It is 1888 and Queen Victoria has remarried, taking as her new consort the Wallachian Prince infamously known as Count Dracula. His polluted bloodline spreads through London as its citizens increasingly choose to be vampires. In the grim backstreets of Whitechapel, a killer known as ‘Silver Knife’ is cutting down vampire girls. The eternally young Genevieve Dieudonne and Charles Beauregard of the Diogenes Club are drawn toge...
Beneath Lausanne cathedral, in Switzerland, there is a secret buried before time began. Something unknown to angels and men. Until now… Marc Rochat watches over the city at night from the belfry of the cathedral. He lives in a world of shadows and beforetimes and imaginary begins. Katherine Taylor, call girl and dreamer, is about to discover that her real-life fairy tale is too good to be true. Jay Harper, private detective, wakes...
Please note if you haven’t read Feed, part one of the Newsflesh Trilogy, this review contains some spoilers. Also it’s brilliant and you totally should. Nothing stays buried for long… Shaun Mason is a man without a mission. Not even running the new organisation he built with his sister has the same urgency as it used to. Playing with dead things just doesn’t seem fun when you’ve lost as much as he has. But ...
A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very peculiar photographs. A horrific family tragedy sets sixteen year old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that Miss Peregrine’s children were more than just peculiar. They may hav...
You may have heard that the world was supposed to end last weekend. Based on the fact that you are reading this post, I think we can all safely assume that it didn’t. It struck me that predictions can be, at best, awfully fickle things. If only there was a book that didn’t mess about, something that took all the guess work out of things and just made The Apocalypse simple. According to the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agn...
Northern Europe, 976 AD. Bjolf and the viking crew of the ship Hrafn flee up an unknown river after a bitter battle, only to find themselves in a bleak land of pestilence. The dead don’t lie down, but become draugr – the undead – returning to feed on the flesh of their kin. Terrible stories are told of a dark castle in a hidden fjord, and of black ships that come raiding with invincible draugr berserkers. And no sooner...
Ulysses Quicksilver, agent of the crown, jumps into a time vortex pursuing Daniel Dashwood, a madman bent on sharing modern technology with Hitler’s forces and changing history to suit his evil ends. Rewind several decades, to the time of the Second Great War, to Darmstadt. The Nazis are battling the steampunk empire of Magna Britannia, cooking up necrotic super solider in the gothic towers of Castle Frankenstein. In the forests o...
Human medicine is easy. On her first day at Grace General Hospital, new intern Aline Harman risks vampire infection, demonic possession, and having her heart torn out of her chest… and this from her colleagues. Juggling transhuman politics only becomes more difficult when a patient’s life is at stake. With a zombie to resuscitate and a mermaid in critical care, Aline has her hands full. At least the doctors are good-looking. I have ...
By way of some sort of explanation – In an effort to expand the my reading horizons I’ve decided that it was high time read something that was not a novel. Quirk Books very kindly provided what I think is some sort of self help/how to guide? The results, I think, speak for themselves…. Pirates, by nature, aren’t terribly literate. As a consequence, no book can hope to fully prepare the pampered, modern-day layabo...
People are predictable. That’s what makes them easy to kill. Detective Chief Inspector Prosper Snow is in charge of an investigation into a serial killer called The Oracle who turns his victims into macabre works of art. But Prosper harbours a dark secret of his own. He and his old school friends were members of a group called The Kult, who made a pact to dish out their own form of vengeance on bullies. Now a member of the group puts ...
Peter has been married to Patricia for nearly thirty years. He’s a practical man, the owner of a thriving factory and the father of two fine lads. He also has a secret mistress. One day, his wife takes him along to an outdoor arts exhibition involving some of her paintings, staged in a dark, deep wood. But his are not the only secrets in this marriage, and as Peter strays off the only path through the woods, he soon realises that Patr...
It was the last thing he wanted, but Joe Ledger is back… Saturday 09:11 Hours: a blast rocks a London Hospital. Thousands are dead or injured… 10:09 Hours: Joe Ledger arrives on the scene to investigate. I knew going into this review that I was in for a compelling read. The last Joe Ledger novel, The Dragon Factory, ended with an event that was guaranteed to have repercussions in the series going forward and I was curious wh...
Today’s post is from guest reviewer @SamaelTB. Just like to take the opportunity to thank him for letting me publish his review. Okay, let’s get one thing clear right now. Pattern Recognition is damned good book. The prose is stunning and the protagonist is at once hardcore and sympathetic. Prior to this I’ve only read one Gibson and while Neuromancer is a bit dated now it’s still an astonishing read. I’m p...