In July I read 10 books (2,637 pages) which takes me to 59 for the year so far (14,965 pages). I read three roleplaying books, two graphic novels and five novels. No non-fiction this month, which was a surprise, but I'm quite close to finishing one which will appear in August's update.
Roleplaying included the excellent Darkened Hill & Dale and Terminus by Sarah Cole. Both of these are system agnostic horror scenarios which I could easily imagine being used with Liminal or one of the many folk horror or Cthulhu based games.
Darkened Hill & Dale is an anthology of seven different scenarios, all of which read well and present interesting and difference conundrums to the player characters. There's only one of them that I would be nervous of running, but that's not because of the plot, it's more that I'm not certain that I have the GMing chops to deliver the time loop conundrum it presents well enough.
Terminus is completely different kettle of fish; a single scenario set in and around Tottenham Court Station which links back the King in Yellow. It is very much a puzzle scenario, and will need players to be thinking through what they are facing or they could come to a nasty end. I could see this one being used for Delta Green quite easily. I recommend both of these books; you can get them here at Sarah's website.
The other roleplaying book that I read was Nathan Russell's Hard City: Noir Roleplaying, which is published by Osprey Games. This has a very workable system - kind of a variation on Forged in the Dark with a bit of FATE. There's an interesting difficulty approach built into the pool mechanic were negative dice can cancel out positive ones if you get the same results. There's a case generator, and two example scenarios, each illustrating one of the two types you can use in the game – investigations or capers. Overall, I like it and could easily imagine running with it, but I’m not sure it gives me the GM tingles.
The graphic novels were the two Dreadnaughts collections. These explore the background of how America adopted the use of Judges as seen in Judge Dredd. You can see why it is done, but also how it leads to a slide into a fascist absolutist state. Very much a warning.
M. John Harrison is always a favourite of mine, and I enjoyed the prose of The End of Everything, an end of the world after an alien invasion told from the perspective of the characters involved. Not his best novel, but enjoyable.
I then returned to authors who have featured heavily in my reading in recent years. Christopher Fowler's Ten-Second Staircase was a return to Bryant & May and has the elderly investigators facing threats to their career, a complicated set of murders and almost accidentally solving one of their long open cases. Enjoyable, and I still have another five or six of these in my to-read pile.
I read The Haunting of Maddy Clare by Simone St. James. Unlike the other books that I've read from her, this was set in the past after the First World War. A young woman from a temping agency takes a job working for investigators into ghostly phenomena, because the job requires a female to interact with the ghost. This is a ghost story about a suicide, but the underlying mystery needs to be solved to find out what drove the girl involved to kill herself, something that poses real dangers and ramifications for the local community. It was well done.
I read the latest spy novel from Charles Cumming, Icarus 17, which was nicely done and continues the story of Lachlan Kite and Box 88, an Anglo-American spy agency. Kite has a person from his past return seeking help finding her son, and the plot presents the perspective from both Kite and the missing person.
After reading Icarus 17, I decided to read one of the older Charles Cumming books I had in my to-rread pile, A Spy by Nature. Set around the period that New Labour comes into power, it tells the tale of a young man who ends up involved in a SIS operation and the consequences that he and his friends face. There's a degree of ambiguity on how this is written, and I wasn't certain how much I liked the protagonist, but I empathised with the dilemmas that his choices gave him. Ultimately, he has to face up to the consequences of his actions, and in some ways this reminded me more of le Carré when the less savoury and dangerous aspects of espionage have to be faced, along with the tolls on the characters involved. A very different novel to Icarus 17.
1 July 2026
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