The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw

 

I love going to author panels at conventions. I will go because I like one of the authors and after listening to all of them talk for an hour, I usually have put a bunch of new books on hold at the library because I’m so intrigued by what I have heard from the new-to-me authors. 

I first encountered Cassandra Khaw at a panel at NYCC a few years ago and I thought they seemed really cool. I realized that they had written for one of my favorite D&D sourcebooks, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, so I decided to check out their fiction. I thought their novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth was creepy and interesting, but I really bounced off The Dead Take the A Train, a novel they cowrote with Richard Kadrey (which did not live up to the specific premise in the title, among other issues I had with it). 

I was intrigued when the publisher and NetGalley gave me an eARC of her new book in exchange for an honest review. The Library at  Hellebore was billed as dark academia, but after recently reading the Scholomance trilogy and Incandescent, this book just felt like warmed over tropes poorly executed with an excess of gore for gore’s sake. The characters were too unlikable and I didn’t care about the plot. This book was not for me. 

Star Trek: Lower Decks, Vol. 1: Second Contact by Ryan North

 

My first ever comics were Star Trek comics. I loved superheroes when I was a kid, of course, still do, but what I knew of them came from Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and the Superfriends and the Super Powers action figures (which did have mini-comics, (as did He-Man figures, but I digress in this double paranthetical)).  When I fell in love with Star Trek in 1988, I couldn’t get enough of it. So in addition to watching the show and reading the novels, I picked up Star Trek comics at a convention and eventually subscribed to get the TNG comic from DC in the mail. 

Although I fell off reading Trek comics for a while, I recently have started reading more of the IDW Star Trek comics (I enjoyed Godshock and I LOVED Ryan North’s Lower Decks miniseries and his new graphic novel Warp Your Own Way) so I was happy to get an eARC of the trade paperback of Mr. North’s six issues from this new Lower Decks ongoing from IDW and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Moonflow by Bitter Karella

I had heard of Bitter Karella before, I sometimes read and find amusing Karella’s bluesky posting of the Midnight Pals, and so I thought I would give his first novel a chance (note: it is my understanding that the author uses both he/him and she/her pronouns) and I requested an eARC from NetGalley and the publisher and exchange for an honest review.

From the blurb, I knew it had to do with mushrooms and was a horrible book and so I was hoping that it would be reminiscent of something by T. Kingfisher. I was very wrong.

I’m not exactly sure what this book is trying to be, or who the targeted audience is, but I am not it.  I think we’re supposed to feel sympathetic to the protagonist in the beginning of the book, because she is selling drugs and underemployed, but I just kept thinking in my head as I read the early chapters “get a job!”  to me, The drug selling and casual drug use removes much of the potential for sympathy for any of these characters.  The protagonist ends up trumping through the woods and encountering a brutal cult, but the offer also seems to go out of her way to bash law-enforcement at every opportunity, even when it distracts from the narrative.  

I was incredibly glad of the content warnings the beginning of the book because if I had encountered some of these scenarios called, I would have found it even more offputting and unpleasant than I did. 

The writing style isn’t bad, and I found several turns of phrasing, beautiful. I enjoyed the framing device of mushroom field guide intros at the beginning of the chapters.  I might try another book from this author again in the future, but for now, this is not a good fit for me. 

Spread Me by Sarah Gailey

I think I first became aware of Sarah Gailey’s work when I read about her hippo riders in a review on tor dot com and thought “that sounds super fun!”  It was super fun, and after devouring River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow, I have always looked for new works by this author. I loved Magic For Liars and the Echo Wife, and Just Like Home was terrifying in a wonderful way. 

I was delighted when I got an audio eARC of her new book, Spread Me, from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. 

This book was so so so so creepy! The protagonist is the leader of a small isolated research team that has been alone in a desert for years (except for the occasional excursions to a dive bar many many miles away). The characters make several joking references to Johnny Carpenter’s The Thing until they find something in the sand. Everyone but the protagonist gets sick - she instead gets very horny. Suddenly her crewmates are sprouting unexpected orifices and the protagonist is surprisingly aroused. 

My description does not do this justice. This book is no Tingler - not to throw shade on the great Chuck Tingle, just to clarify that this is not erotica, but instead a horror novel where the protagonist is erotically drawn to the monster in a fascinating way. This book is excellent and I highly recommend it to people who don’t shy away from horror. 

The Last Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison

 

Harlan Ellison is dead. This was clearly not edited by Ellison, but by J. Michael Straczynski (aka JMS), who, as Mr. Ellison’s friend and the executor of Ellison’s estate, poured alot of time into, energy, and love into this book. That’s fine - Harlan Ellison was a terrible person. He sexually assaulted Connie Willis when she was being awarded a grandmaster award because he thought it was funny. He was mean and rude to fans at conventions, and even if I particularly liked his writing, I have no respect for him and I will not separate the person from the man. 

However, even though his name is on this, it is not his book. It is JMS’s book. And I have the utmost respect for JMS.  I loved Babylon 5 since I was first introduced to it in college.  I loved everything about it, and am still amazed by the fact that JMS wrote every episode of seasons 3 and 4, and all but one of 5.  I don’t think anyone else has ever surpassed that stunning accomplishment. 

I later came to realize that JMS was the reason why I had enjoyed so many of the cartoons of my youth. His work on the Masters of the Universe, the Real Ghostbusters, and Captain Power were all ahead of their times. I read a number of his comics and enjoyed many of them. And when his autobiography came out a while back, I devoured it with delight.  (The fact that Peter Jurasik narrated it didn’t hurt.). I read one of his few fiction novels in the past and really enjoyed it, even though I’m not a big horror fan.

So I was interested when I found out he was going to finish Ellison’s work and finish the Last Dangerous Visions anthology that Ellison claimed to be working on for decades, and even more intrigued when I got an eARC from NetGalley and the publisher. 

Now, I don’t always love anthologies. The tonal shifts can cause whiplash and I always prefer single author short story collections. 

But I really enjoyed a number of the stories in this book! Most of the ones I liked best were the newer replacements for older stories bought by Ellison whose right reverted or which were printed elsewhere. A story about a human food critic who are alien food still sticks with me. 

But the best thing in the book was the lengthy piece by JMS, Ellison Exegesis. In it, JMS details his friendship with Ellison as well as Ellison’s crippling mental illness that ended up with him unable to complete this work on his own. It was a very well written piece and to my mind worth 

The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O'Keefe

 

I’m beginning to wonder: Maybe this author is just not for me?

 I really wanted to enjoy this book - I love space opera and had been poor for a new one to read. I had never read anything by Megan E. O’Keefe before the Blighted Stars, but I had heard good things about Velocity Weapon (and I found it on my virtual TBR pile, purchased when it was on sale ages ago). I really enjoyed the Blighted Stars and was able to overlook its flaws because of all the stuff I enjoyed in it. But in the other two books in that trilogy, all of the stuff I enjoyed about the first book seemed to be missing or muted there. No robots, very little spaceship excitement, mostly it was people talking in rooms boringly. The romance, which had a good long slow burn last time, had hit the reset button and was an unbelievable slog. 

But I really enjoy the author’s writing style, so i requested an advanced copy of her new standalone space opera from Orbit and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

I found this book to be boring with uninteresting characters, an unrealistic take on piracy, and a romance I cared nothing about. The world building had potential, but ultimately fell flat also. It’s hard to recount the plot because nothing interesting occurred. I cannot recommend this, sadly. 

The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi

 

Finally! A return to a well loved by one of my favorite authors that doesn’t disappoint! I’m a big fan of Mr. Scalzi’s work since I found Redshirts on the new books shelf at my local library years ago, and I’ve been reading his website regularly for a long time. After Redshirts, I went through his back catalog.  I remember enjoying Old Man’s War but bouncing off the sequel, the Ghost Brigades, the first time I tried to read it. I went back to it and enjoyed it eventually, but found the series to be a bit uneven. I didn’t particularly care for the Zoe character and didn’t love The Last Colony or Zoe’s Tale, but I enjoyed The Human Division and The End of All Things a great deal more. I realized that what I enjoyed most about this series was the world building much more than I enjoyed the Perry family. This was a space opera set in a world where humans were often the villains and where human civilization was not a monolithic political entity, both ideas that I find interesting and that I thought were executed well. 

Mr. Scalzi’s novels in the past few years have been more misses than hits for me. Many of them were weaker than some of his earlier work, and I personally think it was due to his habit of rushing through writing them to make his deadlines (as he has eloquently described on his blog). However, his last novel, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, I loved (well, except maybe the ending) and he seemed to have his mojo back. 

So I was  I got the new John Scalzi book from NetGalley and Tor in exchange for an honest review I was really looking forward to a return to the Old Man’s War universe. 

The main character of this book was Gretchen, a minor character in previous books who was the teenaged friend of Zoe. When she was a kid, I found her fairly one dimensional and annoying, but now she’s all grown up into an interesting character in her own right. This book tells into two of the interesting and previously unexplored aspects of this universe - the enigmatic aliens the Consu, and the skip drive. When the skip drive was introduced in the first book, it was explained that ships equipped with it didn’t travel through space so much as they skipped into a parallel universe that was so close as to be indistinguishable from the original universe, and that people shouldn’t bother thinking about it. Multiverse stories have all the rage recently, but what the author does with it here did not feel trite or overdone to me. Without spoiling the mysteries, I will say that this story move the overall political plot forward and satisfying ways, while giving us interesting characters that, unlike in a number of previous books by this author, actually felt like different people. 

It was a real page turner and a return to form by an author I really like and like to enjoy.