Smorgasbord Fantasia

I know am late to this rocking party that’s got Adam Christopher right in the center – what with a couple of his novels getting nominated for the biggies recently and his hotly anticipated space-horror(?) novel Burning Dark soon to be released by angry robot this year. So as soon as I got the ARC for burning dark, I went and bought his debut, Empire State to dig through the media-generated hype around the breathlessly positive buzz that this “stunning mash-up of trending cultural touchstones” was generating – A pulpy sci-fi cooler by juxtaposing it against a crime/noir thriller not to forget the superheroes? Cool huh! So – Empire State is set in two worlds. New York during the times of prohibition and another bleaker paler washed out version of New York, called Empire State that exists in vacuum. And most of the story is viewed from the POV of Rad Bradley, a forty-something, down on his luck private investigator who is uncovering the mysteries behind a sordid murder of ...

I am pretty sure you all are going to be talking about Wayward Pines pretty soon. July 2014. Fox TV debut of Manoj Night Shyamalan. Did that pique your interest? So hang on while I let you in on the blockbuster phenomenon that is actually a thriller/horror series called Wayward Pines by Blake Crouch. If there is a word that captures the whole Wayward Pines trilogy, that in my dictionary would be Electrifying. Slick action thriller rolled in tight with horror, science-fiction and dystopian elements, this whole series kicks ass like no other. I haven’t been itching to finish a series like this for a long time. Miriam Black by Chuck Wendig came close – a real balls-to-the-wall visceral experience. But this reading has been a much more wholesome and fulfilling experience. A fire that burns through and consumes you. A little shit-kicker of a thriller with plot twists and action galore. Blake Crouch really knows how to keep you dangling by the barest of the thread, crouched on th...

Vicious is a perfect book. There I said it. It’s such a riveting work of fiction – about Superheroes and their morality. And mortality . Striking a fine balance between these two concepts, Victoria guides us along on this breakneck revenge-saga – a tour of the moral meltdown of two sociopathic mad geniuses who play at Superheroes on a singular mission to exact   revenge for a wrong done in their past. And all the collateral damage that affects this singled-minded focus of these two superheroes so caught up in their own invincibility and clearly a judgment clouded by hubris.    Sounds confusing?   It really is not. It’s a wonderfully written novel that centers around two arch-nemeses superheroes out to destroy each other. Here is the condensed version of the story. Eli and Victor are the super-over-achievers, razor-sharp students at Lockland University intent on outsmarting each other. Being social pariahs, they are driven to do bizarre ex...

it's no secret that I have been a HUGE fan of Joe Abercrombie. Lord GrimDark of everything dark and gritty, I have been a worshiper of that pantheon since the times of the First Law trilogy . First he went on to skewer the usual fantasy tropes by writing his own version of a high-fantasy epic - complete with an all-powerful mage, a conflicted tortured barbarian as the hero and a crippled torturer probably being the most endearing enigmatic protagonist of that series. Pretty much spinning the tropes on their heads and then taking an axe to butcher them. Then came his version of the revenge saga . Tarantino amped up on speed. Full dark, no stars, no redemption, splattered with gore and black blood, the number of bodies falling hitting the stratosphere. Then was his version of the military fantasy . Again a bitter-sweet ironical saga that details the uselessness of war and that there are truly no heroes. written in his own inimitable style dripping with the black gallows humor t...