Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 52

A Note on How I Came to Write The Fire Islands

I’ve been reading fantasy novels since at least the sixth grade when my mother bought me The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. That interest led me to pursue degrees in history where I was introduced to many wonderous periods in the human past. Eventually, I began to wonder why most fantasy literature was grounded in something akin to the European Middle Ages and one morning while listening to Mike Duncan’s podcast, The History of Rome, I found myself wondering what a fantasy series based loosely on the Roman Empire might be like.

 

And that’s the birth of my Legionnaire series. My Aquila is not Rome, but it shares a lot with that historical entity—especially its culture, its internal political problems, its border troubles, and of course, its amazing legions. Aquila and its world also differs mightily from Rome in a few regards—most particularly the existence and widespread practice of magic and an empire which includes and abuts places very different than those the Romans actually encountered.

 

My initial ideas for the story revolved around the second and third books in what would become the Legionnaire series. I wrote the first short novel to introduce the characters and the border provinces of Aquila before the story would take me elsewhere. In doing so, I got to play with something you don’t see so much in medieval-based fantasies—the critical importance of well-disciplined soldiers (legionnaires in my case) acting under competent officers and operating in a military tradition with centuries of success behind it. I also got to show what happens when that discipline breaks down due to poor leadership. And I get to do all of this while exploring the culture of my legionnaires and their subjects in The Fire Islands. Throw in some truly monumental magic and a threat worthy of an epic hero and his companions, and you get the kickoff novel of a series I’ve come to love as much as I do any of the great works of this genre.

 

I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.

 

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

Beat the Reaper is a fast-paced, irreverent, amazingly fun novel about a former hit man who is trying to redeem his life as a doctor. The chapters are interspersed—one in the present where the doctor’s Witness Protection Program alias has just been blown and the other’s in the past explaining how he got in this position. It’s squeamishly violent, but still manages to keep a mostly light-hearted tone. The key to this seeming contradiction is in the great first person narrative voice of the doctor, brilliantly brought to life in the audio by Robert Petkoff. He’s irreverent, witty, and disturbingly honest, and it just makes him totally lovable no matter what he's actually doing in the narrative. I bought this novel on a whim and I’m very glad I did.

 

 

Awaken Online 2 Precipice by Travis Bagwell

Awaken Online 2 Precipice by Travis Bagwell

The second book in the Awaken Online series has all of the things that made the first book so enjoyable. It focuses on an outcast protagonist who has to grow inside and outside of the game if he is to continue to hold his life together. The villain of the piece is a man everyone thinks is great but we, the reader, know to be a sociopath who is truly evil. This is the basic juxtaposition that makes this series work. The hero plays the villain in the game, but actually shows more basic humanity than the true villain, who plays a hero in the game even as he makes dastardly moves against his enemies. He’s the sort of person who takes game problems into the real world with no fear of consequence.

 

So our protagonist, Jason, has to grow quickly both in game power and real world savvy to survive to the end of the game. A real-world bounty has been placed on his game head and lots of self-righteous players are anxious to have some fun making some money hunting him down. Jason, for his part, seems to relish the role of villain, coming up with exciting strategies to stay one step ahead of the opposition. To help him he has recruited two friends, but he doesn’t know how to be a friend and it’s another area where he really has to work on real-world growth.

 

All that being said, this book was slower moving than the first as Bagwell never succeeds in making the breakthrough moments of the first book replicate in this sequel. In many ways I felt like we were just setting pieces in motion for the next book in the series—an idea that was reinforced by its cliffhanger ending.

 

Slugfest by Reed Tucker

Slugfest by Reed Tucker

Here’s a great account of the history of American comic books’ must famous rivalry—Marvel Comics versus DC—with all the personalities, ingenious innovations, and mindbogglingly stupid decisions that have characterized it over the past sixty years. If you are a fan of superhero comics, this is a must read. You will find the series you have loved in these pages and understand how they fit into the continuum of comics or better yet, shaped its future. You’ll also learn a lot about the men and women who helped create the modern comic—or who stubbornly stood in the way of their development. If you aren’t a big comic book fan, it will help you understand how superheroes have come to dominate movies and form an important niche in television, plus give you some insight into the industry that someone you know is so passionate about.

 

Slugfest is not an entire history of the comic industry and its related subindustries like the comic book convention. It focuses quite well on how Marvel and DC fought with each other, inspired it each other, changed each other, and very occasionally worked together to produce great collaborations. As someone who read his first comic book at camp the summer between third and fourth grade, I was absolutely thrilled with the book. I think you will be too.

 

Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Relic is the book that introduced Agent Pendergast to millions of readers. I read the book when it first came out and on the strength of that experience, I have read probably a dozen more of Preston and Child’s books since then. My memories of the book were always good and I decided to go back and see how the reality stood up to my recollections. I was happy to discover that the reality was even better than I remembered it to be.

 

The novel starts out in the Amazon where a scientific expedition has just gone badly awry. It has split up just as one of the scientists is convinced that critical discoveries are being made. He believes he has discovered a tribe thought to be extinct and discovered a critical relic of their religious beliefs—a strangely horrific idol. In addition, one of his two remaining companions has disappeared and he decides to send his third companion back to civilization with their discoveries and his notes while he searches for the lost man. We stay with him long enough for him to meet his end.

 

The novel then follows the crate of discoveries to a warehouse in South America where something kills a man in a rather frightening scene. We then move to NYC and the Museum of Natural History where more murders follow, the police become involved, and FBI Agent Pendergast makes his appearance. The first third of the story is all about establishing that a killer is lose in the area of the museum, quite possibly even living in the unmapped subterranean tunnels beneath the six-block edifice. It’s very well done. The museum leadership only cares about their multi-million-dollar exhibit that is about to occur and they are doing everything they can to frustrate the investigation out of fear that it will generate bad publicity.

 

The second third takes the novel in a horror or science fiction direction as evidence begins to pile up that the murderer may not be human. This is really well done and continues to flesh out the cast. We have a grad student, her wheelchair bound professor, a curator in charge of the exhibit, a journalist working on a book on the exhibit, a bunch of side characters whom one suspects might be wearing red shirts, and finally, the easy to hate museum leadership. As more information is uncovered despite the active efforts of the museum leadership, a very dark and scary picture begins to develop that suggests that the opening night of the exhibit will have more in common with ringing the dinner bell for a monster than creating a high society social event.

 

Finally, in the third section, everything goes to hell as our heroes’ fears prove very correct and disaster strikes the exhibit. All of that groundwork pays dividends here in a very fast paced ending in which death and mayhem are everywhere and you’re really not certain who will live or die. But that’s still not the best part of the novel. That comes in the very last chapter where an alternate, even more horrific explanation of the museum beast is put forth, and that, quite happily, sets up a sequel which I am very anxious to read.

 

Run by Blake Crouch

Run by Blake Crouch

In Run, Blake Crouch attempts to give his readers a zombie apocalypse without the zombies. The result is an exciting ride (or run, as it were) but ultimately his “zombies” don’t hold together as a credible threat and the ending is pure deus ex machina. Let’s take these issue one-by-one.

 

First, the blurb really sets the scene well. As violence expands like a supernova throughout America, an elderly woman on the radio starts directing people to attack specific individuals including Jack, our hero, a philosophy professor. He barely gets out with his family, and not before his wife’s lover arrives and almost kills them.

 

This is where the novel began to fall apart for me. This lover is clearly going to reappear but Crouch passes over the problem that such an appearance would normally cause by mentioning that Jack already knew his wife was cheating. I mean, it really is incomprehensible that no mention of this is made at all until the lover reappears at the end of the story.

 

Moving on, apparently celestial lights in the sky have triggered something in some Americans that have turned them into sadistic homicidal maniacs—maniacs who magically know who else has been affected (they seem to believe they have seen God). Whatever has changed within them drives them to torture and kill everyone else. By the way, Jack’s eight-year-old son has also seen the lights but never turns homicidal.

 

None of what I’ve just said in the above paragraph makes any sense and none of it is explained. I mean, Jack doesn’t recognize the voice of the old woman who sets the maniacs on him in the first chapters, so how does she even know he hasn’t been changed. The longer this situation continues, the more annoying I found it. But to be fair, what it does do is set the groundwork for a threat far more sinister than mindless zombies. These maniacs (millions of them) coordinate and murder their neighbors, setting up convoys and search parties to find the rest of those who “haven’t seen God”.

 

Apparently the changes stopped at the northern border of the contiguous 48 states so Jack and his family are trying to reach Canada. (Again—right at the border? It really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.) They have a lot of truly gripping encounters along the way even while Jack’s two children (especially the son) whine and complain and cause trouble. I wish this last part was unrealistic, but it is easy to imagine that spoiled children would not be able to adapt quickly to this new reality. They were annoying but probably realistically portrayed.

 

Finally, the way the novel ends is pure deus ex machina—as unrealistic as the whole set up, leaving me in the strange place of having enjoyed all of the action but disliked the entire backdrop to the story.

 

The Second Confession by Rex Stout

The Second Confession by Rex Stout

Nero Wolfe is at it again in this excellent mystery and it’s a pleasure to watch him maneuver with clients, lawmen, and criminals alike. Hired essentially to discredit the suiter of a millionaire’s daughter, things get complicated when a criminal mastermind threatens Wolfe off the case by machinegunning Wolfe’s prized plant rooms. This gets Wolfe out of his beloved house to try and resolve matters, only to have the unwanted suiter murdered with Wolfe’s car. The client wants to know who the killer is, but then changes his mind making Wolfe pursue the investigation without him.

 

It's a great mystery and I enjoyed every page. The eventual solution was ingenious. But make no mistake Rex Stout is not writing Ellery Queen mysteries. The reader knows there is a piece of evidence that Wolfe is keeping to himself, but we don’t get to see it in time to solve this crime ourselves. But then, it’s watching Wolfe draw out the criminal that is the ultimate pleasure in these stories, and this one was simply great.

 

Executioner 276 Cyberhunt by Don Pendleton

Executioner 271 Cyberhunt by Don Pendleton

I read The Executioner series pretty consistently for about four years. I enjoyed them. When I moved and needed to downsize a rather massive personal library, this book was one of only two of those volumes that I decided to keep. After having just reread it, I’m not sure why I held onto it.

 

On the positive side, it’s fast paced and very focused in its action. Once the shooting starts, the Executioner pretty much goes from battle to battle without much difficulty until the end of the book. On the negative side, there’s a supporting cast member, a female Mossad agent, who starts out looking quite competent, but falls into “hostage” mode two times during the novel. Two times seemed like overkill to me.

 

I suppose the most negative thing I could say about it is that it wasn’t memorable. Unlike the vast majority of books I reread, I didn’t remember anything specific about this novel. It was fun, but that’s all.

 

Origins of a D-List Supervillain by Jim Bernheimer

Origins of a D-List Supervillain by Jim Bernheimer

If I had known this was a prequel novel to Bernheimer’s D-List Supervillain series, I wouldn’t have started with it, but would have started with book 1, Confessions of a D-List Supervillain. Prequels that try to explain how events got to where a series starts (as opposed to simply telling a good story) are challenging and I don’t think Bernheimer was totally successful in this book. The tale is enjoyable, but not quite as magical as I was expecting. The problem is that the plot is more focused on explaining how Cal became a supervillain instead of on a suitable challenge for him. (By contrast, the cliffhanger at the end of the book is very exciting and makes me very hopeful for Confessions.)

 

On the positive side, Cal’s backstory is engaging. Having invented the force blaster that makes the hero, Ultraweapon, so dangerous, he is outraged when he isn’t publicly credited with his invention. What’s worse, he’s blacklisted for insisting on credit as a warning to other employees and his company then sets about making him unemployable anywhere. Finally, in desperation, he turns to crime and is pathetic at it. I suspect this was supposed to be somewhat humorous, but it didn’t make me laugh. The rest of the novel is dedicated to Cal trying to get his supervillain career going.

 

Why supervillains are not successful is an obvious underlying theme of the story which I suspect will continue throughout the series. I’m definitely interested in reading the next book, but quite frankly this first one is not the one you should start with.

 

The Werewolf Meets His Match by Kristin Painter

The Werewolf Meets His Match by Kristin Painter

In The Vampire’s Mail Order Bride (the first Nocturne Falls novel), Painter created a sweet and genuinely enjoyable romance that incidentally had a non-vampiric vampire as one of the destined lovers. I enjoyed the story, but I thought that the vampire aspects of the story were so weak as to be almost non-important. That’s not the case in The Werewolf Meets His Match in which pack politics, the moon, and the need to shift into another shape, form critical parts of the novel. What’s more, Painter does all of this without losing the sweet, light-hearted tone that made the first book so entertaining.

 

At the heart of this story is an arranged marriage which is technically supposed to bring peace between two werewolf packs, but which is actually a plan to insult the pack that resides in Nocturne Falls. The early action is highly predictable as heroine, Ivy, who is coerced into the marriage by her abusive father/pack leader learns that the hero, Hank, is actually a decent man who can be trusted. Most of the “action” comes in the form of problems from Ivy’s pack and her father, many resolving around her young son who is the “insult” intended for the Nocturne Fall’s pack.

 

There were a couple of small surprises in the end which I kicked myself for not predicting. That’s obviously all to the good. The novel also reintroduces characters from the first book and sets up individuals who will probably be the stars of their own romances in future stories.