A wonderful bucket in the face

Too often I just settle, but now I wanted more. I find it easy to commit, I’m prepared to put in the hard yards once the initial blush has worn off, but it occurred to me, why am I doing this even when there was no fist blush. Back in university days, a friend studying […]

Disgust

David Stevens transforms the countryside into a terrifying ecological nightmare in “Crop Rotation“, a story that makes disgust its bread and butter. Why, thank you very much! I can’t ask for much more than that: terrifying, nightmare, and disgust, all in one sentence. Insert smiley face here. I am happy to see that Haralambi Markov’s review of […]

The Maggot People

Imagine if Dan Brown had the gumption to really whack us with a truly bizarre confection of a conspiracy about the Catholic Church, instead of that wimpy pile he served up. If you are going to show us an imaginary dark world hidden by a conspiracy of the ages, have a real red hot go […]

No Lions please, we’re British

You have to (yes, it is compulsory) love a book that includes the following: a section on the reintroduction of vanished species to Britain; in that section, a table naming species with an estimated date of extinction in Britain; a rating of their suitability for reintroduction; a heading, “Reintroduction efforts so far”; an entry simply […]

Book Review: Sad Jingo by Ron Dionne

(Having mentioned Ron Dionne in my first post, here is a review of his novel SAD JINGO I previously posted elsewhere) We know why the children who read Harry Potter identify with the main wizard.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was magic in the world?  And if there was, of course I would be […]