My first encounter with Michael Marshall Smith was following a glowing review for Spares in the 90s “lad mag” Loaded. It was picked out by some reviewer and the subject matter and premise just really stood out to me, even if I wouldn’t at the time have said that Sci-Fi was my “thing”.

I’d go on to eat up everything that came after: Only Forward; What You Make It; and One of Us, and then persevere with the author as he dropped the “Smith” and became just Michael Marshall for a while, writing a different genre. They were fine - but not what I fell in love with his writing style for. A lazy search some years later found that he’d written “Hannah Green” under his previous name and I’d missed it to the extent that it was no longer in print. Luckily my parents were able to get me withdrawn copy from a Carmarthenshire library for my birthday. I was excited to see if he was back to his old style, and I wasn’t to be disappointed. The book takes us on an adventure through the eyes of Hannah, an eleven year old who’s really going through it family-wise right now, and is put in the care of her footloose Grandfather who has a fascinating back story. The adventure takes us to hell and back with the literal devil and introduces a fantastical fungus-like imp who I’m fairly sure speaks with a Welsh accent. It’s like he’s kind of merged the darkness of his writings as Michael Marshall with the fantastical sci-fi of his earlier work. As a fan of Charles Stross I really like when worlds have narrow points we can cross between and that’s a theme explored here. It’s fun and moves at pace, and we’re introduced to some interesting main