Review
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The third instalment of the Black Iron Legacy, The Broken God, is a fantastic book, once again refreshing the world that Hanrahan is building and adding amazing new voices and faces to his extensive cast of saints, devils, mobsters and monstrosities. This book puts the Dragon-led criminal families of the Ghierdana to the fore, with…
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It’s been nine years since the last outing for Detective Inspector Ben Devlin, and he’s been sorely missed. In this new procedural, he’s investigating the murder of a convicted killer and rapist, with the evidence suggesting the man was killed by his own victim, twenty years after her death. The part to unravelling this mystery…
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The prolific Mr. Campbell shows no signs of slowing down and produces another compelling and chilling read, close on the heels of last year’s, The Wise Friend. This time he goes back to his own past, setting a tale of opportunistic spiritualism and post-war grief in his home city of Liverpool in the 1950s. This…
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Alix E Harrow’s, ‘The Once and Future Witches’ is a book with a righteous temper. Telling the story of the three Eastwood sisters, Juniper, Agnes and Bella—brought up in witchcraft, an old witchcraft that has been otherwise lost to the rest of the world—and their part in fighting for women’s suffrage in a subtly alternate…
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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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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…
Damien Kelly 