[books 2015] HP Lovecraft/HST mashup

35. The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham by Brian Keene and Nick Mamatas

HP Lovecraft meets Hunter S Thompson. HST goes in search of the American Nightmare during the 1972 US election campaign - if Nixon can sweep all 50 states, Cthulu will rise.

They do a plausible approximation of HST's voice (I think, but I've only read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (more than once), but some time ago), which carries it through the first third. In this part the tentacles and cultists can be explained by excess drug use on the part of HST and his informants.

Then we get into territory where Your Narrator has to admit that the monsters are real. Because he's HST, it doesn't surprise him much, but he does lots of outrageous things anyway.

It all comes apart before the end, though. The joke wears thin and there isn't quite enough plot to carry it, but I don't quite understand the conclusion - I think it hinges on the evil alien mind control won't work on Thompson because of the colossal amount of psychedelic drugs he's taken, which is just lazy.

They get more marks for effort than for execution, but it could be a lot worse.

[books 2015] Arturo Perez-Reverte

36. The Painter of Battles by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Perez-Reverte is the author of my second-favourite book in the world, The Seville Communion. I've read quite a few of his books and although they're well written and literary, they're also quite plot-packed and "genre" (perhaps Spanish literature doesn't have the misconception that well-written books have to be navel-gazing wank).

This one's a bit different. A man who was a war reporter for 30 years has retired to a coastal town, rented a big old tower on a hill and is painting an epic battle scene on the walls inside.

He is visited by a Croatian man whose face was made famous by one of his photos in the Balkan wars, whose life was ruined by that photo, and has come to kill him. But first they have a series of long conversations about life and war and how they got to that point.

It's actually better and more interesting than that makes it sound - definitely worth while.

[books 2015] history - Spain in the New World

37. World Without End - the Global Empire of Philip II by Hugh Thomas

Oh dear, I can't believe I read the whole thing.

I have fond memories of his earlier works, The Slave Trade and The Conquest of Mexico. The first volume of this series, Rivers of Gold, is dense but informative. Volume two was pretty painful, as was this (but was shorter). It works neither as narrative nor analysis. It doesn't answer basic questions that a novice like me to, say, the exploration of Paraguay, has, nor is there any meaningful consideration of much of anything. I could rant for ages but the basic take-home is just don't.

I'm still looking for a decent account of the Spanish in South America and I'm beginning to wonder if the answer is become a lot more fluent in Spanish. There's a lot of material on Mexico and the Inca, but not a lot about the more obscure parts that I'm interested in.

Oh, and the maps are crap and relegated to the back so you can imagine how I feel about that.