25
Feb
Yasmin Stoker is a tour guide in one of the most haunted fictional cities ever. She’s also a wraith, an undead creature who feeds off the life of revenants — that is mindless, murderous newly-risen vampires. Nicomedes, a blind, mad Lich Lord and undead ruler of the city, orders Yasmin to derail a PI’s investigation into a series of murders of young girls. Yasmin has no choice but to obey, but the strange appearance of one of victims, prowling the streets on hunts of her own, takes Yasmin on an adventure to find the killer, which might just unbalance the current power system and let loose a horde of demons on the city….
Full Review at DarkScribeMagazine.com
1
Jan
Here’s my top books of 2009, in no real order. (This is of the books I read in 2009, not those published then.)
Welcome to the Jungle by Jim Butcher
We love the Dresden books here at Case de Lee and graphic novels so we were extremely excited when we found this. The art was clean and vivid, the story line was fun, and Harry was as sarcastic as ever. So bonus points go to Welcome to the Jungle for being one of the handful of fiction books to capture my husband’s attention as well as my own, an impressive feat.
Skin Tight by Ava Gray
I got to read this as a first reader (so you won’t see a review here) and I just couldn’t get enough of Mia and Foster. I love the really smart heroine and the tortured, reluctant hero and with this book Ava (aka Ann Aguirre) expands her concept to a whole world mythos while leaving so much more to explore that readers will want to keep sticking with these loose series to find out more. (Skin Tight comes out June 2010)
Magic Strikes & On the Edge by Ilona Andrews
Perhaps it’s unfair of me to both list these together and to take up two slots with Ms. Andrews’ (actually a husband-wife writing team) work. But to hell with it this is my list and I just cannot express my absolute adoration for Andrews’ writing style. She pushes all my buttons in the right way and to top it off On the Edge has the feel of my mother-in-laws’ rural town that’s my hiding place from the world, AND it has a character that everyone say looks like Sesshomaru from the Inyuasha series. You can’t get yummier. Yet Andrews also packs a wallop of dark, sinister fun into her books making them absolutely irresistible to me. Bully Ms. Andrews and keep giving me more!
Convent of the Pure by Sara M. Harvey
Billed as a steampunk adventure it’s actually a lesbian love story urban fantasy with steampunk overtones. It features a Nephilim and her dead lover who stumble upon a secret facility where other Nephilim are being experimented upon for foul reasons, and best of all it’s the first of three novellas. The only problem I have is that I didn’t think to write it first!
Bestial by William Carl
This one shows my roots, my absolute love for horror, despite it’s boxed in, trope heavy current state. Not the most original of tales, it’s the zombie apocalypse novel, but done tongue-in-cheek with a myriad of small additions that make all the difference. Instead of a virus spreading a mind numbing hunger for brains this disease turns people into werewolves at night, only to leave them back to human during the day to deal with the extent of their bestial actions. This book manages to mock the zombie apocalypse–and many other horror tropes as well–while adding unexpected sinister twists and one of the best horror werewolves I’ve read in a long time. I didn’t expect to like Bestial, but I haven’t been able to stop recommending it which makes it a clear winner in my book.
An Ice Cold Grave by Charlaine Harris
You hear a lot about the Sookie Stackhouse series, with True Blood being such a massive force in TV this year. But this is my favorite Harris series. It’s dark, real dark, with the characters barely holding on to their sanity as they risk their lives trying to help the bereaved families of the missing or the dead to find peace and closure. The paranormal thread is also real delicate. Rather than living in a world of vampires and werecritters, Harper and Tolliver live in our world where her powers are somewhere between believable and crackpot. In this books they face their first serial killer, which isn’t a plot taken as lightly as some horror authors deal with this this way. Powerful and disturbing I cannot get enough of this series.
Prey by Rachel Vincent
Another series I love, I thought for sure that Vincent was going to jump the shark with this one. I mean, she writes this dark world where females are, in a way, prisoners due to their value to the werecat species. Protected and indulged they’re free, but still raised to someday marry and continue the species. It’s easy for their identities as people to get lost. From that comes Faythe, who is determined to be her own person and to marry on her own terms, if at all. This is the fourth book in the series, which is dark but has strong romantic ties too. It’s tighter and more adventure driven than the previous books and I thought for sure this is the point where Vincent caved and the series stopped being hard to handle, emotional urban fantasy and softened to a more romance state of being. And I was so wrong. Vincent still tortures her characters and her readers and clearly keeps the spirit of the series together, managing to make Faythe take a full role in her pride and family, without declawing her to do so. An excellent author, who can keep the conflict and theme going for multiple books, and one I look forward to reading more from.
Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs
Another one I expected to be too romance for my tastes. (For the record I like romance, just not as a stand alone story. I have to have something else to the story to keep my interest.) I picked up these books because 1.) they were urban fantasy and 2.) we needed werewolf titles for Monster Librarian’s Werewolf Month and I was glad I did. After finishing the first, Moon Called, I went out to the stores and grabbed the next two in paperback, but Iron Kissed ended up being my favorite. The third book in I loved this one in part because this is where skinwalker (sort of like a werecoyote) Mercy Thompson admits her love for werewolf alpha Adam, but the real darkness and emotion pain that it takes to get there makes this story a monumental read in this year’s collection. It’s good to see that Briggs is popular enough to make it to hard cover, but alas that means this broke reader will have to wait until the paperback to get more adventures from Mercy the shape shifting VW mechanic and her crew.
Demon Inside by Stacia Kane
So this is the first (and only) book I ever made the acknowledgment page of, but I swear that didn’t influence its inclusion here at all. What did was the raw, emotional power of this story of Megan Chase, a psychologist who just discovered she’s part demon and the demons she’s linked to are ones that feed off the pain of humans. A difficult position to be put in, but it’s made worse when she’s called home, to her unloving family after her father dies only to discover that her childhood stint in an institution and her lifetime of struggle with an uncaring, critical family is a complete farce because her father sacrificed her to a demon for his own profit. Heart breaking and overwhelming this is one of the few books this year that made me cry.
Spellbent by Lucy A. Snyder
A last minute winner, this one makes it in by about three days. Jessie Shimmer is akin to a chaos magician and during a spell to summon rain for the farmers of her area instead she and her teacher (and lover) open a dimensional rift and he vanishes. The magical community crashes down on her, despite her losing and arm and an eye defeating the demon that comes through. The man in charge of the area tries, exceedingly forcefully, to make Jessie leave her lover behind. But she refuses even though it costs her her friends, her home, her job, and even her familiar (who is sort of a ferret). But in the process she uncovers a dark secret the community wants to hide, a sense of loyalty and a personalized hell dimension that still has living prisoners. An excellent debut here’s another fantasy world I can’t help but want more of.
The Stats:
Books Read in 2009: 111
Books Reviewed in 2009: 103
39338 word in reviews written in 2009
Below the cut is the list of books I’ve read, if you’re interested.
A free sample of the upcoming Harlan County Horrors anthology, Yellow Warblers by Jason Sizemore, is available here. Harlan County Horrors is an upcoming collection of backwoods strange fiction coming this fall from Apex Publications.
12
Apr
*Cross posted from my personal blog*
It came through the pileline today that Amazon.com is removing the rankings for erotic GLBT books.
Case and point? Zane’s lesbian anthology Purple Panties has no genre ranking. Neither does the Best Lesbian Erotica 2009. But Laurell K Hamilton’s Mistral’s Kiss, with it’s infamous 100 page sex scene, is still listed in not one but three different rankings.
Mark Probst sent an email to Amazon asking for an explanation and received in reply:
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.
Best regards,
Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage
Oh Amazon, do you mean books containing adult materials like:
Personal Demons by Stacia Kane
Kink by Kathe Koja (which proves that Amazon actually has a category for Erotic works, yet is excluding GLBT erotica from it)
Or even Any Given Doomsday by Lori Handeland, a book that cumulates with a (in book) two week long violent rape scene.
So multiple rape scenes and heterosexual sex scenes aren’t “adult material”, and neither is Fighting Dogs or fighting cocks(no puns)?
Perhaps they will use Poppy Z. Brite’s Drawing Blood to prove they aren’t keeping GLBT books from being discovered (You know, just like they weren’t making the sales of books self published through businesses other than CreateSpace difficult. Or cutting off Hachett UK’s buy buttons in an attempt to strong arm the publisher into giving Amazon deeper discounts.)
GLBT books that don’t include erotica (such as Brian Keene’s Dead Sea, and the Unspeakable Horror and QueerWolf anthologies) don’t seem to have been striken from Amazon’s good list.
Honestly, I don’t have a problem with an “Explicit content warning” on Amazon’s pages, but it should be consistent practice, not used as a tool to appease a minority anti-GLBT customer base.
Yes, Amazon, the anti-GLBT can be a very vocal, very volitile minority. But so can those of us who are in the GLBT community.
I encourage others who are outraged by this to let Amazon know how you feel. And of course you’ll notice that Amazon doesn’t make it easy to contact them. Of course not! They want to sell you things, not have to actually deal with you.
So here:
Amazon. com Customer Service
PO Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226
206-266-1000
Toll free: 1-800-201-7575
Fax: 206-266-2335
*ETA Again: Heather Has Two Mommies, among other GLBT parenting and lifestyle books have now also been stripped of their Amazon.com Rankings.
12
Dec
If you want to get added to the list, see Grasping for the Wind for instructions.
A Dribble Of Ink
Adventures in Reading
The Agony Column
Bibliophile Stalker
BillWardWriter.com
Blood of the Muse
Bookspotcentral
The Book Swede
Breeni Books
Cheryl’s Musings
Dark Wolf Fantasy Reviews
Darque Reviews
Dave Brendon’s Fantasy and Sci-Fi Weblog
Dragons, Heroes and Wizards
Dusk Before the Dawn
Enter the Octopus
Fantasy Book Critic
Fantasy Debut
Fantasy Book Reviews and News
Fantasy and Sci-fi Lovin’ Blog
The Fix
The Foghorn Review
The Galaxy Express
Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review
Galleycat
Jumpdrives and Cantrips
Michele Lee’s Book Love
Monster Librarian
Neth Space
NextRead
OF Blog of the Fallen
The Old Bat’s Belfry
Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist
Post-Weird Thoughts
Realms of Speculative Fiction
Rob’s Blog o’ Stuff
ScifiChick
Sci-Fi Songs [Musical Reviews]
Severian’s Fantastic Worlds
SF Signal
SF Site
SFF World’s Book Reviews
Silver Reviews
Sporadic Book Reviews
Temple Library Reviews
The Road Not Taken
Un:Bound
Urban Fantasy Land
Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic
Variety SF
Walker of Worlds
Wands and Worlds
The Wertzone
WJ Fantasy Reviews
The World in a Satin Bag
Foreign Language (other than English)
Elbakin.net [French]
4
Nov
The Apex Raffle has started. This year a portion of the proceeds go to Dolly’s Imagination Library. Here’s what I donated.
It’s a 1974 hardback ARC (complete with a note from Simon & Schuster). The book has some minor wear around the edges of the dust jacket but is bend, tear and stain free and the binding is still great.
Sound like something you’d like to have? What about critiques from the Apex editors? Or a Maurice Broaddus collection? Bid here, tickets are $1 a chance.
29
Sep
(Showing off my geeky, random method of chosing a winner here.) The winner is contestant number two laughingwolf! *cue the muppet yay* Congratulations. Send me a snail mail address where you want the book sent at sicacalestasATinsightbbDOTcom with the spam guards removed.