Games, Books and Films

A Darkness At Sethanon happily avoids the pitfall that seems to trip the last leg of many potentially-great trilogies from time to time, as it continues the Riftwar Saga’s fine line in quality dialogue, characterisation and storytelling, whilst also providing adequate closure to a great trio of novels.
***WARNING – the following text contains minor story/event-based… Read More

James Herbert has been writing horror fiction for many years now, with such classics as “The Rats” and “Haunted” to name just a couple, these books have pushed him to the forefront of British horror and rightly so.
Up until recently I didn’t know much about Herbert as I was stuck in a bit of a… Read More

Magician was a full-blooded fantasy affair if ever there was one. Though it displayed its traditional, swords ‘n’ sorcery brand of fantasy with pride, it clearly didn’t do things by halves; over the course of the eight hundred or so pages the reader is treated to an endless array of colourful characters and witty dialogue,… Read More

Chris Ryan’s first foray into fictional writing struggles to hit the highs that its predecessor The One That Got Away managed. Stand By, Stand By is written with the same attention to detail thanks to the authors SAS background, but beyond this its characters and scenarios are uninspired, meaning it never develops into a real… Read More

It is often said that truth can be stranger than fiction, and in the case of Chris Ryan’s debut novel, it can also make a story a great deal more compelling. The One That Got Away sits snugly between a factual recounting and a full-blown thriller, as the author gives his account of the remarkable… Read More

For 1951’s The Stars Like Dust, Isaac Asimov opted to take the second instalment of his Galactic Empire series down an altogether more action-orientated path than its predecessor Pebble In The Sky. It ditches some of the scientific spectacle that characterises many of his novels; instead focusing more on character development and constructing an atmosphere… Read More

“To the rest of the galaxy, if they are aware of us at all, Earth is but a pebble in the sky.”

It’s a running theme in a great deal of Asimov’s novels – a refreshing view of a galaxy that does not centre around Earth and a writing-style that is not necessarily shackled to… Read More

My good friend and fellow-writer Gildor_Inglorion knows a thing or two about books - and more specifically, about the fantasy genre from which seemingly no major work has escaped him. A little while ago, he gave me a copy of ‘Legend’ to borrow. Before I had the chance to read it though, it emerged that… Read More

Generally speaking, the arrival of a new Stephen King novel is a rather big event given that he is one of the most popular and well-recognized authors in the world. It came as something of a surprise then when The Colorado Kid (published in October 2005) slipped in almost completely under the radar. Indeed, its… Read More

I bought the hefty-looking Desperation from a market stall recently, knowing that the least I would get for my 95p would be a decent pennies-to-pages ratio. Having now compiled more or less all of Stephen King’s novels, I’d still only managed to read about a third of them (though not through lack of trying!) and… Read More