Month: November 2017

The Holidays

Posted on by Leland Lydecker

I’ve been informed that we’ve entered the holiday season.

Oh, I know that the Christmas decorations went up in stores about a month ago, but I’ve gotten pretty good at ignoring those.

As a functioning adult, I’ve earned the right to forego participating in these social traditions. I have my own place, so I’m not obliged to sit through any more festive gatherings. I rarely get invites to other people’s parties and holiday dinners. Being the guy who fills up his mug with gin and retreats to a dim corner, my presence doesn’t add much to the festivities.

Some people might assume that my aversion to cherished cultural traditions stems from loneliness or some kind of personality disorder, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I prefer my own company, and I wouldn’t be any more inclined to celebrate if I had others to celebrate with.

You see, this season makes me wonder more and more each year what the actual fuck it is that we’re supposed to be celebrating.

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Trackers: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series Review

Posted on by Leland Lydecker
Today on the author blog, Leland Lydecker reviews Trackers: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series by Nicholas Sansbury Smith.
Warning: contains spoilers.

As the title suggests, the Trackers series chronicles the struggles of the survivors of an apocalyptic event. That event is the detonation of several high-altitude EMPs over the contiguous United States. The attack is ostensibly retaliation for an ill-conceived mission which liberated the granddaughter of a US Senator from a North Korean prison camp.

Trackers begins with the inciting raid, then cuts to the day of the EMP strike. In regards to the science of the attack and how it might realistically be carried out, Sansbury Smith did his homework. Trackers contains one of the more believable end-of-the-world scenarios I’ve read.

The meat of the story concerns a gruesome murder mystery playing out at the same time as the attack and its aftermath. Compared to the stagnant fare of “the world is screwed and we’re trying to stay alive” that dominates the Post-Apocalyptic genre, this premise comes across as fresh and interesting. The rest of the novel, sadly, is more standard post-apocalyptic fare.

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Leland Lydecker Reviews The Mask of Tamrel

Posted on by Leland Lydecker
Today on the author blog Leland Lydecker reviews The Mask of Tamrel, the first book in Scott J Couturier’s Magistricide series.

It’s not often that I come across a book I unequivocally like, so keep in mind that this a rare statement when I say that The Mask of Tamrel is the best work of fantasy I’ve read in a long time. Couturier’s elegant and vividly descriptive writing pulled me in, and I quickly found myself hooked on the exquisitely crafted world of Thevin. 

Each scene is so richly detailed that you can almost see the colors, smell the scents and taste the food, yet the pace at which the story unfolds is anything but slow. Like a whiff of exotic scents, this tale wraps itself around the reader in a thoroughly pleasant way before digging its hooks into the psyche and revealing itself to be a cleverly disguised addictive substance that keeps the reader turning pages to find out what happens next.

“This is really good!” I found myself thinking. “This is unbelievably good!” I had to stop and check if The Mask of Tamrel wasn’t actually from one of the big publishing houses. I read the first half of the book in one night because I couldn’t put it down.

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