Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Terry Weyna

Tad Williams talks about world-building

I’m reading two of Tad Williams books right now, and enjoying both very much. The first is The War of the Flowers, a one-volume epic fantasy with marvelous imagery and an appealing protagonist, just the sort of thing we’ve come to know and love from this author. The other is The Dirty Streets of Heaven, the first in Williams’s urban fantasy series starring Bobby Dollar, an angel who gets caught up in a battle between good and evil without knowing what the heck is going on. It reminds me of Dashiell Hammett,

September 12th, 2013. Terry Weyna | Tad Williams | Thoughtful Thursday | 15 comments |

Magazine Monday: Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issues 128 and 129

Issue 129 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies opens with a tale by Alec Austin and Marissa Lingen entitled “On the Weaponization of Flora and Fauna.” Told in a faux-19th-century style, this piece is about characters who live in a foreign and wild colonial land to which their king has recently been exiled. New fauna and flora are being discovered daily, and exploration and discovery are the pastimes of the nobility, who have as their servants the native peoples of the land they now occupy. The only somewhat original aspect to this tale is that a woman is the protagonist,

Evil Jester Digest, Volume 2: A horror anthology

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.

Magazine Monday: Nightmare Magazine, August 2013

Matthew Cheney’s “How Far to Englishman’s Bay” leads off the eleventh issue of Nightmare Magazine. Max, the protagonist, impulsively decides to close up his bookshop and permanently leave his home on the day he turns 50. Max drives miles away from his home, finally deciding he’s lost and stopping to ask directions. It’s here that his story has its denouement in an odd bit of horror that seems unrelated to what went before, all the detail about his leaving, its effect on a friend, giving away his cat, gathering snacks — a full half of the tale.

Joyland: One of King’s finer efforts

Joyland by Stephen King

Devin Jones is nearing the end of his sophomore year of college when he signs on for a summer job at Joyland in Heaven’s Bay, North Carolina in 1973. Joyland is an old-fashioned amusement park, not anything near as big as a Six Flags and definitely not anything like a Disney park. It’s staffed by a changing cast of college kids every summer, but has a backbone of old carnie folk, including Lane Hardy, who runs the Carolina Spin, that is, the ferris wheel, and Rosalind Gold, who acts the part of Madame Fortuna and thinks she might have the gift of the sight in real life.

Failure: Erotic horror

Failure by John Everson

It’s been decades since horror was really hot, with whole sections of bookstores devoted to novels with black and red covers. But the genre never really died, and not just because of Stephen King’s ongoing popularity. Horror went underground, in a sense; small presses picked up where the standard publishers left off, and a great deal of fiction was published in extremely small press runs, often in gorgeous editions with full illustrations. Novellas and novelettes were (and are) published as chapbooks, demanding the same price that complete novels do in other genres.

Graveyard Child: Extraordinary depth of character

Graveyard Child by M.L.N. Hanover

Warning: this review contains spoilers for the first four books in the series THE BLACK SUN’S DAUGHTER.

M.L.N. Hanover’s urban fantasy series, THE BLACK SUN’S DAUGHTER, gets better with every book. Graveyard Child has extraordinary depth of character and a plot that takes the series into ever more complicated waters. The voice of Hanover’s viewpoint character, Jayné Heller, is happy, angry, sad, confused, disappointed, frightened, determined and resigned in turn, but always clearly Jayné.

July 29th, 2013. Terry Weyna´s rating: 4.5 | M.L.N. Hanover | SFF Reviews | no comments |

How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea: An exciting adventure

How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea by Mira Grant

I’m a traditionalist when it comes to books; I prefer paper and ink to Kindles. But even I have been forced to admit that there are distinct advantages to using a machine for reading. Amazon has been promoting inexpensive novellas exclusively for the Kindle for a few years now — a story length I’ve always thought ideal and criminally underutilized. These nice long stories make good reading while one is awaiting the next novel in a favorite author’s series. Because the setting and characters are familiar,

The Lies of Locke Lamora: We love it!

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

Trained from childhood as a thief and con-artist par excellence, Locke Lamora employs a silver tongue and quicksilver mind to divest the rich of Camorr of their excessive wealth. No sooner do Locke and his associates initiate their latest scheme, however, than they find themselves at the mercy of the mysterious Gray King, who intends to use them as pawns in his bid to take over the city-state’s underworld. As the Gray King’s diabolical plan unfolds, Locke finds his skills tested as never before as he struggles not only for his own survival,

July 20th, 2013. Rob Rhodes, Greg Hersom, Kat Hooper, Marion Deeds, Terry Weyna, Tadiana Jones and Skye Walker´s rating: 4, 5 | Scott Lynch | SFF Reviews | 10 comments |

Magazine Monday: Nightmare Magazine, July 2013

Brit Mandelo’s story, “And Yet, Her Eyes,” opens with a sentence that snags attention immediately: “Sasha came back from Kandahar in pieces, a sack of broken glass in the shape of a woman.” The mood of the story is set in that single sentence, and everything that comes after is the piecing together of that broken glass as if it were a jigsaw puzzle, gradually forming a picture of deep grief and loss. Sasha is met at the airport by her lover, Liz, whom she would not allow to visit her in the hospital; she couldn’t be sure that the wounds to her face and head,

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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