I’ve been a connoisseur of all things terrifying and fantastical since I was 5, and so scared of my Baba Yaga book downstairs I couldn’t sleep. I pursued the delicious fear of a well-written monster through my teens and into adulthood but found that so many books within the horror and fantasy genres are aimed at younger readers. So I wrote the books I wanted to read. I’d always planned to write, but it was developing extreme anxiety that inspired me to nurture my creative side and finally do it. I was having terrible nightmares at the time, and these awful dreams became the central scenes of my novels.
I wrote...
Darkly Dreaming: Book 1 of the Darkly Vampire Trilogy
Darkly Dreaming is for readers who savour rich characters and carefully crafted writing; it’s as much about friendship as it is about vampires. It’s been accused of giving people ‘the feels’. Rae and her best friend Layla have just moved back in together after their marriages ended. They’re busy being violently happy, pretending everything is fine. They stumble into a party infested with vampires.
Infected with the vampire virus, which mutates and distorts their DNA, Rae, and Layla struggle to come to terms with losing their humanity and their old lives, and coming to terms with their strange new gifts. They should be wary in a Pride rife with jealousies and ancient rivalries. They aren’t safe, but will they recognise the threats in time?
In her final novel of the Mayfair Witch Trilogy, Anne Rice really seduced me with the concept of the sympathetic monster. Ash, her Taltos character is inhuman, but so pure and love-filled, I understood that an inhuman character can be used to highlight humanity’s greatest strengths. Around the creation of her creatures, she wove a history of fiction and legend and Celtic history that I found fascinating. I read this book almost thirty years ago, and it’s still one of those books that I hark back to as inspiration.
SOON TO BE A MAJOR TV SHOW, FROM THE NETWORK BEHIND THE WALKING DEAD
'[W]hen I found Rice's work I absolutely loved how she took that genre and (...) made [it] feel so contemporary and relevant' Sarah Pinborough, bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes
'[Rice wrote] in the great tradition of the gothic' Ramsey Campbell, bestselling author of The Hungry Moon
The Mayfair Witches face an unimaginable new threat: the Taltos - the giant race gifted with preternatural knowledge, who breed in minutes and live for centuries. The race that spawned the monster-innocent Lasher, who gave the witches their power…
Deborah Harkness’s All Soul’s Trilogy was the first time I found an Urban Fantasy novel that featured a more mature heroine, which I loved. I missed being able to lose myself in another world as I got older myself, and found it harder to relate to teenage characters. I savoured Deborah’s strong female characters, women who won’t give up who they are, or their morals to please their man, even if he is a centuries-old vampire who is stuck in his ways. I loved the rich writing, which took the time to create believable characters rather than just rushing from adventure to the next alpha male. High-quality, literary writing in dark fantasy is a real treat.
In this tale of passion and obsession, Diana Bishop, a young scholar and a descendant of witches, discovers a long-lost and enchanted alchemical manuscript, Ashmole 782, deep in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Its reappearance summons a fantastical underworld, which she navigates with her leading man, vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont.
Writing at its absolute finest. I adore all the Robin Hobb novels. I revere all her characters, her world building, and her carefully traced storylines she never loses, and never labours. But the Fool, the Fool was my favourite. Ambiguous, indefinable, irresistible, brave, beautiful, and self-sacrificing. The Fool's Assassin is so beautifully crafted from Robin’s words, dancing out from the page in mischief, magic, and melancholy, that you are left feeling like you knew them.
'Fantasy as it ought to be written' George R.R. Martin
Tom Badgerlock has been living peaceably in the manor house at Withywoods with his beloved wife Molly these many years, the estate a reward to his family for loyal service to the crown.
But behind the facade of respectable middle-age lies a turbulent and violent past. For Tom Badgerlock is actually FitzChivalry Farseer, bastard scion of the Farseer line, convicted user of Beast-magic, and assassin. A man who has risked much for his king and lost more...
On a shelf in his den sits a triptych carved in memory stone…
Evocative, believable, beautifully written. Dark Fantasy at its finest; Megan’s characters will resonate with anyone who feels a bit different, like they don’t fit in with everyone else. Megan explores all this can mean in her trilogy, the good, the bad, and the downright terrifying. Her world is richly written, you can smell the tangy woodfires, and feel the biting cold.
A voyage of discovery into the life of a remote aboriginal community in the Siberian Arctic, where the reindeer has been a part of daily life since Palaeolithic times.
The Reindeer People is the first in a series of reissues of Megan Lindholm's (Robin Hobb) classic backlist titles. It is set in the harsh wilderness of a prehistoric North America, and tells the story of a tribe of nomads and hunters as they try to survive, battling against enemy tribes, marauding packs of wolves and the very land itself.
Living on the outskirts of the tribe Tillu was happy spending…
The Historian is brilliantly brooding. Kostova builds a wonderfully gothic atmosphere of menace using a combination of history and legend to make her fiction utterly believable. The novel is fascinating, delving behind the iron curtain as it does. Her characters are strong and step right out of the page for the reader, so you are completely gripped by their story throughout.
Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters addressed ominously to 'My dear and unfortunate successor'. Her discovery plunges her into a world she never dreamed of - a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an evil hidden in the depths of history. In those few quiet moments, she unwittingly assumes a quest she will discover is her birthright - a hunt for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of…
Dr Dee has designs for a British Empire that will dominate the world for ages to come ushering in Revelation, and with the aegis of the Angels, he has the power to make it a reality.
But, two elements are missing, and through blackmail and occult ritual, infamous swordswoman Captain Lament Evyngar and her giant Dutch comrade are forced to journey to the war-ravaged Spanish Netherlands on a quest that will reveal the truth about strange entities that use humans to fight out their eternal conflicts and in doing so alter Lament and the course of history forever.
Infamous swordswoman Captain Lament Evyngar awaits execution in the Tower of London, charged with heresy and attempted regicide, but all is not as it seems. Unwittingly entangled in the schemes of the Angels, she recounts her tale to the Queen's sorcerer, Dr Dee, who is more than a little responsible for her predicament.
Dr Dee has designs for a British Empire that will dominate the world for ages to come, and with the aegis of the Angels, he has the power to make it a reality. But, two elements are missing, and through blackmail and occult ritual, Lament and her…
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