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Writing fantasy is one thing and writing fiction on mainstream themes is another, but bringing them together is a trickier proposition. The two don't usually cross over all that well since they have different emotional ranges, with fantasy usually requiring a more heightened state that doesn't always sit comfortably with ordinary human emotions. Jason Gurley has a particularly difficult challenge in Eleanor , since the fantasy side is there as a means to deal with recognisable but complex emotions surrounding death and bereavement. We'd all like to believe that loved ones we have lost could be present somewhere we could reach them. Second chances however, where there is a possibility to correct some of the more cruel twists of fate that take loved ones from us, go beyond common experience and the novel risks entering into the area of wish-fulfilment and sentimentality. The harsh reality of bereavement and the trials of life are keenly felt in the early part of Eleanor , Gur...

There's a very troubling situation described in Travis Mulhauser's Sweetgirl . It doesn't start from the most promising of places, it continues to progressively decline over its relatively short length and it ends badly for most of those concerned. Fortunately, the author has a wonderful direct and deadpan style that balances the tension with some black humour, but there's more to it than that. Despite taking place in the coldest of places with the meanest of characters, there's a surprising human warmth at its heart, and it makes all the difference. It helps that the main character is one you're rooting for, even if it's hard to pin down just exactly what makes 16 year old Percy tick. Her intentions at least are clearly well-meaning even if her actions lead to the an unforeseen amount of horror and destruction. She's out looking for her mother Carletta, a junkie who has fallen off the wagon again. As far as Percy can tell, her mother is likely to be fou...

Leaving aside the US variety for the moment (a different breed entirely), it's fairly evident that all the best continuing UK criminal investigator series have a charismatic lead character and their own particular patch to work on; a cityscape that usually feeds in to a large extent to make the characters who they are. You have all that in Ian Rankin's John Rebus, Denise Mina's Alex Morrow, Val McDermid's Tony Hill and Mark Billingham's Tom Thorne novels. Those books need a little more than that however, and - aside from the nature of their investigations (by no means the least important element) - it helps when there is a good team built up around them. David Mark's DS McAvoy series also clearly has what it takes, even if none of those elements fit the template in the conventional way. Take also the setting of Mark's crime fiction series. It's not London, Glasgow or Edinburgh, it's Hull, but Mark's writing and descriptions of the setting noneth...

The best thing that Simon Morden's Down Station has going for it is that it has no shortage of ideas. The author's writing is functional at best, his characters behaviour is often inconsistent and unusual, their banal dialogue littered with Londoner colloquialisms and they tend to speak without thinking, but the ideas... the ideas are what makes Down Station exceptional. Undoubtedly it's this aspect of his writing that won Morden the Philip K Dick award for the first three novels comprising the Samuil Petrovich trilogy . Even though the same failings in the writing existed there, the author nonetheless managed to come up with some amazingly original and mindblowing ideas that completely rewrote and reconfigured a familiar London into something much more sinister and post-apocalyptic. I haven't read Morden since the first Simon Petrovich Metrozone novel, Equations of Life , but Down Station appears to be very much in the same mould, the author working with the same to...