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)
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
Islay My friend Dave and I recently celebrated our joint 50th birthdays by spending a long weekend on Islay. Where's Islay, some of you may ask? Here's Islay: Map courtesy of islayinfo.com And it's pronounced "eye-lah". Not "eye-lay", "iz-lay", or "ill-ay". Eye-lah. It's famous - properly world-famous - for its whisky, particularly smoky, peated, single … Continue reading Islay: Whisky, Place and Magic
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)
Time is cyclical. That's the underlying message of Gareth E. Rees's timely and often persuasive new book, the follow-up to his superb Unofficial Britain. As a species, argues Rees, we've been here before: we've seen the seas rise, seen rising waters swallow the land. It's happened once, twice, many times; and if we take the … Continue reading Review: “Sunken Lands” by Gareth E. Rees (2024)
A hobby of mine when I was a teenager was birdwatching. I'd go for walks up the hill behind my parents' house with binoculars and field guide; if I was lucky Mum and Dad would take me to RSPB Vane Farm (now Loch Leven), a half-hour drive away; or I'd go with my cousin Colin, … Continue reading Not birdwatching
This review first appeared in Horrified magazine in 2022. Of the world’s ’empty spaces’, the polar regions have a long and distinguished place in horror fiction. From The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Edgar Allen Poe, 1838) to At The Mountains of Madness (HP Lovecraft, 1936), and from the TV drama The Terror (AMC, David … Continue reading Review: “All The White Spaces” by Ally Wilkes
The short review: best issue yet of Weird Walk. Buy it now. The longer review: Outwardly, nothing has changed. Weird Walk still has the same neat 48-page A5 format as ever, printed as before on high-quality paper. The design and typography are unchanged, as are the grainy photos of megalithic sites. But the contents have … Continue reading Zine review: ‘Weird Walk’ #4
"This land is laden with phantoms." This line from "The Dunes", one of the haunting and elusive stories from this intriguing collection, is the theme that underpins Tim Cooke's fiction. These interconnected stories - about an unnamed narrator and his mates as they grow through childhood, adolescence and to young manhood - are set in … Continue reading “Where We Live” by Tim Cooke
"If you look closely enough, all landscapes can be fascinating and any object, no matter what its material, can be freighted with meaning." This is the most inspiring book I've read all year. Writer Gareth E. Rees1 shows, through his wonderfully offbeat travels across Britain, that in a secular age "significance" can be found anywhere, … Continue reading “Unofficial Britain” by Gareth E. Rees
Into the Gyre 