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Michaele Jordan Reviews Pantheon

Michaele Jordan Reviews Pantheon

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pantheon-510Pantheon
Josh Strnad
Urania Speculative Fiction, an imprint of Musa Publishing, Colorado Springs, CO (180 pp in Adobe pdf format, $4.99, Kindle edition, April 2014)
Reviewed by Michaele Jordan

Josh Strnad does not look like a horror writer. He’s not dark and brooding, or dressed in black leather. Rather, he’s young and blond, fresh faced and apple-cheeked. He looks like he just came straight from a Wisconsin dairy farm. (And for all I know, he did.) Yet he writes horror. It says so right there on his website.

You probably didn’t need me to tell you that. Quite likely you’ve caught one of his stories. He first came to my attention with ‘Hellevator,’ in Eric J. Guignard’s 2013 collection, After Death… An Anthology of Dark and Speculative Fiction Stories Examining What May Occur After We Die. But you may prefer ‘If You Should Die Before I Wake’ which appeared Nightmare Stalkers & Dream Walkers from Horrified Press, also in 2013.

He has not slacked off with the new year. His H.P. Lovecraft tribute, “Goddess of Our Fathers,” is featured in the new Dark Hall Press Cosmic Horror Anthology. And his latest story ‘The Last Kiss” (he tells us this is unlike anything else he’s ever written) will soon be available in Vignettes From The End Of The World.

In short, he’s written a lot of good stories. Which means it’s time for a novel. So. . . here it is! Pantheon is not, strictly speaking, horror, although it has its horrific moments. It’s more a cross-genre work, merging Greek mythology with the old West. Of course, Greek mythology may not count as a genre, but no matter. This isn’t the same Greek mythology you got from Edith Hamilton in school.

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Alana Joli Abbott Reviews Codex Born

Alana Joli Abbott Reviews Codex Born

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codex born coverCodex Born
Jim C. Hines
Daw (320 pgs, $24.95, hardcover August 2013)

There aren’t many writers who can start with the concept of a literal fantasy woman, pulled from the pages of her book to fulfill her lover’s dreams, and turn her from a slave into a complex hero, struggling to understand her own identity and to create herself as a real person. Jim Hines is one of them.

Codex Born, the sequel to Libriomancer, is narrated by fantasy book lover and magician Isaac Vaino, but in many ways the book belongs to Lena Greenwood, a dryad drawn from a pulp SF novel and Isaac’s girlfriend. Libriomancer concluded with Isaac and Lena and Lena’s girlfriend (Isaac’s former therapist) Nidhi Shah agreeing that they’d embark on a shared relationship — both Isaac and Nidhi would be Lena’s lovers, which would allow Lena, product of her book, and thus destined to conform to her lovers’ desires, a chance to become her own person by existing in the conflicting space between Isaac and Nidhi. In Codex Born, that relationship starts to play out — both Nidhi and Isaac struggle with the dynamic, but keep on trying for Lena’s sake — and Lena continues to hope that she can find a way to preserve who she is, even if something happened to Isaac or Nidhi.

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Michaele Jordan Reviews After Death

Michaele Jordan Reviews After Death

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After_Death_CoverAfter Death. . .
An Anthology of Dark and Speculative Fiction Stories Examining What May Occur After We Die
Edited by Eric J. Guignard
Dark Moon Books, an imprint of Stony Meadow Publishing, Largo FL (292 pp, $15.95, trade paperback, April 2013)
Reviewed by Michaele Jordan

As you can guess from the title, Eric J. Guignard has assembled an assortment of viewpoints about the afterlife. These thirty-four stories (illustrated by Audra Phillips) cover a surprising range, especially since the viewpoint most professed by science fiction fans is the least represented. Please do not interpret that remark as a criticism. There’s not a lot of story to tell in a story about nothing happening. Yet even the perception of the afterlife as nothingness is included with ‘The Last Moments Before Bed,’ in which Steve Rasnic Tem confronts the dreadful hole remaining after a loved one is gone.

These stories run the gamut from blissful to black; John Palisano’s ‘Forever’ anticipates a joyful reunion, while Kelly Dunn’s ‘Marvel at the Face of Forever’ is one of the darkest horror stories this reviewer has ever seen. Several authors contrast the Christian afterworld with the pagan, as in the Christian displacement of the Greek afterlife in Jonathan Shipley’s ‘Like a Bat out of Hell,’ or Valhalla’s continued rowdy intrusion into the Catholic middle ages as told by Christine Morgan in ‘A Feast of Meat and Mead.’

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Beth Dawkins Reviews Ironskin

Beth Dawkins Reviews Ironskin

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ironskincoverIronskin
Tina Connolly
TOR (304pp, $24.99, Hardcover, October 2012)
Reviewed by Beth Dawkins

Ironskin is a fairy tale reimagining of Jane Eyre and the debut novel for author Tina Connolly. I have never read Jane Eyre, and wouldn’t have known the two were related, but there was an author note at the end.

Our Jane comes to the mysterious Mr. Rochart’s home to work as a governess to his child, Dorie. Dorie, like Jane, has been affected by the fey war. Unlike Jane, Dorie does not wear the scars on her face. Instead her power came from birth. Her mother was taken over by a fey before she was born, leaving Dorie with a fey curse. The girl can make things fly, and uses her power instead of her hands. Jane is tasked with teaching Dorie to use her hands, and act like any other child. As Jane works with Dorie to these ends, she discovers more about the fey curses than she bargained for.

Jane’s life has been hard. Her brother lost his life in the fey war. A bomb destroyed him, and the fey shrapnel from the blast caught Jane in the face, destroying one side of it. The shrapnel from the bomb has a type of fey substance in it that causes those maimed in the war to be cursed. These curses make those injured feel unpleasant things such as sadness, hunger, and, in Jane’s case, rage. The curse also affects those that come in contact with the scarred person. Jane wears an iron mask that shrouds half of her face to keep her wounds from infecting anyone else. People like Jane are called ‘ironskin.’ While this has caused self-loathing and depression in Jane, it quickly becomes repetitive.

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Josh Wimmer Reviews Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Dungeons & Dragons

Josh Wimmer Reviews Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Dungeons & Dragons

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everythingineed-toknowilearnedfromdungeonsdragonsEverything I Need to Know I Learned From Dungeons & Dragons
Shelly Mazzanoble
Wizards of the Coast (192 pp, $12.95, September 2011)
Reviewed by Josh Wimmer

I have my first-edition AD&D Monster Manual open on my desk, and I’m looking at the entry for “mimic.” As many of you will likely recall, a mimic is a creature that disguises itself as something else — a chest, maybe, or a door — to fool unwary adventurers.

That is where my head went after reading Shelly Mazzanoble’s second book; she is a bit of a mimic. I don’t mean that she cannot stand sunlight or that she resembles stone or wood — hey, this is not a perfect analogy — or even that her armor class is only 7. I bet it is at least 5. She strikes me as dexterous (not to mention closer to chaotic good than true neutral).

No, what I mean is that Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Dungeons & Dragons, while delightful, struck me as only tangentially “One Woman’s Quest to Turn Self-Help Into Elf-Help,” as the subtitle puts it.

Mazzanoble is fun to spend time with. Most of the book is concerned with her relationships with her mom, Judy (this is the mom ur-name, I think), and boyfriend, Bart. Judy has a lot of advice to offer, much of it on the subject of Mazzanoble and Bart’s love life. Mazzanoble clearly adores her mother — they talk daily, which I can accept intellectually is a beautiful thing, for someone else who is not me — but she gets justifiably fed up when Judy starts sending her an unending stream of books like The Secret.

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Cynthia Ward Reviews The Gods of Opar

Cynthia Ward Reviews The Gods of Opar

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farmer08_bGods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa
Philip José Farmer & Christopher Paul Carey
Subterranean Press  (576 pp, $65.00 Limited Edition Hardcover, $45.00 Trade Edition Hardcover)
Reviewed by Cynthia Ward

Once upon a time, in a lost civilization known as West Germany, the Kreuzberg Kaserne U.S. Army Base let fifth graders leave school grounds at lunchtime. Every week, I crossed the street to the little base bookstore. In the late winter of 1972, I bought the first DC Comics issue (#207) of “Tarzan of the Apes” because I wanted to learn how the heck a human being ended up living with apes. When the writer/artist, the late, much-lamented Joe Kubert, ended his adaptation with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s original cliffhanger, I read Burroughs’s sequel, The Return of Tarzan, to finish the origin story. Then I found myself devouring every other Burroughs book reprinted in the early 1970s.

I couldn’t have been the decade’s only new Burroughs fan, because by the mid-1970s, his estate had authorized two different Tarzan-related series by other authors: the Bunduki novels by J.T. Edson and the Ancient Opar novels by Philip José Farmer. Both series produced a novel or two and then, as far as I knew, ended. The tie-in titles went out of print, their copyright was probably owned or controlled by the Burroughs estate, and Philip José Farmer died in 2009. I figured none of these books would ever see another reprint.

I figured wrong, because Subterranean Press has just released Gods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa, which is an omnibus of the two Ancient Opar novels by Philip José Farmer – Hadon of Ancient Opar (1974) and Flight to Opar (1976) – together with a third, new novel in the series, The Song of Kwasin, by Philip José Farmer and Christopher Paul Carey (Black Gate recently ran essays from Carey about the history of his remarkable collaboration with Farmer, and his discussion of Farmer’s ambitious creation, the lost civilization of Khokarsa.)

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Michaele Jordan Reviews Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations

Michaele Jordan Reviews Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations

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dark_tales_artDark Tales of Lost Civilizations: An Anthology of Horror and Speculative Fiction Stories Unearthing our Forgotten Worlds and Societies
Edited by Eric J. Guignard
Dark Moon Books (pp 241, 25 stories, $14.37 trade paperback, February 2012)
Reviewed by Michaele Jordan

Many readers might think they knew what to expect from this book, just from the title. They would be wrong. Mr. Guignard does an astonishing job of expanding the apparent range of his title into a varied and colorful collection of almost everything under the sun, or rather, everything hidden away from the sun.

Who knew there were so many kinds of lost civilizations? The civilizations visited in these stories range from historically documented civilizations—either trampled under the march of history, as in Jamie Lackey’s story, “Quetzalcoatl’s Conquistador,” or active participants in the trampling, as in “The Funeral Procession” by Jay R. Thurston—to the entirely mythical, like that of “Gilgamesh and the Mountain” by Bruce L. Priddy. In between these two extremes, we find an intriguing half historical, half legendary lost society in Jackson Kuhl’s “Quivira”.

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Cynthia Ward Reviews Lost Things

Cynthia Ward Reviews Lost Things

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lostthingswebLost Things: Book I of the Order of the Air
Melissa Scott & Jo Graham
Crossroad Press (350 pp, $17.99, Paperback, $4.99, eBook, 2012)
Reviewed by Cynthia Ward

I first encountered Melissa Scott’s fiction in her second novel, The Roads of Heaven (1988), which is the first book of the Silence Leigh trilogy. I ended up reading all three novels, intrigued by their smart blending of familiar science fiction and fantasy elements (magic, interstellar travel, a gender-inequitable future) with a strong female lead, sharp prose, excellent characterizations, exceptional world-building, a quick pace, and an insightful exploration of gender roles. Despite a major lack of reading time, I made sure to read all subsequent Scott novels I saw, including her occasional collaborations with her partner, the writer/editor Lisa A. Barnett.

Shortly after the turn of the millennium, I stopped seeing new novels from Scott. I would puzzle over the sudden disappearance of a favorite author until, years later, I would learn that Scott’s partner of 27 years had passed away after a long struggle with cancer. I hoped that Scott would eventually return to writing, while understanding why she might not.

Well, Melissa Scott has returned. And she’s done so in less a whirlwind of activity than a tornado. She’s released a pair of new collaborative novels set in the Stargate Atlantis universe, and a new solo novella set in the Elizabethan-esque world of Astreiant, which she created with her late partner. Their previous Astreiant titles are being reissued, along with several of Scott’s other backlist titles. And she recently released another new novel, set in the shared world of the Orphic Crisis Logistical Taskforce series, and written in collaboration with Jo Graham, an author previously unknown to me. It is this last work, Lost Things: Book I of the Order of the Air, which concerns us here.

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Alana Joli Abbott Reviews Libriomancer

Alana Joli Abbott Reviews Libriomancer

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libriomancerLirbriomancer
Jim C. Hines
DAW (320 pgs, $24.95, hardcover August 2012)
Reviewed by Alana Joli Abbott

We have met this protagonist, and he is us.

Whenever I open a Jim Hines novel, I expect to have a good time – humor mixed with some soul pondering, deep character development, fast action, and snappy dialogue. So I was unsurprised that Libriomancer had all of these things in spades, plus a unique use of magic and a fractured and cobbled together cosmology that makes complete sense as a whole. What I didn’t expect was to see myself in the pages. With Isaac Vainio, Hines has created a protagonist who not only knows and loves the same geek pop culture that I do, but who has a passion for books as deep as my own. In Isaac’s case, this passion, the shared belief in the worlds that inhabit the pages of real-world books, allows him to reach inside those pages and draw objects into the real world.

When the book begins, Isaac has been forbidden from using his magic. He knows about a world populated by magical creatures – both indigenous to the real world and brought into it through the worlds of books – but he’s unable to access it. He’s an incredibly strong libriomancer – a magic user who uses books as both, as Isaac says, a church and an armory – but his rash decisions in the field have relegated him to desk work at a library. (As a former library worker myself, Isaac’s clear love of and appreciation for libraries resonates almost as deeply as his love of created worlds.) When he is attacked by vampires, and rescued by a curvy and kick-ass dryad named Lena, he has no choice but to give in to his longing to return to practicing magic. And it’s a good thing he does: the Porters, the guild of libriomancers dedicated to protecting the world from supernatural dangers, are facing an all out war, with their leader, Johannes Gutenberg, missing.

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Dossouye: The Dancers of Mulukau

Dossouye: The Dancers of Mulukau

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Dossouye The Dancers of Mulukau-smallDossouye: The Dancers of Mulukau
Charles R. Saunders
Sword & Soul Media (326 pp, $20.00, Paperback, 2011)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

Dossouye: The Dancers of Mulukau will feel a bit like new territory for fans of Charles R. Saunders. Unchanged, of course, is the terrific action and imagination of Saunders, and the fidelity to character and setting — indeed everything there is to love about Saunders’ Imaro and Dossouye stories is evident in this latest offering. But The Dancers of Mulukau is Saunders’ first full-length sword & sorcery offering of recent years that is not based wholly or in part on existing material, and represents the Saunders of today, not of decades ago. After the various ups and downs of Saunders’ publishing career, it feels good to at last come to a place in which this author’s classic works are now safely preserved and easily available. Now he is able to move forward into as yet uncharted territory to tell new stories and develop new themes, reminding us once again why he must be counted among the giants of the field of heroic fantasy adventure fiction.

Dossouye herself is in new territory at the start of The Dancers of Mulukau. The story of how Dossouye, formidable warrior woman of the Abomey, came to leave her people and wander the land is told in the first book, a picaresque fix-up novel based on classic novellas penned by Saunders in the 70s and 80s, with additional unpublished material and a new story added for the book’s release in 2008. I won’t trouble to repeat much of what I said about Dossouye in my original review of that book, but readers can be assured that all of the hallmarks of those foundational stories have returned and are enlarged upon in The Dancers of Mulukau.

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