For the first time in my life, it turns out that I know someone who knows someone, which is how I managed to get my eager little hands on a pre-release copy of The Winter of the Witch, the final instalment in Katherine Arden’s fantastic Winternight Trilogy. And what a treat it was. Taking everything I loved from The Bear and the Nightingale (and missed most in The Girl in the Tower, namely the chyerti of the forest and the homestead) and ramping it all […]
Everything is awful
Fresh from finding Dr Livingstone in the Congo, newspaperman Henry Stanley sensed an opportunity and so, in 1877, returned to the Congo to travel through its interior and map its giant river. Despite the mouth to the river having been discovered by Portuguese explorers in the 15th century, until then no outsiders had ever attempted to travel further than the coast. Following the initial routes laid out by the slavers who virtually decimated its coastal communities, Stanley accomplished his mission, opening the interior up to […]
Janet sucks, and so did this
Having inhaled a couple of Seanan McGuire’s which had me jonesing for more fairytales, when I came across this, apparently a Modern Fairytale and cult classic as well as having a cover that would have looked at home on any 70s prog rock album, it looked like I’d found my fix. Sadly, it turned out that this was not the kind of book I had been looking for… Supposedly a retelling of the ballad of Tam Lin, Dean apparently saved all of this for the […]
Me? I’d be a Sleeping Beauty. 1000 years of sleep sounds fantastic.
Not yet able to get my hands on Night and Silence but jonesing for more Seanan McGuire, I plumped for Indexing, a book that appears to have initially been written in serialised form in which fairytales meet the X-Files. In a world where fairytales are constantly trying to force their way into real life, twisting people’s lives into forms that fit the narrative with often deadly results, it’s up to the ATI Management Bureau to step in before the ‘mimetic incursions’ can run amok. Each […]