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The first half of this book was a massive trial, a showcase of the worst tendencies of back-in-the-day science fiction (a nerdy boyscout attitude to science, grim attitudes to women, a disturbing eagerness to sentimentalize "primitive" cultures, and above all the length, the length, my god the way some of these buggers just go ON.) The concise and darkly ironic "The Last Homosexual" by Paul Park was the only good bit.

Things do pick up in the second part, with some good stories by Gwyneth Jones (I mean, I've yet to read a bad story by her), Steven Utley and Cherry Wilder. Stephen Baxter, who I'd come to associate with long-winded "hard" sci-fi impresses with a very short, very hard-hitting and emotional story called "MSOB", and the long final story, "The Robot's Twilight Companion" by Tony Daniels, was also quite engrossing. It's very jargon-heavy - if stories were bags and gee-look-at-this technical terminology were rocks, Daniels' story would be a guaranteed puppy-drowner - but crucially the science in this is something I actually care about, i.e. geology and a splash of mining engineering. The mining robot whose growing awareness forms the meat of the narrative is a goody-goody little sod, a poem-reading, dead-kid-mourning machine, and there are times when this almost makes the whole story tip over like ED209, but Daniels displays several great writing styles (unlike many of the clodhoppers in this anthology) and there are enough plots twists and turns to keep the show on the road.

But overall this was an exhausting read and I'm never going to pick up a Dozois anthology again. This is the second one I've read and baby, I'm done. From that era I much prefer the Omni/Datlow type of writers like Lucius Shepherd, Elizabeth Hand and Terry Dowlin

I didn't know this was a YA book when I bought it, and there are definitely parts where it's aimed more at kids, but it was still a fun read. A great concise style and the author avoids taking an excessively dogmatic stance on the thorny topic of what the heck young people are supposed to do to get ahead in the world. There are several passages that come close to sentimentality and fresh-air-and-exercise preaching but the author usually sidesteps it just in time via the delivery of some kind of sardonic slap in the face.

Like many US novels it's completely obsessed with ancestry, but in a way that feels less turgid than most, and the bad guys are easily unpleasant enough to feature in an adult novel. And most importantly it's packed full of killer lizards, holes and holes full of lizards, more lizards than you can shake a stick at, although that's not recommended procedure because it just makes them angry.

In a way the mainstream lit/horror lit divide reminds me of the way 80s rock bands used to be treated in the media. Overtly gothic Batcave bands would be routinely mocked in the hip music press for being too miserable and doomy, even as the more heterosexual grey raincoat/cardigan bands of the indie scene were frantically pumping out music a million times as dreary as anything the Specimen or Flesh for Lulu produced. And so it goes with all these respectable Booker prize-winning types, Collins being a case in point. He might not be a horror author, but god this is a grim book, despite its funny moments. One of the many wrongheaded review quotes on the book's jacket describes Collins' writing as tough and "macho", but in fact his narrator, a traumatized journalist in a failing local newspaper in the dead middle of 70s America, is sensitive and introspective to the point of neurosis and often beyond. He is fixated on industrial decay but also on food and peoples' weight, referring again and again to the fatness of the people he encounters or, if they are not fat, to their digestive disorders. He fears middle-age and obesity and fast food in the way you or I might fear the atomic bomb. The reader is never quite sure how much of this neurosis is shared by Collins himself, though I hope he has been able to derive some enjoyment from the fact that his book won an Irish literature prize sponsored by Kerry Ingredients (current website pic: a glistening close-up of a floating island desert.)

The style is full of repetition and angst, like someone telling a rosary while they wait to be sentenced in court, and the narrator's obsessions do pall at times. The narrator's voice and the dialogue are, at least to my British ears, convincingly American, but the heavily underlined themes impair that realism, since they are so resonant of what sneering Europeans tended to think of America in those days ("OMG look at all the violence and adverts and fat people!"). If you're looking for a light touch you will not find it here. Having said that, the book does run along well and there is usually enough humour in the narrator's sweaty-palmed mutterings to get by, with some nice Michael Chabonesque laughs here and there. It's also not as misogynist as you think it will be in the first few chapters. So, you know, it wasn't a complete waste of time.

This was SO BAD, and not even so bad it's good. While not quite the target market for this stuff, I do enjoy mercenary/adventure films and novels (Predator is one of my favourite films, and I've read a lot of Lee Childs for instance). But this...this...it's the sort of novel where a character (who you already know is a former IRA boy who's turned on his former masters to become a gun for hire) walks out of a church through a Judas gate, stops on the way and says: "It's appropriate, don't you think, especially for someone like me? Judas was a political terrorist called a Zealot, and my branch of the great game was the IRA". That's how hard men speak in Higgins world, and there's tonnes more just like it. The way his characters talk makes the dialogue in that Essie Fox book I recently slagged off seem like a series of elegant Zen koans. Though the priest's response ("Such talk is pointless, Sean") is definitely fair comment.

Now, if this book were a rollicking roller-coaster of explosions, bomb scares, fisticuffs and sex the talk would barely matter. But it's really boring. 13 books into his series about Sean Dillon, Higgins doesn't seem to have a handle on anything that makes the man tick, apart from the most broad motives (he's pissed off because his buddy got killed, he's implacable, he's good at killing people). Nor does Higgins (assuming it was even him writing by this point) give much of a fuck about weapons or surveillance technology. The cyber stuff is referred to in the vaguest possible terms, and everyone is acting like a bulletproof vest is some kind of revolutionary new technology (we are in 2005 here).

What you do get is plenty of obsessive references to alcohol. Whenever the men (and glamorous Russian Major Nika Elastika, or whatever she's called) aren't in the middle of killing someone they drink and smoke, swilling down spirits and champers in the kind of quantities that make a mockery of the Withnail and I drinking game. And I think Higgins has quite an emotional attachment to cars, too, because he refers to them by their full capitalized names again and again (even if it's People Carrier). On the plus side, I enjoyed the titbit about the Algerian salt marsh that is home to special swimming horses, and I did find what Higgins wrote about IRA sleeper cells in London quite interesting, though I have no idea if it's true. And that's truly it for the positives.

Obviously by this point Higgins was getting on a bit and had spent a considerable part of his career blatantly recycling former works, so maybe it's unfair to judge his earlier work by the quality of this book. But I can think of really old authors who kept cooking on gas right up until their death (some of Reginald Hill's last books feel like they were written by a randy bisexual twentysomething who's somehow acquired the knowledge of a sixty-year-old man, and very good they are too) so I'm not inclined to let Higgins (or his publishers) completely off the hook. Everyone involved in this should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

slams down tumbler on black and red marble countertop Mine's a gin and It.

This book had a lot to love in theory. It ticked a bunch of boxes that interest me, although I admit there is a bit of a glut in the silver-screen haunting market lately and the silent film era this novel is based around has been worked to death by now. Still, it has a weirdo living in a falling-down house, coastal erosion, badly-behaved old women, and more goth fashion and make-up markers than you could shake a stick at. So many dilapidated taxidermy animals. Tsunamis of beetles. Fake Egyptian bling all over the place. Fox also adds a long list of homework reading she did before she wrote this book, which will no doubt be welcomed by enthusiasts of that era of cinema.

The only problem is, she can't really write. Not for more than a couple of paragraphs at a time. She's usually fine describing the journalist POV narrator on his own, and the scenes where he creeps about the garden of former movie star Leda Grey with his camera, or sweats and writhes photogenically in his sticky summer boardinghouse (you've guessed it, it's the 1976 UK Long Hot Summer again, apparently caught in an endless film loop of its own) are the best bits of the novel. There are one or two really good eerie effects when the lad is on his own with his thoughts.

But when people start actually talking to each other, the wheels soon come off. There's no nice way of saying it: Fox has a tin ear for dialogue, and the olde-worlde writing style she essays in Leda's lengthy diary mopes is no better. It's sad in a way, because Fox really throws everything at this job, piling on the dysfunction (one character is a tragic blond curly-haired orphan AND a gay transvestite AND an epileptic AND a psychic AND a tortured artiste, beat that Candy Darling) to an alarming extent, along with endless shovelfuls of glitter and filth. Well, descriptions of glitter and filth, I should say. It never quite feels real. Again and again the lack of believable character interaction and watery "voice" drags things back to the ground, like a swan that's eaten too many dustbin hamburgers. (And yes, by the way, there is some pretty major swan action in this book. It's got a woman called Leda in it, and in Sunday Times Bestseller world that makes the appearance of a swan compulsory. Though there is actually a very funny bit about the taxidermied swan so I don't begrudge the obviousness.)

It's not just the dialogue, either. Fox's, well, I suppose we have to call it "style", is a weird palimpsest where literary A-level essay analyses of things the reader has just seen are routinely dumped on top of any significant event or effect. We are told scenes and imagery are "gothic", "exotic", "mysterious", that images or people "exuded sexuality" and so on, all this terrible book blogger's talk. I'm genuinely surprised each chapter doesn't end with a list of TV Tropes footnotes. Lady, I paid actual money for your book, let ME decide what stuff Means.

Though since we're talking of tropes, this book also has one of my least favourite ever: the tortured genderqueer character as handly plot mechanism (Surprise! It's a boy/girl/whatever!) Fox's implementation of this is slightly less crude and a lot more sympathetic than what you might see in, say, Ace Ventura Pet Detective 2, but you still get a scent of exploitation. The queer character's identity never stops being subservient to the needs of the plot. And overall, this is a work of remarkable straightness considering the degree of camp inherent to the subject. So yeah, if you like this sort of theme for god's sake go and get a book by Gemma Files or Helen Grant or something.

I don't normally go out of my way to read military or naval fiction (it's a bit of a busman's holiday for me), and I mainly bought this because it was cheap, having made its way to a car-boot sale in France. But in fact the absence of postage and packing fees was just one good feature of this tale of a second-world war corvette crew, helping protect merchant navy convoys in their dangerous journey over the Atlantic. This was at a time when British cargo ships were getting routinely savaged by German U-boat raids so the narrator doesn't exactly have a cushy billet, with all sorts of horrors going on, but the tone manages to make that clear without being depressing. A mammoth amount of research has gone into this book but it is worn very lightly. I loved reading about the ASDIC (a kind of early sonar) and its frazzled operator Strang, but was also fascinated by the weaponry and naval engineering aspects. Some of the war's ridiculous gadgets, including the hedgehog (a forerunner of the more successful squid) and the criminally stupid Holman Projector, are also deployed for quite successful comic effect.

One of the officers on board, Villiers, has a substantial backstory which takes up about half of the book, and this less successful. Though his story arc is quite sweet and his status as a half-European, half-Uruguyan at a time of global crisis gives rise to some interesting dilemmas, Radcliffe's characterization is often adequate at best. I also got seriously tired of the endless glorification of Viller's gaucho ancestors who he can apparently hear talking to him in his blood etc. etc. People tend to be a bit nationally stereotyped (the firy unstable Latina, the stuffed-shirt dutiful Brit diplomat etc.) and the scenes in Montevideo are a kind of watered-down Graham Greene. Still, I do like Greene, and Radcliffe's novel is rarely dull. I'd also never read anything about the Urugayan interior before, so there's that.