needs more demons?

I can’t say The Dead Path didn’t get its hooks into me: I finished the final hundred pages at a single sitting, anxious for one of its characters, in particular, to escape the morass. There are some clever aspects to how it works an old religion into a modern tale; Irwin’ prose is reliably serviceable [...]

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Dealing with Dragons shares several traits with the fantasies of Dianna Wynne Jones. It assumes familiarity with fairytale conventions and tropes, and reworks and subverts them, with a particular focus on excising sexism and adding subtle metatextual humor. Princess Cimorene is the sort of strong, quick-witted, and self-reliant protagonist who could easily be at home [...]

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The first part of Reaves and Perry’s novel is set immediately before the original 1977 Star Wars movie; the second section is set during the time frame of the film, and interleaves most of the scenes set on the Death Star into the new story. (It’s a bit structurally similar to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are [...]

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Pink is an engaging writer, and I certainly was entertained by and learned useful things from Drive. It examines the difference between extrinsic motivation (e.g., “I want to earn a million by the the time I’m 35″) and intrinsic motivation (e.g., “I want to be the best criminal lawyer in the state.”), and argues, with [...]

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This was my first exposure to either Cohn or Levithan, aside from seeing the film version Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (without, I’m ashamed to say, even knowing it was based on a novel). But it’s their third collaboration, in which the authors write alternating chapters, “without planning anything out beforehand. That’s the way they [...]

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Lisa Goldstein has long been on the list of writers I thought I should read something by sometime, and now she’s on the list of writers I want to read everything by.
The set up for Dark Cities Underground reads like something from the manual of how to write a novel that appeals to me: Ruthie [...]

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Death from the Skies!’s nine chapters all follow the same pattern: a brief, moderately sensationalized depiction of an astronomical disaster followed by a somewhat more sober discussion of the event, with an emphasis on how likely and/or subject to mitigation it is. The book more-or-less progresses from near-term potential events (like a meteor collision) to [...]

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Dead End Dating’s premise seemed promising, if fluffy, at the outset: a young woman with no romantic life of her own starts at dating service. The twist is that she and most her clients are vampires (although it’s not much of a twist). I thought an Emma-ish comedy-of-manners, 21st-century-ized and fanged-up, sounded kinda fun.
Unfortunately, there’s [...]

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The Dead-Tossed Waves shares some characters and a post-zombie-apocalypse setting with The Forest of Hands and Teeth, but it’s set a generation later.
Ryan’s zombies — which come in both the old-school slow shambling and the newer fast-moving varieties — are certainly horrific, but Ryan treats them almost as an elemental force. The antagonists in the [...]

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Dexter Palmer’s The Dream of Perpetual Motion initially sounds like a steam-punk science fiction novel: it’s set in an alternate twentieth century peopled with clockwork men and flying cars, brooded over by a vast obsidian tower, a sinister airship, and the master of both, the undeniably brilliant and almost certainly mad scientist-cum-magician, Prospero Taligent.
But despite [...]

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