Smorgasbord Fantasia

Titanshade by Dan Stout has to be the most enjoyable urban fantasy book that I have read in the recent past. It is gritty noir, a police-procedural set in a masterfully created world. An absolute blast of fresh air - doesn't read like a debut at all. Dan Stout's writing is a great balance of assured masterful storytelling gorgeous world building and some compelling characters. The narrative is relentlessly paced, starting off as a murder mystery investigation set in this dark gritty town fraught with suspense and perils before heading down the lanes of twisty political intrigue - all of this headlined by a brooding cop hero named Carter, who's been dogged by misfortunes all his life and now has a penchant for the bottle but also built up a reputation for solving crimes. An excellent nose for detective work and perhaps trouble. If you think you've read this before, then think again. Be prepared, for Titanshade will blow your mind wide open and then some. Titanshad...

With this novella from Tor.com, Daniel Polansky has become my all-time favorite grim-dark author. Builders packs in quite a lot of punch in this small novella, just over hundred and ninety pages that is a unique mix of spaghetti western by way of blood-soaked revenge story featuring fantastical furry intelligent animals banding together for one final "job". This is my introduction to Polansky's works - having missed out the Low Town series of books - and what an introduction! Bullets flying fast, furry feathers exploding everywhere, sparse and stark dark humor filling up the silence left in the narrative when this anthropomorphic fantasy gets rolling. It's sheer genius to have got this right. And Daniel does a bang-up job of investing us in the bleak future of this group of animals - getting ready Kill-Bill style to avenge an old slight against a powerful enemy who had split them up once before. A band of friends, getting together for that one last job is s...

Revenge is a dish we are all very familiar with – We have seen this in movies made immortal by Lee Marvin ( Point Blank ) and Quentin Tarantino ( Kill Bill ) – With a name such as “ Best Served Cold ”, Abercrombie makes no bones about what this book is going to be about. But heck, this is Joe Abercrombie we are talking about.  The lord of grim dark , an entirely new sub-genre that he has breathed life into and carved himself a bloody throne out of. So when news comes out that Abercrombie is penning a revenge novel set in the cruel grim world as that of the First Law trilogy, you can’t help feel the goose-bumps break out all over your arms and you wait on a bed of nails until you can dive back into the gore-spattered, crazy dark world slick with blood, sweat and grime, where seasons may change but the only constant thing is death and treachery.  While First Law was mostly Abercrombie’s attempt at skewering the standard fantasy tropes and introducing us to som...

Part-2 of the First Law trilogy.  With such a spell-binding title to a middle-book of a trilogy ( one that evokes grim visuals of dark shadows hanging down from a broken tree at the end of the street and gusting in the wind surely?) one HAS to get swept into it.  It’s been a while since I last read “The Blade Itself” – the epic fantasy debut that explosively launched Joe Abercrombie onto the Fantasy writing scene. While I enjoyed him taking the usual fantasy tropes and then giving them his own bloody “gritty” little twist to make them realistic and super dark, I was not going gaga over it. It was a good book, a 3-star one with some fantastic violent action scenes and the usual generous dose of politicking intrigue. Then I read “Heroes” – one hailed by many to be Mr. Abercrombie’s finest effort till date. I was hooked. This man was greater than the First of the Magi when it came to spinning a violent gritty tale of war. So I cut back to the unfinished tri...