Last night I finally figured out how to make Fruity Loops work! But except for stupid trancy loops, I can’t seem to make any music. No creative sparks. I think I should listen to Making Music a couple of times. ( Ha ha, nice joke. )

Read Andrew Vachss’ Dead and Gone over the weekend. “Dark, “Rivetting” and “Gut-wrenching” are a couple of cliches I might use for this, but I will end up sounding like one of those back-cover blurbs. Which, just for the record, say all of the above, and more. My favourite Vachss-blurb happens to be “Vachss makes Hammett, Chandler and the rest look like choirboys”.

This is Vachss’s thirteenth Burke book, and I guess my eighth. Always loved the character, although the last one I read ( Sacrifice ) made me feel like Mr V was getting stuck in a rut. This brought things back to a whole new level. The book starts with the death of a major character and an attempt to kill Burke. Which he survives because of sheer luck.( and a Kevlar jacket) Loads of character-driven prose, I see more of the man Burke was – he has always dropped hints about his dark past, and this is the closest he’s come to revealing everything. Cool!

An Andrew Vachss novel available online is A Bomb Built in Hell. Written way back in the 70’s, this could not get published because the protagonist ( an antihero named Wesley) did something which publishers felt was “too gruesome”. I read ABBiH, and it was chilling. The kind of stuff that comes closest to giving me nightmares. You feel morally corrupt after reading it. I am not joking. Wesley later turned up in the Burke books, as one of Burke’s friends. This is what www.vachss.com, his official website has to say about the book: – “A Bomb Built in Hell is Wesley’s story, intended, according to Vachss, to be “a doctorate thesis in criminology without the foot-notes, exploring such ideas as the connection between child abuse and crime, and the desperate need of unbonded, dangerous children to form ‘families of choice.’”

Something I read to offset the “seriousness” of Dead and Gone – and whoopie, was it funny – was Noel Langley’s The Land of Green Ginger. A son is born to the lovely Empress Badr-ul-Badour and the Emperor of China, Aladdin. But this is not Aladdin’s story, it’s the tale of Prince Abu Ali and his quest to find the Land of (what else!) Green Ginger, a country that travels by itself, having been created by a Wizard who wanted to have a Ginger garden in his backyard, wherever he travelled. (The Wizard has been transformed into a button-nosed turtle, by the way, because of a spell that went a little awry) Abu teams up with the Djinn of the lamp ( or rather, the son of the Djinn of the lamp), named Bomballaka Wee. And a mouse-that-was-originally-supposed-to-be-a-donkey. Onward!

Finished it in a night. And it was hilarious, to say the least.

Am reading something called Pump Up The Volume, which is a history of House and Garage music. Electronica, so to speak. It’s pretty interesting so far!