So what happens when you die: become a vampire, zombie or ghost? Or do you get reincarnated, no matter how many years later?

A novel that’s been years in the making, the author takes us to contemporary Italy, where photojournalist Josh Ryder – who works for the Phoenix Foundation, which researches children’s past life regressions – visits an archaeological dig. Josh has regressed before, but now the memory lurches are happening more often and in more detail. In Ancient Rome, he was Julius, who had an affair with Vestal Virgin Sabina, whose punishment was to be buried alive.

Review by Tez Miller

For those of us who were geeks in high school, comparing prom to hell wasn’t much of a stretch. The same can absolutely be said of Maggie Quinn, who has no intention of getting conned into going to prom. She doesn’t have a boyfriend, so that’s not a concern, and her stalwart friends have mocked the dance as much as she has in the past. But as the dance nears, and supernatural danger strikes, all of Maggie’s plans are scattered. Welcome to Rosemary Clement-Moore’s Prom Dates from Hell.

Review by Alana Abbott

Kristopher Reisz’s Unleashed sheds light on the steel city of Birmingham, with its cultural history and blue-collar community. Daniel Morning’s parents are far from rich: they struggle to make ends meet whilst doing everything they can to insure that Daniel and his brothers have a better future…even if it means cheating to get into an Ivy League college.

Review by Tez Miller

I’ll have to post something of a caveat up front: I’ve never read the first installment of the Morningstar Saga, Plague of the Dead. That will have to change pretty soon though, considering the quality of Thunder & Ashes.

The zombie apocalypse has come and gone, and a handful of survivors–some of them ex-military, and one a brilliant female scientist–are fighting to find a cure that will save the world. Yes, the plot isn’t exactly original, but the quality of the writing and the characters manage to elevate Thunder & Ashes above most novels that share this popular plot.

Review by Leah Clarke

In Dead to Me, reformed petty-crime naughty boy and psychometrist Simon Canderous (whose surname probably means something, but I haven’t checked the dictionary yet) works for New York’s Department of Extraordinary Affairs. Psychometry made me think of Kim Wilkins’s Gina Champion series, and the government made me think of Shane Maloney’s Murray Whelan series. But Anton Strout’s Simon Canderous is neither a teenage girl nor a political adviser (and not Australian, for that matter).

Review by Tez Miller

Cat Crawfield would love to kill her father. Literally. After raping her mother, he took off, leaving Cat as a reminder of the evening. Oh, and he’s a vampire, making Cat a weird sort of hybrid: living with but a vampire’s strength and speed. So as a way to get even, she starts hunting vamps, picking them up at clubs and staking them for all they’re worth. Every time she does it, there’s one less monster in the world. But then she meets Bones, a vampire far stronger than any she’s met before. When he threatens to kill her unless she studies under him, she challenges him to a duel of sorts–as the loser, she is forced to train with him, learning to be a better, more effective vampire hunter, ready to take on some of the big marks.

Review by Alana Abbott

A few months ago I read the first three chapters of Jackie Kessler’s Hell’s Belles, but had to put it aside when I got caught up in library books and their due dates. My sieve of a memory left me doubtful of how well I could remember these opening stages when I picked the book up again the other day.

I needn’t have worried. I’m the first to admit that I’m very skeptical. Just because something is a best seller, or comes with gushy fangirlies, that doesn’t mean that it’ll automatically appeal to everyone. But I’m happy to report that this novel did appeal to me.

Review by Tez Miller

This is a collection of short stories by Jeff Vandermeer both tangentially and directly about a fictional fantasy city called Ambergris, noted for its somewhat piratical past, the presence of mysterious and sinister mushroom men and freshwater squid. It is also very, very, very weird and very, very, very surreal. I suppose, broadly, it fits into the general thrust of the urban fantasy movement but it is also a damn sight weirder, more Burroughs than Mieville. One story might be a more conventional fantasy story, another might play with the relationship between fantasy and reality and the other might leave you scratching your head and reaching for the dictionary just so you could read something fully comprehensible for a change.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

The problem I have with anthologies is that the quality of the stories varies greatly, as far as I’ve read. Thus, I am not a big fan. Indeed, the authors in this collection are varied: some of them you know well from various paranormal novels, while others are dipping into the supernatural for the first time (they’re primarily mystery writers, on the cosy side, I think). Instead of judging the collection as a whole, let’s look at the stories individually:

Review by Tez Miller

Kate Daniels is a down-on-her-luck merc who has enough trouble paying the bills that the last thing she needs is taking on a charity case. But when her guardian, a member of a magical group of public defenders known as the Order, is murdered, she’s determined to see the last of her family given justice. In order to do so, she has to play nice with the Order, which she left years ago due to her problems accepting authority. When it turns out that both the People–necromancers who use vampires as spies and assassins when it’s good for business–and the shape-changing members of the Pack may be involved, things quickly move from complicated to delicate. And delicate isn’t a word that anyone would associate with Kate Daniels.

Review by Alana Abbott

The Tower is a supernatural horror story that reworks the traditional haunted house fable. In true demonic fashion Simon Clark takes a fledgling band to a secluded house in Yorkshire and proceeds to terrorize them. This is the kind of book where you don’t think of the participants as characters but a group of victims shuffling along to their demise.

The protagonist is Fisher, the bass player, who at first is only concerned with Fabian, the disruptive presence in the band. Fabian has ambitious plans and it seems nothing will put him off pushing the group towards stardom. It’s decided that the band need a quiet place to rehearse some new songs and a month long house sitting job is secured. However, The Tower has plans of it’s own and Fisher’s concerns suddenly become more tangible than just keeping the band together.

Review by Paul Leahy

Some of the stories have interesting premises, but sabotage themselves with clunky writing or clumsy execution (the first two stories, Adam and Eve Versus the Human Race by Alexander Zelenyj and Waking Finnegan by Joseph Benton are prime examples of this). Other stories have competent but unremarkable writing but tired, clichéd plots–A New Year’s Tale by Dave Bartlett starts off promising, but quickly turns into something extremely similar to The Hills Have Eyes.

There are a few pieces that are quite good. The two opening poems by Guy Belleranti are atmospheric and effective. Unfortunately, the rest of the poetry included in this anthology doesn’t work quite as well. But, it has to be said, revenants aren’t the most inspiring subjects when it comes to poetry.

Review by Leah Clarke

A great follow-up tale to Stolze’s earlier Requiem novel A Hunger like Fire, this time we learn about some new members of Chicago’s undead society. Most of the characters in this book, with two notable exceptions, are members of the Lancea Sanctum Covenant. The two exceptions are “Earth” Baines and Aurora…but I’ll get to them a little later.

Events in A Hunger like Fire have put Solomon Birch, the ranking member of the Lancea Sanctum, in a dangerous position. A few members of the Covenant feel he is no longer fit to lead them and begin planning his removal as Bishop. Deals are made, gossip is whispered, and pawns are set into motion.

This is it, all your Conan stories all in one spot accompanied by an able and long article on the author, a nice long introduction to the world of Hyboria and a smattering of black and white art – both endpieces and plates – to bring some of the old feel of the mystery magazines back in. This is what it says on the tin, a full on compilation of everything Conan behind a nice looking inlaid cover.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

A good urban fantasy can be like a mixed drink. It’s got to have the right flavor—but it’s also got to have a lot of kick. Not so much, of course, that you’ll regret it the next morning. The characters in Mark Henry’s Happy Hour of the Damned might not liken themselves to mixed drinks, but they would certainly appreciate the allusion. Because few zombies appreciate liquor like the heroines in Henry’s novel.

Review by Alana Abbott

These two novels of what will likely be a septology (or more, I believe there’s a prequel coming) of novels by Scott Lynch are a sort of Renaissance fantasy world with more than a passing nod to the Venetian merchant princes of history and the ensemble cast crime movies of the modern age. I would call it ‘Oceans 11, with Wizards’ but that wouldn’t be entirely fair since, while there is magic, it’s rather low key magic for the most part, subtle and sinister rather than ‘Kablooie!’. These first two novels cover the rise, fall, recovery and then fall again of master thief Locke Lamora and his companions, most particularly the educated brute (and Locke’s best friend) Jean Tannen.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Ravens of Avalon is the type of fantasy novel that also falls into the realm of historical fiction. The tale is a sequence of events about the Roman invasion of Britannia, threaded together with a cast of characters focused on Boudica, an Iceni Queen who united Britannia and led a bloody, short rebellion against their Roman invaders.

Having read some of the other “Avalon” novels, I expected certain conventions to remain true to this story. For one, this is a story told from the point-of-view of a priestess from Avalon, the Druid tradition. This alone makes the story different, more colorful to read as you travel back to the time of early civilization, and are able to understand not only what the goals of the characters are about, but what life might have been like during those ancient times.

When I say that I’ve read a lot of fantasy novels over the years, I mean that there was a time in my life where I was reading about the equivalent of a book a day. As a lightning fast reader, I’ve read everything from C.S. Friedman, Margaret Weiss and Tracey Hickman to Terry Brooks, R.A. Salvatore, Melanie Rawn and Tad Williams. Included in that bucket of work, were novels I picked based on their size and whether or not there were several books that followed in a series. After a while, I got burnt out on traditional fantasy (with the exception of a few authors) simply because I got tired of the formula. A waif-like character (male or female) ends up saving the world time and time again, but not before becoming ungodly powerful in the way that only fantasy characters can.

A sorceress with attitude manages to get her hands on a powerful artifact, which suddenly makes her the most popular (read: most hunted) girl in town. It sound like a great set up, right? That’s how Raine Benares begins her adventures in Magic Lost, Trouble Found, narrating the entire adventure with wry commentary and snarky remarks. For fans of contemporary fantasy, the narration style is a familiar one. Throw it into a high fantasy setting where the narrator is an elven seeker–a sorceress who finds things–and it makes for an odd combination.

Review by Alana Abbott

Dragon of the Mangroves takes place during the Second World War and traces the fate of two Japanese soldiers during the retreat of the Imperial Army from Burma under assault by British forces including the Gurkhas and Indian Army. Second Lieutent Yoshihisi Suma is in charge of a group of ‘tankettes’ about to be committed to a suicidal defence when he gets a sudden reprieve, a special mission to head a rescue mission to retrieve retreating soldiers from a defeat on an island/peninsula surrounded by mangrove swamp. Meanwhile private Minoru Kasuga, a machine gunner, is part of that retreat, forced back by the ferocious British attack the situation for him and the troops around him gets more and more desperate and as they try to escape the troops become prey to a terrible predatory creature of the mangrove swamps, the salt water crocodile.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough