Cupid's Maze by Mark Souza
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I grew up in Kansas. I left and haven't been back. Why? All the same reasons that Mark's protagonist loathes driving through the godforsaken boring emptiness. I had no choice but to like this story after the first few pages were full of ways of insulting the vast emptiness of the Great Plains. Mark Souza evoked the monochromatic monotony of winter in Kansas perfectly.

The characters developed well, at least until The Trauma. I thought the female lead's arc seemed to vacillate a little oddly at that point, but the tension held until the end. A fantastic short story; I was able to knock this out in one cigarette break at work.

I'm looking forward to reading more of Mark's work.

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Beyond Armageddon by DeCosmo, Anthony
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Brainycat's 5 Bs: [note that this score is for the first three chapters only]
boobs: 0
blood: 0
bombs: 0
bondage: 0
blasphemy: 0

I gave this book three chapters before giving up. It's not badly written or edited, but it's... so very average. The style is very expository, with cliche'd characters rolling out their role's lines right on cue. The invasion of earth by some manner of extraterrestrials is beginning, but the lead character muddles around without any real interaction with his fiance, family or the events of the world - things happen, we hear about them through stilted dialogue and a couple of unimaginative descriptions, and then... I don't know what happens next, I gave up and started reading other things.

The author may have been trying to paint the main protagonist as a self-absorbed, not especially smart Average Joe much like Shaun from the movie Shaun of the Dead, but there was so little insight and the complete lack of incisive wit guarantees that kind of deadpan sarcasm won't work. Instead, the whole setup just seems foggy, ill conceived and not very fleshed out. I hope I just missed the point, rather than the author being lazy. There were a couple of lines that were supposed to be funny, but I have an odd sense of humor - I like very dry sarcasm and unexpected turns towards the macabre, so the jokes were totally lost on me.

This would be a great book for readers who don't expect to be challenged, or who are looking for some network tv grade filler to fill up a couple of hours.

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Dark Passions by Jeff Gelb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Brainycat's 5 Bs:
blood: 5
boobs:5
bombs: 3
bondage: 4
blasphemy: 4

This is a fun little collection of mostly forgettable dark stories with adult themes. I wouldn't necessarily call them all 'erotic', as that's generally used for highbrow smut explicit and arousing sexuality, but all of these stories involve sexuality and relationships. The vast majority of the stories have explicit sex, and most are explicitly violent.

Two stories in particular stand out for me: Magna Mater by
[a:Cody Goodfellow|18841|Cody Goodfellow|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-M-50x66.jpg] and Tres Hermanas by [a:Roberta Lannes|20432|Roberta Lannes|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]. I'm looking forward to reading more of their work; their work showed by far the most depth and interesting arcs of the whole anthology. Magna Mater, in particular, showed the insight and originality that I've come to expect from Apex Magazine - which is very high praise, indeed.

The rest of the stories, while well written and well edited, didn't cover any new ground nor offered any new perspectives on sex, sexuality, relationships, the human condition, yada yada. Maybe I've read too much horror? Maybe there's only so many ways the 'woman scorned' can exact her revenge on her unfaithful lover? Maybe there's only so many ways to retell "The Monkey's Paw" using heteronormative masculine protagonists? Also, what is up with all the stories of possession? Sure, it's a great vehicle for some lurid sexual craziness but where are the questions of free will and are we always dooomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? All the usual horror tropes are trotted out in the twenty stories in this compilation, but only two of them go anywhere interesting. Ten percent. That's it.

I found this at amazon for five bucks, and the other digital editions in this series are each around ten bucks. I feel ten dollars is way too much for this anthology, and I'm trying to convince myself I didn't get ripped off at the five dollar pricepoint. Given the quality and imagination of material that can be had at other retailers (and without the encumbrance of unnecessary DRM or proprietary file formats) I recommend that fellow readers with jaded tastes either wait until these are steeply reduced and/or continue to look elsewhere

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Apex Magazine - September 2011 by Betsy Phillips
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Apex knocks it out of the park, again. Each issue is about US$3 so there's no reason not to download a DRM FREE copy from weightlessbooks.com and get your fix of deeply thoughtful and deeply disturbing dark fiction, horror, and dark scifi.

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Dead Dwarves, Dirty Deeds by Derek J. Canyon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

After seeing some good reviews, I bought both of the books in this series. I read the first short in this volume and I'm not impressed. Perhaps I'm a snob, but I like my scifi to explore the intersections of technology and humanity, and cyberpunk is what happens when you throw both in a blender and tape down the "ice crush" button.

The story I finished reads like a gangster comicbook with some incidental cyberpunk buzzwords thrown in for window dressing. I found it droll and predictable, if at least fast paced. There was nothing in the lead character that made me care about him, which is hard to do because I'm usually a complete sucker for the antihero. Sure, he's a badass bad boy. But his dialogue isn't very snappy and he provides no interesting insight into his (or the broader) human condition.

That being said, the writing and editing are good at a technical level; it was not in the least painful or difficult to read. This could be a worthwhile series if the author were to raise interesting questions and play around with the characters until he's able to come up with some interesting answers.

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Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror by Cheryl Mullenax
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Proper review forthcoming. Definitely worth reading. Very graphic and explicit with a focus on the "becoming the monster that lives inside you" type of story.

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Bedtime Stories for the Apocalypse by Joel Arnold
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A very quick and easy read. Joel demonstrates a command of the language, and a very good understanding of his technique, but I finished this collection of shorts with a feeling that I'd missed the part about the end of the world. The stories are each well written and engaging in their own way, but none of them cover any territory or offer any insight that hasn't been gone over a bazillion times before. While each of the stories encompasses no small amount of tragedy for their protagonists, I didn't feel any sense immediate extinction or suprahuman judgment that I expected from the "Apocalypse" in the title.

On the other hand, it's a lot easier to plow through this book in an hour than the collected works of Kafka, so please don't get the impression that there's no redeeming qualities to this book. It's a solid collection, the price is right, and you can certainly do a lot worse with an hour and a half of your time that finish this.

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Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A fun and lighthearted look at some of the history of the engineering around keeping mammals alive in space. While the author's interjections of her own observations of the engineers and technology are insightful and funny, it felt like they were used as filler to make up for a gap in either knowledge or understanding of the complexities of the problems and solutions. An easy, quick read but not especially illuminating.

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The Cold Commands by Richard K. Morgan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The problem with reading Richard K. Morgan is once you're done, nothing else seems worthwhile for a few days. He's that good.

proper review forthcoming

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Aloha from Hell by Richard Kadrey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

See my review of the first book for details of why this series is made of pure win.

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