Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: October 2019


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WWWednesday: October 16, 2019

Nobel Prize for Literature:

The Nobel Prize for Literature Committee awarded two prizes, one for 2018 and one for 2019. Olga Tokarszuk and Peter Handke are the awardees for 2018 and 2019 respectively. Here is more information from the BBC.

Olga Tokarczuk’s work sounds like something I would like to read; it has elements of magical realism and the fantastical. Her most recent novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, was published in 2009. She has won many honors throughout Europe including the Man Booker Prize.


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Last Ones Left Alive: Bleak and painful

Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff

Orpen is a young woman who lives with her mother and Maeve, her mother’s partner, on an island off the coast of Ireland. As she is growing up, as far as Orpen knows, they are the only humans left alive. Orpen wants to go to the mainland to see if she can find any other people, and to search for the legendary female paramilitary force that is rumored to be fighting the skrake, vicious zombie-like creatures that hunt and kill humans. Her mother and Maeve warn her against this,


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The Twilight People: Kalahati Tao, Kalahati Hayop

The Twilight People directed by Eddie Romero

The 1959 film Terror Is a Man was the very first horror picture to be made in the country of the Philippines. A very well done but uncredited reiteration of H. G. Wells‘ classic 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, the film was gorgeously shot in B&W, featured stylish direction by Geraldo de Leon and (again, an uncredited) Eddie Romero, as well as an intelligent script that was punctuated by interesting speculations on the nature of man and beast.


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The Queen’s Gambit: Short, fast, fun, and sexy

The Queen’s Gambit by Jessie Mihalik

I’m surprised by how much I enjoyed The Queen’s Gambit (2017), the first novella in Jessie Mihalik’s ROGUE QUEEN series. It’s about Samara, the queen of a nation that stayed independent in a war between two powerful galactic empires. But, without allies to trade with, the people of Queen Samara’s Rogue Coalition are practically starving.

To earn some money for her country, Samara decides to attempt to rescue emperor Valentin Kos from the Quint mercenaries who are holding him captive,


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La Nuit de la Morte (Night of Death): French toast

La Nuit de la Morte (Night of Death) directed by Raphael Delpard

OK, I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and make the assumption that any person who might be interested in reading a review of the 1980 French film La Nuit de la Morte! (Night of Death!) is already aware that it is very much a horror picture (as if that morbid title, capped with its exclamation mark, could possibly leave any doubt). And that’s important, because any discussion of this seldom-mentioned rarity is almost impossible without divulging at least one key plot twist,


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Buried Heart: Forced to pick a side

Buried Heart by Kate Elliott

In Night Flower, Kiya and Esladas met and fell in love, beginning a journey that would, eventually, shake the city of Saryenia to its very foundation. In Court of Fives, their daughter Jessamy got her heart’s desire, the chance to train as a Court of Fives runner, at the cost of her family’s safety. In Poisoned Blade, Jes did everything she could to reunite her loved ones while rooting out royal corruption,


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Handful of Stars: A Palmistry Guidebook and Hand-Printing Kit

Handful of Stars: A Palmistry Guidebook and Hand-Printing Kit by Helene Saucedo

October is here, Halloween parties are incipient, and that means group activities will be in order — spooky card games, spine-chilling board games, and, yes, palmistry kits. Helene Saucedo’s Handful of Stars: A Palmistry Guidebook and Hand-Printing Kit (2019) declares itself to be “everything you need to read and create a print of the hand,” and I was curious to see how well the kit actually met that challenge.

The guidebook is slim,


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The Night Digger: A stroke of very bad luck

The Night Digger directed by Alastair Reid

Not precisely a horror movie, a murder mystery, a slasher film, OR a domestic tragedy, The Night Digger, a British film that was initially released in May 1971, yet combines elements of all those genres into one truly sui generis experience. A largely forgotten film, The Night Digger (or, as it was originally released in the U.K., The Road Builder … an inferior title, as it turns out) is perhaps best known today — for those who know of it at all,


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Sunday Status Update: October 13, 2019

Jana:  This week I’m reading Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth, book two of THE BOOK OF DUST trilogy (and a far sight more enjoyable than La Belle Sauvage, let me tell you) and am relishing the opportunity to spend more time with Lyra and Pan despite and because of the horrible, growing emotional gulf between them.

Kat: As usual, it’s been a couple weeks since you heard from me. Since then I’ve read a couple of long novels.


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Bid My Soul Farewell: The story gets even darker…

Bid My Soul Farewell by Beth Revis

Bid My Soul Farewell (2019) is the sequel to Beth Revis’ novel Give the Dark My Love. You need to read Give the Dark My Love first. There will be some spoilers for that novel here.

When we left Nedra and Grey in Give the Dark My Love, they had uncovered the treachery in their government and exterminated the culprit.


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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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