Bad Dog Military Science Fiction Across A Holographic Multiverse (Gate Walkers) by Ashley R. Pollard Triode Press 317pp. The first few pages of Pollard’s book may strike some as a bit of a slog. You get hit with a lot of military jargon right off the bat and might feel that you picked up an …
Sun Fall by Jim Al-Khalili, 2019, Bantam Press, 440pp, available through Amazon. When I learned that Jim Al-Khalili, a top theoretical quantum physicist and world-famous television presenter had written a science fiction novel, Sun Fall, I knew I had to give it a read. In part, it was because [shameless plug follows] my own two …
Later Stephen King, 2012, Hard Case Crime, 256pp. Stephen King has gone back to his roots and written what he might call “a good old-fashioned horrorstory.” More to the point, it’s a ghost story. Specifically, a kid who can see ghosts. This is the type of story where King made his bones (so to speak), …
The Trouble With Peace A while back, I did a review of Joe Abercrombie’s A Little Hatred. the first book in his new Age of Madness trilogy. It was the first work of fantasy by a heretofore unknown writer to absolutely wow me since the 1980s, when I encountered Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. Abercrombie’s writing …
A Little Hatred A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie Copyright © Joe Abercrombie 2019 First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Gollancz, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group LtdAn Hachette UK Company A buddy of mine dropped off a copy of A Little Hatred without any comments attached. Our tastes in fiction are …
The Shining Directed & Produced by Stanley Kubrick Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson Based on The Shining by Stephen King 447 pp, Doubleday 1977 Starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd Contains spoilers since I discuss the differences in how the two versions end. But the movie is over 40 years …
If It Bleeds by Stephen King, copyright 2020 Scribner, An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Every decade or so, Stephen King likes to put out a collection, usually novellas, sometimes short stories, or a mix of both. So to cap the second decade of the third millennium (Also known as “Mankind’s next-to-last decade”), he …
The Secret Commonwealth Phillip Pullman 2019 Borzoi Book, published by Alfred A. Knopf In his introduction to his second book in the Book of Dust series (and fifth in the His Dark Materials set), Pullman gleefully admits he swiped the title from a book called, “The Secret Commonwealth, or an Essay on the Nature and …
The Death of Bunny Munro Nick Cave Canongate Books (UK) Faber & Faber (US) 2009 Bunny Munro has been out there for over 10 years, and was always high on my ‘to read’ list. After all, I like Nick Cave’s music (The Bad Seeds) and I like his movies (The Proposition). He’s got 17 albums, …
Wanderers Chuck Wendig 782 Pages, July 2019 | Del Rey Books “It’s got a ‘The Stand’ thing going on,” my friend explained. So I downloaded a copy. King’s The Stand is one of my favourite apocalyptic novels, and holds up well after 40 years. Wanderers by Chuck Wendig starts out as a variant ‘zombie apocalypse’ …