On a top-secret dive into the Pacific Ocean’s deepest canyon, Jonas Taylor found himself face-to-face with the largest and most ferocious predator in the history of the animal kingdom. The sole survivor of the mission, Taylor is haunted by what he’s sure he saw but still can’t prove exists-Carcharodon megalodon, the massive mother of the great white shark. The average prehistoric Meg weighs in at twenty tons and could tear apart a Tyrannosaurus rex in seconds.Written off as a crackpot suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Taylor refuses to forget the depths that nearly cost him his life. With a PhD in paleontology under his belt, Taylor spends years theorizing, lecturing, and writing about the possibility that Meg still feeds at the deepest levels of the sea. But it takes an old friend in need to get him to return to the water, and a hotshot female submarine pilot to dare him back into a high-tech miniature sub.Diving deeper than he ever has before, Taylor will face terror like he’s never imagined, and what he finds could turn the tides bloody red until the end of time. Occasionally I get lucky and my two main hobbies intersect. It will come as…

In the ultimate battle between evil and evil…only one can win. Four hundred years ago, Benjamin Harwood butchered whoever he saw fit to kill, knowing that sacrificing his murder victims to a demon would keep him safe from eternal punishment. But now, their agreement has been torn in half and the demon is coming for Harwood’s soul, coming to set him to burn.   Preparing for war, Harwood gathers the worst of the worst, the monsters and murderers he calls friends. With this group of damned killers, Harwood must return to the crimes of his past and seek help from his most recent prey: a teenage girl whose family he destroyed, a girl with more reason to loathe him than anyone in his life or death. Only then he can try for a redemption that may be impossible or face a universe of suffering.   But Harwood doesn’t know there is a hole in the floor of the world. And something much worse than the dead is down there… Last year I read Ascent by Luke Walker and really enjoyed his Dante-esque tale of terror in a hellish, trans-dimensional office block. Recently a copy of his latest novel, The Unredeemed…

On the Baltic Sea, no one can hear you scream. Tonight, twelve hundred expectant passengers have joined the booze-cruise between Sweden and Finland. The creaking old ship travels this same route, back and forth, every day of the year. But this trip is going to be different. In the middle of the night the ferry is suddenly cut off from the outside world. There is nowhere to escape. There is no way to contact the mainland. And no one knows who they can trust. Welcome aboard the Baltic Charisma. It has been quite a while since I’ve read any proper stomach-churning horror, so when I heard about Blood Cruise by Mats Strandberg I was immediately sold. Chaos, death and destruction on a booze cruise. What could be better? The premise of the novel is deliciously simple. Hundreds of people are trapped on a slightly dated, rundown cruise liner with a creature who views humanity, and more specifically warm human blood, as a tasty treat. I firmly believe the best horror exists in a vacuum; isolation always ramps up the sense of tension. Once underway, the Baltic Charisma is entirely closed off from the rest of the world. This choice of…

Please note Splinter is the final novel in the Sentinel trilogy. If you haven’t read books one and two in this series, then there is a good chance what follows is going to contain a minor spoiler or two. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. The world is falling apart around Nicholas Hallow. Amid rumours that the Dark Prophets have returned, a deathly gloom pollutes England, unleashing a savage hoard of nightmare creatures. Fighting the tide of evil, Nicholas returns home to Cambridge, where an old ally helps him seek out the mysterious Skurkwife, who could help Nicholas stop Malika and the Prophets for good. Meanwhile, Sam Wilkins unites the Sentinels against the forces of darkness, but with Jessica’s sanity slipping, and Isabel suspicious of her shadowy past, it’s a battle that could cost the Sentinels everything. I’m always a little sad when I get to the last book in a series I’ve really enjoyed. I know that all good things must come to an end, but I’ll miss the characters I’ve grown to like. And so, with a heavy heart, we find ourselves having reached the final book in the Sentinel trilogy. I read the first two books, Sentinel…

Please note Hunted is the second book in The Voices series. If you haven’t read Defender, then it is highly likely this review will contain spoilers. Consider yourself duly warned… The birds are flying. The birds are flocking. The birds know where to find her. One man is driven by a Voice that isn’t his. It’s killing his sanity and wrestling with it over and over like a jackal with a bone. He has one goal. To find the girl with a Voice like his own. She has no one to defend her now. The hunt is on. But in an Inn by the sea, a boy with no tongue and no Voice gathers his warriors. Albus must find Lacey … before the Other does. And finish the work his sister, Ruby began. Hunted is the second book in the highly acclaimed Voices series, where the battle between Good and Evil rages on. And on. I’ll begin with an admission. Now I know it might sound a bit weird, but if I could only read one type of story ever again it would mostly likely be some sort of apocalyptic fiction. Over the years I have read many variations of…

Saqqara, Egypt, 1888, and in the booby-trapped tomb of an ancient sorcerer, Rom, a young Egyptologist, makes the discovery of a lifetime: five coffins and an eerie, oversized sarcophagus. But the expedition seems cursed, for after unearthing the mummies, all but Rom die horribly. He faithfully returns to America with his disturbing cargo, continuing by train to Los Angeles, home of his reclusive sponsor. When the train is hijacked by murderous banditos in the Arizona desert, who steal the mummies and flee over the border, Rom – with his benefactor’s rebellious daughter, an orphaned Chinese busboy, and a cold-blooded gunslinger – must ride into Mexico to bring the malevolent mummies back. If only mummies were their biggest problem… Angry Robot have long been one of my favourite imprints; their authors always deliver the most delightfully quirky reads. Based on experience I know that anything they publish is going to be a treat. When it comes to genre fiction, the self-styled Exasperated Automatons consistently deliver books that are hugely entertaining and blissfully easy to lose yourself in.  I’m pleased to report that their latest, Fury From The Tomb by S A Sidor, continues this trend. Take it from me, I work…

Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere. Tamsen Donner must be a witch. That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the pioneers to the brink of madness. They cannot escape the feeling that someone–or something–is stalking them. Whether it was a curse from the beautiful Tamsen, the choice to follow a disastrous experimental route West, or just plain bad luck–the 90 men, women, and children of the Donner Party are at the brink of one of the deadliest and most disastrous western adventures in American history. While the ill-fated group struggles to survive in the treacherous mountain conditions–searing heat that turns the sand into bubbling stew; snows that freeze the oxen where they stand–evil begins to grow around them, and within them. As members of the party begin to disappear, they must ask themselves “What if there is something waiting in the mountains? Something disturbing and diseased…and very hungry?” My favourite horror always has a distinctly psychological flavour. What can I say? I am drawn to fiction that disturbs, The Hunger…

Please note, Zero Day is a direct sequel to The Hatching and Skitter. You really need to be reading them before you read this book. In fact, don’t venture any further than this paragraph if you haven’t. Trust me. You don’t want to miss out on all that gloriously squishy goodness. It’s also likely this review might contain some spoilers. Consider yourself suitably warned! The world is on the brink of apocalypse. Zero Day has come. The only thing more terrifying than millions of spiders is the realization that those spiders work as one. But among the government, there is dissent: do we try to kill all of the spiders, or do we gamble on Professor Guyer’s theory that we need to kill only the queens? For President Stephanie Pilgrim, it’s an easy answer. She’s gone as far as she can—more than two dozen American cities hit with tactical nukes, the country torn asunder—and the only answer is to believe in Professor Guyer. Unfortunately, Ben Broussard and the military men who follow him don’t agree, and Pilgrim, Guyer, and the loyal members of the government have to flee, leaving the question: what’s more dangerous, the spiders or ourselves? I think…

Demons in Manhattan sewers. Enchanted gateways deep within the Bowery. Zombies in Harlem. Old World vampires haunting New Rochelle. Hidden Templar treasures and a hunt for the Grail across the length of a continent. Quasi-immortal Damian Paladin and adventuress Leigh Oswin pit their wits, guns and flying skills against the magical and mundane in 1930s America – and worlds beyond. Sometimes there is nothing better than a bit of good old-fashioned action adventure. Personally, I’ve always found the 1930s to be a wonderfully evocative time period. Without creations like Doc Savage, The Shadow, Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy, we wouldn’t have characters like Indiana Jones, The Rocketeer, Rick O’Connell or Buckaroo Banzai. Walkers in Shadow from Mike Chinn dives deep into the realms of pulpy goodness to give us a new hero to stand beside his fictional forebears. Damian Paladin is an investigator with a particular interest in the supernatural. Though he has achieved a certain amount of fame through his exploits there is still something mysterious about him. His origins are hinted at on a number of points during the book but never revealed in their entirety. All we know is he is long lived and has been battling…

Leon and his younger sister Grace have just moved to London from New York when news of an unidentified plague begins to fill the news. Within a week the virus hits London. People in the streets turn to liquid before their eyes, and what follows is a frantic hunt for a safety which may no longer exist. For the Alex Scarrow fans amongst you, a quick internet search reveals that Plague Land was previously published under the title ReMade. Just thought you should know before you decide if you want to read any further. Leon and Grace are in a difficult place in their lives. They’ve moved from one side of the planet to the other after their parents’divorce. A new country and a new beginning is going to be hard whatever age you are, but especially so if you are still a teen. Everything is just so different from what both of them are used to. Britain isn’t America, and Leon is finding it particularly hard to adjust. Any chance of starting again disappears with a frantic transatlantic phone call from their father. Leon and Grace are at either end of the teenage spectrum. Leon is nearly, but not…

“Snapshot” is the disturbing story of a Silicon Valley adolescent who finds himself threatened by “The Phoenician,” a tattooed thug who possesses a Polaroid Instant Camera that erases memories, snap by snap. A young man takes to the skies to experience his first parachute jump. . . and winds up a castaway on an impossibly solid cloud, a Prospero’s island of roiling vapor that seems animated by a mind of its own in “Aloft.” On a seemingly ordinary day in Boulder, Colorado, the clouds open up in a downpour of nails—splinters of bright crystal that shred the skin of anyone not safely under cover. “Rain” explores this escalating apocalyptic event, as the deluge of nails spreads out across the country and around the world. In “Loaded,” a mall security guard in a coastal Florida town courageously stops a mass shooting and becomes a hero to the modern gun rights movement. But under the glare of the spotlights, his story begins to unravel, taking his sanity with it. When an out-of-control summer blaze approaches the town, he will reach for the gun again and embark on one last day of reckoning. I’ve become a real admirer of Joe Hill’s work over…