A picture is worth a thousand words unless a poet turns the old platitude on its head and creates an image that is worth a thousand pictures. This poet is one of the few I have read lately who speaks in pictures that drive straight to your emotions. It is a book about childhood, so […]
“The Prodigal Vampire” by M. J. Todd
This novel is a perfect example of a very specific cultural phenomenon: British off-the-wall completely ridiculous humour. It involves a dead vampire who somehow escapes from the netherworld and returns to his old hometown somewhere in England intending to live there. But there is a whole town full of eccentrics whose lives get in his […]
“The Trafficking Murders” by Brian O’Hare
This novel is a rather light approach to a gritty subject. The reason I use the term ‘light’ is that it tells a realistic story of a horrible situation but never goes into the grimy details. The details of the offences are balanced by the interactions of the members of the police squad, and again, […]
“A Tracker’s Tale” by Karen Avizur
This story is fast paced and action oriented, with sympathetic characters in a straightforward good-guys-vs-bad-guys conflict. The plotline is episodic in nature, but the events gradually tie together to lead up to a tense climax. There is a general rule in fantasy of all types not to mix magical styles. Paranormal separate from witches and […]
“Surviving Crazy” by Frank Crimi
The title of “Surviving Crazy” may give a good idea of the main conflict of this novel, but it’s also a good description of the experience of reading the book. When you have baseball teams named the “Raleigh Tar Stains” and the “Arizona Prickly Heat,” that gives a pretty good idea of what you’re in […]
“Lleydrin” by J. B. Moran
Lleydrin is a far-future fantasy world where good people with different objectives and beliefs have been separated through historical events so that they have become increasingly tribal and antagonistic towards each other. The novel explores what happens when these disparate groups are required to cooperate to face a common enemy. Shades of 2020 America. The […]
“America: Dr. Wiley’s Construct – Episode 1” by Jackson Wilder
This is a short book comprising 69 pages, a single episode in a longer serial, an old-style Steampunk story with echoes of modern social and political problems, deftly merged. While the publicity calls this book a novella, it really isn’t. It is the first episode of a series, and as such has a different structure […]
“Twisted Cow Tales” by Debby Schoeningh
This book is not a novel. It’s a compilation of a set of newspaper articles. As such, it’s meant to be enjoyed in small batches, not read through at one go. As we expect with this sort of book, its success is mostly because of the author’s low-key sense of humour and imaginative wit. She […]
“Danger in the Rain” by Douglas Boatman
I enjoyed this novel. It’s a standard private detective serial with deeper touches of setting and character that really bring the reader into the story. However, it was a little too much of a good thing. A story like this one, full of action and description with a complicated plotline, can go in two directions. […]
“The Night and the Land” by Matt Spencer
This is a standard Paranormal plotline with an otherworldly Romeo and Juliet situation to sweeten the plot. Rob is a teenager who begins to realize that there is something other than the everyday world going on. Also that he’s one of the people participating. Then he meets Sally, who seems to know more of the […]