Reviews - cushtie.com

Category: Reviews

  • Thin Air

    Thin Air was Richard K Morgan’s return to science fiction, after his fantasy Land Fit For Heroes series, which I could never get into. It’s another scifi noir (see also: Altered Carbon) but without people about to upload their consciousness into USB sticks, and set on Mars.

  • A God In Ruins

    My wife gave me this book after we inadvertently used it to teach Destroyer to swear on a car journey. It’s the story of Teddy Todd, an RAF airman in the second world War, flying bombers to raid Germany. But perhaps really its an achingly sad, beautifully written meditation on death, kindness, and failed hope.

  • The Secrets Of Drearcliff Grange School

    To confuse myself, I read the sequel (The Haunting Of Drearcliff Grange) first, but then devoured The Secrets on my way to Singapore. It’s amusing that what I took from the sequel to be the big story of the first book, turns out to be something that doesn’t happen in the first book at all; […]

  • Anno Dracula – One Thousand Monsters

    A long time ago, Kim Newman wrote Drachenfels, which was a novel with a vampire, Genevieve Dieudonne, who wasn’t a generic villain, and that did so well for him that he couldn’t give her up. She showed up in several more Games Workshop novels before ending up in Anno Dracula, Newman’s alternate history where Queen […]

  • The Damnation Of Pythos

    It’s been a little while since last I read a book about Space Marines, but finally I got around to this, the last in the sixth anthology of Horus Heresy books. This one was pretty bleak; a bunch of very angry, traumatised Space Marines who really want to be robots instead of men, get haunted […]

  • The Haunting Of Drearcliff Grange School

    The Haunting Of Drearcliff Grange School is the second book Kim Newman has written about a fictional girls school, a cross between St Trinians and either Hogwarts or Professor X’s Academy For Gifted Mutants. Like all Newman’s work, it’s a glorious mashup of B movies, comic books and characters like Dr Shade that Newman made […]

  • Double Eagle

    Last weekend Games Workshop rereleased Aeronautica Imperialias, their fighter combat game, and to persuade people to buy it they also reissued Dan Abnett’s novel about fighter pilots in the grimdark future. To distract myself from Blood Bowl, or the fact that I was on a plane in turbulent skies, I read it.

  • Celestine

    This was a very strange book to read. Half of it is the usual boilerplate Imperial soldiers vs Evil Forces of Chaos story that Games Workshop assume will sell more toy soldiers, and the rest is a wander through what feels vaguely Moorcockian landscapes as an amnesiac wakes on a mound of her own bones, […]

  • Caged Skies

    Today I read Caged Skies, which is not a book about Space Marines and therefore an exception to almost everything else I’ve read this year. It’s being made into a satire about a Hitler Youth member who fantasises about Hitler being his best friend, in a film made by the director of Eagle vs Shark […]

  • Vengeful Spirit and Scars

    I read two more Space Marine novels this week, as I’d been gifted all that spare time for reading by Delta Airlines. Vengeful Spirit is partly a story about some of the good guys infiltrating Horus’ giant spaceship, and also a story about Horus and his forces attacking and destroying the world of Molech. In […]