Robert R. McCammon won the World Fantasy Award for best novel back in 1992 for this book, about a boy who witnesses a horror and begins retelling the events that unfold in the year that follows. Although written from the perspective of a twelve-year-old, it plays as a more mature version of King’s It or Simmons’s Summer of Night. Despite strong elements of horror (McCammon began his career as a horror writer) this feels more like magic realism.

Corey is twelve. Summer approaches.

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Dan Simmons has achieved his greatest fame with clever, complex SF novels such as Hyperion and Illium. He plays with mind-bending concepts, though his work has at its core a fairly conservative world-view. Both the genre-bending and the political leanings should probably be kept in mind when one reads his earlier, more conventional thriller fiction.

Thus we come to Summer of Night, a Lovecraft/Stephen King-influenced horror novel wherein a group of supremely competent children in 1961 Illinois uncover an eldritch evil whose awakening will bring about the apocalypse.

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Has Ransom Riggs written the next Harry Potter? No, but his first novel, a YA fantasy, has won him bestseller status and a movie deal, and he clearly wrote it with the intention of launching a sequel. Indeed, he wrote it a little too clearly with the intent of launching a sequel.

The book has been illustrated with and was partially inspired by creepy old photographs of the sort found in faded cardboard boxes in second-hand book stores and antique barns, pressed between pages of books and lost behind wooden desks.

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“Their world is real… Just in a different way. At a different angle”(1)

Also real, from a different angle, is Jo Walton’s novel, Among Others. This smartly written book defies easy classification, and won’t appeal to all readers. It will find, however, a dedicated following.

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