Asking the Wrong Questions

Readers of Allan's novels, as well as her excellent blog , will have for some time been aware of her growing interest in crime fiction and non-fiction. It's not a surprise, then, that her latest book veers away from the fantastic genres and towards crime writing, and it is equally unsurprising that the result is both excellent and entirely idiosyncratic, a book that stretches our definitions of "novel" and "non-fiction" in equal measure. A Granite Silence begins in an autofictional mode, with a narrator presumed to be Allan taking a trip to Aberdeen to research a new novel in one of the early lulls in the pandemic. There she learns about the 1934 murder of eight-year-old Helen Priestly, who disappeared and was later found dead in her working class tenement building. It's a case that still simmers in the city's consciousness, and has been written about extensively in legal academic circles.  This opening segment quickly becomes a compelling, gripping...

For the second time, I was invited to cover for Lisa Tuttle, the Guardian 's recent SFF columnist. In the May column , I write about Joe Abercrombie's The Devils , a series starter about a Suicide Squad -like troupe of monsters in a sideways, fantasized medieval Europe; Emily Tesh's The Incandescent , in which the magic school story is told from the point of view of the teacher (a longer review of this book is forthcoming in Strange Horizons ); Land of Hope by Cate Baum, an apocalypse survival story in the vein of The Road with a twist that shouldn't work but somehow does; and Roisin Dunnett's A Line You Have Traced , an example of what Niall Harrison has termed "overshoot" fiction, in which three people in different time periods cope with what seems like the end of the world. Writing these sorts of reviews is always an interesting mental challenge. You have to sum up a whole book in a paragraph, and come up with a way to encapsulate the things it does...