Stephen Gallagher

Suffers from very slow pacing, e.g. the (anti) hero does not reach the town where the follower is lurking until page 157, halfway through.

There is also a split between the hero and another male character who forms a love triangle with the heroine. It is not clear for some time who is meant to be the hero because of John's bizarre behaviour, carrying round a gun which made me think he was a hitman, and which it finally turns out he has never fired and treats as a kind of talisman. Both are basically losers and the only positive characters are the heroine and a young man who helps them despite the hostility of his community. There isn't much of a plot and rather a lot of uninteresting stuff about geological surveys and mines which don't actually add anything to the story. The situation that leads to John's mammoth journey to Trondheim is quite contrived, just to get him to the final section.… (more)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/valley-of-lights-by-steve-gallagher/

I knew Steve Gallagher for his Doctor Who stories (Warriors Gate and Terminus), and wandered past him several times at Gallifrey One in February; I had no idea about his other work, but hugely enjoyed this, his best known book, a ale of an Arizona cop chasing a body-hopping entity and trying to rescue the daughter of the woman he loves. A lengthy appendix to the Telos edition explains Gallagher’s attempts to bring the story to the screen, and it also includes his first published short story, “Nightmare, With Angel”, on which the novel was very very loosely based. This was an unexpected pleasure.… (more)