Horror Reviews on Flames Rising
From role-playing games to television series, Flames Rising horror webzine offers hundreds of reviews on products from every world of horror imaginable. We feature nationally-distributed and licensed products like Hellboy, to small press ventures like the game InSpectres from Memento Mori.
Our philosophy on reviews is simple: we encourage our horror reviewers to channel their inner Poe to write reviews that are easy-to-read and provide you, the horror fan, with the best information possible.
Whether you enjoy paranormal romance or post-apocalyptic horror, this list has a little something for the monster in all of us. If you would like to be a horror reviewer for Flames Rising, we encourage you to visit our submission guidelines. We go out of our way to reward our regular horror reviewers, and encourage you to add your voice to our choir.
Our reviews are listed in alphabetical order by type of review category (click on the “Read more…” link just below this paragraph). For an alternative means of navigation, feel free to take advantage of the search box on our site to find what you’re hunting for.
Flash Fire Mini-Reviews! (Hunters & Slayers)
By Matt-M-McElroy | May 9, 2008
Since we’ve started posting some teasers for the Hunter: the Vigil RPG this week I figured I would keep up with the theme and post about a few of the other monster hunter items that have caught my eye recently…
Comics, games supplements and fiction make up the mix this week…
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Midnight Alley Fiction Review
By Flames | May 8, 2008
In the third installment of the ongoing “Morganville Vampires” series, not-quite-seventeen year old Claire has opened a whole new can of worms: she’s agreed to work for the Founder, Amelie, an ancient vampire who has, for some reason been sticking up for her since she came to Morganville. It seems a simple enough exchange at first: Protection (with a capital P) for herself and her friends by promising her obedience. Better yet, her first task is taking advanced classes, and she finds herself with a scholarship to boot. But not all of those classes are the safe, classroom kind: she has an independent study with Myrnin, an old vampire who is brilliant, but seems on the edge of losing it.
Review by Alana Abott
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Witch Fire (Elemental Witches, Book 1) Review
By Flames | May 7, 2008
The line between good and evil is clearly drawn in the first Elemental Witches novel. Coven = good. Duskoff Cabal = evil. Mira Hoskins doesn’t know she’s an air witch until there’s a home invasion, where she’s rescued/kidnapped by fire witch Jack McAllister who claims he’s hiding her away for her own good. Jack trains Mira to use her magick until the time comes to move to the Coven in Chicago.
Review by Tez Miller
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Hidden Fiction Review
By Flames | May 6, 2008
In 2037 there will be an outbreak (a plague, maybe) that kills a whole lot of people. Don’t say I never warned you.
Excluding the prologue, this novel takes place in 2093. The world is now divided into four parts: the Northern Waste, the Equatorial Band, Africa and the Southern Hemisphere. Born in a laboratory in the icy Northern Waste, Tatiana is now free. But there’s something seriously screwed with her genes, clearly evident when she slices off a bloke’s hand with no weapons other than her own hands.
Review by Tez Miller.
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The Resurrectionists RPG Review
By Flames | May 5, 2008
It is curious that Vampire adventures seem to be particularly susceptible to this kind of role-playing when the rules-givers at White Wolf are forever bringing out new rules constraining vampire characters to behave in certain ways and to react to each other based on templates relating to membership of different social organizations and family structures. This seems to be rather un-American to me – no wonder there are so many foreigners in the World of Darkness. Europeans, for example, with their dastardly class-based societies and ability to speak languages. Rafael Pope, a central figure in this adventure, for example, is described as ‘a tall European man, probably Italian.’ Not Scandinavian, then or Slavic or Gaelic. In any case, obviously someone to be watched and subject to the vampiric versions of phone-tapping and having to take his shoes off before being allowed on an aeroplane.
Review by John Walsh
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Flash Fire Mini-Reviews! (Animated Heroes)
By Matt-M-McElroy | May 2, 2008
This week’s Flash Fire Mini-Reviews list is going to be a little different…
We talk about a lot of great Horror & Dark Fantasy books, games and other entertainment on Flames Rising and often have suggestions of where to get these great items. This week we’re going to take a look at a few of these online stores and hit the highlights of what makes each of them work for fans of horror…
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The Host Fiction Review
By Flames | May 1, 2008
Welcome to the future, where souls have the options of many planets and species to inhabit. The souls have invaded Earth, creating a utopian society where violence doesn’t happen and money is not an issue. Wanderer is inserted into host Melanie Stryder, after a mighty struggle to avoid the souls. Usually the host fades, though their body is well and truly active controlled by the soul. Mel remains fighting furious, but to reach common goals she has to work together and get along with Wanderer, nicknamed Wanda.
Review by Tez Miller
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The Dead Girls’ Dance Fiction Review
By Flames | April 30, 2008
The Dead Girls’ Dance is not a stand-alone novel. A reader new to the series (like me) can figure out what’s going on with no problem–but the story doesn’t begin here. Nor does it end here. The conclusion leads straight into Morganville Vampires Book Three (which I’ll be reviewing in the near future). Claire has to choose how best to deal with being wanted by vampires, and how best to gain the protection she and her friends desperately need to survive–how she makes that decision and the consequences of her choice are likely to be the plot of the third entry in the series. As a series book, the story is compelling, the characters sympathetic (even some of the villains), and the world that Caine has drawn is easy to sink into, if not pleasant. Her world is one where monsters aren’t just vampires, but humans, where it’s not safe to be out after dark, and where demons lay in wait in dark alleys.
Review by Alana Abbott
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Inquisitor’s Handbook (Dark Heresy) RPG Review
By Flames | April 29, 2008
The Inquisitor’s Handbook is a hodge-podge of bits and pieces scattering all around the game system and the background. It’s a goody-bag of weapons, skills interpretations, new background options and new ‘fluff’ which may or many not suit a particular player group. To me it didn’t feel like it had quite the same character as a player’s guide for other systems - ones which generally limit themselves to player advice and increasing player options - but it felt like an expansion of the corebook material overall, for both players and Games Masters. I felt, reading through it, as though some of the content here should have been in the corebook and vice versa, particularly the background information and the Calixis sector particulars. It would have made more sense, to me, to have increased the player and character creation options in the main book and then had the Calixis specifics in a sourcebook, or collected in this volume with the specific data appropriate to it. The ‘imposition’ of the Calixis sector as the group’s playground is just another aspect of the ‘hemming in’ that has been a criticism of Dark Heresy.
Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough
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Flash Fire Mini-Reviews! (Zombies)
By Matt-M-McElroy | April 25, 2008
After a short break, the Flash Fire Mini-Reviews are back (from the dead)!
Zombies have always had a following among horror fans. We have several reviews of great zombie games, books and more here on Flames Rising. Among the recent zombie reviews are Plague of the Dead 2, Happy Hour of the Damned and Zombie Fluxx. There are plenty more, including great titles from Permuted Press and Eden Studios.
This week we will be checking out a mix of zombie entertainment. Games, Novels and a Movie will make up the horde…
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Happy Hour of the Damned Fiction Review
By Flames | April 24, 2008
You’ve seen it before: authors blurbing other books, claiming ‘I wish I’d written this’. Seems kind of hyperbolic, I know. But then I experienced it. This 300-something-page tome shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to read. This is my fault because as I started reading, mood-killers kicked in: jealousy, envy and that dreadful thing that’s summed up as ‘emo’. I did not want to feel this way, so for the first half of the book I read only in short sessions. For the uninitiated, I’m only an occasional fiction writer. Still, Mark Henry’s writing is so all-encompassingly engaging that I started hating my work and myself, lalala (emo).
Review by Tez Miller
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Steamworks RPG Review
By Flames | April 23, 2008
This is a tightly presented 165 page PDF in two column format in a fair imitation of much of Wizard’s own presentation, it cover PC and NPC character clases, prestige classes, mechanical devices and effects, the interaction of magic and technology, automations, skills, feats and everything else. Basically this is one entire plug-in to bring technology and its users into the game, along with brief discussions on the affect technological change might have on a society and the means by which it might be introduced. To my mind there wasn’t enough material on this side of things, doubtless to make room for all the mechanical crunch.
Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough
Topics: Roleplaying Game Reviews | 1 Comment »
Chicago Workings RPG Review
By Matt-M-McElroy | April 21, 2008
Chicago Workings is a World of Darkness adventure released under the Storytelling Adventure System from White Wolf Publishing. Written by Will Hindmarch (with a little help from Ken Hite and Bill Bridges) this adventure puts the player characters in the middle of an ongoing conflict between rival architects. At first that doesn’t sound like such a big deal, but what if these two designers had access to mystical writings? These writings allowed them to build geometric grids of power within the city, forever altering the flow of magic and power.
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Vampyre: Dark Genesis RPG Review
By Flames | April 20, 2008
The obvious comparison with White Wolf’s vampire has to be made when reading VDG, while there are some independent and different concepts the overall one - breeds of vampire fighting it out for control - remains the same and the authors are clearly fans of the earlier version of Vampire and the style and methodology of White Wolf, at least as White Wolf used to be at any rate. This is fine by me, I like the old stuff though I have my pet hates of certain White Wolf ways of going about things too, and I much prefer the old World of Darkness to the new World of Darkness, VDG presents a game that is very much like what a post-Gehenna old World of Darkness campaign setting might have looked like and this is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. Some would consider this a rip-off of White Wolf, I prefer to see it as an homage to White Wolf at the height of their creative capabilities and see the relationship as being more akin to a Nightlife/Vampire relationship than something more negative.
Review by James “Grim” Desborough
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Magic Burns Fiction Review
By Flames | April 19, 2008
I love the world-building. Atlanta has two stages in time – tech (when life is as we know it) and magic. But the transitions between the two are getting faster, and Celtic mythology comes to life. (That sounds vague, I know, but I didn’t really understand it.)
Kate Daniels (whose father is supposedly Russian, but you wouldn’t know it from her surname) still has her almighty saber Slayer, but also has a new companion: teenager Julie, whose wannabe witch mother is missing.
Review by Tez Miller
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Claimed by Shadow Fiction Review
By Matt-M-McElroy | April 18, 2008
This is book two of series, and admittedly I had not read Touch the Dark. I was hoping that there would be enough context to bring me into the story and setting without feeling lost. Although Ms. Chance does offer a few lines here and there of Cassie talking about past events, I still felt a little lost. Not huge deal though because the book starts off with plenty of action. Even with me not knowing exactly who some of the characters are…things were certainly interesting. Cassie is looking for a little help in her ongoing feud with some of the vampires. She is hanging out at a supernatural brothel and causing a little bit of trouble along the way.
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Tantalize Fiction Review
By Flames | April 17, 2008
When I picked up Tantalize by Cynthia Leitich Smith, I was expecting something along the lines of Stephanie Meyers’s Twilight. Though I’m not sure where I got that impression, I quickly discovered that, while Tantalize and Twilight may both feature stories of star-crossed love and potentially doomed relationships, Tantalize doesn’t make the love story its center. Instead, it focuses on a sort of coming-of-age for Quincie, a heroine named after the Texan vampire hunter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Quincie is a strong young woman who, by the beginning of the story, has already had to cope with the deaths of her parents. She is going to inherit the family restaurant when she turns eighteen, but until then, she shares responsibilities for running it with her uncle. Because business has been bad, her uncle formed a plan to increase sales by remodeling their traditional Italian eatery to have a vampiric theme, still keeping the best of Italian dishes while serving the would-be vampire crowd, which happens to include his girlfriend.
Review by Alana Abbott
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Tome of Horrors Revised Review
By Flames | April 16, 2008
The Revised Tome of Horrors is a massive play on nostalgia. A book hoping that you miss the strange, often inexplicable and forgettable monsters from 1st edition. The problem becomes, that if you do not know what the hell these monsters are and you have no attachment to a pech or a tentamort, you will think this is simply a massive collection of strange and unremarkable creatures.
The book is single minded in its approach; proudly presenting you with over 300 monsters from the “good old days” of D&D. It clocks in at a massive 451 pages and is only available in PDF format. The reason for this decision is explained at the opening of the book. Ultimately it boils down to the cost involved with a reprint of a book this size.
Review by Vincent Venturella
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Eat the Dark Fiction Review
By Flames | April 15, 2008
I had high hopes for this book. The author is a pal of one of my favorites, Mr Mark Henry. And he’s an MRI tech. That latter factor particularly perked me because I love medical thrillers, and people with medical qualifications are smart, and I like to associate with those more intelligent than I. I was thinking Mr Schreiber would be my kind of writer, a male Tess Gerritsen - and it certainly helped that the aforementioned Ms Gerritsen had a blurb right on the front cover.
Review by Tez Miller
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