Blackstone by Trafton Crandall

We start with a Zombie chase. My daughter is watching yet another something, a film or over extended American series, with zombies in it, on Netflix at the moment, the walking dead are a well-worn trope.

Anyway, thankfully this is not a sassy teen girl verses zombie apocalypse escapade, but more a science fiction, fantasy, Harry Pottery amalgamation, with perhaps a touch of the Matrix and Ursula Le Guin, well, for the latter, very loosely.

Our protagonist, Eliza Grant, perhaps a little unoriginally, the guardian of a superpower, in this case the Wend, is recruited by a future CIA or MI6 like organisation, The Blackstone. There follows, some high octave high jinks where we cross dimensions (Another science fiction staple (and yes used by me in my novel Woken!)), that house a zoo of weird beings, mythical creatures and aliens, and, of course, we have life or death encounters asunder.

An old fogey like myself prefers something a little more sedate and intellectual these days, but, if I could travel back in time to my teen years (Heaven forbid!), I am sure I would have lapped this adventure up quicker than a cat could demolish a saucer of milk. Sadly, my teen years were full of Agatha Christie and the horror of Stephen King and James Herbert, where were you in the 1970’s Trafton Crandall?