The Curse of Salamander Street

Taylor's imagination is as ripe as a rotting corpse ... Taylor excels at metaphysical terror; not surprising for a Chuch of England vicar who has conducted 50 exorcisms ... The scene where Jonah's friend and accomplica Tara finds she has company in her pitch-black cell is one of the most scary and revolting that I've ever come across in a "children's" book ... Taylor conjures up marvellous settings for his characters ... He is superb at creating atmosphere, so he can be forgiven his occasional adjectival and adverbial excesses and the odd gothic cliche.

Taylor's third novel Tersias is giving readers more of the same mix of a grim eighteenth century setting and supernatural goings on that we're familiar with from Shadowmancer and Wormwood. Some Christian readers have praised GP Taylor for writing powerful fantasy literature which has a thoroughly Christian worldview underpinning it.

[Taylor's] mixture of a great plot with a fantasy theme and a kind of Victorian writing style has been compared to Tolkein and CS Lewis, a fact which he quarrels with since he has only been writing for three years ... But what he may lack in literary years, he makes up for in 'life experience'.

[Tersias] is filled with sorcery, intrigue and supernatural strife - a thriller set in the London of 1756, in dark times and with dark forces abounding ... This is real edge-of-the-seat stuff, if that's what you like.

Not surprsingly, given [his] wealth of experience, GP [Taylor] can rustle up an entertaining cast of characters in this novel, which while nominally aimed at older children is not one that adults should ignore ... The ex-reverend has served up a real treat in Tersias, one that should satisfy young and old. Pacy, imaginative and populated with a great array of ne'er-do-wells, misfits and mystics, as well as a gripping plot, it's easy to imagine another film option from Tinseltown for the exorcist-turned-fantasist.

Former North Yorkshire vicar Graham Taylor has enjoyed phenomenal success with his first tw novels - Shadowmancer and Wormwood - and his latest offering, Tersias, is just as enthralling. Taylor fans will be well acquainted with his dark, 18th century settings and Tersias opens with a familiar apocalyptic feel, following the near-miss of a London-bound comet ... The story rips along at speed as various unscrupulous characters desperate for visions of the future enter into his life and try to manipulate the youg oracle for their own ends. Taylor succeeds in conjuring up a dark world with plenty of supernatural goings-on to keep readers on the edge of their seats. His compulsive storytelling skills will leave both youg and old alike gripped until the last page. Guaranteed to keep the kids quiet over the summer holidays.