Ragtag Giggagon

Reading at times like elements of Irvine Welsh's Choose Life speech from Trainspotting, Pink Gallery to Mar Suite has plenty of action. The scattered narrative runs out of chronological order, and it may confuse some readers, but its challenging structure rewards repeat reading. Blood and gore permeate too, as our hero, a malfunctioning android-turned-psychopath who breaches Asimov's Laws of Robotics, navigates his way through society while trying to determine why he is faulty, inter alia. The beauty of sci fi is in its ability to draw analogies with today's society; in the way that Planet of the Apes addressed race, issues such as incel culture and the solipsistic nature of our social-media driven world are cleverly touched on in this novel. Despite some minor misgivings in terms of contemporaneity and anachronism, a great read all-in-all.  You can get this strange and poetic exploration of nihilistic hedonism here . You can follow the author on Twitter .

Some spoilers below! ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Stories tend to be a mix of the uncanny and the canny, or the unhomely and the homely. If we start things entirely in medias res, we are likely to confound the reader who is not yet acclimatised to the writer’s world. The assumption that the reader knows what’s going on in the author’s head is a failing of bad literature. LT Lindberg starts her engaging tale in the rather unsettling yet familiar environment of a mental health facility on Earth before the focus shifts with a flight from this world to a fantasy realm replete with spires and castles and sorcery and talking animals. The set-up impresses because we can follow along with Cayla as she learns the history and myths surrounding this new world. The reader may wonder, though, if this is a world created entirely by heroine Cayla’s schizophrenic musings. Or is it a genuine dimension where an evil villain has cast a long shadow across the land, turning the living into undead servants to do his bidd...

The book’s title, “ For such a time as this ”, is based on a Bible quote which is part remonstration and part piece of advice. The original quote was directed at Esther, who, it is suggested, holds her regal position at a moment of importance in history, and she must take full advantage while she can. It could be taken more generally to mean that we are all living through moments of which we should make the most. Pauline Dewberry’s creative non-fiction tome is a testament to the quote. Throughout her experiences taking on leukaemia, she finds solace in the love from her cats, and offers comfort to others undergoing treatment for cancer, in equal measure. The book is also a fascinating primer in what it’s like to undergo courses of chemotherapy while suffering through a very harrowing illness. Maintaining an awesome sense of humour throughout her ordeal, Pauline also explores her faith with respect to God's timing in answering the many prayers offered up for her. She is at ...

A gladiatorial battle in a bull ring, a fight against goblins on a ship, and a struggle against a monster whose gutting results in the salvaging of a fallen soldier are three highlights in this urban fantasy novel focusing on journalist Nathaniel Runnels and the vampiric Daniel, who acts as his mentor. Runnels is struggling through life, somewhat poisoned by the cynicism of the world, it seems, when he first encounters Daniel - who's a tour de force of cynicism when he chooses to be. His dialogue with angel Sariel is a case in point. A great read that's well worth diving into. Get Only Human here . You can follow JD Estrada on Twitter and Facebook .

Can’t we all identify as black sheep occasionally? Don’t we occasionally vent at, or declare our love for, those who don’t deserve it? Do we not engage in retail therapy? Haven’t we all stayed home instead of going to parties occasionally, due to social anxiety? Well then, Natasha Helen Crudden wants to have a quick – and powerfully eloquent – word in your ear. Much of this poetry is directed at persons. These subjects are rarely the general reader. The power of much of the work, however, lies in taking many of her admonitions, tributes, compliments and criticisms personally. The beauty of much of this talented poet’s work is in the identifiable. Trigger Warning , for instance, is directed at a (probable) female whose “killer Achilles heels” and “summer wardrobe of disorders” provide validation. It transpires that this subject doesn’t have “all that much to say”, falling back on trigger warnings as an excuse to retreat after causing the mayhem typical of somebody with (...

A novel written in verse, Anais Chartschenko’s The Weightless One is an unconventional character portrait of a young woman who’s been sectioned due to an eating disorder. Seemingly inadvertently – and with consummate skill through the prism of convalescence and therapy – Chartschenko slowly reveals a family background and the possible rationales for the development of her heroine’s psychological issues in the series of poems. We also get an insider’s view of a mental health facility. We learn how patients shouldn’t compare care and diet plans with each other. We discover a little about how detrimental the pursuit of modelling from an early age can be on a psyche. That some airbrushed celebrities may not be the best people to place on pedestals is also hinted at. Again, showing impressive topicality, when it comes to the reasons for being placed in the care of the mental health services, there are echoes of the misogyny prevalent in the high school and college campus sexual as...

Conservative thinker Jordan Peterson occasionally cites the traditional notions of the chaos of the feminine and the order of the masculine in his work. Although precedent has been set in ancient literature, the contentious nature of these gendered attributions is undermined by an examination - for instance - at a typical male-occupied space, and a female-occupied space. Women are generally neater than men. While unfair too to attribute the feminine specifically to females and masculine to males, the conventional wisdom with respect to feminine chaos and masculine order could be construed as challenged, if not debunked entirely, by Bianca Bowers in her collection Butterfly Voyage - by virtue of her gender. Sitting astride a body of work that is more conventional, Bowers tackles the atrophy taking place around the world in a book replete with the wisdom of experience and maternal instinct. Through its poet's voice, Butterfly Voyage can be read as a brief to strive against d...

Springing ahead from the 1920s (found elsewhere on this blog), here is an excerpt from An Early Childhood by Paddy Flanagan set in the Second World War. Continued from here . “You are CornJulio,” Bern-ard shot back in a cod Native American accent. “You need tepee for my bungee spongiform encephalitis! Welcome to die." Everyone roared laughing except for Cornjulio, who didn’t take to the word-theft of tepee for purposes of cultural misappropriation as a kind of joke. The Good Doctor withdrew a surgical glove from the breast pocket of his laboratory coat. It slowly emerged, fingers first, before the whole thing jettisoned itself across Barrel-Chested Bern-ard’s face with a snap. A red mark on the cheek flared into existence with the blink of an eye and another eye, both of them Bernie’s, and a veritable shocked silence filled the entire ward, in part because many of the patients were too unwell to say anything at all at all in the first place. You could still cross s...

Springing ahead from the 1920s (found elsewhere on this blog), here is an excerpt from An Early Childhood by Paddy Flanagan set in the Second World War. Well, there I was now, in Compostenela del Salamanca Half Catalytic Army Hospital for the Bewildered, sharing a bed with {[(Frank O’Connor)] due to the shortage of trolleys in the medical health industry. We had been fled across the Pyrenees on a pair of rectum stretchers (sit-down-only type harnesses) after sustaining massive injuries. I don’t recall how I had been wounded myself, but before my concussion, I had watched {[(Frank O’Connor)] wander across the plains of no-man’s-land into a stockpile of German bracket mines; in the process of recovery, it would take some time and a number of operations before he would be fully compost lemsip, but he had had two sets of brackets removed already, and was in the process of getting his short and curlies taken off. The meals were the standard fare - Meeting Two Veg, as they sa...

Lynn Lamb has just published the second book in her Opus of the Dead series, Dissonance of the Dead . The sequel to Lullaby of the Dead , the latest novel features characters from that universe as they journey beyond the haunted house they’ve been occupying – some of them for centuries. They have much to learn about modern ways of living. Tell us a little about some of the characters in the series. We’re continuing on with a few of the characters from the previous book. Landry Sinclair, the narrator of the series, has grown a lot since the beginning of Lullaby of the Dead . She has emerged as being much more conscious of her personal foibles in her dead state than she was when she was alive. We also have Topanga, her love interest, who is important as the mentor of the group. Now he is trying to grow the gifts of those who have left Nashton House and help them find their true selves. He is very much still the instructor. He knows how the world works outside the milieu o...

An interview I did for Mary Woldering's blog . What made you want to be a writer? As a child of maybe 6, I drew comic strips til I realised that my art wasn't up to scratch. I have been writing since then. I wrote what would be today deemed fan fiction of tv programs, but back then I didn't have a name for it. I started writing my own stuff a few years later. When is the release of your next novel? Name genre or if it’s part of a series. If your book is part of a series tell the readers about the others that are out for sale. How did you come up with the idea for the book or series, especially the title? The Quantum Eavesdropper Vol. 1. It’s science fiction and it and volume 2 are 180,000 words long. It should be released Summer 2019. A year after losing his wife, a man gets trapped on the lip of a black hole. It’s 2095, but he finds that he can communicate at this point in time with individuals back on Earth at any point in the past from the birth of telecommun...

A gambling theme permeates many of the poems in JD Estrada’s  Roulette of Rhymes . Card games, the eponymous roulette, and fortune-readings of various kinds feature. There’s a beautiful description of soy sauce being read beneath sushi; other pieces employ card and dice metaphors to describe life. But there’s a diversity to the poems too which suggests that, as Forrest Gump says, you never know what you’re gonna get. I was first introduced to JD Estrada by his fellow poet and author  Katya Mills . From a subjective perspective, their poetry can be, very occasionally, stylistically similar. Personally, all credit where it’s due, I feel that where I may have lauded Katya for creativity, I might have found fault in JD’s work. Why is that? I started into his novel Only Human. I have been reading it for probably two years on-and-off. It has a Gilliamesque lunacy to it, and some wonderfully creative universe building in a very promising series that explores the human conditio...

Lauren and Jessica are the ex-wife and wife of a cad who becomes a cadaver in what appears to be an accidental death. With Brian’s dealings a shade or two murkier than most people realised, it could be murder. The pair are thrust into the heroics of this novel when business colleagues from the criminal underworlds of gambling and arms-dealing come looking for money, missing since Brian’s death. The novel is very plot-driven and a different beast to previous work by the author. It’s probably the most commercial novel to date from this scribe too, whose work (often in the horror genre, but this one is more mainstream thriller) has a literary quality. Informative when it comes to the law and money laundering elements, this book’s also pacey and exciting. Well worth a read. Get it  here .

MILD SPOILER ALERT Jeffrey Wright, a black Brit, plays American CIA agent Felix Leiter opposite Daniel Craig’s Bond. Here, Martin Freeman, a white Brit, plays a CIA agent opposite Chadwick Boseman. The photo-positive – because you turn the colour up – nods to Bond continue in a casino sequence. The entire movie subverts that franchise’s purported misogyny. The strength of the female characters is awesome, and there isn’t a bad performance among them. Angela Bassett as a matriarch is a presence of stability. Danai Gurira leads the Dora Milaje, a group of women comprising the royal guard, in a role where she places civic responsibility over the personal. There’s a cultural richness to the Africa-set film that the continent itself shares, and it’s a movie aimed at everyone, and speaks to everyone. It pokes fun at racism in numerous ways. It shows how vested interests might win out temporarily – illustrating it in a hilarious fashion – but ultimately, humanity is all on the...

This movie-musical has had a critically mixed reception. I have not read the reviews. For good and bad, the music is of the “musical” variety with (from what I can discern) a fine awareness of current chart trends. Hugh Jackman does what he’s best at (and what he’s probably known least for) and he does a great job. His marching band uniform shares an aesthetic with Michael Jackson’s more militaristic stage costumes, and the performances are on a similar par throughout. What’s the movie all about? Artistic endeavour of all kinds is sophistry. Whether we’re watching computer-generated lions, or we’re reading fiction that actually happened, it’s the creator’s vocation to convince us of the truth (or fact) of the creation, to persuade the audience. The film certainly succeeds, on a level, through PT Barnum’s belief in this same artistic tendency. Alongside his love for family, Barnum’s a huckster and a showman, happy to ride on the coattails of the critically lauded and to promote tho...

Claire Buss  is a science fiction writer whose first book The Gaia Effect won a publication prize. Her sequel,  The Gaia Project , continues the story of Jed, Kira, and the array of characters in a world set two centuries into the future. You have a husband and wife as main characters. Tell us a little about them? Jed was a Force Detective but at the beginning of book 2 he is promoted to Captain of City 42 Guard and gets sent on a diplomatic mission to City 15. Kira is an Archivist. From what I remember, themes include genetic engineering, right?  Do you continue in that vein or is there focus on other stuff in the sequel? No, not really – it’s more about hope in a dystopian setting. Man has screwed up but there’s still a little light at the end of the tunnel. The Gaia Project though is my Empire (Star Wars) in the trilogy – it’s when the bad guys fight back! So do you have a chief villain running through the trilogy? Tell me about the bad guys. In book ...

Is it any less painful to watch a villain – made fallible due to his warped petard of principles – make an Abrahamic sacrifice? The Marvel heroes (the Guardians crew, Iron Man, Hulk, the Cap, Spiderman, Thor, Black Panther, Dr. Strange and more) unite against Thanos to bring an end to his stone-collecting ambitions, through which we see his trading of a soul for a soul. There are similar exchanges made or offered in this movie by the heroes. Thanos’s population culls will be ameliorated by the acquisition of the infinity stones to empower him to commit his sustainability-inspired genocides at a fingersnap rather than by the bullet. With more than one stone still to acquire, it allows for a lot of spinning plates in this movie, kept up through humour and character-driven action. (At least) four narrative strands – involving Thor, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Iron Man and Spiderman, and the earth-centred Captain America, Vision, Black Panther et al, are woven around the battle again...

Inspired by the wonderful Kim Chance and her  How to Write Fight Scenes video , and I humbly disagree with just one point [BARK! BARK!]. Lots of great tips here. I LOVE the idea of a battle or fight revealing something about character – fight scenes (probably) need a solid narrative purpose. There are other solid tips among the ones she gives. However, the one which I find a problem is Kim’s suggestion to use emotion rather than getting into the nitty-gritty of a fight scene – don’t do a play-by-play of each footfall of the combatant. Issue 1 I take issue with Tolkien vs Peter Jackson. Yes, Jackson’s a different medium, but wouldn’t you want to have read Tolkien’s description of Legolas bringing down an oliphaunt? That’s  action . Don’t you want to read Gimli say afterwards: “That only counts as one” (or whatever the line was relating to the gruesome body-count contest in which the two warriors are partaking against the orcs)? Issue 2 Show don’t tell. Isn’t that...