Malarkoi

Product Information

Pheby is an accomplished, skilled writer, and Mordew is an atmospheric, bleak fantasy… and may well prove to be a significant addition to the genre. Few writers have the courage to make these leaps between their works, and Pheby has shown just how rewarding such risks can be.”– The Irish Times AnatoleJust because a man dresses well and keeps himself in shape, that does not make him worthy of respect. Nor do those who sing nicely necessarily have sympathetic hearts. Sometimes men overshadow their appearance with evil deeds, and make their voices fearful things to hear by virtue of their reputations. Anatole, one of Mr Padge’s assassins, wears well-tailored clothes, fitted tightly, and has a practiced and melodious vibrato, but you should run at the sight and sound of him unless you are tired of your life. He thinks he is currently engaged in punishing the murderers of his former employer, but if he is ever done with that, he will be free to kill again, something he does at even the most negligible slight. Mordew is a darkly brilliant novel, extraordinary, absorbing and dream-haunting... crammed with grotesque inventiveness. This is an outré book, often mannered and sometimes arch; but it is also oddly, stiffly, immensely vital – is indeed about vitality, in both its creative and its cancerous form. It’s an extravagant and often unnerving marvel.”– The Guardian

Her troglodytes stood tall as she spoke, and though it was evening, they shaded their eyes as if from the brightest noon. They squinted and looked sidelong, only briefly, but each drew a bead on one of the assassins, and with the instincts that killers have for aggression, the group knew that they were being sized up.Anaximander, who can talk, threatens the children with death, and Sirius eats the faces from Joes, whose one body has become two bodies.

Not often does a book remind one of both Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Ellis’ American Psycho, but here we are: immersed in compelling minutiae. Alex Pheby’s Playthings is simultaneously unsettling and fascinating, tragic and hilarious, the sort of novel with an easily-summarized story but a nearly impossible to summarize experience.”– 519 Magazine Down there she took the blood record of the assassins’ pledges, and placed the contract in her Ledger, a book which was like scripture to these godless scoundrels, and its keeper their goddess.There are books that from the moment you enter into their world, you know you are dealing with something special… Here is Fantasy with a profound sense of the uncanny, Fantasy unafraid to embrace the grotesque and the strange, Fantasy that pushes at the edges of its metafictional relationship to the reader. Mordew is set in a world so strange and compelling that it is impossible not to believe in it. It is populated by characters outlandish and grotesque, and their commitment to surviving the bizarreness of the world they find themselves in makes them a joy to follow. And it is all tied together by Pheby’s glorious prose, which somehow manages to mix gothic descriptions with wry understatement to wonderful effect.”– Fantasy Hive The Mother of Mordew led them through her place, less dominating in size again now the roofs were low above their heads. When the passages narrowed, she shrank with them, until, rather than giant, she was now a miniature of herself, and the assassins had to go down onto their hands and knees so that they did not become wedged. The dogs make a welcome return and play key roles. The epilogue on Sirius was more moving than what had gone before, and why this should be is explored. Appendices offer further detail on episodes gone before, intriguingly on an Assembly, mentioned briefly and perhaps a subject of the next instalment. BellowsBoys often become men, the progress of time leading them usually in that direction, but Bellows is an unusual kind of thing. Made in the vats of the Master, his adulthood was brought on magically, and by magic it has been reverted, recreating from a metamorphosed butterfly its previous caterpillar. What effect this has on a person’s mood and character is anyone’s guess, but intuition suggests that it will not be universally positive. From the relatively mindless cattle-headed people that are overbreeding, and religious person-headed snakes than are on the brink of a civil war/jihad, to a realm of dying dragons and of druids trapped in endless death by the wolves that have taken over their forested world...