The Hide

by Liz Williams

Unknown Binding

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Liz Williams is a British science fiction writer. Her first novel, The Ghost Sister was published in 2001. Both this novel and her next, Empire of Bones (2002) were nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.[1] She is also the author of the Inspector Chen series.

She is the daughter of a stage magician and a Gothic novelist. She holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge. She has had short stories published in Asimov's, Interzone, The Third Alternative and Visionary Tongue. From the mid-nineties until 2000, she lived and worked in Kazakhstan.[2] Her experiences there are reflected in her 2003 novel Nine Layers of Sky. Her novels have been published in the US and the UK, while her third novel The Poison Master (2003) has been translated into Dutch.

Series:
* Detective Inspector Chen
* Darkland

Reviews

[Glen Engel-Cox · Rating 3 out of 5]

A moody story about a swamp in England with some special properties. I’m not sure I followed it, but I did admire Williams’ ability to capture the place with excellent details as to the fauna and the lay of the land, as well as her birding information, albeit couched in the terms of a protagonist who is not an expert. The ending for me was a disappointment, as I wanted it to reveal something more than it did, and the denouement felt unearned, even with all the details that had been shared before, by bringing in things that had not been really mentioned other than an aside about one character’s interest in myth. Come to think of it, this runs close to Robert Holdstock’s Mythago work, which is similarly mysterious, but usually has more of a timeless quality to it.

[Stijn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, this is great. Leaves me wondered and feeling unease afterwards, which is what I look for in (New) Weird fiction. Super!