Time from another guest review from MadNad…  It’s Cinderella, but not as you know her… Imagine an enchanted footman, two ugly sisters, a magical ball and a romance to remember . . . and now turn the page for the true tale of Cinderella, told the way it always should have been . . . As Mr Cheesecake tasked me to review Poison, it seemed logical that I would also review Charm, the second in a trilogy of adult fairy tales from Sarah Pinborough, when the opportunity arose. Boosted by the large and small screen revival of fairy tales, this series of books from Gollancz are perfectly timed. I will state, in the spirit of full disclosure, that despite growing fond of shows like Grimm and Once Upon A Time, I probably would not have picked this book up, and I would have missed out on a treat. I am never one to turn down an opportunity to read any of Pinborough’s work, although previous things of hers I have read are more horrific in nature. Her writing is so unbelievably skilled. She has a way of painting a picture with a few well-chosen words that leaves me breathless, and…

Present Day: Cadair Idris, Snowdonia. Hannah Wilde flees to Llyn Gwyr, a remote mountain farmhouse, her husband bleeding to death on the passenger seat beside her. In the back of the car sits their seven year old daughter. Hannah’s father is missing. Her mother is already dead. Mysterious strangers are converging on the mountain. And Hannah must decide who to trust – and who to sacrifice – if she’s to defeat the predator who has stalked five generations of her family. 1979: Balliol College, Oxford. Charles Meredith, a brilliant, obsessive professor, clashes with a beautiful French woman in Balliol’s library. When the woman disappears, and her identity is exposed as a sham, Charles is dragged into a terrifying pursuit. 1873: Gödöllö, Hungary. Lukas Balázs prepares for his végzet night, the celebration that symbolises his entry into adulthood. But the festivities are about to go horribly wrong, and only Lukas knows why.  A centuries-old secret is about to unravel … Jakab is coming. There is something intrinsically appealing about the idea of secret societies. The idea that somehow, often hidden in plain sight, groups of individuals exist who are different from everyone else. They live their secret lives, going about their secretive business, and…

Hereward: End of Days is the third book in a series. If you haven’t read books one and two then there is a good chance that there will be some minor spoilers in this review. England, 1071. Five years have passed since the crushing Norman victory at the Battle of Hastings. The country reels under the savage rule of the new king, the one they call ‘the Bastard’. The North has been left a wasteland – villages razed, innocents put to the sword, land stolen. It seems no atrocity is too great to ensure William’s grip upon the crown. Rats feed upon fields of the dead And now he turns his cold gaze east, towards the last stronghold of the English resistance. After years of struggle, he will brook no further challenge to his power: his vast army masses and his siege machines are readied. In their fortress on the Isle of Ely, the English have put their faith in the only man who might defeat the murderous invaders. He is called Hereward. He is a warrior and a master tactician – as adept at slaughter as his enemy and plans have been set in motion for a bloody uprising…

Please note Rebellion is a direct sequel to Blood and Feathers, so if you haven’t read that, there is a good chance there will be some minor spoilers below. Got it? Good. Onwards… Driven out of hell and with nothing to lose, the Fallen wage open warfare against the angels on the streets. And they’re winning. As the balance tips towards the darkness, Alice – barely recovered from her own ordeal in hell and struggling to start over – once again finds herself in the eye of the storm. But with the chaos spreading and the Archangel Michael determined to destroy Lucifer whatever the cost, is the price simply too high? And what sacrifices will Alice and the angels have to make in order to pay it? The Fallen will rise. Trust will be betrayed. And all hell breaks loose… The thing I’m always on the look out for in the second book of any series is a successful expansion on the existing narrative.  The writing needs to reference the main events of book one and, using them as a base, expand upon the universe the author has already created. The good news is that with her second novel, Rebellion, Lou Morgan…

This is the story of M. Francisco Fabrigas, philosopher, heretical physicist, and perhaps the greatest human explorer of all ages, who took a shipful of children on a frightening voyage through dimensions filled with deadly surprises, assisted by a teenaged Captain, a brave deaf boy, a cunning blind girl, and a sultry botanist, all the while pursued by the Pope of the universe and a well-dressed mesmerist. Dark plots, cannibal cults, demonic creatures, madness, mayhem, murderous jungles, the birth of creation, the death of time, and a creature called the Sweety: all this and more waits beyond the veil of reality. It’s the eternal question isn’t it, should we judge a book by its cover? Well, the book blurb for Theatre of the Gods does make some outrageous claims. I’m paraphrasing, but essentially we’re talking a surreal, mind-bending journey to the furthest reaches of the known universe and beyond. Sounds like a winner to me…oh go on then, let’s give it a shot. This novel features quite a large cast of characters, all revolving around the quiet island of calm that is M. Fransisco Fabrigas. What can I say about Mr Fabrigas that hasn’t already been said? Joining other such curiously…

Angel City is a direct sequel to The Watchers. As a result of this it seems highly likely to me that there will be some spoilers in this review (I’ll be honest there are definitely spoilers, I was trying to be subtle). If you’ve not read the 1st book proceed at your own peril. Jay Harper, one of the last ‘angels’ on Planet Earth, is hunting down the half-breeds and goons who infected Paradise with evil. Intercepting a plot to turn half of Paris into a dead zone, Harper ends up on the wrong side of the law and finds himself a wanted man. That doesn’t stop his commander, Inspector Gobet of the Swiss Police, from sending him back to Paris on a recon mission… a mission that uncovers a truth buried in the Book of Enoch. Katherine Taylor and her two year old son Max are living in a small town in the American Northwest. It’s a quiet life. She runs a candle shop and spends her afternoons drinking herbal teas, imagining a crooked little man in the belfry of Lausanne Cathedral, a man who believed Lausanne was a hideout for lost angels. And there was someone else, someone she can’t quite…

Time for another guest post from my better half. It’s werewolf related so I kinda had to let her read it. She is the expert after all. So without further ado over to @MadNad and her thoughts on Red Moon… Every teenage girl thinks she’s different. When government agents kick down Claire Forrester’s front door and murder her parents, Claire realises just how different she is. Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and, hours later, stepped off it, the only passenger left alive. A hero.  President Chase Williams has vowed to eradicate the menace. Unknown to the electorate, however, he is becoming the very thing he has sworn to destroy.  Each of them is caught up in a war that so far has been controlled with laws and violence and drugs. But an uprising is about to leave them damaged, lost, and tied to one another for ever. The night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognizable world will emerge, and the battle for humanity will begin. In this alt-history, Lycans have co-existed with humans for hundreds of years, but they are segregated and discriminated against by their human neighbours and…

Please note The Eighth Court is the fourth book in The Courts of the Feyre series. It’s entirely possible that this review may contain some spoilers if you’ve not read books one to three. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya! The Eighth Court has been established, but petty rivalries and old disputes threaten its stability. The mongrels that make up the court are not helping, and Blackbird enlists the help of the warders to keep the peace. Has Blackbird bitten off more than she can chew, and can the uneasy peace between the courts continue under such tension and rivalry? I have to admit that I’ve been a little worried about reading this particular book. The closer and closer it got to the top of my review pile the more and more nervous I became. Why all the unnecessary anxiety? Well Sixty One Nails is one of the first books that actually made me want to sit down and try to string together something resembling a coherent review. Yes, I know I didn’t review it on The Eloquent Page but it was one of the first books that made me want to share my passion for reading with the world….

It’s time to finish what he started… A young girl is snatched in broad daylight from outside her school and later found brutally murdered and hanging from a tree. When recently retired San Francisco Police Inspector, Bob Farrell, sees this on the news, he realises his worst nightmare has just come true. The same brutal killer a government agency stopped him from putting away twenty years before is once more on the loose. As the killer wreaks a trail of blood and destruction across North America, Bob Farrell teams up with rookie cop Kevin Kearns and sets out to track down their lethal prey. But Farrell & Kearns are not playing by the rules any more than the killer is, and soon the FBI have all of them in their sights… The bulk of this novel is set in the late 1980s and this gives the story a refreshingly uncluttered air. With not a mobile phone or Internet connection in sight, this is a proper old school police procedural. No country-wide database searches here, well not ones that would give an immediate response anyway. Farrell and Kearns have to rely on chasing up leads the old fashioned way and actually…

As a fan of Greek mythology it’s always of interest to see modern interpretations of the ancient myths. Spin is based loosely on the legend of Arachne and her defiance of Athena. Arachne boasted that her skill was greater than that of the goddess.  She refused to acknowledge that her knowledge came, in part at least, from the gods. Taking the themes from this story Nina Allan has given this ancient tale a modern twist. Layla Vargas is a normal girl who has grown up with just her father on the Greek coast. The one thing that sets her apart from all others is her ability as a weaver. Her talent to create vibrant, colourful images from the silk her father manufactures is so good that it has prompted a change. Layla is moving to the city, to start a new life, taking a chance to control her own destiny. Everything appears to be going perfectly but who exactly is the mysterious old woman that keeps cropping up when Layla least expects it? On a deeper level this story explores the nature of what it means to be a creator, what it means to bring something new into the world. How does the creative…

On Pine Street, the houses begin to shake. The earth begins to move. The streets crack open and yards split asunder…and rising from subterranean depths far below, a viscid black muck bubbles up and floods the neighborhood.  In it are a ravenous army of gigantic worms seeking human flesh. They wash into houses, they come up through the sewers, through plumbing, filling toilets and tubs, seeking human prey.  Cut off from the rest of the town, the people of Pine Street must wage a war of survival or they’ll never see morning. As bad as the worms are, there’s something worse—and far larger—waiting to emerge. Do you remember the movie Tremors? It’s a bit of a classic isn’t it? The only issue I ever had with it was I always thought that the Graboids were nowhere near terrifying enough. Tim Curran appears to feel the same way and attempts to redress the balance with his latest novella, Worm. The good news is that he does a damn good job of it. The residents of Pine Street are just an ordinary bunch of folks and this particular night isn’t going to end well for some of them. I do love that moment in…

1351 BC: Akhenaten the Sun-Pharaoh rules supreme in Egypt…until the day he casts off his crown and mysteriously disappears into the desert, his legacy seemingly swallowed up by the remote sands beneath the Great Pyramids of Giza. AD 1884: A British soldier serving in the Sudan stumbles upon an incredible discovery – a submerged temple containing evidence of a terrifying religion whose god was fed by human sacrifice. The soldier is on a mission to reach General Gordon before Khartoum falls. But he hides a secret of his own. Present day: Jack Howard and his team are excavating one of the most amazing underwater sites they have ever encountered, but dark forces are watching to see what they will find. Diving into the Nile, they enter a world three thousand years back in history, inhabited by a people who have sworn to guard the greatest secret of all time… Jack Howard is a modern day Indiana Jones type, part academic, part action man. Along with his friends and colleagues of the International Maritime University, he travels the globe uncovering facts behind myth and legend. His latest adventure finds him in Egypt and the Sudan attempting to track down the lost…

Hersham Horror Books presents 5 more original stories from the minds of Stephen Bacon, Johnny Mains, John Llewellyn Probert, Stephen Volk and Mark West. The third anthology in our PentAnth range brings you five more chilling tales that all have their roots in the gloriously lurid style of 1970s horror. Anatomy of Death (In Five Sleazy Pieces)  So what gruesome delights can we expect from this short story anthology? Pseudonym by Stephen Bacon – A young man is given the opportunity to meet one of his horror idols, a notoriously reclusive author, but what is it that the old man is hiding? I rather like the tone that this sets for the rest of the collection. This is the subtlest of stories and had me reminiscing about my own introduction to the horror genre many years ago. I loved seeing the mention of Fear magazine, I remember reading it back in the day. It’s a bit sneaky really. I was successfully lulled into a false sense of security by this only for the next story to start messing with my brain. The Cannibal Whores of Effingham by Johnny Mains -A megalomaniacal Hollywood star with seriously homicidal tendencies, meets his match when he visits the ladies…