Review: The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch

The October Man is a short novel set in Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London / Peter Grant contemporary fantasy universe. Only it's not set in London and Peter Grant isn't in it...

When I first heard that Ben Aaronovitch was writing a novel set in Germany, I thought that meant Peter Grant was going on a bigger outing. So far, he's been to London, London, London, rural Hereford and London. I didn't realise it was going to be a spin-off about people who know of Peter Grant (thanks largely to spy agencies), but who have not appeared in any of the previous novels in the series. So I was quite intrigued when, some pages in, I finally realised that this book was going to be something different.

Tobias Winter, our protagonist and first person narrator, is a young German police officer specialising in the supernatural. He is apprenticed to Germany's number one (and only) police wizard. In The October Man, he gets sent to Trier to solve a gruesome murder in the German wine-growing region around the Mosel river, with the help of a local policewoman.

If that premise sounds a little... familiar... then it's because Tobias Winter is the German Peter Grant. The setup of the German magic police might not include a building like the Folly, but apart from that, it feels very, very familiar. There is even an enthusiastic forensic coroner of magic corpses who helps the team, and there are Rivers to talk to...

Tobias Winter also has a very similar narrative voice to Peter Grant. He might not comment about architecture (although he does comment about the history  of places a lot), but apart from that, he has the same sense of humour and wit, the same way of observing things, the same approach to modern policing. His parents might not be into jazz, but Tobias has the same bemused affection for them that Peter has for his...

After the conclusion of the faceless man arc in London, I can see why it must have been tempting for the author to escape to a different angle for a bit. However, it feels a tad disappointing that the different angle turns out to be not that different after all.

The October Man is a curious novel: it's fun and readable and has most of the things you love about the Rivers of London series. Except for the cast. But it has a cast of equivalents instead...

Its biggest advantage turned out not to be the different setting, but the more compact list of characters. Peter Grant's universe has grown to include a big crew of friends, colleagues and recurring characters: at times, Lies Sleeping had felt like an exercise in story logistics akin to pulling the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe together into a tentpole ensemble story. The October Man goes back to basics and echoes Rivers of London more than any other Peter Grant novel since. Its biggest weakness is that it manages to feel weirdly derivative of its own series. It's worth reading and good fun, even so.

Rating: 3.5/5

Review: Swordheart by T. Kingfisher

Swordheart is a romantic adventure novel by T Kingfisher (a.k.a. Ursula Vernon) set in the same world as the marvellous Clockwork Boys duology.

Halla, our heroine and a respectable widow, starts the novel locked up in her room, imprisoned by her awful relatives. Unfortunately, she has inherited a fortune after caring for a curmudgeonly collector and rogue uncle for years. Said relatives (by marriage) don't want to let the fortune leave the family, and so they are preparing to force her to marry her clammy-handed, limp cousin-in-law.

Seeing no other way out, she tries to kill herself with an old sword that has been hanging on the wall for years. Only, as she draws it, a warrior magically appears: Sarkis, servant of the sword, is sworn to protect its wielder.

Swordheart is a fairly straightforward romantic adventure. Halla is likeable, naive, filled with child-like curiosity and wonder, downtrodden and very not-confident. Sarkis is a fierce warrior, not blessed with the greatest patience in general (but a huge amount of patience with Halla, even if he tends to mutter under his breath and bang his head against any nearby solid surface a lot), and generally up-tight and upstanding and cut from the very same cloth as Clocktaur Wars' paladin character.

Their adventure is basically a journey along a road to the nearest town (some days' travel away) and the nearest city (a few more days of travel), and back. There's a lot of travelling along that one road in the story, with a few small and big adventures along the way.

Swordheart is a story on a different scale from other T Kingfisher and Ursula Vernon novels I have read. There's no big quest, no saving-the-world shenanigans, no ticking clock. Instead, it's a story of two characters, both eminently likeable, developing feelings for each other, while having a few adventures along the way. The book leaves and breathes with Halla and Sarkis and the reader's investment in them. They're likeable, but as currently bitter curmudgeon, I did not feel the "awwww" that I was supposed to feel. I would bet that other readers (and, I suspect, women readers in particular) will feel much more warming of their tender hearts at the book.

This book is made of fluffy huggy things and the old TV movie Pride & Prejudice moment when Colin Firth's Mr Darcy is shirtless and all flustered. Curmudgeons beware!

Fortunately, there is a gnole in the book (yay!), it is full of the author's delightful sense of humour, and the Vagrant Hills are awesome. Altogether, there's just enough swashbuckling mayhem and laughter to keep even curmudgeons like myself engaged and interested.

Rating: 3.5/5. A bit too sweet for my palate, but good.

10 Brilliant Books You've Never Heard Of: Perfect Gifts For Bookaholics

A couple of years ago, I wrote a list of Brilliant Books You've Never Heard Of. As Christmas is coming up, I thought it's time to update and expand the list!

Below are a few awesome books which even your bibliophile friends probably haven't read yet. These are books which probably never made it to a Waterstones 3 for 2 table, books which don't appear on the Goodreads shelves of avid readers I follow. Some are older books, which were moderately successful in their time, but which are largely unfamiliar to millennials. So, you know, perfect gifts.

Mood: Happy, Adventurous

For those who like fun-filled stories filled with thrills and adventure

The \ Occasional / Diamond Thief is a YA adventure scifi novel.

Kia Ugiagbe, is a 15-year-old girl on a distant planet. On her father's deathbed, he reveals a secret: hidden at the back of a drawer, there is a huge diamond. Her father, she realises, must have stolen it!

Fast paced, fun, and tense, The Occasional Diamond Thief is great fun. Kia is easy to root for: she's hard-working, not brilliant at everything she does, but dedicated. She has a sense of humour and just the right amount of cheek.

There is a sequel, which is just as good. Read my full review, then buy the books as a gift or for yourself!

 

The Dragons of Heaven is set in a world where superheroes and some kinds of magic are real.

Our hero is Mr Mystic. Able to control shadows and even drift from the 'real' world into a shadow realm, Mr Mystic is a fedora wearing, British-sounding, Chinese-magic-wielding martial arts expert. Oh, and she's also a woman, Missy Masters, who inherited the superpowers from the original Mr Mystic.

If you want a book that is fun, funny, thrilling, a bit romantic and sexy, joyful, whip-smart, and a good romp, this really should be up your street.

Read my full review, then buy the books as a gift or for yourself!

 

Mood: Literary, coming of age, but exciting

For those who like coming of age novels with complexity, warmth and a plot that moves. 

The Chicken Soup Murder is told from the perspective of Michael, a primary school boy about to move on to "Big School".

However, all is not well in his world. His best friend's father has recently died. His neighbour's dog has died. And now his neighbour Irma is dating a policeman, whose son bullies Michael.

Then, Irma dies, and Michael suspects foul play.

The Chicken Soup Murder is a warm, addictive, gently amusing novel about the everyday tragedy that is death, but also a novel about childhood and growing up.

Read my full review, then buy the books as a gift or for yourself!

 

Konstantin is a biographical novel about a boy growing up in Russia,and becoming an oddball young man.

Konstantin is a boy with a huge imagination. After losing most of his hearing, he spends the rest of his life a bit removed from his peers. However, this is not at all a misery book. Konstantin is full of infectious enthusiasm, permanently fascinated, and brave, even foolhardy.

Beautiful prose and the energetic protagonist make this a joyful book. Read my full review of Konstantin to find out more.

 

Jasmine Nights is a coming-of-age novel set in 1963 Thailand. It’s the story of Little Frog / Justin, a 12-year-old boy from a very rich family. Justin is a somewhat eccentric, aloof boy. Then, he is gradually nudged out of his shell by his grandmother, and by the kids who live next door...

Jasmine Nights is a story touching on race and prejudice, finding out about sex, Thailand, the periphery of the Vietnam War, different social classes, but above all else, it is the story of a lonely boy becoming slightly less lonely and growing up a little. Amusing and complex, it reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Read my full review of Jasmine Nights to find out more.

Mood: Literary Science Fiction and Fantasy

For those who like their speculative fiction thoughtful and ambitious.

The Falling Woman is a classic that few millennials will have read. It won a Nebula Award in 1987.

Elizabeth is an divorced archaeologist on a dig in Central America. She can glimpse ghosts of the past, especially at dusk and dawn. One day, one of the spectres looks at her and starts to talk...

Diane is her daughter, joining her on her dig after a bereavement. Diane hasn't seen Elizabeth since childhood, and isn't sure what she has gone out to find.

The story builds up its world and characters one step at a time. Gradually, it gains tension, a sense of the uncanny, a foreboding feel... Read my full review, then buy the books as a gift or for yourself!

 

Sequela is the debut novel of a Scottish poet. It tells the story of a scientist whose job is to create sexually transmitted viruses (STVs). In this future, STVs have become fashionable: they indicate whom one has slept with. Each symptom pattern is linked to different powerbrokers, and every 'player' is trying to have the most rarefied rash pattern.

It's high concept, but really, this is a character-based thriller. The tension comes from social interactions, from office politics, from personal relationships and how they develop...  It's a unique and frighteningly convincing novel.

Read my full review of Sequela to find out more.

 

The Beauty starts years after all the women have died. Men and boys have survived, seemingly unaffected by the bizarre fungus plague that wiped out womankind. It's a very short novel. It's postapocalyptic, it's horror, it's science fiction and it's unlike anything I've read: it's full of ideas, atmosphere and the uncanny, and it sticks with you long after you'd finished reading.

Read my full review of The Beauty to find out more.

 

In Great Waters is set in an alternative history where merpeople are real. They are not like humans: fiercer, more direct, more single-minded. They can interbreed with humans, which results in physical and mental differences. Thus we meet Henry / Whistle, a crossbreed who is born in the sea but grows into adulthood among humans.

In Great Waters is outstanding because of its immersive, gradual worldbuilding. Tension builds up slowly: by the time your fascination is satisfied, the story has sneakily turned into a thriller that can't be put down.

Read my full review of In Great Waters to find out more.

 

Mood: Childlike awe and terror

For those who remember how big and wonder-filled and scary the world was when we were kids... or for kids.

Oy Yew is a tiny boy who grows up sustaining himself on crumbs and the smells of food. One day, he is forced into servitude, first in a factory, then in a country mansion. His comrades in slavery are other waifs, children who arrived as boat people on tiny rafts.

But things are about to go from bad to worse: How come there have been so many accidents lately? What secrets lurk in the sinister Bone Room? And why is Master Jep suddenly so interested in Oy's thumbs?

This is a fantastically atmospheric novel. It's uncanny and tender and beautiful.  Even as an adult reader, I was on the edge of my seat. Read my full review, then buy the books as a gift or for yourself!

 

What books would you add to the list?

Have you read any excellent, but underrated / not very widely known books lately? Add a comment, give some recommendations!

Review: Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovitch

Lies Sleeping is the seventh novel in Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series. Chances are, if you like urban / contemporary fantasy, you will have given this series a try by now. If not: go out and buy Rivers of London right now. It's the first novel, and the beginning of the best urban fantasy series ever written.

Peter Grant is a Detective Inspector by now, having worked his way up from rookie (and apprentice wizard) to trusted professional (and ok wizard, though it seems his magical abilities have plateaued and aren't growing much between volumes). At this point in the series, the support cast includes dozens of people, including lots of policeman officers, extended families of Peter and the Rivers, several scientists / medics, and even a few others who are learning wizarding through officially sanctioned channels. So even though I've read every book, I struggled a bit to keep track of who's who. I may have to re-read the series in one go at some point.

One of the reasons the cast is so enormous is that this is the book of a major police operation, nicknamed "Operation Jennifer", with the aim of sorting out the Faceless Man problem once and for all. Meanwhile, Martin Chorley, the Faceless Man (an evil wizard) is busy, busy, busy, scheming to achieve some big objective that might change the world (or London) forevermore...

So far, the series has largely been alternating between "Faceless Man" novels (the even numbered ones) and "archetypal myth" novels (the odd numbered ones). I have consistently enjoyed the ones featuring some archetypal, atmospheric, folkloric style myths more. The Faceless Man could have been interesting, I guess, but after a big intro, his mystique fizzled out quickly. Now he's just plain Martin Chorley, bereft of charisma or mystique, and not really the creepy supervillain that he started out as. More powerful than Peter, but easily matched by Nightingale. So an odd-numbered novel about him felt a bit like it's cheating me out of one of the good ones. (They're all good, but the ones with little or no Faceless Man are simply better).

So, big police operation, Faceless Man, cast list of dozens... Lies Sleeping is not the most accessible novel. Anyone unfamiliar with the series won't find much to enjoy, and those familiar with it need a really good memory. On the bright side, Lesley is in this a lot, and her former place has been taken by Guleed, so Peter has a kick-ass female sidekick again, this time with a hijab, but otherwise very old-Lesley-like. Even better, we meet someone similar to Molly, and the sub plot around her is the best thing about the book (aside from a cameo by talking foxes). Despite those highlights, the book has the usual faceless-man-novel problem of being complicated, messy, and feeling a bit by-the-numbers, so it's not one of the highlights of the series. But this is the sort of series where even the weak entries are not bad.

Bring on the next one!

Rating: 3.5/5

Review: Apocalypse Cow by Michael Logan

Apocalypse Cow is a book that has two massive things going for it:

1) It was the winner of a contest run by Terry Pratchett when he was alive. (Its theme was "anywhere but here, anytime but now")
2) It knows how terrifying cows are.

I mean, 500kg horned beasts with four stomachs and a tendency to stampede... forget wolves! Cows are what you should be worrying about!

As I rarely see evidence that anyone else shares my moophobia, it was perhaps inevitable that I would buy the book. I hoped for an udderly terrifying reading experience, as a horror novel about cows is pretty much guaranteed to scare any sensible person half to death.

Unfortunately, it turned out not to be a book I enjoyed.

Our heroes (if one can call them that) are Geldof, a horny teenage boy with a constant rash, Terry, a slaughterhouse worker who cannot wash off the smell of dead meat, and Lesley, a journalist with big daydreams but little talent. When a bio-weapon starts turning mammals into man-raping, man-eating rage-beasts (i.e. horny zombie critters), they all struggle to survive (and maybe find out what happened).

Our main characters may be not particularly interesting, but they are surrounded by characters so annoying that the readers is clearly meant to want them to die. Geldof's mother is a leftwing vegan extremist and terrorist sympathiser who walks around naked all the time, harangues neighbours and bystanders about their lifestyles, forces her son to wear materials he is allergic against, and spends most of her time having lengthy noisy sex. Her husband is a stoner whose main function is to be a penis for her to shag, without a shred of a brain cell or the ability to string a sentence together. Their neighbours are a meat-obsessed abusive right wing xenophobe nutter, his twin bully sons and his wife / their mother, a maths teacher whom Geldof is in lust with.

Pretty much every character is written with disdain, which is quite offputting as it's clear the author simply cannot imagine a pleasant human being and has nothing nice to say about anyone.

So, a cast of annoying caricatures who aren't funny. Not a good place to start with.

Then, as the animals run amok, the plot meanders along without having anything smart or unique to say. It does not feel tense because every character is odious, so it's impossible to care about any of them. There are chases, narrow escapes, gory violence, etc. etc. etc., but the story does not pack a punch. Instead, it feels like a comic strip written by a 13-year-old misanthropic boy, with roughly the same sense of humour (immature and witless) and the same level of empathy (none).

Finally, for a novel named after cows, featuring a cow on the cover, and mentioning cows a lot on the back cover, there are actually precious few cows in the book. All animals become a threat, and aside from cows we see murderous cats, rats, sheep, pigs, squirrells, etc. - cows draw first blood, but after that they only make a few cameo appearances. So the book isn't even scary - who would be afraid of a fast-moving mountain of rabid man-eating rats when there could be a cow instead?

I have no idea how this novel won a contest. I'm vaguely surprised it was published. Don't waste money on it: it's a load of cowpats.

Rating: 2/5

Review: Soulbinder by Sebastien de Castell

Soulbinder is the fourth novel in the Spellslinger  YA fantasy series about Kellen, a young mage trying to get by as an outlaw.

I've been reading this series since it began, but for reasons I can't quite fathom, I have never reviewed any of the books yet. Shame on me.

The Spellslinger series is fun. It's made of fun. Our hero may be a self-deprecating young man, but his companion is a fierce and murderous squirrell-cat, his mentor is a gypsy frontierswoman hustler, and his adventures are fast, swashbuckling and exciting. At the same time, the books do have high drama, pathos, tension and enough peril to ensure that boredom is never an option.

Soulbinder starts off the way they all do: Kellen is in mortal peril and great trouble. This time, we meet him after he has defeated and killed an enemy, but he and Reichis (the squirrell-cat) are gravely wounded, in a desert, unable to move, and far from any chance of rescue.

Their plight moves from cliffhanger to cliffhanger until Kellen finds himself in a new place, where other people afflicted by the Shadowblack have come together to find sanctuary, and to fight when necessary.

If you haven't been following the series, then go and read it from the beginning. Spellslinger is a fantastic novel, and the books that follow it are highly readable. The previous (third) novel was perhaps a little confused about its direction, but Soulbinder has laser-sharp focus. The characters it introduces are interesting, Kellen's attitude is surprisingly adversarial and filled with bravado, and the plot is tight, fast and dramatic. What makes it so dramatic is that we see Kellen on his own for the first time since the series began, and it's clear that he is more competent than he thinks he is - but also reckless, foolish and panicky, so the reader is never quite sure whether he's ready for this.

The Spellslinger series is great, but books two and four are, essentially, perfect. If you like your fantasy fun, filled with heart and wit and affectionate bickering, if you like fierce and mean cute animals, if you like swashbuckling adventures, great derring-do and larger-than-life characters, if you enjoy a little bit of terrible heartbreak and cliffhangers, then the Spellslinger series is a must, and I'm glad to report that Soulbinder is another of highlight of the series.

Rating: 5/5

Review: The Fairy's Tale by F.D. Lee

The Fairy's Tale is a humorous novel about Bea, a fairy who works to ensure that fairy tales go according to plan. Bea herself, meanwhile, dreams of being promoted from a watcher to a manager (i.e. a fairy godmother), allowed to interact with the characters (humans) rather than just being an unseen force that applies minor nudges.

In her home world, she faces daily discrimination against cabbage fairies and the Kafkaesque reality of a fairy nation managed by a dystopian bureaucracy obsessed with narrative structures (and complete with tyranny, nebulous enforcers, public ºredactions" that are the executions of fairy souls, leaving behind empty husked zombie fairy slaves). And, when she finally gets her big shot, she has to battle with a cinderella who fancies a farm boy, an ugly stepsister who is a vegetarian, a political activist, and who leads a rebellious protest in the woods, a toff king who means well but is utterly gormless, and a grand vizier / royal adviser / mysterious stranger who appears to have his own designs on the direction of Bea's plot...

Fairy tales lend themselves to a certain postmodern smirk, of course. Even Disney rarely dares to tell one straight any more - we get re-imaginings that star the (previous) villains, we get tales that punch holes into fairy tale logic, we get Shrek, Enchanted, Hoodwinked, and live-action reshoots of animated movies where half the pleasure isn't the story, but the cosplay reenactment of a visual text everybody knows. So, The Fairy's Tale does not  exactly tread new ground with its approach of punching holes into well known tales. On the other hand, we readers still love the aesthetic of fairy tales, so it's still fertile ground even if it is not new.

Bea's adventures, however, struggled to maintain my attention. The text's humour was pleasant if mellow, and I rather liked Ana, the ugly stepsister. But somehow, the book felt unpolished. OK, so it could have used a proofreader (the spelling was fine, but there were quite a few places where words were missing, or superfluous words were still in-text, or two half sentences joined together with an overlap). But that alone does not explain why the book felt lost. Perhaps there was something slightly neurotic about the writing, or the dialogue. Perhaps the exposition and world building was paced wrong. Perhaps some plot developments and some characters felt a little too improvised. Perhaps it was too long. All I can say is that the book felt like an early draft, not like a finished product, and somehow this jarred and detracted from the reading experience.

The Fairy's Tale is not a terrible novel, nor was it ever going to be a great, memorable read. Somewhere inside it, there is a pleasantly fun diversion, but for now, the story is still too half-baked to recommend it.

Rating: 2.5/5

Review: Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher / Ursula Vernon

So I've been a bit quiet on this blog for the past few months. There have been a few changes in my life, which affected my ability to concentrate on books while reading (or, to be honest, to concentrate on any one thing in general). I've kept at it, but without succeeding at getting absorbed in the books -  even ones where I could sense the quality of writing and plot. I felt it would have been unfair to write reviews under those conditions.

One theme that has developed is that I rather like the books and stories of Ursula Vernon / T Kingfisher. I loved Digger when I read it. I also read her short stories (one of which won the Hugo last year) and have been reading her other novels, novellas and novelettes. It's been immensely frustrating to read something as good as A Summer in Orcus while lacking the ability to concentrate. I could tell, while reading it, that it was just the sort of story I love, and yet, my brain felt as if the gas of narrative was flowing but the pilot light had gone out and the igniter wouldn't spark and fire up the imagination. I could tell that the problem was in my brain and not in the story. I'm not sure how else to describe it. A very alienating sensation indeed.

The Clockwork Boys stood out because it was the first book in quite a while where even my hard-to-ignite brain finally caught, and stayed properly engrossed. It's the story of Slate, a woman forger, and the band of not-terribly-merry men she leads on a quest of espionage and subterfuge. There's no-longer-Lord Caliban, a paladin / magical knight who used to fight demons until he himself got unlucky enough to be possessed by one, with utterly devastating consequences. There's Brenner, a professional assassin and Slate's Ex, who adds a sense of bemused menace to every scene he is in. And there's Learned Edmund, a teenage monk who is worried his genitals will fall off and his bowels will liquify if he has to suffer the presence of a woman - which poses a bit of a challenge on a mission led by one. Their mission is to steal the secret of the "Clockwork Boys" - ambulatory war machines that devastate anything in their path. But first, they have to get to the enemy heartland, which is a challenge all in itself...

Clockwork Boys works wonderfully because of the way our questing group is thrown (forced) together, and the way they interact. The best comparison I can think of is Jen Williams's equally superb The Ninth Rain, where trust and friendship between protagonists are also slowly built and earned, while a charismatic female leader drives the mission onwards. However, The Clockwork Boys is a little more light-footed: it's an adventure romp first and foremost, never stopping to be fun. (The Ninth Rain is a bit more serious, with complex character traumas and serious themes weaved into the book).

T Kingfisher / Ursula Vernon has a wry sense of humour. Her books often feel a bit like the Terry Pratchett novels featuring Granny Weatherwax or Tiffany Aching, because the way female characters navigate their worlds and problems reminds me very much of Granny or Tiffany. The writing doesn't chase laughs with the same frequency and persistence as Pratchett, but there's bound to be a chuckle or a smile on almost every page, which makes the book a joy to read. Clockwork Boys is especially funny when our little group first has to ride horses - which neither Slate nor Brenner are used to, to say the least.

The only problem is that this is the first book in a serialised story, so it feels like reading an actually enjoyable "Fellowship of the Ring" and then having to wait for the next instalment. It doesn't quite feel like a standalone novel.

That said, it's fun, pacey, funny, absorbing, full of enjoyable characters to be around and a group dynamic that has chemistry and intrigue and the best time I've had with a book in months. Highly recommended.

Rating: 5/5

Review: Digger by Ursula Vernon

Digger is a graphic novel that started life as a webcomic. Unlike many webcomics, this was not merely a short strip of cartoon humour. Instead, Digger is a long form fantasy epic, told through the medium of a serialised comic strip, almost right from the start. And so Digger - the complete Omnibus Edition is absolutely the best way to read the story.

Digger is a wombat, from a world where wombatkind live in warrens and where wombats are a no-nonsense, practical and deeply unspiritual species, concerned primarily with feats of civil engineering. Or so we are told by Digger herself, whom we meet elsewhere.

When we first meet Digger, she's in the process of accidentally tunnelling into a different world, through sinister, magic-infested caves that induce hallucinations (and which may contain monsters who want to skin her), and out through the floor of a temple dedicated to an elephant God of compassion and peace and stuff. This is a world where no one has ever seen a wombat themselves (though the species is not unheard of, merely semi-mythical and rumoured to be extinct).

Being an atheist in the temple of a God can be a bit awkward. It's even more awkward if the statue of the elephant god in question starts having conversations with you, probing why exactly you breached the temple, through a troublesomely semi-metaphysical hole which doesn't quite seem to be part of the world, and what exactly your intentions are...

What follows is a story that finds its feet by improvising, introducing this strange world and its inhabitants to Digger, before deciding that it was meant to be a tale of epic fantasy all along, and developing a plot to suit. Except, this is an epic fantasy starring a hero who really doesn't like gods, or prophecies, or magic, and who deeply distrusts anyone who foolishly messes around with such unpredictable things.

Digger is a refreshingly different hero. She's tough, a builder (with the mannerisms and working class attitude that entails), and primarily concerned with a desire to return home. She doesn't have an ounce of nambypamby romance in her heart. There's no romantic interest, no desire to start a family or have children, and we even find out that wombat marriages are arranged through medium term contracts, a few years in length. Digger herself is often rude (especially to oracular snails) and generally selfish (quests to save the world from unspeakable evil are only of any interest if they further her goal of returning home)

The humour in Digger ranges between wry wit, subverted expectations and slapstick. However, despite plenty of chuckles, Digger is not a work of comic fiction in my mind. Humour serves and enhances the story from time to time - but the story does not serve the humour.

In her adventures, Digger encounters joy, triumph, heroism, tragedy, innocence, atrocity, wisdom and stupidity. She may have no stomach for spiritualism or romantic notions of heroism and valour, but she always has time for people (no matter what shape, species or gender those people may have). Digger is one of those works which have a certain kindness at their heart. Often in the course of the story, Digger starts out at cross purposes with a character, but eventually grows to know them. Some become friends and allies. Others don't, but are generally understood by Digger (and the reader) to be decent enough people in their own way (or at least, to be following their own moral logic), even if they happen to be trying to do evil things to Digger and her friends.

What really makes Digger work is that it's filled with show-stealing characters. Digger herself is a great centre of gravity for all the others to circle around, but those others are largely outstanding in their own right. There's tragic Ed, a male hyena expelled from his matriarchic tribe, there's the innocent but frighteningly powerful Shadowchild, and there's the very very young Hag, and perhaps most showstealing of them all, there's Sorka the Bridge Troll...

Digger is a wonderful book.

If you took Labyrinth and The Princess Bride and substracted the romance / teen notions of love, but left in everything else magical and wonderful and added a prosaic, impatient wombat civil engineer to the mix, you might - just might - end up with something a little bit like Digger. But you'd have to be a bit of a genius - and Ursula Vernon, it seems, is definitely that.

Rating: 5/5.
Super highly recommended.

PS: I am selling my copy (with a heavy heart) as I will be moving house soon. Interested in buying it? Get in touch!

The Ferryman Institute by Colin Gigl

The Ferryman Institute is a fantasy novel with a premise that's more unique than most. Our hero, Charlie, is a ferryman, someone whose purpose is to accompany the souls of the recently departed and safely transfer them to their afterlife.

With its striking and evocative cover and its original premise, I was immediately sold on the book. Honestly, I could fawn over the beauty of the cover for a while - I adore it. That said, Colin Gigl imagines the Ferryman Institute as an office-based, public service type organisation. There are sadly no rivers to row across, no souls in the Styx...

Charlie's job, in fact, is to be there when a person dies, and when the spirit appears, to convince the spirit to walk through a door towards the light (their afterlife), rather than staying behind on Earth and becoming a ghost, doomed to fade from existence. His job is made hard by the mental state of the spirits just after death: depending on their demise, they can be distressed, confused, terrified, irrational...

We soon learn that Charlie is the best among Ferrymen: he has never failed to convince a spirit to walk through the door. He's the only Ferryman with such a perfect record, and he's been doing his job for a long while. But all is not well with Charlie: his work is eating away at him, grinding down his own soul. Unfortunately for him, he's immortal (and unable to sense pain), so it seems like he's stuck. Until, that is, a special assignment offers him a choice...

The novel is the story of what happens after Charlie makes that choice. It's in large parts a chase thriller, accompanied by wise cracking dialogue and sarcasm. The story moves at a cheerful pace and never fails to entertain.

On the other hand, if you're looking for something more than light entertainment, The Ferryman Institute is probably not for you. The humour is pleasantly diverting, but not cutting or particularly memorable. The story seems a little less original than I'd hoped for (it has quite a lot in common with Chris Holm's Dead Harvest, while the Ferrymen seem surprisingly similar to Dead Like Me - style grim reapers). Characters can occasionally seem a little contradictory (Charlie can go to and fro between being super-competent and completely gormless. Alice's ability to be humorous and sarcastic seems somewhat at odds with her debilitating depression). The plot can feel a little predictable. And the book does this post-post-postmodern thing of referencing pop culture a lot. One character even chose his own name from pop culture references. It feels a little like cheating - as if the author is either overly self-conscious of characters being too similar to others that went before, or as if the author is trying to use a shorthand way of telling the reader what to think and expect of a character / situation.

Basically, The Ferryman Institute is a good first novel. Solidly entertaining, fast paced and fun. A promising start, though not quite as memorable and original as I'd hoped.

Rating: 3.5/5

Stiletto by Daniel O'Malley

Stiletto is the eagerly awaited sequel to The Rook, which introduced readers to the fun world of The Checquy, the UK's magical spy agency. The Rook could be summed up as Hogwarts meets James Bond via Terry Pratchett: it's full of suspense, humour and magic. A masterpiece of fun. So, naturally, I've been very, very keen to get my mitts on the sequel.

The first thing that struck me about Stiletto is the shift in perspective. Myfanwy Thomas, the heroine of the first novel, still appears in the story, but she is no longer the focus. Instead, our main protagonists are Felicity (a combat Pawn of the Checquy) and Odette Leliefield, a Grafter.

The Grafters are the Checquy's oldest enemies: where the Checquy are supernaturally gifted and born special, the Grafters come from a clan of elite scientists who developed near-miraculous surgical and medical techniques, which enable them to modify their bodies in line with their personal preferences. They can be super-soldiers, or they can fill themselves with handy and useful tools and features, ranging from immunities and super-senses all the way to utility skin pockets that also keep their contents sterile.

Compared to the first novel, Stiletto did not have quite as strong a hook. In The Rook, your attention is grabbed from the first page, with a strong mystery at the heart of the plot. Stiletto takes a different approach: there are thrills and mysteries, but this is a story about characters on the periphery of negotiations between two former enemy organisations who seek to form an alliance. Stiletto takes a little longer to find its feet. The story switches between viewpoints, and sometimes it feels like the reader is getting perhaps a bit more detail and background than was strictly necessary.

That said, Stiletto is laugh-out-loud funny and hilarious. The humour ranges from dry wit to potty humour - it should work well for a British audience. Stiletto also succeeds at feeling more true to its setting: The Rook didn't quite feel like a novel set in the UK. Stiletto, on the other hand, feels much more convincing about the UK, Belgium, Europe... there are some rare slip-ups (for example, I think the term "Eurotrash" is more common in America than in the UK or anywhere in Europe), but on the whole, Stiletto is a book that's easy to like, set in a world that is easy to feel at home in, and delivered with an easy-going, tongue in cheek style.

If you've read The Rook, you will undoubtedly enjoy Stiletto too. If you haven't, then I would recommend reading The Rook first. It isn't required reading to understand Stiletto, but it's huge fun, and a slightly superior novel.

Rating: 4/5

Review: Tik-Tok by John Sladek

Tik-Tok is a darkly funny satire about a homicidal robot. Originally published in 1983, it's aged surprisingly well. There might not be an internet or social networking websites in the future it envisioned, but when it comes to politics and society, its predictions are all-too accurate.

Tik-Tok's story is told in two strands. One starts with his first homicidal episode, and tells the story of how he moves away from being enslaved, towards independence and ultimately megalomania. The other strand starts with his creation and tells his back story, the episodes which eventually led him to that moment when his asimov circuits (which are supposed to prevent him from harming humans) finally gave out.

I've always had a weak spot for megalomaniac villains, and Tik-Tok was an instant favourite when I first read the book back in my student days. He's got enough valid grievances against mankind to make him a sympathetic villain / anti-hero, perhaps not unlike the devil in I, Lucifer.

The satire bites, the wit can be acerbic, and the violence is so grotesquely dark that it crosses the line from horrible and gratuitous to funny. If you can stomach the first instance of bloodshed without being utterly repelled, and if you have a dark sense of humour, then you'll probably enjoy the book. (That said, if you are a parent, or if you are particularly partial to defenceless children, this might not be the book for you)

Having grown older and suffered the slow erosion of my sense of humour that comes with an ageing brain, as well as losing some of the possibly slightly immature 'yay evil' attitude to stories which I had in my teenage years, I must confess to finding Tik-Tok a bit less satisfying this time around. I still think it's a great example of dark humour and satire. It's just, perhaps, not as seminal as I thought back in younger days. A classic, yes, but I can see why it's republished in Gollancz secondary back catalogue, rather than the SF Masterworks like.

Rating: 4/5

The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton

The Philosopher Kings does not start straight after the climactic events of The Just City, Instead, the book is set about twenty years later.

(Warning: This review contains spoilers for The Just City)

Apollo, still living as a human, has been married to Simmea, and they have raised several children together. The book starts, cruelly, with Simmea's death in a minor skirmish. This is hard to take, as Simmea was the heart and soul of the first novel. Apollo, for the first time in his immortal life, experiences genuine grief and bereavement. It nearly destroys him.

Matters are not helped by the silly reasons for her death. She died, defending an artwork against raiders. After the events in The Just City, some of its citizens wanted to create their own Platonic utopias, diverging from the one created for them. Some wanted to pursue Plato's ideas more fervently and strictly, while others wanted to create a more Socratic republic of philosophers. The result of the splits are five different cities (including the original one), with different rules. While they share some things - the robots and the knowledge - other things were not distributed, including art. After some capture-the-flag style hijinx, campaigns of art theft turned violent. As all the youths had been trained in combat, skirmishes could be lethal, and Simmea dies in one such art raid.

As Simmea was the heart of the first novel, so their daughter Arete is the heart of the second novel. On the cusp of adulthood, this teenager has more common sense than her older brothers, more heart and brains and drive than almost anyone. While her father spends an awful lot of the novel moping, she navigates the stormy waters of grief, bereavement, first love, debate, demi-Godhood and more with that indomitable kernel of kindness and wisdom that is found in many of Jo Walton's characters.

Much of the novel is taken up with a journey to seek out Kebes, the former rebel who hated The Just City for enslaving him. As an exploratory journey, we meet other contemporaries of these ancient times, and see beyond doomed Atlantis for the first time. We also encounter yet another civilisation...

The Philosopher Kings is, like The Just City, an intelligent novel that thrives on discourse and thought experiments. What deflates it a little is that it is missing the zest that Socrates had provided. It is a much less playful novel. The first book was imbued with a certain sense of bemusement - watching academics and philosophers trying to set up a utopia and follow a rule book, watching fallible Gods having their own blind spots, watching Socrates reach out to robots and interrogate ideas... The Just City thrived on humour and playfulness, even if it featured rape and infanticide and other serious matters. The Philosopher Kings is less lighthearted. It starts with death and carries on through grief and vengeance. It touches on oppression and fear. It features horrendous torture. It's a story of folly and cruelty and tragedy, with lighter moments, whereas the first was a light story about folly with tragic and cruel moments.

The Just City is a novel about consent. The Philosopher Kings is a novel about consequences. I would recommend The Philosopher Kings to anyone who read The Just City, and I would recommend The Just City to just about everyone. That said, I do worry that the road ahead may be more rocky for our protagonists than I'd ever expected...

Rating: 4/5

Blackout by Mira Grant

Blackout starts where Feed and Deadline left off. It's the third novel in the Newsflesh Trilogy / universe (there are other stories out there - novellas, and there is a new novel in the works). And I'm glad to say, it's as good as the first.

Fair warning: you really need to read these books in the correct order. Even the slightest description of Blackout's plot will include massive SPOILERS for Feed and Deadline, so if you haven't read those, don't read this review. Read my review of Feed instead, and then buy that book and become addicted. I'll just say that the conclusion will not let you down.

===========
SPOILER ALERT (for Feed and Deadline)
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So, Shaun Mason and the surviving journos have survived the second, mosquito-carried rising, and they're out in the sticks of the West Coast, trying to figure out what to do about the CDC, which has turned out to be evil.

Meanwhile, in a sterile white CDC lab somewhere, a young woman wakes up. She's confused: her last memory is of her own death, as she was turning into a zombie. She remembers the sensations of her adopted brother, Shaun, shooting her at the top of the spine to kill her. Pretty soon, she realises that she is a clone of Georgia Mason, with implanted memories. And there's something a little off about the CDC doctor who soon presents himself to oversee her recuperation and examinations...

Ahem. George is back! Woohoo! (And suddenly the first person narration of the first book falls into place and makes perfect sense).

Better yet, as this is not the middle volume of a trilogy, the plot moves briskly on, with discoveries, conspiracies, chases, zombies, battles and good-natured banter aplenty. All the things that made Feed great are back in play. (Deadline isn't a bad book, but it suffers from not really having a decent ending, and from middle-book-syndrome). Blackout neatly ties everything together - it seems very likely that the entire trilogy was planned out in quite a lot of detail before the first book was written.

I never thought I'd actually love a series of zombie novels. There are a few zombie movies I vaguely enjoy, but I'm hardly a fan of the genre. The Newsflesh series is superbly entertaining and great fun, even for people who are not fanatical about zombies to begin with. I'd love for it to be turned into a TV series.

If you have read the firs two books, read Blackout, too. If you haven't read the first two books, D'Oh! Why did you read this review?!?

Rating: 5/5

Indexing by Seanan McGuire

Indexing is a brisk, fun little novel about a world where reality occasionally - well, quite frequently - gets dragged into the shape of a fairy tale. The problem with that sort of incident is that fairy tales are not actually harmless and nice. Enter our heroes - the fairy tale police. Their job? To stop fairy tales from happening in our world and/or minimise the damage they do.

In many ways, the very point of fairy tales is that they have been done so often, in so many ways, that there is nothing new left to them. Their purpose is comforting repetition and reimagination in the hands of different storytellers. While Indexing takes a different angle on them, even that angle is not exactly new. There is at least one terribly bland and disappointing TV show which is not very far off in its approach.

Where Indexing differs from Grimm is that it is actually bloody good fun. The gang of characters has all the wit and sparkle of the earliest seasons of Buffy, back when the Scooby Gang were not yet broken people struggling with "grown up" issues, but a witty bunch of gung-ho, kick-ass super teens...

The heroes of Indexing are not teens, but they read that way. A scary Snow White, a super fun gothy Wicked Stepsister (Sloane), a shoe making elf who is also a pretty good librarian, a newbie / rookie who happens to be a teenaged Pied Piper... there's definitely something a little quirky and light about our heroes. They haven't been weighed down by futility and compromise yet. They don't worry about mortgages or paychecks or pension schemes. They don't have (or think about) children. Their relationships don't seem any more serious than high school / uni cliques and flings... in many ways, that's what makes them fun to read about.

The titular Index is the Aarne-Thompson Index, used to classify fairy tales. Our heroes (and their nebulous government agency) use it to classify what sort of "memetic incursion" (fairy tale shaping of our reality) is in progress / about to happen, and to take appropriate countermeasures. It lends the story a whiff of the police procedural, but it's not so much about building a reality but a sprinkling of a different atmosphere. Yes, we get a cranky superior who chews people out and holds them to task, and a bull pen / open plan office, but it feels like an afterthought, rather than something that is part of the bones of the novel. It's never taken too seriously, because the story doesn't really take anything too seriously at all.

I keep calling it a novel, but the first few chapters can be read more or less independently of each other - they each go over the exposition again and again, so I guess this started out as a "serial"... Do serials still exist? How odd.

As Young Adult Urban Fantasy Police Procedurals about Fairy Tales go, it's a quick, energetic and fun read. It's enormously silly, but enough fun so you can forget about its silliness.

Rating: 3.5/5

Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor

Just One Damned Thing After Another has a cheerfully irreverent title, a low price on Amazon Kindle, and an energetic back cover blurb to recommend it. It's the sort of book you buy on Kindle despite a godawful cover that looks as if it could have been the work of a self-publishing author, simply because you can't go too far wrong for 99p or so.

Fortunately, it is a lot better than its cover would suggest. Our heroine and narrator is a historian who is offered a unique opportunity: to join an altogether more experiential research institution. St Mary's Institute is actually a time-travelling outfit, sending historians to the past to witness events (and give their sister institute an advantage with their more traditional research).

The story moves with all speed and a quirky energy, bouncing around its plot like a manic, quirky academic. It probably owed quite a bit to recent incarnations of Doctor Who: the restlessness, the habit of visiting history, the sense of humour, and also the drama, explosions and cavalier attitude towards life and death. This is a book where dozens of characters have - very briefly - names, but few actually stick around long enough to make any impression at all. Most are only there to die quickly - red shirts, cannon fodder, call them what you like. Our narrator might (very very briefly) mourn them, but as we never really noticed them in the first place, their replacements and deaths hardly matter to the reader.

The book has another awkward habit: for a book about time travel, the plot's own timeline is not nearly clear enough. Between one chapter and another, several years pass, and yet that is not explicit or obvious. The book doesn't bother with "the boring bits" of the tale, but when the story cuts from basic training to final exam and then to some missions years later... and then skips some months... basically, things need to be a lot more continuous and clear.

All that said, it's a very pleasant, pacey and fun thing to read. It's a guilty pleasure: shallow and largely predictable, but swashbuckling, tongue-in-cheek and fun. A slightly girly equivalent to Doctor Who.

Rating: 3.5/5

Conjugal Rites by Paul Magrs

As a reader, my awareness of the publishing industry and its trends is patchy: I notice some big trends sometimes (kinky porn, ever since 50 Shades, and general popularity of Young Adult and 'Forever Young Adult' literature - books that have YA-style plots and pacing, but grown-up characters), but other trends pass me by.

So, is there a trend for "senior citizen young adult" literature out there? If not, then I suspect Paul Magrs may sneakily have been carving out a genre for himself while everyone else wasn't paying attention.

I enjoyed the first two Brenda and Effie mysteries without ever thinking about its genre. Cheerful, light-hearted gothic fun, with fairly pacey plots, a mischievous disposition, and older protagonists. But that alone would not make a new genre: the 100-year-old-man-who-climbed-out-of-a-window-and-disappeared, for example, is hardly a book aimed at an older audience.

It's not until I read Conjugal Rites that I started to suspect that something a bit unusual was going on.

Brenda and Effie are both older ladies. Brenda, we find out in the first novel, was created by Doktor Frankenstein, intended to be the bride for his first creature. However, she has fled from that fate, and, after hundreds of years of trying to find a way to fit in, she has set up a B&B in Whitby. Effie, her neighbour, is a spinster and a descendant from a long line of witches. She's a bit fierce, a bit gullible, but very close to Brenda. Together, they have gothic adventures, whether being seduced by Dracula or trying to uncover the sinister secrets of a con man who makes women younger. The two big old hotels in town each have their back histories and charismatic owners (the sinister and evil Mrs Claus, running a Christmas-themed hotel with cannibalism and enslaved elves, while the other hotel is run by the widow of an elderly London-based Chinese Criminal Mastermind and Supervillain). It's all gloriously playful with gothic tropes, and good fun.

In Conjugal Rites, some of Brenda and Effie's former adversaries are again up to no good. One is running a night time talk radio show that somehow compels everyone to spill personal secrets and tell the juiciest, most indiscrete gossip about each other, while another has arranged for a suspicious congress for retired superheroes. Worst of all, it looks like Brenda's oldest adversary has been summoned to town...

While reading the book, some things jarred a bit: frequent repetition, and a habit of summing up everything that has happened so far every other chapter or so. It's almost like one of those TV shows, where, right after the ad break, characters quickly discuss something that happened previously, so that the audience remembers the context for the next scene. At first, I thought this was slightly clumsy writing and I recalled that similar things had bothered me a little in previous volumes. Then a penny dropped: what if it was not clumsy? What if, in fact, this was a planned out strategy? The regularity of these little plot-summary-moments was just too carefully timed. Suddenly, the somewhat strange look and feel of the covers of these books started to make sense. The larger format, too. I read this one on Kindle, but I'd now bet that these books were all printed in slightly-larger-than-standard print, with a bit more spacing between the rows. I'd been reading books written, designed, printed, and created for an elderly audience with weaker eyes and a need for memories to be frequently refreshed. I'd read several volumes without ever suspecting that I was not the target audience.

Maybe there are many books like this series out there. Maybe this isn't new to anyone else. Perhaps I was the only one thinking that older people were mostly targeted by Mills & Boon and Danielle Steel and all those lavender-y, awful-looking romance books, rather than anything fun and adventurous. In that case, shame on me. I used to enjoy watching Murder She Wrote and Columbo and other crime movies meant for older viewers; I should hardly be surprised that there are gothic adventures written explicitly for them, too. (I think someone should make te Brenda and Effie books into a TV series: clearly, with the ageing population, they should have a ready-made market ready)

Once I got past that realisation, the book continued to be pleasingly diverting. There are some aspects where I wanted things to go down a different route: hell features in this novel, but it is not a hell that convinced me. Worse, the entire plot arc about Brenda's erstwhile suitor was uncomfortable and troubling to read. (For a Brenda and Effie novel, there really isn't enough Brenda in this one...)

So, not quite up there with the first volume in terms of its fun, but still a pleasing novel - and the only young-adult-for-senior-citizens series of gothic adventure novels that I'm aware of. Hats off to Paul Magrs for eemingly creating an entire market niche, which he totally owns!

Rating: 3/5

The Eye of Zoltar by Jasper Fforde

The Eye of Zoltar (third book in the Jennifer Strange series) continues the adventures of Jennifer Strange and her wizardly companions more or less where the previous book left off. It starts in the middle of an action sequence (a Trafalmasaur has escaped, and guess who has been selected to act as bait in a risky scheme to catch it again...) and keeps up a brisk pace and hilarious sense of humour throughout.

This time, Jennifer is off to the Cambrian empire (Mid-Wales), where she has to try to retrieve a magical relic (the Eye of Zoltar, a ruby), negotiate for the release of a wizard, all while trying to evade the perilous dangers of the land, including carnivorous slugs (presumably inspired by the fact that the only new species ever discovered in Wales is, in fact, a carnivorous, nocturnal GHOST SLUG, so don't think this part of the story is too far-fetched...), wild Trafalmasaurs, aggressive cannibalistic taxidermy enthusiasts and other dangerous tribes. The satire / farcical absurdity is great, the sense of humour witty, and the story is richly enhanced by the presence of a princess and a tour guide who both add much to the plot.

Where The Eye of Zoltar differs from the previous novels is that it has a somewhat higher body count. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me. I found it a little baffling how many people were killed as collateral damage of the various adventures and incidents, and this somewhat callous approach to life and death detracted from my enjoyment of the story. It made perfect sense to take an unsentimental approach to things in some contexts (where it fit the ultra-perilous adventure tourism / fatality probability satire), but at other times it seemed a lot more dubious to me. (The comment about honour being weaponised manners is very funny, but the result is quite sad).

If you've enjoyed the other Jennifer Strange novels, there's every chance you'll enjoy this one too. I certainly did (even if it was a little darker than I felt comfortable with).

Rating: 4/5.

How Much for Just the Planet? By John M Ford

How Much for Just the Planet? is a rare thing – a Star Trek farce.

I’m not a Trekkie, and only now watching the original series on Amazon Prime, so it’s still a fairly fresh universe for me.
Star Trek is not without a sense of humour, and there’s plenty of gentle ribbing between some crew members (Kirk teasing Spock, McCoy and Kirk teasing each other, and occasional flirtations between women characters and Kirk / McCoy). But the comedy is almost entirely made up of repartee. In this Star Trek novel, the comedy is farcical, and while there are a few witty dialogues, it’s the skeleton of the plot itself that is beset with whimsy. Much of the comedy is at the expense of Kirk and his Klingon counterpart, which is not quite that common in the Star Trek things I've seen so far.

The story starts when the Federation and the Klingons simultaneously discover a planet full of Dilithium, an extremely rare and valuable mineral that is needed to power both fleets of starships. The planet is so full of Dilithium that it could power either fleet for generations. The planet is inhabited, and due to a treaty / limitation imposed by Organians, the Klingons and the Federation cannot engage in open warfare. Instead, they have to convince the local population that they would be more “efficient” at managing the extraction process. It is the locals who are supposed to decide who gets the planet.

Of course, the local population is not all that keen on being taken over by either side, so they invoke "Plan C"…

I’ve only just watched the first appearance of Klingons and Organians in Star Trek Season One, and I must admit, the Klingons were a lot more human and jovial than I expected them to be. I’d always assumed the Klingons were meant to be villains (and later, reformed villains with a slightly pompous and serious air to them, like growling Vulcans with anger issues), but the ones I have seen in that episode (and which feature in this book) are all-too-human, with just a slight tendency towards talking admiringly of violence (but not a whole lot of actual aggression - dogs that bark, rather than dogs that bite…)

After a bit of action and adventure at the start, the Enterprise and a Klingon ship find themselves orbiting the planet, both sending down crews to negotiate with the locals. The landing parties are accommodated on different floors in the same hotel, and after a few farcical encounters, the parties are split and find themselves having independent adventures. Each member of a landing party is matched by opposites from the other, and they have different styles of adventures. Uhura and her opposite find themselves embroiled in a Hitchcockian chase; Scotty, Chekov and their counterparts are embroiled in a war satire through the medium of drinking, golf, and landmines (think M*A*S*H);  Kirk and the (female) Federation Ambassador and their counterparts get involved in a comedy of errors that would delight Shakespeare, Mozart and Gilbert and Sullivan.

Oh, and for inexplicable reasons, most of the people on the planet have a habit of breaking into song when telling their stories. Some of the songs are easy to recognise from the lyrics, others almost certainly match famous librettos of Gilbert & Sullivan operas, except I don’t know them well enough to recognise all the tunes.

To be honest, part of me would love to see this book adapted and performed as a movie or theatre piece. The sense of whimsy is strong in this one, but the physical comedy is so exuberant that it would definitely work in a visual / dramatic medium. It (just about) works in writing, but inevitably the pacing is different…

Where it falls apart slightly is the way the narrative intercuts between the different adventures and episodes. Somehow, the plot lacks glue – each adventure is interesting enough on its own, but they feel so unrelated that the different scenes might as well be from entirely different books. Terry Pratchett is a master of handling different comic adventures that interlink and form a common whole - sadly, How Much for Just the Planet? could learn a lot from Discworld, as it is a bit too putdownable.

On the whole, I’d recommend giving this a try if you do like whimsy and musical comedy. I could imagine Hillesque enjoying it (and especially enjoying it as a stage adaptation, if anyone were to produce one)

Rating: 3.5/5

Note: this is one of the few John M. Ford books that can be obtained as ebook / which remains “in production” so to speak. The bulk of his work is now out of print, with no prospects of reprints being issued for the foreseeable future, due to his death & those managing his estate apparently not being interested in keeping his legacy alive.

Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

You can look at / read an excerpt of Horrorstör on Tor.com.

Horrorstör is a beautifully designed object. This square-shaped book comes in a glossy cover, with a very IKEA-style appearance. The book has authentic catalogue inlays and introductory copywritten text content, uses catalogue-style fonts, and each chapter is named in a pseudo-Scandinavian way after a minimalist piece of furniture. It evokes the look and feel of an IKEA catalogue beautifully.

I have a weakness for quirky gimmicks, so when I saw it, I had to buy it. Once it was in my hands, it did not disappoint. It really does ooze with IKEA-ambience, and if there are awards for book design and presentation, the publishers (and designers) of Horrorstör deserve accolades.

But what about the story?

Amy, our protagonist, is a demotivated worker bee, young, cynical and sarcastic and not trying very hard. She could just as easily be one of the slackers in a Kevin Smith movie. She's trying to avoid her manager, Basil, who is altogether a bit too earnest and a devout follower of the Orsk way (Orsk being this novel's imaginary IKEA knock-off brand). As annoyed as Amy is with Basil's sincerity and officiousness, he was instantly my favourite character.

Her other colleagues are less memorable - there's the checkout lady who is ultra-nice and liked by everyone because she has no rough edges at all. There's the promiscuous girl, and a young man trying to get in her good book / pants. Everyone else might just about warrant a name, but they're soon forgotten anyway.

Our motley crew of mall staff has a problem: every night, things are getting vandalised in the store. Every morning, things are missing, or stained, or corrupted in some way. And tomorrow, there will be an inspection from the corporate headquarters, so Basil decides that a few people have to stay overnight and patrol the shop, to catch the pranksters and thieves in the act. It's him, the checkout lady, and Amy (because the strong men he originally picked managed to get out of it somehow, and because he can bribe/blackmail Amy by promising not to make her redundant & to instead sign off on a transfer to a different store that she has requested)

Once the shop closes its doors, the story follows the well-trodden path of a haunted house slasher. For a while, there is a gradual build-up of ominous and sinister events, and then there's a pivotal moment, after which we're into horror territory.

With a book as neatly presented as this, there is a risk that style might trump substance. Fortunately, Horrorstör's interior matches its exterior in tone. Starting out with a cheerful description of employees turning up to work (zombies, until they consume megadoses of Starbucks), the writing voice is slightly irreverent, light-hearted, not trying anything too clever but perfectly slick and inoffensive. The flair of the presentation and the tone of the story inside are in tune with each other.  If it were a wine, this'd be a Gallo / Blossom Hill Zinfandel / Grenache. We're firmly in light-entertainment territory.

The book has a sense of humour which fits perfectly with its exterior (or vice versa). There are plenty of wink-wink, nod-nod Easter eggs in the text, ranging from mock-Scandinavian words that sound rude in English, via real foreign words that English speakers tend to find amusing if they transliterate them (e.g. Kummerspeck), all the way to Nazi concentration camp slogans appearing in translation. It's tongue-in-cheek satire, comparable to the tone of movies like Josie and the Pussycats, or the corporate-world-mocking jibes of the TV series 30 Rock.

Once our gang are locked in for the night, the novel most reminded me of the movie House on Haunted Hill. That film is a guilty pleasure for me. It's not really all that scary because the build-up is quite short, and the horror, when it starts, is quite over the top, but it has its moments. Horrorstör does more or less the same. Short build-up and rapid escalation, with a few neat observations (never again will I look at the giant, windowless, artificially lit, retail-optimised labyrinth of IKEA without a sense that it is rather cynical and sinister).

The pace and rapid escalation makes it quite a 'safe' horror story - it never builds up bone-chilling terror, the way, say, The Orphanage, does. My problem is that I rather wanted it to do just that.

I definitely expect more from books than I do from movies. Horrorstör may one day make a perfectly decent teen slasher movie, like aforementioned House on Haunted Hill, or the Final Destination Series, or a zombie movie. But, at book length, I hoped for something a bit more gradual and suspenseful and scary. This isn't a suspense horror story, it's a horror-themed action story. It toys with the reader's sense of humour, not with his/her adrenaline.

All in all, it's a bit shallow, but readable, and beautifully presented: worth getting if you like light entertainment horror, but don't expect to be frightened.

Rating: 3.5/5