Fangs For The Fantasy

This time, the Gaslight Chronicles moves to the highlands.  A young Lord, Magnus, Baron Findlay, washes up from the sea nearly dead after fighting a kraken.  Dr. Geneva MacKay is dispatched by the order to see to his care.  Though she is not pleased to once again leave her practice behind even briefly after struggling to establish herself as one of the few female physicians in Edinburgh, she assents to her father’s wish. Geneva does what she can for Magnus but fears that it won’t be enough and decides to help fulfill his dying wish  to return home.  Once in Torkholm, much to her surprise, the magic of the island quickly heals Magnus.  Though his health has returned, they must still deal with the fact that krakens continue to leave the deep to attack the tiny island.  Can Magnus and Geneva discover the source of the attacks? How will the two deal with their deepening attraction, when Magnus cannot leave the island?

Kilts & Kraken is an exceedingly quick read coming in at one hundred and eleven pages.  I actually found the mystery itself quite interesting and which that it had been expanded.  In many ways, the mystery of the kraken attacks was too often displaced to center the romance between Magnus and Geneva. We did get some of the legend that has been customary from this series with Magnus clearly being a descendant of the vikings and the name Torkholm being derived from Thor. The people of Torkholm are still very suspicious and there is a strong belief that the Gods are angry about the modernization of the island as the cause of attacks, making Kilts & Kraken and age old story of superstition and old religion versus progress.

In some ways the character of Geneva is progressive.  She becomes one of the first female doctors and is not shy about being sarcastic when there is a suggestion that her gender disqualifies her from being a good doctor. While Magnus is brandishing weapons to fight the kraken, it is Geneva who uses her intelligence to get to the root of the mystery.  Many of the weapon in Kilts and Kraken are employed in some way and are not waiting on a man to make their life complete.  Geneva in fact makes it clear that her practice is her life. 

Sexually, though Geneva has not had intercourse, she does have some experience.  Magnus however views himself as having taken her innocence, because Geneva’s hymen was intact.  This of course privileges intercourse as the only kind of sex that matters and is problematic given that once again, there are not GLBT characters in this series. Geneva even admits to masturbating but is too embarrassed to admit it to Magnus though he has no problem acknowledging that he self pleasures during his time of abstinence.  This casts a veneer of shame and over Geneva’ desires. The following passage was further troubling:

Read More

Kate is back, juggling the life of a soccer mom and now a full time demon hunter – dedicated to ridding the city of infernal monsters and keep it safe for her children. In between doing the shopping, taking her daughter to the mall, getting her 3 year old in child care and ensuring there’s a meal on the table. Add in that her husband is running for office which means she hardly ever sees him as he runs around for campaign donations – and she’s inevitably dragged into important social occasions she’s neither interested in, nor has time for. It’s hectic. It’s even more hectic when the only person who knows about her demon hunting secret is her best friend, Laura.

And the demons are certainly present – forcing her to kill one and leave its body in her daughter’s school, which is always awkward. The demons are plotting something, something that could invoke the worst of the worst demons out there – and something that may easily catch up her daughter in the process. Finding the answers and protecting her family is only complicated by messages from her ex-husband’s past, a secret she never knew, her own daughter’s curiosity – and a new hunter in town. One without the ties she’s used to – but one who knows far too much about her, and her dead husband Eric’s past.

This book is very fluffy – which makes it a fun, light read. Kate’s fumbling around her life is pretty amusing (albeit not always funny) and the contrast between fighting demons, stabbing them in the eye and having to dispose of the body on the one hand and then facing down snarly, unpleasant PTA members on the other is jarring in all the best ways. This book also added some more on to the world building with the imprisoned demons and the plot to release them which adds a level of what’s at stake and the consequences of failure. But in some ways I think the light hearted, fun nature of the book detracts from any sense of epic; it’s not heavy enough or gritty enough for the horror of the consequences to come through.

The only problem I have with the writing is probably unsolvable without damaging he book’s premise. The whole point of this series, the thing that makes it novel and unique, is that Kate is a harassed mother trying to juggle her parenting and family duties with her duties as a demon hunter. To maintain that theme, we have to see Kate through all her juggling of kids, child care, PTA dramas, volunteering etc etc and it’s not very interesting or engaging. But if you cut it, then you lose the entire theme and purpose of the book itself. But this also makes me look at the series itself and wonder at how it continues for another 5 books because the gimmick is feeling stale round the edges

Read More

Z and his fellow hunters are attending the first every International Hunter Convention in Las Vegas. A unique, happy opportunity to network with fellow hunters, check out the shiniest new toys and hear about hunting techniques from all over the world. And have a brawl that ruins the dining room, but that’s a side point.

That’s before Special Task Force Unicorn, the government organisation that uses the supernatural rather than just destroys it, calls with a job for them. There’s a creature on the loose that needs killing – but the bounty seems unnaturally high for the simple kill they find.

Except they haven’t killed it – they’ve brought it back with them to the convention. A creature released from Decision Week, a time when the US was exploring ways to use the supernatural to end World War 2, and it’s a being every bit as bad as you can imagine. Hunters have lots of experiences to fuel those imaginations.

How do you fight an intangible force that can throw absolutely everything at you and can come back from the dead? And how much can they lose before they stop it? More – how does this link in to the sinister pattern all the Hunters have been seeing, a vast uptick in terrifying supernatural activity around the world – all suggesting something big is coming. Something apocalyptic, if you listen to Z’s father.

A large part of the attraction of these books is the glorious action-movie feel to them. Sometimes you just want to read a book about blowing up the gribbly things with lots of explosions. It’s not exactly the highest or more sophisticated desire, but it still makes them pretty fun reads.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss these books as just being a mix of gun drooling (which I don’t care for) and massively impressive, epic fight scenes. There is a long, sustained meta-plot that has been developed from the very first book. The story keeps growing, the world getting richer and more and more characters are added to the mix, each of which add their own pieces to the overall story. This isn’t just a “see bad thing, blow up bad thing”, every bad thing they blow up adds more to plot and adds new allies and new players.

Even the story of this book itself is as much a mystery as it is a survival horror. The monster isn’t something that can be simply blown away with a sufficiently large gun. Tracking it down, discovering exactly what it is, exactly what it can do and how something like that can be stopped while sparing as many lives as possible is not even slightly simple. It’s also a story full of well written emotional content. Z’s worry about his wife, about the people he cares for are very well written and carry a lot of emotional impact. It adds a level of tension to the story that is exceptional – especially since so many stories rely on creating menace for the protagonist who, in general, we know is going to survive. You can still create fear and tension that way, but it’s hard to do. By creating not just threat for Z, but also for his loved ones – real, fascinating characters the reader is already strongly invested in – then that tension is really well maintained since any of these characters could die.

Read More

Lord Pembroke, Pimm to his friends, is a dissolute, alcoholic younger son of a Marquess. And to be a real embarrassment, he had a hobby as a detective, how scandalous. Despite his familial disapproval, he will keep involving himself in criminal cases where his surprisingly able mind has lead him to great success.

It’s because of that reputation that he has been approached by Mr. Value, a man of poor repute who wishes him to investigate the murder of his prostitutes – and he’s willing to use blackmail to make Pimm accede to his request.

Ellie is a journalist who is determined to be treated as such. Unwilling to go to Paris to report on the latest fashions and instead pursuing stories of greater import – and scandal. Including going undercover into one of the infamous clockwork brothels. But while there she is quickly caught up in a scheme that goes far higher than respectable gentlemen frequenting a house of ill repute.

And she notices that Lord Pembroke, famed detective, is also involving himself with some rather unsavoury characters – perfect for a journalist to investigate.

Together they try to unravel the murders, but the plot goes far higher – to the very top of British society. Along the way they find the animate dead, a machine that makes brain talk, clockwork automata and disturbing revelations about the Constantine Affliction – the new disease stalking London that turns men into women and women into men.

I do love a good steampunk world – which this book certainly has. It manages to convey a true sense of the time and the place – you can feel Victorian London in this book, which is impressive considering how different this London is from actual Victorian London. With walled and domed Whitechapel and the many myriad inventions that so characterise steampunk – clockwork automatons, alchemical lights and all the other anachronistic, fantastic inventions – it’s a very different world. It’s one of those steampunk books that has really hit the language and the attitudes and the behaviour just right to give it an authenticity and a realness.


Read More

When we last left Sandman Slim he had been tricked by Samel into becoming the next Lucifer and his angel half had ditched him in hell.  This book opens with Stark learning how to be Lucifer and to avoid being killed.  The hellions are not impressed to have a human in the top spot and seek to overload him with bureaucracy because hell needs to be rebuilt.  He taken his ancestor wild Bill on as sort of an adviser but longs to be back in LA.

I am pretty sure that this is going to be the last book in this series that I read.  Four books in, and I still don’t enjoy the story and this time, I kept drifting from plain old boredom.  I have zero investment in Stark, who cannot figure out whether trouble comes to him, or he finds trouble everywhere that he goes. His sarcasm, if one can even call it that, is puerile and his behaviour is the equivalent of a bull in a china shop.

He seems to float from one disaster to another in his attempt to save the world.  I really enjoyed the first book in this series but since then, it has been nothing but a series of disappointments.  It is really sad because Kadrey has built what could have been an interesting world.  God is not the God that we understand him to be, nor is he the creator of the universe. 

Honestly, I don’t have much to say about this novel except to say that I a glad I am done.  I very nearly did not finish.  Stark just seemed to meander from place to place with no real point or destination.  The conversations were stilted and that is particularly true of any scene involving Wild Bill.  It felt like Stark entire mission was to walk around and appear as bad ass as possible. If after four books the protagonist has not developed any complexity or nuance it is quite simply never going to happen.

Read More

John Taylor is a private detective. And not a very successful one, given his mounting debts and declining business. He used to be very good – 5 years ago when he was still in the Nightside where his ability, to be able to find anything, actually worked.

But the Nightside is a dangerous place, where literally anything and everything can exist. Wizards and aliens, monsters and demons, ghosts and gods – anything imaginable is in there somewhere; and John is well clear of it.

Except he has a client who is willing tom give him an awful lot of money to find her daughter – in the Nightside. Against his many reservations he finds himself plunging back into this fantastic world, the dark underbelly of London, to face old enemies and old allies, from the sinister to the sublime to the ridiculous. The investigation is dangerous, horrifying, fantastic and macabre, with new revelations even he never imagined, and a threat far greater than he expected. But it does feel like coming home…

This world is one of the strangest, deepest and weirdest I’ve ever come across. Everything you can imagine – absolutely everything – can exist in the Nightside. From aliens and their abductions to gods, to extra-dimensional entities to ghosts to the fae to werecreatures to everything else imagineable. There are timeless pockets where you can drink old style Coca-cola in an eternally 60s café, there are dark and dangerous streets where even the architecture will eat people. There are cars, carriages and other conveyances that will eat people and old hansom cabs pulled by talking horses.

This book has some amazingly fun characters. John Taylor himself is a hard boiled detective with all that means – the good, but very little of the bad. We hear some of his past, enough to make him interesting, menacing and a bit scary, but not enough to destroy his mystery. He is a bit of a Gary Stu in the way everyone is in awe of his power and reputation and his power does have some severely extreme applications. But he also has his considerable limits and there’s a suggestion, at least, that part of his reputation is inflated. It is a powerfest though – but that can be fun. I also appreciate a character with a good grasp of quips and sarcasm.

The writing hits that perfect balance for me when it comes to pacing. Even though it’s quite a short book, the descriptions and exposition are vivid enough to give a strong sense of place – which is especially important when we have a world that relies so much on its alien, fantastic quality. But it isn’t bogged down or distracted, the action keeps coming – never in an overwhelming fashion (the characters themselves actually get overwhelmed and need a break) but event after event, each balancing the description and the exposition and every one of them having some kind of plot. Whether to introduce clearly important characters, to establish a meta plot, move the main plot forwards or provide essential world explanation, every part of this book is necessary. Because of that it doesn’t feel short, it feels concise – just as long as it needs to be.  

Read More

Kitsune Yukiko has lead an extremely difficult life for such a young woman.  Her mother has run off, her brother died and she now has to watch over her drug addicted father Masaru. If that were not bad enough, her father has been sent on a mission by the Shōgun of Shima to do the impossible - hunt an arashitora, which are thought to be extinct.  They manage to do the impossible and catch an arashitora, but unfortunately, their airship crashes leaving Yukiko no idea of whether her father has lived or died and alone with an arashitora who initially has no interest in her.

Using her powers of telepathy, Yukiko develops a bond with the arashtora and eventually names it Buruu after her deceased brother.  The more time they spend together in Japan’s last unchanged forest, the more they take on aspects of each other’s personalities, which becomes crucial in the coming days, when Yukiko is tasked with destroying the Shōgun’s despotic regime.  Can Yukiko save a nation that is so addicted to chi and mechanization that it is killing the environment?

The moment I found out that Stormdancer was Japanese steampunk, I was in all the way.  Steampunk is easily one of my favorites in the fantasy genre, but it is quite often set in Europe.  Having a location in an alternate Japan means that all of the characters were of colour. I do have to say that I am not very familiar with Japanese culture, so any mistakes that Kristoff made certainly flew over my head.

In an interview regarding the research Kristoff engaged in to write Stormdancer he said:

    “I’ve had people ask if I did a degree in Japanese studies, but the closest I’ve come is reading all six volumes of AKIRA in a week. Maybe I’d picked up a lot of detail through film and manga that I’ve consumed down through the years, but Wikipedia was really my go-to-guy. I have a friend who lives in Japan who I bounce ideas off too. I pay him with the promise of booze.”

This greatly troubled me because Wikipedia is a starting place for research; it should never constitute the totality of one’s research.  It’s also worth noting that manga does not completely represent Japanese culture. As I said, not being overly familiar with Japanese culture myself, I am quite sure I missed a lot, especially given the source material, so please keep that in mind when choosing to read Stormdancer.

Kristoff puts a lot of effort into his descriptive world building.  Normally, taking 50 pages for characters to essentially walk down the street would irk me but I do understand why he felt it was necessary.  Those unfamiliar with Japanese culture would need this to get a strong sense of the setting and the culture involved; however, this heavy description continued throughout the whole book, which at times bored me.

Read More

We’ve spoken before about reviewers charging for book reviews - as well as guaranteeing positive reviews - and the many reasons why we consider this to be both unacceptable and damaging to online reviewing.

And I don’t think we can discount just how very important reviewing has become, especially as ebooks become more and more dominant in the market. Increasingly, we’re no longer going into a book shop and buying books, speaking to book clerks about what would be the best choice (assuming we ever did) or being able to physically pick up the book and skim through it to see if it suits us.

There are many things that have tried to replace this - but a synopsis, blurb and even an excerpt are often carefully chosen to show the book in the best possible light - quite possibly a rather inflated light. With the huge and wonderful proliferation of authors out there - with mainstream presses, indie presses, small presses and self-pubs, I don’t think we’ve ever seen this many choices when picking a book to read. So how do we make that choice?

Well, other than the word of mouth of people we trust, a lot of that choice is based on reviewers (which is, in effect, more of the word of mouth from people we trust). I cannot count how many books I’ve started reading now - especially new authors or ebooks - based on an online review from a person I trust. But trust is the key here - and reviewers selling positive reviews undermine that trust not just for themselves, but for all reviewers.

From our point of view, being a Social Justice blog as much as a review blog, we also believe it is vital to review the genre we love to ensure the problematic portrayals and erasures are called out - and the gems we see where they author gets it right are duly praised. Again, we feel this requires trust and it requires honesty - we already have a culture that habitually excuses even the most extreme forms of prejudice and the most awful portrayals - to be dishonest about the problematic or prejudiced portrayals in a book is to contribute to that dismissal.

Read More

Michael has a made a deal with a recording studio to finally get his music out there. It’s exciting, unique – and involves them leaving Morganville. This is also a useful opportunity for Claire and co since it allows them to avoid a deal Claire made that could get them all eaten.

On the road, they quickly raise the chance of finally escaping Morganville for good. But Oliver has been sent as chaperone and what about the loved ones they left behind? More, it’s clear that Even and Michael, residents of Morganville all their lives, have little idea of the outside world and how to behave in it.

Then there’s the problem of the vampire rebels. With the Morganville security network down, the only thing holding the vampires in Morganville is Amelie’s word. And some are not accepting that. Leaving the town, these wild vampires are looking for a new place to take over, one without the rules and restrictions of Amelie. Their travel makes them cross paths disastrously with Claire & Co – and when they reach their destination, they find things are not what they expected.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about this series. I’ve felt that the world that has been built and some of the background characters have been fascinating and have a lot of potential.  Unfortunately the main characters don’t appeal to me and I often find Claire, the protagonist to be an outsider in her own story. In short, I was coming close to giving up on the series, it’s just not for me.

This was my “last chance” book, the last book I’d read before I shelved the Morganville vampires and didn’t open another one.

And I enjoyed it.

By taking the story out of Morganville, we introduced a lot of new contexts and themes. We got to see how the very insular life the Morganville residents had lived. How they were so used to the supernatural dangers of the vampires and how they are used to negotiating the dangers of Morganville, that they were utterly lacking in the social skills necessary to survive in small towns with close minded, dangerous people without vampires lurking around to keep order. It was a really well done twist that added a lot to the world, the characters and the story.

Read More

Every once and awhile despite our best intentions, we come across a book that for various reasons, we simply cannot finish and unfortunately, Pulse false into this category.  I kept waiting for the book to go somewhere, but it seemed irrevocably lost in the inane.  There was absolutely no sense of pacing, or any indication that it would ever verge away from insipid blather into a real plot.

The characters all presumably had to be at least 21, as they were legally drinking in a bar, but they spoke like they were 14.  I could tell that Francisco was going for edgy and slightly counter culture, but the writing fell flat time and time again. It further didn’t help that Francisco introduced us to a plethora of characters, which quickly became hard to follow because there was  little characterization, which made all them all sort of morph into one.  We got tiny details about individual characters but they were nonsensical facts, which told you absolutely nothing about who they really were. Some of the relationships were explained with flashbacks, but the transition was clumsy and poorly written.

The main character, Skylar Roth, is one of the most irritating protagonists that I have come across in a long time. Much of her time seems to be spent either angsting about her ex boyfriend, or her current boyfriend Alekz.  I am going to stop for a second to ask what the point is of taking an ordinary name like Alex and spelling it differently is?  It’s still going to be Alex.  Skylar and Alex of course have their own relationship angst when she discovers him levitating one day.  She then spends the next twenty-four hours obsessing, calling and texting him. She is further insecure about any woman who could possibly find Alexz attractive because other women are the competition. It is absolutely impossible for Skylar to have faith in Alekz’s fidelity and rumbles instead about girls needing to hop off her boyfriends junk.

We did get a mention of a lesbian co-worker, but of course she broke the heart of a straight man over a year ago and he has not gotten over it and she is being stalking online by a girl she dated. Despite the horrendously bad world building and characters, I probably could have made my way through this book if it were not filled with so many damn anti woman messages, with a little fat shaming for seasoning.  Item number one, smelling something terrible in the garbage is not like being raped.  Anticipating getting wet in a storm, is not a justification for invoking rape.

    If I had known I was going to be a victim of eye molestation, I probably would have gone with a few extra layers today.  In hindsight, if I knew I was going to get royally raped by this storm, there is no way I would have even left the house (page 45)

Rape is not something that should ever be casually tossed around the way that it is in Pulse.

Women are slut shamed, referred to as bitches, broads and of course my personal favorite whores.  This is particularly true if said woman dares to show interest in Skylar’s man.  Pulse does not even pass the Bechdel Test because it seems that the women only talk to each other about the men in their lives.  There is never even an acknowledgement that the anti-woman language is harmful.

The inability to decide between mozzarella sticks and buffalo wings and then ordering both is apparently something that fat people do. 

Read More