In My Mailbox

In My Mailbox is a weekly meme created by Kristi at The Story Siren. The idea of the meme is pretty simple - share the books you bought for yourself, won via a contest or first-read program, received as part of a book tour, or were provided with for the purposes of a review.



Since my wife already complains about the bookshelves that have spread across two bedrooms, the pile on the floor by our bed, the pile on the stairs, and the pile in the living room, I try not to bring in too many new books, so this will likely be more of a biweekly or monthly meme for me, but here goes . . .

Purchased - just because I want to give it a read

Cripple Wolf by Jeff Burke





Received for review







The Scar by Sergey & Marina Dyachenko







Cinema of Shadows by Michael West







Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies by James Marshall

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TGIF - Feature & Follow Friday

Feature & Follow Friday is a blog hop that is designed to provide some much-appreciated exposure to the bloggers participating, and to expand their following. Hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read, each of whom feature a chosen blog for the week, it's an interesting way to get to know one another.

Question of the Week: What book would you love to see made into a movie or television show and do you have actors/actresses in mind to play the main characters?



With rare exceptions, I usually loathe books-turned-movies, so I wouldn't wish that curse upon any of my favourites. The best stories simply have too much going on to easily fit into a 90 min popcorn flick - characters and scenes, inevitably, have to be left out, and key themes are altogether lost in the translation.

Parajunkee also hosts a Social Hop for Facebook and Twitter, which I've taken part in the past two weeks. So, if you're one of those people who aren't on Blogger, or who just don't like Google Friend Connect, it's a great way to keep in touch and follow one another.

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TGIF is another blog hop designed to provide much-appreciated exposure to the bloggers participating, and to expand their following. Hosted by GReads, it's an interesting way to recap the week, pose a question, and find some exposure with a different audience.

Question of the Week: What has been your favourite moment (scene) in a book that you've read so far in 2012? Please be kind & not include spoilers.



No spoilers here, but there was a scene towards the end of Tad Williams' Shadowmarch where Barrick, once and for all, sloughs off his whiny angst and stands up to his destiny. It's a critical turning point in the series, and the moment in which the character I loathed to find upon the next page became a hero I looked forward to finding again.

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eBook Review: Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island by Cameron Pierce

The Bizarro genre has to be one of the most polarizing trends in horror fiction. Readers either love it or hate it (unless they simply don't get it), and are either eager pull new readers in, or to push them far away. These are stories that are rude, crude, vulgar, obscene, and disastrously imaginative - the literary equivalent of passing by a brutal car crash, feeling compelled to slow down for a better look, and then feeling guilty afterwards.



Cameron Pierce's Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island is probably the most immediately accessible of the Bizarro books I've read to date, and also the easiest to enjoy. It's a very straightforward contemporary tale, told in a linear fashion, by a comfortably reliable third-person narrator. Actually, if you ignore the sexually mutilated corpse in the closet of the pirates' boat, the first half of the story is pretty standard horror fiction. With coeds on a stolen boat, depraved (if somewhat inept) pirates, sharks in the water, and a tropical paradise that you know must be too-good-to-be-true, it reminded me in many ways of Richard Laymon's Island.



Of course, when it goes off the rails into the extreme darkness of the Bizarro world, it does so quickly and without reservation. Like any truly great slasher story, where the dirty sinners must be punished, it all begins to go wrong with a bout of drunken, illicit sex, preceded by some rather bloody foreplay. Afterwards, Oscar heads down to the beach to take a leak, where he is promptly ambushed by (you guessed it) one of the gargoyle girls. A monstrous blob of writhing flesh, with as many tooth-filled sexual orifices as bugged-out eyes, she rapes the young man in more ways than one, at both ends, and all at once. The moment she's done, however, she transforms into an Amazonian beauty who looks as though she just walked off the set of a glossy porno movie.



From there, it all descends into a hell of sexual slavery, inhuman depravity, and very human cruelty. You know it's not going to end well, but Pierce offers up some truly inspired scenes of punishment and revenge that are guaranteed to make your toes curl and your stomach churn. Rectal dynamite plays a significant role - not once, but twice! - and the sharks make a final cameo appearance before Pierce pushes the story completely over the edge, giving Oscar the kind of happy ending that only the most brutally perverse could ever appreciate.



Twisted, warped, and just wrong on so many levels, it's also a story that is one hell of a lot of guilty fun.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Witch House by Edward Lee

"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:



Witch House by Edward Lee:



Many witches were burnt, hanged and tortured in seventeenth-century New England, including notorious coven-leader Evanore Wraxall and her incestuous father. Not all of them died. Now, on a trip to Wraxall House in Haver-Towne, NH, Stewart Fanshawe, cable television finance pundit, is about to meet them. [May 1]







Yeah, the release is a bit light on details, but Edward Lee, Richard Laymon, and Bentley Little are my unholy trinity, always good for an over-the-top, B-grade dose of horror and gore.

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EXPLORATION: Schoellkopf Power Station (Part 2 - The Payoff)

For the first part of the exploration, showing how we got down to the plant (and what we found along the way), please check out Part 1 - The Approach.



As I said then, I'll let the photos speak for themselves . . .

The roar was awesome. It looked as if the whole gorge wall had opened up like the side of a skyscraper down it came. Rocks and masonry burst into the air splitting into thousands of pieces and pelted the river like shrapnel. And a few fell on the Canadian side. A jet stream of water was unleashed. Three violent blasts followed. The river turned a sickly brown. White smoke poured upward from the gaping gorge mouth and the resounding echo died. 

[Thanks to Thunder Alley for compiling the news reports of the day, nearly 60 years ago]

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eBook ARC Review: Carpathia by Matt Forbeck

THE FACTS: The Titanic struck an iceberg late on the night of April 14, 1912. The unsinkable ship actually sank rather quickly, taking only about 3 hours to send more than 1,500 passengers and crew to a cold, watery grave. While the Carpathia did come to its rescue, picking up over 700 survivors from the lifeboats, they didn't arrive until almost 2 hours after the Titanic slipped beneath the waves.



THE FICTION: No significant departure from the facts, except for the fact that Carpathia does receive the distress call directly from Titanic, rather than the much later relay message from Newfoundland, and  are able to arrive a bit more quickly. Oh, yeah, and there are vampires on board. Kind of important, that little detail.



Matt Forbeck's Carpathia wasn't quite what I was expecting, which is both good and bad. On the positive side, he wastes no time in getting to the iceberg, and does an amazing job detailing the actual sinking of Titanic. Some readers may feel the sinking is drawn out a bit too long, but I thought the pacing was perfect, really allowing him to create some tension and establish the all-too-real horrors the survivors were forced to endure. Having the characters spend so much time in the water also allows for the supernatural horror to make an early appearance, with a small group of vampires slipping out of Carpathia's hold to menace the survivors, a la Peter Benchley's Jaws. In reality, I doubt the survivors would have really been worried about sharks in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, but it's a fun scene that works well, so I'm willing to ignore the discrepancy.



It's once we get on board Carpathia that the story crashed headlong into my expectations, the pace slowed, and things began to flounder a bit. Instead of capitalizing on the claustrophobic confines of a ship and the sense of isolation at sea, allowing the overpowering scent of blood and death in the air to inflame the hunger and lust of the stowaways, Forbeck seems content to fill space with a little mystery and romance. That's not to say the mystery angle doesn't work - it does, and quite well - but I really wanted to see some carnage, with battles and bodies strewn throughout the ship. As for the romance, I had a harder time swallowing it than I did anything supernatural, but as awkward as the love triangle is, it does set up a rather satisfying conclusion a lot further on.



There is, of course, a somewhat forced connection to the Dracula mythos here, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. Forbeck drops some rather suggestive names on us early on in Quin Harker, Abe Holmword and Lucy Seward, but takes far too long to clarify their connection to the Harker, Holmwood, and Seward we know so well, confusing rather than intriguing the reader. He eventually does make the connection, alluding to the fact that Bram's novel was more fact than fiction, but he fails to establish any sort of link between the vampires of Dracula and those of Carpathia. While I'm glad he didn't use the tired old son/daughter/sire of Dracula angle that has been used in so many pseudo-sequels, you can't just make the connection and then let it hang there, with no resolution.



The last part of the story certainly offers up some surprises, especially following the discovery of the vampires' lair deep within the cargo hold, and Forbeck finally offers us some of the carnage we were waiting for. After such a long lull, a lot of significant activity happens very quickly, and there's a 'twist' to the love triangle that I definitely saw coming for a while, but it all makes for a satisfying conclusion. One final note, I have to give him full credit for sticking so well to the conventions, language, and dialogue of the Victorian era - it really does feel like and 'old' story, and there are no jarring incongruities to remind you that it's not.

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Monday Morning Musings - Genre News Wrap-up

I tend to read a lot of genre sites over breakfast (Coke Zero & Pop Tarts again this morning), so I thought I'd get in the habit of sharing the more interesting tidbits once a week.Rather slow on the news front this morning, but here are a few highlights:

• Flavorwire has an interesting piece on 10 Great Magical Books for Adults, inspired by JK Rowling's announcement that her next novel would be for adults.


• Topless Robot has some news on Johnny Depp's post-Dark Shadows project, this time bringing Kolchak the Night Stalker to the big screen.


• Tor has a great piece by Jon Sprunk, looking back at his Shadow Trilogy.


• The Suvudu site has an interesting interview with Peter Orullian, talking about the paperback release of his debut novel, The Unremembered.


• Finally, head over to Ari Marmell's blog and check out the Crossing the Streams giveaway - more than a dozen authors participating, with signed and limited editions to be won.

That's it for this morning . . . happy reading!

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