Book Review: Tormentor by Steven L. Shrewsbury

Tormentor is the first Shrewsbury novel I’ve read, though I’ve also read a short story in the first issue of The New Bedlam Project. I really liked that story, which is why I decided to finally quit procrastinating and buy a copy of Tormentor.

Before I get started, I have to admit that I am probably not within the “target audience” for this book. I wouldn’t say I hated this book, because if I had, I wouldn’t have bothered finishing it. But it was grating in a lot of places, and for a lot of reasons, some of which are personal.

The introduction of the main character, “Battlin’ John Kern,” starts out well enough, and his tour of duty ventures into weirdness just after John gets hit by the concussive wave of a car bomb in Iraq. This somehow makes him sensitive to spirits, and while chasing insurgents, he sees a transsexual goddess along with several other spirits. The goddess guides John to safety, and he then goes on to mend at a military hospital in Germany.

Book Review: King Maker by Maurice Broaddus

Imagine the legend of King Arthur told in a modern era, and set against a complex gangland turf war as a backdrop. King Maker is the first book in the series The Knights of Breton Court, though in this first installment it spends a great deal of time detailing the  decay of the neighborhood created by the warring gang factions.

There are early hints of magic from the start, with the appearance of a nature elemental as well as a homeless guy named Merle prognosticating for Luther White. The story quickly shifts to the present day. Very little of the story follows King James White, son of Luther and heir apparent to the “kingdom,” though he doesn’t yet know it.

Instead, the reader is guided through the various street crews run by rival gang leaders Night and Dred. Neither care much for King, but instead of provoking him directly, the leaders choose to vie for the prime dealing locations in the various neighborhoods.

With Dred’s crew lacking the strength to take on Night, Dred hires a pair of trolls to work as extra muscle. This makes his crew feel inferior, and it inspires them into some reckless and stupid behavior to “look hard,” resulting in an escalating war.

Add to this a fey, a few magi, a dragon, the cops, drive-bys, tainted drugs, and you get a complex tale that moves at a breakneck pace.

The aforementioned knights are slow to react to the war in their hood, so their lives are like various subplots to the core plot of the war itself. This is not the story of how the heroes save the day so much as how the villains destroyed themselves. Which is not to say the Knights don’t get their chance to develop. They do, but these are brief glimpses of their lives in the midst of a war.

This is a solid introduction with a blazing pace, whetting the appetite for future installments. Though it’s a serious book, there are moments of humor that help lighten the mood at just the right times. (“I love her like a big-tittied play cousin at a family reunion.”) The conclusion is satisfying, and it opens up new threads to be pursued in the second book, King’s Justice. I know I’ll be standing in line to pick up that second book, and I give King Maker a full 5 stars.

The little orange cat is gone…

Zeus has been my part-time therapist since my arrival in Italy. Whenever I got mad or upset about something, I went to look for Zeus and cuddle with him until I could calm down. A golden blond long-hair with yellow eyes, he was so adorable that company fell in love with him the moment they saw him. So it was easy for me to be proud of him. He was my best friend and my “kidden.”

During this spring, Zeus developed a raw spot in his skin, and it wouldn’t heal. He licked at it so much, we were forced to put a collar on him after he opened a hole in his side and bled all over the living room. Sometime during the first night with the collar, Zeus tried to jump off of a tall wardrobe in my room and landed badly, bruising his shoulder. As soon as we’d taken the collar off, I also noticed how the right side of his face was swollen.

We took him to the emergency vet, and they gave him antibiotics. But he lost interest in his food, and he started shedding weight fast. We had company this weekend, and I’d explained how rapid this decline was. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t think it was this serious.

An open email to Amazon customer support…

All right, I’m going to attempt this message without cussing because I would like a reply. At the same time, I will be posting this message on my blog as an open message. I don’t believe I’m the only person being affected by this problem, and I’m sure more people than me would like some straight answers on this topic.

I own a CyBook Gen3, a device I paid 395 Euros when it first came out. At your Mobipocket store, I purchased Twilight and New Moon. This week, I decided to get the third book, Eclipse, only to discover that you have pulled ALL of Ms. Meyer’s titles from your own bookstore. I’ve been forced to buy a Kindle copy because even with e-book locations where I COULD find a PRC copy for my e-reader, I was told that they couldn’t sell me the e-file because I’m not in the US.

What the fff–

But okay, today I download Kindle for PC and pay for a file that will be “delivered wirelelssly” to me. So now I’ve paid extra fees for AT&T and VAT, so I can get a copy of the MOBI file and put it on my e-reader…except, I apparently don’t actually get the file sent to my PC using Kindle for PC, because there are no new mobi files on my PC.

So look, I’m a legitimate Amazon/Mobipocket customer. I’m a regular buyer of books, DVDs, Music CDs and e-books. Go ahead, look through my recent purchases with Amazon.com, and Amazon.co.uk…see that? I’m a regular customer. I am no pirate. All I want is a legal way to read my e-book purchases on the e-reader of my choice. You people own Mobipocket, but apparently I’m no longer allowed to use that store to buy titles. So please, tell me what I have to do just to get this e-book onto my CyBook without resorting to a freakin’ torrent site?

Getting off Facebook and MySpace

I’ve officially had enough of social networks, and I’ve deleted my accounts with Facebook and MySpace. In both cases, it was suggested ad nauseum that I should join these services to “get in touch with new readers.”

Bullshit. You join these networks so advertisers can get in touch with you, the consumer.

The vast majority of my friends on both of these networks were people who had something to sell. MySpace and Facebook are both butt-ugly link farms surrounded by ads, but Facebook at least had something going for it when I first joined. I loved how often people would talk to me through my status updates. That was really cool, because I was having loads of fun being social without having to think about buying or selling stuff. Imagine that, being social on a social network. CRAZY!

Well what else was I supposed to do?!

You may have noticed I haven’t been blogging much, and that I’ve only been posting fiction weekly. In theory this was to allow me more time to write, except that plan got slammed in the sensitive bits by  a dual attack of a frigid Mother Nature and a muse who decided to cop a walk just when things were getting good. My melancholy hit a peak today and I decided to spend the entire day watching Zero Punctuation. So if you watch a few episodes and then attach his voice to this rant, it might end up being funny.

Emphasis on might.

Ten years ago, when I was a young and feminine lad of 25 who got a surprisingly large amount of pity pussy, I imagined myself living someplace foreign while I worked in a lucrative but menial creative role and raising two self-centered, spoiled bastards.