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Don Lee Reviews The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Undead

Don Lee Reviews The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Undead

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huckleberry_finn_and_zombie_jimThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim: Mark Twain’s Classic with Crazy Zombie Goodness
Mark Twain and W. Bill Czolgosz
Coscom Entertainment (206 pp, $15.99, 2009)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Undead
Mark Twain and Don Borchert
Tor (304 pp, $13.99, 2010)
Reviewed by Don Lee

I like zombies better than vampires. It is a lot harder to prettify zombies. They shamble. They eat brains. You blow their brains out. In origin, of course, the Romero-esque brain-eating zombies have about as much to do with “real” Haitian zombies as the sexy noble vampires of Twilight have to do with the monster that is Dracula, much less the original walking bags-of-blood from whose folklore the modern literary vampire descends.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim: Mark Twain’s Classic with Crazy Zombie Goodness, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Undead are, of course, part of the recent trend of Classic Novel plus fill-in-the-blank-monster that has brought us such gems as Little Vampire Women, Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Android Karenina, Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers, The Undead World of Oz, Mansfield Park and Mummies, Jane Slayre, Alice in Zombieland, and Emma and the Werewolves. So far. …

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Goth Chick News: When Goth Chicks Attack

Goth Chick News: When Goth Chicks Attack

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image002Vampire Fashionistas, Flesh-Eating Ogres, Paranoid Werewolves and Sugar-Addicted Zombies…

Welcome to Gothopolis.

As I stare at the cover of Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1 which was just delivered by the spotty intern handling the Black Gate mailroom this semester, several thoughts are competing for top billing; like “Where is this ‘Gothopolis’?” and “Someone get my travel agent on the horn,” and “Would Steven Roman mind if I developed a crush on him?”

Finally, someone who understands…

The cover of this magnificent work of art is reminiscent of looking in a mirror. Okay, not so much. But still I’m mesmerized. Is this really a novel about a zombie shooting, werewolf booting Goth chick?

It looks too good to be true really.

So I fire up the blender and with fine adult beverage in hand, I climb into my comfy chair (the big leather one just under the life-size stand up of Bela Lugosi) to have a nice, long, get-to-know-you session with Pandora Zwieback.

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Chris Braak Reviews First Lord’s Fury

Chris Braak Reviews First Lord’s Fury

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first-lords-fury
First Lord’s Fury
Jim Butcher
Ace Books (784 pp, $9.99, paperback November 2010)
Reviewed by Chris Braak

Despite the phenomenal success of his better known Dresden Files, the steady-hand and breakneck pace of First Lord’s Fury suggests that maybe Jim Butcher’s heart lies in epic fantasy.

First Lord’s Fury is the sixth, and presumably final, book in Butcher’s Codex Alera series. It brings to conclusion the long war that the Alerans and their sometimes-enemies, sometimes-allies, the Canim, have been fighting against the Vord. As in previous novels, the action is split: first between Tavi’s family who, along with the survivors of Alera Imperia (which was destroyed when a volcano erupted under it) fight a holding action across what remains of Alera, pursued to its edge by the relentless insectoid Vord. Meanwhile, Tavi – Gaius Octavian himself, the new First Lord of Alera – his band of merry men, and his new army of gigantic lycanthropes, struggle to develop increasingly improbable means to cross an entire continent in time to save the last remnants of his civilization.

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The Woman in Black Is Good-Old Hammer, And That’s All Right with Me

The Woman in Black Is Good-Old Hammer, And That’s All Right with Me

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the-woman-in-black-poster-3The Woman in Black (2012)
Directed by James Watkins. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds, Janet McTeer.

Watching The Woman in Black was the first time in my life that I got to see a Hammer Horror movie first run in a theater. That is just kind of totally amazing. Hammer Film Productions is responsible for nearly half of the horror movies I would list as my favorites, and just the name of the studio summons up delicious visions of Gothic wonder the likes of which live in a distant realm, a dream-state, along with the great Universal monster classics.

Hammer was a studio of the past: it released its last horror film, To the Devil, A Daughter, in 1976, and its final theatrical film, a re-make of The Lady Vanishes, in 1979. But Hammer resurrected itself as a working production company in 2007, and with The Woman in Black it returns to the genre that made it famous: Gothic Victorian horror.

The giants walk the Earth once more!

Oh, how’s the film? It’s fairly good.

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Steampunk Spotlight: Cherie Priest’s Dreadnought

Steampunk Spotlight: Cherie Priest’s Dreadnought

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dreadnoughtDreadnought (Amazon, B&N)
Cherie Priest
Tor (400 pp., $14.99, 2010)

Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Cherie Priest returns to her “Clockwork Century” in full force in this third novel. In some ways, I would recommend that readers begin with Dreadought, even though it’s the third book in the series. Basically, the plot twist at the end of Dreadnought is the entire premise of Boneshaker, as I’ll explain later in the review. (Spoiler-ish alert!)

The book focuses on Mercy Lynch, a Confederate nurse whose husband has just died fighting for the Union. (Gotta love those border state romances!) She receives word from her father – who left her as a child – that he is dying, and he would like her to visit him in the Washington territory. That father is Jeremiah Swankhammer, who readers of Boneshaker will recognize as one of the key characters in that story.

With nothing really to keep her in Virginia, she sets off on a cross-country journey by airship and train to reach Tacoma and, ultimately, Seattle.  Unfortunately, the only train that can get her from St. Louis to Tacoma is the Union steam engine Dreadnought, and the train is carrying some bizarre cargo … cargo which makes the train trip into a harrowing ride that brings Mercy and the other passengers into conflict with bushwackers, a mad scientist, and even zombies!

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Mark Rigney Reviews The Holler

Mark Rigney Reviews The Holler

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the-hollerThe Holler
Marge Fulton
BlackWyrm Press (87pp, $11.95, 2010; kindle edition $2.99)
Reviewed by Mark Rigney

Brevity, observed Shakespeare in the ghost story known as Hamlet, is the soul of wit. Does it follow that it is also the soul of horror fiction? Writers as diverse as Shirley Jackson (“The Lottery”) and Jeffrey Ford (“The Night Whiskey”) rise at once to make the case for the sharp, jabbing effects of short-form terrors. Now enter Marge Fulton with The Holler: Tales of horror from Appalachia. Fulton’s arsenal starts with brevity in the extreme. The book’s eighty-seven pages pack twenty-four separate stories.

“Black Santa” opens the set with a deaf dreamer trying to regain the toy she lost as a child, getting it, and discovering that once you have Santa for a toy, the gifts just keep on giving. Hardly a horrific opener, except for the tawdry semi-Southern Gothic feel, and the next in line, “Preying Hands,” turns out to be science fiction (of the murderous fat camp variety). A haywire ATM spurts blood in “Blood Bank,” for reasons as yet undivulged, but we know this is Appalachia because leading lady Bree frequents the Boone Ridge Mini-Mart and the Nearly New Shop while, in another tale, a character slurps Mountain Dew.

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Matthew David Surridge Reviews The Last Page

Matthew David Surridge Reviews The Last Page

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the-last-page-husoThe Last Page
Anthony Huso
Tor (431 pp, $25.99, 2010)
Reviewed by Matthew David Surridge

Anthony Huso’s debut novel The Last Page is something of a problem. It’s not that it is a bad book; in many ways, it is quite a good one. In fact, it is good enough, creative enough, smart enough, that it raises expectations. You want it to be great. And that is the problem, because I don’t think it is.

The Last Page is a high-fantasy steampunk novel, and a love story. We follow the sexually charged relationship between the improbably named Caliph Howl, heir to the throne of the northern country of Stonehold, and a witch named Sena. The two of them meet at university, go their own ways, and then come together again after Caliph has become king and Sena has acquired a vastly powerful magical tome. Unfortunately, Caliph is facing a civil war against a national hero, and Sena’s book has a lock which can only be opened at a fearsome emotional cost.

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Atomic Fury: The Original Godzilla on Criterion Collection Blu-ray

Atomic Fury: The Original Godzilla on Criterion Collection Blu-ray

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bill-sienkiewicz-godzilla-criterion-cover

This week’s release of the original 1954 Japanese Godzilla (Gojira) on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection is a major step in recognition for the film in the US. Yes, that’s the Criterion Collection, the premiere quality home video release company, acknowledging that Godzilla is a world cinema classic.

As a life-long Godzilla and giant monster fanatic, I can tell you what a long journey we’ve taken to get to this point. When I became feverishly interested in Japanese fantasy cinema, beyond the boyhood love, in my early twenties, Godzilla and its brethren had almost zero respect in North America. And zero quality home video releases. Even as the awful Roland Emmerich Godzilla hit screens to howls of hatred, there was no corresponding move to get the real films out to North American viewers in editions with subtitles and decent widescreen presentations.

In the mid-2000s, the shift started. The original Godzilla, not the Americanized version with Raymond Burr, got a theatrical stateside release, and then a DVD from Classic Media. G-Fans such as myself were finally freed from having to see the movie on bootleg VHS tapes and could recommend it easily to friends, promising them that the Japanese original would blow their mind with its quality. Now, we’re getting into the big-time cineaste world with Hi-Def and the Criterion Collection.

However, I’d like to temper my enthusiasm for 1954’s Godzilla with this statement: although a great film, it is not my favorite Godzilla movie, nor is it representative of the series.

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J.M. McDermott’s Never Knew Another

J.M. McDermott’s Never Knew Another

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Never Knew AnotherNever Knew Another
by J.M. McDermott
Night Shade Books (240pp, $14.99 USD, trade paperback February 2011)
Reviewed by Matthew David Surridge

J.M. McDermott’s third book, Never Knew Another, is a secondary-world fantasy tale told in a sparse yet elegant style, about hunters seeking dangerous magical prey — and also about two people drawing closer to each other without knowing it, despite having to hide their true natures from the world around them. Perspectives nest one inside another; the book’s always clear, but leaves much meaningfully unsaid, and effortlessly holds the voices of its characters in a delicate balance, allowing them to contrast with each other without any given one being overwhelmed. It’s a remarkable accomplishment, and a strong, unconventional beginning to a promising trilogy.

It starts with a pair of holy werewolves, following a trail to a human city they call Dogsland. The werewolves are hunting demons, or humans with demonic ancestry. Creatures with demons in their family tree are dangerous; their sweat is acidic, and their blood can wither plants, or make normal humans very sick indeed. It’s as though they’re radioactive, potentially causing illness and death around them even if they don’t consciously intend evil. The hunters see their task as a sacred duty. Their story, though, is effectively a frame for the main action; one of the hunters communes with the memories of a dead demon-descended man, searching through those recollections for hints of the whereabouts of others of his kind. The stories of that man, Jona Lord Joni, and of the others of his kind that he knows, provide the meat of the book.

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Thomas M. MacKay Reviews The Spirit Thief

Thomas M. MacKay Reviews The Spirit Thief

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the-spirit-thiefThe Spirit Thief
Rachel Aaron
Orbit Books (327 pp, $7.99, October 2010)
Reviewed by Thomas M. MacKay

Eli Monpress is a thief, and he would be the first to tell you that he is a pretty good one. That is not the reason the wizards of the Spirit Court have put a bounty on his head and sent one of their top troubleshooters to hunt him. Eli Monpress is also a wizard, and he is giving the wizards a bad name. He is deuced hard to catch, though. He travels with a swordsman who carries a magical sword he refuses to use, a demon-possessed girl who refuses to succumb to her demon, and the voices of all the spirits that live in every tumbled rock and growing tree. And Eli Monpress has a goal – it may not be his only goal, it may not even be his most important goal, but Eli Monpress intends to have the bounty on his head grow to be the largest there has ever been.

Of course, in order to do that he is going to have to give a lot of people pretty significant reasons to dedicate their gold to his capture. And since he is a thief, that means stealing things – and he travels to the little country of Mellinor to do just that. Mellior’s perfect because, by law, no wizards are allowed to live there. But Mellinor doesn’t have any great treasures in its treasure room worth doubling the bounty on Eli’s head, so he will have to steal something else. Something they would notice; something they would want back. Something that usually sits on the throne. Or perhaps that should be someone…

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