Season 8: Book 4
ISBN: 9787595823106
Despite the last three volumes having different writers they’ve all held deliciously true to the Buffy-verse while not letting the storyline becoming dull or repetitive. With this addition the story moves the focus back to Buffy and to the large story arc, Buffy vs the mysterious Twilight. Except it moves at this plot from a side arc rather than straight forward.
It cannot be coincidence that a temporal anomaly sucks Buffy into the future right when Twilight has been trying to convince her of the futility of her spell to make all the Potentials into genuine Slayers. Whoever Twilight is, they are fighting to kill Buffy, to destroy the spell so the balance between good and evil will be restored.
So whether the anomaly and Buffy being present is due to Twilight’s interference or not, Buffy landing in a future words where a Slayer is at war with her twin, who has been turned into a vampire, seems only to reinforce Twilight’s attacks on Buffy’s resolve.
But the main player in this tale doesn’t appear to be either the strange, lonely Slayer, her vampire twin with the Slayer’s memory, or Twilight. Instead the direct story behind Buffy’s time trip is sadder and closer to home than Buffy could guess.
While ultimately a sad volume, so much is left undone, unexplained, unseen or heard that it takes from the depth of the final scene. Readers can only hope that the Buffy-verse continues its habit of baiting, teasing and most of all, delivering.
Season 8 Book 3
ISBN: 9781595827652
Likely my favorite volume of Buffy so far, Book Three starts off with Buffy finding out about the major plot from the last volume, the lingering number of Slayers who have escaped her tutelage and have become something other than the first line of defense against evil.
But before Buffy and the gang have time to assess this new threat their castle is attacked by a group of vampires, unlike any other, who can shape shift to mist, and wolves and bats. They’re after the Slayer’s Ultimate Weapon and when they get it Buffy and the Slayers and Scoobies have to go on a quest to get it back before something really bad happens.
Joining them in their quest is the immortal, and bored, Dracula, whose powers the vampires used to get past the Slayers in the first place. What results is a hilarious, offensive, dark romp through the Buffy-verse that could rival the infamous Puppet Cancer episode of Angel.
This plot is a side aspect of the overall arc for this “season” but the events and character building in this volume is no less important to the texture and depth of the world itself. This is how one entertains and creates a complex, vivid world with a scope every bit as varied as our own.
Season 8: Book 2
ISBN: 9781593079635
If Buffy, the petite pop-modern vampire slayer wasn’t enough for you this second volume from Joss Whedon’s “Season Eight” of Buffy brings tortured, anti-heroine slayer Faith back into play in a role even more suited to her than vampire and demon slaying.
Part of the draw of the Buffy-verse is the balance of darkness and good. Every character has had their dips into evil, from Xander’s flirtations with all manner of monsters to Willow’s grief-induced stint as the Big Bad. But some characters start out from deeper in the evil well. Giles and Faith are two of the darkest, Faith representing the out of control youth, caught in a cycle of violence from a young age and carrying on the chaos in her own life in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Giles’ history, merely glanced upon in the TV series feels more like a betrayal, when you come to love this patient, always-trying man only to discover he has a hard core of frightening ruthlessness.
Buffy, Xander and even Willow are the Superman and the Spidermans of the Buffy-verse, but Faith and Giles are the Punishers.
This analogy is proven hard and fast from the first few pages when Giles calls on Faith to do what the other Slayers can’t, walk into the house of a single mother who was turned into a vampire and slay the kids she turned. After this trying scene Giles meets back up with Faith at her apartment and asks her to handle a special case for him, one he doesn’t even want Buffy, Xander, Willow and the other Slayers to know about. It stands to reason that not all the Potentials who are now endowed with Slayer powers would turn out good, especially as other creatures of power find and foster them since Buffy’s operation is busy with the new threats from the mysterious “Twilight” and the good old U.S. Government.
Assassinating a Slayer, even if she is evil is not an easy task, as this volume proves.
Furthermore, “No Future for You” also proves that the switch to comics was an excellent move for Whedon and the Buffy-verse as the format allows a lot more playing, and a hyperfocus on characters otherwise glanced over in the series. Many plots dealt with Faith and her waffling between the forces of good and evil, but the glimpses we see of her past in these pages are heart breaking and enlightening at the same time.
One could easily argue, after this addition to Season Eight, that Faith might make a better lead, if the audience can handle a grittier, darker, less reliable narrator.
*Also, this volume features the cameo of my publisher’s wife, Robin, which I was very glad to finally get to read.
ISBN: 1905704607
120 Diseases is a crash course on 120 diseases, conditions and syndromes, from common colds to STIs. It offers everything clinical (pictures, symptom descriptions, prevention tips and stats) in bite-sized digestible pieces that are a perfect starting place or resource for the writer or the casual reader.
There are explicit, and sometimes difficult to view pictures, as well as nudity that parents might want to keep away from a child’s reach and each disease is given a mere two pages, so this is not a book for in depth research. Also, it’s written from a British slant, which means some of the statistics and such wouldn’t be as useful to an American audience.
But each article is thorough, professional but understandable and the 120 diseases covered are the ones people are most likely to encounter. It’s a valuable addition to the writer’s research shelf.
7
Oct
Click to Buy
Zoë Martinique lives in a strange life. Her mom runs a tea/occult shop out of an old Victorian house, with the help of the ghostly gay couple that haunts the house and Rhonda, an urban fantasy cross between Penelope Garcia and Abby Sciuto. And Zoë herself is a strange character, possessing the ability to shuck her body and astrally travel about the city at will. It’s Zoë’s career path, auctioning her services as a super spy off on ebay, that leads to trouble when on an out-of-body spy mission she witnesses a creepy, Vin Diesel look-alike kill and reap the soul of a vice president of a major Atlanta company. Worse the creep marks her somehow, binding the two of them together and sending Zoë on a life changing mission to save herself and others.
I have very mixed reactions to this book. To begin with it was very hard to get into. Zoë makes a lot of TV/movie references, she speaks directly to the reader often and her attitude is rather childish. Zoë’s mother, the ghosts and Rhonda come off flat, and, honestly, annoying. The flow of the action, and therefore the tension, is consistently interrupted by Zoë’s comments to the reader or attempts to be funny (usually with pop culture references) which nine times out of ten aren’t. At one point, after the plot finally starts to be interesting, the flow is completely broken by a scene in which Zoë’s “loving” mother holds Zoë at gunpoint and forces her to submit to an exorcism. I very nearly stopped there. Even though she’s 28, Zoë’s mother, Nona, treats her like child, even to the point of drugging her and physically restraining her to keep her from following the plot. Not only does this make Zoë seems even more childish, and disrupt the core plot, dragging it out more than needed, but the later references to Nona only acting out of love just don’t coincide with her actions making the mother-daughter dynamic feel more like an abuser/Stockholm syndrome relationship.
However, there are some interesting ideas in Wraith. Primarily is the reoccurring theme of people using Zoë’s body against her. She gained her power during a traumatic rape and even after she becomes comfortable with it over and over people capture Zoë’s body while she’s out running around astrally and use it as leverage against her in a variety of ways. Whether Weldon realizes she’s layered this theme into Wraith or not I’m not sure, but I did find myself continuing, wanting to see Zoë overcome this problem as much as I wanted her to have beat off her original rapist.
The dynamic between Zoë and the two leading males in the book is also interesting, especially as unlike other urban fantasy books that stick closer to the romance Happily-For-Now ending this series seems poised to go into some very dark, rule-free territories that are interesting and new.
There’s also something to be said for the plot itself, which has unexpected twists of mystery, centers around planes of existence rather than the ways the character exist and spans into a multitude of human races that are sometimes missing from other urban fantasy tales.
I’m not sure I can recommend Wraith at this point, but I can’t exactly dismiss it either, making it one of the more difficult reads, and difficult reviews I’ve done in a while.
Ralph is tired of his relatives trying to make him share his beloved motorcycle. And he’s afraid zooming through the mud puddles in the lobby of the inn where he lives has gotten his friend Matt in trouble. So with the help of his human friend Ralph runs away, to Irwin J. Sneed Elementary School, where there are long halls without carpet to ride on and plenty of good things to eat.
Except that the students of Room 5 turns Ralph into a class project and an article in the town paper accuses the school of being infested with mice! And worst of all now Ralph’s motorcycle is broken and he has no way to get back home.
Ralph S. Mouse is a classic kid’s chapter book. While amusing at times I found Ralph to be pouty and selfish, not exactly a hero. Cleary does mention the reality of mice (being vermin and all), but doesn’t quite manage to set Ralph apart, other than his intelligence and his abilities to ride a motorcycle and speak (but only to certain, lonely children).
My son enjoyed being read chapters of Ralph at night, but didn’t connect with Ralph’s pouting or anger. He was most interested in the beginning and the end, with a lull of interest in the surly middle parts.
Ralph would probably most interest children who are also feeling surly, angry, and like the world is against them. Its strength is in showing kids that they’re not alone in those feelings and teaching them to look for ways to solve their problems, because they might not be as bad as it seems.
Ty Merrick isn’t exactly a good person. She’s more likely to steal evidence from crime scenes than bag it, she complains (a lot) and seems to have a serious grudge against the world. She’s also not exactly a lycanthrope, but one day after falling unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning she wakes up and something has changed…
Full review at MonsterLibrarian.com
Manjinn Moon is Vitola’s third Ty Merrick book about an unusual lycanthrope living in a dystopian future. In this book, the government has abandoned the poor, overpopulated District One as a monster hurricane hits…