TELEKIN by Andrew Millson

A boy who is a telepath and can communicate with the “fatties” once known as the Fat-ah, and, before the arrival of humankind, the only sentient species on the blood-red planet of Sanguis. Now they are raised for meat on fatty farms. But a few still exist out in the wild – ironically saved from extinction by those who take pleasure in hunting them.

This is real Sci Fi. Read it. It is a stunning story. Now I am waiting for the sequel – there must be one, set on this same unforgettable world. And please, Andrew, make the sequel longer!

Click on the image for the Kindle link.

KINGDOM OF THE GRAIL by Judith Tarr

This book is set in post-Arthurian times when Merlin was still bound by Nimuë’s enchantments and the Grail still something a knight might reasonably set out in quest of. It is a period of which I am very fond, but the only other time I had tried to read a Judith Tarr novel, I gave up after a few pages! I expected the same thing to happen here.

It did not.

Far from it. After the first few pages, I could not put Kingdom of the Grail down.

It is the story of Roland, hero of the epic poem La Chanson de Roland in which Roland dies when he is ambushed by Saracens in the pass of Roncesvalles in the high Pyrenees. Only here he does not die: the story goes on, made wonderful, made mythical, by Judith Tarr’s own brand of magic. Roland, a descendant of Merlin, is both enchanter and shape-shifter – it is in his blood – and warrior – he is Count of the Breton Marches and one of the King’s Companions of Charles the Great of France.

A beautiful woman, Sarissa, appears at the court in France, bearing a magical sword, Durandel, and offers it as a prize. Roland wins it and becomes both her champion and her lover.  But what does she represent? What force, what kingdom, is he now champion of?

As the story moved on, I noticed how much Tarr has been influenced by such writers as Tolkein and Lewis. Everything leads up to a final battle between the forces of Good and Evil that is the best I have come across since the closing chapters of Lord of the Rings and The Last Battle which brings the Narnia books to a close. And her wizard (Merlin = Gandalf) and wicked sorcerer (Ganelon, tool of the Dark Lord) are the real thing, as is her man born to be king (Roland) of the enchanted land whose ancient king (Parsifal) is dying, waiting only for his successor to take up the sword and fight the great war that he himself no longer can – though before that can happen, Roland, not fully trusted yet by Sarissa and blaming her for the nassacre of his friends at Roncesvalles, flees in the form of a hawk and is for a while lost to mankind, his home the wilderness, the wasteland. “He had been human once. He had no particular desire to wear that shape again …”

But this is not mere imitation. It is great writing of the same genre. It has everything, and I cannot recommend it too highly.

THE HAUNTING by Paul Doherty

A ghost story from an author who never fails to please me. I missed this book when it first came out, probably because it was not one of his medieval mysteries. (I never miss those!)

Paul Doherty is a Roman Catholic and his familiarity with the Roman rites frequently displays itself in his stories. This is the first time, though, that the protagonist has been a Catholic priest functioning as a priest.  My favourite Brother Athelstan is, of course, a priest, but he functions as a detective, a sleuth, like Chesterton’s Father Brown.

Father Oliver Grafeld is not a detective. He is an exorcist, albeit a reluctant one. He is sent by his superior, Archbishop Manning, to Candleton Hall, a manor house in the country belonging to an old Catholic family – one of those families that simply ducked when the Reformation occurred under King Henry VIII and carried on century after century as though nothing had happened. Oh yes, they made one small adjustment: they had secret chambers where priests could be concealed built into their great houses.

And thereby hangs a tale. This tale. For the chatelaine of Candleton Hall in the time of Richard III, Henry VII and Henry VIII, was Lady Isabella Seaton, who was neither Catholic nor Protestant, but a Satanist. And when she died, she had no intention of letting any subsequent chatelaine take her place …

Father Oliver and his sister Emma are great characters, but so far as I can tell Paul Doherty has written no sequel to this story. Which is a shame.

FOREVER by Maggie Stiefvater

In my post on the first two books of this wonderful trilogy – Shiver and Linger – I said it was not often that a story moved me to tears these days and quoted Robert Frost’s “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”.

The third book, Forever, did it again.

The last part of Forever is so gripping, so moving, that I defy you to put the book down – or close your Kindle – after you have passed the 80% mark. By this time there are four separate characters you find yourself identifying with or at least rooting for and bowled over by, and each one’s fate hangs in the balance.

When this book opens, it is Grace who is the wolf and Sam the human who has to wait through the long, long winter for the weather to warm up and this wolves who still can to change back into their human form. And keeping Sam company in Beck’s house ( if you don’t know what I am talking about read the first two books) is drop-out rock megastar Cole StClair, who is managing in his own inimitable way to melt the ice-queen Isabel – whose father is organising a hunt with a helicopter :to wipe out these wolves” once and for all!

And Sam is suspected of kidnapping and being complicit in the death of two girls – Grace herself, and her friend Olivia, who had also become a wolf and was found dead in the forest near Beck’s house after shifting back into human form!

I’ve given too much away, but read it anyway. By far the best werewolf series I have ever come across, full of rounded and totally sympathetic characters, and all set in a world I would joyfully return to any time.

SHIVER and LINGER by Maggie Stiefvater

I read Shiver a while back and loved it and meant to say so here, but never got round to it. Then a few days ago I picked up a copy of Linger (the sequel) and was instantly drawn back into that world. It is, if anything, even better. Books don’t often reduce me to tears but the last few pages of this one did. What did Frost say? “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”? Maggie Stiefvater must have had trouble with a soggy exercise book (I always use one first) or a dangerously wet keyboard while she was rounding this story off.

Grace Brisbane is an ordinary girl – boringly ordinary, really, in the opinion of her friends and all who know her. Hard-working and serious – straight-As, never misses school and, as she says of herself she “would never colour outside the line”.

Nothing odd at all, then? Well, she is very independent. She has to be, because her businessman father is almost never at home and her artist mother spends her time in the studio upstairs and goes out in the evenings. Grace looks after herself – and to a large extent looks after them.

In fact, her father is such a bad parent that when Grace was seven he forgot he had her with him in the car and left her locked in it for hours at the height of summer without any air or water. Everyone agreed that she should have died. No one could understand how or why she didn’t. And thereby hangs a tale – this tale! – but I don’t want to give too much away. Suffice it to say that if you like werewolf stories set in the ordinary, everyday world (in this case small-town America) rather than say 19th-century Transylvania, then these two books are just what you’ve been waiting for.

And though it says TEEN on the back, ignore that nonsense. These books are for everyone.

Afterthought: What does TEEN mean anyway? I supposed, mindlessly, that it meant aimed at teenagers, with teenagers as the main characters and the adults in the story mostly brain-dead, nasty or downright evil and living in their own materialistic world. Then I thought, but hold on, 13-year-olds are children, 19-year-olds are adults. What kind of stupid generalisation is this? Then the word “adult” got me thinking again and now I’m beginning to wonder whether TEEN simply means not ADULT – i.e. Trust us: this book contains no explicit sex so you can safely buy it for your teenage niece/nephew (who probably knows more about sex, at least in its more weird and wonderful forms, than you do!).) So there you go.

Second Afterthought: (Just can’t stop today!) I want to make a confession. At first, of course, I identified with Grace. She is the protagonist, she is very sympathetic, and her situation is one we can all imagine ourselves in – at least if urban fantasy forms part of our cultural diet  But gradually, as the second book got under way, I found myself identifying more and more with Isabel (“she-of-the-pointy-boots”), who – if you’ve read only the first book you will know to be a nasty bitch and you will begin to think I must be one too. But I challenge you to finish the second book and not begin to find that while Grace has become a bit of a damsel in distress – through no fault of her own, I hasten to add! – her knight in shining armour is failing dismally (he is busy reading Rilke and Mandelstam, which I must say I find refreshing even if it’s not going to save the situation) and Isabel has completely taken over from Grace as the one you find yourself following avidly from scene to scene. There is a third book out now. Will Isabel dominate it? Or Grace? I was about to say that I’m going to download it to my Kindle, but I’ve just checked and the Kindle edition costs more than the paperback. Totally absurd. Let’s keep cutting down our forests!

LOST VOICES by Sarah Porter

A strange, haunting tale of abused children and of the mermaids those children – all of them girls – become when their lives among humans come to a tragic full stop.

Our heroine is Luce, the daughter of an itinerant mechanic and thief, who travels around with him in his van until his sudden death by drowning. Alone now in the world, she has to go and live with an uncle in Alaska, a drunk who starves her and beats her and finally attempts to rape her on a cliff-top when she is helping him home from the local bar. He fails only because he is so drunk, but leaves her there on the icy ground and staggers off into the distance.

She falls into the sea. And regains consciousness to find she is a mermaid, immensely strong, stunningly beautiful, impervious to the cold, and possessed of a voice that lures men to their doom.

The mermaids there off the coast of Alaska have a queen, Caterina, who befriends Luce and teaches her their ways. Ways which include the destruction of ships and the drowning of humans – those repulsive creatures who once made their lives so unbearable. When they lure a ship onto the rocks, everyone on board must die, or the world will learn of their existence and men will come hunting and catching and killing them.

But Luce is unhappy with this. Perhaps the reason she alone among the mermaids has a conscience is that her own father died when the fishing-boat he had found work on was wrecked off this very coast. Were her new friends responsible? But on the other hand, they are her family now, she loves them and feels safe among them, and she has nowhere else to turn.

Then things fall apart, and Luce must grow up. Though she will never age – she is fourteen and will be fourteen for ever in a sense – she does indeed grow up fast. She has to.

Read it. Unless you have solid cement between your ears and a plastic heart you will love it, whatever your age – or sex.

Apparently there is a sequel, Waking Storms, due out in July. I can’t wait!

THE WITCH OF BALINTORE by James Munro

I have just noticed that James Munro’s The Witch of Balintore is available on Kindle – HERE – so I am posting a review of it that I wrote for MedievalMysteries.com a while back

It is – yes – basically, a medieval mystery, and the story is set in Easter Ross, which is the area immediately to the south of the Dornoch Firth (in the north east of Scotland – there should be a map!), while the first and last chapters take place in London and act as a kind of frame. In the opening chapter we meet Mariana, the narrator and heroine (a good idea if you come to this novel first, as I did, without having read any other Mariana stories) in the company of the demanding and self-indulgent Princess Joan, mother of the young King Richard.

Mariana – Lady Marian MacElpin – was born and grew up in the south of Spain, where she is known as Doña Mariana de la Manga, but her father was a Scot in exile and this visit to Scotland, which is her first, is partly a result of depression – she is fed up with her life in London, where she has made her home, and needs a break – but also a long-planned search for her roots.

She finds her grandmother, who turns out to be a witch. She befriends a group of “little people” dismissed derisively by the local people as “tinklers” but also superstitiously feared by them as shape-shifters and mermaids. The little people are in fact the “Elps”, and Mariana herself, it transpires, has Elpin blood in her (she has Elpin eyes, everyone says, she swims like a mermaid – and consider her name!)

Then she gets caught up in a mystery involving various foreigners, including Raoul, her ancien amour from Paris, and a murder which “smacks of witchcraft“. The suspects are two young Moorish slaves. As only Mariana speaks their language she is asked to interpret for them, which she does willingly, believing them to be innocent and wanting to help. The interpreting develops, predictably, into a full-scale investigation, in the course of which she falls foul of a certain Brother Arsenius, a Black Friar and Inquisitor, and quite the nastiest piece of work I have come across in a book for a long time – with the possible exception of the Master Executioner’s odious son and apprentice, Kenneth.

But it is the background, the world – so beautifully described – in which the story is set, the people – beings – among whom it takes place, that you remember. There are the Elps, the little people of ancient Nordic tradition with “golden hair and green kirtles”, who inhabit the forests and coasts still, as they always have, though now few in number and the prey of ‘heroic’ hunters like the loathsome Sir Hugh, but also still the object of fear and fantasy – do they shape-shift, for example, do they change into mermaids, or wulcats (wildcats)? There are rumours of the ancient Shelts and of Elpi sheltimen who have inherited the shamanistic culture of the original Shelts and go on shamanic journeys to “sheltiworlds”. There is the Queen of Elphame (Elfhame) herself. There are witches, including Mariana’s grandmother, the Witch of Balintore (whose tale of her trip to America and her terrifying experiences there – in the mid-fourteenth century! – you will never forget.) And there is the wonderful “glaistig” Coll, a kind of water-nymph, caught and enslaved by the brutal Thorfinn Skinner: Coll’s encounter with Raoul, as described by him in a letter to Mariana at the end of the book, is also completely unforgettable.

Tweet

CARNIVAL by M.B.Gilbride

At first glance this novel set in Cartagena, a port in the south-east of Spain (an alternative Spain, not quite the one you and I know and love) seems to be just another “sissy story”.

It is not, believe me.

All right, we have the feminisation of a submissive male at the hands of assorted women – and men – many, though not all, of them taking overt sadistic pleasure in what the poor thing bears (and bares); so I suppose if we must categorise, then it does belong basically to the TG/sissy genre. At the same time though, it is one of the most cross-genre/multi-genre books I have ever read – perhaps because Martin is one of the most complex characters I have ever come across in a work of fiction (or in real life!).

In fact, he is a mass of contradictions.

• He is good, but definitely not virtuous. Good-natured, I suppose I mean. Wanting to help, wanting to please.
• He is tame, but at the same time wild in a way few of us ever are.
• He is timid – yes, a sissy – but with far more courage than anyone else in the book; a “man” who would lay down his life not just for a friend – he has no friends – but for a complete stranger he happens to bump into, literally, while they are both hiding from different pursuers during the Carnival Parade.
• He is a much-abused household skivvy who is also a very professional yoga and aqua-yoga instructor.
• He is as humble as a whipped dog, but with something of the super-hero deep down inside him, and he knows it.

And unlike the poor wimp Pablo (the one he bumps into when they are both hiding in terror during the Carnival procession) Martin has a dream.

This novel was apparently first published under the title Sea Change, which was appropriate (though I prefer Carnival) because Martin’s own dream is to be a mermaid.

I am not going to tell you whether his dream comes true, but I will tell you that this is a world in which mermaids exist. All right, some are girls wearing plastic tails. (I want to try that some time!) But others are girls who have been operated on, turned into mermaids. (This is a theme Gilbride seems to have a bit of a fixation with – it comes up even more dramatically in his story The Rose of Harlow.) And then there are real mermaids – yes, real mermaids. (The result of genetic engineering? Or imports from an alien aquatic world? The story does turn into something distinctly SF at certain points – which Gilbride would interpret as Speculative Fantasy. Well, I did tell you it is cross-genre.)

Another thing: I have referred to Martin here in this review always as “he”, but only because it is difficult to contrive the switch from “he” to “she” in the course of a brief review. Anyone reading the book, however, will definitely be thinking of the protagonist as feminine, as the heroine of the story, long before the author in fact makes the switch from “he” to “she” and “him” to “her”.

One for adults then, but if you are an Adult, don’t miss it!

RIVER MARKED by Patricia Briggs

Number six in the urban fantasy series featuring Mercy Thompson, Walker. And a walker, if I’ve got it right (and I should have, after reading all six of these stories!) is a Native American shape-shifter, presumably based on the Navajo legend of the “skinwalker”; but the skinwalker was evil through and through whereas the walkers in Patricia Briggs’ books are either definitely among the good guys or at their worst amoral, as a cat (or any animal) is amoral. They are also very different from the werewolves, who, like the vampires, are of European descent – and like the vampires virtually immortal.

This is the first one in the series, though, where vampires get hardly a mention, and only one werewolf plays any significant part – Mercy’s mate/husband, Adam, who is there  (but actually rather in the way much of the time) because they are on their honeymoon.

No, here it is all Native American medicine men/sorcerers, and shape-shifters who, like Mercy, are walkers and change shape easily and almost instantly, unlike the poor werewolves.

But she is still the only coyote. Apart, that is, from Coyote himself. For here we are presented with an original interpretation of Plato’s Theory of Forms. Coyote (with a capital C) is the Form of which all coyotes are instances, just as Bear is the Form of which all bears are instances: godlike figures who, it is hinted, lay behind the animal-headed gods of antiquity both in America and in Egypt and India.

But I mustn’t tell you too much. Simply that people, whole families, are dying or simply disappearing in or near the Columbia River, precisely where Mercy and Adam are honeymooning. The FBI think it is the work of an elusive serial-killer. Mercy soon realises that the killer is an ancient evil resurrected in the black depths of the swirling water . And only she, it transpires, can stop it.

One thing I want to mention here. I have read many werewolf books and until now it has never, for some reason, struck me how totally un-PC, unfeminist, the whole concept of the alpha male is: he is aggressively – offensively even – dominating and protective, and yet she – Mercy, in this case – laps it up. Now, I am speaking of the alpha male werewolf, but of course it applies to the alpha male man too. And it is quite certain that the young or youngish females with very kick-ass attitudes whom form the vast majority of the readers of such books, are going to prefer the alpha male to the slender and submissive wimp, nerd, sissy or other outsider when it comes to selecting their own mate.

I notice, though, that there is a new series by the same author, Patricia Briggs, the Alpha and Omega books, which feature an omega alongside some of the characters from the present series. Wondering what exactly an omega was – from the context it seemed to be a female who was not instictively submissive to the alpha males, I surfed a bit and found a quiz “What Kind of Wolf Are You?” so I did it and discovered I am an omega! Look -

What wolf are you? Your Result: Omega Male/Female   you are the omaega male/female you tend to be a loner and you have only a couple close friends.you prefer to be alone . and you are not much of a follower.
Beta Male
Beta Female
Regular Wolf
Alpha Female
Alpha male
What wolf are you? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Try it for yourself.
The first book in the “Alpha and Omega” series is called Cry Wolf, and as you can imagine, after discovering that I am an omega I am raring to read it.

ONE WINTER’S DAY IN JUNE by Stephen J Willis

I came across this very original short story  on the ShortFiction.co.uk site. It has a fascinating Past Lives theme.

ONE WINTER’S DAY IN JUNE by Stephen J Willis