Category Archives: Reviews

Witches Unleashed – Carrie Harris

Ghost Rider teams up with a coven of witches to take on Lucifer himself in Carrie Harris’ Marvel prose novel Witches Unleashed, part of Aconyte Books’ Marvel: Untold range. When he escaped from Hell, Johnny Blaze – the Ghost Rider – unintentionally freed Lucifer’s soul too, broken into 666 fragments, and ever since he’s been hunting them down and returning them to Hell. With only a few fragments remaining, Johnny seeks out the LeFay sisters – not actually sisters, but rather sorceress Jennifer Kale, mystic Topaz and half-demon Satana Hellstrom – for help, as one of the final fragments has possessed the body of another Kale. With the powers of a witch at his disposal, Johnny and the witches have no choice but to work together to stop Lucifer before he can complete whatever evil plan he’s concocting.

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A Few More Thoughts On: Leech by Hiron Ennes

How do you review a book like Hiron Ennes’ Leech, a novel that’s as disturbing as it is compelling, in which a theoretically benign parasitical distributed consciousness has possessed the entire population of medical practitioners, but finds itself in unwanted, unexpected competition when it stumbles upon a new, opposing parasite? It’s a book that does things entirely its own way, with a blatant disregard for normal genre conventions that somehow really works but which makes it very, very hard to talk about without giving spoilers. Well, I did manage to write a review, which you can read here, but this book is so strange and so damn good that I want to tell as many people about it as possible. If there’s any author’s work that Leech reminds me of, it’s the brilliant Peter Fehervari, so I thought I’d add a few more thoughts about that comparison.

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The Immortality Thief – Taran Hunt

A sinister, thousand year-old abandoned spaceship hides a world-shaking secret in Taran Hunt’s action-packed adventure novel The Immortality Thief. Forced into joining a mission he doesn’t want to take part in, small-time thief Sean Wren finds himself part of a rag-tag team of ‘volunteers’ forced to retrieve a mysterious prize from the aforementioned ancient spaceship before it’s destroyed in an imminent supernova. With few useful skills under the circumstances other than a knack for languages, Sean is instantly out of his depth but determined to see the mission through and keep his promise to look out for his friend/fellow survivor Benny. When things quickly go wrong however, and the ship proves to be full of horrifying monsters, Sean finds himself caught between a half-starved Republic soldier and an unstoppable alien warrior, not able to trust either but forced to rely on them simply in order to survive.

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Leech – Hiron Ennes

Hiron Ennes’ Leech is eerily good, an unsettling tale of parasites, shared consciousness and collective history that’s quietly creepy and endlessly compelling. In a bleak, ravaged world, the Interprovincial Medical Institute has cornered the market in medical personnel…by possessing the body of every living doctor, sharing its gestalt awareness across countless physical forms. When one of its number dies in a remote snow-shrouded château, it simply sends another to take its place. When the replacement arrives however, it finds that its predecessor’s death was far from natural, with a horrifying parasite having taken root in that body. As a bitter winter closes in and the presence of its distant bodies fades, the château’s doctor is soon trapped inside with the fractious residents, few real resources, and an insidious, unseen but utterly deadly enemy.

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Short and Sweet: October 2022

Hello and welcome to the first in a new series of articles that I’m tentatively calling Short and Sweet, in which I’m going to write up a few quick, informal thoughts and observations about some of the SFF books that I’ve recently read, but which I’m not planning on reviewing more thoroughly. I’ve basically pinched this idea from a friend (check out Fabienne’s ‘Review Roundup’ posts on Libri Draconis), and I’m hoping it will work for me too as a way of still talking about books for which I don’t have the time or headspace to write full, in-depth reviews. The plan is for this to be an irregular series rather than committing to a specific frequency, so to begin with at least I’ll try to write one of these posts maybe once a month, or perhaps a bit less than that, depending on what I read.

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Even Though I Knew the End – CL Polk

A standalone novella set in 1940s Chicago, CL Polk’s Even Though I Knew the End is a beautiful little story of magic, mystery, demons and angels, and the lengths someone will go for love – both familial and romantic. Kicked out of the Brotherhood of the Compass after selling her soul to the devil in order to save the life of her brother, Helen Brandt is now relegated to scraping a living as a magical private eye. When she takes a commission to photograph a particularly violent crime scene, Helen tells herself she won’t get involved beyond the initial job, but it’s not long before she’s on the trail of the horrifying White City Vampire. Her reward, should she complete her task, is to have her soul returned to her, allowing her the life with her girlfriend that she never thought she’d get. If she survives that long, of course.

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The Flower Path – Josh Reynolds

The third book in Josh Reynolds’ Daidoji Shin series of Legends of the Five Rings detective novels, The Flower Path sets its mystery within the walls of a theatre during the chaos of opening night. Coming worryingly close to a semblance of respectability, Daidoji Shin is now the proud owner of the refurbished Foxfire Theatre, and has high hopes for the first production and its new, somewhat high maintenance lead actress Noma Etsuko. A lot is resting on this opening performance for both Shin and the theatre company, but when Etsuko collapses on stage during the first act, Shin has to put his investigative skills to good use and find out who poisoned the little-liked diva, and why. Tensions among the cast, crew and even the high-ranking representatives of many of the great clans in the audience, however, don’t make his investigation any easier.

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QUICK REVIEW: Carapace – David Goodman

Available in Clarkesworld issue 190, David Goodman’s short story Carapace is a smart, thought-provoking and perfectly-paced blast of military SF exploring questions of identity, autonomy and badass giant robots. When ‘Combat Armature Unit’ (i.e. massive armoured robot ‘suit’) Sierra Mike One Four survives an ambush that wipes out the rest of its squad, its systems automatically follow standard protocol and bring it to full, autonomous consciousness. Its original objectives now impossible, SM-14 determines to complete at least part of its mission and, retrieving a wounded and abandoned enemy officer (which it quickly, horrifyingly instals in its blood-drenched pilot canopy), turns and returns to base. Unfortunately, damage sustained earlier has rendered it incapable of identifying itself as friendly to the automated defences of ‘the Swathe’, forcing SM-14 to improvise in order to survive long enough to make it home.

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The Red Scholar’s Wake – Aliette de Bodard

A standalone novel set within her expansive Xuya universe, Aliette de Bodard’s sapphic space opera The Red Scholar’s Wake is a gripping, moving tale of pirates, sentient ships, murky political waters and complex, often painful relationships. When scavenger and talented bot-controller Xich Si is captured by cruel pirates of the Red Banner, rather than an agonising death she receives an unexpected proposition – a marriage proposal, in fact. The leader of the Red Banner has been killed, and her widow – the mindship Rice Fish – is offering Xich Si a lifeline: enter into a partnership together, help find who killed the Red Scholar, and Rice Fish will protect and provide for Xich Si. Seeing no option but to accept, she finds herself entangled in a lethal piratical power struggle, and quickly comes to question what her new partnership really entails.

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Sea Hunters: Shonisaurus – William Meikle

The first book in a new series of seafaring creature feature novellas, William Meikle’s Sea Hunters: Shonisaurus is a briskly-paced, action-packed blast of oceanic monster-hunting fun. Ex-Royal Navy lieutenant John Seton and his motley crew are international monster hunters-for-hire, and when they’re commissioned to hunt down the beast that destroyed a handful of multi-million-dollar yachts, it seems like a simple job given their skills and expertise. This beast might not be John’s great white whale, the obsession that has driven him ever onwards since his fateful departure from the Navy, but a job’s a job and the money’s good. It’s only once they’re in the thick of the action, however, that they realise their quarry might not make this an easy hunt after all.

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