(From Adventures of a Bookonaut)

How not to sound like a raving fanboy?

Hmm… probably not going to happen.

How often does a collection of novellas cause you to go and borrow every book you can by the author?  For you see, that’s what I did before I’d finished reading The Year of Ancient Ghosts. That was before the Lark and the River, the final novella in the collection left me blinking away the tears, left me so immersed that I had to remind myself that it was fiction.

Not many writers do that to me anymore.  It is a battle – skill and talent versus my familiarity with literature and story.  Most of the novellas within the collection were excellent, a couple superb.

The titular novella, The Year of Ancient Ghosts, had me in mind of a dramatisation of MR James’ A View from a Hill – foreboding and menace found in small things, the frisson when the everyday is cleverly juxtaposed with the weird…

Read the rest of this review at Adventures of a Bookonaut.

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