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MALORIE by Josh Malerman n (Orion £16.99, 320 pp)
MALORIE
by Josh Malerman n(Orion £16.99, 320 pp)
In this brilliant, insanely compelling sequel to Bird Box, the world is still infested with monsters so incomprehensible that one glimpse sends you mad.
You survive by going blind, by listening and, if you’re a mother like Malorie with two teenage kids, by being very, very careful. Which is not the teenage way. Is Malorie right to be so scared? Are there other ways to survive?
More importantly, is hope to be embraced or is it the ultimate betrayal? Again, there is an odyssey through a broken Midwest, but this time, there are old scores to settle and the issue of trust is focused on family, cranking the tension and terror to breaking point and beyond.
SURVIVOR SONG by Paul Tremblay (Titan 8.99, 336pp)
SURVIVOR SONG
by Paul Tremblay (Titan 8.99, 336pp)
This is not just rabies, but a mutant strain of rabies that turns humans into chomping maniacs, utterly committed to spreading the virus.
So when very, very pregnant Natalie watches her husband get gnashed, she drives to her best friend Ramola, who just so happens to be a doctor for, er, deliverance. It’s not so much the set-up as the treatment that makes this two-hander so bottom, jaw and everything else clenchingly brilliant.
Crisp, vivid prose marches us through a six-hour odyssey of traffic jams, zombies, vigilantes, kindness, cruelty, tantrums and banter.
When you want time to speed, it slows; when you want it to slow, it speeds to a searing and utterly brilliant climax.
THE SUNKEN LAND BEGINS TO RISE AGAIN by M. John Harrison (Gollancz £20, 272 pp)
THE SUNKEN LAND BEGINS TO RISE AGAIN
by M. John Harrison (Gollancz £20, 272 pp)
Shaw is a broken-down programmer with a room in a Thames-side lodging house and a weird job delivering artefacts to Midland towns.
Girlfriend Victoria is doing up her late mother’s house on the River Severn.
While rivers link them, Shaw and Victoria are slowly drowning in their separate puddles of conspiracy: tadpole-y foetuses, dissolving waitresses, mysterious maps, peculiar dancing and weird craft guilds.
What’s it all about? We grasp for certainties, but sense slips away and leaves behind only a misty residue of significance and, astonishingly, it’s enough.
Like reading Thomas Pynchon underwater, this is a book of alienation, atmosphere, half-glimpsed revelation — and some of the most beautiful writing you’ll ever encounter.