The trek onward continues as Rand struggles to control the taint I mean, Richard struggles to control The Gift.  Only this time, we go on an unnecessarily complicated side quest that turns into an overwrought metaphor about people who refuse to support the American military and our battles for freedom.  I shit you not. If you thought his Ayn Ranting was bad, yeeeeesh.

For fun, pop-science-y action reads, you cannot beat Jonathan Maberry.  My brother recommended Patient Zero to me, and I fucking loved it and gobbled up all the subsequent Joe Ledger books.  I haven’t yet gotten to Benny Imura, because I’m waiting to not be fucking tired of zombies anymore, but I FUCKING LOVED the Pine Deep trilogy.  In no small part because it’s set in a small town in Bucks County.  And it’s about a haunted hayride.  If you ever get the chance, jump the fuck […]

TK introduced me to Connolly’s Charlie Parker series way back during the first Cannonball, and I really dug them.  Connolly is incredibly deft at writing a procedural thriller with just the slightest dark little horror sheen on it.  It’s like Stephen King’s Homicide: Life On Maine’s Streets.  It’s bad men being stopped by a damaged man, and there’s this sort of eyes-glowing-in-the-shadows watching and maybe waiting.  He doesn’t hunt werewolves, he hunts men haunted by the thought that they might be werewolves, but the haunting […]

Despite Stone Barrington being the Mary Sue alter ego for everything Stuart Woods craves in life — eating Dover Sole in private clubs and drinking Knob Creek like he’s got a fucking corporate sponsorship, getting fitted for Turnbull and Asher, drinking fine wines and bedding anything and everything with a vagina with the exception of the President and his son’s girlfriend — this one’s got a decent enough plot.  In that, he balances it between several story threads.

This collection of short stories probably came from an assortment of collections — those lovely teaser tales that allow you to buffet-style several authors at once.  They definitely would offer up a chance to get a feel for the Nightside.  And that’s kind of the problem with the collection.  While we get a nice bit of backstory or origin stories on a few characters for half the collection, the other half consists of John Taylor tales.  And these feel like less fleshed out versions of […]

A Victorian meditation on vampirism.  The rules have been changed — garlic and churchy stuff are out, holy water and silver are in.  There are no sparkletards, but there is an outstanding study on forbidden homosexuality in Victorian times.  This felt like a really intriguing novel on forbidden passions in Victorian times, that got a big old vampire fist punched right through it.  But like Ben Winters and Seth Graham-Smith, I’d totally read Lauren Owen’s next book.