Thomas Locke can find anything. You know the hurricane that hit a while back? Word is he found the butterfly that started it. So, when a desperate Veronica Drysdale hires Locke to find her missing husband, it makes perfect sense. Except the world of Thomas Locke doesn’t make sense. It puts monsters under the bed, makes stars fall from the sky and leads little children to worship the marvels of road-works. This world also hides fro...
I always like to try and expand my reading horizons so, when offered, I jumped at the opportunity to read another short story collection. As I have said in the past I think that horror lends itself particularly well to the confines of the short story setting so I was keen to get reading. Ill at Ease contains three new stories of the macabre, each by a different author. Waiting for Josh by Stephen Bacon – The first story follows ...
1062, a time many fear is the End of Days. With the English King Edward heirless and ailing, across the grey seas in Normandy the brutal William the Bastard waits for the moment when he can drown England in a tide of blood. The ravens of war are gathering. But as the king’s closest advisors scheme and squabble amongst themselves, hopes of resisting the naked ambition of the Norman duke come to rest with just one man: Hereward… T...
Once, Ig lived the life of the blessed: born into privilege, the second son of a renowned musician, the younger brother of a rising late-night TV star. Ig had security and wealth and a place in his community. Ig had it all, and more – he had the love of Merrin Williams, a love founded on shared daydreams, mutual daring, and unlikely midsummer magic. The beautiful, vivacious Merrin was gone – raped and murdered, under inexpli...
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...