Month: June 2012

She’s Never Coming Back by Hans Koppel – Revenge Eaten Cold

Published in 2011, She’s Never Coming Back is a heady combination of  crime thriller and  mystery. Written by Hans Koppel, which is in fact “a pseudonym for an established Swedish Author who was born in 1964 and lives in Stockholm.”

In actual fact Hans Koppel is a  children’s book writer by the name of Petter Lidbeck. Lidbeck published his first adult novel in 2008 and actually revealed to the press in 2010 that he was Hans Koppel. *courtesy of Wikipedia.

She’s Never Coming Back is set in Sweden. The story begins with a murder. A psychiatrist gives a lecture on his book The Victim and The perpetrator and the nine steps required to break a victim down. Two old class mates talk about a group of bullies they went to school with.

And in the town of Hittarp, Ylva Zetterberg is abducted on her way home from work by an older couple. Her husband Mike and their daughter Sanna don’t know that Ylva won’t be coming home that night.

Koppel has written a taut and almost clinical thriller here. A story that deals with revenge, consequences and brain-washing. A long time ago when Ylva was in secondary school she and three male friends were known as The Gang of Four. They terrorised their school mates. Now years later, the Gang of Four have gone their separate ways, but their past has caught up with them.

We are given glimpses into what happens to three of the gang. The first member to go dies naturally of cancer. The second member is murdered at the beginning of the book. The third and last members of the gang will soon be dealt with and their end is not meant to be ‘natural.’

Ylva has been put in the soundproofed basement of the house across the street from her own home. She can see the house through a cctv monitor in the basement. This is where her captors plan to break her down and remove any idea of escape.

The book is set up so we can ‘see’ the process of the victim break-down in relation to what is happening to Ylva. We also see the distress and anguish that her husband is going through. The book is quite detailed and could also have been called Kidnapping for Dummies or the DIY Abductors Handbook.

The story is well told, we see how Ylva’s disappearance affects everyone connected to her. It also shows how difficult it is for the police to investigate disappearances and how the ‘significant other’ is always the first suspect.

A close to the knuckle book of the finest order and one that kept me in suspense until the very end. Suffice to say I think that Petter Lidbeck has successfully shed his children’s author title. Even if he had to change his name to do it.

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Burned by Thomas Enger – A Norwegian Phoenix

Touted on the back of the book as Enger‘s debut novel, Burned is a brilliant jig saw puzzle of a mystery/thriller. Debut novel it may well be, but if you take the time to look up Thomas Enger’s biography on Goodreads, you’ll find that he has been writing professionally for quite a while.

It shows.

I could wax lyrical about this book for hours. But since I don’t have the time to do that, I will limit myself to what I can put in a blog-post.

The ‘hero’ of the book (it appears that this is the beginning of a series) is Henning Juul.  Henning is a journalist who works for an internet news channel. Juul is veteran news reporter and he is going through a very traumatic time in his life.

Henning is a burns survivor .  He  lost his son in the fire that nearly killed him, his wife divorced him and he is plagued by bad dreams about the fire and his son. He is also, understandably, very OCD about smoke alarms.

Juul compulsively checks and changes the batteries in his many smoke alarms in his flat. He instantly checks for smoke alarms when he enters any room or building. He has been under therapy to help him ‘move on’ and how to deal with the stress attacks that he was prone to.

At the start of the book, we get to witness the dream that plagues Henning nightly. We also are privy to his return to work and his daily fight to get back to ‘normal.’

Burned is a tightly woven mystery/thriller novel. He has made his main protagonist a very interesting person, one we empathize with immediately. Henning  Juul was a man with a strong drive before he became a burns victim and it is this obvious drive that allows him to overcome his ‘disability’ and get on with his life.

Although this is a “mystery/thriller, Juul is no Miss Marple. He was and still is an investigative journalist, a crime reporter and a man with a questioning mind who was shown the ropes by a veteran newsman.

A girl is found murdered, stoned to death and one hand cut off, her body is in a tent on a city park site.  The police believe it is a Islamic Honour killing and arrest the dead girl’s boyfriend. Juul reports on the killing on his first day back at work. His inquisitive mind sees the murder scene and to him it doesn’t add up.

Henning decides to follow up his initial news story and help to catch the killer.

As a hero Henning Juul is as flawed we are.  He is not a muscle bound action man. He is not a marksman or a pugilist of rapid reflexes and killer punches. He is not a martial arts expert. He is a ‘wounded’ man recovering from horrific injuries. Both physical and mental. Henning’s biggest assets are his need for independence and his sharp questioning mind.

This looks to be the start of a great mystery series. I am glad I found Thomas Enger’s book and I can’t wait for his next Henning Juul novel.

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Crows Zero (2007): A Yakuza Is Born

Cover of "Crows Zero"

Adapted from Hiroshi Takahashi‘s manga Crow’s, the screenplay was written by Shôgo Mutô and directed by the iconic Takashi Miike. I have read that this is a ‘loose’ adaptation of the manga, while that may be true, the film itself is visually impressive and the plot fairly easy to follow.

The film, except for the fact it’s adapted from the manga, could be called The Birth of a Yakuza. Crows Zero is set in the fictional  Suzuran All-Boys High School. It is said to be the “hardest” school in Japan.  It is certainly the most dilapidated. When the cameras pulled back to show a panoramic view of the school, I felt like I had put in the wrong film. The school looked like it belonged on the set of a horror film.

It seems that Suzuran is a school where the students are engaged in daily battles over ‘turf’ and who rules the entire school’s ‘turf.’ Although different factions hold different levels of power, no one gang has ever ruled the whole school.

Enter Genji Takaya (Shun Oguri) a tall bean-pole of a lad whose dad is a local Yakuza boss and alumni of Suzuran High School.  He has told Genji that if he can rule the entire school, he can take over his Yakuza gang.

The main competition is Tamao Serizawa (Takayuki Yamada) who so far has the toughest gang, but they do not rule the school. There are several factions that control different year groups and different areas. There is even one faction that is made up of just one member, but he is the size of a barge and has never been defeated in a fight.

On the first day of school a local Yakuza lieutenant, Ken Katagiri ( Kyôsuke Yabe) comes on the school grounds with several men to dispense punishment to Serizawa for beating up one of his men. Genji is mistaken for Serizawa and Katagiri is told by his men that they will take care of this kid while he goes to get sodas and ice cream.

Genji proceeds to mop the floor with the Yakuza tough guys. Meanwhile the real Serizawa has been chased back to the school by the police. This has the effect of ending the Yakuza attack. Later, Katagiri catches up with Genji and realises that they were after the wrong teenager. Katagiri likes Genji and tells him that he can help Genji to rule the school.

In this fictional world, there is no time or need for school work. Instead it appears the only requirement for graduation is to show up to  school. In this setting the teen criminals have all the time they need to recruit different gangs to support them in their fight to “rule the school.”

The film is enjoyable, if not typical Takashi Miike fare. It felt like the genre hopping director wanted to try his hand at entertaining the teen demographic for a change. Everything about the film felt tailored for the younger film goer up to and including the minimal amounts of blood shed in the fight scenes (well, minimal for Takashi Miike at any rate).

The fight scenes are choreographed well and look fairly realistic, if you can overlook the fact that if the kids had really fought that hard the fights would not have lasted nearly so long. The shooting schedule for the final big battle at the end of the film must have been Miike training for that big battle in 13 Assassins . It must have taken weeks to film, but it was worth the effort because it does look great.

My only complaint was there seemed to be too much time spent watching ‘J-rock’ bands perform and letting Genji’s love interest Ruka Aizawa (Meisa Kuroki) sing a couple of R&B songs. The time spent on the music in the film was a dead give away that the film was aimed at a younger market and it slowed the film down.

It is a good film if you enjoy watching young Yakuza “wanna-be’s” beating each other bloody. It does have Miike’s stamp all over it at any rate and that alone makes it a film worth watching.

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Gone By Michael Grant – But Not Over

Written by Michael Grant and first published in 2008, Gone is a brilliant start to a series about the youthful survivors of a shattered California town.

Set in the fictional seaside town of Perdida Beach. The book starts with the literal disappearance of a teacher in front of her class full of young students. There is no bang, no pop, no puff of smoke. Just there one moment and gone the next.

It turns out that the disappearance of the teacher isn’t an isolated event. As the book proceeds, we find that everyone fifteen years old and older have vanished.

The ‘hero’ of the piece is Apollonian Sam Temple (do you get what he did there, with the name?) who, with his best friend Quinn Gaither, teams up with Astrid Ellison (who might as well be named super-genius) and Edilio Escobar an immigrant from the Honduras. Their first concern is finding out who from their respective families are still around.

They finally go to find Astrid’s extremely autistic brother Pete who was with his father at the Perdido Atomic Power Plant when all  the fifteen plus people vanished.

Before the end of the first day, Sam has saved the pre-school from burning down, he and his group have found Petey and they have discovered that the entire area around Perdido Beach has been enclosed in some sort of bubble.

Within forty-eight hours the question of eating, living, and who will rule has been broached. Before the dust settles, a convoy of black cars drive into the town square. The children who step out of the cars are from the ‘rich kid’ academy on the hill Coates Academy. Coates is in reality a juvenile detention home for the off-spring of the  rich and privileged who are “discipline problems.”

Their leader is the charismatic and Dionysian Caine (again, look what he did with the name here) who is the exact opposite of Sam and who wants to control everything.

While all this has been going on, a lot of the children are finding out that they have developed new and unusual abilities.

But they face another problem. It is rapidly coming up to Sam’s fifteenth birthday and he’s not getting a cake for his special day.

Lord of the Flies

Grant has taken this small town and using it as a giant goldfish bowl shows how the children of modern society would react if all the ‘grown-ups’ were removed. It is almost like a panoramic and updated view of The Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s classic book. Or even Stephen King’s The Stand, but a microscopic version.

No matter how you look at it, the book is a cracking read. Grant paints the towns tapestry brilliantly and uses the same masterful strokes to paint his characters. I lost myself  in this book and could not stop reading it until the last page was breached.

I am now in the process of getting the rest of the books in his series. I have a feeling that Michael Grant is here to stay as a gifted story teller.

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Thirst (2009): It’s In the Blood

There are a lot of people who watched this film simply because it’s by the iconic, cult favourite, South Korean director/auteur – Chan-wook Park. Chan-wook, who also co-wrote the screenplay with  Seo-Gyeong Jeon which is based on the book Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola, has not disappointed us with his version of a vampire tale.

This is completely unlike any of his ‘trilogy’ films. Of course each of the trilogy films were very different from each other. They all had a “similar” theme, but, visually they were very unalike. Park has, with Thirst, gone completely outside his comfort zone and brought us a masterpiece in the guise of Grand Guignol Theatre.

Starring Kang-ho Song and Ok-bin Kim, Thirst is a love story, horror film, thriller, comedy and a tragedy. I never realised that it was possible to cram so many genres into a single film and more importantly still be able to pull it off. Chan-wook Park has not only managed to pull it off, but he has also, once again, made a film that really is genre-less.

Kang-ho Song plays Father Sang-hyun. He volunteers at a local hospital. He ministers the sick and dying patients, and he provides absolution when they die. He also takes confessions from the staff. But this job is taking a toll on his mental well being. He suffers secretly from depression and doubt about his profession.

He volunteers to become part of an ongoing medical experiment. A medical team is battling to find a cure for a virus known as the  Emmanuel Virus (EV). It affects only Caucasian and Asian men and it is almost always fatal. Sang-hyun allows himself to be injected with an experimental vaccine. When he starts to ‘bleed-out’ he receives a blood transfusion that turns him into a vampire.

He checks himself out of the experimental facility to find that he has been transformed in the public’s eyes as a ‘healer.’

He bumps into a childhood friend and gets an invite to join their Wednesday night mah-jong game. When he attends he gets re-acquainted with his friend’s adopted sister, who is now his wife. It turns out that all three spent a good part of their childhood together. The sister/wife, Tae-ju (Ok-bin Kim) is drawn to Sang-hyun, just like she was drawn to him when they were children.

And so begins their ‘forbidden’ love affair. An affair that will escalate to murder and an almost complete surrender to their passion. It is the first mainstream  South Korean film to feature full-frontal adult male nudity, although not the first commercial film to do so. Made on a budget of five million dollars it can boast a gross revenue of well over thirteen million dollars.

I was completely engrossed in the film from the very first frame. I had no idea where the film was going and at no point could I second guess how it would end.

I suppose that is could be classed as an erotic thriller set in a fantasy. But as I said before I believe it cannot be put in any genre and that is what we have come to expect from Chan-wook Park.

English: Park Chan-wook at the 2009 Cannes Fil...
English: Park Chan-wook at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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