Book of Apex Blog Tour: Guest Post by Tim Susman

Last week, I reviewed The Book of Apex, Volume 4.

Today, as part of the Apex of Blog Book Tour, I have a guest post by one of the authors represented in the collection, Tim Susman. Tim wrote one of the most intriguing stories in the collection, “Erzulie Dantor” and in this post, he talks about some of his process behind penning this particular story. And the good news is that if you haven’t yet read the story, you can check it out for FREE!

Orders of Magnitude

In the last year, I wrote a couple thousand-word flash fictions, a few 10K-word short stories, and two hundred-thousand word novels. If pressed, I would probably say I enjoy novels the most. There’s a sense of satisfaction that comes with completing a long project, and of all the things I’ve written, the novels are the ones that have the most permanence. Still, I enjoy getting a flash-fic-sized idea, something I can write and hone in a couple days, something that gets a point across and then goes away; a short story can be an enticing visit to a world. In ten thousand words (technically a novelette, though I did write several short stories as well), you can introduce a world and a character and a problem and see the problem through to its resolution.

The way I approach each of these is necessarily different, and it doesn’t start the way you might think. When I have the idea for a story, usually the length is encoded in the idea. For the recent series of flash fics inspired by James Bond movie theme song titles (yes, that’s a thing), I tried to write the flash fics as spontaneously as possible, and that meant that I had to search for a flash-fic length idea. Sometimes they grew a little long—“Goldeneye” I think could be a bigger story if I wanted to expand it—but sometimes they ended up being neat little “what if” vignettes.

One of the dangers with flash fic is the allure of the “gotcha” ending. “‘My name is Jesus,’ the alien said.”—you know the kind of story. It’s a particularly tough ending to pull off in flash fiction because a twist ending depends on the reader having an investment in or expectation of the story, and a thousand words is often not enough to build up enough to make the twist worthwhile. What’s more, people are used to shorter pieces having twist endings, so if you telegraph that it’s a twist story, people will often outguess you, and then the story loses its punch. Of course, it could also be that I’m just not good at twist endings.

Review: Doctor Who: Harvest of Time by Alastair Reynolds

When I first heard that Alastair Reynolds was writing a Doctor Who tie-in novel, I was equal part curious and skeptical.

After reading Stephen Baxter’s Second Doctor tie-in, I wasn’t sure the melding of a big-name genre writer with the universe of Doctor Who could be very successful.

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised that within twenty pages of Reynolds’ The Harvest of Time that not only had he captured the spirit of the Jon Pertwee era on the printed page, but that I was also enjoying the book immensely.

Set at the height of the Pertwee era, The Harvest of Time takes place before the on-screen events of “The Sea Devils” and finds the Doctor and UNIT trying to fend off an alien invasion brought about by the Master. But instead of the season eight cliche of the Master bringing a group of aliens to Earth and rapidly losing control of the situation, Reynolds makes this alien invasion one unintentionally triggered by the Master. Seems that our favorite Time Lord villain was sending out a signal to himself across the timelines to help his present self escape his Earthly prison. However, his signal is picked up by an alien race who has already destroyed one world and has now set its sights on Earth and gaining the Master as part of their nefarious plot.

Harvest of Time feels like a story that could have been made during third Doctor’s tenure — assuming they had the budget and special effects technology that help bring the new series to life on our screens. All of the UNIT-era regulars are on hand and it’s clear from Reynolds use of them that he is not only a fan of classic Who but also a fan of the Pertwee era. And while this novel feels like it could easily take place during that era, it still has a scope and scale that simply couldn’t or wouldn’t work as well on our TV screens. Examining the nature of time and the implications of time travel, the story is one of the most entertaining novels — tie-in or otherwise — that I’ve read this year.

It even made me year to dust off some of my old third Doctor era DVDs and give them a viewing (again). It also made me want to run out and read more of Reynolds’ non-Who offerings.

Easily the best of the big name genre author tie-in novels, The Harvest of Time gives me hope that the editors of this line would be willing to try this experiment again with some other more recognized authors. And hope that Reynolds might have another Doctor Who story in him because if he does, this is one fan who’d love a chance to read it.

Review: Star Trek: Allegiance in Exile by David R. George II

Lately I’ve been revisiting the Star Trek universe via a combination of DVDs, Blu-Rays and streaming video as well as listening to the great Mission Log podcast.

All of that, plus reading a few heavier books (both in terms of content and page count) put me in the mood for a light, fun palate cleanser tie-in novel. And so it was that after a year of languishing on my to-be-read pile, I finally decided it was time to give David R. George III’s Allegiance in Exile a look.

Set in the final year of the original five year mission, the novel finds Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise discovering an apparently deserted planet that holds a deadly cache of self-defense weapons. After the ship and landing party are attacked (including the destruction of a shuttle or two), Kirk and company discover a way to detect and disable the installations.

While Kirk struggles with what the future could hold and the next step in his career (he’s not ready to leave the bridge of the Enterprise just yet), Sulu meets and falls for a member of the crew, who was part of the landing party with him. Of course, this can only mean one thing — the crew member in question’s life span is reduced to about twenty or so minute (or in this case about 100 pages).

Review: The Book of Apex, Volume 4 of Apex Magazine edited by Lynne M. Thomas

To paraphrase a famous quote from Forrest Gump, short story collections are like a box of chocolates…you never know what you’re going to get.

That’s the great thing about a collection of short stories — if you come across a story you don’t care for you, there’s generally another chance (or five) that the next story or a story later in the collection will be more your speed or taste.  Since the start of 2014, I’ve immersed myself into two short story collections — one that had been languishing on my to-be-read shelf for far too long and the other as part of the Book of Apex, Volume 4 Blog Tour.

Thanks to the hard work of Andrea from The The Little Red Reviewer, I was given access to a digital copy of this short story collection.   The collection covers the best of fifteen or so issues from the on-line Book of Apex and is edited by Lynne M. Thomas. The stories selected here represent the cream of the crop from her first several issues editing the magazine and they run the gamut from sci-fi to fantasy to horror.   Given that I enjoy each of these three genres and that I recognized several of the names included in this collection, I was eager to sit back and enjoy the stories.

Stories run from a couple of pages (or in my case, clicks on the Kindle screen) to close to novella length.   The varying length of each story makes the collection an intriguing one.  Among my favorite stories from the collection were:

“The 24 Hour Brother” by Christopher Barzak — In a way, this reminded me of the story of Benjamin Button, only with a slight twist. What if you had a sibling who was born, grew up and passed away in a day. That’s the premise of this one and there were a couple of details that stuck out for me — one is that at one point the brother eats dinner with the family and then casually watches a police drama on television. This made me ponder that if I were to live for a day, what is the one show or single episode of a show I’d most want to watch or have shown to me. Of all the stories in this collection, this one has kept me coming back to it and turning it over in my mind long after I’ve read all the others.

“Blood from Stone” by Alethea Kontis — I may be biased toward this one a bit since I met Ms. Kontis once at a book club meeting (she probably doesn’t remember it). So I feel a bit like I’m supporting a friend by picking up her books or reading one of her short stories. Luckily, I’ve yet to be disappointed by her writing, though this is one is a nice change of pace from what I’ve previously read. But like her fantasy novels that put a contemporary spin on a classic story, so does this one put an interesting spin on the horror story. I can’t say too much without giving away some of the fun twists and turns of the story. Trust me — seek it out and read it. You’ll probably like it.

“Erzulie Dantor” by Tim Susman — The good thing about a short story collection is you can read them in any order you want. I’ll admit I read this one first, not because I’m familiar with Mr. Susman’s work but because of a guest post that will appear on this site later this week. Susman’s story is one of the more intriguing of the lot, a bit of an examination of mythology of another culture and its practices.  An intriguing little story that I’m glad I read first in the collection.  Another favorite.

“Winter Scheming” by Brit Mandalo — This was particularily interesting to read around Valentine’s Day.  Brit is haunted by a past relationship and, well, if I say more I might give away some of the fun of this one.    The thing with short stories is that it’s far too easy to give away too many details and possibly ruin some of the fun of reading them for yourself. I am trying not to do that.

These four stories were my favorites from the collection and have made me curious to see what other treats Apex Magazine will offer in the future.  The good news is that if you’re intrigued by any of my reviews, you can easily follow the link above and read the original stories for free on their site.   And after you do, I recommend that purchase this entire collection and put it on your e-reader.   I’m glad I did and I think you’ll be glad you did as well.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was given a digital review copy of this collection in exchange for an honest reviews.

Review: The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson

Many young adult novels create worlds in which young people are forced to grow up too quickly or often have more sense than the adults in their lives.

Laurie Halse Anderson’s “The Impossible Knife of Memory” could easily be placed in that category, except for one thing. Her utterly relatable and authentic characters who inhabit the pages of her novel.

Hayley Kincaid and her father have spent the last several years on the road — he working as a truck driver and she accompanying him. Her father is haunted by his time spent in the service and the road helps him keep one step ahead on the demons — or at least the consequences from his being haunted. When her father decides it’s time to settle back down in the town he grew up, things quickly began to unravel for Haley. Haley blames her father’s ex-girlfriend for certain things that have happened and has a difficult time fitting it at school because she’s forced to not only care for herself but also to care for her father.

That doesn’t stop her from attracting the attention of a quirky boy in her classes and the two starting a reluctant friendship that deepens into something more.

Anderson infuses Haley and the characters in her world with a sense of utter authenticity. Anderson also doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the up-hill battle Haley faces and the consequences of it. The novel is utterly compelling, readable and, at times, moving. You won’t always love or hate any of these characters but Anderson does a nice job of helping us understand what drives and haunts them.

Anderson wisely doesn’t wrap up everything with a tidy bow at the end. She does give us some closure in the novel and hope for the future, but she still leaves some things up to the reader to fill in the blanks,

Anderson’s young adult novels are among the cream of the crop — and this one is another example of why.

I received an ARC of this novel from the Amazon Vine program in exchange for an honest review.

Booking Through Thursday: Snow Day

For most of the east coast, at least, it’s a wintry, snowy day today, so … How do you like to spend your snow days? Feel free to gloss over the obligatory parts like shoveling unless you LIKE it. We’re talking ideal, best way to spend a snow day kind of thoughts, here.

For those of you who live in places where snow days simply don’t happen? Feel free to substitute “snow” with “rain” and think about the kind of days when you just want to cuddle up inside where it’s warm and dry.

Since my favorite way to experience snow is looking at friends’ picture of it on Facebook, I may not be the most ideal person to answer this one.  But I’ll try….

A couple of ways to enjoy a snow day would include a good nap, having time to finish a book I’m reading or possibly starting one of the to-be-read pile, clearing off a few shows on the DVR or watching a movie I’ve been meaning to get around to watching.

 

Review: The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

If the world were going to end in six months, how would you react?

Would you start crossing items off your bucket list? Or would you try and connect with a higher power? Or would you continue on in your chosen career, finally able to move up because a lot of other people had taken the first two options?

Detective Hank Palace is taking that third option, finally getting ahead in his police career because everyone else above him took another path. He’s a detective by default and while he’s good at his job, there’s not really a lot of pressure to solve many cases. For many, being caught and locked up for a crime is a death sentence since, again, the world is going to end in six months when the Earth collides with a giant asteroid.

The sense of impending doom has also led a lot of people to take an early exit on this life. When Hank is called in on an apparent suicide, he begins to suspect the set-up may look too much like a suicide and may actually be a cover-up for murder.

Ben H. Winter’s The Last Policeman is a fascinating combination of a gritty, noir mystery and an end-of-the-world sci-fi thriller. Winter drops us into the world of Hank Palace and allows us to live in it along with him — seeing a variety of responses to the end of the world coming and there being little, if anything, that can be done to stop it. (There’s no Bruce Willis here to jump on a shuttle and take out the asteroid before it collides).

It’s the world-building that sets the first two-thirds of this novel apart from other noir mystery novels. But it’s the last third that offers up clues as to something more going on and also that drag down the novel a bit. The central mystery works well enough and is nicely resolved, but there’s something in the novel’s final third that seems a bit off from what we’ve read until then. And while I understand that we can’t exactly root for a last-second miracle and that the world-view of this novel is a bleak one, I still felt something was missing from the last third of the novel that kept a good book from being a great one.

Interestingly, my local community has chosen this novel as it’s “community read” for 2014. Certainly some of the ideas and questions raised by the novel — just how would you deal with the end of the world coming? — are intriguing ones. One idea that Winters puts forward is how everyday things would shut down or quickly become a luxury or a memory. For example, McDonald’s are shut down but there are local squatters who take over the local franchise and keep things going even if you’re not technically eating the famous fries and a Big Mac. There’s also the question of quantities of certain items slowly beginning to dwindle down as the supply chain is interrupted or else suspended entirely.

All of these are interesting issues and ideas. And yet it never feels like Winters is bringing the central mystery to a halt to have Palace spend a paragraph or two thinking back to the good ol’ days.

And while I wasn’t a huge fan of how it ended, I was still intrigued enough by Palace and his world to want to pick up the next installment in this proposed trilogy and see what happens next.

Thoughts on Bosch

Just as they did last year, Amazon is allowing the audience to decide which of several new pilots will go to series.  But unlike last year, this time around there were two pilots that immediately caught my eye and I added to my “to watch” list sooner rather than later.

The first is Chris Carter’s new series The After and the other Bosch, which is based on the best-selling mystery series by Michael Connelly.

I had some free time this afternoon and enough time to watch one of the two series.  After much debating, I decided to go with Bosch first.

First of all, I will admit that I’m a big fan of Connelly”s mysteries and the Bosch novels in particular.  So, I had some fairly high hopes and expectations heading into the series.

And while it did take me a few minutes to reconcile how the various actors involved in the series differed from my own mental casting (for some reason, my mental image of Bosch is closer to Ron Pearlman), overall I like what I’ve seen so far.

The series has a couple of things going for it right up front.  First is that Connelly is involved as a producer — he even co-wrote the pilot episode.  In addition, some of the creative team in front of and behind the camera gave us The Wire, which I’ve heard nothing but great things about and is on my bucket list of TV shows to watch when time permits.

As the pilot begins, Bosch is stuck in court, facing charges in a civil trial related to a perp that he took out two years before.   While Bosch was exonerated by Los Angeles police department, he’s still facing civil penalties from the family of the man who was shot.   Bosch is going a bit stir crazy being stuck in court all day and pulled off regular duty rotation — so much so that he trades Laker tickets to a couple of guys on the force to cover their weekend shift.

While doing this, Bosch uncovers a case of a child’s bones buried in the hills.   Bosch manipulates the system and his partner, Jerry Edgar, to stay on the case while he’s in court facing trial.

As an introduction to the universe of all things Harry Bosch, the pilot works extremely well. And while I’ll readily admit that Titus Weliver wasn’t the actor I had mentally cast as Bosch, it only took a few minutes for me to get past this and to really like Weliver in the role.  The series has softened Bosch a bit — in the books, he’s a bit of jerk to people — so that we’ll at least root for him as a hero, or possibly an anti-hero.

I’ve read that should the pilot get ordered to series, it will follow Connelly’s “City of Bones” as the backbone of the season.  Interestingly, I believe this is next in line of the Bosch novels I haven’t ready yet and it’s sitting on my to-be-read pile.  It may have to make a move up the pile a bit since the mystery intrigued me enough that I wanted to know more once the fifty or so minutes has finished streaming to my set.

As for the rest of Bosch’s world, it’s all there — from his love of jazz to his taste in food and liquor.  There are also several familiar faces from the novels that crop up.

So far, I’m sold.  If Amazon decides to move forward on this one, I’ll watch.  And given that Bosch has a good sized catalog of books, this is a show that has ample material for a long and fascinating run.

Review: Red Rising by Pierce Brown

I’ll have to admit I was about ready to give up on Red Rising after wading through the first hundred or so pages of the novel, but solid on-line buzz and a glowing review from Entertainment Weekly made me determined to muddle on and see if I could find out what all the buzz was about.

And now that I’ve finished the book (the first in a trilogy of novels), I can sort of see what all the buzz was about. In many ways, Pierce Brown’s debut novel feels like it’s taken a lot of ingredients from other popular novels — dystopian future, a hero who must reinvent himself and embrace his destiny, lost love, a winner take all, no-holds barred contest – and blended them all together like a stew. And while all the ingredients are good, I still don’t feel like everything blended together well enough to leave me feeling satisfied when I got to the bottom of the bowl.

Darrow is the lowest of the low in the future dystopian caste system on Mars. He’s a miner who endures day after day of back breaking labor in an attempt to get ahead a bit. His lifespan is expected to be short, but Darrow takes comfort in the love of his wife, Eo. But when Eo speaks out against the ruling class on Mars, her final act before being hung is one of defiance. Darrow is devastated (her death is made even more brutal by the fact that due to Mars’ lower gravity, he has to pull on her legs to complete her sentence and allow her to die without further suffering) and vows to find a way to get back at those who took the light of his life from him.

This leads to his own trip to the gallows and his apparent death. But instead of dying, he’s taken and turned into an upper crust elite with the goal of leading a rebellion from the highest levels and overthrowing the powers above him and getting his revenge on those who took Eo from him. Along the way, Darrow learns that much of that Mars he knew is built lies and deception, designed to keep the lower classes down and give them just enough hope to keep toiling while the upper castes reap the benefits.

What Darrow endures to become one of the higher castes is interesting, but there were times reading this first installment I wished Brown would spend a bit less time on the world-building and a bit more time developing his characters and moving the plotline forward. At times, Darrow is difficult to like, making some portions of the book less interesting to read than others.

And yet, this book is garnering a lot of glowing reviews from the on-line community, I kept reminding myself. And there are a few twists in the novel’s last third as well as a pick-up in the intensity of developments that I could almost see what everyone else seems to love about this book.

It’s enough to have me interested in a second installment and curious to see what happens next. But it’s not enough for to me really rave about this book and feel completely satisfied with it overall. It feels like it’s a few ingredients short of a complete meal.

Review: The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep And Never Had To by D.C. Pierson

If you’re expecting D.C. Pierson’s novel The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To to address and resolve all the issues related to the title character and his sleeping disorder, you’re going to be sorely disappointed by this book.

However, if you approach this book and view the title as a hook to get you interested in the story of the friendship to two young, geeky teenage boys and their trials, tribulations and first loves, then you’re probably going to love this book. I know I did.

Darren Bennett is a bit of a loner, constantly doodling in his notebooks, textbooks and anything else he can find. One day, Eric Lederer notices the drawings and the two begin their friendship — one that includes developing the outline for an epic franchise of space fantasy films. It also involves avoiding Darren’s older brother and his bullying friends, falling for the same girl (though dating her at different times) and, oh yeah, the secret that Eric doesn’t sleep and never has.

Despite having a sci-fi element to it, Pierson keeps his novels and characters ground, interesting and utterly relatable. This is one of those books that had me losing sleep just wanting to spend a few more minutes in the world of Darren and Eric. Of course, it’s the girl who comes between our two heroes that leads Darren leaking Eric’s secret and the inevitable complications that arise from it.

Pierson’s writing is enveloping and this entertaining, charming story has earned a spot on my favorites shelf and it will likely remain there for a long time. I picked up this one in the hopes of scratching a book off my to-be-read pile and discovered a real gem.