Reviews of titles starting with A.
Popstars of the 60s dread their back catalogue going into the public domain. Their retirement fund has now been opened to everyone to listen to for free. If you think that is sad, please spare a moment for the poor authors who have long died and whose work is open to all. The likes of...
Daniel Polansky is the author of the wonderful Low Town fantasy series, which shows how great a story-teller he is. A City Dreaming stretches these talents and more.
The book follows the life of M, a magically gifted drifter with a loose grip on morality and a quick, sharp tongue. He...
A Crown of Swords is the seventh volume in Robert Jordans epic fantasy series, the Wheel of Time. Following on from the events in The Lord of Chaos, the book begins with the aftermath of the battle at Dumai's Wells. Elayne, Nyneave and Mat manage to finally locate the legendary "Bowl of the...
A Festival of Skeletons is a dark comedic fantasy novel by RJ Astruc. At such rare times of self-doubt, Sink usually fell back on his old adage: What I see I cannot change. But in the aftermath of the massacre it sounded somehow hollow. The merkind hadn’t been right but she hadn’t been far...
To the uninitiated, the fantasy genre is stagnant. The same old dwarves and elves going on long journeys and then back again. Any fan of the genre knows that this is just not the case. The genre has evolved with society. The fantasy books of the 80s and 90s differ greatly from Tolkien...
A Heist Too Far is a fantasy novel by Rob Knipe. Mallik is a skilled assassin who is very quick on his feet with an even quicker temper, he travels with Dick Swede (aka The Black Moustache) who is nearly famous as a highwayman and Jules Van Jives - a quickly bored elf with an unhealthy obession...
A fantasy writer needs to be aware that they could fall into a rut. Another trilogy of books set in the same world, with similar characters doing similar things. This may appease those fans that fear change, but to drive themselves as a writer it is important to evolve; even if evolving within...
There are two ways to treat fairy folk in a fantasy novel. You can hide them, only the protagonist knowing that there is a secret world in the forest. Or you can embrace them. Make the likes of goblins and fairies' part of everyday life. In A Market of Dreams and Destiny by Trip Galey, an accord...
Secrets are powerful. They can make or break someone. In the alternative Edwardian England of Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light there is a magical society of people who hide their powers. This is a big secret to keep, but there are others. Both Robin Blyth and...
Urban Fantasy is its own distinct genre from Fantasy as it takes the essence of swords, orcs and elves and brings them into an urban setting. Having read a lot of this sub-genre, it has increasingly become a victim of its own tropes. A lot of Urban Fantasy feels the...
And it came to pass in those days, as it had come before and would come again, that the Dark lay heavy on the land and weighed down the hearts of men, and the green things failed, and hope died.
For those who have been following the journey of Jordans' epic fantasy series, reaching this...
How do you like your science fiction and fantasy? I will admit to being someone who loves a simple and accessible tale, but the genres can offer so much more than this. There are few genres better equipped to take a reader to truly alien places, to worlds that feel like they were designed in a...
I have not lived in the village I grew up in over twenty years, but I still talk about going home when I am visiting. Where I live now has been my home for longer, but there is something about those formative years that make a place always feel like home. I return to see family, but for some...
Dan Shaper is a wreck, a private "fixer" who takes on jobs for those people who won't or can't go to the police. Constantly haunted by an event in his past life while working as a violent underworld enforcer the only way he can keep those crippling memories at bay is by a growing cocktail of...
A Slip of the Keyboard isn't quite an autobiography and yet in many ways it feels like one. It contains a collection of essays, articles, speeches and interviews by the author from 1963 up to the present day. It is the essence of Pratchett, his thoughts on writing, his development and lately his...
I've been reading Remic's stories for a number of years now. His Clockwork Vampire Series is heroic fantasy at it's very best.
What I didn't realise though was how much he has grown as an author since, that is until I discovered A Song for No Mans Land on Amazon.
...
They say that you should never meet your heroes, lest they disappoint, but I have met several of my favourite authors over the years and have always had a pleasant experience. I never had the chance to meet Sir Terry Pratchett which was a shame as he was, like for many readers of genre fiction,...
A surfeit of mandrake is a short story Anthology which includes elements of fantasy, science fiction, history poems and original artwork. Edited by Chaz Wood and written by a diverse group of Dundonian's. Surfeit - "An excessive amount of something" Mandrake - a plant belonging to the...
A Taste of Blood Wine is romantic. It’s chock full of smoldering description, intrigue and mystery, dark love, and all sorts of gossip and twists and turns.
The novel follows Charlotte, the daughter and lab partner of a scientist, as she rapidly falls for the vampire Karl. But then the...
This is the second in the series of books of short stories in the shadows of the apt world from Newcon Press written by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
You don't need to have read Tales of the Apt book 1, Spoils of War, to appreciate this one, but it would probably help if you were familiar...
Following the events of A Time of Dread, this book raises the stakes even further. Drem and friends flee the horrors at Starstone Lake. They must warn the Order of the Bright Star that a Demon has risen, but Fritha, the Demon's high Priestess has other ideas and is hot on their heels....
Abhorsen is a young adult fantast novel by Garth Nix and is the third volume in the Old Kingdom Series, following on from the events in Sabriel and Lirael. Prince Sameth and the Abhorsen in waiting Lirael are contemplating their next move at the Abhorsens house in the old Kingdom. Surrounded on...
There is a surprising amount of Fantasy that is essentially an epic game of magical rock, paper, scissors. Various mages, witches and Gods all fighting each other with differing powers. They are strong against one power, but weak against another. The balance of the world rests on all these...
I found this book during a post Christmas hunt in my local Waterstones after receiving a number of gift vouchers. I had never read anything by the author (or indeed the publisher) but have seen the third novel in the series (the Immorality Engine) appearing around the web for a while.
...
Have you ever sat down and read some Fairy Tales to your children? Not the sanitised versions that we read today, but the originals. If you have, you gave the kids nightmares as these are stories not about happiness and magic but of...
As a science fiction fan it has to be said that we are becoming increasingly lucky. Film and TV companies seem to have finally grasped that the genre is a gold mine for stories, and that when done right, these stories can attract a big audience.
American Gods is one of the more recent...
Among Others is about as different from any novel I have read than the Moon is from a piece of pie. It's not even a book I thought I would enjoy either, if someone had approached me and asked me to read a novel about a 15 year old girls account of her life in a boarding school - delivered in...
A long running series is a mixed blessing. You can return to the same characters over the books, but too often a series becomes stale quickly and the characters seem to live in statis were they never change. This can never be said of the excellent Rivers of London novels by Ben Aaronovitch...
Illustration ©2019 Francis Vallejo from The Folio Society edition of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys.
The asymmetrical sequel to Gaiman’s American Gods, Anansi Boys makes use of the same dramatic conceit, that Gods exist and walk amongst us. However, this...
This book, by Kiersten White, is a gender flipped historically based story of the early life of Vlad the Impaler or in this case, Lada Dracul.
White takes the bones of the historical accounts and layers it with a rich imaginings of characters and quirks, to give the reader some...
It sometimes feels that if you have read one fantasy novel, you have read them all. The same tropes crop up again and again. This may be comforting to fans of the genre, but people that dabble may soon become bored. Those of us in the know realise that there is a wealth of variation if you are...
Angel of Death is a contemporary fantasy / horror novel by author J Robert King. The Angel of Death for Chicago overseas a an area that stretches from lake county Indiana to Milwaukee, a vast sprawl of a metropolis. His task is to ensure that each person's death matches their lives as closely as...
Angel Souls and Devil Hearts is the second volume in the fantasy horror series "The Shadow Saga" by Christopher Golden. An Epic tale of Vampires, Sorcery and War... The Shadows have been living among us unknown for thousands of years and now revealed the ancient Vampire race must confront the...
In the fantasy that I usually read Regicide is usually the goal for the end of the book. In fact, I have read entire trilogies in which the protagonist is trying to kill a royal. You get the sense that Evan Leikam is going to tackle things a little differently in Anji Kills a King when the first...
I remember reading the short story "Red Reign" about 20 years ago, written by Newman and published in the Mammoth Book of Vampires. This short story formed the basis for the novel and it's been on my list of books to read for some time. The imminent re-release of the sequel "The Bloody Red...
Anno Frankenstein is a novel in the Pax Britannia series featuring the intrepid adventurer Ulysses Quicksilver. In this alternative universe, Magna Britannia is the undisputed superpower of the world whereas since the second great European war, Hitler’s Nazi party has been reduced to the...
Fantasy is one of my favourite genres for a reason. It is a genre that can tell epic storylines through several different characters and span the years. G R Macallister’s Five Queendoms trilogy does just that focussing on the female characters. This is a land dominated by powerful...
Arm of the Sphinx is the second in the Books of Babel series by Josiah Bancroft and follows on from the events of Senlin Ascends.
Tom - who is now going by the name of Captain Mudd, continues his search for Marya. He has help, with the airship The Stone Cloud and it's motley crew. Since...
As Wonders Go By a wildly different book to most I've read. For a start it's narrated in the second person, there aren't many I've read that take this approach.
The protagonist is a woman of "loose morals", at large in Europe and looking for "adventure". She finds more adventure even she...
Ten weeks ago Homicide Detective Sailor Doyle worked on his first ever solo case, a horrific double murder in a remote area of Virginia that almost finished him for good. Now he's recuperating from the physical wounds and mental trauma, the near death experience acting as a focus to overcome...
At the Mountains of Madness is a novella set within the Cthulhu Mythos and written by HP Lovecraft. The Barren, windswept interior of the Antarctic plateau is considered completely devoid of life until an expedition from the University of Miskatonic find strange fossils of unknown creatures...
Autumn was originally self published and given away by the author ten years ago, since then it has been read by hundreds of thousands of people and even turned into a film starring David Carradine and Dexter Fletcher. It's now published by those fantastic people over at Gollancz and I must say...
Carrying on right from where we left the survivors back in Autumn: The City, Purification takes us further down the Zombie survival road. Pretty much imprisoned within the underground Army base this small group sit and wait while on the surface the crowd of shuffling corpses is growing in size...
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 horribly wrong....
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