Friday Round-up: Dawson at SFFWorld & Gibson at Tor.com

Two reviews this week from yours truly, so let's get right into them, shall we?

I've been following Delilah S. Dawson on twitter for a few months now and she churns out great writing advice.  She ran a twitter contest for her new book Servants of the Storm and I was lucky enough to get a copy through that contest. Delilah marked up the book with some great Pop-up Video type behind the scenes notes, too. I thought the book was a lot of fun, from my review:

Savanah, Georgia is devastated by Hurricane Josephine, which drowns much of the city, killing people, and affecting many others in adverse ways. While Hurricane Josephine as depicted in Delilah Dawson’s Servants of the Storm is a fictional storm (and more than just a storm), the devastation such a catastrophe can inflict is too well known, just look to the recent past at the horror stories from Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy. Dawson takes that devastation and weaves a dark, horrific, supernatural thread into this novel through the eyes of first person narrator Dovey.

...

The city of Savannah comes alive very much as a character in its own right, both the seedy elements and dark supernatural entities pulling the strings of the plot. I also thought the monsters, demons, and spirits who haunted Dovey and her city came across as genuine and with a level of authenticity to be if not believable, but plausible. I visited Savannah almost 15 years ago so my memories of the city are confined to a tourist ghost walk, business meetings, and a brew pub (http://www.moonriverbrewing.com/), so I didn’t see the underbelly of the city or anything outside of the touristy spots. That having been said, after being so absorbed in Servants of the Storm, I feel like I visited Savannah and its dark environs in reality with how well Dovey conveys her travels through the city.

Tor.com also posted my review of the inventive Post-Apocalyptic novel from Gary Gibson, Extinction Game. This was as gripping read, too.

Told from the point of view of Jerry Beche, Extinction Game, is Gary Gibson’s foray into this subgenre after a string of successful Space Opera novels.

Through Jerry’s first person voice, we get an intimate portrait of a man losing his sanity despite surviving the initial apocalypse. He speaks with his dead wife, he wants to make sure the people responsible for her death, Red Harvest, get their just desserts. When Jerry finally ventures out of his ramshackle hovel, he finds other people. Unfortunately for Jerry, these people capture and interrogate him, and we soon learn they are from a parallel Earth—Jerry is one of many people extracted from an apocalyptic world to be trained as Pathfinders, specialists who plunder other Earths for hints of salvation.

My SFFWorld colleague Mark Chitty favorably reviewed Extinction Game for SFFWorld, too.