Early in Paul Cornell’s psychological horror novel Chalk (Tor, £14.50), something appalling happens to Andrew Waggoner, a mild-mannered schoolboy who suffers continual bullying. After a Halloween disco he’s attacked by five fellow pupils who drag him into nearby woods, tie him to a tree and mutilate him. Later that night, his tortured psyche gives birth to a Hyde-like alter ego that proceeds to do terrible things; as he tells Andrew: “You can only be healed when your revenge is complete.” What follows, seen through the eyes of the book’s unreliable narrator, is the story of Waggoner’s revenge. The setting is the West Country in the 1980s, and Cornell brilliantly delineates not only the insular milieu of rural England but the brutal materialism of Thatcher’s Britain, in a slow-building novel of retribution and cycles of abuse. Cornell has described Chalk as not being about the triumph of a victimised martyr but about “how the bullied often become the bullies, and a desperate attempt to escape that”. Superb.
Jen Williams’s fourth novel proves that, with sufficient literary flair and psychological insight, even the corpse of a subgenre as moribund as heroic fantasy can be brought back from the dead. The Ninth Rain (Headline, £14.99) is far more than the sum of its cliched parts, which include a fallen empire, a quest, monsters, magic and three disparate characters thrown together by fate. These are the ebullient adventurer Lady Vincenza de Grazon, searching for ancient artefacts; Noon, a naive witch on the run from the powers-that-be for the crime of possessing supernatural ability; and Tormalin the Oathless, a crass but caring mercenary more than a little handy with a sword. Williams portrays her characters as flawed but humane, propels the plot with expert pace, and excels at eldritch world-building.
Alastair Reynolds’ short novel
Slow Bullets (Gollancz, £12.99) packs a lot into its 182 pages: far-future warfare, a slowly failing starship and a complex first-person narrator, all wrapped up in a thoughtful, fast-paced plot. Scur is a soldier fighting for the Peripheral Systems in the long war against the Central Worlds. When the war ends, she is captured by an opponent who tortures her and leaves her for dead. Awakening much later, she finds herself aboard the “skipship” Caprice, taking war criminals to the planet of Tottori. But a “skip” that should have taken months has thrust the Caprice hundreds of years into the future, and Scur and her fellow prisoners are stranded on the malfunctioning starship. When she finds that her torturer is also aboard the ship, the scene is set for a rousing drama of revenge – which, in a moving finale, Reynolds subverts with a wonderfully compassionate resolution.
Vince and Angela, in Relics by Tim Lebbon (Titan Books, £7.99), are just a typical liberal urban couple, she a US academic whose specialism is criminology, he a dealer in the arcane. But just how arcane is the question that drives this slow-burning, atmospheric horror-thriller set in contemporary London. Vince buys and sells the relics of creatures thought to be mythical, and when he goes missing, leaving Angela a cryptic note (“Sorry. Love you. Goodbye”), she uses her knowledge of crime and her contacts in the London underworld in an attempt to find him. On the way, she makes the acquaintance of sadistic gang boss Frederick Meloy and finds herself accused of multiple murder. Lebbon is a master of drip-feeding horror and suspense, and in Angela and Vince he has created a believable couple whose complex entanglement with forces far greater than themselves propels the reader towards a startling climax.
What must be every teacher’s nightmare comes true in James Brogden’s fourth novel, Hekla’s Children (Titan, £7.99). When Nathan Brookes supervises a school trip to a west Midlands nature reserve, four of his pupils vanish – only for one of them to turn up the following day, hysterical and with no memory of what happened to her or her friends.
Ten years later, Brookes – ravaged by self-pity and guilt and no longer a teacher – suffers nightmare visions of the lost trio after the mummified body of a bronze age warrior is discovered close to where they vanished. Alarmingly, the body appears to have undergone the same orthopaedic surgery procedure as had one of the missing boys. When the surviving pupil persuades archaeologists that the body must be reburied to save the world from a bronze age monster known as Afaugh, Brookes finds himself in a life-or-death battle of redemption. Brogden has crafted a visceral, seat-of-the-pants thriller that successfully shuttles between a dark and terrifying bronze age and contemporary Britain.
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