Book, Line and Thinker

“On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.”   'I am Legend' follows Robert Neville, the last man on Earth - he's the sole survivor of a global disease which has turned all other humans into monsters. This may sound like a cliched premise, because the zombie genre is now widely represented, but in 1954 this was groundbreaking writing. It popularised the concept of an apocalyptic pandemic, and was hugely influential in the development of dystopian fiction. It has rightly been included in Orion's list of Science Fiction Masterworks, and fuses sci-fi with horror to devastating effect.  In many ways, 'I am Legend' remains superior to the majority of its successors in the field. Most writers in this genre have used zombies as their premise, but Matheson's disease turns its victims into vampires instead. These monsters display many of the same symptoms as vampi...

“Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital.”   Marina is seven years old, and when her parents are killed in a car crash, she’s left with nothing but a scar and a doll. At the orphanage, the other girls are quick to notice both. Marina soon transfixes them, and their dark obsession becomes increasingly disturbing with every page of the book. 'Such Small Hands' is too long to be a short story, and too short to be a novel... but size doesn't matter when a book is as brilliant as this one. The novella, translated from Spanish, is a chilling work of horror. It excels in its depiction of childhood, capturing the frightening hyperrealism of a child’s imagined world. Mundane moments become chilling rituals, whilst trivial signs take on dark and significant meanings. The girls are feverishly serious in the face of the absurd, and in this Barba’s style is reminiscent of William Golding. His descriptions of childhood are not just disturbing, however, but also...