Dracula by Bram Stoker It’s Gothic, intricate, romantic, tragic, fun and surprising. I haven’t read Bram Stoker‘s original Dracula in about 20 years and most of the details I’d either forgotten or had been smudged, smeared, and overwritten by a lifetime of modern vampire stories and myths. Dracula is set in the late 19th century […]
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Fragment by Warren Fahy I’ve read a number of reviews and comments that compare Warren Fahy‘s Fragment (2009) with Michael Crichton and Jurassic Park. Fragment and Jurassic Park have similar themes and bare bones basic concepts. Both stories involve humans battling supernatural, prehistoric monsters and self-centered murderous villains on the remotest of islands. Let’s be clear: […]
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3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke The elements that make 2001: A Space Odyssey a classic — the pacing, dramatic tension, smartly efficient plot lines — are mostly missing from Arthur C. Clarke‘s Space Odyssey finale, 3001: The Final Odyssey. What it retains is Clarke’s obvious exuberance for biological, technological and cultural evolution. […]
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2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke This is not a great book. It’s really more of an extended novella or perhaps part one of Arthur C. Clarke‘s SPACE ODYSSEY finale, 3001. This story has none of the depth, nuance or scale of Clarke’s classic original, 2001 nor its solid follow up 2010. Beware of spoilers […]
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The Night Eternal by Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan The Night Eternal is the finale to Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan‘s THE STRAIN trilogy and I found it simply… inconsistent. I enjoyed the conclusion to the mythology which includes the genesis of the strain itself, but I was disappointed in the conclusions to the […]
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The Fall by Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan Authors Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan move the world of their apocalyptic vampire saga to a darker place in the second of their STRAIN trilogy, The Fall. This second volume is short, at less than 300 pages, and makes for a satisfying companion when read back-to-back […]
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The Strain by Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan Abraham Setrakian had witnessed and survived horrible evil when he was a young man. He’d made it out of a Nazi death camp in Poland, but the horror brought about by the Germans was not what kept the professor awake at night. It was the Stroigoi — […]
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The King Must Die by Mary Renault “The voices sank and rose, sank and rose higher. It was like the north wind when it blows screaming through mountain gorges; like the keening of a thousand widows in a burning town; like the cry of she-wolves to the moon. And under it, over it, through our […]
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The Loch by Steve Alten Steve Alten’s The Loch is full of clichés — the dialogue, the narration, and the plethora of borrowed plot lines from Jaws. You know the good characters from the bad. You can predict which ones will die violently (and deservedly so), and you know which bad guys will turn out […]
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The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone I defy you to read Ezekiel Boone’s The Hatching and not feel that persistent but subtle pull against your leg hairs, or periodically feel for that brushing sensation against the back of your neck. The Hatching is the first novel in a series about spiders killing everyone and taking over […]
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Here are a few shorter SFF works that we read this week that we wanted you to know about. Some great finds this week! Blood Grains Speak Through Memories by Jason Sanford (March 2016, free at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, free ebook available on the author’s website) Frere-Jones Roeder is the anchor of her land, charged with its […]
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Black Rain by Graham Brown Black Rain is terrific summer reading fodder that fits squarely in the realm of the lighter-weight Dan Brown-esque genre of tech-thrillers. Other leaders of this genre include James Rollins and Jeremy Robinson, whose stories are a bit formulaic and their characterizations often thinly built. Graham Brown, however, brings new energy. […]
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The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin The lengthy journey from Justin Cronin’s vampire apocalypse The Passage comes to a full conclusion (and maybe a bit more) in the third and final book, The City of Mirrors. If The Passage was absolutely great (and it really, really was), and the sequel The Twelve was good […]
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Desperation by Stephen King My only disappointment in Stephen King’s Desperation is that it isn’t longer. This book contains all that makes King so enjoyable to read: strong and believable character development; intuitive and subtle understanding of the childhood psyche; horror as defined by what’s creepy, intense, psychological and sometimes gothic; mythological back-story that superbly […]
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The Twelve by Justin Cronin Justin Cronin’s 2010 apocalyptic-vampire thriller, The Passage, debuted in the midst of the mass consumer love affair with the weird and supernatural. In the evolution of the vampire in pop culture, Anne Rice turned Bram Stoker’s blood-sucking villain into a romantic lead. Stephenie Meyer morphed Lestat into a high school […]
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Ada Palmer is true Renaissance woman: she’s a professor by trade, specializing in history and the history of ideas at the University of Chicago, a Manga Scholar, composer, and has published the nonfiction work Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. Palmer’s fiction debut, Too Like the Lightning, is a complex and broad-reaching work of sci fi, […]
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The Fireman by Joe Hill First of all, Joe Hill‘s The Fireman is no horror story. It’s apocalypse-lit through and through but without the hackneyed zombies and vampires. Second of all, The Fireman is thoroughly infected with the ‘King’ family genetics. If there were any doubt about a connection between Joe and his old man, […]
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The Stand by Stephen King Stephen King‘s The Stand is an awesomely epic creation. It’s good versus evil writ large across the American landscape. It’s heavy, detailed, and extremely rich in the characterizations of its people and themes. The story is familiar — an apocalyptic virus is accidentally (and inevitably) released from a government lab. […]
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Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer Ada Palmer’s debut novel, Too Like the Lightning, is an absorbing, exhausting, and complicated work of science fiction literature. This is not the kind of book you can read in bits and pieces and quickly pick up the plot threads after watching a couple of nights of TV. […]
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It by Stephen King Stephen King‘s It is a wonderfully sweeping tale of what it means to be a child and what it means to leave your childhood behind, inevitably and mostly forgotten, when transforming into an adult. This very evocative tale of childhood orbits and surrounds a tale of exquisite horror, and is my […]
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Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel Sylvain Neuvel’s Sleeping Giants honorably borrows from notable films — Pacific Rim, The Iron Giant, and the Indiana Jones series — in this creative take on first contact in a contemporary world of shadowy government operatives, high tech archaeology, and mystery-shrouded alien technology. Rose Franklin was the little girl who […]
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Eifelheim by Michael Flynn Eifelheim is one of those transcendent science fiction stories where an author is able to treat very human and Earth-bound issues with a well-reasoned and fascinating gloss of aliens and science. Author Michael Flynn‘s alien mythos and capabilities are believable and seamlessly integrated into the very real history of plague-era Germany. […]
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The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty Sometimes I wish there weren’t so many amazing books to read. Because every once in a while I come across a book so intricate, so subtle, and so intense, that without a second, slower, read, I know there is zero chance that I capture a true understanding the book […]
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Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard Detectives Dan Carter and Charlie Hammond have finally tracked down and cornered the perverse serial killer known as The Child-Catcher. Found in his own home, the detectives move in, focused on a speedy capture, before the Child-Catcher performs his bizarre version of open-brain surgery. Charlie takes the lead, […]
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Golden Reflections (Mask of the Sun & stories) edited by Joan Spicci Saberhagen & Robert E. Vardeman Golden Reflections is an anthology of stories based on Fred Saberhagen’s Mask of the Sun, the premise of which is the existence of certain goggles that allow the wearer to see events in the future. But it only […]
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