This is a superpowers story, not a super hero story.  This is a love story, where everyone is incredibly selfish and self-serving and kind of an asshole.  It takes a dark, mean, ugly path in the telling, swiping bitchass claws at reality TV and toxic relationships and super powers.  It’s an amazingly nasty and incredibly brutal story but really, really well done.  We don’t need another hero, and we certainly don’t get one here.

Kadrey’s gotten pretty deep into his urban hellscape of Sandman Slim.  With his seventh installment, you’d think he’d be dangerously close to treading water.  He sort of won the game with the last book, but now he has to carry on, only sans most of his superpowers.  It’s a heady reset, chock full of all the stuff that makes this one of the best damn series around.  If you like hard boiled noir with a side of angels v. demons, this is the series for […]

While I admire the hell out of Ben Mezrich’s non-fiction — his foray into telling the tales of nerds turned criminal badasses — his fiction leaves much to be desired.  Just because Indiana Jones wore a fedora doesn’t mean that your clones have to act like fucking MRA’s.  While flouting about the Modern Wonders of the World like pixelated turds cheating with a GameShark at a SNES RPG, Mezrich has his lead constantly bemoan the fact the female lead doesn’t smile more.  CREEEEEEEEP.

Holy crap, Oz gots itself a sequel!  And with a different author, who didn’t nuke the fridge and restart from scratch!  Anyway, in the latest cash hustle, the Australia offices of Private face down two major crimes — a baby kidnapping they might have been partly complicit in, and the disappearance of a CEO.  Completely, off the grid, and all public records and internet files.  It limps along like someone finishing off a book of MadLibs long after they stopped being funny.

Bleh.  A novel concept — The Order of the Sanguines involves a race of vampire priests that survive by drinking consecrated wine, the Blood of Christ, and thus allowing them to be daywalkers.  Of course, that all gets subverted by terribly overwrought characters who are boring as…well, vampire and zombie stories.  Thankfully, this last overblown crapfest puts a stake in the heart of the vampire series once and for all.

Decided to check out these two epilogues to the original Shannara trilogy.  Indomitable tells of Jair Ohmsford tracking down a single surviving page of the Ildatch and destroying it using the power of Garet Jax.  The Dark Wraith of Shannara is a graphic novel. Which I usually don’t count in my reads, even though I read a crap ton of them.  Dark Wraith combines Indomitable with another adventure.  Kind of DLC to the original trilogy, but ultimately satisfying.  Except the artwork in Dark Wraith makes everyone […]