Solaris, p/b, £7.99

Reviewed by Carl Barker

It’s grim up north, apparently, though having lived in the North East for the last fourteen years, I can’t say I’ve ever found that to be true. Then again, I’ve probably never ventured into many of the areas on the outskirts of Newcastle and Gateshead which may have served as inspiration for Gary McMahon’s fictional suburb in this, the last of his Concrete Grove Trilogy. If I did, I certainly wouldn’t do it after dark because McMahon’s descriptive prose makes for sombre reading.

The central story of this final book is concerned with Marc Price, a journalist who arrives in the Grove to research a child haunting from the 1970s via his connection to one of the elderly inhabitants of the area. Around this narrative, McMahon weaves the tales of several other characters: Abbey Hansen, a mother living through the nightmarish aftermath of her young daughter having been abducted five years previous, Erik Best, a local hardman and gangster previously featured in the second book in this trilogy, and DS Craig Royle, a detective who obsesses over the multiple child disappearances in the Grove whilst simultaneously trying to rebuild the foundations of his failing marriage.

So far, so Get Carter, but when strange scarecrows start appearing all over the grove, each head adorned with a photograph of one of the missing children, things take a turn for the worse. Something is awakening in the Grove, something long dormant that seeks to open a doorway from this world into another.

McMahon’s prose is grubby and sparse, bringing a palpable sense of despair to proceedings, and after a few chapters you realise that this is the sort of estate you hope you never find yourself lost in. With faint echoes of King’s ‘The Dark Half’ and a hefty chunk of urban horror thrown in, the various narrative threads come together very nicely in an ending which feels entirely satisfying, whilst carefully leaving open the possibility for further returns to The Grove. Having not read either of the two previous books, I was glad to find that no previous knowledge was required in order to enjoy this one. Highly recommended for those of you who like your horror gritty, with a side-order of gloom.

Solaris, p/b, £7.99

Reviewed by Pauline Morgan

Good ideas should never be wasted; visions of grandeur should be shared. When an author creates an image of such potential as Eric Brown’s Helix, it would have been a shame to confine it to just one novel. Fortunately, he doesn’t do so.

The Helix is an immense artificial construct created by a technically advanced race known just as the Builders. Scattered along the length of the structure are ten thousand worlds, many of which are inhabited by sentient beings at different stages of technological evolution. The Builders had devised the structure to re-home various species when their own worlds, for one reason or another, became inviable. In the novel, Helix, a human colony ship crashes on one of the planets and the thrust of the novel is about the discovery of the nature of the place where they have found themselves. At the end, the colonists are given an uninhabited world with many features similar to the Earth they left, to make their home on. Humans were also given the role of Peacekeepers for all the planets on the Helix. The book itself is perfectly rounded and could stand as a one-off. The idea though, is too good to ignore.

Helix Wars is set two hundred years later so there is no overlap of characters, except as revered figures of the past. Now firmly settled into their new role, the human community is able to get on with developing their new planet. Not all races, though, have managed to leave behind the worst traits of their kind. Shuttle pilot Jeff Ellis is shot down by the Sporelli as they cross from their planet carving a swathe of destruction across Phandra on their way to conquer the mineral-rich planet that is the next in the chain. The Phandrans are innately peaceable and humane and are prepared to sacrifice themselves rather than give up Ellis to the Sporelli who are hunting him.

Kandra is a Mahkan, a race that changes sex at intervals and has a high sense of honour. Ellis once saved her life so she is honour-bound to try to rescue him. Calla is a diminutive Phandran healer who does save Ellis before she is rounded up to nurse the Sporelli injured. The fates of these three, Ellis, Kandra and Calla are tied together by their actions. At the same time, each has a very different mind-set

The pleasure of reading a book like this is not only the vast scale of the Helix itself but the way the reader and characters together explore the construct. As far as possible, from a human perspective, Brown has made a good attempt at trying to put across the alien-ness of the mores of the other races Ellis encounters. This is never easy as the truly alien would be incomprehensible. Helix Wars is an action novel packed with alien inventions and strange worlds. It is to be hoped that more novels will be set against this background.

Solaris, p/b, £7.99

Reviewed by Elloise Hopkins

Charald’s queen, Jaraile, has been adbucted by the treacherous Baron Eskarnor and it is up to Sorne to save her and protect the ailing king’s reign. Charald’s health continues to deteriorate and if this becomes common knowledge their lives will all be at stake. Young Prince Cedon has been returned to Sorne following his time with the Wyrds and he too must be protected.

Ronnyn and Aravelle have been rescued from the Mieren but they now face separation because of the strict ruling under which the T’En Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods live. After being gift-infused by the causare, Tobazim is craving female gift. If his brothers discovered this weakness the penalty would be harsh. His only choice is to pretend everything is normal and keep as much distance from Imoshen as he can until he can bring his desire to heel.

Imoshen continues to hold onto her position as causare as the T’En exiles sail towards a new life in Sagora. Now more than ever she can begin to make changes to the T’En way of life that may unite the Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods in future. Despite the loss of their home, the Celestial City, for now everything looks as though life may just work out well in the end, that is, if the Sagorans agree to grant them a safe haven.

Sanctuary follows the journeys of Imoshen and the T’En as they continue to overcome the politics and strains between the Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods, as well as tracking Sorne’s mission to save Jaraile and protect Charald’s heir. The pace moves quickly and the book is more action filled than its predecessors giving an increased sense of tension and conflict throughout and building to a dramatic conflict which brings the individual story threads finally together and grants long-awaited closure to the main characters.

The one aspect that elevates Sanctuary above the previous two books in the trilogy is that the decisions faced by the characters are somehow much harder and the consequences of the choices more detrimental than anything they have faced to this point, and they have already faced some pretty impossible situations. The result is that, having travelled this far with the characters, the reader has far more understanding of the dangers they are facing and how these will affect their lives, and thus has a greater connection to them.

As a conclusion to the trilogy, Sanctuary delivers all that you would want and exceeds expectations. There is a satisfying ending to the story arc but events also wind calmly down to a point that hints at the possibility of a return to the world in future, which in epic fantasy is always a welcome possibility. Excellent plotting, interesting, likeable characters and a well-detailed and complex world really give this series an edge.

Magic brings together some of the UK and America’s most exciting authors to produce a collection of esoteric and arcane stories that will enthral and chill – the perfect read for Hallowe’en and the long autumn evenings ahead!

From the otherworldly visions of Conan Doyle’s father in Niffenegger’s ‘The Wrong Fairy’ to the diabolical political machinations of Dan Abnett’s ‘Party Tricks’, this fresh new anthology of magical short stories has been edited by Jonathan Oliver, critically acclaimed editor of The End of The Line and House of Fear.

Fourteen extraordinary writers have formed their own particular coven for this collection of supernatural tales: Audrey Niffenegger, Sarah Lotz, Will Hill, Steve Rasnic and Melanie Tem, Liz Williams, Dan Abnett, Thana Niveau, Alison Littlewood, Christopher Fowler, Storm Constantine, Lou Morgan, Sophia McDougall, Gail Z. Martin, Gemma Files and Robert Shearman.

In a major coup for a brand new imprint, the launch title will be the beautiful debut novel Lupus Rex, by the high-profile musician and writer John Carter Cash, son of legendary singer Johnny Cash. To be published in June 2013, Lupus Rex will have enormous appeal to children and older readers alike. This astonishing new tale is in the tradition of Watership Down, The Rats of Nimh, the Redwall series and Duncton Wood.

Editor-in-chief Jonathan Oliver said: “The Young Adult market is a vibrant and exciting melting pot of genres and ideas and I’m delighted to lead us into this territory with our new imprint.”

Geoffrey Gudgion’s historical supernatural thriller, Saxon’s Bane, will be published in September 2013.

A contemporary novel with a thrilling historical heart, Gudgion’s first novel is set in the 21st century but grounded in the Dark Ages, with a Saxon legend at its heart.

The past invades the present in this beautiful, lyrical and frightening tale, inspired by Gudgion’s love of ancient, ethereal places, and his eye for signs of the distant past in the English landscape of today.

“It’s a rare occasion when a submission comes in that I have to read right the way through in one go,” said Jonathan Oliver, editor-in-chief of Solaris. “Saxon’s Bane was such a book. Discovering a new writer is always a thrill, and Geoffrey’s novel is of such a high calibre that I can’t wait for people to read it.”

Fergus Sheppard’s world changes forever the day his car crashes near the remote village of Allingley. Traumatised by his near-death experience, he returns to thank the villagers who rescued him, and stays to work at the local stables as he recovers from his injuries. He will discover a gentler pace of life, fall in love ¬ and be targeted for human sacrifice.

Clare Harvey’s life will never be the same either. The young archaeologist’s dream find – the peat-preserved body of a Saxon warrior – is giving her nightmares. She can tell that the warrior had been ritually murdered, and that the partial skeleton lying nearby is that of a young woman. And their tragic story is unfolding in her head every time she goes to sleep.

Fergus discovers that his crash is uncannily linked to the excavation, and that the smiling and beautiful countryside harbours some very dark secrets.

As the pagan festival of Beltane approaches, and Clare’s investigation reveals the full horror of a Dark Age war crime, Fergus and Clare seem destined to share the Saxon couple’s bloody fate.

Eric Brown

About the book:
“The Helix is a vast spiral of ten thousand worlds turning around its sun. Aeons ago, the enigmatic Builders constructed the Helix as a refuge for alien races on the verge of extinction. Two hundred years ago, humankind came to the Helix aboard a great colony ship, and the Builders conferred on them the mantle of peacekeepers. For that long, peace has reigned on the Helix.

But when shuttle pilot Jeff Ellis crash-lands on the world of Phandra, he interrupts a barbarous invasion from the neighbouring Sporelli – who scheme to track down and exterminate Ellis before he can return to New Earth and inform the peacekeepers.”

Eric Brown is widely acknowledged as one of the defining voices in British SF – enter the mind-bogglingly vast universe of The Helix and discover a world beyond even the scale of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama or Larry Niven’s Ringworld.

Jonathan Oliver

Solaris have already published Daniells’ King Rolen’s Kin trilogy very successfully, and are publishing her Outcast Chronicles trilogy this year.  The new book, provisionally titled King-Maker, King-Breaker, will complete the story of King Rolen’s Kin.

Jonathan Oliver said: “It’s great to be working with Rowena again and I can’t wait to read this finale to her brilliant fantasy series.”

Rowena Cory Daniells first became involved in speculative fiction in 1976. Since then she has run a bookshop, then a graphic art studio where she illustrated children’s books, had 6 children in 10 years, sold nearly 30 children’s books and an earlier fantasy trilogy internationally, established R&D Studios and served on the management committees of state and national arts organisations. She lives by the bay in Brisbane with her husband and children, and has a Masters in Arts (Research).

Gary McMahon

About the book:
Marc Price arrives on the estate to research a book about the “Northumbrian Poltergeist,” an infamous case from the 1970s. As Marc teases out the suppressed details of the story, he finds himself drawn to a woman whose young daughter went missing years ago during a spate of child abductions. Then the scarecrows appear, their heads plastered with photographs of the long-missing and the dead…

A door has been opened and a presence is about to step through. It is up to Marc to put the ghosts to rest and unravel fact from fiction.

McMahon’s Concrete Grove series is a spine-tingling contemporary horror trilogy merging ancient horrors with modern themes of deprivation and social despair. Join him as he closes this stunning trilogy with with a very different kind of ‘broken Britain’.

The most exciting, daring and sensitive fictional engagement with the post-9/11 era, Osama is set in an alternate world without global terrorism. Joe, a private detective, is hired by a mysterious woman to find a man: the obscure author of pulp fiction novels featuring one Osama Bin Laden – Vigilante…

Joe’s quest to find the man takes him across the world, from the backwaters of Asia to the European Capitals of Paris and London, and as the mystery deepens around him there is one question he is trying hard not to ask: who is he, really, and how much of the books are fiction? Chased by unknown assailants, Joe’s identity slowly fragments as he discovers the shadowy world of the refugees, ghostly entities haunting the world in which he lives. Where do they come from? And what do they want? Joe knows how the story should end, but even he is not ready for the truths he’ll find in New York and, finally, on top a quiet hill above Kabul—nor for the choice he will at last have to make…

The critical reception of Osama has been nothing short of astonishing and it was nominated for the prestigious BSFA award last year. The hardback from PS Publishing was published in October last year.

Lavie Tidhar was in Dar-es-Salaam during the American embassy bombings in 1998, and stayed in the same hotel as the Al Qaeda operatives in Nairobi. Since then he and his now-wife have narrowly avoided both the 2005 London, King’s Cross and 2004 Sinai attacks—experiences that led to the creation of Osama.

Tidhar brilliantly delves into the modern global subconscious, mixing together film noir, non-fiction, alternative history and thrillers to create an unsettling yet utterly compelling portrayal of our times.

“The Church of the Book has assembled a team of twelve battle-hardened adventurers to slay Greatshadow, the evil elemental dragon who spies through every candle flame, once and for all.

But tensions run high between the leaders of the team who view the mission as a holy duty, and the superpowered mercenaries who add power to their ranks but who view this as a chance to claim Greatshadow’s vast treasure. If the warriors fail to slay the beast, will they doom mankind to death by fire?

A striking mix of adventure, fantasy and lurking menace, Greatshadow promises to be the beginning of a stand-out new series in 2012, written by a real master of the genre.”

Full information HERE

The Faceless

“In the Lancashire town of Kempforth, people are vanishing.

When two-year-old Roseanne Trevor disappears, the local kids blame ‘The Spindly Men’. But even as Detective Chief Inspector Renwick vows to stop at nothing until she finds her, terrifying visions summon TV psychic Allen Cowell and his sister Vera back to the town they swore they’d left forever and local historian Anna Mason pieces together a history of cruelty and exploitation almost beyond belief.

Meanwhile, in the decaying corridors and lightless rooms of a long abandoned hospital, something terrible is waiting for them all.

In a chilling tale of contemporary small-town horror, Bestwick has truly evoked the terror of films such as The Orphanage and the writing of James Herbert, Adam Nevill and M R James.”

Full details on the Solaris website

“Imagine there was a supernatural chiller that Hammer Films never made. A grand epic produced at the studio’s peak, which played like a cross between the Dracula and Frankenstein films and Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors…

Four passengers meet on a train journey through Eastern Europe during the First World War, and face a mystery that must be solved if they are to survive.

As the ‘Arkangel’ races through the war-torn countryside, they must discover: What is in the casket that everyone is so afraid of? What is the tragic secret of the veiled Red Countess who travels with them? Why is their fellow passenger, the army brigadier, so feared by his own men? And what exactly is the devilish secret of the Arkangel itself?

Bizarre creatures, satanic rites, terrified passengers and the romance of travelling by train, all in a classically styled horror novel.”

Full details on the Solaris website HERE

The agent was John Jarrold, and the deal was for UK/US rights.  Solaris provisionally plan to publish early in 2013.

Babylon Steel, former Avatar of the goddess of sex and war, runs the best brothel in Scalentine; a city with gateways to many worlds and a widely varied and occasionally violent populace.  Babylon has also become, somewhat against her will, bodyguard to the controversial new member of the ruling council in the nearby country of Incandress.  Not to mention ‘unofficial Scalentine envoy’ or, to put it more bluntly, ‘spy’.  And while she is trying to protect her charge, avoid clashing with Incandress’s rigid morality laws, and stop the whole country plunging into race massacre and civil war, someone back on Scalentine is killing weres.  The city militia can’t, or won’t, catch them.  And when your lover is the Chief of the city militia, who also happens to be a were, this is more than a little worrying…

Gaie Sebold works for a charity.  She has won a few awards for poetry and has sold short stories to magazines including Black Gate, Legend and City Slab, the recent Under the Rose anthology (Norilana) and the forthcoming End of an Aeon anthology (Fairwood Press).  She is an occasional performance poet.  She was born in the US but has lived in the UK most of her life, currently in an ‘up and coming’ area of London which doesn’t appear to have got very high yet. She is a member of T Party Writers, a London-based genre critique group.’

In a world where France and Great Britain merged in the late 1950s, Powell has crafted an environment where nuclear-powered Zeppelins encircle the globe, electronic ghosts stalk the living, and a king lies dying; a world in which a half-brained woman struggles to solve a deadly riddle in order to regain her stolen soul, and a monkey sets about killing as many online gamers as possible, in order to avert Armageddon.

With the scale of Iain M. Banks and the intrigue of Alistair Reynolds, Powell’s The Recollection was published by Solaris earlier this year and brought a stunning breath of fresh air into epic science-fiction – an astounding novel about both personal human relationships and their place in the vastness of time and space.”

Pitched as ‘Alice in Wonderland goes to hell’, Blood and Feathers is about the search for family set against the backdrop of the continuing war against heaven and hell. But her angels are hardly ‘angelic’ – funny, wise and sometimes utterly horrifying, Morgan’s characterisation and dialogue sparkle in a novel that is both heart-breaking and thrilling, and introducing an exciting new voice into urban fantasy and a fresh take on the eternal battle between the forces of good and evil.

“What’s the first thing you think of when I say ‘angel’?” asked Mallory. Alice shrugged. “I don’t know… guns?” Alice isn’t having the best of days – late for work, missed her bus, and now she’s getting rained on – but it’s about to get worse.

The war between the angels and the Fallen is escalating and innocent civilians are getting caught in the cross-fire. If the balance is to be restored, the angels must act – or risk the Fallen taking control. Forever. That’s where Alice comes in. Hunted by the Fallen and guided by Mallory – a disgraced angel with a drinking problem he doesn’t want to cure – Alice will learn the truth about her own history… and why the angels want to send her to hell.

What do the Fallen want from her? How does Mallory know so much about her past? What is it the angels are hiding – and can she trust either side? Caught between the power plays of the angels and Lucifer himself, it isn’t just hell’s demons that Alice will have to defeat…‘

Eric explains the basis of the amazing artefact that is Helix:

“Helix is a vast spiral construct, wound around a main sequence G-type sun, and is the work of an ancient alien race known only as the Builders. The helix resembles a spiral staircase made up of eight ‘twists’, four above the sun and four below. Each twist or circle consists of well over two thousand ‘sections’ or worlds, amounting to some ten thousand worlds. Each one is approximately forty thousand miles wide, with an ocean in between. Each ‘planet’ is barrel-shaped and rotates on a lateral, equatorial axis, like a bead on a string, and each has its own unique atmosphere and duration of rotation. The arms of the helix at the top and bottom, being further away from the sun, are polar in make-up; those closer to the sun are more clement. The alien races of the helix number some six thousand, at varying levels of technological accomplishment.” ‘

The Wizard’s Coming is now available as a free ebook on iTunes, which serves as an excellent introduction to the brand new epic fantasy series, The Hadrumal Crisis by Juliet E. McKenna.

Discover the fallout from the events in The Wizard’s Coming in McKenna’s Dangerous Waters, which was published in August and is also available on iTunes.

READ ANYTHING is the campaign by Solaris and Abaddon Books, two of the freshest genre publishers in the UK today, to encourage people to use their eReaders to explore genres outside of their usual comfort zones. The revolution in eReaders gives readers the freedom to read whatever they want – fantasy, science-fiction, horror, urban fantasy, Steampunk, historical action, ANYTHING. They’re perfect to explore genre fiction you never knew even existed!

The Wizard’s Coming is just the first of the free ebooks that will be made available on iTunes.

“Electronic publishing and e-books provide a whole host of opportunities for the publisher and reader,” said Jon Oliver, editor-in-chief of Abaddon Books and Solaris. “We can get our books out now to an even wider audience and we’re looking forward to welcoming new fans to the world of genre.” ‘

Links for The Wizard’s Coming:

iTunes UK

iTunes US

Links for Dangerous Waters, the first book in the The Hadrumal Crisis series:

iTunes UK

iTunes US

See full article HERE