#Blogtour #Review - Hunted by Damian Dawes

Hunted (Abarath Trilogy, Book 1)
Damian Dawes
Dark Night Horror, 25 January 2022
Available as: PB, 321pp, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781739990879

I'm grateful to the publisher and to Anne Cater for a free advance e-copy of Hunted to consider for review, and for inviting me to take part in the blogtour.

Taking us back to the dying days of the Cold War in 1983, Hunted features an apparently unlikely collaboration: the Vladyka Mira, an ex-Soviet icebreaker, is now owned by maverick Russian captain Belov and (under) crewed by a collection of misfits from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Ostensibly engaged on a scientific mission, Belov's happy to take tourists too, on the sly.

The focus of the book is on Kat Robbins, a diver enlisted for the research work but who has some secrets of her own. Perhaps they might explain why she's buried herself away at the end of the earth, abandoned her boyfriend and gets by on drugs? But perhaps they are a luxury that will cost her, fatally distracting Kat from whatever it is that's out there. On the ice. In the cold.

I really enjoyed this story which is pitched somewhere between the supernatural - the creature we encounter has apparently inspired dark legends among the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic, but is all to physical in its actions - and a thriller: the focus on dive hardware, the deficiencies of the ship and that lurking East-West split put me in mind of full-throated adventure novels where survival is all about reading the environment, thinking quickly and understanding risk.

Speaking of which - Captain Belov seems to have lost his ability to cope with risk. Seemingly a bit of a cliché at the start (a drunken Russian sailor) Dawes rather cleverly turns him inside out, letting us see where he's from and how he got there, rather than just letting him stay a swaying, inebriated stereotype. He does the same with all the characters here: the awful businessman who's booked passage aboard and his rather crushed wife, the couple of sad academics, Dave - Kat's fellow diver - and perhaps most of all, the ship's engineer, a truly awful character, a stalker and abuser who, nevertheless, Kat is forced to rely on in one particularly claustrophobic episode.

Hunted is full of that kind of dark menace: threats from the unknown horror outside but also from the monsters aboard the ship who - frankly - can be just as dangerous and difficult to defend from. There is a lot said here about how the "monster" out there is purse evil.  I have to say I had my doubts - isn't it an animal doing what animals do? (Though, as this is just volume 1, there are also hints of more - so perhaps it'll turn not to be). On the other hand we do see some truly evil human behaviour, with the plight of a starving Polar bear and her cub pointing up the wider impact of climate change. 

Overall this makes it an atmospheric and scary piece of writing. There's much to discover in this book. 

For more information, see the author's website here - and check out the other stops on the tour, listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Hunted from Amazon here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Spider Dance by Nick Setchfield

Cover design by Natasha MacKenzie

The Spider Dance
Nick Setchfield
Titan Books, 16 July 2019
PB, 408pp

I'm grateful to Sarah at Titan Books for a free advance copy of The Spider Dance to review as part of the blogtour.

"Know first thyself..."

This is the second book in Setchfield's series about British agent Christopher Winter. In the War in the Dark, Winter discovered a new and unsuspected front on which the Service was fighting, a supernatural front, and that he had, in a now lost persona, been intimately involved in that struggle.

In The Spider Dance, we learn more about magician Tobias Hart, the man Winter used to be. Winter has attempted to escape the Service and start a new career as hired muscle to a firm of gangsters (this is London in the Swinging 60s) - but when things go wrong, he's drawn back in to the deadly dance...

I loved it that the central character in these stories has had, and lost, great power; is disgusted by that power and what it can do, and reluctant to awaken it; yet is forced to do so. Winter is a partial hero, a man more seeking to survive, to find safety, and to come to terms with his past, than to triumph - at one point in this story he effectively becomes a well paid hitman in the supernatural world. He's caught in a world where allies, ex friends, and enemies all seem to know who he was and what he could do, yet he doesn't know himself. In a vicious world filled with monsters and the supernatural, Winter seems well out of his depth and it isn't clear there he'll find the knowledge power he needs - or whether he even wants to.

Anton aspect that caught my fancy is Setchfield's skilful blessing of the tropes of the gangster novel - a "gentlemanly" crime family head with all trappings of piety, but whose hands are nonetheless filthy, an illicit trade in certain substances (though not quite what you'd think), a city in fear - with those of horror, in this case horror associated with particular monsters. This one is more crime than espionage, despite some early chapters behind the Iron Curtain (which nonetheless capture the authentic atmosphere of a 60s Cold War thriller).

In some respects it's a simpler story that The War in the Dark. There, it wasn't clear exactly what was going on, Winter's secret history was still, well, secret, and there were clearly several factions but we didn't know who they were. Now, a lot is out in the open (if if details remain obscure) and it's less a matter of Winter learning that his supposed life was a lie than of him living with the consequences. So The Spider Dance is more straightforward, but no less readable and the character of Christopher Winter, as Setchfield draws him, is a fascinating and subtle one.

Great fun whether you're into thrillers or horror and - of course - just the thing if you like a blend of the two.

To find out more about the book or order a copy, visit the Titan website here.