C.T. Phipps's Blog, page 23

Sweet Silver Blues (Garrett PI #1) by Glen Cook

    Glen Cook is an author that I intellectually know I should love but just doesn't jive with my style. At least, that's what I thought about him having tried and failed to read the Black Company three times. It was excellent world-building but, for some reason, I wasn't able to appreciate it the way I wanted to so I ended up dropping the series. Still, I was attracted to the prospect of another supernatural PI story. I'm a huge Dresden Files fan and the idea of a normal non-magical PI in a fan...

The Fade Out by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips review

    THE FADE OUT: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, illustrated by Elizabeth Breitweiser is not my usual grimdark fair. However, grimdark is the fantastic cousin to film noir and detective fiction. Much like in my LA Noire review (link: https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/tag/noire/), the subject matter deals with Los Angeles in the 1940s. It is a fantastic time to write stories about because the glamour and sleaze of Hollywood contrasts with the post-World War 2 trauma as w...

My Top Reads of 2022

2022 was a pretty good year for me, reading wise. I managed to hit my desired goal of reading over three hundred books. I admit, I cheated with this quite badly by reading a huge ton of comics on Kindle Unlimited and Comixology

Honestly, outside of Roy Thomas, I may now be the world's greatest expert on Red Sonja. However, I still managed to read a lot of books that I had on my reading list before today. Unfortunately, I'm absolutely terrible at narrowing down my lists so I've ended up with no l...

The Judas Compact or "How the Sabbat got their groove stolen"

V5 Chronicle Tips

1. The Social Satire of Vampire: The Masquerade2.  An analysis of Anarchs in Vampire: The Masquerade
3. Ten Tips to Running the Anarchs in V5 4. Ten Tips to Running the Second Inquisition in V5 5. Ten Tips to Running the Sabbat in V5 6. Ten Chronicles for Sabbat PCs in V5 7. Ten Tips to Running the Camarilla in V5 8. Ten Tips to Running the Thin-Bloods in V5 9. Ten Tips to Running the Tremere in V5  10. Ten Real Life-Inspired Chronicles for V5 11. V5 NPC Update: Sullivan Dane 12....

The Maltese Falcon by Dashielle Hammett review

    THE MALTESE FALCON is about as influential to the creation of the detective genre as we know it as MURDER IN RUE MORGUE and A STUDY IN SCARLET. Dashielle Hammett actually wrote the book as a counterpoint to Sherlock Holmes, at least according to him, as he drew on his actual experience as a private detective working for the Pinkertons. 

    I can't find the exact quote but basically Dashielle Hammett noted that private detectives were more or less the opposite of Holmes and Dupin in methodolo...

The Annotated Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

    THE BIG SLEEP remains one of the greatest detective novels of all time and while I prefer Dashielle Hammett over Raymond Chandler, it's only by degrees. It's also interesting to note the flaws of the narrative that is a Frankenstein's monster of combined short-stories of Raymond Chandler's previous short stories that give the book a somewhat disjointed episodic feel that only slightly hurts it. Basically, the Big Sleep is a bunch of stories from his previous work in Pulp Detective mag...

Writing Update for December 2022

 
Hey folks,

I thought it'd be a good idea to give y'all an update on what I've been working on and what my current projects are. After all, you are the reason that I get to continue making my wonderful stories versus working a more boring 9-5 job.

New Releases

Kindle

Revenge of the Cyber Dragons (Cyber Dragons #2)

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Revenge-Cyber-Dragons-Trilogy-Book-ebook/dp/B0BNYC1CRX/

Ex-Rider Keiko "Kei" Springs was living with her adopted daughter Becky away from her previous life of c...

A dedication to Peter David

    Peter David made me as an author.

    This is something that occurred to me when I was looking over the reports of his multiple strokes and Go Fund Me request. It was always vaguely on my bucket list to attend a convention or somehow make it a point to find Peter David someday so I could thank him for it in-person. I only began being an author in 2015 and became comfortable referring to myself in that professional capacity around 2020 but really, truly, wanting to make the effort to me...

Miskatonic University: Elder Gods 101 by Matthew and Mike Davenport review

 
    MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY: ELDER GODS 101 by Matthew and Michael Davenport is something I've seen before in books like Anna M. Pillsworth's SUMMONED and Serra Elinsen's AWOKEN but is always a pleasing concept to me: Young Adult Cthulhu Mythos fiction. Just like I love the Hunger Games for being horrifically traumatizing about child murder and PTSD, I love the thought about teenagers deaing with sanity bending horrors that will rip out your spine while sucking your soul into unfathomable dimensi...

The Last Iota by Robert Kroese review

 
    THE LAST IOTA by Robert Kroese is the sequel to THE BIG SHEEP and the further adventures of Erasmus Keane and his Watsonian sidekick, Blake Fowler. I really enjoyed The Big Sheep for the fact it managed to be an excellent parody of cyberpunk detective fiction while simultaneously being a really good example of the genre itself. The trick to pulling off the best send ups is that you have a good story at the heart of it and this is why SNOW CRASH remains a cyberpunk classic as well as ...