EvilRedEye wrote:

Rebecca F Kuang, of Poppy War, Babel and Yellowface fame is doing an event in Manchester in December and I’m so excited, arghhh.

Edit: Oh, she’s at London the next day as well for those of you down in that newfangled London.

tigersgogrrr wrote:

It is not awful. You're awful.

Raiziel wrote:

That sounds exactly like the sort of thing I would love.

poprock wrote:

Gogmagog by Jeff Noon & Steve Beard

This is a spectacularly weird book. Noon does psychedelic fantasy, while Beard does historical folk horror. Together they’ve built something like Gormenghast-on-Thames.

It’s the first half of a two-parter, and as such it ends pretty abruptly. But what a journey. And it is literally a journey - a twisted take on the hero’s journey trope.

Our protagonist is Cady - Arcadia Meade - a coarse old sea witch and boat captain who is well over a thousand years old and more plant than person. She collects a rag-tag crew and sets off upriver to the capital. A 10-year old girl with strange psychic powers. A mechanical man - last of his kind - who protects the strange girl. A deckhand whose shadow has a life of its own. A golem with a face of flame and a tragic backstory. A rare creature made of crystal living in the boat’s engine room. And the mentally ill spirit of a dead mill worker resurrected in the body of a robot queen and lashed to the prow of their boat as a figurehead.

I did say this is a weird book.

The river itself is the other main character. The river contains, along its full length, the bones of a long-dead dragon. The dragon’s ghost haunts the river. Sticks to it. And over the centuries, has created the environments, tribes, religions and industries that Cady and her crew encounter along their journey.

There are hints and whispers of the wider world, and the history that led to this dead dragon and fractured populace of races living around its ghost. But none of seems to matter to the characters we meet - the river is all they know.

Gogmagog, in our own myth and legend, was the last giant of old Albion. And you can feel deliberate echoes of British folklore all the way through this book. Just enough to make it feel real, while it gets weirder and weirder. And then weirder again. (This place could be England, 10,000 years post-apocalypse, post-alien arrival, and post-all sorts of other things.)

If you like your fantasy abstract, stoned and hypnotic … you might like this. Takes a bit of getting into, but I was swept along eventually. It’s all atmosphere and little plot, but the atmosphere is so dense you could grab hold of it.