Reviews by Steven

We apologize for the delay of this review. It somehow fell through the cracks, and no one is more upset about this than us. Why? Because TWELVE (Amazon) is an amazing, amazing novel. Jasper Kent, the author, has given us in the US (all you UK readers have known this forever) one of the best books of the year.

Call it Alternate History, Alternate Historical Fantasy, Fantasy, Horror or Alternate Historical Horror… it doesn’t really matter. All you need to do is read it and enjoy it for what it is:

Completely awesome.
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A while back I read and reviewed a collection of short stories titled SWORDS & DARK MAGIC (EBR Review). Hopefully after reading that review you went out and grabbed a copy, because it was fantastic. One of the surprise stories contained in that anthology was The Deification of Dal Bamore by Tim Lebbon. It was a dark, grim and violent tale that impressed me and left me with the desire to read more of Lebbon’s work.

Set in the same created world as Dal Bamore, Lebbon’s new novel, ECHO CITY (Amazon) took some of the interesting concepts from the short story and twisted them even more. The short answer is that ECHO CITY is a great read… for a certain kind of reader.
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It is natural that various art mediums look to each other for inspiration. The movie industry has been looking to novels for, well, ever. TV looks to movies and novels. Graphic novels, lately, has become to go-to source for new visual material. While watching AMC’s Mad Men and Breaking Bad, new ads began showing for a new show. A show about zombies. The Walking Dead. It looked fantastic.
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Come on. Historical France. Musketeers. Dragons. Magic. Spies. You can’t tell us you don’t want to read a book with all this awesomeness in it. Fortunately for everyone, all these things are in Pierre Pevel’s novel THE CARDINAL’S BLADES (Amazon), and for the most part this is a great read.
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It happens more often than you think. Sometimes we just don’t read certain books. It has to do with time, opportunity, cost, motivation or whatever. The end result is the same, and the book sits there in the “To Be Read” pile. It’s a shame, because we miss a lot of great novels this way. We were recently asked to review some of the various novels out there that don’t seem to get a lot of push, and this reminded us of those copies of Alan Campbell’s novels that we bought forever ago.
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We get asked all the time who our favorite authors are. Two years ago the answers would have been absurdly simple, but we read a lot more novels these days. A WHOLE lot more. As a result, who we consider our favorites tends to shift and slide. Barely more than a year ago we hadn’t yet read anything by James Barclay. Now with each novel of his that we read, he solidifies himself as one of our favorite authors.
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We rarely read any novels from Pyr that could be deemed a “miss.” The number of stellar novels put out by Pyr since its inception is astonishing. But every now and again even they miss the mark. THE HORNS OF RUIN by Tim Akers (Amazon) is Sword & Sorcery/Steampunk hybrid. Sounds cool on the surface. In fact a lot of this story sounds fantastic on paper…unfortunately that paper doesn’t include the actual execution of the idea.
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There is something oddly comforting about reading a James Barclay novel. It’s like when the holidays roll around and the smells of good, home-cooked meals automatically make you relax and enjoy the day a tad more than usual. ELFSORROW (Amazon) fits this role perfectly.
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Is there a worse feeling than when you’ve just finished a novel, and the time you spent reading feels completely wasted? You sit back, your face becoming red with hatred for a book that just kept you from reading something else that was potentially awesome. You vilify the “novel” you hold in an ever tightening grip. This so-called novel is the cause of all your problems, and is the evil force reason for war, world hunger, American Idol, and your failing Fantasy Football team (The Aints).

Take a deep breath. Everything will be fine (except your Fantasy team).
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A not-so-funny thing happened. We confused the release of this novel with that of another. We feel pretty awful, because Jonathan Maberry is one of our favorite authors. So, we offer our sincere apologies to one of the greats in the Horror genre. With that said, we feel we should mention how completely awesome ROT & RUIN (Amazon) is. It is… uh… completely awesome!
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