Tag Archives: Book Review

Indie Fiction Round-Up For Winter 2023

Posted by natechen on

I’ve been involved in critiquing and reviewing a number of independently published novels in the past year and I thought I’d bring you my thoughts on three of the best I’ve read so far.

Jiseidai – by Daniel P. Riley

This is a series with two installments so far, focusing on rogue assassin Gabriel on the run from the dystopian megacorp that raised him, trained him and gave him superpowers. Gabriel stumbles upon Hana, a young, abused girl and agrees to save her. He winds up fleeing into the ruins of old Tokyo with Hana, doing his best to avoid pursuit and come to grips with what his role in life is going to be now that he’s left everything he’s known.

There’s plenty of dystopian cyberpunk stories out there and plenty of stories about hardened killers turning over a new leaf. The general direction of these two genres is contradictory so Riley has a hard row to hew here. However so far he’s done a pretty good job of balancing the fun, scifi concepts of near future scientific progress run amok with a much more straight forward narrative of grace and redemption. While I do feel that classifying Jiseidai as true cyberpunk is a bit of a misnomer otherwise it hits what it aims at.

In particular the description of Gabriel’s fighting techniques is quite good. I don’t know if Riley studied budo or kenjutsu in a dojo but he clearly has a decent grasp on the basic concepts and manages to make them halfway believable in the technologically enhanced world Gabriel and Hana live in. Another common concept in Eastern development that runs through Jiseidai is cultivation. In most martial arts stories cultivating refers to the process of isolating and enhancing your internal energies, a foundational concept to the mystic elements of those tales. In Jiseidai what we get instead is a cultivation of relationships. Human connections, human empathy and human morality are central to the growth of our protagonists and seeing them spending as much time refining those instincts and potential is very gratifying. Far more so than the sterile, medicinal processes of cultivation in more run of the mill wuxia fair, although there is a cybernetic flavor of that too.

The Curse of the Star Wraiths – by The Lord Otter

This is a tale of two brothers who must set right the wrongs they have endured. The Curse of the Star Wraiths is a very sword and sandal, Conan the Barbarian style story of vengeance and triumph. Normally this kind of thing is not my cup of tea. However it also involves airships, ancient civilizations and floating ruins and that, my friends, is 100% my caffeinated beverage of choice, so I was willing to deal with the rest.

Don’t get me wrong. Otter has written a story with a lot of elements tailor made to get my attention but the story is by no means perfect. His prose is a little rough at points and his transitions between some scenes or between points of view are often a little jarring. His dialog can feel a bit stilted, although I believe part of that is a purposeful attempt to make it feel archaic and in that it succeeds. It won’t work for everyone, though. All in all, the rough prose is not a big issue. It is his first work and there’s plenty of room to allow for improvement there and I think most people can enjoy the narrative in spite of that. On the other hand, the core of the story is something he handles very well so far.

Steel and Stormbright, his protagonists, have a wholesome, brotherly relationship. It sounds odd to say that but seeing such simple, straight forward and wholesome male friendship its rare and precious these days and I’m very glad the effort has been put into it. Likewise, the target of their vengeance, General Caerst, manages to feel worth of their ire without lapsing into caricature. While Caerst’s goddess does come off as a bit cartoonish… she is a pagan deity. Subtlety is not their forte.

In short, if you want a crazy story about two brothers looking to save their father from slavery and avenge themselves on the civilization that enslaved them, The Curse of the Star Wraiths will bring you the first installment in just such a story with the promise of more to come from an author with a creative mind and promising skill. It’s my hope that sticking with it will let us see the brothers grow into something truly special.

The Waking Nightmares – by M.D. Boncher

If you’ve ever wanted a Flash Gordon style serial about a powerful, almost godlike invader destroying Earth and leaving a handful of people to pick up the wreckage, the Tales from the Dream Nebula series might be just what you wanted. The Waking Nightmares is the third installment in that series. In it, interplanetary truckers Winston and Bubby find themselves crashing with their new patrons, the Junkers, while their damaged ship is repaired.

While there, the two get shown around the estate and reach the mail room just as a suspicious package is delivered. The package turns out to be a colony of terrifying, flesh eating monsters. Hooray! From there our heroes have to fight a desperate, running battle with creatures they barely understand in an attempt to save their hides and hopefully keep their new patron alive as well. There’s a lot of inventive thinking and well paced action in the story.

The stories we’re looking at today have ideas that appeal strongly to me, personally, and in The Waking Nightmares it’s the tricky task of monster slaying. Winston, Bubby and the others have to keep their wits about them to beat the creatures and I find that a lot of fun. The action is also clear and easy to follow, in spite of how chaotic it is. That’s a real achievement in this kinds of fast paced, action adventure stories and is another part of what I really liked about book.

Also impressive is how well I felt I knew Winston after the tale was done. There are several parts of the story where previous events in his life were referenced and each time they came up I had a pretty good idea how those events shaped him, even if I didn’t know what the events themselves were. That’s slick work right there. On one occasion I felt like having a little more context about what those events actually were would have helped me understand a moment better but, outside of that, I feel like Boncher hit a really good balance point in hinting at the past and pushing his story forward. If you want a swashbuckling scifi story to sink your teeth into, this might be just what the doctor ordered.

Now it bears pointing out that these are books published independently and perhaps they are not quite as slick and finished as something you might get from a mainstream publisher. However they are good, fun reads written with a great amount of heart. If you can bear with a few rough edges and you’re looking for rousing adventure of a kind you don’t see from big publishers that often anymore they’re worth checking out.

With this we’ve reached the end of my publications for the year. I’ll be taking next week off for the holidays and we’ll return to our regularly scheduled blogging in 2024. As always I’m grateful to all of you who turn up to read the words I painstakingly put together and I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoy writing them. May your time with family be a blessing and the Lord give you joy this season.

The House of Love and Death

Posted by natechen on

Andrew Klavan’s The House of Love and Death is the third book in the Cameron Winter series which follows its protagonist, a covert government agent turned college English professor, as he works to solve murders that catch his attention. I’ve mentioned this series in fiction reviews before. While I’ve enjoyed it so far this is really the moment where I felt the series made sense as something other than just a tale about a reformed assassin trying to make good on his previous misdeeds.

So far Cameron Winter stories have had interesting things to say about what it means to be a man and what the modern world taking shape around us might mean for those trying to live good lives. However there were a lot of pieces that didn’t quite add up yet. Many good things in storytelling come in threes so when a third book in the series was announced I was optimistic that we’d get a more complete picture of where his tale was leading. The opening scene convinced me that was the case.

The House of Love and Death opens on firefighters rushing into a burning house where they find four dead bodies, all shot to death with a rifle. The only survivor of the massacre is a boy hiding in the woods out back. The rest of his family and his nanny are dead, claimed by the specter of death that looms over the house, and he has little of use to say as, when asked how many people were in the house, all he can tell the firefighters, “Everyone.”

Cameron catches wind of this strange event and his so-called strange habit of mind kicks in. He inserts himself into the case and contends with disgruntled security guards, hostile police, the wealthy and the working class. Outside of the case his life isn’t easy either. The Dean of Students has received complaints about him and is now looking into his past, which draws the wrong kind of attention. His own guilt at his life as an assassin hasn’t entirely passed. At a glance the story looks like it will be very complicated. However from the moment it was clear that the murdered family employed a nanny I knew the payoffs I was waiting for were coming.

Let me explain.

In When Christmas Comes we learned a lot about Cameron’s terrible childhood and how his primary source of moral teaching and emotional warmth was his own nanny. Unfortunately that relationship ended in disappointment. It couldn’t be a coincidence that, three installments in, we see another young boy who’s life is literally saved by a nanny in a case he is investigating. Klavan is a very deliberate author and he wouldn’t include that kind of detail without reason.

I wasn’t expecting quite the outcome he had in mind, however. In his first outing Cameron is dealing with foundational issues, a simple crime with a reasonably straight forward solution. In the second installment, A Strange Habit of Mind, things get more complicated. Social media and its trends intrude on the narrative and the battle for justice unfolds alongside the question of how much we can shape our world through intelligence and willpower. The scope of the story was expanding. In The House of Love and Death the largest possible forces have taken a hand. Love and death themselves are playing out their roles in the medium of human wants and desires and we have to be prepared to accept that these are more than abstractions if we hope to solve the mystery the house presents us.

Cameron is familiar with Death, having been a messenger of it for years. Love, on the other hand, has always kept its distance from him and its absence has left his understanding of the world skewed. It will take the work of a handful of warm, diligent and yes, loving women to help him work that part of it out. The question of what is true and what is a fancy we’re caught up in is also a theme in this work. The mystery itself feels almost like these abstract questions have donned human flesh and manifested their work in any number of ways across the small Midwestern town where the murders happened.

By the end of The House of Love and Death it truly feels like Cameron has come to grips with Love. He just has to manifest it in his life. It’s really a landmark in the series and it feels deeply impactful. In many of the previous stories Klavan has written it really felt like he was struggling to find a way to handle these themes in a way that felt organic. Many of these efforts, such as his Another Kingdom trilogy, were done in good faith but were lacking something. Now, once again working in his favorite genre, it seems like he’s really hit his stride.

In short, The House of Love and Death is a gripping thriller, a murder mystery not afraid to look at the darkest parts of human nature and a sweeping battle between good and evil as its hero seeks to find his place as a man in the modern world. It’s a remarkable achievement by Andrew Klavan. If you are not afraid of a story that deals with the dark side of human nature I cannot recommend the Cameron Winter series enough.