The Midwich Cuckoos resolve personal issues, embark on a programme of self-improvement, restore a damaged property, avoid the neighbours and think about the future. I am so tired and that is all I have to say about that. Good read. Lovely art.

In the Grendel Cycle, the spirit of Grendel is the spirit of violence, passing down through generations, spoiling and corrupting everything around it. In the case of Stacy Palumbo. Grendel's adopted daughter, there is no escape from horror and trauma in her life after Grendel, and the opening story in this collection is profoundly horrible, graphic and disturbing, featuring rape and abuse and severe mental breakdown. it's a stark, brutal nasty story, far from the sleek, smooth, sinister and seductive design of Devil By The Deed, utterly stripping the entire concept of Grendel of any hint or shred of romanticisation. With that nasty bitter taste in the reader's mind, it's onwards chronologically though backwards in print order to Devil's Legacy, and Christine Spar, Stacy's daughter, who goes from chronicling to embracing the Grendel legacy in her efforts to first recover and then avenge the son stolen from her by a monstrous vampire. Despite her good intentions, Grendel takes over her life and the lives of those around her, drawing the fatal attention of Hunter Rose's nemesis, Argent.

The Devil Inside is a bleak tale of urban alienation and obsession, as Christine's lover descends into a hellish world of hostility and sleaze, battling with tangled, jagged emotions he tries to channel into a misguided and self-destructive effort at revenge.

Devil Tales revisits the heyday of Hunter Rose once more, albeit from the point of view of characters almost too minor to be noticed by him. A cop stumbles on a tangled and complex family conspiracy in a claustrophobic noirish tale of tiny panels and small print that reads like a classic piece of detective fiction. The story of Tommy Nuncio, a stoolie who hears something he shouldn't - or does he? And ends up in a state of almost existential terror and dread, is another kind of classic crime fiction, as the walls slowly close in around a hapless small-fry caught up in something way bigger than him.

Tempted to chalk up my reaction to this as 'it's not the book it's me' since the adventures and exploits of a woman in the male-heavy world of post-war espionage is intrinsically interesting, but somehow the story never comes to life, the characters never seem truly, properly evoked, and the writing is full of irritating tics and repetitions that should have been sorted at the editing stage. I might give it another try, perhaps I just bounced off it because I'm not in the mood, I dunno.

Zenith gets a hard time for being selfish and shallow and not particularly heroic, but consider here all the people who set out to save the world, or change it, or seek to advance it, turn out to be monsters, and Zenith's rationale for NOT taking over the world and running things as a super-fascist makes complete sense. Even St John, radical-turned-conservative, who truly seems to care and wants to save London from the missiles, if nothing else, has a nasty little sting at the end showing what he's prepared to do. Otherwise, this deals with Zenith's past while providing intimations of the war to come. I'm, pretty sure it was called 'The Hollow Kingdom' or something like that when originally collected, so it's annoying that that's not used here, and there's at least one superfluous exclamation mark added, so those otherwise gorgeous collections have their annoying bits.

Okay, I'm not feeling the best this morning, but I've been good and faithful in writing reviews for stuff so far, so I shall persevere. Happy Thanksgiving! That was Thursday, of course, and it's Saturday now, but we're going to have Thanksgiving dinner this evening because it's a sort of cross-Atlantic Thanksgiving and yum. Bleh.

Not much to give thanks for in Behemoth, though, other than thanks for a great book, Mr Watts! I read this one on the phone, too, which got wearying after a while, and if I hadn't been utterly caught up in seeing one horrible thing after another being inflicted on the characters and on the world I might have given up. Yay! Bleh.

Lenie and Ken are in the Atlantic with all the other Rifters and lots of rich people who are hiding from the apocalypse in an underwater habitat called Atlantis. The Rifters are the self-appointed prison guards of the rich, and there has been much unpleasantness, but things have been quiet lately, and Lenie finds herself on quite easy terms with some of the rich, much to the suspicion of her fellow Rifters. So when tensions rise again and threaten to explode, she is torn between the two groups and not trusted by either. It soon becomes apparent that someone on the ravaged surface is searching for them, and Ken and Lenie have to head for the surface to neutralise the threat.

Yeah, loved it in all its apocalyptic glory. That's it. That's all I can muster to say. It's free! Read it! Read them all! Have nightmares and the screaming heebie jeebies! Then find something light and fluffy to neutralise the Watts Effect.

The tragic story of the Colleen Bawn is the tragic story behind Gerald Griffith's The Collegians, and, more importantly, the horrible story of the murder of Elli Hanley in 1819. Wooed away from the home of her uncle by a right young swine called John Scanlan, married in a questionable ceremony and eventually taken out onto the Shannon in a boat and strangled at his behest by servant Stephen Sullivan. An ugly, sordid little tale, and while this slime little volume is fascinating, for the most part, I can't help but feel it doesn't do the story justice.

The first part of the book is a dramatised account of the whole affair - well dramatised, too, the various episodes are quite engrossing - interspersed with straightforward reportage. It's very readable, but feels frustratingly incomplete and narrow of focus. The actual murder itself is not described till the end, and then relies wholly on Sullivan's confession, which feels more like a literary trick to keep the reader guessing as to whether Scanlan in particular was truly guilty.

There are so many aspects of the story that seem underdeveloped. The various families involved, the histories of the characters. Surely Scanlan's military record could have been explored, sure more social and historical context could have been given. The respective treatments of Scanlan and Sullivan once captured seem ripe for dissection. Daniel O'Donnell at an early stage in his career is ushered on and off again with unseemly haste. Gerald Griffith gets nary a mention, though surely his own reporting of the case must be available. No mention at all of Scanlan as fugitive enjoying social occasions and hunting parties with the local gentry? And something about him joining a troop of fusiliers and then deserting? What? Even where records are scarce, surely a more complete portrait could have been achieved, a more in-depth examination. Were there repercussions beyond the administration of justice? What further became of the surviving families? Ellie Hanley became an enduring figure of popular culture, is there any sense of the real girl behind it all?

Part two is a condensed retelling of The Collegians, which felt a bit pointless except as a time-saver for people too busy to read the original.

Part three is a supposedly first-hand account by the Rev Richard Fitzgerald who, as a young student on holiday from Trinity, met the doomed girl and the two rogues on a steamer travelling down the Shannon. Fitzgerald paints a heart-rending picture of a young innocent in thrall to a careless rake. His heart positively aches for the poor thing, sending him into passions of purple prose on the debased rake and the sweet maiden. Later, hanging around as he does with his cousin, as he keeps reminding you, the Knight of Glin, he gets a first-hand look at the body, a ringside seat at the inquest and occasional glimpses into the subsequent investigation and man-hunt. Despite the occasion purple flight, a lot of this is quite readable and compelling, though it's pretty hilarious that in describing Scanlan's trial, he forebears to even name the counsel for the Defence.

After the Rev Fitzgerald come a series of original documents; letters of various kinds and deeds pertaining to leases of land by the Scanlan family. I can't help but think that more could have been made of these in a more determined historian/crime-writer's hand. Pity.

A curiosity and, maybe, a starting point some day for a new account of these events. I have to say it feels overdue.

Mesmerising exploration of cities that exist mostly as concepts and designs and mad flights of fancy, and through this an eclectic trip around various historical, cultural and political nuggets, some obscure, some forgotten. It has about three pages on Mega City One from 2000AD, so that's where we're at. Dystopias and utopias and everything in between. Hugely readable and utterly fascinating.

The prescient sci-fi dystopia of a hyper-violent, hyper-sexualised, media-saturated world after environmental, economic and social collapse jumps through the door of a vehicle and kicks the driver in the face in this grand finale. An artificially generated blizzard paralyses Chicago and floods it with refugees, a secretive militia group prepare for a coup, bringing back an unfamiliar and unwelcome face to run the show, Flagg and co move underground and organise the resistance. It's a world where the current US president would feel right at home, which is not a fun thought, but it is a fun book, mad pulpy satirical fun.

Can't help but feel I missed a volume somewhere along the way, but... well, this is a self-contained adventure featuring cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in space searching for his dog friend Laika. They end up transporting a vengeful ex-slave armed with deadly biological weapons into the heart of a vast space empire, pursued by a bored space-judge looking for a little spicey space adventure. So, that happens. It's certainly colourful and strange and full of black humour and violence and scientific nihilism. One senses one could have enjoyed Yuri and Laika's ongoing space adventures, but Hickman isn't the sort to allow any of his characters become overly likable or, y'know, live very long if they do. Still, 259 in dog years isn't bad.

In an unusual twist of fate, a group of the poorest, most despised and disenfranchised people in the US become quite staggeringly rich . In a less unusual, and yet still shocking, twist of fate, the become a target for one of the biggest, coolest, cruelest murder conspiracies I've ever heard of. The Osage Indians, their lands lost, their population devastated, their culture in shreds, take up residence on a rocky, hilly reservation. Regarded by even the most benign of whites as little more than children intellectually and morally, they nonetheless secure the mineral rights to the land and when huge reserves of oil are discovered they become amongst the wealthiest people in the US.

But someone was killing the Osage. Some were shot and some were poisoned, and the family of one woman, Molly Burkhart, seemed particularly afflicted. Investigations seemed fruitless or useless, until J Edgar Hoover, head of the fledgling FBI, sent ex Texas Ranger Tom White to take charge, and he uncovered a horrifying, systematic process of abuse of power, exploitation, victimisation and wholesale murder. But even as the genuinely heroic and committed White pursues one villain through the courts, an even wider series of killings remain hidden and uninvestigated.

Extremely well written, but a horrifying, sickening story made possible through corruption and racism. Compelling, but saddening and sobering. I'm glad that it's being brought back to public attention and prominence.