Keith Yatsuhashi - Kojiki (2016)

My review of 'Kojiki' by Keith Yatsuhashi is up on Fantasy Faction today. It's an enjoyable Fantasy epic that draws as much from Japanese mythology and pop culture as it does from Tolkien. Read more through at the link.

Tor Novellas: Mary Robinette Kowal - Forest Of Memory (2016)

Today my review of Mary Robinette Kowal's 'Forest Of Memory', another Tor novella, is up at Fantasy Faction. The novella looks at how our relationship with technology is supplanting our relationship with nature, and has many pertinent things to say about the fetishisation of nostalgia and our dependence on digital technology. Read more through at the link.

Indra Das - The Devourers (2016)

My first ever solo review for Ginger Nuts Of Horror is up on the website today. I'm reviewing Indra Das' intense and striking werewolf novel, 'The Devourers'. Drawing heavily from Hindu mythology and flitting between modern day and seventeenth century India, 'The Devourers' is richly imagined and steeped in India's history. Its exploration of liminal states, transitions, and deaths and rebirths is striking and powerful, and it subverts expectations about gender and sexuality. However what really stays with the reader is Das' beautiful writing, lyrical and evocative, with an almost hallocenogenic intensity. Das is able to describe the most horrific scenes in excruciatingly graphic detail, all whilst couched in the most sumptuous prose. Read more through at the link.

Ada Palmer - Too Like The Lightning (2016)

July also saw my review of Ada Palmer's 'Too Like The Lightning' at Fantasy Faction. Palmer is a historian, and her eye for sociological detail and political intrigue runs through this fascinating and unique science fiction novel, which explores a new age of Enlightenment in the Twenty-Fifth Century. Her fascination with how people could build a better world, coupled with a realisation of how fragile a better world could be and how much could go wrong, makes this an ambigious utopia comparable to Samuel R. Delany's 'Triton' or Ursula Le Guin's 'The Left Hand Of Darkness'. However Palmer very much has her own distinctive voice. I find myself very much looking forward to the sequel. Read more through at the link.

Tor Novellas: Victor LaValle - The Ballad Of Black Tom (2016)

So, late with the updates again. Apologies all round. My review of Victor LaValle's excellent subversion of H. P. Lovecraft, 'The Ballad Of Black Tom', went up on Fantasy Faction in July. Set behind the scenes of' The Horror At Red Hook', Lovecraft's most offensively racist story, 'The Ballad Of Black Tom' brilliantly dissects Lovecraft's racism whilst paying tribute to the imagination displayed in his stories. It is a timely and powerful critique of Lovecraft, whilst being a work of imaginative Weird fiction in its own right .Read more through at the link.

Urban Fantasy at Ginger Nuts of Horror

I am thrilled to announce that I will now be writing for Ginger Nuts of Horror, a fantasic website covering all manner of Horror fiction. My first article, written in collaboration with my talented co-workers at the site, is a piece on Urban Fantasy, in which we all talked about our favourite Urban Fantasy works. No surprises that my section is the one on M. John Harrison's Viriconium. Read more at the link.