Mystery

Mysteries and misogyny: The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk, reviewed

21 September 2024 9:00 am

Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain in this ‘health resort horror story’ set in a Silesian guesthouse on the eve of the first world war

Anonymous caller: This Plague of Souls, by Mike McCormack, reviewed

21 October 2023 9:00 am

A man returns to his remote rural home after an absence – to be greeted not by his family but a sinister stranger on the telephone

A topsy-turvy world: Peaces, by Helen Oyeyemi, reviewed

15 January 2022 9:00 am

At a village train station in deepest Kent two men and their pet mongoose are setting off on their honeymoon.…

Putting the boot into Italy

14 October 2017 9:00 am

A young woman, naked and covered in blood, totters numbly down a night road. A driver spots her in his…

City of dreadful dusk

2 September 2017 9:00 am

Fantastic fiction loves contrasts made explicit: Eloi and Morlocks, orcs and elves, and above all humans battling vampires, Martians or…

A remote island community is disrupted by the arrival of a troubled teenager

15 August 2015 9:00 am

Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was published in 2012, picked up good reviews, was shortlisted for the Costa…