The Book: Secret of the Sands by Rai Aren & Tavius E

Review Category: E-Submitted requested review.

The Blurb: For 12,000 years a dark and deadly secret has been hidden deep below the Great Sphinx of Giza. In present day Egypt, a frightening, yet awe-inspiring story unravels as archaeologists race against time to decipher an ancient truth…

Preview Available: At http://www.secretofthesands.com/sossample.pdf

Would I buy this? Er… no.

The Product: I received a PDF reviewer’s copy but the PDF typography was indistinguishable from a commercial publication. So I would take that as a guide. The whole product’s pretty darn nifty in a production values way. I spotted maybe three typos. So no more than a real book.

The Nitty Gritty:

STRANGLED shouts echoed throughout the temple as torchlight flickered outside the entrance. Several battle-hardened soldiers pounded on the door, trying to force their way in.

These opening sentences capture Secret of The Sands better than I could hope to describe them without direct reference. Let’s take a closer look shall we?

Firstly we open with some passive shouts. Who is shouting? Is it the battle-hardened soldiers? Or are we talking about some unknown other actor who is as yet unrevealed? And what relation do these shouts have to the torchlight flickering outside the entrance. We could infer, as the soldiers are pounding on the door and the shouts are echoing throughout the temple that the soldiers are merely pounding and the shouters are others whom we have not yet been introduced to.

Which leads us into… well, confusion. Utter confusion. Where are we looking and what are we looking at? Why are we looking at it? The strangled shouts are echoing but we don’t know why they are doing so before we can even ask we are instructed to pay heed to some torches which are flickering, as torches often do, outside the place where the strangled shouts we are now supposed to ignore were echoing. There are several soldiers who are apparently pounding on the door of the temple, this doesn’t do a good enough job of telling us that they did not merely forget their keys so we must be told further to this that they are trying to gain entrance by force. Oh, by the way, did I mention that the soldiers are “battle-hardened” all several of them. Uh huh. True dat.

I mean. Please. God.

It doesn’t let up. Ham fisted failures to signpost trip over cliched descriptions in their rush to avoid the clumsy verbiage of cluttered sentences. Then, when you think your brain couldn’t possibly weep any more, the utterly unengaging 0.5 dimensional characters interact using dialogue cut out of a children’s “action” cartoon from the 1960s in order to make unenthralling pot boiler discoveries with all the gravity of an up quark.

The Secret of the Sands website is dripping with reviews aglow with praise for this work so maybe I’m very very wrong but at the end of the day I have neither the time nor the patience to struggle any more with this uninspiring tripe.

The Straw That Broke The Reviewer’s Back: When I realised that, having forced myself to read in detail two or three chapters of present day, er, “action” (um, well it’s supposed to be, some people you don’t care about find some mcguffins in an acme archaeological dig) I was now skimming happily over vast tracts of prose set in the past. Why? Because I quite simply didn’t give a stuff. I couldn’t give a flying one about any of it. I could care less what metallic doodads of venerable pedigree have to do with the price of a shish-kebab in Cairo town square. I don’t want to read poorly researched and badly written historical fluff about an Egypt that never was taken from a manuscript that was possibly originally drafted in crayons.

I hated this book worse than some of the verbal spaghetti I’ve trashed on here before because it’s taken a kind of thriller I am a sap for and made me understand completely why some people look down on it and denigrate it. This was the worst book I’ve had pollute my headspace for quite some considerable time. Avoid.

The Book: Republic by Charles Sheehan-Miles

Review Category: E-Submitted requested review.

The Blurb: Welcome to the America of the future: an intrusive federal government; economy going down the tubes; and terrorism, domestic and foreign, wracking our nation. In 2016 America has become a place of fear and suspicion. Terrorism and government crackdowns have brought on a cycle of spiraling inflation and unemployment. Basic civil liberties are at risk in a country changed, yet frighteningly familiar. A prominent citizen and commander in the West Virginia National Guard, Ken Murphy, must protect his family and his country, and identify where his loyalties lay in an increasingly dangerous conflict.

Preview Available: Yes, the electronic version is freely distributable on a creative commons licence and there’s an audio book!

Would I buy this? Hell yes.

The Product: I received a PDF reviewer’s copy but the PDF typography was indistinguishable from a commercial publication. So I would take that as a guide. The whole product’s pretty darn nifty in a production values way. I spotted maybe three typos. SO no more than a real book.

The Nitty Gritty: There’s something important about a book like this to me. Having looked at some of the other reviews of the book I guess maybe in Britain we just don’t get as much of this stuff as American audiences do because some people accused it of not being controversial enough.

If this is the case then I am at a loss to imagine why Sheehan-Miles’ words are not on sale in every bookstore in the US and beyond. The man’s a great storyteller with a punchy, economic use of language. The only thing I could readily identify about his work that was, perhaps, non-commercial is that it is unashamedly biased rhetorical storytelling. As long as you accept that the book is not going to be a balanced and fair representation of the current world (which of course alternative histories and dystopian futures are intended to reflect) then you’ll be okay.

This is not to say that the characters are not well drawn. The central characters who are all linked via the central character Ken Murphy of the West Virginia National Guard are all pretty three dimensional. Or at least two and a half dimensional; I have actually met people who are two and a half dimensional in real life so you can’t complain about the verisimilitude in that respect either.

If I was to have a problem then it is that some of the characters, particularly Murphy feel very “set up”. To have a man who finds himself in a position where he can have no doubt that helping West Virginia bid to secede from the United States is the right thing for him to do takes some narrative back flips. I understand that we had to sympathise with Murphy’s difficult ideological stance by any means necessary but the parade of very personal tragedies visited on this man to make his choice acceptable would have tried the patience of Job. It’s nearly comedic in its extremity. Nearly. There is one scene concerning this character that very nearly made me burst into tears. So I guess that counts as Sheehan-Miles skirting the edge between tragedy and comedy to its limits and proving a master of narrative balance.

If I were to have one other criticism of the book its that there are long tracts of military action noodling where you can’t really understand exactly what’s going on or why. I’m sure to a fellow military enthusiast and one who knows the tactical layout of West Virginia it would all be much clearer but I just knew there were some guys in tanks feeling a bit nervous. This went on for many pages and then the story started again.

The power of Republic rests in its shameless manipulation of emotions and its soap opera characters. There’s also a strong dose of edginess. Sheehan-Miles communicates effectively the gravity of the statements he’s making about this attempted secession and it makes the book feel dangerous and subversive, even if its really the kind of thing the average American talks about at the dinner table. I don’t know that it is, and if it is it’s the kind of thing the American television and film industry is careful to tone down in America’s cultural output. As a Brit reading this book I did feel I was getting the inside word on some heavy thoughts that are dwelling front and centre in the American psyche.

The book’s major success is that it makes you feel connected to West Virginia and its inhabitants and for a while you’re happy to boo along at the wicked pantomimic federal government. Afterwards, you wonder whether anyone could really be as shallow and casually wicked as the feds are painted in this book. This is the book’s major weakness, it sacrifices a little of its credibility in order to pack a heavier melodramatic punch. You end up taking it with a pinch of salt instead of with an upraised fist.

Even so I’d heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants a raw, emotional experience mixed in with a clear and purposeful ideological standpoint. This is a thrilling read and I can’t wait for more.

The Book: Distant Cousin by Al Past

Review Category: E-Submitted requested review.

The Blurb: A girl who speaks an extinct Indo-European language shows up at an observatory in West Texas warning of disaster headed for Earth. She claims to know this because she has been studying Earth from the moon for 60 years. Obviously she’s crazy, and they kick her out. But the government watched her land and chases and captures her. Running for her life, she makes some odd friends who help her devise an outrageous plan to get her message across. If it doesn’t work, she’ll die along with millions of others. If it does, what then? That’s only the beginning…

Preview Available: Yes indeed there are some short cuts of prose on the website.

Would I buy this? It’s SF. I’m not sure I read a whole heap of alien stuff but I did buy K-PAX so shows what I know. Maybe, in other words.

The Product: I received a PDF reviewer’s copy but the PDF typography was indistinguishable from a commercial publication. So I would take that as a guide. The whole product’s pretty darn nifty in a production values way.

The Nitty Gritty: It seems like another age when I started in on Mr. Past’s novel. It was, in fact, the last time I had access to a laptop and I managed to get the whole way through “Book One” in that volume before I found myself preoccupied to too great a degree to carry on. Although I did not feel that the novel was one I was never going to finish it has taken me a while.

So Book One is pretty decent, decent enough to finish and want to read more. It details the arrival on earth of alien girl Darcy to warn the interstellar hicks of impending meteor based doom. Not spectacular and revolutionary, admittedly, but pretty good stuff, especially once the style slowed down.

As usual the book would have benefited from an editor’s steering hand. It starts out in a blaze of mannered thesaurus-bashing prose that is quite sickly. Once it recovers from this start it settles into a perky economic style that keeps its head down and runs for the finish at a fair old pace. Overall Book One comes in as a pretty well crafted novella.

And so, all this time later, on to Books two and three (although from the look of Mr. Past’s website Book three is actually the basis for the beginning of volume two and from there confusion may grow so I’ll go no further). In the short novella Book two the plot takes a heavy slug veering away from juggling Darcy’s personal life and her SF adventure into a pure exposition of her integration into earth society and her budding romance with journalist Matt Mendez.

To say that this is an extended meander is to be kind. Basically Book two could have adequately been summarised in about a paragraph with nothing major being missed.

Here is where the crux of the story’s problem comes in. The main character has no flaws to speak of. I mean there’s a token effort at making her emotionally distant but that’s not really an Achilles Heel per se. Darcy is stronger than us, faster than us, brighter than us, nicer than us she is all things to most people. If she hadn’t decided to slum it with Mr. Mendez then we wouldn’t even have known about her supposed emotional distance.

Even Mr. Past revolts at this in the end, dispatching a party from the homeworld (or technically the ancient earth colony) who present Darcy and Matt with some difficulties. These are quickly resolved as most of the party are just as nice as Darcy and the one who isn’t is both barking and mentally feeble. So despite the fact that he is stronger, faster and meaner than everyone on the planet he is tricked into falling out of a flying vehicle, much to everyone’s relief.

If this is sounding a bit like someone wrote down a daydream then, well, that’s because it is. The dramatic tension in this volume is trace and what exists is shooed out of the door at hyperspeed to stop the pleasant fantasy becoming hard work.

By the end of the book I was about ready for not reading any more ever. It’s not that the book is bad it’s just that it comes right down at the bottom of the giant list of readable books. There is no hook and no incentive to come back for more and that is a crime that is inexcusable.

Buy this if thrilling plot twists and turns make you nauseous and believable characters are something you can do without. Otherwise I can’t really in good conscience recommend this book.

The Book: When An Angel Falls by Stephanie L Jarrett

Review Category: E-Submitted requested review.

The Blurb: Laura is a fallen angel struggling to find acceptance in a world torn apart by war. When a handful of spirits step in to help Laura along her journey toward forgiveness, others are reminded that there is more to a soul than the sum of its vices.

Laura’s friends try to help her confront her shame, as the battle for Heaven escalates. While she is caught between those who shun her and those who want her destroyed, many spirits are coming to realize that Laura holds the keys to preventing their destruction.

When an Angel Falls is a story for the imperfect souls among us who strive to forgive, and who seek forgiveness.

Preview Available: A pretty long but slightly unweildy one on iUniverse, yes. More than enough to get the picture.

Would I buy this? Possibly, I like theological philosophy fic. I think the fact I’m uncertain should be caveat enough.

The Product: I received a PDF reviewer’s copy but the PDF typography was indistinguishable from a commercial publication. So I would take that as a guide. The proofreading sometimes leaves a bit to be desired and the cover’s not great but, hey, that’s the world of Self-Pub.

The Nitty Gritty: Occasionally some dumb romantic comedy or comedy of embarrassment slips through the Hollywood net that puts the viewer in a terrible position. The position in question being that of knowing more than all the characters and just so bored out of your brain for the entire time you can bear to watch it because all the “tension” in the piece could be sorted out if people just sat down and talked to one another.

Not that I’m saying a cosmic conflagration of angelic hosts could be sorted out with a cup of char and a good old chinwag but there is one thing here that I just couldn’t get on board with and it all came down to a lack of communication. I think. I’ll come back to it.

Let’s go for an overview before we hit that problem full on. The story begins like a sort of detective story espionage thriller with these two guys called Scott and Ethan looking for an angel on earth on behalf of a cabal of earthly religious luminaries. The subject of their quest, the angel Laura, is living a small town life and being so damned human and not an angel at all no sir that none of her neighbours know that, like the Blues Brothers, she’s on a mission from God.

When we meet Laura the story begins to revolve around her. She ascends to heaven where she introduces us to the heavenly kingdom via a board meeting which seems a bit prim. After that Jarrett’s imagination is unbridled and we don’t know whether we’ll be back on earth with Scott and Ethan or caroming off asteroids disguised as a heavenly light beam.

And let’s get one thing straight, Laura can kick some serious ass in this piece. There are some set-piece comebacks of truly Buffy-esque proportions.

So far, so good. So let’s unveil it. Where are we going to have a problem. Well, the prose is fine, the mistakes are few, and the story is reasonably easy to follow (although occasionally a little fast). So what was…

The Straw That Broke The Reviewer’s Back: I got about 2/3rds of the way through the book before this just became too much.

What you have to understand is that reading should be a pleasure. I should be looking froward to reading a few more snatched pages. When I am seeing the reading as a chore that’s a problem. It might not even necessarily be the author’s fault. Robert Ludlum is a chore to me but loads of people like his stuff… so maybe it’s best not to take this as a last word on WAAF.

I couldn’t finish this book for the following reason: Laura is apparently one of God’s special little soldiers. She’s right up there to the left of Gabriel and apparently just far enough to the right of Lucifer to be upstairs rather than down. But, you see, there was this incident. We’ll call it… the incident. And during the incident Laura did something for which she is ashamed and for which other angels feel that maybe she should be those critical few inches further over to the left… if you follow my drift.

Only Ms. Jarrett does her very best to nudge the gentle reader and tip them the wink. Get this. Whatever Laura is ashamed of, she shouldn’t really be ashamed of it. And what ever other angels think, they are wrong.

I don’t know what the incident was because the novel was evasive on that point right up until my mind gave up. The fact is it was that evasiveness that not only gave the impression that everything would be alright but also that when the great revelation came you would just stop and go “is that it?!?”. You know, like when it turned out Tom Cruise was working for the mafia in The Firm and you went “so what?”.

The major problem was that the more the incident was hidden the bigger the burden of its anticlimactic revelation became. Until in the end I simply ceased to care.

Now, don’t get me wrong. What Laura did might have been a proper nasty piece of work, or may even have looked proper evil until explained. However, I can’t honestly say I believe that because if any reader would be half on the side of the angels who think Laura should be wearing the horns and forked tail ensemble instead of the other then an author would just tell you what was the dealio. That’s dramatic tension and then some. It makes your badass angel dangerous and sexy. If, on the other hand, you would just think all the other angels were uptight for criticising the incident well, then, there’s no more tension.

So maybe I am wrong and the seriousness of the incident was just misplayed. In which case I would urge any author with dramatic character ambivalence to spare to bring it on with all speed. But if I am right and the nature of Laura’s actions were not even misdemeanour let alone crime then new sources of drama should have been sought at any and all costs.

When An Angel Falls was mostly well written, certainly copeable with even when it clunked from time to time. The subject matter was interesting and mostly involving. If it hadn’t been for that one story point I would easily have finished it and be recommending it here. As it is, I simply can’t although I will be interested in seeing further works by the same author.

The Book: Storyteller by G R Grove

Review Category: E-Submitted requested review.

The Blurb: “Blood and fire, gold and steel and poetry, a river’s voice in the silence of the night, and the shining strings of a harp – all these and more I have known in my time… Now they are all gone, the men and women I knew when I was young, gone like words on the wind, and I am left here in the twilight to tell you their tale. Sit, then, and listen if you will to the words of Gwernin Kyuarwyd, called Storyteller…” So begins the tale of the young Gwernin’s adventures as a wandering storyteller and would-be bard in the chaos and contradictions of 6th century Britain. Along the way he encounters allies and enemies both human and supernatural, finds love and friendship, and learns the lore -and the true meaning - of a Bard’s profession.

Preview Available: Yup a perfectly satisfactory lulu one. This gives you more than enough to get your head around what’s going on.

Would I buy this? Probably, actually, but only when I was feeling flush. The book’s not cheap, likely part of the great online retailer little man squeeze. I stick to my feeling that in the end offering a lulu exclusive at low price is the long term winner where dealing with the Amazons may glean short term notoriety but will harm the title’s long term prospects…

The Product: I received a PDF reviewer’s copy but the PDF typography was indistinguishable from a commercial publication. So I would take that as a guide.

The Nitty Gritty: This title has been extensively and favourably reviewed elsewhere, it even won quite serious praise from POD Critic not a reviewer to hand the laurels to just anyone.

It’s unsurprising, therefore, that I find much to recommend about Storyteller. The points I’m going to mention here are centred around finding myself in a unique position as far as the POD review ring goes in appraising the work; that being that I was brought up in Wales from the age of seven until I was twenty and hence lived side by side with a culture that attempts to hold onto the very traditions described in this volume.

Not only that but having read way too many Arthurian spin off myths, not least the outlandish imaginings of Pat Mills in his Slaine series, and being a generic writer who enjoys researching mythology as much as riffing on it I’ve actually read the Mabinogion (where many of Gwernin’s supernatural visions originate) and traced the history of the Arthur myth myself. Not only that I once had the privilege of playing the Irish king Matholowch from the story of Branwen in a studio project when I was in my early twenties.

Essentially, if Ms Grove were looking for a critic on the Welsh angle of this novel she’d have to go to a university to get better; I’m not entirely sure an academic would care much about the entertainment value of the work either.

So how did Storyteller go over to a Welsh-raised mythology enthusuast? The weirdest thing was the use of the letter ‘K’. The Welsh language, by and large, eschews the letter ‘K’ to the level where a place in my home town known in English as “Killay” is translated to “Cila” in Welsh even though the pronunciation remains the same.

Seeing the name “Kyuarwyd” gave me a bit of an insight into what it must be like for people who are not Welsh speakers at all to tangle with “Llanelli” (my own knowledge of Welsh is entirely dependent on bilingual signs but I still don’t understand the problem non-Welsh people have with pronouncing “ll”). Looking at the handy phonetics guide at the back of the volume I worked out how it would be said and then cried out with revelation “Cyfarwyd”! Which made far more sense to me. From that point on the name seemed Welsh to me.

And that sums up my first criticism here. The account is written by an excellent writer who has had Wales explained to them in almost perfect detail. There were just some places where there’s no substitute for the real thing. It’s a small thing and I mention it here merely because part of the stated aims of the volume was to tangle with a “realistic as possible” depiction of Medieval Wales and yet in some small and mostly insignificant ways it sometimes misses the mark.

Far more regularly, however, one had to marvel at how the experience of Welshness comes through with crystal clarity. The book actually reminded me of Wales and experiences of Welshness to a startling degree. Far better, in fact, than many actual Welsh cultural artifacts which get all the Welsh transliterations correct.

So onto the story. At the outset when we join Gwernin and his companion, Ieuan, the book is episodic, lackadaisical and meditative. As the volume continues the past of the narrative catches up with Gwernin and he actually evolves into a clearer character instead of being just some Medieval Welsh travel writer.

One of the main problems I encountered with the book was that Gwernin did not become defined to me until most of the way through the book. When he first stated that he was sixteen years of age he seemed to me unusually wise and placid for such a young age. As Grove decides he is young so he starts to evolve the passions and foibles of a young man and it is a lot easier to see him as such. By the end the reader is fully engaged with the main character and his adventures that makes it a shame to have to finish the book. This is not an experience I had been anticipating from the fairly piecemeal beginning.

Not that any of the writing is particularly bad, quite the reverse. From a story point of view, however, the book looks like a diversion with no core beyond being a window into history and mythology for its first half only fortifying itself with a more traditional threaded story towards the end.

The most remarkable achievement in this is that the historical and mythological writing settle quite naturally into the flow with the gentle trials and tribulations of young Gwernin as he attempts to manage lofty artistic ambitions with the more personal concerns of any young man in the beginning of his life.

Gwernin’s romance with a girl at court provides a lot of tension and exposes an area for discussion of the responsibilities of a young bard as well as providing warm and tender moments in the volume. The human relationships in the book go from being handled as a vehicle for exposing more about Medieval Welsh life to being sensitively handled and filled with vitality and a full spectrum of emotion.

Essentially the book does not start balanced but rather grows into itself. The fact is the book as a whole ends up tending towards being more than the sum of its parts. This is due to Grove’s excellent command of the English language and clear purpose in writing this account. I think the actual plot and story of Gwernin himself snuck up on her as much as it does the reader and it is this stretch of the book from about the start of the section Winter In The Hills to the end that really elevates the book into a different place.

I am most keen to encounter the next volume of Gwernin’s adventures if such should come into being not least because there is a chance in that to make a whole volume that exists at that pitch.

Whoever picks up this book should be confident that it is as accurate as it can be and always entertaining even when it lacks something in velocity. It emerges as more than a fascinating account of what life in a largely undocumented stretch of history may have been like. It grows to become a truly involving, gently dramatic, introduction to a saga that has the potential to be as well regarded as the myths and legends Gwernin turned his attention to relating.

The Book: Cyberpunk by Bruce Bethke

Review Category: Not on a list

The Blurb: This, in somewhat cleaned-up format, is the original manuscript of the novel I wrote between 1984 and 1989. I’m still not sure whether this is a functional book or merely interesting wreckage, but in an admittedly rather naive experiment in electronic publishing, I’m putting the file on the web under the terms of a shareware license.

Preview Available: No need.

Why buy this? The shareware license means you can try before you buy. I tried. I bought.

The Product: This is an e-book. Some funny typographical stuff has been applied to the pages to attempt to render it paperback size but it doesn’t ape a physical book or a reasonably printable document. In the field of self-publishing this has all the hallmarks of the professional making a token gesture towards standards without wishing to make himself into that most hideous of things a self published author. All the same, this is readable on PC and unavailable on paper unless you print it yourself.

The Nitty Gritty: About a decade ago I borrowed a copy of Bethke’s major published novel Headcrash from the Swiss Cottage Library. I read it in a single sitting. I went out, I bought a copy, I read it again. I named a fictional sport after it in one of my unpublished novels. Basically, Headcrash cannot help but be named as one of my “influences”. Not that you’d really know it from what it is I’m writing but it is always there. I keep wanting to yank it out and read it again. Something about that book speaks to me. Therefore Mr. Bethke would have to go way up there on the list of authors who have influenced my output.

So approaching “Cyberpunk” is, as you can imagine, not just a pleasure, or an obligation but also something of a milestone for me. The fact is in the field of novels Mr. Bethke is not prolific, in fact should I read this, a collaboration with Vox Day called Rebel Moon, the novelisation of Will Smith’s Wild Wild West and a hard to track down Asimov Inspired story called Maverick I’ll have read his entire back catalogue. That’s all folks. So each work has to be regarded as something to savour.

Of course when a book has such a deep and lasting impact on someone as Headcrash did on me it’s going to be virtually impossible to follow. So I’m giving a lot of leeway for my own sense that Cyberpunk lacked that special ingredient that has made Headcrash a permanent fixture of my head furniture.

So what’s Cyberpunk actually about? And couldn’t Bethke come up with a less generic title?

To answer these questions in reverse order. It’s generally acknowledged that Bethke invented the word cyberpunk. He has first dibs on it. Unfortunately I don’t think what cyberpunk became is what Bethke intended it to be but them’s, as it is often remarked, the breaks.

Cyberpunk was intended by Bethke to sum up what the central character of this novel was all about. Originally the story was a short about a kid who rebelled against his parents using a portable computer and won because technology had moved so fast the parents couldn’t even really understand what the kid was up to anyway.

In the novel this translates into the set up. Our Cyberpunk, Michael Harris, gets out of bed, meets up with his friends, gets into an argument with his parents, has a good time trashing his dad’s finances and then walks out of the house smugly triumphant to be…

to be….

Well, there’s the thing. What happens next is that a couple of guys drop a bag over Mikey’s head and he gets thrown into a plane bound for a military academy miles away from the nearest internet connection. Why? Well, it’s the only means his parents have of controlling him. The remainder of the book details Michael’s journey through adolescence and the process of his learning to be an individual without an identity and intellect shaped by electronic aids.

I think I must have been conditioned by a youth spent becoming conversant with man/machine stories. You see I, and I suspect anyone else shy of 35 years of age, will be expecting this story to go a different way. We hear, at the outset, about secret caches of data, there’s a character called Rayno who is seriously in need of comeuppance being all style and no substance. Yeah, Mikey shouldn’t be allowed to get away with doing over his parents, and talking of the parents they have a strained relationship which goes way beyond the influence of their demon child. You think at the outset that Mikey’s dad is just exasperated, his true nature evolves piecemeal throughout the novel.

But none of that matters.

What matters is how Mikey learns to get by without technology. How he learns about thinking without assistance, about tactical thinking, about human relationships, about political manoeveuring, about survival. All the while he clings to his identity, cyberpunk, a term used pejoratively in the military academy. The thought in the back of my mind was ‘wait until Mikey gets back to the world’.

There’s a lot that’s weird about this story and it all revolves around the fact that the majority of the novel deals with a process that most authors would have counted as off-stage backstory. The fact is everyone is out to betray Mikey in one way or another. Some don’t get an opportunity because of his removal from the main story flow, some do it off stage to the main action, some of them are just too weak to help him and so betray him by inaction; this hardly matters because in the end Mikey is quite capable of taking care of himself from about two thirds of the way toward the end of the book.

The novel leaves a lot of things to the reader’s imagination and outlines a lot of stuff that readers are usually left to infer. By the time the cyberpunk is finished with his rite of passage he is more of a cyberninja. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this is that Bethke gives Michael discipline and organised thought and allows him to retain his power as a programmer but he never really bothers to temper these qualities with compassion and wisdom.

He takes a rough, dirty explosion of adolescent anger and emotion and hones it into a cold and calculating machine capable of executing far more cold blooded sneak attacks. It is strange that one of the reported goals of Cyberpunk was to address an adolescent’s amorality in the face of increased technological leverage. The question of morality in Cyberpunk boils down to “might makes right” and then adds “might comes in lots of different forms and is proven in many different ways”.

By the end of Mikey’s journey he has might but he also has very little in the way of a moral compass save for an execution of military style discipline. His mentor at the academy Ernst Von Schlager takes the time to instil in Mikey some idea of Spartan military brilliance but as a moral compass that’s of debatable utility.

So, the novel gives you plenty to think about, perhaps too much. There’s loose plot threads, debatable philosophies and unexplored implications. As such this freight of so many relevancies left unspoken makes the actual substance of the novel seem light and somewhat unsatisfactory. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in here but like Mikey you spend a long time waiting to get back to the story before eventually realising, with dull surprise, that this is the story and has been all along.

The fact is you can’t have some of the things that happen offstage happen and not expect the reader to worry about them. There’s a hell of an interesting story to be told about cyberninja Michael Harris. This is just an origin story.

Bethke’s style is always crisp, concerned with delivering the relevant information and always concerned with presentation and communication. The characters are sometimes underused but always fully rounded. Cyberpunk is an enjoyable read whose only problem is that it leaves you wanting so much more.

Well worth a $5 honorary contribution from anyone’s pocket I’d say.

The Book: Continuity Slip by Till Noever

Review Category: Buys > Priority

The Blurb: From one moment to the next, the world just wasn’t the same anymore. Not quite anyway, because it seemed to be merging with another, where Ray wasn’t who he thought he was, and where he was about to be framed for a murder he had no memory of having committed.

Preview Available: Yup a perfectly satisfactory lulu one. Reassuring the reader that the prose is readable whilst not really giving anything away.

Why buy this? The preview was very good. I had read a couple other reviews which were complimentary.

The Product: Indistinguishable from a commercial effort except the RRP is not printed on the back jacket. It’s also Royal Size. Essentially the POD eccentricities are few and small, there if you look for them.

The Nitty Gritty: I wanted to get a look at a gold-standard release. Or at least the kind of work that should be right up there. Apparently it’s a sterling 22,703 behind that Didymus Contingency book which seems to be doing okay without reviews by me (its lulu sales rank is 5). Personally I am a further 8000 behind Mr. Noever so I could probably do with mining this for tips. Or maybe it’s all down to marketing.

Let’s forget that immediately. It’s not all about the marketing. Continuity Slip is a solid thriller and, joy of joys, it presents the inquisitive reader with eccentricities of personality that make it an involving read even when it’s not barrelling along at 500 miles per hour.

The first thing that you notice is that for a thriller it really doesn’t indulge in proper thriller stuff for a long time. It’s very talky and almost a third of the novel’s up before we even glimpse a dead body or anything similarly thrillery.

There’s also the potentially fascinating SF angle on the events in the story, the titular continuity slip. Unfortunately there’s not much the novel’s hero, Ray Shannon, or anyone he encounters can do to explain what really happened. The resolution to this strand is annoyingly woolly and even a little glib. “Proper” SF luminaries will be extremely annoyed that no scientific things happen to attempt a proof of the central theory of the story.

The fact is that the slip is a narrative device and is treated as such. This means that the high concept is pressed into the service of a pretty decent thriller and then kind of discarded.

Our main couple Ray and Alyssa spend, perhaps, more time talking than might have been allowed in a more conventional story of this type. The dialogue is intriguing enough to be put down to “character”. Other characters are either information ciphers, proof of the central conceit or cardboardy foils for the central pair.

Most intriguing is that the slip puts Ray in a situation of marital infidelity. This move is almost entirely unnecessary, there are some plot reasons why Ray’s wife exists but she could equally well have been Ray’s sister or even Ray’s estranged daughter and then huge swathes of moral to and froing (that don’t always make Ray look like a hero) could have been abandoned in service of something more interesting. (Well, more interesting to me.)

As an author I always wonder why authors take the hard road for no reason. In the end my speculation rarely yields any solid reason if that reason isn’t in the prose itself. The fact is Ray’s wife Debbie didn’t need to be Ray’s wife and if she hadn’t been it would have made the protagonist far easier to like.

To complain about things like this is churlish, however, especially when your objective is to read good POD because it’s more interesting than mediocre commercial fare. This definitely satisfies on that level. Continuity Slip is dynamic and purposeful writing. That it has a few things which seem odd is something to be celebrated, not mourned.

If you can resign yourself to the the fact that it’s never going to get seriously quantum and you can put up with a main character who philanders and then has the philandering rewarded by the vagaries of parallel universe theory you will probably enjoy this. I did.

The Book: Mordiscado by Misti Rainwater-Lites

Review Category: Buys > Priority

The Blurb: What do you get when you put the brains of Stephen King, Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Edgar Allan Poe and Misti Rainwater-Lites in a blender? You get an unholy mess. Mordiscado is an unholy mess. Eat it. It is good.

Preview Available: Yup a perfectly satisfactory lulu one. Reassuring the reader that the prose is readable whilst not really giving anything away.

Why buy this? The preview was very good. Ms Rainwater-Lite posted to a thread I’d started requesting that POD authors put themselves forward on the NaNoWriMo shameless promotion board. Looked like the kind of thing I could well read. Affordable.

The Product: This is very confidently a POD novel. That is to say that although it doesn’t really resemble a commercial book it is its own product produced by someone who’s used to working in this medium. The book suffers from a total lack of indents but as it happens this isn’t a problem at all. I think the best way to put it is that the book “gets away with” a load of things. I didn’t have a problem with it.

The Nitty Gritty: I am becoming a real reviewer.

I do not bound towards a work with hope and joyful abandon. I slink towards it with narrowed and suspicious eyes. The gems are rare.

This is one of the gems.

This is like chick lit, erotica, horror, contemporary fiction and poetry were all handcuffed together, given baseball bats, dropped into a dark sack with a single key, bound up tight and dropped into a river.

Let’s be plain this is a heady brew that won’t be for everyone. It’s pretty sexy, and pretty disturbing, and pretty intense. The emotion coming out of this book is just raw.

What impressed me most from the outset was the description of the emotional to and fro between a couple experiencing some trouble because the wife knows her husband is looking elsewhere. Ms. Rainwater-Lites neatly sidesteps all the traditional tropes employed in the depiction of such a scenario settling instead for an unvarnished view of a couple where the woman fears she’s insane and the man is just being an out and out ass.

I’ve been in this emotional place of not getting my partner. Reading this actually helped me gain a new perspective on my own relationship. If a book can do that hell, that’s worth the price of admission right there.

The basic plot, not that it really matters overmuch, is that Zoe and Douglas, our married couple, move into Douglas’s grandmother’s house following the grandmother’s death. The house may be haunted, or maybe Zoe’s just cracking up.

Haunted house fiction like this always treads the line between supernatural occurrences and insanity. This one treads it deftly and with an assurance that stops the reader actually worrying about whether Zoe is really haunted or just insane. It’s unimportant, the important part is the emotional truth of the situation.

When the novel lifts into horror it really does pop. It’s amazing how one person can describe a creepy moaning ghost abusing the protagonist from the hereafter and it seems stale and another author can seriously creep you out. I think that the motivational context and the symbolism of the ghosts in Mordiscado provide the real chill. I don’t want to get too far in analysing it though, suffice to say it works.

This is not to say the novel is free of bum notes. Exchanges between Douglas and his mistress are far more redolent of the fantasy conversations Zoe might imagine them having than real conversations. The mistress herself is never more than a cipher. Male psychology is outwardly described to a tee but the male thought process is a little off kilter.

These details are minor and do not detract from the story’s very earthy passion and power.

I would also have liked to see a different resolution just because I felt it coming from a ways off. The ending itself was incredibly well handled even so. I’m not sure what I would have done because it’s really not my story, maybe asking for something different is asking for too much.

This is really fresh, really taut, gripping and involving stuff. If the right agent were to pick it up I have no doubt it could sell to an indie press or even a brave handler of outspoken contemporary fiction but Ms. Rainwater-Lites seems to have no ambitions in that direction.

If you’re laid back about sex scenes, disturbing religious imagery and description of relationships that’s never less than raw this book is absolutely amazing don’t miss it.

This is remarkable work and I can’t wait to read more from eBuLLieNCe pReSS.

The Book: Darkling by J.M. Patterson

Review Category: Buys > Priority

The Blurb: She has many names, but her street name is “Shatter”, and it’s the only one that really matters. She’s killed more people than she can remember, sold herself for money, and leaves destruction in her wake. She’s an urban predator, a walking lethal weapon with a past she can’t escape. She’s a Darkling. And all she wants is out, to have some kind of life. But no one has ever done that before…and lived.

Preview Available: The whole volume is available as a free download. I think this is due to the fact the softcover, hard cover and e-book versions are sold as separate products. A neat way to get around the “all versions of a product must have same royalty” thing.

Why buy this? The preview was very good. Mr. Patterson made a personal representation to me asking for a review. Looked like the kind of thing I could well read. Affordable.

The Product: A nice Royal format PBack with a bespoke cover and an effort to produce some front matter. Really clean text, good typography. Not that it was hard to follow but had it been it would have been a prose fault not a production fault.

The Nitty Gritty: As a writer you get reminded time and time again that the worst thing you can do is betray the expectations of your audience. The gritty crime drama Dark Blue, a movie written by LA Police novelist James Ellroy of LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia fame, got largely derided because the trailer depicted an action packed stand up fight between big screen heavyweights Ving Rhames and Kurt Russell that the finished product failed to deliver. The fact that the work was far more dense, complex, well written and emotionally engaging than two veteran actors butting heads could have been was unimportant. The fact was that the trailer betrayed expectations and the audience always has the final say.

The aphorism that one should not judge a book by its cover may have held some weight in the days when all you had to go on was a title and a plain cardboard wrapper. In these days of cover art, blurbs and synopses the cover is just about the best way to judge a book in the commercial world. Of course, now we have a new era of creator control and in that situation sometimes the cover, the synopsis and the contents come a little further adrift.

What is “Darkling”? Is it a thrilling cyberpunk SF adventure? That’s what the cover would suggest. So when the answer is “not really” it comes as something of a shock. A discovery, I think, many readers would be less than elated to make. I am quite experimental so I didn’t think that just because the bulk of the prose details a growing relationship between the heroine “Shatter” (and her bewildering array of aliases) and a teacher called “Woody”.

It was interesting to read “Memories of Home” (see below) whilst reading Darkling as well. Both volumes contain a new archetype: the “everyday joe who gets amazing romantic success for very little investment”. I cannot complain too much. My very first novel had a similar trope. I was, at least, guilty enough about it that I made it the central crux of the trilogy’s turning point.

Mr. Patterson has actually done some good tuning work in making Shatter less of an uberbabe and making Woody have to do some work to earn our respect for his outrageous fortune. Still, when you’re not wondering where the hell all this is going you’re wondering whether Woody is really still not smelling a rat with all this.

The ease with which Woody manages to start a conflict only to have Shatter allow him to back pedal out of dangerous emotional waters is incredibly grating. You start to get the feeling that despite the fact only Shatter is a cyborg neither of these people are proper human beings.

Then there’s this cop/corrupt corporate entity strand which makes some attempt to run parallel to the Shatter and Woody story (the ratio is about 2 chapters Woody/Shatter to 1 chapter action movie villain stuff). Patterson seems terminally bored by this strand. Like he can’t wait to get back to the romance.

So we’re looking at Boy meets Female Cyborg in quasi-post apocalyptic brave new world with a side order of OCP from Robocop, and I suppose as bizarre as that may sound if it were done well it might work.

Unfortunately Mr. Patterson seems to need to get over to zoetrope.com where people will not be shy about hammering him with the truth that show is better than tell. We are told that Shatter is a killing machine packed with high tech gizmos. We are told about her past. We are told about her emotional hang ups. We are told about her dangerous life. We are shown so little of this it’s almost non-existent. This is even more frustrating when we keep getting told about all this cool stuff that Shatter used to do that we’re not allowed to see. Or all this cool stuff Shatter could do that we’re not allowed to see. Or all this fascinating stuff about Shatter’s emotional state we’re not allowed to observe.

If this had been structured more traditionally the Shatter/Woody storyline would have been a no-more than three chapter addition to a story that was mostly about Shatter’s last job before she planned to disappear. The whole Woody thing could have been symbolic of Shatter’s aspirations (and hey a relationship with a whiny teacher probably would seem a good alternative to being shot at and used as a guinea pig for unethical cybernetic surgical procedures). As it is everyone just pretty much gets given stuff which allows them to not change and to dwell in the novel mostly drama-free until the closing pages.

Oh, I mean sure, Woody is described as being a little freaked out and uneasy about going out with a cyborg killing machine. The thing is he still seems too laid back about it all. If I were Shatter I’d be concerned that Woody just seemed not to really understand the situation and that he didn’t really seem to want to give her anything but bland assurances that she was up on a pedestal.

The novel has its entertaining moments, for sure and it is definitely nice to read something in the SF mould that isn’t just action movie moments gathered around a series of McGuffins but that doesn’t make up for the novel’s many failings. The romance fails to convince. The action movie moments drift free of dynamic narrative context. The structure is out of joint. The pacing is plain weird. The story never seems to be going anywhere. The thing seems to be caught between being contemplative and being exciting and it loses out in being neither.

Maybe Mr. Patterson has managed to get it together as the series continues. I shall definitely be checking out the previews of his next two volumes. Let’s make no mistake Mr. Patterson can write and can typeset and can produce good materials from a material standpoint. It’s just a shame that the actual work these talents are applied to could do with some serious, well-heeded and unmerciful peer-criticism.

The Book: Memories of Home by Derek M. Koch

Review Category: Not on a list

The Blurb: Derek M. Koch’s 2006 NaNoWriMo Novel

Preview Available: No need. See below.

Why buy this? It’s free! And we can do free! (As an e-book but you can pay to have it sent as a paperback too.)

The Product: No attempt made to render this as a professional book. No front matter etc. Many homonym spelling errors due to spell checking. Despite this it has clear typography and is rarely confusing in its actual production values i.e. speech assignation is clear, grammar is adequate for the purposes of written communication etc.

The Nitty Gritty: Devon Kappa is fortunate indeed for s/he feels it’s unfair to review Koch’s work because Koch declares that it’s unfinished and rough.

Indeed it may be unfair if it wasn’t better than some stuff self-publishers think is fit for human consumption at a price. As it is there is a substantial amount here which may be criticised effectively even when the first-draft jitters set into this sturdy but incomplete chiller.

Let’s get the jitters out of the way. The nearer the end it gets the more repetition and aimlessness sets in and the thing does rather explode in a ball of fragmented pointlessness in its conclusion. That’s the bad that will almost certainly be down to the white heat of initial creation.

Now what about the rest of the substance?

After an introductory note that eloquently apologises for the novel in its current form I had girded my loins for the worst. My girding, it transpired, was unnecessary at the outset for the beginning of the novel was surprisingly involving.

Our main character, Max, starts out with what may be the least irritating first person voice I’ve read in ages. He doesn’t feel it necessary to be wise cracking, or speaking in dialect or any of those things first person narrators tend to do excessively. He seems, in short, normal. Summoned back to his hometown by the death of his father he mixes pleasant nostalgia with present day ennui and actually manages to make the mix entertaining. You can really feel the tension between youthful exuberance and the early thirties slump. Koch’s firing on all cylinders in this section.

It transpires that there’s some bad stuff going on at an old movie theatre in his home town, one where Max used to work, one that’s always had that reputation as a “bad place”. Shades of Stephen King’s “IT” are hard to ignore and this draft doesn’t really do a good enough job of being its own novel. Later on there’s stuff that seems to be straight out of Twin Peaks or Silent Hill via ultra minimalist Canadian SF Cube. All the way through though our menace is strictly IT style and the fact that we resolve bogged down in overwhelmed-inability-to-conclude-ness doesn’t help.

If I were going to pinpoint the actual point at which it all starts to go awry it’s the bit where he manages to bed a beautiful girl in her early twenties in a matter of hours by doing precisely nothing. It’s the kind of bum move intended to make people lose sympathy in minutes. If any of it had been different, if she had been a peer in a similar state of ennui, or if he’d had to wait and build a relationship with the hottie or anything it might have been a little more bearable. As it is it just makes Max smug and irritating, the way he tries to downplay and back pedal and disconnect from the encounter directly following the complete seduction just grates even further.

Basically we lose some respect for Max as readers at that point and the respect continues to be stripped away as the novel continues, Koch manages to rescue an “unreliable witness” angle to the hero’s rose tinted memories of the way they were. In a sense it’s a bit of a red herring to think that any first-person narrative stories are not “unreliable witness” stories. All single perspectives are less reliable in the long run. Also, it tends to help out if there’s some specific reason why the story couldn’t be told from multiple perspectives. Often when you’re plugging through the first draft in first person you work out some reason for this to be the case.

In the end the story does actually end up being all about Max, but just as he seems quite willing to accept his failings at the outset (even if it doesn’t follow that he will do anything about them) so it follows that later on he seems to be eager not to be caught in the spotlight.

Here’s the novel’s major failing. Max doesn’t go anywhere, he is missing an arc. Nothing that happens to him makes any impact on his consciousness. The eventual escape from the hands of psychic assault does not come at the price of personal sacrifice or crystallise with a moment of critical epiphany. It all just kind of happens.

It’s churlish to throw too many barbs at this work given its provenance. Were I Mr. Koch I’d be quite eager to rope this back in, revise it heavily, polish it and get it back out there. I’d even be willing to offer my “Writing Tips” as an aid to revision. All that’s missing here is a broader structure and a sense of narrative rules. This is actually the second best POD effort I’ve read from Lulu thus far and that says a lot for the quality of the other material that’s out there. If Koch’s revision comes forth with little in the way of improvement in structure I’d be inclined to be less kind next time out.

For now it’s an entertaining enough diversion for free should you have the kind of eyes that can stand the assault of reading from the screen.