Reading from ‘Celebrity Werewolf’ at the British Science Fiction Association
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Tag: fantasy
Article in The Shadow Booth about ‘The Dark is Rising’ by Susan Cooper
Click here to read my article in weird fiction journal The Shadow Booth about this classic fantasy:
Review of ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ by Alan Garner
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. […]
Review of ‘The Bookkeeper’s Guide to Practical Sorcery’ by Kate Russell
The title of this fun fantasy adventure for younger adults spells out the troubles faced by Henry Noble, an ambitious, talented youth of sixteen who dreams of becoming a wizard. Unfortunately, following the disappearance of his father on a trading mission two years earlier, Henry is the sole breadwinner for his mother and two thuggish […]
Review of ‘Dreadnought: Nemesis’ by April Daniels
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 […]
Review of ‘The Promise of the Child’ by Tom Toner
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 […]
Review of ‘Gilded Cage’ by Vic James
‘Gilded Cage’ cleverly blends dystopian and fantasy tropes to create a gripping narrative that so perfectly captures the absurdity of contemporary political ‘reality’ it actually made me angry reading it at times. The idea is brilliantly simple: in a world analogous to ours, a minority of people with uncanny abilities called ‘Skills’ become the ruling […]
Review of ‘Age of Assassins’ by RJ Barker
‘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 […]
Review of ‘Tanith By Choice’ by Tanith Lee
This collection, chosen by friends, colleagues and admirers of the late author, is a great introduction to one of our great speculative short story writers. Tanith Lee effortlessly blends myth, fairytale, science fiction and erotica in a way both subversive and compelling. The stories are also often very witty; in ‘Red as Blood’, for example, […]
Review of ‘You Will Grow Into Them’ by Malcolm Devlin
There are many factors that make the short stories in the extraordinary collection so compelling. One is that you aren’t quite sure what genre you’re reading, which makes the outcomes unpredictable. That you’re still not sure by the end is no failing of the author; rather it’s that he mixes a uniquely beguiling cocktail […]
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