Hidden under the surface of everyday London is a city of monsters and miracles, where wild train spirits stampede over the tracks and glass-skinned dancers with glowing veins light the streets. When a devastating betrayal drives her from her home, graffiti artist Beth Bradley stumbles into the secret city, where she finds Filius Viae, London’s ragged crown prince, just when he needs someone most. An ancient enemy has returned to the darkness under St Paul’s Cathedral, bent on reigniting a centuries-old war, and Beth and Fil find themselves in a desperate race through a bizarre urban wonderland, searching for a way to save the city they both love.  The City’s Son is the first book of The Skyscraper Throne trilogy: a story about family, friends and monsters, and how you can’t always tell which is which. I remember reading somewhere, years ago, that a city has many faces. I couldn’t tell now where I read the phrase, but I liked the idea and it has always stayed with me. I’ve since come to the conclusion that when I’m reading well written urban fantasy the author is sharing tantalizing glimpses of these faces. The City’s Son, the debut novel by Tom Pollock, is a great…

A thousand years have passed since the Clan Lords and the Fey commanded dragons and raised mighty citadels. The remnants of their ancient power lie dormant and a new conflict threatens the kingdom of Antia…  King Daris rules a peaceful and prosperous land, but his conniving brother Jerim covets the throne and civil war looms. But there are worse threats to Antia than mere human greed. Two people will stand against mortal and demonic enemies: Alyda Stenna, Captain of the Hammer of Antia returns from campaign to a hero’s welcome after prosecuting war abroad with brutal efficiency. Garian Tain, the spymaster’s apprentice, hunts for an assassin through the streets of the capital while the knights bask in the adoration of the crowds. This is just the beginning.  Both will fight overwhelming odds in a bid to save the kingdom. War and betrayal will test them to their limits. One will rise; one will fall; both will be changed forever. Earlier this year I read the anthology Day of Demons, published by Anachron Press, and one of the highlights was The Deal by K T Davies. It was a fun fantasy tale and it left me keen to read more of…

1067. The battle of Hastings has been lost; Harold Godwinsson is dead. The iron fist of William the Bastard has begun to squeeze the life out of England. Villages are torched and men, women and children put to the sword as the Norman king attempts to impose his cruel will upon this unruly nation. But there is one who stands in the way of the invader’s savagery. He is called Hereward. He is a warrior and master tactician and as adept at slaughter as the imposter who sits upon the throne. And he is England’s last hope. In a Fenlands fortress of water and wild wood, Hereward’s resistance is simmering. His army of outcasts grows by the day – a devil’s army that emerges out of the mists and the night, leaving death in its wake. But William is not easily cowed. Under the command of his ruthless deputy, Ivo Taillebois – the man they call ‘the Butcher’ – the Norman forces will do whatever it takes to crush the rebels, even if it means razing England to the ground. Here then is the tale of the bloodiest rebellion England has ever known – the beginning of an epic struggle…

2013 – The planet has been fried by solar flares turning it into a desert. The surviving population has been affected by solar radiation, turning them into Zombies. Only a handful of people remain unaffected. A family of civilians, guided by a crack army unit who has seen more action than they can handle, must make their way to the safety of a UN base at the South Pole called New Atlantis. But can they make it to this oasis alive or will they only reach it as the undead? I know, I know, I said less than a month ago that I was going to take a break from zombie fiction but when it comes to the undead, it’s like the Mafia – just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in. I couldn’t resist though when this novella popped into my inbox. As soon as I spotted the cover I knew I was going to read it. A zombie head partially obscured by desert sand with a bullet hole in the temple; I ask you, what’s not to love? We follow the action through the eyes of Maxine, a young women who dares to…

Siri Bergman is terrified of the dark She lives alone, an hour outside Stockholm where she practices as a psychotherapist, her nearest neighbor far away. Siri tells her friends that she has moved on since her husband died in a diving accident. But when she goes to bed at night, she leaves all the lights on, unable to shake the feeling that someone is watching her. With the light gone, the darkness creeps inside.  One night she wakes to find the house pitch black, and the torch by her bedside has vanished. Later, the body of one of her young patients is found floating in the water nearby. Thrown headlong into a tense murder investigation, Siri finds herself unable to trust anyone, not even her closest friends. Who can she turn to for answers? The truth is hidden in the darkness. Siri is a curious character, it’s almost as though she displays two distinctly different personalities to the outside world. On one hand she is a strong, successful, self-assured doctor, but there is also the other Siri who is beset with doubt, afraid of the dark and still traumatised by the loss of her husband, Stefan. Though these are only…

The year is 1939. Raybould Marsh and other members of British Intelligence have gathered to watch a damaged reel of film in a darkened room. It appears to show German troops walking through walls, bursting into flames and hurling tanks into the air from afar. If the British are to believe their eyes, a twisted Nazi scientist has been endowing German troops with unnatural, unstoppable powers. And Raybould will be forced to resort to dark methods to hold the impending invasion at bay. But dealing with the occult exacts a price. And that price must be paid in blood. British warlocks squaring off against Nazi augmented humans? I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a certain amount of excitement surrounding this novel, so much so that it made it on to my preview list for 2012 when I heard about it last year. This is exactly the sort of premise that is guaranteed to gain my attention. Raybould Marsh is the intelligence officer tasked with finding a way to combat the mysterious new breed of soldiers the enemy has unleashed.  He calls upon the assistance of an old school friend, Will, who has some secrets of his own. Marsh…

Acheron Island is a world lost to time, home to prehistoric creatures from earth’s savage past. The island’s occupants range from ferocious, man-eating dinosaurs and savage Ape Man tribes to strange ruins from a lost civilization. It is also home to Sir Edwin Crowe, son of the Victorian explorer who discovered Acheron Island, renowned big game hunter, scarred Great War veteran, and last of the world’s Gentleman Adventurers. But now Acheron Island has some new residents – ruthless American businessman Selwyn Slade and an army of corporate cronies. Why has Slade brought all of his modern industrial power to conquer this world from the past? Can Sir Edwin uncover his strange purpose and protect this prehistoric world? Sir Edwin’s only allies are his stalwart Ape Man partner, a beautiful torch singer with a mysterious agenda, his strong-willed sister and her archaeologist boyfriend, and a family of American tourists – and they’re about to become the last hope of a lost world. What do you get if you cross a 1920’s gangster movie, a maniacal despot with a delusions of grandeur and a horde of rampaging terrible lizards? The answer – Dinosaur Jazz by Michael Panush. And what of Sir Edwin Crowe, the stalwart…

Pandemonium: Stories of the Smoke brings you London as you’ve never seen it before – science fiction and fantasy in the great tradition of Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens lived and breathed London in a way few authors ever have, before or since. In his fiction, his non-fiction, and even his own life, Dickens cast an extraordinary shadow over the city he so loved – so much so, indeed, that his name has become synonymous with a certain image of London. A London of terrible social inequality and matchless belief in the human potential; a London filled with the comic and the repulsive, the industrious and the feckless, the faithful and the faithless, the selfish and the selfless. This London is at once an historical artifact and a living, breathing creature: the steaming, heaving, weeping, stinking, everlasting Smoke. At the tail end of 2011, those crafty folk over at Pornokitsch published their first anthology Stories of the Apocalypse. I’ll admit that I rather enjoyed it (what can I say, I have a soft spot for the end of the world, feel free to ask me about it sometime). In April this year, their second release Stories of the Smoke was released. I had…

1854 – The Allied armies prepare to besiege the Russian stronghold in the Crimea Harry Ryder is a maverick hero. Resentful of the army that destroyed his father and his own career, he has no time for incompetent commanders. He clashes with his superiors as fiercely as he fights the Russians. Four men, one woman and a game of cards will change everything and alter the course of a war. Something evil has crept into the ranks of the British Army’s own officers, an unknown enemy who plans lure men to ruin on the battlefields. The only path to victory lies in uncovering the truth, but to find it and confront his own destiny Ryder must charge with the Light Brigade into the Valley of Death itself… Taking its name from a line in the famous Tennyson poem, Into the Valley of Death covers the events that lead up to and the fallout from, the ill-fated Charge of The Light Brigade. I have to admit that prior to reading this novel the extent of my knowledge regarding the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the Crimean War as a whole, was somewhat limited. I’ve only ever read Flashman at the…

At the tail end of last year I read the first release from new small publisher Anachron Press. City of Hell was a gruesomely gory anthology featuring giant bugs and some nasty, nasty body horror. Anachron has been at it again, and once more it’s time for The Great Maurr to rise. Trifecta features three new stories set in the same world as its predecessor.   No Insects at Sea by James Everington A young isolated man from a remote island community thinks he’s safe from Maurr’s deadly reach, but when he comes across a drifting boat, he finds an unpleasant surprise within its hull—a discovery that threatens to shatter his hopes and beliefs. Things start off on a suitably downbeat note. Humanity has been scattered to the four winds and the majority of survivors are only looking out for themselves. No Insects at Sea subtly captures a sense of hopelessness in a world that is truly broken. The Harlot and the Bad Man by Phil Ambler Father Josef Friedricks takes care of a group of young survivors in an underground bunker. Tending to these waifs and strays, he tells them the story of Sophia: a mother who has to overcome…

Please note Blackout is the final book of the Newflesh trilogy and there is good chance that there will be potential spoilers in this review if you haven’t read books one and two, don’t say I didn’t warn you. With that said lets unleash the undead one more time…  Rise up while you can. – Georgia Mason The year was 2014. The year we cured cancer. The year we cured the common cold. And the year the dead started to walk. The year of the Rising.
 The year was 2039. The world didn’t end when the zombies came, it just got worse. Georgia and Shaun Mason set out on the biggest story of their generation. The uncovered the biggest conspiracy since the Rising and realized that to tell the truth, sacrifices have to be made.

 Now, the year is 2041, and the investigation that began with the election of President Ryman is much bigger than anyone had assumed. With too much left to do and not much time left to do it in, the surviving staff of After the End Times must face mad scientists, zombie bears, rogue government agencies-and if there’s one thing they know is true in post-zombie…

AD 68. The tyrant emperor Nero has no son and no heir. Suddenly there’s the very real possibility that Rome might become a republic once more. But the ambitions if a few are about the bring corruption, chaos and untold bloodshed to many.  Among them is a hero of the campaign against Boadicea, Aulus Caecina Serverus. Caught up in a conspiracy to overthrow Caesar’s dynasty, he commits treason, raises a rebellion, faces torture and intrigue – all supposedly for the good of Rome. However, the boundary between such selflessness and self-preservation is far from clear, and keeping to the dangerous path he’s chosen requires all Severus’s skills as a cunning soldier and increasing deft politician. And so Severus looks back on the dark and dangerous time that history remembers as ‘The Year of the Four Emperors’, and recalls the part he, and those around him, played – for good or ill – in plunging the mighty Roman Empire into anarchy and civil war… When the novel begins Severus is a young war hero who has already proven his worth as a solider on the bloody fields of Britain. Full of ambition, but very much on the periphery of events, he is keen to prove himself….

The Mexican cenotés. Flooded caves that fracture the Yucatan Peninsula – places of mystery, the unexplored, and of ancient sacrifice. When Alex meets an old friend while travelling, he doesn’t realise how far the encounter will take him. For Rick is exploring deep beneath the surface of the world, discovering new cave systems, one leading to the next. And when Alex is compelled to follow he has no way of knowing just how deep he will be expected to go, or how dark are the places he will find there . . . Its time to dip my toes into the water that is the latest release from those cheeky scare-mongers over at Spectral Press. (See what I did there? … the story features a great deal of water…oh suit yourself.) Though only around twenty pages long Spectral’s latest chapbook, The Eyes of Water, taps into a plethora of primal horrors that I think many readers will be able to appreciate. The psychological impact of losing someone unexpectedly, fear of the unknown and starting to fear for your own sanity are all touched upon.  Driven by a desire for the truth, Alex travels ever deeper into the water-filled cave system….