When treasure hunters excavate the long-lost wreck of the Steamship Arcadia from a Kansas corn field, a buried creature awakens – a mindless brute made of accursed earth, shaped like a man, but in no way mortal. A century and a half after its creation, the golem’s sole mission resumes: to assassinate a savage pro-slavery guerilla commander named “Bloody Bill” Wolcott. Wolcott, of course, is long dead, but his closest surviving descendant – a corporate IT burnout named Ben Middleton – is quite available. Ben’s life hasn’t exactly gone according to plan, and he’s learned from experience to expect the worst. But he’s never faced the kind of doom posed by a 150-year-old mud monster with no “off” switch. And that’s not even his biggest problem. Because there’s one last stop in Bloody Bill’s bloodline: Ben’s teenage son, Charley. Ben would do anything to protect Charley – if he doesn’t strangle the kid himself first. Ben’s only hope lies in a motley crew of protectors: the descendant of the creature’s original handler; the intriguing new hire from work; and his fellow nerds from First Floor IT. And if he survives, Ben faces an even worse fate: His 40th birthday is…

Bone Adams is a legend, the best mortician in the Spires, and a man without modification in a world where body mods define humanity. When a new killer begins leaving bodies stripped of mods but twisted and bent into grotesque pieces of art, City Officer Stark tasks Bone to unravel the clues, few though they may be. As more victims are discovered, Bone and Stark get drawn deeper into a world where pain and personal statement blend and blur, and finally end up hunting for a semi-mythical, man-machine named Burneo deep within the labyrinth of the sewers. But things aren’t what they seem, and while searching for Burneo, Bone and Stark discover a hidden lab full of evidence of horrific abuses of science and experimentation. Meanwhile, the killer is still on the loose, and, as Stark becomes more and more obsessed with the case, Bone is forced to a shattering realization. Everything is connected, the killings, the gang activity, the labs, and his own past, and unless he can figure out how, he’s not going to survive. To my mind, the best detectives are the ones that are flawed. Their only redeeming quality is their masterful ability to do their…

Please note, though not a direct sequel to Fury From The Tomb chronologically The Beast of Nightfall Lodge does occur after the events in that book. Due to that it is possible that what follows may include some minor spoilers. When Egyptologist Rom Hardy receives a strange letter from his old friend, the bounty-hunting sniper Rex McTroy, he finds himself drawn into a chilling mystery. In the mountains of New Mexico, a bloodthirsty creature is on the loose, leaving a trail of bodies in its wake. Now, a wealthy big game hunter has offered a staggering reward for its capture, and Rom’s patron – the headstrong and brilliant Evangeline Waterston – has signed the team up for the challenge. Awaiting them are blizzards, cold-blooded trappers, remorseless hunters, a mad doctor, wild animals and a monster so fearsome and terrifying, it must be a legend come to life. The brave souls who make up The Institute for Singular Antiquities have returned with a new adventure. Dr Romulus Hugo Hardy, Rom to his friends, is the brains of the operation. Evangeline Waterston is the Institutes benefactor and occult expert while cowboy Rex McTroy is the action man. Finally, there is Wu the…

It was just another day in the life of a small Atlantic resort until the terror from the deep came to prey on unwary holiday makers. The first sign of trouble – a warning of what was to come – took the form of a young woman’s body, or what was left of it, washed up on the long, white stretch of beach . . . A summer of terror has begun Time for something a little bit different. Welcome to a new semi-regular feature I am going to call – From Page to Screen. I know I spend quite a lot of time reviewing brand new releases, but recently I decided I wanted to kick it old school* and read a book that is roughly the same age as me (that’s old, very very old). Let me give you some background on how this works. When I’m not reading then the chances are pretty good I’ll be spending my free time watching a film. A few years back I decided to do an experiment as I was keen to see how the book and movie versions of the same story compared. My first attempt at this was with The…

Breaking: Nuclear weapon detonates over Washington Breaking: London hit, thousands feared dead Breaking: Munich and Scotland hit. World leaders call for calm Historian Jon Keller is on a trip to Switzerland when the world ends. As the lights go out on civilization, he wishes he had a way of knowing whether his wife, Nadia and their two daughters are still alive. More than anything, Jon wishes he hadn’t ignored Nadia’s last message. Twenty people remain in Jon’s hotel. Far from the nearest city and walled in by towering trees, they wait, they survive. Then one day, the body of a young girl is found. It’s clear she has been murdered. Which means that someone in the hotel is a killer. As paranoia descends, Jon decides to investigate. But how far is he willing to go in pursuit of justice? And what kind of justice can he hope for, when society as he knows it no longer exists? I think, for many, the premise of The Last by Hanna Jameson is the stuff of nightmares. You’re away from home, far from family and friends, and a nuclear war breaks out. Quickly news dries up. The media, traditional and social, disappear and…

It is 1868, and a twenty-one-year-old Bram Stoker waits in a desolate tower to face an indescribable evil. Armed only with crucifixes, holy water, and a rifle, he prays to survive a single night, the longest of his life. Desperate to record what he has witnessed, Bram scribbles down the events that led him here… A sickly child, Bram spent his early days bedridden in his parents’ Dublin home, tended to by his caretaker, a young woman named Ellen Crone. When a string of strange deaths occur in a nearby town, Bram and his sister Matilda detect a pattern of bizarre behavior by Ellen — a mystery that deepens chillingly until Ellen vanishes suddenly from their lives. Years later, Matilda returns from studying in Paris to tell Bram the news that she has seen Ellen — and that the nightmare they’ve thought long ended is only beginning. When it comes to the monster, the creatures that managed to burrow into society’s collective psyche, there can be few more enduring than the vampire. An elegant apex predator that sits higher on the food chain than us, and is sustained by the blood that runs in our veins. Of all the myths…

In the 1990s, heavy metal band Dürt Würk was poised for breakout success — but then lead singer Terry Hunt embarked on a solo career and rocketed to stardom as Koffin, leaving his fellow bandmates to rot in rural Pennsylvania. Two decades later, former guitarist Kris Pulaski works as the night manager of a Best Western – she’s tired, broke, and unhappy. Everything changes when she discovers a shocking secret from her heavy metal past: Turns out that Terry’s meteoric rise to success may have come at the price of Kris’s very soul. This revelation prompts Kris to hit the road, reunite with the rest of her bandmates, and confront the man who ruined her life. It’s a journey that will take her from the Pennsylvania rust belt to a Satanic rehab center and finally to a Las Vegas music festival that’s darker than any Mordor Tolkien could imagine. A furious power ballad about never giving up, even in the face of overwhelming odds, We Sold Our Souls is an epic journey into the heart of a conspiracy-crazed, paranoid country that seems to have lost its very soul…where only a girl with a guitar can save us all. I’m old…

On a top-secret dive into the Pacific Ocean’s deepest canyon, Jonas Taylor found himself face-to-face with the largest and most ferocious predator in the history of the animal kingdom. The sole survivor of the mission, Taylor is haunted by what he’s sure he saw but still can’t prove exists-Carcharodon megalodon, the massive mother of the great white shark. The average prehistoric Meg weighs in at twenty tons and could tear apart a Tyrannosaurus rex in seconds.Written off as a crackpot suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Taylor refuses to forget the depths that nearly cost him his life. With a PhD in paleontology under his belt, Taylor spends years theorizing, lecturing, and writing about the possibility that Meg still feeds at the deepest levels of the sea. But it takes an old friend in need to get him to return to the water, and a hotshot female submarine pilot to dare him back into a high-tech miniature sub.Diving deeper than he ever has before, Taylor will face terror like he’s never imagined, and what he finds could turn the tides bloody red until the end of time. Occasionally I get lucky and my two main hobbies intersect. It will come as…

In the ultimate battle between evil and evil…only one can win. Four hundred years ago, Benjamin Harwood butchered whoever he saw fit to kill, knowing that sacrificing his murder victims to a demon would keep him safe from eternal punishment. But now, their agreement has been torn in half and the demon is coming for Harwood’s soul, coming to set him to burn.   Preparing for war, Harwood gathers the worst of the worst, the monsters and murderers he calls friends. With this group of damned killers, Harwood must return to the crimes of his past and seek help from his most recent prey: a teenage girl whose family he destroyed, a girl with more reason to loathe him than anyone in his life or death. Only then he can try for a redemption that may be impossible or face a universe of suffering.   But Harwood doesn’t know there is a hole in the floor of the world. And something much worse than the dead is down there… Last year I read Ascent by Luke Walker and really enjoyed his Dante-esque tale of terror in a hellish, trans-dimensional office block. Recently a copy of his latest novel, The Unredeemed…

On the Baltic Sea, no one can hear you scream. Tonight, twelve hundred expectant passengers have joined the booze-cruise between Sweden and Finland. The creaking old ship travels this same route, back and forth, every day of the year. But this trip is going to be different. In the middle of the night the ferry is suddenly cut off from the outside world. There is nowhere to escape. There is no way to contact the mainland. And no one knows who they can trust. Welcome aboard the Baltic Charisma. It has been quite a while since I’ve read any proper stomach-churning horror, so when I heard about Blood Cruise by Mats Strandberg I was immediately sold. Chaos, death and destruction on a booze cruise. What could be better? The premise of the novel is deliciously simple. Hundreds of people are trapped on a slightly dated, rundown cruise liner with a creature who views humanity, and more specifically warm human blood, as a tasty treat. I firmly believe the best horror exists in a vacuum; isolation always ramps up the sense of tension. Once underway, the Baltic Charisma is entirely closed off from the rest of the world. This choice of…

Please note Splinter is the final novel in the Sentinel trilogy. If you haven’t read books one and two in this series, then there is a good chance what follows is going to contain a minor spoiler or two. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. The world is falling apart around Nicholas Hallow. Amid rumours that the Dark Prophets have returned, a deathly gloom pollutes England, unleashing a savage hoard of nightmare creatures. Fighting the tide of evil, Nicholas returns home to Cambridge, where an old ally helps him seek out the mysterious Skurkwife, who could help Nicholas stop Malika and the Prophets for good. Meanwhile, Sam Wilkins unites the Sentinels against the forces of darkness, but with Jessica’s sanity slipping, and Isabel suspicious of her shadowy past, it’s a battle that could cost the Sentinels everything. I’m always a little sad when I get to the last book in a series I’ve really enjoyed. I know that all good things must come to an end, but I’ll miss the characters I’ve grown to like. And so, with a heavy heart, we find ourselves having reached the final book in the Sentinel trilogy. I read the first two books, Sentinel…

Please note Hunted is the second book in The Voices series. If you haven’t read Defender, then it is highly likely this review will contain spoilers. Consider yourself duly warned… The birds are flying. The birds are flocking. The birds know where to find her. One man is driven by a Voice that isn’t his. It’s killing his sanity and wrestling with it over and over like a jackal with a bone. He has one goal. To find the girl with a Voice like his own. She has no one to defend her now. The hunt is on. But in an Inn by the sea, a boy with no tongue and no Voice gathers his warriors. Albus must find Lacey … before the Other does. And finish the work his sister, Ruby began. Hunted is the second book in the highly acclaimed Voices series, where the battle between Good and Evil rages on. And on. I’ll begin with an admission. Now I know it might sound a bit weird, but if I could only read one type of story ever again it would mostly likely be some sort of apocalyptic fiction. Over the years I have read many variations of…

Saqqara, Egypt, 1888, and in the booby-trapped tomb of an ancient sorcerer, Rom, a young Egyptologist, makes the discovery of a lifetime: five coffins and an eerie, oversized sarcophagus. But the expedition seems cursed, for after unearthing the mummies, all but Rom die horribly. He faithfully returns to America with his disturbing cargo, continuing by train to Los Angeles, home of his reclusive sponsor. When the train is hijacked by murderous banditos in the Arizona desert, who steal the mummies and flee over the border, Rom – with his benefactor’s rebellious daughter, an orphaned Chinese busboy, and a cold-blooded gunslinger – must ride into Mexico to bring the malevolent mummies back. If only mummies were their biggest problem… Angry Robot have long been one of my favourite imprints; their authors always deliver the most delightfully quirky reads. Based on experience I know that anything they publish is going to be a treat. When it comes to genre fiction, the self-styled Exasperated Automatons consistently deliver books that are hugely entertaining and blissfully easy to lose yourself in.  I’m pleased to report that their latest, Fury From The Tomb by S A Sidor, continues this trend. Take it from me, I work…