BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

Kraken (2010) China Mieville We are definitely not into spoilers so it is hard to go too far into the story of this dark fantasy on a scientific theme. A preserved and valuable giant squid disappears from the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Musum and one of its staff, Billy Harrow, discovers a world of cults and magic that threaten apocalypse. So far, so very obviously dark fantasy, but China Mieville adds, with Kraken , a major work to a genre that owes a great deal to the psychogeographical cult of London as the world's most magical city. Its fault is that of all modern creative fantasy - far too many ideas for a basic story line that could be culled from any urban thriller. Although resolved satisfactorily, there are moments when you feel that greatness has eluded Mieville because of an inability to develop fewer ideas in more depth. In the end, despite hints of something deeper, and some remarkable invention and (in places), yes, ideas, it ends up being an ente

The Sandman: The Dream Country (Volume 3) (1990) American Gods (2001) Interworld (2007) - With Michael Reaves Neil Gaiman The Dream Country is third volume of the acclaimed The Sandman series but is stand-alone. This edition also contains the original script for the first of its four stories, Calliope, which might be of interest to students of illustration. Much of The Dream Country has been translated to film very effectively as part of a Sandman TV series shown on Netflix. If we are to be honest here, Neil Gaiman was engaged in a project to bring Tales from the Cryp t up the literary and artistic food chain. There is no doubt that he succeeds admirably in his task, aided by a series of excellent illustrators, but the stories, with the exception of his re-thinking of the origins of Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream', are not complex - poetic and suggestive perhaps but not complex. The first story, Calliop e, tells of a writer's abuse of an incar

The Deep Vault (2016) Life After/The Message (2016) The Blood Drawn Chronicles (2016-2018) The Switchboard (2017)   The London Necropolis Railway (2018)    The Echo Protocol (2019)     Arca-45672 (2019)   Confessions from the Nocturne Nebula (2019)     The Deep Vault is rollicking dystopian science fiction. A band of youngsters escaping some unknown apocalypse find themselves navigating a bunker that appears to include a government project that breeds monsters and has two squabbling competing computer systems as well as a mad scientist. This is the excuse for some gruesome body horror as well as a move through levels that will be familiar to any games player. It is dark but fun stuff, the darkness alleviated by the mildly comic and satirical treatment of the leading characters.  Life After and its sequel The Message adopt a method that is usually tiresome and has become hackneyed already in the fictional podcast space - the dependence of narrative on the detritus of technology (usuall