FANTASY

SON OF THE NIGHT by Mark Alder

(Orion £18.99) Following on from Son of The Morning, here be angels and demons, royals and commoners, as supernatural powers jostle with medieval kings and queens for supremacy.

It’s the Hundred Years War, but recast with England as a hotbed of luciferian heresy and France trying to expel its demons.

Charles of Navarre — half man, half cat demon — has lost the Battle of Crecy for France and is plotting his political survival, while England’s Queen Isabella is weaving spells to redeem the soul of her murdered lover.

This will involve entering hell itself to negotiate with Satan, here made lucifer’s gaoler.

It all adds up to a brilliantly rendered tale of supernatural skulduggery with swords and codpieces, plots and plagues. It is delivered with humour, gutchurning detail and the narrative drive of a charging knight.

THE LAST DOG ON EARTH by Adrian J. Walker

(Del Rey £7.99) VErY few dystopian novels push all the way through to the horrors explored here.

Fewer still reach these heights of lyricism, humour and decency, and none that I know of do it through the eyes of a dog and his near- catatonic owner. Britain has been torn apart by civil war. reginald, marooned in his tower block with his rescue dog lineker, sets off on a mission to return an orphaned girl to the authorities.

At first, lineker sits at the heart of the story, offering strong opinions on subjects as bizarre as the pomposity of wolves.

But the joy of the book lies in the astonishing emotional journey each character makes, with every human and canine weakness exposed, explored and, ultimately, forgiven.

BROADCAST by Liam Brown

(Legend Press £8.99) A successful ‘vlogger’, David Callow defines the shallow, self- satisfied metropolitan, as hordes of cyber-fans follow his every move on the internet.

With his banalities noted and purchases setting off new trends, it is little wonder that he is asked to participate in an online experiment.

Thanks to a clever little microchip implanted in his brain, his every thought and emotion is streamed live across the world. What, as they say, could possibly go wrong?

This is a short, sharp and shocking update of the Faustus myth, with the devil played by a Silicon Valley gazillionaire, Xan Brinkley.

While the lack of detail leaves some of the descriptions a tad short of pixels, Broadcast delivers a brilliant, ice-cold rush of horror as we follow our hero into a nightmare entirely of his own making. Truly a morality tale for our digital age.