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Biblioholic Review: Jason Dark- Ghost Hunter: Demon’s Night

18 Oct

As readers on the edge of the digital age, we’ve felt that it may be time for the writers of novellas, short stories or dime novels to find new commercial success in bits and bytes. We’ve been introduced to one such writer, Guido Henkel author of the Jason Dark novella series.

The Dark series, about a paranormal investigator in Victorian England, runs ten installments and we’re just catching up on these snippets of action adventure. We have leaped into this monster chasing, demon battling story with Volume One, Demon’s Night.

Henkel take particular glee in setting up a scene, building the mood, ambience and richness of backgrounds. His London is one of punches of detail and runaway action.

The phantasmic cloud creeping through the alleys and docks of London in Demon’s Night evoke those primitive but supremely scary horror movies of the silent-era. The glowing, seeping evil haunts the story, setting a richness in tone beyond its minimal size. Disembodied eyes, unblinking, peering out from the mist is the kind of imagery that makes gothic pulp work. And Henkel does it well in Demon’s Night.

Deaths, mysterious and desiccating, reach out of the night and launch our hero into the fray. Henkel doesn’t mess around with too much extraneous. It’s about getting to the meat of the story, eat it fast or it’ll spoil.

Dark is a sort of quirky investigator, in the shape of Holmes or more appropriately Thomas Carnacki, seeking out occult danger wherever it rears its head. He studies the papers, watching for those odd keywords that suggest something other than common murder or property crime. Henkel’s Dark is brave, no-nonsense, dark and mysterious.

Henkel has a clean, quick writing style, uncomplicated and unpretentious. And Demon’s Night, like the serials of old, sets a break-neck pace from beginning to end.

As we race toward Halloween, we think that taking a chance on Jason Dark for some bites of horror adventure will pay off.

Jason Dark- Ghost Hunter: Demon’s Night was received free for review by Boston Book Bums

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Biblioholic Review: Midnight Riot

29 Mar

Midnight Riot is one part police procedural, another part magic 101, London travelogue and is an overall riotous good time!

Ben Aaronovitch’s Midnight Riot follows Police Constable Peter Grant, who overnight, goes from a smart but unmotivated novice copper to apprentice wizard in the Met’s oddest crime fighting division mandated to keep the ‘Queen’s Peace.’ When a head is popped off a British muckity muck and Grant goes looking for answers, his first witness, a spectral snitch.

Yup, from that point on Grant, the brainy but odd son of a one time jazz luminary, begins an investigation into a paranormal London of river gods, vampires, ghosts, spells, incantations and some painful carnal pining for a fellow PC and a young woman who oozes liquid sensuality.

Aaronovitch smartly meshes pop cultural with the deep veins of occult (as in hidden) history of London as background to the wanderings of Grant and his boss, DCI Thomas Nightingale, coming together to form a sort of weird and real travelogue of London.

While Grant is the story’s heart, the guts and soul of Midnight Riot comes from his superior wizard,  Nightingale. The second Nightingale was introduced by Aaronovitch we were hooked. He was the antipode to Grant, the geeky, slightly insecure cop, to the smooth and skilled Nightingale. They make a perfect pair, master and apprentice, each teaching the other something.

The second Nightingale strode into the story, our mind immediately flashed charm and swagger actor Bill Nighy with Trevor Eve’s Waking the Dead bulldog tenacity.

An important piece to Nightingale is that unlike many other magicians wandering around modern genre fiction, Nightingale, as well as Grant, ‘have a pair.’ They are gutsy, brave and bold. When something serious goes down at a residence in Midnight Riot (we won’t say because it’s spoilerly) Nightingale, an apparently old wizard, doesn’t whip up some convenient magic. No, he instead, kicks in a door and charges into the home like a good cop. But instead of armed with a gun or baton, Nightingale and Grant have a holster full of magic.

Some would be compelled to make Harry Potter comparisons, apprentice wizard and all. But the lil guy with the glasses, even as nerdy comparable to Grant, couldn’t live in this world. Some of the villains in Midnight Riot would steal Potter’s milk money and use his Nimbus to light their meerschaum pipe.

This is a wonderfully cheeky reality. Cops enforce real laws on real people, both normal and paranormal folks. No escaping to convenient misty veiled realms, invisible double-decker buses or far off prep schools. When a copper comes looking for you, magic ain’t giving you an out without consequences.

Midnight Riot’s magic, in many ways, obeys Newtonian laws, with a tweak here or there. Another reason why this was tremendously enjoyable.

Speaking of Newton, in Midnight Riot Aaronovitch also pays homage to Sir Issac Newton, who in addition to being the leading scientific thinker in history as also keenly interested in religion and alchemy.

Also, this is brutal and gruesome real London. There are shocking crimes committed, especially early on in the story arc that are completely gut wrenching. Not gratuitous splatter type of writing, but scenes of magically deranged killing portrayed in plausible and nauseating ways.

Interestingly, Aaronovitch’s style of writing is crisp and clipped in ways unknown in most modern novels. Perhaps it’s his experience in writing for television, specifically the stylized banter of Doctor Who, that provides Midnight Riot an especially engaging, witty and perfectly timed pace. The interplay is authentic, if we knew oddly urbane humans were interacting in a strange off center world of river gods and squatter vampires.

We might be looking back in ten years at a mini-renaissance of British-centric urban paranormal universe, each distinct from the other, crafted by entirely different writers, but all having a consistent quality that could result a truly epic omniverse.

That being said, Aaronovitch has a place at that to be set literary table. By far, Midnight Riot is the most fun, smart and brilliant piece of paranormal fiction we’ve read in ages.

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch was purchased for review by Boston Book Bums

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Biblioholic Review: Blood Prophecy

3 Mar

Urban paranormal is the current home to most vampire fiction. And to some readers of more traditional horror fiction there is a distinct lack of innovation in the field. Well, if you are looking for something that has more action, history and less romantic pining, then Blood Prophecy is a book that snaps with the power of pulp bear trap.

Penned by comic book writer and novelist Stefan Petrucha, Blood Prophecy is the story of Puritan farmer Jeremiah Fall. The immediate immersion into a rustic 1644 Massachusetts smartly sets the tone for the historical paranormal of Blood Prophecy. Fall is a Puritan hand on a family farm when a demon is released from a gnarled heap of organic matter.

In shocking slaps, Petrucha unravels the pious world of Fall, killing him and raising him again, setting him on a course to find a solution for his problem of blood lust immortality. He wanders the world and ends up in Egypt, at a time of war and discovers a tablet of fame that could possibly set him free.

We were reminded some of Robert E. Howard, specifically the Puritan demon hunter Solomon Kane, in the character of the vampiric Fall. Our lead may seem emotionally bound, one dimensional, but consider he is just minutes into an eternal life. So Fall is facing a potentially tormented forever and his world is a never ending battle between piety, intellect and avarice. His is restrained, not shallow.

A hard road to hoe without being tedious, unless exceptionally skilled as a writer, is filling in 150 years of vampire-soldier of fortune life. Petrucha does that smartly, sort of backing into Fall’s years of travel and learning. He doesn’t go in the front door, overloading reader with Fall’s years of wandering. Instead he drops you into the sands of Egypt, amidst the Napoleonic wars, carefully spilling the beans about Fall’s previous 15 decades of life.

Blood Prophecy introduces supporting characters, foils and foes at the right moment.  Each lingers just long enough to build familiarity or compassion, disdain or lust. Pertucha pushes and pulls them in an out of the storyline expertly, leading to the climax of paranormal violence.

We won’t delve into too much detail, but there are ghoulish players running along side Fall’s life path, like the grotesque and powerful Skog, that provide the right evil until or when the ultimate evil is unleashed upon the world.

Petrucha also has a solid grasp of creation myths and apocryphal variations, intertwining accepted dogma with his own faiths of imagination; from the well spring of humanity to Bretonian legends.

Blood Prophecy is the fun historical paranormal adventure we love and find so little of today. Sure there are well troped series and epic paranormal thrillers out there, but we pine for stories of pistols, rapiers, fangs and brains. And Blood Prophecy is one such book.

Blood Prophecy by Stefan Petrucha was received for free by the Boston Book Bums

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Biblioholic Review: The Bookman

1 Sep

Now, Lavie Tidhar’s The Bookman doesn’t drop in the States until October, but we snagged a copy from a UK compadre and decided it wouldn’t hurt to give you all a sneak review at this upcoming work.

Like his work The Tel Aviv Dossier, Tidhar does not disappoint with The Bookman. For The Bookman the Israeli born scribe seems to channel Sir John Mandeville and early European proto-science fiction to create a miraculously refreshing, unpretentious adventure book.

The Bookman follows a young coal dusted romantic London-lad named Orphan and his love, Lucy as they are joined and then torn apart by a mysterious terrorist known as the Bookman. His weapons, strange exploding printed and bound volumes. When Orphan experiences grief after grief in rapid succssion, he is compelled to find the Bookman.

But that not so simple mandate launches a series of amazing adventures that careen around the world.

In The Bookman, Great Britain exists, but it’s rulers are not who you think they are. Automatons are law enforcers, poets are politicians and dirigibles hover over an off-center London. Historical luminaries collide with literary inventions, and sometimes mixes in the men that created them.

The cavalcade of imagined and real players Orphan encounters include Tom Thumb and Mycrofte Holmes, Nevil Maskelyne to Irene Adler, just to name a few. They weave in and out of Orphan’s life, pushing, encouraging or manipulating the young poet-avenger into possibly changing the face of history.

And while Tidhar pays homage as well as invents a new universe, his talents are really on display with each cliffhanger. Every so many chapters in The Bookman, Orphan finds himself in danger, dismay or a few times, unconscious. Some would find this cliffhanger staccato annoying. We strongly disagree. The Bookman is a mash-up of old school science fiction and that classic style which relies and thrives on break neck scene changes.

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention Tidhar’s grasp of the verbal exchange. He easily creates conversation between Orphan and strange power brokers, chess playing automatons or notorious libertine pirates. Orphan asks the right questions at the right times. He is no simpleton, wise beyond his alley scamp upbringing, yet there are world-shaking mysteries that he efforts to understand. And it’s Tidhar talent that breaths life into his reluctant hero.

There may be better known and more trendy speculative fiction authors around, but none can compare to the robustious, creative and talented outbursts of Lavie Tidhar.

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar was purchased for review by the Boston Book Bums.

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Biblioholic Review: The Red Magician

6 Aug

The Red Magician may be a book for kids, but 27 years after its initial release, it proves that a great story, told in classic folkloric ways, can transcend age, faith or gender.

The Red Magician follows Kisci, a young Jewish girl coming of age in her Hungarian village. The sense of foreboding goes unsaid, but it is there from the start. One imagines mountain forests, isolated hamlets of peace, ready to be wiped clean by rampaging hordes. Kisci you see lives in a town where the local rabbi is also an adept magician. He sees the future and wields his power harshly.

Our first experience with the rabbi is when he lectures villagers to stop sending their children to school because they are teaching Hebrew. And that knowing Hebrew opens up the impressionable to abuse of the faith. But most importantly the rabbi declares Hebrew should only be spoken for the arrival of the Messiah and anyone attending the school is cursed.

Well, into this environment we see Kisci plunge ahead, inquisitive, well mannered but adventurous. She is becoming a woman and at that moment, with the town in the midst of changing seasons, spiritually and physically, along comes Vörös, the red magician. His flaming red hair and mysterious stature within the community immediately draw Kisci to him.

We especially liked these characters because they were not romantic. Lesser scribes today would have chosen the James Dean route, while ham fisted cherry picking ancient religious traditions and myths. Not Goldstein, she chooses a truly classic relationship: spiritual artist and acolyte.

Goldstein’s ability to deal with intense, dark themes is effortless and is unlike most childrens books. You know when the warnings are unheeded what lay ahead. The Pogrom. The Holocaust. The spiritual heft of the Holocaust can weigh mighty on an author and book. Yet Goldstein handles it with brevity and heart ache. Could we have absorbed more about the heart break of the camps? Yes.  But our depths of sorrow were already plumbed bone deep.

Vörös role in the book is as unpredictable mystical spur, unsure of how powerful this red magician may be early on, you learn when he reappears at a critical moment how his magic effects Kisci.

You find yourself rooting for Kisci as she find despair to embrace than hope. You want her to go forward, but understand why she wouldn’t. Her life was in many ways, over. Yet the final 1/3 of the book has an amazing folkloric feel to it. A magical journey that is less about where they go, but how they get there and what it does to Kisci’s psyche along the way.

We appreciated the author’s knowledge of Jewish magical history. Unlike many today, there was no droning on or showy expositions that felt like pompous displays of “knowledge” (aka the information dug up my many authors research assistants.)

Goldstein properly folds in the golem, demons like Lilith and angelic spirits to perfect effect. They are not plot devices, but dabs of paint that highlight the story canvas. (For an outstanding blog on Jewish magic and myth check out Rabbi Geoffrey Dennis’ Jewish Myth, Magic an Mysticism.)

The Red Magician flows through the seasons like a breeze, never lingering too long in a single place. Yet creating those ‘moments.’ And if time is spent a beat or two longer than usual, it’s for value. No extraneous action or words. It is crisp and uncompromising.

The Red Magician deftly switches between harsh reality and these gauzy in-between realms. And as the book reaches one climax after another you will ache for a better future for Kisci while wishing her a chance to go back once more to a childhood gone all too fast.

Don’t let its children moniker fool you. Many adults could use a dark literary dose of childhood every so often.

The Red Magician by Lisa Goldstein was purchased for review by the Boston Book Bums.

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Biblioholic Review: The Chamber of Ten

4 Aug

The Chamber of Ten is an interesting combination of historical thriller and supernatural horror. Easily, the basic idea could have been plucked from any number of Dan Brown-clones, but the addition of magical elements at the story’s earliest stages create a more substantial and original work.

American archaeologist Geena Hodge works in the slowly sinking city of Venice, racing against time and tides to save the city’s vast untold history. In The Chamber of Ten Hodge’s chore is to reveal the lost library of Renaissance humanist Petrarch. However, when the team of experts led by Hodge probes a subterranean secret vault, a series of surreal moments lead to a greater series of calamities that propel The Chamber of Ten forward.

While Hodge receives top billing, the real star of The Chamber of Ten is her colleague and lover, Nico Lombardi. He is the tragic puppet that makes everything happen in the story. His internal battles are perfectly confusing in the first pages after the vault catastrophe, yet with each strange thought he realizes something even more disturbing is developing inside him.

Interestingly, Hodge’s braininess is overly effusive, seeming out of place as she reads more of average intelligence. She is playing catch up emotionally and physically through most of The Chamber of Ten; and when Hodge takes the initiative it’s unproductive to the plot. It’s a minor beef and doesn’t slow the story at all.

Hang up the logic when trying to think through the scheming of centuries old Venetian political functionaries and how their plots would pan out in the 21st century. Just roll with it folks. Think of it this way, when you are riding a roller coaster you aren’t busy calculating g-forces? No, you buckle in and let your gut lead you.

Hodge’s archeological team are minor players in the overall story but fill in blanks when needed and provide some diversity in the early narrative. If we were linked solely to the metaphysical mushiness of Hodge and Nico for the entire book, it would be a bit too much.

However, that very well established erotic-psychic connection is perfectly foiled by a very mysterious third-party, a ghost if you will, of Venice’s past. And that’s all we say about that.

We race around Venice, amid assassinations, building collapses, strange rituals and magical duels. You hop along with the authors and their cast waiting eagerly for that mystical two-fisted conclusion.

The Chamber of Ten snaps along with magical shock and awe. Grab a beverage, a beach chair and enjoy the macabre machinations.

The Chamber of Ten by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon was purchased by the Boston Book Bums.

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B3: The Week That Was

27 Jun

We came out with a tentacle whipping crack this week with a review of China Mieville’s Kraken and ended with questions whether vampires and werewolves are still “monsters.”

Monday: China Mieville’s Kraken is an occult shell game, bursting with trippy slang, pop-culture riffs & tentacle like plot that twists to climax.

Tuesday: What the bloody umlat!? We wondered why Scandinavian crime fiction has suddenly become so popular? Considering how gentile they seem to us in the States, when did places like Sweden and Norway become hot beds of murderous writings?

Wednesday: Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy is a collection of short stories are concise and deep, not something you often find together. Eleven stories in 232 pages that universally explore loneliness in all sorts of characters.

Thursday: It crossed our minds recently that vampires and monsters when we were growing up were monsters, something to be feared and hunted. Now, the fanged ones are hunky loners with blood lusts but hearts of gold. Are they still monsters to you?

Friday: We tackled the review of Metrophilias, a short story collection that tracked and delved into the nature of lust and desire in 36 stories spread through 36 cities.

Saturday: Sometimes you think you have an iron clad memory when it comes to books read as a kid. Well recently we were reminded of two foundation books that changed one readers life.

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When Did Vampires & Werewolves Stop Being Monsters?

24 Jun

For the better part of twenty years vampires have been the seductive malcontents of the literary world. Starting with Ann Rice through the current Stephanie Meyer Twilight mania, the vampire emerged from the scrap heap of camp a vigorous and apparently immortally popular character.

Yes the raw lustiness associated with vampires throughout their literary history is undisputed, starting with the Gothic German poem Der Vampire of 1748, but the past decade vampires have been cooped by increasing numbers of authors: once raw and vicious creatures have been diluted and their fangs ground down slightly.

But we ask, at the end of the day, vampires are still monsters, right? And a recent addition to the primal pantheon , werewolves, have become hunky loners, due in large part to the popularity of  Twilight. But they too are monsters, right?

Oh, but some cry, ‘But at their heart they are men. Misunderstood, cursed men.’  It seems to us that they may be ‘men,’ they are still creatures that feast on human flesh and blood. Hard for some readers to get past, no matter how brooding or hunky they are portrayed.

The first vampire fiction is believed to be Der Vampire, an 18th century short poem featuring a male vampire visiting a devoutly Catholic woman every night, kissing her and drinking her blood. Later that same century Goethe’s The Bride of Corinth followed an undead woman as she rises from the grave each night.

From my grave to wander I am forc’d,
Still to seek The Good’s long-sever’d link,
Still to love the bridegroom I have lost,
And the life-blood of his heart to drink;
When his race is run,
I must hasten on,
And the young must ‘neath my vengeance sink.

Vampires have been dour and remorseless in their quest to slake their taste for human blood. Through time it’s natural to expect a character become less gore obsessed and more introspective, hoping for a redemption from their cursed life.

Werewolves have only more recently been depilatoried of their monstrosity. In literature, werewolves have been mainstays of animalistic evil since 61 CE the Satyricon, which includes a passage about a Roman soldier turned wolf by night. While later werewolves of fiction modified the basic cursed fiend, the origins were purely malevolent and flesh eating.

Irrefutably, werewolves and vampires have been sensual creatures since they began appearing in fiction. It seems to be those more sexual overtones (or undertones) that draw particularly women to the genre of vampire fiction, running the gamut from straight love stories to more complex supernatural trysts.

In writing about the werewolf and vampire genre, we wonder where gender plays a role if at all. Are men conditioned in society to look at the monster first and being second? Viewing those beasts as baneful threats to loved ones and to be stopped at all costs? Or, more deeply, are they threats to masculinity?

What do you think, are vampires and werewolves still just monsters? Or are their current incarnations acceptable variations on men first, monsters second?

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Biblioholic Review: Kraken

21 Jun

We’ve been chomping at the bit to snag a copy of China Mieville’s Kraken for so long. We begged for a domestic ARC, but to no avail (we’re relative book reviewing newbies, completely understandable.) So, we decided to fire up our every useful UK book buying account and snagged a Brit copy for review.

With a book like Kraken, you really don’t know where to start when reviewing it. Can’t get too deep into the plot for fear of spoilers. Can’t dwell on the metaphysical minutia, because that’s magical somnus powder to a casual reader.

That being said, we’ll just jump right in and declare this was a damn good book! Kraken is literary pointillism, a million little dots of detail, characters and themes that create a marvelous and bewildering universe.

Smartly, Kraken starts of with the drone of normality. The din of dull reality. We’re introduced to Darwin Centre curator Billy Harrow who Mieville perfectly captures in one line “..he would, DiCaprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child.” Harrow, the everyman, is thrust into an impossible situation when the museum’s prized exhibit, the giant squid Architeuthis, vanishes. The specimens collected during Charles Darwin’s Galapagos journeys are left untouched. But this giant squid completely and entirely vanishes.

Unsuccessfully recruited to join the hunt for the squid’s captors, Harrow is harrowingly introduced to a magical world of London unknown to him. The scene in which everything changes for Harrow starts off, like the book’s intro, normal. But literally unfolds in a way that has you grip the page and declare, ‘Did I just read that right?’

There are the Krakenists, Londonmancers, a malevolent Tattoo, a dizzying number of household gods, magical gangs, talismans, omnipotent elements, everything but a warlockian kitchen sink (but even that is not far off.)

If there is a single criticism it is that Mieville dives fast and deep into this occult short-hand. One could use a Kraken-occult-opedia to keep up. That causes the staccato style of his writing to hiccup occasionally as we’re left trying to understand the omnipresent magic that everyone but Harrow and the reader seem to know about. But again, that is a small beef.

Kraken has authorial splashes reminiscent of Bradbury, Gaiman, Pullman, Moorcock and Lovecraft. The novel is also very British, with dozens of local or national references that are sure to go over the heads of some readers on this side of the pond.

The London crime fighters trying to chase down the kraken-napped in this tale are odd and elite, they are the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit, riffing off like a magical version of the BBCs Waking the Dead team. Our favorite character from Kraken wasn’t Harrow, but a member of the occult ‘Old Bill’ team, wise-cracking, chain smoking female Police Constable Collingswood. We’d like to see more of this sassy lass.

As we read Kraken, a work popped into our heads, a purportedly non-fiction travel work, Occult London. The book, penned by Merlin Coverley provided us a nice literary dipping sauce to compliment the main cephalopod dish.

What makes Kraken so interesting is that it is not just one book. It’s not a straight up urban fantasy gone amuck. To the contrary, we race around with cops and occult criminals searching for Harrow, who is also searching for the Kraken, while being assaulted and waylaid at every fantastical turn. Mieville invests proportionally in each little genre, fantasy throughout with dashes of detective, horror and dark comedic tales. Kraken never fills you up with these sub-genres, but appropriately whets your appetite.

Also, Mieville’s creativity investing time in new and odd religions screamed of Roman antiquity in the modern age. We have every manner of faith, god and deity floating around the near-apocalyptic age, but no one bird rules the roost. We imagine this is what ancient Rome was like, a god here a god there, soldiers, merchants and sailors each having their own trinket or talisman. It was practical, but not world weighing serious.

And yet the search for the deity squid and the secrets it may hold are deadly serious for Harrow and the rest of the Kraken inhabitants.

Kraken’s pay off  is near perfection because Mieville expertly foreshadows our climax while engaging in brilliant literary slight of hand until the last possible moment.

Kraken is an occult shell game, bursting with trippy slang and pop-culture references and a straight line plot that takes dozens of tentacle like twists to climax.

Kraken by China Mieville (drops June 29th here in the States) was purchased by Boston Book Bums.

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