We’re coming up on Halloween once again when everything goes spooky and dark, and we like to get scared by things.. Well, here’s a Halloween story I wrote and a list of recommended reads for kids and adults of books that will really give you some shivers . . .
Click on the image below to read the free Halloween Story
And now some recommended Halloween reads to chill your bones and make your blood freeze . . .
The great Subterranean Press continues with its limited edition releases of Dan Simmons’ work, with his early bestseller, Phases of Gravity, originally published in 1989. In Simmons’ classic style that has gone on to create many a fan and reader, as well as win multiple awards, Phases of Gravity seems to be a simple, straightforward story on the surface, but as the reader plunges deeper into its depths, it becomes something much larger and meaningful.
Phases of Gravity is a change from what fans might be used to with Simmons, as it features little of the horrific or science fictional, but is the story about what a man does when he has achieved the greatest pinnacle; how he lives his now very ordinary-seeming life. Richard Baedecker has done what very few people on this planet have done: walked upon the surface of the room. A former astronaut, Baedecker is now traveling around, wondering what to do with his life now that he has done what so few have. He has a failed marriage and a son that hates him. The book takes him to an unusual location in Poona, India, where he meets the beautiful and unique Maggie Brown who will help him in his personal quest to find his “places of power,” the locations that have had meaning to him in his past, and make him realize the importance of what he has.
Originally written on January 24, 2012 ©Alex C. Telander.
To purchase a copy of Phases of Gravity from Amazon, and help support BookBanter, click HERE.
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It seems like the bestselling and award winner author, Dan Simmons, used up a lot of his talent and ability with the truly fantastic The Terror, and almost as good Drood, and in the meantime has been publishing sub-par work that fans and readers of his have come to expect to be otherwise. Black Hills was an atrocious story that seemed to get lost in itself; while Flashback is a definite improvement on its predecessor, yet it still has a lot to be desired as a science fiction novel, especially when coming from the mind of such a talented author.
In Flashback, the United States is on the brink of collapse, but the citizens of America don’t care because 87% of them are addicted to a drug known as “flashback,” that when taken allows users to travel back into their past and memories and live specific moments over and over in excruciating detail, to the point where it is almost as if the memory were reality. Nick Bottom used to be a detective, a good one, and then his wife was killed in a car crash, and now he’s been fired and is addicted to flashback like so many others, reliving moments with the love of his life. But Bottom was a good cop and one rich man knows that, and is employing him one last time to investigate the murder of a top governmental advisor’s son, because Bottom remembers the time of the murder and will need to use flashback to remember some important details to see if he can find out just who this murderer is.
While Flashback seems like a vaguely interesting science fiction premise, and Simmons tries for a quasi-noire story in down and out Nick Bottom, the big problem is that this storyline and construct has been done and overdone in some way or shape or form numerous time in the genre and through various mediums: William Gibson did it with Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson did it with Snow Crash, Phillip K. Dick did it with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (made renowned by the movie version, Blade Runner), Richard K. Morgan is another author who uses this construct. Perhaps this wouldn’t be such a distracting obstruction if Flashback was written by a middling author, or even a new one; but to have it written by a man whom many have come to expect truly great and original and astounding novels from . . . it leaves one feeling disappointed to say the least. Here’s hoping Simmons novel in 2012, whatever it might be, is a big improvement, or the man may begin dropping fans like a person suffering severe leprosy drops digits and eventual limbs.
Originally written on September 21, 2011 ©Alex C. Telander.
CLICK HERE to purchase your copy from Bookshop Santa Cruz and help support BookBanter.
In 2008, at a signing for Dan Simmons’ last incredible tome, Drood – as well as in an interview for BookBanter – the bestselling and award-winning author talked about his next novel in progress: the story about a young Native American boy, Paha Sapa, who is possessed by the spirit and soul of General Custer, who recently expired at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876. It was a very unique sounding story, which is what Simmons does best, but I was certainly hesitant about the novel it would become, Black Hills. Sadly after the pinnacle of his writing with The Terror, Black Hills is a mediocre at best novel that Simmons clearly put a lot of work into, but at the end leaves the reader thinking: “Is that it?”
The story begins with 10-year-old Paha Sapa visiting the battle ground of Little Big Horn, after the fighting. He comes upon a man lying on the ground; as he investigates, a cloud form of the man’s spirit/soul enters his body. Dan Simmons has done his research on Native American ways and culture, as Paha Sapa prepares himself to become a man. His name means Black Hills, named for the specific hills of South Dakota. The story then jumps to 1936 when Paha Sapa is an old man, in his seventies, working on the building and sculpting of Mount Rushmore. Paha Sapa’s specific job is demolitions, strategically placing the dynamite to blast the rock. But he considers the building of Rushmore a great insult to his people and his country, and with President Roosevelt scheduled to make a visit in the near future, Paha Sapa has his own celebratory explosion planned.
Black Hills jumps back and forth in time with Paha Sapa’s growth as a boy in becoming a man, and then his slow, meticulous planning of the catastrophic explosion of Rushmore as he continues to work on the historical site. At the very end of the book, as the reader is left wondering why things happened the way they did, Simmons launches into a lengthy ethereal commentary about protecting and respecting this land and this world, which simply comes out of nowhere.
Simmons does what he does best with Black Hills: some interesting characters, strong description, good writing; but the story and plot are lacking in development, depth and interest that his other novels always possess. Black Hills is simply not a book for everyone: new readers may enjoy it, some Simmons fans may also, but this reviewer found it to be a weak novel from one of the best writers writing today.
CLICK HERE to purchase your copy from Bookshop Santa Cruz and help support BookBanter.
Originally written on May 19 2010 ©Alex C. Telander.
After hearing Dan Simmons talk about Black Hills a little in the BookBanter interview, I’m looking forward to seeing just what the book turned out to be.
Brandon Sanderson, as well as many others, have been raving about Dan Well’s debut novel, I am Not a Serial Killer, and I’m looking forward to seeing if it lives up to its hype.
One of the greatest violations humans can imagine experiencing is not being able to control themselves. This is what is at the heart of Dan Simmons’ Carrion Comfort. There is a secret society that has this ability: to control others, both mentally and physically, trapping their personality and will, and doing with them as they please. It is their power, but it is also what sustains them, what keeps them alive and living through the decades: they feed off the power to control and overpower. It has become a game to them, where each year they compete to see who can control the most. Only now members of this secret society are being assassinated, while clues are leaking out about its existence.
Dan Simmons does what he does best, creating a compelling epic that defies the imagination and takes readers on a unique journey across time and space and the many places of the planet. Carrion Comfort is an incredible, in-depth piece of work on freedom and control and what it feels like when these facets of our humanity are taken away.
If you liked this review and are interested in purchasing this book, click here.
Originally written on March 11th 2010 ©Alex C. Telander.
In a historical epic that rivals Simmons’s science fiction epic Hyperion, The Terror is the incredible fictional story of the journey made by Captain Sir John Franklin and his expedition to discover the northwest passage, which departed from England in 1845. Written mainly from the viewpoint of Captain Francis Crozier, who runs the crew on the ship HMS Terror (Franklin is in charge of HMS Erebus), The Terror will take readers to the very limits of their imaginations, tactile abilities, and hopes and dreams; leaving them exhausted but very satisfied by the end.
The story begins with both ships trapped in the ice. Simmons overloads with description of this frozen wasteland which is an everyday struggle, as the crews fight to keep warm, fed, and the boilers in the ships running, otherwise they’ll all freeze to death very quickly. The men try to make the most of it, even having a masked ball on the ice in mimicry of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Then there is the decreasing citrus stock, with the full realization that cases of scurvy will begin very soon. But everything is still frozen, even though it is summer and there seems little hope left for them. Crozier seems to know this, taking heavily to what alcohol there is on Terror and keeping it for himself, as his grasp on reality lessens a little each day.
Then there is the monster. A terrifying beast that has been taking and killing men, leaving nothing but bloody smears on the white ice. The beast matches descriptions of a giant bear, an abominable snowman, and possibly a nightmare from an Inuit folk tale. But little can be done as the men continue to disappear one by one. Franklin eventually abandons the Erebus which has stopped working, while some of its crew have turned violent and insane. But they cannot all stay on Terror, and the decision is eventually made to venture into the icy waste in a presumed direction to an Inuit habitation. Whether they will make it through or all die of exposure is a reality that will be faced each day they travel further across the ice.
Simmons takes on a classic legend that has few facts and turns it into an incredible story of adventure, survival, and testing the very limits of humanity. He has outdone himself with his complex, complete characters, interesting plot developments and subplots, and skillfully balancing the fantastic fiction with the true story, giving possible answers to one of the greatest mysteries in history. The Terror is a book not for the faint of heart, but for those who seek to know what it is that keeps the human spirit going when all hope is lost; this is the book for you. Especially if you have a thing for cannibalism.
If you liked this review and are interested in purchasing this book, click here.
Originally written on January 10th 2009 ©Alex C. Telander.
For an interview with Dan Simmons check out BookBanter Episode 4.
After the success of John Joseph Adams’ last anthology Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, he returns with a new fantastic collection, The Living Dead, with stories from the greatest horror fiction writers in publication: Stephen King, Clive Barker, Laurel K. Hamilton, Neil Gaiman, Dan Simmons, and many others. It is a fascinating collection for it proves to the reader that no zombie story is the same, and what amazing settings and situations authors can come up that involve zombies.
In the first story, from Dan Simmons, “This Year’s Class Picture,” Ms. Geiss, a former high school teacher, has barricaded herself in her old high school. A barbed wire fence and wall surround the school, along with a moat filled with gasoline. Geiss spends her days with her class, a class of zombie children. After hitting them with a tranquilizer, she chained them to their chairs and each day shows them pictures of humanity, the beauty of the world, and the greatness of the human race, trying to make a connection, trying to get a reaction. But each day she is greeted by the dead stares in their faces, with their eyes hungry for human flesh.
In Neil Gaiman’s “Bitter Grounds,” the narrator has had enough with his life and just up and leaves one day. Meeting an anthropology professor presenting a paper on zombies in New Orleans, he steals the man’s identity, and never expecting to go through with it, finds himself in New Orleans being the professor. At night in the streets of the old city, he meets some people that later he considers may not be human. He presents the paper as the professor, semi-believing in its intention, especially after his experiences of the night before.
In “The Dead Kid” from Darrell Schweitzer, David is a young boy who wants to hang out with the big kids who are always bullying him; he wants to be like them so they’ll stop bullying him. So one day they show him “the dead kid”: a very young child that is being kept trapped in a box in a cave in the forest. It is very pale, twin empty sockets where its eyes should be, and spends its days slowly writhing, trying to get free of its prison.
The Living Dead is a sobering read in that it primarily reveals to the readers the horrors zombies are capable of, but also presents the dark and evil side of humanity and what it is capable of when pitted against these walking corpses. The idea of the zombie forces one to face the reality of death and how in this way it may be cheated, but when the cost is a term that has become synonymous with something that is dead but alive, incredibly stupid, and hungers for flesh; it makes one yearn all the more for an undisturbed grave.
If you liked this review and are interested in purchasing this book, click here.
Originally written on October 9th 2008 ©Alex C. Telander.
Hyperion is the first book in Dan Simmons’ epic Hyperion Cantos tetralogy. In this opening tale, seven unique travelers are brought together on a journey, a pilgrimage to the distant and mysterious planet of Hyperion, where they will face the Time Tombs and perhaps the dreaded Shrike. The galaxy is on the brink of Armageddon, and the pilgrims hope to somehow save it, and ultimately find their destinies on Hyperion.
Employing the structure of the Canterbury Tales, Simmons brings seven very different characters together. It is some centuries in the future, Planet Earth is no more, having been destroyed in a science experiment now known as the “Great Mistake.” But humanity has conquered the stars and traveled far throughout the galaxy. It is a great age, when one can skip across thousands of light years in the blink of an eye with the use of a Farcaster: a teleportation door that takes you where you want to go, created and developed by the AI TechnoCore.
But the Ousters are coming. A distant alien civilization about which little is known, except that they are hostile and a grave threat. It could all end now. The important vantage point is the distant planet of Hyperion, not even a member of the Hegemony of Man, where there are the Time Tombs. These ancient tombs are shrouded in mystery and suspicion; all that remains of an ancient race known as the Shrike, but they may be the salvation that humanity has been waiting for. And now these seven travelers hope to somehow activate these Time Tombs and save civilization.
Simmons begins the story in medias res, introducing the reader to these seven strangers in a world about which nothing is known, but he skillfully reveals everything through the minds, imaginations, and stories of these seven characters. There is Het Masteen, a member of the Templars, a tall and proud but quiet race who created and control the powerful Treeships that possess the Hawking Drive which is able to send ships across the stars at astonishing speeds; Masteen is the captain of the Yggdrasill, the ship that will take the pilgrims to Hyperion; he is also one of the pilgrims with his own unique story to tell. There is Father Lenar Hoyt, whose story is The Priest’s Tale, about the Catholic world and existence of the parasite known as the cruciform which can reincarnate life. Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, a member of the FORCE military who is searching for a supernatural figure that has come to him many times in his dreams in The Soldier’s Tale. Martin Silenus, in The Poet’s Tale, tells of his life as a failed poet who nearly loses his life and then begins his opus that will make him remembered throughout the centuries.
The Scholar’s Tale from Sol Weintraub is the most moving story from the pilgrims as he recounts how his daughter, Rachel, was an archaeologist studying the Time Tombs and after a strange accident begins to grow younger each day. She returns to her family to live with them as she decreases in age, needing to have her story recounted to her each day as she no longer remembers. Eventually a short and easy version is made to be told by Sol each morning to her. Sol and his wife, Sarai, relive the raising of their daughter backwards through time. And now it is up to Sol to return to the Time Tombs with baby Rachel who is now just weeks old and will soon simply disappear.
Tge Detective’s Tale from Brawne Lamia is a noir tale of her job as a private eye with a client who is a cybrid: a cloned human with electronic implants controlled by the TechnoCore. Someone is trying to kill him and destroy his memory, and it’s up to Lamia to figure out who is behind it all. In the final story, The Consul’s Tale, as the Consul talks of his grandparents on the planet of Maui-Covenant which was once a paradise but when the first Farcaster was opened, became a tourist destination and its beauty was destroyed forever. The Consul also talks about his work as a secret agent for the Hegemony in infiltrating the Ousters.
The book ends with the pilgrims finally reaching the Time Tombs. While the sequel, Fall of Hyperion, is the book which explains a lot more of the world and everything that eventually happens, there is a specialty about Hyperion, a uniqueness with it’s original characters and their incredible stories. Simmons epic universe employs multiple forms of the science fiction genre, making it a complex and fascinating world in which most people would like to live in. In a way, Simmons has essentially rewritten the Canterbury Tales of the far future, with some incredible stories that stand out as moving novellas on their own, and a cast of characters readers won’t soon forget.
If you liked this review and are interested in purchasing this book, click here.
Originally written on May 5th 2008 ©Alex C. Telander.
For an interview with Dan Simmons check out BookBanter Episode 4.
Received an interesting collections of books for review over the last couple of days:
I’ve been wanting to read Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons for some time, almost saving it as a weighty book that I much look forward to. And now with this impressive new paperback edition, I guess it’s finally time I read it.
While I don’t remember specifically at the time why I wanted to review Jack: Secret Circles by F. Paul Wilson, as it is the second in a trilogy, it still sounds an interesting story.
I was interested in this book when it came out in hardcover, but wasn’t able to get a copy at the time, but now I’ve managed to snag the paperback which is due out in a couple of weeks; should be a fascinating read.
I was recommended this book by my wife who knows the author, and have now received a copy of review. Sounds interest and may turn into an interview for BookBanter.
After hearing Mike Carey talk so much about his love for The Unwritten, I’m very happy to get a copy of the first collected volume.
