Article contributed by Tessa Qi
A dark yet humorous urban fantasy, The Stranger Times is ready to report some of the weirdest and unrealistic stuff (or at least, that’s what they think) happening in our world at the moment. Based in Manchester, things are about to get eerie and the link between the real world and the fantasy world is starting to turn really vague.
McDonnell did an absolutely splendid job at telling the story from alternative perspectives, gradually revealing the darker forces that are happening in the alleyways of Great Manchester. An evil plan is hatching and possibly only the people at The Stranger Times are able to stop them.
Well, speaking of the people at The Stranger Times newspaper…they’re definitely not a peaceful bunch. They’re all such different people and one can only imagine the dynamics between them. What’s fascinating is that there isn’t one character who doesn’t have an interesting backstory, and they’re all written in a way that makes me feel like they’re just normal people like us, or perhaps people we encounter on an everyday basis.
Take Vincent Banecroft for example, the drunken editor of The Stranger Times, whose only hobbies are probably swearing all day long and shouting at anyone who speaks or tries to speak to him, but there is just something about him that you simply can’t hate. There’s so much more to him than his drunken appearance once you get to know his stories. Honestly, I am a bit disappointed that we didn’t really have much written from his perspective, it would be interesting as hell to see what’s going on in this fellow’s mind 24/7.
Then we have the new assistant editor, the ‘new Tina’, Hannah Willis. Poor girl left her husband and accidentally burned down their house after finding him cheating on her multiple times. She ended up becoming a new member of this crazy newspaper crew after making the decision to leave everything behind and start over again. Hannah has a lot of potential and it would be super encouraging and satisfying to see her transform even more.
Reggie and Ox definitely are the funniest pair, aren’t they? One determined to jump off the building every Monday and another who perhaps lack a bit of enthusiasm when attempting to persuade the other from jumping. And then we have Grace and Stella, a kind-hearted receptionist (I believe) and a girl with something more to her than meets the eye. We also have the nerdy teenager Simon, who dedicates his whole life trying to get Banecroft’s approval and become a member of The Stranger Times. Will he succeed eventually? Guess we’ll have to wait and find out.
Working together to produce some of the strangest news, they were quickly dragged into a series of investigations where weird things start to happen, and The Stranger Times newspaper might start to turn into that name literally…
McDonnell’s style of writing is whimsical, the dialogues are hilarious, and the characters are certainly entertaining enough, especially the guy who keeps trying to sell Hannah the story of him seeing a ghost for 10 grand, honestly dude, I’m very impressed with your persistency. Additionally, in between chapters, there are also short extracts from the newspaper with all sorts of strange things reported daily which makes it even more interesting to read.
This story contains a mixture of dark humour and fantasy elements, and you can always get a good laugh while reading it. It’s funny but not cringey and you could get hooked on right from the start. The next one in this series comes out next year and I certainly can’t wait to read more about the strange things that happen at The Stranger Times.
Get ready, for the weird things might just turn out to be real…
The Stranger Times is available from Amazon and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of January 14th 2021.
Will you be picking up The Stranger Times? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
There are Dark Forces at work in our world (and in Manchester in particular) and so thank God The Stranger Times is on hand to report them. A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but more often the weird) of modern life, it is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable . . .
At least that’s their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little (and believes less) of the publication he edits, while his staff are a ragtag group of wastrels and misfits, each with their own secrets to hide and axes to grind. And as for the assistant editor . . . well, that job is a revolving door – and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who’s got her own set of problems.
It’s when tragedy strikes in Hannah’s first week on the job that The Stranger Times is forced to do some serious, proper, actual investigative journalism. What they discover leads them to a shocking realisation: that some of the stories they’d previously dismissed as nonsense are in fact terrifyingly, gruesomely real.
Soon they come face-to-face with darker foes than they could ever have imagined. It’s one thing reporting on the unexplained and paranormal but it’s quite another being dragged into the battle between the forces of Good and Evil . . .
