The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships
Helen of Troy was the daughter of Zeus. She married the Spartan King, Menelaus, then eloped with the charismatic young Paris – the son of the King of Troy. Paris famously gave Aphrodite a golden apple inscribed with the words To the fairest. The Goddess of Love was so moved by this charming gesture, she rashly promised Paris the hand of the most beautiful woman in the world.
That woman was Helen and her hand had already been taken by Menelaus of Sparta. That didn’t stop Paris seducing Helen and eloping with her back to Troy. When King Menelaus returned from some skirmish at the frontier, he was hysterical. As you would be. He raised an army and launched a thousand ships that sailed across the Aegean to win back Helen, the first act of the Trojan War.
Helen thus earned the sobriquet the face that launched a thousand ships, the personification of great beauty – and this great beauty led to the deaths of many thousands, Trojans and Spartans alike.
It was during the Trojan War that Achilles was killed by an arrow that pierced his heel, his one vulnerable point (we still use Achilles’ heel to represent weakness) – and who was the archer? Ironically, it was Paris the Seducer. From the writings of Homer, we still use his phrase: beware of Greeks baring gifts in honor of the wily Greeks feigning a retreat after leaving a giant wooden horse as a gift to the Trojans. At nightfall, while the war weary people of Troy were sleeping, the Greeks burst from the innards of the wooden horse and conquered the city.
The war came to an end and Homer recorded the tales in the Iliad. Helen had come to realize that Paris was as cowardly as he was charismatic; the two often go together. She sailed back to Sparta – but King Menelaus had seen too much suffering on the battlefield to see beauty in the face of Helen – and both died prematurely.
If the story has a moral, it is beware of charismatic men, they are not what they seem; and beware of those women like Helen of Troy who drive men to war. 
No beauty’s worth it.
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August 18, 2013
Review: The Voyeur
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Mark Parker drinks strong black coffee and keeps notes in a small battered notebook. He is a man with ample self-restraint – but that restraint is wearing thin. Summoning his assistants, Anya and Clara, he instructs them to ready themselves for a night at `Discreet,’ the most exclusive BDSM club in a city famed for its BDSM clubs – London. As they say, if you are bored with London, you are bored with life. And Mark is, he has to admit, feeling just an itsy-bitsy bit bored.
What Kay Jaybee does with tremendous artistry is set the scene in her highly-charged novel in two swift paragraphs that made me feel as she had taken me to the edge of the diving board where I plunged nakedly into the whirlpool of Mark Parker’s 12th fantasy.
The writing is confident, assured and Ms Jaybee doesn’t spend words like some profligate gambler but uses them with parsimonious economy – as if, to borrow a phrase, she is writing a telegram and every word has to be paid for. It is not easy within the genre to be original, there is, it has to be said, a certain modus operandi in all sub-dom erotica, but I did appreciate the way Mark spanked Anya and Clara in turn, “one being hit while the other enjoyed a moment’s respite before being struck again.” It gave me a warm feeling all the way down the back of my legs.
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August 17, 2013
Review: Beyond Bridalveil Fall
Beyond Bridalveil Fall by Sheryl Seal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was immediately reminded of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland when I started reading Sheryl Seal’s Beyond Bridalveil Fall – Dwellers Of Ahwahnee. Oria, her heroine, is a few years older than Alice, 18, in fact on the day her misadventure begins. Unlike Alice, she doesn’t topple down a rabbit hole. Oria plunges into Bridalveil Fall, at the Yosemite National Park, and rather than bubbling back up again, she emerges in a mysterious kingdom where she is both Queen of the Ahwahneechee tribe and a shapeshifter in the tradition of the Iliad and the Epic of Galgamesh, a divine fairy with a mission to lead the tribe in their battle against the diabolical forces luring them into the corrupt world of mankind. If this is a metaphor, it works as metaphors should, subtly and within the subtext.
With her morality tale set up, the author astutely provides Oria with that dilemma that has faced 18 year old fairy queens since way back beyond Gilgamesh: a love interest in the shape of Grey Wolf – but, just as she, a shapeshifter, is not exactly what she appears to be – she has serious doubts about Grey Wolf, a thread that takes readers right through to an ending which may be what we expect, but not in the way we expect it. Beyond Bridalveil Fall is well-constructed, nicely written and perfect for children of all ages, even my own, a grand old lady of 28.
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August 16, 2013
Secret Life Captured on Film
Philosophy answers questions. Literature poses them. Books spin a mystery and leave the reader to work their way through the labyrinth. Novels are founded in subtext, subtlety, nuance. That’s why authors always say they hate their books being turned into films – although I’m sure if Hollywood comes knocking they adore the hype, as well as the cash, a new paperback with the stars embellishing the cover, friends saying…Ooo, ‘I just love the film, I’ll have to get round to reading the book…’
A screenwriter recently suggested that I give him a free option on my novel Girl Trade so he could write a script. He remarked over lunch that we should continue what he called “ongoing talks” and I told him there is no such thing as a free lunch, having just eaten Caesar salad with two glasses of white wine. The whole idea seemed exciting and dangerous, like standing on a cliff edge in a short skirt, but the ongoing talks stopped going on and Girl Trade remains on the shelf in paper not celluloid.
That’s why I was thrilled when filmmaker Lorraine Masterson offered to make a short teaser clip of The Secret Life of Girls – and has managed in 4-minutes to capture the shades of passion and sensuality I tried to bring to the novel. She posted the film on YouTube and here it is, for all the world to see: http://youtu.be/7fLr_-8d32c
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August 15, 2013
Review: Revenge of the Orgasm:
Revenge of the Orgasm: by Greatest Poet Alive
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
GPA is a man who has taken hold of the world as if it were a blank canvas and on its surface has painted his portrait in words of passion and grace. This is the strangest book I have come across in a very long time. And there is nothing wrong in that. In an age of dreary sameness and manic graphology, a time when words spill into the air as rain in the monsoon spills from the sky, it is a rare thing to come upon something original. And entertaining.
GPA has constructed an erotic autobiography in short powerful poems that draw you into his world until his narcissistic claim of being The Greatest Poetic Alive has about it a ring of transcendental truth. Being a gentleman, as he says, GPA doesn’t provide readers with the names of his lovers, even his own is veiled in initials. Instead, he allows his words to drill into our imagination like woodworm in soft pine. The first poem in the anthology is called 15 Minutes – and, in that time, on meeting his lover, GPA takes us through a minute by minute cycle of sensual touches, warm kisses, dancing tongues and a glimpse of souls. Read the first and you are hooked.
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August 12, 2013
Black Dwarf
There is a game we used to play. You ask a friend, if they were obliged to stop being human and had to be an animal, what would you be? Immediately they answer, you say, there are no vacancies for that particular animal. What is your second choice. The first choice (often a lion, a wolf, a leopard) is what we think we are; the second is what we really are (a poodle, a fox, a snake). I can’t remember my first choice, but my second was a giraffe – aloof, an observer, partial to the sweetest leaves.
I always grow afraid when happiness comes near. I grill myself with the same dreary questions. Who am I? Where am I going? What makes me me? What do I want? What do I really want? I look into the mirror and it seems sometimes as if the person in the reflection is wearing a mask, that there is someone quite different looking out through my eyes, the hunched, haunted figure I call Black Dwarf, my avatar, the portrait of Dorian Grey that hides in the cupboard. I have always surrendered to Oscar Wilde’s counsel: The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.
The cold mirror reveals each day someone different. Time is remorseless. It moves, bends, spirals. Our cells die and new cells come to life. Time never sleeps. We grow tired repeating ourselves. Something had been shifting inside me, slow and delicate, like a lizard stalking a fly. An ennui had slipped like a sour smell into my daily routines; perhaps that’s why I moved along the river from west to east?- Inspired by Vincent Moore and Anthony Polson.
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Review: Nevwas’s Gold
Nevwas’s Gold by Cliff Roberts
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was hesitant to review a book in this genre, Mystery/thriller. I’m more of a romance girl. But I’d promised to do the review so I waded in.
WOW! Was I surprised!
I was stunned by the fact that I was hooked from the very beginning. I had trouble setting it down. I found myself daydreaming about where the story would go next while I was at work. Cliff Roberts writes smart, funny, witty banter so life like you’d swear he listened in when you and your friend got together. His characters have real depth. Talking about characters. His leading man is old, handicapped, a struggling writer who just can’t keep his nose out of other people’s business. His nosiness leads him into one predicament after another, as Roberts twists the story into a huge knot before magically snapping it into line for a surprise ending.
Everyone needs to read, Nevwas’s Gold. If I knew mystery/thrillers could be this much fun, I’d read one before now. Now, I’m going to read everything, Roberts writes. I give this book, Five stars.
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Review: The Zombie Chronicles
The Zombie Chronicles by Chrissy Peebles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The thing about zombies is they never die, except in inventive and convoluted ways, and they never go out of fashion. Since White Zombie, the 1932 indie-flick starring the unpredictable Bela Lugosi, movies, books, TV series and video games have been a staple (cannibalistic?) diet of this lively and adaptable genre.
The Zombie Chronicles follows the codes of the genre and is written for young adults with a warning that there is some mild violence – though no more than what you might see in an episode of Family Guy.
Here we find caring, thoughtful and all-round good human being, Val, gorged by a zombie and the heroic Dean – the brother she didn’t know she had – fighting the clock to get her the serum that will cure her before she fades into zombiehood. It all seems to be going well until the helicopter transporting Val to safety crash lands in the heart of zombieland and teenaged Dean must fight his way out against overwhelming odds. Cue: the hero’s journey, and we are with Dean every step of the way.
Chrissy Peebles launches a series with this first book and those who pick it up are sure to look out for the next one.
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