Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived in the mail here at the Geek Compound.
How to Make Friends with Demons by Graham Joyce
Promo copy:
William Heaney is a man well acquainted with demons. Not his broken family – his wife has left him for a celebrity chef, his snobbish teenaged son despises him, and his daughter’s new boyfriend resembles Nosferatu – nor his drinking problem, nor his unfulfilling government job, but real demons! For demons are real, and William has identified one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven smoky figures, dwelling on the shadowy fringes of human life, influencing our decisions with their sweet and poisoned voices. After a series of seemingly unconnected personal encounters with a beautiful and captivating woman met in the company of an infuriating poet, a troubled and damaged veteran of Desert Storm with demons of his own, and an old school acquaintance with whom he shared a mystical occult ritual, William Heaney’s life is thrown into a direction he does not fully comprehend. Past and present collide. Long-dormant choices and forgotten deceptions surface. Secrets threaten to become exposed. To weather the changes, William Heaney must learn one thing: how to make friends with demons!
(Originally issued in the UK as Memoirs Of A Master Forger)
Child of Fire by Harry Connolly
Promo copy:
Ray Lilly is living on borrowed time. He’s the driver for Annalise Powliss, a high-ranking member of the Twenty Palace Society, a group of sorcerers devoted to hunting down and executing rogue magicians. But because Ray betrayed her once, Annalise is looking for an excuse to kill him–or let someone else do the job.
Unfortunately for both of them, Annalise’s next mission goes wrong, leaving her critically injured. With the little magic he controls, Ray must complete her assignment alone. Not only does he have to stop a sorcerer who’s sacrificing dozens of innocent lives in exchange for supernatural power, he must find–and destroy–the source of that inhuman magic.
House of Windows by John Langan
Promo copy:
When a young writer finds himself cornered by a beautiful widow in the waning hours of a late-night cocktail party, he seeks at first to escape, to return to his wife and infant son, but the tale she weaves, of her missing husband, a renowned English professor, and her lost stepson, a soldier killed on a battlefield on the other side of the world, of phantasmal visions, a family curse, and a house… the Belvedere House, a striking mansion whose features suggest a face, hidden just out of view, draws him in, capturing him.
What follows is a deeply psychological ghost story of memory and malediction, loss and remorse. This unnerving tour-de-force, exploring the literary haunted house, from Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. P. Lovecraft to today, incorporates family trauma, abstract art, literary criticism, the occult Dickens, and the war in Afghanistan. From John Langan (Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters) comes House of Windows, a chilling novel in the tradition of Peter Straub, Joe Hill, and Laird Barron.
The Grave Thief (Book Three of the Twilight Reign) by Tom Lloyd
Promo copy:
For Isak, the time for heartless decisions and ruthless action has come if he is to save the land from its oppressors…
Scree has been wiped from the face of the Land in a brutal demonstration of intent. While those responsible scatter to work on the next step in their plan, the stakes are raised—all the way to the heavens—as the Gods themselves enter the fray. Returning home to a nation divided by fanaticism, Lord Isak is haunted both by the consequences of his actions in Scree and by visions of his own impending death. As the full extent of Azaer’s schemes become clearer, he realises prophecy and zealotry must play their part in his battle-plans if there is to be any chance of surviving the coming years. As a white-eye, Isak has had to embrace the darker parts of his own soul, but now the savage religious fervour sweeping his nation must also be accepted and turned to purpose, in the name of survival. With the battle lines vague and allegiances uncertain, the time for heartless decisions and ruthless action has come. Two figures oppose Isak and his allies: the greatest warrior in history, who dreams of empire and Godhood, and a newborn baby whose dreams have no limit.