In honor of the fact that it’s the holidays and life is supposed to be cheerful, this week’s blog is devoted to my review of S.E. Anderson’s Starstruck.

Cover of S.E. Anderson's Starstruck

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I started reading this book. I had been assured that it was science fiction, and the description compares it to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. On the other hand, the cover looks a bit like the love child of a hard scifi novel and a romance. Suffice to say I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but was pleasantly surprised by how the story played out.

Continue reading “Review: S.E. Anderson’s Starstruck”

This week on the author blog, Leland Lydecker reviews a book about his home town that gets almost everything wrong. That’s right, it’s Craig Martelle’s Endure: End Times in Alaska!

Cover of Endure: End Times in Alaska

Endure has garnered a lot of criticism for eschewing the explicit violence, conservative values, and thinly-veiled racism that are common components of the Post-Apocalyptic genre. I have no problem with that. The problem lies in the fact that Martelle hasn’t replaced the those themes with anything of substance. There’s no conflict. There’s never any real sense that Chuck and his family are in jeopardy. Endure is a survival story without the survival.

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.

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.