We’re back at it, folks! Nothing like a casual review of a 1,000+ pager from Stephen King. Today’s special? The Stand, complete and uncut, described by the author himself as “the American Lord of the Rings” (a designation I find to be a massive stretch). The Stand is long, packed with characters, and prescient in…
When tickets become available to the outlandish Sanderson worlds I've come to love, I'm often the first to get my ticket punched. I'm a known worldhopper, partial to his Cosmere work, but I'll pick up pretty much anything Sanderson writes. He's among the best in the business today, so his works are typically an easy…
Well, folks, I did it! I read my first George R.R. Martin book. The book in question? His definitive work, his magnum opus: an illustrated novella called The Ice Dragon. This pint-sized fable comes and goes like a winter’s first flurry, dissipating in a flash after leaving its translucent mark upon the ground where it…
It’s the end of the world as we know it. That’s the setting for TJ Klune’s latest exploration of the human condition. We Burned So Bright drops a retired couple into the oncoming apocalypse, during which they embark on a journey that’s just as internal as it is geographical. A rogue black hole has appeared…
Theo of Golden is the literary equivalent of a "Live, Laugh, Love" sign in the Trump era. Allen Levi spins a hopeful yarn that's worth the occasional smile but ultimately fails to hit the mark with its message of kindness and left me thinking "read the room." The result is a book that reads like…
My wife says I have great ears. She says our toddler also has them. I know she means the appearance of the ears rather than the skills they can perform in conjunction with the brain. I am sometimes a good listener, but other times I just say "damn, that's crazy" after my wife tells me…
Few fantasy series kick off with lines that reverberate through the genre’s collective consciousness quite like Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” It summons an urgent and barren image: one man midstep atop a sandy dune, following his quarry across a vast, dying landscape. It…
Oh lord almighty, it’s another K.J. Parker novella! Pulling the Wings Off Angels embroils readers in a quickfire theological conundrum with a divine winged being at its heart. We’ve praised Parker in the past for Prosper’s Demon (a novella masterpiece) and many other works. Does Pulling the Wings Off Angels have the same heft? Let’s…
Continue reading ➞ Pulling The Wings Off Angels – Helluva Novella
King-a-ding-dong-freakin’-DING! The Stephen King bell tolls yet again, this time for the residents of Castle Rock, Maine. Hoo boy, folks, they’re in for it! When a new shop opens on their main (or Maine) road, the town’s secrets snowball into a monstrous, nigh-unstoppable boulder that threatens to wreck the lives of anyone in its path.…
In my mid-20s, I smoked a helluva lot of weed. One night, my buddy Mike and I were six or seven bong rips deep on my couch, and we threw on Netflix’s Altered Carbon. I had neither seen nor heard anything about the show. And when I tell you that I recall exactly zero percent…
