And now I’ve read it, I know why.

The story opens with a human sacrifice. A boy, Luke, is dragged, screaming, from his bed, across a rocky beach to Crowden’s Sorrow. His pyjamas are torn, he is soaked through with rain and shivering with fear, and hooded adults, whose voices he recognises as friends and neighbours, pull back his head and slit his throat.

And that, pretty much, sets the tone for the rest of the book.

Luke was sacrificed, we learn, to ensure that hoards of demons cannot break through the door in the cavern known as Crowden’s Sorrow. Twenty five years later the door is threatening to open once more and an almighty battle breaks out between the guardians of the door, the Hobarron elders, and Crowden’s coven, a band of witches dedicated to the release of the demons. And at the centre of the maelstrom is Jake Harker, a fifteen year old loner and horror comic fanatic.

This is a real page turner. It’s fast paced and full of action and it’s one of the creepiest books I’ve read in a long while: Jake Harker wasn’t the only one having weird dreams, I can tell you! It’s full of well-rounded characters and a cast of evil creatures to make your stomach churn (the exploding poisonous toads that rain down on Hobarron village are truly disgusting). Adults are generally untrustworthy, and some of the children are no better, and Jake is faced with impossible odds if he is going to avoid the inevitable and bloody end.

It has to be a must for all horror fans. And if you want more, there are two more books Gallows at Twilight and The Last Nightfall due out in January and September of next year. In the meantime the website WitchfinderBooks.co.uk is well worth checking out. There’s a reading by the author and a competition to win signed copies (closes 1st July 2010).

Witchfinder: Dawn of the Demontide, out March 2010.

Hush Hush

I have a confession to make. When I picked this book off my pile of review books my heart sunk. First off, I’d scanned the promotional material and knew it was yet another high school teenager falls for inappropriate male story. Then there was the small matter of the black feather that had fallen out of the envelope that accompanied the promotional material. So, there was no doubt about it. I wasn’t going to enjoy this.

Yeah, well, OK.

Approximately 150 pages in and I had to put it down because the kids were screaming to be fed, and that’s pretty much how it carried on until I had reached the final page.

So what makes Hush Hush worth reading? To start with, there’s the two lead characters. Leaving aside the problem of their names (Nora and Patch! I ask you. Those names might work in the US but in England I have an image of a decrepit and irritable old woman getting down with the dog. But I digress), these two are as well-drawn and attractive as any. Nora is a feisty number. She is self-reliant and not easily spooked and no one could be more surprised than she when she finds herself drawn towards the mysterious new boy at school. Indeed, she refuses to give in to the inevitable, does her utmost to avoid Patch and even starts dating another boy, until she comes to suspect that he may have been involved in the death of another girl. All of which makes the final submission to Patch all the more convincing.

Patch, too is a multi-dimensional creation, no mean feat given he’s the supernatural one. He remains difficult to read, right up to the end. Yes, he’s the fallen angel and yes, he fell, we learn, for all the right reasons. But there are hints a many of the evil he has perpetrated in the past and neither Nora nor the reader can be sure that in the end the evil side of his nature will not triumph.

And then we come to the writing style. This is lean and pacy and dominated by sassy and believable dialogue. Hush Hush is a book you can read quickly, indeed that you want to read quickly. It’s fun and exciting, intriguing and not a little bit sexy; it’s a different twist on the high school romance and a stupendous first novel.

I gather Becca Fitzpatrick is now working on a sequel. I won’t be picking that one up with a sinking heart, but I do hope I don’t get another black feather.

Hush Hush by Becca Fitzpartick, published by Simon & Schuster, October 29th 2009

The Terror Beneath

Now, there’s horror that is scary, and there’s horror that is stomach-churning. This first volume in the Monstrumologist series is both. It deals, by means of supposed nineteenth century journals, with an infestation of anthropophagi in a peaceful nineteenth century New England town.

The journals were written by one Will Henry, who at the time of this first story, is twelve years old and living with, and as apprentice to, the monstrumologist of the series title: Doctor Pellinore Warthrop. The story opens with the arrival at the doctor’s home of a late night caller with a strange delivery: a dead anthropophagus, still attached to the body of the young girl on whom it had been feeding. Strange late night visitors bearing bizarre packages are not uncommon, we are told, but this particular arrival excites more interest than usual and the doctor immediately sets about examining the find, whilst Will takes notes. What follows is the first of many minute descriptions of these beasts, their gore-bespattered rows of teeth, the gut-wrenching odour which exudes from their every pore and the barbed claws ‘as sharp as a hypodermic and as hard as diamonds’. And you know then that this is no book for the faint-hearted.

So this is the story of a reclusive doctor and his young assistant and their battle to rid New England of a pod of anthrophagi. Well, yes. And no. It is also a coming of age tale. Will has come to live with the doctor after his parents were killed in a fire. He is alone, as the doctor is also, and as the quest to discover how the anthrophagi arrived in New England and how to destroy them unfolds, so Will comes to understand who he is and what the doctor means to him.

And the doctor too, has his own personal angle to the quest, and at this point, it seems, the book becomes very much a product of its period. For Pellinore Warthrop is the son of a monstrumologist, and when the anthropophagi turn out to be connected in some way to his father, Warthrop knows that only he can finish the business. Is it fanciful of me to see a reflection here of a war started by one US President and re-opened by his son? I understand that it is all too easy, post 9-11, to read references to the war on terror into fantasy fiction, but whether conscious or not, the similarities here were too marked for this reader to ignore.

A multi-layered book, then? Yes. And perhaps one that is a little too sophisticated for its 13+ target audience. The protagonist may only be twelve, but the writing style and language are true to its nineteenth century journal conceit. The ghastliness of the monsters is described with exquisitely literary quasi-nineteenth century prose. Will that appeal to readers more familiar with, say Darren Shan? I’m not sure. But more sophisticated readers will love having more to get their teeth into!

The Monstrumologist: The Terror Beneath by Rick Yancey, published by Simon & Shuster, October 2009, £6.99

The Zombie Cookbook

I once had a friend tell me that, when evaluating cookbooks, it’s important to not expect every recipe to be of interest to you, and that there can be a cookbook that you love that you ignore half of. As long as there were a few recipes in that cookbook that you would not only use and love, but that you would reuse for years to come, then the whole book was worth getting.

I think that the same logic can be applied, to an extent, to short story collections. The short story, as a format, has undergone a bit of a fall from grace in the past few decades, which is unfortunate, because it’s a unique type of story that allows for a lot of variety and experimentalism that you won’t necessarily get from novels. I think that, if people approached short story collections the same way they approach cookbooks, they’d enjoy them significantly more.

All that brings us to The Zombie Cookbook, a new short story collection from Damnation Books. As the title might suggest, it’s not the most serious of story collections; a lot of the stories here walk the line between horror and comedy. There’s a long tradition of that within zombie literature, stretching back to movies like Return of the Living Dead (which was the origin of the “bbbrrraaaaaiiiinnsss” zombie meme) and Dead Alive. For someone who’s a long-time fan of zombie literature in print or film, this collection doesn’t necessarily break any new ground, but it does provide a solid entry in that tradition.

The theme of the collection, crossing zombie stories with food, is a logical connection, and one that you would think would be fairly restrictive, but there’s a surprising amount of variety among the eleven stories and poems included in the collection. I hadn’t heard of any of the authors in the collection prior to reading it, but I’ll definitely be checking some off these authors out in the future, as there are some who really manage to take the concept and make it their own.

As I said with the recipe book analogy, I didn’t enjoy every single story in this collection, but that’s okay; not everything in the cookbook has to be to everyone’s taste, and even the ones that I didn’t particularly enjoy were well-written. I’m sure they’ll have a lot of fans in their own right. When the collection hits its hight points, though, in stories like The Right Recipe and My Big Fat Zombie Wedding, you end up discovering some short stories that have a lot of depth and world-building done to them in addition to the puns and slapstick humour that pepper the book.

In addition to the stories, the Zombie Cookbook is also really nicely packaged. The cover and interior artwork are beautiful, and nicely accent the stories that they’re interspersed with. A few of the stories even include recipes for zombie cooks, which helps sell the concept of the book as well. If you’re a fan of zombie books or horror comedy, it’s definitely worth checking out at ZombieCookbook.net. Both e-book and print versions are available.

Leviathan

As ‘what-ifs’ go for the starting point of a novel sequence, this one’s a doosie.

Assume that Darwin not only came up with natural selection but that he also pre-empted Crick and Watson, discovered DNA, or ‘life-threads’ as they are called here, and then set about fabricating all kinds of species to help mankind. Then assume that the new ‘technology’ is only accepted by Britain and her allies, whilst Germany pursues a more historically accurate technological development, albeit, unwittingly influenced by the ‘Darwinist’ fabrications.

Now place all that in the historical setting of 1914, add a couple of kids who are not quite what they seem, snap your fingers, and voilà, Leviathan! Well, not quite.

Leviathan is the first in a new series by Scott Westerfeld, he of Uglies fame, and you can tell it’s the first in a series because it ends on one of those cliff-hangers that have you turning the page desperate to find out what happens next.

It opens with the night-time escape of young Prince Aleksandar, Alek for short, in the company of Count Volger and Otto Klopp, master of mechaniks. Alek’s parents have just been murdered in Sarajevo, and the Count knows that the true assassins (not the Serbian scapegoats) will be after Alek next as the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. So, under cover of darkness, they take a Cyklop Stormwalker, stuffed to the gills, with gold bars and the family insignia, and make their escape, trudging across central Europe in disguise and desperately trying to keep one step ahead of their ‘Clanker’ (ie German) pursuers.

Now, the Stormwalker is one of those traditionally powered vehicles that have been subliminally influenced by Darwin. It’s very much a tank or armoured vehicle, but instead of running on tracks (Alek has a little joke about how daft this would be) it uses huge mechanical legs. This provides the reader with no end of fun as Alek learns how to guide the walker at night without tripping over, stop safely from a run and walk on bended ‘knees’ to duck under low archways or keep under cover of trees.

Meanwhile, the other kid, Deryn, is about to apply to enter the British Air Service. Which would be fine, of course, if it weren’t for the minor fact that Deryn is a girl. Of course, she isn’t any girl. She’s the daughter of an aeronaut and has virtually been brought up in the air. She is tough, feisty, clever, and resourceful and she has an endearingly boyish turn of phrase, all of which is aptly demonstrated on her very first day in the service when she successfully pilots a Huxley through a storm.

And this is the point where the reader is first introduced to a ‘hydrogen breather’, for a Huxley is a sort of organic air balloon, a fabrication made from the life-chains of assorted medusae (jelly fish and other poisonous sea creatures) whose belly is full of hydrogen exhaling bugs and bacteria. Therefore, as the medusa feeds it produces hydrogen which fill gas bags in its belly and enable it to rise. (So hydrogen breathers are actually hydrogen exhalers but that just doesn’t trip off the tongue so well.)

Sadly, Huxleys are also rather primitive beasties, as Deryn calls them, which are easily spooked by high winds. Thus Deryn’s feat is considerable even if she does end up having to be rescued by the Leviathan.

The Leviathan. This is the blue whale sized version: a massive ecosystem, part airship and part weapons carrier. But because it is a ‘fab’, because it is organic, it seems to have something resembling a personality, such that when it lies, deflated and famished on a Swiss glacier later in the story, you feel real pity not only for the humans aboard but also for the ship itself.

Westerfeld’s prose, superb as it is, is only partly responsible. For Leviathan isn’t just a written book. It’s an illustrated one and Keith Thompson’s monochrome drawings and their tender depiction of the fabs, all smooth, sinuous lines, and misty depths, cannot but entice the reader into this mindset. I love these drawings. They have a delightfully early-twentieth century feel to them at the same time as being undeniably modern. The attenuated figures and impish faces are reminiscent of Chris Riddell’s Edge Chronicles characters, and some of the battle scenes are pure steampunk, but then you get illustrations like that of the Captain’s cabin which would not be out of place in a Sherlock Holmes story.

Of course Deryn and Alek meet eventually and Westerfeld has no end of fun with roles, allowing, for example, Deryn, the pretend boy, to take Alek, the pretend Swiss villager, hostage. By the end of this novel Deryn has discovered Alek’s true identity, but hers remains hidden, although not for long one suspects given her burgeoning romantic inclinations.

I will reveal no more.

Leviathan, the book, is as superb and captivating a fabrication as Leviathan, the hydrogen breather. It has action, mystery, deception, and even the first stirrings of love. It also raises some fascinating questions about man’s relationship to beasts, should you want to get philosophical, and provides a spin on early twentieth century which makes your mouth water.

It was published only a few days ago. So there should still be some copies left. But move fast as this one is bound to become a bestseller quickly.

Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld, illustrated by Keith Thompson, published by Simon & Schuster, £12.99 hardback.

Dark Visions

Dark Visions by L.J.Smith comprises three novels, The Strange Power, The Possessed and The Passion, all of which were originally published back in the mid 1990s. Now they have been repackaged into a single 730 page paper-back volume and released back to a public whose taste for this kind of urban fantasy has been rekindled by the ubiquitous Twilight books.

And here comes the apology. I know you’re all sick of references to La Meyer and her magnum opus but in the case of Dark Visions I really must draw the analogies. Why? Because reading these three novels you cannot help but be struck by the similarities and as this volume has only just been published (September 3rd) you may fall into the misapprehension that Smith had been influenced by Meyer. The truth, however, given the original publication dates, would seem to be the opposite.

But let me tell you a little more about the novels themselves.

The Strange Power introduces the main characters. Kaitlin is an artist, whose drawings have the uncanny habit of coming true. She is invited by the mysterious Dr Zetes to join his group of psychically talented teenagers in a purple building in California. (The significance of the building’s colour is never explained but it’s such a super detail, I thought I’d mention it!) There she meets the two other major characters in the three novels: golden boy, Rob, the healer, and brooding but gorgeous Gabriel, the telepath.

By the end of The Strange Power the three teenagers, along with the two other psychic teen residents of the purple house, Anna and Lewis, have discovered that Dr Zetes isn’t quite the philanthropist they thought, fought him off and in doing so created a psychic bond between group members that cannot be broken.

The Possessed opens with the group on the run. They have escaped Dr Zetes and are desperately working their way up the west coast of America looking for the beach that Kaitlin believes houses their salvation. As they hide out together they grow closer and Kaitlin finally discovers Gabriel’s secret: he’s not just a telepath, but a psychic vampire who has to drain others of their psychic energy to survive. Now, ordinarily you might run from this. But not Kaitlin. No, she decides that she’s strong enough to control Gabriel and offers herself up as a source. And at this point I can hear you all screaming Bella and Edward at me. So I shall say no more.

The novel ends with an apocalyptic battle between the Fellowship (the good guys) and Dr Zetes and his bunch of psychic freaks (you guessed it, the bad guys), the outcome of which proves to be not entirely satisfactory for either side. And Kaitlin is not happy either, torn as she is between good old Rob and scary but sexy Gabriel!

The third novel, The Passion, brings both the love story and the battle between good and evil to an end. This is the one where Kaitlin grabs hold of her life, takes risks and emerges triumphant. She also gets the boy, but I won’t reveal which one.

So, what did I make of the books? Well, they’re a lot shorter than the Twilight opus and the read far more quickly. The style is leaner and the pages turn rapidly. Watching the relationship between Kaitlyn and Gabriel ebb and wane is a joy and those readers who criticised Bella for being too sappy, will find for more meat on the bone in Kaitlyn.

The minor characters in the group, Anna and Lewis are less clearly defined. This is only natural given the sheer dominance of the romantic triangle, but, for my money, I could have done with a bit more colour. Still, that criticism aside, if you liked Twilight, then you will like Dark Visions and it is amazingly good value at only £7.99 for all three books.

As to me, I’m off to read Scott Westerfeld’s latest. I’ve read too many books about American teenagers recently and I really can’t face them again for a while!

Dark Visions by L.J.Smith, published by Simon and Schuster, September 2009

Invisible Fiends: Mr Mumbles

I read Invisible Fiends: Mr Mumbles on the train to a children’s writers’ event in London and then on the way back again, and so engrossed was I that I had to carry on whilst walking in the dark from the station to my house. It wasn’t an easy task, trying to catch the light from the sparsely arranged streetlamps and, as you will realise when you read on, it wasn’t an entirely sensible thing to do either.

Mr Mumbles is the first of what will become a series of Invisible Fiends books. And it is not for the faint-hearted. It is 250 pages of fast-paced, spine-tingling fun with a dystopian vision that is truly horrifying. Shall I tell you more?

The eponymous, Mr Mumbles, (hero, he is not) was Kyle’s childhood imaginary friend. He was a skinny little man with friendly eyes who made up for his lack of intelligible speech by a wide range of slapstick and mime. He wore a high-collared overcoat and a hat pulled down too far and he had big ears and bushy eyebrows.

But that was then. The new Mr Mumbles isn’t friendly at all. He looks like he has been through Hell and he wants to bring it back with him. Here’s a flavour:

‘The lips were grotesque: thick, bloated, and sewn tightly together with grimy lengths of thread. Each stitch crossed over its neighbour, forming a series of little Xs from one side of his mouth to the other, sealing it shut. The holes the threads passed through were black and infected, the flesh rotting away from within.’

Perhaps I should have mentioned this is not a book for the squeamish either?

Mr Mumbles blames Kyle for what has happened to him and he is out for revenge. In the chase that ensues, Kyle is helped by the mysterious and resourceful Ameena and discovers powers he never knew he had. He also finds himself thrust into The Darkest Corners, the dystopia from which Mr Mumbles has come, and where he find an even more mysterious, and, it turns out, significant, figure.

Invisible Fiends is part good old-fashioned quest. There are some great fight scenes and a real sense of danger as Mr Mumbles comes back from everything that Kyle and Ameena throw at him. Kyle’s quest, therefore is to find a way to overcome and destroy him.

This is all fairly straightforward, if exciting stuff. The horror, however, lies in what feels like the sub-plot for this novel, but is more likely the story that underpins the series as a whole. Kyle has never met his father and his mother will not tell him anything about him. Nan might, but she’s long since lost her marbles. By the end of this novel, Kyle has some idea who his father is, and that brings me back to the reason why it wasn’t a very good idea to finish this novel walking down a dark road. The denouement is truly, spine-tinglingly creepy. I’m not sure if a ten year old would get it, but it left this grown-up with some very disturbing thoughts on which to go to bed.

And maybe that’s the point. Little boys will love it: fast action, sassy dialogue, gruesome imagery and a scary ending. Just don’t read it to them at bed-time. You may have trouble getting to sleep afterwards.

Invisible Fiends: Mr Mumbles by Barry Hutchison, published by Harper Collins on 7 January 2010

Neill Blomkamp originally shot a movie called ‘Alive in Joburg’ (scroll down to watch it) a surprisingly accomplished film made on a shoestring budget that did enough to attract the attention of Peter Jackson who produces the developed film.

The move follows Wikus Van De Merwe an employee of Multi National United (MNU) charged with evicting a population of aliens from a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg to a refugee camp even further outside the city.

The serving of eviction notices, accompanied by raids on shacks and plenty of oppressive unprovoked violence makes comparisons with apartheid South Africa obvious, District 9 mirrors the events of real evictions conducted in similar ways in townships surrounding Johannesburg. In fact the entire alien township of District 9 was filmed in a real township that was in the process of being evicted as filming took place.

A documentary team films the evictions and so also capture the moment that Wikus is inadvertently sprayed with alien fluid that begins to slowly metamorphose him into an alien. This makes the hapless Wikus suddenly desirable to various factions including MNU and local black market players in District 9. He find help amongst the alien community, although perhaps not in the format that he expected . . .

The aliens are fantastically well realised and the CGI is seamlessly integrated into the movie in a way that should make anyone involved with The Phantom Menace hang their heads in shame (assuming they weren’t already doing that). The so-called prawns are slimy, organic and filthy but still convey a personality that is extremely well realised.

Peter Jackson’s influence can be seen in moments of graphic and gooey violence (from his Brain Dead days, rather than LOTR), but handled in such a way that you’re more likely to laugh or groan than be repulsed.

In fact one of the issues with the comedic haplessness of Wikus, the excellently managed awkwardness of the aliens themselves and the casual bloody mayhem is that it undermines the few attempts the movie makes to be sentimental completely. Of course, if you’re a science fiction fan who wants alien weapons, explosions and cool spaceships, this presents should present very few problems.

District 9 lives up to all the careful marketing that has been conducted over the passed few weeks and does so because its premise is so interesting that any amount of action can be laid over the top of it without feeling overdone, even when peoples heads are exploded with lasers.

Watch ‘Alive in Joburg’, the short film on which District 9 is based.

Volcano Roads

Every so often I have a break from reading (and writing) young adult fantasy to read something else and this time it was the latest in Peter Tonkin’s Richard Mariner series. Volcano Roads is due for publication in late November and will be the 21st, yes 21st, Mariner novel. But before you stop reading this review on the basis that you couldn’t possibly find the time to read the previous 20 in the next two months, let me reassure you: each of the Mariner novels is self-contained. It may add to your enjoyment if you have read others but it really isn’t necessary.

So, for Mariner virgins, let me tell you a little about the books. The eponymous Richard Mariner is a sea captain who gets himself and his indomitable (and sexy) wife, Robin, into all sorts of scrapes involving boats and ships all around the world. He’s massively wealthy, extraordinarily well-connected and has a better-toned body than any middle aged man deserves. He’s also reliably practical around boats, guns and women and more than a bit of a polymath. All of which comes in handy when he’s fighting off pirates, terrorists, mercenaries and any other ne’er-do-wells the modern world can throw at him.

Which leads me onto Volcano Roads. The novel opens with the striking image of a young woman diver hanging motionless and near-dead in the Java Sea. Below her is the dead body of her diving buddy. Above her is the dead body of the boatsman. She has less than an hour to live.

Into this scene sails the Tai Fun, Richard Mariner’s state-of-the-art four-masted cruise liner, en route to the grand opening of the Volcano Roads hotel on the nearby island of Pulau Baya and the marriage of the island’s ruler, Prince Sailendra, and Inga Nordberg. I did mention that Richard is rather well-connected and wealthy didn’t I? So it won’t come as a surprise that he co-owns the hotel and that his guest on the Tai Fun is none other than the bride.

Needless to say, Richard saves the diver, kicks off the investigation into the deaths, and still succeeds in getting the bride to the wedding on time. Just.

But that isn’t the last of it and what follows is a complex and fast moving tale involving a truly evil businessman, weak-minded and greedy princelings, double-crossing nice guys and rather of lot of well-researched geography and science. Indeed, the amount of research involved in a Mariner novel is one of their more striking features.

Another striking feature is Tonkin’s style. I rather expect this sort of novel to involve a lot of punchy dialogue and short sharp sentences and paragraphs. But Tonkin’s is a more literary style. At first it seems a bit slow. There’s a languorous description of the diver on the opening page, for example. Let me quote a little:

Her arms were thrown wide, but bent inwards at the elbows as though she was hugging the slow, warm current like an invisible lover. A lover who ran slow fingers across the redness of her cheeks, past the yellow frame of her face-mask, over the silver circle of the regulator between her carmine lips and up through the spread black cloud of her hair.

You fear at first that such exquisite description will slow down the pace of the book. But as you read you realise that it’s quite the opposite. And that is because of the way Tonkin uses the descriptive passages to create atmosphere, suggest character and leave hints and clues for the reader to decipher. It has the effect of making you feel more involved with the characters, and the hints put the reader in the privileged position of being to solve the mystery alongside the protagonists.

If I have any criticisms of Volcano Roads, it’s that it finished just a little too suddenly, as if a final, short, chapter was missing. But maybe that was just because I had got used to luxuriating in this book and didn’t want it to finish.

So, watch out for the publication of Volcano Roads and give it a try. Only be warned, if you like this one, there are 20 others to read too!

Volcano Roads by Peter Tonkin, published by Severn House on 26th November 2009

Wicked: Witch & Curse

Wicked:Witch and Curse is something of a double whammy of a book. For starters, it comprises the first two novels, Witch and Curse, of the Wicked series. And then there is the small matter of the novels having two authors.

Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié met at a Maui Writers’ Retreat some years ago. Holder will be familiar to many of you as the writer of no small number of Buffy, Angel and Smallville books. Viguié was her student at the retreat. They clearly hit it off and the five novels (to date) of the Wicked series are the result.

Witch was first published in 2002, and Curse the following year. The next two novels in the series, Legacy and Spellbound, also came out in 2003 but readers have had to wait until this July for the fifth novel, Resurrection. In the meantime, no doubt in an effort to drum up a little interest, the first four have been re-packaged into two two-novel volumes which were issued in late 2008. Still, I shouldn’t be too churlish about that: two novels for £6.99 is a pretty good deal by anyone’s standards and when the novels are this readable…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. So back to business.

Witch opens with turmoil. Holly Cather’s parents have taken Holly and her best friend on a white water rafting trip on the Colorado river. They have also taken their argument; one of those weeks-long arguments that can only end in catastrophe. So it doesn’t really come as a huge surprise when the weather starts to imitate Holly’s parents, turning the river into a swirling hell from which Holly alone emerges alive.

Orphaned, and best-friendless Holly finds herself dragged from her beloved San Francisco to chilly, and infinitely wetter Seattle, to join two cousins, Nicole and Amanda, and their mother, and Holly’s father’s sister, Marie-Claire. These are relations she never knew she had and as the novel progresses we realise why her father had cut all ties with his family: the Cathers are witches, descended from the ancient family of Cahors in France and the sworn enemies of the equally ancient and French Deveraux witches. And therein lies the problem, because the leading member of the 21st Century Deveraux family, Michael, is alive and well and living around the corner in Seattle.

In Witch, Holly starts to discover her heritage. She begins to settle into her new family, slowly becoming aware of her own and their abilities. At the same time she also starts to understand the powerful link that exists between herself and her 13th century French ancestor Isabeau de Cahors, an understanding which is enhanced when she meets Michael Deveraux’s son, Jer, who is himself drawn back to the 13th Century through his links with Isabeau’s lover, Jean de Deveraux.

What follows is partly the traditional battle between good (female) and evil (male) and partly a Romeo and Juliette style love story. (The reference is deliberate, by the way. Nicole is actually starring as Juliette in the school play during the ferocious final battle of the novel!) On the way there’s also a fair bit of self discovery (not just on the part of Holly and Jer) and challenge to the stereotypes, most notably the ‘male=bad’ one, you’ll be glad to hear.

Curse picks up from Witch a year later. By then Jer is a physical mess hidden away on a mythical island and kept awake by goodness knows what magic, Nicole has run away to Europe to escape her destiny (yes, you knew that would be a mistake) and Holly has become Coven Mother back in Seattle. Needless to say the battle between the Cahors and the Deveraux reaches a further stage, this time accompanied by pyrotechnics that leave the reader gasping for breath. The two harbour scenes are stunners and would look great in CGI.

I won’t say more about the plot, for to do so would take me into spoiler territory. These are both fast paced, page turners of books and I was left at the end of Curse wanting more. This is not just because so many questions are left unanswered, nor because of all the hooks into the next novels. I had also grown fond of the characters and I want to know whether they survive and in what mangled emotional and physical state.

And so, you may ask, was there anything I didn’t like? Well, yes, actually, there was. You see Holder and Viguié consistently use a particular collective noun for a group of covens. It’s Coventry! I can’t imagine that bothers the original American readers a jot, but every time I hit it, an image of a dull Midlands city would swim before my eyes. And apart from wet weather I really could not see what Coventry had to do with anything.

But that’s a pretty niggling criticism. I found both Witch and Curse hard to put down. You may have the same problem.

Wicked by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié, published by Simon and Schuster, September 2008