Dan
I read a lot of Ramsey Campbell's work in the 80s and 90s and then fell away for whatever reasons. Those are the novels and stories that justly earned him the reputation of one of the best horror writers around. Coming back to his work after a couple of decades off, it's immediately obvious that he hasn't changed much. The horror here is decidedly of the slow burn variety and Campbell is a master of mounting unease. His familiar motif of overbearing parent figures that the lead finds themselves powerless against is very much present here, as it is so many of his books (there are good and strong autobiographical reasons for this, iirc). Of those earlier novels, this is perhaps most reminiscent of The Hungry Moon, as the early sense of things not being quite in true gradually builds through pagan myth to some full on cosmic horror. I don't think Fellstones made quite the impact on me that that book did, but then again that was my first Campbell and this is probably my twelfth or so. It's not for the gorehounds amongst us, but this is a solid read that deploys a sense of rising dread well.
Paul Tremblay is certainly versatile. Where his last novel, Survivor Song, was a fast paced slam bang adventure, this one is much more introspective and measured. It's a tale of thwarted hopes and the disappointments of life that most readers of a certain age will be able to empathize with, told as a memoir of a life-defining friendship but also punctuated with interjections from that friend, who is often less than impressed with the author's version of events. It's a great conceit that elevated my enjoyment of the novel. I mean, I knew was going to like it anyway as soon as I saw the contents page and realised that all the chapters were named after Hüsker Dü songs, but this sealed the deal. The supernatural element is kept ambiguous throughout, and you'll have to read till the end to discover if it is an actual horror novel, or a story of an awkward young man's instabilities and projections (hey, why can't it be both?), but that won't be a problem, because it's an excellently readable book.
The idea of Japan disappearing is an intriguing response to that nation's demographic crisis, the logical conclusion to the problem of a declining population. But this novel steadfastly refuses to do anything interesting with it. Plot is very much backgrounded in favour of character exploration, but I didn't find any of those characters especially engaging, and didn't really care about any of them. File under missed opportunity.
The first two books of this trilogy were five star reads for me, with a terrific atmosphere, location and brilliantly imaginative magic system. This final volume massively increases the scale and goes full widescreen. Where the earlier books were largely set in one city this one covers a whole continent blighted by war between two impossibly powerful adversaries, and the stakes are about as high as they could possibly be. But for all the epic conflict there's a huge emotional core and the heart of the book is about two relationships, between a father and his son and our hero Sancia and her wife, and it's these that lead to the final satisfaction of the ending. There's an epilogue set after all the dust has settled and it's one of the most powerful and emotional sequences I've read for a long long time.
With this trilogy and the preceding Divine Cities series, RJB has produced some of the best and certainly the most original fantasy novels of the twenty-first century, and he's at the top of my must read list.
Really enjoyed the author's previously translated novel, Bullet Train, so was eager to read this.It's a tale of revenge that follows three separate characters whose stories dip in and out of each others and finally combine at the climax. There's an interesting philosophical element that comes strongly into focus in the closing pages but don't worry, it's still a fast paced and exciting read for sure, if one that lacks the focus the single confined location lent to Bullet Train.
CA Fletcher's second novel starts slow, filling you in on the location and the characters while an undercurrent of uneasiness is lightly sketched in in the background. That undercurrent swells and rises like a tide, until it bursts its banks and everything goes very bad very quickly. On its own terms this is a decent horror novel, and would have made a great 80s John Carpenter movie. My twinge of disappointment is that the author's previous book is one of my favourite genre novels of recent years, and this one isn't at that level. You'll still have fun with it, but please read A Boy And His Dog At The End Of The World as well!
This one features two narratives four hundred years apart that twine around and echo each other, as a group of Civil War soldiers stumble into a dark and mysterious wood, and a modern day all-female team of archeologists attempt to retrace their steps and solve their disappearance. The publicity mentions the obvious parallels with The Ritual and The Descent, and they are indeed strong, but there's also a lot of the unresolved eeriness of Picnic At Hanging Rock and the sense of ancient landscape Alan Garner evokes. Very atmospheric, creepy, and a real page turner - I blazed through it.
Kay's evocation of a world that is almost, but not quite, the Renaissance Mediterranean is terrifically atmospheric, and he peoples it with characters you care about and believe in. Perhaps the most elegant fantasist working today, he marshals events on intimate personal and global political scales and walks us through their effects and reverberations in wonderfully smooth prose. No one else produces work like this in the genre and this new novel is to be celebrated.
Jennifer Egan's latest is another SF adjacent novel, one that looks at social media and extrapolates our current obsession Facebook, Twitter et al into a near future where people make their actual memories available via tech, creating a collective shared consciousness that anyone can access. The book roams freely in time, showing us how such a thing came into being, and what a life in that world looks like. Like A Visit From The Good Squad, it's a series of linked stories that reflect and feed back on each other. The characters are all connected, some by blood and marriage, some by shared experience, and others more tenuously - probably not unlike your Facebook friends list. A good part of the fun of the novel is tracking these connections and working out how the characters intersect. It's fabulously readable, and Egan inhabits her different voices with aplomb. Marvellous stuff.
This is an illuminating look into a quirky and previously unknown to me avenue of fairly recent British history. It tells the story of the Premonitions Bureau, an organisation that tried harness the aid of psychics in predicting disasters. It started up after the horrors of Aberfan, and ran through the rest of the sixties. largely led by two interesting and contrasting characters, who drive the narrative. It's an interesting history, but that's all it is. The book never really interrogates the idea of premonition, and isn't that interested in questions about the existence of such a force.A lot of the cases described in the book seem to me to be instances of trying to make a vision fit an event by looking at the similarities and ignoring the inconvenient differences. There's almost no argument about premonition versus coincidence, and if there was indeed any basis in fact for the Bureau's work. The author does find room for some philosophical conundrums (if a psychic predicting a disaster means that disaster is averted, does that mean the prediction was false in the first place as there was no disaster?) but I kept reading expecting some sort of analysis of the realism of the whole idea, and was left hanging. Perhaps it's outside of the book's remit, but it's not a long work, and I believe it would have been improved by some more rigorous analysis of the psychics' claims. It's a very interesting read as far as it goes, but I wish it had gone a bit further.
Second book in, and I'm a bit unsure about the New Management. I know it's easy to complain that the old stuff was better, but this series hasn't sparked for me so far like the Laundry Files did. There's a couple of reasons. The main cast (Eve, Imp, Game Boy, etc) are very thinly sketched. After two books I don't feel like I know who they are, what makes them tick, or even like them very much. Also, the author has never been shy about showing you just how much he knows and how clever he is, but that was more bearable in the earlier books when filtered through Bob's journey from know-nothing naif to top occult espionage guy. Here it slides dangerously close to annoying.
But really, the fundamental problem is, there's something strangely joyless about it all. We're in a world where the bad guys have won, and all the corporate satire and endless parades of meat products take on a despairing edge, a “this is it, folks, this is what we have to live with” vibe. Look, some of my best friends are grim dystopias, right? I've got nothing against them, but considering it's trading on a series that started as an extremely fun James Bond meets HP Lovecraft romp the tonal shift feels a bit off to me. There's not (so far) a hint of resistance or striving for anything better, just endless wretchedness, which not even Mary Poppins taking down a T. Rex with an antitank gun can dispel.
I still largely enjoyed it, but a fair bit less than I did the previous books. I'll still be reading the next one, in the hope Stross reins in the nihilism and smugness a bit next time.
Very hard to review this, as more or less any description of the setup, let alone the plot, is going to be heading towards spoiler territory. But rest assured if you relish the dread of approaching disclosure and the stomach dropping clunk of understanding as it becomes clear, and hey I know you do because you're a good horror fan, you're going to lap this up. It's intense, claustrophobic and genuinely monstrous in places. Like all the best gothic fiction the setting is as much a character as any of the actors in the novel, and long after you've finished you will feel the sunbaked desolate expanses of the desert and the cool dark spaces of the house on your skin - at least on the bits of it that aren't still tingling from the hammer blows of revelation and twist that build the climax.
When people talk about things being widescreen, this is what they mean. This book careers between several planets and solar systems, stuff gets blown up all over the place, brilliantly original aliens do horrible things, different factions of humanity vie for galactic supremacy in the face of existential threat, there's something nasty in the woodshed of space-time, and our heroes are right in the middle of it all. Shards Of Earth was terrific fun, and this maintains that. It's high concept, high energy, high fun space opera, and roll on the next part.
This is the capstone to Parker's City trilogy.This time we're outside the City and looking at how it's fall has affected the rest of the world, and especially one Robur translator working hundreds of miles away in a foreign embassy who suddenly finds himself without a homeland or diplomatic protection. Like the other books in the series it's darkly funny and bitterly ironic. It's extremely readable and you'll have a good time with it, plus I have to applaud a book with the message that going to the library is probably the best thing you can do in a tricky situation.
There's a lot of meta in this book. One of the story strands is about an author who's written a very successful novel about a pandemic and is now experiencing one for real, and another riffs on the plot of Mandel's previous novel. I love that sort of thing, so I was already inclined to like the book, even if it hadn't been such a touching affirmation of humanity and our shared connections. It is a pandemic novel in every sense, in story and I suspect in origin, and the message throughout is that we get through difficult times together. Objectively speaking, the final twist isn't much of a surprise if you've read as much SF as I have, but subjectively and in the moment it knocked me out, so caught up was I in this beautiful and emotionally resonant novel.
This novel is a fresh start for Powell, after wrapping up the Embers Of War trilogy. It's set in a new universe, with an excellent and original background, and sees Powell moving towards the darker territory of, say, an Alastair Reynolds. There's a lot of pain and anguish in this book and a focus on violent death and emotional distress that wasn't there before. That's not to say he's suddenly gone all grimdark on us, as a key theme is found families, and relationships strengthening under pressure, and the core of the novel is the kind of rattling space opera fun that has become his trademark, but it is more sombre than some of his previous work. Nevertheless, it's a great read that SF fans will have a lot of fun with. No idea if it's a standalone or the beginning of a larger series - while the story is largely done at the end of the book the setting is strong enough to stand some more novels in this universe, and I'd welcome them
I thought The Stranger Times showed a lot of potential, and glad to say that continues through to this one. McDonnell writes with a lot of warmth, and his worldview, which celebrates ordinary humanity while excoriating its worse excesses, is not a million miles from Terry Pratchett's. This is an entertaining and lively read, with a cast of characters you will be rooting for. Here's to more Stranger Times books!
Since reading the first novel I've discovered all the books CK McDonnell has published as Caimh McDonnell. They are lacking the supernatural elements but the voice and humour is the same, and they are all terrific fun and well worth a look
Oh, and Vincent Banecroft is totally the supernatural's very own Jackson Lamb.
so the final part of the Himmelstrand trilogy has finally made it into English. It seems like a long time since I read the first two. This one approaches the story of the mysterious field and the sinister tunnel from a different angle. To begin with it comes across as a straight crime novel, a tale of low level drug dealing and crime reporting, but the stranger elements begin to creep in as the stakes escalate. It's a satisfactory ending to the series, one that explains what has been going on while leaving a bit of mystery. Tommy is one of Lindqvist's most sympathetic characters, and as for Haage....
This one closes out the Age Of Madness trilogy. Not the best jumping on place for new readers, but those who have been on the ride so far will be familiar with Abercrombie's oh so readable cocktail of brutal violence, political intrigue and dark humour, allied here to some of his best character work. But....
It's more than a bit annoying that one lovely dangling plot line that I'd been expecting to come into play at the climax is parcelled off to the epilogue and used as bait for what I presume is the next trilogy in the world of the First Law. I've invested 1000+ pages in reading this(and don't get me wrong I had fun along the way) and then for the climax of the trilogy to be “here's some stuff that's going to happen in some books I haven't written yet” feels a bit off to me. I suppose that means more books so I won't grumble too hard, but yeah felt a bit cheated when I got to the last page.
