Previous SFF Author: C.M. Waggoner
Tim Waggoner teaches composition and creative writing at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. He also writes science fiction, horror, and thrillers and he contributes to the Dragonlance, Eberron, and Nightmare on Elm Street series. Learn more at Tim Waggoner’s website.
At first blush, Tim Waggoner’s Nekropolis seems derivative. A dark city where the sun never shines? Check. A central bar with an enigmatic bartender? Check. Predatory traffic and a strange sentient vehicle? Check. Vampires, ghouls, zombies and demons? Check. An outsider detective? Check again. Surely I’m reading one of Simon R. Green’s NIGHTSIDE books — oh, no, wait. This is something else.
Waggoner may just be the victim of bad timing. In his Afterword,
Marion Deeds´s rating: 2.5 | Tim Waggoner | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Shirley Jackson Awards will be handed out in just less than two weeks, at Readercon in Burlington, Massachusetts. This is the third of three columns about the short fiction nominees, this column covering the novellas; the short stories are discussed here, and the novelettes are discussed here (now updated to include a discussion of Jeffrey Ford’s wonderful novella, “The Last Triangle” from the Ellen Datlow-edited anthology, Supernatural Noir).
Michael Morano’s “Displacement” from Stories from the Plague Years begins with a chilling picture: a serial killer is “showing” a victim’s body to her decapitated head,
“No Kill, No Pay” by Jacob A. Boyd gets the September/October issue of Black Static off to a roaring start. Howard is a member of a high-pressure sales firm of some sort (we never get the details) that is ruled by five partners. This year, Howard has been invited to join the five in a hunt they take in the Yukon each year. They give Howard no details except that the hunt ends after the first kill. Howard believes that if he can prove himself in the hunt, he will be made a partner.
Terry Weyna | Tim Waggoner | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Evil Jester Digest, Volume 2 edited by Peter Giglio
Editor Peter Giglio explains in his introduction to Evil Jester Digest, Volume 2, that there are two ways to assemble an anthology: send out a call for submissions and read through the piles and piles of stories you’ll get as a result; or seek out exactly those authors you’d like to have in your anthology. In Volume I of Evil Jester Digest, Giglio took the first course, but in this volume he asked the writers he wanted to sell him stories.
Terry Weyna´s rating: 3 | Gene O'Neill, Tim Waggoner | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Previous SFF Author: C.M. Waggoner
I might say "formulaic" actually.
Your review made me curious, so I looked this book up. Sure enough: Tor. Tor seems to specialize in these…
It's a tightrope act for sure.
[…] Stuart (2 December 2015). “Roadside Picnic: Russian SF classic with parallels to Vandermeer’s Area X | Fantasy Lit…. fantasyliterature.com. Retrieved 8 […]
yes, I mean, there are certainly lots of good sci-fi/fantasy novellas out there, so they aren't impossible to do, but…