Ian Mond

The Outsider, Stephen King (Scribner 978-1501180989 $30.00, 576pp, hc) May 2018.

According to Grady Hendrix, who spent a couple of years re-reading Stephen King’s published work for Tor.com (it’s a magnificent undertaking, and you should absolutely check it out) King has written 10 novels where the death of a child is central to the plot. With the release of The Out­sider, that number can be increased by one. This time ...Read More

The Gone Away Place, Christopher Bar­zak (Knopf Books for Young Readers 978-0399556098, $17.99, 304pp, hc) May 2018.

On May 31, 1985, a series of devastat­ing tornadoes swept through Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Ontario, Canada. To this day it is the largest outbreak to hit the region, leaving 90 people dead, thousands injured, and amassing up to a billion dollars’ worth of damage. Christopher Barzak was ten years old when ...Read More

I Still Dream, James Smythe (The Borough Press 978-0007541942, £12.99, 400pp, hc) April 2018.

James Smythe’s gripping, decades-spanning new novel I Still Dream begins with 17-year-old Laura Bow hiding a recent phone bill from her parents. She knows it’s a delaying tactic: her stepfather will eventually discover the charges she’s racked up, but access to the phone is a must-have. The year is 1997, the Internet has entered the mainstream, ...Read More

The Cabin at the End of the World, Paul Trem­blay (William Morrow, 978-0062679109, $26.99, 288pp, hc) June 2018.

I’m not a fan of secluded countryside chalets where the 4G is patchy, there’s no wifi, and the closest neighbor is 20 minutes away. These places fill me with existential dread; every creak and whisper a possible axe-murderer out for an easy kill. Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the ...Read More

84K, Claire North (Orbit 978-0316316804, $15.99, 480pp, tp) May 2018.

Since 2014 Claire North has tapped into a rich vein of high concept speculative thrillers. Starting with The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, each stand-alone novel has been framed around a straightforward “what if.” For example, what if there were people who, when they died, cycled back to the day they were born, but with all their memories intact? ...Read More

Adjustment Day, Chuck Palahniuk (Norton 978-0393652598, $26.95, 316pp, hc) May 2018.

Before Reddit, 4chan, Pepe, Men’s Rights Activists, and Incels, Chuck Palahniuk’s debut novel, Fight Club, explored how consumerism and the touchy-feely attitudes of the ’90s created a generation of disaffected, frustrated, angry men. Twenty-two years later and Palahniuk revisits this subject with his latest book, Adjust­ment Day, substituting capitalism and self-help groups with Social Justice Warriors and cultural Marxism. ...Read More

Tide of Stone, Kaaron Warren (Omnium Gatherum 9780615827995, $14.99, 374pp, tp) May 2018.

When the Time Ball Tower is first mentioned in Kaaron Warren’s terrific new novel Tide of Stone, I thought it was an invention of the author. I had no idea they existed and that I’d been liv­ing near one my entire life. For those, like me, ignorant of this ancient time-keeping device, a Time Ball is an ...Read More

Red Clocks, Leni Zumas (Little, Brown and Company 978-0316434812, $26.00, 368pp, hc) January 2018.

Given that both novels deal with reproductive rights under a repressive regime, it’s not surprising that critics would compare Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The key difference is that while Atwood’s classic is a dystopia where a Christian theocracy has established control, Zumas’s novel is set in the here and now. ...Read More

Gnomon, Nick Harkaway (William Heinemann 978-1785151279, £14.99, 704pp, hc) November 2017. (Knopf 978-1524732080, $28.95, 688pp, hc) January 2018.

I know I’m late to the work of Nick Harkaway. I’ve meant to read his fiction since the publication of The Gone-Away World back in 2008, I even bought the book, but, for whatever reason, never cracked open the covers. I was planning on picking up Gnomon, until I saw it was ...Read More

Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi, translated by Jonathan Wright (Penguin Books 978-0143128793, $16.00, 288pp, tp) January 2018.

Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad places the eponymous monster amongst the suicide bombings and devastation of Baghdad in 2005. It opens with an attack on Tayaran Square where a soul, torn from its body, finds a home in a vacated corpse. It’s no ordinary cadaver, but rather a stitched-together amalgamation of parts, the ...Read More