Fantasy Books
Audiobook Review – Wings and Broken Things (Mitzy Moon, Book 3) by Trixie Silvertale, Narrator Coleen Marlo (4/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Paranormal Mystery
Length: 4 hours and 57 minutes
Publisher: Sittin’ On A Goldmine Productions LLC
Release Date: October 18, 2023
ASIN: B0CL5F5CK9
Stand Alone or Series: 3rd book in the Mitzy Moon series
Source: Audiobook from Audible.com
Rating: 4/5 stars
“Mitzy Moon is eager to test her expanding abilities. She’d love to look into the hit-and-run that struck down her favorite veterinarian while everyone was at the Yuletide Extravaganza. But before she can suss out a single tip, the advances of a charming green-eyed stranger offer a dangerous distraction…
Desperate to put her investigation back on track, she goes undercover at the high school and lands on the wrong side of the law by lunch. And her “get out of jail free” card comes with the help of her meddling Grams, an interfering feline, and her alchemically inclined attorney.
But when a curse puts her powers on the fritz, she may not be able to save everyone…
Can Mitzy juggle dating and sleuthing, or will a hex knock off more than her halo?”
Series Info/Source: This is the 3rd book in the Mitzy Moon series. I listened to this on an audiobook from Audble.com.
Thoughts: This is the third book in the Mitzy Moon series, and I think it was the best one in the series so far. That being said this is pretty typical paranormal mystery and Mitzy can still come off as very immature, although she is starting to grow a bit as a character.
While everyone in town is at the Yuletide Extravaganza, the town veterinarian is severely injured in what appears to be a hit and run. Mitzy is on the case, even though it involves going undercover at the local high school. When a charming new man comes to town, everyone is warning Mitzy against spending time with him, but Mitzy think he seems genuine enough. Can Mitzy balance dating, sleuthing, and maybe even start doing some good with her newfound fortune?
This was again a pretty straight-forward story with a decent mystery. I still don’t love Mitzy as a character but I do enjoy the cat she’s inherited and some of the other quirky folks in the story. To be fair, Mitzy is starting to grow on me a bit. She is starting to mature some and consider what she can do with this money she has inherited to help out the town. We also start to learn a bit more about Mitzy’s odd powers in this book as well.
In the end, this is a cute, light-hearted paranormal mystery. At points, it is a bit simple and immature for me, but it is also a good diversion while I am driving. I go into the office for work once a month, and it is about a 3hr drive in, these are perfect to finish on a trip there and back. I don’t have a lot of other opportunities to listen to audiobooks right now, so it is nice to have a series with some shorter books in it like this.
I don’t really have a lot to say about this series. If you are looking for a light-hearted paranormal mystery read with a younger, less mature heroine, this might work for you. The audiobooks are well narrated and easy to listen to. They are pretty easy and breezy, so if you miss a bit of the story while driving it’s not a huge deal.
My Summary (4/5): Overall I liked this and thought it was better than the previous two books in the series. While the heroine, Mitzy, isn’t my favorite she is starting to grow on me and I do enjoy the quirky town and side characters in the story. I mainly picked this up as a three book pack because these are shorter audiobooks that I can listen to on my monthly trip down to the office. I went ahead and picked up the next three in the series because I was able to get a good deal on them from audible and it’s nice to have a light-hearted, shorter audiobook that is fun and easy to listen to. Would I recommend this series? It’s definitely not the best humorous paranormal mystery series out there, but it’s not bad if you are looking for something with shorter installments.
Categories: Fantasy Books
Portrait of an Artist: A Chat With Nghi Vo
Siren Queen (Tor.com, May 2022). Cover design by Julianna Lee
Nghi Vo isn’t your typical award-winning writer of speculative fiction. Don’t take my word for it. Flip threw her oeuvre and select a story around at random: your bound to wind up reading something that will leave you spellbound. That’s exactly what happened to me when I first read Siren Queen over a year ago and most recently with the short story “Stitched To Skin Like Family Is” (which can be read for free on Uncanny Magazine‘s website).
Her rise has been steady, some might even say as subtle as the plots and characters that have attracted readers to Vo over the years. I had the privilege of interviewing the author about her career, craft, and so much more.
First things first, where did your journey as a writer start?My journey as a writer basically started when I was a kid and my teacher showed me my very first dictionary. It was like one of those old, enormous blocks of paper and she told me that every word in English was in there and everyone that came out used words from that dictionary. I was tiny and thought, “that’s all a book is, I just need to get the words in the right order and that is all the material I need.”
It’s not entirely right but it’s kind of right. It was the discovery that words are very modular and the joy of writing was the fact that there was no buy in, no equipment. Its literally just pen, paper, and the words that you have.
It was a very cheap craft to get into! That was part of it. I wish I could give you something more romantic but that’s where it started.
You have writing credits that go back to 2005. I believe you have short stories that came out back then. What was the process like going from a writer trying to get short stories published to an author with their first book deal?It was less of a journey and sort of like stumbling through the world and falling flat on my face a few times. I actually don’t have any training in writing. When I was in school, I was in school for for media studies and political science. I briefly flirted with law school then realized I would have to spend my whole life surrounded by lawyers and maybe I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t have the endurance for that!
I got out of college and was working tech support. The thing about tech support is there’s a lot of free time and I went back to the fact that you don’t need money to write a story. You know I had my ancient laptop and I saw a call for submissions and I’m like, “I can do this, I have time, I can write 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 words. So, I started writing and submitting, honestly because it was fun, because I thought it was interesting.
If you look at my bibliography, you’ll notice at the time it wasn’t consistent at all. It wasn’t like I was trying to do a certain number of stories a year. I was just trying to write between keeping my job, making sure my family’s taken care of, hanging out with my friends, all the stuff you’re doing in the early aughts.
Then I saw a call for submissions from Angry Robot Publishers. This would have been about 2016 or so. It was a contest for a novel and it was unagented. So I wrote Siren Queen, they passed on it but sent me this lovely rejection which said, “Usually we’d give you critique here but you mostly know what you’re doing.” I’m like, “that’s not true,” but I started doing the agent rounds, sending it off to agents to see where it would go.
While I was submitting to agents Tor.com, who is my current publisher who I owe a lot to, they put out a submissions call for unagented novellas. I said, “I don’t have an agent, I can probably write 20,000 words.” And so in about six weeks I wrote The Empress of Salt and Fortune, I sent it to them, and then I didn’t think about it very much. I was trying to pay a lot of rent at that time, made a lot of bad housing decisions (laughs). Made some bad romantics decisions (more laughter) too.
The first five books in The Singing Hills Cycle, all published by Tor.com: The Empress of Salt and Fortune (2020), When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (2020), Into the Riverlands (2022), Mammoths at the Gates (2023), and The Brides of High Hill (2024)
Then what happened was within the same week I got two offers of interest from agents and then I got this email from Rouxi Chen who is my editor at Tor.com and it was this long letter. I was like wow, this is the nicest rejections letter I’ve ever gotten! She was saying how passionate she was about it, how much she likes it, and then that she wants to acquire it!
It was a lot of falling on my face, I was doing a lot of writing. I was in tech support, I did freelance writing for a while. It was writing but not fiction. I was more or less writing what people paid me to write, things like cockroach care guides and articles about why you can’t ride bears. That was a real thing I wrote!
It was really funny because when I look back on it, I was really quite bad at all of this. My agent and I have been together for about seven years now. She finally told me a few years on, “did you know that your submission letter was deeply mediocre!” That’s the word she used and she still signed me, so there’s hope for all of us.
I’m flabbergasted because Siren Queen is the first story of yours I read. The thing I really love about it is how, though it’s set in a modern setting, it feels ethereal and magical. It feels enchanting. It’s one of those books where, when I got to the end, I just wanted more!Thank you so much for telling me that. If you like I can tell you why that book was written.
Please!What happened was suddenly I realized that the whole system of studios from the time period giving their stars new names and new pasts sounded like fairies kidnapping people, like changelings. I kind of got on this thing when my friend was trying to convince me to have dinner. She’s telling me “Nghi, what do you want to eat” and I keep saying, “there’s so many more parallels! You don’t understand!”
My friends have always been patient when I suddenly have an idea. I have a lot of good ideas and that was just the one that happened to be a novel. I’ve always loved Golden Age Hollywood. Have you heard of The Animaniacs?
Yes.Have you heard of Slappy Squirrel?
Yes.That was one of the places Siren Queen comes from!
Wow! Well, if you look at bookshelves right now, a lot of people, myself included, would say we are in a Golden Age. I feel part of that is because, if you go back 20 years ago, the kind of people getting signed and the types of books that came out weren’t anywhere near as diverse. Now the field is so much bigger, so much richer. How does it feel to be able to write and sell stories featuring leads from wherever you want them to be and still get recognized? How does it feel to appeal to readers without needing to navigate the kind of mazes writers back in the day had to?It feels a lot of different ways. It feels wonderful to have my stories be things that are wanted. It feels wonderful to reach out to people who are in situations a great deal like I was when I grew up. At the same time there is this sort of ocean of grief underneath it because we’ve had a century of modern publishing in the US and you think about how many voices we lost who had amazing stories we will never get to hear. Sometimes that’s very heavy and feels like this responsibility that we have to live up to the people who came before us. It is both true and not true.
We’re working in a business and we’re trying to make a living. But at the same time, we are making art and art has a great deal of responsibility to those that came before us or, one thing I spend a lot of time thinking about, those that should have come before us but weren’t allowed to. For me as a writer its stories all the way down. As I do this job I keep running into readers who have stories, readers who are going to be writers and storytellers, and all I can think is how bright the future is because we’re talking about it, we can see these stories form. At the same time while there is this weight of grief there’s also this sense of hope that we are going into a future where we have more stories than we have ever had before.
The Chosen and The Beautiful (Tor.com, June 1, 2021). Cover by Greg Ruth
Well, my first published novel was The Chosen and The Beautiful which is a sort of take on The Great Gatsby featuring a Jordan Baker who is Asian American, queer, and made of magic. One of the first things anyone told me about it is they called it a joyless cash grab! My first reaction was “No this is an extremely joyful cash grab!” And it is, I’m in this to make money. This is how I pay my rent.
This is the thing. I was asked recently if I felt threatened by AI as an artist. I’m like, look, the minute I start writing I’m throwing myself against every writer that came before. Because I start typing, because I put pen to paper, because I have the nerve to sell my stuff, I have always been putting myself against competition. So, I don’t see why it’s any different.
In terms of being intimidated, they should be! How about that?
Well said! Now, I wanted to ask a bit about your background. Has it had any impact on your work and if so how?Vietnamese is one of the many things I am. I have given up on the idea of having any sort of unified selfhood when it comes to identity. I am Asian-American, I am Vietnamese-Chinese, I am queer… it’s a long list of things. It is something that as an adult I’ve had to corral and accept. While there is the hope of some sort of unified picture, I don’t know if that is a thing that is possible. It is important to me to offer both respect and acknowledgement of the various things that I am and to enjoy the privilege that I do have of being open about it.
The Saint (Paramount Pictures, April 4, 1997)
Way back in the 60s or 70s, there was a spy series called The Saint, there was a Val Kilmer movie about it, it was a huge series. I didn’t realize for a longtime that the author was half Asian. It was not in any of the biographies or anything like that. The idea that I have the intense privilege of being openly who I am, that it is my picture on the books, that there is no question about what pseudonym I have to use… every part of me that I can show I will because so many people before me haven’t been able to do so.
It’s a little dicey sometimes. This is my favorite Margaret Cho quote. Someone once asked her something like, “Aren’t you worried your Asian parents are ashamed of what you’re doing?” Her response was, “Man, I kind of assumed every parent would be ashamed of what I’m doing.” It’s a fine line to walk.
Let’s go back to your books. One thing I love about your bibliography is it is full of short stories, novellas, novels, novelettes, entire series… when you initially get an idea how do you decide if its going to be a short story or something longer?These days I ask my agent (laughs). Historically what I do is ask myself how much time do I want to spend with an idea, how much work is going to go into expressing it? Sometimes it’s a matter of how much is covered in the story to do it justice. Sometimes it’s a matter of ‘wow, that’s a really cool idea that will only last 2,000 words before someone starts asking questions that I cannot answer.’
There’s a certain reality to how much ground you can cover in a short story compared to a novel. This isn’t to say you can’t cover thousands of years in a short story or have novels that take place in a novel. But it depends on what I want to do with it, what I think is fun. Like Siren Queen which was a huge amount of fun to write. I know you said it’s short but I write short because I get bored quickly. But it was good to spend more time with Luli (main character of Siren Queen). There was “Stitched to Skin like Family Is” is which is about a woman that sort of magically communicates with clothes and that one has historical serial killers in it.
Uncanny Magazine, March-April 2024, containing “Stitched to Skin like Family Is”
That was published by Uncanny Magazine!
Yeh.
It won a Hugo right?It won something (laughs). I don’t know.
My next question is about craft. What would you say were the big milestones going from a short story writer sending out those manuscripts to getting your first deal. Were there any moments where you realized ‘I can do this’?Every day is a new surprise, it really is. The big milestones never show up or hit the way you think it will. The Empress of Salt and Fortune came out during the pandemic. The shutdowns happened and my book came out. I didn’t know what was happening and no one else knew either. No parties, no getting to see my book in the store for some time. But the first fan letter was very cool. (The milestones) just keep coming. One of my books is going to be published in Vietnamese sometime in the next couple of years and that gave me so many moments because that means so many of my relatives can read my book if they want to. That’s if they want to, they don’t have to, it’s okay.
I think this job… and I’ve had quit a few jobs, there’s so much weirdness and so much joy in it that the milestones definitely sneak up on you. They aren’t things that you can really work for. I also realized I published like 10 books in the last five years and my brain might not work well anymore! Sometimes I’m like, this is a thing happening to me again! I may not be the right person to ask.
For me, it seems like the milestones sneak up on me. They’re special and I’ll know immediately that they’re special, but I can’t always predict them
I will say this: some of it was the fact that they don’t really stop me from putting what I want in my acknowledgements. So recently, when I was typing up my acknowledgements, I was telling them about the fact that my agent stopped me from putting a half-man half-stove hybrid in one of the books that is coming out soon. She stopped me from that and I got to talk about that and it was weirdly special.
It was in The Scarlet Ball, which will be out later this year, and the best story I can tell about it is I was writing it very fast, there’s this character that is a duke, and he’s like half-human half-stove. I was trying to make a point about overconsumption and the predatory nature of nobility and the industrialization of England. I thought I was being smart and then one day my agent calls me and says, “Nghi, why the fuck is the duke a stove!” She made me stop and upon further reflection that was the right call to make.
You started sending out manuscripts while in tech support. Any advice to anyone trying to balance working a regular job with their dream of getting their writing published?That is a very hard question and in some ways it’s a deeply unfair question. Not that its unfair to ask but in the answers I can give. I am sitting where I am because I am profoundly lucky. I had a tech support job that essentially allowed me to make money while making money. I was healthy, most of my school was subsidized through scholarships, I’m mentally healthy, I didn’t have kids to support, I’ve been very lucky with the relationships that I’ve had largely. A lot of it is luck. What I can tell people who are trying to do something similar is if you see an advantage, seize it. If you have a connection, use that connection. If you have someone willing to put you up while you work on your novel, take advantage of that.
I like my job a great deal. It is not always easy, it is not always fair. It is very, very important to remember that it is a job. You can love this job and this job will not love you back. I’m saying this as someone who is surrounded by professionals who care deeply about stories, who I’m genuinely willing to say care about me as a person, but if you go into this job trying to give it everything you are you are going to lose. And when you lose it can be very dark and dramatic. You are the most important person in this equation and that is the thing you can never forget as someone trying to be a working artist.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Tor.com, March 24, 2020). Cover by Alyssa Winans
It can be brutally unfair. There’s nothing more important than yourself as an artist and yourself as a person. You must take care of yourself. That’s what I’ve been trying to say for a while, because I’ve been talking to other people about this. We are not a life support system for stories; our stories are a life support system for us. That’s the way it has to go.
My next question kind of ties into self-care. Do you ever deal with writer’s block or anything like it?This isn’t to brag but I will say that when I was freelance writing I was like the McDonalds of freelancing! I was doing tiny descriptions of vacuum cleaner parts, I was turning over about 6,000 words a day. That is what it took to get my bills paid. I do know what its like to stare at a page and not know what comes next. But you start putting things on the page anyway.
Here’s the thing I’ve learned about writer’s block: what you think of as writer’s block is a lot of the time that is burnout. A lot of the time that’s people pushing themselves too hard or there’s that little voice in there head that says there’s a time limit on how its going to go. That freezes them up, your not going to go anywhere, and that sucks.
When it comes to writer’s block, I know I keep coming back to it but this is how I pay my rent. I can’t afford it! But I will say this, if you don’t know what comes next a lot of the times the problem isn’t what you’re writing that minute. Go back and try just temporarily removing the last 500 words you wrote. Start from there again. That is one thing that has been helping me when I feel like I don’t know what comes next and gets you things like men that are half-man, half-stove.
Be careful thinking that it is a creative issue when it is just the fact that you have nothing in the tank.
The Scarlet Ball by Nghi Vo, forthcoming from Tor Books on October 6, 2026
You have novel coming out in May, right? Can you tell us a bit about that book and any other projects we can look forward to?
Yeh so we have actually announced that in May we have coming out A Long and Speaking Silence which is the seventh book in The Singing Hills Cycle series. It is hard to say ‘well this one is very important’ when they’re all important stories to me, I wrote them. But I love this one. This is Cleric Chee, our storytelling cleric, with their friend Almost Brilliant the talking bird. This is them at the earliest point in their journey when they are learning to be a storytelling cleric and are quite bad at it. It’s a story about food, veneration, parties, good stuff and bad stuff….I think its hilarious but not everyone is going to agree with me.
And this October we’re going into The Scarlet Ball, which is the story that no longer has a half-man half-stove, once again I was forced to take that out! But it’s the story of a half-French half-Vietnamese courtesan who comes to the united states on the run who gets a deal from a very rich white woman that is one of the New York 400 in 1890. This woman is missing a grand daughter. If my main character Judith is willing to put on a white girls face and go dance with demons, she can go and marry a storm. I’m looking forward to that one, it was not an easy book to write and I can’t wait for people to see it. Its gory, messed up, I like to think it is kind of sexy and just tons of fun.
A Long and Speaking Silence, volume 7 in The Singing Hills Cycle, forthcoming from Tor.com on May 5, 2026
It sounds a ton of fun but I want to go back to the A Long and Speaking Silence you mentioned. That is the seventh book in its series. Most series don’t last that long. What sustained it? What is it you love most about that setting.
I’m going to tell you how The Singing Hill Cycle Series came about. When I wrote The Empress of Salt and Fortune, I had no idea it was going to be a series. My editor at the time, Rouxi, she comes to me when we are going to pub and she says, can this be a series? Here’s the thing, as a freelancer, you don’t say yes to a project when you’re 100% sure you can do it. You say yes at 90%, at 80%. If you are kind of hungry and have rent that needs to get paid you say yes at 60%. So what I said was yes, this can be a series!
Literally I’m on the phone with her and saying, “Yes it can be a series, each book will be standalone, and they’ll all be stories about stories”. It kind of snuck up on me because this is something I did because I wanted to be a novelist… I wanted this job. I was kind of coming up with it on the fly. Part of it is I didn’t expect to love it as much as I did. I didn’t think that I was going to fall in love with these characters or the world. I got lucky when I made the main character Chih who is kind, who mostly wants to hear and tell stories and I love them. That’s my favorite thing about them, how the love came and how unexpected it was.
Love segues nicely into my last question. Our readers at Black Gate magazine love speculative fiction as I’m sure you do. But I’ve got to ask: why do you choose to write speculative works as opposed to any other genre?The answer is: if I can have a dragon, a mechanical horse, talking birds, entire worlds, demons who love cities, girls who wear other girls’ faces why the hell wouldn’t I? This is the most fun you can have while writing so why wouldn’t I?
Categories: Fantasy Books
Probing Questions
The McPherson Tape (Axiom Films, 1989)
Hold onto your butts — a new watch-a-thon starts today!
Who likes alien abduction flicks? I’ll soon fix that.
The McPherson Tape — 1989 – TubiThe youngest of a trio of brothers has acquired a new video camera, and makes his directorial debut at a birthday party for his young niece in a remote Montana farmhouse. As the family jovially bickers and gets ready for cake, the lights suddenly go out, and the three men head out to the woodshed to check out the fuse box. Outside they witness a red light in the sky and, following its trajectory, stumble upon what looks like a landed spacecraft complete with little aliens mooching around. They rush back to the farm, arm themselves, and settle in for an evening of glimpsed faces at windows, strange noises, and family breakdowns.
Coming in at a brief 66 minutes, and made for little more than $6K, this is director Dean Alioto’s first run at a story that he would return to a decade later with a new name and bigger budget (Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, which I’ll be watching later).
Allegedly, this film was considered a classic ‘hoax’ film, although I very much doubt anyone was really taken in by the children in alien costumes and the mostly improvised dialogue of the family members. However, as a found footage flick, it ticks all the boxes; lack of focus when really needed, underlit, all the detailed clarity of a bowl of squid ink ravioli in a coal mine.
It’s all rather shouty and tedious, but I have to admire it for getting made for next to nothing, and inspiring a slew of dodgy knock-offs, most of which I’ll be reviewing.
4/10
Alien Invasion (Creatures of the Dark, August 16, 2019)
Alien Invasion (AKA After the Lethargy) — 2019 – Prime
Intrepid journalist Sara Hamilton has a slight obsession with an incident that happened in Tetis County somewhere in the Rockies. Much like Roswell, a ship allegedly crashed and a bunch of little fellas were found strewn around the wreckage. However, one went missing. Through lengthy bouts of exposition sandwiched between bursts of grimy characters running from pixels, we learn that a remote military barracks was being used for experiments, primarily by the nefarious Dr. Marshall and his wife, in an attempt to create alien hybrids. Hamilton goes to the site to investigate, and assorted ghastliness ensues.
This is a Spanish production and first film for Marc Carreté, who I suspect did not have a lot of Euros to play with. Though grateful for the title change, this is hardly an invasion, more of an X-Files episode where running and screaming take the place of bickering and sleuthing.
Andrea Guasch does a good job as Sara, put through the wringer to ever increasing degrees, although there are a couple of actors who play it a little more over-the-top than required. The film is billed as a horror comedy, but aside from one character who spends most of the film hilariously mumbling like Gabby Johnson from Blazing Saddles, there’s very to laugh at, especially since the central premise is women being kidnapped, raped, and forced to give birth to hybrid abominations. A real rib-tickler.
Not great, but not terrible either.
4/10
Hangar 10 (Newscope Films, October 22, 2014)
Hangar 10 — 2014 – YouTube
Never let it be said that I ignore the follower(s) of these projects, for here is a suggestion from fellow Canuck and purveyor of weird shit, Mark, who thought I should check this one out as it almost meets the criteria. Good enough for me.
Three UK metal detector nerds, Gus, Sally, and Jake, head out to Suffolk to look for treasure, although Jake is only tagging along because he a) fancies Sally, and b) is interested in the Rendlesham Incident, a decades-old UFO event in the same area.
After a good deal of traipsing around in a very orderly forest, punctuated by occasional spurts of bickering, things finally kick off when the trio witness some spooky lights in the clouds, and everything goes to pot deep inside a military installation. Extraterrestrial shenanigans ensue.
This is a found footage film, so it already had an uphill battle when it came to keeping me engaged, and although it is a lot better than many of the other genre films I’ve hate-watched, it still suffers from underexposed/unfocused scenes, and ‘spontaneous’ dialogue. Hangar 10 managed to bring me back under its folds though with some beautifully realized effects shots, and some interesting scenes in the spooky base, which were unfortunately relegated to the last 25 mins or so.
Worth a look if you like this sort of thing, but left me craving a film that might have used a tripod.
6/10
The Recall (Minds Eye Entertainment, June 2, 2017)
The Recall — 2017 – Prime
No, not a film about something going wrong on a Volkswagen, rather this is a jolly romp that threads its way through several genres before settling on a good old fashioned ‘kick the alien butt’ flick.
A group of five friends head to a luxury cabin in the woods for a spot of rumpy pumpy and other youthful distractions. During the trip there, they are aware of strange atmospheric disturbances (not that they pay any attention), and one of them, Brenden (Breaking Bad‘s R.J. Mitte), upsets a local hunter at a gas station (played by Wesley Snipes, having the time of his life). They finally reach the cabin, then find another ghastly shack in the forest with photos of the hunter in his former life as an astronaut. So far, so Wrong Turn.
Then the story turns into a home invasion as presumably the hunter is attacking them, but it turns out to be malevolent aliens hellbent on abducting and possessing the chums.
Once all the threads are tied together, we can settle down for a bit of bish bash bosh as the surviving teens fight back against their aggressors, and the film concludes with big ideas and some X-Men shenanigans.
As bonkers as this all sounds, I had a fun time with this one, helped by a decent cast and solid effects. Sure, it’s all over the place, but at least its not boring, and that’s all I can ask for these days.
Check it out!
7/10
Scary Movie 4 (Dimension Films, April 14, 2006)
Scary Movie 4 — 2006 – Tubi
A bit of a swerve for the next film in my wildly ignored project, but work deadlines have been kicking my butt and preventing movie watching, and it does at least have a War of the Worlds section, so I’m sticking with it.
The Scary Movie franchise has not aged well, not that I ever really liked it to begin with, but the dated pop-culture references and tired direction really makes this one a slog. I really don’t understand why this is so bad. David Zucker, one third of ZAZ who brought us one of the top three comedies of all time (Airplane!), and the sublime daftness of Police Squad! is the solo director on this, although the ‘A’ in ZAZ, Jim Abrahams, co-wrote it.
Yes, I get the notion that these films are meant to lampoon whatever was popular in the few years preceding it (in this case, War of the Worlds, The Village, The Grudge, Saw, and Tom Cruise couch jumping), and that’s not the issue. It’s the approach to the set-ups and landings that kill it. In Airplane!, I’m trying to think of a moment when someone breaks the fourth wall, perhaps there was one moment when someone looks to camera (please illuminate me in the comments), but otherwise it is played straight as an arrow.
In Scary Movie 4, characters look to camera all the time, as if to tell us, “Hey, isn’t this funny and weird?”, and then the gag is repeated to the point where even a dead horse would resurrect itself and walk off.
It is possible that I chortled twice — I definitely recall making a noise- – but I can’t remember what at. If these films are your bag, all power to you, I don’t want to poo-poo your enjoyment, but I’d be happy to never watch one of these again.
2/10
Previous Murky Movie surveys from Neil Baker include:
My Top Thirty Films
The Star Warses
Just When You Thought It Was Safe
Tech Tok
The Weyland-Yutaniverse
Foreign Bodies
Mummy Issues
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Monster Mayhem
It’s All Rather Hit-or-Mythos
You Can’t Handle the Tooth
Tubi Dive
What Possessed You?
See all of Neil Baker’s Black Gate film reviews here. Neil spends his days watching dodgy movies, most of them terrible, in the hope that you might be inspired to watch them too. He is often asked why he doesn’t watch ‘proper’ films, and he honestly doesn’t have a good answer. He is an author, illustrator, teacher, and sculptor of turtle exhibits.
Categories: Fantasy Books
Deceptive Appearances in “Deadly Gold Rush” | All That Glitters is Not Gold
Deadly Gold Rush is murder, mayhem, and the Carolina gold rush. LitStack is excited to…
The post Deceptive Appearances in “Deadly Gold Rush” | All That Glitters is Not Gold appeared first on LitStack.
Categories: Fantasy Books
Audiobook Review: Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher
I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.
Mogsy’s Rating (Overall): 4.5 of 5 stars
Genre: Horror
Series: Stand Alone
Publisher: Macmillan Audio (March 24, 2026)
Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
Author Information: Website
Narrator: Mary Robinette Kowal
T. Kingfisher is at it again, and this is exactly what I’m talking about! I am all in on the creepy setting, the brave and quietly capable heroine, and a horror premise that makes me squirm in grossed out discomfort. The author just has this unmatched talent for taking esoteric subjects or slightly odd interests and spinning them into highly engaging stories that keep me up at night, and listening to this one in audio was even more immersive.
Set at the tail end of the 19th century, the story follows Sonia Wilson, a struggling artist whose career prospects have dried up after a string of personal and professional setbacks. After the death of her father, she decides to leave her dead-end teaching job to return to her first love: scientific illustration. However, the only job she’s able to land is with a surly, reclusive entomologist named Dr. Halder, who needs a new illustrator to finish a book based on his research after his previous artist departed under unknown circumstances. This is how Sonia finds herself at his sprawling rural estate deep in the North Carolinian woods, where the only other residents besides the doctor are his housekeeper, groundskeeper, and a young maid.
It doesn’t take long for Sonia to sense that something isn’t quite right about her new situation. The discovery of an old sketchbook in her quarters reveals that Dr. Halder’s former artist was none other than his own wife, who vanished mysteriously about a year earlier. No one will speak openly about what happened, and the same reticence surrounds the local rumors of “blood thieves” who were said to have terrorized the townsfolk at the time. Sonia tries to keep her head down and focus on her work, even as Halder’s assignments force her to illustrate increasingly unsettling specimens tied to his research. But the deeper she throws herself in the work, the harder it becomes to ignore the strange happenings around her. Is her imagination running wild after too many hours reading up on the grotesque details of parasitic insects and their invasive life cycles? Or is there something truly unnatural stirring in the forest?
What really sold me about Wolf Worm was Sonia. A scientific illustrator protagonist hit a very specific soft spot for me, as I was genuinely interested in pursuing that field myself once upon a time, back before the digital age kind of ruined my plans. Kingfisher captures the tactile, observational nature of the work so well, and also portrays Sonia as a true artist: the way she sketches out the faces of the people she meets for the first time in her head, or the way she matches the names of watercolor paints to the hues she sees in the environment around her. Fans of the author will also recognize Sonia as a classic Kingfisher lead. She’s practical, a little anxious, but also stubbornly competent. Her wry personality allows her to take things in stride, helpful when her job frequently brings her up close and personal with all kinds of creepy crawlies.
Speaking of which, the tone of the novel falls in horror-mystery territory, though the setting does a lot of heavy lifting with its isolation, and then of course, there are the insects! Flesh eating parasites, maggots, you name it. Lots of messy, wriggly, burrowing things! Intimate, horrifying details of how insects live, eat, and reproduce. It’s all here, described in an uncomfortable level of detail, and reading this in spring right when it’s warming up and real-world insects are starting to emerge, it felt even more effective. So, if you have a bug phobia, you have been warned.
Finally, there’s a supernatural thread woven through the mystery that I absolutely loved. I won’t spoil it, but Kingfisher plays with a very familiar gothic creature myth and it filters through a strangely scientific, biological lens. It’s one of those clever reveals that makes you stop and think, ooooh I like that. It’s familiar territory but tackled from a highly unexpected and unconventional angle, and I think it works well with the story’s themes of bodies, hosts, and hunger.
All told, this is easily one of the best books by T. Kingfisher, and now one of my personal favorites. Much praise also goes to Mary Robinette Kowal’s whose narration in the audiobook brought Sonia’s curious and lively personality to life, and made the people and environment feel real around her. Wolf Worm is a smart, character-first horror novel that will make you squirm, and readers who wouldn’t mind a bit of weird science with their Southern Gothic tales will get a cool bonus. In other words, It’s exactly my kind of book.
Categories: Fantasy Books
NO MAN’S LAND by Richard Morgan
You may know Richard for writing SF (Altered Carbon, Thin Air) or perhaps his A Land Fit For Heroes series involving Ringil the elf (The Steel Remains, etc). In his new book, his first fiction novel for eight years – Thin Air was published in 2016 – he takes up that idea of ‘A Land…
Categories: Fantasy Books
Sea of Charms - Early Book Review
Sea of Charms (Spellshop #3)by Sarah Beth DurstWhat is it about:Marin is a supply runner with her own boat that she sails from island to island, delivering whatever anyone will pay her to deliver: letters, flour, even the occasional enchanted lemur. It’s a lonely life, but it’s hers, and she wouldn’t trade the freedom of the sea for anything. Her only companion is a sea serpent, Perri, whom she saved from a fisherfolk’s net.
One day, she sails to Alyssium and discovers the city is on fire. There’s been a revolution, and the empire has fallen. Marin, with Perri, begins transporting refugees, finding them new homes where they can start over. One such refugee is Dax, a composer who refuses to leave behind his instruments, no matter how much she tries to emphasize the gravity of the situation. Intrigued by his stubbornness, his passion for stories, and his charming smile, Marin discovers perhaps she isn’t saving him ― maybe it’s the other way around.
What did I think of it:I absolutely love The Spellshop and The Enchanted Greenhouse so I was super happy to receive an ARC of Sea of Charms.
The book felt initially slow. I get why it started where it started, but as it overlaps time- and event-wise with The Enchanted Greenhouse it felt like a rehash at times and that's what took the speed out of it for me personally. But luckily after a few chapters the story moved away from the previous book and took on speed.
I especially enjoyed Ree, the sentient plant, and Perri, the sea serpent. I love how Durst manages to give the plants in this series their own personality.I didn't totally get into the relationship between Marin and Dax. Marin seemed unreasonably obsessed with Dax from the start even while telling herself they can never be together, while Dax is a cinnamon roll where someone forgot to add the cinnamon.
I didn't mind much though. The adventures of the four of them were more than fun and enjoyable enough to keep me entertained. I loved seeing even more of the world these books are set in, and to discover more of what happened in the aftermath of the revolution. There's exciting action, lots of humorous situations, and more. There were a few delightful cameos from characters from the other books along the way as well.
All in all a fun and entertaining addition to the series. I will most definitely get my trotters on the hard cover once it releases.
Why should you read it:It's a very enjoyable Cozy Fantasy
Expected publication July 28, 2026
Categories: Fantasy Books
Forgotten Authors: Arthur Leo Zagat
Arthur Leo Zagat
Last week, I mentioned Arthur Leo Zagat, who was born in New York on February 15, 1896. He collaborated with Nat Schachner on their first eleven short stories, before they both launched solo careers. Like Schachner, Zagat attended City College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. After college, he served in World War I and studied at Bordeaux University before returning home to earn a law degree from Fordham University. He went on to found the Writers Workshop at New York University. In 1922, he married a woman Ruth Knopf and they had one daughter, Hermine.
Like Schachner, Zagat also practiced law until he decided he could make a living writing full time. In 1941, he was elected to the national executive committee of the Authors League’s pulp writers’ section.
1930 saw the start of his career as an author with the publication of “The Tower of Evil,” which he co-wrote with Nat Schachner. The two men collaborated on eleven stories published in 1931 before both turning to their solo careers as authors. Of the two, Zagat would prove to be the more prolific, although he wrote in a wide range of genres, with his science fiction forming only a small part of his output.
Wonder Stories Quarterly, Summer 1930. Cover by Frank R. Paul
Zagat’s first solo genre story was “The Great Dome of Mystery,” which appeared in the April 1932 issue of Astounding Stories. He branched out to various other pulp magazines, such as Dime Mystery Magazine. He wrote stories about “Doc Turner” that appeared in The Spider, the “Red Finger” series that was published in Operator #5, and under the pseudonym Morgan LaFay for Spicy Mystery Stories, although John Clute has described the LaFay stories as “excruciating.” He also wrote under the pseudonym Grendon Alzee. After 1936, most of his SF genre work appeared in Argosy.
Zagat wrote the six story “Tomorrow” series for Argosy beginning in 1939 with “Tomorrow,” which was set in a near future post-holocaust world. The final two stories in the series, “Sunrise Tomorrow” and “The Long Road to Tomorrow,” were serialized in the magazine.
He also published the novel Seven Out of Time in 1939. Originally serialized in Argosy, it would achieve publication by Fantasy Press in 1949, the same year Zagat died. It tells the story of seven figures from throughout history and brings them to a far future period in which emotions have been lost in order to learn what emotions are and why they are important.
Graham Stone has written that while Zagat helped build many of the tropes of interstellar space travel, such as established shipping lines, his stories had a repetitive feel to them, which may be why he didn’t achieve the reputations of E.E. Smith or Edmond Hamilton. Zagat wrote more than 500 short stories for the pulps, although only about 20 percent of them could be considered within the sf genre.
During World War II, he returned to service, working in the Office of War Information, which served as a form of communications and information between the battlefront and civilian communities through newspapers, radio broadcasts, films, and photographs. Following the war, he remained involved with the military, organizing writers’ workshops for hospitalized veterans.
Zagat suffered a heart attack at his home in the Bronx on April 3, 1949. He is buried Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Steven H Silver is a twenty-one-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.
Categories: Fantasy Books
Guns or Butter? Race for the Galaxy by Tom Lehmann
Race For the Galaxy, Revised 2nd Edition, by Tom Lehmann (Rio Grande Games, 2007)
As I mentioned in my review of Terraforming Mars, Race for the Galaxy is one of my long-time favorite games. Its play models the expansion of up to four interstellar civilizations, each from one of five possible starting points: Old Earth, Epsilon Eridani, Alpha Centauri, New Sparta, and Earth’s Lost Colony. Development is represented abstractly, with nothing that represents physical variables, population, or any other real quantity; the idea is to come up with the right combinations of capabilities.
This is a card game, not a board game. There’s no predefined space for play to happen in. Rather, each player creates their own space by the play of their cards into a “tableau.”
When any player’s tableau gets up to twelve cards, the game ends and players’ scores are determined. Scores are represented by the only other game components: victory point counters. Players can acquire victory points in the course of play, but the decisive scores are determined at the end, based on what’s in each player’s tableau.
The rules are a bit complex, but I was able to summarize them in a few minutes. And the game comes with helpful large cards that have “round summary” on one side and “card summary” on the other, one for each player.
Race for the Galaxy Card Summary
Race for the Galaxy has an ingenious design where cards serve multiple functions. Played face up onto a tableau, they can represent either worlds added to one’s galactic civilization, or technological or social advances achieved by it (“developments”). Discarded face down, they represent a price that must be paid to put a world or a development into play.
Played face down onto a world card, they represent its economic output (one of novelty goods, rare elements, genes, or alien technology), which can later be discarded to gain victory points and/or more cards in the player’s hand.
Since each turn ends with reducing hands to no more than ten cards, players have to economize carefully in putting worlds or developments into play: Cards with lower payoffs may be better discarded to pay for activating cards with higher payoffs.
Race for the Galaxy Round Summary
A lot of the play of a hand is thinking about what combinations of cards will give the most useful results, based on the goods worlds can produce and the powers that worlds or developments may provide. For example, a tableau with worlds that produce rare elements invites playing cards that allow trading in rare elements, or that make it cheaper to add a rare element world to a tableau, or that score victory points at the end for having rare element worlds in the tableau — and so a player can develop a kind of theme where those specific cards have high value.
There’s a higher-level strategic choice behind all of this: There are two ways to add worlds to a tableau. The economic route involves spending cards from a hand: “buying” the world, or symbolically, colonizing it. The military route doesn’t require such an expenditure. Instead, the military power ratings for all the worlds in the tableau are added up and compared with the stated military power to conquer a world.
So players choose to act either as builders or as conquerors (the proverbial “guns or butter”). I have to confess both to a philosophical bias toward the economic route, and to finding the combinatorics it’s based on more interesting; when I introduced a friend to the game recently, I intentionally chose to play a military world and follow a military strategy, as an informal handicap — which seems to have worked, as he beat me handily in that first game!
The thing that’s largely missing in Race for the Galaxy is player interaction. There’s not much players can do either to help each other or to hurt each other! (My wife doesn’t much enjoy it as a game because of that design feature; she prefers more social games — for example, the elaborate trading in Settlers of Catan.) Play is, literally, a race: Who can build or conquer faster?
Race for the Galaxy and two expansions: The Gathering Storm and Rebel vs Imperium
Watching other players has mostly indirect effects. First, there are five actions that can be taken in a turn: Explore (adding new cards to a hand), Develop (playing developments onto a tableau), Settle (playing worlds onto a tableau), Consume (exchanging goods for victory points and/or additional cards), and Produce (having one or more worlds add new goods). But they don’t all happen in a turn! Each player selects one action that will benefit them.
So it’s sometimes possible to say, “Fred’s low on cards, he needs to explore, so I don’t have to select Explore.” Second, if another player is getting close to having a dozen cards in their tableau, that’s a signal to go for quick payoffs in play, and disregard long-term tactics that probably won’t be completed. I’m not sure yet how much of a difference that makes, as I hadn’t paid close attention to it in my previous experience with the game.
The absence of direct rivalry aside, Race for the Galaxy seems to have enough complexities so that it’s not for everybody; it feels as if it’s roughly at the level of, say, Terraforming Mars (though play is much faster — my friend and I got through two rounds in less time than one round of Terraforming Mars took us).
This may be partly a reflection of the inherent challenges of economic/technological development games. But it’s a genre that I like a lot, and Race for the Galaxy strikes me as an excellent example of it.
William H. Stoddard is a professional copy editor specializing in scholarly and scientific publications. As a secondary career, he has written more than two dozen books for Steve Jackson Games, starting in 2000 with GURPS Steampunk. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, their cat (a ginger tabby), and a hundred shelf feet of books, including large amounts of science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels.
Categories: Fantasy Books
Spotlight on “Go Gentle” Maria Semple
Other LitStack Spots – Titles by Maria Semple LitStack has spotted some other titles by…
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Categories: Fantasy Books
On McPig's Radar - A Long and Speaking Silence
A Long and Speaking Silence(The Singing Hills Cycle #7)by Nghi VoEvery story begins somewhere.
On the banks of the Ya-lé River, the town of Luntien gathers to celebrate the start of the rainy season, but the celebration is marred by the arrival of refugees from the sea. Everyone has a story about the foreigners newly in their midst—lazy, violent, unwanted—while the refugees themselves grieve the loss of the home they loved.
Cleric Chih, very recently still Novice Chih, is also a stranger in Luntien. A moment of carelessness and bad luck leaves them waiting tables as they struggle to establish themself as a real cleric. A cleric’s job is to listen and record, but the stories emerging in Luntien are ugly and violent, as hard to predict as the river itself. With their hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant by their side, Chih must help the refugees while also unraveling a mystery that may have roots in their own faraway home in the abbey of Singing Hills.
In the seventh entry of the award-winning Singing Hills series, we meet Chih and Almost Brilliant just beginning their journey together as Chih assumes their place on the road and in the world.
The novellas of the Singing Hills series are standalone stories linked by the Cleric Chih, and may be read in any order.
Expected publication May 5, 2026
Categories: Fantasy Books
Book Review: Weavingshaw by Heba Al-Wasity
I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.
Mogsy’s Rating: 2.5 of 5 stars
Genre: Fantasy, Romance
Series: Book 1 of Weavingshaw
Publisher: Del Rey (February 24, 2026)
Length: 464 pages
Author Information: Website
A lot of other reviewers enjoyed this book, so I’m just going to say this right now: Hi, it’s me, I’m probably the problem! Weavingshaw has a lot of things going for it, at least on a craft level, including a full-on gothic fantasy aesthetic and a tension-laden romance. Unfortunately though, it didn’t fully click for me.
The story follows Leena, a young woman who can see the dead. Ever since her mother died and her father was imprisoned, she and her younger brother Rami have been living as refugees, adrift in a country that treats them as outsiders. For years, they have been trying to survive while she is forced to hide her abilities for fear of being institutionalized or exploited. But when Rami falls gravely ill, Leena has no choice but to seek out help, and the only treatment that can save him is far beyond anything she can realistically afford. Out of options, she turns to the one person everyone warns her to avoid.
Enter Silas, the Saint of Silence, an enigmatic trader in favors and information. The name of his game is leverage, or any knowledge he can use as currency to keep people in his debt. In exchange for the medicine to save her brother’s life, she offers up her secret, the only thing of value that she has. As she’d hoped, it catches the attention of St. Silas, but the bargain comes with strings attached. She’s bound to his service and tasked with finding the ghost of Percival Avon, a figure connected to both the decaying estate of Weavingshaw and St. Silas’s past. From there, Leena and the Saint fall into a tense, uneasy partnership, working together to untangle a mystery buried deep in the past, drawing closer as hidden agendas and outside threats start closing in.
All the classic gothic fantasy and romance ingredients are here, and the setup itself is very much my thing. That said, I found myself appreciating the individual pieces more than the whole. From a world-building standpoint, the lore and supernatural elements are intriguing, but the details are pretty surface level, such as the ghostly mechanics and the stratified society. Ideas are seemingly conjured up whenever the plot needs them, then sidelined again when something else is required. Even though I could sense a larger mythology in play, much of it feels backloaded instead of immersive.
Character-wise, Leena and St. Silas are familiar archetypes, but in a good way. I liked how their motivations were simple, but made sense in the context of their circumstances, i.e. Leena is driven by loyalty to her family vs. Silas being propelled by the secrets in his past and his need to see his long-running plans through. Ironically, the romance was where their relationship felt the weakest. It’s meant to be slow burning, which is fine, but the dynamic also felt overly guarded and stiff as a result. More spark and less posturing would have been better.
Structurally, the pacing can drift with subplots weaving in and out. I confess I put this book down many times because of the meandering, with a storyline that sometimes felt as if it was playing for time in a holding pattern rather than moving towards its destination. However, I always picked it up again, so there is that. The setting really is outstanding, and I enjoyed the fantastically broody vibes. Still, there is a fine line between atmosphere and narrative drag, and I won’t lie, this one frequently came close to crossing it. The open ending was a bit annoying too. As cliffhangers go, it’s far from the worst, but I didn’t love how abruptly it cut off.
In the end, Weavingshaw is a debut with some clear talent behind it, and I completely understand why it’s finding an audience. This just happens to be one where my personal tastes didn’t quite align with the execution. If broody gothic fantasy with haunted settings and a slow-building romance is your thing, there’s a good chance this will work much better for you.
Categories: Fantasy Books
A Swashbuckling Anthology: Swordsmen and Supermen, edited by Donald M. Grant
Swordsmen and Supermen (Centaur Press, February 1972). Cover by Virgil Finlay
Swordsmen and Supermen 1972, subtitled “Swashbuckling Fantastic Anthology.” From Centaur Press, edited by Donald M. Grant. Cover from Virgil Finlay. This was linked to Centaur Press’s Time-Lost series of books but I’m not sure it quite fit that or the “swashbuckling” subtitle. It’s a strange mishmash of material, including three old reprints and two new stories (from ’72).
It starts off with a Robert E. Howard story, but it’s one of his humorous westerns featuring Breckinridge Elkins called “Meet Cap’n Kidd.” It’s a funny tale but not really the type of fantasy one associates with Swordsmen.
The Red Gods by Jean D’Esme, translated from the French by Moreby Acklom (E. P. Dutton, 1924). Cover artist unknown
Then we have “The Death of a Hero” by Jean D’Esme, which does have some sword and axe battles, but it’s an excerpted piece of a novel called The Red Gods and I’m not sure how well it stood on its own.
Third is “Wings of Y’vrn” by Darrel Crombie, featuring a shapeshifter main character. Donald Grant was apparently very high on Crombie at this time, and the prose is well done. Crombie was a pseudonym for Joseph Fraser Darby, a Canadian who had worked as a journalist. Apparently this is the only known story by Crombie. I liked it pretty well.
Grey Maiden: The Story of a Sword Through the Ages by Arthur D.
Howden Smith (Centaur Press, October 1974). Cover by David Ireland
“The Slave of Marathon” is next, by well-known writer Arthur D. Howden Smith (1887 – 1945). This is one of Smith’s Gray Maiden stories (Gray Maiden being a sword) and is my favorite story in the book.
Finally, we end with “How Sargoth Lay Siege to Zarwemm” by Lin Carter. This is a very brief piece, only a few pages, by Carter, and while well-written, is not really a story at all but more of a vignette about an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.
Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was on Avon Fantasy Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.
Categories: Fantasy Books
7 Author Shoutouts | Authors We Love To Recommend
Here are 7 Author Shoutouts for this week. Find your favorite author or discover an…
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Categories: Fantasy Books
COVER REVEAL: A Murder Most Fungal: A Fungalverse Novel by Adrian M. Gibson
Official Author Website
Buy Mushroom Blues over HERE
Mushroom Blues was Adrian M. Gibson's debut and FBC's SPFBOX Finalist, it was also the joint highest scorer of SPFBO 10. But that's not what we are here to reveal.
Thanks to Adrian, we are super thrilled to reveal the cover for the next Fungalverse story in the Hofmann Report series titled A MURDER MOST FUNGAL (releasing on 16th June 2026)
The brilliant & bloody art is by Katerina Belikova & cover design is done by Adrian himself:
Pre-order A Murder Most Fungal on Amazon
Add A Murder Most Fungal on Goodreads
OFFICIAL BLURB: The knives are out in this fast-paced, standalone Fungalverse novel. Set several months after the events of Mushroom Blues, this side story combines the culinary wonder of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the kitchen chaos of The Bear, and the explosive tension of Hong Kong crime thrillers.
In the aftermath of the “Fuyu Massacre,” riots and whispers of revolution continue to plague the Hōpponese capital of Neo Kinoko. As a result, the iron grip of a foreign military occupation tightens day by day. Amidst this, Pocho Jiro, a once-renowned makizushi chef, has chosen to cook for Duncan MacArthur—the Coprinian Military Governor in Hōppon—as his personal chef... and indentured servant.
A run-in with dangerous fungal gangsters sets off a chain of events that Pocho cannot escape from. He’s left with two choices: Assassinate MacArthur, or watch his beloved sister die in front of his eyes. Will Pocho take up his knife and prepare MacArthur’s final meal?
You can also view Katerina Belikova's spectacular art of the book in its full glory below:
Categories: Fantasy Books
The Maleficent Faerie - Book Review by Voodoo Bride
The Maleficent Faerie (For the Love of the Villain #2)by Rebecca F. KenneyWhat is it about:A spicy, Fae Sleeping Beauty retelling with a male version of Maleficent, a dying realm, and intriguing twists on the old tale.When Malec, the Void King, attacks Princess Dawn's carriage, her Fae bodyguard Aura switches places with her. Glamoured as a human, Aura must fool Malec into thinking she's the Princess he cursed 25 years ago. Relentless and powerful, but with a vulnerable side he hides from others, Malec begins to crave Aura's respect as much as he craves her body.
What did Voodoo Bride think of it:I've very much enjoyed the other books I've read by Kenney so far, so I treated myself to The Maleficent Faerie to see if I'd enjoy stories not connected to her Wicked Darlings series.
And this book was such an enjoyable read!
I'd call this a re-imagining instead of a retelling as the story differs greatly from the original fairytale (in the most yummy ways). I fell hard for Malec (I do love a tortured hero/villain) so it was easy to lose myself in the romance between Aura and Malec. There were of course story elements connecting this story to its inspiration, but those were used in original ways to create a whole new story with a romance at the heart of it that doesn't need a prince to save Aura.
All in all I had a great time with this very steamy and delicious Fantasy Romance and you bet I got my hands on another book in this series of standalones.
Why should you read it:It's a delightful Fantasy Romance re-imagining of Sleeping Beauty.
Categories: Fantasy Books
Spotlight on “American Fantasy” by Emma Straub
Other LitStack Spots – Titles by Emma Straub LitStack has also spotted some titles by…
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Categories: Fantasy Books
Teaser Tuesdays - Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die
"Why should he be mad? He's the one who fucked me over," I grumbled, then winced, hoping the construct circling some distance below hadn't caught my words.(page 68, Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers)
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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, previously hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following: - Grab your current read - Open to a random page - Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!) - Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
Categories: Fantasy Books
Kingdom of Heaven: A Perfect Film About an Imperfect Knight
Kingdom of Heaven Director’s Cut (20th Century Fox, December 23, 2005)
Kingdom of Heaven (Director’s Cut) (194 minutes; 2005)
Written by William Monahan. Directed by Ridley Scott.
(There is a shorter theatrical cut, which should be avoided at all costs, like the plague it is.)
What is it?Ridley Scott’s epic saga of the Crusades, as seen through the eyes of a simple French blacksmith who travels to Jerusalem in an attempt to save the soul of his late wife, and ends up as the defender of the city against the massive army of Saladin.
After massive edits mandated by the studio in order to shorten it, the theatrical cut of this film was a bomb. The restored Director’s Cut is, to put it simply, a masterpiece. It is a completely different film from the one the editors hacked to pieces and sent out to theaters, with 45 minutes (!!) of restored footage that completely changes the story and the characters.
For one example of many: in the theatrical cut, Eva Green’s character, the Queen of Jerusalem, comes across as acting irrationally, because we don’t know her motivations. In the Director’s Cut, we gain entirely new and powerful subplots involving her brother, her husband and her son, all of which render her actions quite clear and understandable. The queen becomes half of the beating heart of the story.
How anyone could have thought the movie was improved by omitting even a portion of that material is beyond comprehension.
Orlando Bloom and Liam Neeson in Kingdom of Heaven
The cast is filled with famous actors. Orlando Bloom stars as the reluctant warrior, Balian. Eva Green is the queen of Jerusalem (with Edward Norton uncredited as her brother, the leper king). Liam Neeson is the Baron of Ibelin and father of Balian. Jeremy Irons is, effectively, the police chief of Jerusalem.
The rest of the stellar cast includes Michael Sheen, David Thewlis, Kevin McKidd, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Marton Csokas, Alexander Siddig, Ghassan Massoud, Brendan Gleeson and Iain Glen, among many others. Good heavens.
With the increasing availability of the Director’s Cut, public acclaim for the film has drastically improved. In just the past year alone, the IMDb rating has risen from 5.6 to 7.3, presumably on the strength of viewers’ votes after seeing the Director’s Cut. At this rate, it should deservedly reach a perfect 10 within a couple more years!
(Also of note: Scott’s underrated 2010 Robin Hood movie, starring Russell Crowe, is arguably a direct sequel. Kingdom of Heaven ends with King Richard the Lionheart stopping by Balian’s village on his way to the Crusades, while Robin Hood begins with the king’s journey back home.)
Michael Sheen and Orlando Bloom in Kingdom of Heaven
Quick and Dirty Summary
During the Crusades, Balian the blacksmith (Bloom) travels from France to Jerusalem to seek forgiveness from God for himself and for his late wife, who committed suicide after the death of their infant child.
Along the way, he kills his half-brother (Sheen) — who needed killing, honestly. He discovers his true father (Neeson), falls in love with a queen (Green), battles corrupt knights (Csokas and Gleeson), and befriends a king (Norton).
He also wrestles with moral questions, impresses a top aide (Siddig) to the great warlord Saladin (Massoud), and absorbs wise counsel from knights such as Hospitaler (Thewlis) and Tiberias (Irons), helping him grow as a man, a knight and a leader. And just in time – because the next thing he knows, this former blacksmith is suddenly in charge of defending Jerusalem from attack by Saladin’s massive army!
There’s plenty of sword, as in a number of battles involving massive armies, as well as several individual duels (one sword, two swords, a half-molten sword – a lot of swords!). The sorcery elements are more of a religious nature, but unquestionably and increasingly supernatural as the story unfolds.
The Hospitaller Knight – no other name is given for him – is the focus of the most fantastical aspects of the story. At three particular moments he exhibits abilities that elevate him from mere human to divine and perhaps angelic being.
First, during an early battle scene, Hospitaler evades arrows by disappearing from his horse as it runs through the Crusader camp. Ridley Scott doesn’t play fair with us here, however, as we quickly see that the knight has simply shifted to the far side of the horse, hanging on for dear life while making his horse appear riderless. But it serves a tease for what is to come.
David Thewlis as the Hospitaller Knight
The second scene cranks up the weirdness quite a bit. As Balian sits alone in the desert, brooding over his situation, Hospitaller walks up and addresses him, handing out more deep moral philosophy. Once the knight is done, a literal “burning bush” distracts Balian. When he looks back a moment later, Hospitaler is nowhere to be seen. In true Batman fashion, he has vanished from a vast, wide-open desert. Balian’s horse cries out and rears, as if a ghost – or an angel – had just moved past it, invisible.
Finally, when Balian lies near death following a fight with two of Guy’s Templar knights, Hospitaller appears from out of nowhere. He touches Balian on the forehead, restoring him to life – just in time to try to stop the army of Jerusalem from marching out to its destruction.
Clearly, there’s something going on with that character beyond the realms of mortal man. Some have argued Hospitaler is God himself, or at least an angel, sent to guide Balian. But we are left to puzzle out those specifics for ourselves.
Eva Green in Kingdom of Heaven
High Point
For all the action and romance and adventure, what still rings true above all else with this film is its powerful message that what king one serves or what religion one adheres to does not ultimately make one a good or bad person. What matters is what we choose to do, and choose not to do – as both the leper king and the priest-knight Hospitaler repeatedly point out to Balian.
One scene crystallizes this entire message. When Balian confides in the Hospitaller Knight that he fears he has lost his religion, the knight responds in a way that shocks the young man – and perhaps the audience, as it comes from a holy man. But it lays out the great message of the film:
I put no stock in religion. By the word religion I have seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the will of God. I’ve seen too much religion in the eyes of too many murderers. Holiness is in right action, and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves. And goodness — what God desires — is here (points to head) and here (points to heart). And by what you decide to do every day, you will be a good man. Or not.
Ghassan Massoud as Saladin
Low Point
Balian repeatedly states that his only goal is to be “a good knight.” From this, multiple people respond in shock, with reactions along the lines of, “A perfect knight? Good heavens!” As in, who does he think he is??
But he never says “perfect.” Never once. Just “good.”
It makes me want to pull my hair out.
Marton Csokas, who played Celeborn in The Lord of the Rings and who auditioned for the part of Balian in this film, makes for a truly memorable and despicable villain as Guy de Lusignan, head of the Templar Knights. When he’s not sneering on a scale perhaps not seen since Basil Rathbone in the 1938 Robin Hood or scheming against our hero, he’s throwing hissy fits or issuing catastrophically bad orders to his army. In a movie with so many good-guy supporting characters, Csokas shines in his own darkness.
Kingdom of Heaven theatrical poster
Overall Evaluation as a Movie and as Fantasy/SF/Sword & Sorcery
While not as much a Fantasy film as some others, Kingdom of Heaven contains enough Medieval battles, one-on-one sword fights, supernatural forces and general derring-do to place it alongside the best of that genre. Throw in the entire moral and ethical layer, and the film achieves masterpiece status.
Just treat that theatrical cut like the leper it is!
Van Allen Plexico is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), a Grand Master of Pulp Literature (2025 class) and a multiple-award-winning author of more than two dozen novels and anthologies, ranging from space opera to Kaiju to crime fiction to superheroes to military SF. He notably edited, co-created and co-wrote the Sword and Sorcery anthology GIDEON CAIN: DEMON HUNTER. Find all of his works on Amazon and at Plexico.net.
Categories: Fantasy Books
THE FOX AND THE DEVIL by Kiersten White
Abraham van Helsing is the most famous vampire hunter in literature, and while he vanquished the Count, he may not have been the best father. His daughter Anneke is on the hunt for the creature who killed her father (she happened to be the only person to see this haunting creature), which has helped to…
Categories: Fantasy Books
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