The Suicide Shop by Jean Teulé, reviewed by kaolin

The Suicide Shop by Jean Teule

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Tuvaches, a sort of working class Addams Family, operate The Suicide Shop--a shop where anyone can purchase the equipment and/or training required to off themselves (though children can only purchase sweets that have a 50% chance of killing them).

The story is set some time after North America has been laid to waste by the Big One--but for the most part it could pass as contemporary, with the odd bit of future tech: holographic greeting cards; a solution that turn one's kiss poisonous to others; 3d semi-immersive full-sensory television.

Mishima and Lucrèce Tuvache have three children--two depressed and/or ailing, and the youngest, bright and cherubic. This latter child, Alan, is the force that changes everything.

The chapters are brief, often terse, and the story progresses swiftly--at times a little too swiftly, in that I felt the characters bounced a bit too much in mood and disposition. At the same time, the quick pace kept me turning pages.

I was somewhat disappointed by the direction of the narrative--it's described as a quirky black comedy, but I found it more comedy, verging on slapstick, and less black (until, perhaps, the end). Alan's cheer and undauntable optimism quickly infects the rest of the family (except for Mishima, the father); even suicide commandos are shown to not be able to withstand his barrage of cheerfulness (a favorite quote: "I'll only be demonstrating this to you once!").

Still, it has a definite charm, and if you are perhaps less jaded you might get a real kick out of it throughout. I could easily see it being a cult favorite in the right circles.

View all my reviews.

Stone Masters: A Vampire Reckoning by VMK Fewers, reviewed by Jess

Stone Masters: A Vampire Reckoning by V.M.K. Fewings

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars


'Stone Masters: A Vampire Reckoning' by V.M.K. Fewers is a vampire novel told from two perspectives, in the form of diary entries. Both of the main characters, Orpheus and Jadeon, start us off with an entry from June 2006 as the set up to tell the story of how they became what they are, several hundred years earlier.

Jadeon’s family history is somewhat… interesting. He and his brother, Alex, accidentally witness their father and a group of men performing a ritual over a woman they at first believe to be a witch. The brothers see the woman carried through the family castle screaming, and calling out the name “Orpheus”. Thus begins Jadeon's journey to discover the truth about his father's involvement with the group–The Stone Masters-whose duty it is to kill vampires.

I appreciate that Laurell K. Hamilton and Anne Rice can only produce so many novels a year, and that in-between times vampire fans need a fix. So, this little niche opens up for the rest of vampire fic to have its turn. Unfortuately, Stone Masters is like a skeleton of an Anne Rice novel, without the real flesh, and more importantly blood, which vampires need. Anita Blake without any of the wit, and a poor copy-cat.

Not long ago I read Gabrielle Faust’s 'Eternal Vigilance'. After reading Stone Masters I can appreciate what Faust was doing - she tried to recreate a genre that is wearing rather thin on new material by injecting as much of her own originality as she could. And as it should be. Stone Masters just doesn’t have that jolt of excitement, or even just enough good old gore-fun to keep the reader interested. There is nothing new here, however hard you look, and hope.

The movement from one narrator to the next is confusing, the diaries boring. There was one stand-out moment, which was the description of a nasty witches' ceremony. I felt excited at this point, and for just a moment relieved, because I thought I was finally going to get the dark and scary tale that was hinted at in the story up until this point. No such luck. One good chapter was not enough to save Stone Masters. Poetic prose can be a wonderful thing, but not when it is the veil used simply to cover a weak plot.

I struggled with the book, right from the uninspiring cover art, to the less than satisfactory ending. I know it is not supposed to be taken as one of the literary greats, but there has to be something–it wasn’t even so bad that it was hilarious.

View all my reviews.

Words From a Glass Bubble by Vanessa Gebbie, reviewed by Debbie

Words from a Glass Bubble by Vanessa Gebbie

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Words from a Glass Bubble" by Vanessa Gebbie is a collection of nineteen of her short stories, compiled in a handsome hardback from Salt Publishing. There's no overarching narrative, but although the stories are very different, some themes and images crop up more than once.

Gebbie's talent is to shine a light onto her characters, giving us brief insights into their lives, their hopes, their disappointments, and--most of all--their mistakes, before moving on, leaving us with the hope that the characters too will carry on, make better decisions, have better luck, once the spotlight is removed.

Each story has its own voice, from "Words in a Glass Bubble" itself, where a family tries to come to terms with the loss of their son, to "Smoking Down There", where a child naively recounts her friend's story of how she almost inadvertently saved her baby brother from being disposed of at birth. The fragmentary, butterfly narrative convinces as that of a child. 'But then, if you smoked down there why didn't the hairs catch fire? That's what I wanted to know. But the bucket. Why wash out of a bucket when there were perfectly nice china things?'

Gebbie doesn't shy away from the darker side of life. One story, "Irrigation", goes into great detail--too great detail for this reader--about an enema. In "Dodie's Gift", the central character is left lost and wondering, "...if someone takes something you were going to give them anyway, is that stealing?' Reading this story, it's hard to decide whether to give her a hug or a good shake. Either, you think, might damage her beyond repair.

This story contains an image that recurs--'But there, at the bottom of the hollow, a gull has had a meal, and the sand holds white bone, red bone, skin....' The predator devours, leaves what it doesn't want, and moves on. What's been devoured, abandoned, somehow has to move on, too. Its life now may not be what it envisaged, but it still holds significance.

None of the stories is too long, although it's easy to feel some are too short. The characters live on in our minds and we can't help wondering what will happen next. If they'll come out all right.

This collection is definitely one to savour. Read a story, put it down, think about it, come back--the whole can't be devoured in an afternoon.


View all my reviews.

The Fireborn Chronicles by Mary Andrews, reviewed by kaolin

The Fireborn Chronicles by Mary Andrews

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Fireborn Chronicles is a psionic/space-faring epic. The focus of the chronicles is Rael--an adoptee/refugee from The Hive with implants that allow him to access any data terminal with a thought. He's groomed by his foster-mother for Dark Ops government work, given his own ship and told to assemble a team of his choosing.

The first several sections of the book are essentially short stories jumping from place to place as we're introduced to the team that he assembles. The plot picks up when the team is together-at-last and has to track down what happened to a high-ranking ambassador. In the end, the fate of the known universe hangs in the balance.

Mary Andrews sets a grand stage with many inventive ideas--but as a whole this novel does not tell the story it sets out to as well as I would have liked. It was an easy read, slipping into cliche only now and then, though each section repeated details as if I'd not been privy to them before, jerking me out of the narrative repeatedly. And while a very complex universe is hinted at, its rendering was sparse and, I felt, the hinting overreached its presentation:

PSI of a certain sort are universally recognized, but are only allowed to live in one section of one planet; aliens of all sorts exist somewhere (accomodations have been made for them on a pleasure planet; and we meet one non-humanoid in the form of a station master), but for brief mention they have nothing to do with this story that "will change the universe".

I know the story is not meant to be taken too seriously, but still I wanted things to hang together a bit more. We jump from character introduction to character introduction as a team is gathered (losing one along the way, not to be mentioned again until half-way through the book, and then only off-handedly explained), with large gaps in character development.

And while the plot kept me increasingly curious, what wrapped it up was, for me, ultimately unsatisfying--a deus ex machina that is relatively unexplained and unexplored. The book largely read as a few snippets plus a larger novella whose main purpose was jumping off into another, as of yet untold, story.

All that said, I'm sure there's many a reader that will enjoy this book. It's a "psionic sci fi" romp with tinges of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and tinges of Babylon 5, where everything works out in the end.


View all my reviews.

More Than A Cover

Here's the assembled Steam Bat!



(Photo used by kind permission of Zak Jarvis)

Issue 3 Pre-launch Buzz Contest

Issue 3 is an amazing creation, crammed full of stories and art, with poems, Flash fiction and an entertaining report to leaven the mix. Whether we're battling a mechanical daemon in "A Song, a Prayer, an Empty Space" or experiencing jealousy towards unusual rivals in "Soon You Will Be Gone and Possibly Eaten", we're following the theme of Mechanical Flight into strange and unexpected places (and at times flying further afield).

Here's the (self-referential) Pre-launch Buzz Contest: blog about the launch contest with a link back to this post--then leave a comment at this post with a link to your blog post.  You'll be entered to win A FULL SET OF GUD, HARDCOPY (Issues 0-3). If we don't receive at least 100 entries, we reserve the right not to award this prize, so BE SURE TO TELL YOUR FRIENDS!  You've got seven days to help spread the word (give or take -- through the end of Friday, Pacific Standard Time)

BONUS: First ten entries win a PDF of Issue 3!  And we'll spread a few more goodies around if response warrants it. :)

BONUS 2: Everyone creating an account gets a freebie from Issue 3 just for signing up (it'll be in your account, waiting).  Everyone who already had an account?  You've got a new freebie waiting for you, too.

What's in Issue 3?

 
SO SPREAD THE WORD! :D

Getting Social

GETTING SOCIAL - BLOG SUBSCRIPTIONS

As one small step towards enabling a bustling cultural center for literary and genre fiction, poetry, etc (one very small step), GUD has now entered the late 90's in terms of blog subscriptions.

You can now be notified when new comments have been left on the posts you like--thus helping you back to the site and fostering dialog!  To further enable this, we've removed the somewhat draconic requirement for every comment to be verified by staff--if you've had a comment verified, then you're good to go from there on out.  We love your feedback!

To help you manage all of this, we've created a "subscriptions" area (linked from your account), where you can see what posts you're subscribed to, unsubscribe from them individually (or en masse), or "reset" them if you've lost track of what threads might have gotten recent comments.

http://www.gudmagazine.com/user/subscriptions.php

There's been some discussion on our previous blog post, "A posting for your thoughts?", but we'd love more.  :)  Who knows, with more dialog, maybe the chatroom will get some real use.  It does take hanging out there a bit for someone to stop by, sometimes.

And maybe we'll cobble in those forums I've been dreaming of...

GETTING SOCIAL - GRAVATARS

"A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?"

We've now integrated gravatars throughout the site (staff blog, review blog, and on your account pages).  We're using the "identicon" plugin which gives folks who haven't registered with gravatar a probabalistically unique image as well, a pretty geometric pattern + color.

This hopefully adds a little bit of non-invasive personalization and simpatico.

GETTING SOCIAL - WHERE ELSE YOU CAN FIND US

If you're on a social network, chances are we're there, too. :)  Many of them are linked in our footer, but here's a larger partial listing:

• YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/gudmagazine
  
  
  
  
  • Public Service Announcement--go read a magazine
  
  
  • GUD teaser video
    
     
  
  
  
  


• MySpace - http://www.myspace.com/gudmagazine  
  
   


• Facebook -
  
  
  
  
  • Greatest U. Denominator
  
  
  • Greatest Uncommon Denominator Group
  
  
  • Greatest Uncommon Denominator Page
    
     
  
  
  
  


• GoodReads - http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/431377
  
   


• LiveJournal - http://community.livejournal.com/gudmagazine/
  
   


• Blogger - http://gudmagazine.blogspot.com/
  
   


• Yuwie - http://ww2.yuwie.com/profile/?id=92832

Are we missing something? :)