BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

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 Behemoth (2016)/The Behemoth 2 (2017)   Scotch (2016) Is There Anybody Out There (2018) Pixie (2018) In the relatively early days of the podcast boom, Rick Coste Productions produced some above average short 'weird fiction' narrative series geared largely to younger audiences but which are listenable for anyone else. The wierdness is often, although not always, explained in more realistic ways than usual but every series has been well written enough to carry that off. The Behemoth is the single voice (mostly) story of an unusual and weird road trip. A 'monster' (a mysterious stone man) arises out of the sea at Cape Cod and walks in a straight line across the United States. A lonely teenage girl, Maddy, makes her way to him and decides to walk with him. In the event she is a protective force for her silent friend as the usual suspects in a disturbed society insist on seeing the 'monster' as a problem rather than as a natural force to be respected and