The Bush League Critic

I've been anxiously waiting for this dark fantasy debut since I read a few early reviews that pushed buttons I wasn't even aware I had. It spoke to me. (OK not really, but it sounded like something right up my alley)

The city of Isca is set like a dark jewel in the crown of the Duchy of Stonehold. In this sprawling landscape, the monsters one sees are nothing compared to what’s living in the city’s sewers.

Twenty-three-year-old Caliph Howl is Stonehold’s reluctant High King. Thrust onto the throne, Caliph has inherited Stonehold’s dirtiest court secrets. He also faces a brewing civil war that he is unprepared to fight. After months alone amid a swirl of gossip and political machinations, the sudden reappearance of his old lover, Sena, is a welcome bit of relief. But Sena has her own legacy to claim: she has been trained from birth by the Shradnae witchocracy—adept in espionage and the art of magical equations writ in blood—and she has been sent to spy on the High King.

Yet there are magics that demand a higher price than blood. Sena secretly plots to unlock the Cisrym Ta, an arcane text whose pages contain the power to destroy worlds. The key to opening the book lies in Caliph’s veins, forcing Sena to decide if her obsession for power is greater than her love for Caliph.

Meanwhile, a fleet of airships creeps ever closer to Isca. As the final battle in a devastating civil war looms and the last page of the Cisrym Ta waits to be read, Caliph and Sena must face the deadly consequences of their decisions. And the blood of these conflicts will stain this and other worlds forever.

I'm not going to fool around with a long rambling review here. I'm just going to come right out and say it: I. loved. it... read the book! (Post-review note: I lied... I had a lot of "ramble" in me, apparently.)

None of the reviews I saw bothered to mention whether the The Last Page (part of a planned duology) had some sort of ending, or if it left you hanging in the lurch waiting for its companion volume, Black Bottle. Let me put your fears to rest... The Last Page contains a completely satisfying story arc. Who'd 'a thunk it?!? I was beginning to think that nobody was capable of writing a work of speculative fiction (that was part of a series) that didn't leave me screaming expletives at its complete and utter disregard for the literary concept known as "The End". Anyway... I digress. And apparently, that's my own personal beef with the current state of the genre.

Huso plops you down in the middle of his world and adamantly refuses to explain any of it. Almost annoyingly so--almost, but not quite. I found it quite a refreshing change from the tried and true "brick-by-brick-by-(excruciatingly tortuous holy-shit-did-I-really-need-to-know-all-that?)-brick" world-building technique that pervades the High Fantasy genre. I don't mind using a little bit of my own imagination, and Huso obliged me. I thank him profusely for that! So if your idea of world-building is strapping on your unicorn-bedazzled fantasy bib while the author spoon-feeds you his world on a soft, plastic-coated baby spoon... don't read this book. There's plenty of others out that require no effort on the part of the reader.

Huso's prose is delightfully twisted and he has an excellent feel for the macabre:

It moved. A pustule that could roam, sliding like a parasite just beneath the cuticle of real. A monster. Pressing. Struggling to reach her. Pushing its formless mass against the locus of an ancient embryonic sac.

Yet he still has the good sense to interject some humor. Like when the High King of Isca asks his spymaster; "How insidious are you?"

Sometimes when you’re sitting under the chain and you let one drop you get a splash that comes up and snaps you right in the hole. It’s alarming but you tend to forget about it almost immediately after it happens. I’m like that. I’m the cold water that makes your ass pucker.

The Last Page is a very dark tale told in High Fantasy style by a fresh new voice. Which means that some are going to love it and some are going to hate it. There probably won't be a lot of middle ground, here. I, for one,  can't wait for the sequel.

I know it's late notice and everything, but tomorrow (8/17/2010) at 6:30pm EDT, fantasy author Terry Brooks will be participating in a live chat on the B&N Facebook page. The event is in support of his upcoming release (8/24/2010) entitled Bearers of The Black Staff.

Del Rey and Terry Brooks are personally responsible for making me the epic-fantasy fan that I am today. If you have the time, head on over tomorrow and chat with a legend.

Every now and then, I like to take a break from the zombies, thrillers, action and epic-fantasy to read something a little more introspective and subtle. Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark fit that bill quite nicely.

Corporate life in early 21st-century America is even more ruthless than it was at the turn of the millennium. Lou Arrendale, well compensated for his remarkable pattern-recognition skills, enjoys his job and expects never to lose it. But he has a new boss, a man who thinks Lou and the others in his building are a liability. Lou and his coworkers are autistic. And the new boss is going to fire Lou and all his coworkers--unless they agree to undergo an experimental new procedure to "cure" them.

In this near-future drama, medical technology has advanced to the point where autism is becoming a thing of the past. Techniques and procedures have been developed that can "cure" autism in utero or shortly after birth. Lou Arrington and his co-workers were born too late to take advantage of this new technology. They're able to live somewhat "normal" lives due to advances made in treating very young autists, but they still require special support structures to function in social environments.

This story is told primarily from the viewpoint of Lou Arrington and does a marvelous job of portraying how the world might be perceived by someone with autism. There's several outstandingly written supporting characters who interact with Lou as he deals with anger, betrayal, love, friendship and change.

He grows as a character (and a human) as he struggles with the decision to accept or decline the highly experimental treatment that has the potential to "cure" him. The company he works for owns the research program and may have ulterior motives for "encouraging" him and his co-workers to sign up as test subjects.

Ultimately, the reader is forced to examine their views on "what is normal", as well as exploring the seemingly simple concepts of: choice, free will and change.

It's not an easy read, but a very worthy one.

Some things you just like. Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series is one of those things for me. The books entertain me... and sometimes, entertainment is all I'm after. His latest installment - Distant Thunders - didn't disappoint me in the least.

This blurb is from Into the Storm, the first book in the series:

Pressed into service when World War II breaks out in the Pacific, the US Walker—a Great War-era destroyer—finds itself retreating from pursuing Japanese battleships. Its captain, Lieutenant Commander Matthew Patrick Reddy, desperately leads the Walker into a squall, hoping it will give them cover—only to emerge into an alternate world. A world where two species have evolved: the cat-like Lemurians and the reptilian Griks—and they are at war.

With its power and weaponry, the Walker’s very existence could alter the balance of power. And for Reddy and his crew, who have the means to turn a primitive war into a genocidal Armageddon, one thing becomes clear. They must determine whose side they’re on. Because whichever species they choose is the winner.

I read the original trilogy (Into the Storm, Crusade and Maelstrom) last year and absolutely loved it.  I was worried about the "cheese" factor when I first picked them up, but I couldn't have been more wrong. It was like The Philadelphia Experiment meets Land of the Lost... while neither of those works exactly instill any feelings of "Wow!" on their own, the hybridization of the two can be quite fascinating; let me tell you.

Anderson has a Master's Degree in history and is a forensic ballistic archaeologist, so you're probably never going to read better battle sequences that combine WWII technology with Bronze Age cultures. Did I mention naval battles? No? Well, he's no slouch in that department either. Realistic and entertaining as hell. God, I'm a sucker for a well-written naval battle.

Combine all that with a boatload (heehee) of characters that are easy to give a damn about (as well as a few that are just as easy to hate) and all you would need is a compelling plot to make it completely enjoyable. Well, guess what?... it has that too! Definitely one of those - "maybe just one more chapter before I turn off the light" - type of reading experiences.

I know I didn't really review Distant Thunders, but that's only because it's not a complete story. This book was the start of a new sub-series that starts immediately following the explosive aftermath of Maelstrom - the stunning conclusion to the first sub-series. So it was a lot of setup and teasing. Entertaining and consistent with the quality of the first three books, but ultimately incomplete. I usually hate that kind of serialized shit, but I'm willing to make an exception in a few cases. If I have an ounce of willpower, I'm going to wait until the series is complete before picking it back up again.

Tor.com commisioned John Scalzi to write a new short story in celebration of the site's second birthday. The President's Brain is Missing was the result - and it's available for everyone's free reading pleasure right now.

Also, previously published original Tor.com short stories are available for purchase (99 cents each) on a variety of ereader platforms. From their blog post:

Starting tomorrow, twelve of the first thirteen original stories published on Tor.com will be available on a bunch of e-book platforms, including the Kindle store, Apple’s iBooks store, Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore, the Kobo store, and the Sony Reader store, for 99 cents each. These are in effect little e-chapbooks, complete with the original Tor.com art on their “covers,” designed to work properly with the current generation of e-book devices and reading programs.

The stories going up are:

• “After the Coup” by John Scalzi
• “Down on the Farm” by Charles Stross
• “Shade” by Steven Gould
• “The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder” by Elizabeth Bear
• “Catch ’Em in the Act” by Terry Bisson
• “Jack and the Aktuals, Or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory” by Rudy Rucker
• “A Water Matter” by Jay Lake
• “The Film-makers of Mars” by Geoff Ryman
• “Firstborn” by Brandon Sanderson
• “Errata” by Jeff VanderMeer
• “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction” by Jo Walton
• “A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon” by Ken Scholes

A thirteenth story, Cory Doctorow’s “The Things That Make Me Weak And Strange Get Engineered Away,” will join these soon on several of these platforms.

So feel free to gobble up some free - and some very cheap - reading from some quality authors.

Debut author Patrick Lee makes a bold entrance with this conspiracy-type thriller featuring ex-cop, ex-con Travis Chase.

The blurb:

Travis Chase, a man putting his life back together after fifteen years in prison, takes a solo hike into the Alaskan Rockies. He's just looking for a quiet place to think about his future, but what he finds is trouble: a 747, downed in remote wilderness, the wreck impossibly undiscovered by authorities. Those aboard are dead, though not because of the crash. They've been shot.

This aircraft, along with the terrifying object it was transporting, is only the beginning for Travis. Within hours he finds himself at the center of a violent conflict that spans the globe, and a secret war that dates back three decades. A war for possession of radically advanced technology—that wasn't created by human hands.

This is one of those novels that is very tightly written: every detail means something - every event, conversation, or action has a purpose that ties in to the overall plot. For this alone, I give Lee an A+... tightly written conspiracy thrillers are some of my favorite reading.

The characters are solid, there are no "lulls" in the narrative, and the dialog is very natural, but... (and it's a big "but")... I just didn't "buy" the ending. For reasons that would spoil elements of the plot for other readers, I can't really go into the details of why I didn't buy it... so there you have it.

Another reason that this novel didn't make it into my "Love it!" category is probably no fault of the author. I just "knew" where everything was headed. Perhaps Patrick Lee and I are wired with the same logic and reasoning chips, because  every clue that he dropped felt like a perfect saucer-pass that always landed right in my wheelhouse. All that was left for me to do was to one-time it into the back of an empty net. Which I did time and time again. It was really rather freaky at times!

It's a great debut novel that I'm sure many will (and should)  love... unless like me, you happen to share the same brain as Patrick Lee. I'll definitely be reading his next novel, if only to verify that the freaky-deaky, vulcan mind-meld thing was just a fluke.

Zombies!! What can say? They do get my attention.

Joe Ledger is a Baltimore police detective who gets recruited by an enigmatic character (Mr. Church) to join a hush-hush, super-secret-squirrel government agency known as the Department of Military Sciences. The DMS is an all-star, "the best of the best of the best... SIR!", fast-response team recruited from other agencies (both government and civilian) that answers only to the President and is not restricted by annoying little regulations like the Constitution. You get the idea.

Enter the bad guys: Islamic extremists team up with a greedy, billionaire bastard to weaponize a plague (related to mad cow disease) that turns people into rage-filled, murderous zombies bent on chewing the thoat out of the Great Western Satan.

Enter the plot: Joe Ledger has to stop the terrorists, kill the zombies (walkers) and get the girl.

It's a fun read. I like action and I like zombies, so Maberry didn't have to do much else to get me to "like" this book. But he definitely needed to dig a little deeper to get me to "love" it. He didn't get there.

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't need a lot scientific mumbo-jumbo about prion diseases and folded proteins to make my zombies sound more plausible. I don't mind a little explanation for why there are zombies, just don't dwell on it. Plausibility isn't really the attraction for me... a head-munching, undead human is. So go ahead and tell me whether your zombies are the disease, the radiation mutation, or the demonic variety and let's move on, shall we?

Joe Ledger is a likeable enough badass and he has a lot of great zombie-killing scenes, but I couldn't get past the notion that his recruitment and the relationship between himself and the mysterious Mr. Church was modeled after the similar arrangement between Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith in Men in Black. That coupled with his decision to go with the pre-mixed, Islamic Terrorist bad-guys-in-a-can  made Maberry's whole effort seem more than a little "cookie cutter-ish".

The action sequences are legion and they're damn exciting, but a little heavy on the detail. Breaking down Ledger's reaction time in milliseconds and describing every minutiae of his fighting technique starts to sound more like a lesson in physics and kinesthesiology instead of the - "he grabbed the zombie's head and broke its neck" - kind of moment that I have to assume he was striving for. I think he must have been trying to help out the fight choreographer that Sony Pictures must choose for the ABC TV show I hear is in development.

The only other thing I have to mention is the blatant patriotic propaganda that is used in lieu of an actual denouement. The only thing that would have made it cheesier is if the book came with its own soundtrack that cued up Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA while the characters made their exits.

So if you're looking for your typical "save the world and get the girl" type of action thriller - complete with bad guys who seem to be an afterthought to the hero's Kick Ass-ness, and a few too many unnecessary/transparent plot twists, then Patient Zero might be right up your alley.

Ever read anything by science-fiction author Tobias Buckell?

Want to see if he's an author you would be interested in without spending a dime?

Well, here's your opportunity! Lightspeed (the new, strictly science fiction online magazine) has posted Buckell's previously published short story Manumission in this month's issue.

You can read it online for free, or you can purchase the entire issue (or any issue) of Lightspeed for reading on your ereader of choice - it's available in Kindle, iBook or Epub format for $2.99.

This book was just what the doctor ordered: a hard-boiled, noir, detective-type story with a supernatural twist.

The blurb:

Supernatural fantasy has a new antihero.

Life sucks, and then you die. Or, if you're James Stark, you spend eleven years in Hell as a hitman before finally escaping, only to land back in the hell-on-earth that is Los Angeles.

Now Stark's back, and ready for revenge. And absolution, and maybe even love. But Stark discovers that the road to absolution and revenge is much longer than you'd expect, and both Heaven and Hell have their own ideas for his future. Resurrection sucks. Saving the world is worse.

Darkly twisted, irreverent, and completely hilarious, Sandman Slim is the breakthrough novel by an acclaimed author.

Just a fun, fun bit of sleazy, gritty, noir fantasy. Kadrey hits a home run with Sandman Slim as well as the character of James Stark. It's a page-turner from beginning to end, and I can't wait until the next installment is released in October.

I was little worried about it being over the top silly, but I couldn't have been more wrong. The prose is witty and sharp and the supernatural elements just seem so, well... natural. There's lots of dark humor, but it definitely fits the atmosphere and Stark's character.

Take Raymond Chandler's swift-paced, harboiled style; add Sam Peckinpah's penchant for blood; then throw a main character (who is a cross between a demonic Jack Reacher and Snake Plissken) into a war between Heaven and Hell that takes place in L.A. - and you'll have a pretty good idea what Sandman Slim is all about.

Harry Dresden wishes he was as cool as James Stark.

Well, it's done! My first series by Tad Williams is complete. I'll be honest - this was tough for me. I'm not going to be reading any more series in the near future.

Sea of Silver Light started off slow. Painfully slow... I'm-thinking-about-putting-the-book-down slow. But I stuck it out and was rewarded for my efforts with an ending to a series that was, well... O.K. The ending was extremely thorough and for the most part satisfying, but by no means spectacular.

The overall story was a great concept, but ultimately, Williams just tried too hard to do too much: too many characters, too many words, too many themes and too much exposition... way too much exposition. I had to read about the characters sitting around discussing what they were going to do, then I had to read about them actually doing what they had discussed, then I had to read about those characters giving a recap of what they just did for characters who weren't present when they were doing it. It was maddening at times!

I don't want to come off like this was the worst thing I've ever read; because it wasn't. Williams has good chops. A lot of his prose was great and the parts that were entertaining were fantasically written. The great parts just happened to be sandwiched between mind-numbingly dull, long expositions.That's why it was so maddening for me... the potential was there for something really good, but it never fully materialized.

The first two books of the series should have been trimmed down and combined into one book. There just wasn't enough story for four books. Three might have still been pushing it. Extraneous characters and storylines should have been eliminated, because none of the characters were developed enough to suit me. There were a shitload of somewhat cool, but ultimately, two-dimensional characters that just didn't need to be there. And for god's sake... kill a few characters off! It's not like you didn't have a surplus to work with.

I need to read something else by Tad Williams at some point (because I do think he has a unique style) but it probably won't be anytime soon, because - unless he has some stand-alone novels I'm unaware of - I'm not going to be ready for a long series anytime soon.