Smiler’s Fair by Rebecca Levene | review by Stephen Theaker

“They say the fair holds one example of all that there is in the world – every food, every spice, every pleasure and every vice,” says nobleman Lahiru, who, though married with three children, will be “hunting the finest boy flesh to be had for many miles” during his visit. Smiler’s Fair is a travelling city, drawn by mammoths from place to place, because no one stays still for too long in this world. Do so and the worm men will get you! The fair, home to scoundrels, scum and psychopaths, takes a daily census of its inhabitants and visitors, and when the first death comes the fair moves on. For our cast of characters, all roads pass through this exciting, squalid, movable feast.

The eyes of Krish have silver irises, and so King Nayan, his birth father, wanted him dead to undo a prophecy. Cut from his mother’s belly and stolen away, Krish knows nothing of that, and lives as a shepherd until a brush with the king’s flying squad sets him on the run. Lady Nethmi has been sent by her uncle to marry old Lord Thilak, but he already has a good woman to share his bed.

Eric is a teenage sellcock, growing too old for the sleazy customers of his owner, Madam Aeronwen. He decides to follow his favourite client home from the fair. Dae Hyo, perhaps the last of his tribe, would avenge the murder of his people and reclaim his homeland; trouble is, he’s also a recovering alcoholic chased out of town after he fell asleep on the job and got a team of miners killed by the worm men.

Smiler’s Fair is very much the first part of a series, and doesn’t work brilliantly as a standalone novel. The protagonists move around the board, but few of their stories progress very far. It feels like threads were added till there were enough to fill the pages, rather than because they were truly needed. There’s a common theme to some of them, of scorned and mistreated wives: the woman who adopted Krish, beaten by the husband she always wanted to leave; Nethmi, an unwilling wife with an uncaring husband; Babi, wife of gay lord Lahiru, humiliated by the lover brought into their home. But with no common catalyst, it feels oddly coincidental that these life-changing adventures all begin at once.

The prose style feels uncomplicated and perhaps even deliberately simplified: in one five-page section I looked at, ninety-five per cent of the text was made up of one and two-syllable words, with only two of eighteen hundred words reaching five syllables. It feels like the language is pitched at someone with the reading age of eleven or twelve, though the content is far too salty for that age group. This makes it an easy and accessible book to read, but once you notice it’s hard not to feel like the book is talking down to you.

Levene’s editorial work on the excellent Doctor Who line from Virgin Books was very well regarded, and this feels rather like a book written by a canny editor who has surveyed the market, thought about what will be marketable (it will appeal to fans of Game of Thrones), and produced a book designed to fit the bill. Some parts are a bit corny – one man becomes the captive of a society of women, who of course require impregnation! – but it’s a solid adventure and I enjoyed reading it. I’m sure it will find fans, though I probably won’t read any sequels: I’m not worried about the characters, nor really intrigued by the trundly setting.

The worm men are frightening at first, but the premise of the book, that they can’t dig up into your home if it’s on the move (because the sun poisons the land against them), was unconvincing, and felt like an arbitrary way to set this world in motion. For me that world is in some ways too similar to our own: there are mammoths, but also snakes, cows, horses, goats, rats, etc. Maybe it is our world, or maybe it’s just parallel evolution, but the inclusion of Earth Prime animals in a fantasy novel always feels to me like a wasted opportunity. It’s ironic that fantasy is often less adventurous than science fiction when it comes to these things.

Promisingly, events later in the book suggest that the Hollow Gods of the series title might play a bigger role in future volumes. More weirdness and magic would certainly have made this book more appealing, and it might prove easier to take an interest in the lives of these mostly unpleasant characters if they were set in opposition to gods who are even worse. ***

This review originally appeared in Interzone #254.

A Song of Shadows, by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton) | review by Rafe McGregor

A Song of Shadows (464pp, £3.85) is the thirteenth “Charlie Parker thriller”, as the series is described by Hodder & Stoughton, first published in hardback in 2015. First and foremost – and quite possibly because of rather than in spite of the criticisms I shall make – the series is extremely successful, regularly ranking high on various bestseller lists and regularly receiving rave ratings from the most trusted crime fiction reviewers. I must confess to not having read all of Parker’s cases, which began with Every Dead Thing in 1999 (and was, as an example of my previous claim, the L.A. Times Book of the Year), but I have read the first two and most recent two and can confirm that there has been no fluctuation in quality. Connolly is not one of those writers who rests on his laurels, resorts to repeated uses of the same formula, or tires of his protagonist. My gripe, and I think it is more than mere whimsy on my part, is the idiosyncratic mix of crime and horror Connolly has weaved around Parker.

In his helpful guide to the series on the Crime Fiction Lover website, David Prestidge writes that: “The books are peopled with genuinely mean human criminal types, but Connolly introduces supernatural foes in the novels as well.” The books are billed as dark crime fiction in the same way that dark fantasy is now a distinct subcategory of the fantasy genre. To sacrifice accuracy for brevity, dark crime fiction is crime fiction written by a horror writer or a mystery told as a horror story or crime fiction that gestures towards but does not quite cross over into horror fiction… basically, a crime fiction series that is situated just this side of the crime–horror border. The two genres are, of course, complementary to a great extent and it is no surprise that Edgar Allan Poe was such an important figure for both, that Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles is billed as both a great crime story and a great horror story, or that may of H.P. Lovecraft’s weird tales take investigators of some sort as their protagonists. Prestidge continues: “Yet he never uses the paranormal to explain away loopholes in the plot.”

The issue isn’t using the para-normal to fill normal loopholes in the plot, but rather integrating the mystery and horror elements of the narrative such that they complement rather than counteract one another and this is where several weaknesses emerge. First, the books are longer than most mystery novels, the length exacerbated by the often slow and leisurely build-up to the main plot. This would not be problematic were the denouement worth the wait, i.e. a clever or original mix of mystery and magic, sleuthing and the supernatural. But, as Prestidge correctly notes: “There aren’t any [loopholes], and the Charlie Parker books all offer solid and original mysteries. He is a PI, after all.” Crime fiction readers, particularly those who prefer “thrillers” to “mysteries” are accustomed to fast-paced plots and the slower the action, the more drama they demand in the climax. The fact that all supernatural elements are always (at least in the four I have read and according to Prestidge) peripheral to the main plot – always, in other words, a subplot at best – makes me think of the series as crime-dressed-up-as-horror – in a pejorative sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing sense. Parker’s living daughter (Sam) can see the dead and sense evil and the spirit of his dead daughter (Jennifer) communicates with both him and Sam in A Song of Shadows. There are at least two events in the novel – a young girl sleepwalking and the earth opening up under a villain – that are presented as supernatural, but then quickly rationalised (as the dream of a young girl with a neurological disease and as a rare but not improbable geological phenomenon respectively). I found the subsequent debunking of these at times gripping supernatural scenes something of an anti-climax and that term really sums up my whole experience of the book.

Connolly takes a big risk with his villains in using war criminals from the Second World War. Assuming that the events of the narrative are supposed to be contemporary (there is nothing to suggest otherwise) and that National Socialist Germany in extremis may have used sixteen-year-olds as concentration camp guards – and granting that the camps were maintained until the very end of the war – the youngest possible war criminal would be eighty-six. Given the separation of the supernatural from the main plot, the criminals involved are men rather than demons and eighty-six-year-old men are not very frightening – unless, of course, they are million- or billion-aires at the head of a new evil empire. The Nazi-turned-businessman is something of a cliché, but in avoiding the cliché Connolly presents his readers with a group of evil old men doddering around New England, unworthy antagonists for super-sleuth Parker even if he is recovering from the multiple wounds sustained in his previous case. What makes this even worse for me is that the revelation of the main villain occurs relatively early on (for a mystery, that is), which once again creates a sense of… anti-climax.

Connolly’s fans – and there are dozens, probably hundreds, of thousands of them – may well think I haven’t read the book because Goodreads (to name but one forum) has many reviewers writing about the suspense being maintained to the last page and the jaw-dropping conclusion. I think I know what they have in mind, but I am baffled that it should generate such excitement. And yes, I have read all four books carefully from first page to last. Parker is a likeable sort of chap who leads an interesting sort of life, but neither Parker nor his life justifies the many hundreds of pages that each case generates. As mystery stories, the series is far too slow-paced; as horror stories, the continual and continued relegation of the supernatural to the side-line is disappointing; as a combination of mystery and horror, I can’t help but feel that a writer of Connolly’s undoubted skill could have merged a hardboiled PI with a setting that is both gritty and realistic on the one hand and populated by the angels and demons which the series often promises but never delivers on the other. It is only the worry that I have missed some obvious virtue of the novels that kept me coming back, but I’m afraid I’ve decided that life is too short to attempt a fifth… I’m sure Parker and Connolly will both do fine without me.

Lagoon (Hodder & Stoughton) by Nnedi Okorafor | review

Lagos was lazily named by Portuguese explorers in 1472, we are told: lagos means lagoon. Five hundred and thirty-eight years later, just after 11.55 pm on 8 January 2010, a huge alien craft plummets into the same lagoon. The ship has a transformative effect on the Nigerian ocean, “now so clean that a cup of its salty-sweet goodness will heal the worst human illnesses and cause a hundred more illnesses not yet known to humankind”. The swordfish we meet in the prologue triples in size, acquires retractable spines and golden armoured skin.

The aliens are more cautious on land, sending at first a single representative. It/she makes contact with three humans caught in the ten-foot wave thrown up by the ship’s arrival. Adaora is a marine biologist whose husband has just hit her for the first time. Anthony Dey Craze is a famous rapper from Ghana with a way of working magic with a beat. Agu is a soldier, still bleeding after a failed attempt to stop squadmates assaulting a woman. Each felt drawn to the beach.

Adaora asks their new friend to call herself Ayodele. There is “something both attractive and repellent about the woman”, who they discover is a shapeshifter. She is polite and pleasant, but quite clear on the fact that her people will not be leaving: “No. We stay.” The world has changed, and the question is how to adjust, how to survive, not how to put things back how they were. They take her back to Adaora’s home, but barely have time to talk before word gets out.

Adaora’s babysitter sends a video of the alien to her sketchy boyfriend Moziz, and he recruits friends to plan a kidnapping. One of them shows the video to the Black Nexus, a LGBT group of which he is secretly a member, and so on. Soon there is a huge and angry crowd outside the house. Meanwhile, the government, near paralysed by the absence of the president – secretly recovering from heart surgery in Saudi Arabia – does little to investigate what’s happening in the bay, or to protect the city and its inhabitants. As Lagos falls prey to riots and chaos, Adaora, Anthony and Agu realise what they must do.

The characters through whose eyes we see these events are likeable but not paragons, and always interesting to spend time with, especially the alien Ayodele, who is at first unthreatened and amused by the humans she encounters. “You people have your own… little inventions,” she says, upon seeing Adaora’s new computer; she giggles, “a creepy dovelike sound that raised the hairs on Adaora’s arms”. The grating noise that accompanies her transformations, “the sound of metal balls on glass”, reminds us to fear her.

The dialogue of some characters, in particular Moziz and his gang, is presented in Pidgin English, making it a bit difficult to understand at first. He says about the aliens: “Well, if dem get flying ship, wetin again dem get wey we no sabi?” But readers who persist will get the hang of it; even those who (like me) fail to realise there is a glossary at the back. In any case, science fiction readers shouldn’t be put off a book by a few sentences in an unfamiliar language.

Two thirds in, the book takes an unexpected turn. It would be unfair to give away its surprises, but these sequences provide some of its most frightening images, as the alien disruption of our reality intersects with another, older disruption – and it’s all being filmed on phones and uploaded to YouTube, which keeps it grounded. People in the most terrible danger are still pleased to see their hits piling up.

As the book approaches its conclusion, some readers may wonder sadly if the swordfish introduced in the prologue ever returns. Forget guns on mantelpieces, don’t put giant sea monsters in the first few pages unless they’ll be back to cause havoc. It does return eventually, and it does cause havoc, but don’t expect this book to spend very long at sea. It’s a story of the city, of the fragility of life in a city where some people live in extreme poverty and the government isn’t paying attention, where one well-meaning nudge can have disastrous consequences.

Lagoon delivers a compelling narrative, characters with interesting pasts, presents and futures, and intriguing alien technology and motivations. For British readers the Nigerian setting may be a novel one, the people we meet in Lagos not those we’ve read about a thousand times before, their perspectives on first contact not those we’re used to seeing. It’s an epic story told in a measured, focused way, that coolly resists the temptation to sprawl, and I liked it a lot. Stephen Theaker

After a bit of editing, this review appeared in Interzone #252, back in 2014.

The Forever Watch by David Ramirez / review by Jacob Edwards

First up, the funambulist.

Entrenched within the Noah, an unimaginably vast city-spaceship, the remnants of mankind trek obdurately through space en route to a new home-world. Adults labour for the common cause, enduring whatever stringencies are necessary. Children are raised by the state, the course of their lives determined by aptitude tests and the latent strength of their psychic abilities. Hundreds of generations pass. The mission is everything. Yet, for all she has been indoctrinated to believe that species survival is paramount, telekinesist Hana Dempsey, suddenly at odds with the power-elite who run the ship, finds herself embroiled in an unsanctioned hunt for a serial killer who shouldn’t exist but whose grisly touch ghosts across the Noah’s Nth Web, hinting at a conspiracy beyond nightmare.

In terms of concept, debut novelist David Ramirez with The Forever Watch sets out to walk a tightrope. Stylistically, he does so without a safety net. There are some wobbles along the way, yet by the end of the book there can be little doubt that, should he be able to repeat and build on the performance, he will garner sufficient reputation to secure a future in the profession.

The Forever Watch is written in the present tense, which from the outset puts it in an odd minority. The shift in perspective requires a degree of acclimatisation – from both reader and writer; Ramirez sways woozily on a few occasions when shuffling from absolute to relative tense – but soon ceases to be a distraction. There is a sense of immediacy to eyewitness accounts presented in this way, particularly as Ramirez favours short sentences; the story is told through small blocks of thought, almost as if unfolding in real time.

Further to the boldness of making a novel-length foray in the present tense, Ramirez transplants his authorial voice into a female protagonist for the first person narrative. Male writers have been (collectively) accused of underrepresenting women in science fiction. Ramirez therefore deserves credit for placing Hana Dempsey at the crux of his world; but of course, in doing so he lays himself open to all manner of possible criticisms as to the fidelity of his depiction. The men in the story are themselves a mixed bag: minor character Hennessy, for example, is given a certain depth, whereas Barrens (second billed behind Dempsey) is somewhat stereotyped to cyberpunk preconceptions and speaks in a jarring, unwarrantable pulp-detective patois. The characterisation of Hana serves perfectly well in the gender-neutral sense of moving the plot forwards; for some readers, however, judgment of The Forever Watch may ultimately come down to a verdict on whether Ramirez’s portrayal of her is closer to creditable or culpable.

One undeniable strength of Ramirez’s work is his imagining of the Noah’s insular, pseudo-totalitarian society, the basic framework of which is established via an adroit series of flashbacks to earlier in Hana’s life (still written in the present tense) and then fleshed out as events unfold in the here and now. The world of The Forever Watch is vividly realised and integral to Ramirez’s story, yet has been unobtrusively (though very deliberately) brought to life. What is most impressive about this is not so much the creative vision but Ramirez’s commitment to what he has put in place; rather than preserve his setting for possible sequels, he instead allows the scenario to play out in full, affording scope not only for a symbiosis between action and locale but also for a novel that is unusual in its high level of self-containment.

Having set off across the tightrope, Ramirez does falter slightly at about the quarter-way mark (there is a lull in impetus, which many will find off-putting), but he then takes a deep breath and forges ahead, letting the balancing act play out come what may. For all that each step follows the previous, the shadowy endpoint he reaches is considerably removed both from where Hana and Barrens started and from where we might have expected their investigation to lead. In what is a darkly satisfying, uncompromising debut, The Forever Watch sends an exotic, visceral shiver through the dystopian genre, and in doing so flags Ramirez as an author to be kept under close observation.

The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar / review by Tim Atkinson

What’s the point of a text-only graphic novel?

I’ve enjoyed a few superhero stories in recent years – Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible being a good example. Yet I find they share a common problem: they try to tell the Pop Art tales of their greatest influences with solid but conservative prose. Competing with comics on comics’ terms, they’re always bound to pull up short.

And this is speculative fiction we’re talking about here – chock full of mind-melting ideas and techniques half-inched from serious literature, underway well before Superman was a twinkle in Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s eyes.

A good superhero novel should then draw strength from the novelistic tradition at least as much as from its forebears in the funny papers. Lavie Tidhar’s The Violent Century goes at least some way towards demonstrating this point.

Central to the novel is the idea that, while American costumed crime-fighters, Nazi Ubermenschen and Soviet champions of the proletariat clashed in public, Britain trained its special talents instead as secret agents and players in the great game of espionage.

As the novel opens in the present, Fogg, a telekinetic British operative long since retired, is recalled by an old comrade for one final debrief on an unresolved matter dating back to the end of WW2. His interrogation frames stories of adventure, horror, love and collusion across enemy lines from the past – each revealing more of the real reason for his summons.

Since it draws on war stories and Cold War thrillers more than it does Marvel and DC, The Violent Century sidesteps the anxiety of influence affecting previous superhero novels. Despite a few sly references to Stan Lee and Siegel and Shuster, it’s confidently its own work.

While reading the novel is an intensely visual experience, the movie in your head is less Avengers Assemble, more Inglourious Basterds. Tidhar shows himself to be master of the tone needed, writing vignette after vignette from the battlefields of Europe.

Using the tropes of spy novels also allows an altogether more pessimistic take on the uses and abuses of power than you’d normally find in a four-colour universe. As you might expect, Fogg and his fellow British spies owe more to George Smiley than to Nick Fury, but the costumed heroes with which they coexist are not one whit less morally compromised.

Beating the Nazis and the Soviets – the book suggests – comes at the cost of gradually sacrificing one’s own principles.

Does The Violent Century make the case for the superhero novel as something with real merit in its own right? For me, it’s a resounding maybe; since the book makes most sense as a stylistic exercise, a playful what-if, rather than something with serious intent behind it, in practice it lends support to either view.

Yet while it might not be the return favour that superhero comics still owes literature for Watchmen, it is fun, fast and deeply atmospheric. I’m glad that The Violent Century exists as a novel, rather than being confined to panels and speech bubbles.

And that, at least, is progress.

Outpost by Adam Baker – reviewed

When the skeleton crew of a derelict oil rig in the Arctic Ocean begin to see TV news footage of food riots and carnage in cities across Europe, they begin to suspect that the relief ship scheduled to bring them home is not coming after all. Things quickly worsen, and soon the rig is cut off from all outside contact with the long night of Arctic winter closing in.

Adam Baker's taut, stripped-down writing style resembles a film-script more than it does a novel, although for thriller writers this is now the dominant mode. Many of his paragraphs will start with a terse, "C Deck. Dark, frozen passageways" or "The powerhouse. A steady hum from Generator Three" as though this were actually a part-novelised film script rather than a continuous piece of prose. Still, it keeps up the pace, and one cannot deny that Baker has a very disciplined, lean style. There's a relentless, cinematic focus on the action, switching efficiently between different characters as they grapple with various engineering problems aboard the rig and on the ice. Just now and then the author feels the need to state the obvious by putting into one of the characters' mouths the question that should really have been implied, and which any astute reader would be asking themselves already.

Baker has clearly done his research but wears it lightly. The various settings: the refinery platform itself, a drifting cruise liner, an old underground Soviet nuclear bunker, all feel convincing, but described without indulgence. Every description and conversation is reined to the relentless drive of the story itself, as new disaster follows on the heels of almost salvation. For my taste, this overwhelming concentration on plot palled. The characters do lack depth, and beyond about six core players, the rest of the 15 stranded workers as usually simply referred to as "the crew", an ill-defined mass of idle, tattooed toughs. The dialogue shows early promise, with a delicately drawn tension between Rev. Blanc and the gang of iron-pumping n'er-do-wells who threaten to disrupt the team spirit, but soon any shading between the voices of the main players is lost, and once blood begins to spill, their dialogue merges into the staccato delivery of all action movies, just as they all very quickly get used to handling shotguns and crushing people's skulls with their cramponed boots.

That Baker has made his heroine a depressed, super-obese priest and his hero a dope-smoking lapsed Sikh is an interesting move, and not one that I could easily imagine many Hollywood studios going for (their loss). Reverend Jane Blanc starts the book with a suicide attempt, but as soon as the food runs out and things start getting hairy, she very quickly sheds the fat, and is shinning up knotted ropes in the Arctic wind, throwing thermite grenades around and fitting neatly into the captain's shoes after he succumbs to a mysterious nanotechnological parasite that turns victims into bloodthirsty automatons. This transformation wouldn't seem slightly ridiculous if it was described with more psychological acuity, but Baker doesn't have a great deal of time for inner lives:

'I killed a man,' said Punch. 'That's who I am now. A guy who kills people.'
'The world has changed. We better change with it.'

Captain Rawlings (I pictured him as J.K. Simmonds playing the Editor of the Daily Bugle in Spiderman) tells the priest when he hears about the death of a man on the ice, "Christ. There will be a bunch of tears when they get back. A bunch of guilt. Well, that's your problem. Pastoral care." One gets the impression that Baker has as little time for emotional niceties. The crew soon learn that the parasitic plague has overrun most of the world, and that they are island of uninfected humanity trapped in the ice. Alright, so perhaps I shouldn't have expected too much philosophical reflection on this startling fact from a bunch of bored oil riggers, but surely that is why we find apocalyptic novels fascinating - civilisations in ruins, the end of history, the meaninglessness of human endeavour faced with such a crisis. Baker doesn't give them time to reflect on this - there's always another engineering problem to be overcome, a winch to be fixed or oil drums to be welded together.

Essentially this is a zombie novel on an oilrig, although there are hints that the infected develop some kind of primitive hive mind. It's not clear whether the metallic nanoparticles that infect people are of human or alien origin, but it hardly matters. Otherwise these are classic zombies: slow moving but relentless, bloodthirsty (but not for their own kind), dim but occasionally able to recall aspects of their former, human existences. One of the most effective sections in the book is narrated from the point of view of a character whose mind is slowly being overtaken by the disease, but who struggles to save her team-mates from her own bloodlust, before succumbing. The disjointed narrative reminded me of a particularly bad acid trip.

We never really find out exactly what has happened back in the civilised world, although one character Nikki, escaping on her own on a home-made raft, comes close to the shore of Norway before seeing what she takes as the light of a nuclear detonation over Europe, and losing her mind entirely, navigates her way back to the oil rig. For me this was the weakest part of the plot - Nikki has been drifting on the Arctic ocean for weeks, but apparently is able to find her way back to her point of origin with the aid of her hallucinated dead boyfriend. She becomes psychopathic mastermind too, explaining her insane plans to her hostages with clichéd calm.

I read this book much faster than I would normally read, overnight when I was ill in bed. It suited my mood - I wasn't up to reading anything that would take too much concentration. It's not a memorable novel, but as a zombie/techno thriller it definitely does the job.

Outpost, by Adam Baker, Hodder and Stoughton, hb, 369pp, out on 14 April 2011. Available from Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Blood Oath: The President's Vampire, Christopher Farnsworth

Nathaniel Cade is a vampire, bound by voodoo since 1867 to serve the President and his officers, to "support and defend the nation and its citizens against all enemies, foreign and domestic". A lost extract from the Nixon tapes establishes that the curse leaves Cade to decide for himself who are the enemies of the United States – good news for Woodward and Bernstein! And if the President himself was an enemy of the United States? We may find out in future novels. In this one Cade faces both types of enemies: while terrorists steal body parts from soldiers' corpses and send them to the US for purposes unknown, shadowy conspirators take the opportunity to strike at Cade and his colleagues.

In this kitchen-sink cosmos almost everything fantastical is real, especially the stuff from the movies – vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein monsters, zombies, etc – though there's a scientific basis to it all, we're told. Early chapters are highly reminiscent of the first Hellboy film, even down to the callow POV agent. Zach Barrows, a self-described "useless douche-nozzle", thinks his new assignment's a punishment for naughtiness with the President's daughter, but by the end he's earned his place in the book – and by Cade's side.

The narrative takes the over-traditional Highlander approach – passages in the present, intercut occasionally with relevant episodes from the past – but with 70 chapters that average under six pages it can't help being punchy. The opening left me expecting a Clancy or McNab style military thriller, but the bulk is much more like 24, with crooked agents, conspiracies, power struggles, big shocks and chains of responsibility that lead all the way to the top. It's a lot of nonsense, but it's often very exciting. Farnsworth takes a canny approach to his finale, gambling upon a small number of very tough enemies where many writers would have gone for a horde, making for an tense, tactical battle that really tests his heroes.

Blood Oath: The President's Vampire, Christopher Farnsworth, Hodder & Stoughton, tpb, 398pp.

Contagious, by Scott Sigler

In this sequel to Infected, a prologue quickly brings new readers (and a new President) up to speed. The infected develop welts, kill their families, and die once pyramid-shaped aliens hatch from their bodies. The little aliens then start building stargates while the government tries to stop them. Former quarterback “Scary” Perry Dawsey survived the first novel by hacking off his genitals; here he takes the lead. Think The West Wing v Aliens with Michael Myers as the hero.

One of the shortest six-hundred page books I’ve ever read, this is split up into dozens of tiny chapters, one for every scene; it’s paced like a mini-series (you get to p. 131 before reaching the first line of the back cover’s plot summary), but cut like a music video, which gives it a style you might see as sketchy or punchy, depending on your point of view. The little aliens are not very scary, but the book is surprisingly brutal, and runs a nice line in body horror.

It’s a big sloppy puppy dog of a novel, daft and eager to please. It doesn’t surprise or innovate, but it’s perfect for the beach or a long train journey.

Contagious, by Scott Sigler, Hodder, pb, 640pp

Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, by A.E. Moorat

King William IV is dead, and Princess Victoria takes the throne aged eighteen. England and its monarch are threatened by the forces of darkness (among them the King of Belgium); luckily the new queen has supernaturally quick reflexes and is handy with bladed weapons… Essentially this is Queen Victoria as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, dealing with monsters, boys, evil plots and a hard-ass mentor.

The cover of this book is fantastic, and its tag line is magnificent: “She loved her country. She hated zombies.” Maybe, but it’s p.136 before she meets one, and she only spends about seven pages fighting them in total, being mostly occupied by werewolves. Clearly the zombie angle has been (smartly) played up for commercial reasons.

This is lightly plotted Kim-Newman-esque fun. Little is resolved by the end, and there’s sometimes a sense of characters being moved around like pieces on a board, but those characters, especially Lord Quimby and his dead manservant Perkins, are good ones. Though you don’t have to read this book to get its best joke, there are others, e.g. monster hunters named Hicks, Vasquez and Hudson. Don’t be too disappointed if this turns up in your Christmas stocking.

Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, A.E. Moorat, Hodder, pb, 376pp