Browsed by
Category: Reviews

Mortals, Meet the Dark and Twisty: A Review of Goblin Fruit, Part III

Mortals, Meet the Dark and Twisty: A Review of Goblin Fruit, Part III

Comments 4 comments

header2Hallo again, Ye Faithful Paladins of the Black Gate!

So nice to hobnob with you here, with every mother’s child of you looking so ruddy and so spry. Ah. I notice that since last we met you’ve invested in cold iron and a few sprigs of rowanberries. Protective charms. Hedge-witchery. Well done! I mean, it probably won’t protect you from the wrath of the mighty Goblin Hordes in the long run, but nice try anyway! You’re learning.

So, look. In Part I and Part II of this here saga, I introduced y’all to the myth, mischief and magic that is Goblin Fruit Magazine. In my final homage to the Goblin Queens, editrices Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica P. Wick, I feel it worth mentioning their literary endeavors independent of Goblin Fruit, both prose and poetry, which may be found in such places as Strange Horizons (Amal’s “And Their Lips Rang with the Sun, for example, and Jess’s “How Wizards Duel”), Mythic Delirium, and Cabinet des Fées.

That’s just the beginning of their genre-spanning conquest, of course, but this is the 21st Century. Our friend “Google” will take you the rest of the way.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Satan Took the Elevator, But I Took the Stairs

Goth Chick News: Satan Took the Elevator, But I Took the Stairs

Comments 4 comments

image0043“For the love of God, not another one!”

I was in the midst of exchanging text messages with my regular movie-date crowd, trying to decide what we were going to see. At the top of my list was a new release called Devil which to its apparent detriment, had M. Night Shyamalan’s name attached to it.

You remember him, right? He’s the director who once told us amazing stories such as The Sixth Sense and Signs, but of late has attempted to force feed us unpalatable drivel like The Happening and The Last Air Bender.

M. Night is an amazing teller of tales. Were we all sitting around a campfire while he scared the crap out of us with masterful plot twists, I would never want to go home.

But apparently when he’s handed an all star cast and a multi-million dollar studio budget, what might have been an unforgettable fable makes me want to slit my wrists, at least lately.

If only M. Night would stick to the story-telling and leave the movie making to someone else…

…

Read More Read More

Batman: Under the Red Hood

Batman: Under the Red Hood

Comments 1 comment

batman_under_the_red_hood_posterBatman: Under the Red Hood (2010)
Directed by Brandon Vietti. Featuring the Voices of Bruce Greenwood, Jensen Ackles, Neil Patrick Harris, John DiMaggio, Jason Isaacs, Wade Williams.

Warner Bros. Animation’s series of straight-to-video PG-13 releases set in the DC Comics universe has been a great success. Starting in 2007 with Superman: Doomsday (which completely embarrassed the previous year’s live-action Superman Returns) the team at Warner Bros. that originally kicked off the DC Animated Universe with Batman: The Animated Series has turned out high quality, adult-slanted fare that has even excited me about characters that I don’t usually care much about, like Wonder Woman and the Green Lantern.

But, no surprise, much of the new DVD series has featured Batman, the hottest property in Warner Brothers’ DC catalog because of the huge success of the Christopher Nolan-directed movies. Batman got his own compilation disc with Batman: Gotham Knight (set in the Nolan-verse and featuring a round-robin of top anime-directing talents), co-starred with Superman in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies (an adaptation of the Jeph Loeb-written arc in the popular Superman/Batman ongoing comic), and played a major part in Justice League: The New Frontier and Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths.

Now Batman has his second solo-starring release in the series. Based on a recent popular storyline in Batman’s eponymous comic book that tied into the mega-crossover event “Infinite Crisis,” Batman: Under the Red Hood brings PG-13 to the small screen in a big way. In fact, the film flirts with a “soft R” rating, and it’s definitely not for children—unless you don’t mind your children watching not one but two brutal beatings with a crowbar.

…

Read More Read More

Reconsiderations: The Book of The Dun Cow and The Book of Sorrows

Reconsiderations: The Book of The Dun Cow and The Book of Sorrows

Comments 0 Comment

The Book of the Dun CowOne of the characteristics of a great book is that you can go back to it at different times in your life and get different things out of it. But then sometimes the reverse happens: you read a book before you’re ready. If you’re lucky, though, the book hangs around in the back of your mind, and eventually you pick it up again and find out what you weren’t able to grasp the first time around.

When I was in elementary school, someone gave me a copy of The Book of the Dun Cow, by Walter Wangerin, Jr. I read it, but I didn’t particularly appreciate it. Many years later, I bought another copy, and was much more impressed. I also understood why I didn’t care for it as a child. Not long ago, I found a copy of the sequel The Book of Sorrows. Reading the books together I was impressed again.

The books are an animal fantasy, set when “the earth was still fixed in the absolute center of the universe. It had not yet been cracked loose from that holy place, to be sent whirling — wild, helpless, and ignorant — among the blind stars. And the sun still traveled around the moored earth, so that days and nights belonged to the earth and to the creatures thereon, not to a ball of silent fire. The clouds were still considered to flow at a very great height, halfway between the moon and the waters below; and God still chose to walk among the clouds, striding, like a man who strides through his garden in the sweet evening.”

Humans have not yet been made, and the world is inhabited by animals, who talk and think. And they have a purpose, which is to act as Keepers against Wyrm, the evil that dwells in the heart of the earth and wants to ruin all creation. It is the connection between the animals — their community — that keeps Wyrm from rising. The two books describe two particularly vicious assaults by Wyrm against his keepers, and what happens to the animals as a result.

…

Read More Read More

Not-So Short Fiction Review: Prospero Lost

Not-So Short Fiction Review: Prospero Lost

Comments 0 Comment

prospero-lost2Prospero Lost, by L. Jagi Lamplighter
Tor (448 pages, $7.99, June 2010)

Prospero Lost is the first book of a trilogy and the first published novel by L. Jagi Lamplighter, whose name I assume is not a pseudonym,  though it sounds as if it could be a character in her own book.  As you might gather from the title, the story has something to do with what many critics perceive as Shakespeare’s alter ego in his final play, The Tempest, while also somehow involving hell and rebellious offspring given the  allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost. What you might not expect is just about every fantasy trope you can think of, including (I kid you not), Santa Claus.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Lamplighter is married to John C. Wright, who also favors the everything-including-the-kitchen sink approach to fantasy and manages to make it work. In many respects, Lamplighter’s book reminds me of Wright’s Chronicles of Chaos series which deals with the foibles of family relationships among seeming humans possessed of fantastical natures. Of course, the root of this is Greek/Roman mythology in which imperfect gods irrationally vie among each other out of jealously, envy, egotism or other petty and irrational motivations.  They are, in other words, normal human beings dressed up in magical togas.

According to Lamplighter, the inspiration for her novel’s fantasy world  stemmed from a roleplaying game.

Somewhere in the early Nineties, John and I were invited to play in a roleplaying game run by a friend. He was a new moderator for us, so I decided to write a short story demonstrating what my character could do, so there would be no misunderstandings. For my character, I picked Miranda, the daughter of the magician Prospero from Shakespeare’s Tempest, only in the game, Prospero would turn out to be one of the magicians in the game background…We only played in that game a few times, but I liked the character and the story I had written.

Miranda is the narrator and focus of the novel (indeed, the overarching title of the trilogy is Prospero’s Daughter) and Prospero remains totally off-stage.  He is lost, and Miranda is trying to find out what happened to him.

…

Read More Read More

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.1 “Exile on Main Street”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.1 “Exile on Main Street”

Comments 2 comments

Season 6 starts a year after the events in the finale of Season 5, which I detailed a few days ago. This blog post is being written somewhat stream-of-consciousnessly as I watch the episode.

SUPERNATURAL
Dean Winchester (left), Sam Winchester (center), and their formerly-dead grandfather, Samuel Campbell (right)
It will contain spoilers (like the picture at the right).

You have been warned.

At the start of the episode, Dean’s been living a year with Lisa and her son, Ben, in suburbia, after his Lucifer-possessed brother, Sam, dove into a trans-dimensional prison to save the world. It’s clear that Dean hasn’t completely gotten over his past, though, as a montage relating his mundane daily tasks to his former life makes clear.

Still, he’s making friends. One in particular, a neighbor named Sid, seems to have bonded with him over regular beers, but Dean isn’t sharing anything about his past with him. He tells him that he used to be in pest control. (I, for one, am pegging Sid as a demon or something. He’s just a little too interested in Dean’s past.)

…

Read More Read More

Supernatural Spotlight – Season Four and Five Recap

Supernatural Spotlight – Season Four and Five Recap

Comments 5 comments

supernatural-season4Yesterday, I described the second and third seasons of Supernatural which all built up toward Dean Winchester’s death, as part of a demonic deal to save his brother.

Dean was sucked into Hell, leaving his brother Sam on Earth with the demon Ruby, who has taken on something of a friend and mentorship role with him.

More spoilers to follow …

Season Four

Season four of Supernatural began, a year after his death, with Dean crawling his way out of the grave with no real idea how he got back. But he doesn’t appear to be a demon or any other kind of beastie … so what’s going on?

…

Read More Read More

Harold Lamb’s Swords From the West and Swords From the Desert

Harold Lamb’s Swords From the West and Swords From the Desert

Comments 4 comments

haroldlambSwords From the West
Harold Lamb
Howard Andrew Jones, ed.
Bison Books (602 pp, $26.95, 2009)

Swords From the Desert
Harold Lamb
Howard Andrew Jones, ed.
Bison Books (306 pp, $21.95, 2009)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

Harold Lamb (1892-1962) is an author in danger of being forgotten. This should not be the case, for a number of reasons. Firstly, Lamb is good — from his historical biographies that read like action-adventure novels, to his actual action-adventure stories that cemented his status as a king of the pulps, Lamb is a terrific writer. He is also a diverse writer, having achieved success in both fiction and non-fiction, magazines and books, and even as a Hollywood screenwriter.

And, not to be overlooked, he is a historically significant writer in the evolution of fiction — serving as a bridge from the pulp era to the post-war era, and as a grandfather figure to the kind of adventure fantasy pioneered by Robert E. Howard and then expanded upon by the greats of the field such as Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner, Leigh Brackett, Steven Brust, and Charles Saunders. The idiom in which today’s current crop of rising Sword & Sorcery stars work within can be traced right back to the nineteen teens and twenties, and the historical adventures of Harold Lamb that did so much to inform the approach of the future creator of Conan.

…

Read More Read More

Supernatural Spotlight – Season Two and Three Recap

Supernatural Spotlight – Season Two and Three Recap

Comments 10 comments

supernatural-season21When last we left Sam and Dean Winchester, they’d rejoined their father, John, and confronted the demon that killed their mother (a demon with glowing yellow eyes, named Azazel), but the demon got away. Season one ended with their car being slammed into by a semi being driven by a demon.

Now, allow me to spoil a couple more seasons of the show, before the season 6 premiere on Friday.

Season Two

Season two starts immediately after the accident, with the demon trying getting out of the semi to kill them. Sam, however, is conscious, and he’s able to chase the demon off with the Colt. (Remember, the Colt is a special gun they located which can kill any demon.)

…

Read More Read More

A Review of The House of Dead Maids

A Review of The House of Dead Maids

Comments 11 comments

house-dead-maidsLast week I was contacted by Barbara Fisch at Blue Slip Media, who’s been recommending and sending review copies to me for nearly fifteen years. Barbara had flagged The House of Dead Maids by Clare B. Dunkle (author of the Hollow Kingdom trilogy), just released in hardcover from Holt, as of possible interest to Black Gate readers. And from her description, it sounded like she could be right:

The House of Dead Maids is billed as a prelude to Wuthering Heights, as it features a character who will come to be known as Healthcliff. The novel is a scary blending of Yorkshire lore and Bronte family history. The child (Heathcliff) is already a savage little creature when Tabby Aykroyd arrives at Seldom House as his nursemaid. The ghost of the last maid will not leave Tabby in peace, and her spirit is only one of many. As she struggles against the evil forces that surround the house, Tabby tries to befriend her uncouth young charge, but her kindness can’t alter his fate.

The real task, as always, was matching the ideal reviewer with the book… a bit more of a challenge for a 151-page book with an eleven year-old narrator, I grant you.

As luck would have it, I happened to have an eleven-year old reader in the house, who innocently picked up the book the day it arrived.  I know when the stars have aligned, and sat down with a notepad and pen to interview her minutes after she finished reading The House of Dead Maids.

We’ll call this young reader “Tabitha,” because of what happened when her mother found out I was going to use her picture and real name on the Internet.

…

Read More Read More