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 [...]

[Read more →]

Rites of Spring Break is another frothy cocktail in Peterfreund’s Ivy League series, following Secret Society Girl and Under the Rose, and mixed up according to the same recipe which is roughly:

1 part coming-of-age novel (protracted)
1 part feminist subtext
1 part formalized presentation (every chapter has an “I Confess…” header; text incorporates ordered lists and the [...]

[Read more →]

Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict is the flip side of Rigler’s Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict: the earlier novel cast 21st-century Courtney Stone’s mind into the body of a young woman in early 19th-century England. This (much better) novel brings the unfortunately (if significantly) named Jane Mansfield’s persona forward to modern Los [...]

[Read more →]

Rampant is a unicorn novel for people who hate unicorns — or at least the fluffy depiction of unicorns in current popular culture. Peterfreund sets out to reclaim the dignity of the unicorn by returning to the legendary roots of one-horned critters, and weaves multi-cultural variants on the theme into a unicorn hierarchy.
Since Peterfreund’s unicorns [...]

[Read more →]

The Reformed Vampire Support Group is maybe the most original vampire novel I’ve ever read that actually uses the word “vampire.” With a few deft twists to the rules of the legend, Jinks inverts the dynamic of the modern sexy, super-strong bloodsucker. Her vamps don’t have super strength or magically accelerated healing. They can’t fly, [...]

[Read more →]

I loved Stewart’s Perfect Circle so much that I bought several more of his novels, and then didn’t read any of them for a while for fear they wouldn’t live up to the expectations Perfect Circle had set.
I’m glad I waited to read Resurrection Man, partly because it isn’t quite as good (it’s one of [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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. [...]

[Read more →]

You could be excused for thinking that Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet is a science book. It’s got a Martian landscape on the front cover, and the author was the “Principal Investigator” of the projects it chronicles. If you’re not careful, you might even learn a little bit about [...]

[Read more →]