latest reviews
Autumn - The City
by David Moody
Autumn - The City is the follow up to the sensational zombie novel Autumn, promising the same power and subtle horror of the first.
It takes a lot of guts to start a story again right from the beginning but told from a different perspective - a brave move that could have gone horri...
Blackbirds
by Chuck Wendig
Blackbirds follows the life of Miriam Black who has a singular gift (or curse) that means each time she touches someone she knows when and how they will die - vividly reliving their final moments.
Still in her early twenties she's seen sights most people couldn't even imagine along...
Vivisepulture
by Andy Remic
Vivisepulture is an ebook collection of weird tales from some seriously talented authors, edited by the singular Andy Remic. (According to the online dictionary Vivisepulture is the act of burying someone alive by the way and you get some odd articles looking that one up on Google I can tell you!...
Zombies: A Compendium
by Otto Penzler
Brains, Brains, BRAINS!, you just have to love those lurching, decaying animated corpses. The living dead make a great enemy and here we have wall-to-wall flesh eating monsters, ghouls and things that go bite in the night, brought to (un)life by some of the best horror and fantasy writers in the ...
Storm Front
by Jim Butcher
Storm Front is the first novel introducing the wizard P.I. Harry Dresden to the world, a gritty urban fantasy that manages to captivate right from the start.
We join Harry as he's going through a bit of a slow patch and so when the Chicago PD asks for help with a double homicide he...
Out of Oz
by Gregory Maguire
I must admit that I missed the first 3 novels in this series although I have heard a lot about them (all good) and remember hearing about the (Tony winning) Broadway musical that was based on the first book "Wicked".
The books themselves are inspired by Frank Baum's childrens clas...
Legends of Marithia: Darkness Rising
by Peter Koevari
Back in May last year I reviewed a novel by Peter Koevari, a promising new Indie author who has been creating an epic fantasy series known as Legends of Marithia.
This is the second novel in that series and follows straight on from the events of the previous book - Legends of Marit...
World War Z
by Max Brooks
A Zombie novel by the son of comic legend Mel Brooks, World War Z is told as a series of interconnected interviews from survivors of the zombie war all over the world.
This method of storytelling is very different, there is no central protagonist or contiguous plot, instead we lear...
The Legends of Light
by Gill Shutt
Legends of Light is a high fantasy saga told as a series of poems, each building upon the last to weave a tale of magic, romance and creatures of the dark.
I must admit that I am not really one to read poems, they have never interested me in the slightest and so when I was asked to...
Symphony of Blood
by Adam Pepper
Hank Mondale is a rough and ready P.I. who likes to drink and gamble more than he should, a lifestyle choice which has led to his landlord threatening to evict him and bookie threatening a great deal worse, he desperately needs a break.
When the real estate mogul Thomas Blake call...
Find the latest Fantasy book reviews here. Fantasy as a genre can be very difficult to define but is usually said to encompass stories set in an alternative reality based on imagined fantastical elements like magic or the supernatural. This is the defining difference between science fiction and fantasy, science fiction deals with elements that are theoretically possible while fantasy deals with the improbable or impossible.
Fantasy can be most commonly associated with sword and sorcery stories however the genre can include contemporary (Harry Potter) and humorous (Tom Holt) tales. Fantasy, science fiction and horror can occasionally overlap and generally the term used to describe these novels is speculative fiction.
Fantasy fiction can trace it's roots all the way back to ancient mythology, especially Homer's Odyssey which was written in the 9th century BC. Homer's Odyssey chronicles the fictional adventures of a hero returning to Ithaca after the capture of Troy. The earliest surviving English text of fantasy origins is the poem Beowulf which dates back to 700 AD.
The most recognisable to modern audiences is perhaps the Legends of King Arthur and the knights of the round table. These stories have been told many times from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur (around 1485 AD) to T. H. White's The Once and Future King (1958), Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (1982) and Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle (1987).
The series that could be said to bring fantasy into the mainstream has to be Terry Brooks Sword of Shannara series, written in 1977 it was one of the first modern fantasy books to become a new york times best seller. Since then this has been repeated by David Eddings, Robert Jordan, Terry Good Kind and Terry Pratchett.
Here you can find fantasy book reviews from the big name authors to the self published and independant, it's the story that's always the star here.
