Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 2

The Wedding Proposal by John Swansiger

The Wedding Proposal by John Swansiger

There are absolutely no surprises in this short fully dramatized romance, but that doesn’t prevent it from being a very cute story. Hanna’s fiancé breaks up with her two weeks before their wedding and she can’t get a refund on everything she’s spent on her big day. So, with remarkably little angst, she decides to give the wedding to someone who needs it, and takes out an ad to that effect. Her ad is answered by Eric, whose sister got engaged days before their father found out he has to start debilitating cancer treatments. They want to have the wedding before the treatments begin. Hanna’s tragedy is their blessing.

 

What follows is the comical efforts of Hanna and Eric to fine tune the details of the wedding in time for the big day. (Who would have thought the groom would be violently allergic to flowers?) As they do so, they start to fall for each other—except both of them were hurt before and are a little gun shy. Then Hanna’s ex reconsiders not marrying her and tries to get her back. But the sweetest part of the story was Eric’s parents talking about how they fell in love. Unsurprisingly, there are lessons in their stories for Hanna and Eric leading to the happy ending.

 

As I said, no surprises, but a very cute story. The cast does a great job in dramatizing it and if you like romances, it is well worth your time.

 

Blood Ties by Gilbert M. Stack

My novel Blood Ties is on sale for 99 cents for the next three weeks on Amazon and it’s always free on Kindle Unlimited.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Ties-Gil...

 

I’ve always enjoyed reading books with a supernatural element, but with a few exceptions the stories I’ve written in this genre have tended to come down on the urban fantasy rather than the horror side of the supernatural equation. The difference is pretty clear. Werewolves and vampires and what have you may be very frightening in an urban fantasy, but the focus of the story is usually on destroying the monster. In horror, the focus is more purely about survival. If that involves destroying the supernatural threat, that’s okay, but it shouldn’t be obvious that the heroes can destroy the big bad guy. After writing nearly a dozen urban fantasy style stories (Pembroke Steel, Preternatural, Among Us) and an urban fantasy romance (High Above the Waters) I decided I wanted to take a more traditional look at the great monsters of the horror genre and see just how scary they could truly be. In doing so, I wanted to pay tribute to the great masters who really created this genre.

 

So, what are the key elements to a successful horror novel? I’m sure that every author has a slightly different take on this, but the key difference to me between horror and my urban fantasy books was that I wanted unempowered characters—people who were out of their element and unable to get help with their problems. That required an unhealthy dose of isolation for my protagonists and at the same time, a healthy dose of normality for them. No Navy Seals who just happen to stumble into something way above the average person’s pay grade. No tenth-degree black belts who just happened to encounter something way out of the ordinary. I needed your average everyday Jane and Joe and had to put them into a situation that anybody reading the story could imagine themselves—given the circumstances—getting caught up in.

 

And that’s what you get in Blood Ties—a lawyer still-traumatized from a years old assault—trying to save her practice and a man that just discovered that his recently deceased family were not his last remaining relatives. They’re two scarred and lonely people desperate enough to fly halfway around the world to try and put their lives back together—not realizing, of course, that in a horror novel their pathetic lives are exactly what the big bad is really interested in.

 

So, if you like horror novels, why don’t you take a trip to Carpathia with Liz and Ryan? It’s right next door to the legendary Transylvania and vampires aren’t the only classic threat to inhabit the region.

 

Archie Meets Nero Wolfe by Robert Goldsborough

Archie Meets Nero Wolfe by Robert Goldsborough

Goldsborough takes a break from continuing the stories of Archie and Nero Wolfe to write a prequel novel about how the two met. In it, we meet a nineteen-year-old Archie Goodwin fresh to NYC and having trouble making ends meet during the Great Depression. He gets a job in a warehouse, gets shot at by two robbers, and kills them. This costs him his job and he ends up finding work with Del Bascom who appears several times in the course of Stout’s stories. Through Bascom Archie meets Wolfe and helps to solve a kidnapping. It’s a solid tale, but not one of the great Nero Wolfe stories.

 

Planet Hulk by Greg Pak

Planet Hulk by Greg Pak

I vaguely recall reading this comic book and enjoying it. The backdrop is that Reed Richards and other Marvel heroes have decided to rid the Earth of the problem of the Hulk by tricking him into a spaceship and sending it off into deep space. Seeing as Reed Richards once saved the life of Galacticus, I always thought this was a totally out of character idea. Anyway, the Hulk doesn’t go where he’s supposed to and ends up on a world where a totalitarian ruler forces just about everyone to fight in gladiatorial combats for his amusement. Normally, this wouldn’t be much of a problem for the Hulk, but he’s not up to full strength on this planet. So he does a Sparticus, breaks free, and starts a rebellion. It was an opportunity to put the Hulk in armor and give him melee weapons.

 

There’s an awful lot of action in this book—which is clearly good. One does not read a novel about the Hulk in hopes of getting deep philosophical conversation. The voice acting is good, and the sound effects are fine. The plot is fairly straightforward geared toward constantly leading the Hulk to his next fight. The surprise for the Hulk is he also falls in love which, if memory serves, set the stage for the sequel event, World War Hulk. But this book ends before that story begins. It is fun but not deep.

 

What Lurks Beneath by Ryan Lockwood

What Lurks Beneath by Ryan Lockwood

This novel starts with a bang as two divers get surprised by and eaten by a giant octopus. It’s a very well-crafted and exciting scene. Unfortunately, that was the last bit of excitement for quite a while as Lockwood transitions into super-slow-motion for much of the rest of the novel. Things simply do not happen. What we get instead is the heroine worrying quite a lot about the state of her relationship with her boyfriend and heading off to the Bahamas to look for a cephalopod which she somehow doesn’t connect with the death of four people—two of them the divers whose camera tells her that the cephalopod exists. It just didn’t make any sense.

 

In the final analysis the tiny bit of information about real octopi that Lockwood gives us didn’t justify reading this book. Perhaps if Lockwood had cut out half the prose and thrown out the touch of mysticism which is supposed to explain why our heroine isn’t killed by the giant octopus (and it really is huge) this would have been a good book.

 

The Cassidy Project by Christopher Cartwright

The Cassidy Project by Christopher Cartwright

This is one of the better Sam Reilly novels I’ve read. After providing an historical mystery that always features into the storyline, Cartwright introduces a woman who takes some drugs that helps her go to sleep on her cruise ship only to wake up and discover that absolutely every human being on the vessel has disappeared. It’s a great mystery and it really caught my attention. At the same time, Sam Reilly is responding to a call for help from a group of scientists in Antarctica who have also disappeared. That the two problems will be linked is a certainty, but my interest in this investigation stayed strong for the first half of the novel, and then it turned into more of a James Bond thriller which I also frankly found fascinating. Many of the challenges that Sam and his friend Tom face would feature well on the big screen so long as the budget was big enough to do them justice.

 

If I have a complaint, and I think I do but it’s a very minor one, the big bad guy’s acceptance of the circumstances at the very end of the story bothered me. I realize that he was religiously motivated and that he believed the destruction he was trying to inflict on the billions of people living on the planet would somehow make everyone better off (you know, except for the seven or eight billion who died), but he was just a little too happy and nice at the end for my believability factor. But seriously, that’s a small complaint in a very enjoyable novel. I’m looking forward to reading the next one.

 

Fathomless by Greig Beck

Fathomless by Greig Beck

Greig Beck is the master of creating primordial worlds. This time he creates one in a massive lake underneath an icefloe that has been cut off from the oceans for millions of years. Inside this lake are numerous creatures that have died out in the rest of the world including a terrifying megalodon. As usual, his primordial world was fascinating, but this time the rest of the novel just didn’t keep up.

 

First, there was the problem of pacing. This novel moves very, very, slowly. And I don’t know why. It would have been far better to cut out half of the book then to let the plot creep along the way it does.

 

Second, some of the human villains (and one of the things I generally like about Beck’s books is that there are always human villains that in many ways are as big a problem as the monsters) were just ridiculous. A dirty nuke is exploded at the bequest of a Soviet official trying to kill off a billionaire he hates, and no one apparently notices. And the environmentalists at the end of the book seemed literally unhinged.

 

Third, the tactics of our heroes to avoid the megalodon while in the water just didn’t make sense to me. Paddle slowly, be quiet (except for talking), and so forth. I just didn’t feel like any of these things would have worked. And what about the lights? Forget for a moment that they keep burning all of their flashlights as the batteries die, wouldn’t light be a big attractor in a world that has been dark for millions of years?

 

Fourth, there are some really stupid people in this novel. Cate, our heroine, should have been nicknamed Dr. Poor Decisions. She funds her first exploration on her own and acts as if she has to learn everything there is to learn about a mammoth cave system on one short drone flight. She makes a decision to fly her expensive drone past the point of no return—why? It never made sense. It’s not as if they couldn’t have made many more flights and if necessary, established a forward base camp to extend their reach. Similarly, they later get attacked by a creature thought to be extinct and she rejects the idea of pulling back to better prepare for their expedition deciding that there couldn’t possibly be anything worse in the entire unknown ecosystem. And this woman’s a scientist?

 

I really hate not liking a Greig Beck book, but I just couldn’t get past the problems with this one.

 

Hardy Boys Adventures 3 The Vanishing Game by Franklin W. Dixon

Hardy Boys Adventures 3 The Vanishing Game by Franklin W. Dixon

The biggest news of this novel is that Joe has a girlfriend, Daisy, and her parents have just bought a local amusement park. The success of the park depends heavily on the opening of their star attraction—G-Force. But a great opening day turns to horror when Daisy’s friend Kelly disappears off the G-Force ride without a trace. Frank and Joe immediately agree to help find the missing girl, but things quickly get confusing when Daisy—after asking for their help—starts to get angry with Joe for investigating. When a second person disappears, the tension gets even greater. Daisy’s father is keeping secrets and there is a creepy guy working for the park that seems to be involved.

 

Overall, it’s a nice little mystery, but the police seem particularly incompetent. Frank and Joe get their hands on video which the police should have found. I also think that the police should have located the trick that allows people to vanish. But, that would have made it harder for Frank and Joe to shine.

 

Most unusual for this series so far, there’s a cliff hanger ending after the mystery is solved.

 

WInterhaven for 99 cents

This is the third week of the 99 cent sale on my novel, Winterhaven. You can find it on Amazon and free on Kindle Unlimited.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Winterhaven-Gi...

 

Winterhaven has received some praise from fellow writers. Will Hahn (Shards of Light) wrote:

Readers familiar with Stack's forays into historical fantasy, mystery, horror, westerns and more will be as pleased as I was to learn that yes, he can do epic fantasy just as well. Winterhaven is a master stroke combining the large cast of "Game of Thrones" with the depth and stakes of a literary epic-fantasy. Yet the action is crisp, spiced with the plot-twists and surprises of a much lighter theme which still fits the world he has created in such powerful, convincing detail.

 

The key distinction of Winterhaven is that Stack has a cast of characters so much more likable and admirable than some of the other fare we've been seeing. Human flaws, mistakes, and yes a few truly evil villains are here, but you can believe in so many terrific individuals, each with a fully realized background and developed character traits. It comes together in a tale that is truly epic yet cinematic and engaging.

 

It takes time to read such grand fantasy, but epic fans will have no complaints; in fact, you'll cry out for the sequel as soon as you finish. Want.

 

And Chris L. Adams (A Savage from Atlantis) wrote:

 

Gilbert M. Stack's Winterhaven is classic story telling and world building where the duchies and people come alive right under one's nose without even realizing it. The plot is a complex one that doesn't rush itself, who’s political and character threads are juggled with consummate precision and dexterity. The setting is reminiscent of medieval Europe, but the supernatural also lurks herein, which only heightens the mysticism of this world where things like 'the draal' are real and shouldn't be taken lightly. The players are thoroughly developed...and believable. And that might be what strikes the chord the most—that Stack's Winterhaven world seems so real. This story isn't to be read in a rush; it's immersive--a slow-roasted dinner versus a hot-pocket. Savor it as such.

 

Wearing the Cape by Marion Harmon

Wearing the Cape by Marion Harmon

The first time I read this novel I had gotten a free copy of what turned out to be only the first few chapters of the book. I read a lot of free novels and unfortunately most of them do not leave me wanting to go out and find another of the author’s works. Wearing the Cape was different. The minute I finished it I got online and bought the full novel and then I just kept reading Harmon’s series until I finished all of them.

 

I like superhero stories. I’ve been reading them since my mother gave me my first comic books the summer before I entered fourth grade. Before that I’d watched the original Spiderman cartoon and the Super Friends on television. Many thousands of comics, a whole bunch of movies and television shows, and maybe two-to-three hundred super hero novels later I feel like I’m an expert on the genre. So, it isn’t lightly that I say that Harmon’s Wearing the Cape is easily one of the three or four best superhero series out there.

 

It’s a series for people who take their supers seriously. Like all the other superhero novels out there, Wearing the Cape still demands a certain level of suspended disbelief, but there is a gritty realism in the way this world is envisioned that goes well beyond standard superhero fare—especially that coming out of the genre leaders at Marvel and DC comics. Yet all of that gritty realism doesn’t get in the way of genuine super heroics and the fun that comes from reading about them.

 

Hope Corrigan is an eighteen-year-old woman about to start her first year in college when a terrorist bomber drops an overpass on her and a bunch of other people driving on the highway. By a fluke of luck, she’s not immediately killed by the falling concrete, but she’s worried about all the other people around her and her need to help them generates a superhero breakthrough that launches her into her career as a superhero called Astra.

 

Chicago, where the series is based, is home to America’s premier superhero team, The Sentinels, and to Atlas, the world’s first superhero. They have a lot of experience training new supers and the Sentinels, like all super teams, has a legal status working with the local authorities to A) help them control supervillains and B) work as emergency response personnel during natural and man-made disasters. (You know, like a terrorist dropping an overpass onto the highway below.)

 

Astra’s training gives us the opportunity to painlessly discover how the superheroes function in society. No, that’s not fair, it’s not just painless it’s downright exciting. Superheroes are celebrities with fans, magazines, and clubs devoted to them. There are also movies, television shows and merchandising. They need insurance to cover the civil suits that happen when they’re called in to take down supervillains. There are government agencies that work with them and keep an eye on them. And all of this truly critical world building seamlessly flows from the text while Hope/Astra deals with the completely believable stresses of an incredibly difficult job. And that’s just the day-to-day problems of a superhero—the equivalent of Spiderman stopping a bank robbery on his way to the Daily Bugle. The actual mega-villain activity is worthy of the best story arcs Marvel and DC have ever put on paper.

 

To close I’d like to say a few words about the audio version of this. I’ve read the kindle version two or three times, but the audio brings a whole new level of enjoyment to the story. You see, even though you know Hope’s just eighteen, you can forget that at times while reading, but not with a capable narrator like K. F. Lim. She gets the young Hope’s voice perfectly and the giggles and tongue-tied stutters and a dozen other little narrative effects really drive home that this is a teenager we’re reading about. It brings Harmon’s story to life even more effectively than he did.