What I'm Reading Now - A Walk on the Nightside

I've been reading urban fantasy a bit of late. My reading tastes are cyclical, I suppose, caroming from genre to genre and author to author.

Karen Chance's first novel nudged me onto this current path, though I have a history as far back as Mike Resnick's Stalking the Unicorn. Of late, every couple of books, I pick up something from the contemporary fantasy scene. And I've been recording "Blood Ties" and "The Dresden File" based on some urban fantasy novels, but I guess that's another story.

I like urban fantasy because the flights of imagination are wonderous and intriguing, perhaps moreso because they occur in universes slightly to the left of the real world vs. far flung galaxies.

I discovered Simon R. Green's tales of the Nightside while browsing collections of people with whom I have books in common on Library Thing, and I'm now about halfway through the second novel, set in a shadowy city within London where things are just weird.

Dead singers are on hand in the clubs, demons masquerade as gangsters and larger, more shadowy types are on hand to menace John Taylor, the main character who's essentially a private eye with a psychic gift for finding things. In the first novel, Something from the Nightside, he returns after five years in the real world, rekindling old rivalries and acquaintances.

There's a subplot running through his activities related to the identity of his mother and his potential to bring about a dark future.

It reminds me of "Sandman" as well as a host of current television shows i.e. "Heroes" not to metion the aforementioned cable shows. I think I'll stick with it through the following volumes, then I have to get back to the Weather Warden series.