Shane comes home to Ravenglade council estate after eight months inside for arson. The estate swelters under the long hot summer and sticks from piles of accumulated rubbish, but there’s something truly rotten festering in one of the houses. While the dead-end kids drink and get wasted, tensions mount, and a terrible accident prompts a fateful encounter. The horror of desperate lives seeking escape through addiction and crime in a deteriorating world meets body horror and psychological terror. Razor-sharp writing and incredible art brings a story of sickening tension and tightening suspense and mounting dread to life. Surely one of the most horrifying stories to ever appear in 2000AD, it’s a minor masterpiece of British horror. It’s the realism social setting that grounds it fully, though.

It's Ireland in the 19th century so everything is horrible, and if it isn't horrible just now, something horrible will be along in a moment. Here we go: five members of the same family murdered brutally in one terrible night. What follows is a tortuous and tortured tale of malice and revenge and injustice and judicial murder that rocks the country, echoing all the way to the Houses of Parliament for two tempestuous debates. Men are hung, men are imprisoned. Some are guilty, some are most assuredly not, and someone most assuredly got away with it. Most haunting and poignant of all, to me, is the sketchy fate of the surviving boys, thrust into the tender mercies of the orphanages and industrial schools and largely, though not completely, vanished from history.

A solid piece of historical non-fiction that works hard to be fair and even-handed about a notorious and ugly story, even as it struggles in vain to fully understand the causes and motivations.

Reading all those stories of Crofton Croker's, usually involving babies, hot pokers, boiling water or open fires, about the various ways for dealing with changelings, I remember feeling a sense of creeping horror at the idea that someone at some time genuinely thought it might be a good and necessary thing to do these things. At the back of my mind - not even that far back, really - was the story of Bridget Cleary, burned to death after two nights of torture and mistreatment because her husband somehow became convinced that she was a fairy and his real wife had been taken away. It's a nasty, brutish, sordid story, but Angela Bourke's masterful book works to dispel myths and misconceptions about the case and to put the events in a social, historical and cultural context.

The Cleary's were a relatively well-off childless couple. He was a cooper and she was a seamstress and they lived in a newly-built labourer's cottage at a time that was post-Famine, post-Land War, when progressive and ordered values were gradually asserting themselves across Ireland, conditions for the vast, legendarily-mistreated and long-suffering labouring class of the country were beginning to improve through political and agricultural reforms. A way of life that had employed fairy tales for instruction and entertainment, and belief in which was a complex, ambiguous thing, was being encroached upon. Values were changing. The creameries were replacing dairies, with massive economic and social shifts to small-scale every-day life. Scientific approaches to farming were rendering the fairy tales used to pass knowledge and practice orally through generations obsolete for that purpose.

Bourke cogently and intelligently makes the case that it was this decline and devaluation that seemed to prompt this savage manifestation of folkloric belief and action in a fraught domestic situation filled with subtle undercurrents and tensions. She also links the events to the political situation - Land Acts and Home Rule, as well as the Oscar Wilde libel trial and indecency case with which it was concurrent. Attitudes to the Irish as savage and backward vie with the Irish trying to defend themselves while the fascination with folklore and Irish heritage struggles to come to terms with a grim expression of a their heavily romanticised past-time.

A brilliant, measured, extremely well-written work of non-fiction that gets behind the lurid and sensational facts to form a narrative that provides some insight and understanding.

A great chief lies dying and the great and the good of the land are gathered round here to await the outcome of a decision of who is to replace her. LITTLE DO THEY KNOW that they are about to be subject to a contest with some very nasty rules and conditions, all bound by a powerful geis. The Kite Lord's plucky daughter finds herself caught up in the terrible race, facing danger from the enchantments of the sorceress Niome and from her fellow contestants. Lovely art and charming character-work and exciting action make for a fast-paced fantasy adventure.

A big, bold, gorgeous, bloody, colourful epic of the mighty struggle between Shamyl the Imam of the Caucuses and Nicholas the Tsar of all the Russias. Lots of people die horribly, lots of people do horrible things, on all sides, but there is amazing heroism in the struggle, much to deplore on both sides, but some to admire. Blanch plays fair, being even-handed in her depiction, though it's clear her heart's with the fierce mountain folk in their struggle for freedom over the vast serf-owning empire. The descriptions are astonishing - vivid and rich, bursting with passion for the landscape, the events and most of all for the people involved. Thee are historical events depicted unashamedly as historical epic, almost overwhelming in detail and odd tangents and illustrative scenes and dramatised events. An overpowering book in many ways, that completely takes hold and refuses to let go.

One shouldn't judge a book by its cover but i got this book because of the cover, though it wasn't even the cover of the copy I got from the library, but still, look at that cover it's brilliant. Three children find an ancient belt buckle and then find themselves caught up on the final stage of an ancient battle between good and evil, as you do. Granted the power of flight to help them elide the terrifying Leather Men they must thwart the ambitions of an ancient warlord, and a cracking adventure it is, too.

Perhaps a good new year's resolution would be to get back to doing these reviews as soon as I finish the dang book rather than letting a pile of them grow into an imposing heap until they're due back in the library in an hour and I have to rush through them. Yeah, let's give that ago.

Didn't read many crime novels last year, but this was one of the best crime novels I've read in ages. Big part of it has to be the amazing depiction of Limerick low-lives, accurate in terms of brilliant visuals and vernacular dialogue presented in non-ironic way - a very easy accent to mock or dismiss but as rich and lively as it is loud and blunt. The small-time crooks and wheelers and dealers are depicted with the sort of humanity that makes their worse actions more chilling, but the whole thing is a big bold thriller about small fish Jimmy Savage swimming between the controlling crime families, caught up in a series of violent blunders that lead to a gang war. He has his own family and friends and to deal with as well as his own ambitions and betrayals. A fantastic read, lovely art. Incredibly well done.

Another gorgeous bloody trip to Talbot's world of talking animals, this time the bold Inspector tangles with a deadly cult fronted by a unicorn with strange powers of persuasion, whipping up hatred against humans, even as certain truths of ancient history are set to come to light, turning the world upside down. Always an enjoyable visit.

Sebastian Becker, once a British detective now a Pinkerton in Philadelphia, encounters an old acquaintance involved in a strange and disturbing case from many years before. Tom Sayer, theatrical manager of a touring troupe, was wrongfully accused of the murder of several children. He escapes and goes on the run, determined to clear his name but more importantly, to protect the woman for whom he has developed an obsessive love.

The story becomes less about battling monsters and more about seeking redemption and salvation from what may be some horrid supernatural force or simply a powerful psychological idea. Gallagher is an assured and expert hand at this sort of twisty and turning trek through a maze of horrors and terrors. Hugely readable.

It's a story old as time. Boy meets girl. Boy throws his servant, also his foster brother, downstairs for upsetting the girl, giving the servant a hunch. Servant becomes devoted to boy because he says he's sorry. Years later bot meets girl again but is deceived by her apparently cold demeanour and goes off and marries a rope-maker's daughter and installs her in a cottage owned by his servant's sister and her husband. Boy hopes to gradually introduce subject of marriage to his mother. Mother invites girl to stay for a while and boy discovers that under the cool exterior, she loves him, and he loves her and his mother is expecting a wedding, lickety-split. Boy suffers minor torments of the damned, confesses to his mother (calls it an engagement, though) and is persuaded to cast the rope-maker's daughter off. Servant is sent to take her to a boat bound for Canada. Rope-maker's daughter's wishes are not considered at any time. Agonies of, not exactly guilt, just a kind of foreknowledge that the servant is going to kill her instead of putting her on a boat, plague him. Later, when engaged to girl, discovers that servant killed her instead of putting her on a boat, because he's present when they find the body, because of course he is.

High wild melodrama it is, to an almost comical degree. What really saves the story itself is the hero who, despite being presented as a paragon brought low by a few unfortunate defects, is so incredibly unlikeable and generally horrible, such that his torments and declarations and wild passions are as much of a vain, self-obsessed pose as the rest of him. He's not even technically guilty of ordering the murder, but he's as guilty of sin of being a narcissistic ham. Hanging would have been to good for him, but his contortions are undeniably entertaining.

Even more entertaining is the depiction of Irish life of the period, presumably somewhat idealised, but nonetheless vivid and lively and filled with sparkle and detail. Every character is energetic and loquacious, every voice jumps from the page. It's a society that feels lived in, from top to bottom, a strange mixture of co-dependance and fierce devotion and loyalty mingling with bullish resentment and alienation. We're a weird bunch all the same.

The story was inspired by the case of The Colleen Bawn, but it's not a retelling or recreation of that story, Griffin seems to use the basic facts as a framework for his own tale.

I think more than one or two speeches and passages could have been trimmed, but it's an unexpectedly enjoyable tragic romp.