Category: Reviews

Review of The Loving Dead by Amelia Beamer

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Review

BRILLIANCE AUDIO - The Loving Dead by Amelia BeamerThe Loving Dead
By Amelia Beamer; Read by Emily Durante
7 CDs or 1 MP3-CD – Approx. 8 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: July 2010
ISBN: 9781441868343 (cd), 9781441868367 (mp3-cd)
Themes: / Horror / Zombies / Sex / Airships / Humor / San Fransisco / California /

Kate and Michael, twenty-something housemates working at the same Trader Joe’s supermarket, are thoroughly screwed when people start turning into zombies at their house party in the Oakland hills. The zombie plague is a sexually transmitted disease, turning its victims into shambling, horny, voracious killers. Thrust into extremes by the unfolding tragedy, Kate and Michael are forced to confront the decisions they’ve made, and their fears of commitment, while trying to stay alive. Michael convinces Kate to meet him in the one place in the Bay Area that’s likely to be safe and secure from the zombie hordes: Alcatraz. But can they stay human long enough?

Beamer creates scenes, and cuts adequately between them, but when confronted by the surrealistic circumstances she provides (like being trapped in a Zeppelin bathroom with two lesbian zombies) her characters seem more like emotional marionettes, than like real people. It’s almost as if Beamer was actually role-playing a series of improvised scenarios, rather than plotting it out like a novel. When one of the characters discovers that these zombies respond to the crack of a whip, for example, Kate downloads an “Indiana Jones App” to her iPhone and subdues them with it. Clever? Sure. Novelistic? Notsomuch. Thus the tension of a zombie confrontation – will she or won’t she be able to get 3G service high above Oakland – isn’t very satisfying.

Shortly after this audiobook arrived I listened to it’s author, Amelia Beamer, being interviewed on the SFSignal Podcast #006. She talked about how she found the relentlessness of zombies almost endearing. It was a neat idea. And then she said she intended it to be a romantic comedy with zombies. And that was enough to put it in my bathroom audiobook stack. So, for the last week or so I’ve been brushing and flossing my teeth to this novel. I didn’t go in expecting much other than zombies and loving and a few laughs. It has the first two. The loving is actually sex and the zombies are less dead and rotting than they are contagious and sex crazed. If you did a count you’d probably find as many individuated zombies as there are sex scenes. Come to think of it there were probably about just as many tattoos as there were sex scenes and zombies. Where this novel really doesn’t fulfill it’s promise is in the humor department. I didn’t laugh, or smile, or even smirk. Thinking about it, it wasn’t that there were jokes and they weren’t funny, but rather I that the humor was supposed to come from the absurd situational specifics and the slacker/poser cast’s bumbling their way through it all. It has relationships, and people thinking about their relationships, and it has some zombies but I didn’t find it funny.

Getting into specifics now – there’s something odd going on with the meta-Americanness, or rather some subset of it, within the novel’s characters and setting. Even though both Kate and Michael both pretty quickly recognize the infected as zombies, Beamer’s characters seem highly reticent to kill them. Instead they far prefer restraining their wrists, sitting on them – any form of bondage – as in, tie them up or tie them down. Yeah … well … okay. So, I have to think that, in combination with the whips, and the sex and all the tattoos, that taken as a whole this is not so much a zombie novel as a kind of contemporary fiction novel, set in a slacker BDSM San Fransisco subculture, with some zombie additions. Maybe that’s what I signed up for, but I was wrong to do so.

At first I liked some of the references to local stores and products. This is something that is done far too little in most fiction, as far as I’m concerned. It’s one of the things I like most about William Gibson’s prose, he has a reverence to specifics. But as it all went on in The Loving Dead, and as the characters repeatedly reminded each other that they’d read Max Brooks (World War Z |READ OUR REVIEW|), worked at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, it seemed like it wasn’t so much fun – instead it became increasingly clear that it was what was on their minds all the time. It seemed like the real zombies in this audiobook were the characters, living their quiet lives of desperate consumption, performing a narrative for themselves and expressing it in text messages. If I believed in a soul I’d call it a soul-numbing audiobook.

On the final disc we get a flash cut to ten years after the zombie apocalypse first hits. It’s an interesting experiment, to take a doomsday scenario way down the road and see what life is like in the aftermath. One of the redeeming features, of David Moody’s otherwise lackluster Hater |READ OUR REVIEW|, is also in The Loving Dead too. The author takes one significant aspect of a premise to it’s logical and (hopefully inevitable) conclusion. As such, it has some novelty value if only for that. For some true vanilla zombie goodness I’ll get back to reading Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead.

Narrator Emily Durante, a new voice to my ears, is a good reader, I can see that, even despite my not loving The Loving Dead, she provided a steady voice to a patchy and punctuated narrative.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Live Free or Die by John Ringo

Scott D.

SFFaudio Review

Science Fiction Audiobook - Live Free or Die by John RingoLive Free Or Die
By John Ringo; Read by Mark Boyett
17 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: 2010
Themes: / Science Fiction / Military / Politics / Aliens / First contact /

All authors have political opinions. Those opinions reveal themselves in authors’ novels. Most authors reveal those opinions subtly, probably figuring an in-your-face approach will only turn off some readers.

John Ringo is not most authors. In Troy Rising: Live Free or Die, Ringo (and his Mary Sue protagonist, named Tyler Vernon) wear their politics on their sleeves. It is a robust libertarian brand of politics. This is a little refreshing, and a lot distracting. Readers who dislike celebrations of conservative culture and Don’t Tread On Me economics are going to have to work very hard to ignore the constant needling. In particular, “socialist p***ies” are urged to approach this novel with deflector shields set to maximum.

Even plot points fulfill Ringo’s wishes in surprising ways. When aliens drop rocks on our cities, the result is that the surviving electorate skews rural. . .and conservative. This is just the kind of thinking-through-the-implications work that a good speculative fiction author is required to do. Yet, Ringo takes just a tiny bit of, well, satisfaction from the deaths of millions of misguided liberal urbanites. More blatantly self-indulgent is a plot point involving an alien-engineered virus that makes all the blond women in the world soooper horny. No joke.

You can call this space opera; ear candy; action-packed. The prose is breezy and the plot is intelligently constructed. The narration, by Mark Boyett, is a pleasure to listen to. He’s either an enthusiastic conservative, or a liberal with superb acting skills. (Either scenario is plausible.)

The novel divides into three clear sections. The first act describes a first-contact scenario, with aliens installing an interstellar transport gate in our solar system with precious little warning. The resulting transformation of all human civilization into a galactic third-world country is quite plausible. It’s a disturbing reminder of the way colonial powers are viewed by the colonized.

The second act tells of the ascendancy of Tyler Vernon from unemployed everyman to the richest tycoon in human history. He finds the one commodity unique to Earth that aliens value. Here, the novel becomes less plausible—a little silly, really—and worse, the idea is not original, resembling a plot device in Harry Turtledove’s WWII alt history, where gingerroot turns aliens into crackheads. I won’t give away what the substance is in this case; suffice it to say it comes from a region of the world known for its culture of prickly independence, which dovetails with Ringo’s politics with neat precision. A nifty authorial trick, that.

The third act is the longest, and it describes the building the Troy, an excellent Big Dumb Object—a fantastically massive battle station. Even more impressive is a system of mirrors that concentrate sunlight into powerful beams measured in terawatts or even petawatts. These weapons give Earth a fighting chance against the oppressors. The question nags: could humans think up technology that surprises millennia-old civilizations? Very unlikely.

This book brings to mind another tale of lowly humans besting an established galactic order. Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade describes how medieval knights commandeer an alien space ship and, ultimately, overthrow a space empire. That book is more enjoyable because it’s not even remotely serious. Live Free or Die aspires to a more serious level, but ultimately works only if the reader’s sense of fun can withstand the concentrated sunlight of plausibility.

Posted by the Fredösphere

Review of Darkside by Tom Becker

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Review

Darkside by Tom BeckerDarkside
By Tom Becker; Read by Colin Moody
6 CDs – Approx. 6 Hours 12 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Bolinda Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9781921415340
Themes: / Fantasy / Urban Fantasy / Crime / London / Werewolves / Vampires / Magic / Kidnapping / Evil / Jack The Ripper /
Your home’s been attacked. Your dad’s in an asylum. You’re running for your life. And there’s nowhere to hide.

You’ve stumbled on the city’s greatest secret: Darkside. Incredibly dangerous and unimaginably exciting. Darkside is ruled by Jack the Ripper’s children – a place where nightmares walk the streets. You think you’re in trouble now, but your problems have just begun…

I usually do a fair mount of research about the books I plan to read. Before I pick one up I’ve usually either heard an author interview, read a review, discussed it with people who’ve already read it, or at least got a recommendation from an author whose work I already respect. But I also know these techniques aren’t a very good way to branch out beyond what’s already familiar to me, and so, every so often I just pick up a book, almost at random, and start reading. That’s what I did with Darkside by Tom Becker.

Maybe one of the initial appeals of Darkside, other than the terrific cover, was that it was from a publisher whose audiobooks I’d never heard before. Bolinda Audio is from Australia. And because of that it’s doing things a little differently. First off, it’s narrators are Australian. And second, they’ve got a lot of authors in their catalogue that I’ve never heard of. That’s cool!

Darkside is an interesting tale in itself. In terms of plot, it kind of falls halfway between two Neil Gaiman novels: Neverwhere and The Graveyard Book. It features Jonathan Starling, an unremarkable misfit fourteen-year-old with an ailing father and a deceased mother. He lives in London and is mostly taken care of by a kindly neighbor woman. Other than her, he’s nearly friendless and spends most days skipping-out of school and hanging out at one of the city’s many libraries. His father, an avid book collector himself, suffers some sort of recurring full body paralysis and perhaps it’s related to some of the books he collects. One day, right out in the open on a London street Jonathan is nearly kidnapped by a seemingly invisible giant and a woman with fluorescent hair. He quickly learns that London isn’t going to be safe for him anymore and so his father sends him away. He is to flee, for his own safety, into the arms of a protector. Jonathan takes with him a knife and a bullet. The knife is for protection from the kidnappers, and the bullet is for protection against his would-be protector, a mysterious old friend of his father’s, a man named Carnegie. Plot ensues.

Where the novel falls short is in comparison to the two Neil Gaiman novels I mentioned earlier. A hidden city within London isn’t really new. And neither is a young kid being protected by a paranormal monster-man. More importantly, Becker doesn’t have anywhere near the mastery of English fiction that Gaiman has. But that’s really not a fair comparison. For my money very few living English authors can compare favorably with Neil Gaiman. Apparently Darkside was written when Becker was just 25! When Gaiman was 25 he hadn’t written a single novel, comic, nor even Don’t Panic, his wonderful biography of Douglas Adams. As a result I think Darkside can stand pretty proudly on its own. It’s quickly paced, pretty fun and most of all it’s got a story that keeps your attention all the way through. Good job new guy.

Narrator Colin Moody, a talent stage trained actor, has an Australian accent, except when performing the dialogue of the characters. When in character Moody cowls him reading with various Londoner regionalisms. There are many sinister sounding villains in this novel and he voices all of them extremely well. If you’re a voracious reader looking for swiftly plotted urban fantasy novel (for the juvenile set), and you’ve already read both Neverwhere |READ OUR REVIEW| and The Graveyard Book |READ OUR REVIEW| do check out Darkside. Series fans will also be pleased to hear that four more Darkside novels follow this one, and that Bolinda has the “audio sequel forthcoming.”

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

Seth Wilson

SFFaudio Review

The Bade Itself by Joe AbercrombieThe Blade Itself (The First Law: Book One)
By Joe Abercrombie; Read by Steven Pacey
Audible Download – 22 Hours 18 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2010
ISBN: 9781409111443
Provider: Audible.com
Sample |MP3|
Themes: / Fantasy / Sword and Sorcery / Dark Humor / Revenge / Violence /

For a couple years now, Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law Trilogy has been at the top of my to-read list, but as I’m a slow print reader, the series inevitably yielded to more readily available audiobooks. Imagine my delight, then, when I recently realized that Orion Publishing Group had published the series in audio last June. The wait was worth it. The opening volume, The Blade Itself is a darkly humorous tale full of antiheroes and intrigue. Abercrombie’s strong writing and wry wit set The Blade Itself a cut above other novels in the reactionary subgenre of fantasy spawned by George R.R. Martin.

At first blush, the world of the First Law Trilogy looks like your average fantasy world. The bulk of the action takes place in Adua, capital city of The Union, a land with a dotard king facing imminent war on two fronts: the newly-unified North and the Gurkish Empire to the South. The city, and especially its central citadel the Agriont, is teaming with ambitious councilman, posturing soldiers, and brutal inquisitors. The North, as one might epect, is a sparse unwelcoming land peopled by warrior clans recently unified under the iron fist of King Bethod. In The Blade Itself we see only snatches of the Gurkish Empire, but it follows the usual desert formula for southern kingdoms. (Why do most fantasy series seem to be set in the Northern hemisphere?) This opening volume hints at an intricate magic system that underlies and informs the world, but so far it’s rather underdeveloped.

The viewpoint characters bring this seemingly run-of-the-mill fantasy world to life in vibrant color. Each character is an antihero, in some sense of the word. Like George R. R. Martin, Richard K. Morgan, and other recent writers, Abercrombie is writing against the tropes of the traditional good-versus-evil format of epic fantasy. Unlike some other writers in this vein, though, Abercrombie rarely seems too self-conscious about what he’s doing. Logen Ninefingers, dubbed the “bloody-nine” in the North, does not read like an anti-Aragorn, nor does Bayaz, First of the Magi, read like an anti-Gandalf. Rather, they’re fully developed characters in their own right.  Then there’s San dan Glokta, survivor of a horrible ordeal of torture at the hands of the Gurkish Empire who has in turn become a torturer for the inquisition. Rounding out the cast is Jezal, a headstrong noble youth determined to win the year’s fencing contest. With the exception of Jezal, these characters have endured tremendously hard lives, so naturally their thoughts aren’t filled with sunshine and butterflies. This is a dark book.

The fun lies in watching these characters come together and interact with one another. As in any good book, too, it’s fun to watch these characters, who we’ve come to empathize with even if we don’t actually like them, overcome their internal and external challenges. The most obvious case is Jezal and his fencing contest, which is brought to a most satisfying concentration. Then there’s Glokta, trying to stay afloat in the political post of Inquisitor, all while struggling merely to get out of bed. Then there’s Logen, fleeing his reputation as the “bloody-nine.” And at the heart of it all is Bayaz, First of the Magi, whose story hints at the direction the series may ultimately take. Bayaz, though not a point-of-view character, drives the plot in many ways, either subtly or overtly manipulating events to suit his needs.

If the book has a weakness, it’s the ending. Endings are always tricky things to pull off, especially in the first novel of a trilogy, where an author must bring the present volume to a satisfying conclusion while enticing the reader to continue with the series. Unfortunately, Abercrombie leans too far towards the latter. While the last hour or two of audio will be a treat for fans of vividly-depicted action sequences, they’re light on any satisfying story development. The ending certainly isn’t bad, it just left me a bit disappointed. On the other hand, it also did its job in whetting my appetite for the next volume.

As alluded to earlier, the standout character in The Blade Itself is perhaps Abercrombie’s deft writing style. Admittedly, it took some getting used to. I remember complaining on Twitter back when I first had a go at reading the print edition that the book was too full of sentence fragments and “said bookisms.” I stand by that complaint. The thing is, the style really fits the world and especially the characters. The dialogue reads like you’re sitting in on the conversation, especially under the standout narration by Steven Pacey. And while I’m not personally a fan of long action sequences, there’s no doubt that Abercrombie writes them masterfully. You can feel every bone-jarring sword blow and taste the tang of blood in the air.

I approached this audiobook with some hesitation. I feared that no narrator could match Michael Page’s performance of Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold. At best, I feared, I’d be disappointed; at worst, I wouldn’t even be able to listen to the book in its entirety. Fortunately, Steven Pacey is equal to the task of narrating such an ambitious work. His narration walks the fine balance of capturing the characters’ voices–literally and figuratively–without calling too much attention to them and thereby detracting from the story. The toothless Glokta, for instance, speaks with just a hint of a lisp, a slight slurring. Every now and then, his narration moves a touch too far toward the dramatic, but for the most part it’s spot on.

The Blade Itself, if it were a film, would carry a solid R rating, and therefore isn’t for everyone. Strong language and violence abound. Under its dark veneer of brutality, however, the novel shines with complex characters, compelling writing, and a story that, though not yet fully baked, promises to yield great rewards in subsequent novels.

Posted by Seth Wilson

Review of The Long Walk by Stephen King

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Review

Horror Audiobook - The Long Walk by Stephen KingThe Long Walk
By Stephen King; Read by Kirby Heyborne
9 CDs – Approx. 11 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2010
ISBN: 9780142427835
Themes: / Horror / Walking / Alternate History / Maine /

Every year, on the first day of May, one hundred teenage boys meet for an event known throughout the country as the “Long Walk.” Among this year’s chosen crop is sixteen-year-old Ray Garraty. He knows the rules: Warning are issued if you fall under speed, stumble, sit down. After three warnings, you get your ticket. And what happens then serves as a chilling reminder that there can be only one winner in the Walk: the one who survives.

One of the things that generally makes me not connect with fiction is what’s missing. That is to say, if the story isn’t talking about some idea (the human condition, society, or how the world works) I probably won’t connect with it. I therefore always assume that a novel has some message. A lesson it is trying to impart to me. Perhaps this is a mistake as The Long Walk, by Stephen King, lives on the surface of what it is. It’s 100 boys walking across the United States in a kind of slow motion deathrace. Unlike the the traditional death march, these walkers are all volunteers, and are supplied with food and water. “That’s the premise.” I told myself. But what message had King planted underneath it? What idea was he trying to convey in novel form?

At first I was wondering if King was addressing the Vietnam War. But that didn’t pan out, not exactly. The way the book is structured, the premise is never flatly stated, we only learn how the boys ended up where they are (walking across Maine) when they discuss it amongst themselves. So, we’re learning the premise as we go. I figured that if there was a message in The Long Walk it needed to be decoded. My first suspect for the key to the message was the soldiers who passively enforce the Long Walk’s rules. Their faces were strangely blank, providing no bounce or reaction to their work or the insults the walkers hurl at them. I thought their blankness might be a hint, a symbol, or something. But if so, it didn’t work out for me. In fact, by the end, never having learned the names of any of the nearly faceless soldiers, it was quite the opposite. The only idea I could come up with to explain this was that they were designed to represent the unfeeling laws of nature. Kind of an embodiment physics, unfeeling and inalterable. That got me thinking that perhaps the whole of the The Long Walk was kind of a metaphor for mortality – you know, the idea that no matter your station, no matter your talent, none of us can escape our coming demise. But, the more I read, the less that seemed likely. In fact, no matter which intellectual straw I grasped at I kept coming away with a figurative handful of nothing.

Another angle of attack I took was to look at the world. What kind of a world would allow this horror race? What was the meaning of “the prize” for the winner? The world, what little we get to hear of it, was pretty interesting. We learn that there are 51 states in the Union, that before then end WWII some kind of air raid from Nazi Germany hit the American East Coast, and that the government may be entirely in the hands of a military dictatorship. Nice! These and other small details slip out in the many varied conversations between the boys in the Walk, amongst trash talk, sex talk and the discussion of literature. With nothing much left to go on I tried to think about the literary references, tried to see if there was some key there, to unlocking the meaning of this novel. At one point one of the walkers says that ‘the Walk is like living in a Shirley Jackson story.’ He was right! And later on, when ruminating on the effect of being watched by the public, another of the boys says he’s ‘reminded of a Ray Bradbury story.’ And he was right! In fact, there are maybe a half dozen literary references alluded to in this novel. But none of them, not any one of them, was the key to decoding the meaning for me. So, in the end, I didn’t come away with was any sense of what this novel was about, other than what it would be like to be force marched across the United States.

Apparently The Long Walk was originally written in 1966 and 1967 while King was in his first two semesters of university. I’m assuming it was somewhat updated or re-written before it’s 1979 debut in paperback under King’s Richard Bachman pseudonym. I first heard Kirby Heyborne’s narrative abilities with Little Brother |READ OUR REVIEW|. That novel was told in the first person, and Heyborne’s youthful voice was up for the job there. Here, voicing more than a dozen young men and boys, all in the third person, he renders an acceptable, if not stellar, performance. He adds the occasional regional American accent to each kid and it always sounds appropriate for what we know about his background. Also of note: There is an interesting introductory essay on Disc 1 entitled The Importance Of Being Bachman. It does not, however, provide any particular details about The Long Walk.

Posted by Jesse Willis

FREE LISTENS REVIEW: The Curse of Capastrano

Seth

Review

The Curse of Capastrano by Johnston McCulley

Source: Librivox (zipped mp3s)Curse of Capistrano
Length: 6 hr, 34 min
Reader: Barry Eads

The book: Never heard of this book? Perhaps that’s because it’s the secret identity of its more famous alter-ego. Following the successful Douglas Fairbanks movie based on The Curse of Capastrano, McCulley reissued his novel under the same name as the silent film: The Mark of Zorro.

It’s easy to see why this book became a blockbuster film; it’s full of action, humor, romance, and plot twists. McCulley has a great sense of pacing, building up suspense and taking Zorro from scene to scene with great efficiency. Each short chapter ends with a mini-cliffhanger. Many of the supporting characters are one-dimensional, but I was happily surprised to find the main female character, Lolita, to be a self-reliant woman with a brain, rather than a damsel in distress.The Curse of Capastrano is a great short action-adventure book, perfect for putting a little pep in your morning commute or gym routine.

Rating: 9/10

The reader: Barry Eads does a terrific job with this narration. There are a number of speaking characters in this book, and Eads does a distinct voice for each one, making it easy to figure out who is talking. Even his female voices are believable. He varies the pacing and tone of his narration to keep up with the changes in action, making it easier to follow Zorro’s spectacular feats. The only fault I could find is that Eads tends to mispronounce some of the many Spanish words, but if you’re not a Spanish speaker, you will have no problem with this.

Posted by Seth