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 […]
‘Rawblood’ was recommended to me by a number of different people as a great horror story; and indeed shortly afterwards it won the British Fantasy Award best horror novel for 2016. I don’t want to knock either the horror genre, which I enjoy, or this novel’s place in it; however, in this instance I do […]
Click here to read my article in weird fiction journal The Shadow Booth about this classic fantasy:
Alan Garner’s brilliantly titled 1960 fantasy takes North European tropes familiar from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and spins them into a very English children’s fantasy. Two children, a brother and sister called Colin and Susan, are sent to stay with relatives of their mother’s when she must join their father abroad for six months. […]
I was drawn to this book by its association with John Carpenter’s The Thing, whose alien is a uniquely visceral nightmare. Its physical distortions suggest unknowability, as if it is trying to find a form to express itself, which is a theme picked up on in Adam Roberts’s novel. While The Thing Itself is not a […]
Dreadnought: Nemesis is one of my favourite young adult novels. There is a great line early in the book about how if you’re no good at being a boy, it’s beaten into you until you either comply or have the good grace to kill yourself. It’s a long time since I was a boy, but that […]
There is a complex, even thrillerish galactic conspiracy plot at the heart of Tom Toner’s debut science fantasy novel, but that’s not really why you read it. Indeed, the threads of that plot are so disparate and spread out over so many years (and light years) that the reader simply has to accept what is […]
We’ve all been there. Your village relies on an ancient Relic no one understands but which the economy relies on anyway, like Bitcoin. At the annual ritual in which the Relic ascribes professions and even names to the young people of the village, someone breaks the Relic and that someone is you. Then the sky […]
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ does villainy so well its antagonists are part of our language: from the treacherous shopkeeper to the harsh genius O’Brian; from Big Brother to Winston himself as he willingly becomes the thing he hates. Prize for most hateful bastardy in ‘2084’ goes to the mysterious organisers of EJ Swift’s ‘The Endling Market’. Like […]
‘Age of Assassins’ is a cleverly-rendered fantasy that subtly blends genres to create a unique voice and world. Ostensibly epic, it actually takes place in a single castle, and deals with matters of state, so is technically high fantasy as well, although the protagonist narrator, Girton, is a low-born assassin so enigmatic even he doesn’t […]
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