No Middle Name

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Another backlog of books to review in one go. Chronological order, let's get on with it. "30 Days Of Night" by Steve Niles, with art by Ben Templesmith. Good story of vampires on a chomping holiday in Alaska, with a neat twist at the end. Templesmith's art makes this really special though. Awesome work. If you've read "Fell" or "Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse", you'll know what he's capable of. "Worlds' End" , volume 8 of Neil Gaiman's Sandman epic (only two more to go, yay!). Usual high quality of Gaiman's writing coupled with some excellently varied artwork for the stories-within-stories concept. There's a reason Sandman is still selling so nearly 15 years after these stories were written. "The Physiognomy" by Jeffrey Ford, won the World Fantasy Award in 1996. He also wrote the synaesthesia-love-story "The Empire Of Ice Cream" which won a couple of awards too. A great writer; in this book he...

cheese sardine set Originally uploaded by No Middle Name awesome. truly awesome. found in the salvos.

China Mieville's first novel, "King Rat" , is another story of an alternative London. Like "Neverwhere", or Mieville's own "Un Lun Dun", it concerns normal people dragged into a fantastic underworld of magic and myth. I'd say it is Mieville's best; a leaner, sleeker novel than his later New Crobuzon books. It scurries along at a hell of a pace, terrifying and exciting. Excellent stuff.

jack johnson Originally uploaded by No Middle Name he's tiny

I followed that nice Mr. Vandermeer's advice on writing: read the things you don't like , and work out why you don't like them. I bravely battled my way as far as halfway through chapter four of " The Outstretched Shadow " by Mercedes Lackey and That Other Guy. One thing I forgot to add to the list of advantages that ebooks have is that I couldn't hurl the book into the bin, mainly due to it also being my phone. Maybe that should go on the disadvantages list. Some books need a good hurling. The embarrassing infodumps didn't stop after chapter one, nor did the book become any better. I've come up with a new rule for classifying fantasy novels: those that use the word "magicks" (with a fucking "k", because then it shows the author once saw a sample of faux-olde-englishe from way back before they invented spelling) and those that don't. The first set is a subset of bad books, the other set can also be, but that's not guarantee...

mmm... nutty Originally uploaded by No Middle Name that doesn't look like an egg to me. it does look like something else, though...