  Dreamside — (1991) Publisher: It began as an experiment in college — a seemingly harmless investigation into "lucid dreaming," the ability to control one's dreams.But they stayed too long on Dreamside, and now, ten years later, the dreams have returned — returned to upend their adult lives. The dreams of youth fade, if you're lucky. If not, they can consume you ... and will.
  Dark Sister — (1992) Publisher: Alex and Maggie think they live in an ordinary townhouse until they discover a previous occupant's diary — a narrative of Wiccan practice and herb-lore. Compelled to investigate further, Maggie begins to discover strange powers within herself.
  House of Lost Dreams — (1993) Publisher: Mike and Kim Hansom, sell everything they own, give up their jobs, and land up on the Greek Island of Mavros, so that Mike can fulfil his ambition of painting full time. They rent a villa on the beach, it has no amenities to speak of, but the most "marvellous view in the world". They make friends with people in the village and are as happy as Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden; Ah! then enters, the serpents, the scorpion's, the saint, in "Metal Shoes", the shepherd and the mysterious "Watcher on the hill". From then on everything changes, and we find out the evil intent the house on the beach has on its tenants.
  Requiem — (1995) Publisher: Following the death of his wife, Tom Webster travels to Jerusalem in search of a friend from his college days. But the haunted city, divided by warring religious groups, offers him no refuge from guilt and grief.
As he wanders through the streets and the archaeological sites, a mysterious old woman appears to him, delivering messages that seem beyond comprehension. Then a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, kept hidden by an elderly innkeeper, appears to offer the key to understanding the woman’s pronouncements.
Perhaps the spirit of Mary Magdelene is trying to reveal to Tom the hidden history of the Resurrection. And perhaps the truth is even stranger…
  The Tooth Fairy — (1996) Publisher: After Sam Southall looses his first tooth and places it under his pillow, he awakens to the tooth fairy sitting on his windowsill. But it is not the same tooth fairy from legend.
  The Stormwatcher — (1998) Publisher: In a restored farmhouse, James and his French wife Sabine, their two children and their friends sit uneasily. All are implicated in a tragedy which, in a matter of days, will sweep aside the web of deception they have built around their lives.
  Indigo — (1999) Publisher:
As he tries to faithfully execute his father's will, Graham Joyce is drawn into a bizarre and frightening world, moving among the ruins of ancient forces in a journey of the flesh and spirit.
  The Facts of Life — (2002) Publisher:
The Facts of Life tells the story of an extraordinary family of seven sisters living in Coventry during the second world war. Presided over by an indomitable matriach the sisters live out a tangled and fraught life that takes them through the blitz, war work and on into the hopeful postwar years and a bizarre interlude for one of them in a commune. And through it all wanders the young son of one of the sisters, passed from sister to sister, the innocent witness to a life that edges over into the magical and the world of the fey.
  The Limits of Enchantment — (2005) Publisher: The story of a young woman in the midlands in 1966. A woman who may be a witch. She and her family live on the margins of society. Nevertheless her family life is stifling and she seeks freedom with more outsiders, a group of beatniks, but fights to find acceptance there also. And all the time she is struggling with her fey powers.
  Do the Creepy Thing — (2006)
  The Exchange — (2008) Publisher:
Caz and her best friend Lucy have a secret. Late at night, they break into strangers' homes - not to steal anything, just for the rush. Then Caz gets caught in the act by elderly Mrs. Tranter, and before she knows it, the old woman has snapped a silver bracelet around her wrist. Caz can't remove it, no matter what she does; and then it becomes part of her, sinking into her skin like a tattoo. Worst and most unsettling of all, it's given her an unpredictable kind of ESP. She can see into people's inner lives, whether she wants to or not. The Exchange is gritty magical realism with a sense of humor — just right for fans of Holly Black and Sonya Hartnett.
 How to Make Friends with Demons — (2009) This book is published in the UK as Memoirs Of A Master Forger under the penname William Heaney. Publisher: William Heaney is a man well acquainted with demons. Not his broken family — his wife has left him for a celebrity chef, his snobbish teenaged son despises him, and his daughter's new boyfriend resembles Nosferatu — nor his drinking problem, nor his unfulfilling government job, but real demons! For demons are real, and William has identified one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven smoky figures, dwelling on the shadowy fringes of human life, influencing our decisions with their sweet and poisoned voices. After a series of seemingly unconnected personal encounters with a beautiful and captivating woman met in the company of an infuriating poet, a troubled and damaged  veteran of Desert Storm with demons of his own, and an old school acquaintance with whom he shared a mystical occult ritual, William Heaney's life is thrown into a direction he does not fully comprehend. Past and present collide. Long-dormant choices and forgotten deceptions surface. Secrets threaten to become exposed. To weather the changes, William Heaney must learn one thing: how to make friends with demons!
 How to Make Friends with Demons
Reviewing Graham Joyce for fantasy readers can be tricky, because his novels are often firmly set in our contemporary reality, with only minor fantasy elements. In addition, those fantasy elements are often only visible to the narrator of the novel, creating the impression that they may be figments of the narrator's imagination. Regardless of the fact that Graham Joyce has won a handful of British Fantasy Awards, you could label his books as magical realism, literary fiction, fantasy, or a mixture of all three. The author himself calls his style of writing "Old Peculiar," which is a perfectly fitting way to describe the atmosphere of novels such as The Tooth Fairy and Dark Sister.
How to Make Friends with Demons is another great example of Graham Joyce's distinctive style. Narrator William Heaney is a more or less regular middle-aged man: boring government job, divorced with two kids, likes seventies music, has a drinking problem. Oh, and he believes that there are 1,567 varieties of demons that can possess anyone at any time. Someone else claims to have identified 4 additional demons, but Heaney thinks he's just confusing demons with psychological conditions — and then labels excessive footnoting as a demon a few sentences later.
Heaney as a main character is fascinating — literate, self-deprecating, tortured by his past. He sells expertly crafted literary forgeries, only to donate all the proceeds to a struggling homeless shelter. The novel is told in his voice, which leads to lots of gently ironic prose and gorgeous word choices, frequently funny and always incisive:
Despite the fact that I work for a youth organization, I'm not great at talking with teenagers, even my own. In fact, I'm useless at it: there, let it be said. They hit thirteen and they are swallowed up by the Valley of Demons for seven years. I do know that some people don't emerge until they are thirty-three-and-a-third, but most come out from the undergrowth clutching, by the time they are twenty, a shiny nugget of reasonableness.
(By the way, this novel was published in the UK as Memoirs of a Master Forger and under the pseudonym William Heaney — the name of the main character. Reinforcing the impression that the novel has autobiographical elements: Graham Joyce worked for the same government organization Heaney runs in the novel.)
There is much to love in this novel: its plot is slowly and expertly revealed through a combination of looks at Heaney's present-day life and flashbacks to his college days. Even minor characters are drawn with such care and precision that I found myself thinking about them long after I finished reading. On one level you can simply read this book as an enjoyable contemporary fantasy, but there are deeper themes running through it that connect in surprising ways, some of which I only realized days after finishing the novel. Another aspect I enjoyed is its intimate and knowledgeable look at the city of London, especially its many pubs and taverns. Even though I have no idea if all (or any) of them are real, they were so beautifully described that I wanted to visit all of them.
It had been a while since I read an entire novel in one day, let alone one sitting, but this one was just impossible to put down. Only about 300 pages long, How to Make Friends with Demons is a beautiful novel that's simply over too soon. Recommended. —Stefan Comments
 The Devil's Ladder — (2010) Ages 9-12. Publisher: The time has come...Sophie and James' paths don't cross. Why would they? She's from rough Abbey South School and he's your typical Castle Gate posh geek. They have nothing in common. Or so they thought. For the truth is that they both share a special and dangerous gift: they are savants. Innately sensitive to the presence of ghosts and spirits, they share strange visions and visitations from frightening messengers. With no one else to turn to, they must come together to understand the meaning of the spectres and apparitions that they sense all over their town. Why have they been chosen? Who are these unhappy souls calling from afar? What dangers lurk behind the shadowy eyes of strangers? And can Sophie and James overcome the presence of evil to save their friends and themselves?
The Silent Land — (2011) Publisher: |
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