The Vagrant

The Vagrant by Peter Newman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A sword-wielding mute, a baby, and a goat cross a post-apocalyptic landscape, heading for the Shining City. But will they reach their destination before the demonic horde on their trail overtakes them?

After reading about this book on Chuck Wendig's blog, I couldn't wait to dig in. However, at the time, Harper Voyager wanted $20 for the e-book. Since everyone knows that's horseshit, I held off until I found a new hardcover and I'm quite pleased with my treeware purchase.

The story of the last of the Seraph Knights is quite good, though on the surface doesn't look all that original. At first glance, it reminded me of Jay Posey's Three and Peter Brett's The Warded Man, with heavy doses of The Gunslinger. However, The Vagrant kicked my ass.

The way the story unfolds is masterful. You don't notice how much of the text in a lot of novels is dialogue until you come across a book where the three lead characters don't speak. As a result, it seemed like I wasn't making any progress in the book a lot of the time. The reading experience was a rewarding one, though.

Peter Newman's writing was superb and having to infer the Vagrant's nature and motives from his actions elevated the reading experience quite a bit. I never thought I'd get this attached to a nameless baby and a goat. The worldbuilding was interesting, mostly through the dialogue of the characters around the Vagrant and his gang. There were some infodumps in the form of flashbacks but they were easily digestible.

I don't really have anything bad to say about this book. It's a more difficult read than most fantasy books out there but it's also more rewarding. Four out of five stars.

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Philip Marlowe Finds Himself in Another Very Tangled Mess

Reviewed by James L. Thane
Four out of five stars

The High Window is another excellent novel featuring Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled L.A. detective, Philip Marlowe, although to my mind it's not quite on a par with Chandler's masterpieces, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.

The case opens when a wealthy, twice-widowed Pasadena woman named Elizabeth Bright Murdock hires Marlowe to discreetly recover a valuable coin that has been stolen from her first's husband's collection. The client insists that her daughter-in-law, whom she hates, has taken the coin although she has no proof. The daughter-in-law has either left or been driven from the home. Mrs. Murdock wants Marlowe to quietly find the woman and get the coin back. The police are most certainly not to be involved.

All in all, this is a pretty strange household that also includes Mrs. Murdock's wimpy son and a severely repressed young secretary whom the widow treats like a doormat. Marlowe takes the case, although he pretty much knows from the git-go that everyone is lying to him, including his client.

Well of course they are, and before long poor Marlowe is up to his neck in a case that involves gambling, infidelity, blackmail and a small handful of murders. As is the case with any Raymond Chandler plot, it's all pretty confusing, although in the end, this one gets sorted out better than most.

As always, it's great fun to follow Marlowe through these tangled webs and, as always, the book is beautifully written in a style that has often been imitated but never matched. Raymond Chandler and his tattered detective were each one of a kind. 

Glory in Gaming Throughout the Ages!

Designers & Dragons: The '70s by Shannon Appelcline
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Beware thou weary reader, for herein lies waaay the fuck more than you ever need to know about the beginnings of fantasy role playing games.

But wait up! Before you even get started on rpgs, Designers & Dragons goes even farther back. RPGs began with wargaming, which actually originated around the '50s. Well, if you want to be technical, you could say it started before that. Napoleon used huge maps and figurines representing army and navy units. Such miniature warfare was played in the Middle Ages as well. But gaming as we know it started with those WWII and Vietnam vets who liked to play out war strategies.



The emergence of fantasy literature, such as Lord of the Rings, in the late '60s meant it wasn't long before someone married the two ideas. After all, once a fan was done reading the book, s/he often wanted to continue on with the adventure, to inhabit the fantasy world just a little longer.

Thus was born Dungeons & Dragons. Appelcline's book is heavy on D&D, and rightly so as it dominated the RPG landscape. It was the game all the kids were playing. Other game-makers acknowledged this by attempting to license side products for the D&D system in the early days.

When I was a kid, it seemed like D&D came about around 1979-80. But that was only when the game "went viral". It had already long since enveloped the gaming underground. The original set was put out in 1974 and its true creation really started years before that in the late '60s.

Original D&D


My main interest in reading this was to get a better understanding of the game I knew and loved as a boy. My version looked more like this...


(I go into more detail on it here, if you're interested: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

However, I prefer to get to know my history from the human perspective. In this instance, I wanted to know who created what or how so-and-so had to sleep in their van while they attempted to get their start-up off the ground. It was a brave new world and these fellows were courageous pioneers. I wanted to hear about them. Appelcline gives you plenty of that good stuff. Unfortunately, the book also gets bogged down in litigation and who licensed what to whom. For instance, owner of D&D, TSR Inc was a big ol' suer-rat. If it moved and there was money to be had, TSR sued it. So, D&D's history is embroiled in lawsuit after lawsuit, and Appelcline goes to great length in explaining it all. Frankly, I tired of it very quickly.

This is supposed to be about gaming in the 1970s, but it goes WAY beyond that. It would feel weird, incomplete in almost every case, to shut the door on a company's history at midnight on 12/31/1979 regardless of the story. So you get the whole story, from start to finish, even if that finish takes us right up to today. It was more than I expected and it gave me the opportunity to get to know all those game-makers I was in the dark about until reading this, like...

Chaosium and their main game Call of Cthulhu, a mindbendingly good time, so I'm told.



There was also Middle Earth-esque Tunnels & Trolls as created by Ken St. Andre, who got in on the ground floor with his simplified version of D&D. T&T never gained the same mass-popularity, but it survives to this day.



And then there was "satellite" creators, like Lou Zocchi, the man behind those enigmatic, odd-shaped dice role playing games are so well-known for.



That was good and all, but it took me a damn long time to finish this one, because it is very put-down-able. By which I mean, many of the company's stories are similar enough that reading the whole thing at once would be overkill. Plus, the book is logically broken into company-by-company sections, so once I was done, say, reading about Flying Buffalo, I'd put the book down before moving on to Games Workshop. Days upon days might pass before I was ready to read more.

One of my main gripes is that the writing is a bit amateurish at points. I guess I've grown used to today's writer's of history (Winchester, McCullough, Philbrick) with their smooth style. It really took me out of the story when I'd hit one of the many lines like "More on that later" or "Well return to that soon." It would be a minor point not worth mentioning but that there were so damn many instances of it. And another thing, if you say that a product was recalled due to its artwork and thus has become a hard-to-find collector's item, you really should explain what it was about the artwork that was so scandalous, because I have a very vivid imagination!

Complaints, yes, I had a few, but all in all this was good, good fun!

As a boy, D&D popped into my world almost as if by magic, so I was thrilled to finally get the chance to really learn about the world of gaming and discover the behind-the-scenes, origin stories that once mystified me. For that, I am grateful this book was created, and created with such obvious love for the subject matter. Appelcline once worked for Chaosium, so clearly this book and everything it stands for is important to him. It shows. Well done!

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Like They Always Been Free

Georgina Li
Queer Young Cowboys
Reviewed by Nancy
5 out of 5 stars

Summary

Men play guitar at bonfire parties and find comfort in parking lots. Soldiers find sex and love amidst a devastated America. A shape-shifting surfer hunts a man he can’t stop thinking about. A magician follows the secret messages beneath the graffiti and signs of an urban landscape. A young woman traces the story of her grandfathers: scientists and lovers who established a new colony on a distant moon.

Georgina Li writes with humane poetry, capturing both the profane staccato of soldiers and the blown-grass whispers of country boys. In these eight short stories, Li explores the literal and metaphorical wars of men: on the battlefield, in poverty, and of the heart. Her men are complex, covered in grit but filled with love.

Li’s work slides comfortably from genre to genre, proving that good storytelling is good storytelling regardless of literary conventions.



My Review


I love short story collections, but I am always a little hesitant about trying a collection from a writer I know nothing about. Getting the opportunity to read it for free and knowing it was a finalist for this year’s Lambda Literary Award for Gay Romance gave me that extra push I needed.

Though these eight stories explore the vagaries of love and lust, classifying this collection as m/m romance is reductive. These gorgeous, sensual, and unforgettable stories easily transcend into the literary realm. They are loosely constructed, each one unique, and the characters wonderfully real and very much alive. Their love is a tangible thing, powerful, emotive, and natural. There were times I hated leaving the characters behind, but had no trouble getting immersed in the next story.

Georgina Li’s writing style is fluid and never gets bogged down in extraneous details or too many adjectives.

My favorites are Closer to the Sky; Spill Your Troubles On Me, Love; Shark Bait; and Notes of the Founders.

If you are tired of the usual m/m romances, give this one a try. This rich and diverse collection surprised me in only the very best ways.

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE BY JAMES M. CAIN

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny.”


John Garfield and Lana Turner in the 1946 movie.

Frank Chambers is a drifter, a man who, when life gets too heavy, catches the next boxcar out of town or puts his thumb out on the nearest highway. Being comfortable or achieving normalcy comes with too much responsibility. He’d rather bum it than have anyone relying on him.

It all begins with a sandwich in a California diner on a road in the middle of nearly nowhere. Nick “The Greek” Papadakis owns the diner and is in need of some help. The Greek offers Frank a job which even though he is broke still sounds like...well..work.

Until he meets Cora.

”Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes. Except for the shape, she really wasn’t a raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.”

He takes the job.

Something sparks between them, something desperate, something twisted, something so bad it is good. The first time The Greek leaves them alone, Frank is all over her:

”I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers….'Bite me! Bite me!'
I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.”


The steamy kitchen scene from the 1981 movie starring Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson

The pain they inflict on each other in that encounter is only the beginning of this passionate, sadomasochistic relationship with unexpected moments of what could be termed romance. ”Tomorrow night, if I come back, there’ll be kisses. Lovely ones, Frank. Not drunken kisses. Kisses with dreams in them. Kisses that come from life, not death.”

Which would all seem very sweet except for the fact that they are planning to kill The Greek. Frank would have never had the ambition for such a deed on his own. His idea is that they just take off, become gypsies, live off the land, but Cora wants to be free, and she also wants the diner.

She is a femme fatale.

“I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned, slow, so they would slip out from under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls. Her eye was all black, and her breasts weren’t drawn up and pointing up at me, but soft, and spread out in two big pink splotches. She looked like the great grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money’s worth that night.”

1946 poster for the movie

Frank is caught up in this woman who is game for anything. She lets him do things to her that would have most any other woman screaming for help. It is hard to determine if Cora actually had any feelings for Frank or for The Greek. Certainly, The Greek and Frank liked each other more than Cora liked either of them. Was she playing the game she had to play to get the accomplice she needed? Was the perversion of their relationship something she needed as well? The Greek was too old for her, but Frank as it turns out was not who she needed either.

The trial sequence is convoluted, crafty, and artful as their attorney builds this elaborate defense designed to defeat his frenemy, the prosecutor. He doesn’t care if they are guilty. He only cares about winning. Frank turns on Cora; Cora turns on Frank (another form of foreplay?) which is all part of the defense attorney's plan to set them free. The ending of the novel certainly seems a commentary by James M. Cain that people do not escape their guilts nor their destinies.


One of the more suggestive movie posters from 1981.

There has been much puzzlement over the title because there is no postman involved in the story or anything that would readily suggest a reason for the title. I’ve been doing some research, and it seems that the most logical explanation that people have come up with is that in this time period when the postman delivered the mail, he would ring the bell on the house once, but if he had a telegram, he would ring twice. Telegrams were expensive, and to receive one generally meant that something bad has happened. The title probably made more sense to people in 1934 than it does to us today. If we accept this explanation, then Cain is warning his audience that nothing good is coming.

This is a terrific noir novel, a prime example of the genre. This book and this writer have certainly had an enduring impact on not only the hard boiled mystery novel, but also on literature and Hollywood. The book has been filmed seven times with most people agreeing that the 1946 version with John Garfield and Lana Turner was the best. The book was banned in Boston for being too sexually violent. There were several scenes that even by contemporary standards had me squirming due to the graphic nature, but I was also reading with a certain amount of awe at the audacity of an author trying to depict the very real, dark aspects of a deranged, desperate relationship. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When young Flavia de Luce, aspiring chemist, finds a body in the cucumber patch outside her father's house, she finds herself caught up in a web of deceit and murder...

I'm not really sure how my love of detective fiction led me to this tale of an eleven year old girl in 1950s England solving a mystery involving stamps but I'm glad it did.

Flavia de Luce is a precocious English girl with a passion for chemistry in general and poisons in particular. She lives in an English country house with her father and two sisters, Ophelia and Daphne. The mystery component of the book is secondary to the delightful antics of Flavia. She's funny as hell and wise beyond her years.

Bradley's writing takes what probably would have been a two star mystery and kicks things up several notches. The writing style reminds me of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers with a pinch of P.G. Wodehouse and was a delight to read.

The mystery itself isn't that great, although Bradley red herring-ed my ass about a fourth of the way through. Parts of it reminded me of Nancy Drew and others reminded me of the cozy mysteries of yore. I was less than 100 pages in when I resolved to read the entire series.

Four out of five stars. I'm looking forward to reading more adventures of Flavia de Luce.

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Reviewed by James L. Thane
Four out of five stars

Nick White is having a pretty crappy couple of months. He's lost his job; his efforts to make money as a card player are not going well, and his wife has recently kicked him out. So one can readily understand why the poor guy might be sitting in a bar on a rainy night, sucking down Scotch.

It appears that Nick's luck might finally be changing for the better, though, when an attractive blonde walks into the bar, steps over to Nick and asks, "Are you him?"

Nick decides that he has nothing to lose by playing along and responds by saying, "That depends. Are you her?"

This leads to some witty repartee, but it quickly becomes apparent that the two are talking past each other and that Nick has totally misjudged the situation. If he didn't realize it initially, he gets the picture pretty quickly when the blonde walks back out the door but not before giving him an envelope containing a flash drive, $20,000 in cash, and a photo of the young woman he's supposed to kill before he gets a second twenty thousand.

Once he gathers his wits and realizes what has just happened, Nick races out of the bar after the woman, but she has disappeared into the night and is nowhere to be seen. Totally confused, Nick returns to the bar, finishes his drink, and, of course, is still sitting there, dazed and confused, when the REAL hit man arrives and gets a good look at him.

Of course the logical thing for Nick to do would be to call the cops and turn the whole mess over to them, but then the story would stop dead in its tracks and we wouldn't have the guilty pleasure of watching poor Nick get put through the wringer.

John Rector is a master of taking ordinary people like Nick White, who are usually down on their luck anyhow, putting them into situations like this, letting them make the wrong decisions, usually one after another, and then letting it all play out. It's always great fun watching him do this and Ruthless is a very worthy successor to Rector's earlier books like The Cold Kiss and The Grove.

Suffice it to say that Nick decides not to go to the police but that he should at least warn the young woman who has been targeted for death. And as any fan of noir fiction knows, that means that the excrement is about to hit the fan. This is a book with any number of diabolical twists and turns, one that will keep readers turning the pages very quickly. It's a great summer read.  

Dead Girls Are Depressing

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well that wasn't a happy happy good time...

The Lovely Bones is going to be difficult to review without spoilers, so if you haven't read it yet I'm gonna have to go ahead and ask you to leave, m'kay?

Why am I not surprised to learn that Alice Sebold was raped at a young age? Because only someone who'd been through something as horrific as that would write a book like this. I'm not just talking about the subject matter, but rather the tone. Everything about this book is a victim's silent scream. Suzie, the dad, the surviving kids...it seems like everyone has someone taken from them. Maybe even the mom. I mean after all, the life she wished to lead was raped from her after she had the chance to lead it.

Honestly, I thought this was going to be even more depressing than it turned out to be. There's an unexpected hopeful strain through out, a nice pairing with some of Sebold's better writing.

On the other hand, some of her writing is irritating. Most notably were the many instances in which she attempts to utilize suspense writer techniques. As readers we are expecting a divulgence of information regarding the focal murder of the story. So, it's a big old tease when Sebold abruptly states "I saw him." Many times out of the blue she starts a new paragraph or section with just such a line and then goes on to talk about the family dog or some other nonsense. It's bullshit.

Overall though, this isn't bad. At times I enjoyed this look (maybe not the POV from which the story's told) at the after affects of a young girl's mysterious murder. The grieving period for family and friends, and the various paths each of them takes, is portrayed with authenticity. Some grieve harder than others. This isn't a murder mystery, this is real life. It's not always interesting or entertaining. Sometimes it's just sad and thought provoking.

So yes, I did like The Lovely Bones, but as for my tepid 3-star rating, all I can say is, Oprah lied. She told millions to read this and their perseverance upon that endeavor eventually got me to do the same. I read it. I was not Oprah-amazed. Why blame her? Because if she hadn't kicked it all off with her recommendation, I never would've read this. It's just not in my wheelhouse. Thus, I never would've had the opportunity to give this a lower rating. So, if you feel 3 stars is too low, blame Oprah.

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Martyrs & Monsters

Robert Dunbar
Uninvited Books
Reviewed by Nancy
5 out of 5 stars

Summary

Robert Dunbar has been called one of the "saviors of contemporary dark fiction" and an "avatar of literary horror." Martyrs & Monsters runs the gamut of this extraordinary author's narrative range, embracing vampires and sea serpents, werewolves and swamp creatures... as well as a host of nightmares for which no names exist. Whether set on an orbiting space station or within a haunted tenement, these terrifying tales are steeped in a passionate intensity that renders them all but unique within the genre, and all boast a sophistication that qualifies them as that rarest of rare commodities: horror for intelligent adults.

My Review

I loved Martyrs & Monsters for its variety of rich, intense stories, and its diverse cast of characters, many of whom are troubled people who struggle through life and live on the edge.

These disturbing and unsettling stories are not graphic, but they will creep up on you and won’t let go.

Though each story in this collection will linger on in my memory, a few favorites stand out:

Getting Wet – Very murky, damp and unsettling. Tim and Conrad were extremely well developed considering the short length of this story. They were not especially likable, but their life experiences and the tragic events in the story made me feel very deeply for them. The ending left me breathless and managed to be sexy and revolting at the same time.

High Rise – It’s a contemporary ghost story. It’s also about the relationship between two brothers and the sacrifice one makes. The ending shattered me.

Mal de Mer – A beautifully written, evocative story that left me shaken. I love the sea - its mysteries, turmoil, tranquility, and lack of consciousness. This haunting, disturbing and erotic story explored aging, loneliness, and the emotional toll of being a caregiver.

Explanations – Wagner and Jimmy love comics and old movies. Wagner owns a comic book store. When Jimmy gets a job at Wagner’s store, their friendship deepens and obsession grows. Wagner’s wife has had enough. Dark, sad, and humorous.

I would recommend this collection of stories to those who love thoughtful and intelligent horror.

The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After eighty-five fishless days, Santiago hooks more than he bargained for. Can he battle everything the sea throws at him to land his prize?

In the interest of reading a wider variety of things, I snapped this up like an eighteen-foot marlin bites a baited hook. It was definitely worth a read.

The Old Man and the Sea is the tale of an Old Man. And a Sea. It's man vs. nature at its finest. Hemingway's language is spare but very powerful. I felt every wound and heartbreak along with Santiago and was nearly as worn out as the old fisherman by the end of the tale.

If you haven't already had the ending spoiled for you, do yourself a favor and steer clear of introductions, reviews, and Wikipedia summaries. I knew the ending before I got there due to reading an excerpt in middle school and the experience would have been much better going in cold.

What else is there to say? It didn't win a Nobel Prize for Literature for nothing! For years, the only Hemingway I'd read was The Sun Also Rises and I wasn't overly fond of it. However, The Old Man and the Sea has made me a believer. Four out of five stars.

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