Archives | Fantasy Literature: Fantasy and Science Fiction Book and Audiobook Reviews

All Those Vanished Engines: All those vanished meanings…

All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park

I’m not a big reader of avant-garde fiction. In fact, I’m SO not a big reader of it that I’m not even sure if I’m applying the term correctly to Paul Park‘s recent novel All Those Vanished Engines. I’m probably not. But the thing is, I’m not sure what term to apply to it: meta-fiction? Experimental fiction? Alternate history with several unreliable narrators who may or may not be Paul Park himself?

All Those Vanished Engines is a novel told in three parts.

June 30th, 2014. Kate Lechler´s rating: 0.1 | Paul Park | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |

Deceiver: A suspenseful work of dark fiction

Deceiver by Kelli Owen

DarkFuse, an independent publisher of horror, suspense and thrillers, has a thriving novella series. For $85 per month, you can subscribe to the limited hardcover editions of the novellas, which are published at the rate of two each month. (The subscription also includes a hardcover novel every month.) Only 100 copies are printed, though the works are also available in electronic form. It’s a delight to see a publisher take an interest in publishing this shorter form, which is often exactly the right length for genre works (and for mainstream fiction,

Skin Game: Exciting and well-crafted

Skin Game by Jim Butcher

Reading a DRESDEN FILES book at this point is literary equivalent of sky-diving. I think I’ve compared the experience to a roller coaster before, but I was in error. Roller coasters, in the main, start off with a slow clickety-clack up a steep slope, and you sort of bob up and down and round and round after that before finally drifting to a long, hissing halt. Skin Game, however, dispenses with the trappings and simply shoves your exuberantly screaming self out an airplane door and directly into glorious freefall.

Moonhead and the Music Machine by Andrew Rae

Moonhead and the Music Machine by Andrew Rae

I’ve recently had the good fortune to discover comics and graphic novels published by Nobrow Press, and if you’ve never heard of Nobrow before, Moonhead and the Music Machine by Andrew Rae is an excellent place to start. It is a stunning graphic novel that is representative of Nobrow‘s highly selective catalog. Nobrow puts out high quality art books, so if you are a fan of sequential art,

June 27th, 2014. Brad Hawley´s rating: 5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Map of Days by Robert Hunter

Map of Days by Robert Hunter

I’ve recently become a fan of Nobrow Press: They put out unique, and often small, runs of graphic novels that stand out as special works of art because of the high level of paper, binding, and printing techniques. Each graphic novel is sized differently to suit best the artwork inside, and the printing technique reminds me of William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts. Each book stands out and looks and even feels unlike any comic book or graphic novel I’ve ever seen.

June 27th, 2014. Brad Hawley´s rating: 5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

Destination X by John Martz

Destination X by John Martz

I’ve recently become a fan of Nobrow Press: They put out unique, and often small, runs of graphic novels that stand out as special works of art because of the high level of paper, binding, and printing techniques. Each graphic novel is sized differently to suit best the artwork inside, and in the case of Destination X, the book is a small, square volume. Each book stands out and looks and even feels unlike any comic book or graphic novel I’ve ever seen.

June 27th, 2014. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4.5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Thoughtful Thursday: The Game of Groans

In the spirit of the Bad Hemingway, Faux Faulkner, and Bulwer-Lytton fiction contests, we would like to inaugurate our own bad fantasy contest. We call it THE GAME OF GROANS. Your task is to write an atrocious paragraph (or just a couple of sentences) of fantasy fiction. Something that really makes us groan!

To get you started, I dug into my files and pulled up an early draft of a novel I worked on in college. (Please be kind. I was young.):

If he had learned one thing toiling in the kitchens,

June 26th, 2014. Bill Capossere | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 8 comments |

Drawn to Marvel: Excelsior!

Drawn to Marvel edited by Bryan D. Dietrich & Marta Ferguson

Comic book superheroes have become the dominant money-making vehicle in Hollywood the past decade or so, and we’re become accustomed to seeing them in spectacular, big-screen set pieces that boggle our eyes. But sometimes it’s nice to shift perspective a bit, not just to give our senses a break from the noise and sound and spectacle, but also to allow for a more intimate relationship, a more thoughtful one, one that evokes other emotions beyond “wow.” And that’s just what is offered by the anthology Drawn to Marvel,

June 26th, 2014. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |

Son of Man: A stoner book

Son of Man by Robert Silverberg

Back in the 1970s, there was a certain type of film that, whether by chance or design, became highly favored by the cannibis-stimulated and lysergically enhanced audience members of the day. These so-called “stoner pictures” — such as Performance, El Topo, Pink Flamingos and Eraserhead — played for years as “midnight movies” and remain hugely popular to this day. Well, just as there is a genre of cinema geared for stoners, it seems to me that there could equally well be a breed of literature with a genuine appeal for those with an “altered consciousness.”

WWWednesday: June 25, 2014

On this day in 1903, Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, was born. Orwell wrote Animal Farm and 1984, introducing the world to the terms “Big Brother,” and “doublethink.”

Writing, Editing, and Publishing:

Strange Chemistry, Angry Robot’s YA imprint, has shut its doors. This is sad, especially so for us because its editor, Amanda Rutter, used to be a FanLit reviewer.

The Atlantic wants readers to read weird fiction. Their Twitter bookclub,

June 25th, 2014. Kate Lechler | World Wide Wednesday | 2 comments |

Month: June 2014

All Those Vanished Engines: All those vanished meanings…

Deceiver: A suspenseful work of dark fiction

Skin Game: Exciting and well-crafted

Moonhead and the Music Machine by Andrew Rae

Map of Days by Robert Hunter

Destination X by John Martz

Thoughtful Thursday: The Game of Groans

Drawn to Marvel: Excelsior!

Son of Man: A stoner book

WWWednesday: June 25, 2014

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