QUEEN RAT by Kim Lakin-Smith.

Murkee. £4.99.

Reviewed by Elloise Hopkins

Princess Ratiana Clementine Saint John of the submersible Victoriana is about to become a queen. Unfortunately to do so she has to get married and that is way down on her list of priorities behind learning to run the Victoriana, learning to fight with proficiency and most of all, vexing her parents. At 14 she is now old enough to become queen and awaits the arrival of her betrothed.

The Aesthetes are perceived as weak, precious perhaps, and Rat, as she likes to call herself, simply can’t imagine Prince Simeon being at all suited to her. It seems the prince has the same opinion of Princess Rat, with her boyish clothes and manners to match. The betrothal has to begin with a series of trials set by the four submerged communities, and Rat and Simeon will have to learn to work hand in hand if they are to triumph.

A young adult steampunk novella wouldn’t fall into my usual reading wish list but I’m always open to new suggestions and I have to say I’m glad I got hold of this book. It was a quick and enjoyable read and a pure run of escapism. The worldbuilding is its biggest strength by far and I found myself in a world where something as simple as looking at the time becomes a beautifully descriptive piece of prose.

Considering the length of the piece, the characters, even the supporting cast, are surprisingly well detailed and likeable in their not always favorable portrayal. The relationship between the two heirs is forced to develop as the trials go on and the result is a story that perhaps whilst not as tension-filled as it could be, is well told and blends elements of steampunk and our own world perfectly to create a believable alternate reality.

NOCTURNAL by Scott Sigler

Crown/Hodder & Stoughton, p/b, £12.99

Reviewed by Stewart Horn

Monsters hunt nightly for human prey in San Francisco. They vary greatly in appearance, from the apparently human to assorted grotesques. Some seem part-animal, with claws or talons or the heads of wolves or snakes. And they’re super-strong, fierce and cannibalistic, somewhat like the Nightbreed from Clive Barker’s Cabal. Some human characters develop a telepathic bond with these creatures, and we join them in their exploration and discovery of the monsters, the horrors hinted at and gradually revealed. Sigler shies away from any supernatural element, preferring his own brand of pseudo-science, which isn’t really any more convincing than demonic possession or the like but it’s fun to read and lets us get some good scenes with the pathologist.

It’s a furiously paced, plot-driven horror thriller, very much in the style of early Dean Koontz or Stephen King. The imagery is striking and it seems designed to be filmed, as if he had one eye on an adaptation when he wrote it, or perhaps he just has a very visual imagination. Despite a hefty word count, this is a quick and easy read, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The characters are engagingly quirky. There is an overweight, foul-mouthed Chinese cop who is gathering material for the TV cop show he’s writing. His partner the terminator is a highly efficient killer of bad guys. The smutty one-liner dialogue between these two is the source of most of the novel’s humour, and that humour is welcome because the story is relentlessly dark.

I had a few problems with this book. The witty dialogue is great, but it didn’t always ring true: I couldn’t imagine such light-hearted banter at scenes of carnage and death. The monsters are bulletproof and superfast healers, but their invulnerability varies to suit the plot: If you’re going to re-write the laws of biology you should at least make the new ones consistent. Also, I saw the ending coming from two hundred pages away.

This is not Sigler’s masterwork but, nevertheless, it is a hugely enjoyable read by an author who continues to grow, and whom I shall continue to follow and enjoy in the future.

THE ALCHEMIST OF SOULS (NIGHT’S MASQUE VOLUME 1) by Anne Lyle

Angry Robot, kindle edition, £4.49

Reviewed by Carl Barker

Upon reading the blurb for Alchemist Of Souls, one might be forgiven for initially attempting to directly compare it with the first of Marie Brennan’s Onyx Court Series. Certainly, it’s true that both books revolve around a common theme – that of otherworldly creatures (here the Skraylings) inhabiting an alternate Elizabethan England – but to so pigeonhole Anne Lyle’s debut novel as ‘more of the same’ would be to do it a grave disservice. This first volume in a planned series is an entirely different animal, in that it chooses to downplay the fantastic side of its tale to an almost unnoticeable level, choosing instead to concentrate on embellishing the more recognisable trappings of history with an attention to detail and characterisation.

The three central characters of Mal, Coby and Ned are each well fleshed out in their own right, allowing the story to lightly dance between several different viewpoints as what begins as an absorbing drama slowly evolves into something more akin to a whodunnit by the end of the book. Many of the more well-known characters from the period are introduced at various points in the book, as down-on-his-luck swordsman Mal is recruited into the service of Sir Francis Walsingham and made bodyguard to the Skrayling Ambassador. Forced to repel both physical and political threats from a variety of sources, Mal must uncover the secrets of the Skraylings whilst at the same time attempting to unravel both his own past and that of his twin brother Sandy.

An outstanding debut and Lyle is certainly a name to watch for the future. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

DEAD HARVEST (THE COLLECTOR: BOOK 1) by Chris F. Holm

Angry Robot, p/b, £7.99

Reviewed by Craig Knight

Sam is a Soul Collector, a courier of damned souls bound for Hell. When he’s sent to collect the soul of a young woman charged with the horrific murder of her family, Sam is convinced she is innocent and refuses to take her soul. His actions break an ancient treaty and an epic war between Heaven and Hell looks set to begin.

Dead Harvest is a strange mix – part detective novel, part supernatural story – and it works well. The idea of Soul Collectors has been done before but Dead Harvest puts a refreshing take on the concept by telling this story from the viewpoint of the Collector. Sam is a great character, a decent guy forced to do a job he hates because of crimes he committed when he was alive. Sam’s self-deprecating style and realistic acceptance of his fate allows the reader to warm to him very quickly.

Kate is the victim who has been targeted for collection. She is a sassy and strong female character who doubts her innocence. This works well in keeping the reader guessing as to whether she really is innocent or not.

Dead Harvest is told in the first person which gives the story the tone of a diary. Holm’s use of foreshadowing further encourages this but it is handled well and is by no means a bad thing. There are flashback scenes to Sam’s life every few chapters and although interesting as backstory, they tend to break up the flow of the main narrative and could perhaps have been placed a little better.

My only real gripe, and it isn’t that big a gripe, is the ending. The realisation of who is behind the events comes too suddenly and out of the blue that it threatens the believability of the story. If there had been a few more hints dropped from time to time, it would have been more realistic but as it stands it comes across as a little rushed.

Dead Harvest is a great story. Original, fascinating and absorbing from the onset, it captures the reader and describes an interesting supernatural world that sits alongside our own. If you like supernatural ‘who-dunnits’ then this is the book for you.

KULTUS by Richard Ford

Rebellion, p/b, £7.99

Reviewed by Jay Eales

Looking like the bastard son of Alex Droog and Spider Jerusalem, Thaddeus Blaklok looms out of a frankly awesome cover image by Frazer Irving. Unfortunately, I found the story itself struggled to live up to the wrapping.

Blaklok is a tattooed thug in the steampunk inspired city of Manufactory. His reputation precedes him, but like the disparity between contents and cover art, he rarely lives up to his promise, given the number of times he is coshed, beaten, crushed and ground down by the many groups of antagonists he faces along the way, while trying to find and keep hold of an artefact known as the Key of Lunos.

Chapter Twenty opens with the sentence “This was getting to be an annoyingly familiar situation”, as Blaklok is captured and bound for the umpteenth time in the novel. It was as though he was reading my mind. Despite this, as the book progressed, I found myself warming to the character, cipher though he is, and by the end, the prospect of further adventures for Thaddeus Blaklok did not fill me with dread. If Ford is able to broaden out the setting to incorporate more than a succession of runaround fisticuffs and magical fireworks, and delves a little deeper into the character, rather than waggling a handful of mysterious hints and sudden displays of power that give him a get out of jail free card just when he needs them, Kultus 2 might be onto a winning formula.

THE ISLANDERS by Christopher Priest

Gollancz, h/b, £12.99

Reviewed by Pauline Morgan

The word novel originally meant ‘of a new kind or nature, strange, hitherto unknown’ rather than specifically a long work of fiction. This book by Christopher Priest is published as a novel and fits very well into the former definition; whether it also fits the latter is something that could generate a lot of discussion.

The Dream Archipelago was a book published in 1999 and consisted mostly of stories written between 1978 and 1980. The five stories and the new, introductory piece (which is still fiction), are set on a distant planet that has most of the modern conveniences we are familiar with such as aircraft and computers. The Archipelago is an uncounted collection of islands girdling the equatorial regions of the world. To the north is a large continent on which there are two warring countries. They do most of their actual fighting on the southern continent but to get there the troop ships have to pass through the Archipelago. Sometimes they stop. Some islands have garrisons on them.

Priest started writing The Islanders as a gazetteer of the Dream Archipelago, pulling out of the original stories names, climates and histories, the kind of thing that would have gone into a Rough Guide. This accounts for the format as the entries are listed by alphabetical island name. It has evolved into much more and has become a tangled tapestry revolving around one incident on one island. A number of contemporary historical characters recur, each mention adding either to the knowledge of, or confusion left behind. To elicit the truth is like picking through a barrel of green apples to find the ripe ones.

The centre of the controversy is a mime artist known by the name of Commis who died on stage in a theatre on Goorn when a sheet of plate glass fell on him. Although it could have been an accident, the assumption from the start was that it was a case of murder for which someone had to be convicted.

Chaster Kammiston is an acclaimed novelist from Piqay who built his reputation around not being able to leave the island due to various superstitions. As his by-line is on the introduction, where he warns the reader not to trust the veracity of the entries the truth of this becomes highly suspect. He may or may not have been on Goorn at the time of the incident.

Esla Caurer appears on many islands in many guises. As a writer and social reformer she influenced many inhabitants. She is a teacher on Smuj, a manifestation on Derril, Kammiston’s lover on Piqay and the champion of a young man from Cheoner who was executed for a crime he probably did not commit.

Turning up on almost every inhabited island, and leaving in a hurry after possible sexual indiscretions is Dryd Bathurst, an artist as famous for his affairs as his renowned canvases. Another artist that has left her mark on the landscape is Tamarra Oy. Her installations are of a grander affair – tunnels bored into the rocks with varying effects.

In some ways, like a true gazetteer, this is a book you can dip in to. It is a selection of cleverly interwoven histories, stories and descriptions which up to much more than the individual parts. It is worth rereading sections to spot the clues planted and possibly missed as the heart of this book spirals around itself. Is this a novel? Yes. But please, beware of the insects from the island of Aubrac Grande.

DIARY OF A WITCHCRAFT SHOP by Trevor Jones and Liz Williams

NewCon Press, pb, £7.99.

Reviewed by Selina Lock

Liz Williams is best known as a science fiction and fantasy author, with works such as the Inspector Chen novels, but here she and her partner Trevor Jones give you an insight into the trials and tribulations of running a witchcraft shop inGlastonbury.

No matter what your views of witchcraft and paganism this diary is brimming with humour, honesty and downright strange occurrences. As evidenced by our own visit to Glastonbury when we found the Tor closed due to a man wielding a ceremonial knife. Apparently this kind of unusual incident can appear quite normal in a town that attracts a wide variety of eccentric people.

In part, this is the story of Trevor and Liz’s life, with the highs of knowing interesting people and the lows of serious illness. It is also a peek into the reality of the Glastonbury that is shaped by its history and connection to myths, magic and various religious beliefs. It bears little relation to the muddy music festival that has helped make the area famous…

I also enjoyed the digressions into the history of British witchcraft and the love/hate relationship residents have with Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon books.

The only minor quibble I have is that it is not always obvious which authorial voice is speaking, which makes some of the entries slightly confusing. On the whole, this is a fascinating glimpse into someone else’s world.

EVOLVE TWO: VAMPIRE STORIES OF THE FUTURE UNDEAD edited by Nancy Kilpatrick

Edge, p/b, £9.36

Reviewed by Pauline Morgan

There have been anthologies of vampire stories before, there will undoubtedly be others. There are readers who will lap then up, whatever their content; others will shy away simply because vampires in recent years have become a mite too cuddly. They have lost their bite. The question is, then, why should the jaundiced reader bother with this volume. There are a number of reasons, but most important, these vampires all have the same agenda – survival. The way they do that best is by treating humans as prey. These creatures are as varied as their authors but are all very dangerous.

Flicking down the contents list, the British reader will recognise very few of the authors. This is a book produced in Canada and most of the authors are Canadian. If anything this is an advantage as there are no preconceptions when coming to their work. The editor, Nancy Kilpatrick, considers the future of the vampire race and has divided the volume into three sections – Pre-apocalypse, Post-apocalypse and New World Order.

In the first section, the eight stories have an alternative present – where vampires are known to exist – or a near future scenario. They start relatively gently and gradually get bloodier. The first in the section is “The List” by Kelley Armstrong. Zoë knows she is the only vampire living in Toronto but an anthropologist has claimed that there are 24. At the end of his lecture on vampire lore he is stalked by a Goth demanding to know why she isn’t on the list and Zoë has to intervene. This story is slight, fun and a lead in to the darker ones where the vampires always live up to their heritage. Some do have a kind of compassion. In “Six Underground” by Michael Lorenson, the vampire, Connor, gets himself onto the jury of a murder trial. His intention is to persuade the rest of the jury that the girl the defendants killed was not a vampire – as they are already dead, vampires cannot he murdered. “Toothless” by David Beynon takes us into the near future when the ozone layer is virtually extinct. The focus here shifts away from an individual vampire onto the cops who are trying to find who is killing the vampires and stealing their teeth.

In the eight stories in the second, Post-apocalypse, section, there has been some kind of apocalyptic disaster causing the collapse of civilisation. As a result, vampires are either in the ascendant or the conflict between them and the human race is one of survival for one or the other. Problems can arise when vampires have dwindling sources of prey. An example is “Chelsea Mourning” by David Tocher. When the vampires awake from their twenty year hibernation they find the world devastated by a huge meteor strike and few humans. They intend to capture one alive to lead them to more. They have the misfortune to pick on Chelsea, who is a telepath. “Survival of the Fittest” by Leanne Tremblay has a desperate vampire colony. Most surviving humans are poor specimens so when Charlie turns up claiming to live well outside the colony they believe they have found a new food source, especially as Charlie seems able to cope with the radiation coming through the ozone stripped atmosphere. Evolution, though has favoured the humans rather than the vampires. “Blood That Burns So Bright” is another turning point story in which a human girl is a cage fighter up against the best of the vampires. If she wins her fight, she will show that vampires can be beaten.

The final section of six stories takes vampires out into deep space. John Shirley’s “Soulglobe” has them hidden from sight. The Soulglobe to the human population is an exotic place to which the terminally ill can go to die. When Frank takes his wife there, he has second thoughts and uncovers what is really happening. These vampires are trying to survive by misusing human concerns about death. In Tanith Lee’s “Beyond The Sun” the vampires, because of their qualities, are sent out ahead of the humans to create a new world on which they can live. This is a beautiful science fiction story combining myth and technology tied together with the romance of the vampire life and the love of another being. Love also plays a part in “Beacons Among The Stars” by Anne Mok in which the more adventurous of a vampire pair heads out among the stars on the early colony ships. Later, his lover follows in a desperate bid to find him.

There are a huge range of stories here, each focusing on different aspects of vampire lore and stretching the boundaries. That is what makes this a good book to pursue and dip into.

THE SOOKIE STACKHOUSE COMPANION edited by Charlaine Harris

Gollancz, hb, £.16.99

Reviewed by Selina Lock

This is exactly what it says on the cover; a guide to all things Sookie Stackhouse. It includes a new short story, summaries of all the novels, information on the short stories, a guide to the creatures of the Sookieverse in her own words, a trivia quiz section, Southern recipes as would be eaten in Bon Temps, interviews with Alan Ball and Charlaine Harris, thoughts from fans of the series and entries on characters, events and settings in the books.

This is one for the hardcore Sookie Stackhouse book series fans, who will love the details and insights related.

For those that follow the books, the main point of interest is going to be the new eighty page short story ‘Small-Town Wedding’. Harris gives us a wider glimpse into the Sookieverse by sending Sookie to Sam’s home town as his date for a family wedding. This is set after the shifters have revealed themselves to the world and shows us how the revelation has split a community apart. As usual, Sam and Sookie find themselves smack in the middle of a dangerous situation, fighting to keep their loved ones and innocent people safe. We get to see some returning characters and some ongoing plot threads are resolved, so a must read for fans.

I would have preferred some of the sections to be more clearly labelled in the table of contents, as a section called Life in Bon Temps did not say to me that it was the summaries of each of the novels. If you’re a follower of the True Blood TV series, rather than of the novels, then most of the Companion won’t mean much to you, given the way the two series have diverged.

One to buy if you’re pining for the next Sookie Stackhouse novel, or as a gift for a loved one who is.

HARBOUR by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Quercus, p/b, £7.99

Reviewed by Selina Lock

Setting off for a family day out Anders, Cecilia, and their six year old daughter, Maja, ski across the ice to visit Gavasten lighthouse, just off the coast of their Swedish island home. The visit goes horribly wrong when Maja disappears. She vanishes into thin air with no sign of broken ice and her body is never found.

Anders returns to the island several years later when his marriage has broken down and he’s become an alcoholic. Upon his return he is haunted by memories of Maja and incidents from his own childhood.

Meanwhile Simon, a non-native resident of the island, finds a strange creature just after Maja’s disappearance, which has special significance to him as an illusionist.

The novel draws you in using the tragedy of Anders’ life and the intrigue of Simon’s find before introducing the other residents of the island. It then delves back through the generations to show how the strands of history have led the residents to their current predicament.

Lindqvist provides a gripping portrayal of the devastating effect that the loss of a child can have on a parent. He shows how Anders’ attempts to reconnect to the past through possessions and comics Maja left behind lead him into danger. The mystery deepens with the melding of illusion and magic, weaving throughout the story the way that magic and superstition have become a normal part of life on the island, and leaving both the characters and reader unsure of what is real and what is not.

As a British reader, it was also amusing to see how far our pop music had penetrated into Swedish culture during the teenage scenes set in the 1980s.

One of the main themes is the atrocities people are willing to commit upon each other in their own interests, or to give themselves power over others. Water is ever-present in the book; the island is surrounded by and depends on it in many ways. How it is essential for life but still so very dangerous.

Highly recommended to those who like eerie mysteries with flawed, believable characters and a strong plot.