The Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books are always fun. They are thickly plotted and the real villain is never exactly who it first appears to be. Garment of Shadows is no different. My only real complaint about these wonderful books is that they star Mary Russell and not Sherlock Holmes, who is always relegated to a supporting role. I should be used to this by now, but I would still like a little more of super genius Sherlock Holmes and a little less of super genius Mary Russell. But then, what writer can ever love another’s creation more than her own?…
Category: book review
Driven by James Sallis
Clocking in at an amazingly short 147 pages, Driven is a breath of fresh air when compared to the books I have been reading lately. The writing is clean and simple. The sentences short and to the point. The vocabulary purely functional. I liked it. Driven finds our mysterious hero Driver alive and well and living in Phoenix. In the opening scene two men try to kill him. He kills them, but not before they kill his girlfriend. This leads to the Jeremiah Johnson plotline where random men crawl out of the woodwork and do mortal combat with Driver. Cars…
The Runes of The Earth
It’s hard to know exactly where to start here, which seems to be how Stephen R Donaldson felt when he decided to take one more trip to the well for The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The Runes of the Earth is filled with the retelling of tales any fan of the earlier books already know-and surely no one would pick this up and start reading here-so why all the backstory? The Runes of the Earth is a pretty bad book on countless levels. It follows in the tradition of the Second Chronicles-give the readers something broken-by allowing long years…
The White Gold Wielder by Stephen R Donaldson
Our heroes sail back across the endless seas and find the northern tip of The Land. They wander across the frozen waste and meet up with some old friends from The Wounded Land. As with everyone Covenant meets, nothing good has happened to them and they will soon die pointless deaths at the hands of the second croyel to pop out of the nowhere and into the here. But this is just a minor diversion, the Land and the Banefire await. Like all of the Covenant books, we spend endless hours trekking across endless leagues Bad things happen, more Law is…
The One Tree by Stephen R Donaldson
The Matrix lost it’s way once the Wachowski Brothers decided the machines were the good guys and humans didn’t matter. Once the Programs took the lead, the story was doomed. In The One Tree, Stephen R Donaldson starts down the same dark path that the Wachowski Brothers took-he begins to make mere humans irrelevant. The fruit of his love affair with demi-gods will not ripen until the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, but the seeds are planted here. I still loved The One Tree, for all it’s nonsense about Elohim and The Worm of The World’s End and The Guardian…
The Wounded Land
When the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant came out, I had already read the first Chronicles at least twice. I read The Wounded Land greedily and found it to be just as compelling as the first books. It was kind of tough having to wait years between books. The Wounded Land starts off with our real hero, Linden Avery. A doctor who has a lot of secrets and has burdens laid on top of her from the moment she arrives in town. The first three chapters or so take place in the real world and the Second Chronicles breaks the tradition…
The Ramen King and I
Here we have the often funny, sometimes amazing, and occasionally baffling story of a womanizing writer and his Michael Moore like quest to met the man who invented instant ramen noodle soup. We learn the story of inventor Momofuku Ando in small bits scattered throughout The Ramen King and I. There is also a lot of information on many food based Manga comic books and deep insights on the meaning of Samurai movies. But really, the star of The Ramen King and I is Japanese food. From Bento Boxes to Ramen to Sushi we are told about the wonders of all…
11/22/63
JFK was President when I was born, so his death didn’t mean much to me. But the Kennedy assassination was one of those Big Moments in American history, something important that happened in modern times and was recorded for all the world to see. It’s been a lighting rod for sci fi writers, here is a moment where the question What If? all but asks itself. I listened to the audio book version of Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and it has to be one of the best audio books ever recorded. Reader Craig Wasson brings the story of our hero Jake/George…
The Cactus Eaters by Dan White
I like to think of myself as a writer, like to pretend that I can string together the odd sentence here and there and make it sing. But I have to admit that I was constantly humbled by the word play of Dan White in The Cactus Eaters. It’s the story of an idiot and his one true love walking the Pacific Crest Trail, a little hiking path that runs from Mexico to Canada through some of America’s last great wilderness. Here’s a couple of the sentences: His joylessness made him stand out like the shy one at an orgy.…
The Power That Preserves
We start off with Thomas Covenant in the real world and things are not going well. People hate him, he thinks a singer in a night club called him Berek, and someone burned down his barn and left him an apple with a razor blade in it. He decides to stop eating and wander around the woods behind his house. This is a pretty long and dull opening which ends with him running into a little girl who is being threaten by a rattle snake. Just as he is about to save the girl, he gets a call from High…