G.D. Burkhead's Blog: The Burkshelf, page 3

All Plot Twists Come With a Price – Why Once Upon a Time Couldn’t Convincingly Kill Off Rumpelstiltskin

(Warning: For those who like this show but haven’t caught up on Season 4 yet, or for those who want to start watching this show but haven’t gotten around to it, know that this article is gonna contain some massive spoilers. The title also contains a pretty glaring spoiler, while I’m at it. Sorry about that. No real way around that one. All titles come with a price, I suppose.

Ahem…)

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but occasionally a show will come along that demands my attention and continued inte...

Shelf Life – Banewreaker Will Make You Feel Bad for Sauron

Very few fantasy fans can get away with admitting that they aren’t all that big into sweeping, high epic fantasy à la Lord of the Rings or the Pern stories or everything that Terry Brooks writes. Many non-fantasy fans, however, can point to these tales as examples of why they aren’t into fantasy. Like it or not, it’s hard not to see the latter group’s point, as a lot of high fantasy is riddled with confusing terminology, rehashed stories, and genre clichés. This is not to say that these stori...

Ms. Li’s Fish and Jelly Sandwiches

I sit with my girlfriend in a plastic booth at McDonald’s and watch as Ms. Li unwraps her McFish sandwich. She had paid for it, and for our McFood as well, with a hundred dollar bill from the early 1900s that the cashier lady had to counterfeit check twice before just about emptying the register to make the change.

Spreading the McFish paper out carefully on the fake marbling of the plastic table, Ms. Li bites open a packet of mayonnaise, which she squirts across her fried McSquare of McFish....

Shelf Life – Sir Apropos of Nothing Skewers the Hero’s Journey

Fantasy and satire are two of my favorite genres in any medium, but especially so in books. Satirical fantasy, then, holds a special place on my shelves. I grew up on Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and desire to imitate him and his style is what led me in middle school to begin writing in earnest, for fun, and for myself rather than just for my teachers and their assignments.

So when I picked up Sir Apropos of Nothing, I did so based on the title pun and the back-of-the-book synopsis...

Shelf Life – Hottest Blood: The Ultimate in Erotic Horror is Neither of Those Things

Warning: This particular blog post contains content that’s a bit more grownup than most of the other stuff on here. Not, like, X-rated or anything like that, but a bit dark-ish. M for Mature, perhaps, but not so far as AO for Adults Only.

We’re gonna talk about a book of sex stories and the many disturbing ways that it fails, is the general point here. Nothing to get hot and bothered over, but also not the most appropriate subject for the kids or for reading at work.

If you’re cool with this,...

Shelf Life – Flightless Falcon Still Glides Pretty Well

(Since I want to keep this blog with some sort of momentum but have been lacking the time to do anything about it for the past few weeks, enjoy this book review from an earlier, temporary blog that I had going for a class, in which I pretended I was a dragon with a computer, edited to remove any reference to me being a dragon with a computer, as I am in actuality not one of those.)

Flightless Falcon is a light DAW fantasy by Mickey Zucker Reichert that first came out in paperback in July of 2...