J.M. McDermott | Fantasy Literature: Fantasy and Science Fiction Book and Audiobook Reviews

SFF Author: J.M. McDermott

J.M. McDermott graduated from the University of Houston in 2002 with a BA in Creative Writing. He resides in Arlington, Texas with an assortment of empty coffee cups, overflowing bookshelves, and crazy schemes. You can read more about him at J.M. McDermott’s blog.

Never Knew Another: Fascinating concept, frustrating deficiencies

Never Knew Another by J.M. McDermott

AUTHOR INFORMATION: J.M. McDermott is the author of numerous short fiction and the critically-acclaimed debut novel, Last Dragon, which was shortlisted for an IAFA William Crawford Award and included on Amazon.com’s list for Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2008. Last Dragon will be reprinted in early 2011 by Apex Publications who will also publish McDermott’s next novel, Maze, in Spring 2011.

PLOT SUMMARY: When Walkers discover the corpse of a demon’s child — a city guard of noble blood named Jona — the memories of the deceased lead the Walkers to the city they call Dogsland.

Robert Thompson´s rating: 3.5 | J.M. McDermott | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Maze: Scary, surreal, and scattered

Maze by J.M. McDermott

J.M. McDermott’s Maze is about a maze. Or possibly the maze: An unending series of stone halls and corridors which lurks in our primordial past, populated by monstrous creatures, loops and fragments of non-linear time, and a ragged band of humans who somehow got stranded there. The maze is never revealed to have any moral or mechanical logic; it just is, and the people who live there just do. Maze operates as a disjointed series of narratives about the people who have fallen into the maze.

Tales from a Talking Board: Is anyone here? Read along and see.

Tales from a Talking Board edited by Ross Lockhart

Tales From a Talking Board (2017) delivers fourteen shivery stories that involve spirit boards. In the US, we think of them as Ouija Boards, but that was actually a brand name; spirit boards, which involve a surface with the alphabet and an object that glides over it, stopping at letters, have been around quite a while.

This anthology has plenty to please people who like the creepy, and lends itself to a dark autumn night pretty well.

Magazine Monday: Beautiful Steampunk

“The Melusine (1898)” by Caitlin R. Kiernan is this week’s offering by Subterranean Online. It is a wonderful story, written with an unearthly beauty. Kiernan imagines a steampunk circus that comes to town advertising its name in letters five-stories high, “shaped from out of nothing but the billowing clouds of red dust raised by those rolling broad steel and vulcanized rims.” The circus is made of automaton mastodonts and living elephants, and no one can tell if the acrobats are mechanical or real. It promises miracles.

Cala Monroe Weatherall is “a learned woman of industry and science” who comes to the circus in answer to a secret cry,

SFF Author: J.M. McDermott

Never Knew Another: Fascinating concept, frustrating deficiencies

Maze: Scary, surreal, and scattered

Tales from a Talking Board: Is anyone here? Read along and see.

Magazine Monday: Beautiful Steampunk

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