Author Archive: Dave Brzeski
Hell’s Bounty by Joe R. Lansdale and John L. Lansdale (book review).
‘Hell’s Bounty’ is a book with a chequered history! The copy I received from the SFCrowsnest review stockpile was the original Subterranean Press paperback edition, which is now long out of print. Since then, Short Scary Tales Publications in the UK, picked it up, but again it went out of print. Now it has yet […]
Corpse Light (Verity Fassbender book 2) by Angela Slatter (book review).
For those unfamiliar with the set up in this series, Verity Fassbinder is a ‘strangeling’…half-human, half-Weyrd. ‘The Weyrd’ is a term for all the supernatural creatures of legend, who actually do exist. They live under an agreement with the humans in the know…which means they’ll not eat humans in return for being allowed to live […]
Vigil (The Verity Fassbinder series book 1) by Angela Slatter (book review).
When I saw this in the SFCrowsnest list of unclaimed review copies, it immediately struck me as something I might like. I’ve always been a fan of stories that combine detective fiction with the supernatural. Having said that, I generally prefer the supernatural element to not be too common. Worlds that have every sort of […]
Ghost Frequencies by Gary Gibson (book review).
I’d never previously read anything by Gary Gibson, so I picked this one, ‘Ghost Frequencies’, out of the review pile on the strength of the title and the publisher. Apparently, Gibson is generally known for writing hard SF, so this mash-up of quantum mechanics with a ghost story is a bit of a departure for […]
Matryoshka by Ricardo Pinto (book review).
‘Matryoshka’ is an odd one to say the least. It’s an adult variation on a classic children’s story trope in that the protagonist, Cherenkov, lost in Venice in the aftermath of the second world war, meets a beautiful redhead, Septima. After a passionate encounter, she leads him through a door at the back of a […]
Soot And Steel: Dark Tales Of London edited by Ian Whates (book review).
Editor Ian Whates provides a fascinating introduction to this book, ‘Soot And Steel: Dark Tales Of London’, telling us how the chance discovery of a slim novel written by Arthur Morrison in 1902, along with memories of his own early years in London, inspired this collection and how he came to the decision to mix […]
Comet Weather by Liz Williams (book review).
‘Comet Weather’ is a story of four half-sisters and the search for their mother, who has been missing for a year. That could easily be the opening line of the description of a common or garden family mystery/drama, with no fantastic elements whatsoever. Anyone expecting something like that has never read a Liz Williams book […]
The Complete Short Stories Of Mike Carey (book review).
Despite having been a fan of Mike Carey’s work for quite some time, I am, perhaps one of the few people to have neither read nor seen the film version of ‘The Girl With All The Gifts’. While I do intend to rectify this situation at some point, I was actually grateful, as it allowed […]
Knightwatch: Invictus X (Invictaverse book 1) by Mark Ellis (book review).
This book was first conceived as a comic series, back in the 1980s, when Mark Ellis was the primary writer/ideas man for Adventure Publications. Ellis states in his ‘Author’s Note’ that he was asked to create a super-hero team following the dark, ‘adult’ tone of Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’. He wasn’t greatly interested in copying the […]
Chasm by Stephen Laws (book review).
There were a couple of factors I wasn’t aware of when I accepted a pdf review copy of this book from PS Publishing: Firstly, that it was actually a new edition of a book that originally came out just over 20 years ago. In fact, this is the first book release of the complete, restored […]
