ISBN: 9781906584146

I was given this magazine to review.

Issue # 9 Murky Depths is stuffed with about as much spec fic as you can get in 82 slim pages. It’s got a comic book look, and a comic book feel, from the first glance at the sullen Dead Girl on the cover to the last frame of the last graphic strip.

It starts with the cover-inspiring first part of Richard Calder’s new serial strip “Dead Girls”. Just a sliver of a tale, but with enough mood and set up to tease readers, this tale of a sex robot STI, the infected girl and the man who must save her promises many more excitedly twisted things to come. From the future this issue flings readers into the English past with “Is This My Last Testament?” by Juliet E. McKenna. Not quite a werewolf tale, but bearing some resemblance, honestly the self-absorbed, almost cold main character both makes readers almost want to see nasty things happen to him, as well as effecting them more powerfully with horror that can break through even his dulled emotions. One of the meatier tales of the issue it’s also one of the best.

Now that MD has your attention it serves up a series of short tales that focus on wild set up and strange worlds. Matt Finucane’s “Complaint from the Other World” is a straight forward tale of a man ran afoul of modern witchcraft and trapped, well you’ll know from the illustrations. “Distant Rain” by Andrew Knighton is one of only two longer tales, this one spinning a science fiction pirate world where humans have tried to repopulate the ocean through science, but instead have ended up having to hunt down their genetically engineered mutant creations. The world set up is truly interesting, but the story focus is on the characters, which are somewhat less interesting due to the brevity of the tale itself. One small adventure out of so many, no matter how it ends, just feels like not enough.

Part Two of Luke Cooper’s “The Wrath of God” continues the love affair of Goulding, the cop with the heart of an angel and Halo Slipping, the angel with the soul of a human, and their battle against the angel of death who wants to kill Halo to earn his way back into heaven. Real dark (and not just art-wise) Cooper’s tales make the world of J. O’Barr’s The Crow look upbeat.

“Cancelled” by Robert E Keller is about an actor in a extreme future world, who regularly plays deaths scenes, for real, and the creature that’s getting pretty pissed off at humanity’s blatant disregard for the natural order of things. Derek Cagemann’s “Fast Learners” is also a dark SF tale, of robots who are almost human in nature, and a human who very much isn’t. The writing is solid enough, but one can’t help wondering why such a complete waste of flesh like Lon is so important to deserve a private tour of the factory, and have such things explained to him, in the first place.

“March of the Broken” by Craig Hallam features some of the best art of the book, beautiful and gruesome, matching the tale, a short, visual ode to love and zombies. Anthony Malone’s “The Transported Man” is off beat for the issue, a crude (at times) but humorous tale of a man made super lover by the tragic power that forces him to teleport at orgasm. This is one of the few love stories to be found inside MD’s pages.

“Postosuchus Kirkpatricki” by Simon Petrie is told in play form, that while at times is amusing in a Little Shop of Horrors/tongue-in-cheek form, also features non-linear theatrics that come from nowhere and seem tossed in for effect rather than natural to the story.

Lastly is “The Escape Artist” by Chris Lynch. Of all the deaths in this Murky Depths issue the ones in this graphic strip mean the most, being the most soulful and most felt, despite the very limited word use. The second to last frame says it all, showing a level of darkness, timing and devotion missing in many tales in the spec fic world.

It’s an issue of propositions and build up, and while not all the tales follow through to a satisfying conclusion Murky Depths does spark the imagination and bring to light some amazing speculative possibilities.

ISBN: 9781906584085

I was given this book to review.

Remember back when vampires were definitely creatures of horror, bound to humanity, yet whole apart from it? Welcome back to that time, with Sam Stone’s Futile Flame, the second in her Vampire Gene trilogy.

In the first book readers met Gabi, a two hundred year old vampire, on the hunt for a perfect mate who instead ends up with Lilly, the last person he expected to survive his killing kiss. In Futile Flame a monster stalking Lilly and Gabi pushes him to re-explore his roots, now armed with the knowledge that Lilly was, in fact, his own mortal descendant. Gabi hunts down his maker, Luci, once an infamous member of the Borgia family, terrorized by her own brother and finally turned in a vicious black ritual. Surely Luci has some idea to the identity of the beast that now threatens her entire vampiric family and how it became what it is today.

With all the style and charisma of Ann Rice, but less indulgence and crazy, Futile Flame is a sensual, deadly tale of immortals, sins and the unknown wrapped up in a vivid take on the past. Stone’s characters capture the same studied, immersive style, a sense of being in love with every detail of the world around them, past, present, or even future, that readers fell in love with in Rice’s intensely detailed earlier works, as well as the long standing charm of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Count Saint Germain series. Rich, enticing and utterly charming Stone’s vampires are ambrosia to horror fans hungry for the good old monstrous vampires who look, walk and sound like us, but hold our deaths in their gaze.

Trade Paperback: 9781906584078

If Dracula and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Count Saint Germain mixed you’d have Gabriele, the lead in Sam Stone’s throwback vampire novel, Killing Kiss. Stone takes readers on a ride back to when vampires were ageless, alien creatures only pretending to be human, where they mourned or celebrated their liberation from the species, found themselves constantly drawn to it and they didn’t sparkle.

Gabriele was a well-off Italian singer who fell prey to a woman, who quite accidentally made him a vampire when she fully intended to kill him. After his own tragic attempts to maintain a human life Gabriele gives up and instead once a year he ventures into the human social world to find and attempt to change a woman to become his mate. Four hundred years, and four hundred failures later sees Gabriele assuming the life of a college student, and almost given up on finding an equal, intent just on surviving.

As his new persona Jay, he runs into shy, quiet, bashful Carolyn, exactly his type of victim. For he must be a serial killer, even if he’s only killed once a year, for leaving such a trail of lost loves behind him. Then there’s Lilly, who is most definitely not his type, until spiked drinks from a frat party cause Gabriele to drop everything, his identity, his game and his defenses to whisk Lilly away.

Killing Kiss could never be dismissed as mere “vampire porn”. While the plot is foresee-able it’s also a return to vampires as predators on humanity, yet creatures utterly charmed by and weakened to us. Flashbacks are mixed in with modern events, giving the book the feel of slowly backing away from a painting to see the full picture.

Vampire fans, especially those feeling left behind by romance’s siege on the genre, will find Killing Kiss (the first in a trilogy) has a lot to offer and shouldn’t be missed.

Part four of Death and the Maiden moves outside of the restrictions of a magazine strip and into a space of its own. It features full color pages of the same surreal, near pornographic art that can also be found in the first three sections (in Issues 1-3 of Murky Depths).

The Black Order and the whores of New Babylon are caught up in a war of pornacracy and gendercide. In the midst of it all Flip, an outcast whore from New Babylon falls for Mr. Death, an outcast from the The Black Order. With the expanded space Calder has the chance to not just catch new readers up on the premise, and expand the world tenfold, but Flip and Mr. Death also face down metal-lined clones determined to carry out the sentence of execution on them for their crimes. A spot of action takes the comic out of the reflective and pushes boldly forward.

Calder “pornographizes” (his word) our vanilla world, from the inside out, creating a skewed world of up the skirt shots and Barbie-doll bodies. Death and the Maiden is like no other comic, veined with social commentary and cloaked in unrelenting sex.