Starred review from Publishers Weekly for The Doll Collection, edited by the invincible Ellen Datlow and available next month from Tor. PS I’m in it.

Last Summer I discovered a bookshop with a healthy haul of ’60s paperbacks, many of them in great condition for their age and fairly priced at three quid a pop. So of course I kept going back. I put my focus on popular fiction writers that are now forgotten, or had passed me by, or…

In some of the awards-season discussions of The Imitation Game I’ve noticed a subtext in which anything other than support for the film is read as an act of disloyalty toward Alan Turing himself. Much as, once upon a time, thinking The Green Berets an awful movie branded you as anti-American, or finding 12 Years…

They say you should never meet your heroes. I’m here to tell you that it isn’t necessarily true. I’ve written elsewhere of my personal debt to The Avengers and little imagined, as a kid growing up with 60s TV, that I’d someday get to play in the telefantasy sandpit. (Actually, that’s a lie. I fantasized…

Hey, I don’t want to brag, but I got my card from the Blairs.

After Saturday’s mass signing at Forbidden Planet, and catching up with old friends at the enjoyable British Fantasy Society open event afterwards, a less pressured Sunday included a visit to The British Library’s exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination before the drive home. The exhibition follows a path from Otranto to the present day…

  It’s called a Kindle Countdown Deal; the price of an e-book gets slashed to the bone for a couple of days and then rises in increments over a week or so until it’s back to full price again. Grab ’em, do; they’re going for about 99p/99c but the clock is ticking. The Spirit Box…

I know I haven’t updated the blog for some time, and if you’ve been checking, I’m sorry. It’s partly laziness – so much easier to fire off a quick snarky mindbite on Twitter than to actually organise a thought or two into something worthwhile – and partly personal, but mostly it’s business. The personal –…

The large-print edition. My favourite KoB cover to date, I think.

And here’s what he brought.