Good Guys by Steven Brust
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fairly light UF superhero fiction with traditional powers, relics, and mystery.

Of course, it's fueled by quasi-governmental agencies and assassinations that may or may not be justified, but the real joy in the novel comes from the mystery.

Murder.

Increasingly interesting and gory effects murder.

But to whom? And why?

The guilty. :) You know all those bank people who busted the economy, or the a-holes who focused on all their specialty pet projects but completely ignored the plights of the common man? Yeah. Deaders.

Feeling conflicted? Me, too.

But that's the joy we can gleam from this superhero novel. Magic, relics, and the common man. Minimum wage superheroes???? Come on. You KNOW this has to be a gimmick. A fun one, too. :)

I've been a big fan of Brust for a long time now and this modern rendition of the comic tradition is fun as hell. Just bring the beer. Please. The good stuff. Don't get all pansy ass on me.


Thanks to netgalley for the ARC!

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Knight's Shadow by Sebastien de Castell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I fell into this second book with no hesitation, read through its long pages with great joy, and ended it feeling so satisfied.

This is odd.

Why? Because despite being a party to a great character's prolonged torture and hellish defeat, I still feel like I came out on top. Falcio has it really rough in this novel. Really, really rough.

And yet, all the humor is intact, all the brilliant action scenes, all the corruption and vice in the kingdom and all the desperate idealism of those few who still believe in mercy and justice in the face of an overwhelming need to get all revenge-y on those Knights' asses. :)

It's a hell of a good balancing act and the author pulls it off beautifully. The world-building is deep and thoughtful and larger than life, but it's the people inside it that live and breathe.

And then there's the whole Saint business, the visiting gods and their inability to shape anything except obliquely, and, again, the brilliant action scenes filled with despair, skill, heartbreak, and sacrifice. I can't emphasize these bits enough.

As a fantasy, I'm placing it right up there on some of the best of the best, but not for the flash of magic or the scope, but for the nitty-gritty heart, the detail, and the characters.

What can I say? I'm in love. :)

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Unclean Spirits by Chuck Wendig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Let's be real here. This one is bare-bones wicked, amping up the horror elements, the noir mystery elements, and then, finally, a total American Gods vibe.

Only all the gods have been cast down and the one who cast them down is gone. As in gone, gone. What's left? All the b-listers with a fragment of their original abilities, from Sumerian, Greek... everything... working to maintain their little kingdoms in the modern world.

Fifty years of this, and even the gods are jaded, annoyed, and upset about their lot in life.

This isn't funny like Kevin Hearne's great Iron Druid series. It's not sly like a natural noir. It's gritty, bloody, and dense. It starts with great action and mystery and always just trying to keep one's head afloat, and it gets absolutely wild with absolutely enormous stakes. As in an empty hell and and empty heaven kind of stakes.

It's hardcore cool, but it's also tiring as hell.

Who should I recommend this to? Anyone who's a fan of old gumshoe tales, super-gritty and disturbing personal lives, and anyone who wants a world of mean streets full of all the most fantastic gods. Eros gets murdered, Psyche is a MC, and so is Aphrodite. Want more? Read the book. No spoilers, but it's wild. Shifting alliances, backstabbers, hidden gods and imprisoned ones, awesome parentages and bloodlines fill these pages while always remaining true to a hardcore thriller mode.

I'm super impressed. I'm really surprised that this isn't being read by everyone. Like, rabidly. Especially all you folks who love your mythologies and can trace all the bloodlines of all the gods and demigods.

It's important. :)

And thanks to Netgalley for the ARC! (Republished, I do believe.)

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Besieged by Kevin Hearne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is pure candy. What else can we expect out of a collection of novellas and short stories set in between the long-running Iron Druid series? Of course, we need to have some passing familiarity with the events, but for the most part, these snap right along and give us cute, sometimes, funny, and sometimes horrific scenes of an immortal druid battling demons in the wild west or taking on carnies.

Say what?

Well, yeah! And running from Bast in ancient Egypt! Oops. Well, we always knew that Atticus was a dog person. Right, Oberon? Want some meat, my immortal Irish Hound? :)

There's even a short with the knock-off thundergod sporting black leather and hunting down a wizard perv. You gotta love these.

Gods and goddesses are everywhere and Atticus always makes such GOOD friends with everyone.

This is great for all of us who miss the series. Fortunately, I'm enjoying Hearne's new fantasy quite a bit, so I'm not going to cry. Too much.



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The Body Library by Jeff Noon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To call this a simple Noir mystery is to completely miss the point. Noon has created something on a completely different level of anything I've read before.

Yeah, that's right. The world of the imagination taking to the mean streets, turning meta-fiction on its head and grounding a whole world in a stinking reality where people really are the stories and stories walk the streets.

This is a fantasy and a science fiction novel. Make no mistake about that. Noon is running with a fantastic idea where a city must live with the fundamental fact that words are magic for everyone. Everyone is a writer, and if they aren't, then they're a character in someone else's' story. The motivations are clear. To get ahead, you must write. And then the police are editors and there are Dada fiction writers rebelling against the same-old narratives and murder isn't always murder... it's art.

The novel makes it gritty and grounded in the Noir foundation, but by god, it gets hallucinogenic as hell as Nyquist (our escaped protagonist from a city beset by shifting timelines) finds himself in a murder mystery he has to solve, only to get caught up in a madness of becoming a writer or be the written.

Lordy, this was one HELL of a trip. Not for the faint of heart. Or the impatient. But by Bradbury in heaven, I swear this is the spiritual godson of The Illustrated Man on PCP.

Noon's imagination is TOP NOTCH. I think I've just found my new favorite to-go guy for cutting edge and brilliant Weird fiction.

*does a happy dance*

A BIG thanks to Netgalley for letting me read this early. :)



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A Man of Shadows by Jeff Noon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think this book should be proud to sit atop the "New Weird" label.

It is like Dark City, a potboiler Noir with a very timey-wimey worldbuilding twist.

For the early part of the novel, it's all hardboiled detective stuff and it's familiar and fun, but I for one was clicking my teeth for the moment it started showing me the good stuff. And it did... in time zones.

A city all in man-made darkness, stars that never moved, where time is a relative thing, where industry collapses when certain pieces of reality can slip into different time streams.

Like, cool, right? Chaos. And industry leaders, working stiffs, government officials, everyone does their very best to keep the peace and the time in place.

I can't tell you how much I love this idea.

The detective noir stuff is polished, too. From a missing kid to a freaky wild family mystery to lots of cool spoilery things happening. :)

I can easily say I'm going to be reading a LOT more of Jeff Noon. Mixed genres may be a kind of specialty thing for intrepid and courageous readers, but it's so damn rewarding. Let your imaginative hair down! :)

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Sienna McKnight by R.K. Syrus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a novel of ultraviolence for all you military novel nuts with a hankering for added paranormal abilities. :)

I know you're out there. You like the fight. You like the anger. You like drive, the teamwork, the gun- nuttery. :) Above all, you like the anger.

It doesn't hurt that Sienna is a borderline sociopath with great survival skills. It's fun for exactly what it is. It's popcorn and gunporn.

Looking forward to more!



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