Book Review: The Strain

This book review is of The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan.

This review is not a part of the 2011 Speculative Fiction Contest (because  2011 is over, and the 2012 challenge doesn’t seem to include a review portion), but I decided that I enjoyed book reviews enough to keep on doing them.

The Basics

Something terrible happens to an aeroplane on the tarmac at JFK Airport New York, and it is up to a lone-wolf disease specialist to find out what the hell is going on. Things quickly go from weird to  troublesome when the plague that killed the passengers on the plane starts to spread throughout the Big Apple.

The Good

The bad guys don’t sparkle.

Sorry, I know that technically counts as a spoiler, the bad guys in The Strain are vampires, and it took a long time for the authors to clarify that point to the reader. But really, the vampires in this book are some mean-ass blood suckers, not the pretty, picking flowers and holding hands kind. I like that.

The Bad

Where do I start?

I had high hopes for The Strain when I started reading it, but I quickly lost interest and found the plot and characters so absurd that I just couldn’t take the story seriously. I finished though, but only so that I could write this review and warn you of how bad this book is.

The Strain is a non-stop cliché treadmill and the poor reader is left wading through flat dialogue, weird metaphors, and phrases that make you laugh out loud at the worst possible moment. There is the shadowy cabal; the brilliant-genius CDC scientist hero; the beautiful, sexually accommodating female sidekick who takes a back seat and never does anything useful (except babysit while the MEN go off to slay the big baddie at the end of the book).

The authors seem to be very confused about what causes the vampirism. Is it a virus? Is it a worm in your blood? Who can tell.

And what kills vampires again? The authors throw out the usual methods (holy water, crucifix through the heart etc.) but cling to sunlight (maybe). It’s confusing. The rules change as you read the book and that sucks. If you are writing off-canon you need to at least be consistent about the things you change.

The Bottom Line

I think this story would make a great movie. It’s full of action, the plot is thin, and the characters make up for their vapid lack of depth by being good looking and/or OSSUM. But, as a book it fails. And apparently there are two more books coming out (it’s a freaking trilogy!), I won’t be reading those.

If you want good vampire fiction, read I Am Legend, it kicks The Strain’s ass a thousand times over.

“. . . her clothes and skin could not have been dirtier if she had been sleeping in real dirt.”

- The Strain

Book Review: The Hungry

This is the 10th review I am doing for the Speculative Fiction Reading Challenge. The goal was to read and review 12 books in 2011. I’ve read way more than 12 books, but have been very slow in the reviewing. Only 2 more to go though, I think I’m going to make it!

This review is of The Hungry by Harry Shannon and Steven Booth.

The Basics

As the name suggests, The Hungry is a zombie horror novel. We follow Sheriff Penny Miller and a small group of survivors as they battle their was through hordes of zombies and a secret military base trying to survive, and trying to put a stop to the zombie apocalypse.

Sheriff Miller is determined to protect the people in her group, even though one of them is a bad-ass biker who murdered her partner in cold blood.

The Good

While the basic “group of people trying to survive the zombie apocalypse” theme has become the staple form of this genre, I have rarely seen it done better. The Hungry is less about the zombies themselves and more about the people who are trying to survive. The characters are somewhat stereotypical, but the quirks of personality are fantastic, and Millers sarcastic evaluation of minor characters is often priceless. This makes The Hungry stand out above boring-list-of-weapons Day by Day Armageddon and well-written-but-I-couldn’t-care-less-about-her Zoo City.

The zombies themselves, while taking a back-seat to the character’s story at times, are all kinds of gory and awesome. The authors describe them beautifully. They are the relentless horde, mindlessly pursuing their next meal. They are an ever-present threat and they are scary.

The book is one intense, scary, fast paced ride.

One of my favorite quirks in The Hungry is Sheriff Miller’s wedding dress, but I suggest you read the book to find out why.

The Bad

The Hungry is not all good. As I said before the minor characters are quite stereotypical; the bad-ass, anti-government biker, the handsome gay guy who would be perfect for her, the hell-bent-on-power military mad man. It is disappointing in a book that is so much fun.

The Bottom Line

The Hungry will never be great literature, but it is one hell of a fun book. The characters are cool and I love the torrents of explicit insults that tumble from Sheriff Miller with regularity. Read it!

Book Review: Zoo City

This is the 9th book review I’m doing for the Speculative Fiction Reading Challenge 2011, only three more to go after this!

This review is of Zoo City by Lauren Beukes.

The Basics

Zinzi lives in Joburg and is a member of a caste which wears it’s sins on it’s sleeves, in the form of animals which are psychically tethered to their bearers. Zinzi becomes the suspect in a murder investigation and has to use her special talent, finding things, to try and dig her way out of trouble.

The Good

I like the fact that Zoo City is set in my back yard, one of the locations in the novel is just down the road from my house. I grew up in this city and know it well, so it is very cool to read a story set in an area I am so familiar with. It takes a lot of the guess work out of imagining the environment.

The book is well written and the characters are well portrayed.

The Bad

I know that this book has received a lot of critical praise, so I am going against the grain when I say I just didn’t like it all that much.

I found the idea of the animal familiars to be a little too similar to the daemons in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Except now it’s not children who have daemons, it’s the criminals. It’s a small thing but it bothered me.

The Bottom Line

While the start of the book was reasonably enjoyable, the last third lost it’s momentum. I didn’t care enough about the protagonist to want to keep reading, and she was rushing about from one encounter to the next without it actually meaning anything for me.

And that made it hard for me to finish the book. I just didn’t care what happened next.

Five great websites for authors

The Internet may be made of cats, but it is also a fantastic place to learn about writing, and to get involved in a community of writers. Over the past few years I have found some fantastic writing resources online, and this post is me sharing the love (in no particular order). Enjoy!

1. Duotrope’s Digest

So, you’ve sat down and written a novel. Then you’ve edited it, proof read it, re-written it, re edited it, and FINALLY you are sure that it is ready for the world to bask in its glory. One problem… you don’t know who to send it to. There must be a million publishers out there, but apart from Penguin and Random House, who else looks at manuscripts like yours? Never fear, for Duotrope’s Digest is here!

The Digest is one massive, hulking behemoth index of publishers in every genre you can name (and a few you have never heard of). The index is searchable by genre, story length, type of payment etc. This is an invaluable resource for any author.

2. Query Shark

Whether or not you are ready to submit your manuscript to a publisher for consideration, I highly recommend a thorough reading of the Query Shark. This is a blog maintained by Janet Reid, a literary agent and wielder of a wicked sense of humor.

At Query Shark, Reid reviews and recommends corrections to query letters before authors send them off to the agents/publishers they are hoping to approach. Reid is ruthless at pointing out poor writing and awful story construction and her blog has given me an enormous amount of insight into how to write queries.

(As an aside, about a year ago I wrote a letter, using Reid’s guidelines, to every company I could find in my home town which might use a good writer and I was able to change my career because of it. This blog changed my life people!)

3. Story Fix

It’s happened to me more times than I can count. I get inspired with a great idea for a story, I sit down and start hammering it out, and within a few weeks I lose the thread and give up. What was I doing wrong? What was I missing? Why couldn’t I finish a story?

When I started reading Storyfix I realised that my mistake was in not planning my stories and not knowing enough about story structure to execute the story properly. And the site gave me the tools to bridge the gaping chasms of my knowledge and start to create stories that work.

4. Terrible Minds

Because sometimes someone just has to hit you over the head with a bucket full of expletives that convey some of the best real-life writing advice you will ever hear. Chuck Wendig is as unforgiving as he is vulgar and I absolutely love his blog. He tells it like it is, writing is messy work sometimes, but at least you can do it with no pants on.

5. Wordplay

Not all advice comes as mallets wrapped in bacon though, and Wordplay is a great site with a lot of very useful advice that won’t have you clutching your pearls.

Well, that’s all for my list of great sites, hopefully I will be able to compile more lists like this in the near future.

Book Review: Hidden Empire

This is the 8th book review I’m doing for the  Speculative fiction reading challenge. Only 4 more to go to achieve the target of 12 in the year. I’ve read ‘em, I just have to write the reviews. So, without further ado…

This review is of Hidden Empire by Kevin J. Anderson.

The Basics

Humans have colonized the galaxy, they had a little help, but they have managed to spread their spawn far and wide between the stars and they have only discovered one other sentient life form in the process (apart from the creepy robots that seem to be hiding something). Hidden Empire is the opening salvo in a series about what happens when, thinking nothing of it, the humans turn a gas giant into a star and upset the other sentient race.

The Good

The Hidden Empire is a vast and highly detailed novel. The universe that Anderson has created is beautifully rendered in loving detail and I felt, at times, as though I was there in person. What more could you ask for? Living in this gorgeous, diverse universe are only two sentient races. This is somewhat unusual, most of the space operas I have read are teeming with life, overflowing with uncountable species all squashed up against each other. Not so in the Hidden Empire. Anderson compensates for the lack of species diversity by creating factions among the humans that are as vastly different from one another as the worlds they choose to inhabit.

The Bad

Not much to report on here. I found the book a little bit slow in the beginning, but it soon got going at a good pace and I was gripped.

There are a LOT of different characters in the book, and Anderson describes the events from at least a half-dozen different points of view. This can be quite confusing at first, but I also adapted to this quickly.

Of course, the second sentient species (not the humans) is benevolent and has a caste that is almost indistinguishable from humans. This always bugs me in science fiction because, let’s be honest, it is so unlikely that aliens would evolve to look exactly like us that it is as good as impossible. At least these aliens don’t think and act like humans, so this does save the book.

The Bottom Line

This is a good novel, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It felt a little simple at times and I did find it a little predictable. But that never stopped me from turning the pages. Not every author gets everything right (in fact, damn few of them get anything right), but there is so much right in the Hidden Empire that it was easy to overlook the few things that did bother me and enjoy the book for what it was.

And the creepy robots are awesome!

The Trigger Reflex is available

A few months ago I mentioned that I have had a second monster hunter story accepted for publication by Pill Hill Press. This is a second outing for the cryptid hunter, Jackson Cook, but both the monster and the setting are far more dangerous and challenging than the Asanbosam (the first monster Jackson hunted for the Leather, Denim & Silver anthology).

The Trigger reflex is available as a tree book and as an ebook from Amazon.com and directly from the publisher.

The good news is that Miles Booth has tentatively hinted that there will be a third book in the Legends of the Monster Hunter series. He has given us a bit of a brain teaser, the title of the book, as an initialism is “UEG”. I’m still trying to work out what it stands for…

Hopefully I will be able to get a third story in the UEG book and make it a threesome. Here’s holding thumbs!

Tribulation now an eBook

The cover art for Tribulation

This morning I finally took the plunge and uploaded my first story to Smashwords. Tribulation is now available for purchase in all the most popular electronic formats (and .pdf just for good measure).

This is a post-apocalyptic story of Tony, a young man who realizes that the prophet who saved his family from destruction has been lying to the congregation. When Tony tries to bring this to the attention of the community he quickly learns that some people would sooner commit murder than have their secrets revealed.

I have made the story available at $0.99, with 20% as a free sample.

Reviews of Tribulation

There were moments of astounding beauty in it. You have some descriptions down excellently. You remind me of Donna Tart (I think you would enjoy The Little Friend; also very dark and has a human ending).

Your protagonists are slightly too flat (especially Abby), but it is to be expected of short-stories. The henchmen were brilliant, reminded me of Stephen King. I liked the touch of adding we don’t want them thinking ‘you’d had your nails done’. Very nice. Got so much about that character from that one line and a few sentences of admiring the blood on his cloth. Lovely stuff. And that creepy bastard, Old Jackson was very good.

It also had the good/bad element of a particular short-story (so if it’s good/bad at the same time, it’s probably descriptive!) which feels like there is so much more to tell. It’s tantalizing, that’s for sure. Very nicely done. (The way it feels bad is as if it just suddenly ends. Yours at least had to end (bleep). There wasn’t a happy ending, a deus ex machina of some kind, i.e. the strangers ride in bearing fruits and lesbian porn and everyone is happy.)

- Tauriq Moosa

So, what are you waiting for? You know what to do!