Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Rating: 4

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Unclean: Excellent sword and sorcery romp

Unclean by Richard Lee Byers

What happens when a young bard returns home to find the lover he left gone? What would you do if you saw your entire regiment slaughtered by the undead? If an undead lich made a grab for control of your country, even if that country is the notoriously self-serving Thay?

It is these questions that Richard Lee Byers’ attempts to answer in Unclean: The Haunted Lands. Byers continues to show his writing prowess in the shared world arena by tackling a difficult topic in the Forgotten Realms world: the undead.

June 19th, 2008. John Ottinger (guest)´s rating: 4 | Richard Lee Byers | SFF Reviews | no comments |

The Prestige: Haunting and thought-provoking

The Prestige by Christopher Priest

I was drawn to Christopher Priest’s novel after having watched and enjoyed the Nolan brothers’ film adaptation of The Prestige. Going into the reading, I knew that several plot twists would be spotted a mile away, but the film is sufficiently different from its source material that Priest’s work contains several surprises.

Journalist Andrew Westley is brought under false pretences to a Derbyshire estate to meet with a young woman who is quite desperate to get in contact with him.

Bast: Bell, Book, and Murder

Bast: Bell, Book, and Murder by Rosemary Edghill

Speak Daggers to Her, The Book of Moons, and The Bowl of Night are some of the best fiction about modern witches I’ve seen yet. And the main reason why is the heroine — Bast. In Bast, Rosemary Edghill creates a delightful heroine with a deep belief in the Goddess and magic — and also with a barbed tongue that deftly skewers the politics and foibles of the Pagan community.

June 16th, 2008. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4 | Rosemary Edghill | SFF Reviews | no comments |

The First Vampire: A Novel of Samson & Delilah

The First Vampire by Alicia Ryan

I am a big fan of alternate history books and urban fantasy. Alicia Ryan has done a more than adequate job of blending the two into a fun book. The First Vampire is a story based on the Biblical Samson and his seductress/destroyer Delilah. Ryan weaves urban fantasy into the culmination of a millennia long search by Samson to have his final revenge.

The First Vampire takes elements of alternate history to explain how vampirism came to be through a fluke event.

June 15th, 2008. John Hulet´s rating: 4 | Alicia Ryan | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Dead Men’s Boots: Another delightful Felix Castor novel

Dead Men’s Boots by Mike Carey

Dead Men’s Boots is the third Felix Castor novel after Vicious Circle and The Devil You Know. Like the previous volumes, the book finds Felix dealing with several different issues that may or may not be connected. In this case, there’s the suicide of a fellow ghostbreaker (exorcist) who leaves a message for Felix; a wife who hires Felix to clear her husband’s name of murder; a Chicago mob femme fatale who seemingly continues to kill decades after her execution;

June 14th, 2008. Robert Thompson´s rating: 4 | Mike (M.R.) Carey | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Shriek: An Afterword

Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer

Shriek: An Afterword is Jeff VanderMeer’s second novel set in his AMBERGRIS cosmology. There are a lot of elements with regards to the book that I want to talk about, so please bear with me.

The first is that this is a sequel, yet it’s not. I won’t talk about City of Saints and Madmen here, but suffice it to say, Shriek: An Afterword builds on the material presented in that novel.

June 12th, 2008. Charles Tan (GUEST)´s rating: 4 | Jeff VanderMeer | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Armed and Magical: Darker, snarkier, funnier

Armed and Magical by Lisa Shearin

Armed and Magical picks up almost right where Magic Lost, Trouble Found left off. It’s a week later and Raine is on the Isle of Mid with her cousin, Phaelan (“He was a pirate. Excuse me, a seafaring businessman.”), and the leader of the Conclave Guardians, Mychael (“an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, coated in yum”). Raine’s young friend Piaras is also there as a student. He is the most powerful young spellsinger to come along in decades.

June 9th, 2008. Tia Nevitt (guest)´s rating: 4 | Lisa Shearin | SFF Reviews | no comments |

The Alchemy of Stone: Discover the magic of Ekaterina Sedia

The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia

CLASSIFICATION: With its intriguing blend of steampunk, gothic romance, political intrigue, and fairy tale spirit — not to mention metaphors on such real world issues as terrorism and racial discrimination — The Alchemy of Stone is like a bizarre, but captivating cross between Frankenstein, Pan’s Labyrinth, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Steamboy, Tool’s animated stop-motion music videos, and the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle).

The Well of Ascension: Plenty left to tell

The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson

Bridge books are always dicey things — many fall into a sophomore slump, meandering along trying to get from A to C with the required stop at B (because everyone knows a fantasy story can’t be told in only two books; three is clearly the sacred minimum — damn you Tolkien!). Luckily, The Well of Ascension (2007) doesn’t fall into that trap.

Mistborn is set in an ashen, mist-filled world whose myths tell of a time when plants were green.

Lasher: Almost surpasses Lestat as Rice’s most intriguing character

Lasher by Anne Rice

As part of Anne Rice‘s The Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy, this installment comes after The Witching Hour in which we were introduced to three major concepts: a secret organisation called the Talamasca (best described as a supernatural FBI), a powerful family of witches known as the Mayfairs, and a strange spirit called Lasher that has haunted generations of Mayfairs, and been investigated by the Talamasca for centuries.

In the previous novel Rowan Mayfair, the latest matriarch of the Mayfair clan,

June 5th, 2008. Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4 | Anne Rice | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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