By John Dover The pitch for this novella sounds like the start of a joke: a cowboy, a vampire and a ghost walk into a bar... This line should let you know what kind of a book you are in for. Dover has written a fast-paced, blood soaked western and filled it with vampires, ghosts... Continue Reading →
The Opening by Tim McWhorter
Nick Fallon knows failure all too well. His string of collapsed business ventures make for a resume from hell. This next one, however, will be different. The Chamberlain Theater (sic) itself is different. Nick has bought himself a theatre and renovated it into a state of the art 4-D experience, but there’s something wrong with... Continue Reading →
Zhiguai:Chinese True Tales of the Paranormal and Glitches in the Matrix
Translated by Yi Izzy Yu & John Yu Branscum ‘Zhiguai’ roughly translates as ‘true weird tales’ and that is exactly what you get in this book. Fifteen tales of real encounters with the unexplained – the titular ‘glitches in the matrix’. The stories contained here vary massively from spooky precognition dreams, strange visions and trips... Continue Reading →
Tuxedo Junction by Thom Carnell
The third short story collection from Fangoria/Dread Central veteran writer Thom Carnell. I have put off writing this review for a while now as I’m finding difficult to put my thoughts on this collection into words. I didn’t especially like the book, but I am sure there is a massive market out there – it... Continue Reading →
Berserker: Green Hell by Lee Franklin
A terrifying debut novel set during the Vietnam War.Australian Lance Corporal Terence 'Pinny' Pinfold and his squad find themselves in the midst of the living hell of the Vietnam War.Known as Reapers, their job is to go in after the firefights, collect dog tags and any evidence of war crimes.As each soldier tries to make... Continue Reading →
Creatures of Clay by Patrick Moody
Welcome to Stark Falls, New Hampshire, 1985. A quaint, wholesome town, where couples picnic on the green, kids hang at the malt shop and drive-ins, and neighborhood potlucks are the place to be. White picket fences line well-manicured lawns, and evening concerts at the bandstand fill the town with the sound of joy.But in the... Continue Reading →
Your Turn To Suffer by Tim Waggoner
Lori is determined to confront the Cabal and get her life back…. Having not read much by Tim Waggoner before this, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. From the blurb, Lori Palumbo has to ‘confess and atone – or suffer’, so I was envisaging some kind of cult type thing, especially with the Cabal... Continue Reading →
Dark Missives by Dan Howarth
My pre-release review copy. Great cover! This is Dan Howarth’s first collection of short fiction and it’s a good one, filled with diverse stories that all successfully highlight Howarth’s abilities as a writer. There are eleven stories in total covering a range of topics, including wrong doings in a holiday park, the Liverpool blitz, stalkers, and a home that doesn’t want to be... Continue Reading →
The Apocalypse Strain by Jason Parent
A multi-national research team study an ancient pandoravirus in a remote Siberian research facility. Much calamity and death ensue. Okay, so the actual blurb for the book reads a lot longer than my synopsis, but that should be enough to give you the gist. I went into this assuming it would be a bad idea... Continue Reading →
Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
Alastair Reynolds is probably best known for his Revelation Space sequence of books, which is how I came across him (fun fact – Revelation Space is the first thing I ever bought from Amazon). If you like hard science fiction, then these books are a must and once I’d read them, I devoured everything else... Continue Reading →
David Watkins 