To The Last Page

New life forms The first part of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy manages to present a vaguely unsettling new spin on what amounts to a familiar SF situation where a group of explorers face unknown dangers in a hostile alien environment. Just to raise the tensions, the volunteers are aware that they are not the first explorers of Area X either. This, we are told, is the twelfth expedition (but you'll soon find that you can take nothing as written in Annihilation ), the previous expeditions having ended in rather strange and inconclusive terms, with scientists and investigators wandering off, disappearing or committing suicide. What's strange about the alien environment of Area X however is that it appears to be an area of natural wilderness on Earth. In fact, Annihilation initially bears more than a passing resemblance to Andrei Tarkovsky's remarkable and influential film Stalker , but only as a jumping off point. In contrast to Tarkovsky's poetical allegor...

Holy vampires! I would imagine that it's difficult for any writer to find any new spin on vampire lore, but Marcus Sedgwick has a fair go at it in Love Like Blood . He not only finds two new ways of looking at the subject that consider arcane aspects of the love of blood and the drinking of it from a scientific and a religious perspective, but he ties them together well and with some conviction. More importantly however, Sedgwick creates a thoroughly delicious horror-thriller that is never short on new twists and escalating developments. The scientific context of the study of blood, its properties and various mysterious practices associated with it, comes from the character at the centre of the book. Charles Jackson is a doctor, a consultant in matters related to blood diseases, but specifically on the subject of haemophilia. And interest in blood, the love of blood and love as blood all come together in 1951 when Charles encounters a beautiful American student in Paris who is writ...