Mini book review: Dead Harvest by Chris F. Holm

Dead Harvest, by Chris F. Holm, is a noir-tinged urban fantasy.  Sam Thornton is the narrator and a Collector who reaps the souls of bad people, sending them off to Hell.  Sam himself was collected back in the day, and little bits of his backstory are sprinkled throughout the novel, becoming pertinent to the plot as well as rounding out Sam's character.  Since he's no longer alive, Sam either inhabits and reanimates recently deceased bodies or possesses live ones, jumping from meat sack to meat sack as necessary.  This becomes a little confusing for his companions, whom he begins to gather when he refuses to do a collection: the girl he's been sent to collect is actually an innocent.  To collect her soul would cause Very Bad Things to happen, like all-out war between angels and demons ...

And right about there is where Holm lost me.  There are angels and fallen angels and demons and really terrible demons and I just wasn't able to pay attention enough to the mythology to keep everyone straight.  The story moves along at a breakneck pace but it's sparely written, without much extra to flesh out the world-building.  I like complicated plots but I also like details and pauses in the story to enrich the world I'm in.  And maybe I just don't like noir that much.  I'll tell you what I did like quite a lot: the retro cover art.

Sorry-sorry-sorry-sorry

Oh my hell - I've totally dropped the ball here.  We went away for a long weekend, and then we've been trying to get caught up and I'm making excuses like an excuse-making machine.  Soon, I promise: book review for Chris F. Holm's Dead Harvest.  In the meanwhile, if you're in the mood for

Pop culture nonsense incarnate
Horror flicks and related stuff
Shamed dogs
Mild western adventures:(sister blog to FMS)

Thanks for your patience!

Mini book review: Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson

One of my favorite blogs to read is The Bloggess: irreverent, random and wickedly funny, by Jenny Lawson, a native Texan with a long-suffering husband, a miracle daughter, several cats and an impressive taxidermy collection.  Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) is what it says, a revved-up, exaggerated in places memoir - of her growing up poor in Wall, Texas, with her eccentric family; meeting her husband Victor; getting through life as best they can.  I'm doing a TERRIBLE job of selling this book but it is hilarious.  Mr. Mouse was getting annoyed with me because I was giggling at nearly every page (and I never laugh out loud at books).  There's infestations of scorpions and angry spider monkeys, serial killer cats, potential homemade zombies, giant metal chickens, extreme social anxiety and lots and lots of f-bombs.  I absolutely loved it.  Read a couple of her blog posts and if you find any of it funny, you'll love Let's Pretend This Never Happened.

Waiting for the world's end

Wright + Pegg + Frost, beer and a robot invasion?  It's like they made this movie just for me:

In the dead zone

I'm traversing a bit of a pop culture desert right now, burning through S2 of Fringe, which is picking up steam and getting better and better - I'm glad I went back to it after giving up partway through broadcast S1, and re-reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books because I own volumes 1-12 and need to refresh before finishing the series.  (Actually, I'm mostly re-reading those books because my library is undergoing some major renovations and it's a huge pain in the ass to get books out of there right now.  Pluswhich the one I really want to read - Joe Hill's NOS4A2 - has a huge waitlist.)

I'm reluctantly keeping up with Under the Dome, which I'm less and less enamoured of as it goes; I know Stephen King is being all supportive of it but the show is SO different from the book (it would have to be since the book is one of King's more violent tomes) and so much less interesting and well done.  I really don't think they should have renewed it: you can't keep those people under that dome indefinitely.  Finally, I am eagerly awaiting the return of Breaking Bad and the start of Broadchurch, and have also become sucked in, for the first time, to So You Think You Can Dance.  A girl's gotta have at least one guilty pleasure, right?