DNF @ 10% Sadly, I’m bouncing pretty hard off of this one, and almost immediately at that. Ivy Grimes got some rave reviews from others that I trust wiDNF @ 10% Sadly, I’m bouncing pretty hard off of this one, and almost immediately at that. Ivy Grimes got some rave reviews from others that I trust with her debut short story collection from Grimscribe Press, so maybe that’s a better place for me to begin with her work. I requested an ARC of this title from Ms. Grimes, but unfortunately this isn’t looking like a good match for my mood and taste at the moment. ...more
For as much as I dug the cover art and synopsis, I’m just not connecting with any of these characters, and good lord are there an awful lot oDNF @ 27%
For as much as I dug the cover art and synopsis, I’m just not connecting with any of these characters, and good lord are there an awful lot of them to try and keep straight. The Divine Flesh is a twisted Lynchian crime novel by way of Clive Barker, chock full of body horror and gore, drug couriers and gods. All of which should be right up my alley. But whatever Drew Huff has concocted here just isn’t adding up for me.
It all feels too aimless and messy, with too many concepts to try and keep track of, and too many characters to remember how they all fit together. Over a hundred pages in, and roughly another 260 to go, this book just feels overstuffed and overly, and unnecessarily, complicated.
To top it off, there’s nothing for me to really latch onto, as if the material actively works at resisting a reader’s engagement and pushes itself away from its audience. Frankly, I’m just bored by all the many various and seemingly random detours, and puzzle pieces of plot that don’t seem to fit together. Time to call it quits....more
EC Epitaphs from the Abyss Vol. 1 serves as a perfunctory reminder of why short horror comic stories rarely work well for me. Given the condeDNF @ 49%
EC Epitaphs from the Abyss Vol. 1 serves as a perfunctory reminder of why short horror comic stories rarely work well for me. Given the condensed format of multiple stories, usually three or four, per issue, the writers and artists are provided an extremely narrow window in which to tell their stories. In only a handful of pages, their task is to give us a world, a setting, and characters we're supposed to become familiar enough with to care about and shocked or appalled when everything goes sideways. And it's in this remit where things usually fall apart for me, since it's hard to care much for somebody who has only existed for a few sparse panels before the meet their grisly end, or for the rules of the horrifying world they exist in to be established.
Take, for example, the lead story in this collection, "Killer Spec." Written by J. Holtham, with art by Jorge Fornés, it starts off well enough with its exploration of a narcissistic writer who turns to murder in a fit of jealousy, but falls apart with its inexplicable ending. The climax revolves around his victim returning from the dead, but due to the brevity of the piece there’s no exploration or explanation for the how or why of this sudden reanimation beyond this being a horror story and so of course something like this has to happen. It’s accompanied by meta commentary from the victim about how a story’s ending should feel both inevitable and surprising, and exactly the right thing, but Holtham’s scripting fails to capture any of these requirements. Is this a world where the dead routinely return? Did this occur by magic, or is it a fluke? We have no way of knowing. The crux of the story occurs simply because it’s what is expected to occur, logic or reason be damned.
Chis Condon's “Senator, Senator” proves to be a bit more compelling with its look at conservative politics and its cultish ideals as a reporter who has seen it all decides to dig into a Republican senator’s shifting viewpoints on abortion. Unfortunately, the remaining two stories in issue one didn’t do much for me at all, with one exploring a father’s impossible decision to kill one of his family members after being forced at gunpoint. Brian Azzarello's "Us vs Us" succeeds in being provocative, but its messaging is sloppily handled with its twisted “both sides” look at pro- and anti-vaxxers, questioning who the real monsters are here.
The second issue doesn't fare much better aside from Tyler Crook's "Gray Green Memories" and Jason Aaron's "Sounds & Haptics." The first centers around a zombie who has been standing in a grocery store aisle for an indeterminate amount of time, but who knows they had come here from something. Aaron takes a look at the consequences of driving while distracted, as a phone addicted teen undergoes some vigilante surgery in the aftermath of a car accident.
While these two short pieces are nicely done, they didn't do much to convince me to stick around for the back-half of this collection. Taken as a whole, this trade collection has so far, unfortunately, been the very definition of mediocrity. ...more
For as much as I dug Nat Cassidy’s MARY, I’m finding myself at the polar opposite end with WHEN THE WOLF COMES HOME. I had so badly wanted aDNF @ 32%.
For as much as I dug Nat Cassidy’s MARY, I’m finding myself at the polar opposite end with WHEN THE WOLF COMES HOME. I had so badly wanted a killer new werewolf book, which Cassidy’s latest starts off as, but then morphs into something else. The premise certainly has some high-octane thriller potential, with a struggling actress on the run with a kid she has rescued from his abusive father, being hunted by that same father cum monster. Unfortunately, Cassidy makes it all very terribly silly.
The five-year-old kid is both dumb as rocks but written far older than his years. There are reasons, I’m sure, but I’m not interested enough in Cassidy’s half-horror, half-comical farce to find out. The kid, of course, also has powers, which are telegraphed a mile away and so clumsily handled that I’m honestly not sure if Cassidy meant for there to be some grand reveal to shock and awe us, or if it was deliberately made to be oh so obvious that we’re forced to impatiently wait for the actress/waitress/heroine to finally get a clue.
WHEN THE WOLF COMES HOME reminds me a bit of a Dean Koontz book, with its focus on a precocious kid, the pseudo-mother figure to be who has rescued him, and the nonstop chase from an evil force that is hunting them. Only this isn’t good, classic, bald-headed, mustachioed G. Gordon Liddy-lookalike Koontz. It’s bad hair-transplant, New Agey dog religion worshipping, spiritually cringey, god-awful Koontz. Frankly, I’ve had enough of that particular Koontz without Cassidy aping it, too....more
DNF at 33%. Rather than be engaged with this supposedly sexy romance, I'm finding myself too annoyed by the characters to give a shit. He's a former SDNF at 33%. Rather than be engaged with this supposedly sexy romance, I'm finding myself too annoyed by the characters to give a shit. He's a former SEAL and son of the town's mayor. She's a salon owner and running against his father in the upcoming election. He's infatuated with her but every time he speaks he ends up putting his foot in his mouth and ticking her off. She's constantly swinging back and forth between wanting him and choosing celibacy to protect her image. Needless to say, they have some steamy sex.
I was already growing tired of their schtick by the 20% mark but wanted to see what might happen and gave it until 30% to improve. When the second sex scene rolled around - in a gas station bathroom, which the author paints as being clean and pine scented, I just couldn't suspend my disbelief long enough to roll with it. I'm guessing Beck has never been in a gas station men's room before and it shows. To add to the ludicrousness of it all, their sex gets interrupted by a trucker demanding to use the men's room, hears their grunting it out, and suggests the guy see a doctor before high-tailing it out of there. It's supposed to be cute and funny, at least as cute and funny as implied scatalogical humor during a furious fuck romp in a wholly fictitiously clean gas station's men room can be, but all I could do was roll my eyes and wonder just how many infections these two were going to coming out of that bathroom with.
Merged review:
DNF at 33%. Rather than be engaged with this supposedly sexy romance, I'm finding myself too annoyed by the characters to give a shit. He's a former SEAL and son of the town's mayor. She's a salon owner and running against his father in the upcoming election. He's infatuated with her but every time he speaks he ends up putting his foot in his mouth and ticking her off. She's constantly swinging back and forth between wanting him and choosing celibacy to protect her image. Needless to say, they have some steamy sex.
I was already growing tired of their schtick by the 20% mark but wanted to see what might happen and gave it until 30% to improve. When the second sex scene rolled around - in a gas station bathroom, which the author paints as being clean and pine scented, I just couldn't suspend my disbelief long enough to roll with it. I'm guessing Beck has never been in a gas station men's room before and it shows. To add to the ludicrousness of it all, their sex gets interrupted by a trucker demanding to use the men's room, hears their grunting it out, and suggests the guy see a doctor before high-tailing it out of there. It's supposed to be cute and funny, at least as cute and funny as implied scatalogical humor during a furious fuck romp in a wholly fictitiously clean gas station's men room can be, but all I could do was roll my eyes and wonder just how many infections these two were going to coming out of that bathroom with....more
I had to verify a few times over the course of my brief reading of This World Is Not Yours that I was, in fact, reading the right book. OveDNF at 40%.
I had to verify a few times over the course of my brief reading of This World Is Not Yours that I was, in fact, reading the right book. Over the last few days, I've been inundated with sponsored posts on my Facebook feed advertising this book as "nonstop action." The book's synopsis even describes this work as "action-packed" and promises the threat of an alien goo on a hostile world. Well, dear readers, at 40% in, I am still waiting for the action -- any action at all -- and the alien goo, the Gray, which exists to cleanse the world of invasive organisms, has only been briefly mentioned. The one big action set piece that has been introduced thus far, involving a raid on one colony by another hostile colony, has occurred entirely off-page and described only through exposition.
So, no action, and little to no alien goo thus far, and we're just shy of the half-way mark. The author, Kemi Ashing-Giwa, focuses instead on relationship drama between a dysfunctional polycule that has been mandated by the colony's government and torn apart a lesbian relationship to force our central protagonists into breeding with men. The central concern is whether or not Vinh and Amara's marriage can be saved, set against the lasting memory that Vinh has left Amara once before. I suppose, if one were to view this in a particularly skewed and slanted way, one might consider this a type of action, in much the sense that opening or closing a door is an action, just not a particularly exciting one. I, however, consider the handling of all this to be dull melodrama and boring relationship stuff.
I can't help but feel like there's been a bait-and-switch here between the book I thought I was getting when I requested this review copy, versus the book I actually got. But, one must review a work based on what it is and how well it goes about being that, rather than what one wanted or hoped it to be instead. Yes, I had hoped that This World Is Not Yours would be the next big work of alien horror, but the more I've read of it, up to this point, the more it has resisted and defied those expectations. What it is, then, based only on this book's roughly first half, is a toxic relationship drama that's presented to readers in the most deliberate and least interesting ways possible, despite offering a scenario still brimming with potential within this persistently at-odds and forced-upon dynamic. It's a book that's easy to set down and forget about, and that's exactly what I'm going to do now. I do like the cover, though, but even that promises more interest than the book can deliver....more
Beautiful cover art and a compelling synopsis can't save the prose on this one. The Deading reads more like a dry academic textbook on DNF at page 42.
Beautiful cover art and a compelling synopsis can't save the prose on this one. The Deading reads more like a dry academic textbook on oyster farming and birding than a horror novel, and it didn't take long for boredom to outweigh my patience. Moving onto my next read......more
I never did get around to checking out The Expanse series, in either book or television form, but that certainly didn't stop me from becominDNF at 39%
I never did get around to checking out The Expanse series, in either book or television form, but that certainly didn't stop me from becoming very familiar with James S.A. Corey, pen name for the writing duo of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, thanks to word of mouth and a whole lot of publicity. I thought this first installment of their new The Captive's War series, The Mercy of Gods, would be the perfect jumping on point, and all I can say now is, "This is what I've been missing?!.
Leaden prose. Shallow characters that are so unmemorable and paper-thin that to even call them one-dimensional is giving these authors too much credit. Absolutely glacial pacing. The astounding ability to turn what should be momentous events, like an alien invasion and the absolute annihilation of a civilization, into mundane, forgettable, dull instances that occur with nary a shrug. At least the authors almost try to make central protagonist Dafyd somewhat interesting by making him a complete asshole whose sole reason for existing is to manipulate others as he tries to bed fellow research scientist Else. The latter is smart and beautiful, or so we're told, repeatedly, which about all Corey can muster up in an attempt to define her, and is more depth than they can be bothered to give any of the other women in this book's largely interchangeable cast of Man 1, Man 2, Woman 1, Woman 2, etc. etc. etc. Yes, these other characters do indeed have names, but that's about the only sort of differentiation Corey can muster. Readers will be hard-pressed to tell one apart from another, though.
The Mercy of Gods has to be among the most lackluster "big-budget" sci-fi efforts I've read in a while, and even after the destruction of their world and their abduction by a mysterious alien race the greatest threat these characters face is the reader's ability to bother turning from one page to the next our of sheer boredom. Everything about this book positively reeks of "been there, done that," and has been done better virtually everywhere else. Either this fiasco is a complete misfire from the authors Corey or my tastes have once again deviated greatly from the mainstream tastemakers. Dropping this book nearly halfway through may be an act of preserving what little sanity and patience I have left, but skipping it altogether would have been a far greater mercy. ...more
Gary Whitta's Gundog offered a lot of promise, but failed to deliver. It revolves around an alien invasion, and in the book's opener we getDNF at 30%.
Gary Whitta's Gundog offered a lot of promise, but failed to deliver. It revolves around an alien invasion, and in the book's opener we get a two page infodump that catches us up on future history, which - in the 85 pages I read - is about as interesting as this book gets. A machine race known as the Mek (get it? Mek because they're mechanical beings? I'm not sure if they named themselves that or if it was meant as a derogatory hardy har har name invented by the humans they subjugated.) came to Earth in peace, seeking to trade their advanced technology for our natural resources, which their dying home world was in desperate need of. But, since humanity is the shitshow that it is, we decided we could just take their technology in lieu of nothing at all, and declared war, because we're a cynical, barbaric species and such is our way. Of course, the Mek's peaceful ways hid a hugely advanced military might that they used to wipe the Earth's ass with us and claim our planet for themselves. Humanity was rounded up into labor camps, which is where Gundog actually begins and any excitement that may have existed in this story goes to die.
Mechs are a hugely important part of this book. The alien race is wholly mechanical and Gundog arrives in timely fashion given current events regarding the threats posed by artificial intelligence to humanity, employment, and the arts (see the Writer's Guild of America's strike, for instance, and their demands to regulate AI in Hollywood productions). There are giant mechanized war machines the humans piloted in the war called Gundogs, and one long lost, fabled Gundog left standing as a monument by the Meks to humanity's utter failure supposedly still standing outside Bismark, ND, or so rumor has it. Whitta's writing is mechanical, too -- stiff, dull, and completely lifeless, there's no joy, urgency, or amusement to be found in these words. The book itself may as well have been outlined by AI with the prompt "The Hunger Games meets Robot Jox" it's so trope-ridden.
If you've read virtually any post-apocalyptic dystopian book with a YA woman destined for greatness thanks to her unknown especially to her legacy on a Joseph Campbell hero's journey, aided by a boy she knowns nothing about but who knows more than her about basically everything including her familial legacy, you've read far less robotic versions of Gundog already....more
DNF at 13%. The writing/translation is pedestrian, the pacing slow and plodding, and the humor is too flat and goofy for my tastes. I'm chalking this DNF at 13%. The writing/translation is pedestrian, the pacing slow and plodding, and the humor is too flat and goofy for my tastes. I'm chalking this up to one of those rare instances where the movie was better than the book....more
DNF @ 32%. While I enjoy Philip Plait's work as a science communicator and find his tweets entertaining, Under Alien Skies is proving a bit too dry anDNF @ 32%. While I enjoy Philip Plait's work as a science communicator and find his tweets entertaining, Under Alien Skies is proving a bit too dry and repetitive for me. It does have some truly striking photography, but the text itself isn't really firing up my imagination as much as I'd hoped. Sorry, Philip!...more
As much as I was looking forward to this book and had hoped I would like it, I'm having the hardest time connecting with it and am finding myself incrAs much as I was looking forward to this book and had hoped I would like it, I'm having the hardest time connecting with it and am finding myself increasingly bored. Tonally, it reminds me of Kathe Koja's The Cipher - it's dark and moody, to the point of being overwrought, and tries too hard to be edgy (I've seen some other reviews dinging Tell Me I'm Worthless as being little more than some Twitter edgelord's attempt at writing fiction and as somebody who's seen and has had enough of Twitter edgelords, I can't really disagree). At 28%, it's also proving itself to be just as pointless and unnecessarily stretched out as The Cipher, and I refuse to put myself through this crap again. This might have been a good short story, or maybe a novella at most, but given how tedious the writing is at little more than a quarter of the way through, there's no way I can handle 200 more pages of this. I greatly appreciate Tor Nightfire providing me with a NetGalley ARC, but it's turned out this book just isn't for me....more
DNF at 53%. Holy Ghost Road is styled like a chase thriller, but feels a lot like just running in place. The characters don’t really go anywhere and tDNF at 53%. Holy Ghost Road is styled like a chase thriller, but feels a lot like just running in place. The characters don’t really go anywhere and they do a lot of it, getting nowhere fast. They run, they rest, they get chased again, they run some more. They run across land, down the road, through the woods, swim across a lake to an island, then leave by boat to get back to land, to flee through the woods again, to get to the road, to escape again, to be chased again, and on and on and on. The plot moves with the ease of convenience heaped upon convenience, and the whole damn thing is just tiring as all get out. I’m not feeling this one at all…...more
DNF at 40%. This book feels incredibly derivative of last year's Curse of the Reaper, and I'm having a real hard time caring despite my fondness for cDNF at 40%. This book feels incredibly derivative of last year's Curse of the Reaper, and I'm having a real hard time caring despite my fondness for cursed movie productions. It's slow and plodding, and 'protagonist suffers from blackouts right before violent incidents occur' is probably my least favorite trope ever. So far, this book feels too familiar in the been there, done that kind of way, and I'm not connecting with it at all despite too many days of trying. This one's not for me....more