Unhinged by Logan Keys
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Logan's roots are showing!

These are early horror stories, four of them in all, and they're full of good eats, a little cosmetics, and, of course, meatloaf. Everything goes down better with meatloaf.

I kinda begged Logan to get this back out there, and I'm super glad I did, because, well... HORROR! Does there really need to be an excuse?

Just a warning to all you kiddies out there: this is for adults. You better not be sneaking a peek here. If you do and you get caught, well, maybe you'll get a little visit to "The Last Rainbow".

Or who knows? You might find yourself sitting around a nice lady's table in "Violent Delights". Maybe that wouldn't be so bad. The meatloaf IS really good. And NO, it's NOT made of the same stuff as what we had to eat in Snowed. Whatever gave you that idea? Sheesh. Young people these days.

I think it's time that early works get another day in the sun, don't you? Damn, I love horror. :) It makes me feel so naughty. :)

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Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So. A ghost who suicided is forced to work as an operator at a suicide help hotline. Sounds like a neat setup for a joke, right?

Partially. The thing is, this UF is a ghost story where the ghost is just trying to get by, dealing in the coin that only she and her ghostly friends can spend... Time. Time and Ghosts. I guess Alan Moore has it right that we become creatures of the fourth dimension after we die! :) Or something. :)

But even though this is a pretty cool UF setup and I love the idea, we've also got witches. All kinds of witches. Corn witches, Water witches... and of course they prey on the ghosts and the power struggle can become quite predatory in that the poor ghosts can be trapped in mirrors.

Also cool.

It reminds me a damn lot of Angela Slatter's great fantasy stories, only a bit more accessible and mainstream.

The personal small-town nostalgia is nearly as heavy as the pathos of the main emotional arc, and I'll be honest... I probably would have enjoyed this more as a full novel with a longer, more developed end. Maybe not as a series, despite Seanan's proclivity with writing great series, but as a straight novel, I think this could have been a lot more solid and satisfying.

As it is, I'm just fine with the end, I just think it might have been a tad less easy. :)

Still, Seanan's a great writer, no doubting this!

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Exiles of Ascension by Drew Cordell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been getting into the Absolute Knowledge series quite a bit, but is it a far stretch to say that I've been loving the prequels a slight bit more? Probably not, but here's the reason: I love world-building.

I'm hooked for world-building, and this piece sets up an entire realm that has remained outside of the events that have transformed the Earth... outer space! :) No major AI to stand over their shoulders. In fact, it feels more like I'm being set up for even greater things to come.

This short piece is good and it has cool action and events, but I'll be honest... if it wasn't for the fact that it's all tied to the rest of the series, in context, it probably wouldn't feel that special.

It's the mystery that makes it fun as hell. :)



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From Hell by Alan Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm torn on this one. I mean, sure, it's Jack the Ripper and Alan Moore and it's supposed to be this grand masterpiece, but to me it just feels mostly like some kind of disjointed hodge-podge collection of personas that simultaneously lift up and denigrate both the East Side women and everyone else, nearly randomly, until much later in the comic when things finally tie together into a mystical extravaganza that is both surprising and feeling rather out of place.

What do I mean? Well, throw out the movie version, for starters. Keep the bits about William Gull, REALLY emphasise the importance of Masonic conspiracy theories and the connection to the crown, and then, after you're thoroughly grounded in all the blood and gore and the feeling like nothing really matters, top it all off with a dose of Alan Moore's more odd explorations in the human psyche and/or WOW mysticism.

Fortunately, I've read Jerusalem.
From Hell goes there, serving as a freaky introduction to life without time, magical incantations, demons, and the power of location upon magic.

This part is worth all the apparent slog of most of the rest of the comic. (At least for me, but I love literature of ideas and oddities and complex plots.)

Will people hate me if I was rather bored with long segments of this story? That I only really started perking up to it with Gull's becoming Virgil?

Still, in the end, I really liked it and I thought it was rather cool how all the well-researched conspiracies tied it back in. I did, however, have a hell of a time with reading the text. It hurt my eyes.

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The Alteration by Kingsley Amis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Off With His Balls!!!"

Or maybe, another alternate title, "What PKD would have written if he was mired in Lutherism and he wanted to write something to counteract the hedonistic oddity that was Gravity's Rainbow"

Seriously, this is what Philip K Dick would have written if he was focused on Popes and the total emasculation of humanity. And rather than Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, we've got a ton of snipping or at least talk of snipping going on. :)

Let me talk about the world-building. It's all way below the surface, with most of the action focused on this poor kid who's about to get his balls chopped off for the sake of his beautiful singing voice, but right below this is a bunch of straight homages to alternate histories and even a direct love letter to PKD's The Man in the High Castle, only taking the switch back WAY in the past, keeping science a dirty word and the Holy Roman Church in high supremacy.

Pretty cool, right? Well, yeah, I guess it would be based on just this description, but it really just feels like a "Poor me, I'm about to get snip-snipped, all the adults around me are acting REALLY strange, and now I'm getting asked questions like 'Do I play with myself and have you ever wondered what it would be like to do that with a girl?'"

Ahem. This is such a penis-oriented 70's novel. Like, totally. But it's really focused not on the bright side of parading about with a boner, but rather, the fear of losing that big "B" forever. Alas.

And it only gets really funny by the end of the novel with the global implications.

Too bad we didn't get a bit more of that earlier on, right? Alas.

Still, it's a pretty cool book on the straight traditional fiction front, with a lot of characters and grounded explorations, but the SF portion is still kinda light. That's my main complaint. Oh, plus, all the little crazy strangenesses that have crept into Political Christianity over the last six hundred years. :)

I don't know if I'd really recommend this for anyone except fans of The Man in the High Castle and people who like weird major twists in Catholicism.

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The Collector by Rhett C. Bruno
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was pretty sweet! Mystery, cool SF elements, and even better world-building for the rest of the Titanborn series.

And, I think it can be read with or without foreknowledge of Titanborn even though the main character from Titanborn is also in this one. Why? Because it brings out some of the most interesting aspects of the corporate world that has made the Collectors a going thing after the destruction on Earth. It also brings out the personal things I loved about the gritty Malcom in Titanborn, too.

And who doesn't like a gritty mystery full of all the things that makes PKD great, all wrapped up in a bow that points a huge arrow at so many of life's injustices?

No spoilers, but this is the kind of thing I wished I saw more of in From Ice to Ashes, the actual sequel to Titanborn. :) It might be a personal preference thing with a bit of attachment to the MC. :)

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The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet by Neil deGrasse Tyson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like all of Tyson's books, it's very well written, explaining any number of difficult subjects with clarity and ease, but unfortunately, with this subject, we devolve into a catalogue of cultural significance for the poor demoted Pluto and a very long list of rather humorous emails and letters all sent to Tyson because of his role in the decision.

If that's what you're looking for, then, by all means, enjoy this book!

But if you're looking for an in-depth rather than an adequate focus on Pluto rather than our cultural reactions to the planet, then perhaps you should look elsewhere.

I'm not saying this book wasn't fun... and the politics of science and all those pooooooor schoolchildren writing Tyson was both humorous and slightly off-putting at the same time... but it wasn't so much about science as it was about justifying (rightly so, in my opinion,) the need to pluto Pluto. RIP.

Or rather... go play with your new Kuiper buddies. ;)

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