Urban Fantastic

Read the most by: boys and girls

Rarely has modern British writing witnessed an authorial voice as distinctive, as exciting and as wonderfully original as that of urban fantasist, Allen Ashley. These are stories shot through with science fiction's sense of wonder, coupled with psychological horror's sense of unease. In short - the urban fantastic! Ashley's great skill lies in his ability to treat the extraordinary as reality, to make plausible the incredible. He creates worlds which differ only minutely - but so significantly - from our own, and imbues them with a normality that is at once disturbing and compelling. From the girl who attempts to control her family through their dolls' house counterparts in "Playing Statues," to the claustrophobic horror of "Dead to the World" - via the verve and wit of "Felicia and the Cheese and Onion," the wistful longing of "Dead Dot Com," and the examination of inspiration in "The Ideas Mountain" - Ashley takes the reader into landscapes that are fantastic indeed. Faint whiffs of magic weave in and out of every story, while reality and surrealism, allegory and anecdote, collide, ensuring breathtaking results for urbanites and fantasists alike. "Urban Fantastic" is set to become the defining text in a new genre for the 21st Century. "Ashley purposefully upsets every apple cart in the genre 'produce' market...more radically imaginative than many of his peers in the indie press," Steven Hampton, The Zone "Allen Ashley...master storyteller and fantasist," David Hebblethwaite, The Alien Online "Quite frankly, this book is almost too good." Peter Crowther