Review: Aliens: Bishop

Aliens: Bishop by T.R. Napper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

T.R. Napper gets invited to play in the world of Aliens. Here we learn that Colonial Marines Master Sergeant Apone has a brother. His brother is a Captain in the Colonial Marines who is charged with tracking down Michael Bishop. Bishop is the progenitor of the Bishop series of androids. He also has a desire to investigate and exploit the xenomorphs.

The mission to track down Michael Bishop reveals an opportunity to recover the physical remnants of the Bishop android from the Aliens movie. (That is the one with Newt.) Eventually, it becomes clear that Michael Bishop has grown more xenomorphs. Captain Apone wants some payback for the death of his brother.

The events of the book take place after the Aliens: 3 movie as one of the survivors of the prison planet eventually becomes part of the story.

Napper does an outstanding job of filling out each character with unique motivations and history. There are many events where characters are faced with choices that pit a desire to settle past grievances with the desire to survive in the face of low chances of survival. Collectively and individually, they demonstrate the grit needed to rise to the most lethal of challenges.

The book provides us with a raft of new characters and events without breaking the lore of the Aliens fictional world.

View all my reviews

Review: 100 Fathoms Below

100 Fathoms Below by Steven L. Kent
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a 3.5-star review which is a fair representation of my experience.

The book is a straightforward vampire tale. One of the crew is bitten just before his submarine deploys from Pearl Harbor for a mission. As with the old shampoo commercial, he bites a friend, who then bites a friend, and so on, and so on.

The tale centers around how the unbitten crew reacts to the sudden presence of horror that is slowly consuming their ship. The crew are highly trained submariners. Their initial responses of treating the problem as a common virus/disease are predictable.

The characters are reasonably fleshed out with unique motivations and perspectives. The authors wisely placed this in 1980 due to the use of racism as a very minor plot element. Racism in the military was not unknown in 1980. Opposition to racism was more prevalent in 1980. The presence of racism as a plot element manages to accurately walk that line.

There are a few plot-related issues that keep this from being a solid hit.

- The crew's responses to the unfolding problems are predictable throughout the book.

- Chekov's Gun makes several appearances. As one example, the book talks about the crew and mechanical spaces but clearly doesn't mention the nuclear-powered engine room. It's not a big surprise when we find survivors here. Nor is it a big reveal as to why the vampires haven't taken over this space. There are many other occasions where something with an obvious implication of utility or danger is mentioned in one chapter only to be revisited as a "reveal" a chapter or two later.

- Up until the last few pages, there is zero effort to explore the motivations of the "big bad". Vampirism is the result of some entity. It is implied that there is a single source of it. Late in the book, it is implied that there is an intelligence for its motivations beyond the need to feed, but no effort is made to explore that intelligence.

- Spoiler - In the closing chapters, the captain intends to dump all of the dead bodies overboard and then return to Pearl Harbor. There isn't any consideration for the impact on his career (and that of the remaining crew) from bringing a partially crewed ship back to base without also bringing the bodies. What explanation will he offer? What proof will he have? That his career (and his crew's careers) is over as a result of this incident is left unacknowledged.

- Second spoiler - The vampires die when exposed to low levels of radiation. The crew has access to waste coolant water that is not radioactive enough to do them serious harm, but radioactive enough that contact with a vampire has instantly corrosive effects on the vampire. They have one...one!!...bucket available to slosh the radioactive water around the ship. No effort is made to locate spray bottles or other containers. Using radiation to kill vampires is kind of a neat twist. The execution was lacking. 

If you like vampires and you like books with a military setting, then this is a great book for you. It is a straightforward and entertaining read. You'll just need to enjoy it for what it is; straightforward and fun without any serious depth.

I think this could be an excellent movie!



View all my reviews

Review: King of the Bastards

King of the Bastards by Brian Keene
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a 2-star review which is a fair evaluation of my experience with this book.

Our protagonist (??!?) is a Conan knock-off who has all of the bravado and toughness but none of the nuance. He conquers and kills because that is what he does. Others are expected to submit to his will. That apparently includes raping women just because.

This book is an amalgamation of cosmic horror, fantasy, and science fiction.

Our protagonist is out adventuring when his group is attacked by various monsters from the ocean's depths as well as raiders arriving across the sea. He and one of his crew survive after running aground on some foreign land. They beat off the remainder of their attackers and are discovered by some of the locals.

The locals are afraid of some wizard that lives on the top of a mountain. In exchange for agreeing to help rid the locals of the wizard, the locals agree to travel with our protagonist as he sails for his home that has been taken over by raiders working for the deity that fomented in the original attacks.

There are two primary issues with this book.

1. Our protagonist is a cheap Conan knock-off.
2. The author is attempting a pastiche of the original RE Howard stories, but he is unable to consistently use language that is in keeping with that pastiche. He uses terms and phrases that are not appropriate for a Conan-type character.

View all my reviews

Review: The Liar of Red Valley

The Liar of Red Valley by Walter Goodwater
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Our protagonist's mother possesses the magical ability to cause reality to change based on what she writes in her book. Whatever she writes comes to pass.

Rather than using that power to run things, she mostly just exchanges her talent for money.

Mom eventually dies and our protagonist discovers that she also possesses this ability, it has been passed down from mother to daughter since the founding of the Valley.

There is some sort of powerful being (an alien? something supernatural?) that is attracted to the valley. He wants her for her power.

Fans of Stephen King will recognize many of the features of this book. But this is a reasonably unique story and setting. Worth a read for any fan of horror and fantasy.

View all my reviews

Review: Darkness on the Edge of Town

Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-Star review. That's a good description of my experience.

Residents of a town discover that a dark curtain has descended on their town. The curtain blocks out the sun, moon, and stars. No one that enters the curtain ever returns. Those that enter it can be heard screaming in agony...for a time.

Faced with living for some unknown time confined with their neighbors, the town quickly...and in my opinion a little bit inexplicably....becomes self-destructive. It is suggested that the force behind the curtain is telepathically encouraging the self-destruction. The book doesn't provide enough context for each individual to know if that force is planting an new seed of destruction or encouraging something that was already there. As a group of humans, it seems like it was something already there. But we never get to meet most of the characters before the curtain came down, so it is impossible to know how they have fundamentally changed after it came down.

This is sort of a cross between Lord of the Flies and Stephen King's Beneath the Dome. In fact, this book was published a few months after Beneath the Dome.

I was halfway through the book before I had enough interest to want to finish it. I'm a huge fan of the author's podcast and wanted to give his books a try.

There were very few reasons to have any emotion for or against any of the characters. They have little history upon which to base an emotional connection.

There isn't any real building of suspense. The dark curtain falls. Things become steadily, progressively worse. There really aren't any huge surprises once we get to the worst condition. The violence borders on being mundane because it is expected.

While I'm sure that I'll be reading more of the author's work, I have no desire to revisit this book.


View all my reviews

Review: Fighting to Survive

Fighting to Survive by Rhiannon Frater
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a weak 4-star review.

Fighting to Survive tells the story of a group of survivors from the prototypical zombie apocalypse. They start out living elbow to elbow in a reinforced/walled construction yard with zombies on all sides. Eventually, they expand out into the surrounding area.

The zombies are a problem. But in some ways, human politics is a larger challenge.

And in some ways, the purposeful cruelties of other humans living in the area pose the largest challenges of all.

The cast of characters includes a broad spectrum of individuals each bringing their own unique talents and perspectives to performing the myriad tasks needed to help humanity survive and hopefully to let human civilization begin to thrive.

Difficult challenges will face our merry band of survivors. Some of their solutions are not what most people would endorse. They happen anyway.

A mysterious Vigilante is in the compound occasionally tossing someone over the walls to the waiting zombies. The victim being someone that had demonstrated a purposeful lack of concern for their fellow survivors. Exactly who the Vigilante is an ongoing question.

This was a solid 4-star read right until the last 5-10 chapters. At that point, the author took a wonderfully inclusive narrative and infused it with latent racism and misandry.

A very enjoyable read. Easy to see why it was picked up from being self-published by a major publishing house. Just a couple of rough edges that could have been smoothed out with a little editorial discretion.

View all my reviews

Review: Skin

Skin by Peter Fugazzotto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A good novella from horror/grim-dark fantasy author Peter Fugazzotto.

A group of men guarding a border outpost find that they have invited some creature into their keep. The creature can mimic any person. And it is killing them off one by one.

Well constructed story. Compelling characters and decent world building.

As the author readily admits, this story seems to be a close parallel with John Carpenter's movie "The Thing". That was apparent to me early on in reading the story. But the writing was compelling enough to keep me interested in seeing how Peter would reveal his version of the story.

View all my reviews

Review: Waiting Out Winter

Waiting Out Winter by Kelli Owen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A 3-star review. Really more of a 2.5-star review.

Thought this was going to be a suspense/horror book. Not really a lot of either involved. Perhaps that explains my response as I was expecting this to involve some level of horror that simply was not there.

A fairly pedestrian "something bad happens and some people survive" storyline. The characters were not terribly engaging.

View all my reviews

Review: Servant: The Awakening by L.L. Foster

Servant: The Awakening by L.L. Foster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

L.L. Foster's Servant: The Awakening is the best book that I did not finish. I'm giving it 3 stars in this review.

The premise is straightforward.

God...or "god"...or "something" periodically compels our heroine, Gaby, to destroy demons. A feeling comes over her that is both painful and undeniable at the same time. The pain remains until the demon is dead. Or sent back to hell. The early part of the book is unclear on the religious connections involved.

At the start of the book, the characters bore more than a modest whiff of cardboard. Gaby is an angry loner. That's all you get; anger and purposeful separation from the rest of humanity. She doesn't understand why she has to kill these demons and she doesn't like the compulsion to kill them either.

Her landlord has poor self-esteem. Mort is just wishy-washy in every aspect of his life and relationship with others.

Then there is the handsome and dashing police Detective Luther. The good detective inspires feelings in Gaby. Feelings that she doesn't want to have. He is a bit of a mystery as he keeps showing up at all the wrong/right times. And Gaby experiences an unexplainable attraction to him that also messes up her demon-killing skills.

All very cardboardery. But then midway through the book, the interaction of the characters, as well as the developing threat of a continuing stream of new demons, starts to make things interesting. I bought this book at a Dollar Store and it could have been easily worth the original cover price in terms of entertainment.

The problem....cancer. The hook in the book is that all of the demons end up possessing cancer patients. The villain, in this case, is using the patients as potential hosts for the demons. Instead of doing his job and curing the patients, he is actively making it worse.

And I couldn't finish the book. I've lost too many people to cancer. Seeing their pain as a pathway to demon possession isn't fun for me. I think the book has some potential as the characters start to unfold. I would be open to reading something else from this author in the future. Just not any more of this.



View all my reviews

Bitten by Kelley Armstrong - A Goodreads Review

Bitten by Kelley Armstrong

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


1 star on my scale is a book that would actively advise against reading.  I did not finish this book.

The book suffered from two primary problems.

1)  A majority of the story occurs within the head of the main character.

2)  As a result, there are lengthy sections of exposition.  And a lot of that was about her "feelings".  The cardinal rule of "show me, don't tell me" comes frequently into play.

I ended up tossing this book because the main character exhibited beliefs that were misandrist and more than just a little bigoted.  Both attitudes were irrational even within the context of the story.

I bought the book because they turned this into a TV series.  The TV show wasn't good enough for me to continue watching.  But in my experience, the book is always better than the movie/TV show.

Except this time.





View all my reviews

Impaler by Kate Paulk - A Goodreads Review

Impaler by Kate Paulk

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A 4 star book on my scale is one that I would want to read again.  3.5 stars is probably a more accurate assessment of my experience with this book.

Impaler by Kate Paulk takes the primary character from the Bram Stoker's Dracula and re-imagines him as a hero defending his land from the invading Turks.  Kate Paulk has re-inserted what little is known about the real-life Vlad Tepes and his family into the story.

If you want your vampires to rise at sunset and to drink blood until a village mob drives a stake through his heart and removes his head, then read something else.

I found the cast of characters to be interesting.  The sole plot perspective on Vlad was a bit tiring. While there were opportunities to examine other characters, those opportunities when unexploited.  A little variety in perspective and this would have made this a solid 4 star book.

The book included a modest amount of military strategy as well as some commentary regarding politics of eastern Europe as the Turkish empire was expanding.  Both were modestly interesting aspects that certainly added to the flavor of the book.



View all my reviews

Red Equinox by Douglas Wynne - A Goodreads Review

Red Equinox by Douglas Wynne

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


3 stars - on my scale, it was enjoyable, but I am likely to give the book away as I won't read it again.

A rather derivative take on the Lovecraftian mythos.



View all my reviews

Night Shifted by Kate Paulk - A Goodreads Review

Night Shifted by Kate Paulk

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


2 star review - on my scale, 2 stars is a book that probably isn't worth the time.

Vampire fan fic. 

I wouldn't have finished it if it was any longer.



View all my reviews