Regular readers will know the name of Dan Coxon, whether as editor of the excellent Tales from the Shadow Booth series and This Dreaming Isle anthology, or as author of the delightfully dark micro-collection Green Fingers. Only the Broken Remain is his first full-length collection of horror shorts, and it's full of good stuff. Some … Continue reading “Only the Broken Remain” by Dan Coxon
Not one for your Granny. Or your mother-in-law. Richard Cabut's short novel is a gleefully explicit story of a young man addicted to hardcore internet porn. Ray is in a spiral of vicarious debauchery. Impotent with his girlfriend (who, significantly, is never named and who lives in blissful ignorance of his habit) he can only … Continue reading Review: “Dark Entries” by Richard Cabut
Adam Scovell takes his long-standing fascination with the idea of Place a step further in this, his coldly enveloping second novel. Isabelle is in Strasbourg. Her increasingly-distanced partner has left for a trip to South America, and she's alone when she receives word of her father's suicide. So begins her slow sinking into the fabric … Continue reading Review: Adam Scovell – “How Pale The Winter Has Made Us”
Alasdair Gray lived - and wrote and drew and painted - in the hope of seeing Scotland once again become an independent nation. There's a grim symmetry in that he died at the very end of a decade which had come so close to seeing just that, and on the cusp of a new one … Continue reading Alasdair Gray 1934 – 2019
So. A further update on my own fiction. As I wrote last month, I wasn't happy with the way that my first "reeds" story had turned out: lots of atmosphere at the expense of, well, anything else really. A sign that I'm likely to be happy with something - that it might even be good … Continue reading #AmWriting – Finding the story
Any discussion of Yukio Mishima's life and work has to deal, at some point, with his death. A right-wing nationalist appalled by the Western influence on Japanese society and culture, he tried to lead his own personal militia in a coup. It failed and Mishima immediately committed seppuku - ritual suicide - before (following the … Continue reading The Japanese Proust? Yukio Mishima
Just 6 months after the superb volume 3 of Tales from the Shadow Booth (which I reviewed here), "the international journal of weird and eerie fiction", Dan Coxon brings us another. And its just as good: that's all you really need to know. But if you want more, read on... It begins, as all trips … Continue reading Review: “Tales from the Shadow Booth: Volume 4”
Ends and new beginnings as The Sovereign Forest draws to a close. Sherwood will burn.
This book took me places I didn't expect it to. Firstly, I assumed it would be a biography: of Len Howard, who left everything behind in London to pursue a life dedicated to studying the behaviour of garden birds. I was intrigued. Then, when I discovered it was a fictional re-imagining of her life, I … Continue reading Review: “Bird Cottage” by Eva Meijer
Some books just don't do it for you first time. Some never will, and you have to acknowledge that. Others leave spore-like traces that may not germinate for months or even years, but will eventually bring you back to them. Hollow Shores is one such for me. Published in 2017 by indie press Dead Ink, … Continue reading Review: “Hollow Shores” by Gary Budden (2017)
