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Shorefall, Robert Jackson Bennett’s sophomore outing in the Founders series, and the follow-up to 2018’s phenomenal Foundryside, is a fantastic book which straddles high fantasy and techpunk aesthetics, producing a genuinely unique and engaging universe in the process. I got hold of Foundryside at Worldcon last year as a gift from the publisher and they’ve…
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I have to preface my thoughts on Brian McGilloway’s latest novel, The Last Crossing, by saying that I knew Brian in his twenties, during that part of Northern Irish history that half this book is set in. We were in university together during the early nineties, in Belfast, during the Troubles. Both Catholic, but from…
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So, I love this gentle series of contemporary rural fantasy, and the latest, penultimate, instalment is a continuation of all that’s great about it. It’s very personal, centring very closely on its protagonists, and it tells a story of inner threat as much of one about threat from enormous cosmic forces. Wise woman Judith is…
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I attended a lot of panels on horror at Worldcon in Dublin last year. Some were focused on themes, like body horror, but most were focused on publishing. “Don’t call it horror,” was the basic gist of most of those talks. Horror “in-the-mix” was key to not putting the punters off. Say Grimdark. Call it…
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BOOM! Studios continue to show me love, giving me this amazing collected volume to read ahead of its UK release in June of this year. It’s a blinder of a title and writer James Tynion IV and artist Werther Dell’Edera (and aren’t those a couple of names to conjure with?) are instant follows for me…
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Boom! Studios kindly let me see a copy of volume one of Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora’s Once & Future ahead of its release, and it’s absolutely brilliant. Duncan McGuire is a well-meaning innocent: he works in academia, he plays rugby in his spare time, he’s bad at dating and he loves his grandmother. His…
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At the tipping point between horror and adventure, Beneath the Rising ultimately falls on the side of adventure, and if that’s a major consideration for choosing your fiction, its best you know in advance. The style here is overtly Lovecraftian, but there isn’t the weird or the hopelessness to match those emblematic horrors. There is…
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Ramsey Campbell is a master of the kind of tangled, snaring horror that reminds us all we’re in a living trap that we can’t escape. In The Wise Friend, this is woven into a terrifying cat-and-mouse with half-seen horrors, in a sort of exploded Gothic landscape; a series of isolated, beautiful, but haunted locations replacing…
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Damien Kelly 