Books shelved under “Urban Fantasy”

Right, so you don’t have a soul, which means any supernatural creature you touch turns back into a mortal. Handy, but also it makes you a kind of threat to the supernatural community. Queen Victoria makes you muhjah, which is a fancy term for “I have a bureaucratic position as well as target painted on my back.” And you marry a werewolf member of the peerage. Who is Scottish. Then, suddenly, a phenomenon that replicates…

Dark Currents, the anticipated debut to Jacqueline Carey’s new urban fantasy series Agent of Hel, got my attention back when it first came out. I saw it on io9, added it to my to-read list.

And promptly forgot about it.

Because that’s what happens when you have a list so long that even if you stop adding books to it today, it will take you about four years to get through it.

Fortunately,…

I wasn’t going to go out of my way to read The Magician’s Land. I’m so ambivalent about this series. But there it was on my library’s New Books shelf … it seemed almost rude not to borrow it. At the very least I was hoping to find closure. Honestly, I got more than that. This is a series that has steadily improved over the three books, with The Magician’s Land probably offering the…

Blood and Iron, not to be confused with the urban fantasy novel of the same name by Elizabeth Bear, is the first entry in a trilogy by Jon Sprunk about fantasy nations at war. Our hero is Horace, a shipwright and carpenter stranded on the shores of a hostile empire, at their mercy, who suddenly finds out he can do magic. What ensues in the slow self-destruction of the capital city of this kingdom…

Mmm, it’s good to dip back into the Laundry Files universe for a little while. Charles Stross is in fine form with Equoid, a delightfully creepy take on unicorn mythology guest starring a young H.P. Lovecraft. Bob Howard is itching to get out of the office, and in a classic case of careful-what-you-wish-for, he gets sent to a country farm with a unicorn infestation. Zombies and tactical teams and chaos and destruction ensues.

The…

I read Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead last summer when he was first nominated for the John W. Campbell Award. I remember getting a good deal of enjoyment from it during a few sunny days reading outside. It was fantasy, but not as we’ve become accustomed to know it. Gladstone’s Alt Coulumb was a twisting maze of legal deals entwined with magical contracts. The worldbuilding was simply superb, and the plot had me hooked. So…

Here we are at the end of the To Hell and Back trilogy. As I said in my Dreams of Gods and Monsters review, a trilogy works best for me if each successive book raises the stakes and widens the scope of its world. By these criteria, Matthew Hughes has succeeded. The first book introduces Chesney Arnstruther, a high-functioning autistic man whose world is mostly numbers until he accidentally summons a demon, incites a strike…

Disclaimer: I received this book for free from the author in exchange for a review. Loves me the free books!

So, I don’t necessarily do steampunk. I understand the appeal (I think) of speculating about what would have happened had the Victorians taken the Industrial Revolution to the next level. But I think that steampunk often runs aground, for me, as resembling too much both science fiction and fantasy. I like my science fiction scientific,…

This might not have been the best time for me to read The Holders. The first (and only) season of The Tomorrow People just finished broadcasting here in the UK, and I’m sad it’s over, because my landlady and I were having so much fun heckling its ridiculous characters and plot twists. Seriously, Stephen is supposed to be a high school student but has the ripped body of a mid-twenties man and never gets…

Well, here we are. Dreams of Gods and Monsters, the third book in this delightful trilogy from Laini Taylor, was coincidentally published a few weeks before I discovered the first book, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, courtesy my landlady. Two months later and I’ve read all three books. There’s always something fun about binging on a series in short succession. It definitely creates momentum and allows one to keep the characters and their…

Micah Grey runs away and joins the circus. It’s a common enough idea in literature. There is something magical about circuses, which function as heterotpias in which misfits and outcasts find a place where the rest of society can tolerate or ignore them as long as they offer entertainment value. What makes Pantomime different from the run-of-the-mill circus novel is its setting. Ellada is a country in a different world with a society relatively similar…

It’s hard to believe I’ve had to wait over a year between Dresden Files books! I’m glad I developed this sideline of being a teacher while I waited.

As with previous reviews, this is full of spoilers. And, to be honest, I don’t really understand why someone who hasn’t been following the series up to this point would be much interested in what happens in book 15. If you’re really curious about whether Dresden…

So, God Stalk is the first book in a series by P.C. Hodgell that seems to have a cult following but otherwise is shrouded in obscurity. I can’t remember where I first saw it mentioned, but it sounded interesting. I read the omnibus edition of the first two books.

It seems like God Stalk is a book that provokes one of two reactions: either one loves its rich, evocative characters and environment, or one hates…

In Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor introduced us to Karou, a blue-haired seventeen-year-old girl whose origins are far more fantastic than you could believe at first glance. She is a linchpin in a war between the angelic seraphim and the demonic chimarae of Eretz, a world parallel to Earth. At the end of the first book, Karou learns the secret behind her origins and abandons her on-again/off-again angelic lover Akiva to go…

I have a soft spot for urban fantasy in which there is “another” world within our own world—Neverwhere comes to mind as a good example. I think it speaks to the reader in me; for someone who inhales escapist fiction, the prospect that any door could potentially be a portal to another place is just … intoxicating. Daughter of Smoke and Bone capitalizes on this idea. Karou is the human adopted daughter of a…

My first outing with Thomas Usher didn’t go so well. People died. He moped around. I wasn’t sure why or how I should care. Pretty Little Dead Things was a car crash of a dark and nasty novel that would definitely appeal to certain people who are not me. But still, I had Dead Bad Things on my tablet courtesy of my Angry Robot Books subscription, so I thought I would give it a chance.

…

The Great and Secret Show reminds me of the only Tim Powers novel I’ve read, Last Call. And that, for anyone wanting a one-sentence review (contingent upon understanding the nature of my opinion of Last Call), is that.

In many ways, coming across a book that doesn’t interest one even though it’s a good book makes writing a review far more difficult than coming across a bad book. But if one truly reads…

Spiritwalk bills itself as “the sequel to Moonheart”, and while this is technically true, the events of Moonheart are only barely linked to this book. Reading it will spoil certain outcomes from Moonheart, but you could probably read it without having read the first novel. I wouldn’t recommend this course of action, however, simply because it seems that Charles de Lint doesn’t spend as much time in Spiritwalk developing the atmosphere of the…

Yes, I have indeed read another romance novel with vampires. What is wrong with me?

As with The Rest Falls Away, Soulless has been on my to-read list for a while now. I almost bought the boxed set of all five books in this series at Christmas time, stopping myself on the grounds that I wouldn’t want to bring them back to England with me, so they’d gather dust at home until the summer.…

For Valentine’s Day, my school library had a "Blind Date with a Book" event. They had wrapped books in wrapping paper festooned with hearts and put them on display. You could select any book at random and borrow it, keeping its identity under wraps until you get home. (We have this week off for a half-term break, so the students would have an entire week to read it.) The idea is to try a book…