Midshelf Review: A Love Letter to Genre Fiction

  Malazan series author Steven Erikson blurbed something akin to Glen Cook’s books being like reading Vietnam war fiction on peyote. I’m inclined to agree, and though the setting to this second installment of Cook’s Black Company Chronicles is nothing like east Asian jungles, there is definitely a feel of lethargy and malcontent among the soldiers that inhabit its pages.  Shadows Linger is set in a medieval empire where sinister immortals tend to take power. Heck, the Black Company of soldiers serve a beautiful undead sorcerous empress and are ordered to quell rebellion and keep enemies at bay while expanding her territories. As the prime narrator Croaker states in many passages, the fighting men of his ragtag band of military veterans must choose the lesser of two evils. This empress they serve, known as the Lady, is ruthless herself, and they have killed thousands in her name while filling out the map of her holdings. Croaker, a surgeon and chronicler for the Black Company,...

  *No Spoilers* What are we? Are we human or monsters? Or both? When our steps crunch through snow, perhaps the tracks we leave depend on the moon’s cycle. Certainly, there is tendency to distance monsters from ourselves. They are deemed to exist separate from us, to live in darkest corners of woods, caves, and back alleys. And yet, while  The Wolf of Snow Hollow  presents the premise that a werewolf is prowling a small mountain town, the film alludes that there are monsters inside of us that come out when the pressure is on, when we let our guard down, and instead of protecting those close to us, we can attack them like a savage beast.   Jim Cummings—the film’s writer, director, and lead role—plays policeman John Marshall who heads investigation in apprehending a killer, who many believe to be a werewolf. John is a sympathetic, empathetic and—at times hilariously and uncontrollably angry—character who faces a murder case that is muddled and getting negative atte...

  A royal wedding is about to take place in the heart of Victorian London. One of its guests will be an assassin. Their reputations on the line, can detectives Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn track down the killer before it’s too late? This is the question that lies at the heart of this mystery-thriller hybrid,  Dance with Death  by Will Thomas.   While I have not read any of the first twelve books in the series, Will Thomas’s thirteenth installment of his Barker and Llewelyn duo is welcoming. Though there are mentions and connections of prior cases, they are not essential to engagement. The author makes it seem as if Barker and Llewellyn, stern Scot and genial Welshman, are as old friends to the reader.   The two detectives run a private inquiry agency and are tasked by a man named Jim Hercules, an anomalous guard of tsarevich Nicholas, heir to ruler of Russia. Jim is amongst Nicholas’s retinue during the tsarevich’s visit to London for his friend Prin...

You’ve heard the title   Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead . An alt-title to the subject of this review could be Do   Tell Mom the Babysitter’s a Psycho .   The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer   by Liza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan is a riveting True Crime tale that is half Liza’s childhood memoir and half narrative non-fiction, documenting Tony Costa’s metamorphosis into the Cape Cod Vampire of late 1960s.   The story alternates between a first-person account of Liza’s early life and a third-person narrative of Tony Costa’s journey from charming boy to brutal killer. The reader first hears of nightmares plaguing Liza, where she finds herself in a hotel, harassed by a familiar face. It is only when she wakes up and thinks back to her early days, when she strolled the halls of the Royal Coachmen in Provincetown, that she knows the face belongs to her childhood friend and babysitter Tony Costa. Liza realizes how lucky she is to not have been one of To...

  Extra! Extra! Ladies and gents, review in print! In the mid-shelf corner, weighing in at a mysterious weight category, we have the enigma, the anomaly, the nameless wonder, The Colorado Kid! Did that grab’ya? Well, maybe this will: Stephen King. That’s right, this non-horror novella was written by the king of creepy himself. A mystery set on an island off the Maine coast, The Colorado Kid does not disappoint.   The book begins with a reporter up from Boston looking for an unsolved mystery story. This reporter has lunch with the two-man crew of editors who work at the island’s only paper, along with their young intern. Editors Vince and Dave are ages 90 and 65 respectively and their intern Stephanie is in her early 20s. When the two elders don’t have anything new to offer the Bostonian in terms of a good mysterious yarn, the reporter pays for lunch and leaves. However, for Stephanie, school is in session because there’s one odd duck of a story they didn’t bother to tell the c...