Month: April 2024

Lot Lizards by Ryan Hyatt

Posted on April 29, 2024 by - Book Review

One of my favorite creators has a new piece of short fiction in the “comic horror” genre (his words), and it definitely delivers. Lot Lizards starts out with a couple of cops checking out a used car lot where a call has come in from an outside party that some shenanigans have taken place.

Per usual, Mr. Hyatt excels at setting a concise scene without letting it take up valuable real estate for a short work. I’ve found that some authors want to set aside everything to set the stage, but the ones who engage me best, roll that right into the narration like a vignette from Outer Limits.

Lot Lizards delivers and it delivers fast. Things go from a calm oddity to pure mayhem starting on page ten with a very ironic “We are one thirty-eight.” (the pun was definitely not lost on me)

What I love about this kind of fiction — especially the gems that Mr. Hyatt has shared with me over the last couple of years — is that it is exactly the snapshot needed at the time of reading. Sure, Mr. Hyatt plays within the realm of his Terrafide universe, and this story will really pull in more readers curious to know more about the kiaskis that keep getting mentioned.

Regardless, Lot Lizards is a fun story with some serious visceral action. It has the baddies, the big bad, the authorities, and tragic foils, and vigilante heroes all in the span of about fifty-four pages. It was exactly what I needed while scarfing down my sandwich at lunch.

Like I’ve said before, life is too short to not read short fiction. It’s plentiful, and there a lot of really good stuff out there. At the very least, if you didn’t like it, you didn’t waste too much time.

The Atlas Complex (The Atlas #3) by Olivie Blake

Posted on April 29, 2024 by - Book Review

I really really don’t know what to think of this one. On one hand, the way this, highly anticipated, series-ender wraps up is annoying as all hell, but on the other hand, it is probably one of the most realistic resolutions to such a fantastic series of untenable situations I have read in a very long time.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the story to summarize how we arrive at The Atlas Complex.

Atlas Blakely is the caretaker of an elite organization known as the Alexandrian Society. Under his care, six of the most talented and hardcore magical academicians in the world are brought in to be considered for initiation. During this time (through The Atlas Six and The Atlas Paradox), alliances are formed, broken, re-formed, and severely tested. Secrets come out related to each of the six (and a few more), and more and more information is discovered about the Alexandrian Society as a whole.

Shit gets really real, and every indicator generally points towards a significant denouement in book three.

Well, here we are at book three and the story starts to twist and turn into something that seems right in alignment with what the reader had been expecting from the previous two books: and then just flat out fizzles.

Like I said at the beginning, this could either be the most intentional setup for reflecting the actual nature of humanity in that nothing really happens given the extreme situations our characters are put in, or it could have just been a happy accident due to a plot that spiraled out of focus.

I have all respect for Ms. Blake’s ability to world-build and weave together multiple story lines, so I really didn’t see myself coming to the end of this series really not giving a damn about what was going to happen to any of characters. And I mean any of them. There are “mysterious” disappearances that seem like convenient rugs to sweep inconsistencies under, and there is a general apathy writ large, that makes me really want to re-evaluate my feelings about the previous two books.

There was a ton of potential energy built up in the first two-thirds of this massive story that I waited to be converted to kinetic, but it just didn’t ever happen. The balloon deflated in a sad “poof” and the reader was left holding a dead piece of limp rubber.

Yes, I definitely needed to read this book to get some closure on some dynamic characters I’ve enjoyed over the past couple of years, but I really really wish they’d been given the opportunity to make a better choice than the seemingly overwhelming “I don’t care.” that trended in the last parts of the book.