I finished the new William Heaney Graham Joyce novel (to be issued as How to Make Friends With Demons by Night Shade next month) on the plane on the way over. As always with Graham, it is great stuff. There’s one small thing I want to have words with him about, but as I won’t be at World Fantasy I shall miss that opportunity and I’ll probably have forgotten about it next time I see him. Basically, however, it is a lovely book. It is very British (including a guided tour of famous London pubs, that Graham must have very much enjoyed researching), but hopefully that won’t deter the sort of people who would normally buy Graham’s books. Reviewing it in Locus, Gary Wolfe said:

It’s the sort of non-fantasy fantasy that Joyce readers will appreciate, the sort of writing that is increasingly coming to make genre irrelevant.

He’s right in that it is not Fantasy, but it does have demons. And given that it is, amongst other things, about dysfunctional family relationships and the first Gulf War, I think it qualifies as horror.