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I think Steve was giggling maniacally to himself as he added this book to my review stack. He probably took one look at the cover and assumed it would be bad. Go ahead, take a look at it again. You might make that assumption, as well. And would you be wrong?

OK, who am I kidding… yeah, Steve’s unerring taste runs true, even without having read it. Unfortunately I did have to read it.
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The Sword & Sorcery sub-genre is currently the most important facet of my reading life. This is the sub-genre that got me back into Fantasy after a five year hiatus where I read nothing but Science Fiction. With that in mind, I take the authors and novels of this genre very, very seriously. At first glance SCOURGE OF THE BETRAYER by Jeff Salyards (Amazon) failed to catch my eye. I didn’t find the cover immensely appealing (don’t give me that look, we all judge books by their cover) and the synopsis sounded like somewhat standard fantasy fare. At second glance, however, one might notice a quote by an esteemed fantasy author, comparing this novel to the works of Joe Abercrombie and Richard K. Morgan. Name dropping of that caliber is the surest way to stroke my curiosity.
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Dan Wells has had quite the run. The John Cleaver series — starting with I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER (EBR Review) — was a fantastic blend of Horror and Fantasy with a YA tone (although it wasn’t really marketed as YA in the US). His novel PARTIALS (EBR Review) has been getting some really strong reviews. So I was pretty excited when I got my hands on an ARC of his latest work, THE HOLLOW CITY (Amazon).

I’d heard him describe the basics: a story told from the point of view of a paranoid schizophrenic, Michael Shipman. A man who literally can’t tell what’s fantasy and what’s reality. He’s seeing faceless men, and is convinced they’re trying to kill him. But no one else can see them, and he hasn’t been taking his medication in months. To make things worse, there’s been a serial killer at work in the area. Someone’s been killing people and essentially destroying their faces, and Michael is a prime suspect.
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Talyn the Dark, one of the immortal Vaerli (aka Breaker of Oaths), hunts the enemies of Caisah of Conhaero, Master of Chaos. As his Hunter, she rides her nykur on the Road or the Void itself to fulfill the bounty on Manesto, Ahouri, and Portree alike, to return them dead or alive to the city of Vnae Rae (aka Perlious and Fair). At the same time Talyn works to undo the Harrowing (aka the Great Conflagration) and fulfill her people’s oaths with the Kindred.

Oy vey.
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At first glance THE MIRAGE by Matt Ruff (Amazon) struck me as irreverent and offensive. I was offered a chance to read the book for free through the Amazon Vine program and I passed it up. A couple weeks later I ended up coming across a review of THE MIRAGE that made me pause and think. From there the desire was planted and I ended up purchasing a copy, reasoning that even if it turned out to be a terrible novel at least I could write a scathing condemnation of it. As it turns out, not only is THE MIRAGE an excellent novel, but it is also everything a thriller should be.
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Several times now I’ve sat down with my wife and have attempted to explain a China Miéville book. I’ve tried to tell her how cool it is and how amazing the ideas are.

I tried to tell her about THE CITY AND THE CITY (EBR Review) and how it was about two cities that occupy the same space, and how you weren’t allowed to look at the other city. How you could be identified by the way you walked and talked as being from one city or the other. I once tried to tell her about a special kind of magic in KRAKEN (EBR Review), where you were able to fold large, three dimensional objects as if they were a piece of paper down into small pieces of origami. I even tried to tell her about a cool race of cactus like people that lived in the Bas-Lag novels: PERDIDO STREET STATION (Amazon), THE SCAR (Amazon), and IRON COUNCIL (Amazon).
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I have a kid that has a blanket.  Anyone with kids (or who can still remember their “blanket”) totally knows where I’m going with this.  This raggedy piece of purple stitching gets dragged around everywhere.  Actually, it only used to be a blanket–these days about 12 square inches in size–but it’s still the only source of comfort that works every time.

DOWN THE MYSTERLY RIVER (Amazon) is a novel written by Bill Willingham that contains an amalgam of other authors’ characters caught up in a young-adult adventure story right out of the storybooks.  The main character, Max the Wolf (originally written by Lawrence Swift) is a scout’s scout that teams up with a number of talking animals (from the minds and imaginations of several others) after waking up in a forest with little to no memory of how they got there.
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Being a book critic is sort of like getting to experience Christmas at least once a week. Getting books from your favorite authors months before release is the gift that keeps on giving. Earlier this year I read GREATSHADOW by James Maxey (EBR Review), and despite my cynical reservations it blew me away. Now we have HUSH (Amazon), the much anticipated sequel that I had to wait excruciating months for. Months! With great excitement I started reading about the most original and colorful fantasy world I have encountered in recent memory.

HUSH picks up almost immediately after the events of GREATSHADOW. If you haven’t read GREATSHADOW please stop with this review and go buy it. Otherwise you may encounter some spoilers, though I will try to keep those to a minimum.
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Once upon a time I read OLD MAN’S WAR by John Scalzi (Amazon) and it became my favorite book of all time. That said, REDSHIRTS (Amazon) has much more in common with Scalzi’s ANDROID’S DREAM (Amazon) than it does OLD MAN’S WAR. Sometimes a book is worth losing sleep over. Some books are basically begging to be read in one sitting. REDSHIRTS is one of these books.

Andrew Dahl, Ensign of the Universal Union, has a problem. He has been assigned to the capital ship Intrepid, a ship with an alarmingly high casualty rate for low ranking crew members. Recognizing a terrifying trend relating to away missions, Dahl and his friends seek to discover the origin of the trouble plaguing Intrepid. As death draws ever nearer, Dahl must race against fate to save himself and his friends from a most assuredly gruesome demise.
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In a perfect world reviewers would read books with no biases at all and based the work completely on its own merits and not compare it to other books, or other works of the same author.  No prejudices would sway the reviewer for good ill.  Wake up.  We don’t live in that world and perfect as we Elitists are, we still have our biases.  That being said I’m going to give you a review of SHADOWS IN FLIGHT (Amazon) the latest work in the Enderverse by Orson Scott Card.  Firstly let me lay my biases out for you so you can know understand where this review is coming from.
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