needs more demons?

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Entries Tagged as 's-title'

Jonathan Barnes: The Somnambulist

15 Nov 2008 · No Comments

Barnes’ first novel is promising, if less than entirely satisfying, and certainly not lacking in ambition nor scope. It’s set in a fantastic London peopled by flamboyant, unlikely charactersat the close of the 19th century. Several folk are Not As They At First Seem, including the narrator, who does, it should be noted, remark in […]

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Tags: historical · s-title · mystery · fantasy · b-author

Roger Highfield: The Science of Harry Potter

17 Aug 2008 · No Comments

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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Tags: s-title · science · h-author

Maggie Estep: Soft Maniacs

04 Aug 2008 · No Comments

I have mixed feelings about the merits of collections of linked short stories, as opposed to novels. A short story collection is legitimately free from the need to function as a single work. And short stories can explore multiple perspectives on characters and events in a way that’s difficult for a (conventionally structured, anyway) […]

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Tags: s-title · fiction · e-author

J.F. Lewis: Staked

05 Jul 2008 · No Comments

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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Tags: thriller · s-title · fantasy · l-author

Karen Russell: St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

29 May 2008 · No Comments

Most of the ten stories in Russell’s debut collection share the same literary device: the unease and tension of emerging adolescent sexuality is mirrored by strangeness (supernature, surreality) in the external world. Russell has a knack for killer first sentences, like “My brother Wallow has been kicking around Gannon’s Boat Graveyard for more than an […]

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Tags: s-title · fiction · r-author

Garth Nix: Shade’s Children

28 Apr 2008 · No Comments

Back in 1999, members of a mailing list I was on traded book recommendations. Several of the novels I read as a result (among them Hulme’s The Bone People, Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, Dunn’s Geek Love, Ryman’s Was, Carroll’s Outside the Dog Museum, Powers’ The Goldbug Variations, and Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End […]

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Tags: young adult · s-title · science fiction · fantasy · n-author

Dennis Wheatley: The Satanist

15 Apr 2008 · No Comments

Dennis Wheatley’s supernatural thriller The Satanist is so ugly and offensive that I often found it unintentionally hilarious. It revolves primarily around the attempts of a special branch of British intelligence to unravel the schemes of a cult of communist Satanists (some of whom are also, no joke, ex-Nazis).
The novel was first published in […]

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Tags: thriller · s-title · w-author

Mark Kurlansky: Salt - A World History

27 Feb 2008 · 1 Comment

Several people asked me what I was reading while my answer included “a book about the history of salt.” To my bemusement, this answer was usually greeted with a drawn-out, “oh-kaaay” that seemed to ask, “Why would you want to read that?” if not “Why would anyone want to write that?”
The reaction puzzled me. Before […]

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Tags: history · s-title · food · k-author

Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers (eds); Slipstreams

14 Sep 2007 · 11 Comments

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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Tags: s-title · historical · mystery · science fiction · h-author · fantasy · g-author

Peter Dickinson: The Seventh Raven

02 Jan 2007 · No Comments

An illustration of the power of context:
Lately I’ve been writing quite a bit about fantasy novels marketed to young adult audiences (probably to the dismay of many readers, but that’s beside the point for now). I was on the Amazon website perusing lists of people’s favorite young adult novels, and in a list with a […]

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Tags: young adult · s-title · d-author