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Bob Van Laerhoven is a writer and journalist who has travelled the world’s warzones and seen what people do. He is haunted by it. The evil that humans do. But I suspect that the darkness haunted him before that: it’s not everyone’s choice, that line of business. He chose to look.

These stories aren’t comfortable. He wasn’t going for “comfortable”. How does a terrorist feel? What is happening in the mind of the man who kills an innocent man for revenge, generations later? How do people delude themselves? And above all, how do people betray each other? Even the lightest and most innocent of these stories is a narrative layered with betrayals.

Mostly we like dark stories because they reassure us. We’re fascinated by evil but we don’t have to own it. People do terrible things – but it wasn’t us. There are villains down there in the dark. Drug addicts, terrorists, thieves, perverts… and closer to home, petty criminals, wicked parents, treacherous friends. We read the stories, transfixed, delighted. Because it wasn’t us. We are here in the light – looking down into the underworld. Against these crimes, our own are negligible. We’re in the clear. Perhaps we are heroes even.

Bob Van Laerhoven doesn’t play those games. Yes - to find the darkness he went all the way to war-zones and to far, exotic, troubled countries, so perhaps he also wanted to believe that the darkness was somewhere else. And on the surface of his writing there is the journalist shouting: I was there, this is what they did, I saw it, now look at the consequences. Focus on that, if you like. These are things you need to know. But if that is enough for you, read fast, skim the pages, close the book quickly, play some music.

But play it loud, or you will hear, echoing beneath that shouting, another voice that whispers (don’t listen !) I didn't just watch, I did it, it was me. And then, as an echo of an echo – barely heard but impossible to escape - you were there too… don’t you remember? We did it together.

Supernatural/Human hibrids. They’re all over the place in literature and myth. Achilles. Dionysus. Helen of Troy. Supernatural father, human mother… (I won’t mention Jesus. Yes, definitely best to leave him out of this….) Human and more than human. It’s a nagging whisper of things we feel – powers we feel inside ourselves, possibilities, dangers.

I liked this modern rendition. Dahlia is the perfect fusion of edgy and timeless. The dragonworld in the backstory was the usual brutal feudalism that is the big cliché of fantasy literature, but Schneider tempers that, and grounds her hybrid in the sharp modernity of an American city. A recognisable place, with office blocks where people work and parks where children play. Her dragon-human heroine drinks coffee, wears cool clothes (sometimes), works out in a gym… But she also shapeshifts, and throws fire, and wrangles all manner of unhuman creatures. Between these poles she drifts between her dragon sensibilities – ruthless and carnal – and the awkward capacity for empathy and friendship that has already, at the start of the book, got her into a lot of trouble.

It’s a layered book. An action packed police procedural. A fantasy with sex and monsters. A character novel, with moments of humour. It glances at a number of very human troubles – the pains of integration, the unease of the displaced, the alienated, the misfits and those who live longer than their friends. The pace of it keeps you surfing through the plot, cresting the waves, looking for what happens. But beneath you, if you ever look down, there’s a lot going on in the water….

I heard the audio version of this book (Scribd) as a companion for running. It’s light, it’s engaging, it has lots of positive female characters, and a plot that certainly helped the kilometres to pass without boredom. I did spot one of the baddies early on in the story – but perhaps I just read too many of these books so I know the signs! I didn’t really mind that – it’s great to go through a book with a bit of smug suspicion, and even so the ending remained a gratifying surprise. The only thing I really didn’t like were the sex scenes – I often do like sex scenes, but the clinically anatomical descriptions in this one seemed quite out of character with the cosy mystery feel of the book. (At one point I started to wonder if these bits of the narrative had been pasted in afterward, and possibly written by a man!)
The narration is spot on, and brought each of the characters to life. Great characters. Altogether a nice book for a careless afternoon (or a week of running).

Ah the old stories are always best!

I loved this modern take on the timeless tale of the living person who breaks into the after-life. It’s certainly been around since Homer sent Odysseus to visit Hades, so that’s pushing 3 millennia, but I bet it’s much longer than that, actually. What is there after this? Where do dead people go? Aren’t those amongst the questions at the very heart of the human condition?

Kirkbride does it well, and his story manages to be gripping and funny and touching all at once, which is quite a feat. I like the fact that he’s made a modern god, in a modern afterlife, with modern issues. I never could understand why we dress God in a sheet with nothing but endless harp-music, or that Satan is still relying on brimstone and magic. What’s the point of them if the best they can manage is stuff from the dark ages? And if God’s omniscient, he’ll surely have discovered Spotify by now…

The Greeks didn’t have this anachronizing zeal: they dressed their gods in quite the same clothes as they wore themselves and gave them all their own technologies. The same appetites too, and the familiar petty vices. They did not use them for moralising and mystifying, but to tell stories about their own lives and troubles, just as Kirkbride does.

My only criticsm of this so-called book is that its really just a short story – weighing in at only just over 60 pages. Partly I’m disappointed because it finished before I was ready, but also it meant that it lost a lot of opportunities, and had a lot of “rushing through”. At times that worked well – but he could have done a lot more with this story if he’d given himself more space. The world building was started but not finished, the politics of the place were significant, clearly, but largely untold. It’s a rip-roaring yarn (just as Homer’s was) but it’s been done before and the questions aren't going away, so there shouldn’t have been a rush to get it out.

Take your time, next time, Mr Kirkbride.

This is a book that doesn’t let you pin it down. Part detective thriller, part dystopian post apocalypse, part paranormal fantasy… but all of it solidly and surprisingly grounded in an uncomfortable political commentary – not quite a political satire, but definitely a wide awake, eyes-open observation of contemporary America.

It’s set in 2026 – a year not so very far away. Not as far away, say, as 1984 was to 1948, when Orwell put pen to paper. Of course, the world changes faster now, so the author has crammed in a lot more technological change than Orwell dared to –a lot of it being AI gadgets and personal knick-knacks, and it would hardly be plausible to think ten years ahead and not have more of those. The bobble-head robot is particularly delicious. But as with 1984, this is really a book about the present. A book that has things to say about unchained capitalism, about police brutality, about climate change and pollution and uban decay. About inquality and political oppression and being a kid in an impossibly damaged world . Reading this book on the day Trump finally lost the US election, the California of this book is pretty close to the nightmarish America that exists in my European imagination. I didn’t find the world implausible.

There’s the magic stuff and the superpowers of course – I never was one for the paranormal, though it didn’t annoy me in this story as it has done in some. This was paranormal in rather the Mulder and Scully tradition– something to be skeptical about and investigate – extra-terrestrial perhaps, or evolutionary... But the “school for kids with superpowers” (bit of a trope now isn’t it?) didn’t do it for me. I’d have preferred the book with just one magical mystery, the girl who can see the future. In a book about a dystopian present, isn’t this the superpower that everyone most wants and most dreads? The rest are just party tricks.

The characters redeemed the magic stuff for me – all were nicely drawn, believable and their stories left me minding about them. They go through some grim things, and I felt it. By the end of the book I had lost myself in the story, giving up – finally – my analytic zeal. It’s a good story.

Let me issue some warnings. Horror (as I’ve recently discovered) is one of those tricksy catetories that means too many different things and you can cause a lot of offense if you make the wrong assumption! So you need to know what this book isn’t or you may be disappointed. (By which I possibly mean appalled.)

This isn’t a book of slightly spooky ghost stories written for nice middle-Englanders who like a little frisson now and then (if you want those, try [a:Rayne Hall|4451266|Rayne Hall|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/f_50x66-6a03a5c12233c941481992b82eea8d23.png]). Nor is it a book that goes for horror by piling on the blood and gore (there are lots of them, but for a decent one you could try [b:Follow Him|52618826|Follow Him|Craig Stewart|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1570494993l/52618826.SX50_SY75.jpg|73676886] by Craig Stewart). It’s not gross out. It’s tough but not "horror for it's own sake", not "extreme horror". (See www.goodreads.com/topic/show/292322-gory-disgusting-revolting-novels). Nor is it classic stuff like Bram Stoker or Edgar Allen Poe or Mary Shelley.

So what’s the right shelf for this book? I think I’ll put it with [a:Miles Watson|14988570|Miles Watson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1465444760p2/14988570.jpg]’s “[b:Devils You Know|32706702|Devils You Know|Miles Watson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1476943184l/32706702.SY75.jpg|53284299]”, on that very small shelf called “Hard Core Horror Stories by Seriously Intelligent Authors who I’d Like to Write a Different Sort of Book”. (Miles Watson has done so, several times in fact, so come on Sawney, your turn to step up to the mark...)

What he gives us here is a really interesting set of stories, using horror as a vehicle for asking questions about the lives we actually lead. There are several stories about unachievable obsessions. An ageing husband so obsessed with not dying that he isn’t living either. A loving carer throwing away her own happiness to protect an unsavable patient. The infatuation of a ghost for a living woman. And there are several stories about the lure and fascination of cruelty. A couple, possibly, about madness. The author doesn’t pile it on: he has an admirable lightness of touch and the stories have plenty of humour. But they all – most gruesomely in the penultimate The Dark at the Deep End – point to a terrifying darkness just below the surface of what others can see.

Through his well-quoted title the author is gambling with the possibility that he’s not alone, that other people also have heads that seethe with unspeakable thoughts as his own clearly does. It’s a brave thought to admit to. I’m not saying whether I think he’s right – too much of a coward, me – but I have a theory… It's a book worth reading. A question worth asking.

This is a unique and extraordinary book, cutting across mindsets as much as genres.

It can be read, just about, if you’re prepared to put the work in, as a crime thriller, a whodunit for the rape that slams through the early pages of this book. Sadly the violence and horror of that scene may make some readers stop there and decide the book is not for them, but press on if you can bear to, you will be repaid.

You may be better repaid if you think of it as a literary work, a meditation on consciousness and determinism. A physicist speculates about whether one could predict the future if one knew the trajectory of every object in space, every action and reaction in the infinite Newton’s cradle. A Seminole woman sees the future, as a child is born, locking into an inevitable prophesy. Throughout, the book traces the infinitely complex web of apparently unrelated actions and events, that underpin an eventual outcome. In the midst of such forces can anyone have free will?

But to keep yourself from losing track, you might try to read it as a cultural saga – complex, spanning generations and timeframes and perspectives – a saga in which, no matter how the cultural backdrop changes, women hold the world together, and men – sons – disrupt it. Throughout this book, sons are problematic.

But however you read it, you do have to put the work in. The intricacy of this work is intriguing, and the writing is sometimes quite mesmerising, but you can easily miss a step. It jumps in time and place and person, forwards and backwards. And the author does warn you. The process of the book is described rather neatly in a passage very near the beginning, in which a judge reflects on the nature of a trial: A trial is a jigsaw puzzle, she told the jurors. Each piece of the puzzle is a piece of evidence. There is no order in which the pieces of the puzzle must be assembled. But you can’t see the puzzle’s entire picture until you have all the pieces. When all the evidence is presented, you will have all the pieces of the puzzle. Then following my instructions, it will be your job to put the puzzle together. You can only reach a proper decision after you’ve seen the entire picture.

And it will, indeed, be your job, dear reader. The author gives instructions, and throws all the pieces of the puzzle into the mix. But you have to put it all together. Enjoy.

This is a book to listen to when you just feel sluggish and need your energy back! High intensity, high adrenaline, lots of action of all kinds - and a cast of characters to die for. OK, so they're criminals, the lot of them, including the badass good-guys. And the main character isn't put together to draw too much sympathy, even though there's a thread of integrity running through him that the author just somehow couldn't keep out. Henry Roi is a writer who injects exuberance into every scene and carries the reader along with such wild abandon that you can't help loving the ride, even if you're being taken somewhere that you never expected or planned and wouldn't have said yes to if he'd asked before he swept you up.

I loved this book!

The narration is perfectly judged. Jamal West clearly completely ""got"" the book, and didn't miss a beat at any moment in the reading of it. Sharp, sassy, full of energy. Perfectly captured the spirit of the book, and the Razor's delicious voice.

Life-enhancing badness!

This is billed as a book for lovers of Doctor Who (amongst others). More than half a century ago I was wowed by the very first episode of same; last week I slept in a house with a six foot Dalek outside my bedroom (seriously); in between I’ve always been a fan of that sort of stuff - so trust me, this is a book I had to read!

Wasn’t disappointed.

This merry drama is quite in the tradition of that admirable super-series, and I’ll be happy for its cast to have just as many episodes, even though I’ll have to regenerate to watch the later ones. Turns out the universe is not being run by God or TimeLords or Bill Gates, but by a bunch of superhuman “Minders”, who operate from swanky office blocks in another realm. And of course, in the tradition of Doctor Who, the universe is under threat, and in the absence of some seriously smart input from a super-competent inhabitant of an off-world realm, its destruction is imminent.

Our heroine, Angela Hardwicke, isn’t Doctor Who (she’s much more badass than the recent female one and much less messianic than David Tennant, the best of the recent men) but she’s an interesting creation – recovering (sort of) addict, sharp shooter, failed mum … and despite some dalliance with a male-looking Minder (who can tell? They aren’t human), she’s clearly got some issues with sexual orientation... Loved her.

Still in the tradition of Doctor Who, the out-of-world realm (“Eternity”) did seem largely indistinguishable from the world we're otherwise bored with. Everyone seemed to have a familiar job and everyday worries, and instead of futuristic jumpsuits (think Star Strek) its population appeared to be dressed exclusively in 1990s gear from the high street. (Our heroine favours pin-stripes, a fedora and a big trench coat – but she’s a private eye, so of course she does.) As for world building – and I’ve read some reviews that praised this, so I must have missed something – I couldn’t see any of that except for the constant iteration of unusual celestial features – pink and green skies, supernumerary moons and so on. Everything at ground level seemed amusingly familiar. There were office blocks, burger joints, a florist, a laundromat (Really? A laundromat???) I loved this banality, which I take to be some sassy kind of homage to the era when Doctor Who was being shot in a Welsh seaside city, before CGI, when the props department made monsters out of toilet rolls, and the whole of the wardrobe department would fit into …. well, a wardrobe. (If it’s not an homage to such times, then heaven knows what it’s about, because CGI comes cheap in novels – it might be making some kind of philosophical point, but I was enjoying the story too much to worry about it).

It’s a great yarn – some classic cliché scenes (like the one in the warehouse where the goodies are tied up and the baddy is about to shoot them but delays too long – Doh! Phew! ) interwoven with neat twists, moments of emotion and a bit of good old fashioned detective work. Doctor Who meets Raymond Chandler. (Now that would make a good episode….)

This novel stands alone, but it’s also part of a series. Nice. As Raymond Chandler wrote “To say goodbye is to die a little.” All things considered I’m happy not to say goodbye to Angela Hardwicke.

I feel like I’ve lived in Aegaan. (For a while, I thought I might die there). This is an absorbing book whose characters get inside your head and steal a bit of your soul. Mind you, they have time to do so. This is the longest book I’ve ever read. Having started it, I did feel compelled to finish, but I also felt an irrational resentment as if I’d been taken hostage. If I’d bought it as a physical book, I’d probably have noticed that it needed its own suitcase, and I’d have known what I was letting myself in for. With an e-book – gifted kindly by Blackthorn Book Tours in exchange for an honest review - the size isn’t immediately apparent… And it got its claws into me before I had time to realise.

It’s a great book, in its own way – fair do’s, it must have taken a lot of writing, and every page is full of Matthew Cox’s trademark qualities as a writer – beautiful fluid prose, good dialogue, wonderfully defined characters, world class world-building, great story telling. A less confident writer (like JK Rowling or Tolkein maybe?) wouldn’t have dared this project – they’d have taken each of the strands and done each as a separate book, making it a series. (Aah, perhaps there is a parallel universe in which JK Rowling and Tolkein are both one-book wonders… one very long book each…)

There is a beauty in the unity of this novel – and it is a unity, a single story, no matter how many paths it takes in getting to its conclusion. Perhaps it was this that drove him to do it in this way, to preserve the integrity of his vision - in which case credit to him for taking the risk. All the same, even in a summer of Covid, with half the world off work, locked down, and looking for escape, I’m not sure that there is space in readers’ lives for a book this long. If that’s right, it’s a shame – Aegaan’s a great place and deserves the tourists.

As one who spends her best hours pulling nettles on wasteland in a corner of the (who owns the land anyway? I don't know) world, I felt I had found a family when I read this book. It is a book about people who do this thing, not as I do it, alone and as a bit of a meditation on solitude, but in a community fashion, with other humans. A book about people who cultivate little patches of unused urban soil, for as long as they can before the bulldozers come. A book about people who cultivate communities as well as plants - and sometimes artwork and families.

It's a precarious activity. Since the book was first published, in 2002, most of the gardens it describes have disappeared - built over and forgotten. That never means it wasn't worth the effort. Something that gardeners know is that it's always worth the effort. And it never lasts. But just for a moment, it is there. That leaf. That flower. Like you. Yes - dare to know it - like your children. We're all mortal.

I first read this book a year or so ago, before it was available as an ebook. I am really pleased that it is now available to a wider audience - nothing has really changed since it was written, except the numbers on the calendar.

Poplar Hill is a lovely book, part memoire, part fiction, carefully and quietly written. Set in Nova Scotia, Canada, just before the millennium, it beautifully conveys a time and a place and a small town culture of friendships and loyalties. The book focuses on Kitty, a local celebrity of sorts, who is approaching the end of her life, and recalling her youth, as an American ‘society girl’ caught up in Germany at the slow start of the second world war in Europe. Her very personal and vivid memories provide an unusual and striking perspective on the often-told stories of that time, and I found myself won over by the continuity of character from the bold, self-possessed girl in the stories to the still vibrant old lady now dying in her adopted country, amongst old friends. As a commentary of its time, the book also depicts, in the background, the complicated and professionalised business of an old person dying of natural causes in North America – multiple changes of care settings, blood transfusions, intensive care, invasive tests and monitoring – against an affectionate counterpoint of older traditions, of friendship, unburdening of old secrets and keeping vigil. This is a book well worth reading. Enjoy.

A compelling political thriller and a great story

Here’s a taut, well written thriller that you will read in a rush of “What happens? What happens?”, but then think about for a long time afterwards. Set in an unspecified not-too-distant future, it tells the story of an international crisis triggered by an (initially rather insignificant) incident on the remote Alaskan border with Russia. There is plenty of tight, well-written action, and the characters - including several feisty women in different roles – are beautifully drawn and fully engaging. The writing is a joy, and the depictions of the unusual arctic setting are atmospheric and memorable. What I may remember longest from this book, however, is the compelling depiction of the politics underpinning a potential world war. As two world powers square up to each other, it becomes clear that this small incident has roots going back deep into history. Other countries jostle uneasily towards one side or another, looking to their own interests; financial agencies struggle to contain economic risks; on all sides, key players are struggling to second guess each other, in the full knowledge that both sides will lie about their intentions and that a wrong guess could have desperate consequences; even on the same side, different players have very different agendas, looking to manage or exploit the situation for their own advantage. And cutting across all of this, there are the random networks of human friendships and animosity, sometimes assisting, sometimes undercutting, the higher political objectives. I was completely persuaded by this book. Seriously worth the read.