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  • 03/08/2024 09:02 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    The Collector cover

    The Collector by Laura Kat Young

    (Titan Books, 2023)

    Reviewed by John Dodds

    If there were ever to be a science fictional equivalent to Ken Kesey’s great novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Laura Kat Young’s The Collector fits the bill perfectly.

    I can honestly say this is one of the very best science fiction/horror novels I have read for some time. And while I am always a little cautious about over-praising, in my view this novel stands on a par with classics like Orwell’s 1984 and Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Yes, it is that good.

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    Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.


  • 30/07/2024 16:41 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    All Hallows cover

    All Hallows by Christopher Golden

    (Titan Books, 2023)

    Reviewed by Steven French

    I started this book just before Halloween but didn’t finish it until Bonfire Night, which is a fair indication of how little it actually gripped me. Which was disappointing, as I’ve been a fan of Golden’s work for some while, not least his comics-based collaboration with Mike Mignola. The story itself has all the ingredients of an atmospheric and creepy yarn: a quiet suburban neighbourhood where the Halloween preparations mask long-kept secrets and lies which finally erupt into the open just as something much, much worse stalks out of the nearby woods. Yet somehow it just couldn’t muster enough of a chilling effect to keep me turning the pages. Partly that’s due to the ‘tell, repeatedly, rather than show’ approach which by spelling everything out leaves little to the imagination and so deflates any tension or sense of mounting horror. And partly it’s because of the structure of the book which, with its chapters cycling through the points of view of different characters, generates a narrative that is just a little too choppy to sustain the scares.

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    Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.


  • 27/07/2024 09:36 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    Camp Damascus cover

    Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

    (Titan Books, 2023)

    Reviewed by Kate Onyett

    Chuck Tingle is an internet philosopher and a spirit on the electronic winds, best known, perhaps, for his e-novellas of seminal erotic fiction. You know the ones: “Pounded In The Butt By [human, animal, objects, metaphysical concepts]”. He espouses above all love in all its forms and self-determination.

    Camp Damascus is his first ‘serious’ novel, about a demonically successful gay conversion camp run by a conservative Christian sect. It is a journey of revelation for Rose, a devout 20-year-old honestly devoted to the teachings of the sect. A clever, sheltered, fact-curious and mildly autistic woman, Rose’s life is complicated with feelings of attraction for girls. We begin at a wholesome social at a local waterfall with her friends and peers under a warm summer sun, but things quickly get weird. She spots a literal demoness on the cliff opposite and later at home coughs up a load of mayflies.

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    Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.


  • 24/07/2024 19:51 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    The Other Shore cover

    The Other Shore by Hoa Pham

    (Goldsmiths Press, 2023)

    Reviewed by Harry Slater

    The Other Shore, by Hoa Pham, winner of the Viva La Novella prize, deals with some of the biggest questions there are. It’s about life and death and legacy, about power and control, colonisation and oppression, ancestry and the price we pay for the future we want. And it’s all told from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old Vietnamese girl, Kim Nguyen. That makes for some interesting stylistic choices; the prose can sometimes feel stilted, lacking in the emotional clout that an older voice might add. At the same time, though, there’s a visceral naivety at play here, the realisations of the state of the world are ever more compelling because they’re wounds delivered fresh, for the first time. In one way, then, The Other Shore is a coming-of-age story, and at the same time a brutal indictment of human cruelty, an examination of the structures of power that bind Vietnam, and the world, and how they’ve come to be.

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    Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.


  • 22/07/2024 17:12 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    The Living Stone cover

    The Living Stone: Stories of Uncanny Sculpture, 1858–1948 edited by Henry Bartholomew

    (Handheld Press, 2023)

    Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

    Sculpture is inherently uncanny; the creation of simulacra of human (and other) form, enigmatic and often loaded (says Henry Bartholomew in his introduction) with destabilising fears of otherness. Sabine Baring-Gould’s “Master Sacristan Eberhart” (significantly subtitled “not quite a ghost story”) is an interesting start to this selection. The Sacristan’s reflection, after a statue of a monk has foiled a robbery, warns against what we are so often doing—seeing in these stories and their subjects “reflections of our own selves, our feelings and passions” instead of their artistic truth which might cause us to direct attention away from our selves. It might be argued that Eberhart, in his strange “friendship” with the statue he calls Father Simon, has fallen into precisely that trap!

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    Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.


  • 20/07/2024 09:09 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    A Study in Drowning cover

    A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

    (Del Rey, 2023)

    Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino

    A Study in Drowning, Ava Reid’s new book has a certain air of neo-Victorian feminist gothic along the lines of Elizabeth Bronfen’s argument in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992) about the Victorian fascination with dead (or not so dead) female bodies captured by the male gaze. It reminded me of A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990): both novels are poised between a detective story and a textual analysis exercise and infused with mythology and gender studies written in a stunning poetic prose.

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    Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.


  • 17/07/2024 16:34 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    Throne of the Fallen cover

    Throne of the Fallen by Kerri Maniscalco

    (Hodderscape, 2023)

    Reviewed by Steven French

    This is the first adult offering from YA author Kerri Maniscalco and by ‘adult’, I mean ‘ADULT XXX’ with episodes that are definitely NSFW! The story is constructed around two core protagonists: Miss Camilla Antonius, a talented painter who is petite and buxom, with ‘deep silver’ eyes; and Lord Synton, whose eyes are a ‘unique, lovely shade of emerald’ and who is lean but hard, in all the right places (if you know what I mean…and trust me, you will after just a few pages!), and is actually Prince Envy, one of the seven demon Princes of Hell. He is caught up in The Game, set by the chaos-loving King of the Unseelie fae. As well as some anagrams and a pretty obvious riddle, this involves successfully completing certain magical tasks, the first of which is to persuade Camilla to paint the Hexed Throne.

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    Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.


  • 15/07/2024 16:21 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    What The River Knows cover

    What The River Knows by Isabel Ibañez

    (Hodderscape, 2023)

    Reviewed by John Dodd

    Together We Burn surprised me when I read it, I wasn’t expecting to like it anywhere near as much as I did, particularly with the nature of the story. With that in mind, I took a chance on reading What the River Knows, which turned out to be something else entirely.

    Inez Olivera is an adventuress in the making, her mother and father are famous explorers and are missing much of the time because of their ongoing adventures. Until they die, and Inez is left with the mystery of what happened, but more importantly, the same adventurous spirit to journey out to unknown lands and find out what happened to them. Thus begins a twisting tale of death, revenge, and mysterious artifacts. After reading Together We Burn, I was expecting betrayals and complex familial situations, and nothing to be what it had been set up to be by the end of the book, and I was not disappointed.

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    Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.


  • 13/07/2024 09:02 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    The Land of Lost Things cover

    The Land of Lost Things by John Connolly

    (Hodder & Stoughton, 2023)

    Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino

    “Twice upon a time,” as The Land of Lost Things starts, I fell in love with a book. It has all the elements I enjoy: old libraries in abandoned houses opening entries to parallel worlds, ancient woods populated by stranger, darker creatures, primeval gods from the dawn of history, fairy lords rivalling humans, and a deeply moving and emotional story—but there is something more to the book, a quality both rare and precious: its over-arching humanity that stretches through universal (and thus relatable) mythological tropes.

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    Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.


  • 10/07/2024 16:29 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    The Double-Edged Sword cover

    The Double-Edged Sword by Ian Whates

    (NewCon Press, 2023)

    Reviewed by Susan Speak

    Ian Whates is active in British science-fiction in almost every way possible. He is a writer—novels, novellas, short stories—an anthologist, a publisher (NewCon Press), and a BSFA director. Possibly the only thing he doesn’t do is SF art. He has a distinctive writing style which, at its best, has a Gaimanesque quality (e.g. ‘Knowing How to Look’ in his short story collection The Gift of Joy). So I found that reviewing his novella, The Double-Edged Sword, seemed like picking a pebble off a beach—but a rewarding and interesting pebble.

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    Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.


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