Book Review | Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

“Am I a person or a weapon?” Borne asks Rachel, in extremis.

“Yes, you are a person,” Rachel tells him. “But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.”

A ruined city of the future lives in fear of a despotic, gigantic flying bear, driven mad by the tortures inflicted on him by the Company, a mysterious biotech firm. A scavenger, Rachel, finds a creature entangled in his fur. She names it Borne.

At first, Borne looks like nothing at all―a green lump that might be a discard from the Company. But he reminds Rachel of her homeland, an island nation long lost to rising seas, and she prevents her lover, Wick, from rendering down Borne as raw genetic material for the special kind of drugs he sells.

But nothing is quite the way it seems: not the past, not the present, not the future. If Wick is hiding secrets, so is Rachel―and Borne most of all. What Rachel finds hidden deep within the Company will change everything and everyone. There, lost and forgotten things have lingered and grown. What they have grown into is mighty indeed.

***

Following his triumphant trek through Area X in the cerebral Southern Reach series, Jeff VanderMeer mounts a more modest yet no less affecting expedition into uncharted territory by way of Borne, a surprisingly beautiful book about a blob which behaves like a boy and the broken woman who takes him in.

Her name is Rachel, and when she was little, she "wanted to be a writer, or at least something other than a refugee. Not a trap-maker. Not a scavenger. Not a killer." (p.37) But we are what the world makes us, and no poxy author would have lasted long in the world in which this novel's narrator was raised:

Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world. (p.37)

There is hope even in this haunted hellscape, however, and it takes a strange shape, as hope tends to: that of "a hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colours" (p.6) Rachel finds in the festering fur of a skyscraper-sized flying bear called Mord.

She brings the titular thing, Borne-to-be, back to the Balcony Cliffs, a broken-down apartment building where she lives and works with Wick, her sometime lover and a secretive biotech beetle dealer who pushes a memory-altering product "as terrible and beautiful and sad and sweet as life itself." (p.7) Out of the gate, Rachel intends to give her purplish prize to him to pick at—but something, the beginning of some instinct, stays her hand. Instead, she places it in her room, and tries to take care of it.

"This required some experimenting, in part because [she] had never taken care of anyone or anything before," (p.17) but equally because her amorphous mass is a complete mystery. Certainly Wick has never seen its like, and having worked once for the Company, he has seen everything there is to see. To wit, Rachel treats this colourful clump like a plant to start; reclassifies it as an animal after it starts to move around her room; and then, when it shocks her by talking, she takes to behaving around it as she would a baby boy. She talks to him; teaches him; comes, ultimately, to love him—and he her in turn.

Book Review | The End of the Day by Claire North

At the end of the day, Death visits everyone. Right before that, Charlie does. Sometimes he is sent as a courtesy, sometimes as a warning. He never knows which.

You might meet him in a hospital, in a warzone, or at the scene of a traffic accident. Then again, you might meet him at the North Pole—he gets everywhere, our Charlie.

Would you shake him by the hand, take the gift he offers, or would you pay no attention to the words he says?

***

I've fallen for every one of Claire North's novels. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Touch and The Sudden Appearance of Hope have between them broken my heart and expanded my mind. They've thrilled me and they've chilled me. By way of them I've been exposed to new places, new ideas—new ways of being, even. But if I had to level a single criticism against her thoughtful body of work, it would have to be directed at its measure, because whilst her texts have tackled a great many meaningful themes, not least the array of ways we determine identity, I've found North's literary positions a little non-committal.

That's not the case in The End of the Day. This is a book with something to say; something important, if I may. It's slow to start, and oddly episodic even when the plot has picked up; its characters come and go with next to no notice; it's difficult, and confusing, and contradictory—but that's what life is like, right? And the messy, maddening, magical gift of life we've all been given, that's what The End of the Day deals in: not death... although its principal perspective is on her payroll.

Like North's other novels, The End of the Day is a high concept travelogue of sorts, but this fiction's frequent flier is Charlie, and Charlie just got hired! He's to be the Harbinger of the foremost of the apocryphal horsemen, of which singular position Death gives this description:

The Harbinger is a mortal, a bridge between this world and the next. In the old days I used eagles, but people stopped paying attention to them after a while—just birds in he sky—[so] I switched to humans a few thousand years ago. One must move with the times. (pp.12-13)

North doesn't waste any time reinventing the wheel here. Death appears in any number of forms over the course of the story. Sometimes he's male and sometimes she isn't; from time to time she has a scythe; here and there, horns protrude from his lumpen skull. "In all other respects he was the figure she had known would come, the god of the underworld, exactly as the stories said he would be." (p.14)

Charlie, on the other hand, is just a puny human.

Book Review | The Erstwhile by Brian Catling

In London and Germany, strange beings are reanimating themselves. They are the Erstwhile, the angels that failed to protect the Tree of Knowledge, and their reawakening will have major consequences.

In Africa, the colonial town of Essenwald has fallen into disarray because the timber workforce has disappeared into the Vorrh. Now a team of specialists are dispatched to find them. Led by Ishmael, the former cyclops, they enter the forest, but the Vorrh will not give them back so easily. To make matters worse, an ancient guardian of the forest has plans for Ishmael and his crew. 

Meanwhile a child of mixed race has been found abandoned in a remote cottage. Her origins are unknown, but she has powers beyond her own understanding. Conflict is coming, as the old and new, human and inhuman are set on a collision course. 

Once again blending the real and the imagined, The Erstwhile brings historical figures such as William Blake and places such as the Bedlam Asylum, as well as ingenious creations such as The Kin (a family of robots) together to create unforgettable novel of births and burials, excavations and disappearances.

***

More than four years on from The Vorrh, professor and performance artist Brian Catling is back with a book that explodes the exceptional premise of its predecessor at the same time as falling short of fulfilling its awesome promise.

The Erstwhile shifts the focus of the darkly fantastic fiction from the forest around which the first volume revolved to one of its many denizens. "No one quite knew what they were. But they had been given a name, which translated into 'of Before' or 'the Previous' and finally settled as "the Erstwhile.' Some said they were 'undead, angels, spirits embodied in flesh.' All that was known was they were as ancient as the forest itself." And the vast Vorrh, held close to the heart of Africa like an unspeakable secret, is at least as old as us. Indeed, "there is a deep belief that this land is sacred and may be the physical geographic location of the biblical Eden."

What business, then, does man have messing with it?

None, n'est-ce pas? But where there's wood, there's timber, and where there's timber, there's industry—a truism even in this alternate history. That industry animates the settlement of Essenwald, where the majority of the events of The Erstwhile occur. Truth be told, though, the Timber Guild has been having a tough time of it since the Vorrh started screwing with its various visitors:

The forest had a malign influence at its very core. Some said it was an unknown toxicology of plant and oxygen. Others said it was a disturbance in its magnetic resonance. A few said it was haunted and that its evil nature was responsible. In fact, nobody knew why prolonged exposure to the trees caused distressing symptoms of amnesia and mental disintegration. No matter what or who they tried, all was in vain. Nobody could work for more than two days in the Vorrh without contamination.

Nobody, that is, other than the Limboia. "They were hollow humans" whose lack of humanity left little for the forces of the forest to fuck with. And yet even the Limboia have been lost. As of the outset of The Erstwhile, they've been missing for some months, and without them, Essenwald's singular industry has stuttered to a costly stop. Alas and alack that the Powers That Be in that precarious place are prepared to do whatever it takes to get these beings back.

Book Review | The Kind Folk by Ramsey Campbell

Luke Arnold is a successful stage comedian who, with his partner Sophie Drew, is about to have their first child. Their life seems ideal and Luke feels that true happiness is finally within his grasp.

This wasn't always the case. Growing up in a loving but dysfunctional family, Luke was a lonely little boy who never felt that he belonged. While his parents adored him, the whole family knew that due to a mix-up at the hospital, Luke wasn't their biological child. His parents did the best they could to make the lad feel special. But it was his beloved uncle Terence who Luke felt most close to, a man who enchanted (and frightened) the lad with tales of the other—eldritch beings, hedge folks, and other fables of Celtic myth.

When Terence dies in a freak accident, Luke suddenly begins to learn how little he really knew his uncle. How serious was Terence about the magic in his tales? Why did he travel so widely by himself after Luke was born, and what was he looking for? Soon Luke will have to confront forces that may be older than the world in order to save his unborn child.

***

In everything we do, every decision we make and every action we undertake, our identities define us... yet we never really know who we are. We know who we were—we tell ourselves we do, to be sure—but like all memories, these recollections lose their sharpness with time, and, invariably, some of their truth, too. And while we think we know who we will be, these are projections at best; messy guesses subject to sudden and surprising changes in circumstance.

Take Luke Arnold, the central perspective of The Kind Folk by Ramsey Campbell. He thought he was the only son of Maurice and Freda Arnold, but as a DNA test taken on television demonstrates, he's not; the hospital must have given the couple he calls mum and dad the wrong baby. "He still has all his memories; nothing has changed them or what he is, let alone the people who are still his parents in surely every way that counts." (p.19) Nevertheless, this sensational revelation alters Luke's perception of his past, and that, in turn, has huge ramifications on his future.

Who, then, is the man caught in the middle?

Not who—or what—you might imagine, actually...

A father-to-be, in the first, because Luke's wife, the singer/songwriter Sophie Drew, is expecting. And although the doctors at the hospital give clean bills of health to both of the prospective parents, they take Luke to one side to say that it would be "in the interest of your child to discover what you can about your origins." (p.73) Origins that, try as he might to divine them in the subsequent months, don't seem to be entirely natural in nature.

It just so happens he already has an inkling as to where else he could conceivably have come from, because as a boy, he was haunted by bad dreams, imaginary companions and a compulsion to twist the fingers of his hands into shapes seen by some as satanic. The child psychologist little Luke saw all those years ago thought this was the fault of Luke's beloved uncle, Terence, and his tales of the Kind Folk.

Book Review | The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin

In life I was a scientist called Fanning...

...then, in a jungle in Bolivia, I died...

I died, and then I was brought back to life.

Prompted by a voice that lives in her blood, the fearsome warrior known as Alicia of Blades is drawn towards to one of the great cities of The Time Before. The ruined city of New York. Ruined but not empty. For this is the final refuge of Zero, the first and last of The Twelve. The one who must be destroyed if mankind is to have a future.

What she finds is not what she's expecting: a journey into the past, to find out how it all began, and an opponent at once deadlier and more human than she could ever have imagined.

***

The epic journey that began in The Passage finally comes full circle in The City of Mirrors, a proper doorstopper of a novel that satisfies somewhat in spite of its sheer size and a hell of a hammy bad guy.

I have such fond memories of the beginning of this trilogy, which paired an awesome and expansive apocalypse—one up there, in my estimation, with the end of the world in Swan Song and The Stand—with a truly heartbreaking tale of loss on the small scale. By the denouement of that book, I had no idea where the story as a whole was going to go, but I knew that I wanted to know. And then... well.

The Twelve wasn't terrible. It had a couple of a kick-ass action scenes, and some stirring slower moments that allowed Justin Cronin to explore the emotions of his vast cast of characters. But almost every other inch of that many-inched monolith of a novel felt like filler; texture at best and time-wasting at worst. In that respect, The City of Mirrors splits the difference. It doesn't meander as much as its messy predecessor did, but nor, on the back of such bloat, and with more of its own to add to the tally, can it recapture the magic of The Passage.

"Three years had passed since the liberation of the Homeland" (p.18) that ended The Twelve, and almost a hundred thousand souls now call the walled city of Kerrville, Texas home. Considering how catastrophic the survivors' situation seemed until recently, that's reason enough to be optimistic, never mind the fact that there hasn't been a single viral sighting since:

The age of the viral was over; humankind was finally on the upswing. A continent stood for the taking, and Kerrville was the place where this new age would begin. So why did it seem so meager to [Peter], so frail? Why, standing on the dam of an otherwise encouraging summer morning, did he feel this inward shiver of misgiving? (p.15)

Perhaps because Peter—the leader of the resistance that took down the Twelve viral progenitors, and in turn the millions of vampires they had sired—has lost his sense of purpose. Or perhaps because "people had begun to openly talk about moving outside the wall," (p.15) and he can't believe that the threat is actually at an end.

Heads Up! | Back to The Vorrh

Though I realise that a lot of Alan Moore's later work is lacking, his earlier efforts are so superlative that I'll never not consider myself fan of the man, so when, back in 2012, he blurbed a book called The Vorrh, I got in touch with the publisher—a small press called Honest Publishing—and sorted out a copy.

I went into The Vorrh, then, expecting something special. And fuck me, I found it. From the conclusion of the review I wrote:

Equal parts dark fantasy and surrealist dream, [The Vorrh] is inescapably dense, and unrelentingly intense. Shelve it shoulder to shoulder with 2012’s other most notable novels, be they of the genre or not, then consider carefully which stands lacking in comparison.

It was a decision I dithered about, but I went on to call The Vorrh the second-best book of the year, after only 2312, in Top of the Scots.

Alas, I was and I am only one man, so no matter how strenuously I recommended it, without the word of many mouths, The Vorrh wasn't the unfettered success—commercially, I mean—that it could have been. Should have been, even.

That changes today, with the release of a revised and expanded edition of Brian Catling's dizzyingly good debut. It's out from Hodder & Stoughton hereabouts—and thanks to Vintage, the new edition of The Vorrh is also available in the States.

But wherever you're based, and whatever your tastes, please: read it. It's remarkable.

Let me leave you with the new cover copy, the first sentence of which would surely have sold me on The Vorrh if I wasn't already admirer: 

In the tradition of China Miéville, Michael Moorcock and Alasdair Gray, B. Catling's The Vorrh is literary dark fantasy which wilfully ignores boundaries, crossing over into surrealism, magic-realism, horror and steampunk. 

In B. Catling's twisting, poetic narrative, Bakelite robots lie broken—their hard shells cracked by human desire—and an inquisitive Cyclops waits for his keeper and guardian, growing in all directions. Beyond the colonial city of Essenwald lies the Vorrh, the forest which sucks souls and wipes minds. There, a writer heads out on a giddy mission to experience otherness, fallen angels observe humanity from afar, and two hunters—one carrying a bow carved from his lover, the other a charmed Lee-Enfield rifle—fight to the end. 

Thousands of miles away, famed photographer Eadweard Muybridge attempts to capture the ultimate truth, as rifle heiress Sarah Winchester erects a house to protect her from the spirits of her gun's victims.

Book Review | Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory

Harrison Harrison—H2 to his mom—is a lonely teenager who's been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished. One of the "sensitives" who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school.

On Harrison's first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea. Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knife-wielding killer, and the Deep Ones, fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources—and an unusual host of allies—to defeat the danger and find his mother.

***

Not an author to dare wearing out his welcome in any one genre, Afterparty's Daryl Gregory turns his attention to tentacles in Harrison Squared, a light-hearted Lovecraft lark featuring a friendly fishboy and a ghastly artist which straddles the line between the silly and the sinister superbly.

It's a novel named after its narrator, Harrison Harrison—to the power of five, in fact, but around his mom and his mates, just H2 will do. Whatever you want to call him—and you wouldn't be the first to go with weirdo—Harrison has a paralysing fear of the sea. A hatred, even, and for good reason, because when our boy was a baby, his father—Harrison Harrison the fourth, of course—was swallowed by the waves, one dark day; a day Harrison has forgotten almost completely:

Some images, however, are so clear to me that they feel more true than my memory of yesterday's breakfast. I can see my father's face as he picks me up by my life vest. I can feel the wind as he tosses me up and over the next wave, toward that capsized boat. And I can see, as clearly as I can see my own arm, a huge limb that's risen out of the water.

The arm is fat, and gray, the underside covered in pale suckers. It whips across my father's chest, grasping him—and then it pulls him away from me. The tentacle is attached to a huge body, a shape under the water that's bigger than anything I've ever seen. (p.12)

In the lifetime since that nightmarish sight, Harrison has reasoned his strange recollections away. He knows, now, that he imagined the monster:

Yes, we were out on the ocean, and the boat did flip over, but no creature bit through my leg to the bone—it was a piece of metal from the ship that sliced into me. My mother swam me to shore, and kept me from bleeding to death. My father drowned like an ordinary man. (p.12)

Little wonder, really, that Harrison isn't keen on the sea. His marine biologist mother, on the other hand, is obsessed with it—as his father was before her—which is why she and her son have arranged to spend a couple of months in Dunnsmouth: a creepy coastal village where Harrison's mother means to meet Mr. Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni.

(That's a forty-five foot long squid "whose suckers are ringed not only by teeth but sharp, swivelling hooks," (p.22) for those of you who haven't been practising your Latin of late.)

Book Review | The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

Only nine people have ever been chosen by renowned children’s author Laura White to join the Rabbit Back Literature Society, an elite group of writers in the small town of Rabbit Back. Now a tenth member has been selected: a young literature teacher named Ella. 

Soon Ella discovers that the Society is not what it seems. What is its mysterious ritual known as "The Game"? What explains the strange disappearance that occurs at Laura White’s winter party? Why are the words inside books starting to rearrange themselves? Was there once another tenth member, before her? Slowly, as Ella explores the Society and its history, disturbing secrets that had been buried for years start to come to light.

***

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen proposes that places, like people, have particular interests. Some specialise in film; some in food. Others areas boast about an abundance of athletes, or artists, or authors. The small town of Rabbit Back "was known to have no less than six writers' associations, and that was without counting the most noteworthy writers' association, the Rabbit Back Literature Society, which accepted members only at Laura White's invitation."

Laura White is an almost mythical figure in the Finland of this baffling but beautiful English-language debut, which is fitting considering the contents of the Creatureville series:

The local ceramicists for the most part produced water sprites, pixies, elves, and gnomes. Laura White had made these creatures popular all over the world through her children's books, but in Rabbit Back in particular you ran into them everywhere you looked. They were presented as prizes in raffles, given as presents, brought to dinner as hostess gifts. There was only one florist in Rabbit Back, but there were seven shops that sold mostly mythological figurines.

To be taken under Laura White's wing is no little thing, then, and though she hasn't asked anyone to join the Society in some time—in forty-odd years, in fact—speculation about a potential tenth member remains a sensational subject, so when an invitation is unexpectedly extended to substitute language and literature teacher Ella Amanda Milana, Rabbit Back pretty much erupts.

Ella herself jacks in her job to focus on her fiction, but at the ball where she and her sponsor are meant to meet, the Lynchian mystery this book is about begins:

There was a party, then there was a snowstorm in the house and Laura White disappeared right in front of everyone's eyes, and the tenth member isn't going to be trained after all. That's it in a nutshell.

Book Review | Gleam by Tom Fletcher

The gargantuan Factory of Gleam is an ancient, hulking edifice of stone, metal and glass ruled over by chaste alchemists and astronomer priests.

As millennia have passed, the population has decreased, and now only the central district is fully inhabited and operational; the outskirts have been left for the wilderness to reclaim. This decaying, lawless zone is the Discard: the home of Wild Alan.

Clever, arrogant, and perpetually angry, Wild Alan is both loved and loathed by the Discard's misfits. He's convinced that the Gleam authorities were behind the disaster that killed his parents and his ambition is to prove it. But he's about to uncover more than he bargained for.

***

Hot on the heels of three deeply discomfiting horror novels, Gleam marks the starts of a fantasy saga that's never better than when it harks back to Tom Fletcher's first fictions. It's burdened by a bland protagonist and a lacking opening act, but besides that, The Factory Trilogy is off to a tantalising start.

In large part that's due to the darkly wonderful world it introduces us to. Gleam is a devastated landscape equal parts Ambergris and Fallout 3, arranged around a truly hellish edifice:

From the centre rises the one structure that is not tarnished with extraneous growth, or overwhelmed with moss, or just rounded and worn by erosion. It's a vast, black, six-sided pyramid, separated from the rest of the chaos by a ring of ashen wasteland. The wasteland is the top of a hill, which slopes down into a darkness from which all the rest of the chaos emerges. This is the only visible ground in the whole place, and it's grey and dusty and somehow creepy. The pyramid itself, though, looks clean and new, and its edges are all sharp. (p.3)

Alan has lived in this "knot of lies and rituals that referenced only each other and combined to mean less than nothing" (p.211) for twelve tedious years—long enough to meet and marry his wife, Marion, and father a boy by the name of Billy with her—but he doesn't belong here any more now than he did on the devastating day he was made welcome within its walls. "He'd never been a Pyramidder and he never would be. He still dreamed about Modest Mills; being able to run around outside. And not in some courtyard or garden, but the real outside—the Discard." (p.12)

His dreams of freedom come true too soon, in truth. In short order Alan offends an Assistant Alchemical Co-ordinator, who sends heavies to his house to remind our protagonist of his place in the Pyramid. In the aftermath, Marion asks Alan to leave—not because she no longer loves him, but for the sake of their son's safety.

She doesn't have to ask him twice. He packs a bag and skedaddles, to find that though life in the Discard is difficult, it's not as awful as the Pyramidders insist.

Book Review | Murder by Sarah Pinborough

Dr Thomas Bond, Police Surgeon, thinks he has finally recovered from the terrible events of years before. He no longer has nightmares about Jack the Ripper—or the other monster, an enemy even more malign who hid in Jack’s shadow and haunted the streets of London at the end of the 1880s. He has made his peace with his part in bringing calm back to the East End.

His fame as a profiler of criminals is increasing, his practice is steads, and Dr Bond is beginning to dream of marriage, and children. Life is good.

But when a woman’s body is found brutally beaten to death in a railway carriage and a letter written years before is discovered by the police, the past he has fought so hard to put behind him begins to taint the present, and he can no longer fight his new suspicions.

Just when he thought life had returned to normal, Dr Bond is about to discover that some things will not remain buried: once again his uncanny enemy is loose on the streets of London... and this time Dr Bond is alone.

***

Mayhem was "a moody whodunit with an horrific twist, set in London during Jack the Ripper's red reign." This was essentially set dressing, however. Instead of simply reiterating that grisly business, as many such texts have been content to, Sarah Pinborough's plot revolved around "another real life serial killer, namely the Thames Torso Murderer, and the factual figures who set out to apprehend him," including Dr Thomas Bond, Police Surgeon, who returns—rather the worse for wear—in Murder.

It's been six years since the shocking events at the end of Mayhem, which saw Bond and his assistants in all things mystical—a priest and a pauper—catch and kill the Thames Torso Murderer: one James Harrington; husband of the beautiful Juliana, whose heart the doctor dearly desires.

Harrington, for his part, was hardly to blame for his horrendous descent: it was the Upir—a violent parasite he picked up in Poland—which led him down that dark path. And though the host is dead, the creature he carried on his back lives still... and hungers, I shouldn't wonder.

Murder begins with Bond feeling free of these fears for the first time in recent years, and planning, at long last, to propose to Juliana. But his hopes have to go on hold when an American friend of Harrington's arrives in the capital with a collection of confessional letters which implicate their late acquaintance in some truly unspeakable deeds.

To keep up appearances, he has to be seen to take these seriously, and inevitably, his investigations lead him back to Jack. Harrington, he realises, couldn't have been the Ripper, as he had in his heart of hearts hoped... but perhaps his parasite played a part. Perhaps the mayhem that the Upir created in its wake drove another member of Juliana's family to madness. Perhaps her outwardly affable father, whose alibi falls apart the moment Bond subjects it to the slightest scrutiny, is a killer in their midst.

Book Review | Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

For thirty years, Area X, monitored by the secret agency known as the Southern Reach, has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border—an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness. Eleven expeditions have been sent in to investigate; even for those that have made it out alive, there have been terrible consequences.

Annihilation is the story of the twelfth expedition and is told by its nameless biologist. Introverted but highly intelligent, the biologist brings her own secrets with her. She is accompanied by a psychologist, an anthropologist and a surveyor, their stated mission: to chart the land, take samples and expand the Southern Reach’s understanding of Area X.

But they soon find out that they are being manipulated by forces both strange and all too familiar. An unmapped tunnel is not as it first appears. An inexplicable moaning calls in the distance at dusk. And while each member of the expedition has surrendered to the authority of the Southern Reach, the power of Area X is far more difficult to resist.

***

A biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist venture into Area X.

Sounds like the setup for a joke, doesn't it? Well halt that thought, because Annihilation is no laughing matter. On the contrary: Jeff VanderMeer's first new novel since Finch is a nightmarish narrative about the fungus among us which trades in terror and tension rather than simple titters. It's the award-winning author's most accessible text yet... though there's a very real chance Annihilation will leave you with weird dreams for years.

So what the hell is Area X?

The government's version of events emphasised a localised environmental catastrophe stemming from experimental military research. This story leaked into the public sphere over a period of several months so that, like the proverbial frog in a hot pot, people found the news entering their consciousness gradually as part of the general daily noise of media oversaturation about ongoing ecological devastation. Within a year or two, it had become the province of conspiracy theorists and other fringe elements. (p.94)

But of course, there's more to the story.

At bottom, Area X is an anomaly; a treasure trove of the unknown. Our unnamed narrator—the biologist of the aforementioned four—describes "a pristine wilderness devoid of any human life," (pp.94-95) but this image, like many of the pictures she posits, is imperfect. After all, the Southern Reach has been overseeing trips into this treacherous territory for several decades. Annihilation, in fact, follows the fortunes of the twelfth such expedition to date... or so the agency tells its members.

They are women to a one, and they are represented throughout by their respective roles. "A name was a dangerous luxury here. Sacrifices didn't need names," (p.134) and that is exactly what they are—that is how some of them even see themselves—thus they are not people but purposes. Their mission: to map Area X. To explore and more in service of the Southern Reach's knowledge of the anomaly, though the agency may know more than it's willing to admit.

Book Review | Chiliad: A Meditation by Clive Barker

Welcome to the world of Chiliad, an astonishing two-part novella by the incomparable Clive Barker. A brilliantly composed narrative filled with unforgettable images, this visionary meditation on time, history, and human suffering is surely one of Barker's most distinctive — and distinguished — creations.

Chiliad consists of two interrelated stories, stories filtered through the melancholy imagination of a narrator perched on the banks of a river that flows backward and forward through time. The first movement, 'Men and Sin,' takes place in the millennial year of 1000 AD. The second, 'A Moment at the River s Heart,' occurs exactly one thousand years — the length of a 'chiliad' — later, as the new millennium approaches. At the heart of these stories are two savage, seemingly inexplicable atrocities, each of which reaches across the centuries to reflect and connect with the other. As the narratives unfold and time becomes increasingly permeable, Barker creates a dark, sorrowful portrait of the ancient human capacity for cruelty and destruction. Writing always with lucidity and grace, he addresses a host of universal concerns, among them the power of guilt and grief, and the need to find signs of meaning in the chaos that surrounds us. In the process, he examines the endless chain of consequences that inevitably proceed from a single act of violence.

At once hugely expansive and deeply personal, Chiliad is a compact masterpiece, a resonant reminder of Barker's ability to create fictional worlds that enrich and illuminate our own.

***

For more than twenty years, Clive Barker was terrifically prolific. During that period, a year without a new novel by the author seemed—to me at least—incomplete. Sadly, when Barker started work on the Abarat, that was that. Since the first part of the series was released in 2002 we've seen, for various reasons, just two sequels and one short novel in the form of Mister B. Gone. 

That may change in 2015 with the belated publication of The Scarlet Gospels: a return to Barker's beginnings by many measures. A sequel, indeed, to one of his very earliest novellas—no less than The Hellbound Heart, which found fame later when it became the basis of the film Hellraiser. Before that, though... this: an amoral meditation on humanity's spiralling history of violence which certainly whet my appetite for more from the man who helped define dark fantasy.

Chiliad, to be sure, is neither a novel nor new. Rather, it is an arrangement of two tales intertwined with a maudlin metatext about an author who has lost his voice, and though its relevance today remains great, both 'Men and Sin' and 'A Moment at the River's Heart' were previously published in Revelations, the Douglas E. Winter-edited anthology of short stories intended to celebrate the millennium.

That said, the overarching narrative seems particularly prescient here, at this point in Barker's career. We find our unnamed narrator mid mid-life crisis, having forsaken all his old haunts and habits because of a bone-deep despair; a hateful malaise that says, to paraphrase: all he had in his life, and all he had sought to make, was worthless.

But at the river, things are different.

Book Review | End of the Road, ed. Jonathan Oliver

Each step leads you closer to your destination, but who, or what, can you expect to meet along the way? 

Here are stories of misfits, spectral hitch-hikers, nightmare travel tales and the rogues, freaks and monsters to be found on the road. The critically acclaimed editor of Magic, The End of The Line and House of Fear has brought together the contemporary masters and mistresses of the weird from around the globe in an anthology of travel tales like no other. Strap on your seatbelt, or shoulder your backpack, and wait for that next ride... into darkness.

An incredible anthology of original short stories from an exciting list of writers including the bestselling Philip Reeve, the World Fantasy Award-winning Lavie Tidhar and the incredible talents of S. L. Grey, Ian Whates, Jay Caselberg, Banjanun Sriduangkaew, Zen Cho, Sophia McDougall, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Anil Menon, Rio Youers, Vandana Singh, Paul Meloy, Adam Nevill and Helen Marshall.

***

For his fourth anthology for Solaris, a sister of sorts to 2010's very fine The End of the Line, editor Jonathan Oliver has turned to the road story: a genre, as he explains in his insightful introduction, widely mined in film and literature alike — in epic fantasy, for instance, insofar as the road represents the length of the hero's quest — though the fifteen short fictions which follow show that the form has much more to offer.

Thanks in part to Lavie Tidhar, whose guidance Oliver acknowledges, End of the Road is composed of stories from an expansive assortment of authors; some familiar, some fresh. The former camp includes Adam Nevill, S. L. Grey, Rio Youers, Philip Reeve, Ian Whates and, indubitably, Tidhar too; in the latter, a goodly number of newcomers hailing from here, there and everywhere. To wit, tales from Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, South Africa, Thailand and the like lend End of the Road a welcome and indeed defining sense of diversity.

The score and more of stories to be told can be divided down the middle, into those that revolve around the road, and those that are more interested in where the road goes. As the aforementioned editor asserts, "destination (expected or otherwise) is a theme running throughout this anthology, but often it is the journey itself that is key to the tales. And that needn't be a physical journey (though, naturally, the majority of these stories do feature one); the journey into the self is also explored in various ways." (p.7)

Book Review | The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough

Tonight is a special, terrible night.

A woman sits at her father's bedside watching the clock tick away the last hours of his life. Her brothers and sisters — all traumatised in their own ways, their bonds fragile — have been there for the past week, but now she is alone.

And that's always when it comes.

As the clock ticks in the darkness, she can only wait for it to find her...

***

In my review of Mayhem, published this past spring, I suggested that generations hence, people will revere this as the year of Sarah Pinborough. With six of her books published in the six months since, I think my argument still stands. There was Poison, Charm and Beauty too — a trio of neat novellas riffing on familiar fairy tales with such warmth and wit that Once Upon a Time seems shallow and artless in comparison — whilst the final volume of her first trilogy, The Forgotten Gods, will be re-released in North America in early December, as the previous books in said series have been throughout 2013.

It falls to The Language of Dying to bring the year of Sarah Pinborough to a conclusion, and the postscript it presents is both bittersweet and truly beautiful. It's a life-affirming short novel about a tired old man waiting to die and the family of five that come together to bid him goodbye, and though I did not enjoy it at all, from first to last I admired The Language of Dying wholeheartedly.

It begins, as will we, with this:

There is a language to dying. It creeps like a shadow alongside the passing years and the taste of it hides in the corners of our mouths. It finds us whether we are sick or healthy. It is a secret hushed thing that lives in the whisper of the nurses' skirts as they rustle up and down our stairs. They've taught me to face the language one syllable at a time, slowing creating an unwilling meaning. 

Cheyne-Stoking. (p.1)

In other words a common consequence of chain smoking; as is the terminal lung cancer our unnamed narrator's father has. He's been struggling for months, falling further and further from the waking world for weeks, and with only her to help; meanwhile she, as we'll see, has issues of her own — not least the fear that she simply doesn't fit. To her credit, however, she's been with him since the beginning of this... and she'll see it through to the end as well.

Book Review | The Waking That Kills by Stephen Gregory

The ghosts that haunt us are not always strangers...

When his elderly father suffers a stroke, Christopher Beale returns to England. He has no home, no other family. Adrift, he answers an advert for a live-in tutor for a teenage boy. The boy is Lawrence Lundy, who possesses the spirit of his father, a military pilot — missing, presumed dead. Unable to accept that his father is gone, Lawrence keeps his presence alive in the big old house and the overgrown garden. His mother, Juliet, keeps the boy at home, away from other children, away from the world; and in the suffocating heat of a long summer, she too is infected by the madness of her son.

Christopher becomes entangled in the strange household, enmeshed in the oddness of the boy and his fragile mother. Only by forcing the boy to release the spirit of his father can he find any escape from the haunting.

***

We may not know why, or when, or for what, but we will all, in our lives, lose someone we love.

Loss is not the whole of the story, of course. All too often, death itself is shocking, awful, to say nothing of the terrible tales that culminate there, but it's only when we let go — of the memory, the expectation, the guilt or need or even relief — it's only then than we begin to come to terms with the end.

Before The Waking That Kills is over, teacher Christopher Beale will have learned to let go of his father. Though his father is still alive at the start of this short novel — Stephen Gregory's first for five years — he is a sad shadow of the man he once was. A monumental mason by trade, which is to say someone who carves names and dates on graves, Christopher's father has had a stroke, and lives now in a nursing home in Grimsby, England; bewildered, bitter and impotent.

Christopher himself has been working in Borneo for seven years or so. It's a credit to his character that he hightails it home when he hears of his father's condition, ostensibly to be there for the man that made him, but he is, alas, distracted; trapped, perhaps, in an increasingly sinister scenario. "From the sweet, seductive, pitcher-plant entrapment of Borneo, to the Lincolnshire wolds" (p.146) he goes, to take a job tutoring a troubled teenager.

When he drives his father's hearse to Chalke House, however, where will live for the length of the sweltering summer that's just begun, Christopher finds that his status as a teacher is in truth a token. Instead, he is to be a friend to Lawrence Lundy first, and a father-figure afterwards, given the accidental death of his dad, whose memory Lawrence refuses to let lie.

He is a hard boy just to befriend, however. And it's clear from the first that he and his mother are keeping secrets from Christopher, though the truth will only out when he grows closer to both...

Book Review | Balfour and Meriwether in the Incident of the Harrowmoor Dogs by Daniel Abraham

When a private envoy of the queen and member of Lord Carmichael's discreet service goes missing, Balfour and Meriwether are asked to look into the affair. They will find a labyrinth of dreams, horrors risen from hell, prophecy, sexual perversion, and an abandoned farmhouse on the moors outside Harrowmoor Sanitarium.

The earth itself will bare its secrets and the Empire itself will tremble in the face of the hidden dangers they discover, but the greatest peril is the one they have brought with them...

***

In recent years, the adventures of Balfour and Meriwether have been a rare yet redolent pleasure. Daniel Abraham's dashing duo have appeared in only two tales to date — 'The Emperor's Vengeance' and 'The Vampire of Kabul' — both of which I reread this week, the better to be ready to review what is certainly their best and most complex quest yet.

I really needn't have — happily, no prior knowledge is required by The Incident of the Harrowmoor Dogs — though it was a pleasure to immerse myself again in said secret histories, and this novella's revelatory resolution did prove particularly potent on the back of those stories.

Again per the precedent set by its predecessors, there is the sense that The Incident of the Harrowmoor Dogs is but an episode in the larger canon of Balfour and Meriwether's collaborative careers as agents of Queen and country. Here, however, the episode is essentially supersized; to wit, Abraham is able to expand his narrative and develop his characters in a fairly fascinating fashion.

Book Review | Still Life by Tim Lebbon

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The incursion has been and gone, the war is over, and the enemy is in the land, remote and ambiguous. The village outskirts are guarded by vicious beasts, making escape impossible. The village itself is controlled by the Finks, human servants to the enemy — brutal, callous, almost untouchable. 

Everything is less than it was before... time seems to move slower, the population is much denuded, and life itself seems to hold little purpose. This is not living, it’s existing.

But in a subjugated population, there is always resistance.

For Jenni, the happiest part of this new life is visiting the pool in the woods, seeing her dead husband within, and sharing memories of happier times. It calms her and makes her feel alive.

But the resistance comes to her for help. 

And when her dead husband tells her it is time to fight, Jenni’s life is destined for a shattering change.

***

Jenni and Marc have it all, almost. A relaxed relationship, equal parts attraction, affection and respect. They enjoy their youth to the full, and look forward to growing old together, too — but not before they've made a small army of babies to take care of them later. And what better place to start a family than the idyllic little village they live in? It is "a beautiful, safe place, but sometimes beautiful and safe isn't enough for Marc." Sometimes, sadly, Jenni espies a look in his eyes that speaks of his "need for fear. [His] delight in danger." (p.8) So when one dark day the enemy emerge — whether from the heavens or the earth, even now no-one knows — he's one of the first people to volunteer.

He doesn't come home a hero, however. He doesn't come home at all. Hardly anyone does. The enemy are a wholly overwhelming force, thus this and every single instance of resistance since has proved to be brutal, and in the final summation futile. Indeed, you could measure the cost of man's defiance in disemboweled bodies; each action has only added to the enemy's ever-lengthening otherworldly wonder: the Road of Souls. Which is made of mooshed human.

All Jenni has of Marc when Still Life begins is his memory, though this takes a strange shape in the milieu of Tim Lebbon's immensely messed-up new novella: at a local plunge pool, formerly a favourite spot of theirs, his reflection still watches from the water. She often goes there to gaze at it... to lose herself in the blessed memories his image brings.

Jenni doesn't know if it's normal, now, for the dead to appear to the living like this. It could be, conceivably; most everything else has been different since the incursion. She'd ask, perhaps, but she's afraid to, for though the enemy are certainly present, no-one can say with any certainty what they are, or where. As Jenni reflects, "in truth, no one really knew what the enemy wanted, where it had come from, or why. Sometimes not knowing made everything so much worse." (p.12)

Music, if I may, to this reader's ears!

In any case, the enemy — and that's all Lebbon calls them — the enemy, then, leave it to their embedded agents to ensure the obedience of the surviving villagers. These Overseers — or Finks, if not to their faces — are merely evil people, keen to flaunt their newfound power, thus trust has become a rare commodity in this subjugated community.

But as the synopsis says, "in a subjugated population, there is always resistance," and a plan is being fashioned to kill the Finks: merely a small step to pave the way for more significant strides, yet if Jenni refuses to play her pyromaniacal part, the entire village could be crushed — and initially, at least, she is unwilling. However when Marc's mirror image urges her to fight back for once, she realises — too late, I dare say — that there may be a better way.

With a Star Wars novel, two volumes of his YA series Toxic City, Coldbrook for Hammer Horror, a collection of short stories and The Heretic Land all published since 2012, Tim Lebbon has been particularly prolific in recent years, but Still Life is his first novella for quite a while, and I think it's no coincidence that it is the finest thing he's written since Echo City. In part this is because it doesn't, at 80 pages, overstay its welcome, as to my mind a number of the author's full-on novels have. Its lesser length also allows Lebbon to establish an atmosphere, create a compelling character and elaborate his narrative without falling into that dastardly dark fantasy trap of explaining the inexplicable into insignificance.

Now it's not without fault. I'm afraid there isn't a great deal of depth to Jenni's relationship with her late, lamented lover — would that their pairing had been a little less picture perfect — and parts of the piece lack polish: one last pass could have made Lebbon's prose all the prettier, which may have made the bubble our protagonist exists in to begin with that much more convincing.

But by and large, this is bloody good stuff, with no paucity of plot — Still Life reads like a short novel rather than a long short — an admirable unwillingness to undermine the unknowable nature of the enemy, and, in the Road of Souls, the single most horrific idea anyone has had in years.

I've had my ups and downs with the tales Tim Lebbon has told in recent years, but Still Life is undoubtedly one of the former sort, to the point that I wish this edition weren't so strictly limited — to just 225 copies in toto for the time being — particularly considering Jim Burns' fantastic cover art. To wit, dark fantasy fans would be well advised to order Still Life direct from Spectral Press before it's gone for good.

***

Still Life
by Tim Lebbon

UK Publication: November 2013, Spectral Press

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Book Review | The White Forest by Adam McOmber

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Young Jane Silverlake lives with her father in a crumbling family estate on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Jane has a secret — an unexplainable gift that allows her to see the souls of man-made objects — and this talent isolates her from the outside world. Her greatest joy is wandering the wild heath with her neighbors, Madeline and Nathan. But as the friends come of age, their idyll is shattered by the feelings both girls develop for Nathan, and by Nathan’s interest in a cult led by Ariston Day, a charismatic mystic popular with London’s elite. Day encourages his followers to explore dream manipulation with the goal of discovering a strange hidden world, a place he calls the Empyrean.

A year later, Nathan has vanished, and the famed Inspector Vidocq arrives in London to untangle the events that led up to Nathan’s disappearance. As a sinister truth emerges, Jane realizes she must discover the origins of her talent, and use it to find Nathan herself, before it’s too late.

***

I've never been a particularly religious person, but even I am struck, sometimes, with the conviction that there must be more to the world than this. Some power greater than ours.

I don't mean to say that the world is not enough — that would make me the Bond villain of bloggers, after all. Nor do I intend to imply that the power people wield is at all paltry — to be sure, that too would be very far from the truth. But in the face of nature's creations, not to mention its infinite variations, it's hard to avoid being awed, is it not?

Be that as it may, I am content to live in a wonderful world and know that it is so, yet many demand more. To each their own, of course; I wouldn't dare discriminate! But from time to time, men like Ariston Day emerge from the many aforementioned. The antagonist of Adam McOmber's darkly fantastic first novel believes with every fibre of his being that there is somewhere a door to be opened; a membrane, maybe, to be teased — or torn — apart. And Day is determined to do so. At any conceivable cost.

The charismatic leader of a sensational sect known as the Theatre of Provocation, which has its headquarters deep beneath a tavern called the Temple of the Lamb, Day exists primarily on the periphery of McOmber's magnificently measured debut. His tempestuous presence, however, is felt from the first.

That's not the case for our narrator, Jane Silverlake, who has lived a lonely life. At once shunned by the poor and rejected by the rich, she seems set aside from society entirely at a time and a place, specifically Victorian-era England, which values nothing else as highly. To make her existence still more maudlin, she's been haunted by objects ever since losing her mother to an eerie fever — an uncanny talent that takes a telling turn during The White Forest's first act. Rather than simply singing to her, the things she sees start to speak; if not in words then courtesy increasingly crystalline images:

It was as if every object had become a curtain, and behind that curtain lay a new realm. The realm was not of simple colour and sound — it was an actual place. Had I read any of the burgeoning literature of scientific fiction, I might have called the place a "parallel dimension," but I had no word for what I saw. It was a landscape — a white forest, pale as paper, clearly a vision of some alien landscape. In the forest there was a stream of milk-white water that did not flow but remained still, as if frozen. There were flowers in the undergrowth — blossoms that appeared to be lit from within, like Chinese lanterns. I recognised the place. As a child, I'd seen it in dreams inside the mouths that opened in Mother's flesh. (p.90)

Jane tries to keep these surreal experiences a secret, but when she is befriended — quite out of the blue — by a beautiful young woman, Miss Madeline Lee, and a dashing gentleman-in-the-making named Nathan Ashe, her abilities inevitably become apparent. A powerful bond forms between the three thereafter, brought on by this shared knowledge, and the years elapse happily.

For a long while, we triangulated, and there was energy in that. I sometimes felt myself to be the center of our group, a project for both of them. It wasn't until Nathan discovered the Empyrean itself that everything truly got out of hand. The triangle was broken by that strange vision, and it was then that we began our free fall. (p.87)

Nathan's fascination with the Empyrean ultimately leads him into the arms of Ariston Day... and then he disappears completely. Quite literally, he is lost. An Inspector Vidoq — the model for the main character of many of Edgar Allen Poe's most notable short stories — is called in to investigate this locked room mystery of sorts, but Jane and Maddy only cooperate with Vidoq to a point. To preserve the sanctity of the secret they share, the ladies resolve to unravel the strange circumstances surrounding their dear heart's vanishing act themselves.

Little do they realise where the case will take them, and how it is bound to break them.

The White Forest has an absorbing plot, compelling characters and an exceptionally well-rendered setting, assuming you can get past a few factual and geographical inaccuracies, meanwhile McOmber imparts an abundance of exquisite imagery in pristine prose that often comes close to poetry. Little about this book is anything less than impeccable, in fact — let me state, out of the gate, that it's great; positively phenomenal for a first novel — but what impressed me most about The White Forest was its incremental descent into dark fantasy.

At the outset, the author plays it perfectly straight. His Hampstead Heath feels nearly real. His lords and ladies are far from the caricatures that tend to populate these sorts of novels; they're authentic individuals, flawed and self-absorbed, but not tortured or hysterical or wholly heroic. Our central characters are similarly convincing, which is to say, for all that they're the good guys, they do some despicable things.

In short, it's all awfully ordinary. But the extraordinary is never far away. Even the banality of the beginning is punctuated by moments of sudden, shattering violence. Confronted by Maddy's beauty in a mirror, for instance, Jane wonders:

What would it feel like [...] to crack the brush against her skull? An awful notion. She was mine, and I was hers. And yet she had a lovely face — I could not stop myself from thinking this — certainly lovelier than my own. But what did Nathan think? A horrid question. If Nathan ever chose one of us, the fantasy would be broken. Flood-waters would rise. (p.175)

And indeed they do.

But these are only isolated moments, initially. By the end, however, the unknowable notions that formerly suffused the fringes of the fiction have supplanted its earlier reality entirely; the last chapters don't even take place on our planet! Suddenly The White Forest is like Lovecraft come Among Others, Caitlin R. Kiernan meets The Croning, yet somehow McOmber makes the whole his own.

At once weird and wonderful, The White Forest is an uncanny confluence of magic and mystery, and over its controlled course, Adam McOmber paints a picture both beautiful and terrifying, exhibiting his mastery of both the fantastical and the practically factual. To come full circle, The White Forest is the sort of book that makes one wonder whether there mightn't be something more to the world than we're aware of, and it's my pleasure to recommend it unreservedly.

***

The White Forest
by Adam McOmber

US Publication: July 2013, Touchstone

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Book Review | Black Feathers by Joseph D'Lacey

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It is the Black Dawn, a time of environmental apocalypse.

It is the Bright Day, a time generations hence, when a peace has descended across the world.

In each era, a child undertakes a perilous journey to find a dark messiah known as the Crowman. But is he our saviour... or the final incarnation of evil?

***

There can be no question that the world we live in is a very different one than that of our ancestors.

I dare say we'll debate the whys and the wherefores of this issue till we're blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is obscenely simple: our world has seen better days than these. As have we as a people—according to Joseph D'Lacey, at least. Look at "the weather, the economy, the self-serving government, the crooked legal system, the diseases and food shortages [...] If only we'd cared a little more for each other and a little less for ourselves." (p.324)

Well, if wishes were horses—why, we'd be riding gleefully into the future, wouldn't we?

And perhaps we will, one day... but not today, eh? Today, as they say, is unsustainable. Today cannot last.

So what of tomorrow? What of the world of our children, and our children's children? Tomorrow's world, I warrant, will be different again from ours, whether for better... or for worse. There are startling extrapolations of both futures in Black Feathers, the first part of a darkly fantastic duology by the man the British Fantasy Society named Best Newcomer in 2009.

Before D'Lacey looks ahead, however, he casts his eye back a ways, to the birth of a baby boy:

"A freak gust had sucked open a window. Unexpected winter breathed into the room. Snowflakes twirled in and fell to the carpet. A fleeting impression of black wings beating their way into the night was interrupted by the curtains billowing inward. [...] Louis shut his eyes, committing the scene to memory. It was sacred and extreme, both beautiful and base. A smell from the room lingered in his nostrils; the dry, almost Alpine chilld of the air and the moist scent of Sophie's sweat and blood." (pp.15-16)

So it is that Gordon Black comes into the world, causing as much fuss in his first flush as he does later in life, and accompanied—as ever—by a murder of black-feathered birds. Thus, from day one, his parents realise that there's something... different about their son; a problem which only becomes more pressing as Gordon grows older. We all fall to wondering who we really are from time to time, but some questions are not so easily answered. Some questions don't even have answers.

Yet time marches on regardless.

Fast forward to a period resembling the present day, in which Gordon approaches his adolescence, ever more aware that he doesn't fit in amongst all the other kids with, yes, their pumped-up kicks. Gordon however has other interests than new shoes. Sure, he'd like a few friends of his own, but he's more interested in a safe place to call home. Above all else, Gordon wants his family to be happy, and whole.

He should be so lucky. He really should be; that's not a lot to ask, after all. Alas, "the world is descending into chaos and there's a simple reason for it. We've abused it. We've drained it. We've mined it. We've cut down its forests. We've over-farmed its land and turned it into a desert. There's no part of the world untainted by the touch of humanity," (p.167) and Mother Earth has finally declared an endgame: the Black Dawn is coming. And unless Gordon does something about it—he's the only person in a position to, for reasons that will become clear—every living thing will be lost.

"This is the beginning of a story. A true story. One greater and more far-reaching than the story of a pale, gentle boy; it is the story of the Black Dawn and the Bright Day, the story of the world's rebirth. And she must learn it." (p.150)

She is Megan Maurice, apprentice to an old storyteller come medicine man—called a Keeper by the people of this period—and in her world, a Bright Day beckons: a time of peace, and love, and longed-for light. But the way there is shrouded in shadow. Lies and snakes and spiders lurk between the moment she submits to her master and the era of spiritual wealth ahead.

Like Gordon, Megan too has a duty. Meanwhile she is haunted by horrible dreams, as is he. And though untold generations separate them, they dream, sometimes, of one another. In this way the past and the future are entwined: a divide, and indeed an interdependence, which Joseph D'Lacey makes much of over the course of Black Feathers.

D'Lacey has been writing steadily since making waves with the publication of his wonderfully disgusting debut in early 2008. Garbage Man, Snake Eyes, The Kill Crew and Blood Fugue all followed in the mould of Meat, to a certain extent, but Black Feathers is something different, I think. Gone are the grotesque excesses of yesteryear—torture porn this is not. The latest from D'Lacey is as bleak as ever his work has been, but it's sweeter as well, and ultimately much more meaningful.

I'd go so far as to say that Black Feathers represents the maturation of his practised craft.

Which isn't to say it's perfect by any stretch. To begin with, it's pretty preachy. Given the preceding quotes, I hardly need note that if you aren't into the idea of the world as a living, breathing being, you should steer clear... but beyond that, D'Lacey sometimes comes on too strong, surfacing the green politics of the premise every time the opportunity to do so presents itself. I'm in complete agreement with the author on most of the points he makes, but even I was rolling my eyes the tenth time he iterated on the population problem.

There's also some dodgy dialogue. Some confusion at the outset as to what was happening when—and to who, too. And the convenient appearance of several peripheral perspectives took me out of the story rather than drawing me deeper into its weave.

In every other respect, however, Black Feathers is something special. Equal parts a novel of the apocalypse and a powerful coming of age tale—as much The Stand as Stand By Me, if I may—D'Lacey's latest grabbed me from the potent prologue, and let go only when the new had become old, and the story told.

No longer a boy but not yet a man, Gordon is a fascinating character from the first, and he develops a great deal before Black Feathers is over. His journey of self-discovery is punctuated by painful realisation, awful responsibility, feelings of inadequacy... and the clamouring carrion call of something called the Crowman:

"In every depiction of cataclysm, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes a tiny representation watching from afar, stood the same figure. Long dark hair hanging over his features, arms stretched wide and upwards as if in summoning, a long coat covering most of his body, and at his cuffs and ankles something like black straw or black lightning instead of fingers. Some sketches were portraits in close-up. A beak for a face, grey eyes fixed on the artist or viewer, hair like skeins of black silk and everywhere black feathers falling like snow. A few of the pictures weren't of a man at all but were merely studies of crows, some in flight, some sitting in high branches, some lying dead in the deserted streets." (p.230)

Visions of this figure assault Megan as well, and though she is certainly of secondary interest in the beginning of Black Feathers, her half of the narrative—which D'Lacey uses to illuminate elements of Gordon's desperate perspective—builds to a tremendous crescendo at the end. I look forward to finding out what's next for her in the latter volume of this duology.

In lieu of book two of The Black Dawn, let me stress that Black Feathers is perfectly satisfying on its own. Hugely approachable, and immensely readable, it represents an effective narrative with rewarding characters, rich imagery and an atmosphere so stark that you really feel the horror of it all. Of course this isn't the first time that the end of the world has meant something, but whether you buy into its author's politics or not, Black Feathers is a deftly rendered realisation of a reckoning that seems, by all accounts, almost inevitable.

***

Black Feathers
by Joseph D'Lacey

UK Publication: April 2013, Angry Robot Books
US Publication: March 2013, Angry Robot Books

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