For the past, five years Flames Rising has been fortunate to publish content from some interesting folk. From musicians to up-and-coming authors or horror fans, our reviewers have come from all walks of life. Flames Rising review Lynne Thomas is no exception. Here Lynne opens up and describes her fascinating job as the Head of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL, where she focuses on Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror literature.

Come take a look at this awesome day job, and learn how you can help preserve the science fiction, fantasy and horror books you love to read.

Let them know obedience. Let them know desolation. But, most of all, let them know pain… – Salena Valanas, instructing the Shapers Guild

Written by Hal Maclean and Mathew Kaiser, the Blighted Bestiary presents a host of new monsters and minions designed to help the blight elves carry out their crusade of visiting misery to every corner of the world. Though designed as a companion volume to Blight Elves: Architects of Despair, a Narrator could easily adapt the creatures, templates and even stat blocks of different creatures found within this book to fit other situations. Every world needs villains, the more dastardly the better, and the blight elves, devoted servants to the goddess of suicide, bring an entirely new dimension to villainy.

The Suzerain rulebook is a slim fifty pages of very pretty plate artwork and a lot of apparent coffee spillage. Rather than being tied to a particular setting or world this Suzerain seems to be trying to pass itself off as a generic system with specific world books, though there are hints of the New Age mysticism and multiversal aspects in the fiction snippets and illustration explanations throughout the book. The immediate first impression is one of over-engineering for such a small book(let). For your money you get a brief introduction, basic rules, advanced rules, character creation and ‘Feats’ which covers the ground of skills, innate abilities (merits), innate failings (flaws) and special powers such as magic, cybernetics or SCIENCE!

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

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Ever wish you could just toss a grenade into a room full of orcs? Or wish you had an automaton to scout out a booby trapped hallway? Or that you could let your fantasy characters explore the ruins of an ancient, technologically advanced civilization? If you’ve ever wanted to introduce a little bit of steampunk into your fantasy campaign, then you want Steamworks!

Kristopher Reisz’s Unleashed sheds light on the steel city of Birmingham, with its cultural history and blue-collar community. Daniel Morning’s parents are far from rich: they struggle to make ends meet whilst doing everything they can to insure that Daniel and his brothers have a better future…even if it means cheating to get into an Ivy League college.

Review by Tez Miller

I’ll have to post something of a caveat up front: I’ve never read the first installment of the Morningstar Saga, Plague of the Dead. That will have to change pretty soon though, considering the quality of Thunder & Ashes.

The zombie apocalypse has come and gone, and a handful of survivors–some of them ex-military, and one a brilliant female scientist–are fighting to find a cure that will save the world. Yes, the plot isn’t exactly original, but the quality of the writing and the characters manage to elevate Thunder & Ashes above most novels that share this popular plot.

Review by Leah Clarke

The Violet War is a series of books, based on urban fantasy setting designed by author Monica Valentinelli. Book One is the Violet War is called Argentum. Chapter One of Argentum is now available online for free. The basis for the setting originates from world myth themes combined with more specific areas loosely inspired by […]

Scion is about the only recent output from White Wolf that I’ve really cared for other than Exalted. While the game overall seems to have been completed with Hero, Demigod and God it’s nice to see that it’s getting some ongoing support and even more nice to see that White Wolf seems to be one of the first companies to really start taking PDF publishing seriously. There’s still some imperfections, I believe the idea is to sell sections of the Scion companion bit by bit as complete PDF releases, but to omit some final sections which will only be present in the print version, but it’s a big step in the right direction and one that I hope will be followed up on by other companies. Incidentally, I was about to write a Celtic pantheon fan-offering up for Scion when this came along, so they just managed it in the nick of time!

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

In Dead to Me, reformed petty-crime naughty boy and psychometrist Simon Canderous (whose surname probably means something, but I haven’t checked the dictionary yet) works for New York’s Department of Extraordinary Affairs. Psychometry made me think of Kim Wilkins’s Gina Champion series, and the government made me think of Shane Maloney’s Murray Whelan series. But Anton Strout’s Simon Canderous is neither a teenage girl nor a political adviser (and not Australian, for that matter).

Review by Tez Miller

Buy $50 worth of in-stock books (preorders not included) and you’ll automatically get a copy of James A. Moore’s Little Boy Blue by Bloodletting Press thrown in your shopping cart for free!

What’s so special about this sale, is that this book isn’t even available for sale anywhere, as Bloodletting Press produced it for this year’s World Horror Convention, as a giveaway chapbook.

So if you couldn’t make it, here’s your chance to get it for free!

Even Mages are Afraid of Someone Breaking into their Home A mage’s Sanctum is his home, and the Hallow is the soul of it. When bereft of these two things, the mage is not only robbed of her sanctuary but also the Mana that replenishes her magic. Wars have been waged among mages for centuries […]

Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium has a new cover illustration, courtesy of Tariq Raheem (concept artist on TV shows like Farscape and video games like Heavenly Sword). This new artwork depicts a pair of Disciples about to come under attack from a group of demons led by a Pelogris.

A few months ago I read the first three chapters of Jackie Kessler’s Hell’s Belles, but had to put it aside when I got caught up in library books and their due dates. My sieve of a memory left me doubtful of how well I could remember these opening stages when I picked the book up again the other day.

I needn’t have worried. I’m the first to admit that I’m very skeptical. Just because something is a best seller, or comes with gushy fangirlies, that doesn’t mean that it’ll automatically appeal to everyone. But I’m happy to report that this novel did appeal to me.

Review by Tez Miller

The Mist The storm rolled across Long Lake in Maine with a fury, leaving David Drayton and his family with fallen trees, downed power lines, and no electricity. At his wife’s request, David heads to the local supermarket to stock up on supplies, taking his young son and neighbor along for the ride. But the […]

This is a collection of short stories by Jeff Vandermeer both tangentially and directly about a fictional fantasy city called Ambergris, noted for its somewhat piratical past, the presence of mysterious and sinister mushroom men and freshwater squid. It is also very, very, very weird and very, very, very surreal. I suppose, broadly, it fits into the general thrust of the urban fantasy movement but it is also a damn sight weirder, more Burroughs than Mieville. One story might be a more conventional fantasy story, another might play with the relationship between fantasy and reality and the other might leave you scratching your head and reaching for the dictionary just so you could read something fully comprehensible for a change.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

The problem I have with anthologies is that the quality of the stories varies greatly, as far as I’ve read. Thus, I am not a big fan. Indeed, the authors in this collection are varied: some of them you know well from various paranormal novels, while others are dipping into the supernatural for the first time (they’re primarily mystery writers, on the cosy side, I think). Instead of judging the collection as a whole, let’s look at the stories individually:

Review by Tez Miller

The game of Dungeons & Dragons is, at its core, a game of epic fantasy. The characters we choose and role-play more closely resemble the mythological heroes of ancient times or modern fantasy literature. The nature of an epic fantasy adventure is that the hero(es) will face a great threat which will endanger the lives of innocents/family/the world. There will be a great struggle, but the outcome is never in question. Epic fantasy stories end with our protagonist overcoming the long odds and great trials to become a truly legendary hero. But this begs an interesting question.

What if the hero can not succeed?

Review by Vincent Venturella

Along with Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, Howard Phillips Lovecraft is considered one of America’s most innovative and popular American horror writers. The master of the weird tale during the first decades of the 20th Century until his premature death in 1937, Lovecraft’s distinctive style and canon of work has influenced as many authors as the stories of Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett. Lovecraft’s earliest published work, Herbert West: Re-Animator, was turned into the 1985 cult classic film, Reanimator.

Caliber Comics has published a number of Lovecraft’s classic tales and inputed a modern spin for today’s audiences and the writers are developing new tales based on Lovecraft’s imaginations in addition to adapting some of the classic stories.

Joe Carriker speaks with PSI Point Blank

Joe Carriker, the Vampire: the Requiem developer, was recently interviewed by Boyan Radakovich, the Director of Hobby Sales and Marketing for Publisher Services, Inc. (PSI) as part of their new Point Blank podcast. This business-focused podcast is scheduled to regularly include members of the White Wolf development team as a part of its standard format, but Joe’s interview went so well, it is now a segment unto itself!

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