Last year I wrote a brief New Treasures piece on Nick Setchfield’s debut novel The War in the Dark, and made a note to keep an eye out for the sequel. The Spider Dance finally arrived in September, and in October Nick gave this enticing summary in an interview with Starburst Magazine.

It’s the next adventure for supernaturally-inclined British Intelligence agent Christopher Winter. This time he’s mixed up with the stolen hearts of the undead, unholy criminal empires and a contract for a kill that demands a very strange bullet indeed. It’s a quest that spans the stranger corners of London, Budapest, Venice, Normandy, and Naples and the map certainly gets spattered with blood along the way.

[It’s] The Day of the Jackal – with vampires…. I wanted to refresh the vampire myth. Keep the essential glamour and horror of the creature but create a breed of vampire that would slot into a ‘60s-set spy thriller.

That certainly sound like something I need. But is it any good? Last week Ginger Nuts of Horror gave it a rave review, saying in part:

The Spider Dance is the direct sequel to his excellent 2017 novel The War in the Dark , a perfect genre blend of spies, monsters, magic and derring-do… In Nick Setchfield’s previous novel, he laid out the groundwork for a well constructed and believable alternative history where magic and the occult coexist in an otherwise reasonably realistic representation of our world…

It’s going to become cliched and, but you can’t review this book without mentioning James Bond, after all the simplest way to describe this book is James Bond meets the occult…

The mashing up of genres is pitch perfect… However it [is] his portrayal of a classic horror monster that shines in this book… Setchfield has created an exciting and extraordinary version of the creature that has sadly over the years been unfairly represented in fiction.

The Spider Dance was published by Titan Books on September 3, 2019. It is 352 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 in digital formats. See all our recent New Treasures here.