June
4
That is all.
June
2
Private Lessons Chapter Four
Private Lessons is an explicit erotic romance with a horse-lover flavor. I will be posting consecutive sections on Tuesdays until the whole thing is posted. Then I’ll post it as a free pdf on my website. Do not click the link to read more if you are offended, or bored, by adults in explicit sexual situations.
June
2
Blood Bar by Norm Applegate
Trade Paperback: 9780982253014, $17.95- A patchwork collection of genre standbys, Blood Bar by Norm Applegate features an S&M loving Madame-with-a-heart-of-gold/detective/vampire called to aid her friend Rose Nichols (or possibly Nicholls), whose boyfriend Drach, a role-playing vampire, is killed in Chapter One by a cute, but psycho woman named Erin who is on the warpath against real vampires who killed her dad. Despite being busy living a life of booze and “night games” (and running an incredibly successful brothel) Kim Bennett drops everything to help Rose prove her innocence and find Drach’s killer.
- But the pair are in deeper than they thought since the killer, working for a vampire herself, is after the legendary Black Testament, a sacred vampire document written by Jack the Ripper (who supposedly lived in Manhattan and founded the wickedest blood bar in town).
- Spiked with crazy sex addicted women, a confusing array of vampires, random scenes of Truth or Dare between the two female leads and a need for tighter editing Blood Bar is a tale for hardcore vampire fans or horror fans. Readers beware though, the women in this book know the facial expressions of the people they are on the phone with, believe intelligence is an ugly trait and are very willing to throw plot and everything else aside for random sexual thoughts and acts.
May
29
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home by Joss Whedon
Season Eight: Part One
Graphic Novel: 9781593078225, $15.95
The Long Way Home doesn’t start exactly where the last television season of Buffy left off, instead it starts a little past that, after Buffy and her crew have restarted their lives. In some ways, things are very different, but in others, they’re exactly the same. Each character seems to have taken a level of bad ass as they push forward in the fight against evil in their own ways.
Training the new slayers for a fight that’s longer and more eventful than the epic big bad battle season seven kissed viewers goodbye with, Buffy still has issues, and still has a ton of problems, including; Andrew, Willow’s sometimes tenuous hold on her personal darkness, Dawn’s feelings of uselessness and need for attention, Xander’s everlasting support that might just be more than friendly and a cadre of teen girls to wrangle, train and keep alive.
On a part-training mission, Buffy and some of her trainees interrupt a demon ritual and discover the human prey all have the same strange symbol carved into their chest. More than just a casual encounter, the crew get to work trying to unravel the larger plot only to be distracted by a series of villains, who like good antagonists, never seem to go away completely. So between high school rivals, still bent on revenge, the military declaring Buffy’s operation a terrorist sect, giant sized little sisters and a mass zombie attack The Long Way Home doesn’t skip a beat, thrusting beloved characters right back where fans love to see them, with the same humor and mix of horror and fantasy that Buffy is famous for.
There couldn’t be a better continuation of the Buffy-verse and with such a There couldn’t be a better continuation of the Buffy-verse and with such a die-hard audience we can hope this new, more affordable, and in some ways more flexible, series will continue for a long time to come.
May
27
Dying to Live: Life Sentence by Kim Paffenroth
Trade Paperback: 9781934861110, $14.95
Dying to Live, both the original and this book, the sequel, are heralded as “the intelligent man’s zombie novel” and I can’t think of a better description than that.
The second book picks up twelve years after the first as Zoey, the baby rescued at the end of the first book, prepares to be inducted into life as an adult-in-training. Between Jack, Will (aka Popcorn) and Milton (the other zombie Christ figure) the survivors have branched out quite a bit from their initial encampment in a museum. Now part of a prosperous town, with the zombie threat so far diminished that terror and survival has given way to a ritualistic reverence of the ambulatory dead, Zoey concentrates with precocious skill on the nature of their existence and surviving in a new kind of world.
As she faces danger from zombies and other humans she slices into the nature of the people around her (dead, living and somewhere between) with a painfully keen intellect. Harder-core horror fans shouldn’t be disappointed. Through the commentary on human nature there are fights, gore, moaning undead and more.
There are also peculiar things happening among the dead, including a pair of zombies who seem to remember their lives before death, and who refuse to be dismissed as mere mindless creatures of hunger. Truman, once a philosophy professor, now a dead man, challenges the town’s perceptions of the creatures who destroyed the world with his refusal to eat flesh and his joy of reading.
And because Paffenroth himself is a shrewd flayer of human behavior, there are not-so-subtle reminders that the walking dead are far less sinister than the living who embrace cruelty and savagery.
It’s very readable, smooth and insightful. Intelligently horrific and outright beautiful in places, it’s a must-read for zombie fans looking for something more than a zombie uprising story of a motley crew being picked off one by one.