Nickers and bogles, fulgars and wits: these newly minted creatures populate the Monster Blood Tattoo series. This world has the depth and complexity that characterises all good fantasy, and fans of D.M. Cornish’s Aurealis Award-winning Foundling (2006) will eagerly continue the journey and be well rewarded for doing so. Beautifully presented, the second novel is as impressive inside as out.

Cornish, an established illustrator, has applied his prodigious imagination to this series. His pencil and charcoal illustrations are a spur to the imagination, not a shackle: they convey the required warmth, friendliness, malice or grotesquerie of characters and creatures without trammelling the reader’s own mind-portraits. It is pleasing to discover that Cornish has an equal facility with language. His language is fantastic yet vaguely familiar, it is based on various Romance languages and their accents.

Good fantasy is often marked by the presence of extensive and detailed maps: Cornish goes further by providing more than one hundred pages of appendices. These include a glossary outlining a colossal mythic and historical background, illustrations with detailed captions, maps and even calendars and daily schedules. Cornish has not cut corners by merely reproducing the first novel’s appendices; these are specific to this stage of the series, and refer the reader to Book One at appropriate points.