What he should do next is get his camera and take a picture.
Graham Annable has a website here and art and card sets for sale here. An iPhone game animated in Grickle-style, Puzzle Agent, is now available for the iPhone.
Tag Archive for 'ultraviolence'
Behold. I recently stumbled upon a huge cache of bizarre short videos, all of which appear to be titled in Russian(?), and all of which are violent battles between famous fictional characters. The above has to be seen to be believed. Also of interest are: Ninja versus Knight, Batman versus Dracula, and Jigsaw versus Sherlock Holmes. Some further investigation makes it seem like they are ads for a cracker? WAT.
More mini reviews to put a further dent into my horrible book review backlog. Those pressed for time may wish to check the executive summaries (in italics) at the end of each mini where I rate each book for creepiness, suspense, violence, and erotic factor. Each executive summary ends with a one word summary of the book.
Several years of writing regularly has made it clear to me that it is deceptively hard to be entertaining. Roman Dirge is among those gifted with the ability to make even the weakest plot sing with life (or death, as the case may be). Read LENORE – WEDGIES to keep up with what dead megalomaniac little girls are up to these days. This book is the graphic novel equivalent of doing things like taping firecrackers to tomato worms, playing how-and-tell with scab collections, or putting a deceased, mummified lizard on a giant ant pile to see what happens. THRILL! As Lenore spends three pages playing with a dead frog. GASP! As Lenore realizes she pickled a fairy queen. LAUGH! As Lenore sends a bacteria-eating slime monster back to hell with a plunger. Creepy, funny, violent, and repulsive. Rotten. (Titan Books, 2010) Lenore: Wedgies on Amazon
As usual, Tim Powers carefully piles painful injures on his protagonist in DINNER AT DEVIANT’S PALACE. When Greg Rivas is hired by a brandy baron in post-apocalypse Los Angeles, he discovers that his mission is to rescue and deprogram his first love, who has been kidnapped by a dangerous religious cult. Along the way, he discovers the truth in the Residents lyric: “The only really perfect love is one that gets away.” As mentioned before, he also collects a dizzying array of non-fatal injuries, and we swoon as part of his skull becomes squishy. This being a dent left by a falling architectural feature after his meeting with the Deviant, who I can’t tell you about without spoiling the book. I thought the book was OK. Published right after THE ANUBIS GATES (still my favorite by Powers), this book was the 1985 Philip K. Dick Award winner and a Nebula Award nominee. Creepy, suspenseful, violent, and more about love than sex. Painful. (Ace Books, 1985) Dinner at Deviant’s Palace on Amazon
When I read the second novel in the Detective Inspector Chen series by Liz Williams, I wondered if the second was inferior, or if the novelty had worn off a little and made it seem not quite as stellar as the first. PRECIOUS DRAGON, the third book in the series, has made things clear by being made of awesome and dark fantasy based on Chinese mythology with strong female characters. If anything at all must be clear by my continued celebration of this series, it is that I am in love with it. You readers thirsting for truly imaginative adventure should really check it out. Start with SNAKE AGENT. See my reviews of the first two books, here and here. Creepy, suspenseful, can be violent, not really sexy. Awesome. (Nightshade Books, 2008) Precious Dragon on Amazon
Richard K. Morgan turns in another fine hard-boiled Takeshi Kovacs thriller in BROKEN ANGELS. After loving his novel ALTERED CARBON and hating THIRTEEN (see my review here), I was curious but a little worried. Protagonist Kovacs goes AWOL to help a group of rouge archeologists investigate a priceless alien artifact that leads to a massive abandoned space ship. It makes for a fascinating story with an almost nonsensical ending. Morgan includes a lot of gratuitous exposition about power, war, politics, and violence, which is rather thinly disguised as dialogue. There was enough of this that I got a little annoyed, but unlike THIRTEEN, some people in this book have a sense of humor. I liked it. Slightly creepy, rather suspenseful, ultra-violent, and hyper-sexual. Hard-boiled. (Del Rey, 2004) Broken Angels on Amazon
Many thanks to Titan Books for the review copy of Lenore – Wedgies.
This brings to mind one of the first scenes in the movie JURASSIC PARK. The one where the person encounters the little dinosaurs. They look all cute and colorful and fascinating, until they attack. Then, before you know it, POW: you’ve got a dozen of them on you. With their fuzzy paws and bellies, their x-ray camera noses, and their little wiggly butts. Yeah you don’t have me fooled, Fujitsu! WHEN THIS THING BLINKS, IT DOESN’T CLOSE ITS EYE, DOES IT?
Let’s talk about orphans and fiction. The Guardian UK recently put together a list called “10 of the Best: Heroes from Children’s Fiction“. A full 4 of them (almost half) are orphans or were abandoned by their parents. Shockingly, this list excludes Harry Potter, an orphan whose franchise has become the tenth largest economy in the world. Here are three books I’ve reviewed on this site whose protagonists are orphans or abandoned children: Green by Jay Lake, Foundling by D.M. Cornish, and Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest. As you can see from these statistics, it’s a good thing that there are evil fairy godmothers, witches who live in candy houses, and diabolical evil wizards to keep these orphans down, because otherwise they would be kicking our butts out of the world.
By now you’ve probably guessed that the protagonist of The Left Hand of God is an orphan or abandoned child. If you’re hip to the standard orphan plot, you’ll be able to guess that the protagonist is “special” somehow, and is more than likely suffering at the hands of some adults. In this case, our hero is fourteen year old Thomas Cale, who has been raised in an appallingly violent environment while being trained to be a soldier by a group of militant religious fanatics.
The world Thomas Cale discovers when he and his friends escape their cruel tutors is very much like an alternative medieval Europe. The book itself is very firmly in the fantasy genre, and I would say is really properly a young adult book. It is also, I should mention, the first in a series.
I thought that the first half of the book was rather interesting, but vague disappointment set in rather quickly after that. There is a mysterious lack of emotional depth in Left Hand of God. All foreshadowing proves to be superfluous. Bad decisions lack consequences. Like many novels being published now, there is almost no sex and plenty of descriptive, explicit violence.
Creepy Factor: 1 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 3 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 0 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 1 out of 5
Final result: Because of its choice of subject matter, this book is entering a crowded field, and to me it compares poorly to some others that I named above. If you told me you really liked this book, I would be able to relate. But I thought it wasn’t so hot.
The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman – Dutton Adult – 2010
Buy The Left Hand of God now at Amazon
Thanks for reading another one of my book reviews, and thanks to Penguin Books for the review copy. See you next time!
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