The Bedlam Detective (2012) by Stephen Gallagher: The second of Stephen Gallagher's Sebastian Becker series, in which Becker investigates whether mentally unstable nobles in Edwardian England should be committed. That's for the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy. Seriously. That was a thing.
In The Bedlam Detective, Becker has been sent to the coastal English countryside to investigate and fill a report on the sanity of Sir Owain Lancaster. Lancaster led a disastrous expedition into the Amazon Basin several years previous and then emerged claiming that nearly the entire party was killed by giant monsters. He's a pariah now, but is he crazy?
But as Becker arrives, two girls go missing. Becker, a former Pinkerton, gets involved in the search for the girls right off the train. And then, having proven himself useful to investigating detective Stephen Reed, Becker gets more and more involved in the mystery of the girls, the mystery of Owain Lancaster, the mystery of the monsters... well, a lot of mystery!
Gallagher spikes his novel with lots of intriguing historical details without overloading the reader or getting too far away from the mystery. There's a lot of modern psychology involved -- among other things, Becker's 18-year-old son is a high-functioning autistic savant in a world where the term 'autism' does not exist.
But the mystery of Lancaster is also probed from a psychological POV, often ranging into the possibility of a serial killer and his motivations though the term wouldn't be coined for another 60 years. Gallagher also touches upon Great Britain's Suffragette movement through another major character.
Telling details also include the utterly botched collection of evidence at a crime scene, infuriating Becker, and a marvelous sequence in London with a thick fog having rolled in. Becker's son is sensitively and believably drawn -- autism hasn't given him "super-powers" as is often portrayed in current TV and cinema, but it does allow him to help out on the case because of his intense powers of close analysis and organization.
Everything will dovetail together by the end. An early version of the personal movie camera will play a part. So, too, South American caterpillars and an odd early example of the automobile. There will be tragedy. And maybe even a pay raise for Becker, who desperately needs a new suit and whose office at Bethlehem Hospital is so squalid that he takes all his messages at a meat-pie stand. Highly recommended.
The Predator (2018): written by Shane Black and Fred Dekker; directed by Shane Black; starring Boyd Holbrook (Quinn McKenna), Olivia Munn (Casey Bracket), Trevante Rhodes (Nebraska Williams), Thomas Jane (Baxley), Keegan-Michael Key (Coyle), Sterling K. Brown (Traeger), and Jacob Tremblay (Rory McKenna):
1. The Predator in this movie gets a definite article because it's 11-feet tall and comes with two Predator dogs and the ability to speak English.
2. The funniest line in the movie was apparently not written by writer-director Shane Black, who was not having a good week when he wrote this movie, but rather by Olivia Munn's sister.
3. Olivia Munn needs to hire an agent who stops putting her in front of green screens. She does look less discombobulated than she did in X-Men: Apocalypse.
4. Because there can only be one active woman in an action movie, Yvonne Strahovski gets sidelined for the most part even though The Predator kidnaps her son.
5. Boyd Holbrook, who plays the protagonist, Strahovski's ex-husband, and the father of that son, has negative charisma.
6. The son has autism. In the Predator universe, this makes him "the next step in human evolution!"
7. Shane Black labours so hard to make the wacky group of crazy soldiers who team up with Boyd Holbrook, um, wacky and memorable, that one can fairly see the flop sweat running down Black's face.
8. The last 20 minutes are so frenetic and (literally) dark that I don't know whether Sterling K. Brown's evil Black Ops guy is alive or dead when the movie ends.
9. The now infamous deleted scene probably involves our wacky group of Predator fighters procuring the RV that mysteriously appears 55 minutes into the movie.
10. Arnold Schwarzenegger turned down a cameo after reading the script.
There are a few moments, and it's not unbearably awful or anything. Lightly recommended.
Experimental Film by Gemma Files (2015): As brilliant a new novel Canadian or otherwise as I've read in a long time, Experimental Film is also a dandy horror novel. It's an almost perfect expression of the sort of documentary approach to horror that H.P. Lovecraft codified. It's also a moving character study of its narrator and her troubled relationships with pretty much everyone in her life, but most notably her young, autistic son.
Lois Cairns has lost her regular jobs as both a film journalist and as a teacher of film at a Toronto diploma factory dedicated to film. But a freelance assignment to review the latest experimental offering from a pretentious, obnoxious film-maker ends up revealing to Lois what appears to be footage from an unknown, early 20th-century Canadian director that the pompous contemporary film-maker has interpolated into his own work. And so the detective work begins -- and the eternal quest for grant money!
Cairns' investigation soon suggests that the mysterious footage was filmed by the even more mysterious Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb. Whitcomb was the wife of an early 20th-century Canadian businessman. She vanished without a trace from a sealed train compartment in the 1920's, leaving behind only a film projector. Decades earlier, her only son had also vanished somewhere in or around the Whitcombs' house in Ontario's cottage country.
And we're off. Experimental Film does many things very, very well. Files' narrator earns our sympathy despite (and also because of) her bouts of self-pity, self-loathing, and nastiness. This sympathy comes in part because the narrator is intensely self-aware, and aware of her many moments of nastiness. She's also surrounded by keenly observed and rendered supporting characters, most notably a brilliant former student whom Cairns hires to work on the movie about the search for the movie and Cairns' autistic son.
The accumulation of documentary detail, and the details of the search for the lost movie or movies, all work very much in long-standing horror traditions. More importantly, they're expertly done in this novel. Files creates a convincing alternate history of Canadian film. And she does so in a gradually building horror narrative in which both sudden, almost epiphanic shocks and the creeping terror of the slow build are both given their moments.
Perhaps most rarely for a horror novel, Experimental Film is genuinely funny throughout. And it's not the tiresome horror humour of the Crypt-keeper and his ilk, nor the deadly jolité of many an omniscient serial killer or Joker knock-off. It's just funny -- sardonic at certain points, cynical about the art scene.
In all, this is a fine novel, and one that will hopefully win readers and appear on courses of study for years to come. It's also a hell of a travelogue for certain portions of Toronto. It even has a scene set in Sneaky Dee's. The only thing it's really lacking is a climactic appearance by the helpful ghost of Al Waxman. Highly recommended.
