Psi Reading Group
The Psi Reading Group is run by Janette Fleming, Reader Development Officer at Halton Lea Library. We meet once a month on the second Thursday of the month at 5:30 in the new Coffee Bar at Halton Lea Library. New members are welcome, just contact Janette to let her know you will be attending.
We are a small group with a broad range of reading tastes, and the book selections might be considered to be the books that other reading groups wouldn’t necessarily consider. Our books are a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. The fiction has a tendency towards magic (and not in the Harry Potter sense), strangeness, or sometimes just a little on the weird side. The non-fiction has a strong science theme, looking at anything from the oddness of psychology to the fascinating history of salt.
One of the best things about the reading group is that if you start the book and it doesn’t grab you, then there is no pressure to have read it by the next meeting. Not liking it enough not to read it is as valid a point of view as loving it. Though I have to say that even though I am quite selective about my reading matter, this reading group’s selections have only once failed to interest me. I have thoroughly enjoyed all but one of the books listed here.
This is probably the best reading group… in the world.
So why not come along and join us.
Reviews
The Tooth Fairy
Graham Joyce one of the most underrated authors possible because he is so hard to market. Is he horror? Is he fantasy? Or possibly ‘social surrealism’…?
What ever he is his stories are strange, magical and original and he fast becoming one of my favourite authors.
He likes to instill in the reader a feeling of lingering uneasiness ….
‘You come away from the book feeling your perception of the world has been just been knock slightly askew away from what you previously thought to be normal’ Graham refuses to come down on one side or the other of the ideas he presents in his novel, it is all about ambiguity and uncertainty
Sam, Clive and Terry are ordinary (ish) boys growing up in the 1960s until one day when Clive punches Sam in the mouth and knocks out a tooth. …Sam puts the tooth under his pillow at bedtime…as you do
He wakes up during the night and first lays eyes on the Tooth Fairy “oddly dressed and smelling of horse’s sweat and chamomile”.
Tinkerbelle this Fairy is not …it is an angry, bitter and viscous looking creature from nightmare.
Thus begins a strange, disturbing sometimes touching relationship with the Tooth Fairy as it dogs Sam’s footsteps through childhood and into adolescence.
The Tooth Fairy, whose appearance, mood and sex change constantly makes for a rather unpredictable, mercurial companion – sometimes protecting Sam other times tormenting him, bullying and threatening him and his family. The Fairy is a character in its own right with its own moods and emotions, jealously, lust, spite, anger and touching moments of tenderness. The author skilfully coveys the wild, unpredictable primeval nature of the Tooth Fairy.
Without the supernatural element, the adolescent adventures of Sam and his friends would have made a brilliantly funny ‘rites of passage’
novel…all petty vandalism (though making pipe bombs in your Dad’s shed is hardly petty), growing pains and awakening sexuality.
The novel is brilliantly structured, well characterised and entirely compelling and the elegant writing at times is almost prose with a whimsical and nostalgic tone.
This novel shows that horror fiction doesn’t not have to be high octane ‘gore splatter’ serial killing zombies but that it can be beautiful, compulsive, hilarious, tragic, magical and very, very funny …oh very, very rude!
Janette Fleming
The Ritual
“And on the third day things did not get better. The rain fell hard and cold, the white sun never broke through the low grey cloud, and they were lost. But it was the dead thing they found hanging from a tree that changed the trip beyond recognition.”
I have always been a fan of Adam Neville since the Banquet of the Dammed and believe he is firmly as the forefront of the British horror revival of recent years which this gripping and disturbing novel confirms.
Four old university friends go on a walking holiday in the wildness of sub-Arctic Sweden. However they are not the men they were once, mentally and physically, people change over time and soon tensions rise between the characters. When it is clear that, due to their lack of fitness, two of the party cannot continue, a shortcut rather than the intended route, invariably , proves a disaster.
Hungry, thirsty and injured they struggle through one of the last great, ancient forests in Europe. Things couldn’t get any worse…but they do… much worse.
As they make their way, hopelessly lost, through the forest it becomes clear that they are being hunted by some primordial beast/being that begins to pick them off one by one……
If ever there was a book of two halves this is it… the first half is breathless, panicky and shot though incredulity. The second section…is drawn out and painful with the one surviving character almost resigned to his fate.
This is superb storytelling. It is atmospheric and imaginative with a compulsive writing style that keeps the reader turning those pages although feeling exhausted by the horror and despair experienced by the four friends. The Ritual reminded me of one of my favourite author’s stories ‘The Wendigo’ by Algernon Blackwood…animistic spirits or primal creature that defies explanation
There seems to be a rise of primordial themed horror recently, The Leaping and The Darkening and now this….I like it!
Janette Fleming
The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes
Review:
This book is all about the author’s work with using mitochondrial DNA to classify human populations and their movements across the globe from stone age times onwards. The first three-quarters of the book is fascinating and relates the author’s personal journey in relation to his work with mtDNA and its extraction from old bones. I particularly enjoyed the story of how he, through a motorcycle accident, got himself stuck on a Pacific island for several weeks and how this led to a whole string of research on the population movement across the Pacific and how to identify whether that movement was from South America westwards (as proposed by Thor Heyerdahl) or from Asia eastwards – against the prevailing winds. I remember reading, back in the 60′s, Thor Heyardahl’s book about his recreation of this colonising journey on his balsawood raft Kon Tiki, so this early part of the book grabbed my interest very easily.
The author then moves on to work with extracting DNA from older fossils found in the Cheddar caves in Somerset, and then on to the classification of human populations in Europe and how he whittled us down to 7 clans with one clan mother each. He also identifies the location of the origin of each of these groups.
And this is the point at which I think he should have stopped writing for he then goes on to construct a fictional short-story about the primitive lives of each of these ‘daughters of Eve’. the stories are okay, but are all a bit samey and I understand the author’s desire to make these people seem real and very human – but if you want that then just read Jean M Auel’s ‘Earth Children’
Nevertheless, the book is well worth reading and the science quite fascinating.
Michael Hadfield
Will Storr Vs. the Supernatural: One Man’s Search for the Truth About Ghosts
Will Storr starts off as a sceptic on a search for real evidence, if it exists, of paranormal events and activities. His travels take him to the US, the UK and even to the last place you might imagine a paranormal investigator to be welcome – the Vatican.
He meets people who seem to be desperate to find evidence of the weird; he meets people who seem to be living in a different reality from most of us; and he meets genuine gentle people who are just looking for answers.
One of the most interesting reports was Will’s interview with Maurice Gross one of Society for Psychical Research’s investigators on the Enfield Poltergeist case and his discussion with Maurice about a critic of Maurice’s handling of the case. Will gently presents both points of view without bias. In fact Will presents most of the details of his encounters with these ‘searchers for truth’ in a very matter of fact way leaving the reader always to reach their own conclusions about what it is that drives some people to get involved in this territory.
Will very much wanted to speak to an exorcist and his approaches to several ministers resulted only in refusals to be interviewed. In desperation he approached the Vatican and was granted an enlightening interview with the Vatican’s chief exorcist. The book is worth reading just for this.
I enjoyed this book, and anyone with an open mind will not doubt that there is sufficient evidence available to suggest that there is indeed a weirder side to life – even if it is after death.
Highly recommended.
Michael Hadfield
The book is hailed as “one of the most powerful and gripping debut novels I have ever read” Whilst I couldnt put the book down once I had started, it is not the thriller that it is advertised as. That notwithstanding, the reader does pick up a strong sense of the remoteness and isolation (possibly compounded by the fact that I read this book during the “Big Freeze” of late 2009 / early 2010) experienced by the characters and the possibility of history repeating itself.
It describes the archaeolgical dig of a norse settlement carried out by a team of 6 (5 professionals, 1 new to archaeology) very different individuals who during the course of the 3 week dig, become increasingly seperated from the rest of the world. Whilst the book is narrated by 5 out of 6 of the characters, you are never sure whether the main narrator e (Nina) is bordering schizophrenic or can in fact see with increasing reality the ghosts of the bodies who were lying interred in the settlement. As Nina’s visions increase in intensity so does the isolation of the group and the sense of impending danger – not just from the present (the plague which results in an inability to connect with the world and the removal of planned transport home) but also from the past, as the spirits anger increases owing to their graves having been disturbed.
The book does look at the world of fiction (Nina gains notoriety by reading (instead of digging!) George Eliot’s book Middlemarch which is a ficticious book about society) versus reality (not just the differences in the reality of the society in which each of the characters live normally, but the reality of the enclosed society each of them are currently in. Through this enforced enclosure you get a real sense of the danger posed to the group by the actions of an individual, not just through the apparent increasing instability of Nina but also the actions (aswell as inactions and incompetence) of the leader, Yianni, who’s excessive conscientiousness and frugality caused his own death and very nearly caused the deaths of all of the characters, and man’s strong desire to survive against all of the odds.
The most interesting aspect of the book for me was the fact that history was threatening to collide violently with the present; in Nina’s world the spirits, already killed in violent circumstances, were getting increasingly angry with the team of archaelogists for removing their bodies from where they had been interred and threatening to seek their bloody revenge on the team for disturbing their peace, thus almost recreating history with the present. Nina’s return trip to Greenland also reinforces the message of the impact of history on the present.
However I did feel that the sense of doom quickly dissolved in the last chapter when Nina describes their chance return home to an almost normal world, with the effects of the plague (which the reader was lead to believe caused the internet to go into almost meltdown, and the plane i.e. their transport home, not to arrive) unmentioned, and the fact that the spirits she saw during the dig disappeared as a result of the medication she started to take once she returned to England.
Overall the book was an enjoyable read. It was incredibly detailed and descriptive in places, with an incredibly appropriate front cover. I did feel that more could have been done in the last chapter to maintain suspense.
Merryn Stoyle
The Girl On The Landing
I enjoyed it on the whole and liked the alternative narrations – how often does that happen in reality – how one person view something is never the same as someone else.
The bits I found most interesting were whether Lamia was the figment of an hallucination or whether she was a ghost (how would she have otherwise been able to spy on Elizabeth once she moved back to her mothers), and also the different relations – mother daughter, parent child (hate –(Michael and his parents), despair / non (Elizabeth and her mother), doctor patient, friend – friend, wife husband (Michael Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s Mother – husband / boyfriends, Michael and Elizabeth’s friends relations with their spouses relations and the fact that each person has a different type of parent child relation or relationship with friends) the need to be accepted by others (Grouchers) and the need for conforming to Society (now whilst I don’t think there was any doubt Michael was Schizophrenic, it raise the issue about what happens when people don’t conform to accepted society Norms), what its like to be typically English (though whilst Michael was in a club for English gentlemen, he was actually a Scot – this was kept very quiet) and how archaic and behind the times this now seems given the cultural shift of England. But there were some contradictions – Michael himself told the tale of his parents respective disappearance – especially as he wanted to keep the house as it was in case his father returned – but then it transpired he had probably murdered him (unless one was serendizopan induced False Memory and one was “real” memory.
The characters were also few and far between – almost like an enclosed society…
The love that he felt for Elizabeth and the need to protect her I felt made the book very powerful in many ways, especially given his relationship with others (i.e. his parents) that he had loved.
Merryn Stoyle
Previously read:
Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know About it
Quirkology: The Curious Science Of Everyday Lives
The Man in the Picture: A Ghost Story
Salt: A World History
The Stolen Child
The Blind Watchmaker
Under the Skin
Come Closer
Company of Liars
The Gargoyle
Slaughterhouse 5
Bad Science
Dracula
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Your Inner Fish: The Amazing Discovery of Our 375-Million-Year-Old Ancestor
If you have read anything that you would like to recommend to our Paranormal community then please post the details here, and if you want, feel free to add a review of it too.
