There’s something about watching a fantasy series really hit its stride. No matter how good an initial entry in a series is, there’s always a fair bit of expositional license-plate-making that has to be taken care of, thus there’s always room for growth, for the author to take everything cool about the series and turn it up to eleven. A Storm of Swords immediately springs to mind, as do The Two Towers and Memories of Ice. And now, so too does The Well of Ascension, […]
C’mon, Luv. Let’s Go Do Druggy Sex Magic!
[Sound the Second Novel Alarm! Spoilers for The Magicians ahead. I mean it this time.] The Magicians was an exercise in literary frustration for me. I loved it. It was wonderful. Its adherence to explaining away its every mystery absolutely infuriated me. Reading it a second time allowed me to be well aware that the breathtakingly horrific things that occurred in the unfurling of Lev Grossman’s fantasy novel cioppino would not remain the unexplainable night terrors of a magical world beyond our reckoning and to simply enjoy the […]
And Is Probably More Hygienic Than Most Bikers
Occasionally timing is simply not on our side. Shortly after posting my review for Paul Chapman’s Porn Gnomes and Other Strange Tales, the author had a twenty four hour giveaway of his three collections, free to anyone who might have liked to download them from Amazon. Though I would have liked to have spread the good word, it was only at the very end of that day that I saw the announcement, and the price shortly thereafter returned to normal. Then again, maybe that’s for the best. The […]
Everything happens in this book: Snow Crash
Hiro Protagonist (yeah, that’s his name) is a pizza deliverer in an unspecified future. Pizza delivery is run by the mafia and is super important. All pizzas must be delivered within 30 minutes or huge, major consequences happen. Long story short he crashes in a pool and meets Y.T a spunky skate-board-car-surfer. She delivers the pizza and thus befriends the mafia. And then Hiro is also a hacker and there is a huge virtual world called the metaverse. And in this metaverse there is a […]