#Review - The House that Horror Built by Christina Henry

The House That Horror Built

Christina Henry

Titan Books, 14 May 2024

Available as: HB, 336pp, audio, e   

Source: Advance e-cop

ISBN(PB): 9781803364032

I'm grateful to Titan for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The House That Horror Built to consider for review.

Christina Henry's horror stories are always challenging and creepy, but in The House That Horror Built she's really surpassed herself. Explicitly addressing the conventions of the genre, this story also takes on issues of homelessness and economic precariousness ('resentment is a familiar meal when you can't afford contentment'), religious indoctrination and social privilege.

Harry, the lead character, is a single mother scraping a living in Chicago as the US comes out of covid lockdown. Hard up (she's a waitress and of course the restaurants are mostly closed) she's lucky enough - or so it seems - to get a cleaning job with reclusive and scandal-hit film director Javier Castillo. Through Christina Henry's portrayal, Harry emerges as resourceful, stretching her slender means beyond all reasonable expectations to support her son, Gabe (Gabriel) - juggling bills and supermarket coupons, always with an eye on what can be obtained cheaply.

Harry has been estranged from her Fundamentalist parents for decades (they were controlling and abusive - burning her stash of horror magazines was only the start) and the focus of her life is raising Gabe who's a star pupil but just entering those difficult teenage years. Gabe is delighted when Harry scores her new job with Javier, but as he moves further into the director's circles, Harry becomes concerned at events in Bright Horses House, Javier's isolated mansion...

I loved this book. The relationship between Harry and Gabe is wonderfully done. As a parent I can sympathise with the line Harry treads between protecting her son, sacrificing her time and attention for him, and the need not to control, to let him grow. I can also sympathise with Javier, who has his own parenting issues (his wife and son disappeared amid murky rumours of the Hollywood cover-up of a crime the boy may have committed). Harry and Gabe are horror addicts, and it was both scary and funny when they began to dissect events at Bright Horses House in the light of the grammar and conventions of the horror film. I always think horror is at its best when it is successfully self aware, as here, though this is a very difficult thing for authors to get right. To begin with they have to find a really convincing answer to that 'don't go near the old scary house' trope, because both readers and characters are fully aware of it. Here, Harry's poverty helps - but then the setting of the story in the margins of the film industry gives an added dimension to Harry's concerns over a particularly nasty prop.

It is a story that carefully builds and layers tension, as convention demands, but also, organically and credibly, given what's going on outside Bright Horses House. Harry's threatened with eviction, something that - given her shaky position on the bottom rung of society - is both all-consuming and impossible to deal with (when does she have the opportunity to house-hunt? How could she afford to move if she did). That adds a degree of menace as well as preventing her bailing out when things get weird. Sometimes horror doesn't 't mean bangs in the night and movement glimpsed out of the corner of an eye. The threat of ending up sleeping under a bridge or being followed by a creep because one can't afford the bus fare can be equally alarming.

Examining the stresses and guilt of parenthood, the story gives us three examples - Harry's strict parents, Javier's absent father, and Harry's and Gabe's (over?) close relationship. There are so many ways it can all go wrong, so many ways to lose one's kid and end up alone in a creepy old mansion...

In the end Henry gives us a spectacular climax that will leave you unable to put this story down until you reach the last page. It's a fitting ending to a magnificent story that sees her on top form.

For more information about The House That Horror Built , see the publisher's website here.

Review - Coming Up For Air by Sarah Leipciger

Coming Up For Air
Sarah Leipciger
Doubleday, 19 Mar 2020
Available as: HB, e, 320pp
Read as: e-copy via NetGalley
ISBN: 9780857526519

I'm grateful to the publisher and to NetGalley for a free advance e-copy of this book.

And now for something (for me) completely different.

Coming Up For Air tells three stories, taking place in late 19th century Paris, mid-20th century Norway and late20th/ early 21st century Canada.

We see a young woman - never named, she is literally referred to as L'Inconnue (the Unknown Woman) - travel to Paris and take up a post as companion to Madame Debord, a suspicious ('She may have been paranoid but she was still a Parisienne'), irascible older widow (older than L'Inconnue, that is, and by the judgement of the time, "old").

In Norway, Pieter Åkrehamn is a young child in the 1920s and later a grown man in the 40s and 50s. It becomes clear that he is narrating his life story - a story balanced between a love of the Northern seas and lakes, of swimming in the cold water until just before it begins to kill and between a constant, haunting grief.

And in Canada, Anouk grows up in the 80s, a girl with cystic fibrosis. Leipciger describes, not a tragedy bravely borne or any other cliche, but the day to day practical difficulties for her and for her parents. Again there is a fascination with the outdoors, with swimming now in the rivers and lakes, even the polluted Lake Toronto. (The chapters focussing on Anouk interleave with those on her mother, Nora, but these two sections are much closer to each other than the rest of the book).

Each story - and they are very different - is narrated with a crystal clear eye for detail ('the hard rainfall of a piano being played mezzo-forte', 'granite like the story of the Earth'), a studied appreciation of, and empathy for, the tiny events and incidents of everyday life. L'Inconnue's takes place over the shortest period but documents her growing up - coming to Paris as a "provincial", learning how to live there ('this was my first city, and it was Paris': there that sense here of Paris as more than a place, as a civilisation) becoming increasingly confident and self-assured, discovering love ('She had a beautiful potted belly, and if a hundred cakes would have given me a belly like that I would have eaten every one of them') but - not a spoiler as this is the first scene we encounter - throwing herself into the Seine in despair. Anouk's story parallels L'Inconnue's, we see her growing up, a happy child, through medical crises, finding her feet, weathering her parents' increasing distance, but, also, coming to a crisis point where her condition requires a lung transplant.

Bridging the two, Pieter's story spans the longest period and forms a critical bridge in the book though it also forms the shortest part of the book. Pieter's account is wrapped round a loss and is perhaps the most intense of the three, telling of a grief, almost while not addressing it. It was incredibly moving.

Three different stories yet they have some common themes. Both Pieter's and Anouk's stories touch on men - husbands, fathers - who seen self reliant and in control but who at critical moments are actually absent or absent-while-present: they don't know what to do, they freeze. It's Anouk's mother who deal with the dead deer, it's Pieter's wife who saves the house from fire (and who copes with the difficult child when he can't). These are significant moment but Leipciger doesn't make them simplistic turning points in the narrative or in relationships.

Similarly, the idea of water, of immersion, runs through all three narratives. For Anouk it's both a balm, helping her live with her condition and - if the warning signs are not heeded - a danger. The margin is slight, as we see also with Pieter when he swims out too far. And L'Inconnue too develops a fascination for the Seine before that final plunge.

And, of course, there is death. Actual deaths, as the loved are borne away, sometimes overtly marked - a joyous funeral in Canada - sometimes not, as when unclaimed corposes are exhibited in the Paris Morgue, visited by L'Inconnue and her lover - sometimes simply passed over, as with a boy who dies unseen. Deaths garnished with rumour and fancy. Deaths that afford life to others, as transplant donors or the inspiration for life saving innovations. Potential deaths, close escapes: the book explores that margin, that grey area, discussing the idea of resuscitation, the limited time when death can be averted, undone.

There's an idea behind this, I think, the symmetry of life and death - life as a brief interruption to death, rather than the other way round: 'Where we are, I think it's like a river and you're the flow. And every so often, out of the flow, you, me - all of us - we crawl up on to the bank and we do life... River is life and death both'.

At a time of uncertainty and indeed death, it's actually a rather uplifting thought to take from this very beautiful, absorbing book. I would strongly recommend.

For more information about Coming up for Air, including links to places where it can be bought, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan

Illustration by Richard Anderson
Design by Steve Panton

The Gutter Prayer
Gareth Hanrahan
Orbit, 17 January 2019
PB, 512pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.

I'm writing this review in a slight haze, after being up past midnight finishing this superb book ("The city hasn't slept. It staggers, drunktired, into the new day...") so please forgive me if I drift off into incoherent praise... gripping, imaginative, real... My message for you is simple - just BUY THIS BOOK.

If you're fantasy inclined, you NEED IT, you really do.

If you're equivocal about fantasy - as I am - then, you STILL need it.

Indeed I would say that coming from a position myself of slight fantasy scepticism, it did all the right things for me - a recognisably alt-modern setting (no furs, snowstorms,  dragons or timbered halls) that is all the more weird for liking like our reality, only distorted*. That's not to say this book, and its world, are unaware of fantasy conventions, indeed Hanrahan has some fun with them - for example when a character dimly remembers fusty old tales the language switches to parody fantasy just as we see faux King James Bible or Shakespeare used as shortcut i the present day: "The bane sword... he tries to recall - the bane swords were forged in lo the year something because verily a dread thing arose. Demons. Something something."**

The city presented here is dealing with refugees from a distant war. Its alchemical industries are gross polluters, causing illness and poverty. Many of the products of those industries are weapons, sold to all sides in the war (a moral question that hangs over the book: "She's seen the weapons of war the alchemists can make... - fires that never stop burning, animals warped into huge monsters, knife-smoke, ice contagions.") There are political tensions between the Church, modernisers in Parliament and the industrial lobby.

This is the city of Guerdon, ancient, destroyed and rebuilt countless times, home to many races, religions and peoples, from the ghouls who live in deep tunnels and caverns, to Crawling Ones - collectives of worms in human form, to various gods including some who embody themselves in human saints. (I loved sweary Aleena ('Are you the fuckwit that scared of all the bloody ghouls?" she asks') saint of the kept Gods, who's 50% cynicism and 50% sheer, naked violence).

It's here that three low-level thieves stage a daring heist, and come to grief. There's Rat, a young ghoul who's trying to stay on the surface and avoid the stage of ferality that plagues kind. Spar, a young man who is infected with a  deadly disease, slowly turning him to stone. And Cari (Carillon) Thay, temple dancer, adventuress, rogue and wanderer whose family were murdered and who has recently returned to Guerdon. Together, they set out to burgle (appropriately) the House of Law.

Rat, Cari and Spar soon come up against thief-taker and steam-punky Sherlock-Holmes alike investigator Jere who's been tasked by a political boss to take down the Thieves' Guild. Much of the first part of the book is taken up with the question of how things went wrong in the House of Law and who might seize some advantage from it - Spar has ambitions for leadership of the Guild, in the footsteps of his father - while at the same time, various nasties begin to emerge (check out the Raveller...)

Between worries about the possibility of the city being drawn into the apocalyptic Godswar, the machinations of the Kept Gods' priests and Jere's attempts to bring Heinreil, head of the Guild, there is a lot going on but Hanrahan deftly keeps it all moving - this is a book that seldom lags - and has a real ability to make the weird seem everyday; one accepts his explanations for the co-exitensce of a kind of alchemical science, of sorcery, of real gods which are a kind of emergent phenomenon because they're grounded in the goings on of ordinary seeming people in believable institutions (University, Parliament, industry). Granted alchemical technology, there would obviously be a shadow market in stolen and illicit traded products. Granted active gods, issues of religious tolerance become very real and urgent. Granted a plague that can turn people to stone, there would be issues of disease control, prejudice and access to medication. Hanrahan borrows just enough from our world and experience to make his background plausible, while retaining a cheeky sense of the fantastic at the same time.

The characters here are also terrific. I've already mentioned Aleela, who may be a reluctant saint but is never short of a quip, but Cari is pretty awesome too, both making her way in a pitiless world and remaining loyal to her friends. And I should also mention Cari's cousin Eladora who starts out as a mousy scholar, loses everything - home, mentor, money - and changes, developing a swagger and a menace and managing to uncover the key information that shows what's really going on while struggling several times with Nameless Horrors and Ancient Evils.

(A warning, though: don't become too attached to anyone, Hanrahan is brutal with his characters.)

Those horrors and evils signpost the story, I think, as having a bit of a Lovecraftian vibe, indeed if you wanted a label for it you might call it "steampunk Lovecraft" although that doesn't really do the book credit. Yes, Hanrahan weaves what is in many respects a superficially modern world menaced by horrors from the past, but actually Guerdon is of a part with that past, which isn't really the past at all, just the way the world is. We have ex-mercenaries here reliving the horrors of bombardment in the Godswar, still raging overseas and displacing refugees. We have food shortages causes by the war.  So it's not that a "civilised", "modern" world is imperilled by atavistic, "dark" "savage" forces (we all know what HPL was getting at there, don't we) it's that terrible extremes coexist in one world, in one city, in the same people (sassy Aleela's a case in point: she's committed slaughter for her gods - the civilised, "decent" gods that supposedly protect Guerdon) and somehow those extremes will have to resolve themselves.

There is simply so much in this book too think about, it's such a bewildering, exhilarating, head-hammering banger of a book, that if you have any interest in or curiosity  about the best recent fantasy, YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK.

For more information about the book, see the Orbit website here.

*Reading this book made a point clear to me that I hadn't spotted before: the fantasy I have most enjoyed recently has all been of that recognisably modern-but-but-weird type - for example, Fonda Lee's Jade City and Robert Jackson Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy have something of the same balance to them.

**Not the only way in which Hanrahan has fun with broad modern source material - I spotted references to Stranger Things, to The Italian Job, and many more besides (and I'm sure I missed a lot too).

Review - Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

Cover design by Sarah Anne Langton

Unholy Land
Lavie Tidhar
Tachyon Publications, November 2018
PB, 255pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via Netgalley. (I have also bought a signed copy - Forbidden Planet in London has them in!)

This is a bewildering and brilliant alternate history. Tidhar imagines a Jewish homeland that might have been, a tract of land actually offered (really offered, I mean, in real history) by the United Kingdom in high Imperial mode in Central Africa and considered, however briefly, as an alternative to Palestine. (The views of the previous inhabitants weren't, of course, canvassed).

What might our world be like, if that offer had been accepted? How would things stand in Africa? How would they stand in Palestine? What else would be different?

A man, Lior Tirosh, a writer, flies back to Palestina (that might-have-been state) from Berlin. He's a writer of pulpy detective novels, son of a famous general, returning to visit his ill father. Tirosh remembers, sometimes, a son Isaac; sometimes he doesn't. In his conversations with his agent he refers to a possible book casting an alternate universe Adolf Hitler as a seedy private detective.

Hang on... I read that book... it was A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar.

Tirosh has also written a book called Osama.

As has Tidhar.

There are layers and layers to this book. A writer returns to his homeland. A people find, or are given, a homeland. Another people loses theirs. Many are saved, or lost, and the world pivots. In the world Tirosh inhabits, for example, things turned out sufficiently differently that in a refugee camp, the "Red Swastika" is an equivalent symbol to the Red Cross, Crescent, or Star of David. Tidier isn't afraid to take his idea to shocking conclusions any more than he was in A Man Lies Dreaming. Yet even in this different world, echoes remain, with the same tragedy of people displaced, with echoes of genocide, camps, an armed struggle, and the same security response, as in our present day.

It's a deeply unsettling book, asking questions, perhaps, both about individual responsibility and about the shape of history. Through them all, Tirosh ambles, a bit lost, seeming to forget, at times, who he actually is. Affected perhaps by all the possibilities Tidhar has granted, he remembers who he might have been, as it were. That is both engaging - Tirosh is very human and hapless, not, for most  of the book, a fictional protagonist and also frustrating: he doesn't provide any answers (this isn't a book of answers).

The story also follows two others. There is Bloom, a security official in Palestina, and Nur, who seems to work for another agency from outside. It's not clear to begin with whether they are working together or at cross purposes, but they both seem to have an interest in the blundering Tirosh who himself increasingly assumes the persona of a gumshoe, setting out to ask questions and find the truth. But while he may have written about private eyes, he doesn't seem well fitted to actually be one. Is this real life, one may ask, or is it just a fantasy? Either way, bullets kill and walls divide. There is a kind of dead heart at the centre of this story with real consequences for those who might - or might not - have been saved if history had taken a different course.

It's a deeply troubling, deeply thought provoking read, no less for the lush evocation of the Jewish State in Africa: the colours and light of that continent, as well as the imagination Tidhar uses to weave his imaginary country. You might almost swear he'd been there.

I don't want to say exactly what happens in the end because there are twists that should only emerge slowly. It's the kind of book you may want to go back and reread, looking out for little hints once you really understand them. It's also a book that refuses to be sidetracked by action or plot, however tempting that may be: the final third could, for example, have been a great deal longer with much that is sketched out given in detail, but that would I think be to obscure the central idea behind too much running around and shooting. Instead Tidhar gives the bigger picture and leaves much of the detail to the reader's imagination - a risky judgement but one that really pays off since it lets this book be much, much odder that you might expect.

It's probably a bit trite to say that given the facts of actual Jewish history in the 20th century, alternatives, might-have-beens, other turns and possibilities, will always fascinate. As Tidhar explains in his Historical Afterword, speculative fiction was anyway part of the events leading to what would become Israel, long before that awful historical weight became a factor. But it's impossible to read this book without it provoking that sense of how different things might have been, and the good and bad that might have followed from that.

But perhaps that is true of all history, and isn't it really the basis of any fiction?

As you may guess, this book has left my head buzzing.

I'd strongly recommend you read it, and set yours buzzing too.

Other reviews of Lavie's books:

Central Station
A Man Lies Dreaming

Review - The Changeling by Victor LaValle

The Changeling
Victor LaValle
Canongate Books, 5 July 2018
PB, 448pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.

Like LaValle's last book, The Ballad of Black Tom (my review here) The Changeling brings the fantastical and magical to New York, but whereas Ballad was very much a riposte to the racial (indeed racist) subtext of HP Lovecraft's cosmic horror,  Changeling is more of a riff on a classic trope of fairy stories, the baby stolen away (and replaced) by the Other. In locating this in the modern US and having it happen to people of colour one can't but reflect on a history of racism, but LaValle's focus is more on what has happened - or not happened - and on its effect on a family: where the earlier book addressed matters of race head on, this one is perhaps more focussed on gender, looking at the impact of a new baby on a family, the roles of mothers and fathers, the precariousness of womens' place in this world - and, ultimately, the steps they may go to for security.

That said, with the main protagonists being people of colour, race issues are never far away. There is its effect on Apollo's career as a dealer in rare books - often refused access to house sales. There is a scene where Emma and her sister wander into a park where some (White) mothers are with their children. Who are these Black women? Nannies perhaps? And so on. A litany of little differences, leading up to the moment when two cops find Apollo, late at night, in the determinedly White neighbourhood of Little Norway.

Lavalle takes his time establishing what is going on, describing in detail the background of Apollo and Emma, especially how Apollo's mother Lillian fled Uganda, came to New York and met Brian - who subsequently fades from the picture, so that she brings up her son alone. A sense of mystery about this chimes with the theme of the book, of vanishings and parenthood. Similarly, Emma  and her sister are orphans and the details aren't clear until later in the book. I like the fact that Lavalle doesn't rush - these stories are interesting in themselves, especially how Apollo builds up his rare books business. This lead up - and the subsequent very tender, story of Emma and Apollo's courtship, marriage and of her pregnancy - really grounds the book in the world of New York, and in a sense of realism: there is nothing 'weird' going on or at least nothing weirder than the early 21st century generally has to offer (which is perhaps not quite the same thing).

All this is, though, only the build up to a shocking, shattering event. It would absolutely be a spoiler to say what this is, beyond the fact that it concerns that central family, and that they'll never be the same again. LaValle really plays with your (the reader's) sympathies here (a good thing!) and the book left me questioning  everything I thought I'd understood so far . It then places the reader, with one of the main characters, in some pretty unsavoury company as they (the character) try to come to terms with what's happened. The book raises questions about trust, truth and commitment. It's desperate, heartwrenching stuff which moves the story on at pace much more than in the first part and creates a compelling situation. I did wonder whether - after that patient, early work - Lavalle hadn't, still, skipped something here. Basically a storm blows up in the family: but while we are given some early hints of trouble, a great deal of the development seems to be covered when the story skips several months, resuming with things about to reach a crisis. At the risk of making for a very long story, I'd like to have seen more filled in here.

That's only a small reservation, because once the crisis hits, it really hits and the fallout from what is a truly devastating event tales a long time to settle.

We watch, in shock, as things go on, meeting those unsavoury characters and caring about the path our protagonist seems to taking. Things seem to lurch from bad to worse, until Lavalle pivots the book and makes it into something rather different from what one assumed, showing everyone's actions in a very different light. I apologise if that seems cryptic, but I don't want to spoil the story.

A book about women and men, parenthood, trust, and secrets, The Changeling provides a great deal to think about. Inspired by fairytales it may be, but this is a gritty, contemporary fantasy-romance which grips in every page.

Review - The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts

Cover by Elizabeth Story

The Freeze-Frame Revolution
Peter Watts
Tachyon Publications, 28 June 2018
PB/ e, 192pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution is a science fiction story, reaching into the far future. The far, far future - it ends some sixty million years from now (give or take a million or ten). Hence the title: Sunday Ahzmundin, our protagonist, is one of a 30, 000 humans carried aboard the Eriophora, a repurposed asteroid (I think) adapted as a space vessel and launched on a spectacular mission, planned to last into deep time.

As such, the Eriophora is operated from day to day by an artificial intelligence, referred to throughout as Chimp. Humans are stored in deep hibernation and only awakened, for a few hours or days, when their particular skills are needed for "the Mission". Thus they do not age appreciably, even as the world they have left behind - and the universe around them - evolve inexorably.

With this set-up, Watts seems to have created an inseparable barrier to any kind of linear narrative. Sunday is revived to assist with occasional "builds", some of them thousands of year ahead, and we begin to see... something... paying an interest to the rock as it performs its physics voodoo and spits out artificial black holes behind it. But the nature of the "gremlins" that seem to be following is obscure, and information about them relayed only indirectly.

Similarly, as some of the other characters seem to be developing doubts about "the Mission" (we learn that everyone aboard was brought up from childhood to take part, and we suspect there may have been even earlier modifications to them) it's hard to see how they can lead to anything more than stray remarks, centuries apart, in the margins of "builds' or as the crew wind down afterwards before being sent back to the "crypt".

Yet despite these constraints, Watts manages to spin a compelling narrative, albeit one that requires the reader to stay sharp and pick up hints from the text. I didn't find this difficult, this (admittedly short) book is one of those that whizzes along, almost demanding to be read in a sitting. (If you are worried about the hard science overtones and physics stuff making that difficult, don't be - just focus on the central point, this ship is basically a floating factory for making black holes and wormholes).

It is though more than just a whizzy SF plot, there is a lot here to think about. I spotted overtones of 2001 in Chimp's enthusiasm for the Mission and their general benign - or is it? - affect, which were very pertinent given the nature of that mission (establishing wormhole powered gates allowing for jumps across spacetime; not actually black monoliths, but, you know...) I also found Sunday's moral dilemma with regard to Chimp and to her fellow humans plausible, as well as the impossible position of the entire crew, seemingly the last humans in the universe.

Altogether then, an enjoyable and fun SF read and one with some genuine surprises for me.

For more about the book, see the Tachyon website here.

Review - One Way by Simon Morden

One Way
Simon Morden
Orion, 10 April 2018
PB, 336pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of One Way via NetGalley.

In the mid 2040s, Frank Kittridge is serving life (or many lives) without possibility of parole for murder. He's lost touch with his son, his wife has divorced him, and there's no future apart from years inside followed by death.

So when he's approached by Xo, the company behind the upcoming Mars mission, and offered the chance of a one-way ticket if he'll join a team of cons doing the spadework for the new base, he knows he's got little to lose. And perhaps, he may find redemption and even some honour one day in the eyes of his son. So Frank says "yes".

From then on, the story is of hard physical training and team building as the group - recruited for their various skills, all put away for life - practise, practise and practise for their different tasks. It's made clear by Brack, the group's brutal overseer, that any slip, any failure, any disobedience - even any illness - will mean being thrown off the programme and consigned to the Hole - a lifetime of solitary in a super-secure prison.

Frank may be out, but he's never going to be free.

Morden effectively portrays the forming dynamics between the members of the little group, their attempts to make the offer work for them and to ensure they succeed and don't get put in the Hole. They are, as one might expect in a story like this, a fairly mixed bunch and trust is hard to build. All the same, Frank gets some satisfaction from accomplishing his assigned task - building the habs that will form the base on Mars, and driving the Mars buggies to be used on the surface.

Throughout this - and indeed throughout the book - we also see internal memos, emails and transcripts of meetings from the Xo Corporation, giving information about the aims and means of the project but increasingly making it clear that corners are being intentionally cut and that there are other agendas than simply completing the base on time and to budget. It's a fascinating patchwork and I'd advise the reader to pay close attention to the dates here as this material bobs about a bit over the ten years or so in which the mission is planned and developed.

The story proper really picks up pace once Mars is reached. The team awake from suspended animation to find that the materials, equipment and food they're supposed to use have been scattered far from the landing site. They will need to pull together to survive, but accidents begin to happen...

I really enjoyed this story. Really, really enjoyed it. It's the kind of book that keeps you reading long into the night and has you annoying the family at meals when you pull out your e-reader. (Reader, I know whereof I speak...) Morden tells a compulsive story, which is at first driven along by the technical challenge of survival in a harsh environment but then, as the base seems to be coming together, turns into a deadly game or murder in a closed setting. There is plenty of tension in how that latter element is resolved (although I did work out fairly early on who must be behind it all, if not, exactly, how and why it was done and I also became rather frustrated that Frank was a little slow to do the same).

It's one of those books that almost seems to change character as you move through it. Given the first parts seems to be an exploration of how teamwork, and trust, might ensure survival, I began to wonder if there was almost a riposte here to what otherwise might seem a very similar book, Andy Weir's The Martian. (You knew I was going to have to mention that...) Weir's book read to me as very old-school, technocratic and individualistic SF, with everything coming down to its protagonist's skills and determination. Like One Way, I read it at a gallop. Unlike One Way (I was surprised to discover when I went back to check) I never reviewed The Martian (one of the few books I've read and not reviewed in the last 5 years or so) which suggests perhaps that for all its readability it made little mark. And it was certainly criticised on grounds of diversity.

Morden does perhaps invite such comparisons by exploring the same survival-on-Mars space,
and in centring the story very firmly on Frank as viewpoint and protagonist, especially in the final part of the book with everyone else a potential suspect, the book explicitly doesn't totally reject The Martian's individualism. What it does do, I think, is enrich it. Frank is a much more rounded and complex character than Mark Watney, with a set of motivations and a backstory which are much more developed. And for much of the book, he is able to demonstrate his relationships with, and his care for, the rest of the team (with all their flaws). In that, the story reminded me of Morden's fantasy novels Down Station and The White City which take a group of Londoners and thrust them into a parallel reality as London burns. There, too, one sees the team dynamics, the trust and the betrayals. It is those same dynamics which Morden uses to build up to his conclusion - a conclusion that is in the end very human.

So while the setup to this story and some of the practicalities may be similar, which seems vary courageous, Minister, on the whole I think it would be unfair to Morden to see this book through that lens, although  I suspect he'll be asked about it A LOT.

In short this book is a fine read, providing a lot to think about.

For more about One Way, see the publisher's website here.

Review - London Rules by Mick Herron

London Rules (Slow Horses, 5)
Mick Herron
John Murray, 1 February 2018
HB, 352pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

London Rules. What might those be? Something like George Smiley's Moscow Rules, perhaps - principles honed over many years, helping a spy to survive in hostile territory?

Well, kind of. We soon learn that "Rule one was to cover your arse..." which kind of makes sense and probably encapsulates whatever you might want to say in any longer set of espionage commandments. But when the bad guys begin to play the game, we're warned that if "they want to play London Rules, they should have known to write their wills first".

Rule One is particularly apt for Jackson Lamb's little team of Slow Horses, those would-be spies who have messed up somehow and whose careers have taken a turn into the shabby dead-end corridors of Slough House. The drug addict with anger management issues. The alcoholic. The hacker with just too much ego. And Lamb himself... we found out more here about what sent this magnificent monster to Slough House. (Lamb is a wonderful creation, the fast food eating, unhealthy, hard-drinking,  chain-smoking cop dialled up to a hundred and eleven). The Horses are only there on sufferance. Nobody will look after them. They have to do it all for themselves. And also, they have to do it for all of us. Because it seems that when the gates of Hell open, the smooth operators of "Regent's Park" - home in these stories to MI5's best and brightest - can do nothing to swing them shut again.

A terrorist campaign is playing out, with mounting carnage - 14 dead, in one incident - and nobody knows who is behind it, or why. At the same time (the book is set post the EU Referendum), populist politicians have emerged from under their stones ("recent years had seen a recalibration of political lunacy") including one prominent Brexiteer with a wife who's a notorious tabloid columnist. Thank goodness this is fiction.

As the PM's favourite modernising Muslim campaigns for one of the new Mayorships in the North, the mounting violence might be the perfect opening for Dennis Gimball to make his name.

And then there's an attempt on the life of Slough House's very own, Roderick Ho, hacker extraordinaire, the Rodster, the Rodman (in his own estimation). We're permitted inside Ho's head (ugh) and might just wish his would-be killers well - except that doesn't sit well with Rule One, does it? So the Slow Horses gallop into action ("if you think our little gang of Jason Stillborns'll pass up the chance to mount their own private op, you're forgotten what testosterone smells like...")

What follows is a tautly plotted, often tense, always funny drama that delights in imagery and wordplay and animates its characters with some very shrewd insights. These very from the sly

"Louisa was telling Shirley her idea for a TV show, which would open with a view of Tom Hiddleston walking down a long, long, corridor, shot from behind. River waited. 'Then what?' he asked at last. But the women had misted over, and didn't hear him...",

"It was difficult arguing a point when you had no reliable information or accurate knowledge. Unless you were online, obviously."

to the poetic

"The day was packing its bags and tidying up... during the winter the day tires early, and is out of the door by five: coat on, heading west, see you tomorrow".

There's a nice line in what you might call espionage mythology - Herron notes that "there's nothing Spook Street enjoys more than a legend, unless it's a myth" - with references and nods to some of the classics including of course Le Carre's: like the secret in Le Carre's Smiley trilogy, the answer here lies in an old, old file and Lamb has to track down an old, old archivist to nail it who in, I think a nod to the "Registry Queens" of the Circus is now a "Queen of the Database". But the book builds its own mythology too, mentioning that "Lamb had done his time behind the Wall, and could still read the writing on it" and referring a number of times to the OB, the Old Bastard, grandfather to River, one of the Slow Horses and a man so lost in his legend that he's just that, just lost. The OB was at the centre of the previous book, Spook Street, and it's good to see him still waiting in the wings.

Herron also displays a nicely jaundiced view of the referendum's aftermath ("a frenzy of backstabbing, treachery and double-dealing on a scale not seen since the Spice Girls' reunion"). One of its unforeseen consequences, notes the PM in this book, "was that it had elevated to positions of undue prominence any number of nasty little toerags. Ah well. The people had spoken." and (another Rule) "...when campaigning, lie your head off - the referendum's other great legacy..."

Overall this is a great, compelling read. It's a book that kept me up till 1 in the morning till I had finished it. I devoutly pray that the UK's safety isn't in the hands of anyone like the Slow Horses... or do I?

Review - The Toymakers by Robert Dinsdale

The Toymakers
Robert Dinsdale
Del Rey, 8 February 2018
HB, 480pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via Netgalley.

It is 1917, and while war wages across Europe, in the heart of London, there is a place of hope and enchantment.

The Emporium sells toys that capture the imagination of children and adults alike: patchwork dogs that seem alive, toy boxes that are bigger on the inside, soldiers that can fight battles of their own. Into this family business comes young Cathy Wray, running away from a shameful past. The Emporium takes her in, makes her one of its own.

But Cathy is about to discover that the Emporium has secrets of its own…

This book will always remind me of winter. It's not just that so much of it is set in the wintry time between First Frost and the budding of the snowdrop, the magical time when the doors of the Emporium - Papa Jack's Emporium, the most magical toyshop in all London - are open.

Nor is it because I read it on a weekend break in snowy Reykjavik.

No, it's more that Dinsdale has somehow captured the essence of winter in the frozen lives, the frozen hearts - for much of the novel - of his characters. So much so, that as the book continues one aches for the spring, the thaw, the warm sun.

It doesn't begin like that of course.

The story proper opens with a young woman, Cathy, who has fallen pregnant. In the judgemental atmosphere of 1906, she must be made to suffer, and she is to give the child up ("They brought her down to Dovercourt to sell her child"). Running away to London she heads for - where else? The Emporium, where she takes a job as a shop assistant.

Dinsdale is at its best conjuring - I use the word advisedly! - the atmosphere of the Emporium in all its pomp. Of course, a bustling, thronged toyshop in the Christmas season lends itself to being portrayed as a hive of wonders, so perhaps he's going with the grain, but even so, we get a glimpse of something almost magical in the glimpse of the brightly lit shop, hidden away at the end of Iron Duke Mews, so much so that it's easy to believe stepping inside takes you a little way out of this world.

Yet this glimpse - seen in the prologue, and again in the opening of the novel proper - has to sustain us, and Dinsdale's protagonists, through a long, hard winter, one that we suspect they may not all survive. Life is precarious, and the Emporium, despite appearances, is not a haven from the outside world. Cathy has run away and has, in her pregnancy, a secret that could destroy her hard-won security. Kaspar and Emil, the two Godson boys who work with Papa Jack, are rivals in all sorts of ways. Jack is himself a refugee from hard times in the East - his life history explored in one particularly moving sequence where he dramatises what happened to him through a magical, immersive wind-up toy.

And looming over all there is, of course, the backward shadow of the future - looming war which will consume the shop hands and the comfortable life of the Emporium, bring division and pain, and break hearts.

It is, then, in many respects a very dark story that Dinsdale tells. Like Jack, he portrays his themes through the medium of toys - mainly, the evolving lives of the wooden, clockworks soldiers made by Emil, with perhaps a hint of Papa Jack's magic, models which learn, and teach, lessons about freedom, restraint and endurance. But there's also the windup patchwork dog, Sirius who, in the manner of dogs, is fiercely loyal yet may bring you to tears.

It is, then, a magical story in so many ways - in theme but also in form. Like the Emporium itself, Dinsdale presents something that is bigger on the inside (I wondered whether the echo of Doctor Who was conscious, and I'm still not sure, but it is very appropriate). Like one of Papa Jack's miraculous paper models, it unfolds to show love, persistence, rivalry, despair and how the passing of the years dilutes and refines these. Far from a Peter Pan or a Wind in the Willows, fine books which nonetheless present an idealised summer preserved for ever, The Toymakers focusses on the winter, and as the seasons turn things do change. Children do grow up and some of them can turn out very bad. But at the core of the book is Papa Jack's belief in the power of a memory of childhood (emphatically not its indefinite prolongation, nor taking refuge in it) which can be redemptive in even the darkest moments.

Often a hard book to read, but nevertheless uplifting, even joyous at times and imbued with a deep optimism.

A gorgeous book. You want to read this, you really do.

Read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1113668/the-toymakers/#2DrdFpFdwpImQY04.99

Review - Moonshine by Jasmine Gower

Cover by John Coulthart

Moonshine
Jasmine Gower
Angry Robot, 6 February 2018
PB, 400pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy via NetGalley

This is a strange, mixed-up yet nevertheless joyful book. Set in a world going through something like 1920s-era US Prohibition, it strongly evokes the spirit of the Jazz Age: our heroine, Daisy Dell, is "the very picture of a Modern Girl - slender of frame; her short, tight curls coifed with a shiny pomade; heeled dance shoes dressing either foot; and her dark skin complemented by the contrast of daisy yellow, so vibrant as though it was part of her identity. This she supposed it was."

Daisy is making her way in Soot City, capital of Ashland, a nation recently resettled after centuries of volcanic eruptions - think Iceland, but with a gentler climate. The portrayal of Ashland, its social and political tensions, the hints at a wider world - many of the citizens have fled there to escape from vaguely described trouble elsewhere ("Mr Blaine's family fled to Ashland presumably to escape the fascist regime in Berngi"), most of all the morality campaign aimed at suppressing magic - for, reader, this is very much a fantasy world - are all done very well. And as we might expect, Dell pretty soon falls in with gangsters, dealers in the illegal substance mana ("the blue stuff") essential for magicians. From then on it gets a bit Bugsy Malone with shootouts, political shenaniganns, a ruthless hitwoman and romantic entanglements.

The plot is pretty linear and restricted - we're not dealing here with world changing conspiracies, Dark Lords or the fate of the Universe. Some may dislike that: for my part I found it rather refreshing, allowing time and space for Gower to develop her characters - she gives Dell, and her boss, Swarz, plenty of backstory (Daisy's eventually reveals a rather horrifying secret that counterbalances the less pleasant aspects of the speakeasy gang - no-one in this book has clean hands) and a nicely complicated relationship. It was a slight disappointment that the plot is pretty transparent, with the antagonist and their motivations identified to the reader (not to Dell) early on. To set against that, there is, as I have said, a satisfying atmosphere of moral murkiness to the book. The same phrase - "a girl's got to eat" - is used of both Dell and her Nemesis. Motivations here are mundane, about making rent or keeping food on the table or just having  good time at the end of the week, not about fulfilling ancient prophecies or crusading against evil.

The book is also nicely observed. Early on, Swarz challenges Dell's motivations, wondering if she shouldn't spend a bit less money on partying and move into a better flat. Dell is having none of it and basically tells him to mind his own business. Gower also has a nice line in hard-boiled one-liners ("She had to admire his nonchalance in approaching someone... younger... drinking alone like she was contemplating revenge", "Daisy held forth the letter, putting on a smile she was too weary for"). The book is unashamedly progressive and pro-diversity, with, for example, a character who presents sometimes as male and sometimes as female ("Well, sure, when I am a man. I'm not now") and with the treatment of both the native ogres and the magicians a proxy for the results of ethnic and social privilege ("Magic, alongside ogre technology... had probably built half the city.")

Overall this was a great read. the world building is second to none, the characters plausible, and if there's a bit less plot then I might ideally have liked, that also has its attractions and Gower never, never lets the pace of events slacken with several viscerally realised set-piece battles before the end.

A great debut, and I hope that Gower writes more about this intriguing world soon and especially about Daisy Dell. (Also, just take a moment to appreciate that gorgeous, glamorous cover!)

Review - Mad Hatters and March Hares ed by Ellen Datlow

Cover by Dave McKean

Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Tor, 12 December 2017
PB, 332pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

The playground that is Lewis Carroll's Wonderland begs to be peopled by authors, filmmakers, comic makers, indeed anyone with a creative spark who can produce a fresh take on the adventures of Alice and the surreal, sinister crew that she encountered down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass.

And so we have in this book an abundance: dark Wonderlands, Wonderlands turned into theme parks or battle fields, imaginary Wonderlands, Wonderlands that have spilled over into the "real world". We have White Rabbits (literal and metaphorical), Red and White Queens, Cheshire Cats (and other Cheshires), Jabberwockies, wabes and much, much more.

Above all, we have Alices. Alices of all sorts: little girls who fell down that rabbit hole, older women who came out, the real Alice Liddell, missing daughters, wayward Alices, tough cookie Alices. Alices as victims, as manipulators, as surrogates, as avengers.

All read at once, it is perhaps rather overwhelming, like eating a whole box of Christmas chocs in one go, and I wouldn't advise that (apart from anything else, many if not all of the stories evoke - mostly with some success - the jargon and atmosphere of Carroll's books and that is something which is perhaps best not taken in large doses). No, I'd suggest rather that you come and go: read a story, ponder, return. Hop around the book, depending whether you want pastiche Alice, Alice-with-a-twist or - and these were my favourites - Alice inspired fiction, perhaps with no Wonderland, indeed even no Alice as such, but with a sense of something.

As you fall down that rabbit hole, passing shelves and volumes, I offer the following as a brief guide, to help you choose what to read and in what order.

My Own Invention (Delia Sherman) - An Alice meets the Red Knight in a wood. Or is she a not-Alice? In Wonderland you can never be sure.

Lily-White and Thief of Lesser Night (CSE Cooney) is a beguiling piece of fantasy, clearly set in a Wonderland but not, for once, featuring an Alice. It's a nice story of fantasy and adventure set among the vorpal roses.

Conjoined (Jane Yolen - some of whose Alice stories were included in her The Emerald Circus which I recently reviewed, although not those featured here) is a story of the Tweedle twins touring with Barnum's circus.

Mercury (Priya Sharma) is a dark tale set in a debtors' prison not so far from the village of Daresbury where the real CL Dodgson is commemorated in church window.  It features a hatter and his daughter and the mercury that causes hatters' madness. The ensemble of Wonderland turn up in wonderfully distorted ways - a Duchess who is the boss of the jail. An Alice who's taught "Be tiny. be giant. Adapt to the dictates of the situation". A cat called Dinah. A Knave... Here, it's all about escape.

Some Kind of Wonderland (Richard Bowes) reimagines the Alice stories as a film made in 1960s New York, which is revisited by its stars, now advanced in age. Again, the Wonderland motif bleeds through into mundane reality raising possibilities of escape but also of entrapment in that beguiling pocket universe.

Alis (Stephen Graham Jones) is towards the horrific end of the whimsy-horror spectrum that these stories define, taking a familiar trope - foolish students experimenting with things that should be left alone - and giving it a distinctly Carollian twist involving a mirror. "Inspired by" rather than "interpretation of", I think, but nevertheless a fine and chilling story.

All the King's Men (Jeffrey Ford) is one of the odder stories here. Again it features motifs from Carroll's books, but is not quite set in either Wonderland or in any real world. It is more a nursery rhyme kingdom, complete with an evil Humpty Dumpty. It's an inventive, twisty tale, hauntingly effective, portraying a world which could surely feature in a longer piece of fiction.

Run, Rabbit (Angela Slatter) is firmly set in the (a) real world but in a seamy, noirish version of it. The Rabbit (something of a dandy) is on the run from the Queen, and he's late. Then he encounters a girl in a bar. Her name is Pleasance and she works in a garden, with roses. Rabbit works in import-export: don't ask in what he traffics or for whom. A truly seamy, shudder-inducing take on that original encounter between innocent Alice and the distracted Rabbit.

In Memory of a Summer’s Day (Matthew Kressel) is another rather twisted story, its embittered narrator working as guide ("I've been leading tours of Wonderland for forty years...")  in a tawdry version of Wonderland that's now run as a theme park. It's still not a safe place, though, as some of the visitors - and our narrator - discover. Memorable for the collision between the essential Wonderland magic, the sheer sinisterness of the reality behind that, and the hustle of the carnival, this one will stay in your mind a long time.

Sentence Like a Saturday (Seanan McGuire) points out that "doors swing both ways" as do stories and then rather brilliantly inverts the logic (or illogic) of Wonderland to ask what happens if somebody - or something - comes up the rabbit hole? A rather tender story, in point of fact, this contains multitudes and shows how strange our world would be - it runs on logic! - to a befuddled Wonderlandian exiled here. And the price they might pay. After all "a mother was the door through which tomorrow passed".

Worrity, Worrity (Andy Duncan) is another that might almost be a classical horror - I was strongly reminded of MR James. It focuses on Sir John Tenniel, illustrator of Alice, and his problem with wasps. Eerie, chilling and a nice counterpoint to the stories which actually take us to Wonderland.

Eating the Alice Cake (Kaaron Warren) is another horror story (I think!) There's no overt Wonderland here, quite the opposite: but we have an Alice, who has a consuming passion for food and a painful secret, we meet a Mock Turtle... and there are some familiar names and a mirror. It is a grim little story, slightly nasty in the manner of the best horror.

The Queen of Hats (Ysabeau Wilce) is a little different from the other stories here in that it takes the Alice mythology and transposes it into a new cultural setting: it's about a "poor tamale girl", locating the story in South America but also evoking a meta fictional world which might contain "Ticonderoga, Arkham, Cibola, Porkopolis, Beleogost, Goblin Town, Eboracum, Sunnydale" as well as that most fictional of locations, "London". These names are found on labels on a theatrical trunk, a trunk that contains many marvels, indeed, wonders... here the Wonderland settings are transposed to disused backdrops as might be found in an old style theatre, complete with wardrobe room and auditions for something called (to avoid bad luck) "The Oxford Play". What might that be?

A Comfort, One Way (Genevieve Valentine) speculates on the very question of the identity of an Alice, seeming to suggest that despite all appearances, Wonderland has its own logic and that this may lead it to consume you...

The Flame After the Candle (Catherynne M Valente), a long story, indeed practically a novella, is very much set in this world, the real world, until it isn't. Again it seems to suggest that to its hero, Olive (not, for once, an Alice) real world events and people foreshadow or parallel another, richer place ("Father Dear had left them for that pale, rabbity little heiress in London"). Olive's story is interspersed with an the story of an encounter between who great literary figures, scarred by their visits - whether real or not, is never quite sure - to Wonderland and Neverland. The two tales complement each other well and there are echoes between them, as there are echoes between Olive's own life and the fantasy behind the mirror. A truly enchanting fairytale with a rather bitter edge to it - my favourite in this volume.

Moon, Memory, and Muchness (Katherine Vaz) is another "real world" story. It invokes the tropes of Wonderland ("Everything screams, Eat Me, Drink Me") to tell a very sad story, set in present-day New York, about a mother's loss ("I turned my back, and the earth swallowed her.") A story about appearances, and hurting, and what comes afterwards. Very moving.

The book closes with Run, Rabbit, Run (Jane Yolen), a short poem and perhaps a warning that the childish delights of Wonderland will only carry you so far.

If there is a preoccupation that these authors return to time and gain it is perhaps, "afterwards". We see both the effect on the Alices (and others) of that time in Wonderland - a kind of theme of the effect on survivors of what was a very weird experience, whether treated as real or imagined. But we also see the effect on "real" people of their encounter with an author who, literally, wrote them into immortality. How does it change you to have your life defined at an early age like that?

Overall, a very strong collection of stories. Recommended.

Review - The Overneath by Peter S Beagle

The Overneath
Peter S Beagle
Tachyon, 30 November 2017
PB, 336pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

The Overneath is a kind of non-Euclidian, extradimensional connectedness linking certain special places in our world via a ramified set of routes through another - provided you make the right moves. It's discovered by Avram in the story The Way It Works Out And All which is part of this collection and it might function as a useful metaphor for the book. Overneath. "The sub-basement of reality-all those pipes far down under pipes, tunnels beyond tunnels, vast valves and connections, profound couplings and joints and elbows."

Like the imaginary Overneath, this collection joins things up - it will take you to unexpected places. Here be unicorns, and fantasy worlds (well, you might expect that) but also fairytales, urban fantasy, steampunk (of a sort), ghost and horror stories - and a great deal beside.

I'm ashamed to say that I hadn't previously read Beagle but, on the evidence of this book, there is a great range and variety of his work to explore.

There are thirteen stories here, including The Way It Works Out And All. Each is briefly introduced by Beagle. Thus, for example, he informs the reader who hasn't yet encountered Schmendrick the Magician, one of Beagle's most popular characters, of his place in the wider canon before, in The Green-Eyed Boy, we read his "origin story". Schmendrick is apprenticed at an early age to a magician who takes him on almost, it seems, to prove his father wrong to dismiss him. It seems to be a rocky start to an illustrious career, with many mistakes. Part comedic, part fond, the story looks at a boy on the cusp of growing up, and at what that might mean when he has powerful, if ill-controlled, magical abilities.

Then, in Schmendrick Alone, we see the first adventure, in which he confronts an arrogant lord ("His voice had the sound of boot heels in it") and eventually summons something unpleasant that he can't control. Schmendrick isn't the first young and inexperienced wizard to have done this (I thought of Sparrowhawk in Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea), but Beagle's story really captures the reader's attention and shows us why he did what he did (it involves a girl, of course).

The Story of Kao Yu is the first in this book that reflects a recurring theme of unicorns. Set in China - or in a Chinese fantasy mileu - it features a rigidly honest judge who travels the country trying cases and comes up against something he never expected to, something even the unicorn that sometimes shows up in the courtroom to help him out may have trouble with. My Son Heydari and the Karkadann is another unicorn story. The karkadann is a destructive, implacable Near Eastern variant of the creature, modelled on the rhinoceros but is sadly dying out at the time the story is narrated. This is a fact the narrator rather rejoices over, since one karkadann in particular has caused trouble for him and his son - but we feel that it may actually have led the boy to something better.

The Queen Who Could Not Walk is very much a fairy story, with a curse and a quest, love, loyalty, revenge and consequences. Featuring the oft used trope of a king and queen who lose their royal privileges, it shows have true love may still endure.

In a brisk change of mood, Trinity County, CA: You'll Want to Come Again and We'll be Glad to See You reads to me as urban fantasy (although Beagle doesn't use the phrase). I loved this story which examines what might happen if dragons were real, and common, in our world. Who would deal with them and how? Under-funded and hard pressed, it focuses on the D patrol, who police the backwoods of California. At the same time realistic and fantastic, it is very convincing and fun.

Also set in the modern world - but in, perhaps, an SF vein - Kaskia is a strange, haunting story in which a supermarket manager acquires a miraculous laptop. We'll all recognise his nervousness at invoking a feature we don't understand or can't control ("There were keys he carefully avoided touching, software settings he never once changed... areas of the screen where he never let the mouse wander...") but in this case the consequences go far beyond lost data or unfriendly account settings, they place Martin in contact with something that draws him in...

Great-Grandmother in the Cellar is, I think, more of a horror story, if an amusing one, and set in one of Beagle's fantasy worlds. A solid merchant family is confronted by a (one suspects) slightly deranged witch-boy who wants his way with the daughter. Father's away - how will they defend themselves, what resources might have to be called upon, and what will the price be? Creepy, funny, convincing, this was my favourite story in the collection. While not sequential I'd pair it  with The Very Nasty Aquarium which I think is firmly a horror or ghost story and reminded me of M R James classics such "The Haunted Doll's House" or "The Mezzotint". When Mrs Lopsided purchases a pirate figure to place in her new aquarium, she's struck by how keen the shopkeeper seems to be to get rid of it. Maybe she should have paid more attention, as it begins to transform her fish tank into something darker. This story is notable for introducing the redoubtable Mrs Bascomb ("She had taught junior high school English, and feared nothing") who steps in to help.

With Underbridge we return to the fairy story, perhaps, yet in a modern world. A variant on the troll legend, this is the story of a jobbing academic and his obsession with a very unusual troll. Notable for pairing Richardson's gradual slide into despair of ever getting a safe university position with his growing obsession and loss of restraint this story grounds a horrifying and creepy narrative in a modern setting.

Music, When Soft Voices Die is a strange story. Beagle confesses in the introduction that he's got no background in steampunk (a point he then illustrates perfectly by mentioning William Gibson - confusing "cyber" and "steam"?) yet this was an attempt at such a story. Thankfully he eschewed brass goggles and airships and instead produced a rather effective alt-Victorian tale (I think that is the essence of steampunk?) set after a UK-Turkish war which went badly for Britain ("Ramadan came early that year"). Four slightly Bohemian young men occupy a flat in Bloomsbury, where one of them embarks upon a series of experiments. Again almost a ghost story, I felt that this skilfully blended its Western and Turkish themes, as well as - without labouring the point - exposing the casual racism beneath the surface of the Imperial power.

The final story, Olmert Dapper's Day, stands out slightly as it is, while still fantastical, a historical tale, set mainly in New England and based on an actual recorded sighting of a unicorn by Dr Olfert Dapper in 1673. How cool is that? We want to know, however, who Dapper was, how he came to be in Maine, what became of him - and how he met a unicorn. Beagle sets out to answer these questions in what is a beautiful little tale.

Altogether an exceptional collection, a beautiful introduction, as I've said, to Beagle's writing.

One note of warning. The Overneath may be a convenient way to travel, but it doesn't always get you exactly where you expect, and you may find yourself attracting attention from what dwells there. venture in, and eyes will be one you. You may not be the same when you come out.

Review - The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Beautiful Ones
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Thomas Dunne Books, 24 October 2017
HB, 323pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

Moreno-Garcia's new novel is an engaging fantasy-romance with a hint of magic. It's set in Levrene, a country like... well, perhaps a bit like somewhere in central Europe, on a planet a bit like Earth, around the turn of the 20th century. While clearly an imaginary world, many of the place names, both local (Loisail, Montipouret, Luquennay) and remote (Port Anselm, Yehenn, Carivatoo), evoke that, as does the atmosphere of carriages, telegraphs and newly built railways.

Despite these stirrings of modernity it is still a ferociously traditional society, not to say patriarchal, with women's roles in particular fiercely constrained by the rules of etiquette and the fear of what Society will make of any scandal. A woman's only asset is, it seems, her reputation.

Against this background we follow the lives of Antonina (Nina) Beaulieu, a young woman from the country in the capital for her first Grand Season and Hector Auvray ("a castaway who had washed up on a room of velvet curtains and marble floors").

Nina would rather be at home collecting beetles and exploring the woods. She'd certainly prefer not to be under the dominion of her martinet Aunt Valérie. Valérie despises Nina and takes delight in being cruel to her: Nina, young and inexperienced, chaffed at the restrictions imposed on her and unknowingly torments Valérie with visions of what she has lost.

Hector is a performing magician - and here we meet the first feature that makes this book a little different. Hector can, in reality, perform magic - he can move objects by thought alone and has made a spectacular career of this. The place of magic in this book is well thought out - it's not high fantasy, we have no duelling mages here, and on the whole, "Talents" as they're called are accepted, if treated with a bit of suspicion. But there's no doubt Hector is an outsider to the carefully modulated social set who call themselves The Beautiful Ones.

This isn't only because of his abilities - Hector is of humble birth and that isn't forgotten, but he has amassed a fortune, and The Beautiful Ones do crave money for the upkeep of their ragged castles and their lavish lifestyles. ("Nothing matters more than money to us, the proper people who walk down these city streets in pristine gloves and silk-lined garments").

Silvia Moreno-Garcia (picture by Martin Dee)

In fact, the quest for money via an advantageous marriage is ever present in this book, giving distinct echoes of Austen: Aunt Valérie in particular wouldn't be out of place in a drawing room weighing up newly arrived officers and considering which daughter should pair off with which. But there's more to Valérie than that - a tragically romantic past that has marked her life and drives here still. It wouldn't be too much to say she's the presiding spirit of this book, setting much of the plot in motion and pulling strings behind the scenes to get what she wants. It's a chilling, at times frightening role that makes one both hate and pity her. Warped by having had to conform herself and enter a loveless, childless marriage ten years, she's something of a cross between Lady MacBeth and Anna Karenina, she's now determined to inflict the same on others, her own hatred a measure of the love she believes she could have had.

I enjoyed the way that Moreno-Garcia makes Valérie both the voice, and the victim, of the stuffily rigidity society. It's a very character-driven, people-focussed story - beyond names and cultural trappings we don't learn a great deal about wider society, we don't see ordinary people at work or see anything of the politics (apart from learning, in a couple of throwaway lines, that there is a King). Yet by skewering that one one aspect - the position of women in the more privileged layer - we can I think infer the rest.

A very enjoyable read, with characters who felt real to me and about whom I found myself caring a great deal, and gripping to the very end.

Review - Acadie

Acadie
Dave Hutchinson
Tor, 5 September 2017 (e)  / 13 October (PB)
PB, 112pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.

The first humans still hunt their children across the stars.

The Colony left Earth to find utopia, a home on a new planet where their leader could fully explore their genetic potential, unfettered by their homeworld’s restrictions. They settled a new paradise, and have been evolving and adapting for centuries. Earth has other plans.

The original humans have been tracking their descendants across the stars, bent on their annihilation. They won’t stop until the new humans have been destroyed, their experimentation wiped out of the human gene pool.

Can’t anyone let go of a grudge anymore?
This is a fun - and thought provoking - novella from Hutchinson. It's very much a change of mood from his Fractured Europe sequence, or at least, it seems to be on the surface.I very much enjoyed seeing Hutchison sketch on a broader canvas (although this is a fairly short narrative - I read it on my commute home - the ideas in play here could easily have filled a full length novel, so in places "sketch" is the right word: we know what's happened and where we are from the few bold strokes we see, but a great deal is implied).

Our protagonist is Duke, "Mr President", a man elected to lead his deep-space Hab largely on the basis that he doesn't want the office. Waking from his hundred-and-fiftieth birthday party, Duke steps into a crisis. The Hab - and all of the others that make up the colony - may have been discovered by deep probes from earth.

Whether they have, why they are on the run and what they do next, is the subject matter of this story and I won't spoil that. What I will say is that Hutchinson delights in easing the reader's feet out from under them: building up characters as sympathetic then gradually casting doubt on their motives, letting the narrative go one way then sowing seeds of doubt.

It's a great example both of daring space opera - the central conceit of how the colony survives - and great storytelling (is everyone telling the truth? If not, who is lying to who?) and, as I said, is great fun while also raising questions about AI, genetic manipulation and reality.

I'd strongly recommend this, not least as a good starter to the author's work.

For more about this book see the Tor website here.

Review - The New Voices of Fantasy

The New Voices of Fantasy
ed Peter S Beagle and Jacob Weisman
Tachyon, San Francisco,  August 2017
PB, 336pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

It was fun to read a themed SFF anthology that wasn't themed, if you see what I mean - not a book about magic, ghosts, the apocalypse (given current events I'm especially glad it wasn't about that) but which still had a focus: showcasing new voices. These are writers who've perhaps had a few stories published (in the case of Rajaniemi at least, a trilogy of novels) but who are still bringing something perceptibly different to the table - whether that be content, point of view or who they are.

Of course, what you regard as "new" will depend where you've coming from and what you read. For the record, I'd only heard of three of the authors here (Wong, Gladstone and Rajaniemi) before and I'd only read one, so for me, the book presented a lot of really new stuff and I look forward to following up many of these authors. Others may have encountered more of them before, but it's such a wide ranging collection that I hope everyone will see something new or different here.

So - what of the stories? They range from the apparent simplicity of the fairy story or fable ("Duck","The Cartographer Wasps and Anarchist Bees", “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn”) to knotty horror ("Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers", "The Haunting of Apollo A7LB") to fantasy romance (“The Tallest Doll in New York City”) adventure (“My Time Among the Bridge Blowers”) and all points in between. Many are multilayered, reflective stories - see for example how "Pauper Prince" and "Bridge Blowers" in particular both echo and critique the kind of story they appear, on the surface. There is a lot of dialogue with the existing body of SFF work going on here, though it doesn't stop the stories themselves being immediate, entertaining and fun.

In "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers" (Alyssa Wong) the balance of power - and danger - between Jen and the (frankly repellent) men she dates swings back and to, only made less stable by her supernatural abilities. Wong deftly wrongfoots the reader about where it is all going, creating something very disturbing indeed

"Selkie Stories are for Losers" (Sofia Samatar) plays games with the traditional selkie story, the unnamed protagonist both retelling examples of the story and embodying them (or is she?) It's a sweet, touching story in places ("Mona gets out, yanking the little piece of my heart that stays with her wherever she goes") but we don't know if there's a happy ending or not.

"Tornado’s Siren" by Brooke Bolander also has romance, and dash of humour as a tornado falls for Rhea (and why not?) Bolander makes this far fetched idea totally plausible and creates in Rhea a determined and self possessed hero who the reader is cheering on by the end. It's also pretty sharp: "You can't fall in love with destruction. What would that say about a person?"

"Left the Century to Sit Unmoved" (Sarah Pinsker) was my very favourite of these stories. It's an intensely moving, deeply imagined, account of a local place (a pool) and a custom (diving in from the top of a waterfall) that may or may not be linked to a series of disappearances - of what this means to one of the left behind, and of how the community bends and grows around the unexplained, like a tree enclosing a railing. Just mesmerising - at the same time totally mundane, and totally entrancing.

"A Kiss with Teeth" by Max Gladstone is a monster, rather than a horror, story, an imaging of how a vampire might fare in a domestic setting which - at the same time - has clever things to say about modern life, loneliness, the city... and even the plight of the overworked teacher. I don't think I'll soon forget the glimpse of tired Angela, in her one room apartment, at the end of a long day.

"Jackalope Wives" (Ursula Vernon) is another fairytale, loosely Native American in setting, almost a counterpoint to "Selkie Stories are for Losers". Here the transformed beast is rather different but the dynamic - about possession and control, about taming the wild - is the same. An old story in some ways but one that never stales.

"The Cartographer Wasps and Anarchist Bees" (E Lily Yu) reminded me of Animal Farm. It's a sort of fable, a story of bees and wasps, of colonialism, survival and evolution, very much a fable, deeply thought provoking and I think a tale one could return to again and again.

"The Practical Witch’s Guide to Acquiring Real Estate" (A. C. Wise) has  more than a dash of humour as it informs the reader of all the ways to become a homeowner. But it becomes clear that for a witch, this isn't a matter of simply paying for a house - quite apart from the attendant dangers of local prejudice (which are spelled out in an almost unbearably sad section). No, it's more like a courtship, always with the possibility of heartbreak. Funny, yes, also sad and wise.

"The Tallest Doll in New York City" by Maria Dahvana Headley is a mesmerising little love story, set, of curse, on St Valentine's Day. Note perfect, it tales an outrageous concept and makes it works so well.

"The Haunting of Apollo A7LB" (Hannu Rajaniemi) is either a ghost story, or science fiction, or probably both. Apollo A7LB is a space suit displayed in a museum, and it seems that it's not as empty as you'd think.

"Here Be Dragons" (Chris Tarry) isn't really about dragon hunting. It's about domesticity, building a life and raising kids - and maturity. And immaturity. A very odd story, a very old story in many ways but perfectly told and among my favourites here.

"The One They Took Before" (Kelly Sandoval) might be part of an emerging genre, portraying what happens after the cool events of the fantasy story. I thought of Seanan McGuire's "Every Heart a Doorway" or Alan Garner's "Boneland" - both books that, in very different ways, explore the trauma of the survivor, as Sandoval does so well here. A striking and poignant story.

"Tiger Baby" (JY Yang) is, I think, about becoming oneself - and how this might not be quite what you expect - perhaps a common theme but here it's done in such a hauntingly beautiful way while also being so prosaic, centring on the day to day details of a life. Another of my favourites here

"The Duck" (Ben Loory) is about a duck, about love, about devotion... VERY fairytalelike, very beautiful.

"Wing" (Amal El-Mohtar) is a story about books, and people, and finding the right person, and the right book. A gem, and another of my favourites.

"The Philosophers" (Adam Ehrlich Sachs) is actually three stories, which look at aspects of the father-son relationship, making metaphors literal - about communication, about identity and being your own person - and inviting the reader to really think.

"My Time Among the Bridge Blowers" (Eugene Fischer) sees an explorer - perhaps not in our world - visiting  a remote people who have an amazing talent. Can he bear to simply watch and wonder or will he interfere, setting in train future trouble for this already suffering tribe?

"The Husband Stitch"(Carmen Maria Machado) is a profound story that, slightly, broke my heart. It's a story of a life, with very little overt fantasy to it but... something... lurks in the background. One detail. One flaw in a relationship. Can you see it? Can you touch it? Will it matter, in the end?

"The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn" (Usman T. Malik) is the longest story in this book, practically a novella. It tells of a princess, a Jinn and a family legacy, drawing on a rich vein of Islamic folklore is a fresh and arresting way and using this to comment on the lives of modern-day Pakistani Americans. An absorbing story.

The collections as a whole is very strong, with something for everyone. They are all great stories, though different readers will have their favourites. Whether as a solid collection in its own right or as a sampler for these authors, I'd recommend this to anyone interested in where fantasy is going.

Review - The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack

The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack
Nate Crowley
Abaddon Books, 10 August 2017
PB, 400pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via Netgalley.

Schneider Wrack wakes in hell.

Then he revises his opinions; he’s on a factory ship.

Then he re-revises – this is Hell, and he’s not out of it. He is dead, and has been reborn as a zombie, condemned to work until he rots, Wrack is part of an undead workforce, slaving to carve up the great sea creatures of the planet Ocean to feed his native city, Lipos-Tholos. On decks slick with blubber, in the driving rail, they toil ceaselessly until, too decomposed to work, too cursed to die, they are left stacked in charnel heaps. All this takes place on the great ship, the Tavuto.  Lipos-Tholos has been besieged for generations and depends on the sea - and especially the Tavuto - for food.

In this far future, there has been time for humanity to spread across the planets, to form a civilization ("the lemniscatus") which is now in decay, but, in its prime, opened gates between far locations - gates forgotten to worlds forgotten, gates and worlds rediscovered and lost again. So the great whale-like creatures that Tavuto (a "nightmare in steel, floodlights and scale") hunts, disassembles and renders, flow back through the gate to whatever world that city's on - while the zombies and their human handlers face the horrors of Ocean: they have "lips like salted dogs" and experience "the piercing, ammoniac stench of a sharkmonger's stall at midsummer".

It's a very vivid, stark novel, the sights, sounds and - especially - smells being rendered viscerally. You can taste the salt, smell the decaying blubber, the fraying flesh of the zombies, feel their despair as they sink into the dark dreams that keep them under control.

But Wrack wakes from these dreams, and the first part of the story is then about how he finds himself again, striking up an improbable friendship with a woman, Mouana. There are limits to this friendship ("no point in holding hands like lovers; we're both far too rotted in the funbits to care about that") - but what they do both have an appetite for, is fighting.

So the story proceeds with Wrack's and Mouana's revolt against the powers that zombified them. It's a long road and it takes a great number of twists and turns, bringing in both Wrack's past (he may have been one of the rebels - the Pipers - who oppose Lipos-Tholos's government. Or he may be an innocent bystander) and Mouana's (spoilers!) All around are the hints of an older, higher technology – like the zombifying process – which present-day societies are clumsily trying to use.

All this leads, after many adventures, betrayals and revelations, to another world entirely, a jungle world - Grand Amazon itself, where the zombies are eaten dead by bugs and fragments of an even older civilization - the hulk of a burned out starship, a city of lizard people - loom and are then forgotten.

Only at the end of this quest, in High Sarawak, will the pair find what they need.

This book is in three parts - The Sea Hates a Coward, Fisheries and Justice and Grand Amazon - which have previously been published separately (do bear this in mind if you've read, or especially bought, them separately). I hadn't read those books so I don't know if Crowley has reworked the material at all to bring the stories together but they do read very much as a single narrative, with puzzles and mysteries from the earlier parts (such as what happened to Wrack to get him on Tavuto) explained in good time. It's an intense read, very sensual as I noted above, but also very distinctive in style, both evoking great adventure stories by writers like Rider-Haggard, Conan Doyle and, of course, in the Ocean sections, Melville and also adding a distinct sense of darkness, of unease.

All that, and this is a "zombie uprising" story told from the perspective of the zombies themselves... and it makes them sympathetic (and at times funny). It is also, though, a ruthless book, with innocent blood poured out in torrents and, for a long time, seemingly no moral centre. But do hang in there.

I don't know whether I should call this SF, fantasy, adventure, or a combination of these, or something entirely different. For me it read as very new, very different and I'd strongly recommend it.

For more info about the book, and links to buy, see here.