Book review: 666 Charing Cross Road

A standalone (although... not quite) novel from Paul Magrs of Brenda & Effie fame, 666 Charing Cross Road shares those novels' camp take on the supernatural, except this time in more of a cosmopolitan setting, with the first half of the novel set in New York and the second half in London. When ageing American ghost story fan Liza discovers a specialist Charing Cross bookshop that will deliver the most obscure old English ghost stories, she's an instant fan. But one of the shipments contains the real thing, a bloodsoaked grimoire that contains a trapped demon who possesses her niece's boyfriend and starts a vampire and zombie plague on New York.

This is another lot of good fun from Magrs (although he's perhaps overcompensating a bit with how many of the English characters are bad guys and the Americans good - I'm sure if he was trying for a more transatlantic audience they could have handled a bit more of an even spread of good and evil.) The evil-fighting team are a familiar combination, with a seemingly innocuous old lady with a badass past, a gay best friend and a terrifying monster who's actually one of the good guys. It certainly takes place in the same universe as the Brenda and Effie books and early on I was wondering if, like in To The Devil - A Diva! this book's characters might eventually end up crossing over into the other series; a reference near the end makes it look pretty much inevitable that they will.