Stephen Graham Jones is an author that had been on my radar for quite a while, but I had never got around to reading any of his work. I was immediately intrigued by the premise of The Only Good Indians, and I am happy to say that I was not disappointed. The characters are the main…
Last Argument of Kings
As I read the last page of Before They Are Hanged, my enthusiasm for the series had waned considerably. It’s not that the second entry in The First Law trilogy was bad, just merely disappointing. It took me a while to pick up the third and final book, Last Argument of Kings, but I am certainly glad that I…
Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre
I can confidently say that Devolution is the worst book that I’ve read in a very, very long time. I am absolutely flabbergasted that this novel managed to get published. That might seem harsh or hysterical, but I assure you that the feeling is warranted. I’ll begin with the format in which Devolution is told – journal entries. From…
Rivers
Rivers tells a tale of a world where humanity has finally caused the natural order to deviate, and hurricanes pummel large portions of the coastal United States. The rain hasn’t stopped for years, and nothing remains except cold and water and despair. Michael Farris Smith builds an atmosphere here that is simultaneously engrossing and terrifying, the…
True Grit
My love for Westerns stems from a feeling of nostalgia for a time that I never experienced. Romanticized or not, the American West elicits a feeling of wanderlust and freedom that is sorely missing in today’s world. To ride out into the setting sun, striking out across the plains and prairies in search of fortune…
Before They Are Hanged
When I finished Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, I felt that I had a good grasp on the characters he had crafted. I understood the world, the politics, and had a vague notion of what Bayaz’s quest entailed. I was satisfied, and eager to continue the journey with Before They Are Hanged. That said, this second installment is…
The Road
When you think about the end of the world, you typically imagine the reasoning for it. Whether it’s nuclear war, climate change, or plague; there’s some clear reason why the human race was brought to near extinction. Not so for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Here the bleak, desolate landscape of the Earth is cruel in its…
Velocities
I suppose perhaps that short fiction simply isn’t my cup of tea, but I expected more from Velocities. The collection is described as “strange”, but I found the majority of the stories to be anything but. In truth, I found the majority of this collection to be simply boring and I really only truly enjoyed three…
The Blade Itself
Say one thing about Joe Abercrombie, say he is a fantastic teller of stories. There are very few books that grab me and pull me into their world the way that The Blade Itself did. From the very beginning, I was eager to learn about this world that Abercrombie had created and the characters that inhabited it….
Blackwood
Blackwood contains just about everything that I look for in a book of this genre, and everything I’ve come to expect from Michael Farris Smith. This haunting tale of a dying town in Mississippi not only deals with the death throes of a community, but also how trauma affects the people attached to it. When the…
The Shadow of What Was Lost
The Shadow of What Was Lost is an unfortunate testimony to the fact that most fantasy authors aren’t even attempting to write something unique. Everything about this novel is derivative. Perhaps it’s simply my pessimism, or the fact that I’ve been reading the genre for 2o years, but nothing within the pages of The Shadow of What…
Eden
Eden is a novel that began with potential, but quickly squandered it. The general idea of the Virgin Zones was initially interesting and unique – something that I hadn’t really encountered before and hadn’t given much thought to. Lebbon proposes an interesting scenario where humankind has basically destroyed the world, and these zones without human interaction…
Quite Literary 