Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels is a remade fairy tale which explores and updates the Snow White and Rose Red fairy tale. In the Brothers’ Grimm tale, Snow White and Rose Red, daughters of a widow, look after a bear during the Winter and encourage it into the house. They do this for a couple of [...]
Earlier this year, I picked up Thicker than Water by Mike Carey as I finally made time to catch up on my Felix Castor kick. I had a feeling that there was a certain amount of Carey getting Castor to being dealing with his past which he continually runs from and in The Naming of [...]
Ian Rankin’s Dark Entries is a locked room crime novel with a haunted house twist. Or is that a haunted house novel with a crime twist. Whatever, it is good. One of the first publications in the Vertigo Crime list (Filthy Rich is the other by Brian Azzarello) and it makes for a fun read.
John [...]
Michelle Zink’s debut novel, Prophecy of the Sisters, is an intriguing debut which certainly promises a lot for the rest of the series. I picked this up as a curiosity to see what it was like and found that I couldn’t put it down.
The Milthorpe sisters, Alice and Amalia (better known as Lia), have just [...]
Jeremy de Quidt’s The Toymaker is a fabulously strange book which extends the conversation regarding puppets that Steve Cockayne and, on a more metaphysical level, Philip Pullman started and moving towards the Frankenstein myth. It was shortlisted for the Brandford Boase award (which went to B.R. Collins for the Traitor Game).
Dr Leiter, the Toymaker, wonders [...]
I approached the Greek Street series by Peter Milligan a little warily but it seems to fit into an emerging patterns about comics doing meta-fiction and musing on the recurrence of narratives, what with Mike Carey’s The Unwritten as well.
Eddy picks up a stripper and has sex with her, not realising that she is his [...]
Julie Hearn’s Rowan the Strange is, at once, a fairy tale and also a riff of One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or, perhaps, the Bell Jar.It continues her exporation through questions of identity that she has explored in books like Ivy and what adults can do to children. It is becoming a wider question [...]