Review: Walking To Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Walking to Adebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: May 28, 2019


Walking to Aldebaran is a stand-alone novella starring astronaut Gary Rendell, a member of an international expedition team sent to explore an alien artifact that suddenly appeared out beyond Pluto. We follow Gary as he wanders the halls and corridors of the artifact (which he calls the Crypts), intermixed with flashbacks to the strange events that led him there. To say any more about the plot . . . well, that'd be a pretty honking big spoiler.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of those incredibly prolific writers who somehow manages to be incapable of writing a bad book. I've long thought of him as the male Seanan McGuire, and this installment just reinforces that impression. His prose sucks you in, and when you're finished, you flip around to find the next installment (and get kind of cranky when there isn't one!) I really loved the overall aura of the setting: it comes across as this sort of bizarre hiking story---like being on some Lovecraftian version of the Appalachian Trail, with fellow hikers you do and definitely *don't* want to meet.

And let's just say, it's definitely the sort of book you'll want to re-read.

Highly recommended.

A big thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Seven Blades in Black by Sam Sykes

Seven Blades in Black (The Grave of Empires #1) by Sam Sykes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publication Date: April 9, 2019


Sal the Cacophony--bounty hunter, former mage, and wielder of the damned gun Cacophony--has been captured by the forces of the magic-less Revolution, scheduled to be executed before a cheering crowd. Playing Scheherazade to her executioner, she gives us the tale of how she came to be imprisoned: a hunt for seven rebel mages who did her a terrible wrong.

What that wrong is, she doesn't say until well past the halfway mark. Which is odd, because the story description straight-up announces it. (And because if Sal is a Vagrant, and Vagrants are rebel mages, and Sal doesn't seem to have any magic aside from the Cacophony, then it isn't hard to do the math.)

There's a really fun story in here, with some genuinely witty writing. The problem is that it's buried beneath at least a couple hundred pages of needless bloat. This leads to some pretty severe pacing problems, and a book that was far more of a slog than it should have been. Add in the plot twists that any reader who's paying attention should see coming from a mile away, and this was a pretty unsatisfying read.

A huge thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review!

Review: The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall

The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
To Be Published: June 18, 2019


Shaharazad Haas, who is essentially the bastard love child of Sherlock Holmes and Johannes Cabal, is a consulting sorceress in the semi-drowned city of Ven. Captain John Wyndham, native to the land of Ey (which went a bit Puritanical after overthrowing their Witch-King), suffered a bizarre wound fighting the forces of the Empress of Nothing beyond the Unending Gate, and ended up rooming with Shaharazad in Ven; Ey being less than sympathetic to men like Wyndham, who began their lives as women. When an old frenemy/lover comes to Shaharazad seeking help with a blackmailer, a partnership for the ages is born.

This is not the first Sherlock Holmes/cosmic horror mashup I’ve read, but it is by far the wittiest, cleverest, funniest, and most engaging. The characters are richly drawn, Wyndham’s deadpan narration mixing with Shaharazad’s batshit insanity across a series of well-fleshed-out Lovecraftian dreamscapes to create an engrossing narrative that I had trouble putting down.

This better end up being a series, or I will be quite cross.

If you love weird fiction, detective fiction, or any sort of fiction that finally elucidates what happened in Carcosa once the Revolution came for the King in Yellow, then this is definitely for you.

A huge thanks to Penguin First to Read and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Aftershocks (The Palladium Wars) by Marko Kloos

Aftershocks (The Palladium Wars) by Marko Kloos
My Rating: 4 of 5 stars
To Be Published: July 1, 2019


Huge thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Five years after the end of a system-wide intergalactic war, civilians and former combatants are desperately trying to pick up the pieces of their lives, just as a new threat emerges from the shadows. (Well, it doesn’t really emerge. By the end of the book, the threat remains firmly ensconced in the shadows, which as a reader, I found somewhat problematic.)

This is a difficult book to rate properly, because it didn’t really feel like Book 1 in a series. It read more like a prologue to Book 1: it introduced the characters, fleshed out the worldbuilding, introduced some hints toward the overarching plotline, then . . . ta-da, The End.

Which is not to say it was bad. Far from it! This was my first Marko Kloos book, and it won’t be the last. (Which, as a reader, is probably the highest praise I can give.) The prose is clean, fresh, and perfectly styled; the work flowed effortlessly, in that particular manner that only truly talented authors can manage. The story has enough potential that I very much want to read the rest of the series.

Had I been able to go straight from this to Book 2/3/whatever, I might not necessarily have found the lack of plot resolution so jarring. (Also, two of the POVs wouldn’t have felt quite so , , , bare bones.) As it was, I read to the end, then I wanted to double-check to see if my e-ARC file was corrupted. The book does not end on what feels like a full-book storyline. It’s the sort of ending that has you expecting to turn the page and see “Chapter 1”.

Recommended, but be aware: very much the first part of a series, even more so than readers accustomed to reading series might expect.

Review: In the Shadow of Spindrift House by Mira Grant

In the Shadow of Spindrift House by Mira Grant
My Rating: 5 of 5 stars
To Be Published: June 30, 2019


Add one part Scooby-Doo to one part Lovecraft, sprinkle on a heavy dash of agony, and you end up with this delightful novella about friendship and family and the unnaturalness of straight lines.

Harlowe Upton and her three best friends are teen detectives who’ve left their teenage years behind and are wondering what comes next. What comes next turns out to be the mystery of Spindrift House, an old Victorian manor in a slowly-drowning New England town with a history of mysterious deaths and other, more horrific things. Harlowe is our narrator and our Velma, and also somewhat more than both those things, though if that’s a spoiler then you weren’t really paying attention. 

Lovecraftian anything is very much my cup of tea, and add in the inestimable Seanan McGuire, and it’s guaranteed to be a treat. This was no exception; even at such a short length, the characters breathed, the story gripped, and I kind of didn’t want it to end. Despite the aforementioned agony. 

(As an FYI: this is under her Mira Grant pseudonym, which usually is more mad science-y than her Seanan McGuire work, but if there was a science basis to the story here, I missed it. So be aware of that, if that’s important to you.)

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review.