No idea why the hell I had it in my head that this book was about vampires.  Forever.  I’m taking decades.  But no.  Instead it’s this brilliant and thought provoking combination of Twelve Years a Slave and The Time Traveler’s Wife.  It manages to brush against so many touchstone topics of thoughtful deliberation that it’s no wonder that it’s still taught in high schools.  Honestly, so worth the read.

While blending his various universes is sort of bread and butter for Simon Green, this one got a little TOO Nightsidey.  It was like a bad cross-over episode between two shows that shouldn’t have.  It was like A.W.E.S.O.M.E.-O. pooping out his fourty-billionth Adam Sandler premise.  Or me writing reviews for Book 8 of a 12 book series.

There was gunfights and butchery and Frankenstein stuff, and then a werecoyote fought a Snake-Injun, and they Gatling Gunned some cowboys and pirates jumped out of hot-airballoons and AND AND TWO STEAMPUNK SCIENTISTS GOT INTO A LIGHTNING FIGHT.  And that wasn’t even the angels and gods stuff.  With all the backstory dropped in Six-Gun Tarot, Belcher has room to go batshit crazy with his second book, and everyone gets their own boss fight.

There was nothing of any nutritive value in this utter rehash of events we already know. No insight into anything.  Nope.  In fact, Goodkind uses this as some sort of screed announcing that he has discovered eBooks and that he no longer need be bound by a publisher!  And that eBooks are the future.  And that three years later, this is totally available as a hardcover book.  You know nothing, Ter Go.

It’s almost a shame that this is a Bill Hodges story, because he doesn’t need to be here.  Instead, we get a tale about ownership of an author’s works.  John Rothstein created a beloved character in Jimmy Gold, and wrote a trilogy where his character became normal.  A trio of burglars steal into Rothstein’s home and rob him of $24K and almost 200 Moleskine journals which contain two more Jimmy Gold novels.  Flash forward 30 some years to Pete Saubers, a teen whose father was crippled […]

A fantastic concept — a less over-bronzed steampunk western taking place in a remote desert town.  It covers all manner of religious and mythological topics.  And that’s the problem.  It covers ALL MANNER.  There’s Native American, Mormon, Christian, Chinese, Cthulhu-ish, King in Yellow, Lilith/First Mother.  By the time we’ve met all the characters and gotten their backstories, the book is 7/8ths over and the finale kind of gets briskly settled by six or seven CHOSEN ONES.  Still, it’s worth a read.