Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 78

Review: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

Sherlock Holmes is renown for his keen analytical mind and his amazing powers of deductive reasoning. He’s a detective totally grounded in the physical world. So, what would he do if he was confronted by a mystery not of this world? More to the point, what would he do if confronted by the mind-bending otherworldly entities of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythologies?

 

If your first thought was—Holmes would either die quickly or go insane—this would not be a good novel for you. But if you think instead that after eliminating the impossible, he would turn to other explanations, no matter how improbable, then you are going to enjoy this book.

 

Lovegrove suggests that a significant portion of Sherlock Holmes career was spent protecting the world from the entities that humans weren’t meant to know, and this first novel was a compelling and exciting read. I’d like to see more.

 

If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.

 

Review: Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed by Edwin Barnhart

Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed by Edwin Barnhart

This is one of the best Great Courses books I have yet read. Edwin Barnhart offers forty-eight extremely lucid lectures on the history of Mesoamerica (roughly modern day Central America and Mexico). Part of what makes these lectures stand out is the effortless interweaving of the historiography that has revealed this history with the history of the region. You get the impression that unlike in Egypt where most of the great finds have probably been discovered, that we have barely scratched the surface of uncovering the remains of the great cities of the Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs. Barnhart makes both the history and the uncovering of that history come to life.

 

If you are like me, and listen to audiobooks in the car or while taking walks for exercise, you are probably going to want to listen to this series more than once. The basic problem—no fault of the author’s—is that the place names and the names of the majority of the rulers—were not familiar to me before I started the course. That means that I was constantly checking maps a couple of lectures behind where I was in the course. Next time through, I’ll be better prepared.

 

If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.

 

Review: Spellmonger by Terry Mancour

Spellmonger by Terry Mancour

Spellmonger is a great fantasy novel set in a very complex world of magic at a medieval level technology. Armies have learned to incorporate mages into their military units. Our hero, Minalan, is a veteran of these magical wars who, at the ancient age of twenty-five-ish has decided to retire from the army and set up shop as a village spellmonger, selling his skills to the locals. He thought he was setting himself up for a simple life without a lot of stress. Then a major goblin invasion begins and his life is turned upside down as the world he knows may well be coming to an end.

 

There is a tremendous amount to like about this book. The world has been carefully developed with a lot of depth and breadth. The main character is very likeable as are many of the supporting cast. The bad guys are happily irritating. The battles are good. The magical system is interesting. The overall threat keeps developing into a more and more apocalyptic peril and I didn’t see any way for them to ultimately escape – and since Minalan is narrating the novel, it was clear that he had to survive.

 

On the downside, each chapter includes a flashback to show how Minalan got to where he is and this structure got old fast. It also pretty much precluded any real character growth occurring in the novel. I think it would have been far wiser for Mancour to tell the story in much more chronological fashion and let us watch Minalan become the man he is at the beginning of the story. I also think that this would have added significant drama to the tale.

 

Over all, I really enjoyed the book. It’s a great set up for further adventures as the goblin threat continues to imperil all of civilization. I’ll be curious to see where Mancour goes with this.

 

If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.

 

Review: We the Jury by Robert Rotstein

We, the Jury by Robert Rotstein

When I picked up this book, I expected to find a Twelve Angry Men style story, and it is that, sort of, but it’s also much, much more. Rotstein gets you deep into the courthouse as the jury sits down to deliberate so that you get a real view of life in the whole courthouse.

 

There’s no doubt that David Sullinger killed his wife. He split her head open with an axe. But does a battered husband defense justify the killing? His two children have split on the issue, one supporting him and one condemning him. And the history of his relationship with his now dead wife further complicates the issue—he was her high school student who had an affair with her while in her class. His high-powered defense attorney sees an open and shut case for acquittal and apparently ran rings around the small-town prosecutor during the trial. The prosecutor is equally certain it’s a simple case of premeditated murder—but with far smaller resources than the defense, did he prove his case?

 

Rotstein makes the book far more interesting by jumping the point of view around between well over a dozen people. Inside their own minds, most of these people prove to be very petty with their unique insecurities, idiosyncrasies, pathologies, and secrets. It’s a delight to see their deliberations unfold as the reader tries to figure out how the jury will decide the case.

 

If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.

 

Review: The Maw by Taylor Zajonc

The Maw by Taylor Zajonc

Having enjoyed a bit of caving in my high school years, I have always appreciated a good thriller set in an underground environment. The Maw is that and more. Milo is an historian who has all but killed his career by pushing a theory about how explorer Lord Riley DeWar met his end and getting involved in a romantic relationship with one of his students. Now he has a bizarre chance to fix both of these errors by joining a top secret expedition exploring a super cave in Tanzania. The expedition’s billionaire funder has a theory that, contrary to popular belief, DeWar met his end in this cave. More important to Milo, the student he had the relationship, now a well-respect physician, is also going on the expedition.

 

So Milo, with no experience in caving, joins a trip that is figuratively going to the center of the earth and everything goes wrong right from the beginning. The billionaire has not shared all of his information with his team. Another expedition between DeWar’s and their own has found the cave and tried to seal it with explosives. There is also evidence that native peoples with stone-age level technology have impossibly found their way thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface millennia before the current expedition. Something unusual exists in this cave and it is changing the explorers in ways that are both exciting and terrifying. Cut off from the surface both by a hemorrhagic disease infecting the camp and a huge storm, the explorers find themselves seeking to understand a mystery that dates back to the beginning of the human species while surviving tremendous challenges thousands of feet below the surface in utter darkness.

 

This sort of novel usually promises more than it can provide, but not in this case. Zajonc has put together a remarkable mystery that truly does explain why humans are different than all the other species on this planet. And he accomplishes this while conveying the claustrophobic terror of trying to survive without support deep in the bowels of the earth. It’s a truly remarkable accomplishment.

 

If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.

 

Review: Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

I’ve been watching Scooby Doo television shows and mysteries for my whole life. The early series is almost a meme in and of itself. The episodes were totally formulaic and they always ended with a mask being pulled off the monster’s head to expose the villain. Later the gang began to encounter some genuine supernatural entities, but nothing truly terrifying. All that’s going to end if you open Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero, because the Scooby gang—or at least Cantero’s counterparts for the famous quintet—is about to uncover one of the ancient entities of the Cthulhu mythos and this is every bit as disturbing as such an encounter should genuinely be.

 

First off, let’s be clear that while Cantero has great fun playing with the Scooby formula his characters are not one-for-one knock offs of Fred, Velma, Shaggy, Daphne and Scooby Doo. So push that out of your mind and you’ll enjoy the story a lot more. Instead we get Peter, Keri, Nate, Andy, and their dog, Sean (later replaced by his grandson, Tim). Together these intrepid pre-teens formed the Blyton Summer Detective Club where year after year they protected Blyton from a lot of creepy villains wearing masks. They thought that’s what they did in their last case too, but it turns out that a lot more was happening beneath the surface. There really was some serious supernatural stuff going on that their young minds couldn’t process and thirteen years later it has driven one of them to suicide, another to alcoholism, a third to uncontrollable bursts of rage, and the fourth to commit himself to an insane asylum in the hopes that the doctors can stop him from seeing the ghost of his dead friend.

 

So this is not the Scooby Doo of my childhood, but that’s good because this is a much more awesome story than that cartoon was structured to tell. The surviving members of the Blyton Summer Detective Club have to pull themselves together, return to the scene of the original crime, and come to grips with the unbelievable fact that the apocalypse is about to occur and only three meddling sort-of-grown-up kids and their dog have any chance at all to save the world. Cantero knows both the Cthulu genre and the Scooby Doo classics and he brilliantly mixes both together here for a story that kept me on the edge of my seat never knowing where he was going. Every few chapters he hit me with another surprise. And now I find myself sad the story is done and desperately hoping for a sequel, even if it is just a crazy villain hiding behind a mask.

 

If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.

 

Review: Serial Date by D.V. Berkom

Occultober may be over, but the reviews continue...

Serial Date by D. V. Berkom

I love the setting of this book—a reality TV show called Serial Date that purports to match serial-murderer-ex-cons with young wannabe actresses to see who can have the most popular romance. It’s an idea just crazy enough that we can believe some cable channel would give it a try. Then one of the actresses actually is murdered and the show goes into crisis.

 

Enter former contract killer Leine Basso. Her life’s a mess. She’s given up killing people for pay for an unnamed government agency and is trying to go straight (as it were) and she takes a job as added security for Serial Date when it’s offered to her by a contact from her old days who is now working as head of security on the show.

 

If the plot had continued to revolve around a killer on Serial Date, I think I would have liked this book a lot more. Instead, the story takes a left turn. Leine’s estranged daughter arrives and is promptly kidnapped by the man killing Serial Date actresses and all he’s really interested in is Leine with whom he has a sick obsession.

 

That’s not a bad storyline. Leine’s an interesting character and I enjoyed her adventure. But I felt like Berkom had this great setting that wasn’t properly taken advantage of. The big diversion away from the reality TV show made me impatient with the rest of the plot.

 

Occultober Day 31 Hiding Among Us by Gilbert M. Stack and Marc Hawkins

Occultober Day 31 Hiding Among Us by Gilbert M. Stack and Marc Hawkins

Even spooky things have to come to an end, so to celebrate the final day of Occultober I’d like to return to my own work and spotlight a novel I co-authored with my friend, Marc Hawkins. Marc and I wanted to craft a paranormal adventure that held within it the seeds of all the classic monsters—werewolves, vampires, zombies, etc.—but didn’t actually use any of them. Instead we created what I believe is a unique paranormal creature and placed them all over the planet fighting their own little wars while humanity goes about its business blissfully unaware of the monsters hiding among them. At least humanity was unaware until Mina Raintree stumbles into a situation that forces her to confront this terrifying reality.

 

Here’s the blurb: If not for the quick action of a passing stranger, Mina Raintree’s bad-news sister would have bled out in the road. Now the hit-and-run driver who put her in the hospital has fixated on Mina with pathological fury. He wants something Ally stole from him, and the stranger who saved Ally’s life is the only thing standing between Mina and the madman. But who is this good Samaritan who’s always at the wrong place at the right time to help Mina? And is he, like Ally’s crazy-eyed assailant much more than he appears to be? There’s a supernatural community hiding within Philadelphia pretending to be human and Mina, thanks to her younger sister, is about to learn what happens to people who discover there are monsters hiding among us.

 

Hiding Among Us is available on Amazon both for purchase and as part of the Kindle Unlimited program where it can be read for FREE.

 

Thank you for joining me for these 31 days of Occultober. You can continue to find my reviews on this site, ranging from the spooky stuff we encountered here, to just about every other conceivable genre. Next March I will host the second March to Other Worlds event to spotlight great science fiction and fantasy stories. I hope to see you all then and in the days in between. Be safe and have a Happy Halloween!

 

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

 

Occultober Day 30 The Blonde Goddess of Tikka-Tikka by Chris L. Adams

Occultober Day 30 The Blonde Goddess of Tikka-Tikka by Chris L. Adams

The modern author I know who best embraces the themes of classic pulp horror writers such as yesterday’s spotlight, H. P. Lovecraft, is Chris L. Adams. Adams is an expert on the pulp horror-adventure story and in his own fiction updates the genre for modern audiences. In his short story, The Blonde Goddess of Tikka-Tikka, I feel we get a mix of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. And I’ve had the pleasure of reading an early draft of a monumental sequel to this book that I hear is coming out soon.

 

Adams is at his best at building suspense as ancient horrors return to the earth. The Blonde Goddess is a fast-moving tale which you’ll want to read in one sitting. There’s a tiny twist at the end of the story that gives some well-appreciated justification to the villains’ actions. I’m hoping we will be spotlighting the sequel in this space next year.

 

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

 

Occultober Day 29 At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

Occultober Day 29 At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

As the month of Occultober winds to a close, I wanted to make certain I paid tribute to at least one of the great figures who has inspired so many of these works. H.P. Lovecraft created and popularized the whole Things Man Was Not Meant to Know subgenre of horror / fantasy / sf or whatever it really is. The Elder Gods threatening the very sanity of the planet comes from Lovecraft and not only do his motifs show up rather blatantly in works like Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October as well as more recent series like John Ringo’s Special Circumstances and Larry Correia’s Monster Hunters International, I suspect that you would never have gotten a TV show like the X-Files without Lovecraft, much less HBO’s new Lovecraft Country.

 

So, Lovecraft is hugely influential (the World Fantasy Award used to be a bust of Lovecraft) but that doesn’t mean that he’s an easy author to read. Most of the problem is that he was writing in the 1920s and 1930s and his fiction style comes off as slow moving and dated. At the Mountains of Madness takes the form of a narrative account of a disastrous expedition to Antarctica written long after the expedition’s survivors returned with the hope of dissuading the next expedition from beginning. It is filled with long and impressive descriptions of the geology of the continent and the remarkable discovery of a series of fossils the like of which have never been seen on the planet. Isolated from the rest of the world the scientists begin to discover that a wholly unanticipated species inhabited the earth tens of millions of years ago and the more they discover about this early life form the more horrific the story becomes.

 

And yet, while it is definitely creepy and Lovecraft has many subtle tricks to increase the reader’s understanding that things are going badly wrong, it is still a very slow-moving story thanks to the narrative style. Today this book would have been written as a third person narrative following the expedition in “real time” and the action scenes that are quickly summarized in the original would have been fleshed out to play a much more significant role in the book, but that’s not how Lovecraft wrote and I think it makes the book harder to approach for today’s readers.

 

I listened to an audio version of the novella narrated by Edward Hermann who did a masterful job of bringing the text to life, but even so it remains a slow-moving story. That being said, I still highly recommend it due to its influence over the decades since it was published.

 

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