Target: Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch. Translated by Andrew Bromfield Profile: Urban Fantasy, Suspense, Horror, The Watches Pentalogy (Read in stereotypical movie preview voiceover) In a world where epic battles between good and evil are a dime a dozen on the Teen Fantasy shelves, one Russian author struggles to bring a sense of subtly and realism to stories about vampires, werewolves and wizards. (End voiceover) And that’s to his credit. Lukyanenko’s vision of a supernatural world where nothing is as it seems sounds trite on paper, but […]
True Detective, Texas-style
Like everyone else, I’ve been swept up by the amazing True Detective on HBO. The storytelling and acting are really great, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens this weekend on the finale. I really have no idea where its going — but I love reading the theories and speculations all over the internet. Yellow King, Carcosa, Spaghetti Monster, Rust Cohle — they are all amazing creations. I had no idea that the series’ writer, Nic Pizzolatto, was also a novelist. Galveston is about […]
NOT Another Historical Romance. I’m Joking, Of Course. It’s Three Historical Romances.
Who else loves to see an autocratic hero brought down a peg? My newfound delight in Juliana Gray continues with the historical romance trilogy Affairs by Moonlight which includes A Lady Never Lies, A Gentleman Never Tells, and A Duke Never Yields. If you read them in order, you have two books to wait before the aforementioned peg lowering and they are a really enjoyable ride. The Set Up: It’s 1890. Three aristocratic/aristocrat adjacent English men rent a villa in Tuscany to escape Society, explore […]
Batman; the long Halloween (it’s because they kill people)
A murder on halloween kicks off a year of murders in the mafia family. It is a year where almost all well known batman characters are instantiated; the killings continue every subsequent holiday. Batman is trying to catch the killer, but as in all the best batman-stories he is really just the path that the mystery walks upon. The story is well drawn, and incredibly well crafted. Loeb and Sale play with story telling techniques brilliantly executing some of the best themes throughout Batman; the […]