Did she retire after suddenly getting married to some guy that we never met at all? What was the thing that Richard couldn't remember? What the hell was up with his clothes? I wasn't happy about the way the sequence took a couple of chronological leaps, the first I think three years or so and the second over a decade! There seemed like plenty more adventures that could be written, why rush to pension off your characters? I was frustrated that Vanessa disappeared. Several of the stories reminded me of tv programs from that period, especially the little-known "Sapphire and Steel". I prefer the early setting just as a matter of taste, but Newman does a good job with not only the setting but the feel of the 1970s. However, that's the only connection that short story was set at the turn of the century and this collection is set in the 1970s and later. I found this book after reading Newman's excellent contribution to The Fair Folk, which also features an agent of the semi-governmental supernatural investigation agency The Diogenes Club. Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche-perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel. In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. He is complexly and irreverently referential the Dracula sequence-Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha-not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith. Note: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil.Īn expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy.
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