needs more demons?

The Raw Shark Texts is an out-of-the-park homerun of a book for me, soaring over the Monster, bound for who knows where. My friend Marty convinced me to read it with enigmatic remarks about how he didn’t want to tell me anything about it, but thought I’d like it. That seems like a wise strategy. […]

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I read this book in a continual state of bemusement about the audience for which it was written, wondering if, in fact, it exists. Presumably, people in the “buy anything that says Harry Potter” camp are supposed to pick it up. I was mildly intrigued because my biggest gripe with Rowling’s series is that the […]

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It may partly be “too many books in the same series back-to-back” syndrome, but Freeze My Margarita felt much more tired and formulaic than the previous book in the Sam Jones series, Black Rubber Dress, and several particulars bugged me:

The opening scene is set in a D/s club. It seems to be set there purely […]

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I liked Black Rubber Dress quite well right up to the final chapters. Sculptress and amateur-sleuth-by-virtue-of-nosiness Sam Jones (don’t call her Samantha) sells a piece of artwork to a London investment bank, which — along with the titular garment she wears to the unveiling — gives her an entrée to, and a pleasantly outside perspective […]

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Harwood’s The Ghost Writer is a tour-de-force of the “is it a haint, or ain’t it” style of ghost(?) story, and simultaneously an impressive feat of post-modern multi-level narrative construction. Gerard Freeman keeps finding ghost stories — both whole and as tantalizing fragments — written by a mysterious relative, which the reader gets to absorb […]

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Pretty much ever since the genres science fiction, fantasy, and horror have existed as distinct marketing categories, there have been periodic movements seeking to un-define them as such. In the 60’s there was “The New Wave.” In the 80’s some bruited about the awkward, demi-hemispherist phrase “North American magical realism.” And more recently, an unruly […]

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I liked Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novels a lot, even if they were a somewhat guilty pleasure. Many other people apparently liked them too, because LucasFilm and Bantam Spectra cooked up a chronology spanning some fifteen years after Return of the Jedi and found writers to fill it in with dozens of novels. The back […]

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I’m a longtime fan of the Daedalus Books remainders house. I’ve learned about some of my favorite authors from their chatty, informative catalogs.
Every once in a while, though, I follow up a recommendation for a real dud. Hewson’s A Season for the Dead drew many comparisons to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, because […]

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