The Do-Not Press, 2004
Night Shade Books, 2005 (print run included 125 limited edition hardbacks contained a bonus short story, Come for Your Dead)
“An impressive tour-de-force that ranges from grimy magic realism to outright horror.”
David Langford, SFX
“Conrad Williams’ novel of a world beneath our own positions itself somewhere on the spectrum between Iain Sinclair and China Miéville, but moves off smartly at an oblique angle to both. Williams may be in the process of developing a new genre, a kind of matter-of-fact Gothic which can draw conclusions about the contemporary heart by rifling its dustbins. Readable, rebarbative and frightening.”
M John Harrison
“Williams describes the capital with hallucinatory clarity and inserts numerous photorealistic close-ups of abandoned objects and random violence. On to this detailed topography he superimposes an alternative network spotted with nodes of intense surrealism.”
Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday
“Williams creates existentialist horror with hallucinatory imagery and prose that is as muscular as it is tender, and laced at times with quite extraordinary beauty. To paraphrase one potent image, this will stud your brain with little cloves of madness.”
Nicholas Royle, City Life (Book of the week)
“This is a book which effortlessly slips sideways from horror to psychological thriller to fantasy to urban social comedy to neo-noir; Williams is utterly in love with all of these genres and part of the point of London Revenant is to stuff as many of them together as possible. The book moves from moments of lyricism to moments of utter disgust with little clashing of gears. Williams is obsessed with what things feel like, whether they are extremes of erotic pleasure or viciously inflicted pain. If London Revenant has deep fault lines within it, they come mostly from a surplus of virtuosity.”
Roz Kaveney, Time Out
“His writing is almost visionary at times, illuminating sights, moods, emotions, moments that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. The prose is absolutely gorgeous, the imagery truly memorable and dreamlike, and the plot moves along very nicely indeed. All in all, this is a pretty special novel… Williams has an eye for the lonely, the sad, the wan beauty that shines within moments of extreme horror like an oil slick rainbow. Buy it today, and starting reading a modern master of the genre.”
Gary McMahon, laurahird.com
“London Revenant is a novel of rare, seductive power, propelled by its evocative setting and use of language. Certainly, Williams’s creation of a mysterious and strange London, fantastical yet gritty-real, deserves to be mentioned alongside Miéville’s New Crobuzon and Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris. Furthermore, Williams’s proclivity for rendering such a bleak atmosphere palpably aligns him with the British literary tradition paved by the likes of M. John Harrison and Ramsey Campbell—call it the bleak-fantastic. But make no mistake, Williams is a true original, one who should appeal to all fans of literary dark fiction.”
Kelly Christopher Shaw, Strange Horizons
“Williams’ blend of the banal realities of the city with the best kind of dark fantastic horror really reflect, for me at least, what London can be like. Highly recommended.”
Gary Budden, New Lexicons
Conrad Williams 