Michael Patrick Hicks's Blog, page 52

A Not-NaNoWriMo Writing Update

Another November, and another annual National Novel Writing Month is upon us. Although I’m not taking part in NaNoWriMo, I thought it would still be a good time to give you a little update on what I’ve been working on. Coincidentally, though, my current Work In Progress is expected to be (at least) a 50,000 word novella, which I hope to have completed by the end of November.

I started writing Mass Hysteria! over the summer, with the blindly optimistic hope that I could finish it before my wife delivered our first child. Naturally, the story kept growing while time grew more and more scarce as we approached our September due date. And since Baby Hicks was born, free time has been…well. What is this “free time” you speak of?

Mass Hysteria! will be a return to straight-up horror for me, following my shorter detour into this arena with last year’s Consumption (which, incidentally, received this great review from SCREAM Magazine). It’s a dive into some natural horror, in which Mother Nature gets its aggro on against mankind and the food-chain gets flipped upside down…and then things get crazy from there. This past weekend involved writing a fairly strange and gruesome scene that I’d sort of been putting off, but finally plowed through. I’m now in the homestretch and think there’s maybe two or three more chapters worth of material left to cover before I hit THE END on this first draft.

Editing this one is going to be a bit of a doozy I think-slash-fear. I’ve already had to cut out a particular subplot involving events in DC since it just wasn’t flowing well with the main Northern Michigan-based narrative, and there’s more than a few things that need fleshing out and clarifying. But I still really dig that subplot, which means although my work will (should) be done soon on Mass Hysteria! prime, I’ll then begin working on a companion stand-alone side-story that I’m tentatively calling Mass Hysteria!: Checkmate.

The plan is to have both these titles released simultaneously sometime in 2016, budgetary concerns (read both time and money) permitting. They’ll be independent narratives, but set in the same “world” and facing similar events and consequences. Each will give readers a full story in their own right, but reading them together will provide a larger A and B story. Or at least that’s the plan…

Alongside writing, I’ll also be proofing final edits for my short story, The Marque, and giving a read over on some of the other stories to be collected in Crime & Punishment.

My story is a bit of cosmic horror by way of the apocalypse turned wild, wild west. It’s gooey and gory and inspired quite a bit by Eastwood westerns. I’m waiting on edits and suggestions to come through from Lucas Bale and Alex Roddie, and I was given a sneak peek at the forward from Samuel Peralta. If there’s an award for Best Damn Foreword Ever, Sam’s is a sure-fire winner, let me tell you.

I also recently completed edits on a short story, Preservation, which will be seeing publication in The Cyborg Chronicles, with an ETA of December. Keep an eye out for the cover and more release details as soon as I have them! Although Preservation is completely a stand-alone story, it is set in the DRMR world established in my novels, Convergence and Emergence. Preservation introduces us to all-new characters (a Wounded Warrior with plenty of cybernetic enhancements) and an entirely new setting (Africa’s Kruger National Park) than the central storyline told in the two DRMR books, so there’s no required reading prior to enjoying this short story. My hope is that it will act as a gateway to these novels, though, and introduce new readers to my work.

The Cyborg Chronicles is part of the line of The Future Chronicles anthologies, spearheaded by Samuel Peralta, and which, taken as a large body of work in its entirety, has featured the likes of Hugh Howey, Lucas Bale, Anthony Vicino, Ernie Lindsey, Susan Kaye Quinn, Ann Christy, Jennifer Foehner Wells, Peter Cawdron, Therin Knite, Ted Cross, and loads of other great authors.

In The Cyborg Chronicles, I’ll be sharing pages alongside Hugo Award winner Ken Liu, whose debut novel The Grace of Kings released earlier this year, and Hugo nominee and USA Today bestseller Annie Bellet. This a huge, huge honor for me, and having the chance to appear in a Chronicles anthology has been a dream of mine since starting this whole indie author venture a year ago.

So I think these projects will carry me through the rest of this year, and hopefully 2016 will be just as productive as 2015 has been. Now, what’s happening your world, writers?

Review: Bad Apples 2: Six Slices of Halloween Horror

About Bad Apples 2

The minds behind the bestselling BAD APPLES: FIVE SLICES OF HALLOWEEN HORROR return this October with another batch of frightful fare. This time, they brought along a friend – Bram Stoker Award-winning author Kealan Patrick Burke!

Dive into the season with these six Halloween treats:

• Two boys enter a Halloween attraction that holds a devilish secret – but one of the boys has a surprise of his own in Edward Lorn’s HALLOWEEKEND.

• Halloween was his birthday, and all poor Bob Talley wanted was for his family to be together again. This year, his wish might come true amid whispers of CANDIE APPLE, from Evans Light.

• A deserter seeks to escape the horrors of war and pave a new existence in a foreign land in Jason Parent’s DIA DE LOS MUERTOS.

• Does something putrid truly reside in a small town’s pumpkin patch, or is it only a local legend? Find out in Adam Light’s TOMMY ROTTEN.

• An old man and his dog await Halloween visitors with candy and a shotgun in Kealan Patrick Burke’s THE ONE NIGHT OF THE YEAR.

• Jimmy Stones and his Uncle Shel uncover the dark secrets of Medium, Ohio’s annual Halloween puppet show in Gregor Xane’s DOCTOR PROCLIVITY & PROFESSOR PROPENSITY.

My Thoughts

Bad Apples 2: Six Slices of Halloween Horror is a follow-up to last year’s Halloween-themed anthology and features the same authors as before, but with one new addition. Joining this cool little writer’s troupe is Kealan Patrick Burke, who certainly wins points for atmospheric style with his short story “The One Night of the Year.”

I found the first Bad Apples collection to be a perfect seasonal read in the evenings leading up to Halloween, so jumping on board for a second helping was a no brainer. If you liked the previous anthology, or are just in need of some solid and quick horror reads to get you in the proper mindset for October 31, buying Bad Apples 2 is an obvious choice and should satisfy your appetites nicely.

The tales here range from straight-up monster horror mayhem to dread inducing ghost stories, and a splash of Twilight Zone weirdness for good measure.

HALLOWEEKEND by Ed Lorn is a fun little romp of horror house mayhem. What happens to those animatronics when their keeper leaves them to their own devices for a night? Worse still, what happens when they get loose and venture out into the streets seeking a sugar rush? This is a great short story, and the gypsy Janzuzu…loved the heck out of this creation. All hail Janzuzu! Bonus points to Mr. Lorn for naming his characters are many very familiar horror authors that have no doubt provided him with a great deal of entertainment and inspiration over the years.

Evans Light’s CANDIE APPLE is a wonderfully creepy ghost story (of a sort). The opening packs in a lot of emotion, followed a frenetic sequence of discoveries that had my heart racing. So far we’re two for two in this anthology (but based on the first Bad Apples, I wasn’t really expecting anything less…)

DIA DE LOS MUERTOS by Jason Parent – I freaking LOVED this tale of an AWOL soldier hiding out in Mexico during the Day of the Dead celebration. The writing and story telling is freaking crisp and absorbing as all get out, and even managed some great military-horror in the process. The Afghan-set B-story is every bit as compelling as the A-story as Russel goes on the hunt through the Day of the Dead parade. Just absolutely superb, and perhaps my favorite of the collection. On a small note, I really liked the small nods and references back to Lorn’s story that peppered Parent’s narrative, and which gives the anthology a bit more depth and interconnectedness.

TOMMY ROTTEN by Adam Light is a perfectly serviceable short story that keeps the Halloween theme right at its center by focusing on a pumpkin patch haunted by the titular figure. My only real complaint is that, compared to the other works in the antho, it’s so very short. By the time I really got into the groove of this story, it was over.

THE ONE NIGHT OF THE YEAR by Kealan Patrick Burke is another short short story, but one that practically oozes atmosphere right out of my Kindle’s screen. Here we find an old man and his dog, resting on their porch, awaiting the arrival of a few much-expected and very unwelcome visitors. There’s enough humanity to balance out the dread here perfectly, and this story just sucks the reader right on in. I kinda want to see a short black & white film made out of this one ASAP. Note to self: Read more of Burke’s material pronto!

DOCTOR PROCLIVITY AND PROFESSOR PROPENSITY by Gregor Xane more than makes up for the brevity of the prior two short stories and amounts to nearly forty percent of the page count all by itself. Thankfully, it’s a damn engrossing page-turner that sends the anthology out on a high note. Xane brings a welcome touch of noir to the proceedings as Jimmy and his Uncle Shel – “investigators” of a sort – chase down the trail of missing children to Medium, Ohio and the small town’s annual Halloween puppet show. There’s a procedural element to the narrative, but one that rapidly shifts gears into the ultra-weird during the story’s climax and pushes right on through to a bitterly dark finale. In short, I dug this one quite a lot!

Bad Apples 2 is certainly one of the more consistent horror anthologies I’ve read, in terms of quality and tonality, and it’s perfect reading material for All Hallow’s Eve and the days leading up to it, as night falls ever faster.

Buy Bad Apples 2: Six Slices of Halloween Horror At Amazon

Halloweek Reading to Seize The Night

Enjoying a great treat is not just for kids on Halloween. Indulge yourself this week and read SEIZE THE NIGHT: NEW TALES OF VAMPIRIC TERROR, the new “stellar anthology of tales” (Publishers Weekly Starred Review), sure to quench your thirst for a Horrific Halloween read! Conjuring reactions such as “Going back to the heydays of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot” and “For anyone who likes tales of the creepy sort like Stephen King’s short stories in Everything’s Eventual or Nightmares & Dreamscapes,”  how can one resist?

SEIZE THE NIGHT

Edited by Christopher Golden

Gallery Books

October 6, 2015

ISBN: 9781476783093

Trade Paperback

$18.00

Once upon a time, vampires were figures of terror…and they can be again. Legends of these dark creatures sprang from every corner of the world and infinite variations throughout history—with even more of them waiting in the farthest corners of the imagination. SEIZE THE NIGHT takes hold of a popular culture environment where the vampire has largely lost its ability to inspire fear, and now brings out the dread, showcasing twenty all-new tales of horrifying evil from an extraordinary lineup of twenty contributors:

John Ajvide Lindqvist

Kelley Armstrong

Laird Barron

Gary A. Braunbeck

Dana Cameron

Dan Chaon and Lynda Barry

Charlaine Harris

Brian Keene

Sherrilyn Kenyon

Michael Koryta

John Langan

Tim Lebbon

Seanan McGuire

Joe McKinney

Leigh Perry

Robert Shearman

Scott Smith

Lucy A. Snyder

David Wellington

Rio Youers

The dusk is upon you, and your fright-filled journey to the shadows of the hereafter is about to begin with SEIZE THE NIGHT—old-school vampire fiction at its finest.

“The notion of the romantic vampire is transcended to chilling and even heartbreaking effect in this stellar anthology of tales …These stories move smoothly from the subtle to the horrifying…”

—Publishers Weekly Starred Review [image error]

“Twenty stories of varying lengths offer quick bites of otherworldly entertainment. Edited by Christopher Golden, this collection takes vampire fiction back to its bloody, frightful roots. Readers looking for old-school horror laden with darkness will appreciate these diverse stories from some of the best writers in the genre…all are entertaining…With new spins on classic traditions and inventive, unexpected twists, it’s the perfect spooky read for Halloween — or any night that calls for a touch of terror.”

— RT Book Reviews

“The twenty-one authors collected in this volume have…succeeded in returning vampires and their ilk back into our nightmares where they belong…each tale delivered the goods. And by goods, I mean terror…These are not your Count Dracula vampire stories, but thankfully they’re not of the friendly variety either. What they all have in common is that each and every story is a cut above the ordinary. My highest recommendation.”

—Cemetery Dance

 

“Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror is a highly successful anthology, one that puts vampires back into the shadowy, hidden corners where they belong and makes them creepy, chilling, at times downright frightening…we’re getting back to the old-school roots of vampiric lore, going back to the heydays of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot…this is a vital return to form for these stoic, and historic, universal baddies…Seize the Night has the singular aim of making vampires terrifying again, and it heartily succeeds in its mission. Golden and the contributors deserve a fair amount of applause for their work here, and this anthology is a wonderful reminder of what made vampires such a popular horror staple, and why they continue to endure across the ages.”

— Michael Patrick Hicks

“Anthologies have always been one of my favorite things. A chance to read old favorite authors and a chance to also find some new favorites as well, all based on some short stories. Which is, of course, why I chose to read Seize the Night – New Tales of Vampiric Terror… Seize The Night –New Tales of Vampiric Terror is slated to be released on October 6, 2015. Be sure to get your copy before they disappear! Anyone who likes tales of the creepy sort like Stephen King’s short stories in Everything’s Eventual or Nightmares & Dreamscapes should check out Seize the Night.”

—The Goth Girl Reads

“…a diverse and high quality collection of new stories from some great names within the horror and paranormal sub-genres…Quite simply, if you are a fan of vampires, do not miss this one. 4 Throbbing Carotid Arteries for Seize The Night.”

—Horror After Dark

“Sink your teeth into this collection with caution, it’ll bite back.”

—Hardboiled Wonderland

 

“I would really recommend this wonderful book to anyone who wants to read a vampire anthology that harks back to the heyday of quality horror fiction.”

— Book Nutter’s Reviews

“I thoroughly enjoyed reading Seize The Night…well-written with plenty of frights to keep any horror fan awake at night.”

— Coffee Addicted Writer

“I really prefer my vampires evil, so this anthology was just what I was looking for. It opens with a novelette by Scott Smith, and that one story is worth the price of the book. The victims are suitably disgusting and deserve their fate, which is rapid and brutal. Michael Koryta suggests a rather different cause for vampirism. Charlaine Harris has a very nice story about an energy vampire rather than a blood drinking one. Kelley Armstrong suggests there is a genetic marker for vampirism. Tim Lebbon takes us back to a particularly brutal period of history for his story. John Langan presents a time traveling vampire that can duplicate bodies to ensure it has a steady source of prey…well above average.”

— Don A’mmassa On Horror

“…Brings out the dead and dread, showcasing 20 all-new tales of horrifying evil from a coffin full of different writers who dabble in the undead from various angles, from horrific to heart-wrenching, romantic to rough. We especially feasted on Rio Youers’ “Separator”, set in a typhoon-devastated Philippines where a land developer gets a brutal taste of local legend. Ouch!”

— Examiner.com – A Tricky Treat for Fright Night

“I honestly had nightmares reading this anthology, which is a first for me, and found the writing samples to be strong and powerful tales that twisted an already frightening lore. I definitely recommended reading Seize The Night as a Halloween novel. This book will appeal to readers who enjoy horror, frightening tales, anthologies and short stories, gruesome and violent vampires. I would wholeheartedly recommend reading Seize The Night if you are a horror fan or a supporter of real, gritty vampire novels without the romanticism and moral questions.”

— Silk & Serif

 

“Now, from some of the biggest names in horror and dark fiction, comes this collection of short stories that make vampires frightening once again.”

— Bookgasm – Halloween-Ready New Release Awaiting You to Treat Yourself

 

About the Editor

Christopher Golden is the #1 New York Times bestselling and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such novels as Snowblind, Tin Men, Of Saints and Shadows, and The Boys Are Back in Town. His novel with Mike Mignola, Baltimore; or, the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, was the launching pad for the Eisner Award-nominated comic book series Baltimore. As an editor, he has compiled the short story anthologies The New Dead, The Monster’s Corner, and Dark Duets, among others, and has also written and co-written numerous comic books, video games, and screenplays. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in more than fourteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at christophergolden.com.

 

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Guest Post: ‘Getting Out There’ by J.S. Collyer, Author of The Orbit Series

Hello everyone. First I want to thank Mike for allowing me to do a guest post for his wonderful blog. I hugely admire Mike as both a reader and a writer and look to him for inspiration for both my own writing and on what to read next.

I wanted to write this post not only to share details about my latest SciFi novel release, Book 2 in the Orbit Series ‘Haven’ (reviewed by Mike last week), but also to prompt any new writers who are hesitating on jumping into the deep end to take the plunge. Because, let me tell you, the whole ‘I just released a new book’ thing never gets old.

Wanting to be a writer and actually getting a book out there, or even written, sometimes feel like two separate places on either side of a deep, echoing canyon. Bridging the gap is daunting. So daunting in fact that sometimes new writers don’t even try, or try only as hard as adding a paragraph to an old manuscript every couple of weeks, following agents on twitter or joining writers’ groups online. All these things, and I know as I’ve been there myself, are helpful and feel good and may help you learn some technical skill, but don’t actually get you anywhere real on their own.

The trick? Write a book.

No, I’m not kidding.

Sit down, get it written.

No, I’m not joking. You think it’s obvious but not having a manuscript to work on or to approach agents with is the biggest stumbling block I’ve seen many promising new writers trip on time and time again. The major obstacles to getting something written (in my experience, usually worrying about whether your book will be any good, what people will think of it, whether your facts will be straight or whether it will even get published) are not sinister and evil and should be squashed, they are also redundant as you will never have to confront them unless you’ve actually written something.

I’m  not saying don’t be prepared. By all means, seek feedback as you go, make plans, take a course or get a book about writing (I recommend Stephen King’s On Writing), but don’t get yourself into such a knot of preparation you’re afraid to commit even a single word to paper. Just get yourself a plan or a premise and have at it and see where it takes you. You’d be amazed at how quickly a manuscript can come together and once it has you’re committed. You’ll motor forward because there’s no going back.

Don’t worry that your first draft is pants. It’s meant to be pants. Big, baggy, shapeless, unattractive pants more times than none. Polishing, editing and refining is when the story really comes into its own and where you really get to roll up your sleeves and show that script just how much potential you have. So don’t worry if, once you’ve geared yourself up to get a book written, that the script doesn’t feel right, or if it doesn’t feel good enough or even if its riddled with plot holes and cliché. All that can be fixed. You can’t fix anything if you haven’t written it.

Once you have a book, then you can get to work on everything else. Whether you decide you want an agent and, through them, a traditional publishing contract or if you want to self-publish  or go through a smaller, independent publishing house like me, (Dagda Publishing I believe are currently looking for submissions if you wish to look: http://www.dagdapublishing.co.uk) you can’t even begin to approach any of it if you don’t have a script. So get it written! You have the power to do it, it is all down to you, you call all the shots and it’s fun. Ok, so it’s hard work, it’s nights of hair pulling and forehead-clutching, it’s early-morning Google fact-checking and it’s facing the fact that you will need to kill some or parts of your darlings. But there’s nothing else like it and it’s why we do what we do.

I won’t approach getting entirely to the other side of the canyon, i.e., going through all the pros and cons of the all the ways of getting your book actually published (though I will say: once you have your manuscript, do your research. There is no right or wrong way to get published but they all require work, commitment and determination and how long or painful the journey is can depend on whether you’ve chosen the right path for you) because there are many, many such articles out there that will explain it better than me and this post is just about that first step. Writing your book. Because once that’s done, you’re officially on the path and that’s where it all begins.

I wrote my first novel, Zero in 2013 and it came out last year. I was lucky enough to have Dagda Publishing already interested in my work as I’d contributed a couple of short stories to some of their anthologies (which I discovered through those half-trying methods of getting out there – following publishers etc online – proof it is still worth doing!), but even their interest wouldn’t have been enough to get me anywhere without an actual novel. So I wrote one. And having done that, I knew I could write another. And I did.

Haven, my latest release, is book 2 in the Orbit Series, sequel to Zero and came out over the weekend. Both books have done well amongst fans of Science and General Fiction alike thanks to the efforts of both my publisher and the promotion work I have taken on myself. And now the third is on the way too.

And let me tell you, the late nights, the hard work, the worry the doubt and the fear about the quality of your work or what people will think of it (or what people DO actually think of it once the reviews start coming in) all pale away to mist in comparison to the fiery, invigorating feeling of seeing your book published, whether it’s your first or your hundredth. Whatever you do to get there, it is all worth it. And is more than possible.

So what are you waiting for? Where’s that first draft? Put the time aside and get it down! Because once you’ve done that there’s no stopping you.

I still have a long way to go and many more books in me, but being two steps further along the journey than I was two years ago I have found is the best incentive for continuing down the road, wherever it may take me.

Book 1 in the Orbit Series is called Zero and has been described as ‘James Bond meets Firefly’. It is out now on Amazon: http://a-fwd.com/asin=B00MRACF86

Haven, book 2 in the series, which has been described as ‘cinematic, full of breathtaking moments’ and is out now for Kindle and as Paperback: http://myBook.to/havenjscollyer

Details of all publication and more thoughts on writing, publishing and promoting SciFi on J S Collyer’s WordPress: http://jcollyer.wordpress.com

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Twitter: @JexShinigami

Review: Extinction Evolution (The Extinction Cycle Book 4) by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

About Extinction Evolution

There’s a storm on the horizon… 

Central Command is gone, the military is fractured, and the surviving members of Team Ghost, led by Master Sergeant Reed Beckham, have been pushed to the breaking point. While the strong return to the battlefield, the wounded are forced to stay behind on Plum Island and fight their inner demons.

Betrayed by the country they swore to defend and surrounded by enemies on all sides, Team Ghost has one mission left: protect Dr. Kate Lovato and Dr. Pat Ellis while they develop a weapon to defeat the Variants once and for all. But after a grisly discovery in Atlanta, Kate and Ellis realize their weapon might not be able to stop the evolution of the monsters.

Joined by unexpected allies and facing a new threat none of them saw coming, the survivors are running out of time to save the human race from extinction.

About the Author

Nicholas Sansbury Smith is the author of several postapocalyptic books and short stories. He worked for the state of Iowa for nearly ten years before switching careers to focus on his one true passion: writing. When he isn’t daydreaming about the apocalypse he’s likely racing in triathlons around the Midwest. He lives in Des Moines with his family and several rescued animals.

My Thoughts

Here’s the deal: Extinction Evolution is now the fourth (out of five) books in Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s Extinction Cycle series. If you’ve read the previous three, then you know what to expect here – vicious Variant violence, great military action, and human scientists continuing their quest for a biological weapon that will eradicate the threat decimating mankind. If you have not read the previous three, then you need to start back at the beginning with Extinction Horizon pronto.

As this is book number four and the final novel is a short ways off in the distance, Smith picks a fine time to shake up the series formula a little bit and introduce a few new wrinkles. What, exactly, the main wrinkle is can be easily discerned from the title. The Variants (think along the lines of zombies with a dash of parasite DNA weaved in, but supremely aggressive pale-skinned people eaters), already a massive threat in this apocalyptic series scenario, have upped their game and developed a few new unusual characteristics. They seem to be getting smarter, and are starting to adapt to their environments. In a cool little check-in with military bases around the world, we find out that Arctic Variants are a thing, and the nasty critters wreaking havoc in the Middle East are making like camels and growing humps to store water. These are neat bits of escalation, but Smith doesn’t stop there and I won’t ruin the surprises.

The main thrust of the narrative stems from a crucial point of evolution for these monsters, while the human element revolves around scientist Kate and Ghost Team operator Reed Beckham’s deepening relationship as she continues to search for ways to develop and engineer the means to end the threat of the Variants once and for all. Along the way, we’re introduced to a new team of military commandos dubbed Variant Hunters and headed up by a man name Garcia. Their story meshes well with that of Ghost Team’s, leading up to a propulsive and firey finish.

Smith is really good at crafting suspenseful action scenes, and with Extinction Evolution he’s at the top of his game. The finale is brutal in both execution and the emotions it provokes given how long we’ve been spending with these characters. It also ends on one heck of a maddening cliff-hanger!

From a sheer action standpoint, Smith rock and rolls with the best of them, crafting an excellent cross-genre work of military sci-fi horror. This entry might be the best book of the series thus far, but I have a gut feeling Nick’s going to top himself in the finale.

Buy Extinction Evolution At Amazon

Cover Reveal: Crime & Punishment

Earlier this year, I contributed to the science fiction anthology No Way Home, which was curated by Lucas Bale and featured some of the most talented up-and-comers in indie sci-fi publishing (if we do say so ourselves).

No Way Home was a big success for us, and we immediately began talking about a follow-up. Well, Crime & Punishment is that follow-up, and you should be able to guess the theme uniting our stories pretty easily this time around. Expect more science fiction, dystopian, apocalyptic goodness, and plenty of heart-string tugging.

Bale once again took the lead on curating, and shared editing duties with Alex Roddie, with most of the same author’s returning. Cover art duties this time around came from Adam Hall at Around The Pages.

Keep an eye out for the official synopsis soon, as we’re aiming for a late-November release. We’re all so very excited to get this one out there! The launch for No Way Home was an exciting time, and the reception for it was fantastic. I expect Crime & Punishment to be even bigger and better! Now then, onto the cover…

Review: Haven by J.S. Collyer

About Haven

Blast off into orbit once again with Kaleb Hugo and Ezekiel Webb!

It is a few years since Lunar Independence League’s rebellion against the Service was defeated, taking the Zero and everything she stood for with it. Her former captain, Kaleb Hugo, set himself on a new path and a lot has changed under his watch. And yet, not enough. Despite everything, circumstances will drive Hugo back to an underworld full of fears he thought he’d left behind.

Ghosts of pain, betrayal and guilt haunt Hugo after the shocking and brutal torture of the woman he loves, forcing him to seek out his ex-commander from the Zero, Ezekiel Webb, to help him get revenge. Together they must gain entry to Haven, an off-world colony where those with nothing left to lose end up, but where the answers they need are hidden.

But Haven is a place with its own rules. Rules which are harsh, brutal and unforgiving.

On the edge of Service-controlled space and outside the boundaries of civilised society, Hugo and Webb will come face to face with enemies old and new, and once again will have to fight to save their own skins as well as secure what they need to deliver justice. Will they prevail against all the odds stacked against them, when sometimes their own worst enemies are themselves?

About the Author

J. S. Collyer has written stories since she was old enough to hold a pen and began reading obsessively when she discovered Star Wars and science fiction in secondary school. She went on to study literature and creative writing up to Master of Arts level at Lancaster University.

After graduating with her MA in 2008 she has stayed in Lancaster with her partner and has written consistently since.

She has always had a taste for narratives that are larger than life and science fiction delivers what she needs. But, though it’s true she likes spaceships, lasers and moon rocks, she also likes humanity, sincerity and relating to her characters. They may live on the moon, but they’re real and she is committed to creating human narratives albeit usually with a super-human backdrop.

Website: http://jcollyer.wordpress.com/

My Thoughts

[Disclosure: I received an advanced copy of this book from the author. J.S. Collyer is both a friend and colleague, and our work has appeared together in the anthology, No Way Home.]

When I read J.S. Collyer’s debut, Zero, last year, I was rather impressed with that fun little space romp. There was a great sense of depth to the narrative, despite keeping things fairly local for a space opera, operating in the orbit of Earth and its moon colonies. The greatest strength, though, were the characters and their interpersonal relationships, particularly between Ezekiel Webb and his captain, Kaleb Hugo.

That same strength provides a very solid backbone to the narrative in Haven, as Collyer gives the friendship between these two men and battle-hardened brothers-in-arms further depth. The men have been separated for three years following the events of the previous novel, but find themselves reunited following an assault on their mutual acquaintance, Marilyn Harvey. To take it one step further, the man responsible for hospitalizing Harvey and prompting the miscarriage of her and Hugo’s child, is also the same man who spent a fair amount of time torturing Webb in the prior novel.

Hugo wants him captured and brought to trial; Webb, naturally, wants him dead. Their hunt for this villain takes them to the orbital colony of Haven, an insular factory town if ever there was one, ruled by a council of Elders with very strict governance and harsh penalties for those who dare break the law.

I was a bit surprised to discover how small-scale Haven was, in comparison to its predecessor. Where Zero was rife with intrigue and missions that took its cast to various locales, Haven concerns itself with staying fairly tied down to a central location. The tendency in sequels is to go wider and bigger, so I appreciate Collyer’s restraint in keeping the focus on both her characters and setting more intimate. There’s a great bit of world-building on display here, and Haven ends up feeling like a real and well-lived-in place that I was able to buy into fully.

It helps, too, that this colony also has very personal connections to Webb. And it’s those connections that help inform how Webb and Hugo relate to one another this time around. Hugo is very much a fish out of water here, and it prompts a fair amount of head-butting between the two. Even better, though, is the insight we get into Webb as we become privy to a bit more of his history.

While there’s a good dose of action throughout, the focus, rightly, is on the characters first and foremost. Collyer does a terrific job reintroducing and refining our two male leads, but still injects enough whizz-bang heroics and a nicely bloody finish to satisfy. At this point, catching up with these two guys feels like hanging out with a couple old friends reminiscing over lost time. I’m looking forward to catching up with them again soon.

Buy Haven At Amazon

Review: Locke & Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (Audiobook)

About Locke & Key

Based on the best-selling, award-winning graphic novel series Locke & Key – written by acclaimed suspense novelist Joe Hill (NOS4A2, Horns) and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez – this multicast, fully dramatized audio production brings the images and words to life.

A brutal and tragic event drives the Locke family from their home in California to the relative safety of their ancestral estate in Lovecraft, Massachusetts, an old house with powerful keys and fantastic doors that transform all who dare to walk through them. As siblings Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode Locke discover the secrets of the old house, they also find that it’s home to a hate-filled and relentless creature that will not rest until it forces open the most terrible door of them all….

Featuring performances by Haley Joel Osment (Entourage, The Sixth Sense), Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black), Kate Mulgrew (Orange Is the New Black, Star Trek: Voyager), Joe Hill, Gabriel Rodriguez, and Stephen King (The Stand, 11-22-63), as well as a cast of more than 50 voice actors, this audio production preserves the heart-stopping impact of the graphic novel’s astounding artwork through the use of richly imagined sound design and a powerful original score.

Locke & Key is FREE until November 4, 2015.

*Locke & Key contains explicit language and adult situations.

My Thoughts

The Locke & Key graphic novels have been on my to-read list, and sitting among a stack of other shamefully neglected graphic novels and trades, for several years now. You’d have thought that after discovering the pure joy of Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 that I would have dived headlong into this comic book series, but alas… (Maybe somebody can loan me a Time Key to free up more reading hours in the day?). When Audible announced its adaptation of Hill’s and artist Gabriel Rodriguez’s much-acclaimed IDW comic book series, I was thrilled to give it a listen, and also curious as to how the heck one adapts a comic book for an audiobook.

Comics, obviously, are quite a different breed from prose novels, given their reliance on visual imagery to tell a story. Sure, there’s narrative boxes (typically) and plenty of dialogue (usually) and thought bubbles, but the nature of a comic book is in its art. Audible Studios has worked around this translation from visual to audio by harkening back to the days of radio productions. Rather than rewriting the Locke & Key comics into a more novelistic approach for narration, the story is told by way of audio drama with a cast of more than 50 voice actors.

For the most part, this approach works quite well, but with a few caveats.

The story itself is largely understandable and very approachable in this re-imagined fashion, and for roughly 13 and a half hours we follow the Locke children, and their mother, Nina, as they relocate to the family estate of Lovecraft Mansion in the wake of the Locke patriarch’s murder. While readjusting to their new lives, the children begin finding strange keys scattered and hidden across the house, keys that unlock doors into mysterious and terrifying new realms. Keys that are also being hunted for by an old evil named Dodge.

As the son of Stephen King, it seems clear that Hill has inherited quite a bit of his father’s story-telling panache and hits on a few similarities in style. This was most clear in NOS4A2, but Locke & Key also exhibits some of the same themes common in many of King’s works (and keep an ear open for a nice little homage to King’s Carrie late in the story). First of all, this is an epic work of horror, with smatterings of fantasy thrown in for good measure, and how it affects the everyman. The central characters aren’t burdened with super-powers, and most of their daily challenges come from attending school, making friends, dealing with being the outcasts because of the hellacious events in their lives. This is also a story of multi-generational horrors, as the Locke kids discover the secrets of their ancestry and the tribulations their father and his friends experienced upon discovering the keys.

All of this is performed admirably by the large cast, and I felt fully invested in these characters right from the get-go. The acting is pretty superb all-around, as is the sound production and score, with the cast and crew even making use of real-world locations to record, rather than sticking it out in a recording studio for the entire job. My only real issues came in the lack of narrative connective tissue in the big action scenes, which often felt muddled and pulled me out of the drama as I struggled to figure out who stabbed who, whether or not X or Y lived, and what exactly was happening in the aftermath. A few of these issues were mostly resolved in the following minutes, but the initial impact was jarring and confusing. Still, there were a few times where I imagined the narrative must have been clearer in the original comics and that certain scenes would have worked better as a companion piece to the source material. Maybe I missed a few things due to my lack of familiarity with the comic books, particularly in how the characters appear. We usually don’t get any kind of character descriptions until much too late, well after I’d already formed a visual of who they are in my head and so I spent much of the narrative not realizing one family was African American, or that another sported plenty of ink across his body, or that one has a particular piercing that becomes quite a distinguishing feature for one of the Locke boys in the aftermath of a brutal murder.

These, mostly little, issues aside, I found Locke & Key to be a completely engrossing audio-drama and an absolutely terrific listen. The acting is strong, and Hill’s writing, as expected, is completely top-notch. As an audio-drama, this sucker just works, and it works well. I was scared in all the right places, and my heart was racing during the brutal climax and left feeling exhausted in the wake the Locke family’s cataclysmic showdown with Dodge. I might have even, maybe, just a little bit, kind of teared up in the final moments because I was so damn attached to these characters and to this family. And although the graphic novels have been untouched thus far, this audiobook has made me aware of exactly how much greatness I’ve been missing, so I’ve ordered the final volume to complete my set of IDW Locke & Key hardcovers and hope to dive into them soon. This is a completely fantastic story, and Joe Hill himself is quickly becoming one of my absolute favorite writers that I can trust to turn out solid, quality work and whose stories I look forward to the most. If Locke & Key becomes one of my latest die-hard obsessions, well, I can blame this recording for it.

Buy Locke & Key At Amazon (Free until 11/4/2015)

Review: Failure by John Everson (Audiobook)

About Failure

Raymond is such a failure, he can’t even kill himself and get it right. Cindy just plain doesn’t care; she’ll get on her knees for anyone beneath the football field bleachers to score a nickel bag hit. And Sal is a frustrated goon with a hook nose and an attitude so sour he can’t nail a girl, even with the lure of free dope and a getaway car.

When these three desperate teens meet Aaron, a failed practitioner of the dark arts, who offers them the best high they’ve ever smoked in exchange for kinky sex play, things only go from bad to worse. Aaron hopes to ensnare and re-birth the spirit of a late witch to capture her power from beyond the grave for his own.

Soon, they’ll all learn the darkest, bloodiest, most terrifying definition of failure.

About the Author

John Everson is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of eight novels of erotic horror and the macabre, including his latest, the Fountain of Youth thriller THE FAMILY TREE, as well as the Bram Stoker Award-nominated tour de force NIGHTWHERE, the Bram Stoker Award-winner COVENANT, its sequel SACRIFICE and the standalone novels THE 13TH, SIREN, THE PUMPKIN MAN, VIOLET EYES.

John shares a deep purple den in Naperville, Illinois with a cockatoo and cockatiel, a disparate collection of fake skulls, twisted skeletal fairies, Alan Clark illustrations and a large stuffed Eeyore. There’s also a mounted Chinese fowling spider named Stoker, an ever-growing shelf of custom mix CDs and an acoustic guitar that he can’t really play but that his son likes to hear him beat on anyway. Sometimes his wife is surprised to find him shuffling through more public areas of the house, but it’s usually only to brew another cup of coffee. In order to avoid the onerous task of writing, he occasionally records pop-rock songs in a hidden home studio, experiments with the insatiable culinary joys of the jalapeno, designs book covers for a variety of small presses, loses hours in expanding an array of gardens and chases frequent excursions into the bizarre visual headspace of ’70s euro-horror DVDs with a shot of Makers Mark and a tall glass of Newcastle.

Learn more about John on his site, http://www.johneverson.com, where you can sign up for a direct-from-the-author monthly e-newsletter with information on new books, contests and occasionally, free fiction.

Want to connect? Follow John on Twitter @johneverson, or find him on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/johneverson.

My Thoughts

[This review was originally published at AudioBook Reviewer, http://audiobookreviewer.com/reviews/failure-john-everson/%5D

John Everson’s Failure is an intriguing mash-up of horror, kink, and magic, but one that ultimately fell a little bit flat. If you’ve read the description for this title, then you know what you’re getting into. Sadly, there’s little else beyond the synopsis to capture in terms of depth or plot.

Now, that said, this one is a quick and breezy listen, clocking in just shy of 90 minutes and there are many, many worse things to while away a few car-rides between work and home. Once the story gets all revved up and gunning for the climax, I found myself enjoying the story quite a bit more.

The gist of Failure is stupid teens making one very large bad choice all in the name of good drugs and sex, not quite believing or realizing they’re being lulled into a much darker ritual of ancient magic. By the time they realize how wrong things have gone, it’s six months later and Aaron, the old mage who duped them, is out for blood in order to finish his ritual.

And that’s when all kinds of stuff and things, most of it fleshy and bloody, hit both the proverbial and literal ceiling. Gore hounds should be quite happy with the story’s second-half, where the gruesomeness is the main order of business, alongside some detours flashing back to the sexual shenanigans our three teenage characters engage in under Aaron’s prodding. Things turn awfully vicious pretty quickly, and the proceedings hit a high-note for me when Everson drops the descriptive, vulgar phrase “womb syrup” during a particular mauling.

While Everson’s story, overall, didn’t quite suit my particular tastes, the narration by Joe Hempel was solid and professional, and the audio quality was clear. Hempel was pretty consistent in his mild reading of Everson’s words, but I think I would have liked a little more oomph and emoting, particularly when the story takes a turn toward the nastier side of things. It’s not much of a complaint, but the narration struck me as a little too placid.

All in all, Failure wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, and I would have liked Everson to expand on his characters and give them more depth. I didn’t feel much in the way of sympathy for any of them, with the trio of teens coming across as shallow and a bit single-minded in their highly-questionable motives. The latter half of the book manages to coalesce into some nicely wrought and descriptive horror, though, the finale is sufficiently bloody.

If nothing else, Failure, originally published in print back in 2006, has at least got me curious enough to check out this author’s more recent work to see how he’s refined his style and grown as an author.

Review: The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata (audiobook narrated by Kevin T. Collins)

About The Red: First Light

Reality TV and advanced technology make for high drama in this political thriller that combines the military action of Zero Dark Thirty with the classic science fiction of The Forever War.

Lieutenant James Shelley, who has an uncanny knack for premeditating danger, leads a squad of advanced US Army military tasked with enforcing the peace around a conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. The squad members are linked wirelessly 24/7 to themselves and a central intelligence that guides them via drone relay—and unbeknownst to Shelley and his team, they are being recorded for a reality TV show.

When an airstrike almost destroys their outpost, a plot begins to unravel that’s worthy of Crichton and Clancy’s best. The conflict soon involves rogue defense contractors, corrupt US politicians, and homegrown terrorists who possess nuclear bombs. Soon Shelley must accept that the helpful warnings in his head could be AI. But what is the cost of serving its agenda?

About the Author

Linda Nagata is a Nebula and Locus-award-winning author. Her more recent work includes short fiction “Nahiku West,” runner up for the 2013 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the novel THE RED: FIRST LIGHT, a near-future military thriller that was a finalist for both the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Though best known for science fiction, she also writes fantasy, exemplified by her “scoundrel lit” series Stories of the Puzzle Lands. Linda has spent most of her life in Hawaii, where she’s been a writer, a mom, and a programmer of database-driven websites. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

My Thoughts

[Note: This review was originally published at AudioBook Reviewer.]

Linda Nagata’s The Red: First Light is a superb military sci-fi thriller, and, for the most part, the narration from Kevin T. Collins does a darn fine job pulling the listener into the story and alongside Lieutenant James Shelley.

Right from the get-go, listeners are put into the elite armored squadron commanded by Shelley as they prepare to suit up in their mechanized uniforms, the squad connected via cerebral implants referred to as the overlay. Shelley and his team are in the African Sahel to maintain the peace as a secularist reformer rises to power. When their base comes under aerial assault, though, they realize — too late — that their peacekeeping efforts are for naught. Shelley, however, has a sort of sixth sense that has earned him the nickname King David from his comrades, who joke that he is able to receive the word of God. The truth, though, is a different story entirely and one that is both consistently captivating and increasingly frightening the more we learn about it.

Over the course of more than thirteen hours of audio, we join Shelley for a series of missions and a harrowing period of recovery after being severely injured early in the narrative. What follows, then, is a search for the truth behind his King David messages and his team’s efforts to halts homegrown terrorists working to incite revolution and tear Texas away from the Union.

The Red is a seriously dark bit of work, and more than a few scenes caught me off guard. Nagata’s first-person narrative manages to shock with sudden flashes of violence and terrific insights into the her characters. Shelley himself is a bit of conundrum – formerly an anti-war protester, he now serves the military to avoid jail time for past crimes, only to find himself increasingly loyal to the military and those who serve beneath him. The large question that looms is whether or not this is a natural growth for his character, or the result of whatever may be messing with his brain and repeatedly warning him of danger. How much of his decision and actions are truly his own? And how long can he rely on the King David insights to keep him and his soldiers safe?

I refuse to give away much more than this, but please be aware that we’re only scratching the surface of the book’s plotting. There’s a great sense of breadth to the events here, and plenty of fantastic military action sequences. The upgrades these soldiers sport is really fantastic, and the augmentations provided by the military make sense in a beautifully cynical and bureaucratic way. Operating at the behest of mega-rich defense contractors, and beneath their constant and subtle warnings of reprisal if ignored, Nagata’s story brings to the forefront Dwight Eisenhower’s warning against the military-industrial complex and their threat to democracy. This aspect makes her story feel all the more timely rather than a far-flung future scenario.

As narrator, Collins handles the material suitably well. Any criticisms I have toward his work here are very, very small, but I will say that it took me a little bit of time to adjust to his inflections and airy tones when narrating dialogue from the female characters. I also didn’t really care for his use of “spoken” shouts during some of the more-intense action scenes that requires characters to be yelling back and forth or attempting to command attention. I would have preferred to just have an actual shout with some pure energy and raw acting talent behind it. But again, these are rather mild complaints and did not take away from the overall listening experience. Throughout it all, the audio quality maintains a level consistency and solid production values, with the narration coming through crisp, clear, and well delivered.

Bottom line: Linda Nagata just earned herself a new fan with this book! I loved it and am now eagerly anticipating the chance to either read or listen to the next two books in this trilogy.

Buy The Red: First Light At Amazon