June 3

Jason Dark: Ghost Hunter by Guido Henkel

“Your encounter with the extraordinary awaits,” claims the tagline of the new Jason Dark: Ghost Hunter series by Guido Henkel. A sort of supernatural Sherlock Holmes, this serial series follows the adventures of Jason Dark, a Victorian London bachelor and Geisterjäger, who is the latest in a long line of ghost hunters.

The series has a feeling very similar to the Gabriel Knight series of video games from 1993, which is not surprising as Henkel is also a video game writer. Each serial is sixty-one pages, fast-paced and action-oriented, much like TV show episodes… Full review at Dark Scribe Magazine

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May 27

Futile Flame by Sam Stone

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.

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May 20

There too much, let me sum up

– Work still on going on the house.

-Finished a soulful chapter that I think might just be one of the strongest scenes in this book and almost has me excited about it again

-Was visited my my Aunt Becky, one of the few family members who stuck it out with me over the years, whom I haven’t seen since my mother’s funeral in February 1989. Conversation was equal parts bitter, funny, angry and sad, and I suspect if they had stayed tonight we’d all be drinking something majorly alcoholic (which reminds me that I never told her about the absinthe, she’s admonish me, then laugh historically and ask for some I’m sure), sitting out on the porch and be crying til we laughed and vice versa. You have to treasure moments like that with people who really get you.

-Last two weeks of school OMG field trips and field days, a science fair and an art show/performance next week.

-Allergic reactions to soaps suck. A lot.

-So worn out today, and playing host to some hormonal issues, so I want to rant about the pit falls of working from home but I’m not even sure I’m making sense anymore (and I currently feel like my dinner might be holding a particularly enthusiastic rave in my guts) so I’m off to bed. Rant tomorrow. Probably. If I remember.

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May 20

Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane

ISBN: 978-0345515575
I was given this book as a gift.

Downside book #1

With this book Kane has brought Urban fantasy back to its roots, not a place where a girl detective has to choose between the unbelievably sexy vampire that might someday weaken and kill her, or the blindingly gorgeous werewolf who might get her mixed up in a fight too big for her and end up just as dead. Here Kane takes strong element of the world we all know and forges them into something new, familiar, yet utterly different.

In the Downside books the Church and the government are one and the same, but this isn’t the modern Church running things. Instead the supernatural is fact, and veined with magic, ghosts and witches, and the Church as controller of it, also must protect the citizens from the supernatural (mostly so it can maintain it’s steel-locked control of the world). Chess is a witch working for Church, a Debunker, who either debunks faked hauntings, or clears up real ones for her employers. She’s also a drug addict who owes someone terrible a lot of money. So in one book readers will find a fantasy-skewed religious conspiracy thriller and a paranormal, hard core (in the dark and harsh sense and in the Oi punk! sense) noir mystery story.

Bump, Chess’ dealer, demands that she debunk the haunting of an old, abandoned air field so he can use it to funnel in more drugs. Meanwhile a rival dealer makes her an offer, enticing her with free drugs, if only she’ll make sure Bump can’t use the airfield. Both tasks turn out to be more complicated than expected since Terrible, Bump’s right hand enforcer, becomes Chess’ assistant and guard as she works, and as Chess tries to fight her attractions to Lex, a dealer for the rival drug lord. In the end the airfield isn’t just haunted, something much, much worse is going on, and Chess can’t even go to the Church for back up because of her own dark dealings and her suspicion that someone in the church is behind the dark magic at the airfield.

Unholy Ghosts is a thrilling ride, textured and vivid, a powerhouse of fantasy. Brimming with characters that aren’t quite heroes but aren’t quite bad guys either, it shows the hard core, broke down parts of the world other stories skip over, the dark side of reality that comes not from magic, but from the poor, desperate and disillusioned trying to make it through a hard life.

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May 18

Of Wolf and Man by Christopher Fulbright

Lachesis, 2009
ISBN: 9781897562369
Available: New, used & digital

Years ago, Carrie was kidnapped from her coven by a wolf cult and initiated, her body becoming the home to the Mother of the Wolves. Despite her coven’s attempts to save her, time has moved on, the spirit of the Wolf Mother has grown slowly inside her, and the people of the her coven have found other life paths. Now, as their children edge into adulthood, the remaining members of the white coven find themselves under attack by Carrie, now fully under the control of the Wolf Mother and determined to take out the coven that held her bound for so long.
The decision on including Of Wolf and Man in public collections is a split one. The first half of the book, if not more, is spent in slow set up, so much that a chunk of readers will not make it past page 100, where most of the action actually starts. Once the plot pushes forward, so does the speed of the book and the attention to detail and story, avalanching toward a dramatic end. At first, the story seems scattered and restless, nothing but detail with no action to make the handful of point of view characters and their back stories relevant. Slow to advance, the story does bloom into a more familiar traditional horror tale, complete with complex character and plot and payoff for patient (and bloodthirsty) readers. Of Wolf and Man shouldn’t be included because of its subject matter, but rather because of its style. In libraries where Stephen King and his stylistically similar peers are popular, readers will find this book to be an interesting new slant on werewolves. However, wiith so much werewolf fiction available in paranormal romance and urban fantasy these days, readers coming from that angle will find this book too slow to start and lacking the drive and focus they’re used to. With so much crossover between the two types of readers, librarians should consider their audience before adding this one to their collections.
Contains: sex, violence

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