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Some people are just magnets for trouble and Dylan Dog is definitely one of them, thankfully I suppose, as otherwise there wouldn't be an adventure for us every month. It wouldn't be entirely correct then to say that what happens in Il sonno della ragione (The Dream of Reason) is the strangest thing to happen to him (you need only look back at Dylan Dog 153 - La strada verso il nulla for example), but with the Edvard Munch inspired cover (why not Goya?) you have to consider that there is something in Il sonno della ragione that pushes him to the limit this time. It all starts when Dylan discovers an extremely thin entirely naked woman lying in an alley close to his home. It looks like a case of a drug overdose, but something strange passes through Dylan when he lifts her up to take her to the hospital. Even stranger is what Dr Oldbright discovers when the woman is put through a CT scan. The entire left hemisphere of her brain has been removed, and not recently either. As wel...

The original story for Dylan Dog 153, La strada verso il nulla (The Road to Nowhere), was developed by Italian crime writer Carlo Lucarelli ( Commissario De Luca ), the final script adapted by the creator of the series, Tiziano Sclavi. It's a classic horror tale, following the logic of a nightmare that feels impossible to escape from, touching on the usual horror movie references, but fully retaining the character of Dylan Dog with a self-referential tone not uncommon in Sclavi’s series. It's a classic Dylan Dog story, working in multiple levels, dark and reflective, touching and humorous, recognising the conventions and playing with them, and it's brilliantly illustrated. Dylan has just been dumped by his latest girlfriend, Louanne, despite Dylan believing they have had an ideal relationship for the whole month they were together (the maximum allotted time for a romantic relationship in this monthly series). It's an acrimonious breakup, the end of the road for them as...

The first novel in Carlo Lucarelli's Commissioner De Luca series is set during a very significant period, and it's undoubtedly something that contributes to its particular mood and character, or perhaps I should say that Lucarelli succeeds in establishing that particular character of a police murder investigation that takes place in April 1945, in the dying days of the war that precipitate the fall of Mussolini's Republic of Salò. It's not a political thriller, even if many of the characters are of necessity connected to the government, but it's also more than just background colour, the period and the politics making any murder investigation that involves an official just that little more difficult and dangerous. Indeed Carta bianca opers with commissioner De Luca finding himself having to duck as a grenade attack carried out on a funeral procession as he makes his way to a crime scene. Only recently transferred to political police headquarters of the Questore in R...

It doesn't necessarily have to, but science-fiction can present us with new ways of viewing who we are as people and as a society right now, how we confront genuine issues that are around us today, how we respond to changes and consider where that might take us in the future. Traditionally, that often that involves our relationship with technology, a reality that seems to be becoming more science-fiction-like every day. There are many innovative ways of exploring that subject and, as a black writer writing about a family of Nigerian origin, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor definitely takes an interesting and unusual approach to those themes in Death of the Author . What is really unusual in her approach to SF is that the futuristic science-fiction appears a side issue to the main story set in a more familiar reality only slightly more advanced than the present day. That's a style more often employed in the genre of fantasy, where they want to keep one foot in...

The focus of Ed McBain's take on crime in Guns is, unsurprisingly, on guns. You can look at the logistics of carrying out a hold-up on a New York liquor store in a number of ways and Colley has been weighting the options up. The fact that it's in the middle of an August heatwave could play a part in how things play out, he's a little superstitious that it's the thirteenth job he has worked on with Jocko and their driver Teddy, but the one factor that is inevitably going to be the most significant on this or any job is the use of guns. But Colley trusts these guys and, after all, they even gifted him with the gun he carries after being released from prison, so despite his reservations outside the store, Colley is in. He's right to be worried though because the thing with guns is, while it gives you enormous power and control, what happens when someone else in the liquor store also has a gun? And what if it's two cops holding guns? The first 30 or so pages of Gun...

It's not unusual for a PI crime thriller to open with the discovery a dead body, but Where There’s Smoke is unusual in that it opens with the absence of a dead body. To be accurate, the corpse of Anthony Gibson has been taken from Abner Boone’s funeral parlour. Abner isn't keen on reporting the disappearance - it wouldn't be good for business - and he hope that if it's found quickly before the funeral, he can avoid telling the family of the loss. To that end he employs former police lieutenant, Benjamin Smoke to help him out. Smoke is 48 but retired from police, unsatisfied that he has never had a really difficult case to solve, everything has been routine, he has never come across anything that resembles a perfect crime. This one however intrigues him enough to want to look into it a little bit further, and inevitably the more he finds out the more odd and complicated it looks. The deceased's son suspects that the road accident that killed Anthony is murder as Ton...