Lonely Werewolf Girl By Martin Millar

Published by Meadow and Black (2007) £9.99

Break out the bunting; it might have been five years since “Suzy, Led Zeppelin and Me” but Martin Millar is back with an excellent new book. It is about twenty years since his first novel “Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation” was published and over the intervening years he has earnt himself a reputation for penning curious post-punk magical realist tales, often set around the fringes of South London society.

This new book combines this heritage, his love of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and also evokes resonances with his novels form the nineties, “The Good Fairies of New York” (recently republished with an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and “Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving”.

“The Lonely Werewolf Girl” is Kalix McRinnalch who has escaped from her Scottish based clan for assaulting the Thane, her father, and is now living rough in London. Also in London is her sister, the Werewolf Enchantress, clothes designer to the Great and the Moderately Good. Throw into this mix human students, a handful of plots, werewolf civil war, werewolf hunters and Millar’s eye for humour (he also wrote the Thraxus books as Martin Scott), and you have a 560 page book that rips along.

Over the years he has written about fifteen novels, plus a graphic novel, a film novelisation and a stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma”. This book though – with a quote his old mate Andi Sex Gang on the back _ is where he should be. And, with the few loose ends left hanging, I hope there will be a sequel.

Rutland Dedlock