Review - The Cold House by AG Slatter

The Cold House

AG Slatter
Titan Books, 7 October 2025
Available as: HB, 160pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781835412541

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

Though set in modern Britain rather than her fantasy Sourdough world, in The Cold House Slatter explores similar themes to her recent fantasy novels - here we meet a woman left somewhat alone and struggling to understand her place in the wider world. Everly'd had her share of tragedy. there is a mystery about her early life which Slatter only gradually shares, and more recently, she's lost a husband and child. When we meet Everly at the beginning of the story, she reached the "attacking strangers in supermarkets" stage of grieving, something which rather shakes her out of herself and forces her to seek help.

Though the help proves to be a recommendation to get away from it all by spending a few days at an isolated, spooky house on a remote island. That leads Everly into a somewhat folk horror chain of events which moves quickly from the charming and quaint to the downright terrifying. As we learn how she handled those earlier, terrifying events in her life, the question looms: does that make her a survivor, or a betrayer? Will she be able to summon the strength to push through, or will things, this time, just be too much?

The Cold House is a cracking read, a short book but one with terrific pace. Slatter is perfect at judging what her readers need in the book, and where gaps will be filled in. That means we don't get reams of back information about Everly's harrowing earlier years, for example, or about the history of YYY Manor, just essential nuggets which are really quite enough. But there is a beautifully told account of Everly's very real distress and sense of dislocation at the start of the book (if "beautiful" is an appropriate word for a portrayal of such distress; I couldn't find a more apt one). 

The pace also feels natural, I think, as the book moves from an initial paralysing situation to exploration to that to a real, pounding, action-y conclusion as Everly's forced to fight for her own identity - and to choose who, and what, she will trust. Her quick decisions will result in lasting consequences and we have to hope that those will be results that she can live with. I felt that the ending contained a delicious ambiguity here, and wondered if things were, indeed, over? I suppose time will tell!

I'd strongly recommend The Cold House, if you haven't read any of Slatter's stuff before this standalone would be a good place to take the temperature, as it were.

For more information about The Cold House, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Small Fires by Ronnie Turner

Small Fires
Ronnie Turner
Orenda Books, 27 February 2025
Available as: PB, 300pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788473

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Booksfor sending me a copy of Small Fires to consider for review.

After the mysterious but violent deaths of their parents, sisters Della and Lily flee their home in Cornwall to a remote and nameless Scottish island known only as the home of the "God-forgotten". Public opinion has the girls down as killers, despite there being no proof (the complicated truth emerges through this story) and they're the subject of keen discussion not least in the blogosphere(!) and among podcasters. 

Perhaps the island will be a refuge, despite the damning words of the boatman who finally agrees to take them to it - he sees them as a curse that he hopes will bring harm to the strange community known as "the Folk".

Or perhaps it will be the end of them.

As the two women explore the island we learn what a truly strange place it is. Owing fealty to a devil - if not perhaps the Devil - known to the Folk as their "Warden", the island is haunted by dark stories. Cut off from the mainland that the Folk never visit, instead living in fear and accepting their own dark fate, it is though plugged into events in the wider world, so that rumours of the Pedley sisters' evil have reached the place (as has news of the dark goings on at Berry and Vincent, chronicled in Turner's So Pretty). Della and Lily soon learn these stories - horrific, Gothic tales of cruelty, abandonment, revenge and murder. 

The sisters struggle to make sense of these. That struggle is itself, I think, an inherent part of the Gothic - I remember first reading The Castle of Otranto and being struck not so much by the magnitude of the weird but by its simple presence, its lack of a rationale. There is talk in Small Fires of curses and darkness affecting the island or its Folk, but no, at it were, actionable intelligence, so sense of an origin and so, no sense of a solution.

There are though hints, with a constant theme - present in the Gothic background but also in the present day action of the abusive treatment of women and girls by men. One of these girls ends up on the island, telling how, even with its evil reputation, it's safer for her than the father she's left. But the danger doesn't end at the water's edge, among the Folk there are men with the same dark desires.

The sisters, too, are troubling. The island, and the Folk are, we are told, somehow toxic, poisoned, serving a dark power. The stories we hear about their past are twisted, many of the personalities we meet are gruesome - only Silas, the sort-of hereditary leader, appears even remotely normal. But equally, Della and Lily seem to have secrets and stories of their own. 

Which is worse? Where does the darkness come from? Can evil overpower evil?

Written in short chapters told from the point of view of a man and woman, Small Fires contains bitter little nuggets of plot, of emotion, of character. It's a book where every word counts, where the mental and the spiritual is expressed, even extruded, though the physical, with pains, wounds and injuries, with stress and fear, visited as people clutch stomachs, poke, prod and clasp one another, draw blood. On the Island, it seems, there is licence to injure. The normal constraints and boundaries don't seem to exist.

Instead, we have dangerous games played in the half dark. Different characters play them by different rules, convinced they hold the winning cards but not knowing how they're about to be outbid. A pervading sense of masculine entitlement is part of it, but by no means all. We also see - illustrated through those stories - bitter jealousies and hatreds within families and abusive cycles between generations (not only inherited, but eagerly fostered and anticipated for the future).

There is a lot here that may hard to stomach, and I'd definitely say it's a high pressure book, one you may want to take a break from. But it's equally one that will grow on you, in you, and that can't be left alone for long. All in all a remarkable piece of writing, and calling it horror, folk-horror or even gothic barely scratches the surface of this disturbing, thought-provoking story.

For more information about Small Fires, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Dead Water by C A Fletcher

Dead Water
C A Fletcher
Orbit, 21 July 2022
Cover design by kid-ethic
Available as: HB, 501pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy provided by Orbit
ISBN(HB): 9780356513836

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for a free advance copy of Dead Water to consider for review.

Dead Water is an experience of a book, a whole body, heart-thumping, grabs-you-and-makes-you-finish-it story. It kept me riveted and sitting up reading on the hottest night of the year (only slightly because it took me to a seaswept, rain drenched location much more attractive than the stifling heat of global warming hit Oxfordshire).

It's not, though, a book that grabs with immediate action. Rather, the first half is slow and studied (and the better for it) introducing us to a cast of characters on a Scottish island (and to some visitors and incomers arriving on the ferry). A young woman who flirts with danger, freediving alone every morning because it's the only thing she can embrace in life after a series of tragedies. An elderly dog-walker who just happens to be there each day with his binoculars when Sig changes out of her wetsuit. Matt, a young fisherman, with whom Sig has history. A family arriving on the ferry to make a new life on the island - with tensions between stepmum and stepson marked. A shady character, travelling to the island for some purpose that requires him not to register in memory or CCTV gaze. And so on.

We learn about all these people and more, picking up the tensions, the histories, the hopes, the hates, that blossom and fester in any small community, and especially in a fairly isolated one. Among and behind this is a degree of foreshadowing: that ferry is described as an unlucky ship, there are near-accidents, talk of omens, unchancy happenings, and coincidences. It's less that these are things that happen to people, but markers for a world, or a worldview, which accommodates the less than rational (or the more than rational?) They are signposts, showing us that Sig's fiercely scientific outlook, acquired after a horrific loss, is set to be challenged.

A pair of ravens patrol the island, and a woman who may have the Sight wakes uneasy. Those themes bleed into a separate story told between the parts of the main one, the story of a young warrior, far from home, who trespasses against ancient custom and suffers a retribution. His connection to the island story slowly becomes clear and if you want to know a little more about what's going on, without too many spoilers, you might read those sections together as one. Quite aside from his part though in the wider tale he, also, contributes to the atmosphere of weirdness, representing a different, a more believing, even spiritual side of things than the mundane concerns of the islanders (fish catch, the spotty phone coverage, romantic entanglements). 

There are then plenty of hints and scene setting to warn that something very strange will happen to those well-realised and fully three dimensional characters, and while some readers may think that makes it go too slowly and want the action to hurry up, I'd argue rather that the buildup gives us just what we need - a clear picture of the protagonists, hopes and fears for some (and in particular their dogs! I always worry when an author brings dogs into a story and Fletcher has form here) and a distrust of others. We get a sense of how they will behave, see how high the stakes might be, and then begin to follow the chain of events that will lead to... 

Well, that'd be telling. It is a culmination fully worth waiting for and one which shouldn't be spoilers, pitting a small group of islanders against an implacable, because entitled and self-assured, enemy that they are ill-suited to defeat. Especially because of animosities, mistrusts and, well, just history stuff, which have been sketched earlier. But, Fletcher hasn't told us everything about everyone, nor have they all been completely honest with themselves. It takes the strain of extreme peril to surface some things that would otherwise have stayed submerged - and to make unlikely heroes. Once this begins to come together you'll know that you just have to go on reading, the writing becoming more and more arresting: the wild storm, the isolation and the lurking evil out there in the dark more and more impossible to resist. (A great book for a sweltering night, in fact!)

So I'd recommend, but do be aware the story doesn't start off with a bang. 

It's better than that.

For more information about Dead Water, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Bone Shard Emperor by Andrea Stewart

The Bone Shard Emperor (The Drowning Empire, 2)
Andrea Stewart
Orbit, 25 November 2021
Available as: HB, 560pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356514994 

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The Bone Shard Emperor via Netgalley to consider for review, and to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers for inviting me to take part in the blogtour.

The Bone Shard Emperor picks things up almost where The Bone Shard Daughter left them and, yes, I really think that before reading this, you should read the earlier book, if you haven't already. Some series you can pick up the middle, but not this one, and the reason goes to the heart of why it's so compelling. Quite apart from simply understanding the plot detail - something I don't think is that important - you need the context to really appreciate the characters here. 

Lin, for example, is now Emperor, having killed her corrupt and abusive father, but she's struggling. She really wants to be a better Emperor than her father. In the previous book we saw what he made her and how he treated her, and that is central to her struggles to be herself but also to understand him (which itself risks her becoming more like him). In The Bone Shard Emperor we will see that tension play out, and the danger that Lin courts. Apart from the forces that shaped her as a person, she's inherited a volatile political situation. Her rule isn't absolute: the islands making up the Empire have their own Governors, who consult their own interests first. There is rebellion in the air, and in a series of catastrophes, islands have begin sinking for unknown reasons.

Similarly, notorious smuggler and folk hero Jovis is now Lin's Captain of the Imperial Guard, but his loyalties are conflicted. Stewart's writing here is deft and her characterisation subtle: Jovis is far from loyal to Lin, retaining affiliations both with the Ioph Carn crime syndicate and with the Shardless Few rebels. It would be easy to hate Jovis for what seems like betrayal (it IS betrayal) but if you travelled with him through the earlier book you will understand what he was trying to achieve and the hopes and fears which he still has, and will sympathise with, if not perhaps forgive, him. 

Again, the enigmatic exile Nisong, who spent most of the first book enslaved and befuddled by 'mind fog' has now woken and is visiting a terrible revenge on the Empire. In many ways a hateful character, Nisong has suffered greatly, and using her, Stewart shows how abuse and betrayal can feed on itself - just watch her justifying what she is doing, blaming the innocent who she destroys for the deaths of her friends in the bloody rampage. Again, Stewart's characterisation is chilling and convincing. 

The other main characters here, island governor Phalue and her wife Ranami, perhaps need less backstory - their loyalties were more conflicted in the earlier book and things are simpler in this one: Phalue is trying, in a similar way to Lin, to be better, to raise up her people, and she confronts many of the same problems as Lin in establishing her authority, introducing radical change and dealing with the horrors left by Lin's father, the wild 'constructs' which previously controlled and administered the Empire. Lin and Phalue contrast nicely, Lin having forsworn the bone magic that drives the constructs, thereby leaving herself vulnerable, Phalue resorting enthusiastically to her sword and armour in a most un Governor-like way and rather relishing her hands-on exercise of power.

This book was full of characters I wished would join up, get on, and work together. Lin and Phalue could complement each other so well. Phalue would make a much better Captain than spy/smuggler Jovis. Jovis and Lin, in turn, clearly fancy the pants off one another, but they are held apart by all sorts of formalities and conventions as well as what they don't know about each other. It's frustrating, but Stewart has written a story that captures the nuances and contradictions of these characters extremely well, so that although there are all sorts of catastrophes, rebellions and magical weirdnesses breaking out, it's the central relationships that really drive the plot, adding a sense of peril and risk - as though everyone was on a high wire and might fall of any time - that keeps the reader turning the pages.

A potent blend of politics, magic, warfare and romance, The Bone Shard Emperor fully lives up to the promise of The Bone Shard Daughter, giving us plenty of action and mystery and, best of all, more of the strange creatures Mephi and Thrana, whose nature is now a little clearer. There's also a new character, Ragan, a mysterious warrior-monk who confounds stereotypes (you'll have to wait, no spoilers) and makes Jovis VERY jealous when he gets close to Lin (great fun to observe).

In short, if you've read The Bone Shard Daughter you'll love this sequel, if you haven't read that book I hope I've inspired you to go and do so - before moving on to The Bone Shard Emperor next.

For more information about The Bone Shard Emperor, see the publisher's website here and also the other stops on the tour, listed on the poster below.

You can buy The Bone Shard Emperor from your local bookshop, or online from Bookshop dot org UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - Ten Dead Comedians by Fred Van Lente

Ten Dead Comedians
Fred Van Lente
Quirk Books, 11 July 2017
HB, 288pp

I'm grateful to Quirk Books for an advance copy of this.

Ten Dead Comedians is an ingenious and entertaining take on Agatha Christie's well-known mystery And Then There Were None (successfully dramatised on BBC TV at Christmas 2015). (This was the story that was originally published under a different title, unquotable today although closer to Van Lente's).

Basically, ten guests are invited to a remote island by a mysterious patron. They come because they are led to expect some benefit: they stay because escape is impossible - and one by one, they die. We know all that beforehand, and if we've read Christie, we may also think we know why this is happening and what the outcome will be.

The questions are, who is doing the killing and why, and can any of the guests survive? As that is unravelled we learn more about each guest and their history and why someone may wish them dead.

Van Lente has perhaps put himself at a disadvantage because so much is known or may be inferred from Christie's work, but of course he has also given himself the option of either confirming her structure or undermining it. And he claims another advantage by making his collection of mostly unappealing guests comedians. A problem with this template for a book is that you have ten main protagonists. For the reader to "get" the book they need to be well realised, and quickly. The comedy angle gives an immediate way in because by including or describing their various acts, Van Lente can sketch his characters very efficiently and effectively. In other words the presence of the comedy material - in very different forms - isn't just a fun bonus to this book, it's an integral part of the narrative (as well as being very funny).

More, by using the comedy to set up tensions between the protagonists Van Lente makes his Murder Island almost a microcosm of society - from the cultured, entitled comic cynically playing a redneck bigot to the New Age "Orange Baby Man" who has found release from a lifetime of bullying to the radical podcaster to the taboo-breaking young woman comedian who's smuggled a friend onto the island. It's a more diverse group (in every way) than Christie's original (although she wasn't completely blind to class and gender tensions either).

That's all very well, but a book like this could still fall flat if it didn't have a sense of mystery - and if Van Lente wasn't adroit enough at both embodying and undermining Christie's plot. I'm glad to say he does well on both scores and, while much of the enjoyment in this book is in the character development and interaction, there is a genuine sense of menace and a genuine mystery about why the murders are happening and who is responsible. You'll have to look closely to get any clues (though they are there).

So - a smart, rather unusual, book that manages to be both funny and bleak but never less than absorbing. Ideal for a summer holiday.

Though not, perhaps, one on an exclusive Caribbean island.

The Gradual by Christopher Priest

Image from http://www.christopher-priest.co.uk/

The Gradual

Christopher Priest

Gollancz, 15 September 2016

HB, 352pp

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

This review appeared in the October 2016 Shiny New Books.

This was the first of Christopher Priest's books that I'd read. While I gather from other reviews that it's particularly accessible for him and so probably a good place to begin, I am still dismayed that I've missed out on such a good writer for so long. I'll put that right soon.

The Gradual is the latest of a collection - not really a series - of stories (some short, some longer)  that includes the motif of the 'Dream Archipelago', a mysterious and, it seems, ultimately unknowable group of islands that feature in different ways. I don't know whether they are intended to be a self-consistent feature, or more of an idea, a mythology. In this book, at any rate, they form a band of islands which encircles the whole world. They are unmappable, idiosyncratic, home to a myriad dialects and seem to stretch from the equator to colder, more Northerly climes. For our hero, Alesandro Sussken, from the moment he glimpses the nearest islands as a child, they represent an alluring Other, a place to escape.(and he needs to escape). Even the names seem to hold promise: Dianme, Manlayl, Derril, Callock, Gannten, Unner, Leyah, Cheoner.

Sussken is a composer, living in the drab, grey country of Glaund, a state ruled by a junta and perpetually at war with its neighbour, Faiandland. We are told that there is little freedom in Gland. one must renew identity documents every three months and report to the police if away from home more than three nights. Everyone is required to carry a certain amount of cash. The entire country is under curfew on certain days, and everyone must be assigned to a church whether religious or not. (Priest is studiedly vague about the religion of this church or churches). 

Military service is compulsory. At the start of the book, Sussken's beloved older brother is called up  by the army and much of the subsequent story is a quest to come to terms with this, or to find him again. The grim background of Glaund is vividly conveyed, but that said, Sussken seems to flourish, building his musical reputation and subject to no censure even when he dares name a musical piece after one of the forbidden islands (they're not supposed to be referred to at all). 

Indeed he is even, eventually, permitted to join a cultural trip to the Archipelago when relations thaw somewhat. The book is necessarily much concerned with travel, both the practicalities - tickets, luggage, accommodation, Customs procedures - and the psychological effects of exposure to different cultures and places - so Sussken's life isn't as cloistered as you might fear or even expect, given the realities of life in Glaund.

It is though exclusively travel by ferry or cruise ship - there is no sign of air travel, an interesting omission in a world that seems technologically to be equivalent to ours (there are cars, Internet, CD players, plastic). From the geography, vague as it is, this obviously is not 'our 'world, not even an alternate timeline version, but on the other hand it is a recognisably modern society of 'our' kind and indeed at one level the story only works because much of what is alluded exists in our world. For example, at one point it's mentioned that social networking was introduced to Glaund then rapidly banned again, an allusion that only really makes sense in a world where social networking is a reality. 

It's in other words a shifty, impressionistic, world, furnished with props from ours: items and cultural things that could only originate in certain social situations that exist here and now being, used to make points or flesh out Priest's invented reality (jazz is another example - such a context specific form of music that it rather surprises the reader when it's mentioned, but it functions perfectly to represent the sort of music that Sussman doesn't like: his forte is austere ultra modernist stuff). Priest hasn't then felt the need to create a whole self-sufficient world like Tolkien, or like most fantasy writers. That shows I think a very confident, very mature writer who trusts his own ability to keep the reader's focus where he wants it without the need for a scaffolding. A confidence that is completely justified - the scenes and events in the book have much greater resonance than would if supported by a wholly invented structure.

Things in this story are shifty in other ways too. As I said, early in the book, Sandro's beloved brother Jacj is taken by the army. We then hear no more of him, with Sussken's career developing, including through his extraordinary trip to the Archipelago - which changes everything - till suddenly it's ten or more years later. For a moment I thought poor Jacj had simply been forgotten, but no: something odd is going on here and it's the attempt to resolve the mystery that eventually - one might almost say belatedly - brings Sussken into conflict with the authorities and takes him back to the Archipelago.

His life after this is far from plain sailing (sorry, I couldn't resists the pun). Travel between the islands has its own strange features. In a section of the book which has the island hopping overtones of a Conrad or Somerset Maugham and allusions to a pattern of islands which are implicit in the whole setup, there are more peculiar features, indeed dangers, to travel in the archipelago. Sandro doesn't understand them at first and he suffers the consequences. Much of this part of the book is about how he comes to an understanding of what's going on. (It's frustrating writing about this aspect because there are a couple of shocks in the story and it would be a shame to blunt them by giving away precisely what's going on).

One oddity worth a mention is the bureaucracy involved in island travel. Despite them being neutral in the war and subject to little central authority, the amount of paperwork and sheer checking involved in making even short island journeys is daunting and the details sometimes mysterious - there are episodes, presumably involving searches and questionings, that are never described in detail except by how angry they make Sussken. Indeed, at one stage he seems to find it easier to slip away from - and later return to - his martial-ruled homeland than travel between two of the apparently peaceful and paradisiacal islands. This is one feature we never quite get to the bottom of - a reminder perhaps that Priest's Dream Archipelago has a deeper and wider existence than in this book. 

I'm in danger of rambling on now. This book is simply so good and there is so much that one might say about it that it's hard to know where to stop. It's extremely readable and immersive from the first page. Its world is well portrayed and convincing. The language can be playful, fun (at one point we visit Ilkla, a "place of high windswept moors... where almost the entire population seemed to speak a heavily glottal patois." Remind you of anywhere?) There is also a whole musical dimension I haven't even touched on, being totally unmusical myself, with Sussken's musical tastes and development and even the milieu in which he works convincing described, including how he is influenced by the Archipelago. Indeed the book has a deep musical sensibility throughout linking people, events and places.

Above all, the book has heart. While Sussken comes over, at first, as a bit of a cold fish - fussing over his luggage, passively going along with the petty restrictions of Glaund, fumbling himself into a marriage against all expectations - he is really a deeply human character, a man who loses such a lot in a pitiless and inexplicable world that one can't help but warm to him.

And, in keeping with that, he does thaw.

I'd recommend this book highly both as a remarkable story and a demonstration of modern fantasy at its very best, showing what can be done and how to do it.

Simply brilliant.