Any author who comes with recommendations from Donovan, Alan Moore, and Ben Graham (author of Amorphous Albion, an Illuminatus! Trilogy for the 21st Century) must be worth checking out. And so it proves. Mandrake Petals and Scattered Feathers is unlike anything I've read for some time. The closest comparisons I can think of are the … Continue reading Review: “Mandrake Petals and Scattered Feathers” by David Greygoose
I'm sorry, faithful visitors to the Gyre. I've been writing elsewhere. Mostly for the excellent Horrified magazine, for whom I'm reviewing new horror fiction. You can find my reviews here. But that's not all! I've just finished the third story featuring my recurring character, and you can meet him soon. Yes, STORGY will publish my … Continue reading #AmWriting Elsewhere…
My review of the latest novel by British horror veteran Graham Masterton is now up at Horrified magazine.
My review of the highly enjoyable portmanteau horror collection "Studio of Screams" by the formidable line-up of Stephen R. Bissette, Mark Morris, Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon & Stephen Volk, is now at Horrified Magazine, your new home for everything to do with British Horror.
Here's a book I misjudged by its cover. I bought it in the expectation of something enjoyably trashy: maybe a family pet gone psycho, like Cujo? Or at least animals on the rampage like The Rats, Crabs, Slugs, etc.? Not quite. It's the story of Don Boyd, seventeen and trapped in a house with parents … Continue reading Horror Rewind #5 – “The Pet” by Charles L. Grant (1986)
I love Weird Walk. I'm not being paid to say that, nor have I been sent a copy for review. I say it freely: there was a small, quirky-and-friendly zine-shaped hole in my life that I'd never noticed, and Weird Walk fills it perfectly. It's been a funny old year - a weird one indeed … Continue reading Zine review: ‘Weird Walk’ #3
Welcome to the second in my occasional trip back to the 80s Horror Boom. Having looked at Mark Morris's excellent Toady, we're now going a little further back in time - and a little further north - to look at three books from 1986-7, all of them set around Tyneside and Northumberland: Stephen Laws's The … Continue reading Horror Rewind #2 – Wyrms, Fire Worms & Spectres
The Folk Horror Chain is a framework devised by writer and film-maker Adam Scovell in his essential study of the genre, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. For Scovell, Folk Horror can - among other things - be categorised as "a work that uses folklore…to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for … Continue reading The Folk Horror Chain in Clive Barker’s “Books of Blood”
I recently reviewed Dan Coxon's great little horror micro-anthology from Black Shuck books, Green Fingers. Impressed, I took a punt on another from their "Shadows" series. There are 21 at time of writing, but there's little information on their website to allow you to choose one over another, other than cover art (their jacket design … Continue reading Review – “Winter Freits” by Andrew David Barker (2019)
A quick post this, and one which the title pretty much explains. I've been reading UnLunDun to my son, because he really enjoyed Miéville's other YA novel Railsea when I read that to him. Railsea is aimed at slightly older readers, is more linguistically and thematically complex and probably the better book, but UnLunDun is … Continue reading China Miéville’s “UnLunDun”: dismantling the cliché of Prophecy
Into the Gyre 