Procession of the Dead by D.B. Shan
Harper Voyager, £10; 312pp

THE FIRST Darren O'Shaughnessy novel came out in 1999, subtitled The City: Book One, but there was no sequel: by the following year the writer had become Darren Shan, author and eponymous hero of a best-selling vampire saga for younger readers. Now, “extensively revised,” his debut reappears as Procession of the Dead by D.B. Shan. The new byline is an uneasy compromise: the publisher's desire to keep the bestselling “brand” in conflict with a recognition that this explicit, brutal fantasy was not written for children.

It's obvious why Shan is so popular with boys. The narrative voice is engagingly cocky, the action races along, and there are some surprises lurking behind the familiar scenario. Young Capac Raimi arrives in an unnamed City determined to become a professional criminal, and is taken up by The Cardinal, the powerful gangster boss who is looking for an heir.

Many scenes seem recycled from violent crime movies - the massacre in a warehouse, the severed head in a refrigerator - while others are pure Enid Blyton, such as female cat burglar deciding to break in to the well-guarded heart of The Cardinal's citadel: “Nobody could get near the place without attracting attention. So she went round the back.”

The background, Shan's City, is an oddly vague setting. It has “Incan connections” and American-style gangsters, but apart from a few Incan names and some mysterious blind priests, it seems blandly British, featuring takeaways, National Insurance numbers and cornflakes for breakfast.

Dark Blood by John Meaney
Gollancz, £12.99; 345pp

John Meaney's city of Tristopolis, on the other hand, is a vivid and fascinating creation, first displayed in Bone Song, now revisited in Dark Blood. The sequel unravels more of the conspiracy revealed in the first book, only now the detective hero is dead - or, rather, undead, having been revived as a zombie - and facing the possibility that new legislation will strip human rights from him and all other undead citizens. Meaney entertainingly merges the police procedural with science fantasy in its most Gothic mode.

The Unblemished by Conrad Williams
Virgin, £7.99; 347pp

The usual tradition in horror fiction is to begin with comfortable, even cosy, normality, build a sense of unease, and then bring on the monsters. In The Unblemished, Conrad Williams plunges immediately into the supernatural, as two young people driving through Northamptonshire find the road has led them off the map and into a forest full of malformed semi-human creatures who want their flesh.

It's a risky strategy, but Williams sustains his opening high pitch of terror and mystery through most of the book, with only the occasional wobble. His carefully crafted descriptions of horrific images, along with the ability to suggest they are even worse than words can tell, is reminiscent of Poe and the early stories of Clive Barker. Not for the squeamish, but no fan of literary horror should miss it.

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