Month: March 2022

The Maleficent Seven by Cameron Johnston

Posted on March 22, 2022 by - Book Review

When the synopsis for this novel came across my field of vision, it was damn near love at first sight. Here is a story that deals in very familiar tropes, pivoting the usual angles on their proverbial ears and taking a swipe at the entire concept of good vs bad, right vs wrong, and holy vs evil. To say the least, The Maleficent Seven definitely caught my attention.

I’m going to get a tad more spoiler-y than I usually do in my reviews, so you have been warned.

Very basically stated, The Maleficent Seven is the story of an evil demonologist general, Black Herran, who disappeared forty years previous to our story, right on the cusp of bringing the entire continent of Essoran to its knees before her along with her band of six merciless warrior generals.

With her abandonment, the royal families of Essoran prevailed, and the generals all went their separate ways.

Fast forwarding to our tale, a new force is wending it’s way through Essoran, and it’s threat is far different than what the citizenry faced with Black Herran: the army of the Bright One.

Headed up by the Falcon Prince, the army of the Bright One is charging through Essoran destroying every town and village who follow the ways of the Elder Gods: basically killing a majority of the populace in the process.

Here’s where the twist comes in (and where I get a bit spoiler-y): Black Herran has been hiding in one of these small towns as a “normal” citizen for these past forty years!

It turns out the Falcon Prince’s holy knights are making their way towards the town of Tarnbrooke: where Black Herran has been in hiding, and she is now forced to give up her simple life to, once again, become the terrible threat she was notorious for. Also, she’s decided to convince her dreaded six generals to help her in the effort.

If you weren’t already in on this stunner of a tale, let me give you a rundown of the generals.

There is a necromancer, a vampire lord, a demigod, an orcish warleader, a pirate queen, and a very mentally unstable alchemist. Almost all of these folks hate Black Herran with burning passions, as well as being not to fond of each other. It’s an absolute dream for the reader.

There are, naturally, some parallels with the nigh-homophonic title inspiration The Magnificent Seven[1], but it is the originality of The Maleficent Seven that really hit it home for me. Everyone loves a good villain, and there are seven that have been so meticulously constructed that I would absolutely love some off-shoot novels regarding their forty-year stories (hint, hint, Mr. Johnston).

Yes, the Falcon Prince is the real “baddie” of the story, and masterfully neglected by Mr. Johnston in his character development. That is one-hundred percent not a slight. Aside from the pressing threat, the Falcon Prince, for me, is only as useful as the mega-fight that is promised in the buildup of the rest of the story. It takes some serious dedication to stay that path, and Mr. Johnston delivers.

The Maleficent Seven is not the most profound novel I will read this year, but it will, absolutely, be on my favorites list. It’s mirthful, gory, drunken and gritty, and I absolutely loved it. It’s not often I gleefully giggle through battlefield dismemberment (oh, who’s kidding, it happens a lot), but there is a lot of that in this one.

[1] I prefer the 1960 John Sturges version over the 2016 Antoine Fuqua version, but both have their merits. It is also probably considered criminal to not to consider the original, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), since it is widely considered an epic masterpiece of cinema.

The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman

Posted on March 16, 2022 by - Book Review

I’ll be very up-front and let you know that I do not read a lot of non-fiction. My reading habits focus largely on escapism, so I rarely find it necessary to dwell on aspects of “real life” while I am trying to relax from said “real life.” Chuck Klosterman is one of the rare exceptions. In general, Mr. Klosterman’s take on popular culture aligns pretty closely with my own. We are about the same age, so we share a lot of similar cultural experiences and our tastes similarly align.

The Nineties: A Book is a release I was very much looking forward to. A large chunk of the nineties were my college years, so I was ready and prepared for fully contextual nostalgia, a mess of validation, and probably quite a few new insights for a decade that is now 20+ years ago.

By and large, my expectations were met. Sure I would have loved some exposition on the rise and fall of Britpop, maybe a bit of rationale of how Pogs managed to be popular, and definitely some mention of the Nintendo/Sega/Sony console wars, but maybe those are topics for another time.

What we do get is some focus on popular culture and then how it related to the political climate followed by large examinations of the political climate of the world (mainly in the United States), how it was changing, and how that affected the global outlook.

There is a large focus on the rise of the readily available internet, and how it started to be an affecting factor on things without being an affecting factor.

Yes, The Nineties: A Book is entertaining. Especially for someone, like me, who lived through the decade very aware of what was going on around me. I do feel, however, that Mr. Klosterman has put a very 2022 lens on his examination. I very much came away with the feeling that the intention of the book was to explain why things in the general cultural, informational, political, and sociological senses of today’s world are the result of actions and attitudes of that decade. I will agree with some of this approach, but find fault in much of the logic. That’s just my opinion.

I will say that The Nineties: A Book forced me to address my own recollections of the decade and contextualize them in parallel with the text of the book: an interesting exercise that made me chuckle quite a bit. I’d be very curious to hear what others think.

Psycho Therapy by Ryan Hyatt

Posted on March 2, 2022 by - Book Review

Psycho Therapy by [Ryan Hyatt]

Here’s the thing, a while back Mr. Hyatt approached me via this very website to ask if I wanted to read his novel The Psychic’s Memoirs. I did, and that was my initial introduction into the Terrifide world. Boy howdy it’s been a wild ride since then, and Psycho Therapy falls perfectly in step with my expectations.

What are those expectations, you ask? Don’t expect anything.

Psycho Therapy opens nicely enough. We are introduced to Tucson police officer James McCabe who has a new position in the department patrolling the streets. We learn pretty quickly that the scenario for this tale is the post-invasion timeline of the Terrafide universe. It appears that, post-invasion, Terrafide Labs has figured out how to “tame” and weaponize the kiaskis: an alien canine-like creature that, by description, reminds me a lot of Mike Mignola’s interpretation of Samael.

In an apparent twist of strange fate, the American justice system is now relying on these kiaskis as a part of a bizarre “gauntlet” for severe sentences, and part of Officer McCabe’s duty — along with his veteran partner — is to monitor the process of said gauntlet and provide sideline support.

Per usual, there is a twist, and that particular twist relates to McCabe’s traumatic relationship with the invasion. I’m not saying anything else because it’s a short story and you can bloody well read it for yourself.

I do love where Psycho Therapy sits in the larger Terrafide universe. Each glimpse Mr. Hyatt releases gives a fog-of-war-esque clearing into a larger world that just bristles and roils around a much much larger, and much more terrifying, underlying situation. Per usual, I have far more questions than answers upon finishing this story, and I see that as an incredibly good thing. Psycho Therapy is a teasing amuse-bouche ahead of such a larger scenario, and it deftly pulled my attention in and left me wanting more.