May | 2020 | My Haunted Library

May 31, 2020
by Jennifer Leave a comment

Review: The Turn: The Hollows Begins with Death

How exactly did a tomato decimate humankind and cause vampires, witches, werewolves come out of hiding? Find out in this prequel to Harrison’s bestselling Hollows series.

The Turn: The Hollows Begins with Death—Kim Harrison, 2017. Rating 3/5

Trisk, a dark elf, is a top-notch geneticist but the glass ceiling keeps her from getting a plum job. Her bitter nemesis, elf Trent Kalamack—“Kal”—has had his way smoothed by his parents’ name and money. Trisk lands a position in a human lab as part researcher and part elven corporate spy. While keeping an eye on fellow scientist, Dr. Plank, who is working on a tactical virus, Trisk develops a genetically modified tomato that promises to end world hunger. Kal, out to discredit Trisk’s research and steal her ideas for himself, links the tomato to the weaponized virus and unleashes a killing plague that rips through the human population.

Trisk and Dr. Plank hop trains, avoid weres, escape the police, and race pell-mell towards Washington, DC to warn humans not to eat tomatoes. But the Inderlander species who have been in hiding for years (witches, pixies, werewolves, vampires, and elves) aren’t so sure they want humans to survive. Political infighting ensues.

I am an enthusiastic fan of Harrison’s Hollows series. While The Turn offers interesting detail on the backstory of series heroes and villains like Kalamack, the demon Algaliarept, and security guard extraordinaire, Quen, the novel is a disappointment. It runs long, takes a while to get going, feels repetitive, and would have worked better as a novella. Believe it or not, even those issues didn’t irritate me too much: The characters are the major turn off. Trisk and Kal are egoistic, selfish, petty, and prideful. I know that’s Harrison’s point, but it makes for a downer read. You don’t care about either of them. The two throw fits of pique, worry about each other stealing their thunder, loathe each other, deceive each other, lead each other on (while totally aware they’re being led on)—and then have sex. Please. I also realize that Harrison is making a stand for women’s rights in the male workplace: Trisk is more competent than Kal, yet her skills are dismissed. Trisk longs for geneticist glory, but it is hard to relate to her struggle when she is as self-serving as Kal—to the point of summoning a demon to thwart him. Fortunately, Trisk has a modicum more empathy than Kal and genuinely wants to warn people about her tomato. But on the whole, The Turn is just meh.

If you’re new to the Hollows, don’t start with this book. Pick up Dead Witch Walking (2004), the first in the series and you’ll enter a beautifully realized world where the supernatural exists alongside the mundane; one that is filled with well-rounded characters and great stories. Save The Turn for last.

May 17, 2020
by Jennifer Leave a comment

Review: Mycroft & Sherlock

Mycroft Holmes and his younger brother, Sherlock, become entangled in an insidious case of ritual murders. Their investigations pull them deep into the shadowy world of the London opium trade in this first-rate Holmesian pastiche.

Mycroft & Sherlock – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse, 2018. Rating: 4.5/5

For those not quite as steeped in the Sherlock Holmes canon as some of us uberfans, Mycroft is seven years older than Sherlock, enjoys a mysterious position in the British government, and is reputed to have even greater powers of deduction than his famous brother. Mycroft plays a role in only four of Conan Doyle’s sixty (4 novels, 56 short stories) original Sherlock Holmes tales.

Abdul-Jabbar, a Sherlock enthusiast since 1969, brings Mycroft into the limelight in his new crime series. Mycroft is recovering from the betrayal and loss of his fiancé and a traumatic adventure in Trinidad (Mycroft Holmes, 2017). Now, his good friend Douglas, the successful African American owner of a high-end tobacco and spirits shop, needs his help. Douglas runs Nickolus house, a home for orphaned boys. When one of the boys dies from a suspicious drug overdose, Douglas and Mycroft suspect something even more nefarious is at play. Sherlock thinks so also. To Mycroft’s irritation, the nineteen-year-old runs his own clandestine investigation, and Mycroft can’t keep him out of danger.

In Mycroft & Sherlock, Abdul-Jabbar and Waterhouse hit all the notes a Sherlockian desires: a twisty mystery, lots of brilliant deduction, realistic period detail (you can almost feel that choking yellow London fog) and above all, excellent characterization. Mycroft emerges as an intriguing, well-rounded character in his own right. He struggles to find direction in his own life, while trying to guide his precocious, acerbic younger brother. We empathize with Mycroft’s frustration and increasing isolation as he devotes himself to the War Office and service to the Queen. There are some genuinely poignant moments as the two brothers struggle with emotions they refuse to reveal to each other. Douglas is a strong investigative partner and Mycroft’s best (and one of his only) friends. Although independent, intelligent, and savvy, Douglas nonetheless is a victim of the racism of the era. He must employ an elderly white couple to pretend to be his shop owners and poses as the forward face of a fictional white owner of his orphanage. While never losing the thrust of the mystery, Abdul-Jabbar and Waterhouse delicately explore the marginalization of African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and women.

Mycroft & Sherlock is a terrific addition to the body of Holmes literature. Fans of Conan Doyle will approve, and if even you’re not familiar with his work, Mycroft & Sherlock stands very successfully on its own merits. I look forward to reading next in the series: Mycroft & Sherlock: The Empty Birdcage (2019).

May 10, 2020
by Jennifer Leave a comment

Review: The Book of the Dead

Shoggoths are popping out of sinkholes, Cthulhu is clawing its way out of some other dimension, and mankind is on track to be enslaved and devoured unless ancient languages professor and reluctant hero, Matt Kearns, can save the world. Beck pulls out all the stops in this entertaining homage to Lovecraft.

The Book of the Dead – Greig Beck, 2015. Rating: 3.5/5

Matt Kearns is a good-looking professor, a bit of a ladies’ man, who is currently jockeying for a tenured job at Harvard. But the position is contingent on a short, easy trip to Syria to help the military translate some ancient tome. No problem. Except the book is a copy of the original Necronomicon, and a planetary convergence is just days away when a cult of Cthulhu worshippers will open the gate for the Old Ones. Plus, tentacled slimy things are eating people. Matt and a tiny elite team made up of a couple SEALs, two military officers, a young anthropologist, and a formidable one-woman army in the form of an Israeli Mossad agent, must decipher the Necronomicon and stop the madness.

The Book of the Dead does not require a lot of brain power but does demand a lot of suspension of disbelief. One little sinkhole and a Shoggoth quickly ramps up to world-wide earth-falls and a full-out army of slimy monstrosities that is subjugating the population. Salvation comes down to the woefully outnumbered (and rapidly dwindling) little strike team. If you can avoid rigorous logic—actually, any logic—for a while and accept Beck’s wild premise, you’ll get a kick out of the book. Kearns is a likeable hero who doesn’t take himself too seriously (except when dealing with viscid monsters). A good dose of tongue-in-cheek humor balances out the military action. Lovecraft groupies will appreciate the abundance of black goo and floating eyeballs while thriller fans will enjoy the tale’s shoot-outs, knife-outs, and all numbers of battles versus both humans and octopus-like things. In his concluding Author’s Notes, Beck reveals his own love of the Cthulhu Mythos, and explains a few allusions for those of us who aren’t quite as well-versed.

The Book of the Dead rockets along and will make for a fun, escapist beach read. Wait. Make that a porch read, it’s safer. Who knows what might suck you down into that sand?

May 3, 2020
by Jennifer 1 Comment

Review: The Complete Carnacki, The Ghost Finder

The Ghost Adventure team has nothing on Thomas Carnacki, one of the first (albeit fictional) paranormal investigators to utilize both arcane manuscripts and scientific methods in his investigations into the macabre.

The Complete Carnacki, The Ghost Finder – William Hope Hodgson, 1913. Rating: 4.5/5

Living in London at beginning of twentieth century, Carnacki is called on to examine suspected hauntings and lay them to rest. Each of the nine tales in this collection is framed by his friend Dodgson, who, along with three of Carnacki’s other confidants, enjoys visiting the detective for a comfortable dinner followed by a harrowing story of the occult detective’s most recent adventure. An “unprejudiced skeptic,” Carnacki asserts that ninety-nine out of a hundred hauntings are “sheer bosh,” then rhapsodizes, “But the hundredth!”

Carnacki sets up his physical—and spiritual—protections using both time-proven words from ancient rituals, along with his own inventions including an electric pentacle and a battery-operated color-spectrum vacuum tube defense. Carnacki relies on his intelligence and open mind during his encounters with such horrors as a whistling room, an invisible phantom horse, and a powerful monstrosity from the Outer Circle. With pluck and aplomb, Carnacki deals with possessions, hauntings, and spectral manifestations as well as his share of hoaxes.

While these stories are gloriously classic ghost stories in some ways—filled with curses and old castles and moldering English manors—they have a fresh energy about them thanks to Carnacki’s enigmatic and unique approaches to the “ab-natural.”

A body builder, sailor, and lieutenant in the Royal Artillery during WWI, William Hope Hodgson produced everything from poetry and science-fiction, to horror and sea stories before his death in 1918 in the Fourth Battle of Ypres. His 1908 horror novel, The House on the Borderland, is perhaps Hodgson’s most well-known work. It, and the bulk of his horror writing, was greatly admired by H.P. Lovecraft. The Complete Carnacki, The Ghost Finder is a gem. Wait for a nice, grey afternoon, pour yourself a cup of tea or a tot of whiskey, settle back in a comfortable armchair, and treat yourself to a Carnacki story. You’ll be glad you did.