Dane Shipps is a worker aboard the spaceship King Space Void, a gigantic ship that fuels itself by eating planets. He and the other workers worship the ship as their god and believe it will take them to a paradise called the Edge. On an especially bad day for Dane, he meets a woman from […]
Book Review: Rock ‘N’ Roll Headcase by Lee Widener
April 1, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Chaino Durante is a loser working the night shift at the Nuclear Burger. He bids his time working up the courage to rob the place, just so he has a chance to have control for once. One day at work, he happens to discover the disembodied head of Alice Cooper (it happens) who helps him […]
Book Review: Pixiegate Madoka by Michael Sean LeSueur
January 25, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Due to a weird mix-up, foreign exchange student Julian Argento finds himself transferred to Urobochi High, a training academy for magical girls. There he teams up with a kitchen-themed squad to stop his evil sister, Florence, from destroying Japan. My re-attached arm vibrates with life. My fingertips can now unhinge to reveal soap cannons. My […]
Book Review: A God of Hungry Walls by Garrett Cook
December 16, 2015 by Leave a Comment
(Disclosure: I’ve taken writing workshops from Garrett Cook, and he’s done editing work for me.) There’s horror fiction out there that seeks to entertain, like the thrillers by the late Richard Laymon. Then there’s horror that seeks to get under skin and disturb you on a deep psychological level, like Jack Ketchum’s incredibly difficult masterpiece […]
Book Review: Brother by Ania Ahlborn
November 25, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Ania Ahlborn’s Brother reminds me a lot of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, which to me is entirely a good thing. If I were to pitch this book to someone, I would probably say it was like if Erskine Caldwell wrote House of 1000 Corpses. The Morrows are a family with strange traditions. If “strange” […]
Book Review: Journey, A Short Story Volume I by Mykl Walsh
November 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Journey, A Short Story Volume I begins in the year 10,001. An expedition team from Earth lands on a planet in a neighboring galaxy. Exploring the planet, they find that human-like life once existed on the planet a long time ago. While most signs of civilization are now gone, they still discover several preserved relics. […]
Book Review: Ichthyic in the Afterglow by Jason Wayne Allen
October 23, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Ichthyic in the Afterglow is the kind of book that the subgenre “bizarro” was invented for. It uses the mythologies of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers, but it isn’t really horror. It takes place in a dystopian future, but it isn’t really science fiction. Its story is driven by factions of warring cults, but it’s […]
Book Review: Sexbot by Patrick Quinlan
September 25, 2015 by Leave a Comment
I know what you’re thinking. But despite the title and the cover, this isn’t Kindle porn. For one thing, I have a paperback copy of it. For another, Patrick Quinlan is an established author of thriller novels. That background shines through in Sexbot. Susan Jones and her partner Martin Wacker were robotics engineers who made […]
Book Review: Birdsnatch by C.J. Cummings and Mark Ryan
September 4, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Birdsnatch (also available at Amazon.co.uk) is apparently the first in a planned series called “A Tale Told Twice.” The idea behind the series is that two authors take the same title and build separate stories around only the title. This is the first result of that experiment. In C.J. Cummings’s novella, an irreversible computer error is causing […]
Book Review: Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg
August 12, 2015 by Leave a Comment
“I never had much use for science fiction… Science Fiction gave the program a bad name. It was so disreputable in the minds of most people that the program had to be as businesslike as possible in order to seem legitimate.” Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg was first published in 1972 by Random House. […]
