Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 57

Destroyer 42 Timber Line by Warren Murphy

Destroyer 42 Timber Line by Warren Murphy

An old acquaintance of Harold Smith’s discovered a tree that produces raw kerosene like a maple tree produces syrup. That was twenty years ago and the trees have been successfully transplanted from the Amazon to the U.S. and are about ready to prove their worth. Naturally, lots of people find the idea that the U.S. could become self-sufficient in oil production troubling and want to burn the grove to the ground. Remo and Chiun have to stop them from doing it.

 

This is a fun adventure. Nothing about it is too deep and you have to keep reminding yourself that this was written forty years ago when the oil and gas situation was very different than it is today. There are the usual cast of over the top personalities as Remo blunders around trying to find the villain, eliminating suspects usually because they die. Chiun, of course, figures things out much faster, but doesn’t deign to give Remo the information he needs. How Sinanju will survive when Remo becomes reigning master remains to be seen.

 

Mongoose Bravo: Vietnam by Tim McCullough

Mongoose Bravo: Vietnam by Tim McCullough

This is an autobiography of the author’s years fighting the Vietnam War as an infantryman, but it often reads more like an adventure story. It mixes telling about the day to day drudgery of life in the war with those moments of intense fear and excitement when McCullough and his fellow soldiers encountered the enemy. Most surprising to me was the large number of times McCullough was injured or grew sick in his years in the army—a constant reminder of how very dangerous the war truly was.

 

Occultober Day 31 Graveyard Classified by Desmond Doane

Occultober Day 31 Graveyard Classified by Desmond Doane

As Occultober draws to an end once again, I offer you the first book of the best horror trilogy I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. It’s got everything you could want in a horror series—fantastic supernatural threats, a meaningful plot, and really wonderful characters.

 

Two years before the start of the first book, The Dark Man, Ford Atticus Ford lost everything over a terrible decision to allow a five-year-old girl to be put in danger on his hit television show, Graveyard Classified. He literally encouraged her to confront a demon by herself on live television and she was clawed bloody by the monster. His misjudgment (and doesn’t that seem like a very understated way to describe what he did) destroyed his life, but he has slowly put it back together by seeking redemption through doing low profile, mostly pro bono, work for police departments across the country who have run into dead ends and need a miracle to advance their investigations. Part of the genius of this story is that Ford is a very sympathetic character and Doane makes him that way by making Ford very honest with himself—even when he doesn’t fully understand why he made the choices he did that led to the little girl being injured.

 

The novel revolves around Ford’s latest bit of police work, but it never strays far from the event that wrecked his life. A woman either committed suicide or was murdered years earlier and her diary has surfaced heating up a cold case. The problem—the investigating detective has a terrifying supernatural encounter in the woman’s house and calls Ford for help. That investigation is creepy and fascinating and we get to see how Ford took his fascination with the supernatural and made a television show out of it. We also realize very quickly that ghosts, demons, etc. are very real.

 

When the supernatural threat proves to be much more serious than Ford at first suspected, he reaches out to his former best friend, Mike, who won’t speak to him because of what happened to the little girl. Again, Doane shows his strength as an author. Mike had been the voice of reason and caution who didn’t do everything he could have to stop the danger to little Chelsea, but certainly looked to be the one with the stronger moral compass. Except—now that he’s broke as a result of some bad investments and his marriage has collapsed, Mike wants Ford to do a follow up Graveyard Classified movie to finish the investigation that broke the show. He wants to take advantage of Chelsea again, as do the girl’s parents, because their princely court-awarded damages have run out. It’s all utterly fascinating. The man the world vilifies for his callousness is the only one actually worried about the little girl.

 

Despite their badly damaged friendship, Ford and Mike have to figure out how to pull it all together if they are to defeat the new demon and save it’s intended victim. And from there in the last two books they need to discover just what kind of men they really are.

 

This is a fantastic trilogy.

 

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

 

 

Occultober Day 30 The Green Brain by Frank Herbert

Occultober Day 30 The Green Brain by Frank Herbert

On the second to last day of Occultober, we turn to one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time for a look at a very horrific future.

 

Frank Herbert’s novels have often included ecological themes and in this one he seems to have taken his inspiration from Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and the War on Crop Eating Pests—birds, rats and insects. In China, this effort to eradicate pests put special emphasis on the killing of swallows because they ate the crops. Swallows also, as it turns out, ate their body weight in insects every day and without them the insects could not be stopped from ravaging harvests exasperating the famine caused by other policies of the Great Leap Forward. Yet, China found it ideologically difficult to admit that Mao’s policies had had such devastating results and it is in this that I think Herbert found his idea for The Green Brain.

 

China is leading the world (except for North America and Western Europe) in a program to destroy all insects so that they will not eat food needed by people. China is convinced (and tells people that in China they have already marvelously succeeded) that all the ecological niches filled by insects can be filled by mutated bees. Unfortunately, these policies have resulted in horrendous crop failure in China and they need a scapegoat they can provide to the Chinese people so that their leaders can stay in power. To find this scapegoat, they have come to Brazil where their agent is spreading rumors that men hired to exterminate the insects in the jungle are secretly repopulating the jungles with mutated insects in order to continue earning the huge bounties they make from their work.

 

There are two heroes in the story—one is Joao Martinho, the man chosen as the Chinese scapegoat. The other is the Green Brain of the title—a mutated insect collective that is trying to figure out how to convince the humans to turn away from their path of destruction that is destroying the world. It is part of Herbert’s genius that these insects can be both the source of horror in the story and a force that we can also hope succeed.

 

The heart of the story is very similar to Herbert’s book Angels’ Fall which he wrote early in his career but wasn’t published until after his death. It involves a trip down a mighty jungle river in an unpowered airplane floating on pontoons. At every turn, intelligently directed insects pursue our heroes.

 

This isn’t Herbert’s best novel, but it’s a good story so long as you remember that it was written before our modern satellite system was in place. China’s schemes would be impossible with satellite imagery showing that they had turned their nation into a desert.

 

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

 

 

Occultober Day 28 High Strangeness by Will MacLean

Occultober Day 28 High Strangeness by Will MacLean

I love a good radio drama, and lately, thanks to audiobooks, the format has been revived in fully dramatized stories. That’s what you get with High Strangeness, a quirky, often funny, tale of paranormal craziness that is so out of hand it will quite likely destroy life as we know it. A fanatical paranormal investigator stumbles into an actual otherworldly event and runs afoul of a secret government agency that both investigates these happenings and tries to shut up anyone else who finds out about them. A lot of the action is delightfully over the top. You’ve got clones, cow mutilations, a bizarre religious cult, rival paranormal investigators, coverups, the aforementioned end of the world, and an awful lot of fun. The book is set up for a sequel and I’m certainly hoping we get one.

 

https://www.audible.com/pd/High-Stran...

 

Occultober Day 29 Awaken Online: Catharsis by Travis Bagwell

Day 29 Awaken Online: Catharsis by Travis Bagwell

As Occultober nears its end, I offer another LitRPG novel.

 

One of my long-running complaints about LitRPGs is that while they all seem to start with a person in the real world living a crummy life that he or she wishes to escape, there is rarely any genuine synergy between the game experience and the real-life experience. We see character growth in the game, development of tactics, greater self-awareness, and often enhanced maturity, but that growth occurring in immersive game experiences rarely has any impact on the player’s real-life experiences. That’s not the case in Awaken Online: Catharsis. More than any other book which I have read in this subgenre, it consciously uses the gaming experience to influence how the player deals with life in the real world and it does so in a way that develops the plot in both game and life.

 

The book is a little bit slow getting started as it establishes just how crummy our protagonist’s, Jason’s, life really is, but once the game gets going the tension builds and the pages fly past. Jason gets expelled from school when the administrators side with a bully over him because the bully comes from wealth and Jason doesn’t. He seeks to escape his problems in an online game which is much more sophisticated than it first appears. We learn about this sophistication through a supplemental narrative at the beginning of each chapter. The game is run by an artificial intelligence which is out of control, making changes to the game rules, and demonstrating the ability to both access players’ memories and write onto their memories. But since there is money to be made, the company hides this from government regulators and starts the game anyway. Evidently they have never seen the movie, The Terminator.

 

In the game, Jason discovers that his nemesis Alex, is the hero of light, Alexion, who, because he was a beta player, has a ridiculously high-level character. Jason is encouraged by NPCs to act on his desires (i.e. seek revenge and power) and become a necromancer. As he develops his skill he discovers that kills made by his zombies give him experience. He also discovers that his city is being betrayed by the nobles and the guards to Alexion’s kingdom, and so he decides to try and frustrate their plans. He takes his small horde of zombies and by using excellent tactics, is able to wipe out all the noble families in the city in one crazy night. His levels shoot skyward and he decides to take out the guards as well cleverly creating a zombie apocalypse and transforming the city into an undead metropolis called the Twilight Throne. This is big news in the online community and Alex/Alexion quickly swears to take down the undead realm setting the stage for the real conflict of the novel.

 

This is where the novel really shines. The contrast between how Alexion runs his army versus how Jason rallies his city and fights for them is quite strong. Jason is extremely clever using psychological warfare to defend the Twilight Throne. He gets roundly criticized by many players for this but essentially he is defending while they are making an unprovoked attack upon him. By contrast, Alexion continues to act as a bully without any real sense of strategy. It is purposely ironic that an evil person is running the forces of light while a good person is mobilizing the dark. Overall this is one of the stronger books in the LitRPG subgenre.

 

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

 

 

Occultober Day 27 Half Dozen of Horror by Clark Ashton Smith

Occultober Day 27 Half Dozen of Horror by Clark Ashton Smith

If you thought yesterday’s pick sounded creepy, wait until you get a look at today’s stories—a collection of six tales by Clark Ashton Smith, a master of the horror genre from the pulp era. A couple are fantasy adventures with a dark flavor, one’s a science fiction piece, and three are genuine horror from start to finish. All are worth reading, or preferably, listening to Will Hahn read the stories to you. Here’s a quick guide to a few of the stories:

 

My favorite by far is “Necromancy in Naat” in which Smith surprised me with his ability to cultivate a sweet romance in his horrific setting. It’s a story that should be appearing in “best of” compilations everywhere and I find myself still thinking about it a lot long after I finished listening to it. The creepiest in the collection is “The Double Shadow” for building that unsettling feeling of dread so important in this genre. The most fun is “The Black Abbott of Puthuum” in whose pages Conan the Barbarian would have felt at ease (well, not at ease, per say, because there are foul magics threatening the heroes, but you know what I mean). And if you are looking for selfless daring do, “Phoenix” takes the prize. That’s not to downplay the remaining two stories, but they can’t all be the best in the volume.

 

If you’re like I was and have heard Smith’s name but never read one of his stories before, this collection will give you a strong appreciation of just how good he really was.

 

https://shop.authors-direct.com/produ...

 

 

Occultober Day 26 The Haunted Forest Tour by Jeff Strand and James A. Moore

Occultober Day 26 The Haunted Forest Tour by Jeff Strand and James A. Moore

Jeff Strand’s Wolf Hunt series comprise my favorite werewolf novels of all time, so I was quite excited when I came across The Haunted Forest Tour and was really curious to see where Strand’s crazy mind would lead us. I’m happy to say that not only was I not disappointed, Strand and his co-author, James A. Moore, blew me away.

 

The premise of the novel is lovingly established in the opening chapter when a homeowner and the local sheriff try to figure out how someone managed to plant a decades old tree in the middle of the homeowner’s porch. It’s a perplexing problem without an apparent solution—at least until more trees start to spontaneously sprout all around them. The image is quite gripping. In seconds, trees are reaching full growth and causing destruction all around them.

 

The story then picks up several years later when an enterprising American has started a tour service into the haunted forest. All kinds of fantasy creatures from ogres to demons to things that defy categorization exist within the trees. Up to now, the tours have only penetrated the perimeter of the forest, but now, to celebrate Halloween, sixty lucky individuals are going to ride straight through the center of this marvel. Unfortunately, their “luck” is not of the “good” variety.

 

As all great horror writers do, Strand and Moore take the time to make you like a large cast of characters ranging from a young child to a grandmother, and from tourists, to employees, to scientists. It’s fun to try and guess which ones will die and which will survive, but shortly after the disaster in the middle of the forest begins to unfold, you will start to wonder how anyone can escape this situation.

 

And this is a huge part of why this book is so brilliant. The tourists and employees treat the Haunted Forest as a bizarre natural wonder, but it is so much more insidious than that. There’s an intriguing mystery to be solved at the heart of the forest and the stakes are much greater than the survival of the few people trapped within it. Strand and Moore play totally fair here—doling out clues and false leads between shocking revelations fast enough to make you resent anything that interrupts your reading.

 

Finally, the authors pass the most important test of the horror novel—the cause of all the problems is equal to the great buildup they give it. And the solution is simply genius…

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06...

 

 

Occultober Day 25 On a Winter's Eve by Chris L. Adams

Occultober Day 25 On a Winter’s Eve by Chris L. Adams

As we enter the last week of Occultober we return to the spectral world of ghosts, goblins and worse with a truly creepy story—author, artist, and poet, Chris L. Adams’s tribute to the masters of the pulp era, On a Winter’s Eve, where a backwoods family learns just how dangerous it can be to look out the window at the falling snow.

 

It turns out that there are other-worldly creatures that come out at such times and they don’t like humans very much. Adams expertly builds the tension page by page as this isolated family comes under assault by the creatures surrounding their small home. Since the story is told from a first-person perspective years after the event, you know the narrator is going to survive, but it doesn’t feel that way as the danger mounts and the body count expands. This one will linger with you and give you second thoughts about looking out the window to watch the snow.

 

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

 

 

Occultober Day 24 The Land Below by William Meikle

Occultober Day 24 The Land Below by William Meikle

For Day 24 we turn in a different direction for spookiness, delving into the hidden world under the earth. I’ve been reading books like The Land That Time Forgot and The Lost World for decades. There’s something about modern people running into dinosaurs that just grabs my interest and keeps me coming back for more. So it was with great anticipation that I jumped into The Land Below and despite a setup that led me to believe that I knew everything that was going to happen before I began, this book pleasantly surprised me again and again.

 

So let’s get down to basics. A scholarly young man (Ed) has stumbled across a reference to a hidden treasure of the Teutonic Knights and organizes a very small expedition to go and find it. The expedition consists of his know-it-all brother (Tommy) and a retired soldier with serious experience of combat and crisis (Danny). The expectation is that Tommy will lock horns with Danny throughout the book, constantly endangering all of their lives when they find dinosaurs in a cave in Austria. Except—none of that happens.

 

At the mouth of the cave in Austria they encounter the last two (accidental) members of their expedition, a shepherd (Stefan) and his dog who end up tagging along for no truly good reason and getting trapped in the cave with the others.

 

This is when things get interesting. Instead of dinosaurs, Meikle has built his subterranean world on ancient Germanic legends introducing the wyrms that are the forerunners of European dragons. He also builds very serious tension through the injuries his heroes receive, recognizing that you can’t just take a serious wound and then act as if nothing happened in the next chapter.

 

The only thing that never really worked for me was the character Stefan. He decides to go along too readily and he never really is upset by anything that happens. I kept expecting him to be revealed as a descendant of the original Teutonic Knights sworn to protect their hoard of hidden treasures. The fact that he wasn’t struck me as a lost opportunity.

 

The novel concludes with an absolutely wonderful scene that could have inspired so many of those ancient legends, at least if you assume that much of what is found predates the Teutonic Knights and was simply discovered by them.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08...