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.

This latest series from NK Jemisin has gone to a duology rather than an a trilogy, for reasons the author recounts in an afterword, and hence this is the final volume. She is of course perfectly entitled to do what she wants with her work, and it's not for me to question her motives, but I do think this reduction undercuts the series. The ending is too quick and easy, which would be fine if it was a question of getting pieces off the board ready for the next volume, but is a little bit too pat if this is really it. And the climax to one of the borough's storylines feels like it should be weightier than it is, and is just left sat there, waiting to be followed up on. But, y'know, leaving you wanting more isn't exactly the worst crime a book can pull, is it? Yes, it's a bit frustrating, but it's still a deliciously readable novel, and there's plenty of stuff to like here, from the characters and relationships, to the angry political engagement, as well as the expansion of the core concept with appearances from other cities. But it's New York, in all it's vibrancy and contradiction, that's the star.

Dave Hutchinson returns to Fractured Europe with a new novel that doesn't feature Rudi and instead picks up on a very minor character from Europe In Winter. The flavour is the same though - it's insanely complicated, and will make your head hurt as you try to keep the various timelines, sides, motives, and schemes straight. But it doesn't really matter if you can, because confusing or not it's so very readable and the journey is terrific fun even if you have no idea what the destination is. These books really are some of the best espionage fiction being written today, and deserve the same broadsheet kudos as a Mick Herron.

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.

This ghost story is...okay. There's quite a bit of atmosphere, and I felt a sense of the house as a real location, to the point where I could draw you a floorplan of the layout. But the story is solidly middle of the road. There's no real original ideas, and the pair of revelations at the end feel unearned and unnecessary - in fact they're a little frustrating as if the author had leaned into them earlier the book it might have felt a little fresher. Some of the secondary characters just fizzle out, and there's one plot contrivance that made me winch a bit. That said, there's nothing really wrong with the book, and I enjoyed the couple of hours I spent with it, but ultimately it's a competent entry in the genre and that's all.

probably a three star novel in all honesty, but it gets an extra one because Radar is a Very Good Girl

Chris Brookmyre's take on a locked room mystery, where the room is a remote Scottish island, and the cast are attending a hen party that goes very very wrong. As always with this writer it's compulsively readable, and has the “just one more chapter” factor in spades. Twist piles on twist, motives swim into view and out again, and you're left guessing who is behind it all until the rug is pulled out from under you. Terrifically entertaining.

This novel appears to be drawn from the author's own experiences of postpartum depression. It doesn't tiptoe around the subject, or indeed anything else, but it's brutally, unflinchingly, honest, and unsurprisingly CW'd up to the eyeballs. It's extremely raw, with some absolutely intense scenes of visceral body horror. But by the end, it's also cathartic, full of the exhausted peace that comes after a violent purging. It's not an easy read by means, but it is ultimately a hopeful one.

This is a pitch-black satire on Japanese office life and the role of women in that society. Shibata hoodwinks her colleagues into believing she's pregnant, and as events move out from there you are left wondering if she's even being truthful with you, the reader, as we get towards the end, and the double meaning of the title becomes apparent. Very entertaining.

Grady Hendrix has the enviable knack of writing some really nasty unsettling horror that also has strong and believable emotional underpinnings, and this one is perhaps the most fully realised version of that he's produced so far. The sister and brother at the core of the story have, like all the best families, a complicated relationship, and Hendrix nails it, expertly swinging your sympathy between one or the other. It's moving and very satisfying. However, for all the excellent character work, it's also important to point out that this is one creepy book. The antagonist is horribly malevolent, and plenty of bad and nasty stuff goes down, including one graphic scene that left me wincing. Hendrix does a great job of balancing outright horror and suggestion. I have to say it took me a little while to get into, but when it clicks, around the 15% mark, it really clicks. Very possibly Hendrix' best book yet.

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.

I loved the first book in this series, but this one didn't quite hit those heights for me. Let's look at the positives first. Dark Mill South is an excellent villain, right out of the classic Jason or Michael mould. There are some really inventive slayings and set pieces here as well, and Proofrock feels like a real place. But at the same time, it feels a little bloated. It's nearly 500 pages long, which is too much for the genre - a great slasher movie should be a tight 90 minutes in and out, not some latter day Scorsese three hour epic! One of the best things about the first book for me was the focus on Jade and her journey from troubled teen to some kind of understanding and (whisper it) redemption. This one doesn't have that same kind of emotional throughline, and it's poorer as a result. I'd guess these are just middle volume blues - let's hope there's a barnstorming conclusion to come to Jade and Letha's story!

loses a star for calling people who eat fish vegetarians, gets it back for the Watership Down gag

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.

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.

Fans of this book may like to know it's been filmed as Wood Job!, which is one of my favourite Japanese movies. If you liked the book, you'll love the film!

I liked this one a lot. It is a slow, sad, book about the various ways we can disintegrate, with an intriguing central mystery at is heart.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I love wuxia movies, but it's a genre largely untapped in contemporary (Western) fantasy. If names like Tsui Hark, Yuen Woo-Ping or King Hu quicken your pulse a little, then be assured there are sequences in this book that will make your heart sing. The fight scenes are gloriously visualised, the characters (especially Taishi!) are memorable and believable, and the plot rattles along in splendid fashion. As ever with multi-part series, final judgement will have to wait until it's complete, but I am definitely along for the ride.

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.