Stacking The Shelves & What I'm Reading

Stacking The Shelves is a weekly meme being hosted by Tynga's Reviews, while Mailbox Monday is being hosted by 4 The Love of Books this month (see Mailbox Monday for each month's host). Both memes are all about sharing the books you've added to your shelves - physical and virtual, borrowed and bought. It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is a weekly meme hosted by Book Journey, and it's focused on what's in your hands, as opposed to what's on your shelf.

A small stack of review titles this week:

As for what I'm reading, I have reviews coming up over the next 2 weeks for:

What's topping your shelves this week?

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Freebie Friday!

Good morning, and welcome to Freebie Friday! I've put together a list of free reads I think might be of interest to my fellow wanderers through the ruins, so take a look, click through, and stock your digital library today . . .



Available via AMAZON



Draculas (A Novel of Terror) by Crouch, Kilborn, Strand, and Wilson - Within these pages, you will find no black capes, no satin-lined coffins, no brooding heartthrobs who want to talk about your feelings. Forget sunlight and stakes. Throw out your garlic and your crosses. This is the Anti-TWILIGHT.



Starliner by David Drake - The Empress of Earth: Finest passenger liner in the galaxy, brightest link in the chain that binds the starflung civilization of the 23rd century, and neutral pawn in an interstellar war!



Run by Blake Crouch - For fans of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Thomas Harris, picture this: a landscape of American genocide...



Plague Zone by David Wellington - There are a million zombies in the Seattle Plague Zone. Tim needs to find and kill just one. In the midst of world-wide apocalypse, there are still some things a man has to do. Like get vengeance for his lost family.



Hard Duty: Merkiaari Wars 1 by Mark E. Cooper - Humanity's last encounter with aliens saw sixteen point two billion people killed in a war with the Merkiaari that had spanned decades.





Available via Kobo Books



Revenant - Book One of The Tatterdemon Trilogy by Steve Vernon - In 1691 the town of Crossfall taught the witch Thessaly how to die. They beat her, they shot her, they hung her - but nothing worked.



The Weight of Blood - The Half-Orcs, Book 1 by David Dalglish - Fantasy author David Dalglish begins his series of the half-orc brothers, whose struggles will soon bathe the land of Dezrel in demon fire…



Fat Vampire by Johnny B. Truant - When overweight treadmill salesman Reginald Baskin finally meets a co-worker who doesn't make fun of him, it's just his own bad luck that tech guy Maurice turns out to be a two thousand-year-old vampire.



Snowman Shivers: Scary Snowmen Tales by Mark Leslie - If you have ever cast an uncomfortable glance over your shoulder when passing the silent snowy sentinels that stand looking at you as you pass on the icy sidewalk . . .

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Guest Post by Al Ewing, author of The Fictional Man

In a post elsewhere on the blog tour for The Fictional Man (either already on the web or yet to appear) I talked about the Reader’s Voice, a staple of the humour comics I grew up with – a kind of primitive breaking of the fourth wall, the setting up of a meeting-point for fictional characters and their readers. American comics, I mentioned, didn’t tend to pull that trick. It was out of touch, out of style, childish.

There was, however, one notable exception, and that was Ambush Bug.

Ambush Bug was a character created by Keith Giffen as a one-off villain for Superman who ended up making several return visits, evolving slowly from a killer with a wacky turn of phrase to a less homicidal, more gently zany irritant, and finally getting a four-issue mini-series where he could fully run riot in adventures seemingly inspired more by the Pythons and Loony Tunes than by the fictional universe around him.

Part of the gag – arguably, the gag on which all the other gags rested - was that Ambush Bug knew he was in a comic. In the same way the characters from the kids comics of my youth all had a basic understanding of their fictional status and had regular conversations with their readers, Ambush Bug would have regular set-tos with his writer and artist. By the time I got on board with all this as a kid – the second mini, Son Of Ambush Bug – the Bug was entering his imperial phase, and by that point seemingly every joke was in some way about breaking the fourth wall.

There’s one frankly brilliant sequence that sticks in my mind to this day, involving scripter Robert Fleming and artist Giffen getting into a blazing row and then swapping jobs in a fit of pique, leading to a page of terribly poorly-drawn stick figures yelling ridiculous dialogue. Needless to say, this one page was by far the most hilarious thing in the issue and probably influenced my writing career more than any other comics page I can think of. To this day, Son Of Ambush Bug #3 remains one of my very favourite things of all time, and reading it brings back all kinds of powerful nostalgia.

he smashing of the fourth wall was relentless, and no part of the comics process was left uncastigated. No cow was sacred – not the characters, not the creators, not the readers, not the competition, and certainly not the publishing company paying good money to have this grotesque satire of all their highest-paying trademarks splashed across the newsstands for a braying audience of juvenile malcontents. (Like me.) Son Of Ambush Bug ended with the Bug – having transitioned over the years from the larger-than-life Bugs Bunny figure of the early days to something more akin to Elmer Fudd, a bitter, scrawny, put-upon shnook resigned to his fate as a punching bag – being unceremoniously booted from the DC universe and even more unceremoniously killed. His death sequence, in a final twist of the knife, was allegedly rendered by a small child – more stick figures, this time with the word DED written above them.

That’s how you go out.

The Bug returned many years later, for what felt like a victory lap – a giant-sized annual called the Nothing Special, which once again mercilessly mocked all the sacred cows of the day. The tone was celebratory, Giffen and Fleming represented by cutting away to a neon bar sign as their increasingly drunken voices echoed underneath it. I was older, and the magic wasn’t quite as strong as before, but it was still a welcome return. Things could happily have ended there, but Ambush Bug always pushed his luck.

He was brought back one final time in the comics, relatively recently – in the 2000s, if memory serves – but this time he didn't seem quite so untouchable. The final issue of the six-issue series – the one that would have excoriated the company’s most recent blunder – was never seen. Eventually, a sanitised version emerged. Old fans shook their heads. It felt like a mortal wound.

Well, it’s not quite so sad as all that. Ambush Bug got a proper last hurrah of sorts in the last episode of the Batman: Brave And The Bold cartoon, which tore as brutally into kids’ cartoons as the print version tore into comics. But these days, the Bug’s home is in the back of every DC comic, doing promotional ads, pushing the latest crossover. The anarchist is now the pitchman for what he once tore down.

That’s the trouble with being a fictional character. You can act as savvy about it as you like, but in the end you’re only as knowing as the company holding the IP.

--

That’s it for this entry. Further along my blog tour, I’ll be discussing more breakages of the Fourth Wall in my youth, and how they inspired me to write that book I keep failing to mention. What was it called? The Functional Man? It’ll come to me

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Al Ewing is a major new writer whose work in US and UK comics has seen him hailed as the most exciting new voice in the field. His work for Abaddon Books has been equally lauded and his unique visions of pulp fantasy have found their home in five different novels for Abaddon Books. This is his first novel for Solaris and is one of the list’s most keenly awaited books.

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The Fictional Man

By Al Ewing



How does it feel, not being real?



Al Ewing is a writer of extraordinary talent and with his first novel for Solaris, The Fictional Man, his incredible imagination has created a work of disturbing, fascinating insight and power.



In Hollywood, where last year’s stars are this year’s busboys, Fictionals are everywhere. Niles Golan’s therapist is a Fictional. So is his best friend. Fictionals – characters ‘translated’ into living beings for movies and TV using cloning technology – are a part of daily life in LA now. Sometimes the problem is knowing who’s real and who’s not.



Divorced, alcoholic and hanging on by a thread, Niles – author of The Saladin Imperative: A Kurt Power Novel and many others – has been hired to write a big-budget reboot of a classic movie. If he does this right, the studio might bring one of Niles’ own characters to life. But somewhere beneath the movie – beneath the TV show it was inspired by, the children’s book behind that and the story behind that – is the kernel of something important. If he can just hold it together long enough to figure it out...



Having already produced some of the most celebrated work in the shared-worlds fiction of Abaddon Books, this much-anticipated book is being tipped for cross-over success as Ewing lays claim to the legacy of Philip K. Dick while also stamping his own unique vision on the genre.



This is a major new author whose career should be watched and whose writing must be read.

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Waiting On Wednesday - Codex Born by Jim C. Hines

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill over at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.



This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:



Codex Born by Jim C. Hines

Aug 6, 2013 (DAW Hardcover)



Five hundred years ago, Johannes Gutenberg discovered the art of libriomancy, allowing him to reach into books to create things from their pages. Gutenberg’s power brought him many enemies, and some of those enemies have waited centuries for revenge. Revenge which begins with the brutal slaughter of a wendigo in the northern Michigan town of Tamarack, a long-established werewolf territory.



Libriomancer Isaac Vainio is part of Die Zwelf Portenære, better known as the Porters, the organization founded by Gutenberg to protect the world from magical threats. Isaac is called in to investigate the killing, along with Porter psychiatrist Nidhi Shah and their dryad bodyguard and lover, Lena Greenwood. Born decades ago from the pages of a pulp fantasy novel, Lena was created to be the ultimate fantasy woman, strong and deadly, but shaped by the needs and desires of her companions. Her powers are unique, and Gutenberg’s enemies hope to use those powers for themselves. But their plan could unleash a far darker evil…





From him Princess Novels (which crossed the darker themes of fairy tales with Charlie's Angels), to his Goblin Quest series (where the little guy rules the day), to the first book of his Magic Ex Libris series, Hines is an author I've been meaning to give a read for a long while now. Something about this one intrigues me, so I suspect he'll make his way onto the 'read' pile before long.

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Guest Post and Giveaway with Jason S. Walters

I remember it as vividly as if it were yesterday. My father, sporting an awesome set of Issac Asimov sideburns, driving me to see Star Wars in our Volkswagen Bug. The warm rain pounding down as it always does on a summer afternoon in Florida, the humidity causing Dad's glasses to fog up. Elvis on the AM radio.



The year was 1977. And Dad had always been disappointed by science fiction films.



Can you blame him? A physicist and engineer by trade, he could only look at modest special effects, limited grasp of science, and slow pace of the films of the time (Logan's Run and Futureworld come to mind) and sigh.



“Son,” he said to me, “I know you're excited about seeing this film. But don't be too disappointed. There are going to be little green men with pointy ears and ray guns. They'll shoot each other... and that's about it.”



A couple of hours later we were back in the car, silent and looking at each other with wide eyes.



“Wow.” I said.



“Yeah. Wow.” he replied. “Not what I expected.”



Little did I know that at the tender age of seven I had become seriously hooked on science fiction – and, in short order, this grew to include its sister genres of fantasy and horror. Since I belonged (and still belong) to a family of avid readers, making the move at an early age from watching science fiction movies to reading genre books was a natural one. My parents started me out with Tom Swift books, and I moved rather rapidly on my own to authors like Issac Asimov, Heinlein, HP Lovecraft, CS Lewis, and Jack Vance. At the age of twelve I was particularly enamored by Vance's Demon Prince books. They were dated even when I was reading them in the 1980's (Guiding a starship by slide rule? Really?) and Vance knew it, but the whole “manly revenge on galactic supervillains”  thing was about as much awesome as a preteen boy can handle without actually hurting himself.



Though I'm now much older (thought apparently not much wiser), I've never lost my love of science fiction as a genre. It's always appeared to me to be the least constricted of the fiction genres, able to effortlessly absorb contain other genres, whereas the reverse is not necessarily true. For example, you can easily put swords & sorcery style fantasy into a scifi story by simply having the characters travel to a world where such things are the norm. You can introduce horror into a scifi by having the characters chased through a derelict spaceship by an alien creature, or politics into it by using a future civilization to highlight problems in our current society. All of these things are still considered science fiction. But if you reverse the situation – say, put spaceships into a fantasy novel or aliens into a political novel – they are instantly considered science fiction, and are politely asked by the rest of the genre to leave the building.



Like snarkiness, science fiction pretty much creeps into everything I write, asked or unasked. So when I decided to write a novel highlighting some of my problems with urbanization, world wide civilization, and our treatment of the mentally handicapped, it was an easy choice. Nakba is a novel about all of these things, and a space opera as well. So besides the usual spaceships, heroes, and villains it also contains the usual menagerie of displaced oddness that you'll find in any of my books: French feminist clones, obsessive holograms, African tribesmen on Mars, renegade Japanese sex robots, and Russian Suprematism to name a few. It couldn't be anything other than a science fiction novel, to be honest.



So if you might enjoy reading a science fiction novel that tries to juggle social criticism, thoughts about heroism, and general abnormality in the unsteady arms of an exurban desert recluse (moi), think about picking up Nakba. With any luck it will leave you wide-eyed in the rain, glasses fogged up, and possibly sporting giant Issac Asimov sideburns.

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About Jason S. Walters:

Jason S. Walters is an author, essayist, and publisher best known for running Indie Press Revolution (IPR), a distributor of micro-published roleplaying games. He is also one of a small group of investors that purchased Hero Games in 2001, and serves as its general manager. After owning a San Francisco bike messenger service for 15 years, he and his wife Tina moved to Midian Ranch: a homestead near the town of Gerlach, Nevada. It is also the location of IPR’s warehousing complex. They have a daughter with Down syndrome named Cassidy and animals too numerous to mention.

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Nakba

A thousand years ago humanity’s dissidents fled, leaving behind a peaceful, unified world content to exist in a state of perpetual hedonism. Then a daring escape plunged civilization into chaos, forcing its rulers to expand  outward to maintain order. Now all that stands between a newly imperial Earth and the rest of the solar system is a loose coalition of Maasai tribesmen, cloned feminists, shape-shifting humannequins, and vengeful Berbers led by the least likely hero in human history: a young woman with Down syndrome and a bad attitude.

An Unforgiving Land Reloaded

In the desert life is hard. It can also be surreal. In the absence of congestion and convention, imagination takes you by the hand: or the balls. In this macabre collection of riveting tales, ENnie Award-nominated author Jason S. Walters grabs the reins of storytelling as if it were a wild stallion, leading the reader ever deeper into the physical and spiritual wasteland of the Black Rock Desert.

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Plow the Bones by Douglas F. Warrick (REVIEW)

Intellectually surreal and emotionally disturbing, Douglas F. Warrick's collection of tales marks a superb introduction for readers to the Apex Voices line of fiction. Not having had any prior experience to Warrick or his work, I wasn't sure what to expect when the review request first came in, but Plow the Bones sounded like an intriguing collection - and, let's be honest, an introduction from Gary A. Braunbeck certainly didn't hurt.



What we have here is a collection that runs the literary gamut from snippets of narrative scenes to full-fledged story arcs, the diverse pieces held together by an imagination that refuses to accept any sort of mental, emotional, or physical boundaries. Comprised of equal parts WOW and WTF, Warrick's work is neither for the squeamish, nor for those readers secure within their four walls of the traditional narrative. While I wouldn't quite call the writing experimental, and am hesitant to use the tired old clichés of avant-garde, it is refreshingly original, challenging, engaging, and entertaining, all at the same time.



Behindeye: A History is one of those strange little snippets, a tale that can be read on many levels, which sets the stage for everything that follows. It's almost as if Warrick is confronting the reader with a bold demand to get inside his head, with the unspoken agreement being that he gets to climb inside ours as well.



As for what follows that invitation, highlights for me included:



Funeral Song for a Ventriloquist - a sad and melancholy story of a dead ventriloquist's sole surviving doll and the cautionary tale he weaves for a young girl. It seems so simple and direct, but has the kinds of layers to it that you might expect from a classic Twilight Zone episode.



Her Father's Collection - by far, my favourite of the collection. Here, Warrick tells us a tale of obsessive love, in which a father commits the ultimate atrocity, simply so that he never has to let go. Not content to stop there, he wraps that tale in a ghost story so cruel, and so chilling, that you almost want to applaud his audacity by the end.



Zen and the Art of Gordon Dratch’s Damnation - is probably the most intellectual of all the tales in the collection, a philosophical musing in which a dead young man is forced to suffer the Judeo-Christian idea of eternal damnation . . . and who comes out the other side, having denied the pleasures of heaven along the way, due to a rather Buddhist philosophy.



Ballad of a Hot Air Balloon-Headed Girl - a weirdly touching tale of innocent lost, the mindless suffering of war, and the magic inherit in freedom of it all. The battlefield story could have been a story in and of itself, but contrasting that grisly reality with the fantasy of a girl with a head that becomes its own hot air balloon really pulls it all together.



Stickhead - almost demands comparisons to Stephen King's The Body, with two kids discovering a decomposing corpse in a ditch, but goes in a very different direction. Rather than exploring how such a find might force onto to confront their own mortality, Warrick invites us to poke the body with a stick and see what happens.



I Inhale the City, the City Exhales Me - is a surreal story of life imitating art. It all begins with the concept of anime drawings comprising their own reality, which is exciting on its own, but when it begins exploring the idea that even those we trust to report on events around us are actually creating it as they go . . . well, it all gets rather disturbing.



Across the Dead Station Desert, Television Girl - a serious contender for my favourite entry, a darkly erotic tale of the ultimate in masturbatory innovation, and an invention that goes so very, very wrong. Beneath the surface, however, it's also a story of objectification, obsession, and possession, a condemnation of our need to compel our pleasures.



Plow the Bones is a relatively short collection, but by no means a quick read. These are stories to be savoured, considered, and sometimes even reread to uncover all of the layers. The language of the writing is well-suited to the surreal creepiness of the stories, drawing us in with the promise of poetry, but then ensnaring us in subtle arguments and criticisms.It's a weird, wild ride, and a welcome dose of originality.





Published May 3rd 2013 by Apex Book Company

Paperback, 228 pages

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A Crown Imperiled by Raymond E. Feist (REVIEW)

With this, the second volume of The Chaoswar Saga and the second-to-last volume of the entire Riftwar Cycle, Raymond E. Feist doesn't necessarily advance the story, but instead elaborates on the significance of the events in A Kingdom Besieged, and builds some necessary (and much-appreciated) depth on the part of the characters. While it left me impatient to move on with the story, to advance things towards the ominously titled Magician's End, it was largely satisfying in terms of securing the overall story arc.



A Crown Imperiled does three things exceptionally well. Number one, it reestablishes the Conclave of Shadows as a force to be reckoned with, giving them not only power, but a purpose. The period of mourning their losses is over, Pug is invested in the fate of Midkemia once again, and Magnus seems finally positioned to fulfill the critical role his family legacy has so long demanded. More than that, the psudeo-resurrections of Miranda and Nakor that had me groaning at the end of the first book are not only explained, but handled exceptionally well. The scene in which Pug is confronted with a demon who carries all of his dead wife's feeling and memories is one of the strongest emotional moments Feist has ever written.



Number two, the book sheds some light on those subtle political coups taking place across the land. I felt they were really underplayed in the first book - introduced and hinted at, but left very vague in terms of exactly what was happening any why. Here, we see that aspect of the tale really expanded upon, elevating a lackluster minor plot thread to a level of significance worthy of Midkemia's final chapter. Hal, Martin, and Brendan are drawn back into the heart of the conflict, elevating their tangential adventures into something as relevant as they are exciting. The entire flight sequence with Princess Stephané is probably the most exciting, swashbuckling event the series has seen in quite some time.



Number three, the book has some big . . . and I do mean BIG . . . moments. I won't spoil them here, other than to say there is a scene with dragons taking flight that has me grinning with excitement, and a world-ending cliffhanger that had my jaw dropping to the floor. It's not as strong of a book in terms of plotting as the first, but it does pull things together nicely, setting up what will hopefully be a fitting conclusion to the Riftwar Cycle.





Published February 26th 2013 by Harper Voyager 

Paperback, 407 pages

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