Review: Star Trek – Book of Opposites / Written by: David Borgenicht / Publisher: Quirk Books / Release date: November 6th (UK)

Review by Simon Besson (age 41):

The latest offering from prolific author and worst-case scenario survivalist, David Borgenicht is a wonderful little oddity in the form of a pre-school educational book teaching children a number of different words and their opposites by using visual examples from none other than classic episodes of Star Trek.

Anyone with kids will be familiar with the format of this chunky book with its dozen or so rip-proof cardboard pages, primary colour panels and large, clear text but it’s the context that sets this apart from the normal ‘Apple = Red’ type children’s book that we are so used to with glossily reproduced stills from the William Shatner era illustrating words like ‘calm’ (close up of Dr Spock’s stoical features) opposite ‘surprised’ (Captain Kirk frozen in camp-shocked pose). Other word combinations include appear/disappear, empty/full, big/little and Star Trek fans will have lots of fun naming which episodes the accompanying pictures are taken from.

This is first and foremost a children’s book and as such there is nothing offensive or scary in it to be concerned about but it is also a lovingly reproduced tribute by a super-fan for other fans and if it subconsciously cements Star Trek into the awareness of a whole new generation of fans then all the better.

There is no other children’s book like this and there is no other Star Trek book like this – it is a joy for everyone.

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Review by Abigail Besson (age 4):

I love ‘Star Trek – Book of Opposites’. It is really really funny and I love the pictures.

My favourite page is the alien with all the hair and the mean lady.

I was not scared and this is good for children to learn new words.

I’ll admit right off the bat (pun intended) that this book was never on my radar. I didn’t know it existed. It was the title that caught my eye when I saw it advertised on an Amazon linked banner ad featured prominently on Harry Knowles’s Ain’t It Cool News web site during one of my daily visits.

The title “The Boy Who Loved Batman” struck an instant chord. Ask anybody who knows me. Since my late mother bought me a pack containing a slab of pink toxic bubble gum that was inedible by any conventional standards and accompanied by 5 illustrated cards depicting the adventures of a guy in tights and black scalloped cape way back in 1966 – I was that boy. All through school, while the other kids chose their football teams to follow, I stayed in Gotham City with Batman. Comic books were a fad to many, a way of life to a few and I was one of those few. Of course, being a Batman fan and having the first name Robin led to years of school yard taunts.

Through the Adam West years, the reinvention by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams taking him to his dark and gothic roots in the early seventies, the groundbreaking years of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Brian Bolland’s Killing Joke and beyond. Tim Burton, not so much Joel Schumacher, but Christopher Nolan for sure – and the Animated Series. Broken Bat, Knightfall, Cataclysm, No Man’s Land. I read them all. Batman died, Batman was lost in time and finally, he’s back… I was there and still am. So who’s this other boy who loved Batman?

The author Michael Uslan is one of us who did good, and this is his autobiography. According to the blurb on the cover, this memoir is the true story of how a comics obsessed kid conquered Hollywood to bring the Dark Knight to the silver screen.

But unusually for a cover blurb – that’s an understatement. This book is more – so much more.

It’s the inspirational story of Michael Uslan’s journey from an avid reader of comic books in his formative years, and how despite qualifying as an attorney, he never wavered from following his dream. Like many Batman fans, myself included, he soon tired of the character being eternally identified with the comedic and campy Batman series of the mid sixties and resolved, at a young age, to do something about it. He was determined that the “Pow, Wham, Thwap” days were over and he made it his mission to show the public what Batman really could be.

The book is packed with heart warming stories and recollections that bring a flood of nostalgia in waves as the author has been through what we all went through in our childhood. The buying of Marvel and D.C. Comic books back in the day. The collecting and eventually amassing a decent pile followed by the inevitable the dreaded “clear outs” by well meaning mothers who just didn’t “get it”. This stuff was our culture – and I never did forgive my mother for throwing away my prized Spider-Man 82 in 1970, which featured the return of Electro for the first time since Spider-Man Annual 1 in 1964. The desperate deals where we promised to keep your collection tidy (and out of sight) to spare the emotional wrench of losing your precious trove of literature while you were at school. (Come on – we’ve ALL been there).

Except that Uslan took it further – he took his love for the medium and turned it into a successful and lucrative career. To us comics geeks, he’s nothing less than a real-life super hero. Entering college, he became the student who actually taught an accredited course in comic books. This opened doors for him with D.C. Comics who later employed him to write not only The Shadow, but also his dream job of scripting Batman.

You’d think that this would be enough, but Uslan was nowhere near finished. Acquiring the film rights to Batman, he followed his dream of bringing the darker, grittier Batman to the screen with the relentless tenacity of a terminator chasing down Sarah Connor, thus restoring his hero’s dignity.

Uslan has executive produced ALL the Batman movies since Michael Keaton took the role in 1989, and there’s a great story telling his reaction at the casting of “a comedian” in the role as The Darknight Detective after his casting coup of Jack Nicholson as the Joker. In retrospect, Tim Burton’s counter arguments were insightful and completely logical. Curiously, though understandably, the Schumacher films are glossed over in a paragraph and never actually specifically named – but we know exactly what he’s talking about.

Throughout the 250 plus pages, Uslan comes across as a likeable “one of us” and I recommend his book not only as a memoir of a man who chased and attained his dream, but it’s also an insider’s look at how the comic book industry and the film industry work together – and how, sometimes they just don’t. The struggle to get Warner Communications to take comic book super heroes seriously when D.C.Comics was owned by them is a surprising eye opener.

The Boy Who Loved Batman is out now from Chronicle Books

Darth Paper Strikes Back is the second in Tom Anglesberger’s Star Wars related children’s books, following on from The Strange Case of Oragami Yoda. These books are aimed at children of about 8-11 years old.

Although this book has loose connections and the same characters as the first, you can easily enjoy this one as a completely separate story. I have not read Oragami Yoda but after uneasily getting through the first couple of pages, I really enjoyed this unique children’s book. I warn you now that the first page includes the word ‘like’ a disturbing amount of times and the little sketches and doodling all over the place are a little distracting to begin with (although I am presuming this would be found far more appealing by the children it is aimed at). But as soon as I got used to the style and format, I completely and utterly fell for this surreal story of friendship and a paper problem solver.

Most of this book is written from the perspective of Tommy, a seventh grade school boy. When Tommy finds out one of his best friends, Dwight, might be sent to a correctional and remedial education facility, he gathers the rest of his friends together to save him.

Dwight is, simply put, the agony aunt of the school. Via a little, paper origami Yoda, placed on his finger, he expertly advises them on their problems and makes scarily accurate predictions. But of course, where there’s a goodie, there’s always a baddie. This comes in the form of Harvey, a classmate of Tommy and Dwight’s who decided to create an origami Darth Vader to bring down origami Yoda and attempt to undermine his status within the school.

As Dwight is suspended for his unusual finger puppet based behavior, Tommy and his other classmates band together to create a case file of incidents to hand over to the school board in an attempt to convince them that Dwight and Yoda are much loved, needed and respected. Although, when Harvey and Darth Paper hear about Tommy’s plans, the Dark Side does its best to throw a spanner in the works.

And in case you were wondering, this book isn’t just for Star Wars fans either. If you are a fan then you’ll appreciate a few more of the references and quotes but as long as you get the gist that Yoda equals good and Darth Vader equals bad, that’s all you need to know to full enjoy this read.

This is the most beautifully surreal story I have read in a long time and I love how the authors captured children’s open mindedness to situations adults would consider ridiculous. I have read quite a few reasonably serious children’s books lately (Morpurgo etc.) and although I adore them, I found it really refreshing to read something so completely aimed at simple entertainment. I can also see this book appealing to kids who are slightly more reluctant readers or struggle with concentration as the chapters are brief and the case files the classmates make create a collection of short stories in themselves.

Will Dwight be sent to reform school? Is origami Yoda real? Will Darth Paper and the dark side really win?

Well I’m not saying, you’ll just have to read it and find out!

Darth Paper Strikes Back is out now from Amulet Books

The Colour of Death is the sixth novel from author Michael Cordy. The book grips you from the explosive first chapter, where a ten year old Nathan Fox loses both his parents and sister in a petrol station robbery. It then cuts straight to nineteen years later, to women, running from something but we don’t know what. A police car scares her into cowering beside a building, out of sight. Simply by touching the wall she could sense the terror inside. She fights against the fear, breaks into the building and discovers numerous women, caged inside. She frees the women and just as she turns to run, a shot rings out, a bullet clips her head and her memory is gone.

This is what brings the two main characters together. Nathan Fox has grown up to become a highly respected psychiatrist in Stanford University’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and when a scared and confused ‘Jane Doe’ is admitted to his ward, she instantly bonds with him. He is warned that she’s suffering from terrible hallucinations, is rude, fussy, unmanageable and accuses people of being ‘the wrong colour’ but she insists that Nathan is the right colour. After further investigation he realises she has a number of different forms of synesthesia.

Synesthetes have the involuntary ability for a second sensory perception, when a first sense it stimulated. Some associate colours and letters with numbers, some associate them with personalities and sometimes they can relate colours to sounds. Nathan Fox soon realises that Jane Does synesthesia is far more advanced than any he has ever seen before. She can actually sense ‘death-echos,’ the vibrations left imprinted in materials when a person dies traumatically.

As he tries to help her uncover her past and discover who she really is, he is also asked to assist in assessing a crime scene of a gruesome murder. When a second murder indicates a link to Jane Doe, Nathan must do all he can to save her. But who can be trusted?

I must admit I was not sure I was going to enjoy this book. In crime fiction, I adore the logic, the science and feeling that it was all possible. I was not sure how adding synesthesia ‘abilities’ into the mix would pan out but it worked beautifully. As the character of Nathan Fox is a doctor, his entire viewpoint is from this perspective and although some open-mindedness is required, it is not to the level where I felt it was unbelievable.

This is a gripping page turner I will definitely be keeping an eye out for Michael Cordy’s work in the future.

The Colour of Death is out now from Bantam Press

It’s a strange quirk of Apes mythology that only three of the seven Planet of the Apes films have actually taken place on the titular world of that far-flung nightmarish future. Planet of the Apes, its first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and Tim Burton’s dreary 2001 remake remain the only films to explicitly show the evolution turned upside-down scenario that Pierre Boulle dreamed up in 1963. The planet has always seemed like a goldmine for fresh stories though, so it’s little surprise to see Archaia, BLAM! Ventures and author Andrew Gaska take advantage of the current ascendancy of the Apes with a story that takes us right back to the planet of the apes. Indeed, right back to the Planet of the Apes itself.

Taking place during the 1968 classic, Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes follows John Landon, one of the other three astronauts to land on the future Earth along with Charlton Heston’s Taylor. In the film, he comes to a sticky off-screen end and Gaska follows his progress towards that deadly fate as he, Taylor and their compatriot Dodge crash land on the planet and try in vain to work out where they are. So far, so familiar, right? Indeed the first thing you notice about Conspiracy, the first ever official continuation novel of the Apes series, is just how unoriginal it is. Gaska recounts the opening act of the film almost verbatim with only subplots and flashbacks to break the repetition.

Thankfully, the author’s eye for character is as good as his eye for detail, and the early chapters open the leads out in ways Michael Wilson and Rod Serling’s script never did. Landon, the serious professional, is focused only on the mission and he detests nihilistic hero Taylor, who’s only trying to prove his own cynical beliefs about mankind. They squabble and bicker, the tensions exacerbated by a mutual attraction to Maryann Stewart, the sole female crewmember who died in the crash. She forms a vital part of Conspiracy’s story, Gaska flashing back in time to a previous mission on which she and Landon served – the Juno flight to Jupiter. These sequences are actually among the weakest in the book, proving a frustrating diversion from the action on the planet of the apes itself, but they do up the dramatic stakes. Landon becomes a more tragic figure and Conspiracy a rich, rewarding and ultimately quite downbeat read.

Along with the human characters, these early sequences also set up Conspiracy‘s ape leads. Just as with their human counterparts, the apes from the film take a backseat, so although they appear don’t go expecting much from Cornelius or Zira. In their stead, peripheral and sequel characters shine: General Ursus, the military gorilla from Beneath, Doctor Milo, the ill-fated ape who accompanied Cornelius and Zira to Earth in Escape, and Galen, Zira’s assistant who is mentioned very briefly in the first film – a testament to Gaska’s attention to detail. Ursus is eager to stamp out the human menace once and for all, Milo dreams of the power of flight, and Galen hopes to step out of Zira’s shadow and impress the ape elders. Not all the ties to the original series work (the appearance of the subterranean mutant humans from Beneath seems contrived), but generally Gaska’s story plays beautifully. Conspiracy not only respects continuity, but enriches it.

Tying Gaska’s story together is a series of illustrations that makes the book a unique entity – not quite a novel, not quite a graphic novel. Graphic prose, if you like. It’s an interesting idea that perhaps shouldn’t work, but does – beautifully. The paintings, all created by different artists, including Matt Busch, Joe Jusko and Jim Steranko, add tone and texture to the novel, enveloping the reader further in Gaska’s story. The author scarcely needs them, so good is he at setting the scene, but they don’t overpower his words or pander to the audience. They simply complement events, drawing the reader into the atmosphere and acting as beautiful pieces of art in their own right. A trilogy of paintings of the Forbidden Zone by David Hueso is particularly impressive, while a late shock scene is emphasised with a glorious two-page spread by Erik Gist. Archaia and BLAM! have struck upon a great format here and there are plenty of other sci-fi franchises that could benefit from their own version of Conspiracy.

Naturally, the story isn’t without its flaws. As the Star Wars Expanded Universe has shown, no mythology is invincible – stretch it too far and eventually it’ll snap. Conspiracy bears this point out. Occasionally, Gaska relies too heavily on contemporary human sayings to illustrate the apes’ emotions (would the word ‘bitch’ still exist as an insult this far into the future?) and there are some moments where the apes act a little too human that just don’t read right. An ape family sitting down for dinner is one thing, but an ape affair pushes the world too close to the familiar to retain the mythology’s magic. The scenes between Galen’s wife Liet and the ape Mungwortt are certainly well written and pivotal for the plot, but they do have a touch of the Midichlorian about them.

The novel ends as it has to, of course, and Gaska makes the most out of his character’s pre-determined fate with some subtle foreboding and a chapter that’s as gruesome as anything in a horror novel – if not more so because we’ve been given so much to like about Landon. It leaves an unpleasant taste in your mouth, but that’s no bad thing – in fact it’s exactly what an Apes story should do. Gaska has not just replicated place and character, but also tone and themes, with intolerance, prejudice and hatred all coursing through the book. They help make Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes not just a great continuation novel, or even just a great science fiction novel, but a great novel in its own right. A sequel is reportedly already in the works, so it’s well worth catching up before there are as many Apes novels as there are Apes films.

Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes is out now from Archaia Entertainment

99.4% of all zombie stories cast the undead as nothing more thoughtful or interesting or involving than cannon fodder.

That’s cold, hard science there, and you can’t argue with science — unless, I guess, you’ve got God in your corner.

As to how the good lord would feel about Stony Mayhall, well… you’d have to ask Him yourself. But science – and this much I can assert with some certainty – would hate him, because just as nature abhors a vacuum, science abhors the inexplicable, and Stony Mayhall is a walking, talking impossibility: a contradiction in terms from the moment Wanda Mayhall and her three daughters find him.

“The infant was wrapped in what looked like bath towels. Only its tiny gray face was visible, its eyes closed, its lips blue. Wanda made a low, sad sound. She worked her hands beneath the child, her hand cradling its neck, and brought it to her chest. It was cold, cold as its mother.” (p.5)

In the immediate aftermath of the great outbreak of ’68, you’d think most folks would look the other way when presented with the likes of the grim tableau which greets Wanda and the mini-Mayhalls on the drive home one evening: a concrete-coloured babe cradled in the arms of an eviscerated dead (or undead) woman. But the Mayhalls, as we will see, are not most folks. Instead, in full knowledge of his nature – Stony is a zombie baby, and as such a grave enemy of the state – Wanda adopts Stony, and raises him in secret on a decrepit farm in Iowa, because “she couldn’t imagine abandoning an infant, even a dead one.” (ibid)

Stony doesn’t bite in any event. In direct contrast with those hungry hungry zombies Wanda and her lot have seen on the news, Stony seems as harmless as the babe in arms he began as. He is, however, unlike any other infant Wanda has raised: he doesn’t eat, or sleep, or ever even cry out.

Nor does Stony stay a baby for very long at all. Within weeks, he appears years old, and after a couple of years, Stony has become a typical adolescent: curious, confused and adventurous. Early on the neighbours across the road took a friendly interest in his well-being, and Stony seems to have aged in direct correlation to the Cho’s only child Kwang. But by necessity, other than Kwang and his own adopted family, Stony has no-one; he thinks himself the last zombie alive, and it is a lonely living death he has.

Then… well, that’d be telling. Read Raising Stony Mayhall yourself and see. And really, you must. In 2010, you will I hope recall how Alden Bell set a new bar for all things undead with The Reapers Are The Angels. This year, Daryl Gregory has raised it again.

That being said, beyond the fact that they’re both resoundingly original stories set against a scenario long-since exhausted in the form it takes 99.4% of the time – that is to say the same old zombie apocalypse – Raising Stony Mayhall and The Reapers Are The Angels are not particularly comparable narratives. One is spare and elegiac, a haunting thing about the discovery of beauty in an ugly world, whereas the other is a sparkling little charmer which touches on family, religion, rebellion, politics, love, friendship, adolescence, loneliness… and so many other subjects I won’t bore you with the rest of the list!

Truly, Daryl Gregory’s third novel after Pandemonium and The Devil’s Alphabet ranges far and wide. To get a sense of its scope, understand that the plot details I’ve revealed in this review will take you all of two chapters to catch up on. There are twenty, and two bookends besides. Raising Stony Mayhall begins in the wake of free love and the first outbreak and ends in the current day, taking in the life and death of the last boy zombie. In fact, Gregory establishes as much in all of five pages.

From there, Raising Stony Mayhall grows like graveweed. It wouldn’t do to ruin for you just how, because a large part of the pleasure I took from this rollicking, writhing zom-com come heartfelt horror novel was in seeing just how Stony’s strange (to say the least) life changes from day to day, and from year to year, but know that his journey – and ours – resembles in its broad strokes that of a certain other… shall we say literary figure? We shall have to, I think, or the game will be up in short order.

In its pace, in any case, Raising Stony Mayhall is more fast zombie than the shambling, single-minded slowpokes George A. Romero birthed unto us, a world ago in time. It whips along not in incremental nips and nibbles but great meaty mouthfuls, skipping decades rather than precious seconds, pausing only to recount those encounters that are fundamental to Stony’s character, or pivotal in terms of the larger narrative. It’s safe to say Raising Stony Mayhall will not bore you for a single, solitary moment.

On the other hand, perhaps it is the case, what with its pace, that Raising Stony Mayhall gives short shrift to some of its themes. For instance, where Mira Grant would have written a whole trilogy about the particular political philosophies and ideologies Stony encounters in the late 80s, Gregory’s novel gives them a couple of chapters then gets back to what matters: character. Saying that, the Big Bite and the diggers do come into play again, later in the day…

If I were to level against this brilliant book a single complaint, it would be that it feels so complete in itself. If only it went on longer, or left the door open for a few more stories about this boy zombie! Alas, its many and various threads are comprehensively gathered together in the last act, and those few elements which remain open-ended point towards a continuation much changed. That is if ever there were to be such a thing — a highly unlikely notion, no doubt.

But damn it all, I want more!

Raising Stony Mayhall is a magnificent genre novel – among the most memorable of the year, as The Reapers Are The Angels was before it  – which roundly demonstrates that whatever people may say, there’s plenty life left in the undead yet. A few readers may find themselves frustrated by an abundance of fits and starts, though I would argue this is in accordance with the memoir-ish mode of Daryl Gregory’s third novel. A few more may take exception to what can seem a whistle-stop tour of certain other renowned speculative narratives – among them Stand By Me, Lost Souls, World War Z and The Shawshank Redemption – but because of the unique character at its still-beating heart, Raising Stony Mayhall is in the end, as in the beginning, all its own thing…

…and what a thing it is.

BBC Radio’s curmudgeonly Mark Kermode, with his fascinating hair and his curious obsession with ‘The Exorcist’, has slowly but surely become one of the most respected film critics in the UK. According to a YouGov poll in October 2010 Kermode is in fact considered to be “the most trusted” film critic in the UK by 3% of people polled for their opinion. You may not be hugely impressed by this statistic but then neither is Kermode and indeed the thrust of Kermode’s latest book, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex’ is that not very much at all about the modern film-going experience – or, indeed – modern films themselves, particularly impresses Kermode.

Kermode’s a bit pissed off, really. He just likes good movies and he really can’t understand why, given the amount of money and talent available in Hollywood, the big studios aren’t capable of making better films. He takes the view that, with a little bit more effort, a lot of films would be a lot more worth seeing. He also has little time for 3D films (don’t we all?) and points out that this latest fad has nothing to with artistic integrity and is just a desperate ploy by desperate studios to generate a bit more revenue for their naffer films and that not only is it not proper 3D anyway, it’s doomed to fail in the long-term just as it did back in the 1950s and the 1980s. He also despairs of the fact that Hollywood feels obliged to remake (and thus destroy) perfectly good foreign films just because they have – horrors! – subtitles and joins you, me and just about anybody with an iota of sense in wondering just why anyone thought remaking the sublime ‘Let the Right One In’ as the inferior ‘Let Me In’ was really necessary, much less the Daniel Craig-starring Millennium Trilogy (‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, etc) when the perfectly-good foreign language versions were made only recently and are unlikely to bettered just because James Bond is in them. Perversely Kermode likes some seriously bad trashy films and seems to have a worrying soft spot for former ‘High School Musical’ dreamboat Zac Effron and, in one particularly amusing chapter, he recounts a recent cinema visit with his daughter to see an Effron movie only to be worked into a frenzy by the fact that the top of the picture (and thus Effron’s hair) was off the edge of the screen and that nobody working in the cinema seemed especially bothered about it.

And ‘The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex’ is an extremely amusing book. It reads like a one-way conversation, as if Kermode is ranting directly at you, scarcely pausing for breath and veering off at all sorts of tangents whilst trying to make a point and finally finding his way back to his point after dropping in some fascinating, if indiscreet, industry anecdote or other. It’s a breathless read and sometimes you can’t help wishing for an Editor who could have reigned Kermode in a bit and persuaded him to stick to the point for a while but the writer undoubtedly knows his stuff and his opinions, if hysterically-expressed from time to time, are well-argued and inevitably thought-provoking.

If you’re at all familiar with Kermode’s movie review section on Simon Mayo’s Radio 5 Live show, some of his targets here may ring a bell or two and it may seem that Kermode is trying to batter down doors he’s been hammering on for too long. But despite it all this remains a fun and engaging read and in the end Kermode just wants what all real film-lovers want… a better cinema-going experience, less soulless over-priced multiplexes and, of course, better films. Amen to all that, says I.

‘The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex’ is out now

A boiling, seething darkness known as the Roil feeds upon the world of Shale. Where once twelve proud cities stood, bastions of life, now only four remain. Humans fight back with endothermic weaponry, semi-organic sky-ships and vast, lumbering cannons. But nothing can stop the Roil’s relentless advance.

A young drug-addict, an orphaned woman hell-bent on revenge, and a man who has lived four-thousand years set out to find the Engine of the World and destroy the Roil before it can consume all life on the planet.

Roil is a well-visualised monster romp through a shattered world of insanity and shadows.

Trent Jamieson’s clear and easy style is a pleasure to read, and while the characters suffer from a lack of originality they remain likable enough as they struggle through a nightmare landscape of horror and human misery.

Unfortunately, Roil is burdened with a slow start, but hang in there because Roil becomes so much better than your standard genre fiction, catapulting the reader on a roller-coaster ride of tense-action scenes, gore, and monsters by the bucket load.

Oh yes! The Roil has monsters and not the wishy-washy, sparkling kind, but the far more deadly – tear your limbs off as soon as look at you – variety. They are vomited from the Roil in their multitudes: from the relentless quarg hounds to the hideous garment flutes – there’s a roiling for every occasion.

But it’s the Roil itself that steals the show.

A monster in its own right: the Roil is a seething mass of billowing energy that crawls across the world of Shale subverting and corrupting anything that gets in its way.

Roil is very much a book at odds with itself. The decadent world of Shale facing the obsidian curtain is at once a unique and terrifying vista for this character drama to play upon, but it’s tempered by a sense of missed opportunities: battles take place off-scene, the POV shifts without warning, and both the beginning and ending are weak and without substance.

That’s not to say Roil is a bad book, because it’s not. It’s great fun, and in the main, written with clarity and talent. It just has to be forgiven for the occasional stumbling step.

Move through those sections, and you will be rewarded with the former. Dig past the caricatures and the irrelevance, and you’ll find nuggets of pure genius.

Ultimately, Roil flounders when it should shine, offers glimpses of brilliance before crawling to a predictable conclusion.

The sequel, Night’s Engines, is due out late next spring, and a small sample of the Roil can be found for free on Angry Robot’s website here.

Roil is out now from Angry Robot publishing.

You really have to be a ‘Doctor Who’ fan of a certain age to appreciate just how important Target Books were in the 1970s. Picture, if you can, a world without DVDs, Blu-rays, downloads, torrents and all the other mind-frazzling ways fans can just get their hands on stuff these days; technology we take for granted in the 21st century would have seemed as outlandish to a 1970’s ‘Doctor Who’ afficionado as any of their hero’s colourful exploits. Because in the 1970s if you wanted to remind yourself of an old ‘Doctor Who’ adventure you had to have seen it and remembered it. Back then you couldn’t go online and pick up a 4 part William Hartnell adventure on a spruced-up digital disc for not much more than the price of a cheap curry; you saw the show on TV or you didn’t. It was that simple. The arrival on the bookshelves in 1973 of ‘Doctor Who’ paperbacks in bright, shiny covers, bearing the  distinctive ‘Target Books’ logo, was not only the beginning of a massive merchandising phenomenon which lasted for the better part of two decades (and continues today in the form of the BBC’s original novel series) but was also a massive revelation for the show’s young fans, offering up an easy way to enjoy the show’s dark, rich past without, at the time, much hope of ever actually seeing any of it.

Of course ‘Doctor Who’ in book form wasn’t a new idea. Three novels had been published back in 1965 and, whilst successful, they hadn’t paved the way for further titles. Target Books reissued those three novels with attractive new covers – and then sat and watched as the money rolled in as ‘Who’ fans lapped up their series’ past. It didn’t matter to them that none of these books featured then-current Doctor Jon Pertwee but rather starred the barely-remembered first Doctor in three of his earliest televised exploits, particularly his exciting first adventure with the Daleks. Target Books, quickly realising they were on to something and that ‘Doctor Who’ had a long history and potentially a healthy future, made plans to capitalise on the success of their three reissues with ‘original’ novelisations of more recent TV episodes, as well as the best stories from 1960s.

The early Target books have been out of print for some time (but they’re not difficult to track down in second-hand stores if you know where to look) so BBC Books have snapped up the rights to some of those early titles and repackaged them, with their original covers and new shiny gold logos, with special introductions  from  modern writers associated with the show – Russell T Davies, Gareth Roberts, Neil Gaiman – and the legendary Terrance Dicks, former series script editor who found himself writing most of the novelisations Target released over the years. This first batch of six releases takes the Target story right back to its beginnings and even if you’ve already got these books in one edition or another you’ll find it hard to resist snapping up these pocket-sized new volumes – and if you’re a newer fan it’s fair to say these books are pretty much essential if only for the chance it affords you to imagine you were there in 1973 when this was the only access to archive ‘Doctor Who’ it was possible to imagine.

I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that ‘Doctor Who and the Daleks’ (original title, ‘Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks’ – imagine that!), written by the TV series’ first story editor David Whitaker from Terry Nation’s scripts, is the best ‘Doctor Who’ book ever written and I’ll race you to the Lake of Mutations if you don’t agree. Stunningly written with a maturity way beyond the age of its intended audience, this is a darker and bleaker telling of the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks, infamously rewriting the show’s own history by dumping the cavemen adventure which launched the series on TV and crafting an entirely new introduction where Ian Chesteron meets Barbara Wright after her car has crashed on foggy Barnes Common and the pair stumble across the mysterious Doctor and his everlasting matches and his peculiar Police Box. For many fans this remained the true origin of the series and that first viewing of ‘An Unearthly Child’ years later was one of the show’s greatest surprises. Whitaker, writing in the first person as Ian Chesteron, beautifully depicts the confusion and fear and disbelief of the discovery of the TARDIS and its capabilities and he evokes a real sense of the exploration of the unknown as the TARDIS travels to the blasted post-Neutron bomb wasteland planet of Skaro and its mutated war survivors. Bold, and pioneering stuff, this really is as good as ‘Doctor Who’ fiction gets, even now, nearly fifty years after its first publication.

If ‘The Daleks’ is the best ‘Doctor Who’ book (and it is), then Whitaker’s ‘The Crusaders’ runs it a close second. Working from his own scripts from the second season story ‘The Crusade’, Whitaker does for time travel what he did for space travel in ‘The Daleks’, with a poetic first chapter in which the Doctor neatly explains to his companions the consequences and responsibilities of travelling in Time before sending his characters off into a middle-ages adventure full of escapes, captures and dark intrigue managing throughout to create a real sense of ordinary people experiencing the past. ‘The Crusaders’ is an enthralling read and it’s hard not to wish that the underrated Whitaker hadn’t written more prose fiction beyond the worlds of ‘Doctor Who’.

Curiously, BBC Books have chosen not to reissue Bill Strutton’s bonkers ‘The Zarbi’ (the third of that original trilogy of books and based on the TV serial known as ‘The Web Planet’) but opted instead to leap straight to Target’s own first two original novelisations. Indulge this reviewer for a moment as he recalls with almost crystal clarity the day he casually scanned the children’s book section of (the long-gone) WH Smith’s in St Mary Street in Cardiff and his jaw dropped at the sight of ‘The Auton Invasion’ and ‘The Cave Monsters’, two all-new colourfully-jacketed ‘Doctor Who’ books with Jon Pertwee on the cover! Fifty pence later (the books cost twenty-five pence each!) I was engrossed in Terrance Dicks’ lively retelling of Jon Pertwee’s first TV adventure ‘Spearhead From Space’, last shown on TV a couple of years before, before moving on to Malcolm Hulke’s denser ‘Cave Monsters’, his novelisation of ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’, Pertwee’s second adventure. In ‘The Auton Invasion’ (televised in 1970 as ‘Spearhead from Space’ – Target’s first ‘Doctor Who’ editor was quite happy to change TV serial names to something snappier) Dicks establishes the crisp, no-nonsense storytelling style which would hold him in good stead right across the Target range, fleshing out the scripts but never deviating from the televised narrative. Hulke, meanwhile, clearly relished the opportunity to add meat to the bones; in ‘The Cave Monsters’ he delves into the prehistoric background of the Silurians, making them even more sympathetic than they were on TV, and adds much more light and shade to the human protagonists, especially Doctor Quinn who first makes contact with the reptiles. Reading ‘The Cave Monsters’ again can only make you weep for the way Steven Moffat turned these noble creatures into just another bunch of masked, gun-wielding costumes when he resurrected them for the 2010 series.

The final two reissues in this initial batch both take the reader back to the 1960s and the era of Patrick Troughton and ‘The Cybermen’ by Gerry Davis (from his TV serial ‘The Moonbase’) and ‘The Abominabe Snowmen’ by Dicks from the scripts by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln and both books, whilst never attaining the heights of the other four books, continue to evoke strong memories of reading them for the first time and for his reviewer at least who dipped in and out of the series in the 1960s and for whom these were all-new stories which had previously just been titles in the famous 1973 Radio times ‘Doctor Who’ Tenth Anniversary secial. Despite the fact that Chris Achilleos’ beautiful cover illustration depicts a Cyberman from a later era in the show’s history, ‘The Moonbase’ reminds us of the cold, clinical, other-worldly nature of the original Cybermen as they plot to devastate the Earth’s weather system by manipulating a lunar weather-contol station; the Cybermen here, cruel and calculating, are a far cry from today’s version which, whilst visually formidable and threatening, tend to get wheeled out now and again for budgetary reasons rather than for any need to tell a new story about them. In ‘The Abominable Snowmen’ Dicks takes the second Doctor to the Himalayas in the 1920s and an encounter with an alien intelligence using remote controlled robot Yetis to terrorise a local monastery. Only in ‘Doctor Who’…

With their loving introductions and handy ‘behind the scenes’ epilogues these new BBC rereleases, complete with the original interior illustrations most of the books featured in the early years of the range, are an absolute delight, an exercise in pure nostalgia for those of us of a certain vintage and essential reading for fans of all ages if only because the Target book range remain probably the most important piece of merchandising in ‘Doctor Who’s long and continuing history. Rumour has it BBC Books are planning more releases; good news, of course, but I hope they’ll resist the urge to rerelease every title. There are some good books lurking out there from the likes of Brian Hayles, Ian Marter and John Lucarotti – but even Terrance Dicks would surely agree that some of his later efforts, where as the only in-house author he was churning out novelisations of Tom Baker serials month after month in a style which was little more than a pamphlet with script dialogue punctuated by cursory descriptions and the odd ‘he said’, ‘she said’ and ‘they ran’, weren’t exactly his finest hours. The rereleased series has made a cracking start with these six titles and if you’ve any real interest in ‘Doctor Who’ at all you need these books on your bookshelf and, more importantly, in your heart.

The Eighth Black Book of Horror is a collection of 13 short horror stories, selected by Charles Black, published by Mortbury Press.

The collection starts with a very classic, almost Victorian feeling ghost story based around the unusual grave of a man buried standing upward. I thought this may set the scene for the rest of the collection but the styles and settings of each story vary dramatically. I found this quite refreshing as short stories that are too similar have the ability to leave me feeling a bit bored and with a terrible tendency to skim read. This collection jumps straight from Victoriana to traditional working mens clubs, so no confusion there!

There were three stories that really stood out for me personally. The first one was called Tok, written by Paul Finch. The tale begins with Don and Bernadette traveling to visit Don’s mother Miriam, whose home stands within a housing estate where a murderer is on the loose. Bernadette agrees to stay with Miriam as Don cannot get time off from his security work, not realizing what a vulnerable position she is putting herself in, until it is too late. Bernadette’s shocking and unnerving discovery of a mutant looking creature Miriam keeps from her childhood in Southern Rhodesia is just the beginning.

The second was The Coal-Man by Thana Niveau. I think this was my favourite tale after just the first paragraph: 

“The long black arm snaked out of the pillow and a hand with chalky fingers closed over Jen’s mouth. The fingers prised her lips open and slipped inside, crumbling to charcoal dust as they clawed their way down her throat.”

This is a deliciously dark tale of Jen, a young lady haunted by the death of her sister and the eerie ‘Coal-Man’ that took her… or did he? Committed as a child for blaming her sister’s death on a monster she openly admits that started as a figment of her own imagination, she struggles to figure out if she is being haunted by a monster or is losing her mind. When her parents die in a drink driving accident, coal at the crime scene is brushed under the carpet as mere coincidence but Jen knows better. When she is released from the asylum as an adult, she returns to the family home. Here, she lies in her bed at night and listens to lumps of coal fall down the inside of the walls, out of holes in the skirting boards and onto the carpet around her bed. One day she cracks and decides she needs to know for certain one way or another if these lumps of coal are real, or if she really is suffering from delusions. She pleads the one person who has offered her a kind hand (a man she works with) over to her home to question what he sees in her room.

The last story in the collection, Mea Culpa by Kate Farrell also resonated with me. Not so much from the horror aspect but for the twist in the ending that really left me thinking. I don’t want to include any spoilers, so I will leave it at that but Farrell’s story was perfect to wrap up this collection.

It may or may not be coincidence that my favourite stories from this collection were generally the longest ones. I think horror is a very difficult genre to create in such a short period, with atmosphere being such a huge part of style.

If you are a fan of short stories in general, I think you will love this collection as there are some great ideas and brilliant writing. But if you are a fan of being completely absorbed by a book, this may not be quite for you, as many of the stories just do not have the time to fully grab the reader.

The Eighth Black Book of Horror is available now from Mortbury Press