My copy was supplied for review; spoilers follow I reviewed Julian Payne's previous work Harvest, co-written with partner Zoe Elkins, a few years ago for Horrified magazine. I said then that I looked forward to seeing what they'd do next. I have my answer here, in this gorgeous - and sizeable - graphic novel by … Continue reading Review: “What The Tide Reveals” by Julian Payne (2025)
My copy was supplied for review. Warning: spoilers ahead Life is good for Jimmy Cochran. He’s a freelance journalist, investigating supernatural stories for a local paper in New York, is a successful comic illustrator, lives in an apartment overlooking Central Park, and in Sophia, has a fuck-buddy who’s into a bit of BDSM. Yep, all … Continue reading Review: “The Last Breath Before Death” by Alan Golbourn (2024)
FEAR appeared at exactly the right time to fill a gap in the market. Although there were similarly-glossy genre magazines (Starburst, Fangoria, Samhain) their focus was on film whereas FEAR recognised there was demand for a magazine that covered horror fiction1. As an avid reader of ZZAP!64 in the mid-80s, for their publishers Newsfield to … Continue reading Horror Rewind #12 – ‘FEAR’ magazine # 2, Sep/Oct 1988
I wrote here (and more pertinently here) about maps in fantasy books, and for no justifiable reason I want to look at the ways in which the nature of Clive Barker's work is largely resistant to cartography. When we think of fantasy maps we tend to think of Christopher Tolkien's classic Middle Earth one (although … Continue reading The Unmappability of Clive Barker
How does Star Wars begin again? Ah yes: “Another galaxy, another time.” That’s right. Wait – what? Star Wars geeks among you already know that the above is true – from a certain point of view. That’s because the sentence comes from Alan Dean Foster’s 1976 novelisation, published under George Lucas’s name. It came out … Continue reading The joy of film novelisations
The book's subtitle puts it better: Ghost Movies. But even that's deceptive. In this 260-page anthology, editor Peter Haining (whose many other spooky collections were familiar to me as a teenager) traces the history of the ghost story onscreen through the works of fiction that inspired such classic films as Night of the Demon, Don't … Continue reading Horror Rewind #11 – “Classics of the Supernatural” (ed. Peter Haining) (1995)
Childhood is weird, isn't it? Weird in a good way: weird in that the world is more full of wonder than at any other time in our life. As we age, depending on our cast of mind, we view this openness as something silly, and rightly confined to the past, or else envy young children … Continue reading First Frights: Ghosts, ghosts, and ghosts
Around the same time I was watching Close Encounters for the first time, BBC2 were showing, in a weekday tea-time slot, a series of 1950s science fiction classics. This was my first exposure to older sci-fi, i.e. things that pre-dated 1977. I'm sure if I dug around the internet the evidence would contradict me, but … Continue reading First Frights: 50s Sci-Fi!
A widower and his young daughter live in a hillside cottage. Interspersed between the increasingly dark events of their life are vignettes of historical scenes from the area's past: moments of violence, trauma, and death, whose actors and events feed into each chapter. The girl, Nia, has a powerful imagination, which seems capable of dissolving … Continue reading Review: “Dark Play” by Tim Cooke (2024)
Read Part One The mid-1980s saw a change in Herbert's work, of which Moon (1985) although it contains many similar elements to The Jonah, is the first example. The hero of this transitional novel in Herbert's oeuvre has a "softer" name than his usual heroes - Childes - which reflects his vulnerability. He's a teacher … Continue reading Horror Rewind special: James Herbert! (part two)
Into the Gyre 