Once again I find myself ambivalent about cheering for the dastardly British military, but in this volume dragon and rider are obliged to take a slow boat to China as a result of the diplomatic contretemps caused by Temeraire's capture and subsequent indoctrination into the British Imperial war machine. The voyage is long and rather tense, but the eventual arrival in China is a revelation, and I quite fancy the idea of Temeraire going back and sparking a revolution amongst the dragons of Britain, I can't imagine that will go down well at all.

Jade Daniel's life is a mess, so she messes back at life, mostly by obsessing on slasher films. On the summer of her graduation her horror dreams appear to be coming true - a slasher is targeting her lakeside town, all the signs are there, the problem is can she get anyone to believe her warnings before the cycle spins up? Of course she can't and she knows it, that's how the slasher cycle works, all she can do is get ready to ride it out, probably not surviving because that's not who she is, and provide a few tips for the one person she has singled out as the Final Girl. She's wrong abiyt a lot of things, though. But that's the thing about slashers - the best ones keep you on your toes. When it isn't chopping them off. 

A love letter to horror, a portrait of trauma and obsession, an examination of social inequality and the legacies of colonialism, and finally just a good old-fashioned water-borne massacre. What's not to love? To be honest there's only a few of the current crop of horror writers who combine literay writing with horror who can carry it off - the literariness sometimes swamps the horror, or the horror sometimes undermines the literariness, either way it just doesn't quite mesh for me - but Stephen Graham Jones, like a select few others, carries it off.

Yowza, the bodies hit the floor, the blood sprays on the walls and the cupcakes strike. This sequel fractures the narrative into multiple POVs, not all of them entirely reliable, as a snowstorm and an escaped serial killer and Jade Daniels all close in on Proofrock for a night of murder and mayhem, and everyone complaining that this can't possibly be happening again it's not fair! Well, it isn't fair and Jones leans into and milks that unfairness for all he's worth, expertly putting beloved characters, older and wiser though they tend to be, through hideous wringers, such that even the survivors don't get away clean. Multiple narrators do the story justice. Seriously, as an audio book, it's a keeper. This is only the second in a trilogy, and the heart quails even as it yearns to see what tortures await. 

A homeless woman follows a person-snatching monster hoping to track down her missing partner, and discovers a strange and terrifying underground cult centred around the worship of a cosmic worm who once went back and changed the distant past on a whim, wiping out a whole world and replacing it with ours, and is ready to do so again at any moment, possibly when someone finds it a worthy bride. Through horrors and betrayal, this builds to a vision of cosmic transcendence, all in a compact hundred or so pages. Remarkable, and moving, particularly Monique's survival of a botched back-street surgery and attempted kidney harvesting with the help of the then-indomitable Donna, leaving her scarred and traumatised but somehow stronger and willing to defy that darn ol' cosmic worm.

Southern gothic murder mystery, brilliant and twisty.

| After the sheer unmitigated raw savagery of Stephen Graham Jones, this is something of a genteel middle-class comedy of manners, not that there's anything wrong with that. When Blaylock isn't running around Victorian England, he's spinning fantasies and ghost stories set in Orange County, California, which is mostly sun-drenched, except when yet another hundred-year storm is boiling on the horizon, and threatneing the allotment/market community co-op that is Jane's life work. While her husband, Joseph, is digging out bones and treasure from their cellar, she's meeting with the peculiar Lettie Phibbs, who wants to provide some financial assistance, but who quickly catches scent of an opportunity. While all this unfolds and the storm closes in, Jane and Joseph are haunted by realistic dreams of old betrayal and murder. 

An enjoyable, twisty thriller with ghosty elements.

God I love a good puzzle book, I especially love a book that embodies the puzzle it is presenting, and tells its story through the mystifying and deceptive layers of the puzzle. This is one of those. Should have twigged it when I found myself amused by the way the audio book is a recording of someone reading transcripts of audio files, and in such a relatively flat voice, not even trying to add a bit o' cockney geezer, and dismissing it as the original book not necessarily being a neat fit for audio. Well, I was wrong, there's reasons and reasons and red herrings and herrings whose red washes off, this is excellent and delightful.

Perfectly polished stories from Hap and Leonard's younger days, featuring racism, murder, violence, corruption and fighting, but also friendship, family, community, heroic altruism and food. Even the recipes at the back are damn readable and infused with their personalities.

Bob goes to Japan to fight an eldritch manifestuation of cuteness and sentimentality in the form of Hello Kitty and assorted other lesser avatars of predatory cuteness feeding on childish adoration. That's the joke, and it doesn't outstay its welcome, and its awlays nce to have acerbic cantankerous Bob back saving the world and filing expenses.

I almost didn't like this, as it veered into unbearably twee/Ready Reader One territory, with its quaint old bookshop, loveable old owner, odd customers taking odd books, suggestions of a secret society chasing down a hidden message for centuries, then getting gazumped by Google, a nerdy protagonist with unbearably cool and useful friends and flatmates and even a pixie dream girl girlfriend (non-manic or that would have been the final straw,) but somehow it teetered back from the brink and managed to cram in a clever heist and a neat treasure hunt before a surprisingly lovely climax filled with friendship and optimism.