Tim Powers - Where do I start reading?

I get through a lot of books, on a regular basis, but the one thing I'll always be sure of is that there will always be more to read! I'm never going to read everything but I'm going to give it one hell of a go! :o)

Every so often, when I'm browsing forums, I'll hear an author's name mentioned and realise that I've never read any of their work. Tim Powers is one of these authors and, considering I've heard nothing but good about his books, I figured it was time I checked him out.

Where do I start though? Hopefully, this is where you guys come in... Have you got a favourite book, by Tim Powers, that you think I should read? Leave a comment telling me what it is and why you think I should give it a go. Finances permitting (because there's no way on earth I'm buying the £55 second hand copy of 'On Stranger Tides'...!) I may end up picking that very book up and telling you all what I think of it right here :o)

Comments please!

Giveaway! 'Salamander' - Nick Kyme

To mark the latest Space Marine series, from the Black Library, I have five copies of Nick Kyme's 'Salamander' to give away to five lucky readers. By the way, this competition is open to everyone. It doesnt matter where you live!

If you fancy reading an extract from 'Salamander' before you enter then click right Here...

Did you like it? Or are you going to enter this competition without reading the extract first? Either's good! Entering is simple. All you need to do is drop me an email telling me who you are and what your mailing address is. I'll do everything else ;o)

I'll leave this one open until the 19th of July and announce the winners on the 20th.

Good Luck!

‘The Goon #32, Tenth Anniversary Issue!’ – Eric Powell (Dark Horse Comics)

Jasper Kent’s ‘Twelve’ is starting to get really good but it’s such a heavy going read (more on that next week when I post my review) that there was no way I was going to finish it in time to get a review up today. I think what I’d say right now is that ‘Twelve’ is a good read but I haven’t found it as enjoyable as everyone else...

I was at a bit of a loss for what to post today until I popped into Forbidden Planet last night (for the Mark Chadbourn and James Lovegrove signing) and saw a copy of ‘The Goon #32’ lurking on the shelves. It really was lurking as well, peering out between ‘G.I Jo’e and ‘Green Lantern’... I’ve only been reading the series for a year so can’t get my head round the fact that it’s been running, in one form or another, since 1999. I’m always up for a new ‘Goon’ story though so wasted no time in taking this one home for a read.

If you’ve been following ‘The Goon’ then you’ll know that he’s got good reason to be in such a deep depression that not even birthday cake and Milwaukee beer will cheer him up. How will the Goon get his zombie kicking mojo back? The aforementioned birthday cake and the God of Hobos play their part and while all this is happening the Zombie Priest is making moves to get back in the game (poor Cat)...

I wasn’t too keen on the tangent that the story took midway through. I’ve never been too keen on comics where you cut back from the story to see the writer working on what’s happening, it takes me right out of the story and that was a shame seeing as I’d really got into this one. Some of the humour (one bit in particular) really didn’t work for me this time round either. Some things are just not funny... Having said that though, Powell seemed to get this and moved on from it pretty quickly.

The story itself though was good fun, a mixture of laughs and foreboding. Nothing keeps the Goon down for long and it was good to see him back on top of his game again. ‘Rat Alley’ was one of my favourite locations in ‘Rough Stuff’ and it was good to see it make an appearance here.

As normal, I loved the muted colours and art that give the world of the Goon that dreamlike (almost nightmarish) quality. What was interesting, this time round, though was the sketchbook section (after the story) where other artists show us their impressions of the Goon. Mike Mignola and Jeff Smith’s renditions were the standout moments for me but Eric Powell still does it best! :o)

If you’re a fan of ‘The Goon’ then the 10th Anniversary issue will be one that you’ll enjoy. If you’re not a fan, check ‘The Goon’ out. I think you’ll like it...

‘The Hunger Games’ – Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

If you’re looking for a decent read (or to find out which books to stay well away from) then this blog, amongst many others, is a good place to start looking :o) One of the other places where I go to pick up tips is the Westeros forum where people are incredibly well read and really know what they are talking about. If they like a book then you can bet it will be a good one!
It was this that made my decision, whether to read ‘The Hunger Games’ or not, a lot easier. I’m trying to include more YA fiction here but am really picky about what I read. After all, there’s a whole load of adult genre fiction that I want to get to first! I saw the recommendation on Westeros and decided to give it a try. I’m glad that I did!

In an America of the future, the downtrodden districts are kept in line (by the affluent Capitol) by having to send their children to compete in ‘The Hunger Games’; a reality TV event where the only rule is kill or be killed. When sixteen year old Katniss Everdeen steps forward, to take her sister’s place, she has no idea what the Games will hold other than that her death in the arena is a near certainty. However, Katniss has a few tricks up her sleeve that even she is unaware of. Living in one of the most impoverished districts can set someone up to be a real competitor in the Hunger Games. Game on...

‘The Hunger Games’ is one of those books where I ended up staying awake long into the night to finish it and find out what happened to Katniss. I felt like death warmed up the next day but it was worth it. Once it hit its stride (the build up to the Games themselves is a bit slow) ‘The Hunger Games’ was in no mood to let me go and I was in no mood to put it down.

The first part of the book sets the scene for this America of the future and there’s not really a lot to set it apart from any other post apocalyptic vision you might come across. The masses are downtrodden while the elite live it up without a care in the world. Collins makes up for this by laying it on thick with her portrayal of this world, I was left in no doubt as to what it meant to be oppressed and live on that fine line where one mistake could lead to starvation. Hunger is what this book is all about and the contrast between the Districts and the Capitol is made through the food that people can lay their hands on and how easy it is (or isn’t) to do this. Collins makes this difference very clear although (going off on a slight tangent) I was left wondering why food seems to be such a big deal in the YA fiction that I’ve read. Seriously, think about the YA books that you’ve read and how much the authors make of the food on offer at tea parties, banquets etc.

Anyway, back on topic...

The opening chapters are slow going but necessarily so in terms of setting things up and setting them against a well painted backdrop. Once the games begin, the pace ramps up a gear and stays there... Collins is very good at laying things on the line and showing the reader just how important they are. The arena is all about survival, even if you’re not fighting another contestant. You’re not just at the mercy of capricious games masters either, if you can’t find anything to eat or drink then you’re in real trouble... Katniss goes through this ordeal and her character shines through as she negotiates the pitfalls. Here is a person with huge reservoirs of mental strength that propel her through the physical and mental challenges. Collins does a fine job of maintaining the tension throughout the book. Not only does Katniss not know what is round the next corner but she also doesn’t know who she can trust; winning is the most important thing and people will do anything to be the last one standing...

It’s kill or be killed in the arena and it was here that I thought Collins dropped the ball a little, at least as far as I was concerned. Although Collins isn’t afraid to have death make an appearance, she isolates Katniss from this reality by having her either hide from the other contestants (a lot of the deaths take place off the page) or have other people do the job for her. Katniss is witness to death, and kills one person, but I ended up feeling that Collins didn’t want to take the risk and explore the notion of killing to survive any further. This robbed Katniss’ progression of any sense that it had been earned. To be fair though, ‘The Hunger Games’ is a book for people who are eleven years old (plus) so I can’t really blame Collins for wanting to tone things down a bit! As far as my reading went though, it felt like a trick was missed to make the book a lot more than it ended up being...

Despite this though, I enjoyed ‘The Hunger Games’ immensely and am looking forward to seeing what happens next. The Games may be over but the story definitely isn’t...

Eight and Three Quarters out of Ten

Robert Dunbar - Featured Author on 'Horror Bound Online'

Ok, I caught this a couple of days late but it's still cool :o) Having really enjoyed Robert Dunbar's 'The Shore' it was very interesting to see what Robert had to say about the book itself as well as the Jersey Devil, folklore in general and the horror genre itself. Check it out!

‘G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra’ – Max Allan Collins (Del Rey)

As a kid I used to love movie novelizations, I couldn’t get to the cinema that much and ‘the book of the film’ was a great way to make up for what I was missing out on. In some ways, reading the book was even better than seeing the film; especially during the long wait for the film to show up on TV so you could videotape it for future viewing. In the hands of a decent writer the movie tie-in could become so much more than what you saw on the big screen, giving you a better look at the world in question and the characters in it (I’m thinking ‘Return of the Jedi’ here, I’d include ‘Ladyhawke’ as well but I’m not sure of the book or the film came first...)
I’ve got a real soft spot for movie novelizations but have refrained from including them here simply because I didn’t want to give too much away for people who were planning on seeing the film. ‘The Rise of Cobra’ proved to be the exception though. We didn’t have G.I Joe over here in the UK (we got ‘Action Force’ instead which doesn’t sound quite as good...) but I’d read a couple of the comics which was enough to intrigue me. It’s a shame that the book didn’t live up to that promise...

I’m not going to give too much away; suffice it to say that ‘The Rise of Cobra’ deals with Duke’s induction into the G.I Joe team and their ongoing struggle against the plans of a ruthless arms dealer who is unaware that a nascent terrorist organisation is growing right before his eyes. Cue lots of gunfights, high speed pursuit and last minute confrontations where nothing less than the fate of the world is at stake...

There is plenty going on in ‘The Rise of Cobra’ and the constant action moves things forwards at a very fast pace. The resulting confrontations are full of spectacle and promise good things for the film if you like explosions, gunfights, high speed pursuit and so on.

The only problem was that there wasn’t anything more to the book than that, not that I could see anyway...

This is going to sound odd (seeing as I haven’t seen the film) but here goes...
To me, ‘The Rise of Cobra’ reads like a straight retelling of the events on film. On one level this is a good thing as it’s doing its job. That’s all it does though. I got the impression that if it wasn’t in the screenplay then it wasn’t going in the book. This is all well and good but it felt to me that there was a lot of room for expanding the story that was never exploited. The relationships between G.I Joe members (who weren’t main characters) were glossed over and you never really got a sense of why McCullen was doing what he was doing (other than being a stereotypical villain). When Collins decided that things did need explaining I was left wondering why he had felt the need...

‘In days to come, the craft would be known as a Typhoon gunship...’

Was there any need to tell the reader what the craft would be known as in ‘days to come’? Surely all that mattered was what it was doing right now? This wasn’t the only time Collins’ pulled this trick and it really jarred the flow of the story for me...

I could really see this working on screen but explosions and spectacle in a book just aren’t enough to cover up what is essentially half a story. I haven’t read the prequel yet so I’m open to the fact that it may provide more background detail to the story as a whole. ‘The Rise of Cobra’ doesn’t do it though and I was left wondering why Collins didn’t bother... Surely he had the scope to do that?

Five out of Ten

‘Through Violet Eyes’ – Stephen Woodworth (Piatkus)

Something I’ve realised recently, after reading Diana Rowland’s ‘Mark of the Demon’, is that I’m a bit of a fan of urban fantasy with a police procedural edge to it. This is quite strange as I’ve never felt the urge to pick up a straight police procedural novel (the closest I’ve come is Raymond Chandler’s ‘Phillip Marlowe’ books) but found myself wanting ‘Mark of the Demons’ to downplay its urban fantasy element and concentrate on the detective work. Is this a sign of a new direction that the blog will be taking? Erm... no :o) It’s more of a sign of how I like urban fantasy to read, an emphasis on the ordinary but with just enough ‘other worldliness’ to provide the spark. Anyway...
The blurb for ‘Through Violet Eyes’ sounded like it could be just my thing so I bumped it up the reading list accordingly. It wasn’t a bad read; not amazingly great either but certainly one that kept me reading all the way through to the end.

If you’re born with violet coloured eyes then you are lucky (or unlucky) enough to be able to channel the dead and have them speak through you. The flip side is that your life can never truly be your own in a world where violet eyes are a rare commodity and those people with them are destined to be strictly controlled by a society that wants to communicate with the dead.
But now the ‘Violets’ themselves are being targeted by a serial killer who has learned how to keep his identity a secret (this is a world where the dead can testify in court). FBI agent Dan Atwater is on the case with the aid of ‘Violet’ Natalie Lindstrom but can they track the killer down before he strikes again?

The thing that I love about this book, before I even got to the ins and outs of the plot, is that although ‘Through Violet Eyes’ is a police procedural it doesn’t limit itself to that in terms of describing the world in which the ‘Violet’ phenomena occurs. Violets’ aren’t just there to help in police cases; they also perform a range of other tasks as well as allowing the dead to carry on doing what they were doing when they were alive (in certain cases). Certain composers are still writing music two hundred years after they died... The afterlife is also intriguing to read about with its hints (of more to follow) that are never expanded upon which give the reader tantalising glimpses of a strange New World. The net result is a world that’s familiar but, at the same time, has enough of the strange going on to keep people reading. It certainly kept me reading!
I found this world to be the ideal backdrop for the plot and characters to hang off. It was a shame then that they didn’t hang quite as well as they could have...

I as engrossed by the plot but although I had fun with it I couldn’t help feeling that I’d read it before. The concept of a killer who can hide from the dead is a good one and the resulting twists and turns of the plot kept me guessing although I found that the ‘red herring’ sub plot was sign posted a little too obviously to fool me. I was interested to see what it was all about but at no point was I left thinking that this guy was the killer. Because it was sign posted so clearly I was left watching Atwater and Lindstrom work towards an obvious conclusion rather than getting in there with them. The issue of ‘sign posting’ sums up the problem I had reading ‘Through Violet Eyes’. Although the flesh of the story was tasty enough, there was a very rhythmic feel to the plot that robbed certain climatic scenes of their potential to truly stir the blood. After a couple of chapters I could see the red herrings and blind alleys coming a mile off…

While I had fun getting to know the characters, in terms of how they reacted to what the plot threw up, I was again left feeling that I’d come across them far too many times before. Atwater is a typical FBI agent with a tortured past while Lindstrom is the gifted psychic who cannot afford to let people get too close to her. When a book features two main characters like this… well… you know what’s going to happen next. And it does. This isn’t a bad thing in itself but I found that time spent waiting for this to happen was time not spent wondering how their relationship would work out. Sometimes I want to find out what happens next, not have it made so clear…

Despite all this though, ‘Through Violet Eyes’ was one of those books where I found myself skipping to the end to find out what happened. When I find myself doing this then it’s clear that the book has got me hooked in the right way. ‘Through Violet Eyes’ certainly did this. It may be lightweight and predictable but it was one hell of a lot of fun to read.

Seven and a Half out of Ten

‘Complete Zombies vs. Robots’ – Chris Ryall & Ashley Wood (IDW)

Sometimes a comic book comes along that I just have to get my hands on. Anything with zombies in it will at least be picked up, off the shelf, for a read but this book pretty much got my cash card out of my pocket and bought itself! Why? Just read the title... Are you done? Read it again. Cool isn’t it? Zombies are cool enough on their own but facing them off against robots... Can it get any better than this? Yes, yes it can...

At some point in the near future, government research into dimensional technology has the unwelcome result of flooding the earth with the living dead. If this wasn’t bad enough for humanity, government research into robotics is also having some unwelcome side effects... The upshot is a planet inhabited by zombies, robots... and one human baby. Can the robots help the human race begin again or will the zombies get to eat the last human on the planet? All this is before the Amazons appear with a zombie Minotaur in hot pursuit...

Now you might think that a fight between a zombie and a robot would be fairly short and fairly one sided. You’d be right but, in the case of ‘Zombies vs. Robots’, only to a certain extent. Not only do the zombies far outnumber the robots but their infected blood is just as dangerous to robots as it is to humans. If that wasn’t bad enough, robots are slaves to their programming and liable to really screw things up as a result (with no humans to look out for them). All this opens the book up to be a lot more interesting than you would think. Anything can happen and it will always happen at the most inopportune moment! This never failed to make me laugh out loud but there was always an underlying pathos to the story. There’s something about these robots trying to reboot humanity (as they don’t know what else to do) that made me feel really sad. There’s only one way out of this mess and it’s a surprise that anything is left standing afterwards! This is where the Amazons come in...

You never really find out how a tribe of Amazons managed to survive the nuclear apocalypse so don’t bother thinking about it, just go along for the ride! Some people might see this as an enormous plot hole, I prefer to see it as the writer not taking things too seriously and going for a ‘throw everything at the zombies’ pulp style affair. It works for me and if you’re after something light hearted and irreverent then I reckon that this will be for you too.

The only problem I really had with the book was the artwork, not good when you’re reading a comic book! Ashley Wood’s art is all over the place, only stopping before it falls off the page. Also, on some pages it was very much a case of lightly coloured characters on a lightly coloured background which made it really difficult, sometimes, to work out what was going on. To be fair though, once I got used to it I found that the ‘mad artwork’ really complemented the writing itself.

Despite some misgivings about the art I ended up having a lot of fun with ‘Zombies vs. Robots’. The ending hints at more to come (mermaids!) and I’m definitely going to have to check it out...

Competition Winners! 'Midnight Never Come' and 'In Ashes Lie'

Thanks to everyone who entered this competition, there could only be two winners though and these lucky folks were...

Erin Hartshorn, Pennsylvania, US
Joakim Elovsson, Sweden

Well done guys, your copies of 'Midnight Never Come' and 'In Ashes Lie' will be heading your way very soon! :o)

Better luck next time everyone else...