Turton paints a colourful canvas on the page with deft, short strokes of the pen. The beginning introduces us to a bleak scene, coloured in intrigue, mystery and horror. The flames that licked the leper’s rags only a taste of horror to come … and a scene that gripped me hard with a startling, eerie sense of place. From every cleverly chosen word that pulls you into the depths, further out to sea, Turton’s writing is a true marvel.
Review: The Hand of the Sun King (Pact and Pattern #1) by J. T. Greathouse
Hand of the Sun King is the brand new, erudite voice of an epic fantasy that sweeps you away into an empire reminiscent of ancient China, teeming with culture, doused in war, political intrigue, ancient proverb, philosophy, and a magic system that shares its roots with many others, but strikes out its own path in the genre. It’s for fans of the Poppy War who like their books a little more tame, and a little more hopeful, and for those who loved the Bone Daughter and its dive into traditional intricacies, and intricate plot.
Review: A Strange and Brilliant Light by Eli Lee
A Strange and Brilliant Light in the political, thought-provoking debut from Eli Lee that poses the question of AI in a dystopia where humans are losing their jobs in tech advancement and puts it to several vastly different but interconnected POVs that answer in the way they move through the novel and navigate this new world.
Review: Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb #2) by Tamsyn Muir
Harrow the Ninth is the utterly full of mood sequel that we needed for the Locked Tomb; the prose sings old harmonies from an ancient turntable, the needle screeching in eloquent – but drawn out – screams that dig deep into a sense of misguidance, a sense of the unknown dipped into depression and coated in necromancy. This sequel takes the gothic laboratory in space, seeped in mystery and necromantic theorems and flips it upside down with planet-sized Beasts of the Resurrection, terrorist orgs with nukes, God himself, Necrosaints to the Lord Undying, and bones … lots of bones.
Review: When the Sparrow Falls by Neil Sharpson
When the Sparrow falls is a literary scifi spy thriller in the vein of Altered Carbon meets the Iron Curtain – set in a future where people can have their consciousness digitized. The Triumvirate are, George, Athena and Confucius, three Super AI who rule the world apart from Caspian, a state that rejects all the Machine would offer and places strict law and harsh judgement on anyone using said tech from within their territory; it’s a place which finds comfort in state executions, and the only real escape is a bullet through the head or a needle in the back of the neck … if you can find Yoshik.