Look Out For… We Will All Go Down Together by Gemma Files
In the woods outside Overdeere, Ontario, there are trees that speak, a village that doesn’t appear on any map and a hill that opens wide, entrapping unwary travellers. Music drifts up from deep underground, while dreams—and nightmares—take on solid shape, flitting through the darkness. It’s a place most people usually know better than to go, at least locally—until tonight, at least, when five bloodlines mired in ancient strife will finally converge once more.
Devize, Glouwer, Rusk, Druir, Roke—these are the clans who make up the notorious Five-Family Coven. Four hundred years ago, this alliance of witches, changelings, and sorcerers sought to ruin and recreate the Earth in their own image, thwarted at the last only by treachery that sent half of them to be burned alive. Driven apart by rage and hatred, their descendants have continued to feud, intermarry, and breed with each other throughout the centuries, their mutual dislike becoming ever more destructively intimate.
Why we’re excited about this book: Witches seem to be an underused trope in horror fiction, perhaps because of their association with fairy tales and modern day re-tellings like Wicked and the Discworld books. But witches and witchcraft were once genuinely feared, both in fiction and real life. It seems odd more writers haven’t tapped into this. And as well as witches themselves, there’s also the terrible figure of the witch-hunter, whose single-minded pursuit of an evil perhaps only in his mind is as scary as witchcraft itself.
Both witches and witch-hunters feature in Gemma Files’s new novel We Will All Go Down Together: A Novel in Stories About The Five-Family Coven (to give it its full title). The book also seems to take some inspiration from The Godfather books with its feuding five families and the effects of their mistrust and treachery felt down the generations. With a plot spanning centuries and a large cast of misfits and monsters, We Will All Go Down Together promises to be an enthralling read, from an author who never fails to entertain.
This book will appeal to: readers who’ve been waiting ever since Conjure Wife for a scary witch book.
We Will All Go Down Together is out on the 26 August 2014 from Chizine.
Look Out For… 25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf by Jo Thomas
‘My name is Elkie Bernstein. I live in North Wales and I kill werewolves.’
When Elkie finds herself fighting for her life against something that shouldn’t exist, she is faced with the grim reality that werewolves are real and she just killed one. Part diary, part instruction manual Elkie guides the reader through 25 ways you can kill a werewolf, without any super powers, and how she did it.
Why we’re excited about this book: A compelling mix of fantasy, YA, and horror, 25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf, is author Jo Thomas’s first novel and an it’s an original twist on an old monster, as well as an antidote against the stale use of werewolves in much Twilight inspired fiction today. The werewolves in this new book from Fox Spirit aren’t there to be lusted after or to be part of a particularly messy emotional threesome. Fortunately the title of 25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf doesn’t make promises it can’t keep, being in part written as a ‘how to’ guide on slaying the titular beasts. The books is also a coming of age story about Elkie Bernstein, and it’s set in rural Wales – werewolves being more scary when facing them on their home turf of the wilderness compared to a the back alleys of a city at night.
And just what are the twenty-five different killing methods alluded to in the title? One thing’s for sure, it sounds like it’s going to be great fun finding out.
This book will appeal to: people for whom silver bullets just don’t cut it.
25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf is out on the 15 August 2014 from Fox Spirit.
JAMES EVERINGTON