The Night Inside -- Nancy Baker

Ardeth Alexander, a research student in Toronto, has measured out her life in careful plans and predictable behaviour. It’s a guarded life, with no one allowed to become too important to her - except her younger sister Sara, singer with the rock band Black Sun, for whom Ardeth is a refuge in an uncertain world. But Ardeth’s researches, unknown to her, have uncovered truths that some would rather not have revealed. She is abducted and imprisoned in an abandoned asylum - where, each night, she is required to give her blood to the monster in the next cell. Helplessly, she submits, planning her escape; but gradually it becomes clear that there is only one, ghastly, way out. How else can she avenge what has been done to her? And Ardeth is not the only victim; there are all the dead girls, the actresses, out in the gully with stakes through their hearts ...

The sacrifices Ardeth must make are sympathetically described; there’s a real sense of the anguish she feels at giving up everything normal and safe. Only then can she learn the lessons that her old, orderly existence denied. In the city, a killer is stalking. Sara is hunting, relentlessly, for her lost sister. A wealthy recluse sits and pores over her grandfather’s diaries, searching for clues. And Ardeth is seeking out the real monsters; whatever they may be, they are more dreadful than the man who shared her imprisonment.

‘The Night Inside’ combines elements of thriller, romance and gory horror; despite the occasionally clumsy style, it’s a good read.

Fate -- Mary Corran

Asher's childhood is spent in a small world, like most children; her parents are farmers, her playmates are the other children from the village and the manor house. Then the Grey Men invade the country, and everything changes. The Oracle says that Vallis, Prince Lykon's infant daughter, will save the realm - but Vallis has disappeared, and Asher grows to adulthood in a land crippled by heavy tributes and the presence of the hated invaders who now rule half of the known lands of Tenebran.

Fourteen years after the invasion, Asher has fled a repressive marriage and is living in the city of Venture and working as a senior clerk at the Treasury. Only recently have women been employed in such important positions, but it's good political sense; women don't have to be paid as much or treated as well as men, and anyway many of the men have been sent to internment camps. Asher appreciates her position. It gives her the chance to embezzle money for the women's underground - which helps women escape the city, and their male oppressors, and head north to freedom in the lands of the alien Saff.

Asher has another advantage; she believes she is immune to destiny. The people of Tenebran are deeply fatalistic; there is no religion, only a strong belief in destiny and in the cryptic rhymes of the Oracle. The death of Asher's twin brother when they were born seems to have cancelled out her own fate; she is free to act as she will. If she needed proof, it is supplied by her immunity to the magical wards and hexes which guard warehouses and strongboxes.

Then the Oracle summons Asher. She is horrified to find that it has a prediction for her - and more horrified to meet her childhood friend Mallory, now a wealthy merchant, in front of the statue of Lady Fortune. Clearly their fates are linked - but Asher has spent too long running from her past, and from destiny, to accept the Oracle's message graciously. She sets out to tempt fate ...

Fate describes a world with real people engaged in real moral dilemmas, asking - and finding answers to - age-old questions. Is gender destiny? Can an individual have free will and yet be destined to perform a particular act? Can men and women be friends in a society which oppresses women?

Mary Corran's City background is evident in the detailed structure of her society; the politics and economy of a country under the thumb of the invader are clearly and comprehensively described without lessening the roles of magic and fate in the lives of the inhabitants. More unusually, Corran manages to write a novel with feminist leanings which neither damns or apologises for the behaviour of men and women in a strictly patriarchal society. While some of her male characters seem at times to be little more than ciphers, it's made clear that this is simply Asher's perception of them. She slowly becomes aware of her bias: 'Because he's a man, I acted as if he had no feelings, or no right to have feelings. As if he were first a man and only second a friend.' Perhaps Asher's major insight is when she realises that much can go unnoticed unless one has eyes to see; this realisation is the crux of her quest, but it changes her in smaller, more personal ways as well.

Asher has a quest to fulfill, courtesy of the Oracle; but Fate is as much the story of her philosophical quest for meaning and understanding as it is the tale of the Oracle's prediction and how it is finally fulfilled. 'All I ever wanted was to have control over my own life', she muses at one point. By the end of the novel she is left with more questions than answers; but she, and others, have a freedom that is new and wonderful.

MagicNet -- John DeChancie

Like many an American fantasy before it, MagicNet begins in the enchanted groves of academe. Schuyler King, professor of English at a New England college, has just settled down for the evening with a volume of Keats when he receives a disturbing phone call from an old friend. Grant turns out to have been torn apart by a demon - but not before he’s mailed King a set of computer disks. The disks contain a program which is, effectively, Grant’s ghost. Apparently he’s been messing about on the Net and upset a few people too many - but this isn’t your normal everyday infobahn. This is MagicNet, based on rationalised magic, where demons roam dataspace and the response time is instantaneous. "It’s not like any other computer network you’ve experienced".

Now a hacker called Merlin is going for world domination through the Net, and he must (of course) be stopped. King, armed only with a new laptop and accompanied by a lesbian witch, sets off for San Francisco where the bad guys hang out. King swiftly realises that a virtual San Francisco is even weirder than the real thing. Fortunately Jill has a non-Net friend with whom they’ll be safe - one Harlan Ellison ...

MagicNet is an extremely entertaining book, although there are enough loose ends to weave a very tangled web. Elements of assorted Eastern mythology creep in, and together with DeChancie’s witty, fast-paced prose style, create an ambience not a million miles from Zelazny’s later works. Fantasy’s answer to Neuromancer? The lighter side of Snow Crash? Decide for yourself.

Raiders of the Lost Car Park -- Robert Rankin

Robert Rankin’s previous novels didn’t make that much of an impression on me; competently written, ingeniously plotted and occasionally very funny, but something didn’t quite click. Despite this I tried to keep an open mind about Raiders of the Lost Car Park, and was pleasantly surprised. My knowledge has been broadened no end. I now know what really turns Prince Charles on (and the current royal revelations do little to disprove Mr. Rankin’s allegations); I’ve also discovered where travellers really come from, and the names of the people who are responsible for corn circles. And that’s not the half of it ...Rankin has a gift for describing people and places: from the opening scene in Minn’s Music Mine, where the ashtrays are overflowing with ancient stubs, to the grand finale in the King of the World’s throne room (located, unsurprisingly, somewhere under West London) there is an attention to detail which demonstrates a keen eye and a keener imagination. Cornelius Murphy (the Stuff of Epics) and his minuscule friend Tuppe make endearing heroes, matched with an equally appealing set of blacker-than-black villains and assorted helpers and hinderers. Throw in a suitable mixture of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and a few traditions and old charters, and you have a hugely enjoyable book - much shorter than ‘Illuminatus!’, and even funnier. The humour isn’t as heavy-handed as Pratchett’s can be, and the self-referential mockery of Rankin’s style makes the text itself part of the joke, which should keep the post-modernists among us happy as well.

Riding the Unicorn -- Paul Kearney

In the Iron World which constitutes our reality, John Willoby is going comprehensively mad. He hears voices and sees visions - things which have no place in the monotonous desperation of his life as a prison officer. Once a soldier, he chafes at the constrictions of civilian life, yearning for the easy camaraderie and simple truths of his army days. The hallucinatory glimpses of a rough, pioneering life in a green land beyond savage mountains seduce Willoby, and he finds it increasingly difficult to maintain his uneasy truce with his wife and daughter. The visions are becoming more regular and it’s only a matter of time before his patronising psychiatrist locks him away in an asylum that will be as much a prison as the one he patrols daily.

Meanwhile, in the Green World, the unlikeable bastard prince Tallamon - ‘a real Machiavelli’ - is laying his plans for a king-slaying. The mage Aimon protests this abuse of his magic even as he redoubles his efforts to bring a man from another world to do the foul deed. Tallamon’s icy ambition, however, knows no bounds; he will sacrifice all whom he holds dear to achieve the kingship. Even Merrin, the woman he loves, is made into part of the trap that Willoby should find impossible to resist ...

Riding the Unicorn describes the fulfillment, and the failure, of men’s dreams; while the women in the tale are portrayed with clarity and even sympathy, their importance is only as tools or symbols. Merrin is an independent woman, but her actions are still driven - wittingly or not - by the men who surround her. This is a male world of warriors and politics, of masculine friendships and unity in the face of adversity, in which love and beauty are of secondary importance to the grim fight for survival, and honour is a luxury few can afford.
Kearney’s style is harsh yet evocative; no long poetic descriptions here (and, indeed, no unicorns). He conveys a real sense of the unpleasant realities of a medieval warrior society. There are no heroes either; acts of heroism, perhaps, but only those demanded by the situation. And there is no neat resolution; the novel ends on a curiously inconclusive note (perhaps indicating a sequel). Not a nice sweet fantasy, but a powerfully-drawn conflict.

Faery in Shadow -- C. J. Cherryh

This is a world where the Sidhe walk; a dark, fantastic Celtic land through which Caith and his dark companion Dubhain hunt, and are hunted, through tangled wet woods at night. A Beast from the dark loch follows their trail with a sound of rattling bones, and rabbit skulls are nibbled to the bone in an instant by invisible teeth.

Caith’s grim and shadowy past has left him labouring under a geas, a Necessity, which is not clearly stated but which he curses at every twist of fate. He doesn’t understand the machinations of the Sidhe, or of the witch in her castle at the head of the loch. Nothing of Faery is ever quite what it seems; but there is a perverse logic, and even honour, to the game they are playing with Caith, their mortal pawn, although there is little of humanity about them.

Faery in Shadow partakes as much of horror as of fantasy; the sense of Celtic nightmare is well-sustained by Cherryh’s occasionally unsubtle use of dialect and archaism, and the understated terror of old, malevolent powers lurking in the shadows and streams of a land that, for all its daytime beauty, is dark and threatening.

The Black Gryphon -- Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon

The Black Gryphon is set in the same fantasy world as Lackey's best-selling Valdemar series, but no previous experience is necessary; the action of this novel takes place fifteen hundred years before the events described in The Heralds of Valdemar. Urtho the Good, and those who espouse his cause, are locked in combat with the mage Ma'ar (implicitly the Bad) and his dark armies. The war, 'like a creature with a huge appetite', has dragged on for years, and slowly but surely Ma'ar seems to be winning. This isn't that sort of book, though.

The novel centres on four characters. Skandranon, the eponymous black gryphon, is an aerial warrior with immense fighting skills and an ego to match. His friend Amberdrake is a kestra'chern, a kind of therapist who uses sensual massage, sexual healing and a generous dose of Empathy and Healing skills to soothe and heal the mental and physical wounds inflicted by the war. Both Skandranon and Amberdrake have their female counterparts. Zhaneel is a female gryphon who appears to be a mutant, an unwanted by-product of Urtho's magical genetics program. Winterhart is an emotionally repressed healer who remains in a dysfunctional relationship with the mage Conn Levas, unable to accept that she is capable of more. Both must come to terms with who they are and accept their roles in the conflict.

On one level this novel is a simple good-versus-evil fantasy, where the forces of good fight for what they believe in, and pledge their loyalty to Urtho, while the Makaar and other creatures of Ma'ar are motivated by fear and loathing, and demonstrate their moral repugnancy by stooping to torture and foul play. On another level, Lackey and Dixon (her husband) deal with moral and ethical issues such as therapy, emotional dysfunction, betrayal, genetic engineering and child abuse. A light fantasy novel is not the best place for this; while the authors never trivialise these subjects, depth has been sacrificed to simplification.


The Black Gryphon is a book which will appeal to anyone who enjoys Anne McCaffrey's later Dragon books. That is, it's good, positive, happy fantasy, where the images and ideas are drummed home in case you missed them the first time round. The style is occasionally marred by clumsy phrasing ("this plan didn't have the chances of a snowflake in a frying pan of working"), but it's readable enough, and will no doubt please Lackey's existing fans.