Limbo II
By Andy Secombe

   Exactly a year ago, Tor UK proudly launched Andy Secombe’s Limbo upon an unsuspecting world. This was a delightful comic fantasy about a magical kingdom and how it impinges upon Brighton and the Boggs family. Now they are all back for a second (and sadly final) helping and once again Limbo is in trouble. Perhaps it all starts when Queen Iris says she is bored with perfection and wants to go back and work part-time in their old newsagents. Or perhaps it is The Book, which is prophesying doom once again. Add into the mixture a geneticist who wants to create a biological computer, a visitor from the planet Thrripp, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and some Morris Dancers and you have a good comic fantasy--something which all too often (in this reviewer’s humble opinion in any case) is something of a paradox.

   I don’t even like comic fantasy as a rule, so finding somebody who can make this sort of thing sing is a rare and wonderful thing. For one thing, there is an actual plot around which everything centers in lieu of the sequence of bantering wordplay and broad farce other writers of this sub-genre go in for. Most of the laugh-out-loud parts come from jokes about modern life which have been deftly woven together with the fantasy and the fast-paced adventure. Perhaps in some respects (the Four Horsemen, for example) it is a little more like Terry Pratchett than the last book, but not enough to be at all similar; the world has plenty of room for both. Funny instead of merely silly, and actually rather clever in many ways, I do hope that Andy Secombe will write something else soon. There really isn’t enough of this sort of thing around. Highly recommended.