L.S. Popovich's Blog, page 25

Review of Reflections of Destiny by Benzon Ray Barbin

One of the first things you’ll notice about this debut novel is the striking imagery. While not always fantastical, it does not shy away from surprising and otherworldly moments.The setting has a baroque atmospheric quality, with many points of reference on which the short scenes tend to hang. It deals with technology, warfare, combat, assassins, […]

Review of The Outlands (The Outlands Saga #1) by Tyler Edwards

I was pleasantly surprised by The Outlands.  The book has movement, action, and fast pacing. The writing rarely slows down, offering a new layer or concept page by page. A labyrinthine world unfolds, depicting the ins and outs of thievery. As orphans in Dios, our main characters are subservient to an abominable caste system, yoked […]

Review of Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon honed his catchy thriller-esque atmosphere into a tense road novel reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s off-kilter weirdness and soft-dystopian Straw Dogs-style manhunts. An addictive read with dark undertones establishing the prescient consequences of social media, drugs, cloning, the morals of biological and artificial relations and other deep and relevant stuff. Yet, the close […]

Review of Waiting for Gaudiya & Other Stories by Erik Martiny

Despite the reference to Beckett in the title of the collection and some passing moments within, this collection of short stories borrows little and invents much. As the opening quote intimates, Martiny invests in a continual creation of reality in real-time, through uncanny conjuring of the absurd, straddling the reader’s comfort zone like a menacing […]

Review of The Cutest Girl in Class by Quentin S. Crisp

I have already come to expect greatness from the publisher Snuggly Books.  This did not let me down. It is an intriguing descent into a particularly uncanny-valley subculture. It left me wondering where the name Sooki comes from. Urban Dictionary offers a number of possibilities. Turns out it is not an uncommon Eastern name. But […]

Review of Eight Dogs, or “hakkenden”: An Ill-Considered Jest, Being the First 14 Chapters of Nansao Satomi Hakkenden by Bakin Takizawa

“The Hakkenden” is the nickname for the longer titles by which this monumental novel has been known since it appeared in Japan in serial form.  Bakin was one of the most prolific authors of all time, and wrote historical novels in a variety of styles. His work might be superficially compared to Alexandre Dumas: A […]

Review of Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions by Neil Gaiman

Started out strong but ended up inconsistent.  Whereas the much-touted Gene Wolfe produced unpredictable story collections of genre-bending, unconventional tales of varied length culled from a wide selection of magazines over decades, IMO any of Wolfe’s collections are better than the totality of Gaiman’s output. It is not just that this collection is inconsistent, but […]

Review of Third Winter’s War (Seventh Realm, #3) by M.L. Little

This third book continues in the Seventh Realm to bring us more of what every reader is likely to adore from the first two including a large cast of colorful characters and an intriguing plot with expert world building.  It begins where the last book left off and shapes into a culminating encapsulation of the […]

Review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Review of The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike