Archives 2026
All reviews published during 2026
In fiction you can blur the real world with the fictional to give your story a sense of authenticity. This is something that Jake Arnott has done in the past taking a splash of truth, a soupcon of reality, and then blending in some fictional high-octane action. In the case of Blood Rival, there...
My partner and I have differing opinions on ghosts. I like to read about them but am incredibly cynical that they exist. My partner is more of a believer. I just refuse to believe that ghoulies can exist without more evidence, we live in a surveillance society at this point. However, even I...
One of the best things about Science Fiction is that it also works as Science Fact. Much of the science and fantasy in the books are based on real research; taken to the nth level, but with a basis in truth. Exiles by Mason Coile layers this with some fundamentals in philosophy. Occam’s...
There are different people in life. There are those that love the idea of travelling to a remote Indonesian island with three friends and surfing huge waves, and those that think this is a barmy idea and would rather go on a nice city break or read a book by the pool. What you do not always get...
They say never judge a book by its cover and this is a good lesson to take heed of with Peter McLean’s Paved With Good Intentions, as the UK cover stars Eline dressed in regal splendour. You see, Eline is also someone you should not judge from by her looks. She may be presenting as a...
One of the wonderful things about genre fiction is that an author does not have to explain what is going on if they do not want to. Science Fiction often goes into great detail trying to explain the science, but sometimes it just happens to be set on a remote alien planet – deal with it....
Back in the nineties, Fantasy had a comedic moment. Led by Sir Terry Pratchett, other authors were signed up to produce lighter fantasy with a sense of humour. Whilst none became as popular as Discworld, I still miss those days. T Kingfisher agreed and Nine Goblins is the author’s homage...
We all come of age at some point in our lives. If we are lucky enough this will be as part of a loving household and we come out of it not too messed up, but not everyone is lucky. In the real world it can be tough enough, but take this dysfunction and place it is space, things can get real bad....
Fantasy has a rich history of heroes who fight against the odds to ensure that good triumphs over evil, but what about the cowards? What about the people who would rather live in peace and quiet faraway from the front and have no truck with prophecies, even if they are the centre of them? In...
Dealing with major changes in your life is not easy. You can find help in your community, but when you are a Witch who is hunted down, this is not so simple. Any other Witch that you come across is also being hunted or is too young to know what to do and needs a mentor. All Merhrab wants is to...
As a born cynic, I am always on the lookout for the angle in life and in fiction, but sometimes something is what it seems on the surface; wholesome. Not all books need to challenge the reader and leave them exhausted. Novels can be an escape, an entertainment, full of love and magic. Books and...
A science fiction story that describes the gradual development of artificial intelligence and demonstrates the inadequacies of human beings as they try to train it and interact with it, The Peachy Paradox begins with a lightness and humour, but as it continues, the humour is satirical, sporadic...
One of the benefits of being a vampire is not the insatiable lust for human blood, but the eternal life. It can make meeting other vampires a tad strange as that 25-year-old looking person may actually be 100 years old, or a 1000. They try to act all modern, but they always have that whiff of...
A lot can happen during a siege, enough so that you do not have to have a book full of battles, you could have just one about the siege itself. This is the setting of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest in the The Tyrant Philosophers series, Pretenders to the Throne of God. We will meet new...
Naming your book The Last Phi Hunter comes with some idea that this will be the last of their kind, but Salinee Goldenberg proves this is not the case with a sequel, Way of the Walker. But is this Walker an actual Phi Hunter? If your job is to find and kill the undead (Phi), befriending them and...
If you are like me, you will have an escape plan from the building you work in, just in case there is a zombie attack. My plan is to get to the roof and use one of the ladders up there to simply steer the zombies over the low edge. This might work, but not in the Antarctic, were there are few...
Many of us do not really know what is going on in Space, and not everyone really cares. It is all so far away and beyond our control. However, even the layman would think twice if the planets in our Solar System started to disintegrate one after the other and strange new discs appear in Space...
When is a vampire not a vampire? When it is a Gul. These strange creatures are part of everyday life in this version of Brazil, the secret for the humans who want to survive is to stay at home after curfew, lest they be eaten by Guls or taken for enemies of the state by the Fascists who run the...
A large part of fantasy novels is not really the destination, but the journey. The camaraderie that builds among a troop of characters as they travel to their destination, but what happens once they have arrived? In T Kingfisher’s Clockwork Boys four mismatched social pariahs set out to...
I like when a genre becomes so embedded that as a whole, we can play with it. This has happened for years in comic books, even the films are so prevalent now that you get plenty of leftfield superhero movies. One genre that has been around longer and has even deeper roots is Fantasy, but has it...
Woodstock is an event that has passed into folklore. Like Spike Island, I imagine that every eligible person the right age claims to have been there. Who is to say that they were not? These events are massive, you can lose yourself in the crowd, but other things can hide to. Would anyone notice...
What is art? It is a question I have to ask on occasion as I live with an artist. It is in the eye of the beholder, some of the stuff I see I would not look twice at, even top name artists are not to everyone’s tastes. Some are labelled outsider artists, those that have no formal training...
What differentiates a short story series from episodes? Allen Stroud’s The Fractal Series comes in a collection or can be read separately. There are twelve individual stories, that sounds like a short story collection, but there is a difference as they all take place within the Fearless...
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me, but in Shay Kauwe’s The Killing Spell, words will very much hurt you. In fact, words can be fashioned into spells to kill. Not the best in an everyday family situation where words can fly thick and fast, nor in a society...
I love to play hidden object games; I find them a nice way to relax after a busy day. I also love to read for the same reason, even a crime story can be comforting in its own way. Death Wasn’t Invited by Carlene O’Connor combines the two as it is a ‘cosy’ crime caper...
I am a student of History, but even to this day there are massive blind spots in my learning, moments in the past that I know little about, so anything on the subject matter feels fresh to me. I have a passing knowledge of the Antient Greek Gods, but having read Aphrodite in Pieces by Lauren J....
Twas in a café they first met, Romeo and Juliet. And twas the first day they fell into debt, because Rome-owed and Juli-eat. It feels to me that the entire system is rigged so that you never have quite enough money to escape, you work to live, and if you do not work, you do not eat. It is...
Starting a new book can always be daunting, but I have a special trepidation for short story collections. They can be vast, full of stories that are loosely linked. Trying to find themes and remember all the stories can feel impossible when considering a review. However, you sometimes get a more...
Journalist have somewhat of a chequered reputation, for every Watergate, there is ten celebrities caught in the act. In recent times, the profession has cleaned up its act a little, but it still relies heavily on eyes on the page or viewing figures. This leads to a competitive market and some...
A small note before the review: Skin Game is the kind of book that hides a lot of its best work in its second half, and to talk about it usefully I will need to touch on a few of the setup beats from the opening...
A short warning before the review: Peace Talks is the first half of a single story that concludes in Battle Ground, and certain late-book events spill across both volumes. I have kept the major plot resolutions and the...
A brief admission to start. I've just finished Twelve Months and realised, slightly to my embarrassment, that I never actually got round to writing a review for Battle Ground. So here, six years late, is that review. I will keep this one largely spoiler-free; the events of Battle Ground are by...
To work in a novel, you need to be the right amount of crazy. Too little and you just come across as a little odd and moany, too much and your book has just become a horror novel. In Callisto Lodwick’s The Drowned Siren, Eleanor is a student in Scotland who is introverted and clingy, but...
I am not sure if readers have noticed, but we have quietly entered a new Golden Era of Fantasy writing. There is a handful or more of established fantasy authors who have the experience and skill to be writing at the top of their game. Fantasy novels that are not just simple retellings of old...
As more novels are written within the Star Wars Universe, I start to realise that I am drawn increasingly towards the wider Universe and not the core Skywalker saga. On TV, The Mandalorian, and in the book world the stories I have enjoyed most were adapted from a Star Wars comic, and one even...
There's a shape of epic fantasy that a lot of us have grown up on. A sleepy village in the back of beyond, a clutch of young people on the edge of adulthood, a once-a-year ritual that lifts one or two of them out into...
I do not think of myself as a person of culture, but when I stop to think about it, I have likely been to more theatre productions, museums and Stately Homes than most people. I can thank my mother for this as being forced to go as a youth has made me appreciate them and want to go as an adult....
Some books refuse to sit still in any one genre, and Fever House is one of them.
I picked it up at a recent convention while browsing...
Before we get started, given that this book is number 18 in the series, the review inevitably has spoilers for what's happened previously. This is unavoidable, but if you haven't read Battle Ground or indeed the 16...
Science Fiction and Westerns have a long history, many stories are your classic stranger coming to a new town, but instead of carrying a six-shooter, they carry a Ray Gun. Fresh Start by Johnny Worthen is the latest and this is one strange stranger. Is Qays Mendoza a monk or a marine? Is his...
There is something magical about childhood, you do not need a genre novel to tell you this. Everything is new, experiences that will map the person that you are going to be and stay with you for a lifetime. If you are lucky, these will be good experiences and not bad ones. In the case of Jeff...
I read quite a lot of horror, to the point that it does not really affect me anymore, flesh eating clowns, aliens that tear off limbs, none of this is going to happen to me. A child being bullied at school, another joining a rough crowd, work becoming too stressful, a parent with dementia. These...
I first met RJ Barker some years ago at FantasyCon in Glasgow, on an interactive panel about public speaking, which is roughly the worst possible context in which to take the measure of another writer. Public speaking panels at conventions tend to attract people who are either visibly terrified...
I think we can all agree that throughout history, and the present, we have had some leaders who are not always the best. Leaders that make their horse a senator, leaders who kill huge swathes of their population to keep control. Despite the madness of our own despots, we have not had a leader...
M. R. Carey has built a career out of refusing to do the obvious thing twice. Across thirty-odd books he has slipped from the quiet apocalypse of The Girl With All the Gifts to the medieval strangeness of Once Was Willem, never...
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