Archives for reviews - Page 23
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Book Review – Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link
Pretty Monsters: Stories by Kelly Link My rating: 4 of 5 stars A collection of nine short stories with a sort of urban fantasy/horror theme, although low key theme horror rather than scare you into changing your pants horror. What they do is make you think about things. Almost all of the stories could be very normal, with a slightly mentally off kilter protagonist, or there could be something else there that you cannot quite see. A couple are straight fantasy, the Wizards of Perfil, being a good fantasy story about wizards that buy children for a nefarious hidden purpose. All of the stories are well crafted, and they all have a good premise that is well executed. I didn't feel that any of them were there just to make up the numbers. There was a level of variety about them…
Author Interview – Matt Abraham
Today's author interview is with Matt Abraham, his novel is superhero noir, a supervillain turned PI. How long have you been writing for and what made you start writing? I’ve been writing for about ten years, but most of that time I was producing a lot of “blah blah”. It was only in the last three that I’ve produced what I consider well-crafted fiction. I started again because I was tired of stories that were either a redo, sequel, or reboot. I crave originality, like most people I imagine, so I set out to make my own world. Do you write for a living, or do you also do other work? I write for a living, but my lifestyle is heavily subsidized by my wife. See next question for a more extensive response. How did you get into being a…
Book Review – Firefall by Peter Watts
Firefall by Peter Watts My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is an epic science fiction first contact piece that left me wondering about sentience, consciousness and whether I could trust anything I saw, heard or felt. It is certainly the best book that I have read so far in 2015. Peter Watt's acceptance speech at the Hugo Awards ceremony in 2010. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The book is an expansion of a previous novella, which is about half of the story. It's set in an advanced human spaceship travelling out to make contact with some suspicious anomalies in the outer solar system a few years after a massive extraterrestial probing of Earth, the firefall of the title. The mission is lead by a vampire (Peter Watts has a novel take on vampires, and they're not the traditional blood drinking horrors,…
Author Interview – Peter Bailey
This week's interview is with Peter Bailey, a British based author of horror stories. How long have you been writing for and what made you start writing? I wrote my first ‘story’ way back in March 2011, and story is in quotes because it was a completely factual report of a disastrous trip to Las Vegas – but written in a deliberately comic style loosely based on Dave Barry (And if you’ve never read Mr Barry, please do!) The review is still online at and has gathered over a hundred replies. Now this was very surprising , It had never occurred to me that anyone might be interested in what I had to say, and once the idea had formed there was no turning back. The review became a short story, later stories were printed online and in ‘real’ books…
Film Review: Jurassic World
Immediately after the Don't Panic megagame I took my nine year old son Alexander to see Jurassic World at the cinema. We saw the 3D version (although I don't think that the 3D added anything to the experience). I wasn't expecting it to be a fantastic movie from a story/plot/realism perspective. Jurassic World is the fourth in the Jurassic Park franchise, and some of the earlier ones were a bit ropey. I couldn't quite see how any government would license a dinosaur park given the mistakes of the previous attempts, especially the last one that set a T Rex loose in a major American city. The movie worked though. It paid homage to the previous movies and acknowledged the need for absolute safety. It also showed a lot of safety measures as background too. It also showed the science having…