Malasz

Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells is what 2001: A Space Odyssey would’ve been if the monolith had actually talked to the crew. NASA has known about an alien spaceship parked in the Asteroid Belt since the 1960s but has kept the information from the public.   All efforts to establish radio contact have been met with silence.   In the early 21st century, NASA finally develops the technology required to send six astronauts to the ship to discover its secrets.   Dr. Jane Holloway is a linguist and a reluctant astronaut recruited by NASA to communicate with any possible aliens.   As soon as their capsule docks with the mysterious ship, she begins to hear voices.   She not only has a hard time convincing herself they are real, but most of her crew as well.   When the mission takes a disturbing turn that not even the highly trained astronauts are prepared for, it’s Jane’s connection to the ship that becomes their only hope for survival. Fluency was a finely wri...

Chained by Fear , book two in Jim Melvin’s Death Wizard Chronicles , begins the story of Laylah, the beautiful sister of the evil sorcerer Invictus.   Invictus has imprisoned Laylah in a magical tower, hoping that she’ll one day become his queen and rule the world of Triken with him.   Laylah, however, happens to be the sane one in the family.   She’s repulsed at the thought of marrying her own brother, let alone spending her life with a depraved lunatic with god-like powers.   She’s locked away for seventy years—her demon blood gives her long life—before finally escaping with the help of Invictus’s former allies. While on the run, she meets Torg the Death-Knower, a powerful wizard in his own right.   We last saw Torg in Forged in Death , after he had escaped Invictus’s vile prison and made some roguish friends.   When Laylah and Torg meet, sparks fly.   Literally.   They are drawn to each other in a supernatural passion that neither can explain. ...

The Tattered Banner by Duncan M. Hamilton is not your typical rags-to-riches fantasy story, but it does start out as one.   The hero, Soren, is plucked from a starving street urchin’s life by a famous nobleman to attend Ostia’s prestigious Academy of Swordsmanship.   Magic is outlawed in Ostia, so the Duchy’s best and brightest become master swordsmen to move up in society.   It’s an opportunity that’s too good to be true, and Soren recognizes this.   He becomes the hardest working student at the Academy because he knows that one failure could throw him back on the streets; something his rich, noble classmates don’t have to worry about.   It soon becomes clear that Soren has a magical “Gift” with a blade that enables him to defeat almost anyone he faces despite his limited training. That’s where the story turns away from the typical hero’s journey. The Tattered Banner is not about undertaking quests or vanquishing dark lords, but how one young man survives from ...

I Am John, I Am Paul by Mark Tedesco follows the lives of two real-life Roman soldiers in the fourth century, Ioannes (John) Fulvius Marcus Romanus and Paulus.   John and Paul form a strong bond of friendship during their days fighting on the German frontier, a bond that is never broken even when John is sent away to Alexandria by a sadistic centurion. John spends years in Alexandria longing for home and corresponding with his family and Paul in Rome.   While in Alexandria, John is initiated into the Mithraic religion, but his faith in Mithras doesn’t seem to give him the peace he thought it would. Political upheavals enable John to return to Rome, his family, and Paul.   John and Paul resume their duties in the Legion, and even volunteer to rescue a close family member of Emperor Constantine, who was kidnapped by a rival Roman general. The mission succeeds, and the Emperor is so grateful that he gives them both farm lands and a house in Rome, ensuring they and their fami...

Note: The author has re-named this novel to Time Bomber. We don't know if there have been any revisions to the story. In Apple Blossom Time by Robert Wack starts with an interesting Prologue—a time traveler jumps back and forth in time between different locations in World War II Europe tracking another man important to the time traveler’s mysterious mission. It’s a violent struggle, as the traveler sometimes kills his quarry and then sometimes loses him. The Prologue promised a novel filled with paradoxes and alternate timelines. In my opinion, however, the novel did not deliver on that promise. Dr. Willem von Stockum is an American mathematician who abandons a lucrative academic career to join the British Royal Air Force prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. He’s disgusted with America’s indifference to Nazi oppression in Europe and wants to do what he can to free his Dutch homeland from the Nazi invaders. When his bomber is shot down over Normandy during the D-Day invasion, a gr...

Black Book, Volume 1, has the first three episodes of the genre-bending Black Book series.  It’s a story that mixes Western, science fiction, and fantasy into a quest that spans centuries. In Part 1: The Devil’s Blood , we find Sheriff Jack trying to keep the peace in a small, American West town during the 1860s.  But Jack is no ordinary Sheriff.  He has almost supernatural skills that help him survive a bloody encounter with bandits that shoot up his town and kill many of its citizens.  He’s quick on the draw, knows how to use his fists…and can time-travel out of town when a powerful adversary leaves him no choice but to retreat. In Part 2: Out of Time , we meet Benjamin Freeman, President of the United States in the year 2308.  Ben has directed his time-travel corps to locate Jack, an old military comrade who has gone missing in the distant past.  When Ben personally oversees the operation, he walks into a trap orchestrated by a deadly faction that also w...

Grab a comfy chair by the fire, a hot drink, and a book of good horror stories.  Those rattling shutters outside?  Just the blowing snow.  Those shadows dancing in the corner?  Fire light, nothing more.  And the whispers behind your chair are your imagination. Maybe. That’s the feeling Mark Fuller Dillon conveys throughout his short story collection In a Season of Dead Weather . In most of the stories, it was never quite clear whether the “horror” was in the narrator’s mind or if it was real. The reader was left to interpret at the end. And that worked for me. Each Lovecraftian tale was expertly crafted, with poetic and visceral language describing characters enduring the loneliness and isolation of a long winter in the country or the city. Dillon is a Quebec native, so he’s no stranger to maddeningly endless winters (I’m a west Michigan native, so I can sympathize). Most of the stories were quite literary and a little confusing to me, a genre reader. But t...

Forged in Death , the first of six books in Jim Melvin's Death Wizard Chronicles, starts out with a scene from a claustrophobic's nightmare – Torg, the Death-Knower and king of the Tugars, is imprisoned by the evil wizard Invictus at the bottom of a cold, dark pit bored hundreds of feet into a mountain. He can't stretch out because the pit is too small, and he can't lean against the walls, because they're enchanted with flesh-burning magic. He either has to stand or curl into an uncomfortably tight fetal position. We're only in the prologue, and the book is already giving me the willies. And that's a good thing. Torg eventually escapes the pit and embarks on an Odyssey-like journey back to his desert home to stop Invictus from enslaving the world of Triken. Jim Melvin's world-building was at once fantastic and logical, from the unique human cultures to the strange twists on traditional monsters. It's obvious Melvin put a lot of thought into the...

Demonworld by Kyle B. Stiff is a highly imagined Lovecraftian tale that combines science fiction, fantasy, and horror in a way I've never seen. It's dark and dystopian, but with elements of humanity that hint at a hopeful future in the books to come. The world is dominated by monsters called “flesh demons." Most human tribes appease the flesh demon “gods” by offering them human sacrifices. But a small hope for humanity exists in a technologically advanced city called Haven. It has survived and thrived by staying isolated on a small, bleak island in the middle of a vast ocean, hidden for hundreds of years from the flesh demons and aggressive human city-states. Wodan, a gifted teenage boy from Haven, finds himself mysteriously exiled from his home for no reason he can comprehend. Wodan has to battle flesh demons, their twisted minions, and humans just as warped and evil as the demons, to return home to Haven and discover who kidnapped him and dropped him into the mi...

Kill Screen by Benjamin Reeves is as creepy as a late-night session of Resident Evil in a dark basement. An apt description, considering the book is about a dark and creepy video game that achieves sentience and drives its players insane.* Jack Valentine, co-owner of the video game company Electronic Sheep, finds his partner and best friend Dexter Hayward dead in a bathtub filled with his own blood. It's a confirmed suicide – something to which Jack is not a stranger – but it spurs Jack to discover why his friend abruptly killed himself. Jack's investigation leads him to Evi, a mysterious computer program embedded in a video game under development at Electronic Sheep. Evi shows Jack terrifying things, including horrors from his own past. To save his sanity, and gain justice for Dexter, Jack has to discover what the program wants and how to stop it from causing more deaths. Kill Screen is set in San Francisco during the 1990s, a heady time and place to be working in soft...

The Magus’s Tale , book two in Colin McComb’s Oathbreaker series, primarily follows young Alton, a boy plucked from certain death by Magus Underhill to become the elderly magus's apprentice.  Alton spends his childhood and adolescence excelling at powerful magic despite abusive treatment from his master.  Once Alton becomes a magus in his own right, he learns that great power comes with a price—loneliness.  To earn acceptance from his nervous neighbors in the village of Lower Pippen, he uses his magic to cure their ills and protect them from the bitter weather and wild animals that assault their farms. But what seems like a minor encounter with petty brigands blows up into an unimaginably horrible event that releases a terror upon the world that “threatens life itself.” The Magus’s Tale is Alton’s story, but we do learn what the main characters from book one, The Knight’s Tale , have been up to.  Sir Pelagir, General Glasyin, and Princess Caitrona are living a relati...