Fiction

An Author I Wish Everyone Knew About – J.G. Ballard

I first heard J.G. Ballard’s name in connection with the film Crash and its NC-17 rating. Not the super-shrill-racism-is-bad (which of course it is) film Crash. I’m talking about the David Cronenberg film from 1996 which features a peculiar group of people who get turned on by automobile collisions. (Honk honk!) The movie sounded bizarre. [...]

December 19, 2011 READ MORE →

Book Review: The Affair by Lee Child

In my admittedly biased, Lee-Child-loving opinion, The Affair by Lee Child is as good as any of his other Jack Reacher books, and better than a few. If you have followed the series you have seen Reacher go from being a military policeman to an unemployed drifter, but we never got the story of exactly [...]

December 9, 2011 READ MORE →

Mathieu Duchesneau and the Horrors of Missing Capitalists! Book Review of Atlas Shrugged

 By Mathieu Duchesneau Are you a looter or a producer? I am not an extremist by any measure. As it happens, I am what you could call an anti-ism..ist. Or something. You might say that this is a form of extremism, but please bear with me for the moment and continue reading. The point is, [...]

October 31, 2011 READ MORE →

Book Review: A Dark Matter by Peter Straub

A Dark Matter by Peter Straub is my favorite of his most recent three or four (how’s that for a vague rave review?). I first encountered Straub in the grand old bookmobile in Spring Creek, Nevada. I was in fourth grade. I grabbed copies of Ghost Story, Floating Dragon, and Shadowlands. They were a bit [...]

October 13, 2011 READ MORE →

If You’ve Ever Wanted A Female Hannibal Lecter: Chelsea Cain’s Archie and Gretchen Books

The Chelsea Cain books that I’ve read remind me of The Silence of the Lambs, but with a beautiful, educated woman in place of Hannibal Lecter.  I’ve read the first three in the Archie and Gretchen series. I can’t get into the second and third books too much today without spoiling things for you, but [...]

October 8, 2011 READ MORE →

A Wizard of Earthsea

“The Earthsea books were my absolute favorite as I was growing up.” So said a coworker of approximately the same age as me. I was reading fantasy back then, constantly, just like him. But I never ever heard of Ursula K. Leguin’s Earthsea novels. A Wizard of Earthsea is the first, and I read it [...]

August 31, 2011 READ MORE →

Sara Gruen Books, With Reviews To Come

I had never heard of Sara Gruen before seeing a copy of Water For Elephants come across my desk at work. I’m a sucker for the circus, having grown up with Something Wicked This Way Comes and graduating later to weirdness like Geek Love. So I grabbed it. I read it over the next 30 [...]

August 23, 2011 READ MORE →

Book Review: Embassytown

 Guest post by Whitney Jones China Mieville is an amazing and infuriating writer. His worlds, meticulously built and lovingly detailed, force the reader to pay attention to every page for fear of being left behind. As a leader of the “New Weird” movement in speculative fiction, Mieville isn’t afraid to push the reader a little [...]

August 11, 2011 READ MORE →

Necroscope – Book Review by Logan Christopher

Note from Josh: Necroscope is the beginning of a pretty long series. If you like the first one that Logan reviews here, I predict that you will enjoy the others as well. I was at a wedding and ran into an old friend. My girlfriend asked about his tattoo of a zombie wolf on his [...]

August 6, 2011 READ MORE →

Book Review: Worth Dying For by Lee Child

Yesterday on desk I saw a copy of the latest Jack Reacher novel, Worth Dying For by Lee Child. I took it with me to lunch, skipped over the passages which lovingly describe bullet velocity, rifle finishes, fist to thorax calculations, and I was done by midnight. It was my evening shift and I was [...]

July 28, 2011 READ MORE →