C.T. Phipps's Blog, page 86

Fallout 4: Nuka World DLC review

    I've never shared my post-apocalypse plan. It's to take a car, journey to Disneyland and take it over. Alternatively, I will journey to Brazil and live on a plantation where I will grow the ingredients necessary to create Coca Cola. If this is a peculiarly specific plan for Armageddon, I should note that if you somehow merged Disneyland and Coca-Cola then I never would have left as a child. I would have run away from my parents and lived in Colaland's sewers along with the...

Red Dead Redemption review

    This is a really overdue review but I, honestly, fell prey to hyper aversion. Everyone I knew mentioned it was one of the best video games of all time and a decent candidate for the best. However, I was leery of the idea of Rockstar being able to produce anything above Grand Theft: Stallion and it fell by the wayside. Still, with the upcoming announcement of Red Dead Redemption 2, I decided to finally give the game a try. Now, I'm kicking myself for not doing it much earlie...

This Side of the Grave review

    I've mentioned how much I love the Nighthuntress series and this is no exception. Part of what I enjoy about the books is their R-rated Buffy sensibility. They're squarely on the divide between Paranormal Romance and urban fantasy. The books have plenty of sex, relationships, and couples moments but also big epic storylines involving supernatural wars. They're not for everyone but for those of us who do like this combination, they're a really great expression of how authors...

Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos by Bobby Derie review

    The peculiar cover of a tentacled monster (a shoggoth in human form?) flashing an old woman is misleading. This is not a funny book with a nudge-nudge tongue-in-cheek look at sexuality in the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Rather, this is a serious scholarly treatise on not only the works of HPL but also his primary Arkham House successors as well as large portions of media inspired by him.

    In some ways, Bobby Derie overreaches. At 314 pages, this work could hav...

Summoned by Anne M. Pillsworth review

    With the advent of the 21st century and the entering of Lovecraft into the public domain, there are more risks being taken with his stories. Works like The Ballad of Black Tom and The Litany of Earth challenge assumptions about the racism inherent in some of his stories while things like the Cthulhutech RPG merge Lovecraft with sci-fi anime. Summoned is enjoyable and surprising as it's the first time I've ever read a Young Adult Cthulhu Mythos novel.

    I'm a...

Destined for an Early Grave (Night Huntress 4#) review

    I've expressed my love for the Night Huntress series and I will continue to do so. While Anita Blake was the original R-Rated Buffy (before it became porn), Night Huntress nicely fills out that role of a darker edgier vampire-slaying heroine. Dhampir Catherine "Cat" Crawfield and 200-year-old-vampire Crispin "Bones" Russell are two engaging characters who have an excellent relationship which makes their already well-written supernatural adventures even more fun.

  ...

Cthulhu Attacks!: The Fear review

    Dammit, Sean, I wanted to destroy the world first. This peculiar opening to this review is a disclaimer as I know Sean Hoade personally. He's a great guy and the two of us had an interesting conversation a few years back when I was working on Cthulhu Armageddon and he was working on Cthulhu Attacks!.

    The sum of that conversation basically amounted to how both of us were annoyed Cthulhu never actually got on to the whole destroying the world thing. He eithe...

Ibenus review

    Seth Skorkowsky is one of the most promising fantasy writers I've read in the past decade. He has managed to create top quality urban fantasy in the Valducan series and exceeded that in the Tales from the Black Raven stories. While I prefer the latter, I was a day-one purchaser for this latest volume of the Valducan series.

    The premise for the books is that the world is infested with demons. These spirits possess human beings and transform them into vampir...

Hallowed Ground review

    It's basically Needful Things in the Wild West. That's the short review of this book by David Niall Wilson and Steven Savile. The book's premise is a mysterious traveler comes to a sleepy little town in the Wild West which is full of secrets, feuds, and hatreds. By the end of the conflict, the town has torn itself apart with the traveler's true supernatural evil having been exposed for the world to see.

    There's significant differences in the story, especia...

Dead West Omnibus vol. 1 review

    The Weird Weird West. You know, it's kind of strange but the Pirates of the Caribbean movies successfully grafted ghost stories and pirates together into a massive franchise but the Weird Western has never really gotten its niche despite the 20th century being utterly drenched in the genre. Deadlands, Cowboys vs. Aliens, Jonah Hex, and a few others exist but they've never gotten the kind of signature piece they deserve.

    I suspect this is because the Weird...