Reviews by Allan Bishop

BLACK LOTUS KISS (Amazon) is an unabashed pulp mystery with a side of Marlboro Man smoke-crowned charm, and a kiss on the neck of the Black Dahlia homage to cheesy occult detective novels of the 1970s.

As far as mystery novels go, BLACK LOTUS KISS hits all the marks: character, location, and plot. It doesn’t try to be more than necessary: an over-the-top Hell’s Angels is in league with an eldritch deity-controlled Girl Scouts cookie drive style of mayhem. It is inane, irreverent, and utterly unapologetic in its absurdity.
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Kameron Hurley owns weird.

Since her first novel, GOD’S WAR, she’s developed a motif. All writers have them. All writers hone them. And in the near decade since she crawled out from a dead man’s corpse with her first novel, she’s consistently gutted it toward nasty perfection. I’d be biased to say I don’t love her disgusting motif.

She’s New Weird with her body-hoppers, mind-wipers, and amoral assassins. Also, she had a literal bee gun that eats the flesh of its victim in last year’s APOCALYPSE NYX (EBR Review), so there’s darkly creepy done sinister. But with her latest book, MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, a short story collection, Hurley turns to a different theme.
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VALLISTA is a weird story, and Vlad Taltos, Steven Brust’s long running, on-the-run ex-gangster fantasy series, embodies the series’ increasing strangeness. The novel focuses predominantly on everyone’s favorite time and worlds-travelling stealth hi-byer, Devera. While Devara drags her Uncle Vlad into a search to help her escape her predicament (it makes sense as you read), Vlad soon finds himself in a strange manor where rooms lead nowhere, the patrons and denizens are a lot of miserable secrets and wretched histories, and a monster stalks the halls. The House itself, which is alive and delightfully a character with its own soul and history, takes the center stage.Read the rest of this review »

Strange is good; in fact, strange is what makes Fantasy and Science-Fiction so wonderfully memorable. Neither genre need always be grounded in absolute realism; but, as Fantasy and Science Fiction fans expect, worlds must adhere to their own internal logic.

In an alternate future, far from Earth, there is a planet. It is a planet where eternal war rages. Its rationale? Forgotten. Its objectives? Pointless. It is on this world, where Islamic-influenced matriarchal societies dominate the planet, we encounter a particular soul.

She is a bel dame, she is a killer, and she has the heart of a venomous eel. Her name is Nyx, once a government assassin, now a rundown mercenary, a black dog.

And so begins APOCALYPSE NYX, a series of interconnected novellas surrounding Nyx, her team, and several contracts of… well, non-importance.
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Some series have a definite end while others linger on, bringing joy to their long-time readers and fans. For me, and those who enjoy the seminal series, THE WITCHER, SEASON OF STORMS is both a return to Andrzej Sapkowski’s original 1980s short stories, and at the same time, it is a eulogy for the series, in a certain sense.

SEASON OF STORMS is set, for hardcore fans, after the events of THE LAST WISH, with Geralt broken up with Yennefer (in a long series of makeups and breakups in their legendary relationship…) but before the contract that made him truly famous throughout the world of THE WITCHER.
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Real politics, the actual grind and wear of backdoor committees, debates, and miles-long legislation is a snore. Unless you enjoy reading obscure case law or an inane housing clause that forbids people from living in a “den of iniquity,” you’re likely not going to enjoy any political fiction.

Luckily for you, and me, I enjoy reading such dry-as-wall-paint material.
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The line between an homage and a pastiche is as thin as a sheet of New England lake ice. At times refreshing when done right, but often as bitter as an old flame’s sudden departure, the Noir genre has for decades fascinated, riveted, and influenced literature, both pulps and classics alike. When I caught wind of a fusion of a hard-boiled mystery staged in an alternate 1960s LA, still as iconic as it was in the days of yesteryear, I had to crack it open over a bottle of ten-year-old stale gin for a compulsive reason. Why I have gin in my rickety desk is only my business, but I was feeling pretty cozy with this little spine opener of a yarn.

But it didn’t have that pop you’d expect from a Coke. It was more like a flat Coke. Sure, it’s got the feel, the look, and even the shape of a Coke, but it don’t have the taste of it. You can feel it in your gullet. Something just ain’t right about this one. But that’s ok. Not every tale’s got to be a real sob story, a mournful heartbreaker, or make your gray matter noggin do some joggin and thinking real hard about all the bad stuff that goes on in life. So it goes.
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Sometimes I wonder if Urban Fantasy is stuck in the year 2005. Vampires. Werewolves. Angels. The Fae. And then once in a while, lo and behold, I find a novel that fulfills a certain niche: mages versus mages. Except this isn’t Hogwarts, or Harry Dresden walking into yet another CSI murder scene that turns into the Fae having a turf war. No. It’s Steven Brust, author of the acclaimed Vlad Taltos series, returning with his first standalone in twenty plus years. And it has all the trademarks of Brust’s usual style: dry wit, working-class grit, and a whole lot of talking. GOOD GUYS asks a simple question: Is it good to be working for a shady organization who pays you peanuts for a wage? Maybe.
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