I has the flu. I is doped up. I read this book. It is great. Great stuff about low-level mercenaries hustling to make money in Iraq, 2005, more great stuff about, y'know, zombies way out in the desert. Action. Fighting. Kaboom.

Another epic tale of murder and mystery and moral and spiritual torment and lush landscapes and horror and corruption in America's deep south. This one feels particularly epic for some reason, and poor ol' Clete gets put through the wringer and Dave seems to sense that one way or the other he's circling the mortal drain and his meditations on life and death and the meaning of it all and various other philosophical subjects become more stringent and morose, and increasingly bad-tempered with anyone who gets in his way or refuses to believe his accounts of missing girls visiting him in hospital and giving him an iPod with music on it no-one else can hear, but he'll still up to holding his own for the climactic shoot-out. Dave and Clete, without quite seeming to realise it, have produced their own potential replacements on this Earth in Alafair and Gretchen. Great stuff from the master.

The second part of Morrison and Quietly's love-letter to Superman is a bright, beautiful, colorful and deeply moving comic. Superman is dying, exposed to too much solar radiation thanks to Lex Luthor's trickery. He has twelve might tasks to perform before he dies, and to get his adopted planet ready for a world without a Superman. The strange and backward Bizarro World attacks, replacement supermen try to supplant his role, and of course Lex Luthor is waiting for his chance to strike.

This is gorgeous, epic, mad, oddly gentle in parts, and sometimes came about as damn close to moving me to tears as anything I've ever read. Morrison makes the myth of the alien who protects his world, saving it while at the same time urging us to save ourselves, into a celebration of all that's amazing about superhero comics, of the past, the present and the future, with typical Morrisonian simultaneity. Of course, there are precious few comics - or books or films or anything - as lovely as this, so get it and enjoy it and surreptitiously wipe away the odd tear of joy.

When the night closes in and the jungle sounds start with their screeches and shrieks and ice-cream jingles, we gather round the fire and huddle together for warmth and clutch our rusty knives and clubs and garotting wires and the kids ask for a story and I say how about some post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror military action from the incomparable pen of Adam Baker? And they groan and cry and sob and beg for Winnie the Pooh or the goddamnd Gruffalo or whatever and I start shouting and swearing 'cause we only got the post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror military action from the incomparable pen of Adam Baker, you understand? That's all that's left! The rest is gone! Just us and this book is what's left of humanity! And they say quiet, quiet they'll hear you and come looking and I say fine, fine, you wanna hear this or not and they say yay! Post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror military action from the incomparable pen of Adam Baker! Our favourite! Fine, I say, then I'll begin.

Like the monster whose alt-universe career the series charts, the Anno Dracula books shift in form and type and identity, reflecting the era in which they're set, cannily skipping eras and events that would potentially mimic earlier entries. A bloodsoaked epic adventure, a war story, a dark and bloody comedy, and now this assembled patchwork of narratives skipping across three decades. The last Anno Dracula novel was published in 1998, though bits and pieces of Johnny Alucard have appeared as novellas and short stories over the years, that's a long wait for a new entry. It might be a pity that it's not all wholly original material, but Newman's stuff is rereadable anyway.

The first great alt-pop coup is a version of Coppola's Dracula if it was Apocalypse Now, as experienced through the calamitous process of filming the damn thing, a shuffling revisited later when we afforded a brief glimpse of the script for Orson Welle's 'Citizen Dracula.' This sets the tone and the style and the subject for the rest of the book. Ion Popescu, Dracula's young get, flees under cover of the film from Roumania to New York and reinvents himself through ruthless and horrible innovations, before heading to LA as John Alucard where he starts making films. Films about Dracula. He is a revenant who carries the ghost of Dracula and is preparing carefully for his big comeback. Touched by his rise and rise are our vampire heroines, Kate Reed and Genevieve, and he has them marked for his attention.

The narrative, though fragmented, covers a lot of time and space, carrying a great deal of inventiveness and insight in each section or interlude. As usual, real and fictional characters walk on and off, in and out of the story, building the universe and populating the new epoch. Dracula rises, and maybe in the next installment he'll fall again. Being Dracula, he won't be down for long.

I had a bad experience with Joe Hill's Heart Shaped Box, inasmuch as I took a violent dislike to the hero right from the start, and the book never recovered. He was a bit of an arsehole anyway, but I'm not sure I was supposed to despise him quite as roundly as I did, and it says something for Hill's writing that I stuck with the book all the way to the end, because Hill could clearly write like hell. Then there was Lock & Key, the comic series he writes for IDW, which is just about as damn brilliant a comic as you could hope to find. So I was interested to see what this was going to be like.

So young Vic McQueen has a bike that allows her to find lost things, but which also brings her into contact with one Charlie Manx, who has a Rolls Royce Wraith that takes him to a place he calls Christmasland. He likes to bring children with him. They never leave. Vic's experiences take a terrible psychic toll, but years later as she tries to put her life back together and reconnect with her son, the body of one Charlie Manx disappears from a hospital morgue and Vic and Manx are about to meet again.

What it reminded me mostly of, strongly, forcefully, in fact, was the sort of epic horror fantasy I used to gobble like maltesers in the eighties and nineties. King, Straub, McCammon, Campbell, Simmons. It becomes quite clear that this is very much on purpose, and this is a fond homage to that beloved genre, quite specifically to that of King. So there is spookiness and terror and horror and suspense and adventure; but will good Triumph over evil? Read it yourself to find out. It's a great Summer read. Fast-moving, extremely well written and utterly engaging. Merry Christmas!

By now, the ingredients of a Dave Robicheaux thriller should be familiar to the constant reader: an ex-alcoholic Vietnam vet Louisiana cop with a self-righteous streak for whom even a trip to the shop to buy some milk ends up being a wrestling match with great themes of life and death and good and evil against the backdrop of epic natural grandeur and decay; there's his old partner, an alcoholic overweight burnout with poor impulse control, PTSD and a violent criminal career before turning PI who will find some rich wife or widow in trouble and end up in bed with her despite everyone up to and including the Hand Of God descending from the heavens with a note the size of the Grand Canyon tied to its finger stating this it is a Bad Idea but who is, nonetheless, the Goodest Man In The World; there's Dave's daughter, beautiful, talented, headstrong and doesn't like being called 'kid' anymore; new since the previous book is Clete's daughter, abuse survivor turned near-mythical mob hitperson, out of the life and making films and just maybe the person to whom all the bad things James Lee Burke can't bring himself to let happen to Alafair will happen instead; there's usually a basically decent law enforcement official who just won't see things the way Dave and Clete see them and who is small-mindedly constrained by not grasping the titanic spiritual war at the heart of each book; there is a rich family who are all awful, awful human beings; there is a not-so rich person who is even worse and either working for or using the awful rich people and committing various atrocities for reasons the human mind cannot easily contain within the comforting confines of Judeo Christian morality, or something; and there will be a damaged, dangerous, violent man looking for redemption, with or without the help or hindrance of good or bad woman, depending.

You'd think after twenty of them you'd get tired of it, but nope, bring on the next one.

Light Of The World has Dave and family taking a break from battling fathomless evil and venality in Louisiana to go battle some fathomless evil and venality in Montana, staying with their writer friend, with whom Dave, at least, never seems to do anything other than argue. Someone shoots an arrow at Alafair, and Dave hassles what turns out to probably be the wrong guy over it, but that's okay, he's involved anyway. There's an escaped, presumed dead serial killer who may be an avatar of an evil from outside the ken of men stalking the landscape, some dead and missing women, and a vile, filthy rich family up to no good. Clete's got a bad feeling about this one, he thinks it might be his last boogie, but we gotta punch their lights under a black flag, podna. Honestly, Dave and Clete must be scary and weird and insufferable to other people, and they ain't aging gracefully, but Burke continues to write like an angel taking an aerial survey of hell, making these books addictive and cathartic. One of the most readable crime novelists working today.

Growing up is weird, and can seem quite sad, especially when you remember the things that used to ring and resonate and you can almost remember what the ring and the resonance sounded like but not why it set your nerves on fire and filled your head with light. I suppose they were simple things in their way. Magic. Adventure. Heroes. Villains. Whether it's age or the world, such things don't quite hold the thrill they used to, or the thrill seems cheapened by camp and over-saturation and the acute knowledge of how dreary reality can be.

But maybe it's not supposed to be quite like that. We assume as we grow that we put magic aside and sigh and set our shoulders and stride in the grey light of adulthood, and that fantasy and adventure and romance are now cheap escape routes from the grey. But there is more than one sort of knowledge, isn't there? As we grow, we acquire the tools we need to live. Language. Skills. Strength. Learning. perhaps within those tools are deeper, more profound consolations and magics.

Alan Garner wrote two children's novels: The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen and The Moon Of Gomrath. They were wildly popular, and I know I wore my copies out with rereading. They were an odd mix; old-fashioned, inventive but somewhat conventional children's stories imbued with deeper, darker roots into folklore and landscape. The adventure narrative dominated, though, and they were quite thrilling and exciting reads, for all the slight tingle of unease they left when completed. The conventional narrative was to shrink and the unease to grow through Garner's subsequent novels: Elidor and The Owl Service, until with Red Shift he broke with linear narrative completely and jumbled time and place and memory and history and myth and wove them into an extraordinary, disorienting form.

Garner does not seem to have retained much fondness for Weirdstone or Gomrath, and has a tendency to disparage them. It was a surprise, therefore, to discover that they were the first two volumes of a trilogy, and he was finally, decades later, going to complete it.

Boneland is not an adventure narrative of heroes and magic. Boneland is, if anything, almost an apology for those first two books, addressed to the landscape they exploited, the myths, the people the community and the history they, perhaps, cheapened. It is an author coming to terms with his own beginnings, both as a person as an author. And it is an offering to the reader, hopefully the reader who grew up with those two books, of a reading experience that is at once harsher, more difficult, less fantastical, much more uneasy and ambiguous, and yet also deeper, richer, broader, invoking the lost memories of deep time and the unfathomable vastness of the entire universe, while reaffirming the debt, the ties and the need for a deep rooting in a a home place.

In Boneland, Colin cannot leave Alderley Edge, cannot spend a night out of its sight or else it will vanish and the world will end. The wisdom of this book is that this is both something true and a metaphor for something else, and though we use different tools to examine the truth and the metaphor, they do not have to be divided. And so Garner offers his readers, who thrilled as children to magic and adventure, a conception of the adult world that encompasses its dreariness and a form of magic and adventure that cannot be cheapened or made camp.

Short, fast, western adventure set around the second Battle of Adobe Wells, which is a thing that happened, when a bunch of Indians got sick and tired of all their buffalo being shot and skinned and decided to kill a bunch of buffalo hunters and skinners holed up in a saloon. Bullets and arrows fly and Lansdale spins his yarn with his usual aplomb. Narrated by Nat Love, an ex-slave turned cowboy who has turned up in a few other Lansdale stories, this is a prequel or a taster of sorts to a forthcoming novel to which I am now very eagerly looking forward.

Oh I do enjoy taking a trip around Paul McAuley's future solar system, chasing secrets and technological maguffins and odd sub-cultures in odder places, pursued by assassins and cultists and the past in a quest for the future. Our hero is Hari, marooned after his ship is boarded and his family is killed or captured. He escapes with the head of a scientist locked full of knowledge, and lots of people are after it while Hari himself wants to find what, if anything is left of his family and gain some measure of revenge.

McAuley's writing is crisp and cool and his portrait of the solar system, inhabited but moribund after the fall of an Empire and the rise of millennial cults, with is asteroid garden full of vacuum flowers and moons and habitats and a thawing Earth is fascinating, while Hari's questturns out to be less about revenge and more about getting free of the past.