A favourite of mine, an an alternative historical fantasy about four damaged people, a one eyed Welsh wizard, an exiled heir to the Byzantine throne, a female physician to Lorenzo de Medici and a German vampire engineer, working against the Byzantine Empire. The struggle takes them to England after the War Of The Roses, where deadly dynastic squabbles threaten to turn the kingdom on its head. Clever, elliptical, occasionally horrific, full of magic and intrigue and mystery and betrayal. I wish I could write more about it but I'm still tired and my eye still hurts.

Just a quick review of this because I'm busy and my eyes hurt. Creditable Victorian gothic vampire novel, very well written and atmospheric with meticulously drawn characters. It trips on the pacing here and there, but the story keeps rolling and the setting is very well evoked. The ending drags on a bit too long, could have been cut by about thirty pages, I thought, but I'll certainly be looking out by more from Owen.

Compared to most Tim Powers book, this is neither terribly exciting, and even a bit of a drag at times. Compared to most historical fantasies it's a clever, entertaining, swashbuckling romp as Brian Duffy, irascible Irish mercenary, is finagled from Venice to Vienna, hired to be a bouncer at an inn famous for its beer. Crossing the Alps on the way to gainful, if unlikely employment, he is attacked and waylaid but also protected by a cavalcade of mythical monstrosities, indicating that there is a lot more going on than meets the eye. Indeed, noting is as it seems, not even Duffy himself, who must protect a rare and magical brew of dark beer from the invading Muslim horde abut to lay siege to Vienna.
It's fun, but the writing drags here and there, and some of the plots are undercooked and the mingling of myth and history, Power's trademark intellectual trick, isn't quite as thoroughly developed as you find in later works. Read this if it's your first Powers, or if you;re a bit of a completist.

Brutal, searing, epic sequel to The Power Of The Dog - though reading the latter isn't essential, as the various low points of the Keller/Barrera hategrudge are succinctly presented, and then the book gets on with the business of fictionalising the horrors of the last decade or so of the drug war. Adan Barrera swans out of prison and goes to work re-establishing his power. Art Keller is, reluctantly, sent south of the US/Mexico border to track him down. But there are more players involved in the rising cartels than just Barrera, and they are embarking on a war of their own of unprecedented savagery, infecting every level of Mexican society with fear and corruption and bloodshed.

In terms of crime fiction as social document, this is the literary successor to The Wire. Winslow's been impressing with his distinctive prose style and the effortless cool of hos characters and his plots, but this surpasses Ellroy in its portrayal of a society brutalised by crime. Even the ugly moral choices made by Keller as he battles his way closer to Barrera are dwarfed by the sheer scale of the evil. A dark, passionate, angry, unflinching novel, and though it leaves the reader dazed and sobered and weary, it also exhilarates as a major piece of crime literature.

Spanning six decades, from the halcyon 1980s to the grim 2040s, this is the story of Holly Sykes, who runs away from home and meets someone who offers her some tea and who makes a fateful deal. It's the story of a number of other people as well, not all of them particularly nice, all of whom will love Holly Sykes. But Holly's life is haunted by that encounter, and by the warring immortals whose battles will intersect with her lives, perhaps to threaten, perhaps to save.

With Iain Banks' cool evocation of the surfaces and neuroses of 20th and 21st century modern life and Jonathan Carroll's surreal and strange coalescing fantasy, Mitchell has written combining present day drama, chilling science fiction and mindbending fairytale. There aren't many that can carry that off, and he does. A riveting, brilliant, sometimes beautiful read, that, even as bleakness closes round our beleaguered Holly and her family, never loses its slender thread of hope.

I don't think I've read any proper full-on horror for a while now, so I was slightly unprepared for this modern vision of the universe as a dripping maw crunching manly protagonists in its masticating jaws with sharp, crooked, yellow, teeth made of squirming star-stuff, the gore of its screaming meal dripping over a chin like a mountain made of night and maggots. And so on.

This stuff is brilliant, pure, mind-bending brilliance. Conceptually, there's a debt to Lovecraft, but there's something way more physical and pervasive about the monsters in this mythos, chased down by amoral hard-boiled protagonists who usually don't like what they find but keep searching just to end the nightmares. So crime and westerns and the more literary horrors of Straub and McCarthy are in evidence here as well.

There's lots of incredible, vivid, writing with an eye for detail and sudden unsettling swerves of imagery. Hard to pick a favourite, but I loved the swaggering, cynical Pinkerton man in Bulldozer, and the garish horror tableau of the opening of Hallucigenia, and its apotheosis at the end. Weakest was The Royal Zoo Is Closed. Brilliant writing, an encapsulation of post-millennial urban angst, but it doesn't have a story, or not much of a one, and it's the sheer meatiness of the stories that marks out all the rest of this collection. Great stuff, overall. Fantastic to find a new (to me) writer working at this level.

Between the grim tale of an AI out for revenge Sword and the slightly more complex tale of managing a colony on the brink of post-colonialism in Justice (ooooh, now I see what she did there) we have the final book in the trilogy, revenge and post-colonialism! Or not.

Breq has the situation in the Athoek system on an even keel, just in time for an ancillary, probably belonging to the ancient ship lurking, trapped, in the Ghost System next door to turn up on the Station. Her relationship with the AIs of Station and her own ship are not as completely amicable as they seem, Seivarden is headed for an emotional breakdown, there's a new Translator from the terrifying alien Presger, wondering where the other Translator went, and a particularly unfriendly fragment of Anaander Mianaai is about to drop by. How exactly is Breq going to resolve things without massive bloodshed?

I've previously compared Leckie to banks and Cherryh, but this didn't feel particularly like either, suggesting perhaps she's found her own distinctive voice. Fast, clever space opera with an unexpected streak of humour. The culture of the Radch and the Ships have become quite familiar by now, and I was sorry to leave them behind.

In some ways this is the most conventional horror novel Newman has written since Jago, with ordinary people dealing with a supernatural eruption in their lives. With a title like that it's to be expected. A dysfunctional family moves into a haunted house. Things occur. The family isn't just dysfunctional, it's on the brink of collapse, with all the members, except perhaps the youngest, Tim, complicit in the impending disaster, and all the members, including Tim, left emotionally and psychologically scarred.

At first, a miracle occurs. The specialness of the House is immediately apparent, and the growing sense of benign otherworldly powers at work is gradually accepted, and for once, everything seems fine. But the past isn't done with them, and more importantly their own worse selves aren't done with them. Feeding and fed by the ghostly presences in the house, things take a dark and horrible turn.

With the family imploding in a welter of modern neuroses and the setting by turns idyllic and darkly sinister, this is a clever tale of haunting as a manifestation of psychological and emotional horror, Can the family find the strength to overcome their own weaknesses and selfish delusions? Or will they allow themselves to be eaten alive by their own twisted pain? It's a riveting read to find out.

Another collection of Barron's ridiculously muscular and physical tales of ridiculously vast and cosmic horror. Hunky hunters get hunted! Sorority sisters get spooked! Gunny gangster gets gazumped! Loving lesbians go lycanthrope! Creepy corporate creep gets crepuscled! Lewd legbreaker gets... laminated! I think I'm making up some of these words! Geeky god gyrates! I'm sorry I started this! Wild Bunch turns into Fried Lunch! Last one! Angsting author adumbrates! Okay? Happy? No? GODAMMIT!

Great collection all the same. Ridiculous reviewer retires.

After a war, a soldier wakes on a ship filled with a mix of military dregs and civilians. Thousands of years out of their time and facing a deteriorating store of data, Scur must try to keep the survivors together and find the man whose torture is the last thing she remembers before waking. Great little mind-bender from Reynolds, typical huge scope and big ideas and survival in near-untenable situations.