Latest Stack of Novels

The Fall by Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan

This creepy, spooky, disturbing novel is the sequel to The Strain. The writing sucks me right in to the story and keeps me there until it's all over - always the mark of a successful writing job for me.  The Master's vampire take-over of the world is well underway now, having spread past New York into most major global cities. The vampires in this series appear to be something like extra-terrestrials except that the infection that they pass on is not simply a biological colonization of the human body, but also something which affects the mind and the "soul" or "spirit" since there is a sort of "hive-mind" at work. I continue to enjoy the band of vampire hunters:  the "old man" (whose entire life has been dedicated to vampire hunting) Abraham Setrakian, Eph Goodweather ex CDC, Vasily Fet the exterminator, and Augustin Elizalde (aka Gus) ex street tough. I'm looking forward to reading the next novel in the series when it comes out.

Bullet by Laurell K. Hamilton

I don't care what the detractors say, I am a die-hard Anita Blake fan. Hamilton manages to keep producing novels in the Anita Blake series which never fail to keep my interest from start to finish. I'm always sorry when each book is done because it means I have the leave the world and imagination of my favorite bad-ass female vampire executioner/necromancer.  Anita may be physically tiny, but her powerful personality is awesome.  In the face of all the challenges thrown at her in each book, she keeps on growing , learning about herself and others, becoming wiser, more complex and sophisticated, more loving, and also more ruthless (as necessary).  Death-dealing is never easy for her - it comes with a price that she must pay - and that others are not so willing to pay. In this latest novel in the series, The Mother of All Darkness wants  to possess Anita's body, soul, and mind for her own and Anita needs everyone's co-operation to win the fight.

It says on the back jacket that Hamilton is a full-time writer. My wish of the day: when I grow up I'd like to be like her - a successful, published writer who makes a viable living doing what she loves to do most. I've started buying some how-to- write novel books. I'm taking notes every night in one of my brand new journals (I am a such a journal-nerd-girl). My goal this year is to educate myself as well as I can about how to write my first book, and then to set about doing that. I turn 45 this year. I think it's time for me to "grow up" by now...I've wanted to be a "real writer" since I was a tiny little girl.

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

This is the first sci-fi or speculative fiction novel in a series. It's set on a human-habitable world somewhere in the Universe where people have been infected with the ability to read each other's minds. They can't shut the power out, so it drives a lot of them crazy, and results in some awful consequences and extreme reactions (like killing off women, making classic gender-divides even worse, and so on). It's well written. I like Todd the main character. I am curious to see what happens next. Can Todd be corrupted by the other men into "falling from grace" or not?

Arcane Circle  by Linda Robertson

Persephone Alcmedi aka "Seph" is a witch, and a Master vampire's Master. Her boyfriend is an uncomfirmed Domn Lupe waerewolf whose power is locked down in the mysterious tattoos all over his body. The leaders of the werewolves must challenge and confirm Johnny's powers. To save his life, Seph and Johnny must work together to solve the mystery of the tattoos all the while planning their foster daughter's 10th birthday party. A light and entertaining supernatural read.

The Hidden Goddess  by M.K.Hobson

I enjoyed reading The Native Star so much that when I saw this sequel on the library shelves I grabbed it. This is a hybrid genre novel combining steam-punk and witch-craft, and set in a Reconstruction-era America. The heroine is one Miss Emily Edwards. She is a very down-to-earth, smart, independent Earth-Witch, who is willing to do whatever it takes to save the Earth and all it's peoples, and who is totally uninterested in the ego-trappings of power, wealth, and fame.

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

This gritty urban fantasy is set in a futuristic Johannesburg, South Africa.  Some humans become mysteriously "infected" or "cursed" with the dubious and mysterious gift of symbiotic animal familiars and individual shamanic magical talents. Protagonist Zinzi December is smart, tough, street-wise, and has a talent for attracting disaster and for finding missing things and people. Let the trouble begin...

The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow

This book has a series of fantastic reviews by famous authors. After reading it, I understood why. It is one of those books which stands out from my stack and glows with a life all of it's own. The writing is luminous, magickal, and hypnotic. Sentences and phrases light up in the mind and float there, waiting to be explored like rooms in a mansion, or secret doors in mysterious closets that lead into alternate worlds. Cassandra Brooks is a diviner, from a family of diviners. She doesn't just find water though, she finds a lot of other things too, in the past, present and future, in her life and other people's lives, in life and in death.

My sincerest thanks to author Bradford Morrow for teaching me the meaning of Syzygy in a most meaningful manner, and for writing beautiful thought provoking passages that I felt compelled to copy down and save in my personal journal.  This one is special - a real keeper.

I amend my original wish - when I "grow up"  into the "real writer" I hope someday to become,  I'd like to be something like a combination of Laurell K. Hamilton and Bradford Morrow.  Despite the snootery certain critics heap upon best-selling authors, I don't think that there is anything wrong with making a successful living writing books that people actually buy and enjoy reading.

Some thoughts on Laurell K. Hamilton's novels

I really enjoyed Hamilton's character Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter in the early novels. In the beginning the writing and the plots were good enough to draw me in and keep my interest. Anita was an admirably strong female character, tough, brave, intelligent, and skilled - perhaps a grown up, hard-boiled, Buffy the Vampire Slayer squared.  I didn't mind some of the graphic sex scenes as long as they were integral to the larger plots, weren't in every other chapter, and didn't seem to be the raison d'etre for the books. It was intriguing when Anita first started developing some extra talents in addition to her abilities as a necromancer and vampire hunter.  I also enjoyed the tension between Anita's two suitors: Jean-Claude the Master Vampire of the city of St. Louis, and Richard Zeeman the Ulfric (leader) of the local Werewolf pack. (And no, Stephanie Meyer, author of the saccharine sweet, insipid, teeny Twilight series most definitely did not invent the Vampire vs. Werewolf competition over the female love-interest!)

However, I was very disappointed when Hamilton began to cross the line between what was believable and interesting to what was eye-rollingly unbelievable and even boring. Anita began to develop just far too many supernatural and cross-species qualities for me to take them seriously anymore. It's one thing to "push the envelope". It's another thing to stuff the envelope so full that the envelope explodes and everything that was once thrilling, risque and exotic becomes commonplace.

I'm not against polyamory (or anything else as long as it's safe, sane, consensual and between adults), but I think that there have to be some limits somewhere, and Anita's endlessly proliferating octo-entourage of were-animal and vampire boy-toys eventually became, well, just plain old multiple partner, cross species, boundary-less pornography. (Actually her only boundaries seem to be that she stays Heterosexual and Christian -- two boundaries which make absolutely no sense to me whatsoever). The later novels began to make me think of a three ring circus of interspecies sex. Anything else outside of sex which might have held the plots together has long since been lost. Speaking of circuses, it just might have been around Circus of the Damned and after, that the novels began to deteriorate.

Finally, the novels became shorter and shorter, the writing and plots of poorer quality, and much less satisfying to read. Perhaps Hamilton was put under too much financial pressure to quickly produce mass quantity instead of quality. Whatever the reason, it's a terrible shame, and I'm very sorry to say that I stopped buying Laurell K. Hamilton's novels (both her Anita Blake vampire hunter novels and her Meredith Gentry fae novels) just over half way through the series. I've been so disappointed by the loss of quality that I can't be bothered to even take the newest ones out of the library anymore. I truly mourn the devolution of what started out to be a very entertaining, exciting and promising novel series.

Still, if you are interested, it wouldn't hurt to try out the first few novels before the writing quality began to take such a steep nose dive.

Here is a link to her website: http://www.laurellkhamilton.org/