Trench Mouth begins with a series of vignettes. It begins with human intrusion into the ocean depths upsetting a balance that existed in an alien world on our own planet, drawing a cruel and vicious attention to our existence–our delicious flavor–and ultimately to the surface waters where unsuspecting prey is in abundance. It begins with eight people who have nothing left to lose signing up for a chance to become something more, something new, something better than they are. In the dark depths of the ocean, where Fathom-5 illuminates a tiny patch of ocean floor just beyond a seemingly bottomless trench that carves down into the crust of the Earth, experiments are being conducted. Will Dr. Yale and her colleagues advance the next stage of human evolution, preparing us to venture into a massive new realm largely off limits until now? Will monsters, both man-made and ancient, tear everything apart before we even have a chance to find out for ourselves? We know how it begins. I guess you’ll have to read past the beginning to discover how it ends for yourself. It’s appropriate to talk about how it all begins, because Trench Mouth feels like a beginning, the origin story of some larger tale that might unfold over years to come. I, for one, would gladly join Christine Morgan in the depths again if she chooses to tell us more of this world she’s created. Reminiscent of my favorite underwater science fiction/horror novel, Starfish by Peter Watts (the beginning of his Rifters series), Morgan has done something fantastic with Trench Mouth in telling a story that stands up next to a novel written by a man with a Ph.D and a long history of working as a marine biologist. Nothing feels out of place or poorly researched within these pages, and it makes the whole experience feel that much more immersive. Perhaps my favorite element is the Morgan makes the denizens of the deep feel like fleshed out characters in and of themselves, by sharing perspectives that are at once alien and strangely familiar.
You can obtain this book for yourself wherever books are sold. I will include a couple of links below:
If you take a dash of Brave New World, toss in a healthy dose of Bladerunner, and blend it all with a bit of sadism, you’ll end up with Sweet Tooth by Matthew A. Clarke. It’s a short story that overall feels like a transcript for an episode of Black Mirror. The ultra-wealthy have finally done away with the poor and undesirable, and they’ve replaced those forgotten and discarded people with Hollows. Hollows are manufactured in bulk to perform the menial tasks and services the ruling class deems beneath them. Candy is such a hollow, designed to be an escort–though not in a sexual sense, as she isn’t equipped with the necessary parts. In tribute to the banality of all existence, we first discover Candy is becoming aware beyond her programming because she’s unhappy about someone else deciding how her hair should look. Other Candy models are disappearing, and there appears to be a man involved in those disappearances. Our Candy finds herself in the predicament of needing to unravel the mystery behind the missing hollows while maintaining her facade of going along with her base programming. In a sense, this is a truly depressing, dystopian vision of a possible future, extrapolating on the income inequality and class warfare we already experience. More than that, it showcases that no amount of weeding out undesirables based on social status will erase the sort of people who become serial killers today. Those types of people will always find a new group of “less dead” as criminologist Steven Egger refers to the typical victims of serial murderers. Clarke captures that grim reality in this story. Is there a happy ending? Is such a thing even possible in a world like that? You’ll have to read the damn story for yourself to find out.
Sweet Tooth is a Godless exclusive title available at http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless app on the mobile device you utilize for reading digital texts. The link for the story is below:
The Book of Accidents may superficially appear to be less epic than Wendig’s previous novel, Wanderers, but there’s so much more beneath the surface. When we first meet Oliver and his family, the story seems to be focused on a family under strain, moving into what could potentially be a haunted house. It doesn’t take Wendig long to dispel those assumptions as he takes the reader on a multiverse-spanning adventure of magic and terror. While the story is filled with interesting characters, Oliver is at the core of it all, in more ways than one. He’s a special boy, empathetic and sensitive, but there’s so much more to him than that. Oliver can see the pain in others in a literal, visceral sense, and the world we’re living in today gives him more than enough pain to witness. Hoping to find some peace for their son, Nate and Maddie move into Nate’s childhood home in rural Pennsylvania after his abusive father passes away. Nate transitions from his life as a Philadelphia police officer to a Pennsylvania Fish & Game warden, and Maddie decides she wants to try a different sort of sculpture from what she’d been creating in the city. Oliver successfully makes new friends on his first day at the new school. Unfortunately, he makes a couple of new enemies as well. If only things could level out at that point, it would be a typical family drama, and the story would be over. Thankfully, for the reader–though not for the family–Wendig is at the helm. The very enemies Oliver makes at school are instrumental in putting him in Jake’s path, and everything begins to fall apart from there. Wherever Jake goes, the collapse is soon to follow. You’ll need to be prepared for anything to happen because there’s no way to go into this one predicting the outcome. It’s masterful the way Wendig brings the disparate threads of narrative together. It astounded me when I was reading Wanderers, and it’s no less astonishing when reading The Book of Accidents.
The Bleed: Rupture is the beginning of something great, for sure. If the combined efforts of Mark Tufo, Chris Philbrook, and the always fantastic David Moody maintain this same sort of quality moving forward, this series will be spectacular. The three authors involved in this project successfully combine body horror, fantasy, and science fiction into something greater than the sum of the individual components. The individual stories meld together, creating a sweeping, epic tale of a multiverse in jeopardy as a race of gods and their halfbreed offspring fight a battle of attrition on one world after another against an unstoppable, all-consuming enemy, The Bleed. We get to experience the disastrous consequences of two gods with conflicting goals in modern-day London as Jenny struggles to come to terms with her heritage. We join the members of a lunar colony as their settlement faces catastrophic collapse. The small handful of survivors learn that there are secrets on the moon no one could have expected. And finally, we follow Arridon and Thistle, two half-gods, as their world approaches a horrifying end at the hands of a monstrous force that seeks to devour everything living and dead in absolute domination. As the stories tie together at the end in the most unexpected ways, I couldn’t help but want to move immediately on to the second volume in the series. The narration provided by Scott Aiello for the audiobook edition is fantastic. He tackles the cast of characters and their various accents better than many audiobook narrators I’ve heard.
Volume One of Chuck’s Dinosaur Tinglers compiles three previously available stories; My Billionaire Triceratops Craves Gay Ass, Gay T-Rex Law Firm: Executive Boner, and Space Raptor Butt Invasion. If you’re unfamiliar with the brilliant Chuck Tingle and his plethora of tinglers, I’m not sure how you’re accessing this review from the space beneath the rock you’ve been living under for however long. In the first of these three tinglers, Jeremy receives a call out of the blue from Oliver, his former pet triceratops, now an exotic dancer who made billions from sports betting. An evening of expensive dinner instead becomes a gay, erotic encounter in Jeremy’s New York apartment. The second tale tells us of Donny’s first day at the T-Rex law firm, where he’d just gotten hired as a secretary. Seeking prestige and a better paycheck, Donny soon gets more than he signed up for as he learns just what sort of animals he’s working for when an indecent proposal crosses his desk. The final tale introduces us to Lance, an astronaut, just as he begins his solo, year-long mission on an alien planet undergoing terraforming to provide humans with a new home and salvation from a dying Earth. Little does he know that a velociraptor astronaut from Earth 2 is also on a similar mission. A friendship borne of mutual loneliness soon becomes a steamy affair, as Lance and Orion discover a new way to pass the time that has nothing to do with playing ping-pong. In true Tingle fashion, these three stories are short, sweet, and smutty. The erotic elements are graphic in detail and ridiculous in content, which is precisely what Dr. Chuck Tingle excels at bringing to the table. In his life’s mission of showing his readers and fans that love is real, he often goes to extremes that guarantee one will not soon forget the experience of joining him on a tingling journey.
This paperback edition was a Father’s Day present for me from my girlfriend in 2020. Additionally, I was gifted two more Tinglers in paperback at the same time. Only someone who knows me well would have considered these to be just the sort of things I would want in my library.
Gregor Eisenhorn, surrounded by a cast of characters both old and new, finds himself at the center of a vast conspiracy orchestrated, seemingly, by Cherubael. Following a devastating attack on Thracian Primaris, events are set in motion leading Inquisitor Eisenhorn to one of two fates. Either Eisenhorn is escorted to the prisons of the Inquisition, where he’ll be branded a heretic and executed, or he locates the puppetmaster pulling the strings of far more sinister and powerful forces than any he’s ever faced, where the future of the Empire will be decided. Dan Abnett seems to have skimmed over large sections of the narrative in this account of Eisenhorn’s legacy, sometimes going so far as to reference these other puzzle pieces without filling them in for us. Of course, upon reaching the climax of this tale, it makes perfect sense that a lot of those details are left out. There is, after all, a universe-spanning mystery to unravel, and providing the reader/listener with some of those other elements would give far too much away. It’s a shame, though, because it makes for a book that feels less evenly paced and complete than the previous installment of the series. Though the events of Malleus certainly seem to be far more epic in scope than those of Xenos, something about the way they’re documented in this book makes them feel more condensed. This isn’t a flaw, but it was a peculiar thing I happened to notice. The narration provided by Toby Longworth, as before, perfectly captures the grim, wry-humored tone of Gregor Eisenhorn in such a way that I can’t imagine him sounding otherwise. The voices provided for the additional characters are distinct enough–in most cases–to make the narrative flow smoothly.
It was bound to happen, but I sort of hoped I would be wrong. Firefly: The Ghost Machine wasn’t the best of the tie-in novels following up the abruptly terminated Firefly series. I’m not suggesting it’s not a good story or that it’s something I’d recommend skipping over, but it wasn’t as good as the previous two books from James Lovegrove. This third installment of the series of books filling in the gap between the Firefly finale and the continuation provided by Serenity falls into the interval after both Inara and Shepherd Book have left Serenity. The loss, relatively recent, leaves a discernable and tender hole in the lives of the remaining crew. Lovegrove’s writing succeeds in capturing that despondency without being heavy-handed about it. At the request of Badger, the crew of Serenity heads to a distant location for recovery of a case containing an unknown device to deliver it to Badger for a client. Unhappy and unsettled by the lack of information provided–as well as Alliance patrols in that region of space–Mal determines he doesn’t like the deal and opts to pass on the money. The supplier doesn’t take kindly to Mal’s repudiation, and bullets fly. Unbeknownst to Mal and the rest of the crew, Jayne sneaks the parcel onto Serenity, and everything goes sideways. The device was designed as a form of mind control and crowd suppression, triggering those in proximity to lapse into hypnogogic states. As the crew of Serenity finds themselves trapped in dreams they can’t rouse themselves from, River is the only one aware of the problem and hopes she’s capable of breaking her family aboard the firefly from their respective trances before it all ends in tragedy. Naturally, we know they come through the other side since Serenity takes place…but we do catch glimpses into the dreams and nightmares of the remaining crew members along the way. Unfortunately, there’s not much more to the story than that. As with the previous books, the narration from James Anderson Foster is spot-on. Aside from a full cast reading of the scripts, I don’t think they could have found a better narrator for these books.
This review was originally written in July of 2015
Ex Machina starts off slow but remains compelling from the beginning through to the end, and it managed to prove itself to be easily the most well-written and well thought out story to touch on this subject matter. Chappie was entertaining and sort of sweet, Age of Ultron was exciting, but Ex Machina was the best and most honest exploration of artificial or emergent intelligence I have witnessed on screen. Everything from the introduction of Ava, through the process of getting to know her as she is put through a protean sort of Turing test by a gifted coder, to the intense and chilling (but somehow still understated) climax of the film is insanely captivating. The interactions between the relatively naive Caleb (the programmer) and the erratic and controlling Nathan (his boss and the man who developed Ava) fluctuate between bizarre and somewhat friendly but with an ever present sort of tension that builds as the narrative continues. The true star of the movie is Ava herself, portrayed by Alicia Vikander…and she most certainly shines in her role, showing that it might not be the best idea to strive for human emotional development and sexuality when working towards AI. Elements of the movie definitely take a cue from Bladerunner…questions of identity, what it is to be human, and how far we might go in simulating humanity when creating a new form of life…in addition to exploring all too common human issues like insecurity, desire, and mistrust. I want to say more. I want to discuss specific points in the narrative, but I don’t want to include any spoilers. I hope that you’ll see it for yourself. There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the best science fiction movies I will see in a good long while, and I believe you will feel the same if you take the time to watch it.
The Magnificent Nine confirms the placement of these Firefly novels–or at least this particular installment–as falling between Objects In Space and the Serenity motion picture. The previous book hadn’t made any specific mention of the events in that episode and thus could have fallen before or after that final episode of the tragically short-lived series. The crew of Serenity is floating adrift, between jobs and looking for work to keep themselves afloat when a message arrives from an old friend of Jayne’s. There’s trouble on the distant, dry–almost desert–world of Thetis. Jayne’s former lover, Temperance, is desperate to find help for her small village. A cruel, savage bandit going by the name of Elias Vandal threatens the survival of all residents of Thetis who won’t bow to his reign or join his cultish band of raiders and criminals. Though there’s no money in the job, it’s the right thing to do, and the crew of Serenity naturally makes their way to Thetis. This group of nine mismatched compatriots is hardly the collection of soldiers or heroes Temperance was expecting, but they might be precisely the heroes the planet needs. While the previous installment, Big Damn Heroes, provided us with a fair bit of additional backstory for Captain Malcolm Reynolds, this book supplements what we know of Jayne Cobb before his time with the crew of Serenity. It’s a satisfying story that could have made for a pretty fantastic episode or two of the series. The narration from James Anderson Foster is just as good as it was for the previous book–and hopefully will be for the remaining handful of Firefly supplemental novels.
In 2017, my friend and fellow author, Adrian Ludens, had asked if I might be interested in sharing a table with him at the local anime, science fiction, and pop culture convention. At that point, the local convention was SoDak Con–previously SoDak Anime Convention. Unfortunately, due to a planned and scheduled vacation in the Pacific Northwest, I was unable to partner up with him.
I’m sad to say that I might not have done so even without those prior obligations. At that point in my writing career I had only the novel, Unspoken, and my collection of short fiction and poetry, Errata, available. Both titles had been self-published and neither had been particularly successful or generated much by way of buzz or interest beyond people who knew me to some extent. I would have felt like a fraud, sitting there next to him. Adrian had sold probably dozens of stories to various publications and anthologies at that point…and who the fuck was I?
Since then, I’ve come a long way in feeling more comfortable and secure in calling myself an author. My next self-published novel, Innocence Ends, was more successful than both of the previous titles combined–and then some. Thanks to the sales associated with Innocence Ends, I was able to join the HWA (Horror Writers Association) as an Affiliate Member. My new novella, You Will Be Consumed, was published by a small press I respect and appreciate–in addition to since being adapted into an audiobook with a fantastic narrator doing the heavy lifting.
When the new convention–now Black Hills Con–was announced for June of this year, I reached out to Adrian and asked whether he might be interested in sharing a table with me. I was pleased to discover he was interested.
This would be my first time attending a convention of any kind as a guest and a vendor. I was never particularly big on attending conventions in the first place, being as anti-social and riddled with anxiety as I find myself to be when surrounded by crowds of any kind.
I neglected to request time off from work on Friday. Thus, I had to get up at 3:45 AM and begin my shift at the television station at 4:30 AM. I directed the hour and a half of Good Morning KOTA Territory from 5:30 to 7 AM and then KOTA Territory News at Noon from 12 to 12:30 PM. It had already been a long day, as you can probably imagine, before I pulled out of the parking lot and made my way to the hotel where the convention was being held.
I arrived at the hotel and was directed to the vendor room where Adrian and I would be sharing our table. I was pleased to see that my old friend, Tom Rasch, was at the table right next to us. Tom is a comic book artist/creator who has been active in that industry for quite some time, in addition to having done a good deal of video game character design back in the day. He was there to promote his various independent comic properties, Black Alpha and Salem Tusk in particular, as well as a documentary film that is detailing his efforts to bring these properties to life in the way they deserve to be realized. At some point in the relatively near future, he’s likely to have a Kickstarter campaign going live, and I’ll be sure to share those details here.
Needless to say, I felt a wash of relief, knowing that I had familiar faces right there next to me.
The next five hours turned out to be a great deal more fun than I suspected they might be…additionally, I managed to deplete a fair amount of the books I’d brought with me for the convention.
Using a trick I’d developed for coping with social anxiety, I carried my camera with me and captured photos of the events, separating myself from them by placing the lens in between myself and the rest of the world.
I was exhausted when I arrived home shortly before 7 PM on Friday. I ate dinner and took a nap before waking up and going to the gym around 10:30 PM. I have a difficult time breaking from routine, and I try to always go to the gym on Friday evenings, regardless of what my day consisted of.
On Saturday morning, I woke up at 6:30 AM and took a shower before taking the puppies outside and making sure my daughter was ready to go. We stopped for coffee and arrived at the convention location right at 8 AM as everything was getting started. I made my way to the vendor room–it was closed to all but the vendors until 10 AM–while my daughter went to watch Saturday morning cartoons that were being projected on the screen of the large conference room by the convention staff.
Most of the vendors weren’t there yet, so it was nice to just relax and chat with Tom while I put everything out on the table, including some creepy photo prints I’d brought with me to see if they might also sell. Adrian arrived not too long after.
Tom was hosting a panel on Saturday morning, sharing his experiences in the comic book and video game design industries and talking about his current projects. I attended some of that panel because I wanted to see at least some of it instead of spending all of my time sitting at the table.
Throughout the day, my daughter sporadically returned to the vendor space with different friends in tow and it was fun to see the teenagers enjoying themselves so much. My daughter also took advantage of the fact that Adrian had brought the rolling, steel table from a morgue with him.
The second day of the convention was a marathon, though slightly less of a marathon than the first day had been for me. We held our post in the vendor room until just after 6 PM when it was time to pack it in and head home. I returned home with only four of the copies of You Will Be Consumed that I’d brought with me, and none of my other books. All in all, I’d say it wasn’t a bad day.
It was great being able to spend time with friends I don’t often see in real life and to meet new people.
Before leaving the hotel, I gifted two of my photo prints to the two special guests of the convention–voice actors in various anime films–because someone had mentioned it was their first time visiting South Dakota, and I thought they might like something a little less tourist-oriented as a memento. One of the two brought over a signed art print that made my daughter’s day, because she had considered getting one until she saw the prices they were charging.
The other remaining photo print, I gifted to another of the vendors who had been awesome to talk with here and there.
As tired as I was, I must admit I was sort of sad to see the convention ending.
All things considered, I have to say I think my first experience as a guest of a convention was a success. I look forward to doing it again.
I have to thank the folks who organized Black Hills Con 2021, because they did an excellent job of making sure everything ran smoothly and that everyone was comfortable and taken care of. The atmosphere was a positive one and free of some of the toxicity and gatekeeping that I’ve heard about regarding similar conventions around the country.
Domus Necrophagous 