The Hollows is an enjoyably gripping blend that starts as a police procedural, quickly engages horror’s shared DNA with thriller fiction, and ultimately descends (in the best sense) into cosmic elder god nightmare. It also works well as a social deconstruction of folklore, splicing Peak District place names with the roles of individuals in village […]
I will write more about the experience soon, but I wanted to share the recordings of the show, which premiered on 17 April at Reclamation, the 2022 EasterCon in London. Deviant Database is a solo theatre show I wrote and performed based on previous pieces written for Virtual Futures, and also a near-future nightmare anthology […]
The first ‘Diamond Roads’ novel is a story of two sisters: Charity (the blonde on the left) and Ursula (on the right). They are sisters, although Charity is adopted and does not know who she is; instead, she lives her life vicariously via the outrageous ‘People’s Princess’ Ursula, who is the celebrity face of the […]
This is a densely-written novel, whose rhythmic narrative is as much of an accomplishment as the convincing world-building; the latter detailed with such invention you forget it’s not, in fact real. Links to our realm – stupid attitudes towards refugees, the desperate politics of smaller countries who want to go their own way without some […]
If Aliette de Bodard and Anne Leckie joined forces to write their version of ‘Silence of the Lambs’ set in a space war imagined by Iain M Banks it might end up a bit like ‘Ninefox Gambit’. For all that, the novel is entirely original, with a sonorous, almost detached rhythm that makes it uniquely […]
This book is so good I bought it twice, once as an ebook and once as a paperback for a gift. Yes, it’s one of those novels you end up buying for other people. The set-up is disarmingly simple: in a world reshaped by an ancient nuclear war, people only give birth to twins. One […]
There just isn’t anyone else writing like Anne Charnock. Her exquisitely-crafted short novels are like super-distilled iced vodka, clear, compulsive and with a kick that comes later. You also don’t need much to get off your head. In this one, part of a series of four novellas by different authors published by NewCon […]
As the title suggests, reality is a tricky matter in Verity Holloway’s darkly compelling debut novel. When is a tooth not a tooth? When does it become something else? What if it was something else all along? Most disturbing of all is the question of whether it occupies conflicting realities simultaneously. We don’t normally associate […]
I had a great chat with fellow author Faith (FD) Lee last night at the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) about SF, fantasy, the creative process and writing generally. If you missed it, Chad Dixon caught the whole thing on Periscope and you can watch it here: Click here to watch on Periscope Many thanks […]
Acclaimed author Anne Charnock joined me for the Facebook launch of my latest SF thriller novel ‘The Outer Spheres’ on 8 December 2016. Anne is one of my favourite authors and there are links to her work at the end of this piece. We covered so much good stuff about writing, adaptation and performance […]
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