Author Archive: NealeMonks
Inferno Revealed: From Dante To Dan Brown by Deborah Parker and Mark Parker (book review).
Bridging the gap between literary criticism aimed at scholars and the readers of mass market fiction of the sort Dan Brown produces isn’t easy. Virtually nothing about Danté’s ‘Inferno’ is accessible by modern standards, not least of all because very few people read epic poetry of any sort, much less those written in medieval Italian. […]
Assassin’s Creed #001 (comic-book review).
From its origins as a video game, the ‘Assassin’s Creed’ franchise has successfully been spun out into a number of different media, including graphic novels and comics. The central idea is that there are two hidden forces at work in the world and have been for centuries. One is trying to bring humanity into a […]
Beneath An Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan Volume Two by Caitlin R. Kiernan (book review)
In the introduction by S. T. Joshi reflects as much his literary preferences as the work of American author Caitlin R. Kiernan in stating that she does not describe herself as a horror writer but as an author of weird fiction. The differences between these two genres are debatable and they are perhaps best thought […]
Shades Of Milk And Honey (The Glamourist Histories book 1) by Mary Robinette Kowal (book review).
Mix Jane Austen’s novels with the ‘Twilight’ juggernaut and you pretty much have where this book, ‘Shades Of Milk And Honey’, is going, though of course this being the world where no self-respecting fantasy author can possibly tell their tale in a single volume, it’s merely the first instalment of a five-book story. It’s also […]
Tales Of Ramion by Frank Hinks (book review).
Frank Hinks is a barrister and a dad and it is this latter activity that led him to start writing children’s books during the early 1990s. The ‘Ramion’ stories were born out of the stories he told his young sons and his three boys feature in both these volumes as the primary protagonists. Ramion itself […]
Mars by Rod Pyle (book review).
Mars is the planet most like the Earth in terms of environmental conditions and the one that holds most tightly to popular imagination. When HG Wells published his ‘War Of The Worlds’ in 1897, scientists couldn’t quite resolve surface details through the telescopes of the time and some believed they could see canals criss-crossing the […]
The World Of Dinosaurs by Dr. Mark Norell (book review).
It wasn’t that long ago that everyone ‘s idea of what dinosaurs looked like was limited to comparisons with the slow, sluggish reptiles of today. Robert Bakker and the Dinosaur Renaissance began transforming them into the dynamic animals we saw in ‘Jurassic Park’. But as alert and agile as these new dinosaurs seem, they’re still […]
Sam Kills Christmas by Thomas Ridgewell, Dorina Herdewijn and Eddie Bowley (book review).
‘Sam Kills Christmas’ is a strange book and, while marketed as a children’s book, it’s not one to be handed out to youngsters without a degree of forethought. While this reviewer’s four year-old certainly listened with due attention and appreciated the twist at the end, she found a lot of it a bit too dark […]
Edgar Allan Poe: Ghastly Tales From The Master Of The Macabre (book review).
It’s probably impossible to overstate the influence of Edgar Allan Poe on popular fiction. To pick two celebrated examples, the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft and the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stories of Arthur Conan Doyle have obvious precursors among the works of Poe and, if you follow these lines of descent through to the present day, […]
H.P. Lovecraft: Uncanny Tales of Cosmic Horror and Unspeakable Terror (book review).
There have been any number of Lovecraft anthologies over the years, evidence if it were needed of his enduring popularity and influence on weird fiction. But when it comes to describing Lovecraft’s writing, the fact is that he ranged across several different genres, from straightforward fantasy through the supernatural and finally into what ultimately became […]
