Smorgasbord Fantasia

Bite , the first book in the Wastelanders saga by KS Merbeth is a fun read, set in the post-apocalyptic barren earth ravaged by nuclear war. Unlike my first impressions about the book when I saw that chilling cover, the book subverted all my standard expectations - of this possibly being a romp in the dirty deserts with some flesh-craving zombies. Instead what we get, is an engrossing and highly immersive story of this young girl, nicknamed 'Kid' - an intimately personal story of her adventures and how she survives these brutal wastelands. It is also a well written tale about family (the pseudo one that she "stumbles" onto and decides to stick up for), friendships and relationships (borne out of necessity or need) and even questions the concept of humanity in these harsh, ruthless post-apocalyptic deserts. Kid has lost her father recently and is left to wandering the hot, brutal deserts of the wastelands - in search of food and water. That's when she comes ...

Let's get this out of the way first. Yes - it's a  Jay Kristoff  book. And that guy is right now everywhere! [  Dark Dawn  just released and it's a bestseller for all the good reasons - I am on that book right now, more on this later!] But  Illuminae  was probably an experiment. That went wildly successful. What else can you say about this beautiful beautiful book ! ( I mean literally! The physical copy of this book is a visual candy layered with all sorts of gooey goodness shots! It's an amazing piece of art!] A talented writer duo belting out a concept that bordered on insane: A space warship guiding a research ship adrift in the outer reaches of space somewhere, homeless and also hotly chased by another dreadnought hell bent on blasting them both out of existence. And well, when the future of everybody on-board depends on just these two teenagers, driven by heartbreak and longing for each other, that makes for a very thin premise indeed. Add ...

I confess I have never read anything by Kiersten White - and this book, And I Darken that is the opening salvo into an alternate history epic, The Conqueror's Saga - was a complete surprise package for me. I picked this up on a whim - wherein I read that the book is a twist on the historical facts about Vlad the Impaler and the tyrannical rule of the Ottoman Empire. What if Vlad had been female? But as I read the sampler, I realized Kiersten digs much deeper than just alternating the gender of Vlad, building up an entire world around these characters that are nothing more than just side-notes in the annals of history. There is rich detail, vivid imagination and scrumptious world-building at hand as Kiersten peels off the layers from that age of history where women were relegated to the Harems and siblings killed each other for the throne, bringing us a well-thought picture of what could have been. The first book follows the life of Ladislav Dragwlya known as Lada, daugh...

Every once in a while there comes along a well executed, darkly comic and exuberantly horrific story that forces you to just drop everything else, stay up way past your bedtime reading - dunking coffee to stay awake, looking over your shoulders all the time, grinning like an idiot while your heart is hammering away like a jazz concert on boosters till you hit the last line and then again, stay up all night just thinking about this book. This. Was. That. Book. I know I am perhaps two years late in reading this phenomenon of a book but good books persist beyond years. And hey apparently there's a movie being made on the book (and heck, I am not surprised as to how well this lends itself to being movie fodder! And Jason Arnopp himself is a scriptwriter with some serious credits to his name) So the Last Days of Jack Sparks is sort of an autobiographical account of this pop journalist Jack Sparks who is out to debunk the myths around the phenomenon of supernatural horror/...

Seanan McGuire is a prolific author - and whatever genre her novels may be in, she always infuses elements of strange and the horrific in some subtle ways to make all the stories darkly hypnotic and compelling. Her books have a charm, in the sense that before you know it, you are already a quarter of a way into the story. And then before you realize it, you get sucked in deeper and then you are staying up, past bedtime to just race to the end point. Addictive, is to put it mildly. And so with Every Heart a Doorway - a strange little love letter to the nomad in all of us, that part of us that never belonged, to those who never felt happy with their ties to their worldly possessions weighing them down - Seanan transports us to the boarding school of Eleanor West, who looks after those 'special' children who have tumbled through doors into different other worlds (like the Moors of blood-sucking monsters, the market of goblins, dancing skeletons) around us but for some ine...

So I admit, Language of dying is the first book by Sarah Pinborough that I read. And by Gods, am I hooked. Language of dying by Sarah refuses to be pigeon-holed into a specific category of fiction - And by far, this one definitely is a literary knock-out punch. A gut-wrenching, soul-rending song of a book which attempts to unravel the something called the  language of dying - Yup it exists. How much ever we deny the same, this is a language defies definition or capture but is indeed something that all of us have had to deal with one time or the other. It is not just the fact that she chose to write about something as morbid and shocking as death. In fact, it is Sarah's treatment of the subject. Honest, unflinching and just plain brave. The story is that of a father wracked by lung cancer, lying painfully in his death bed while the nameless narrator, the daughter is waiting on him to die, a hauntingly disturbing vigil as this drama play out against the backdrop of grey m...

Wake of Vultures hit all the right notes with me – right from the start. Trippy headlong ride into the weird wild west. Horrific monsters that go bump in the night – Vampires, skinwalkers, shapeshifters, vultures with claws and boobs that mock you and cackle in glee! You name it. The baddest of them being a monstrous Cannibal Owl that hunts and kills kids in the night! FTW!! Leading the charge against these horrors is an absolutely kickass protagonist, Nettie Lonesome – who’s as different from any conventional lead hero/heroine you’ve read about. Just like this book is an unconventionally refreshing and an absolutely delicious mash-up of elements like slack-jaw horror and mind-boggling world building of the wild-west minus the gunslinger tropes of old. But the heart of this book that appealed to me as a reader is the raw emotional core, the truths that cut away the cloak of childhood and helps the teenage protagonist come of age in a ruthless and brutal bad world. This i...

Peter McLean , I think is a rockstar in this genre. The darker seedier side of urban fantasy - with a protagonist like Don Drake and his snarky archdemon The Burned Man -  who are right up there, with say Miriam Black (Chuck Wendig) or the Sandman Slim series (Richard Kadrey). This series starts off in the best possible manner - introducing us to Drake and his pet archdemon in a gritty version of London – dark and violent like no man’s land. And Drake while not exactly a wall-flower, doesn’t really come across as a man you would consider making friends with soon. But for all his flaws, there is something redeemable about this crook who can summon demons from Hell to do his bidding as a ‘diabologist’ and has more to him than meets the eye, at first glance. I have to warn you that if you haven’t read book-one, Dominion is a sequel and middle-book in a series, following up closely on the events that transpired from the first book. But if you want a swimmingly good dark u...

Raven Song is the first book in this series called Inoki's Game , by IA Ashcroft  introducing us to this dark, dystopian world, teetering after a nuclear holocaust, filled with magic and inexplicable dangers. I took this up on a whim after I read the premise of the book. I signed up for the blog tour ( and as usual, I got a bit late in posting the review!) and started the same, the last week of my holiday season hoping I could whizz through it. Alas - a combination of reasons saw me plod through it and not wrap this up in time. Well, mainly two reasons. The pacing of the novel and of course, the new year rush that crowds in on your time. About the Book A century ago, the world burned. Even now, though rebuilt and defiant, civilization is still choking on the ashes. Jackson, a smuggler, lives in the shadows, once a boy with no memory, no name, and no future. Ravens followed him, long-extinct birds only he could see, and nightmares flew in their wake. Once, Jackson thought...

Robert Masello has risen up to the top tanks of my must-read authors, who can skillfully interweave historical fiction with mystery and intrigue. I admit to not having read this author before, but that is soon going to be rectified. An enticing mix of history, horror and literary, The Jekyll Revelation by the best-selling author of Einstein Prophecy caps off a good year of reading for me, 2016 and is definitely one of my favorite works this year. The Jekyll Revelation is a gripping thriller in which Masello takes one of the darkest chapters in the human history, namely the shocking and brutal murders by Jack the Ripper and deftly weaves his creative genius around it to create a riveting tale that imagines the dark evil depths the human mind can fall to. Split as two parallel narratives, one set in the late nineteenth century and the other in modern day, the story weaves these parallel threads together, subtly at first and then through this hair-raising revelation about ...

I have already been crooning about my die-hard love for Blake Crouch - His latest, Dark Matter - a twisted dark pretzel of a delightful science-fiction thriller was the icing on a noteworthy career full of glorious books. I first came across him before Wayward Pines became a TV Series. And now this - Good Behavior hit the small screens across America on TNT a month back and is raking up the TRP's, purportedly one of the best shows after Southland. I picked up the collection of three novellas after I came across this news but hey, it's a rule now! Anything Blake Crouch, sign me up for the ride baby! This man sure knows how to write a thriller, get your blood pressure roaring and ratcheting up the tension to levels often sharp enough to cut diamonds. So this one features Letty Dobesh , a thief, a meth-addict and a functioning alcoholic - fresh out of prison and looking to redeem herself. She has a young son, being taken care of by her own mother and probably wants to...

ABOUT THE BOOK: From the New York Times bestselling author of the Souls of Fire novels comes the second in the futuristic fantasy series that will make you want to keep the lights on... When the bombs that stopped the species war tore holes in the veil between worlds, they allowed entry to the Others. Now, a hundred years later, humans and shifters alike live in artificially lit cities designed to keep the darkness at bay.... The humanoid supersoldiers known as the déchet were almost eradicated by the war. Ever since, Tiger has tried to live her life in peace in hiding. But in the wake of her discovery that Central City’s children are being kidnapped and experimented on, Tiger’s conscience won’t let her look the other way. The key to saving them lies within the walls of a pharmaceutical company called Winter Halo. But as she learns more about the facility, Tiger’s mission is derailed by a complication: Winter Halo’s female security guards are being systematically at...

Jakkattu Series gets off to a fantastic start with this blistering action-packed alien contact story set in a dystopian earth featuring two remarkably gutsy female leads, rebelling against the ruling tyrants. I confess I haven’t read the prequel stories, Avendui 5ive set in the same world or the earlier works of PK Tyler . But when I got a review copy, my interest was piqued by the “Margaret Atwood of the indie scene” comparison. And after having rushed through this one, I am definitely looking to reading anything else from her. A year, when xenophobia has been termed as the word of the year by Dictionary.com, this book truly brings out a different dimension to that word. A startlingly original novel, The Jakkattu Vector is the first in a series that chronicles a disturbing contact story of aliens arriving on a ravaged earth destroyed by environmental disasters, but with veiled intentions and genetic experiments that go horribly wrong. The story begins on an exuber...

Welcome to another Novel Publicity tour! We're so excited for the release of The Jakkattu Vector by P.K. Tyler  ! I am halfway through with the book and it's mind-blowing stuff. Imaginative worldbuilding, posing some really tough questions in the guise of a well-packaged post-apocalyptic story of alien contact, poignant and disturbing at the same time. Look out for a review coming up soon! About the Book They came as saviors to a deteriorating Earth Julip Thorne questions whether there is more to life beyond the barren dirt, acidic seas, and toxstorms her people work and die in. Living in poverty on the withering Greenland Human Reservation, she wonders if the alien Mezna goddesses are truly as holy as the temple preaches. Julip begins to dig deeper into the history of the planet and her leaders’ rise to power. But nothing can prepare her for the atrocities she uncovers. Meanwhile, Jakkattu prisoner Sabaal suffers constant torture and heinous medical experiments...