Monday, December 05, 2022

November 2022 Reading Round Up

November still had a linger of horror to start, but it the month saw traipses through fantasy, horror, and science fiction. I didn’t post any reviews to SFFWorld in November, but all the reviews I posted in October made up for that, I’d hope. However, two books I read in November will end up being reviewed for SFFWorld (The Art of Prophecy by Wesley Chu which posts tomorrow 12/6 and The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal which will post 12/13) so as usual, I’ll focus on the other books I read.



Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia kicked off November in a great way. I’d read the author’s 80s love letter, Signal to Noise a few years ago and had my eye on this book for a while, especially since Tor Nightfire acquired the rights and wrapped the pages in a gorgeous cover by John Picacio. 

Garcia plays with vampire mythology and noir in this fantastic novel set in Mexico City. A young man named Domingo finds himself drawn to vampire Atl and despite her attempts at pushing him away, he continues to find her. Vampires are real and very much a part of the world in Garcia’s novel, although they aren’t quite welcome in Mexico City. Atl and her Doberman are on the run from a gang of “Necro” vampires led by Nick, who has a long-held grudge against Atl. 

I loved how the relationship between Domingo (not quite a “Renfield”) and Atl played out over the course of the novel. He was bright and optimistic, she a bit closed off (understandably). What I enjoyed even more was the deep vampire mythology Garcia built for this novel. It isn’t in your face world-building, rather, the backbone of the story that informs the conflicts Atl is forced to deal with in her life.

Certain Dark Things is an immediate classic vampire novel. 




The book that took up the most significant portion of my reading time in November was Chuck Wendig’s Wayward, the sequel to his epic apocalyptic Wanderers. Chuck picks up those threads and weaves a powerful, gripping story of how the survivors of a plague-apocalypse (White Mask) try to survive as humanity with the “help” of an extremely powerful and convincing AI (Black Swan) who helped to “hand pick” a select group of people and protect them from the plague as a last hope for humaity. Picking up about five years after the events of Wanderers, Chuck keeps the pace addictive over the course of the novels lengthy 800 pages. There’s a sense of anger in this novel that is completely believable, especially with the returning characters like Shana Stewart and “President” Ed Creel, though scientist Benji Ray and rocker Pete Corley balance out that anger with signs of hope. 

There’s something about “road stories” and “apocalyptic” stories that work so well when brought together, traversing a barren landscape with potential dangers out of sight makes for great storytelling. That’s one strong element of the Wayward and I again felt resonance with Robert McCammon’s Swan Song. In fact, characters in Wayward specifically called out Swan Song.

There’s also the Very Good Dog Gumball, who along with Radar from Stephen King’s Fairy Tale are co-winners of the goodest dog of the year. Many authors try to tell stories from the point of view of dogs, not all of them succeed, Chuck does. 

Chuck did a pre-release signing at the Doylestown Bookshop the Saturday before the book published, with the bookshop about an hour away from me, there was no way I was going to miss it even though I chatted with Chuck at NY Comic Con. 

In the end, Wayward was a fantastic novel, I was consumed by it for the week-and-a-half I was reading it. Never did I want to leave, never did the novel drag, never did things happen in the novel that didn’t make sense even if what unfolded over the course of the novel was not what I expected. I was surprised by where the story went, and at times even scared by a lot of what the characters had to confront. 

Put simply, a fantastic novel. 




On the audio side of things, I dipped into another V.E. Schwab novel, This Savage Song, the first of Monsters of Verity duology. Set in a world where monsters are real, the story focuses on two young characters – Kate Harker, daughter of a powerful monster hunter who oversees on portion of the city and August Flynn, adopted son of man who runs another portion of the city.

I've read a good handful of novels by Schwab and what I enjoyed in those novels was on display here - deft characterization. Kate and August felt real, genuine, and I wanted to believe them. I also appreciated Schwab's world-building especially when it comes to the various monsters who live in this world side-by-side with humans. She balances the details with the elements that are mysteries to the readers but taken for granted by the characters very well.




Lastly, I started (and am still listening to) A Crown of Swords, the seventh Wheel of Time novel. I was trucking along pretty well diving into Randland on an almost monthly basis for the first portion of the year, but it was July when I finished the preceding installment, Lord of Chaos. At this point, what can I say about a Wheel of Time novel. I knew this book is where many fans of the series see the "slog" creeping in, but so far I'm feeling very comfortable back in the world. It has been just over a decade since I re-read this book so this makes the audio version I'm currently consuming the third time I'm reading the book. 

That's it for November 2022!

Thursday, November 03, 2022

October 2022 Reading Round Up

October, shockingly, was all about horror. Well, the books I read, at least. The first weekend in October was New York Comic Con and it was the fist time since 2019 I was able to attend. They limited the press passes in 2021 and it wasn’t held in 2020 because of the COVID-19 Pandemic. One of the books I’ve already read, but you can click over to these three posts at SFFWorld to read my recaps of my time during the convention:


As I said above, every book I read in the month of October either had some horror flavors or was flat out horror. Three of those books were review books part of the annual “Countdown to Hallowe’en” series we do at SFFWorld




Little Eve touches many topics in its slim, but potent length. There’s the concept of “grooming,” psychological manipulation, cults, animal cruelty, and of course child abuse (both mental and physical). Although this is a fictional tale set nearly a century prior to today, the games Uncle plays with his family are frighteningly real and are very much cultish in nature.

Hines manages to generate a wonderful atmosphere in the novel, there are hints of things familiar in the genre, but mixed up in a way that feels quite refreshing. With a creepy mine, there’s some definite horror vibes of the dark dwellers flavor of the genre and even something of an old west feel…In addition to The Thing, I also felt a sense of resonance with some of Jeff VanderMeer’s weird horror fiction and in the way the Institute “helps” humanity, I couldn’t help thinking of Octavia Butler’s Dawn and Lilith’s Brood/Xenogenesis books. Like I said, some familiar echoes that when fully projected are a story of its own.

What I found as unnerving as the black cloud over “The Day” was the affect it had on Nina’s relationship with her husband Lord Hugh. He initially seems quite stable, but as Nina begins to stray from the home as the “Day” draws ever closer, he seems to unravel. As it turns out, Nina is a quick learner and the true impact and import of “The Day” begins to settle into her mind, she understand what it means to be a resident of Lute and somehow begins to find herself more resolute.

Compulsive…that’s the word that comes to mind when I think of this novel. Gibson has lovely prose and the tale is told with both auras of relaxed prose as well as elements of urgency, but through it all, the narrative of Constanta’s confessional is powerfully compulsive, which is why I read this book in only a couple of days. Her tale is gripping and you want to see her overcome her abuser.



Of the non-SFFWorld review books, let’s start with Ronald Malfi’s Black Mouth, which is the first novel I’ve read by the author. I’ve been seeing good things about his work for the past couple of years (Come with Me in particular), but this one’s description grabbed me for its very superficial similarity to books like King’s IT and Dan Simmons’s Summer of Night - friends reunite in their hometown to take down a monster they thought was gone. Those similarities, as I noted, are just superficial. Malfi’s tale is a little more confined, in that there are fewer characters and much more despair surrounds the characters; protagonist Jamie Warren is an alcoholic struggling with his addiction; his mother is a junkie who killed herself, thus brining Jamie back to Sutton’s Quay, VA. His disabled brother was found wandering. Dennis’s other friends Mia and Clay have their own demons, but they were very close friends when they were kids, but haven’t seen each other in years, since an eerie man known only as the Magician touched their lives. Malfi excels with his characters and building a sense of creepiness, between the Magician and the haunted region of Black Mouth itself.

He tells the tale in intertwining chapters that focus on the present and past when Jamie and his crew initially encounter the Magician. Malfi has a very deliberate pace and that pace works perfectly in Black Mouth to build up empathy for all the characters, the horrific nature of the Magician, the unsettling nature of Black Mouth itself, and how the tension builds towards the conclusion.

Black Mouth is one of my favorite novels of the year and I’m looking forward to reading more from Malfi in the future.




One of the books I picked up at New York Comic Con was Clay McLeod Chapman’s Ghost Eaters, which he then signed. I’ve read two of his books so far (The Remaking and Whisper Down the Lane) and enjoyed both and shared both with my wife to read. This one focuses on a drug called Ghost that allows the people who consume it to see dead people, or ghosts. Thinking about seeing dead loved ones might bring a swell of positive emotion to your heart…Clay goes the opposite direction. 

I won’t spoil what that means, but damn. The story focus on Erin and her toxic ex-boyfriend Silas. She keeps trying to get away from him and his addictions, but she finds it difficult. He eventually turns up dead of an overdose. Erin can’t hold on, she always feared he may wind up dead, but it actually happened and she has difficulty dealing with it. Then she learns about the aforementioned drug called Ghost. There’s an escalating creep factor that sets it apart. Chapman’s characters seem genuine and are empathetic and not since Jeff VanderMeer have mushrooms been so very creepy. 

The other non-SFFWorld review book I read was Nick Cutter’s Little Heaven, which I was looking forward to reading after The Troop earlier in the year because I enjoyed it so much. I can’t say I felt the same way about Little Heaven. The book started off fine, I was into it. But it just turned into a slog as it felt everything was happening at a glacial pace.



The audiobook I read (and have yet to finish) took up all of October, but it was a re-read, Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers, which I reviewed back in 2019 for SFFWorld when it published. The book was released before the COVID-19 Pandemic, but damn if Wendig’s story wasn’t prescient for what we’ve experienced the last few years. Seems more horrific in hindsight than it did at the time. Here’s some of what I said back in 2019: 

In short, between the potent politics, graphic nature, and embracing of the tropes, Wending doesn’t shy away from ANYTHING in Wanderers. As a writer, Chuck is far from a shy person, as people who follow him online and in fiction already know. I’ve read a few of Chuck Wendig’s novels and I see some pieces of those works, here, except maybe a little more refined an in your face. Wanderers is a magnum opus for him, it seems like a work of fiction he’s been working towards, and is a powerful achievement ...  Wendig has shown himself at the very least an equal storyteller/writer of the Epic Apocalypse with Wanderers. For me, it is an instant classic, an immediate Modern Masterpiece of the genre, and will probably be my favorite 2019 novel, and a book I will hold very high in my pantheon for years to come.

I’ll close out with my bookstack from New York Comic-Con 2022.




Thursday, October 06, 2022

September 2022 Reading Round up

September proved to be a proflific and varied reading month for me. A few books I read were review books for SFFWorld: Ruination (the first prose novel set in the world of League of Legends) and It Rides a Pale Horse. Also, I read Full Immersion by Gemma Amor in August (as hinted last month), but the review posted in September. As of this post, those reviews are up at SFFWorld, but the excerpts of each are below. 




My SFFWorld colleague Mark Yon and I both received review copies of Ruination, we both enjoyed the book a great deal…and probably more than we expected: 

Reynolds has a great deal of experience in writing these kinds of books and he’s quite adept at relaying a lore-heavy world while also maintaining a well-paced story with developed characters. The primary characters manage to breath uniquely beyond the tropes in which they fit and the plot is fairly straight-forward. The details of the world relayed in the novel are just enough to keep the plot going for a relatively un-experienced League of Legends person like myself. 

On the other hand, I didn’t quite enjoy It Rides a Pale Horse:


Marino does some interesting things with his characters, at least Lark and his two companions, pens engaging dialogue, and has a knack for crafting some horrific, visceral scenes. Unfortunately, those elements – while strong – weren’t strong enough to carry through the portions of the novel that didn’t work for me. That dichotomy ultimately left me feeling frustrated with the novel.

Full Immersion by Gemma Amor was one of the most potent novels I've read this year:



Amor pours her soul into this novel, it is raw, full of emotion, and incredibly honest. That feeling comes through in every word of the novel, even outside of the forward. There’s a science fictional aspect to the novel with the Virtual Reality element, but a mounting dread both in the simulated environment and with the observers has the novel creeping and creeping towards horror. The bouncing between the observers and what Magpie was experiencing in VR made for a very gripping read, building tension on both sides that made it tough to set the book down

As for the non-review books, I read Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne, the first the Burning Kingdoms saga and thought a very good silk road, epic fantasy. 



Potent themes, thrilling action, and fantastic character development. Set in Parijatdvipa, which is very much inspired by the legends and history of India, the novel focuses on the character of Priya, a servant in the household of the regent of the city state of Ahiranya. The other main character is Malini, a prisoner and sister of the emperor. The storyline of the two characters eventually intertwine making for a very satisfying novel. Great world-building, interesting magic, with enough closure for the novel itself, while also setting up a foundation for future novels. 



Fairy Tale by Stephen King is a book I’ve been anticipating since I heard about it in January of this year (2022). I immediately thought of The Eyes of the Dragon and The Talisman when the title was announced and there are some parallels to those King classics, but this one is its own story. Charlie Reade lives with his father, a recovering alcoholic. Charlie’s mother was killed in a freak car accident when he was younger. Charlie managed to push through his challenges, becoming a star athlete. When he befriends a mysterious man who lives in the oldest house in the neighborhood, Charlie learns of another world filled with magic, strange creatures, and evil. He also befriends the neighbor’s dog, Radar. 

There are little shout outs to past King works, it is a novel that blends so many things King is good at doing; youthful protagonist, monsters, character, friendship between an older and younger character, and dogs. I suspect Molly, AKA the Thing of Evil may have helped there, too. I wouldn't be surprised if some Constant Readers will end up naming their dogs “Radar” in the future. 

In the end, I’d say that Fairy Tale is a top 5 or top 10 King novel for me, out of the near 50 or so books I’ve read by Sai King. This one is an instant classic.



The Last Stand of Mary Good Crow by Rachel Aaron is the first book in a new Weird-Western-Epic Fantasy series. Set in Medicine Rocks, Montana which is a hotbed for “Crystal” a mysterious substance discovered in 1866 which has since become the most valuable thing in the world. Crystal, unsurprisingly, is a magical substance that can speak to certain people. The Mary Good Crow of the title is a guide, helping would-be seekers of fortune find crystal in the mines. She is enlisted by Josephine Price, an heiress from Boston seeking to reinvigorate the company she inherited. Rounding out the trio of protagonists is Tyrel Reiner, who has connections to a lot of things happening in Medicine Rock. 

Like I said, the Crystal is highly sought after so many people are vying for control of the mines, which presents one of the novel's primary conflicts. Two strong elements make this book as enjoyable as it was: Aaron’s amazing world-building skills and the characters she creates. 

This was a fun one and a good start to a series. As with The Jasmine Throne, there is a decent amount of resolution in the novel, but The Last Stand of Mary Good Crow is definitely just the first of a series. 




Children of Chicago by Cynthia Pelayo is a fascinating blend of urban fantasy, fairy tale, crime procedural, and mystery. These are all genres that can naturally meld together and Pelayo does an impressive job of placing the Pied Piper myth into modern day Chicago. The main character is detective Lauren Medina, whose father was also a police detective. Children are being brutally murdered and the only clue is a connection to the Pied Piper. Medina is an extremely well-constructed character, flawed, determined, and undeniably believable and real. The novel is also steeped in the dark history of Chicago. 

Unsurprisingly, this one takes some chilling turns on the way to the stunning conclusion. 



 
I just finished The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James a couple of days before this post went live so technically it could be either an "October" or "September" read. Either way The Book of Cold Cases is the second book I’ve read by St. James and it is just as good as the first one, The Sun Down Motel. In this book, Shea Collins, a young divorced woman has a hobby looking into open murder cases and runs the Website “The Book of Cold Cases.” Her latest obsession is the socialite Beth Greer, who was suspected killing two men in 1977, shortly after her parents died. Shea, in 2017, is able to convince Beth to tell her the full story of the murders and her life. It is fascinating story, that has hints of a ghost story, murder, and great character development. St. James excels at telling parallel stories as we learn about Beth’s from Beth as Shea listens intently.



Wednesday, September 07, 2022

August 2022 Reading Round Up

August was an interesting month, in terms of what I read. A couple of big fat fantasies, a couple of darker novels, and I started a new space opera / military science fiction audio book series. I’ll only really mention the two big fat fantasies I read in August since the other two books are review books for SFFWorld.

August started in a big way with Into the Narrowdark the penultimate volume in Tad Williams Last King of Osten Ard series. This series is sequel to his landmark Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy. I reviewed The Empire of Grass (The Last King of Osten Ard #2) and The Witchwood Crown (The Last King of Osten Ard #1) as well as A Brief Retrospective of Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow and Thorn over at SFFWorld, so I’m a big fan of everything Tad Williams has written and it may be easy to surmise that Into the Narrowdark was quite high on my anticipated reads list for 2022. 




As it turns out, this is just the first half of what is the final volume of The Last King of Osten Ard. Tad has a tendency of publishing four-book trilogies. 

The premise of the series is that about three decades have passed since the end of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn with Simon and Miriamele ruling. Their son has passed away and their heir, Morgan, has not turned out to be the prince they’d hoped. In this novel, Tad deftly balances multiple points of view as the world is on the precipice of another momentous change. He does a fantastic job of balancing the weigh of each character’s storylines and weaving in plot threads dangling from 30 years ago. As it turns out, there’s been about 30 years since Memory, Sorrow and Thorn concluded and that’s about the same time that has elapsed in Osten Ard. Those older mysterious and revelations to the characters make for some great moments. 

I like what Tad has done with the character of Morgan over the course of these books as the young man matured and is coming into his own. He’s paired up with Nezeru, a harsh sacrifice who acts as his guide through the wilds while he guides her to a life that could be better than what she knew. 

Simon, I have to admit, was a little too wrapped up in his grief, but a switch went off with him in the later part of the novel and Miriamele continues to shine in every scene that features her. The Hayholt, the castle that serves as the home and seat of rule, continues to be a mysterious and often creepy place to navigate, as Simon’s granddaughter finds out. 

The conclusion/finale of this novel…just…damn you Tad! It was so well executed and is as much of a cliff-hanger ending as you’d want but also hate to read. I can’t wait for The Navigator’s Children

My only real slight on the book – and this is no fault of Tad Williams – is that DAW books decided to drastically change the look/cover art of the book. The legendary, iconic Michael Whelan painted all the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn covers and the two earlier volumes in this series (as well as many of the covers for Tad’s novels). That is not the case with this book. The cover is fine and eye-catching, but a small bit of magic is missing from the overall physical element of the book. A big, fat, Tad Williams tome just doesn’t seem right without a Michael Whelan cover. 

The other big Epic Fantasy novel I read in August was Lamentation, the first installment of Ken Scholes’s Psalms of Isaak five-book saga. This book was published a little over a dozen years ago (2009) and was Ken’s debut novel. 




Set in a world that has survived a few apocalyptic events, magic and science coexist, though not always quite comfortably. The inciting incident – the city of Windwir being destroyed, particularly its legendary library – was because a robot cast a spell. From there, the novel winds through a wonderful path of alliances, manipulation, romance, politics, and redemption. Religion is quite powerful in the novel as the philosophy of the long dead P’Andro Whym drives the Androfrancines who are led by a Pope, but that is where the large similarities end. 

The main players are Rudolfo, the heroic Lord of Ninefold Forest; the duplicitous Sethbert Overseer of the Entrolusian City States; Jin Li Tam, the prominent daughter of the house of Tam, whose father does a lot of plotting; Neb, the seemingly lone survivor of Windwir; and the old man Petronus who takes Neb under his wing. Scholes does a great job of jumping between these characters to keep the pace of the plot moving very briskly. 

The novel is more concerned with how these players react to the destruction of Windwir than anything else, so there isn’t too much world-building on display but the hints (robots and magic coexisting, essentially) are quite intriguing. There are also hints of a deep history to the world, so I'm hoping subsequent volumes will reveal more.

The series was completed a few years ago (in 2017 with Hymn) and I’ve got books 2, 4, and 5 on Mount ToBeRead waiting. I’m quite excited to see where this series goes over the course of those next four novels.

On the audio front, I started Glynn Stewart's The Terran Privateer, the first book in his Duchy of Terra Space Opera/Military SF saga. More on that next month once I finish it since I was only about half-way through when September began.

Thursday, August 04, 2022

July 2022 Reading Round Up

July was another great month for reading, I read a couple of authors for the first time as did many people recently, they were debut novels. Three of the books I read in July were review books for SFFWorld (one of which will post in August so I'll note that next month), but the review of a book I read in June was posted in July. The short of that sentence - I posted 3 reviews to SFFWorld in July: 




Kagen the Damned by Jonathan Maberry: Horror and Epic Fantasy tend to intermingle, just read some of the passages of Tad Williams’s The Dragonbone Chair and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re reading a horror novel. More recently; however, some big chonker Epic Fantasy novels don’t just have horror passages, or dashes of horror, they can be considered Epic Horror novels outright – Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire and Christopher Buehlman’s Blacktongue Thief immediately come to mind. Of course, this novel could be considered Grimdark – and it will definitely appeal to Grimdark readers – but the horror DNA of Kagen the Damned is pretty potent. 





A Mirror Mended by Alix Harrow: Powerful prose, modern sensibilities, and a great sense of fun make A Mirror Mended a great follow-up to A Spindle Splintered. There are many other fables/fairy tales Harrow can explore with her fine-tuned pen and sensibilities, I for one would welcome more stories in this vein with these characters. 




Black Tide by K.C. Jones: I also like how Jones injects humorous passages into the otherwise dark and horrific tale. The best horror novels, and movies, have a laugh here or there to balance out the tension and the same can be said for Black Tide. That humor and balanced approach…i.e. not every chapter/passage being a conflict with an alien monster…helps to keep the pages and story moving at a great pace. 




In books I read that weren't reviewed at SFFWorld, I continued with Marshall Ryan Maresca’s Maradaine super series with Lady Henterman’s Wardrobe, the second in the Streets of Maradaine sub-sequence. This trilogy within the big series has a heist-like/caper feel and focuses on The Holver Alley Crew. The crew is still trying to get some kind of revenge or recompense for their homes and base of operations being burnt down. The street-wise group needs to infiltrate a high-society party to learn who was pulling the strings lead to a surprise. I’ll admit, a book with a title about a woman’s closet may be peculiar, but the book was lots of fun and was a great “episode” of the overall Maradaine saga. 



Paul Tremblay is one of the more impressive horror writers to emerge into the genre the last decade or so. A Head Full of Ghosts is one of the most perfect horror novels I ever read. Slowly, I’ve made my way through his books and this past month, landed on Survivor Song which is set during a pandemic as a new, deadly strain of rabies emerges. Although published in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tremblay wrote it before. Timing can be interesting. Anyway, this was a pretty gripping novel focusing on the plight of Natalie, a pregnant woman who was bitten and asked her friend, a Doctor, to help her. The novel follows their journey across a small region of Massachusetts over the course of a few hour. An intense, emotional and unsettling novel. 




As the month came to a close, I cracked open Into the Narrowdark the third book in Tad Willams’s latest 4-book trilogy, The Last King of Osten Ard. Hard to say too much at this point, but I eased right back into the world and these characters. Small print at 500+ pages means I’ll be occupied with this book for a while. That is NOT a complaint. 




For my audiobook readings, all of July was consumed by Lord of Chaos, the sixth installment of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. I’m enjoying it as a very comforting return to friends and familiarity, but I’m beginning to see hints of the dreaded “Slog.” Some fantastic character moments in the novel, more perspective from the Forsaken and dark side. 

Only one book didn’t work for me in July, Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden. I found the pacing to be rather slow. I didn’t’ connect with the characters and was simply not feeling the book.



Thursday, July 07, 2022

June 2022 Reading Round Up

Another month, another batch of books read and shelved. Let’s start with the lone book I reviewed for SFFWorld, In the Shadow of Lightning by Brian McClellan 

 

In the Shadow of Lightning is an enormously entertaining, inventive, and smart novel. As a series starter, it does everything perfectly…lays the ground for the world and the people, invites speculation about where the plot can go, provides some closure, but leaves the door open for the inevitable second novel. I was a fan of Brian’s Powder Mage Trilogy and this book reminded my why I like his writing and storytelling so much…it is FUN! I could feel how much Brian enjoyed crafting this magic system and have his characters play in it, the feeling was infectious. That’s something he has always infused his work with and reminds me I need to catch up with the sequel trilogy to Powder Mage Trilogy. 


I’ve slowly been making my way through Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black series and I tore through the fourth book, Thunderbird early in the month in about a day or two. With each book I read from Chuck Wendig, he climbs my top 10 list of favorite writers. This series is a horror/mystery/noirish hybrid that focuses on title character Miriam Black who can tell you when you die. In this fourth novel, Miriam is even more broken. This installment finds Miriam hoping to get rid of her ability to see people’s deaths, which she considers a curse. Of course, it isn’t that easy for Miriam because she gets caught up with drug dealers in the Southwest and bad things happen. I’ve got two more books in the series and I’m vacillating between consuming them quickly because they are so damned good and stretching out that consumption because well, then they won’t be new to me any longer. DAMN YOU WENDIG!



After bouncing off of Ava Reid’s newest novel, Juniper & Thorn, I dove into S.P. Miskowski’s The Worst is Yet to Come. This one is a few years old (2019), but I’ve been seeing it mentioned with some frequency in some of the horror social media circles I’ve been following. None of that prepared me for what was in store in this dark, sort-of-coming-of-age story. Tasha is a 14 year-old girl who befriends Briar, a new girl in town, much to the chagrin of her mother. Miskowski brilliantly tells this story from multiple points of view and each layer of dread that unfolds reveals a new layer of dread. Miskowski has more stories set in this town of Skillute and I think I need to get my hands on them. Also, that cover is just hauntingly gorgeous.



After a couple of dark tales, I jumped into a book I’ve had sitting on Mount Toberead since late 2017 – Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft, the first novel in his Books of Babel. This book was a self-published sensation when Orbit republished it and the second book, Arm of the Sphinx, in 2018. What makes this novel so enchanting is how it is everything an Epic Fantasy novel should be, but has similarities to so very few Epic Fantasy novels I’ve read. The closest two novels that come to mind for me are Alastair Reynolds’s Terminal World and Gregory Frost’s Shadowbridge. Those comparisons really don’t do justice to the magic of what Josiah Bancroft has done with this novel and world. Bancroft sets his story in a world that has many similarities to our own, but is clearly just echoing that familiarity, the story has a fable-like feel too it, as well.

Title character Thomas Senlin takes his wife Marya to the Tower of Babel for their honeymoon. The tower is an enormous, continuously growing structure with each vast level, or "ringdom," essentially a world unto itself.  Thomas and Marya are separated almost immediately and he spends the bulk of the novel searching for her. Bancroft’s prose is elegant, it lulls you in like a comforting blanket, but the stories it reveals over the course of Senlin’s journeys through four of the forty "ringdoms" are harrowing, enchanting, and often dark. The fourth and final novel published November 2021, so I may have to binge the three remaining books I’ve yet to read.

 


If there’s one author I’ve “discovered” in the sense that I hadn’t read them before the last year or so who has jumped up my must buy list it is Jonathan Janz. The third book I’ve read by him over the last year, The Raven is a post-apocalyptic/horror/adventure hybrid. Prior to the events depicted in the novel, in order to avert what was thought to be a guaranteed nuclear holocaust a group of rogue scientists played with human genes that triggered monsters of legend, like werewolves, zombies, cannibals, and vampires, to reemerge from our “junk DNA” in the world. They were always real in the world of The Raven, but mankind all but erased them from memory. The titular character, The Raven, is Dez, a man trying to survive in this broken world and find the woman he loves. Dez is guilt-ridden for the lives he couldn’t save, which drives him to find and hopefully save her. This one is a blast and Janz is releasing a second book (hopefully of many) later in the year.

Audio Books



I mentioned last month I was in the home stretch for Lindsay Buroker’s fantastic Star Kingdom saga and I finished the last book in the series, Layers of Force about halfway through the month. I can’t recommend this series highly enough, fun, light-hearted, and optimistic with some interesting SF tropes on display. The narration by Fred Berman is awesome.  After that, I tried a new series from a trusted author: Seanan McGuire’s Discount Armaeddon, the first novel in her InCryptid series. If the first book in the series is any indication, I’m going to enjoy these books. They focus Verity Price a ballroom dancer and part of a family of Cryptozoologists, who were once monster hunters. Verity's family realized a couple of hundred years ago that hunting and killing innocent monsters might not be such a good thing. There are some similarities with Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International series, but those are mostly superficial. McGuire’s series, at least based on this first book, is far less militaristic and a little more upbeat and flavored with more romance. Enormously fun in every way.



I went back to The Wheel of Time with book six, Lord of Chaos. I’ve only just begun, but I think this is one where the bloat starts to creep into the series. I’m enjoying it on what is either my third or fourth re-read. The audiobook is 40 hours so I may not finish it in July!



Friday, June 03, 2022

May 2022 Reading Round Up

This is getting to be a regular thing, it seems – I read some books, I post about them. Sure, I’ve been doing that at SFFWorld for years, but with far less frequency here.



I’ll briefly mention the reviews I posted to SFFWorld during the month of May before doing an overview of the goodies I read not for review for SFFWorld, i.e. books I bought or were gifted, but not sent for review from the publisher. Over the last month at SFFWorld, you’ll find my review of The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas, which I posted last week. This was a haunting, excellent horror debut novel. Last month, I hinted at a book I read in April whose review would be going live May 3, that was Holly Black’s Book of Night. A review of a book I read back in March went live in May, too. An outstanding Horror Anthology edited by John F.D. Taff, Dark Stars: New Tales of Darkest Terror. There’s one book officially publishing in June which I’ll post to SFFWorld on the book’s publication date. I started it late last week, but will hopefully finish it in the next week or so. Here’s the rundown of what I read outside of the review books I received for SFFWorld. 




May started out strong with the audiobook of Take Your Turn, Teddy, by Hayley Newlin. This is a book I’ve seen good things about on the various horror blogs and instagrammers I follow. This book starts out as a sad tale of a young boy named Teddy whose father is extremely abusive to his mother and becomes a horror novel mixed with a serial killer police procedural. Some creepy scenes, nice character development with the cast of characters, and nods to the Stephen King. It works extremely well and the narration by Thomas Gloom helped to enhance the story. Haley also reviews for Cemetery Dance magazine online. 




Clown in a Cornfield is a book whose title alone would strike a chord of creepiness in most reader’s imagination. Adam Cesare tells the story of a middle American town, but it can be seen as a microcosm of some of the issues in everyday America. Our main character, Quinn Maybrook, moves to Kettle Springs, a town whose divide between the adults and teens traces back to the recent shutting down of the syrup factory, which was a great source of the town’s economy and livelihood. Added to the chaos is “Frendo the Clown,” the mascot of the syrup factory, who begins killing people. Quinn is caught up in the mess as a new kid torn between the popular crew and the not so popular crew. 

Cesare did a fantastic job of immersing me in the story, building empathy for his characters, and keeping the tension and scares a very appreciable level. I read the book in only a couple of days because it was both relatively short and very difficult to set aside. As this post goes live, the sequel, Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives is on the horizon. 




A break in the horror with Sarah Chorn’s second novel in her Songs of Sefate series, Glass Rhapsody. I was a big fan of the first book (Of Honey and Wildfires reviewed @SFFWorld) and was eager to see where she took this fantastical frontier world. Her prose remains top notch and beautiful. Building on the momentous events at the conclusion of the first book, Sarah manages to maintain the same emotional pull that drove Of Honey and Wildfires while also examining new ways for her characters to deal with grief and tribulation. Sarah self-publishes her novels, but her storytelling ability is stronger than many traditionally published writers whose work I’ve sampled.



Back to Horror with The Troop by Nick Cutter. This book, as well as Cutter’s other books, seem to make every recommendation list I see for “recent horror” novels. After finally diving into the book, I now understand why. A scout troop goes to a local uninhabited island, Falstaff Island, to experience the wilderness as part of their annual trip. This island is essentially cut off from civilization, which is the point of the trip, especially in a world that is uber-connected. The boys and Scoutmaster arrive and are shortly joined by an unexpected visitor. That unexpected visitor brings some unexpected visitors of his own. The hype is pretty genuine with this book, it is horrific and creepy, at turns reminding me of the films Alien and The Thing, and of course the easy novel comparison, The Lord of the Flies. Some gruesome scenes, but not really gory for gore’s sake. Any of the squelchy scenes serve the story as a whole and a couple of characters are equally monstrous. Cutter openly admits the use of “real” updates like blogs, court records, and psychological transcripts interspersed in the text was inspired by Stephen King’s Carrie. It is an extremely effective method for building tension in the story. I’m looking forward to reading more of Nick Cutter’s novels in the future.




I took a break from my audiobook re-read of The Wheel of Time to finish out Lindsay Buroker’s Star Kingdom space opera series over the past month with book 7 Home Front and I started, book 8 Layers of Force at the end of the month, and will finish early June. This is a fun, character driven space epic set thousands of years in the future and unlikely hero Casmir Dabrowski who finds himself at the center of events of galactic conflict. The series features genetically modified humans, robots with AI, royalty, romance, space pirates, ancient technology and is enormously fun. In many ways, protagonist Casmir Dabrowski and his hopeful outlook in the face of tyranny reminds me of Julius from Rachel Aaron’s equally fun Fantasy/Apocalypse hybrid, Hearstrikers. I reviewed the first two books of that series for SFFWorld: Nice Dragons Finish Last and One Good Dragon Deserves Another.

On to another month of books!




Sunday, May 01, 2022

April 2022 Reading Round Up

Books, I read books. I read lots of books. 



I read a few books in April, one of which is a May release. I’ll be posting my review to SFFWorld on May 3, the day of publication. I also posted a couple of book reviews in April, books I read in March: The Hunger of the Gods by John Gwynne, the spectacular second entry in his Norse-inspired Bloodsworn saga. Bottom line: this is shaping up to be a stellar fantasy saga. The other book review was T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone a modern take on the tried and true fairy tale about the princess who wants to marry the prince. In the case of this delightful novel, a princess wants to kill the prince. I highly recommend this one, too. 



On the audiobook front, the entire month was consumed joyfully with book four of The Wheel of Time, The Fires of Heaven wonderfully narrated by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. I continued with my descent into the Horror genre with two gems from small presses. 



John F.D. Taff’s The Fearing, which was originally published in serialized format as short novels/novellas, much like Stephen King’s The Green Mile. Grey Matter Press released a “Definitive Edition”/omnibus slightly re-worked by Taff to be more of a novel. Boy-howdy did I enjoy this book. In it, all the fears of the world have been unleashed and it is up to a handful of characters to figure out how to navigate this world in the midst of transforming. Seemingly at the head of this release of fears is a man named Adam. Taff follows Adam’s journey across America and his affect on the people he encounters along with a few groups of characters who manage to survive the catastrophies and monsters unleashed in the world. 

Have I said I loved this book? Well, Robert R. McCammon’s Swan Song, Stephen King’s The Stand, and Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers now have another book joining them on my proverbial top shelf of Epic, Apocalyptic Horror. Love the cover on this one, too. 




Gwendolyn Kiste’s  The Rust Maidens received the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel and it has been appearing on several lists when I'm looking for a good creepy read. 

Set in 1980, Kiste paints a very bleak picture of a Cleveland manufacturing town in the process of dying. The factory which employs the majority of men in town may be closing or cutting back. Phoebe is our protagonist who is returning to town when her mother is about to move from the family home and the area is even more rundown in 2008 than it was in the 1980. Phoebe is powerfully devoted to her friends, even when they exhibit strange maladies like leaking water, glass fingernails, and showing metal bones. Kiste does a fantastic job with character and place in this novel. I could have used a little bit more of an explanation of why these girls were transformed, but sometimes in life, things happen without explanation. I’ll be reading more from Gwendolyn Kiste in the future. 

Unfortunately, one book did not work for me and it is from an author whose work I typically adore. Seanan McGuire’s Season Fears is the “companion” novel to her masterpiece, Middlegame. I found the book to be an overwrought world-building exercise, with one of the main characters taking far too long to actually believe what was happening. The plot momentum was extremely sluggish and everything was bogged down with dense, complicated, and confusing world building.

...and that's a wrap for my April Readings