roadtripreader's Reviews (357)

There be hellfire in this here book

Well would you look at that. When I finally stopped looking for a sphagetti western that would help with my hangover from "That Dirty Black Bag" I stumble onto a splatter western chockfull of demons and devils and guns and now I'm bracing myself for a new hangover.

Now now don't let anybody fool you, vengeance is a helluva drug. This book what I imagine snorting everything and then downing absinthe would feel like. What's that drug that leads to hallucinations? Yeah that one - throw that on the pile.

Plot/Storyline:   writing so encapsulating damn near everything is quotable.
Characters:   Black Magpie/Salem Covington is an epic rider of hell.
Favorite scene: Black Magpie sitting in darkness deciding which of the 2 gaurds gets to live and which one gets to die beneath his knife. I did not see his choice coming. Both men were garbage bags. That entire scene was metal
Favorite Quote/Concept: The entire Dead Bear Sequence : I kept my hand on the Gun as a man stepped out of the night. He was clothed in furs and moccasins. White face paint that gave him the appearance of a dead man stepped right out of the grave. His forehead had been peeled off, scalped in the same way that his people had. Bits of totems and jewelry hung around his neck, still dripping with blood from where his throat had been slit. Two eyes that burned with feral intensity stared into me.  Dead Bear, my teacher. (Black Magpie on meeting a deadDead Bear)

StoryGraph Challenge: 1800 Books by 2025
Challenge Prompt: 150 Horror Books

 I would have words with Ambassador Abumwe.

Walk the Plank felt like I was watching an episode of some intergalactic tv show that's been lost in the ether of "The golden era of tv". Scalzi wrote the short story in script format and it was effective. We Only Need The Heads takes place directly after the events of WTP and we're back with remnants of "The B-Team". Here's the thing, the end of WTP and the start of WONTHs is so seamless it's jarring when we realize that something is amiss in the Wildcat Colony. Much like watching one of those shows.

Plot/Storyline: Holds the reader in a vice grip and drags one through a riveting, shenanigan-esque plan of sneaking and plotting and hoping things work out.
Characters: I'm beginning to understand the Ambassador but c'mon, just give my man Hart Schmidt a break. He is NOT useless. Harry Wilson remains extremely likeable. For some reason I keep seeing middle-aged Jude Law in Harry Wilson's place - so I guess the character has that going for him.
Favorite scene: The sequence leading up to the "We only Need the Heads" line that Harry Wilson delivers with a bit of wonder still stuck in his voice. Charred remains of a wildcat colony, destruction, fire and the distinct feeling that there is way more to the story than meets the eye.
Favorite Quote/Concept: The Wildcat Colonies first seen in Walk The Plank are insane and remind me of something straight out of Spielberg's Terranova. Also; I still want the BrainPal for Christmas so who do I need to sell my soul to in order to get one? Do I need to find a Djinn or demon?
StoryGraph Challenges: 1800 Books by 2025 and Top 22 Male Authors (Scifi/Fantasy/Horror)
Challenge Prompt: 150 Short Stories by 2025 / John Scalzi Human Division Series 

More than halfway up the hill to brilliance.

I think Tchaikovsky did this on purpose. Weave a story using jamais vu to elicit a feeling of presque vu and then bake it into a story laced in deja vu and voila - you have a very ethereal haunting.  I swear this all seems familiar and unfamiliar; It's made my head spin.  Unless of course that whole collective unconscious theory means we've all been taking up residence within the folds of the writer's hippocampus and feel echoes of these and other stories in our subconscious hence the deja vu.  Whatever it is - it's pretty nostalgic

I just want to bloody stumble  upon a garden full of Fae. Dangerous - yes. Deadly - for sure. But still.  Is that too much to ask?

Using familiarity by anchoring the character Harry into IPs that have already been in existence like Eastenders or the BBC then fictionalizing the rest of the story with enough callbacks to fictional works like El Laberinto Del Fauno, Secret Garden, that story of the photograph of fairies that turned out to be a hoax and other fantastical tales we wished were real in our childhood. But it's not that one, the one with the wardrobe and the nice lion - Harry will remind you of that.

I came away from this feeling utter despair for Underhill and a burning desire for an otherworld (not alien) encounter.

Plot/Storyline: How very Tchaikovsky.  Seriously, who uses words like lugubriouslyand still manages to be relatable.  Okay so I might be a bit biased but there was that one book I hated.  This is not that and this whole plot was right up there with the best of them.  Also, the phrase "clutching pearls" was thrown in for good measure and it worked.
Characters:   Harry/Felix is so damn relatable in his totally wasted life.  Either you know someone like Harry, you've loved someone like Harry, You've hated someone like Harry or you've been Harry. Like many of the author's characters in other books, he stumbles between likeable and annoying so well he ends up in the sweet spot.
Favorite scene:  Harry/Felix's dream sequences of kids cartoon characters trying to live a normal life and everyone just going about their business not noticing that a bunny or rose plant is manning the cash register - this dream was trippy.
Favorite Quote/Concept: Thistlesham, in that moment, looked like the sort of man who’d bathe in the blood of virgins every Tuesday if only you could source it from Waitrose. (Harry, realizing the ritual done in an attempt to reach Underhill would be all kinds of no bueno for him)
StoryGraph Challenge: 1800 Books by 2025/TOP 22 Male Authors (Fantasy/Scifi/Horror)
Challenge Prompt: 150 Fantasy Books / Adrian Tchaikovsky Terrible Worlds series 

I remember one of the visiting priests at my Catholic boarding school gave us a chastising speech about prostitution (all girl school, he felt the need to put the fear of damnation in us every term). Father McBoring O'Stuffypants said something like "Dens of Iniquity - you can find pleasure, coin and a false smile fot the night but you can't find love." Well let me just throw this book right in your face Father Pearl-Clutcher because I found a sweet tender love story in the middle of Madam Monikas Brothel which turned out to be a safe haven for an emotionally tormented soul.

Spice level: 🍭sweet like candy despite being set in a brothel.
Plot/Storyline: I'm so drawn into this world and it's social structures. My first foray into Sex Wizards Universe. More please.
Characters: I love Garret to a million pieces. I'd read 300 pages of him finding his place in the world.
Favorite scene/quote: Stand tall. Stand Proud. And Always watch your back. (Garret's Mother on surviving as an Orc-Human bi-species)

Yeah, I much prefer this version of Rapunzel/Sleeping Beauty/Grimmesque fairytale.

Half the world had died of the plague and made less impact on her than a few moments of conversation.
Toadling's years of solitude triggered a memory of my two years spent in much the same as the rest of the world recently - lockdown, isolation, quarantines, hybrid this and hybrid that. At the tailend of the pandemic I wondered what it would feel like to be that alone again or that isolated. The first chapter hooked me. The way Toadling felt speaking to someone for the first time in maybe hundreds of year left something raw in the periphery of my mind. Poor little Toadling.

The bait 'n switch was so well done. A story like this, it's only natural to seek out the pretty princess. The Sleeper was a welcome subversion of the fairytale.

Plot/Storyline: -1   Bravo for making me not shudder at the thought of toadflesh, toadslime...just general toadiness.  However, "she though she might cry" became like an annoying catchphrase stuck on repeat.
Characters:   I thoroughly enjoyed that entire exchange between Halim and Toadling in the opening chapters. The Greenteeth, Elder and Duckwit were sweet in an Oh My God that's gross kind of way
Favorite scene: “I brought things to break curses,” He gestured toward the mule. “There’s moly and salt and rowan and rue and candles, and a knife that my mother’s imam said duas over and also I had it blessed by the Benedictine monk who ran the library, so between the two of them, it ought to be quite holy by now. I couldn’t find a rabbi. Well, I did, but he wanted to come along because he’d never met a fairy, and I thought you wouldn’t like that.” (Halim on curse-breaking)
Favorite Concept: The Changeling and the surviving human baby. The timewarp between the mortal world and the faerie world. Oh, yest and Greenteeth and so much more
StoryGraph Challenge: 1800 Books by 2025
Challenge Prompt: 150 Fantasy books 

Every now and then, I stumble on a book that makes me question how far my capacity for empathy will go and I come to realize that at some point in time, I'll probably die of it. This book is a horror. Not the writing - the premise that could quite possibly be a reality in a messed up timeline.

I have to wonder about the psychology of these survival stories that persist with sustenance in the form of cannibalism. Mass suicides in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event really seems rational to me as someone who has danced the devil's tango with seasonal depression. The thought of going on in a world as bleak as the deep void of depression seems like cruel punishment. The though of becoming ...this, this family - the survivor's instinct seems like it's just too much of a drain to bother to even go down that route. Like depression is exhausting enough now add cannibalism and incest - I CANT be bothered.

Still, I want to understand what happens in the brains of the ones who have a stronger grasp on their mental faculties - like Brother - he seems like he was "normal" or rather typical at one point. He wants to survive, but he wrestles with everything that takes place. Father I feel could have already been an underlying sociopath - or maybe I'm just grasping at some latent brain chemistry anomaly to explain away what they did to each other and other people.

Either way, as much as this book HORRIFIED me, it is now stuck with me.

If the Mad Russian chose to hit the switch tomorrow - I know I'd choose to go out the same way that elderly couple in the abandoned house did.

Plot/Storyline: written so bloody well I couldn't will myself to look away as it got progressively more damned
Characters: I wish all of them could have been spared their turn toward monstrous. I fear Father most but Mother gave me the heebie jeebies just as well.
Favorite scene: NONE
Favorite Quote/Concept: I wish we could blame everything on the radiation, I really do.
StoryGraph Challenge: 1800 Books by 2025
Challenge Prompt: 150 Horror Books by 2025

 

And people wonder how Hellboy is half-human. This is why people. Smouldering Hot demons. Listen if Azoth came knocking on my door offering me that deal; well you'd better believe I'm comin away with a souvenir of our time together.

Without all the erotic scenes, does this story have good bones? There is a really good subplot here. I would have been okay with Moore fleshing out the story even more. Still what we got was really titilating and I just gobbled it up like Sunday ice-cream.

Spice level: 🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶 You're going to need a bigger hose or better yet, just read in a bathtub filled with cold water.
Plot/Storyline: I am usually not one for the 1st person narrative but I have to say it was succinctly done, felt like I had just been dropped into the experience like a dimension-traveller and ...well that was yum.
Characters: Azoth is my kind of demon
Favorite scene/quote: you're the most outrageous virgin I've ever met (Azoth on Estelle after ahem...something something something booom). It was hot is all you need to know. 

Catastrophizing vs Prediction.

The Past is Red (TPIR), One Day All of This will Be Yours(ODATWBY), Midway Relics and Dying Breeds (MRDB) and now Permafrost.  At what point is speculative fiction becoming a predictive model for a not to distant future. I'm beginning to think these authors are time travelers and are begging us to HEED their words. 

In MRDB - a version of Greenpeace is in power. In TPIR, basically Elon Musk, Mark Shuttleworth and all the other billionaire leeches succeed in getting off planet and onto Mars. ODATWBY is the most depressing because anarchy gives rise to a time-travelling homicidal Bluebeard soldier.

In Permafrost, WHO or an iteration of the World Health Organization is the remaining socio-economic and political power in a future just about 100 years from now... food is scarce,and the ability to produce crops to develop an artificial-agro industry is non existent as a result of a massive event in the past rendering future tech almost non-existent. 

Enter Director Cho, The Brothers Karamasov and 5 pilots including Lidia Lidova - our seventy year old protagonist.

Plot/Storyline: Time Travel via Body snatching. How refreshing.
Characters: Having characters in their late forties and well into the seventies was different and refreshing.  We're all going to age, yet age representation in books seems to have gone backwards. Tons of books for us in the 30s and 20s and of course the YA demographic but gone are the days of the 40s onwards being represented in the roles of main protagonists. This was a welcome change.
Favorite scene: The introduction to The Bothers. A short scene but for some reason it's impactful.
Favorite Quote/Concept: Paradox itself is ... not entirely paradoxical (Dr Cho on the Lidova Paradox Noise conundrum in time travel)
StoryGraph Challenge: 1800 Books by 2025 / Top 22 Male Authors 
Challenge Prompt: 150 Speculative Fiction / Alastair Reynolds Standalone or Series

 Saved by the Second Act

I am an annotator.  There, it feels better to say out loud.  I can't help making notes as I read and I sit there with my journal and doodle and get worked up about one character and swoon over another.  Boy if you saw the notes on the first 8 chapters you'd be sure this was going to be a DNF. I'm trying to limit my DNF to 10 per year.  I ended up in the sweet spot and that's thanks largely to the worldbuilding.  I am a damned sucker for an immersive world and immerse I did.  Sometimes the FMC threw me off with her "Not Like Other Queens" schtick and I was this close to telling her to sod off - but I persevered and look at me now, loving Luella and Eldas almost a fraction as much as I love Brishen and Ildiko  or Valroy and Abigail.  That is a whole lot of love.


Spice level: 🌶🌶 and 🍭

Plot/Storyline: you know I LOVE the idea of this book.  Kudos to Elise Kova. I love the idea of a Human Queen and an Elf King and somehow they balance out life and death

Characters:-1 I grew to tolerate Saraphina/Luella.  She was a cross between a childish teen pretending to be "deep" "not like other girls" and a grown woman  coming into her element. I wanted her to be more.  Eldas was such a hot Grouch but I did like him a whole lot more than his Human Queen.

dialogue wins/losses: -1 good dialogue but at times it had a very 21st Century lilt to it that took me right out of The Fade and smack bam in my room.

Favorite scene/quote: “If you’re always walking above people you risk walking on them, Eldas. And that’s how you make enemies.  (Luella/Saraphina on Mutual respect after Eldas used Knowing magic to control her)