Welcome to The Eloquent Page’s annual awards/review of the year (2017 Edition). Ten awards created at random for your delectation and delight. The rules remain deliciously simple. I make up a series of categories and I choose a winner. Eligibility is also easy, if I’ve read it this year, it’s eligible. First some stats (I apologise, I’m a stat whore and so I’m often compelled to start throwing numbers around). I’ve read sixty-one books this year. There were an additional fifteen I started but didn’t finish. Fantasy fiction featured most heavily with twenty-two books, while Horror came a close second with seventeen. My longest review was one thousand two hundred and thirty-four words long, my shortest was four hundred and twenty-eight. The total number of review words written in 2017? A suitably satisfying fifty-two thousand and sixty-six words. “Enough of this statistical folderol”, I hear you cry. Alrighty then. Please take your seats and direct your attention towards the stage. Without further ado on with the show… The “They’re Good Dogs Brent” Award for Canines in Fiction – For some inexplicable reason, 2017 seemed to feature more dogs in fiction than in previous years. Adrian Tchaikovsky brought us Dogs of…

Molly wakes her mother to go to the toilet. The campsite is strangely blank. The toilet block has gone. Everything else has gone too. This is a place with no sun. No god. Just four families remain. Each has done something to bring them here – each denies they deserve it. Until they see what’s coming over the horizon, moving irrevocably towards them. Their worst mistake. Their darkest fear. And for just one of them, their homecoming. Imagine waking up one morning and everything you are familiar with is absent. Only a handful of other people remain. Like you, they have no idea what has happened. Is this change going to be permanent? What, if any, action should you take? How long would it be before that thin veneer of civility goes out the window and Darwinism kicks in? The latest novel from John Ajvide Lindqvist explores that premise. When there is nowhere else left to go, are you capable of confronting your innermost fears, accepting them and surviving? I Am Behind You is an ensemble piece. The cross section of people left on the campsite feels like a tiny microcosm of society. The actions and reactions to their predicament…

To round off Zombie Appreciation Month I’ve decided to read Handling The Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Set in Stockholm, during the midst of a heatwave, strange things are starting to occur. Electrical appliances won’t switch off and everyone is suffering from unexplained headaches. Over the course of a single night, every person that has died in the previous two months is reanimated, including those that have been buried. The ever pragmatic authorities move from one disastrous idea to another when trying to find a solution to the problem. The dead are all collected and taken to a hospital but the staff are unable to cope with the demands of caring for the deceased.  It seems that when brought together in groups, the ‘reliving’ are able to channel the emotions of the living. They also cause spontaneous telepathy amongst the living. These mental stresses prove too difficult for the doctors and nurses to manage.  Unsure sure of how to proceed, the government try to relocate the reliving to disused housing and secure them behind an electric fence. There is a certain degree of ambiguity regarding the cause of reanimation. I liked this as it gave the author an opportunity to let his…