needs more demons?

Revamped is, like its predecessor Staked, a fantasy thriller very much in the mode of Hamilton’s Anita Blake series: jockeying for dominance between various supernatural entities is the prime mover of the plot, which features a lot of sex and violence, the latter even more copious and explicit than the former.
Lewis continues to exploit the [...]

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Prospero Lost is one of the most original contemporary fantasies I’ve read in years from outside the slipstream camp. Its central conceit is that Shakespeare’s The Tempest was loosely based on fact. Prospero, Miranda (and later additions to the clan) are near-immortal beings secretly responsible for imposing order on elemental magical forces, thus making modern [...]

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Larbalestier’s new book is hard to talk about while avoiding spoilers. But I had one good reason to buy this book that has nothing to with the contents: although its narrator, Micah, is a young woman who is half-black and wears her hair short, the original US cover design featured a long-haired white woman, mostly [...]

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A double entry in my books-I-wouldn’t-expect-myself-to-read endeavor: a Lawrence (whom I’ve never read, more or less deliberately) and a travel book. Three travel books, sort of — this omnibus edition comprises “Twilight in Italy,” “Sea and Sardinia,” and “Etruscan Places.”
I’ve always suspected I would find Lawrence an annoying writer, and I do. He’s fiercely judgmental, [...]

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How to Ditch Your Fairy is a grass-is-greener fable that uses the device of magical entities to examine the unfairness of innate talents. The fairies of the title give the humans to whom they’re bound powers that drastically exaggerate normal traits. Physical attraction, for example, becomes compelling attention from literally everyone of the opposite sex [...]

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Several of Lanagan’s spooky short stories start with deceptively simple, even prosaic, sentences, like “I arrived in moonlight; it wasn’t hard to find the way,” and “‘Well, at least it’s a fine night,’ said Mum.”
But these innocuous openings give little away. In what era is the story set? Does it take place in world like [...]

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I picked up Staked (or as my wonderful girlfriend prefers to call it, on account of the cover art, Stacked) because I thought it looked like a pleasantly trashy read for a business trip. Perhaps unfortunately for it, I didn’t actually read it unitl I got home.
It has a good first sentence:

Somewhere in the middle [...]

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My expectations for Magic’s Child were very high, and they weren’t quite met. The first novel in the series, Magic or Madness, introduced a remarkably fresh conception of magic in the modern-day world, (as well as exploring the author’s own experiences with transcontinental transitions in a fantastic context). The sequel Magic Lessons deepened and extended [...]

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Laurie Lindeen’s rags-to-well,rags chronicle of her band Zuzu’s Petals reminded strongly of Tommy Womack’s excellent and thematically similar Cheese Chronicles, with the added fillip that Laurie hooks up with someone Much More Famous midway through the band’s career arc.
Almost all of the book is written in the present tense. Lindeen is sometimes deliberately cagey about [...]

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I think it would probably occur to me to compare and contrast the first two volumes of Larbalestier’s “Magic or Madness” trilogy with the first two books of Scott Westerfeld’s “Midnighters” trilogy even if I didn’t know the two authors were partners. Many novels feature teenage protagonists simultaneously blessed and cursed with special powers, but [...]

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