Book Reviews
Guest Review: “The Traveler” by John Twelve Hawks
The first words that come to mind are speechless and breathtaking. I lose all sense of almost any vocabulary when trying to define the experience while reading The Traveler. The imagery and realism with which Hawks so cunningly captures in his words are profound and exhilarating.
Review: “The Sorority” Trilogy by Tamara Thorne
Tamara Thorne wrote The Sorority trilogy as the literary equivalent of a teen exploitation horror movie. It has dozens of girls in a sorority house, an evil sorority president, sex, ghosts, oral sex, dead football players, group sex, human sacrifice, and chipmunk sex. Reading a book like this makes me cry. In college I couldn’t get laid to save my life.
Review: “Not Your Father’s Horseman” by Valerie Griswold-Ford
When you ask author Valerie Griswold-Ford how she got her contract for Not Your Father’s Horseman, she will tell you, “Well, Tee suggested I finish the manuscript and then pitch it to Dragon Moon. What Tee didn’t tell me was he pitched it for me to Dragon Moon and got me a contract.” So, yeah, I figured a great motivator in getting your first novel done was a contract.
Review: “The Darkest Part of the Woods” by Ramsey Campbell
Have you ever had a sore spot like an aching tooth, an ingrown toenail, or a spot on your arm where you just got a shot? You know, some place that kisses you with a sharp pain if you don’t leave well enough alone? What do you do? You touch it, squeeze it, push on it. There you go, a grown-up, intelligent human being with a toothache, and you’ll actually bite down hard. When you can’t take the pain anymore you let up and wonder at your stupidity. Then, you go and do the same thing again half an hour later.
The Darkest Part of the Woods, by Ramsey Campbell, was a toothache I wouldn’t stop biting down on. I don’t know how many times I set the book down after an hour of reading, completely bored, totally uninterested… just to pick up the book again the next day.
Review: “Bride of the Fat White Vampire” by Andrew Fox
God, I love the sci-fi-fantasy-horror-magicrealism-pagan-mystic genres, cause every once in a while you come across a book like Bride of the Fat White Vampire, by Andrew Fox. Funny, clever, and highly entertaining.
Review: “Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest” by A. Lee Martinez
Helen and Troy are just your ordinary, average young Americans who work together at minimum wage jobs in a fast food restaurant.
Well, except for the small detail that Helen is a minotaur and the two have been given an epic quest by a hamburger god.
Review: “Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword”
Do you hear that sound? That is the sound of a thousand Sacred Cows of Fantasy being tipped in the night.
Let me share a piece of wisdom I’ve picked up being the reviewer for the Dragon Page. You simply cannot go wrong reading anything Tee Morris writes. You won’t find a better blend of action, humor, suspense, and romance anywhere else.
Review: “Steampunk!” edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant
I do enjoy a good short story anthology and Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories really fits the bill. It offers 14 terrific stories all in the steampunk genre (although some of them are pretty loosely connected — I’m looking at you Garth Nix!). And the quality of the stories are uniformly good.
