PositiveLiterary Review (UK)Strange Hotel records an exhausting fictional itinerary of nights ... the prose is also a little simpler than in McBride’s previous work. It’s still full of its own lexical and grammatical idiosyncrasies ... but this voice is that of a speaker for whom ‘a good old linguistic knot’ no longer seems the adequate medium, and who finds herself searching for ‘other configurations’ to organise her experiences ... These are interior pieces, both in their setting and in their compelling transcription of a mind examining itself, its surroundings, its past, its processes of self-reflection and self-deception ... they seem merely fragments of a world, the observer of which has become, or wishes to become, indifferent to such possibilities of connection ... There is a certain satisfaction here, albeit of a slightly clinical, psychoanalytic kind: by revisiting the scene of trauma, the damaged psyche is able to repair itself, to resume a healthier form of connection with the rest of the world and with its own desires.
Neil Gaiman
PositiveThe GuardianFragile Things confirms Gaiman's reputation as an ingenious teller of sinister tales, whose whimsical and fine writing, at its best, equals MR James and Edgar Allan Poe . There are occasional stretches of filler among these Fictions and Wonders . Like Poe, Gaiman has tried his hand at poetry and, like Poe, been almost entirely unsuccessful (though some of the poems do well enough if treated as short stories punctuated for reading aloud). The fictions, marvellous in every sense, are more than enough.
Nick Harkaway
RaveThe GuardianJust as blithe in its disregard of verisimilitude and generic constraint, Angelmaker flits between old-fashioned villains in London's East End and covert action in 1940s south Asia, arranging its whistlestop plot around the modern-day discovery of a weapon of mass destruction in the unlikely form of a skepful of clockwork bees ... A stingier novelist could find material here for a decade's output, but Harkaway is anything but stingy. The miracle is that it all hangs together so well ...a hyperactive bit of storytelling, but despite all the hybridity and genre-bending, Angelmaker doesn't feel gimmicky ...a solid work of modern fantasy fiction, coupling credit-crunch anxiety with an understandable nostalgia for the mythical days of 'good, wholesome, old-fashioned British crime.'
