I have been a fan of the British fantasy writer Alan Garner since meeting him, age 11. Garner attended the same school as me (significantly earlier), and came to give a talk, not to a huge auditorium but just a classroom of young readers.  For nearly a decade he brought out books that almost perfectly aged with me in their target audience, from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to Red Shift (with the last we parted company as I found it too depressing). I was sufficiently fascinated by his books that I made a home movie in the late 70s visiting many of the locations used in them.  For those who remember the copper mine on Alderley Edge used evocatively in his writing as a dark underground location, a friend and I (probably illegally) explored a bit of it - which is where the photos below come from. In The Weirdstone there is a strange booming noise in the mine, coming from the goblin-like creatures, which meant we did eventually decide to leave in a hurry when we heard a simila...

There's a popular marketing approach that involves describing a book as 'X meets Y' - in the case of this new urban fantasy fairy story by Joanne Harris, we're told it's ' Neverwhere meets Stardust' -  and I've never seen such an accurate comparison. Yet Neil Gaiman need not worry: although there are strong echoes of both books here, this is never a ripoff of his work. If you've only ever associated Joanne Harris with romance (perhaps in the form of her novel/film  Chocolat ) she may seem an unlikely author for the genre - but she has form with her excellent Gospel of Loki - and, as was the case with Neverwhere , this is a romance in its own way, underlining the difference between lust (or glamour) and love. The similarity to Neverwhere is that the book features a London with a mysterious magical hidden side, including the secret nighttime market of the title, into which our innocent main character Tom is plunged, while the Stardust side comes wi...

I'm quite fond of Sarah Painter's Crow Investigations books - an urban fantasy series set in London featuring four magical families in the otherwise normal setting, so I was interested to see what her newish Unholy Island series, based in the same world, but located on an island with a causeway off the North East of England, just north of Holy Island, would be like. Going on the first two books in the series, the concept and setting is great, but the plot development is initially somewhat glacial. The idea is that Unholy Island has its own, magical nature - unless you are wanted by the island, you will never stay more than two nights and you will forget about any experiences there when you leave. It's a great setting into which Painter deposits a newcomer, Luke, who gets a mixed welcome from around a dozen residents, each a remarkable character, ranging from BandB owner (and ward witch) Esme to the mysterious (and unnerving) three sisters. The first book, The Ward Witch , ...

Having recently had a week with sole charge of the TV remote, I've taken the opportunity of catching up on a couple of new series in my favourite fantasy sub-genre. I'm not a fan of swords and sorcery (with the noble exception of Lord of the Rings ), but I love what you might call real-world fantasy. This is pretty much the same as urban fantasy, but doesn't have to be in a city. You could also see it as magical realism without the pretentiousness.  The idea, then, is to incorporate fantastical occurrences in the normal world. The first example of this was ITV's Passenger . This sets what should be a normal police procedural story in a weird village (Chadder Vale) in Lancashire. There are strange occurrences, some sort of unexplained dangerous creature and a cast of misfits. As such, you can see it as a mix of Twin Peaks, Stranger Things and Happy Valley . Perhaps the weirdest decision by Andrew Buchan, the man behind the series, is to set the show in the present, but ...

This is an unusual and atmospheric book. It's described as speculative fiction, but I'd call it fantasy for reasons I'll go into in a moment. The setting is a city that reminds me in some ways of Gormenghast - like Mervyn Peake's imaginary location, this fictional setting is ancient and decaying - what's more it's dominated (in the week in which the story is set) by pointless ritual. The city of Galata is being overtaken by the tides - so another point of reference is the dark feel of the movie version of Du Maurier's Don't Look Now . A final piece of fiction it brought to mind was Henry Gee's dark and horrifying murder mystery By the Sea . Galata , too has an element of murder mystery. As the week-long festival that is supposed to hold back the sea is underway, someone is killing young women. The central character, Joseph, is a former policeman and becomes involved in the distinctly half-hearted investigation of these deaths, which seem increasingly...

This book is, in effect, a sequel to Holdstock's astonishing fantasy novel Mythago Wood (though the author considered it not a sequel, but rather a story using the same setting with some overlapping characters). It's hard to rate it, as the first half of the book is even better than its predecessor, but then there is a change of gear into part two, which for me doesn't work as well. Once again, the action centres on Ryhope Wood, a place where ancient woodland has mysterious ties to the past and where interaction between humans and the woodland allows echoes of myth from the far past to become solid and dangerous. The exact setting is unclear - the introduction by Lisa Tuttle says the real world setting is Holdstock's childhood home in Kent - but Mythago Wood puts the location as Herefordshire, while in Lavondyss  a local is described as having a Gloucestershire accent. This is even more confusing when Holdstock rather beautifully brings in Ralph Vaughan Williams as a ...

For me, almost all the best fantasy has one foot in the real world (I'll make an exception for Lord of the Rings and Terry Pratchett's books). Such books work by juxtaposing the weirdness of fantasy with our everyday lives, meaning authors can deliver far more impact. If asked to name great authors who have written in this vein it would be easy to name the likes of Gene Wolfe, Neil Gaiman and Alan Garner - but it's somehow easy to forget Robert Holdstock.  Part of the problem with a book like this might be that this type of fantasy is often labelled urban fantasy, but like most of Garner's work, some of the best would be better countryside fantasy - and none more so than Holdstock's Mythago Wood . I first read this in the 1980s and have come back to it a couple of times since, but starting as I did in that pre-internet era, I never realised it was the first of a series of books, so I've re-read it now before getting on to the sequel, Avondiss - and it is still a...

Although I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan, I've never read The Sandman , as I just can't relate to comic books and graphic novels. I'm not a very visual person, and I like a story to contain (far) more words. Nonetheless, I was aware it was considered something of a big thing in the genre, so watched the Netflix version with interest. The first episode is distinctly on the slow side - I know at least one person who gave up part way through - but it's worth persevering to make your mind up, as things certainly change gear after a while. However, I do think the series has an underlying problem in the way it has apparently been painstakingly based on the individual comics. This gives an extremely episodic approach, making it almost impossible to produce a really top notch drama series. The problem is not having mostly separate stories in each episode - I like that. But if a series is take that approach, it needs two other things to support it - a group of good recurring chara...

John Buchan is best known for his thriller The 39 Steps , filmed melodramatically by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. The Gap in the Curtain is another period piece, first published in 1932, but it is anything but a conventional thriller. It's sometimes presented as science fiction, but it would more reasonably be described as fantasy: although the events it covers are supposedly triggered by the work of a scientist, the mechanism is pure fantasy. We begin at a country house party, where a random selection of toffs are encouraged to take part in an experiment by the mysterious Professor Moe. By obsessing over a particular section of the Times newspaper for a while (plus the administration of a mystery drug), seven participants are set up to have a second's glance at a small section of the newspaper from one year in the future. In practice, two of the experimental subjects, including the narrator, don't undertake the final part, so five people are given a brief glimpse of the futu...

Urban fantasy, which brings fantasy elements into the everyday world, is far more interesting than the totally imaginary setting of a classic fantasy, because the clash between familiar life and weirdness provides brilliant opportunities to stretch the imagination. Of late, some of the best urban fantasies have incorporated a police procedural element - most notably the Rivers of London series. But Adam Simcox inverts the whole approach.  Standard urban fantasy/police procedural crossovers feature real world police coping with fantasy-driven problems. Simcox gives us a refreshing new approach in dead detectives who deal with crimes defeating the mundane police. This is linked into an afterlife that seems loosely based on the Catholic triad of hell, purgatory and heaven, with the main fantasy setting being the Pen, described as purgatory, but in reality distinctly hellish. It’s from here that dead cop Joe Lazarus sets out, making a dangerous transition to our world, which the dead ...

Of all the flavours of fantasy novels, I only really enjoy those set in the real world (often described as urban fantasy, although some, as is the case here, are mostly rural) - whether it's the intricate cleverness of something like Gene Wolfe's Castleview , or when it's mixed with the police procedural, as in Ben Aaronovich's Rivers of London , Sarah Painter's Crow Investigations or Paul Cornell's Shadow Police . That meant I was delighted to discover Mark Hayden's King's Watch series. In many ways it's great, though it has proved to be something of a curate's egg. The good news is that Hayden does some things brilliantly. I love the idea of rather than a police tie-in, it's a quasi-military one linked to the Tower of London, with a group originally set up by King James I (the aforementioned King's Watch, headed by a Peculier Constable). Hayden's magickal (sic) world and its political complications are beautifully imagined - wheth...

Alan Garner is, without doubt, one of the UK's greatest fantasy writers. I was privileged to grow up with his books, which aged in audience as I did, peaking for me with The Owl Service . Garner also visited my (and his) school, which the book is dedicated to, when I was 12, a really important moment in my young life. But I lost some enthusiasm with his adult titles, which were both difficult to follow and depressing. However, now well into his 80s, Garner has produced what is arguably his best yet. Although Treacle Walker is a very compact book in large print, it is so intensely written that it still has considerable heft - I've seen it described by someone as poetry, and although I wouldn't personally say that, like the best poetry it does pack a huge amount into relatively few words. The book's protagonist is a young boy, but this is not a children's book. The closest parallel I have is Ray Bradbury's wonderful  Something Wicked This Way Comes - the book cap...

There are broadly two types of urban fantasy. Ones where the setting is primarily the normal world, intruded on by the fantasy - think, for example, of fantasy books where conventional police officers investigate supernatural crimes - and ones where there is a parallel magical society. The latter was the case with the Harry Potter books, and is also what we find in Benedict Jacka's excellent Alex Verus books. This series, beginning with Fated , is now complete with Risen , its twelfth title, which seemed an excellent point to review it. I was a touch suspicious about this 'new master of magical London' tagline that appears on some of the books - apart from anything, I'm fed up with urban fantasy books set in London. But Jacka gives us something genuinely original. This is a society where the small, magically endowed subset of the population is impressively self-centred. I'd go so far as to say that most of them are psychopaths. But the central character, Alex Verus ...

Erin Morgenstern's first novel, The Night Circus is one of my favourite books, so I was awaiting the infamously difficult second novel with a mix of anticipation and concern. Now I've finished reading it, I think both emotions were appropriate. Although still a fantasy with a partial real-world setting, The Starless Sea is a different kind of book to The Night Circus . As both have something of a period feel (despite The Starless Sea being set in the present day), I would say that the new book is like an Impressionist painting to the first novel's Pre-Raphaelite. In The Night Circus , the attraction of the book was crystal clear - here it's fuzzy and consists more of light than detail. Overall, The Starless Sea is a very clever creation, intertwined in a complex fashion. Most of the narrative has interlaced fairy stories, which initially seem to be little elements on the side but gradually weave their way into the whole. It's a long book - perhaps a tad to...

Although my main business is writing science books, I've always enjoyed writing fiction and I've recently had the chance to revisit a title I made a first draft of about 30 years ago. It's now finished and available (if you use Kindle, you can get a copy free of charge if you download it by Friday 5 October 2018 at the latest - see Kindle links here ). Called Oberland , the book is set in the Swiss alps, centring on the beautiful Lauterbrunnen valley. I wrote parts of that first draft while on holiday there, so the locations were still very fresh in my mind. In the story, when English twenty-something Jo Fuller takes a summer job on a campsite in the Swiss alpine valley of Lauterbrunnen, she does not expect her whole understanding of the world to be turned upside down. A camper dies in suspicious circumstances. With three broken individuals - Bob from America, Paula from Australia and Werner from Germany - Jo discovers a strange alternative world at the top of the Sc...

If you're wondering why I review less here, my SF reviews are now all on www.popularscience.co.uk - but this one is fantasy. Roger Zelazny has always been one of my favourite authors, so it was a delight to discover his last novel, which I'd never read. It sounds like an unlikely topic to be successful. The book is narrated by Jack the Ripper's talking dog, Snuff. It tells of the preparations for a strange Game played out when Halloween falls on a full moon - featuring some familiar fantasy characters (full marks if you spot who Larry Talbot is before it's revealed) and Lovecraftian dark forces. If this sounds an unlikely plot, Zelazny is the master of taking the unlikely and making it entertaining. And he does it here to the maximum. Although some of Zelazny's work was science fiction - the excellent Doorways in the Sand , for example - he's best known for his wisecracking fantasy series set in Amber. However, the style in A Night in Lonesome October is...

Image from Wikipedia Over the years many scientists and technologists have admitted that they were inspired to work in their field by Star Trek, but few, if any, would say the same about Star Wars. And yet the same individuals have an almost universal affection for the first trilogy of Star Wars movies. This is because, where Star Trek was solid science fiction, primarily influencing the head, Star Wars won the heart as an epic fantasy that comfortably wore the robe of 1930s pulp sci-fi. And nowhere is that more obvious than with the light saber. Take a look at the technology of Star Trek and you’ll find a whole gallimaufry of items that have already made it to reality, or that are setting future directions. Our smartphones and tablets have left the TV show’s equivalents far behind. Even Siri is a better conversationalist than the Enterprise computer. And while we might not have warp drives or transporters, NASA is giving serious thought to ways of getting around the light speed ...

Already sadly half-forgotten, Roger Zelazny was one of the best science fiction/fantasy writers in the generation that came after the golden era greats like Asimov, Heinlein, Wyndham and Clarke. He often wrote in a science fiction - fantasy crossover known unimaginatively as science fantasy, which seems to have almost disappeared as a genre - and why it can be so good is demonstrated masterfully his short novel Roadmarks . It's science fantasy in that it operates like science fiction, with logical, science-based content providing the setting, but it contains a couple of off-the-wall elements that don't have any scientific basis. Arguably, the one area science fantasy has flourished is in superhero stories - but Zelazny's are far more interesting. Although Zelazny is probably best remembered for his highly entertaining Amber fantasy series, Roadmarks is significantly more sophisticated in its approach. To begin with it's not totally clear what is going on - in a goo...

I was more than a little wary to see that Netflix had issued an eight-part series 'based on' the Douglas Adams titles  Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency  and The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul , especially as these novels are very British, where this is a US-based series - but with a couple of quibbles, the result was very pleasing, sufficiently so that I've got through the whole thing in a couple of evenings. (It helped I was home alone.) And surprisingly this is because the TV show bears hardly any resemblance to the original books. There's something very odd about Douglas Adams's output. I'd suggest that each of his fictional series - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently  - only properly works in one format. The HHGTTG was a superb radio series, but for me seemed forced by comparison in book form, was so-so on TV and disastrous on film. When it came to Dirk , these were novels of ideas (in part cobbled together from unused ...

The Damned Busters follows in a noble tradition of humorous fantasies in which someone gets one over on the devil when entering into a pact - such stories follow on from what seems to be a very early form of fantasy story with a number of legends (usually explaining odd landmarks) using this plot line. In Matthew Hughes' novel, comic-book obsessed Chesney Artstruther, an actuary on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum. accidentally summons a demon. His refusal to accept a pact results in a strike in Hell, which leads to Satan agreeing to allow Chesney demon-powered super abilities in exchange for ending the strike. Altogether this works reasonably well - Hughes has some clever twists on the pact with the devil riff, and keeps us engaged, even though the female characters are very old-fashioned: the overbearing mother, the girl he loves who is beautiful but shallow and the girl he will end up with who is bright and sassy. The writing style is good but sits slightly...