Scott Graham
Contains spoilers
More standard glitch in the matrix than grief in the matrix like his other novels, Dustin Thao's third story is more evocative than emotive. One can't help but think about the paths not taken and be left a little wistful at the end. Oliver, from You've Reached Sam, has earned his own tale of love and sacrifice, and what you may lose in making things right in your life and the lives of your loved ones. While continuing to talk wih his dead best friend Sam via text msg, Oliver makes a real connection with the new owner of the phone number. The only problem is that the connection spans alternate universes, with subtle differences between the two worlds, casually inserted at first, until Oliver realizes he must act in everyone's best interests, if not his own. Mr. Thao's best character has been written into Oliver, and his story is not finished.
A walk through Tim Curry’s entertainment career on stage, screen, and television is dry as dust with any revelations limited to which directors or costars he didn’t like at the time but has subsequently made friends with. His childhood is presented at short length but he offers no relections on how it affected his work. One also would surmise from the memoir that Mr. Curry maintained a pretty celibate lifestyle; I wasn’t hoping for a tell-all, but I wasn’t expecting a no-tell either. Not ho-hum, but relatively humdrum.
Contains spoilers
A gothic horror story of a set of Caroline era wooden stand-up figures with a suspect provenance and possible malignant intention. The plot builds trepidation well across two timelines, one during the reign of Charles I and the other timeline contemporary to the main story during tge Victorian era. The earlier timeline explains the cause of the apparent fall of the Bainbridge family and the latter details its final demise. The author created enough murkiness in the narrative to leave the reader unsure of what, if any of it, actually happened. The narrator is unreliable, and all of the tragic events are unbelievably presented as either the act of one person, or of a set of painted wooden stand up likenesses that can change personality at will. Witchery, possession, murderous intent, and unbelievable coincidence come together to an unsatisfactory conclusion. Recommended only for someone who likes a good tale of building dread only to be left with one of multiple conclusions to come to at the end, none of which would tie up all the threads woven into the story.
T. Kingfisher’s Alex Easton wanders into H.P. Lovecraft territory in a West Virginia coal mine in this third outing of her Sworn Soldier series. Easton rejoins friend Dr Denton from What Moves The Dead in the search for Denton’s missing cousin, deep in an abandoned mine in WV. There they run into something somewhat reminiscent of Journey To The Center Of The Earth crossed with The Blob. This story is the weakest of the trilogy so far. The incipient danger is hinted at very much in passing and comes and goes in the space of a page or two. Overall, this was a tasty looking but ultimately unfulfilling nothing sandwich action-wise, but the characters continue to be entertaining and very likeable so I will follow Kingfisher into Easton’s fourth adventure which, if What Stalks The Deep is to be believed, will also take place in the states.
Alex Easton as the Gallacian Carl Kolchak, takes on his second paranormal adversary in the form of a moroi, kind of a succubus without the sexual tension. The action has moved from the House of Usher to a hunting cabin owned by Easton. Not much world building occurs and the other-worldly enemy is not well fleshed out but that’s the way it is in dreams. This outing was not as well imagined as a complete world as the one described in What Moves The Dead, but the supporting characters, including Easton’s batman Angus, and his new acquaintance Miss Potter, a housekeeper and her grandson, were all described well and were quite likeable, and the reader is fervently rooting for them once the threat is defined and manifests itself. A quick enjoyable read.
Contains spoilers
This suspense/horror graphic novel in 6 parts is effectively told in story by Joe Hill and artwork by Gabriel Rodriguez. The Locke family, traumatized by the violent murder of their husband and father, return to the ancestral paternal home, known as the Keyhouse to regroup and mentally convalesce, but the house’s property houses the root cause of the father’s death, and it has more machinations in store for the family with the ultimate goal of possessing all the special keys that are hidden around the house, forged hundreds of years ago, each holding a special power. The Locke children are instrumental to the entity’s plans and he spans 2 of the 3 timelines explored in the story: the father’s timeline with his friends, his children’s (and current) timeline, and a short, slightly explored timeline explaining the source of the keys and the ultimate evil source behind the entity that plagues the Locke family and their friends, from both generations. Although the entity wants all the keys, it especially seeks the one that will grant it access to the source of the evil with an obvious objective which may not be exactly as it appears. Violence, death, racism, abuse, sexuality, and homosexuality themes are represented.
Setting aside the reading of the prose from the Regency Period and Victorian Era, this novel was an incredible disappointment. I think that the praise heaped upon the novel is more for the story from subsequent adaptations than this source novel. Victor, the coddled son of a well off family goes off to study anatomy and physiology and quickly knows more than his mentors (ohhhhkaaaay) and in seeing a tree rent asunder by lightning suddenly knows the secret of creating life (ohhhhkaaaaay). A few lab jars and some time later, he has created his “monster” and immediately abandons him, completely. Some may consider the question of the nature of monstrosity in the story to be stridently determined by the later adaptations of the work, but I suggest that Frankenstein is more the monster than his creation, in the utter abandonment of him to an unsympathetic and superstitious public who shun and attack the creature. The creature reacts in kind, coincidentally hitting Frankenstein close to home, twice in one night. Time passes and a few more incredible coincidences later, a vendetta is formed, the chase is on and no one ends happily. The book reads like the piffle of an 18 year old 4th year high school student or university freshman. I suggest that history agrees with me in that no faithful adaptations of the novel have been made; copious additions have been made in all cases to flesh out the story, pardon the pun, to much greater effect. Give me Igor (an addition), torch and pitchfork wielding mobs (an addition) and a burning windmill (an addition) any time. Actually, give me Frau Blücher, a performance of Puttin’ on the Ritz, and Madeline Kahn as Elizabeth, even better.
Classic longform poetic tale of a doomed ship voyage complete with dead crew, from which we get the classic phrase (paraphrased): “water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink”, “a sadder but wiser man”, and the concept of an albatross around your neck as a great burden. A great insight into the phantasms one might see on a long voyage, being trapped in the doldrums, in times long ago, complete with the exquisite Gustave Doré illustrations.
The story of an everyman who died and is condemmed to a short stay in hell. Short = not infinite. Hell is a library that contains, somewhere in its stacks, the perfect story of your life. It is housed there, along with every other book that could have possibly been printed with no regard to rhyme or reason. Any combination of the characters in the Roman alphabet, grammar and actual words not required. Your task is to find the book of your life, at which point you get sent to paradise.
You leave your time reading this book with a infinitesimal understanding of the time frames of infinity and forever, and it is frightening.
The classic tale of vampires and staunch heroes lives up to its reputation as the progenitor of modern vampire lore, with sunrise and sunset, garlic, stabbing through the heart and beheading, and permission to enter a home required, all figuring into the story prominently. The story is generally easy to follow despite its Victorian prose, save for the pieces authored by Van Helsing. Stoker made his Netherlander understanding of the English language variably stilted, so a careful and close reading was warranted in those passages. Oddly, Dracula does not appear in the action too often once he has left Castle Dracula; he is felt mostly through his effects on the other characters, most notably Renfield, Lucy, and Mina, hardly a fitting role for Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, or Gary Oldman. Except for the final chase, the story is more drawing room drama than horror story, and even that is mostly told from the point of view from the intercepting party rather than the pursuing parties. Overall I am very glad to have read it and be able to judge the adaptations against the source material and appreciate them all the more for the literary license taken by each. The tone most closely matches the Lugosi movie, but the story is very faithfully reproduced by Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation.
A book with the slow burn of a 1000 foot fuse, but an explosion does occur in the last 5 chapters. A haunting, residual magick, and family dysfunction weave together like a DNA helix to threaten the daughter and granddaughter of an autodidactic witch, and their landscaper, and friendly neighborhood wiccan. Well written with a real life flavor for the mixture of humor with the serious even in the darkest of times, all the little clues come together in a creepy satisfactory conclusion. Let the lesson be learned that one should warn their guests before they come to stay in your threatening haunted house.
Contains spoilers
17 issue comic series read in a graphic novel compendium format mixes a sci-fi world with a historic medieval earth sensibility to relate the tale of a family that has sequestered from the larger society to remain pure from the rot that infests it. The title of the series starts as a loose confederation of creatures to bring an end to society’s ills by separating the king from his thrall and restoring justice to the world and the good name of the protagonist and his family, but turns out to be a double entendre that we don’t learn until the close of the story, when all is lost and corrupted. Our hero is the villain, the villain sought an end, and all the other characters were playing the angles for a piece of their own small part of the world. A very nihilistic story told during nihilistic times. Great art and a very entertaining dark tale.
Contains some but not all of the charm of Cerulean book 1. A slow, somewhat tortuous start takes off once the protagonists finally decide to take off their gloves. The children remain the stars of the novels, and as they mature, grow out of their sullenness, and start to show some more personality, the reader can’t help but be enchanted, especially by Lucy, Sal, and newcomer, David the yeti.
The urge to call this tale Lovecraftian is strong, but I pull back from that description. I will go so far as to say that there is a Lovecraft inspiration present in the incarnation of the fantastical aspects in the narrative, but it’s missing the demented nature, i.e, the craziness of a Lovecraft story. Two friends and coworkers pursue all the fishing holes of the Catskill Mountain region, and ignore the warnings of one stream, the ill omened Dutchman’s Creek. Told in two timelines, one historic, incorporated within and bisecting the other more contemporary tale. The historical story stands separate from the contemporary tale and is effective on its own. The contemporary tale builds on the historical story that exists as a warning to the curious. The reader is given all the information they need to suss out the way the story goes, but the narrative imagery is described so well that it plays out very vividly in the reader’s movie screen of the mind. Nightmarish and shudder inducing.
Like Liu’s other short story collection, The Paper Menagerie, The Hidden Girl is a mixed bag, but most of the stories that you pull from the bag are interesting, thought provoking, and even tug at your heart a few times. They are best when the story is exploring the idea of the human/computer singularity and whether or not humanity would actually be much changed in the surrendering of the body. The other speculative stories are also quite good; the weakest tales are the more fantasy based selections in my opinion. The author seems to be better suited to calling out the pitfalls of advancement, or at least moralizing on it gently. Well worth the read, but beware of a couple clunkers.
When heroic people do stupid things, and red herrings predominate the plot. I like the bones of the story, but the whole goreydamned thing reads like an old 30s serial with dire cliffhangers at the end of every third chapter. It got old fast. The 518 page story should have been 300. In any case, it did bring the story of Darrow of Lykos to a putative end in the trilogy until book 4, Red Rising: The Search for More Money was published. I'll stop at the end of the trilogy, thank you very much.
Lush sci-fi fantasy of a dystopian world with multiple societies, almost all running out of light, both natural and artificial. The cast of characters become embroiled in the efforts to fix or take advantage of the dimming or darkening of the towns and communities within multiple associated but strategically antagonistic schemes and plots. Multiple story lines slowly converge as secrets are revealed and characters are unmasked to the reader, in a seemingly never ending series of Holy S#%& moments. As part 1 of a series, obviously not all is revealed, but the reader is left slavering for part 2, and not grabbing pitchforks and torches to mob the publisher.
This fever dream of a grimmer tale than the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm was a delight from start to finish. I took my time(?) in the reading because there was a plethora to glean from the Middle English used throughout much of the story (see meanie, lief, pizzle, sieur, etc). Luckily I had undertaken the reading as an ebook; I had lookup capabilities at hand rather than having to constantly swivel-chair between book and dictionary. As for the story itself, this sword-and-sorcery-lite novel of a revenant boy vs evil sorceror and the battle for the future of a small village is filled with the threats that are born from the worst desires of people with power, desirous of more power at any cost, with a dark magic twist. It’s either a fast read if you glide over the Latin and French phrases, and Middle English words, or a slower one if, like me, you take interest in new words and ancient etymology. The author threw a lot into the narrative, from theology to mythology, damsals in distress, hapless villagers, a plucky protagonist and darkly evil villains, and sundry monsters in a medieval setting. I was reminded of The Legendary Black Beast of Arrrrgh in a few spots (IYKYK), but that did not detract from the pleasure in the reading. Highly recommended.
A spicy gay romance with werewolves, but it is beautifully written, compelling reading. The characters are extremely well developed and the reader immediately becomes invested in them, their stories, and their well-being. The romantic couple are a bit unorthodox, werewolf status aside, but give the author a chance to let things unfurl before you start clutching pearls. At turns happy, ecstatic, sad, and devastating, Mr. Klune will wring a few tears from all but the most stoic of souls (and if you are one of those people, all I can say is, “who hurt you?”). Very recommended for an open minded reader.
Book 2 of TJ Klune’s Green Creek Series (beginning with the fantastic Wolfsong), follows and furthers the magical fantasy romance of werewolves and witches in Green Creek OR, a town and surrounds that may have some magic of its own. Ravensong contains the complete tale of a threat to the Bennett family/pack, but it also unveils more of the antagonists and their motivations without bringing them to a conclusion (there ARE 2 more volumes in the series as of the time of this opinion). Extremely likeable and sympathetic protagonists and formidable villains drive the action to a satisfying minor conclusion, but threats still exist and the clouds are gathering in the distance. Again, like Wolfsong, this novel is not for those of a closed minded sensibility; gay love is represented both emotionally and physically in a tasteful and descriptive manner.
A fitting ending to the Green Creek saga - TJ Klune can weave a tale of witches and werewolves like no one else. The Bennett Family and friends and their enemies square off one more time to claim the soul of one that each calls their own. Steady pacing brings the parties together until the story reaches a head, and matters are concluded. Tears will be shed.
Heartsong, volume 3 of the Green Creek Novels tells the story of a prominently featured character and fleshes him out for the reader and gets them more invested in him. It's a good story though not as emotional as the first two volumes. It mainly introduces the main villain, their odd motivation (very derivative of Stephen King's Storm of the Century, "Give me what I want and I'll go away."), and sets up the story for volume 4.