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When manga comic book styles meet a popular author’s work, the results can be either spectacular or disappointing. Christine Feehan’s Dark Hunger is paranormal romance mixed with a highly stylized art form that does what it sets out to do — entertain fans and entice new ones with a bit of passion and lust.
What I liked about this particular manga interpretation, was that this product is the whole package; the cover art shows the two main characters (Riordan and Juliette) as they appear in the book. With cover copy that shows off the “romance” in the work, you know what you’re getting into when you read it.
There’s more to paranormal creatures than mechanics in the opener of Patricia Briggs’s popular urban fantasy series.
Mercedes “Mercy” Thompson is a hereditary walker, brought up in a werewolf foster home. Now Mercy runs her garage specializing in German vehicles, and takes on a new assistant – who happens to be a werewolf with a lot of trouble on his back. But it’s hard to make friends when you’ve been kept in a cage, and experimented on.
When a corpse is dumped on her front step, and next door there’s more destruction, and a teenage girl is missing…it all leads to Mercy working with werewolves, vampires and fae to get everything resolved.
This review of an author that is one of my favorites. Terry Brooks. I first read The Sword of Shannara when I was fourteen and although it had many (and I say many) similarities to the Lord of the Rings, I still liked it enough to read more by him.
The story is this. It is the near future, civilization has fallen into chaos. Nuclear war has left the land barren of food and water and people struggle to survive anyway they know how. Demons are pushing the world farther into oblivion, and there are only a few that stand up to them. Knights of the Word. Logan Tom and Angel Perez are those knights and it is there job to take the remnants of humanity to find a safe haven for their survival.
We’re back from GenCon and so are the Flash Fire Mini-Reviews.
This week we’re going to take a look at some of the cool new books we picked up over the weekend in Indianapolis. This mix of Horror and Dark Fantasy game products from large publishers and small press shows off just a few of the interesting items that were available at the convention.
I’ll be upfront and admit I have not completely read these titles yet. GenCon was only a few days ago and some of these books are quite hefty (Starblazer Adventures alone is 600+ pages). So, these are first impressions and notes from playing demos at the convention.
Science and magic come together to decimate Las Vegas’s population in the second volume of the Signs of the Zodiac series.
Joanna Archer is still living a double life as a superhero and a socialite heiress, going under her sister Olivia’s name. But someone else knows her as Joanna: a Shadow initiate whose metamorphosis isn’t far away. Regan DuPree seems both a helper and a hindrance, and Jo trusts her when she probably shouldn’t. As a result, she unintentionally spreads the deadly virus that the Tupla let loose, and things worsen from there.
Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden is back and invading the world of comics in a series entitled, Welcome to the Jungle. Don’t know who Harry Dresden is? Well, if you haven’t met Chicago’s favorite wizard yet, this four-part comic series is a good introduction to the world of Harry Dresden and his friends.
In Welcome to the Jungle, Harry Dresden has an unusual innocent to save–a gorilla named “Moe.” Accused of violently murdering a victim in Lincoln Park Zoo, Harry Dresden rushes in to investigate, spurred on by Lieutenant Murphy. Just when he picks up the trail of the “real” killer, things get sticky as our lucky hero gets right into the middle of a death match with supernaturally-charged lions. With a little help from his partner-in-crime, Bob, Dresden tracks down the source of the possessed animals–but is it too late? Will Dresden be able to stop a big evil from taking over Chicago?
Cy is an ordinary guy with a beautiful fiancee — until his uncle’s suicide changes his life forever. Consumed with discovering the motive behind his relative’s sudden and painful death, he finds notes and scribblings about a nonsense word he doesn’t recognize… Cthulhu. Obsessed, he seeks out answers to questions he should have never asked. A horrifying glimpse into a modern day Lovecraftian world filled with nightmares and excursions into Lovecraft’s Dreamlands!
The Fugue collects the first several issues of the Fall of Cthulhu comic book series. This is a modern tale of the Cthulhu Mythos featuring several well-known elements of the setting that have been built up over the years in various novels, anthologies and role playing games. The treatment of Miskatonic University is a great background element throughout the story, for example.
Do you like slasher films? How about the one where this really, gorgeous girl gets chased by a guy in mask? Ever wonder what would happen if the girl fought back?
Enter Cassie Hack, a girl with a violent past. You see, Cassie wasn’t well-liked as a teenager in her school; kids would taunt her, call her a freak. Her mom–in her own, over-protective way–tried to stand up for her daughter by killing those vicious snobs and serving them up to other students as mystery meat. Of course, with an influx of protein into the diets of those kind, innocent kids, someone had to notice. When Mrs. Hack was confronted to pay for her crimes, she committed suicide by sticking her head in a pot of boiling gravy.
Eryn James is a medical secretary by day who the police have asked to become bait. Five women who’ve been to LifeMate have been murdered; Eryn looks similar and she’s a shifter – though I’m not sure if it was explained how she met the police and how they know she’s a shifter. But Eryn’s not just a shifter – she’s a beagle shifter. Okay, that’s something new, and it causes for perhaps unintentional hilarity…
Filmed on location in gorgeous Marin County, California, The Beckoning is an independent horror film based on the legend of Sir Francis Drake. In 1579, Sir Drake landed in California, claiming the land as “Nova Albion” or “New White.” The story of the film is a look at a legend surrounding this historical figure; Drake’s burning of a Native American woman at the stake for setting a pox upon Natives and English alike.
Vicki Pettersson brings fresh ideas, deep psychology and Las Vegas’s underbelly in this flashy first volume in the Signs of the Zodiac series.
Since her almost-deadly assault about nine years ago, Joanna Archer has been tough and hard, with an empty façade that keeps even her nearest and dearest away. A blind date ends in violence and death, and Jo’s not just an innocent bystander. Turning twenty-five has awakened powers that have made her a target of the warring Zodiac factions, Light and Shadow. With a parent from each faction, Jo could go either way, and though she chooses to align with the Light, a traitor walks among the troop and exposes them all to the Shadow agents…including Jo’s father.
Requiem for Rome is a historical supplement and setting for Vampire: the Requiem from White Wolf Publishing, much like Dark Ages: Vampire was a historical setting for Vampire: the Masquerade. Requiem for Rome is a beautiful, but dark, book full of cunning aristocrats, noble savages and mysterious monsters. It is a 260 page hardcover (or eBook) filled with history, rumor and legend.
Ken Hite’s Foreward, The Deathless City, sets the mood immediately with a look at the history, secrets and terrors of Rome. Any Storyteller should be able to gather more than a few ideas from this section of the book alone. It is definitely worth the read if you get the chance.
As a fan of Big Red, I was eagerly anticipating seeing this sequel to Hellboy after watching the Hellboy and the Golden Army trailer and hearing about Guillermo del Toro’s involvement with the film. Impressed with del Toro’s work on Pan’s Labyrinth and Christopher Golden‘s novelization of Hellboy with artist Mike Mignola, I went into the movie with certain expectations.
Like other films and content within the Hellboy franchise–you do not need to be familiar with the characters or the setting to watch this film.
With sold out shows and talks of an Oscar, if you haven’t seen The Dark Knight you’re probably wondering if it lives up to all of the hype. Even within the body of countless movie reviews for the film there are a few who, believe it or not, don’t like The Dark Knight. Why? You see, the one thing this comic book movie has at its core (that other movies of a similar type don’t) is an atypical visibility to a broader audience. While it’s impossible to find a true statistic, could it be safe to assume that people unfamiliar with the darker Batman franchise went to see the movie just because it was Heath Ledger’s last role?
Exquisite Replicas is the latest game from Abstract Nova, who specialise in surreal off-the-beaten-track games such as Heaven and Earth 3rd edition, Aletheia, and Noumenon. ER shares this surreal quality, but couples it with horror. This is not the gore-laden horror of zombie films (though there are creatures in the game which you wouldn’t want to come across on a dark night), but the horror of losing your mind, or a distinctly unsettling feeling that you know something’s wrong, but can’t explain (even to yourself) why, and you feel powerless to do something about it.
Only the brave men and women of The Century Club stand between villainy and humanity, and they’re not going down without a fight.
‘‘Spirit of the Century: A Pulp Pickup Roleplaying Game’’ by Evil Hat Productions is a fast-paced, character-driven RPG that seeks to capture the feel of the old, over-the-top dime-store novels where the pulp genre first flourished.
Characters can range from machine-gun wielding dilettantes to two-fisted mystery men to brilliant (or mad) scientists or spiritual seekers of truth.
I would assume, given all the fuss about the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris, that I’m missing a great deal of what makes them good by reading From Dead to Worse before reading the beginning of the series. I hope this is true, because otherwise, I don’t really understand what all the hubbub is about. Sookie is a fun main character, the writing is charming, and the setting is both intriguing and well used (how many urban fantasy series take place in the South, much less post-Katrina Louisiana?). But From Dead to Worse is missing something extremely core: a plot.
“InSpectres” is a role-playing game of horror and comedy written by Jared Sorenson and published by Memento-Mori Theatrics. Players take on the roles of supernatural investigators who are part of a franchise, ala “Ghostbusters.” The players control not only their characters, but also the business itself, allow it to grow financially, physically and in terms of contacts and clientele. A game master sets up the story and calls for different die rolls at different times, controlling all of the non-player characters in the game.
I’ve been reading a lot of Mythos fiction lately. It started with my review of Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition, which was a lot of fun and renewed my interest in the genre once more. Since then I’ve picked up several books and was blown away by the Trail of Cthulhu RPG from Pelgrane Press. So I started digging into the fiction collections even more…
Frontier Cthulhu is a bit different, having characters explore the “frontier” throughout the ages and encountering dark, twisted horrors along the way.
“Donar’s Hammer” is the first of the smaller supplements for “Godlike” RPG, and provides an introductory scenarios as well as optional rules for your “Godlike” game.
Set in Sicily in 1943, players take on the role of a group of Allied Talents that come face to face with a group of Axis Overmen protecting a talent called Mjollnir, the name of the norse god Thor’s mythic hammer. What begins as a simple seek-and-destroy mission instead becomes a fight for survival and the soul of a small town.
When manga comic book styles meet a popular author’s work, the results can be either spectacular or disappointing. Christine Feehan’s Dark Hunger is paranormal romance mixed with a highly stylized art form that does what it sets out to do — entertain fans and entice new ones with a bit of passion and lust.
