Religion is electrified in the snappy first book of Jeff Somers’ cyber-noir series featuring Avery Cates.

John Lennon might have imagined a world without religion, but this futuristic tale features a church gone mad, where to convert means sacrificing your brain to a cyborg’s body. And if you don’t want to convert…well, the Electric Monks want to kill you. (I think. I read a lot of this in front of the TV, and thus didn’t pay as much attention as I should have.)

If your mission is to kill the head of a legalised-yet-suspicious religion, where might they live? In England, apparently, in Westminster Abbey – only what Avery Cates finds there is mind-blowing. But before that he has to build up a team to help him take down Dennis Squalor – which is nice, but I got tetchy waiting for the assassination to begin.

Review by Tez Miller

We gave you a peek at the new cover art by Eric Lofgren and introduced you to the basics of Tales of the Seven Dogs Society last week.

Tales of the Seven Dogs Society is a collection of stories inspired by the Aletheia role-playing game published by Abstract Nova Entertainment. Each of these stories is a possible continuation of the events described in that book.

Today’s sneak preview is a small bit from Jim Johnson’s Lifting the Gingham Veil, which is the second story in the collection.

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.

Tachyon Publications is proud to announce the August 2008 release of a new edition of Tim Powers’ classic novel, The Stress of Her Regard.

A novel of secret histories and dark revelations, The Stress of Her Regard is the tale of a terrified young doctor who – after discovering his bride brutally murdered in their wedding bed – allies with the great Romantic poets, Byron, Keats and Shelley in a battle against a malignant apparition seeking her ultimate pleasure in their ravaged bodies and imperiled souls.

Eric Lofgren’s Cover Art gave us a quick teaser of the new RPG coming from Abstract Nova this summer. Next we learned about The Anonymous and the Shadow Crews. Some of the “good” and “bad” guys of the setting.

After learning a bit about this new, twisted world of Exquisite Replicas folks had a few questions on just how you play the game. So, Abstract Nova gave us a teaser into the Paranoia elements of the mechanics and today they bring us just a bit of Mental Imbalance…

With characters working for the CIA, this series is ripe for social commentary on what it means to work for the government, and how to deal with conflicts between their ideals and yours. Unfortunately, the author hasn’t picked up this golden opportunity to create fiction that would really resonate with readers. And I think this is why I’m not connecting with this series ?

It isn’t doing what it could.

Review by Tez Miller

Arc Dream Publishing and Pagan Publishing are working together again to produce a new collection of terrors for Delta Green.

Last year, Arc Dream and Pagan Publishing produced the long-awaited Delta Green: Eyes Only, a gorgeous hardcover sourcebook for Pagan’s award-winning Delta Green game setting. Despite having only 1,000 copies released, Eyes Only is now a finalist for the industry-standard Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game Supplement of 2007.

We want to do it again with Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity. The authors of Delta Green have been working on material for Targets of Opportunity for years. This fundraiser will tell us if there’s enough interest to finish developing it and to print a limited hardcover edition of the same quality as Delta Green: Eyes Only.

Delta Green is a new take on H.P. Lovecraft’s Mythos, bringing the fight against darkness and horror to the 90’s and beyond. Delta Green is made up of government agents secretly working against a larger conspiracy of horror and madness. This anthology offers us eight tales from around the world of various agents and the missions that bring them into conflict with creatures of terror.