The Lake of Souls by Darren Shan

In The Lake of Souls, the tenth book in Darren Shan’s CIRQUE DU FREAK series, we take a little breather after the horrid events at the end of the previous novel, Killers of the Dawn. Darren has just lost someone who’s really important to him and he’s grieving. So, when Mr. Tiny shows up and tells Harkat it’s time to find out who Harkat really is, Darren wants to go with him. They embark on a quest where they cross weird landscapes, meet weird people, and complete weird tasks. Some of it is like a scavenger hunt.

We do, indeed find out who Harkat is, and the answer will almost certainly surprise you. It shows that author Darren Shan has been careful with his plotting so far and it will be interesting to see what role Harkat plays in the future. The little guy is growing on me and I appreciate his developing sense of humor.

Personally, I don’t particula... Read More

The Prince of Lies by Anne Lyle

Warning: This review may contain spoilers of the previous books.

The Prince of Lies, by Anne Lyle, finishes up the NIGHT'S MASQUE trilogy with plenty of magic, adventure and suspense. I wish it had more skraylings in it. I should be more specific. I wish it had more skraylings in their native form. Instead Mal Catlyn, his wife Coby and twin brother Sandy  must uncover and defeat the skraylings known as “guisers;” humans who are possessed by skrayling souls that entered their bodies instead of a skrayling infant’s, the normal process for their race. This particular group of guisers, who have been in Europe longer than most people realized, have plans to rule England.

Lyle tweaked the historical line of succession in the first book, The Alchemist of Souls, by creating a seventeenth century England where Queen... Read More

Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers

Having recently seen Saving Mr. Banks, a film that purports to examine the strained relationship between author P.L. Travers and film-maker Walt Disney when it came to adapting Mary Poppins for the big screen, it was only natural that I finally got around to my long overdue reading of the classic children's story Mary Poppins.

Having grown up with the Disney film, it's quite shocking to realize how little one resembles the other. Of course, I knew there would be significant differences — the film is filled with animation and musical numbers, for a start. But I... Read More

The Heaven Makers by Frank Herbert

The Chem are a race of aliens unknown to humankind. Because they’re immortal, they’re bored. So, for entertainment, they broadcast drama TV from Earth. Fraffin is one of the most successful producers of human drama. Authorities from his home planet suspect he may be manipulating events on Earth, which is forbidden, so they send Investigator Kelexel to find out what’s going on. But Fraffin has a way of dealing with snoopy investigators. All he has to do is trap them by tempting them with Earth’s secret pleasures.

In actuality, Fraffin is indeed interfering with humans and creating his own dramas to boost his ratings. For his current project, which he’s been setting up for decades, he incites a well-respected man to brutally butcher his wife. Before being taken to jail, the man asks psychologist Androcles Thurlow to look after his daughter, Ruth, who is Thurlow’s ex-fiance. When Thurlow gets involv... Read More

Killers of the Dawn by Darren Shan

Killers of the Dawn, the ninth of Darren Shan’s CIRQUE DU FREAK books, continues right where Allies of the Night left off. The vampaneze have taken Debbie hostage in the tunnels under the city, but they’ve let Darren, Mr. Crepsley, and Vancha go. After escaping, Darren and company decide (not too smartly) to go back to the apartment they’ve been staying in where they have a run-in with the police. The rest of the plot involves captures, escapes, rescues, hiding, poor decisions, battles, death, and a couple of big surprises. At the end of Killers of the Dawn, life has changed for Darren and there’s a huge twist. Many readers will have seen this coming, but it’s still a major turning point in the story.

These CIRQUE DU FREAK books are very short (around 4 to 5 hours on audio). The twelve books could have easily been combined into half as many. A... Read More

Allies of the Night by Darren Shan

In Allies of the Night, the eighth book in Darren Shan’s CIRQUE DU FREAK series, Darren, Mr. Crepsley and Harkat return to Mr. Crepsley’s hometown to investigate the vampaneze activity there. This is the city we visited many years ago in the third book, Tunnels of Blood, where Darren met his first and only girlfriend, Debbie. Darren still has the body of a young teenager so when he gets to the city, he is discovered by the authorities and forced to go to school (Very Unlikely Event #1). He agrees to go (Very Unlikely Event #2). His English teacher is Debbie (VUE #3). As much as this made me roll my eyes, I was really happy that Debbie corrected Darren’s bad grammar.

Romance between Darren and Debbie is a little difficult right now because 1. The teacher-student relationshi... Read More

Hunters of the Dusk by Darren Shan

Hunters of the Dusk is the seventh book in Darren Shan’s CIRQUE DU FREAK series. Though Shan always does a nice job of quickly and sufficiently recapping the plot, it’d be best not to start here. Go back and begin with A Living Nightmare. And be warned that this review will contain spoilers for previous books.

It’s been six years since the events of The Vampire Prince. Young Darren Shan is now one of the leaders of the vampires because making him a prince was the only way that the other princes could legally excuse him for failing to pass the trials. Frankly, this part of the plot is disappointing. It’s hard to believe, first, that Darren had to do the trials at all, and second, that the vampire princes can’t manage to change or otherwise get around the ancient rules. And, if making Darren a prince gets him above the law so that he doesn�... Read More

The Emperor’s Blades by Brian Staveley

Have you ever noticed how sometimes your reading seems to fall into a recognizable pattern? Sometimes it’s an obvious similarity of plot, sometimes it’s one of character (I still fondly recall my Pre-20th Century Whore run of The Dress Lodger, The Crimson Petal and The White, Slammerkin Read More

Trials of Death by Darren Shan

In Vampire Mountain, the previous book of Darren Shan’s CIRQUE DU FREAK series, Darren was asked to prove himself worthy of being a vampire by surviving a series of trials. If he fails, he dies. These trials will remind many readers of the tests Harry Potter endured in The Goblet of Fire. For example, for the first trial he must escape from a maze that’s filling with water. As the tasks go on, Darren becomes increasingly injured and fatigued and it seems likely that he’ll fail and be killed.

In my review of Vampire Mountain, I complained about the premise of this novel. I think most thoughtful readers will agree that making Darren undergo the trials is a little silly, not to mention ethically unsound, which is surprising since the vampire princes seem to be concerned with eth... Read More

Griffin’s Egg by Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick’s Griffin’s Egg tries as much to be retro sci-fi as it does to push the limits of the genre — or at least the limits when the novella was published in 1991. The story of a industrial worker on the moon who must deal with the spillover of violence from Earth to the point of post-humanism, Swanwick’s effort succeeds as much as it could be improved, making Griffin’s Egg at least marginally effective.

Gunther Weil is an employee of G5, one of the biggest industries mining the moon for metals and raw materials. Though working on a voluntary contract, he holds no place in his heart for the rote and plethora of bureaucracy, the rubbish strewn about th... Read More

Vampire Mountain by Darren Shan

It’s been six years since the events of the previous book, Tunnels of Blood. Darren and Mr. Crepsley have been travelling with the Cirque du Freak, but this is the year that the Vampire Council meets in Vampire Mountain and so it’s time for Mr. Crepsley to present Darren to the other vampires. Thus they set off on the long and perilous journey to Vampire Mountain, bringing with them two of the mysterious Little People who belong to the even more mysterious Mr. Tiny. Along the way they encounter a friendly wolf pack and we learn that wolves are cousins to vampires and that Mr. Tiny has something to do with the breeding program. The travelers also encounter various frightening and foreboding signs that the vampaneze are getting ready to attack and it turns out that Harkat, one of the Little People traveling with them, is bringing a warning message from Mr. Tiny for the vampire princes. According to... Read More

Tunnels of Blood by Darren Shan

Warning: This is the third book in the CIRQUE DU FREAK series, so this review will contain spoilers for the previous books. You don’t have to read the previous books because author Darren Shan gives a short but sufficient recap, but starting at the beginning would be ideal.

Mr. Crepsley is the only full vampire that Darren had ever met until Gavner Purl, Vampire General, shows up at the Cirque du Freak. After Purl meets with Mr. Crepsley, Darren is told that he and his mentor will be taking a little break from the freak show and going to live in a city while Crepsley takes care of some business there. Darren is allowed to bring his friend Evra the snake-boy.

At first the city is fun and Darren even meets a girl who becomes his first girlfriend. But then things start going badly, as they always do. Darren and Evra see a news report which says that corpses have been showing up ... Read More

When It’s a Jar by Tom Holt

When It’s a Jar is Tom Holt’s sequel to last year’s Doughnut. It can stand alone, but you probably want to at least read about Doughnut first (here is Stefan’s review). In Doughnut, physicist Theo Bernstein made a math error which blew up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider. Then from his friend, a famous physicist, he inherits a bottle which is a portal to the multiverse he never knew existed. Now he can travel to different parallel universes through the holes in doughnuts. Or bagels work, too.

In When It’s a Jar, Theo is back and is again having some life-threatening trouble with the multiverse. He’s stuck in a jar and keeps having his memories wiped. Each time he has to start over, reconstructing all of his knowledge about the world and his situation from “first p... Read More

Doughnut by Tom Holt

Theo Bernstein accidentally put a decimal point one place to the left instead of the right and, thusly, caused the Very Very Large Hadron Collider to explode, thereby disintegrating an entire Alp and becoming one of the most hated men alive. Coincidentally, Shliemann Brothers, the company that held all his investments, went bust at just about the same time, so, well, things aren’t going great for Theo.

After Theo receives an apple, a seemingly empty bottle and a small pink powder compact as part of an inheritance from his friend and former physics professor Pieter van Goyen, he ends up working at a huge but mostly empty hotel. There, he accidentally stumbles into what appears to be a parallel universe, and from that point on, things start getting weird…

Doughnut is the first novel I’ve read by Tom Holt. Even though it’s not that great, I laughed out loud more t... Read More

Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre by H.P. Lovecraft

For those who just can’t get enough Lovecraft, Blackstone Audio has just released this lovely collection of a significant portion of his work. It contains 56 of his horror stories, poems, letter excerpts, and essays. Notably missing are his longer works (e.g., “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”) and a few of his most popular short stories which are so often collected elsewhere (e.g., “The Call of Cthulhu,” and “The Dunwich Horror”).

Most of the stories in Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre are vaguely related to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, or at least his general premise that the universe is inhabited by a race of horrible ancient gods who sleep but are occasionally awakened by cultish worshipers from the darker regions of our planet... worshipers who usually eventually go mad.

Here are the stories... Read More