Book Review: We Sold Our Souls

So back in 2016 I happened across a copy of Grady Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism in my local book store and after reading it was delighted to find a new voice in the horror genre that felt like a bridge between YA horror and the adult stuff.

A few months later I tried his first book Horrorstor and although I didn't like it as much, I loved the layout and design of the book and there were some really great bits in it that I saw coming more together with My Best Friend's Exorcism.

Finally, last year I read his non-fiction work Paperbacks from Hell and I have to say it ranks quite high in my favourite non-fiction about the horror genre.

So last weekend when a copy of his latest, We Sold Our Souls came into my local library I was thrilled to dig right in. And three days and 330 pages later - I absolutely loved it.

The book follows a has-been heavy metal guitarist named Kris who begins the book in a dead-end job in a small town, and on a quick side-note, I was thrilled the lead of this story was a woman in her mid-forties, rather than a nineteen year old kid - I'm always happy to read coming of age stories, but shake it up a little people!

The story moves from small town nightmare to the truly epic and does it with a great love of the music it glorifies. It bounces from humour to terror to gross-out horror and back again, and honestly, I simply couldn't put it down.

Book Review: Railsea

China Mieville's 2012 YA novel Railsea is a bizarre mishmash of any number of things ranging from Giant Monster Movies to Moby Dick and the works of Robert Louis Stevenson. It follows a young doctor's assistant on a train named Sham, who begins the book covered in blood and, no...

Okay, so the book takes place in a world covered in train tracks and populated in those who live in hard rock areas where the giant Moles and other monsters can't...

So there are trains that travel out searching for moles to butcher - sort of like whaling ships...

OK - simply put, this novel is really an immersive experience. Going into it with little expectation (except that I'm a fan of the author), I found myself quickly drawn into Sham's world and into the mystery that he spends most of the novel attempting to solve.

In some ways, the less you know going in the better, but believe me, it's well worth the journey.

Book Review: Dingo

Charles de Lint's 2008 novella Dingo focuses on two young men who both fall for the same girl, and what they do to try and win her affections.  Of course, being a de Lint story, there ends up being more than a little magic, danger and even a visit to a world separate, but not that different, from our own.

The novel focuses on Miguel, a seventeen-year-old high school student who falls immediately head over heels for the new girl in town, Lainey, an Australian girl with a strange dog.  Things get more confusing when the usually friendly Lainey starts acting like she's never met Miguel and then Johnny, a local bully, seems to take an interest in her as well.

The novel uses Australian folklore and merges it quite nicely with the world de Lint has created in his city of Newford.  None of his regular characters make an appearance in this novella, but as per usual, much of the story focuses on how normal folk deal with a undeniable confrontation with the world of magic.

A fascinating, if short, read.

Book Review: Waifs and Strays

Charles de Lint's Waifs and Strays sits comfortable between a collection for Young Adults and a collection about Young Adults. Although four of the stories appear in other short story collections by the author, this collection focuses specifically on teen protagonists, and move throughout many of the worlds previously created by de Lint, whether in realms of high fantasy, the world introduced in his science fiction novel Svaha, stories he contributed to the Borderlands series and many stories set in Newford.

For me, the standouts were the two stories about the Apple, a teen vampire (which sounds horrible when I write it out that way) who is desperate to understand her new condition and hopeful for her future. Unlike the Twilight series, there is very little glorification of the vampire condition in these stories and de Lint works to get the reader very invested in Apple and her family.

In addition to some really great stories, each entry also includes an introduction (ranging from a paragraph to a page) giving background info for the story as well as suggestions as to how it fits in his increasingly expanding fictional world.

A great introductory read to de Lint and although I had read four of the stories before, I happy reread each of them, finding them to be like old friends I hadn't seen in a while, but was happy to spend time with again.

Book Review: Half Lost, by Sally Green

Last week I finished the last of Sally Green's Half Bad trilogy, Half Lost, and I think in many ways it perfectly ended the world she set up and ended up being a deeper mediation on the nature of war and its cost to the combatants than I was expecting out of a Young Adult Dark Fantasy book.

The book continues the story of Nathan Byrn, a young wizard born from mixed parentage, with one parent following Black Magic and the Other White, and his place in a world that despises him for the circumstances of his birth and raised him in an environment where he grew up knowing just how despised he was.

This series was a really great find for me (my youngest daughter actually found it first, I just followed her suggestion to check it out), and left me feeling that the series had managed to find a pretty great ending, and one didn't have me wishing for more, but simply wishing to share the series with others.

A really great read.

Book Review: The Dreaming Place

I've long been a fan of Young Adult (YA) fiction, so with Charles de Lint's first YA novel, The Dreaming Place, published in 1990, I found a pretty great story involving two young women, Ashlyn and Nina, cousins who have been living together since Ashylyn's mother died and Nina's parents agreed to take her in.

The novel alternates point of view between Ashlyn and Nina, Ashlyn dealing with her grief and Nina suffering from a series of terrifying nightmares.  Although the story begins in a pretty real world setting, it quickly moves into the Urban fantasy that de Lint is most famous for writing.

Including magic, spiritualism and an intriguing concept regarding the consequences of actions, the story works quite well and would be a good introduction to the author's works.

Book Review: Half Wild by Sally Green

A little less than a year ago I read the first of Sally Green's Half Blood series and really liked it.  The story, a dark fantasy following a boy named Nathan Byrn in a world of Black and White witches, moved with a breakneck pace and asked a lot of nature vs. nurture questions.  Nathan has mixed heritage, his father is a notorious black witch and his mother was a well loved white witch.  Raised in White witch society, Nathan is distrusted by all around him, as they feel he is destined to become as dark as his father.

Half Wild picks up almost immediate where Half Blood finished and is begins the build to the war between the Black and White witches that the series is clearly leading up to, with Nathan working for a loose alliance of Black and White witches against a draconian White rule.

The book was a lot of fun, but the immense cast of characters leads me to feel you should read the books back to back and the violence level should put the book at the upper end of Young Adult fiction.

Although it didn't wow me quite as much as Abercrombie's Half a King, it was a fun read and I'm looking forward to the next in the series when it comes out next year (hopefully).