I felt turned inside-out like the skin of a dead rabbit, waiting to be filled, stuffed fresh and preserved, put on display and admired--how life-like, don’t the eyes follow you about the room?—those that are new to the craft always look at the glass eyes first, just to check that the specimen is really dead. Or maybe to see if any remaining life clings on.


The first thing that struck me about The Taxidermist’s Lover is the gorgeous, lyrical language. It was immediately apparent to me that the author, Polly Hall, is a poet; the stained glass prose in this work of literary horror is the type of writing the author wants the reader to luxuriate in, appreciating all the fine colors and the way the lights and darks affect the reading experience. The style is so well done I barely noticed the 2nd person narrative.

But it wasn’t just the sensual and eerie language of the book which makes The Taxidermist’s Lover stand out; the structure of the novel is quite intriguing, as well. The narrative is told as a January through December month-by-month retrospective account of the life of the main character (Scarlett Pepper) interspersed with brief interludes of Christmas Day, which is presented as “today” and written in present tense. The reader slowly comprehends over time that something dreadful happens on Christmas, and the entire novel is a slow build up to the inevitable conclusion—a work of exquisite dread.

Set in the isolated moors of Somerset, UK, the landscape itself is delightfully eerie and evocative, mirroring the dreamlike language. Even the intricate details of the taxidermy process, though grotesque and visceral, are presented as noble and sublime through Scarlett’s eyes.


You have touched the brains of animals, eased the moist, grey whorls of matter from the skull cavity; you have scraped the layers of fat from their skin, and discarded the skeletons and fibrous sticky tissue. You have touched death’s glorious aftermath.


As beautiful as the language is, The Taxidermist’s Lover is not an easy read, nor is it for everyone. I had to stop reading it at night because the visuals were too intense, the descriptions too vivid; I genuinely feared nightmares. It reminded me, somewhat uncomfortably, of the 2005 Terry Gilliam film Tideland--a film which still haunts me, for better or for worse. But if you find the intricacies of taxidermy fascinating, and enjoy a sensual and disturbing love story, The Taxidermist’s Lover is a true gem.

Created as an homage to the 1980 classic horror anthology, Dark Forces, this collection contains 12 original novelettes showcasing today’s top horror talent edited by John F.D. Taff. Within these pages you’ll find tales of dead men walking, an insidious secret summer fling, an island harbouring unspeakable power, and a dark hallway that beckons. You’ll encounter terrible monsters―both human and supernatural―and be forever changed. These stories run the gamut from traditional to modern, from dark fantasy to neo-noir, from explorations of beloved horror tropes to the unknown―possibly unknowable―threats.

I’m doing it again. Another anthology! I think the attraction for me, certainly when reviewing books around a busy work and home life, is that you can dip in and out without losing track as easily as you can with a full-length novel. It’s nice to be able to grab a book before going to work or over lunch and be able to devour a tale in one sitting; short stories are great for busy people or those who don’t manage their time well. I’m saying nothing.

Dark Stars is a powerful addition to my recent roster of anthologies, and I enjoyed reading the twelve dark tales contained within. There is no real over-arching theme with Dark Stars, it is just a solid and varied collection of creepy tales and unnerving characters. What you get here is an eclectic mix of vampires, murderers, aliens, pagans, voodoo, ghosts, demons, and a wendigo! All from a great collection of authors including Caroline Kepnes, Ramsey Campbell, Priya Sharma, Livia Llewellyn, Stephen Graham Jones, Chesya Burke, Alma Katsu, John F.D. Taff, Gemma Files, Josh Malerman, Usman T. Malik, and John Langan.

It's usually about this time in the review that I say how I won’t look at each story in turn or pick out my favourites for fear of suggesting that there are any poor entries in the book. This isn’t the case for Dark Stars; this time around they are all excellent, and every entry is worthy of a place in this book. Inevitably everyone will find particular stories that they resonate with more than others but, with Dark Stars, I enjoyed them all and found none of them lacking. They all had an impact on me and intrigued me and I never found myself flicking forward to see if I was near the end of a story that was not working or with which I was bored. Dark Stars was a breath of fresh (rank) air.

A couple of the stories that I really enjoyed were Josh Malerman’s “Mrs. Addison’s Nest” a multilayered, King-esque fight against the forces of darkness shared by old school friends and John Langan’s “Enough for Hunger and Enough for Hate” a slow-burn encounter with the Wendigo. Also, Livia Llewellyn’s “Volcano” speaks volumes of the power and rage inside women and is particularly pertinent when considering everything that is going on in the world right now. But, regardless, every tale presented here is a triumph, there are no album fillers here.

This might be the shortest review I have written for Ginger Nuts as there really is no real reason I can think of as to why you wouldn’t want to read this collection. If you want horror, darkness, mystery, and death, then you need look no further. In his foreword, Josh Malerman talks about Horror "having a moment” and how this collection is a celebration of that moment; a collection of twelve writers marking a mini renaissance of Horror. Dark Stars houses an incredible pool of writers and a collection of talent that it would be an honour to be part of.
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“Horror is everywhere,” he says, and it is true, regardless of what the more conservative among us might think, Horror pervades every part of our lives, on TV, radio, in films and books – even real life. It is everywhere. And Dark Stars is a celebration of the diversity, variety and joy of horror, an escapist joy to die-hard fans, and the start of a slippery, yet attractive slope for newbies.


So, grab a copy, settle in, and enjoy.


Come


Join us


And gaze at the stars

​Twelve chilling and thrilling stories from the darkest stars of modern horror including Josh Malerman, Caroline Kepnes, Stephen Graham Jones, Ramsay Campbell and more…
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Created as an homage to the 1980 classic horror anthology, Dark Forces, this collection contains 12 original novelettes showcasing today’s top horror talent edited by John F.D. Taff. Within these pages you’ll find tales of dead men walking, an insidious secret summer fling, an island harbouring unspeakable power, and a dark hallway that beckons. You’ll encounter terrible monsters―both human and supernatural―and be forever changed. These stories run the gamut from traditional to modern, from dark fantasy to neo-noir, from explorations of beloved horror tropes to the unknown―possibly unknowable―threats.

OTHER TERRORS: AN INCLUSIVE ANTHOLOGY
BY VINCE A LIAGUNO , RENA MASON
William Morrow/ HarperCollins 2022
Reviewed by Mario Guslandi

Reviewing  horror anthologies is becoming increasingly difficult because editors, taking advantage of the flexibility of the digital format, tend to include  progressively larger amounts of short stories.

The present volume, for instance, assembles twenty-four contributions, the majority of which are far from being short, and a good number of which could have been easily excluded from the final table of contents. Thus, both readers and reviewers have to spend a lot of time reading  forgettable tales as well as good material.

Obviously not all the stories will please anyone and every reader will love or hate different tales.

Even so, I maintain that oversized anthologies are becoming a disgrace and that editors should be more selective when assembling their volumes.

This particular anthology can be defined as fairly good, but, in my opinion, there are only four stories which will really remain in the reader’s memory.

In the excellent “ Waste Not” by Alma Katsu, a young widow, a policewoman, tries to get rid of the incredible amount of junk that her late husband and her mother-in-law have accumulated throughout the years. With some surprising results.

In “ There’s Always Something in  the Woods” by Gabino Iglesias a monster lurks around a cabin in the woods where three undocumented immigrants are hiding. The rather predictable outcome is redeemed by a tense, spellbinding narrative which keeps the reader constantly on edge.

Tananarive Due contributes “ Incident at Bear Creek Lodge” ,an offbeat, quite interesting  tale where a young boy must come to terms with an unknown side of his family, especially an obnoxious grandmother.
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To me the best story is the outstanding “ Idiot Girls” by Jennifer McMahon, where two girls try to discover the culprit of some murders taking place in a small community ( with an unexpected twist in the tail).

Hall’s Grimoire is a bit more “meta” than your average spellbook. It’s a book about a book – an ancient anthology of stories weaponized by magical code embedded into their prose -  but also is that book, since it consists of these four stories along with two framing tales. Unless, of course, it’s an imposter itself... Hall’s poker-faced introduction is a scholarly warning to the curious and reveals that the  stories change Mezzotint-style over time to keep pace with the reader, so we’re on unsteady ground even before we jump into An Encounter in 1690.

This first framing story introduces us to the Toths, a family of Rom with occult leanings, and their quest for the Grimoire. Narrated by an embattled courtier of Lady Willoughby, a charismatic 17th-century noblewoman with a taste for the dark side, it stars a great pair of sinister automata and has plenty of travelogue appeal as the reader is carried off across Eastern Europe and into a Rom encampment and a Hungarian village crackling with suspicion. Its briskly-paced, with a narrator who is likeable but not too perfectly detached from the prejudices of his day.

And then it’s onto the Grimoire’s bloody core. The Orb of Wasp and Fly, Being A Psalm of the Malformed Mind is a maggoty mouthful set in Germany at the time of the Landsknechts, savage mercenaries who devastated the country in-between the various religious wars of the 17th century. It starts with an example of their handiwork, a monastery razed to the ground leaving only a handful of survivors, all but one of whom are incurably mentally ill. With the only sane man grievously injured, things are looking bleak, and they get worse. Historian Hall is always happy to remind us what accidents were like before penicillin and proper hygiene, and there’s a hefty dose of body horror to go with the sylvan dread. Hall grasps the nettle of depicting several characters on the psychotic end of the mental illness spectrum and he pulls it off pretty well, giving them each a convincing backstory and individuality. He also avoids stumbling into the trope of the Magical Nutter whose quaint folksy lunacy saves the day, though undoubtedly this is the kind of narrative where full sanity isn’t much of an advantage.

Next comes The Nightshade Garden, my personal favourite of the collection. Dorin (Son of Toth) is an upwardly mobile scholar who is called upon to visit the occultist Madame Sarkozy at her unsettling family estate, complete with poison garden and servants who laugh in the face of physiology. Although it feels less rounded-off and complete than some of the tales here, I loved the way aristocratic elegance and charm hide a weird and rotten heart, like a scented pomander heaving with worms. Toth, a man with a foot in at least two worlds, is another engaging narrator along with his faithful greyhound Vinegar Tom.

Hall casts his net a bit wider with The Brine And Bone Alchemy, a Conrad-dark story of marooned sailors in the French West Indies and the avalanche of trouble they draw down on themselves for messing with a local known only as The Carib. I consider this the weakest story because the more spectacularly weird element doesn’t get properly started until it’s almost over, and it has little new to add by way of insight into the dynamics between colonizer and colonized. It does, however, work well as a character study of a bunch of really screwed men, whose grim fate always remains present in the mind of the reader.

Sire of the Hatchet takes us back to Merrie England, where we find a travelling executioner rolling into a woodland village to despatch a woman accused of burying her baby, only to find that the roots of the matter are more tangled than they appear. This story appeared in Fiends In The Furrows and in my review of that collection I described it as “decent” with a touch of Blood From Satan’s Claw. It actually improves on the second reading since you get a chance to properly savour the atmosphere, which is heavy, sylvan and sweaty, with the possibility of disease and hysteria bubbling away whenever the foliage parts long enough for humans to be seen. These stories are all set in a time when wood was much more present in peoples’ lives than it is today, and by the end man and tree feel truly enmeshed in a visceral way that seems more Ramsey Campbell than Arthur Machen. In a book preoccupied with inherited culture it also delivers a gentle warning to those who hope to find the key to their own natures in a dutiful search for their “roots”. As one character remarks, Who, here knows their mother? Who else has severed a piece of their body to learn their heritage? This is also a more overtly erotic story than the others, with maybe-murderess Rosamond given to purring and mumbling darkly about wood while the men around her swell with horror and confusion.

Finally we come to the second framing story, An Encounter in 1724. We’ve now reached Bela Toth, Son of Son of Toth, who joins forces with a Cambridge student to track down the Grimoire and is soon caught up in the toils of a powerful witch who doesn’t let her recent public hanging get in the way of her activities. Hall’s evocation of life in the warrens of the ancient castle city of Nottingham is vivid and horrendous, a true descent into the Abyss where dog eats dog and often a bunch of other stuff dog shouldn’t be eating at all.
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It forms a satisfying end to a collection that is so readable it is easy to forget the impressive amount of scholarship that has gone into it, with a well-pitched writing style that has some of the patina of bygone days without being mummified by strenuous attempts at replicating the parlance of the time and place. In a weird fiction market crumbling under the weight of Victorian and Edwardian settings it offers the reader a fascinating glimpse of a less familiar period in history, while hinting at the shifting, unsteady nature of history itself. The old joke about history being “one damn thing after another” certainly applies here, with damnation of all kinds afflicting the Toths and their fellow seekers of knowledge, but the ones who come off best are those who remember that the past is a constantly writhing, many-headed serpent always poised to strike those who want to catch it by the tail.

‘Black Mouth’ finds Ronald Malfi continuing his superb run of form
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Starting a 432-page novel on Saturday morning and closing the last page on Sunday evening, developing tunnel vision for the spreading horror across the weekend, is the type of intense experience I have come to expect from Ronald Malfi. This author is on such a rich run of literary form I am surprised Titan, the publisher of Black Mouth, have not tied him up on a ten-book contract instead of a measly two book deal, with the superb Come With Me (2021) being the other half of his cracking double-A side package. If you are new to Malfi he has so many excellent novels to choose from, other recent efforts The Night Parade (2016), Bone White (2017) are beauties, or you could backtrack further to December Park (2014) or Little Girls (2015) for your first sample. Malfi can be compared to the great Adam Nevill in that both authors have such impressive back-catalogues fans frequently disagree in identifying what the ‘best’ is, in reality both have relatively few weak links, with this latest offering as good a place to start as any. Malfi is totally stellar and those just discovering him are in for an epic journey which gleefully shimmies around all types of horror without ever becoming samey.   


Although Come With Me was very well received, I did read some criticism directed to the fact that some saw it as more thriller than horror, those doubters will be silenced by Black Mouth as even though thriller elements are key to the story, this is full-blown and very unsettling horror which is laced throughout with the painful haze of addiction and guilt. The promo material notes “for fans of IT and NOS4A2” which in actual fact does it a disservice as it lacks the flab which weighs down those two books and Joe Hill’s back-catalogue is rather light-weight in comparison to Malfi’s own. However, his latest does have some structural similarities to both works, in particular IT, where adults return to the place of a childhood trauma which shaped their later lives. In this story Malfi also cleverly sidesteps the ‘coming of age’ trope, which would have been very easy to fall into, instead jumping from kid protagonists to those aged 35 without missing a beat.


Structurally Black Mouth was a beautiful tale which effortlessly sucked the reader into the broken life of alcoholic Jamie Warren who is wracked with guilt for abandoning his mentally impaired little brother, Dennis, some years earlier. Jamie is the novel’s main character and his story is told in the first person, however, every other point of view is presented in the third person with the narrative fluently moving between styles. Adding to the flow are the natural flashbacks to 1998 in which the unspoken trauma which dominates the novel lurks and the shadowy character which pulled the strings. I’m not going to say who he was, or what his game was, but the scenes in which he featured totally crackled and when he was off-page I was hungry for his return.


Malfi is a master of providing vivid and atmospheric settings, ranging from the terrifying Alaskan location in Bone White to the pitch-perfect ‘coming of age’ small town of December Park and the cursed ruin of Black Mouth ranks alongside his best. ‘Black Mouth’ is an area on the outskirts of the West Virginian town of Sutton’s Quay which years earlier suffered from a devastating coalmine collapse which as a result ruined the landscape and became a location to avoid. Jamie Warren and his two best friends Clay (who is black but has a skin condition which makes an easy target for bullies) and Mia, who lives in poverty and neglect with her uncle. These three kids (and Dennis) were natural outsiders and it was a treat to follow their progress and how their actions impact their older selves. Jamie’s troubled relationship with his alcoholic and abusive father provided some of the most powerful (and horrific) scenes in the novel and upon reflection showed that sometimes you don’t have to go very far from home to find a real monster.


Like father like son, Black Mouth opens with Jamie being reprimanded for being drunk on the job and being forced to attend rehab and then AA, shortly after which he hears that his mother is dead and that nobody is looking after his disabled brother Dennis. As Jamie relapses, fights the bottle and heads back to West Virginia the story jumps to Mia who has become a relatively successful independent filmmaker and whilst visiting a film festival spots a man in a fairground who looks uncannily like someone from their past. The reader realises that the events of 1998 are going to interconnect with the current story, but how is the big question? But I do not want to give any spoilers and you will have fun finding out yourself, with some very clever twists and reveals along the way. I particularly loved Mia and would have enjoyed reading more of the book from her point of view, as she was a great character with swagger, punch and attitude.


Black Mouth is top-heavy with great characters and even though it would be very easy to dislike Jamie, a broken alcoholic who abandoned his brother, one cannot help feeling compassion for him, particularly with the powerful flashback sequences. The alcoholic moments, hallucinations, withdrawals and the fight with the bottle were all vividly described and their realistic nature balanced nicely with the unfolding horror. However, it is Dennis who steals the show and he easily ranks amongst Malfi’s finest literary creations. Disabled and slow he might be however he has a beautiful natural childish charm and an undiagnosed otherworldly manner about him which begins to pulse stronger as events escalate. Showing no fear, Dennis may well have you both shouting from the rooftops and shedding a tear in some outstanding sequences towards the end.


Malfi is at the peak of his powers and I was delighted to recently read that Titan are also publishing a collection of four new novellas later in the year, with Ghostwritten. If you have never tried his novellas Mr Cables (which was republished in 2020) is a great place to start, or for his short stories the awesome We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone (2017) is also worth investigating. Black Mouth was a fantastic horror novel and ranks amongst his very best, and that’s saying something.


Tony Jones

​A group of friends return to their hometown to confront a nightmare they first stumbled on as teenagers in this mesmerising odyssey of terror.

An atmospheric, haunting page-turner from the bestselling author of Come with Me

For nearly two decades, Jamie Warren has been running from darkness. He's haunted by a traumatic childhood and the guilt at having disappeared from his disabled brother's life. But then a series of unusual events reunites him with his estranged brother and their childhood friends, and none of them can deny the sense of fate that has seemingly drawn them back together.
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Nor can they deny the memories of that summer, so long ago – the strange magic taught to them by an even stranger man, and the terrible act that has followed them all into adulthood. In the light of new danger, they must confront their past by facing their futures, and hunting down a man who may very well be a monster.

Jon Bassoff - Beneath Cruel Waters


Jon Bassoff returns with a bleak thriller loaded with bite and family secrets 


Nine novels into a career which began back in 2013 Jon Bassoff continues on his own singular path, which frequently genre hops, veers into the darkest of places, whilst remaining refreshingly unpredictable. I have read most of his fiction and always look forward to discovering what curveballs he comes up with next. He is notoriously hard to pigeonhole and his type of horror is often blended with thriller, mystery or bizarro (and I have a feeling that is just the way he likes it). Of his recent output I was a massive fan of both The Lantern Man (2020) and the Drive Thru Crematorium (2019) which illustrate the quirky breadth of his fiction. However, if you want something even wackier then head to Jon’s previous novel Captain Clive’s Dreamworld, it was not by any means my favourite, but one cannot fault its creativity and originality.


Bassoff return to calmer waters (physically, but certainly not mentally) with his most mainstream novel for some years and, with a bit of luck, this psychological thriller has the potential to be a hit. Beneath Cruel Waters is a very entertaining non-supernatural page-turning thriller which had me on the hook from the striking opening chapter and I sped through in a couple of days. It was also blessed with a terrific sucker-punch and very sneaky ending in which the reader probably thinks they have sussed what is coming, before an outstanding final change of direction.  This was a very cleverly constructed book and most readers (like I did) will enjoy being wrong-footed, with the most obvious answer not always the correct one, so follow the plot very closely.


I’m not going to contextualise the plot too much as it is very easy to head into spoiler territory by dropping too many hints. At the heart of the novel lies a long unspoken (the worst kind) family clash between a mother and son, which flicks back to when he was a child in the mid-eighties to returning home to Thompsonville, Colorado for her funeral. Memory is one of the key background themes to the story and how well we remember things from our childhood and the impact repressed memories might have on our adult life. Kansas firefighter Holt Davidson makes the trek home for the first time in over twenty years and for some reason, vaguely unsettled with undiagnosed anxiety, cannot stop rattling the skeletons in his family’s closet.


Beneath Cruel Waters beautifully captures his fraught state of mind who sees ghosts around every corner and cannot comprehend why his Jesus loving mother might hang herself at a remote house way off the beaten track. Although he hopes to make peace with her memory, instead he spends the night at his childhood home, rummaging through each room, exploring the past and the broken memories it holds. But nostalgic souvenirs are not what he uncovers, shocked he discovers a gun, a love letter, and a Polaroid photograph of a man lying in his own blood. It was relatively easy to figure out who the dead man was, but it was only one part of a significantly more complex mystery which plays out via the pacey plot.


Holt’s relationship with his teenage sister was both one of the great strengths and mysteries of the novel. On one level he remembers his bouncy and loving sister, who at some point takes a mental downturn and is institutionalised (with the ‘why’ being a key part of the novel). However, as a child he is too small to remember any of the finer details, except that it also impacted his relationship with his mother. All this is intertwined around memory, murky childhood half-recollections, and the idea that the past is never buried and along the way takes in mental illness, domestic violence, and looks at religion in a relatively non-judgmental way. As thrillers go I would not call this book a twister, as it was not difficult to predict the general direction it was heading, this did not make any less enthralling or satisfying.


In Beneath Cruel Waters, Bassoff intricately peels back the layers very slowly and drops secrets and details a little at a time so that experienced thriller readers can collect clues, bits and pieces of information, and formulate their own theories. As I said earlier, I thought I had cracked it, but still came up short. Ultimately this was a great, but extraordinary bleak read, and proves that we all have ghosts, especially in our childhood. Various points had me thinking of old haunts and places from my own personal life where you expect characters from yesteryear to appear from around the corner. If you have never read Jon Bassoff then this is a great place to start as this is easily one of his most accessible novels to date and then you can start having fun getting lost within his impressive and unique back catalogue.


Tony Jones

Dave Jeffery’s A Quiet Apocalypse quartet of novellas, which began back in 2019, concludes in some style with the riveting Tribunal. The final instalment is a clever change of direction and pace from its predecessors, which brings the series to a reflective and satisfying end. I would recommend reading all the other books before tackling Tribunal as it references many previous events, ties up loose ends, fleshes out previous plotlines and reintroduces notable characters, particularly from Cathedral (2021) and The Samaritan (2021).  Bringing back major characters in this final instalment in support roles enhanced that feeling of closure and hope beyond the misery and hopelessness of what went before.

I previously reviewed all three books for the Ginger Nuts of Horror, by way of a brief recap:

A Quiet Apocalypse
https://gingernutsofhorror.com/fiction-reviews/book-review-a-quiet-apocalypse-by-dave-jeffery

Set in a grim post-apocalyptic world where a mutant strain of meningitis (MNG-U) wipes out most of mankind, the few who survived the pandemic were left deaf, an even smaller percentage retained their hearing. The focus of the book concerns the horrible relationship which develops between those with hearing and those deprived of it, who vastly outnumber the former. Not to mention the biggest scapegoats: those who were always deaf.

Cathedral

https://www.gingernutsofhorror.com/fiction-reviews/book-review-cathedral-by-dave-jeffery

Book two is set entirely in the town of ‘Cathedral’ (an area of Birmingham) which is mentioned briefly in its predecessor and there is some brief character overlap. The story concerns the brutal system of law and order which the inhabitants of the town follow in order to exist and live whilst hunting for other survivors to either join their cult, enslave or ritually murder.

The Samaritan

https://gingernutsofhorror.com/fiction-reviews/the-samaritan-by-dave-jeffery-book-review

The third entry focusses upon a Samaritan, the equivalent of Cathedral’s police or enforcers, who go beyond the town scouting and hunting for food or other survivors. Whilst in the wilderness the Samaritan becomes detached from his group and meets a family with unexpected consequences.

Tribunal opens with an academic from a Birmingham university presenting the foreword of a book (written in 2095) which discusses the period in history from over fifty years previously which is now referred to as The Quiet Apocalypse, reflecting upon humanity’s brush with extinction, noting that this period was amongst the darkest in humanity’s history. The professor hopes that by documenting these events in the book it acts as a warning that such barbaric acts can never be repeated and need to be remembered in the same way that we reflect upon The Holocaust from the Second World War.

Tribunal is entirely and convincingly presented as a court trial in which there are both victims and perpetrators from The Quiet Apocalypse era, many of which appeared in the previous three books. Much of this revolves around the goings on in Cathedral (book two) and Samaritan (book three) with those charged effectively being tried for crimes against humanity for which the death penalty exists, similar to what happened to the Nazi’s in the Nuremberg Trials after the war. The events of those books took place around 2025 and the trial around 2039, with the Cathedral and Samaritan way of life collapsing in the years between.

I was surprised how quickly and easily I was sucked into reading court transcripts, documents and interviews, with the reader forgetting they are emersed in a historical document. Everything felt very current and realistic, from the statements of the survivors to the six hearings of those on trial for their crimes. The different perspectives were fascinating, particularly those who were in the dock and their reliance on ‘Maslow’s Law’ to justify how they acted. I was interested by the fact that there was little remorse or blame throwing, as has been the way with former members of the Islamic State in recent contemporary trials.

It would have been easy for Tribunal to come across as preachy or worthy but it does not fall into that trap, instead it drops clever nuggets regarding the bigger picture of this apocalypse and refuses to portray everything in black and white. When reading the first three books the action is entirely set in the Birmingham area and the trial concentrates upon these events and so the reader can draw their own conclusions as to whether the rest of the country blamed the deaf for the near mass-extinction event which led to the horrific events previously documented. Also, as we are now hopefully entering the ‘post’ COVID period and in reflection did many of us blame the Chinese all too easily? In reality this blame game was only a few short steps away from what went on in A Quiet Apocalypse.

Tribunal is a fitting and reflective conclusion to this great series and in the accompanying endnotes Dave Jeffery notes that it was equally important for himself to have the cycle of brutality end. New readers are in for a treat, as the A Quiet Apocalypse sequence can undoubtedly be read back-to-back, providing a rich reading experience with the different perspectives in which a world with perpetual deafness is perceived and the resulting extremism which arises as a terrifying biproduct.   
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Tony Jones

Tim Lebbon's latest novel The Last Storm, was published last week by Titan Books, to a huge fanfare by some of the finest genre magazines and websites, and by us The Ginger Nuts of Horror, it has been a joy to see Tim's book gain so many first class reviews.  Tim was one of, if the not the first authors I connected with online, hell it was in the days before Facebook and Twitter, and maybe even MySpace.  For those of you of a younger disposition MySpace was the place to be long before Facebook and Twitter were even a glimmer in the internet's eyes.  I formed my friendship with one of the greatest multi genre writers on and old school forum.  Those were the days, forums were and in my opinion the best way to connect with people, none of this fleeting presence of a post or the fight against algorithms.   

I had scene a review of his debut novel Mesmer, in SFX Magazine, and for some reason I searched for him online (probably AOL'd it, stop laughing in the back you young folk) and found that he had a forum.  So I signed up and found Tim was always approachable, always willing to chat about books, music, and horror, even if he did swear when I recommended a band to him, that he didn't like.  ook he may be a brilliant writer, but sometimes brilliant writers can't help not having a perfect taste in music.  It was our mutual admiration for some bands that led to a massiver highlight in my life online, when Titan asked me to do the launch for his last novel Eden, I decided to reach out to some of his friends to do a sort of This is Your Life video, if you know what that was good on you, if you don't ask your parents or guardians about it.  And I reached out to Frank Turner by email, within minutes Frank had replied with a video message for Tim,  I could not believe it, and if it wasn't for Tim I would never have had the chance to talk to one of my musical heroes.  

Which brings us to why we are here today, I LOVED THIS BOOK SO MUCH, I wanted to do something special to keep the momentum rolling for this book, it deserves to find a huge audience.  If you missed our interview with Tim last week you can read it here, and today I am going to talk about my five favourite books by Tim.  This was a hard choice and I have swapped out a few titles a few times as I couldn't decide on a firm one so this is my final choice. I've left out some of the deep cuts like Hush which Tim co-wrote with Gavin Williams, as these are as far as I can see not readily available, but these books should still be ready for purchase via most online retailers, so buckle in and get your wallets out as I take in on a book buying journey.   The books are presented in no particular order.  

"Kosar the thief senses that Rafe Baburn is no ordinary boy. After witnessing a Red Monk plunder Rafe's village and murder his parents, Kosar knows the boy needs his help. And now, for reasons he cannot fathom, others are seeking the boy's destruction. 
Uncertain where to begin Kosar turns to A'Meer, an ex-lover and Shantasi warrior whose people, unbeknownst to him, have sworn to safeguard magic's return to the land of Noreela.

It is Rafe who bears this miracle of magic.

Now Kosar and a band of unexpected allies embark on a battle to protect one special boy. But horrific dark forces are closing in, and if they take magic for themselves dusk will fall forever."

I have to admit that I am not a big fan of fantasy novels, and I haven't really read anything much in the genre since the death of David Gemmell, his death hit me hard, and I haven't even brought myself to read his final novel, if don't then I will always still have one of his to read.  However i picked up this trilogy based solely on my love of Tim's writing.  The Noreela Trilogy consists of Dusk, Dawn and Fallen, with supporting novellas and short stories, is a DARK, fantasy series that cleverly mixes horror with fantasy, hell I'll probably get shot for saying this by the fantasy crowd, but this was Grimdark before Grimdark was a thing.  Tim has always excelled with world building in his horror novels, but they are set in variations of our world, so to see Tim take the huge plunge and create a rich epic and varied world from scratch was a something that was a pure pleasure to read.  

"When a father loses his son and his wife leaves him, he cannot tear himself away from the small fishing village where the boy's memories reside. They're all he has left. Thinking that his life is all but over, he takes to wandering the cliffs, carrying broken things that he always promised his son he would fix, but never did. They're a sign of his failure, and they keep little Toby close. And then he meets the thief of broken toys, and everything begins to change..."

The Ginger Nuts of Horror website has a tagline "The Heart and Soul of Horror", I have always believed that horror once you scrape past the dead skin of the most simplistic stories that are just designed to shock (and there is nothing wrong with those I am a massive fan of these type of stories) horror has always had the power to look at the human condition in ways that allow it more freedom than many other genres.  And The Thief of Broken Toys is a perfect example of this.  Best described as a dark fairy tale, I rank this story alongside Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree for emotional resonance and its ability to make me cry.  


One hundred and forty  pages of sheer awe inspiring writing. I have never read a book that affected me in such profound ways. I found this a difficult read emotionally being a father, so I don't know how easy this was for Tim to write. You can feel the father's pain and despair on every page of the book. I just wanted to find him  and give him a big hug. 

"Rick's girlfriend from years ago was dead. Murdered. Buried. Or was she? Who was the girl he'd seen at the motorway services? Why was he so sure he knew her? And who had started calling him in the night ... whispering his dead girlfriend's name? In the world of the Mesmer, 'alive' and 'dead' are ambiguous ... the only certainty is pain. And when Rick enters that world he must confront everything he has ever held true, all those comfortable and naive beliefs, if he wants to gets out alive."

I'll be honest here, this isn't Tim's best book, however it is the book that set me on a 22 year relationship with an author who constantly excites me, and makes me eager for the their next book.  Yes it suffers from a few "first novel" problems, there might be a few too many point of view changes, and some better editing and tightening up of the narrative would have helped.  Although I have only ever read the first edition of this book and Tim did republish it few years back so some of the editing issues might have been addressed.  Nevertheless there was enough seeds of Tim's potential to be a an amazing writing in this bleak and dark novel to keep me hooked. 

"A gripping, terrifying road trip through the heat of the post-apocalyptic American desert from the author of Netflix’s The Silence. This action-packed and thought-provoking eco-nightmare will appeal to fans of Benjamin Percy, Christopher Golden and Josh Malerman.

With global warming out of control, large swathes of North America have been struck by famine and drought and are now known as the Desert. A young woman sets out across this dry, hostile landscape, gradually building an arcane apparatus she believes will bring rain to the parched earth.

Jesse lives alone, far from civilization. Once, he too made rain, but he stopped when his abilities caused fatalities, bringing down not just rain but scorpions, strange snakes and spiders. When his daughter Ash inherited this tainted gift, Jesse did his best to stop her. His attempt went tragically wrong, and he believes himself responsible for her death.
​
But now his estranged wife Karina brings news that Ash is still alive. And she’s rainmaking again. Terrified of what she might bring down upon the desperate communities of the Desert, they set out to find her. But Jesse and Karina are not the only ones looking for Ash. As the storms she conjures become more violent and deadly, some follow her seeking hope. And one is hungry for revenge."


This book is simply brilliant 

"a spectacular ending to a brilliant novel, utterly cinematic and bombastic in its scope and delivery. Lebbon may have just produced the best finale of his career so far​"

Read my full review of The Last Storm here