RICHARD E. ROCK

For the uninitiated, Liv Kristine is a Norwegian singer who, as lead vocalist in Theatre of Tragedy and Leaves’ Eyes, helped to define the gothic heavy metal subgenre. She has also throughout her career contributed vocals to a number of other bands and released five solo albums plus numerous EPs. But what I’m reviewing here,…

Just as my first novel, Deep Level, began with a nightmare, so did this one. Actually, scratch that. The journey to Frenzy Island began with a series of them. There were four, and they came over successive nights. The first depicted a shipwrecked party of cruise liner tourists washing ashore on an island with a…

Whitechapel 1888 was no place for a lady. Not only were poverty, disease, crime and alcoholism rife, but there was a notorious killer on the loose whose savagery, it seemed, knew no limits. But Jack the Ripper wasn’t the only murderer preying on woman at that time. The Ladies of Whitechapel by Denise Bloom sits…

Early on in this novel, Stephen King identifies the ‘one last job’ trope in crime fiction as a sub genre in its own right. And, as he points out, that ‘one last job’ seldom goes smoothly. Enter Billy Summers, a hit man with literary aspirations who is acutely aware of the perils that come with…

Does Alan Moore, the impressively bearded sage of Northampton, even need an introduction? Regardless, he’s getting one anyway. He’s the enigmatic writer who revolutionised the comic book industry with such classics as the Batman graphic novel The Killing Joke, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and many, many more. He…

McCrae stalks the streets of his city in a creepy beaked mask and a hooded cloak, looking for all the damned world like a demonic crow. The downtrodden denizens call him ‘Doctor Death’, but instead of taking lives he is actually trying to save them, for he is a plague doctor. His lover Katrein is…

Alright, I admit it. I have a problem. I just can’t let this damn movie go. I’m talking of course of the 1994 unreleased adaption of Marvel’s The Fantastic Four, produced by legendary B-movie filmmaker Roger Corman. Regular visitors to this blog will be familiar with this production. I have in the not too distant…

We Never Make Mistakes is a collection of two novellas by one of Russia’s greatest ever novelists. The first story, An Incident at Krechetovka Station, concerns an officious and somewhat lonely Red Army Lieutenant called Vasili Vasilitch Kotov who is overseeing the day to day running of a busy railway station during WWII. The author…

Hard boiled journalist Jake Eldritch is embroiled in an on/off relationship with Mariana, the tough but sympathetic proprietor of a nightclub. It’s in this nightclub that Jake first spots Amanita, the white haired siren who may or may not be responsible for the spate of mysterious deaths known as ‘Dead Men Sleeping’. As you’ve probably…

In the interests of full disclosure, I feel I must begin this book review by stating that I have a borderline obsession with the movie it deals with. If you don’t know the story by now, The Fantastic Four was a low budget adaption of the popular Marvel comic produced by b-movie legend Roger Corman…