Daytripper by Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba
“Isn’t it strange how we always seem to remember the trivial things from our daily lives… yet so often we forget the most important ones?”
In the opening chapter of Daytripper, Bras de Oliva Domingos, main character of this lushly drawn graphic novel, stops for a beer and a pack of cigarettes on the way to a gala honoring his famous and powerful novelist father. He becomes involved in a shocking event, one that leaves the reader reeling.
September 28th, 2012. Marion Deeds´s rating: 5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Manhattan in Reverse by Peter F. Hamilton
I’ve been meaning to read Peter F. Hamilton for years. I own a few of his books, but I haven’t read them yet. If you’re familiar with Hamilton, I’ll bet you know why. His books are HUGE, and most of them are part of a series. Every time I look at them on my shelf, they scream “MAJOR TIME COMMITMENT,” so there they stay. Thus, I was pleased to come across Manhattan in Reverse, a slim and inviting collection of seven stories by Peter F.
July 25th, 2012. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3 | Peter F. Hamilton | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Thirteen Hallows by Michael Scott & Colette Freedman
I don’t generally read urban fantasy, but this one looked too good to ignore. Thirteen Hallows is an incredibly dark, urban, mystery/suspense novel based on the legend of the thirteen hallows, which I had never heard about before I read this book. The hallows fill the book with an interesting and appealing history that may inspire readers to research these legendary objects on their own.
Thirteen Hallows is told from multiple points of view and while some of these perspectives are done better than others,
June 13th, 2012. Sarah Chorn | Michael Scott | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Ajjiit: Dark Dreams of the Ancient Arctic by Sean Tinsley and Rachel Qitsualik
Ajjiit: Dark Dreams of the Ancient Arctic, by Sean Tinsley and Rachel Qitsualik, is a collection of fantasy short stories based on Inuit myth and culture. It isn’t often I come across wholly unfamiliar fantasy backgrounds, creatures, or images and it really was a pleasure to wander through the utter strangeness of these stories. They took me places I didn’t expect to go: not to the snowy arctic landscape I imagined,
May 15th, 2012. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Briony has lots of secrets. She’s a witch. She can see the Old Ones. And when she loses her temper, bad things happen, like the accidents that crippled both her sister and her stepmother. Luckily, her stepmother figured out why these things happened, and taught Briony the trick to make sure they never happen again: she must always hate herself. Always. And she can never tell anyone else about her secret power, or she will be hanged. But when the locals decide to start draining the swamp near the town for the train to go through,
May 11th, 2012. Ruth Arnell´s rating: 3.5 | Franny Billingsley | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
After the Apocalypse by Maureen McHugh
I’ve read Maureen McHugh’s “Useless Things” at least three times now, and I admire it more with each rereading. It appears just a bit less than halfway through McHugh’s thought-provoking short story collection, After the Apocalypse. The first-person narrator is a woman living well outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a time when the United States seems on the brink of collapse: the economy is terrible, and water is extremely scarce in the Southwest — a time that doesn’t feel very far away from today.
May 10th, 2012. Terry Weyna´s rating: 4 | Maureen McHugh | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Chasing the Moon by A. Lee Martinez
Diana’s had a tough time of it lately, but finally a stroke of luck comes along: after a long search, she finds the perfect apartment. It’s affordable. It’s furnished exactly the way she likes. There’s even a jukebox with all her favorite songs. Maybe she should have been more suspicious about how perfect it was, because once she’s moved in, she discovers that the apartment has an extra inhabitant: a monster who goes by the name Vom the Hungering and who tries to eat everything in his path.
May 9th, 2012. Stefan Raets´s rating: 3.5 | A. Lee Martinez | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Haunting Violet by Alyxandra Harvey
It’s Victorian England, and Spiritualism is all the rage. Violet Willoughby’s mother Celeste is a phony medium, using parlor tricks to scam her way up the social ladder. Now, the Willoughbys have been invited to the palatial estate of Rosefield for a grand house party. On this trip, Violet learns something shocking: she is a medium. A real one. And the ghost of a girl from the next estate over, who drowned mysteriously the previous year, is haunting Violet and demanding she solve her murder.
May 6th, 2012. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 3.5 | Alyxandra Harvey | Stand-Alone, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Bible Repairman and Other Stories by Tim Powers
Tim Powers does not often write short fiction, but when he does, he comes up with doozies. The Bible Repairman and Other Stories contains a mere six stories, but each one is so well-crafted that it will stick in your brain, giving you odd jabs now and then, twisting a thought or causing goosebumps.
“The Bible Repairman” is about Torrez, a man who makes his living “fixing” Bibles: carefully “scorch[ing] out the verses the customers found intolerable,
April 27th, 2012. Terry Weyna´s rating: 4 | Tim Powers | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
When Jack Holloway’s dog blows up a cliff during a prospecting mission on the planet Zarathustra, Jack loses his contract with ZaraCorp. Fortunately, inside the cliff he discovers the biggest vein of precious gems that have ever been found on the planet and he gets to take a percentage of the profits as finder’s fee. Things start to get complicated when Jack returns home to discover that his house has been invaded by a fuzzy mammal that seems a lot smarter than he should be on this planet that has no sapient creatures.
April 18th, 2012. Kat Hooper´s rating: 4 | John Scalzi | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
What a fascinating exploration of Edwige Fenech's contributions to the giallo genre! I love how the post highlights her unique…
Pretty challenging book. Cut by half, speed up the cadence. Trying to figure out the plot, the main point of…
Thanks for the kind words, Marion! Coming as they are from a professional writer, they are much appreciated!
Wonderful review, Sandy.
The "body count" bothered me a bit less because being dead seemed more like an inconvenience than anything else... unlike…