The Ice Plague

Tim Lees’s fiction has been compared to that of Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury, Franz Kafka, Ted Chiang and Mervyn Peake. In this, his latest collection, you’ll meet a couple of artistically-inclined hit-men (“Scenes from Country Life”), a woman caught up in an interdimensional war, whose friends are far worse than her enemies (“Love and War”); you’ll visit a Heavenly realm invaded by monsters (“Gumps”), and witness a terrifying ritual which nonetheless sustains the peace and stability of the world – and causes hell when it’s disrupted (“The Shuttered Child”). From familiar city streets to strange, inhuman landscapes, from the fields of England to the unknown cities of America, these are stories which push the boundaries of genre and show human life adapting to the weird, the alien – and the outright terrifying.