This is Dan Howarth’s first collection of short fiction and it’s a good one, filled with diverse stories that all successfully highlight Howarth’s abilities as a writer.

There are eleven stories in total covering a range of topics, including wrong doings in a holiday park, the Liverpool blitz, stalkers, and a home that doesn’t want to be changed. My favourites include From The Ground Up, which is an excellent story about the dangers of buying your first home and discovering it’s not really the ‘forever home’ you envisaged. It is an excellent showcase of what Howarth does best: believable, relatable characters in a strange situation.

Another strong story is Nesting Instinct. It’s a bizarre tale, but one in which I think parents will recognise the underlying fear of messing up your children, albeit not in the exact manner of this twisted story.

The final story Collaboration is by far the darkest and bleakest of all. I don’t want to say anything about it, to avoid spoilers, but buckle up before you read this one: it is grim! As bleak and horrific as it is, it’s also my favourite in the collection.

Mergers and Acquisitions was the only story I didn’t really like – nothing wrong with the writing, but I didn’t really ‘get’ it. Howarth is striving for ambiguity in his tale of a high-flying banker type, and perhaps more certainty would suit the story better.

Clearly, I enjoyed this collection of high quality of stories. Author notes round it off and I wish more collections included them, although I concede that perhaps I find them interesting as I am a writer too.

Throughout, Howarth’s writing and voice are consistently strong, whether he’s writing from the point of view of children or adults on the verge of losing their minds. Several of the stories have family as their central theme: buying your first home together, becoming new parents or playing games with kids. These stories are the strongest in the collection and are perhaps a reflection of Howarth tapping in to what truly frightens him.
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Based on this collection, Howarth has a great future ahead. Recommended

My bio
David Watkins lives in Devon in the UK with his wife, two sons, dog, cat and two turtles. He is unsure of his place in the pecking order: probably somewhere between the cat and the turtles.
He has currently released three novels, (The Original’s Return, The Original’s Retribution and The Devil’s Inn) and has a short story in the werewolf anthology Leaders of The Pack.

Lavie Tidhar is a writer famous for the variety of his output: sci-fi, thrillers, fantasy…the man has done it all, with a reputation for quality the common factor across this variegated body of work. I have to say “reputation”, because this actually the first time I’ve read a Tidhar book myself. In terms of length, his latest offering, The Big Blind, is an ideal place to start, since it’s a novella that can be easily finished in two or three sittings. Thanks to the efforts of book designer Pedro Marques this slim hardback is also possibly the most beautiful book I’ve ever seen from PS  – just seeing a photo of the cover doesn’t prepare you for the experience of handling it. The potential for pleasing contrast inherent to the plot (a trainee nun enters the world of professional poker to drum up funds for her nunnery) is fully exploited by Marques’ blend of traditional playing card art and ecclesiastical richness of colour.

The same can’t be said for the words. If there is one thing this novella lacks, it’s colour. This is a surprise given the value placed by card game fans on the aesthetic side of things, with poker being particularly associated with a certain kind of dirty glamour. While the book is filled with long blocks of poker jargon - I would say about a quarter of it is raw poker terminology - the cards in the players’ hands could be checkout receipts for all the mystique that comes off them.

There is almost no sense of place, either. The settings – ordinary houses, soup kitchens, lamplit streets, poker dens great and small – are lacking in geographical identity to an unusual degree and the dialogue is the same. The city in this novella is pure Someplace, USA, and I was startled to realize that it’s actually meant to be Dublin. Yes, that Dublin, in Ireland, here recognizable only by outbursts of bad cuisine and a larger-than-usual headcount of nuns.

I initially thought that this lack of identity might be an attempt by Tidhar to avoid the usual barrage of try-hard hip clichés associated with both poker and Irish culture. But in fact clichés are the backbone of this book. Do you remember those old nun comedies like Sister Act and Nuns On The Run? Those packs of feral nuns, some scary, some jolly, some meek, all rubbing along together in the name of the Lord and engaging in whimsically incongruous behaviour like drinking in bars and gambling…This book is all that, and more, because the soup is further thickened with a huge dollop of hokey old tournament comedy (think films like Kingpin or Baseketball.)

I personally found it hard to swallow. Although an agnostic, I am interested in the spiritual paroxysms of religious folk (as explored in Phil Rickman’s early Merrily Watkins novels, for instance) and don’t find the desire to join holy orders intrinsically risible or wicked. But a lot has happened in the Irish Catholic landscape since those 80s and 90s feelgood comedies, and for me the horrors of Bon Secours and the Magdalene laundries are just too recent to allow me to go along with Tidhar’s light-hearted comedy, which deliberately exists in a total social vacuum. I think this has a knock-on effect on Claire’s character development, too: perhaps constrained by the short format, Tidhar fails to provide a compelling evocation of the reasons why a bright and talented young woman would want to devote her entire life to the Church.

But then, Claire as a whole is a character oddly lacking in agency, considering that the novella is all about the dilemmas she faces. She seems doomed to a choice between serving the memory of her late father (yes, a wastrel poker player) and old Nobodaddy, and much like her mother (who we learn devoted her life to cleaning up her fathers’ messes) Claire eventually dissolves into a sea of typically female abnegation without ever really asserting a sense of self. Although she does make the choices the plot requires of her, she drifts around the poker tournament with reactions that seem muted and second-hand, to an extent far beyond the requirements of the “poker face”. Even her attraction to handsome competitor Mikey is weirdly asexual (in Hollywood terms he’s very much a pre-Brando heart-throb, all nice clean smiles and hair.)  It could all be a study in high-functioning depression, though the cheesy comic framework seems to refute this. Intentionally or otherwise, the end is as predictable as it is depressing.
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As a very amateur poker player I did enjoy the accounts of the various games Claire plays, some of which are very absorbing, and I appreciated the brevity of style. This isn’t a book that will take up too much of your time. But it has a very definite audience, and I just wasn’t it.

The daughter of a legendary card player with skills of her own, Claire doesn t want to go into the family business. She s heard the call, and she desperately wants to become a nun. But when her convent comes under financial threat, Claire must leave what she loves to save what she loves and enter an international poker tournament.
Both a poker novella and a meditation on faith, The Big Blind is a taut, heartfelt and compelling new book from multiple award winner Lavie Tidhar.

A multi-national research team study an ancient pandoravirus in a remote Siberian research facility. Much calamity and death ensue.

Okay, so the actual blurb for the book reads a lot longer than my synopsis, but that should be enough to give you the gist. I went into this assuming it would be a bad idea to read about a virus during a pandemic, but thankfully this novel is not really about that sort of spread. Well, it sort of is,but it has more in common with The Thing than The Andromeda Strain or Contagion.

This is a virus that assimilates its host and changes it (yep, a bit like The Thing). The virus is also self-aware and clever, adapting and reacting to the humans as the novel progresses.

The book cracks along at a breakneck pace, with barely time to catch your breath between one set piece and the next. We’re quickly introduced to the main players, everything goes wrong and continues to go wrong for the protagonists all the way through to the ending.

I’m a slow reader, but I polished this off in around three days because I wanted to keep turning the pages to see what happened next. Parent throws everything at the ‘good guys’ in this and you are never far from the next death. Many of the creature details throughout are well done. There’s a wonderfully tense scene in a lab where no-one knows quite who is infected or not.

However, there is a massive elephant in the room, and I alluded to it in my opening: this is reminiscent of The Thing, right down to cold, remote location and flame throwers. I enjoyed myself to much to be overly bothered by this similarity, but it might put some people off.

For me, aside from the two main characters of Clara St Pierre and Dante, the rest of the characters didn’t really make an impression. Towards the end, a character reappears, and I had to flick through the book to check who he was. This lessens the impact of the book somewhat, as I would prefer to care a little about the characters before they meet their inglorious ends. Furthermore, given Clara’s prickly nature, it is difficult to warm to her and care about her fate.

There are other issues too, like how easy it is for Dante to infiltrate this place, or the fact I totally missed that the base is enormous until about halfway through (that could just be me, of course). There is an early mention of protestors outside the base, but this is supposed to be remote Siberia, so how did they get there? Where do they go when things start to go wrong?

None of these issues detract from this being a completely fun ride. I feel I’m being harsh on the book with those last few paragraphs, and I need to be clear: this is a very entertaining, fast paced, well written good time. I’m really keen to read more of Parent’s work.

He knows how to keep you turning the pages, which is no mean skill, and I don’t think many horror fans would regret purchasing this book.

So, to sum up, not perfect, but damn good fun.
3* out of 5.

​With cover art reminiscent of the Poison Ivy character introduced in the Batman comics, and a blurb which promises a supernatural mystery, Rami Ungar's Rose is an intriguing title that doesn't always deliver on its promises.


Starting with a burst of body horror as the titular character finds herself transformed into a plant/human hybrid with no memories, the story then walks you through Rose's gradual rediscovery of her self. There's a heavily signposted revelation about how she came to find herself shacked up with a deceptive young man called Paris, after which things slide into an uncomfortable mix of psychological torture and sheer frustration, as you hope alongside Rose that she can escape the situation she's in.


It's a story which has things to say about the cycle of abuse, and as such you're forced to endure scene after scene where Rose finds herself helpless at the hands of Paris, who's used an ancient Japanese spellbook to bring her back to life. At first he's concerned, then romantic, forceful, violent, manipulative, demanding, you name it. As the story progresses things get darker and increasingly perverse, to the point where I had to skim through certain sections as they dwelled a little too long on Paris' cruel, psychotic behaviour. There are never any excuses made for how he is, though there is a suggestion that dark forces are pulling his strings. He's irredeemably foul.


As for Rose, your sympathies rest with her from page one, as she desperately tries to make sense of the weirdness around her. She's far from helpless thanks to the plants she's fused with, which she learns to control, but she's never actually in control, which is where most of the chills come from as Paris – and those aforementioned dark forces – take advantage of her. I can't say that her journey is a satisfying one, and for a story centred around abuse, I didn't like the way things panned out. There aren't that many directions a story like this can take, and while it's definitely effective in making your skin crawl, there weren't enough moments of catharsis for my tastes. It's a downward spiral, in other words, and when the supernatural elements become more prevalent towards the end, the story takes an exhausting turn towards shared tragedy which didn't pay off for me.


The dialogue also feels a bit clunky at times, knocking the drama out of many a scene. And while the imagery of Rose and her plant-based powers comes across effectively, other times it's hard to place scenes and characters, as more focus is given to those supernatural elements. As Rose's memories return, there are a few scenes where you're given a large information dump, and while this is meant to be a rush of remembrance for Rose, it feels like heavy-handed exposition, especially during one late scene where a key character and their relationship to Rose is described right before they pop into the story.


With a bit of pruning, Rose might have bloomed into something great, but as it stands, this is more of a last minute bouquet from a petrol station forecourt than something you'd see at Kew Gardens. It does its job, but it's not the best.

​Rose Taggert awakens in a greenhouse with no clear memory of the past two years and, to her horror, finds her body transformed into an unrecognizable form.
Paris Kuyper has convinced Rose that they are lovers and as Paris could not bear for her to die, he has used an ancient and dark magic to save her from certain death.
But the dark magic Paris has used comes at a price. A price which a terrible demon is determined to extract from Rose.

As Rose struggles to understand what is happening to her, she must navigate Paris’s lies and secrets; secrets that Paris will do anything to protect.

Okay, I’m going to need you to imagine you’re in a record store, and it’s the mid-nineties. You’ve eschewed the popular music of the time, moving right past the Britpop section into where they keep the heavy metal at the back. Take a look at the variety of different album covers. Ignore any that have the band on (heavy on the leather, hair interestingly coiffured) . The strange chrome creatures and monstrous instruments are pretty cool, but they’re not what you’re after. Once you get to the demons and scantily clad women you’re getting closer, but keep going. Right, you see that cover with the weird fantasy cityscape? See the strange races that cavort among its streets? See the colourful alien skies that tell you that you are somewhere quite extraordinary? Now imagine that the places depicted on these album covers are not just real, but the song lyrics on the album tell the stories of those places and reveal the secrets of how to get there.

That’s the case with scream metal band Valentine Killshot, on the verge of global superstardom as they prepare to release their fourth album.

Their songs tell of the world of Dae’eshta, its incredible occupants and impossible places and of its Laughing God. For the lead singer of Valentine Killshot, Jed Maine, it’s an obsession, a place he visits every moment he possibly can until he can find a way to reside there forever.

Their music draws an almost cult following, and that brings us to Tara and Nicola, two eleven-year-old fans of the band. Sale captures the youthful enthusiasm of young fans perfectly in the early parts of the novel. They collect merchandise, they memorise lyrics and they spend countless hours discussing favourite songs and the different qualities of the members of the band. Sale develops Tara and Nicola well. They’re girls with very different backgrounds, but it’s a love of the band that brings them together. While both girls have suffered the loss of a parent, Tara has stability with her mother, Amanda, while Nicola is trapped with her abusive, drug addict father. That said, life isn’t ideal for Tara, for at night she becomes convinced a wolfish creature loiters in the corner of her room, a creature that could well have been featured in one of Valentine Killshot’s songs.

The novel takes place in two time frames (and it two very different places, but we’ll get to that later) 1997, when the girls are 11 and 2004, when they are 18. Childhood is viciously snatched away from the girls, and as we see then again in their late teens, it’s clear they’ve taken different paths. The development of the characters of the girls here is handled really well as we see what the trauma they’ve faced has done to them. Tara goes through a series of rituals to get through each event of her day and safeguards herself against risk in any way that she can. Nicola has followed in the footsteps of her father, taking solace in drugs, but now trying to come to terms with her addiction. For me, this part of the novel was most effective. I felt Sale really captured their struggles, and whole it was horrible to see two characters that were so full of hope and enthusiasm struggling so, it was totally understandable given what they’d experienced.

A large part of the novel takes place in the fantasy world of Dae’eshta after the transformative event which also reveals the true intentions of Jed Maine and sets him up as the antagonist for the rest of the novel.

Tara finds herself in this strange place, with the creature that had been watching her from the shadows, a being she comes to call Wolfhead. Sale has constructed a solid and believable world in Dae’eshta. The novel is constructed so that we learn what we need to of this place as Wolfhead guides Tara through her time there. Sale showcases his rich and vivid imagination in Dae’eshta bringing the place to life with engaging prose, though he is perhaps guilty of dwelling on the description for a little too long from time to time, slowing down the pace a little too much.  I expect those that adore such fantasy worlds would be thrilled with the skill and detail with which Sale paints his world though

As real as these fantasy places seem, they can very much be seen as a place where Tara and Nicola can try to overcome the demons that plague their real life. Their battles in Dae’eshta are not merely metaphorical though; these are encounters with real meaning that leave real scars. As good as Sale is at bringing his fantasy to life, he’s got a knack for writing action too, with the encounters springing off the page, and when things turn gory (as they often do) they are presented with visceral detail. It never feels like Sale is taking sadistic glee in this situations, but they are necessary to have the needed impact on the characters.

Plot-wise, Dark Hilarity is an unpredictable novel, but it never feels like there’s a twist for twist’s sake, and every surprising turn of events leads the characters into new places leading to interesting situations and it makes for a compelling read. The characters feel genuine, never simply acting in service to the plot, and Sale makes them make difficult decisions, particularly Nicola. The way that Tara and Nicola develop and in some way switch roles is particularly well handled.

As something of a stranger to other-world/portal fantasy, I felt Sale led me into Dae’eshta carefully and built a convincing world for me with likeable protagonists and a complex and interesting antagonist. It’s very much a story of facing adversity and overcoming demons that leads to a pleasing conclusion. I very much get the feeling that this would appeal even more strongly to those more familiar with portal fantasies, but I’d happily go in again for another visit to this type of world if Sale was leading the way.

Review by Benjamin Langley 

Amanda Desiree’s fascinating debut Smithy which treads a fine line between psychological study and horror/thriller will undoubtedly be one of 2021’s most ambitious novels. For the majority of the plot, too much for my taste, events were deeply entrenched around the activities of a group of seven collegiate researchers attempting to teach a chimpanzee American Sign Language. Coming it at a hefty 500 pages, it might be too long for some readers, as 250 pages were gone before we begin to get a serious inkling that something spectral might be afoot. Much of your enjoyment of Smithy will depend on how you take to the very detailed psychological study. However, the sheer level of thoroughness Desiree puts into this study was truly commendable and incredibly believable. Hell, you could be mistaken for thinking you were reading the account of a genuine experiment.   


Why might you be mistaken for believing you were reading an authentic study? The experiment took place between 1974-5 and the entire book is made up of excerpts gathered from the period, embracing the epistolary format by the throat. This style can often be a tension killer, but the sheer range of sources Desiree presents the reader with keeps the story flowing, albeit slowly. At least twenty years have passed since the events of 1975 and one of the sources quoted most frequently is ‘Smithy: a Twenty-Year Compendium’ which alludes to the fact that the experiment has an ill-fated ending and obviously has some lingering controversary in the annuals of animal psychology. Some of the later written excerpts use a certain level of hindsight and they add a fascinating contrast to their original comments.  What exactly went wrong? This is the million Dollar question and is key to the mystery element presented by the novel, with the uncertainty hanging nicely over proceedings as the chimpanzee ‘Smithy’ quickly picks up new words and delights the bigwigs at Yale University who are funding the project.


Smithy is built around an incredible range of secondary resources which create a believable picture of a 1970s psychology experiment, even if too much of it lacks any sense of horror, no base is uncovered or unexplored. It includes letters from the main characters to their families, diary entries, journal entries (library, kitchen and bedroom), handwritten statements and film footage. All of this helps build the characters who interact with Smithy, in particular Gail Ehrlichto, Tommy Cohento and Ruby Carbinito, who are involved in teaching him sign language and are in their early twenties (very naive) and hoping the project will be a huge positive tick to add to their CVs. Living in a rented rundown mansion, through these characters the author is able to construct an intricate, daily routine of the house whilst slowly weaving in a sense of unease through very small instances where things move or disappear, with poor Smithy often fingered as the culprit. But is he? Ambiguity adds to the fun and atmosphere.


There are further layers of detail for the reader to absorb, concerns over funding lurk in the background, and the reader is also provided with the weekly memos from Wanda Karlewitz (who leads the study) and other interactions from Piers Preis-Herald (who is the overall boss and leader of the experiment) but strangely absent much of the time. Also throw into the mix, notes posted on bulletin boards, weekly word lists for Smithy and many more memos and telegrams. Further excerpts from ‘A Rare Medium’ and ‘Why Chimpanzees Make Bad Mediums’ will give you a vague hint of the direction the story heads into. At a certain point we are even told how many toilets are blocked and what the plumber charged to fix it. Yes, 500-pages was way too long and the author got slightly carried away with her exhausting list of sources!


The Library Journal said of Smithy "This original haunted house tale, with a unique plot and compellingly vivid characters, moves from uneasy to creepy to all-out 'keep the lights on' terror." They obviously thought it was significantly scarier than I did, as I was unconvinced by the supernatural element of the story, which when it did eventually appear, lacked the implied terror this review mentions. Overall, I felt sorry for the chimpanzee, who never got to interact with another of its own kind, was forced to sleep in a bed and wear a nappy. There was little wonder it went mental, starting with small tantrums which slowly escalate. However, it does dance around a question which frequently appears in horror; are animals more likely to see or feel ghosts than we humans are? Smithy provides a nice twist on this idea, but chills could certainly have been ramped up via this part of the story.


However, on the other hand I could also see why Amanda Desiree keeps things relatively restrained. This was a psychological study and was not parapsychology and because of this Smithy is as much about denial as anything else. These scientists cannot talk about ghosts, partly as everything is recorded and talk of the supernatural would see their funding disappear down the river and their study ending up in the dustbin. The group fail miserably to read the chimpanzee’s moods correctly and although everything is very well crafted, considering it is built around so many sources, the reader gets to the ending way before the so-called experts do.


Smithy is not going to be to everybody’s taste, some will find it too slow, or the elements of horror pushed too far into the background in favour of the psychological aspects. However, if you are patient it has a lot to offer, rarely have I seen the epistolary format used so effectively or extensively and the 1970s sense of time and place was superb. Once I got into the rhythm of the style, I enjoyed the wide range of resources presented to the reader and this novel is just as likely to find an audience with thriller fans as it is horror. Sadly, poor old Smithy does not have a voice in the story, which was a shame as I really liked him, and I felt more compassion for him than any of his human ‘family’ who, although they treated him well, did see him as a step onto the next stage of their careers. This was a fascinating debut novel and Amanda Desiree is surely a new name to watch out for in the horror scene.


Tony Jones

​"This original haunted house tale, with a unique plot and compellingly vivid characters, moves from uneasy to creepy to all-out 'keep the lights on' terror." --Library Journal, starred review.In the tumultuous summer of 1974, in the shadowy rooms of a rundown mansion in Rhode Island, renowned psychologist Dr. Piers Preis-Herald brings together a group of seven collegiate researchers to study the inner lives of man's closest relative―the primate. They set out to teach their subject, who would eventually be known to the world as Smithy, American Sign Language. But as the summer deepens and the history of the mansion manifests, the messages signed by their research subject become increasing spectral.
Nearly twenty-five years after the Smithy Project ended in tragedy at Trevor Hall, questions remain: Was Smithy a hoax? A clever mimic? A Rorschach projection of humanity's greatest hopes and fears? Or was he indeed what devotees of metaphysics have claimed for so long: a link between our world and the next?