Michaud, Whispered Echoes (2015)

Anne Michaud, Whispered Echoes: An urban fantasy. Book One. Sad Ghost Press, 2015. Pp. 195. ISBN 978-1-51726-784-1. £6.55 pb/£0.99 e.

Reviewed by Margrét Helgadóttir

Whispered Echoes by Canadian author Anne Michaud was published in the United States by Sad Ghost Press in late 2015. It’s the first in a YA-series of five books (all published) about ghost seer Alyx. The first book is a dark and thrilling story about Alyx’s escape from the mental institution that has kept her captive for nine years and her way to discover and learn her ghost seer abilities. A fast paced action story, the book is good entertainment and is well worth reading if you like horror, the paranormal genres and young adult stories.

Tidhar, Central Station (2016)

Lavie Tidhar, Central Station. Tachyon Publications, 2016. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-1-61696-214-2. $16.95 pb/$9.99 e.

Reviewed by Wendy Bousfield

Lavie Tidhar’s moving, lyrical, insightful work of speculative fiction, Central Station, extrapolates a future in which humanity is entering a new evolutionary stage, triggered by growing immersion in the Internet. In Tidhar’s world, “nodes,” implanted at conception in “birthing clinics” (there are no natural births), provide direct access to the “Conversation”: “a hundred thousand… voices, channels, music, languages, the high-bandwidth indecipherable toktok of Others, weather reports, confessionals, off-world broadcasts time-lagged from Lunar Port and Tong Yun and the Belt…” (23). Akin to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Central Station traces the emergence of children psychically linked to one another and to other minds, both human and mechanical.

McAllion, Moristoun (2016)

Kevin McAllion, Moristoun. Austin Macauley, 2016. Pp. 360. ISBN 978-1-7845-5284-8. £7.99.

Reviewed by Kate Onyett

This book is a first for two reasons. It is a first novel by a chap previously most involved in sports journalism, and, as far as I know, the first novel dealing with the afterlife of Scottish suicides. Bear with me, it’s not as dour as it sounds! The titular island, set in an interminable sea and reachable only by a portal from the mainland (unless you arrive by the more conventional and terminal method), is a place where suicides have to learn to move beyond their personal demons and spiritually better themselves before they can leave and ‘move on.’ That is not entirely the end, either, as McAllion adds a little Eastern detail to this purgatorial narrative with hints of what lies afterwards; a cycle of rebirths and lives lived as both animals and humans. Woe betide the unrighteous, though. Should further grave offences be added to one’s CV whilst on the island, then a soul is hell-bound for a more directly punishing purification.