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It seems like there are a lot of books dealing with fairies and the little folk recently, but few of them in my experience have put the subject to good use or have had anything original to add to the mythology. Alison Littlewood's The Hidden People , for example, comes across as a little too well researched from traditional folk stories of the past, with a debt owed to Wuthering Heights  and gothic fiction that makes it feel very old-fashioned, it as if it could have been written 100 years ago. On the other hand, Laurence Donaghy's comic/horror take on Folk'd  trilogy ambitiously tied the activities of the little folk to ancient Irish mythology and connected it all up to the present day by tapping into real-life family concerns.  Perhaps it just works better in an Irish situation, but the truth is that what really makes Lisa Carey's handling of subject work so well is in how it similarly ties what goes on above the land with the legends of what lies beneath it. The two ...

As an award-winning writer of fiction for young adults and children, Marcus Sedgwick's books - just to go by the titles, as I haven't read them - seem to have always had a taste for the macabre and the gothic, but his work in adult fiction is also proving to be just as twisted and imaginative. Sedgwick's first work for a more mature readership Love Like Blood (2014) managed to find an original spin on vampire lore, linking it to various Christian rituals in post-war Paris. Rather than cower before the cross, these vampires actually worshipped it. Paris and certain gothic practices are also to the fore in his second work of adult fiction, Mister Memory . The location and the period evoke this quality on their own, set in Belle Epoque Paris in 1899, in the seedy haunts of the brothels, cabarets and pornographer's dens of Pigaille, Montmartre and  the Moulin Rouge. Locked up in the asylum of Salpêtrière is Marcel Després, also known in one of the lesser cabarets as Marcel...

It's initially a little disappointing to find that Of Sand and Malice Made turns out to be not the long awaited follow-up to the first book in Bradley Beaulieu's Song of the Shattered Sands series, but rather a short three-part prequel novella. We will have to wait until February 2017 for Blood upon the Sand 's continuation of the imaginative Arabian fantasy outlined so thrillingly in Twelve Kings , but all is not lost, as Of Sand and Malice Made proves to be a fine reminder of just what was so good about the first book, and it has plenty to recommend in itself. If you haven't read Twelve Kings , Of Sand and Malice Made is actually not a bad place to start. You'll very quickly be introduced to Çeda, a young girl - who appears to be fifteen in this book and nineteen by the time we get to Twelve Kings . Çeda is however already making preparations for her life mission to destroy the Twelve Kings of Sharakhai who she believes are responsible for the death of her mot...

When you dealing with time travel, you don't expect it to be easy to get your head around all the complex comings and goings. There are also a lot of ground rules, variables and paradoxes to address right from the outset. If you go back in time, can you change events and establish a new time line? But what if this new time line prevents time travel back to the past? Can you travel to the future and find out what happens and then go back to change it? It seems like you need to establish a lot of scientific precepts before you even get started on an adventure. Robert Dickinson finds an interesting way to establish the conditions of time travel in a simple and adventurous way in his novel The Tourist , but somehow the novel still seems to become overly complicated and lose direction along the way. The simple part of the time travel conundrum - relatively straightforward at first anyway - is the idea of a time travel tour company. Spens is a tour guide from 2345 who takes holiday-goers...

There's a bit of everything in Michael Russell's The City in Darkness , his third 1930s set novel featuring the Irish Special Branch detective Stefan Gillespie. There's the familiar historical and political element that considers the place of Ireland in Europe and in relation to Britain in this intriguing period. There are connections to be established between the actions of the De Valera government, the growing strength of the IRA, and with the Nazis as the war threatens to engulf wider Europe. At the same time, Russell has his detective become embroiled in an investigation into a series of murders in the beauty spot of Glendalough in Co Wicklow, drawing in some personal elements that have haunted the detective in earlier books. Incredibly, he ties all these elements together remarkably well, extending even further his outlook on the period in this series without the reader needing to have any previous knowledge of the first two books. Following on from the connections to ...