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There's a great deal to admire in the works of B. Catling. Leaving aside his work as a sculptor and artist, his fiction has a distinctive character, a tremendously imaginative and original approach to dark fantasy, the writing evoking wondrous visuals. He is at his most expansive in The Vorrh trilogy, but equally creative in shorter works like Earwig . Hollow is another fabulous creation, creating a world so unsettling that it's not one you'd particularly want to revisit in a trilogy. It indeed starts out like a fable, one set in medieval times, where Follett and his group of mercenaries and knights of seemingly Dutch or Flemish origin have been tasked by the High Church with delivering a new oracle to the monastery of the Eastern Gate, Das Kagel, formerly known as the Tower of Babel. The nature of the Blessed Oracle is a little obscure but also somewhat disturbing. A creature of withered limbs, it feeds on the marrow of human bones treated fresh by the whispered sins of ...

There’s clearly a dark European fairy tale element to Brian Catling’s Earwig , one even that may be indebted to a certain type of surreal East European cinema. There’s a sense that classic tropes have been imaginatively reworked for our times, for a modern audience, with a hint of Kafka and dark heart of war colouring if not directly influencing the narrative. There may indeed be more to the work than it being a delightfully Gothic nightmare, but if there is it’s not laid out in any obvious manner. On the surface the situation described in Earwig at least fits a fairy-tale narrative pattern familiar to one extent or another from Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Bluebeard; the story featuring a beautiful young girl who is held captive by an ugly cruel tyrant. Will a prince come and save her? Well, although one bold young blackmarket urchin Pedric recognises the situation as that of a “maiden imprisoned by an ogre”, he’s perhaps not the saviour you might be expecting. No...