Apollo Kagwe's father disappeared from his life, leaving his mother to raise him alone while Apollo dreams of his return. When Apollo has a child of his own with his wife Emma, he tries to be the best father he can, even in the weary sleepless haze of the early months. But something is wrong, or at least Emma thinks so, and one day she does something truly awful and disappears. Apollo sets out determined to find her, and discovers that something was wrong, and not what he thought.

A dark fairy tale set in modern New York that shoudd probably have reminded me more of Neil Gaiman than it did, but it didn't, not really, except for one specific bit. Well written, atmospheric, strong on character.

After the horrors and darkness of the last volume, our surviving heroes have to deal with some of the fall-out in a far-off corner of the galaxy where certain operations can be performed. But this operation is a trickier than normal proposition, so they have to head into some badlands.

Oddly relevant volume, given recent events here in Ireland, it must be said.

Things get worse. It's brilliant. I ripped through this in a few hours, even though the sun was roasting my headmeat with unnatural rays of heat. Pure bloody brilliant.

Ellis reinvents the WildStorm universe as a Cold War stand-off between competing secret agencies of immense power, disrupted by a selfless act that sets off complex repercussions. It's really good, an example of how this sort of thing can be sharp and ruthless and timely.

Making the subtext text, not that it was always sub, maybe shub niggurath, here's Lovecraft with the racism, or racism and Lovecraft existing cosily side by side making life difficult for coloured folk in post-war US. A coloured family becomes entangled with the sinister doings of an occult society, but that's merely an added complication to the dangers and inconveniences of the racism they experience in their daily lives. Ironically, the latter gives them the fortitude and instincts to deal with the former, though they'd prefer not to have to deal with either.

Ben Dill's sister, homicide detective and landlady, dies in a car bomb explosion. Bill takes some time off from his work for a Senator on a committee of some sort looking into political and intelligence skullduggery, to go and bury her and grieve and since this is a thriller maybe find her killer. Meantime he meets up with a very old friend who is one of the subjects of that investigation back in Washington and discovers that it looks very much like his sister was on the take, something Ben completely refuses to believe. The two plots twist and intertwine, skilfully blended by Thomas the master.

Review forthcoming.

It's a war, but a secret war! A doom, but a God Doom! They should have called it Secret God War Doom. I mean, as a culmination of years of build-up it's unbelievably daft, and dafter still to see Hickman using the high languae of science and myth to stitch together something stitched together by an editorial board to level up some old crossover I presume somebody somewhere has fond memories of. It's great, don;t get me wrong, if you ain't reading superhero books for this level of sheer epic melodramatic nonsense, well, what a pity, because this has it in spades.

A strange and extrordinary book, a travel book about a walk across Sussex, but also a memoir interrupted by extended meditations on various subjects and historical characters. A sad, beautiful, hearfelt book, endlessly fascinating, almost mesmerising as the thoughts flow from the landscape to history to art to natural science, to lives lived at various points in the past. Mortality and transience hang over and run through the book like storm clouds and veins of ore, inescapable, no matter how fascinating the world or the far reaches of the mind and imagination.

Nice twisty, turny time-hopping mystery thriller with heaps of ghostly atmosphere and horror flourishes, shades of Micheal Marshall Smith and Graham Joyce and no doubt a few others I'm not thinking of. Really strong for a debut, great voice, great prose, only one plot thread left dangling (or maybe I'm being dim - why the chalk figures in the church?) but lots of others tied up nicely and yeah, that ending, not so much a twist as a deeply chilling beginning of an end.