Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 29

Occultober Day 6 A Heart in the Right Place by Heide Goody and Iain Grant

Occultober Day 6 A Heart in the Right Place by Heide Goody and Iain Grant

Ah, the werewolf—one of the trinity of creatures that dominate the modern urban fantasy. That’s why they appear in so many of this year’s Occultober stories, but few authors handle them as well as Heide Goody and Ian Grant do in A Heart in the Right Place.

 

The story purports to be about a young man and his dying father taking a father-son trip into the Scottish Highlands to try and rehabilitate their relationship before dad dies. You quickly get the impression that neither of them really want to do this and that they have only agreed to the trip to make the mother/wife happy. This turns into an absolutely great part of the story after a fairly slow start, but it’s not, in my opinion, the heart of the tale.

 

That would be Finn. Finn is a totally psycho assassin who in addition to being a sociopath is also a control freak. She is fascinating from moment one to moment last. Her need to control everything never lets her quit and she is really just a delight every time she appears on a page. I feel a little bit bad liking the “bad gal” more than anyone else (and I want to be clear, I really like Nick and his dad by the end of the book), but she is just a delightfully evil creation—not someone you would ever want to meet or even hope exists in the world, but a wonderful villain to fuel the story.

 

Finn has been given the not-as-simple-as-it-looks task of procuring a heart from a still living man named Oz. Nick, trying to set up his perfect weekend with his dad, has the misfortune of having the bottle of 30-year-old Scotch he purchased for the occasion misdelivered to Oz’s house by the postal service. This small misfortune will lead to some very bad decisions on Nick’s part coupled with incredibly bad luck as Finn mistakenly believes that Nick is Oz and chases him and his father into the Scottish Highlands. None of that is a spoiler, it’s just the basic scene setting for the plot.

 

Complicating Finn’s life is that she’s been given a minder for this “hit” and she doesn’t play well with others. The minder is a corporate type who is big on planning and is keeping one important surprise away from Finn for much of the tale. They don’t get along well, but it helps to flush out Finn’s character quite a bit.

 

Finally, there is the werewolf who makes an appearance early enough to inject some seriously high octane into the rest of the story. Everything goes crazy once the werewolf makes an appearance and while I correctly predicted some of the consequences, I didn’t predict all of them. I love the take that Goody and Grant have on werewolves and would love to see them do more on this theme. In fact, I’m going to have to look over their other series to discover if they are as delightful as this book.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

 

If you’re interested in A Heart in the Right Place, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

Occultober Day 5: On a Winter???s Eve by Chris L. Adams

Occultober Day 5: On a Winter’s Eve by Chris L. Adams

For the fifth day of Occultober, we turn to the unnerving prose of Chris L. Adams. On a Winter’s Eve is the story of a very troubled man and how a horrific event in his youth continues to affect him in his old age. The trauma was so great that he has had himself institutionalized more than once to stop the nightmares from rearing their heads in his waking hours. So right up front he’s confessing you can’t trust him, even as he insists that he’s sane and what he’s going to report is true… It’s a great beginning to a very creepy tale that would have found a comfortable home in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.

 

The narrator goes on to tell of a long-ago night when the snow fell thick in the deep woods. Peering out a window he found a set of hellish eyes peering back at him. What is even more troubling is that when he screams in fright, his parents don’t seem to think he was having a nightmare. Instead, they prepare for the most desperate kind of war.

 

I can’t say more of the plot without spoiling the story, but I will make a note on the writing itself. Adams’s prose is particularly vivid and striking, even when he’s describing truly horrific things. It helps confirm the age of the narrator in the reader’s mind, as well as to leave absolutely no doubt about what happened on that Winter’s Eve—whether the narrator is ultimately trustworthy or not.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...

 

If you’re interested in On a Winter’s Eve, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

 

Occultober Day 4 Blood Ties by Gilbert M. Stack

Occultober Day 4 Blood Ties by Gilbert M. Stack

For the fourth day of this celebration of spookiness, I want to introduce one of my own novels—a book that I originally conceived as a humorous satire of the supernatural adventure, but found myself instead writing a much darker, more traditionally thrilling, novel.

 

One of the things that made Dracula so effective is that it began by taking an English man out of his normal setting and isolating him in what was effectively another world—Transylvania—home to Vlad the Impaler—a much more medieval than modern setting. In Blood Ties, I’ve tried to capture that sense of helplessness that comes from being dropped into a foreign environment way outside of a person’s comfort zone. Liz Dunn is a lawyer who has never quite recovered from a severe beating she received while protecting a client from a stalker. Now, she has to accompany her new client to the country of Carpathia right on the border of Transylvania so he can meet his only living relative—a reclusive uncle who is (unsurprisingly given the genre) much more than he seems. You see, the uncle wants to meet Ryan just as badly as Ryan wants to meet him—but for a far more nefarious reason.

 

Blood Ties is my tribute to the classic creators who invented the modern horror field. Vampires, werewolves, zombies—it’s all in here, including a little touch of Cthulhu.

 

You can find Blood Ties on Amazon and and free on Kindle Unlimited.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

 

If you’re interested in Blood Ties, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

Occultober Day 3 A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny

Occultober Day 3 A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny

For the third day of Occultober I introduce one of my favorite classic tales, A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. A book I believe was his very last completed work.

 

I am a huge fan of Zelazny and have read most everything he’s written. My favorite of all of his stories is this novel. I read it every October, sometimes listening to my old audiobook cassette tapes in which Roger Zelazny reads the story himself, and sometimes reading it either in print or electronically. It’s a beautiful story and a tribute both to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and to many great works of literature and film focused on the late nineteenth century.

 

This is a tale of people who are drawn together to strive to open or to keep closed a gate to the realm of the Elder Gods on a Night in the Lonesome October when the moon is full on Halloween. This time, those gathering are Jack the Ripper, a witch, Dracula, the werewolf, Dr. Frankenstein, a druid, and many more. There preparations attract the attention of law enforcement and the Great Detective. All of this would be wonderful enough, but the genius of the story is that the humans are not the eyes we see through in the relating of this tale. The point of view and all of the interactions are between the animal familiars of those who will contend—a dog, a cat, a snake, an owl, a bat, a rat, and so on.

 

As the month advances, players start to turn on each other, winnowing the ranks as some position themselves to save the world while others play for power. There are twists, turns, and secrets aplenty here and I enjoy rereading this masterpiece every single year.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09...

 

If you’re interested in A Night in the Lonesome October, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

Occultober Day 2: Princess of Wands by John Ringo

Occultober Day 2: Princess of Wands by John Ringo

For the second day of Occultober, I have chosen a book that is firmly in the urban fantasy genre, with an unusual twist. Rather than have paranormal powers, the heroine has only a genuine faith in the lord to protect her—that and a bunch of kicking martial arts and weapons skills.

 

Princess of Wands is a modern urban fantasy in which a soccer mom, Barb Everette, devout Episcopalian woman, finds herself confronting one of the elder gods from the Cthulhu mythos and after that gets pulled into an organization that helps the government handle Special Circumstances. The book is structured in three major (and one minor) parts and it moves very quickly in three of the four, keeping up a level of excitement while Ringo builds a fascinating world of secret investigations into things pretty much everyone believes the general public of the world is better off not knowing anything about.

 

Barb is a very interesting and unusual central character. She’s a military brat with extensive martial arts and weapons training, but she’s also a soccer mom with all that that implies. One day she gets fed up with her mundane existence and over her husband’s protests decides to take a weekend off for herself. She gets off her route and ends up broken down in a small town in the bayou which just happens to be the site from which a serial killer has been operating as he attempts to cause the manifestation of one of the elder gods. This is not a coincidence but, we assume, the result of the subtle influence of God getting Barb to the one place the world most needs her to be. The resulting action is well developed.

 

The second section of the book is much lower key, but just as interesting. Barb is brought into the U.S. organization that deals with Special Circumstances and learns a lot about people that are very different from her. They are a colorful group that don’t all get along with each other, but they are the best line of defense that America has for dealing with supernatural threats, of which there are many.

 

The third part of the book is the longest and the slowest. Barb is brought in on the investigation of a serial murderer with special circumstances. Her area of investigation is a science fiction convention, and Ringo has way too much fun going into the details of who attends conventions and what happens there. The excuse to do this is to identify suspects who might be the killer, but I’ve read the book four times and I still can’t keep track of the wide host of possible suspects. I would have liked this section to be cut in half. It’s good once all hell (literally) breaks loose, but pretty slow before that.

 

Finally, there’s a very nice extended epilogue in which Barb has to deal with a small but real problem at home.

 

As you can tell from the above, I love this novel. If you like supernatural investigations and combat, this is a good book for you to try out.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

If you’re interested in Princess of Wands, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

Occultober Day 1: The Graveyard Shift by D.M. Guay

Occultober Day 1: The Graveyard Shift by D.M. Guay

Welcome to Occultober 2022! Over the course of this month, I’m going to introduce you to 31 books or series that play with the horrific and the supernatural—sometimes straight up and sometimes with dark humor. You know what I mean, these are the books that delve into the darker side of fantasy and fiction and often get downright spooky. So, secure your shutters and light the candles as you prepare yourself for 31 dark and stormy adventures.

 

And if you like what you see, please feel free to leave a comment, share the review, or even recommend a book you think I might want to feature in next year’s Occultober event. Let’s face it, anyone interested in this event will appreciate a good recommendation.

 

Now, to launch all of the spookiness for 2022, I have chosen The Graveyard Shift, the opening book of one of my favorite series. In it, author D.M. Guay manages to take the spookiest of settings—a small 7-11-esq market that is in actuality a gateway to hell—and make it a source of some wonderful dark humor.

 

Now, I should point out that I don’t usually get the comedy in most comedic books. Fortunately, that wasn’t a problem in The Graveyard Shift. I was laughing from the first chapters and sharing the jokes with my son who would laugh uproariously at them second hand. Guay has a gift for the absurd and it really works in this first book of her 24/7 Demon Mart series.

 

The hero (Lloyd) is a loser. It’s not nice to say, but even he recognizes it. His major problem would appear to be pure laziness coupled with a remarkable lack of even a modicum of ambition. He seems essentially happy living in his parents’ house, playing video games, and going every night to a convenience store to sample one of their 100+ varieties of slushies. Oh, and I should also mention, that he is really, really, stupid. I’m not saying he has a low IQ, just that he’s really amazingly dumb—but weirdly enough, in a totally believable way.

 

So, here’s the set up. Lloyd goes into the convenience store where he has a schoolboy crush on one of the attendants who probably doesn’t know he exists, and while he’s there a demonic snake creature appears and tries to escape the store. Lloyd helps his fantasy crush stop this from happening. In addition to the snake creature, genuine magic is displayed. Keep this in mind for later.

 

The long and the short of it is that the store owner rewards Lloyd for his help by offering him a job at an extraordinarily good hourly rate. Since Lloyd is in desperate debt, and it will let him be near his crush, he accepts. It is very clear to the reader, and in all fairness, the demon hiring Lloyd tells him this, that this store is not a normal place. There are genuine threats to life and limb here. There are demons involved. But Lloyd immediately zones out on the training video and never does get around to reading his employee handbook which tells him how to survive these dangers. He also has a really hard time accepting that the supernatural is in play in this store. All of which produces hilarious situation after hilarious situation in a setting that is perfect for Halloween. It’s as if Lloyd just can’t process magic and the supernatural even when he keeps seeing it.

 

Guay also manages to show Lloyd growing as a person without having him overcome the qualities that have made him basically unsuccessful so far in life. So, it’s sweet when his mother’s sheer joy that he has gotten a job keeps him from quitting. And it’s also nice to see him starting to want the things that other adults around him desire. Oh, and I should mention that even though Lloyd thinks he is a coward, he’s actually intensely brave and steps up when he has to. And again, credit to the author, this is done in a very believable way.

 

The Graveyard Shift is not the spookiest of books, but its firm setting in the supernatural make it the perfect book to launch this year’s Occultober.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

 

If you’re interested in The Graveyard Shift, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

When Plants Attack by Rebecca E. Hirsch

One day before the start of Occultober, I have a book of real world phenomena scary enough to be fiction.

When Plants Attack by Rebecca E. Hirsch

Plants are supposed to be the passive, attractive, stationary life forms that make up your grass or offer you shade or decorate your yard. However, there are a few that reject that ornamental role and take a more aggressive view of life. No, this isn’t Day of the Triffids or some other scary sci fi or fantasy story. It’s a short overview of a handful of plants that either seek out their food or decide they’re just not going to wait and see what sun, wind, and rain bring to them. It’s absolutely fascinating. There are plants that trap their prey, plants that crawl about looking for a meal, and plants that have all sorts of ways of punishing animals that decide to eat them. This is a fun book for the not too squeamish.

 

Harbingers of Hope by William L. Hahn

Harbingers of Hope by William L. Hahn

This is a towering work of fiction that reads much better as a complete work than it does in smaller installments. It’s the Tolkienesque story of the Lands of Hope—at peace for millennia—on the cusp of a renewal of their great war with the forces of Despair. The fulcrum upon which this story is built is Solemn Judgement, a fascinating young man of deep convictions whose outsider status permits him to see the weaknesses in the Lands of Hope that its long-term inhabitants are blind to. That blindness is the crack that the forces of Despair intend to exploit to reignite the war and Solemn Judgement is the best “hope” to stop that from happening. Yet Solemn is a flawed hero as well which makes his efforts endlessly fascinating.

 

I read this omnibus because I had encountered Solemn Judgement in Hahn’s Shards of Light series and absolutely loved the enigmatic character. But there are many more intriguing characters in this story—a prince struggling to keep to the path of honor and avoid a senseless war, a band of adventurers seeking their fortune through the extermination of evil, and an intriguing knight whose religious devotions mask a serious problem in the city of Conar. And there are so many problems for the many heroes to tackle—including a lich and a demon seeking to bring their own brands of hell to the world. Add to all of this Hahn’s willingness to kill off characters in Game-of-Thrones-like fashion and you’ll be reading late into the night to learn what happens.

 

Harbingers of Hope is the sort of book that High Fantasy was meant to be—exciting characters engaged in inspiring deeds in a world that is riddled with history and budding with many more stories waiting to be told. You won’t regret reading it!

 

The Sirens of Mars by Sarah Stewert Johnson

The Sirens of Mars by Sarah Stewert Johnson

This sort of book tends to do three things—and Johnson does all of them extremely well. First, it gives a little bit of biographical information on the author, helping the reader to understand how she was inspired to become interested in her field. Second, it gives a historiography of the great scientists who came before her, showing how they helped to create the modern field of study. And finally, it shows how our understanding of the field has advanced, and in the case of Mars, Stewert spends a lot of time going through the many missions to the red planet that have expanded our knowledge.

 

Let me end by saying that there were a lot more missions than I understood there to have been, and since I have been interested in Mars since reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury, this came as a big surprise to me. I’m sure that most people have heard of Mariner, Viking, and Pathfinder. But did you know about Observer, Global Surveyor, Climate Orbiter, Polar Lander, the Rovers, Phoenix, and more?

 

It's an interesting book for anyone who is curious about how we know what we know about Mars.

 

The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper

The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper

Most people think that all of the broad outlines of the ancient world are already known to historians, but in that last fifteen or twenty years an important new understanding of the problems that beset the Roman Empire is adding considerably to the debate over why Rome fell. I first became aware of this debate about ten years ago when scholars started to note that an event referred to as the Justiniac Plague was not a relatively isolated event in Constantinople but a crippling empire wide event on a par with the Medieval Black Death. Since then, much new information has come out and in this book, Kyle Harper looks at the related issues of climate change and disease in the last few centuries of the Roman Empire.

 

Why was the third century so difficult?—cooling temperatures and a consequent rise in diseases like small pox which devastated both the population and the economy. Things got a little better during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine before the temperature dropped again and disease returned to ravage the land. Justinian’s attempt to reconquer the west might have been doomed to failure anyway, but it didn’t help matters to have unusual volcanic activity cool the earth and set the stage for a surge in bubonic plagues that lasted at least two centuries. It’s hard to defend your new lands when the size of your legions is now one-third what it had been with no way to recover the numbers. It’s hard to keep funding your government when the tax base has just plummeted (leading Justinian to raise taxes to impractical levels).

 

This is a fascinating book with perhaps a little too much detail for the casual reader. It doesn’t lessen other issues that are discussed as contributing to the fall of Rome (like poor leadership) but it certainly goes a long way to show that the earth itself played a heavy role in bringing down the west’s most successful empire.