Graham

PKD is primarily known these days for his sci-fi. The Cosmic Puppets is probably his only attempt at a fantasy novel. One of his earlier and less well known works, the immaturity of the prose is definitely evident, but the wild ‘what if' ideas that characterize his best sci-fi works is absolutely present.

Here we are playing with the ideas of creation. The whole story steeped in heavy Zoroastrian imagery - the cosmic battle between light and dark - this time played out in a kind of urban fantasy setting. The idea of ‘what is real?' is something that PKD plays with a lot over the years. It is intriguing to see his early ideas on this front. The concepts have evolved into much more well fleshed out examples in his later works, but seeing how he has previously explored them is definitely interesting.

This is certainly not one of his best books. His prose is weak, the setting dated. However, seeing where some his more famous ideas started being developed is certainly fun for people who like his works.

The basic premise of this sounds really fun - a 1920s art deco steampunk alternative history. Certainly an intriguing set up. In many ways the vibe reminds me of the boardgame Scythe. The world building is certainly the highlight of this - the combo created provides a vivid setting. The issue for me was the characters and story. It all just mulched together into a bit of mush. I dont think the memory loss story line really helped this as it just added to the sense of confusion.

I loved the setting. I just wished story was a bit more memorable. It wasn't bad, just nothing special.

Historical fantasy is an interesting subgenre, weaving fantastical elements into well established historical events. The best ones of these really manage to capture the time period with the fantastical elements used more to drive the story and fill in blanks rather than attempting major revisionism. At this The Embroidered Book most definitely succeeds.

Here we take on the story of Marie Antoinette and Maria Carolina, two sisters who had a major impact on European history. Marie Antoinette needs no real introduction as Queen of France during the French Revolution. Maria Carolina was Queen of Naples during the same period, and effectively the power in the country as her husband was disinterested in matters of state.

Kate Heartfield manages to weave a story of magic into a well researched history of the period. She prevents a much more sympathetic view of Marie Antoinette than is usually found in the popular discourse. It was also fascinating to read more of the story behind Maria Carolina, whose own history is really interesting!

Overall a well worked take on the history in the period. Possibly a bit on the long side (it drags a little in the middle) but it provides a fun fantasy read with a fascinating take on some important historical figures.

I loved this. A gritty look at the importance of justice and how difficult it is to not have bias when taking judgement, how power corrupts. In many ways this seems especially pertinent when considering the erosion of rights in part of the world and the use of power to control the idea of justice. In The Justice of Kings we follow the apprentice of a Magister as they do their rounds in a kingdom. At the outset of the book the Magisters are the ultimate power, the arbiters of law based on a presumption of neutrality and justice. The throne has other centers of power that resent this and it is machinations around this that form the main plot of the book.

The ethical and moral questions asked in the book are intriguing and well followed through. The fallibility of people is a reason why perfect justice does not exist and this is explored in depth here - despite our main characters desire for justice and the respect they hold the law in, you cannot help but empathize with the challenges they face in upholding the principles the espouse.

I was probably the new series I was most anticipating so far this year and it has not disappointed in its opening novel. I really do look forward to where this goes!

I have always had a fascination with maps. My career (geologist) and several of my hobbies (sailing and hiking) revolve around both map making and interpretation so the theming here was always going to capture me.

Here we are given a Dan Brown style mystery wrapped in some magical realism based around a very real artifact present in some maps - phantom settlements. These are fake places put onto maps to try and catch copyright thieves. The cross genre nature of this story does lead to some messiness in the structure, and the inherent plot holes found in any Dan Brown style mystery are most definitely present here too, but I had fun reading it. Definitely a book that forces you to suspend your disbelief so ymmv depending on how you approach it. For me an adventure featuring cartographical nerdiness works well. The fantastical elements are maybe a bit overwrought but in the end it is fun, and to be honest, that is the main reason to read things, isn't it?

A somewhat uneven police procedural story. There are some very good parts to this - the way that corruption high up is woven into the story creates for some interesting tensions. However, it doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a political police procedural thriller or a Hollywood style guns blazing all action thing. I am not sure the Hollywood ending is doing the story any favours in the long run...

The setting is an interesting one for me - Brighton is a place I am familiar with and several of the places mentioned I know reasonably well. Whilst there is crime here it is not exactly the crime capital of the UK. The pressures on policing with regards to budget cuts are definitely a hot topic and the author obviously speaks from a place of knowledge. With regards to corruption in the forces, it is dealt with in an interesting way. The location of the story and its contents do become a bit jarring. There is quite a brutal story buried in here, but it is the firefight at the end that really bugs me. This is an extremely American style piece of action and feels supremely unrealistic in a UK setting.

The first few chapters are somewhat confusing with the POV jumping around a lot. This settles down as the book progresses and the prose becomes an engaging and readable affair. The characters are mostly well written, although I think having Phil Cooke as the Police Chief made some of his later actions less believable and more frustrating. I do feel that if the desire for the Hollywood ending had been reigned in a bit this would have been a very good crime novel.

We need more nautical fantasy. RJ Barker has certainly found a niche where fantasy is under served with this series. His creativity in his creatures is matched by his brilliant world building and relationships between the crew members on the Tide Child.

Fantasy is at its best when it manages to be both huge and small at the same time - epic drama but focused in on a small tight nit group. A boat is almost the perfect setting for this as the crew provides the ‘found family' closeness whilst the ocean provides a vastness and scale.

Call of the Bone Ships is an excellent second outing. Following the character development of Joron in the first book we are presented with a much more competent and confident ship officer as our main protagonist. This allows the focus to switch to some of the larger political machinations at play in the world. There is not really a sense of second book malaise that sometimes affects trilogies - this book is confident and has a proper drive to it, always feeling more than a mere stepping stone to the finale. The stakes are rising and the real peril and risk is always underlying. RJ is not frightened of killing of important characters and it really adds to the sense of drama and brutality to the setting

As you can probably tell I thoroughly enjoyed this. High quality fantasy that deserves its increasing recognition!

Sapphic witchy Great Gatsby sounds like a good tag line. Unfortunately this is one hot mess of a novel, not quite sure what it wants to be.

The first half leans heavily into the Gatsby imagery, partying and lifestyle. The problem here is that the Great Gatsby's success is owed to the fact that it captures a time in history from the perspective of one of its witnesses. The story itself is somewhat of a whole lot of not much happening. Wild and Wicked Things is not trying to capture a reality and that means that its gatsbyisms fall flat. The first half drags and lacks the charm that makes F. Scott Fitzgerald's work the masterpiece that it is.

Then we get to the witchy parts. This is largely dumped on the reader with no background, no worldbuilding. I found myself tripping up over what the author was trying to achieve here. To begin with, magic seems more like a party drug, something to get high on. Towards the end the magic is a completely different animal leading to possession and all sorts of dark things. The jump between the two is somewhat abrupt. I liked the first hint of the magic which was a very intriguing take and could have been expanded much more - the idea of it as a drug. The later magic was both generic and confused.

Finally we come to the characters themselves. Most of them were just plain unlikeable. Bea and Emmeline were both just unpleasant and unpredictable. Annie changed dramatically and unbelievably. I just failed to connect with any of them

There were some interesting ideas here, but in the end the whole thing just did not gel for me

Firstly, this book is not badly written. The prose is competently put together, but it just was not for me. I failed to engage with the characters, found the plot meandered in ways that just did not work for me and ultimately it all fell a bit flat.

Chess playing automatons in the 18th century seem to have been a bit of a theme in recent historical fantasy stories. I am not sure what to make of this - I presume it is related to an increase in interest in chess recently as it is a somewhat esoteric trend. Anyway, I digress a bit. The main theme of the story follows the story of a clockmaker somewhat beset by tragedy. The earnestness is a bit overbearing and exhausting. The familial relationships are all a bit strained in weird ways, which jarred me somewhat. Ultimately the characters were not ones that I could relate to, their eccentricities very much on the extreme end of the scale. YMMV, but this one was not for me.

4 short stories/novellas collected together. An intriguing glimpse into Andrew Cull's style. He has an almost cinematic take on writing, his prose reading in a very vivid way.

Did You Forget About Me
A creepy return to an abusive father's house after he passed away. But here it is not the abusive father that provides the most chilling memories. This one pulled out all the stops on the general ‘dread' theme, leaning heavily into death and the effects it can have on people who were close to the deceased for many years.

Hope and Walker
Death is definitely a theme to this collection and this time we are taken into a funeral parlour. Here the main protagonist has taken to drawing pictures of the deceased. But what happens when the dead start talking back to her?

The Trade
Something is leaving grisly presents on the porch of a house deep in the woods...

Knock and You Will See Me
Probably my favourite story in the collection as it leaves a wonderful sense of ambiguity. Is it the grief talking or is the father really buried alive? Is the father possessed by something else?

There is a final very short vignette called The Rambling Man which I wont dive into too much but is definitely worth a read too!

Death is definitely the theme, but the directions it takes provide some truly interesting twists!

Sun Eater is one of those series that is improving as it progresses. The scope and scale and shear epicness only increase with each entry, but each entry also manages to be self contained without leaving to many plot threads hanging. This is epic story telling in the vein of Rothfuss - telling the tale in a poetic way in a more retrospective look - it is the protagonist telling the story after the deed. The prose is rich and beautiful without being obtuse, and is very very readable.

In this, the third book, we are drawn closer to the center of power. Hadrian is now engaging with the Emperor and his close political advisors, getting caught up in a lot of the politicking inherent in a large empire. He is still the great hero - being sent out regularly to counter the Cielcin hordes. We see the fruits of the links that have been alluded to between the empires enemies and that provides a large driver for the first half of the novel.

Whilst the politics have got grander and more Machiavellian, so have the conflicts. There is a lot of huge scale fights. We have moved away from the intimate gladiatorial fighting that characterized the first novel and are mostly dealing with massive armies and space fleet battles - there is an edge of military Sci-Fi to the tale now. This is particularly so in the latter half of the novel.

We also delve further into the mythos that has driven Hadrian's story. Who are The Quiet? Some of these questions begin to be answered.

Not just a stepping stone like some middle books, this one is epic story telling in its own right!

A clever little thriller. The set up here is interesting - combining some coming of age elements, an unusual location (Alaska) and some clever social dynamics. Strand is probably better known for his more pure horror stories. As with most thrillers there is a horrific element to this tale, although there is nothing supernatural about it. Mostly this story deals with the frustrated sense of impotence that most people will feel when confronted with a crime. This take is usually done through grieving parents or some such but taking it through the eyes of a teenage friend is an interesting twist on it. It is also quite clever as the inherent stupidity of a lot of characters in these situations is better explained and rationalised through the dynamic of child, where it is more believable.

The thriller here is well executed. Whilst it is not stretching the boundaries of the genre by an means, it does take its twists and turns well. The prose is very engaging and helps to draw the reader in. I thoroughly enjoyed this!

The best epic fantasy manages to make very big events feel very small and intimate. The Collarbound maybe takes this a bit too much to an extreme (there are so many grand events eluded to, but the entire book is set in the politics of a small university like environment). This book leaves more questions than it answers. Some people may find that frustrating, but for me that is actually one of the good things about this book. It leaves me intrigued about the world.

Beyond the grand world scale politics there is also a clear race politics motive going on. There are two very different peoples in this world, the humans and the Kher, and there is a lot of prejudice and discriminatory undercurrents.

This is not action packed fantasy. Instead it revels in the intricate details of the plotting, the small scale and petty lives overshadowed by the greater events. There is a rebellion going on, but this very distant and impacts only on the edges of the lives of people here.

The ideas are very clever, the world building intriguing in both its simultaneous grandeur and small scale detail. I don't think this will be for everyone - if you want all action bombast you wont find it here. But you will find epic fantasy on a small and intimate scale.

Sweary mercenaries strike again! The Articles of Faith follow the basic premise of Murphy's Law - if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. The Righteous picks up pretty much where The Black Hawks left off. Throughout the course of these pages, the shenanigans of the mercenary band follow the progressive bad choices and escapes by making further bad choices. The found family basis is wonderfully done, the irreverence and needling of each other forms a constant backbone to the progressively more dire straits the gang finds themselves in.

A warning - do not read this book if you are easily offended by bad language. For me, this definitely helps capture the spirit of the books (soldiers are some of the most foul mouthed people out there), and the bickering between the characters provides one of the great joys of reading this!

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Yes it is silly, yes it is crude at times, but my god this is fun!

There is an intrinsic cleverness to the way the War for the Rose Throne has evolved over its 3 books so far. Whilst Priest of Bones was fantasy Mafia on a gang level, now with Priest of Gallows we have evolved into a full on Mafia state and it is fascinating and horrifying to watch at the same time. The structures which have been set up have a horrifying believability to them - you can kind of see examples of how they have been used by people seeking power in real life at times. And the sheer Machiavellian mastery of it all is brilliant.

Tearing back the levers of state we see how much is controlled by the Queen's Men. Tomas may be a Queen's Man but he has not been fully initiated into the organization. When the Queen dies and the succession begins the Queen's Men are called into action to leverage their influence. Succession as a gang war ensues. But are the Queen's Men really what they seem?

The War for the Rose Throne is one of those gems that has flown a bit under the radar. This is such a clever twist on fantasy and it truly deserves more recognition!

I think insects are under represented in fantasy. Yes, you get your tropey Giant Spiders, but other insects really are not so present. Adrian Tchaikovsky is on a mission to change that. Shadows of the Apt is almost a fantasy celebration of insects. Here we come across different insect ‘Kinden'. The Kinden are all humans, but each has abilities linked to a specific arthropod, be it Beatle, Mantis, Spider, Wasp etc... These are further divided into ‘apt' and ‘inapt' - those who can use machines and those who can use magic. This all has combined into an incredibly layered and fascinatingly realized world.

Empire in Black and Gold opens this story up with a shadow brewing in the East - the Wasp Kinden, hyper-militaristic, are on the march. This is a very military focused novel - a lot of fighting goes on, spread over multiple cities and multiple points of view. The scale is certainly epic and whilst a lot goes on in the novel there is very much a sense that this is only the opening act to something much larger.

There is a lot of creativity here. The different Kinden are really fascinating and I really am intrigued to see where this goes. Some of the fighting was taken a bit to extremes, but the world built was so fascinating that it just kept drawing me in

This was a delightful little gem. A collection of short stories and flash fiction, this was one of the best written and best balanced collections I have read in a long time.

My partner and I have developed a little tradition where each year we hand each other 5 books we have read that we think the other should read. This was one that my partner handed to me. I knew next to nothing of the author, but the cover looked really cool so I was intrigued.

What we have is a brilliant collection of creepy and sad little stories. Brandon Applegate has a masterful way of building atmosphere in a very short space of time. He plays with ambiguity, with tropes and expectations. He understands the real history of fairies (see Tea Party - probably my favourite in the collection, but there are no weak stories here). All the emotional levers are pulled in all the most sensitive ways.

This is dark, brutal but strangely sympathetic stuff. A name to watch for the future!

A clever take on racial tensions in a fantasy setting. Racism is often a challenging topic to take on, and this one takes it a step further by making the colour of a persons blood literally the defining characteristic of their social standing. With 3 castes of people living in the empire the tensions between the haves and the have nots are cleverly manipulated by those at the top. The reveals and twists cleverly act to undermine the social order and the basis for the regime, but also the motivations of some of the rebel characters as well, creating a wonderfully murky moral picture despite the obvious bias of the society.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. The very real oppression, the politicking and the hidden agendas all work together to produce a fascinating cocktail. Very much looking forward to see where this series goes

A retelling of a Lovecraftian story, I struggled somewhat with this one. This novel was written early in Michael Shea's career, but has only recently been released. The typical Lovecraftian elements are there, with a strange sense of unreality to a lot of the storytelling, but I found the pacing really dragged on this. The gritty setting of a run down hotel in San Francisco in the late 70s was captured well, but the time setting this all up dragged horribly. When adding to the general ambiguity of the tale this made this a bit of a struggle to get through. There is no doubt that Michael Shea is a good writer. The quality of the prose is evident in this very early work of his, but the story craft and structure was still a work in progress.

I don't think I realized I was missing a horror novel about dams and reservoirs, but apparently I was. Scott Carson takes an interesting idea - the drowned town that is replaced by a reservoir and builds an impressively crafted supernatural tale around it. In some ways the supernatural here is only used to enhance the feeling of mounting peril - they could be seen as a metaphor for mundane things and that underlying ambiguity gives the story its power.

A significant proportion of the worlds population must live downstream of dams. Whilst dam bursts are incredibly rare they are terrifying events, that really are not brought into literature that much. The Chill focusses on a fictitious reservoir within the very real Catskill water catchment system for New York. Funnily enough I had just recently watched a YouTube video on this very system so was already a little familiar with this somewhat niche and esoteric subject. Here we a c0nfronted by the events leading up to and the aftermath of a dam collapse, driven in part by the myths of an old village swamped beneath the reservoir.

I thoroughly enjoyed this one - it read a lot quicker than its apparent length. Always a good sign in my mind! An intriguing subject for terror, and one that probably more people should be aware of!

Jeff Strand writes a very fun brand of horror. Allison is the story of a women who can control peoples muscles with her mind when she gets emotional, but has little control over it, tending to break people and kill them by accident. She has spent most of her life hiding this ability. This Tarantinoesque story follows what happens when a local mafioso becomes aware of her abilities and tries to control her. This is very much into the splatterpunk territory with a gruesome body count. The story drives along at a breakneck speed and is just downright fun. The characters are well rounded and the silly premise is used to generate a suitable level of entertainment. Is this highbrow literature? No. Is this a lot of fun? Hell yes

I often find collections to be a mixed bag and this is no exception. Brian Knight appears to have quite an eclectic take on horror, varying from extreme body horror and splatterpunk to much more psychological focus on grief and reality. To be honest it is the latter end of this spectrum that i found the most engaging. The story Dakota is beautiful and heart wrenching and by far the stand out of the show, and the one I keep finding coming to my mind long after reading this. Another interesting highlight was a twisted take on a Poe story (The Cask of Amontillado recast as a The Case of a Thousand Dildos...). At the weaker end there is some decidedly rapey stories in here which I found somewhat uncomfortable to read (and not in a good way).

Somewhat uneven, but at its best it is very good

An intriguing little short story chapbook. It definitely plays with grief in an interesting way and I will never look at ladybirds in the same way again...

Insanity as a literary device is a challenging thing to get right. This is a more literary take on it, trying to get into the mind of a very disturbed young man, who is living in a kind of juvenile fantasy that all his acquaintances have long grown out of. The prose is pretty, but the lyrical stylings and confused perspective really frustrated me as reader. I can see why people might enjoy it, but it is all just way to dense a literary styling for my own preference. It acted as a barrier to me engaging with the characters. I am just not a fan of flowery literary stylings...

Lycanthropy as an STD in an oversexed small town USA setting. As an elevator pitch it works, and it keeps on working when you actually dive into the story. With Ray Garton you can expect a certain sleazy brand of horror and he certainly delivers that here. Definitely one of the more unique takes on werewolves that I have read!