Tom King and Gabriel Walta take a character about whom I have been completely indifferent and weave a claustrophobic sci-fi suburban psychological chiller that reads like what would happen if Gillian Flynn wrote comics. The Vision him out of The Avengers, creates a picture-perfect nuclear family of synthezoids and sets up home in the outskirts of Washington while he commutes to consult with the president and occasionally save the world. While acknowledging the futility of trying to become more human, they embrace the pursuit of the futile as something quintessentially human. However the difficulty of being normal when artificial and the target for irrational super-villains and plagued by your own insecurities and fears and expectations is too much and things begin to spiral out of control, and the question becomes what will the Vision, a paragon of morality who has saved the world 37 times, at least, do to protect his family?

The price Vision has to pay to create a version of normal life for himself, when he and his family are not only synthezoids, but also subject to the demands and expectations and scrutiny of superheroes with their scientific surveillance and their mystical prophetic dreams, becomes the price he is willing to exact when that life is threatened or damaged. The construction of this story is exquisite, a finely tuned creation for squeezing tension and suspense out of every panel and putting the reader through the emotional wringer as likeable characters do terrible things for excellent reasons. Dark, measured, intense, occasionally shocking, it's a brilliant, unexpected and highly original merging of superheroes and psychological thriller.

I haven't read a Ramsey Campbell in many many years, and I had forgotten how excruciatingly British they are. So while the protagonist is surrounded by odd noises and furtive movements and strange behaviours, the real creeping horror is the collision of manners, the pettiness of officials, the animosity of girflriend's parents, the toxicity of his relationship with his own parents, all fueled and exacerbated by misunderstandings, farcically embarrassing incidents, and the overspilling of repressed rage and frustration at what turns out to be wrong targets. Ramsey Campbell's everyday horrors are the horrors of social cringe. Of course there's also delving into the history of a forgotten silent movie star with an unsavory reputation and the protagonist's ongoing obliviousness to, or denial of, the fact that weird and strange and terrifying things are subtly warping his world, and the dysfunctional nature of his everyday world and the supernatural creepiness are melding and mixing until it's far too late to do anything about it, if there ever was something that could have been done about it.

Since the uproarious first volume, the chaos has settled down, sort of, to the adventures of our paper girls as they're tossed around in time, trying to find their way home, while two forces fight a temporal war with stakes that are difficult to grasp and sides that are impossible to pick. Our girls just want to survive. This volume finds the gang washed up on the eve of the Millennium with giant robots battling it out and a mysterious old cartoonist who has been sending messages to the future embedded in her comics, and Tiffany encounters her older self.

The adventure rages on, fast and furious and beautifully illustrated. The gang is lovable, the danger is as hair-raising as it is incomprehensible, an absolute epic.

A lovable trio of con-men make a living during the Depression by throwing fake seances for rich folk looking to commune with the other side, until a manifestation occurs that appears to be the real thing, and they set out to find a missing girl, uncovering way more than they bargained for in more ways than one. Excellent novel.

This is well-written, has excellent characterisation, is extremely well-paced and well-structured... and yet I ended up skimming it to get to the end. I wanted to know what happened, but I didn't want to read this particular book to do so. But I had to. Because this was the book it happened in. Does this make sense? Hell no. I think the problem was it's a book that slipped so smoothly and ingeniously between genres, from mystery thriller, to literary study in grief and loss, to ghost story, to horror, that I just couldn't get properly invested in any of them, but the underlying story still packed such a punch that I needed resolution. Urgh, I hate writing bad reviews of books that I admire from a technical standpoint.

Absolutely ace boarding school horror/thriller that rips along with great characters, dialogue, atmosphere and a creeping sense of encroaching danger, with twists and turns and a satisfyingly bloody finale. The chapter titles alone make clear the novel's debt to about a million horror films, and you could easily see this being turned into a smart, slick, suspenseful slasher flick, but even if it isn't, it's all that, in a book.

An ex-slave turned thief with a a magical metal plate in her head steals a small object from a secure wharfside, accidentally setting most of the place on fire. People start trying to kill her. The guy in charge of the wharf starts to hunt her. In a sort-of steampunk city ruled by four merchant families who control the scrivenings, the ancient alphabet that persuades dumb objects to do things they shouldn't be able to to, she's just found literal key to even more astonishing powers and secrets, and someone is willing to do a lot of killing to get their hands on it and silence her.

A dark setting, but very likeable characters, lots of action, good worldbuilding, a magic system that sort of vaguely feels like computer programming applied to runes make for a very fun read. Bennett just sort of pushes right through the conceptual framework by having everyone, no matter what their educational background, know what 'gravity ' means, then later make a discovery about what gravity *is* which, maybe it wasn't a joke, but i found it funny. Anyway, he sacrifices a certain amount of gritty realism in terms of conceptual understanding for clarity, and it works fine.

Great to encounter a writer at the absolute top of their game and in their groove. Elizabeth Hand feckin rips it up with her wounded, damaged ex-punk photographer anti-heroine who can see the damage in others but who still has a heart, even if she doesn't believe in it. Hired after decades in failure and obscurity to interview a reclusive photographer who lives on an island off the coast of Maine, she finds a damaged place full of damaged people and is soon drawn towards a web of old crimes and new: missing people, bloated bodies washed up with the tide.

The writing here is absolutely top of the line, the voice, the characters, the setting, the sinister development of the plot as its outlines become visible. Bleak and brutal and brilliant.

This has the sort of dense, intense, highly focused and analytical writing that immerses the reader in the mind and imagination of the narrator as she grows from childhood in the tight, claustrophobic volatile and often violent little Neapolitan neighbourhood that is her whole world. Her friendship with another girl, her struggles as she grows physically and intellectually, the changes in the lives of the people around her, the growing awareness of the larger world, of the history that lies behind the fears and tensions and undercurrents that run through the lives of her neighbours, and which are hinted at in the city and the country beyond. Her eye is pitiless, brutally honest, as much, if not more so, with herself as with anyone else. Her voice is calm, detached, intelligent, probing the outer limits of her awareness and perceptions as she moves from childhood to adolescence. An extraordinary, strangely terrifying book.