What are you reading? - Never Forgotten: a Foster's Home Community

jekylljuice · 01-14-2009, 07:52 AM

Wow, this thread has been dormant for an awfully long time, wouldn't you say? Maybe it's time to dust it off a little...

Presently, I'm half-way through Never Trust A Rabbit by Jeremy Dyson, one of the co-writers of the black-comedy series The League of Gentleman (of which I should emphasise that I'm not really a fan - I was enticed to pick this up and start reading chiefly because the title had intrigued me, although, as Jeremy explains in the introduction, it doesn't really have any solid connection with the contents of the stories, having come about as the result of some random wordplay...it was a toss-up between that and Never Love a Dragon, apparently). So far, though Jeremy's writing style is certainly very engaging and enjoyable, it's been something of a mixed bag, narratively speaking. All of the stories set themselves up very nicely with intriguing characters and scenarios, but some of them suffer from an unwillingless to develop themselves any further ("City Deep", for example which had the makings for a fine ghost story but ended upon a rather cheap piece of shock value just as it started to get really interesting, with perhaps too little substance or closure for its own good), or from dipping too heavy-handedly into morality (which is especially true of the opening story, "We who walk through walls" - though naturally it wasn't helped by the rather barmy twist ending). The best and most satisfying of the first few yarns is easily the one entitled "Love in the time of Molyneux", concerning a man who cannot help but resent the perfection and unflinching humility of his flatmate, which he's convinced conceals something of a darker side that he's determined to unravel, only for his flatmate to go ahead and drop the ultimate bombshell upon him. I got quite a substantial little smirk out of the ending of that one. "At Last", which is probably the simplest and most straightforward of the early stories, is also pretty good.

As I say, I'm only half-way through - there are still six more stories left to go, and I'm going to read them all before I form any real opinions about the book as a whole.

01-14-2009, 07:52 AM	#20
jekylljuice Executive Weasel Ball jekylljuice was here. Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: the 44th floor (not counting the mezzanine) Posts: 1,568	Wow, this thread has been dormant for an awfully long time, wouldn't you say? Maybe it's time to dust it off a little... Presently, I'm half-way through Never Trust A Rabbit by Jeremy Dyson, one of the co-writers of the black-comedy series The League of Gentleman (of which I should emphasise that I'm not really a fan - I was enticed to pick this up and start reading chiefly because the title had intrigued me, although, as Jeremy explains in the introduction, it doesn't really have any solid connection with the contents of the stories, having come about as the result of some random wordplay...it was a toss-up between that and Never Love a Dragon, apparently). So far, though Jeremy's writing style is certainly very engaging and enjoyable, it's been something of a mixed bag, narratively speaking. All of the stories set themselves up very nicely with intriguing characters and scenarios, but some of them suffer from an unwillingless to develop themselves any further ("City Deep", for example which had the makings for a fine ghost story but ended upon a rather cheap piece of shock value just as it started to get really interesting, with perhaps too little substance or closure for its own good), or from dipping too heavy-handedly into morality (which is especially true of the opening story, "We who walk through walls" - though naturally it wasn't helped by the rather barmy twist ending). The best and most satisfying of the first few yarns is easily the one entitled "Love in the time of Molyneux", concerning a man who cannot help but resent the perfection and unflinching humility of his flatmate, which he's convinced conceals something of a darker side that he's determined to unravel, only for his flatmate to go ahead and drop the ultimate bombshell upon him. I got quite a substantial little smirk out of the ending of that one. "At Last", which is probably the simplest and most straightforward of the early stories, is also pretty good. As I say, I'm only half-way through - there are still six more stories left to go, and I'm going to read them all before I form any real opinions about the book as a whole. __________________ That's it, The End, But you'll get over it, My Friend. Last edited by jekylljuice; 01-14-2009 at 07:52 AM.