#Review - The Strandling by James Brogden

James Brogden
Aion Books, 2 September 2024 
Available as: PB, 365pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9798333565426

I'm grateful to the author for sending me a copy of The Strandling  to consider for review.

Set in the present day, in a village on the East Coast of England which is rapidly being eroded into the sea, The Strandling has extremely resonant mythic themes as well as confronting present day issues including climate justice and religious intolerance.

Megan Howard lives a difficult life, looking after her father in a cottage that will fall into the sea come the next big storm. (And it is coming!) Her dad, broken by his wife's death, collects junk from the shore and it's left to Megan, who stopped going to school during the Covid epidemic, to try and persuade him to accept the Council's offer of new accommodation inland. 

Megan also does her best to take care of the scattered community living in and around the village, doing what she calls her 'rounds' visiting the old and the housebound who live in caravans on the margins of society. Her closest friend is probably her dog, Kelpy, who she rescued from the beach some years before. No-one else seems to care much for Megan, indeed many do not approves of her (in particular one of the local farmers hates her and Kelpy) - but she doesn't care much about that.

Yet is will fall to Megan, again, to step up when the local community is threatened by an evil from its past, and she may have the means to fight it.

If they'll let her.

Brogden's books always weave together the supernatural and the eerie and very practical, workaday issues. They make no bones about the presence of the weird - so here we see something very nasty emerge in an otherwise modern setting, a village beset by climate change and the kind of poverty that is increasingly common in marginal communities. Yes, there's a mystery about the 'something nasty' but Bogden shows it emerging, and something of its perspective (a perspective deeply interwoven with the reality of the place, with the drowned land under the North Sea and the drowning land that is still to be lost).

There is also a mystery about Megan (and Kelpy) who seem to be becoming the villages' protection, but we don't understand either although we see them go about their business. The story reminded me in some ways of MR James, with modern day people oblivious to the historical dangers and protections that surround them, and as liable to do the wrong thing as the right. The trouble here is, though - what is the right thing?

With many moments of danger, a salty taste of gathering evil and the ever real threat of the sea and the storms, it's hard to see how The Strandling won't end with carnage. My concern was, though, who would pay the price for that carnage?

The Strandling is a book that explores being folk horror but is I think in the end something even more complex and satisfying. 

Strongly recommended.

Review - The Scholar and the Last Fairy Door by HG Parry

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door

HG Parry
Orbit, 24 October 2024
Available as: PB, 436pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356520322

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door  to consider for review.

I have been enjoying HG Parry's books, particularly how they address inequalities such as those of race, gender and colonialism, aspects of society that some strands of fantasy manage to sidestep (one might even say, some strands of fantasy seem to exist to do that).

In The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, set mainly in post Great War England, that means largely class prejudice, colonialism and patriarchy. 

Clover is a young girl growing up on a farm in Lancashire. When her brother is seriously injured on the Western Front, Clover determines to learn magic in order to discover how to help him. The magic she studies is largely the preserve of the upper classes, taught on a magical campus called "Camford" (it can only be entered from either Oxford or Cambridge). Overcoming considerable barriers merely to earn a place at Camford, Clover comes up against the reality of life as a 'scholarship witch', distinctly second rate among the gilded young things of post war England's magical elite, very few of whom are women and even fewer of whom are poor - or Northern.

Fortunately (or perhaps not as events turn out) Clover is taken up by the circle that follows Alden Lennox-Fontaine. There's a question about why they allow her such access, but Clover pushes that to the back of her mind - until she's forced to confront reality and ask what her fine friends really want.

I absolutely loved The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door. Clover is a redoubtable and likeable personality, wrestling with real life dilemmas: different social circles, the pain of moving on from home to grander (maybe) things, class prejudice and guilt, and friendships. And, as then layers of truth are peeled back from England's magical world, there is the need to reckon with the crimes of the past and to admit that foundations of the glittering world - with which Clover is so enchanted - may conceal crimes and violence. As a metaphor for a colonial society it's compelling and rich.

But The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door isn't just a neat allegory for imperialism, it also features active, buzzing characters, a strong plot and an increasingly taut and thrilling denouement with Clover hunted by malign forces and forced to reckon up what she most values - and fight for it. And to recognise what may be lost.

All in all, an engaging and fun read with thought-provoking themes. I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

A Conventional Boy (Laundry Files, 13)

Charles Stross
Little, Brown, 7 January 2025
Available as: HB, 224pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356524641

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending giving me access to an advance e-copy of A Conventional Boy to consider for review.

A Conventional Boy is a more or less contemporary Laundry Files novella set before the events that brought us The New Management. (If you need to be told what all that means, when we are 13 books into this series, you possibly shouldn't be starting here and I'm not going to explain it all because this is only meant to be a short review - although if you do start her I think you'll soon get the hang of things.)

The protagonist is Derek Reilly, a young boy who, in the 1980s, expressed an incautious love of Dungeons and Dragons and due to an unfortunate misunderstanding was rounded up by the Laundry, the branch of the British secret services that deals with supernatural threats, due to an unfortunate misuderstanding. As a teenager who was very into D&D at the same time, I can only say, there but for the grace of God... 

Well. Decades later, Derek is still banged up, now institutionalised in a shabby camp for - what shall we call them? Not so much political as, perhaps, Ludic prisoners? - situated in the Lake District, England's wettest region. Rehabilitated to a degree, he's allowed to run his play-by-mail RPGs because the camp hierarchy think he's harmless and don't read what he's producing. If they did they might get some hints about their own futures. In an amusingly meta development we see Derek analysing and puzzling over developments in the Laundry saga that readers of the recent books will be well familiar with.

So far, so OK... till one day Derek learns that a major RPG convention is taking place just down the road and he decides to show up. That involves a fiendish escape plan and then contact with the modern world - something he's been denied for thirty years.

All of this is slickly handled and amusingly done, I love the vein of co(s)mic horror that Stross maintains in these books, delivered in the deadpan style of a 1950s field training manual, agents for the use of. At the same time there are I think definite barbs aimed at over commercialised RPG companies (or at one in particular, I'm sure you can guess which) with too much money to splash and no love for the games. One such is up to something nefarious here, and a ragtag group assembles to take them on before something really bad can happen to Derek.

Or before he can do something really bad.

Or perhaps, both.

A Quest (of course!) results, as always in the Laundry books, and while I think Stross has dropped the idea of channeling a particular different author or trope in each of these books, nevertheless, the story follows the logic, as it were, of a dungeon crawling RPG with challenges to be solved and dangers awaiting. That's of course playing to Derek's strengths - he's basically been in training for this all his adult life - and he also has help and support. The final third of the book is therefore a no holds barred battle with the danger not just the immediate threat of the dungeon, but a real peril for the visible world as well.

Great fun and a book I consumed pretty much in one reading. Recommended.

For more information about A Conventional Boy, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Broken River by Chris Hammer

The Broken River (Ivan Lucic & Nell Buchanan #4) 

Chris Hammer
Headline (Wildfire), 2 January 2025
Available as: HB, 464pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781035410774

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Broken River to consider for review.

The "Broken River" of the title gets its because it flows through a valley in New South Wales that was once ruined by uncontrolled gold prospecting. Trees were felled, farmland destroyed, the Indigenous population driven away, and the river itself redirected and channelled to serve human greed..

But the gold went away, as gold will. The Valley remains and is now peaceful - apart from ongoing friction between loggers and environmentalists. But it's not that which draws Ivan and Nell to the remote community, rather a prominent businessman has died under suspicious circumstances and the two are sent to investigate. Exactly why this death merits the attention of their high profile murder team rather than being left to the local police isn't clear, though...

I loved this novel. Hammer has established a winning formula with these books, dissecting the tensions and history of a small community where the shadow of the past is always, always shaping the present. Like previous books, the timeline moves back and forward, giving us glimpses of what set the modern day mystery in motion, but keeping the spotlight mainly on Ivan and Nell as they resolve them. The last book, Cover the Bones, also closely involved Nell whose family turned out to be involved with the mystery (but also, not to be quite the family she had thought). The Broken River builds on that family connection making the two books in some respects, I think, a little duology of their own within the series as Hammer tells us more here about Nell's origins. Given that Ivan's life has calmed down since his father's death, that is perhaps a logical development in the pairing. It's time to find out more about Nell. The past timeline has, perhaps, to strain a little to accommodate this but the drive of the plot, and the passion of the events and characters, easily carries the reader along in a story that's both exciting and baffling.

There is certainly plenty going on. The days of gold mining may, it seems, be coming back to The Valley, but, aside from the death that sets things in motion, there is a series of puzzles to be solved. Accidents, disappearances and coincidences surround the old abandoned mine. An inheritance is in play. There is a crooked lawyer who its suspected of enriching himself. And thugs from out of town seem to be taking an interest - what is their agenda? Will the new owner be the one who finally succeeds in turning this stubborn valley to profit?

The Broken River has a bit of everything - family passions, secrets, gangsters, and corruption in high places. Will Lucic and Nell be up to unravelling things...? Well, what do you think?

Marrying a fascinating setting with a vivid cast of characters, The Broken River is another excellent continuation to this series. And publishing these books in the UK in the dreariest time of the year is a stroke of genius (I write as I look out into the pouring rain) as we can live out all this drama beneath the heat of the Southern Hemisphere.

Again, the setting here is well realised and intriguing, helpfully illustrated by  another of Aleksander Ptočnik's maps (though to call these gorgeous 3D realisations "maps" doesn't really convey their nature very well). 

For more information about The Broken River, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Legacy of Arniston House by T L Huchu

The Legacy of Arniston House (Edinburgh Nights, 4) 
T L Huchu
Tor (Pan Macmillan), 7 November 2024 
Available as: HB, 400pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529097771

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Legacy of Arniston House to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

I've been really enjoying Huchu's Edinburgh Nights series, of which The Legacy of Arniston House is book 4. The setting is a chastened Scotland, humbled in the aftermath of a "Catastrophe" and held down by a resurgent England. Its capital has complex politics, criminal networks, magic and, above all, the authentic texture of an alternate Edinburgh.

Huchu's main character, Ropa Moyo, is engaging and spiky, a marginalised figure (literally - she and her gran live squatters' lives in a caravan encampment on the edge of the city) who is trying to make her way in the world of Scottish magic whose leading lights, snooty and entitled as they are, don't want to be bothering with her. At the end of the previous book, The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle, Ropa seemed to have caught a break when she was hired by the English Sorcerer Royal. While I was concerned this might take her away from Edinburgh, I need not have worried: it seems that Lord Samarasinghe has ongoing business in the North. (That can't bode well, can it...?) Ropa is therefore still hanging round her old home town, albeit cut off from magical society, something that pains her more than she expected. She's even able to revive her old gig as a ghost talker, albeit not everything seems to be well in the spirit realms... there could be trouble ahead.

Huchu definitely ramps up the tension in this book. After a deceptively calm opening (if you've read the first few chapters you may say to yourself "David's talking nonsense again" because they don't seem that calm, but JUST YOU WAIT, IT'S ALL RELATIVE) mayhem of all sorts erupts with rioting, mischief and Ropa being hunted by both magicians and Police. She's framed for a heinous crime and  the whole world she was used tseems about to be torn apart. All this leads up to a fast-moving conclusion in which we learn more both about Ropa's past and about recent Scottish history - and are then left, literally, on a cliffhanger. 

Or perhaps, over one.

Compared with the first three books, which were more self-contained, The Legacy of Arniston House represents a clear change of gear and of focus. There is, as in each of the others, a self-contained mystery and an injustice to be solved and righted (you might think, actually, several). But there is also a much more intricate and visible connection to the plot that's been glimpsable in the background, with certain puzzles finally closed from those earlier stories. At the same time, the implications of Ropa's own history and background are made plain for the first time.

A fun return to what is shaping up to be one of the most interesting and readable series of the past few years. I'll wait for the next book with a great deal of anticipation.

For more information about The Legacy of Arniston House, see the publisher's website here. 

You can buy The Legacy of Arniston House from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones.

#Review - The Proof of my Innocence by Jonathan Coe

The Proof of my Innocence

Jonathan Coe
Penguin, 7 November 2024 
Available as: HB, 352pp, PB, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780241678411

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Proof of my Innocence  to consider for review.

Reading a review this weekend of a new TV series set in the 80s, I found myself agreeing with the writer's point that to portray the 80s, you need to stir in a good deal of the 70s. Coe would I think agree, at least one of the characters in his novel would, asking as she does when the 80s began? (The answer isn't 1 January 1980).

The 80s 'beginning' is code in this discussion for the onset of the individualistic, consensus-breaking phase in UK national life which has often been a theme, or lurking in the background, of Coe's novels. It's particularly appropriate here since The Proof of my Innocence focusses on what one may hope is the end, or the beginning of the end, of that worldview, with a bunch of highly unattractive and ideologically bent conservatives meeting in a rural hotel to set their world to rights. This takes place as the Queen (THE Queen: sorry, but that's what she'll always be even for this anti-monarchist) dies, and Liz Truss is appointed to her catastrophic period as PM. (When I reviewed Coe's last novel, Bournville, which appeared just after that time and had a key episode around most of the significant points of post war British history, I noted it was a shame that publication timetables meant he had missed that one - he does though take it in here, most notably The Queue, is a sequence that could almost be a coda to the earlier book).  

Coe is though slightly playing games with the reader: the conference section is in a part of the book that also, or perhaps primarily, explores the conventions and settings of the cosy crime genre (the out-of-this-world setting, the eccentric detective, the unlikely murder) as subsequent sections do dark academia and autofiction (in a pleasingly meta way). They're not parodies or pastiches of those genres, still less I think meant as straight examples, but those styles do influence the events and characters. So after the gruesome country house section introduces a foodie detective who's about to retire, we get a memoir of 80s Cambridge which touches on a cabal who meet behind locked doors (and I think a walk on part by Coe himself?) and then a jointly narrated section by the two young women whose story frames this book, inspired by autofiction.

What these three interrelated stories are all about though is unpicking the tragic story of a novelist, Peter Cockerel, who committed suicide, also in the 1980s. He's a shadowy figure whose books have been given a posthumous revival by an academic, also an attendee at that conference. Cockerill's voice gives Coe an opportunity to explore a conservative worldview and vision at one remove, or two, perhaps, with something of the same distancing effect that MR James might use in a ghost: here is something I found, in the last quarter of the previous century, in an old manuscript; and here is the trouble it got me into. That distancing is I think important here as it creates a separation between what is at least a fairly human view of conservatism and the grotesque cult that it now seems to be.  Perhaps that's a true difference of perhaps it's just nostalgia. In either case Coe demonstrates, and comments on, the difference, and suggests how it perhaps arose (that moment when the 80s began!) but he is wise enough to not try to diagnose it in detail. 

Rather, the point is illustrated, in a variety of settings, throughout the book in encounters with lift controls, overheard chat on a train, and even a character who, unwittingly, sings in his sleep. What goes on in our heads, and our ability to empathise with what goes on own others' minds, is important here. Some things should be shared and others, not. Both individuality and the collective experience matter, but the boundaries between the two can shift and that is not a light matter.

In a book that features murder (perhaps more than once), suicide, and other deaths, it's hardly surprising that bereavement and how we cope with it, or don't, is also a theme. Death is of course one of the great internal/ external events in life so is a suitable part of the book's subject.

As always with Coe's books, I found The Proof of my Innocence very entertaining and funny, but it also made me think hard about appearances and reality (as I said, he plays some games). As the husband of a vicar, and someone who has far too many books, I also took the opening scenes, in a book infested rectory, very personally, and wondered if, indeed, Coe doesn't have uncanny abilities to see into others' minds...

For more information about The Proof of my Innocence, see the publisher's website here. 

#Review - Ice Town by Will Dean

Ice Town (Tuva Moodyson, 6)

Will Dean
Hodder & Stoughton, 7 November 2024
Available as: HB, 400pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781399717342

I'm grateful to the publisher for  giving me access to an advance e-copy of Ice Town to consider for review.

Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

The sun is spent, and now his flasks

Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

The world's whole sap is sunk...

- John Donne

Two years on from the shocking events that rounded off Book 4 in this series, Bad Apples, Tuva is keeping on keeping on. She fell back into binge drinking, but has come through that with the support of a good friend, though unsurprisingly she is still not looking after herself very well (when does he ever?) as we see with her diet. Life in Toytown is though quiet, and perhaps Tuva needs the atmosphere of a major evolving story - so she seizes the chance to drive 20 hours north to cover the search for a missing Deaf teenager in a VERY remote town.

Esseberg is something else, even among the strange locations that Dean has given us so far in this series. Entirely surrounded by mountains, it's accessible only through a single-lane tunnel that is shared between road and rail. One must wait for a time slot to drive through and, once inside the town, there is no escape when the tunnel shuts down for the night.

This place is then even more isolated, inward looking and suspicious than Gavrik - and Tuva has no standing here, no relationship with the police, and no base to operate from (she's staying at a B&B that doesn't serve breakfast, and that is also the town's tanning salon, popular in the Winter months).

Tenacious as ever Tuva goes about her work, against a background of severe cold and short days, trying to establish what has happened to Peter even as bodies begin to turn up. Dean exploits a real flair for the gothic here vin portraying how this remote community reacts to the tragedy unfolding. Several times Tuva is put in danger - visits to the creepy hotel accessible only by chairlift are especially skin crawling. St Lucy's Day, the shortest day (and the subject of Donne's poem which I've quoted above, because that last line, The world's whole sap is sunk, just seems to me to sum up the atmosphere here) is approaching. Normally this would be a big deal as the world turns back to light, but the mood is hardly celebratory rather the villagers begin to go out only in pairs and the local biker gang patrols the streets as vigilantes.

It is great to meet Tuva again. This stubborn, lonely, and often, suffering, woman has been through a lot in earlier books but she still reaches out to help others, whether it's the missing Deaf young man here or her neighbour's kid (and at the moving climax of this book, we hear of another). Strictly she's out of her own domain and has no business here, but she sets about unpicking the threads of life in a small town, allowing us encounters with many interesting characters - whether it's the ex-con ski lift manager, the self-absorbed true crime podcaster, or creepy Eric at the hotel. As ever, Tuva has to balance the need to push these people for info, to go further than the police can, with her position as a stranger, an outsider in Ice Town, someone who may herself be at risk in a tight-knit community where survival depends on the community and somebody who throws round accusations or asks awkward questions may just slip out of that circle of support...

The writing here is good - one senses a warmth from Dean for his protagonist - and we learn more about her complicated early life, but while unexpected, the details don't come as just dropped in, it all makes sense in the context of the character. Billed as a standalone episode in the series, presumably because it's set "away", this book nevertheless feels fully integrated with what's gone before and sets up plotlines and hints for the future.

It's great to this series powering forward so strongly and I am eager to hear more about Tuva Moodyson.

For more information about Ice Town, see the publisher's website here.