When I was about 14 or so, my family was in Wisconsin visiting relatives. We decided to go see Taliesin, but when we got there and my parents found out that tickets were like $50 a person, or maybe they were sold out or something, we had to find something else to do last minute. We ended up at the House on the Rock. Now, if you’ve never been to the House on the Rock, I can’t do it justice with sheer words. I simply […]
A fantasy classic where the hero refers to monsters as “those guys”
Contains Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, Sign of the Unicorn, The Hand of Oberon, The Courts of Chaos I’ve given myself ample time to sit on this book (or collection of books?) and mull it over. Zelazny is one of the fantasy greats and this, my first exposure to him, is supposed to be a fine example of that greatness. I didn’t dislike The Chronicles of Amber, overall. There were parts of it I liked a lot. But the reading experience was […]
She Alone Will Wield the Strength and Skill….
This was April’s Vaginal Fantasy pick and I’m going to come right out and admit that I did not finish it. I probably would have finished it, it was annoying but brainless, except that while reading the VF discussion boards I learned that it ends on a cliffhanger and I have no desire to plod though eye-roll inducing trope usage only to find out that the author can’t even write a complete story. This is an ongoing complaint of mine, I have no problem with […]
Dragonopolis Sounds like Every Fantasy Nerd’s Idea of Heaven
I could almost swear that I’ve read this book before, except that I haven’t according to Goodreads. It is entirely possible that I read a hardcover copy of the book and simply forgot to mark that down, but I’m still not really sure. Even though the book feels very familiar, as if I’ve read it before, nothing in it really triggered the certainty that I actually have and so I’m left with this uncomfortable feeling of uncertain déjà vu. The book, and its follow up, […]
He told the tale as he believed it.
I can’t tell if I liked the music scenes/parts of this novel. I really can’t, maybe because I just don’t care about the rapture of live music that much or more to the point, the times I have felt it, I don’t think I would have enjoyed reading about it. It’s a sui generis experience captured in a singular moment and so a description of it automatically loses the magic of it. I can’t think of something much more impossible to describe than this. However, […]
Meanwhile, inside the Brotherhood of Mutants
I started writing the synopsis for this story and everything made it sound like pretty much what you’d get if you set a story in Discworld’s Thieves’s Guild merged with the Assassins’s Guild with a splash of the Fast and Furious franchise. Which it kind of is. But isn’t entirely.* And it works. Tori Rivas gets busted while breaking into a secret file cabinet of a global tech firm. See, Tori was unaware that the firm is owned by one of the world’s most infamous […]