A Red Sun Also Rises, by Mark Hodder – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

A Red Sun Also Rises, by Mark Hodder (Del Rey, hb, 274pp). Vicar Aiden Fleischer adopts an initially unkempt young woman, Clarissa Stark, as his curate. The favourite of an English Lord whose dissolute son ran her over, breaking her back and legs and killing her father, she was thrown out when the father died and the son inherited. A warm friendship grows between the two, a shared love of reading and science its crucible. When the vicar’s almost innocent infatuation with a local rufty-tufty girl goes horribly wrong, Clarissa accompanies him on a Christian mission to Papua New Guinea.

Zenith Lives! ed. by Stuart Douglas – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

M. Zenith the Albino is from the rogues’ gallery of Sexton Blake, although a book with the variety and quality of Zenith Lives! (Obverse Books, pb, 2425ll, edited by Stuart Douglas, fourth entry in the Obverse Quarterly series), attracting such high quality contributors as Michael Moorcock and Paul Magrs, makes one wonder whether he might outlive his opponent. I won’t pretend to be an expert on Zenith: all I knew till reading this book was that he had inspired the appearance of Elric of Melniboné; I didn’t even know of his connection to Sexton Blake. Luckily, a couple of stories in, my interest piqued, I was able to refer to Blakiana, a superb website maintained by Mark Hodder, another of the contributors to this book. From there I learnt that the original conception was one that we might now think rather old-fashioned, in that Zenith turned to evil out of bitterness over his albinism, but that aspect isn’t one on which these stories particularly dwell. Unlike Elric, he’s not a weakling; in these stories we read of “his powerful muscles and extraordinary sense of balance”.