Blogtour review - The Space Between the Trees by Norm Konyu

The Space Between the Trees
Norm Konyu
Titan Comics, 21 October 2025
Available as: HB, 104pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB/): 9781787746800

I'm grateful to Julia at Titan for sending me a copy of The Space Between the Trees to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Norm Konyu's new fantasy The Space Between the Trees brings his haunting imagery and heartfelt storytelling to the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.

In 2022 a young couple, Meera and Mark are looking for a house, viewing a development that has been cut into the primeval forest. Something about it doesn't appeal - it's all a bit "Little Boxes" perhaps and despite the sylvan street names, the forest is nowhere to be found. Disappointed, they head home - which is when the fun really starts (for a rather special value of "fun") as, despite a clear road, they become lost.

The reader will have anticipated this from a short prologue set in 1902 and featuring a group of loggers who run into problems themselves. But the exact danger is left unclear. As in Downlands, Konyu plays games here with his setting.

And as in Downlands, I love the way that the threat creeps up on Meera and Mark. We've been given a hint in the prologue that something may be up, so I was expecting that journey into the woods to go wrong, but Konyu cleverly wrongfoots the reader as to what has happened and, of course, what will happen. Though Mark's story about the spooky forest where he grew up may give a hint.

Konyu's angular, understated drawing style is perfect for this - extreme horror doesn't need swirling imagery. I think it's fair to describe the atmosphere here as gothic, but by being rendered in clear, stylised graphics the creepy factor is dialled up because of a certain... incongruity? A contrast between what are very Modern graphics (in a mid 20th century sense) and the primeval, gothic mystery of the forest. The fate of the characters is slippery - they seem so solid, so well located in their clearly depicted, definite world... which then turns shifty and paradoxical as they seek to march from one frame to the next. It's like there is a magician performing in front of you, everything is visible, but then, wham! And where did that go? Look at the page again, can you spot the glitch... maybe...

I found that once I started reading this book, I couldn't stop. It is perfect for devouring in a single sitting - and then going back to see what you'd missed. There's a richness - both of storytelling and of characterisation - that is belied by the plainness of the style.

And which would be undermined if I said anymore about what happens! This is a book to come to unsuspecting, as it were.

Like Meera and Mark.

In short, really, really enjoyable and I hope to read more by Norm Konyu soon.

For more information about The Space Between the Trees, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Space Between the Trees from your local high street bookshop or comic shop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith (they can call it what they like, it'll always be Smith's to me) Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - What Kind of Mother by Clay Macleod Chapman

What Kind of Mother
Clay McLeod Chapman
Titan Books, 31 January 2024
Available as: PB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803368269

I'm grateful to Titan Books for providing me with an advanced e-copy of What Kind of Mother via Netgalley to consider for review.

What Kind of Mother is set in the swamps of Virginia, to which local girl Madi Price has returned with her teenage daughter. Living in a closed down motel and making a marginal living as a palm reader, Madi's trying to support Kendra as the girl bonds with the achingly respectable father who showed no interest in her when she was younger. One thread of the story therefore examines the seventeen-year-old's growing interest in both her parents (did I sense that she might be playing one against the other?) and where that leaves Madi - both mother and daughter have led a drifting life since Madi's parents threw her out when she got pregnant, but perhaps it's now time to settle down?

That leads me to Henry McCabe, a local fisherman who Madi knew at school. Life hasn't been kind to him, his wife having killed herself after their son, Skyler, vanished: Skyler is still officially missing. Madi runs into Henry again at a farmer's market and he asks for her help. Madi, who's basically a charlatan (in a fraught scene, her vague, well-intentioned advice to a young woman leads to catastrophe) begins to feel she is in over her head and that, perhaps, something may actually be trying to speak through her.

For both Madi and Henry, here, then, are are interrupted relationships and friendships from the past resurfacing. This is a milieu where nothing is ever truly lost to the waters, although it may be transformed. It's not exactly a world where everyone knows everyone, but it is a close community, which contributes to the sense that and the past will never lie. The writing here is rich, organic, linking the lives of the local community to the greater life of the swamp which comes across almost as a single, breathing, brooding entity, one that can send its emissaries into the small lives of the human at will.

Given that, the creepiness of this book is perhaps not surprising, but it is impossible to overstate. The desolate, marshy setting, a littoral place neither sea, river or dry land, haunts the reader with a sense of the primordial, a sense that in that fertile, silt-rich basin, anything may brew. There are monsters here but perhaps they transcend a simple notion of good and evil, driven rather by the need for survival and the desperate hope of people who have lost everything and want something, anything, back.

So, a supernatural horror, but so much more than that - a book that explores parental love, but admits the dark side of that, the need to control, the thin line between love and obsession, protection and control and leaves the reader to answer some very uncomfortable questions.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about What Kind of Mother, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour review - Grave Danger by Alice James

Grave Danger (Lavington Windsor Series, 2) 
Alice James
Solaris, 23 May 2023
Available as: PB, 298pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781786188403

I'm grateful to Alice James herself for sending me an e-copy of Grave Danger to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

I was SO glad to see Alice's "rural fantasy" (modern supernatural, but not urban) continue into another volume. We pick up Lavington (Toni) Windsor's story six months on from the end of the previous book. It's a bleak January, and whole everyone's favourite Staffordshire estate agent/ necromancer (it's in the family!) is settled into a regular routine, flogging property by day and raising the dead/ being with her vampire boyfriend Oscar by night. Toni is though struggling with her relationships - her menage with Oscar and his human partner Peter is problematic: Oscar wants to take her blood and allow her to 'ascend', Toni can't bear the thought.

So a spot of corpse raising to assist her policeman brother William investigate the death of a local schoolgirl sounds like a suitable distraction, but Toni has to be careful. While vampirism is now public and accepted, necromancy isn't - so Toni may draw attention to her talents in a way that may risk opening her activities up to unwelcome attention. 

As well as walking that tightrope, Toni is wary of attracting unwanted attention, lord of the local vampire Assemblage to which Oscar belongs. Benedict warned her off Oscar, and she distrusts him, but she also swore loyalty and is uncomfortably aware that she may as a result be required to intervene in local vampire/ human matters as a result.

I am really enjoying this series. 

Toni is, her nocturnal hobby aside, a refreshingly normal protagonist: she's not out to save the world or defeat dark powers, she enjoys a gossip with her girlfriends, enjoys splashing out on a new outfit when she gets a windfall and has to negotiate office politics (her boss is a bit handsy but otherwise nice). Toni also has a complex family legacy and is short of money (Oscar would help out but would it be wise to let him?) The crime side of the book is well developed mystery which Toni doesn't just jump into and try and solve, she's providing (covert) support for her brother and most of the investigation uses conventional methods with Toni's contribution having to be sneaked in by William. There's also a nicely developing relationship with the dashing Bredon Havers, Toni's favourite corpse to raise, who's seeming becoming younger and easier to call and I wonder where that is going to lead?

Grave Danger is therefore a fine read, a genuinely original, funny and in places sexy read (Toni's relationships are nothing if not full).

It is also, at times VERY dark read. Alongside the supernatural peril and crime, James explores issues of consent, abuse and control in relationships. She admits to a history of poor boyfriend choices, and as this second part of the series opens, is recognising that all is not what it should be with her current ones. It's another issue to be negotiated in a life that is becoming more and more complex and where moral boundaries are far from clear (negotiate with demons? REALLY?)

So there are aspects here which some readers may wish to be aware of before beginning the story, but I would say they are handled with sensitivity and importantly aren't gratuitously or justified because vampires: many of the vampires here would deplore such things.

Overall then, a book that left me wanting more.

For more information about Grave Danger, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Grave Danger from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - The Last Stage by Louise Voss

The Last Stage
Louise Voss
Orenda Books, 11 July 2019
PB, e, 306pp

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for a free advance copy of The Last Stage to consider for review and to Anne Cater at Random Things Through my Letterbox for inviting me to take part in the blogtour.

I live in a part of the country sometimes used for filming the ITV cosy crime series Midsomer Murders.  We're used to seeing film crews in the village (once, my wife actually met Sykes the dog!) and I enjoy watching the programme, trying to spot where things were filmed. So I found the setup of this book quite familiar. An 80/ 90s superstar, Meredith Vincent, dropped out of music after a frightening incident and now lives a reclusive life in a pretty village. Something awful happened to her back then and she guards her identity: only her brother Pete knows who she really is and she works in the gift shop at the local stately home, satisfied to be out of the limelight.

Then bodies begin turning up... you can see that happening in MM and the book even draws attention to that.

But.

But.

BUT. There is much more than that bare plot going on here. Voss has written a seriously tense, complex and threatening book, drawing out not just the who and the what - who is responsible, who is next - but on a deeply imagined, convincing, and disturbing backstory for Meredith. The book  visits first the early 80s of her teenage years where she bunks off from school on her 17th birthday, blithely unaware of impending tragedy at home, to join the peace protest at Greenham Common. It moves forward, in flashbacks throughout the book, to the career of Meredith's band Cohen, which we see emerging and leads up to that horror from she is hiding.

These chapters establish an atmosphere of guilt and mystery, and also explain why Meredith was estranged from Pete for so long. When I learned of her family tragedy I felt particularly for her, I went though something similar myself though a bit older and it is a hard thing. Voss is good on teenage self-centredness and its overlap with denial - there is a sense in which Meredith has spent her life running away not only from whatever it is menaces here, but also from the truth about herself. The events of this book will bring her face to face with all that but after spending so long running, will she be able, finally, to accept what happened?

Meanwhile back in the present, Meredith becomes entangled in a series of events which start off as embarrassing and guilt inducing and rapidly take a turn for the horrific. There are secrets here and buried enmities and Voss does a terrific job of showing us how they insidiously corrode relationships, draw down danger and hurt even the innocent. In particular Meredith's replaying of that incident - which is seared into her, almost to a PTSD extent - is shown vividly and chillingly. We can see, can feel why it remains with and why, when things begin to go bad at Minstead House she is simultaneously in denial and paralysed. She does some very foolish things as a result, but it's hard to blame her (one of the things that can disappoint in this kind of book is when the protagonist doe something silly just to move the plot: that doesn't happen here, if you have any empathy at all you'll exactly see where Meredith is coming from).

As well as the general air of tension and the portrayal of Meredith, I also enjoyed the subplot featuring two young police officers, Gemma and Emad, who are at the centre of the enquiry (in a refreshing touch they're quite junior, so get plenty of hands on experience but are not in charge).

It is, overall, a well told, tensely plotted and very interesting piece of crime fiction with a distinctly Gothic tinge and for the, the 80s roots of the story felt like coming home in many ways (I worked out that I'm either the same age as Meredith or a year younger).

I would recommend this to anyone interested in English country village crime who wants to go beneath the surface and experience the darker side to some of these places, with a bit of psychological bite and some real tension.

The tour continues, with further great stops coming up as you can see from the poster below!

You can - and you should - buy this book either from your local shop, including via Hive, or online from Blackwell's, Waterstones, Foyles or Amazon. It deserves a place on your shelves.

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