C.V. Hunt's Blog, page 15

Book Review - Die You Doughnut Bastards

Die You Doughnut Bastards by Cameron Pierce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good variety of the author's work. I have to point out the story titled "Lantern Jaws" as my favorite. I'll be looking for more.

ABOUT:


"Like William S. Burroughs on crack!" - Thomas F. Monteleone, New York Times bestselling author

The bacon storm is rolling in. We hear the grease and sugar beat against the roof and windows. The doughnut people are attacking. We press close together, forgetting for a moment that we hate each other.

In Die You Doughnut Bastards, amputees, lonely young people, and talking animals struggle for survival against the freakish whims of nature. A typewriter made of fetuses is the source of woe for an expecting couple. A girl with a glass jaw hides an otherworldly secret. A demonic loner goes to a birthday party in Hell. You'll encounter a killer in a marsupial mask, a prison for anorexics, haunted pancakes, and a songwriter with a cult following.

Surreal prose poems give way to personal accounts of alienation and modern love. Vegetarian narwhals are sold at the supermarket. And in a city that might be your own, zombie doughnuts are rising up. Kill yourself before they kill you. Or just kill yourself.

Featuring original illustrations in the style of Daniel Johnston, Die You Doughnut Bastards is the latest way to drown, brought to you by Wonderland Book Award-winning author Cameron Pierce.


View all my reviews

Book Review - Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Review:
This a collection of short stories and the first time I've read anything from this author. All of the stories were good, but the last one, "Lull", stood out as my favorite. I plan on reading more from Kelly Link.
About:

The nine stories in Link's second collection are the spitting image of those in her acclaimed debut, Stranger Things Happen: effervescent blends of quirky humor and pathos that transform stock themes of genre fiction into the stuff of delicate lyrical fantasy. In "Stone Animals," a house's haunting takes the unusual form of hordes of rabbits that camp out nightly on the front lawn. This proves just one of several benign but inexplicable phenomena that begin to pull apart the family newly moved into the house as surely as a more sinister supernatural influence might. The title story beautifully captures the unpredictable potential of teenage lives through its account of a group of adolescent schoolfriends whose experiences subtly parallel events in a surreal TV fantasy series. Zombies serve as the focus for a young man's anxieties about his future in "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" and offer suggestive counterpoint to the lives of two convenience store clerks who serve them in "The Hortlak." Not only does Link find fresh perspectives from which to explore familiar premises, she also forges ingenious connections between disparate images and narrative approaches to suggest a convincing alternate logic that shapes the worlds of her highly original fantasies.
Contents:The Faery Handbag (2004)The Hortlak (2003)The Cannon (2003)Stone Animals (2004)Catskin (2003)Some Zombie Contingency Plans (2005)The Great Divorce (2005)Magic for Beginners (2005)Lull (2002)

View all my reviews

Book Review - Vaempires: Zombie Rising by Thomas Winship

Vaempires: Zombie Rising by Thomas Winship
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the third book from the Vaempires series, and it doesn't disappoint. This author does well with action. And what better way to show that than with a zombie uprising. If you're looking for something new out of the vampire genre, then look no further. Mutated vampires that just keep going... what else is there to say?
View all my reviews

ABOUT:


The tale of the Evolutionary War resumes in Væmpires: Zombie Rising.
Væmpires have taken control of twelve major cities. Their leader, Vielyn, seeks the atomic weapons that will bring the rest of the world to its knees.
Vampire forces are reeling. As Linq and Ray race to the royal estate to rendezvous with Cassandra and Daniel, the princess is captured and Daniel falls.
With the fate of world shifting to their teenage shoulders, Linq and Ray must deal with tremendous losses while battling a most unexpected—and undeadly—new foe.

Dreaming.

I've started a new project. People who know me know I'm a weird sleeper. I sleep walk, talk in my sleep, and lucid dream. HERE is a crash course in lucid dreaming if you don't know what it is. 
Usually if I have a vivid or bizarre dream I write it down after waking up. A couple of days ago I had such a dream, but I was too tired after waking to follow through with this. I decided to use my voice memo feature on my phone and recite the dream instead. I asked if anyone would be interested in my mad ramblings and had a few people show interest. So I took an hour and created a small slide show video on YouTube for people to listen to me ramble for three minutes in a sleepy voice. I'm going to start doing this more often for people to use however they like: laugh at them, share them, analyze them, or use them for inspiration. 
Here it is: http://youtu.be/dtMfzeDQDXE

Book Review - Terror In Tensiltown by Peter H. Brothers

It is December of 1941, and in this, the thrilling sequel to “Devil Bat Diary,” the author takes his reader on a entertaining roller-coaster ride of suspenseful fantasy as the Chicago Daily Register’s resourcefully resilient reporter Johnny Layton and his picture-taking partner “One-Shot” McGuire travel to Hollywood to investigate a series of gruesome murders. Along the way they meet numerous luminaries and experience many one-of-a-kind adventures as well as unimaginable terrors in exotic locations, and Layton even reconnects with a lost love as he tries his best not becoming yet another grim victim himself!

Review:
Terror In Tinseltown is the sequel to Devil Bat Diary. And again Peter H. Brother takes the unique characters on a twisted and suspenseful ride. This time it’s in Hollywood among the snobbish, the glamorous, and the not so glamorous, as they try to solve a string of murders for the newspaper they work for in Chicago. Strange things start happening while Johnny Layton investigates, and someone is out to stop them... no matter what the cost.
For some reason I found the sequel a little adverb heavy. I don’t recall this in Devil Bat Diary. But somehow it’s fitting and in comparison to the story as a whole, this was the only thing that struck me as negative. The story was well paced and keeps the reader wanting more.
The author does a great job of painting a scene of Hollywood in the 1940’s. You’re taken back to a time when movies made the world feel wholesome. You pepper in the absurd acts of the characters, the abandon of manners, and the constant banter of two grown men, and it takes on a new life I found comical. 

Photos from BizarroCon 2012

I took a lot of photos at Bizarro Con. There are so many that I don't think I can share all of them with you without them taking over my blog. These are a few of my favorites, and they're in no particular order. 
This is me the night I arrived. I got started right away.


 Huddle around for story time.
Shane McKenzie after a performance.
 John Skipp and Zoe Welch showing some bizarro love.
 Books and beer.
 Jeff Burk posing for one of my paintings.
 From left to Right - Anderesen Prunty, Sam Reeves, Zoe Welch, and Justin Grimbol. (This is my favorite photo. I think it sums up my whole weekend.)
 Me and Zoe in a glasses swap up.
 Kevin Shamel and Rose O'Keefe.
 Andrew Goldfarb blowing up the world.
 I'm in there somewhere.
 Alan M. Clark using Jeff Burk's dreads to paint a picture of Jeff.
 Andersen Prunty and Bradley Sands doing the coat and glasses swap.
 My stash.
 It's all fun and games until Bradley Sands shoots you in the face.

Book Review - Breathers by S.G. Browne

Meet Andy Warner, a recently deceased everyman and newly minted zombie. Resented by his parents, abandoned by his friends, and reviled by a society that no longer considers him human, Andy is having a bit of trouble adjusting to his new existence. But all that changes when he goes to an Undead Anonymous meeting and finds kindred souls in Rita, an impossibly sexy recent suicide with a taste for the formaldehyde in cosmetic products, and Jerry, a twenty-one-year-old car-crash victim with an exposed brain and a penchant for Renaissance pornography. When the group meets a rogue zombie who teaches them the joys of human flesh, things start to get messy, and Andy embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will take him from his casket to the SPCA to a media-driven class-action lawsuit on behalf of the rights of zombies everywhere.
Darkly funny, surprisingly touching, and gory enough to satisfy even the most discerning reader, Breathers is a romantic zombie comedy (rom-zom-com, for short) that will leave you laughing, squirming, and clamoring for more. 4 out of 5Review:
I love a good zombie book, but I love them even more when it's not your standard slash and dash zombie story. I don't know about other zombie fans, but I'm sick of your standard story about a group of survivors killing zombies. There's a monotonous feeling when authors try to come up with more gruesome ways to slaughter them. This isn't that type of book.
This book is about being a zombie. About the life you lose. The struggles of acceptance. The rejections of your friends and family. But more than that, it's about the new life you build when you wake up a zombie, and learning to accept what can't be changed. 
If you've never woken up as a zombie, then you probably wouldn't understand.

Things in the Portland area.

Here are some pictures I took while visiting the Portland area for BizarroCon. We visited Indian Beach on Thursday, which is located next to Cannon Beach. Cannon Beach was the beach used while filming Goonies.
Wednesday we took the short drive to Multnomah Falls. I promised I wouldn't swamp you with photos and decided to break them into two parts.

I'm back from BizarroCon!

I've made it back from Portland in one piece. It was great. I met a lot of cool authors and fans. The atmosphere was stimulating and we partied the whole weekend. This is a video from my first night. I will post photos and another video over the next couple of weeks. There's a lot. And I don't want to clog up the blog. So, enjoy Jeff Burk's reading of the song "Put It In Your Mouth".

Book Review: King Of The Perverts by Steve Lowe

4 out of 5Poor Dennis. He's a regular sort of guy who's recently been dealt a shitty hand by life: he lost his job, his wife hates him and wants a divorce, and it turns out she was also cheating on him as well. Now he's living on his brother's couch. Holy fuck, that sucks. Dennis can't imagine things could get much worse, and that's why he jumped at the opportunity to take part in a new reality game show: a "sexcathlon" where the first person to achieve 10 increasingly difficult and perverted sexual challenges wins a million dollars and is crowned King of the Perverts. Dennis doesn't care about the title, he just wants the money, but now he's not sure he can make it to the end. Enduring a golden shower and following through with an Abe Lincoln are hard enough, but he's losing his nerve and fears what act of perversion will come next. He'd like to drop out, but his Russian bear of a cameraman, Mongo, has other plans for him and that million dollar prize, and Dennis has to decide which is worse: winning the King of the Perverts, or losing it.
Review:
This was really entertaining: the crapped on attitude of the protagonist, the awkward fumbling of the sex challenges, and don't forget there's a million dollars at stake here, people!