Reviews and Comments

Lovecraft's most famous story, The Call of Cthulhu, starts with: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." His stories almost always dealt with researchers finding out more than they bargained for. Knowledge of the existence of the Great Old Ones was enough to destroy sanity.

Darkness Below had none of that. Arkham and Miskatonic University are treated as places where Sabrina the teenage witch would have felt at home. Kooky, witchy and hiply supernatural. Students regularly perform rituals and seem to have no problem dealing with creatures from beyond. The book is more fantasy than horror and just wasn't for me. It's not even fantasy so much as romantasy.

Lovecraft's baroque and florid descriptive prose is replaced by a breezy, fast paced narrative that rarely takes the time to describe what anything looks like. I never felt emotionally invested in the text. Never felt for the characters, never felt the atmosphere of any of the ostensibly creepy places we visit. The book just left me cold.

The characters are fairly flat and behave as they must on order to move the plot along. The main character, Ellen, is a rich, good-looking and confident blonde who is treated as a social pariah for no reason I could see except that it fit the narrative.

Her sparring partner/love interest is the charming dickhead teacher Andrew Carter. He acts as expected.

We're introduced to a friend of Carter's, Connie something. I thought 'oh, this guy will take Ellen under his wing and introduce her to Carter's world.' Instead, he unexpectedly becomes a hateful jerk for reasons that were murky at best.

I didn't like the characters, didn't like the writing and didn't like the story. That cover is pretty awesome though.

For a licensed property, Micronauts have been pretty lucky. The original series benefited greatly from the talents of Michael Golden, making it a classic of seventies comics.

There's a trilogy of paperback novels that I have, but haven't yet read.

And now there's the more recent series by Cullen Bunn. How'd he do? Pretty well, I'd say.

Unlike later toylines GI Joe and Transformers, Micronauts doesn't have a built-in back story or even characters. New creators are free to interpret the weird world of the Micronauts as they see fit.

This is a benefit for new readers. There's no need to be aware of anything about the Micronauts previous adventure to jump in here.

Micronauts remains pure sci-fi adventure, along the lines of Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica. It seems there is a civil war going on between the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Science while a phenomena known as the entropy storm is wiping out entire planets. Into this steps our Pharoid hero Han Solo. I mean... TBH I can't remember his name. And that is the problem this series has. While the story itself is fun and interesting and it's great to see a new spin put on familiar names (Acroyear, Biotron, Microtron and Baron Karza are all here, but not necessarily as you remember them), the characters themselves are a bit generic. Karza is easily the most interesting.

It's with a read. It really is a good series. But it's just a little too slight. Likely because Bunn knew he was a hired gun with a limited time. I really would have liked to see more depth, like the effort Mantlo and Golden put into the seventies series. That isn't here. But what's here is still good, even if it isn't Golden.

I picked up The Ninja hoping for the literary equivalent of the old Cannon schlock-action Ninja movies. And at its’ best, The Ninja is that. But the problem is that too often the book is something else, something less good.

The book starts with a bang, as a ninja assassinates... some guy. But then, ugh, this book gets awful. The next hundred or so pages or so are a romance. We spend time getting to know our leads, Nicholas and Justine as they get to know each other. I hated them.

Nicholas was a vapid Mary Sue who made major life-changes for no discernible reason at all. Early on he abruptly quits his advertising job on the brink of wild success. But no worries, he is offered a job as a teacher at Columbia despite his lack of qualification or any interest in the job.

Justine came off as a snob who speaks like Mrs. Howell and also casually refers to homosexuals with British slang for cigarettes. I understand the book was written in 1982, but even in the 40's, authors knew that having their femme fatale casually use at-the-time acceptable slurs would be a turn-off.

I finally understand what is meant by 'florid prose'. It's almost like two writers wrote this book: when the POV is on a minor character, the writing is decent enough. But when the POV shifts to our hero, oh buddy. Such gems as "He was quite startled to see that her face in profile seemed remarkably different, as if he was seeing her now from the perspective of a different age, some other life." A little of this would be fine, but it is paragraph after paragraph. We're talking romance novel levels of turgidness.

I was also surprised by the porn-y detailed descriptions of sex. Hey, I enjoy me some smut. But the graphic sex combined with the purple prose made me laugh out loud at least once.

Also, the book wallows in the 'inscrutable Asian' stereotype. Or, to be generous, Romantic Orientalism. The idea that Asian mindsets were just so different from our Western ways that we just couldn't understand. And this book was published several years after Shōgun was a pop-culture juggernaut.

The Ninja is overly long. It could easily have lost two hundred pages, as it spends time covering the history of Japan from the end of World War II which is all interesting, but at best tangentially related to our New York story of a ninja hunting down a scummy billionaire. On the other hand, the love story of Nick and Justine wouldn’t have kept me reading. The extra bits and bobs did. So maybe it was a smart move.

Finally, after far too many pages, the ninja remembers why he’s in the story and that’s when I finally started to get my Golan & Globus cheesy action film goodness. Lustbader doesn’t write the best action scenes, but they were good enough.

Lustbader doesn’t stick the landing though. The book comes to a natural end, but it is stretched out with an unsatisfying plot twist and set-up for the sequel.

In the end, eh, it was fine. But the negatives outweighed the positives. I doubt I’ll read the sequel.

Ugh, this book is awful. I finally understand what is meant by 'florid prose'. It's almost like two writers wrote this book: when the POV is on a minor character, the writing is decent enough. But when the POV shifts to our hero, oh buddy. Such gems as "He was quite startled to see that her face in profile seemed remarkably different, as if he was seeing her now from the perspective of a different age, some other life." A little of this would be fine, but it is paragraph after paragraph. We're talking romance novel levels of turgidness.

I was also surprised by the porn-y detailed descriptions of sex. Hey, I enjoy me some smut. But the graphic sex combined with the purple prose made me laugh out loud at least once.

I hated the main characters, Nicholas and Justine.

Nicholas was a vapid Mary Sue who made major life-changes for no discernible reason at all. Early on he abruptly quits his advertising job on the brink of wild success. But no worries, he is offered a job as a teacher at Columbia despite his lack of qualification or any interest in the job.

Justine came off as a snob who speaks like Mrs. Howell and also casually refers to homosexuals with British slang for cigarettes. I understand the book was written in 1982, but even in the 40's, authors knew that having their femme fatale casually use at-the-time acceptable slurs would be a turn-off.

Also, the book wallows in the 'inscrutable Asian' stereotype. Or, to be generous, Romantic Orientalism. The idea that Asian mindsets were just so different from our Western ways that we just couldn't understand. And this book was published several years after Shōgun was a pop-culture juggernaut.

What an awful book.

Don't get me wrong. I knew going in that this was a porn novel. I've read one of Sebastian Lamb's previous literary masterpieces, The Secret Meeting. So I was familiar with the format and the author. But the idea of The Slasher holds so much promise: a gay erotic thriller dealing in the gay world. Maybe like Cruising without the mainstream constraints. Sign me up!

But that idea is let down by the author's inability to rise to the occasion. He clearly didn't know much about police work and was winging it all the way through. An eyewitness sees the killer in his vehicle moments before the killer strikes again. The police interview the witness, but our hero cop is so busy flirting with the hunky guy they barely talk about what he saw. That information is never shown being put to any use. The detective is squeamish and on the edge of vomiting at every crime scene.

But the worst part of this book was the writing. Mr. Lamb never met a run-on sentence he didn't like. Sentences will take up an entire paragraph, changing subject several times; Here is an example of what I had to wade through reading this book: "He dropped his hand into his lap, groped the throbbing hard-on he had felt rising, and then let out the brake, stepped down hard on the accelerator, aiming the van carefully, his body tense, taut, alert, and at the last moment, before the van crashed into the side of the junk-car heap, leaped agilely to the ground, losing his footing, falling, rolling, but free of the rushing tons of steel, unhurt, except for his dignity in lack of grace, but who was to know? there was no one about to see." There are many of these beauties in the book.

I know it's not fair to expect a porn book to be as entertaining as a regular novel. But I did and it wasn't.

A newly established boys prep school is run by a hunky headmaster and his hunky partner, the athletics coach. Whisper was not at all what I was expecting.

It's not a porn book at all. In the end it was a poorly written melodrama with homosexual themes. At a time when such books were rare, you take what you can get. But the book isn't sexy enough to be enjoyable smut, nor is it well written enough to be interesting pulp. And the ending is an insulting cop out.

Ultimately, this book is a real piece of crap, not worth rediscovering.

Eh, it's a gay porn novel, so manage your expectations.

While attempting to dial a friend, actor Chris misdials a hotel instead. Suddenly Randy, he decides to place an obscene call to a random room. This goes better than expected and he hits it off with the mystery man on the other end of the line, Kyle.

The rest of the novel is Chris falling head over heels for Kyle while contrivance after contrivance keeps them from meeting face to face.

The sex scenes are fun, though not as wild as the best porn paperbacks. Chris's obsession/overwrought emotional state became a core to Wade through. But it wasn't bad. I'll read more Sebastian Lamb.

Eh, it's a gay porn novel, so manage your expectations.

While attempting to dial a friend, actor Chris misdials a hotel instead. Suddenly Randy, he decides to place an obscene call to a random room. This goes better than expected and he hits it off with the mystery man on the other end of the line, Kyle.

The rest of the novel is Chris falling head over heels for Kyle while contrivance after contrivance keeps them from meeting face to face.

The sex scenes are fun, though not as wild as the best porn paperbacks. Chris's obsession/overwrought emotional state became a core to Wade through. But it wasn't bad. I'll read more Sebastian Lamb.

I'm truly surprised to be the first review here. In The Red was an excellent pastiche of the 1930's Weird Tales/Cosmic Horror stories, mixing elements of Lovecraft and The King in Yellow.

A chaplain in a 1930's Civilian Conservation Corps camp is approached by a local mountain man who wants to show him an ancient paved road on his property he claims was built by the Cherokee, though the chaplain (a history buff) knows that they never built such a thing.

In The Red has all the Weird Tales ingredients: a disreputable local, a standoffish scholarly type, mysterious artifacts and a sanity-shredding revelation. As a novella, it is long enough not to feel rushed, but short enough to not wear out its welcome. Recommended.