Previous SFF Author: Michael A. Stackpole
These are stand alone novels (not part of a series).
Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias
I’m giving 2018’s Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias five stars, and I’m going to recommend it highly here. Then I’m going to post warnings, because this is one of those “this book is not for everybody” things.
On Twitter, Iglesias describes his writing as “barrio noir,” and also “a mix of horror and noir.” Coyote Songs follows several characters on either side of the Mexico/USA border as a mysterious rage-filled entity comes into their lives.
March 25th, 2020. Marion Deeds´s rating: 5 | Gabino Iglesias | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Stephen King takes over 550 pages to relate the story of the mysterious Institute and its merciless dealings with kidnapped children. Given that page count, it shouldn’t be too surprising that King spends the first forty pages setting up his tale with a seemingly unrelated story of a man adrift in his life. Tim Jamieson, an out-of-work cop, takes a hefty payout to give up his seat on an overfull flight, and ends up making his rambling way from Tampa, Florida to the small town of DuPray,
March 24th, 2020. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 3.5 | Stephen King | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
If you’ve read one Stephen King novel, you’ve read nearly all of them. And yet people keep coming back for more. Published in 1987, Misery explores King’s relationship with his most obsessive readers while also wrestling with his own addictions.
Misery‘s plot is pretty straightforward: Paul Sheldon is an author of best-selling novels who one night drunkenly drives into a blizzard and crashes. When he wakes up, he has been (not rescued, but) kidnapped by Nurse Ratched,
March 20th, 2020. Ryan Skardal´s rating: 4 | Stephen King | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Drums of Tapajos by S. P. Meek
As you may have noticed, over the past six months I have been dipping into Armchair Fiction’s current Lost World/Lost Race series of 24 novels, and with mixed results. One thing I have observed is that the best of this bunch — such as Frank Aubrey’s The King of the Dead (1903), Rex Stout’s Under the Andes (1914), John Taine’s The Purple Sapphire (1924) and A.
March 12th, 2020. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 3 | S.P. Meek | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
CLASSIFICATION: Weaving together fairy tales and history, Deathless is kind of like Pan’s Labyrinth, if it was told by Hayao Miyazaki and Neil Gaiman. Highly recommended for fans of adult fairy tales, Russian folklore, and Catherynne M. Valente.
FORMAT/INFO: Deathless is 352 pages long divided over a Prologue, 6 Parts, and 30 numbered/titled chapters. Narration is in the third-person, mostly via the protagonist, Marya Morevna.
March 10th, 2020. Robert Thompson and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4, 5 | Catherynne M. Valente | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The World of the Giant Ants by A. Hyatt Verrill
In two novels that I recently read, Ralph Milne Farley’s The Radio Man (1924) and its sequel, The Radio Beasts (1925), engineer Myles Cabot accidentally transports himself to Venus and discovers a society of enormous and intelligent ants, the so-called Formians. But, it would seem, if a certain book of 1928 is to be believed, Cabot did not have to leave planet Earth to discover such gigantic and civilized creatures.
February 27th, 2020. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4.5 | A. Hyatt Verrill | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
In his whimsical way, Charles Yu writes about the Asian-American immigrant experience in Interior Chinatown (2020). The story is about Willis Wu, a young man whose family lives in an SRO (Single-Room Occupancy Hotel) in the Chinatown of mid-20th century San Francisco. He’s the son of immigrants who came to America looking for a better life but who have been misunderstood, alienated, marginalized, ghettoized, and further discriminated against by an American government and populace that is always putting people into boxes and insisting that they stay there.
February 26th, 2020. Kat Hooper´s rating: 5 | Charles Yu | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Black Leviathan by Bernd Perplies, translated by Lucy Van Cleef
Vengeance is a tale as old as a time, and female characters have been killed in order to set male characters off on a protagonist’s journey since well before there were refrigerators (almost before there was ice). But it takes a particularly audacious ambition to use Moby Dick as an explicit inspiration for a coming-of-age fantasy set in a world where sky ships hunt dragons and one captain becomes maniacally obsessed with killing one such dragon. And for a little while there I was thinking Bernd Perplies,
February 20th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3 | Bernd Perplies | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray
The Last Day (2020), by Andrew Hunter Murray, is a sci-fi thriller, though to be honest I found both elements (the science and the thrills) to be a bit slight and while it’s a highly readable work, I’d call it moderately engaging or tense.
The book opens some decades after “The Slow” (or “The Stop”), when the Earth’s rotation gradually declined then halted altogether, plunging half the planet — the “Coldside” into uninhabitable cold and darkness and the other half into a baking sunlit zone.
February 14th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3 | Andrew Hunter Murray | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North
“I do not know whether death is mercy, or love is easy, or vengeance is peace, or if all these things are lies or truth. Or if it is the truest thing of all to say that life is all of these things, all of these truths together in perfect contradiction, blinding us to a greater truth that lies beneath.”
My husband and I are foodies. We love to try new foods, new cuisines, and new restaurants. When we order off the menu,
February 6th, 2020. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | Claire North | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Previous SFF Author: Michael A. Stackpole
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