nd I have read Barker’s Books of blood volumes 1-3, as well as volumes 4-6, which were released under other names (In the Flesh, The Inhuman Condition, and Cabal).  I have read the Great and Secret Show and its sequel, Everville.  I have read the Hellbound Heart, the basis for the Hellraiser movies, and a Thief of Always, a book geared towards young adults.  I have read his two newest offerings for adults, Coldheart Canyon and Mister B. Gone.

I have not read the Abarat series, which is also geared towards young adults, and I have no desire to at this point.

And that leaves us with, what I call, the Big 3.

Big, because they are massive volumes.  And an 800 page Barker novel would be akin to a 1500 page by most other authors.  I mean, have you ever looked at the type in one of Barker’s books?  They are dense pages.  If you were to take the newest 350-page offering by Koontz and condense his words to be the same size as Barker’s, the Koontz novel would be a paltry 200 pages.

But I digress… I never bought either of these Big 3, Imajica, Galilee or Sacrament because I didn’t want to involve myself in a novel that would take me six months to read.  Between the children, TV, comic books, video games and MLB, my reading time is limited, and there is so much I want to read.  So I purposely eschewed these three novels.

But, of course, I was at a used book store one day, and Imajica was sitting on a stack of $1 books, an old wonderful hardcover copy with a little stain.  The clerk notcied me looking at it and told me it was his favorite Barker book.  And I, being the sucker I am, turned over my $1 and took the book home.

Where it sat on a bookcase for over a year

I finally picked it up three weeks ago, after finishing Lincoln Child’s Terminal Freeze and Simon Greene’s Daemons Are Forever and left with nothing else to read.

I cracked that baby open and…

Here I am, three weeks later, only 230 pages in.

I eat 230 pages for breakfast.  At least I do when there are 33 lines per page and a measly 9 words per line.  And a good amount of the story is dialogue.

I hate to say it, but reading Barker can be a chore sometimes.  He oftentimes takes two pages to describe what most authors would spend a sentence or two describing.  And while the images he paints are compelling and complete, he can often go into overkill mode, describing everything and not leaving enough to the imagination.

His paragraphs are so dense, and his language, while almost akin to poetry, can be stilted at times.  But he is British, so what can you expect?  So many sentences are multiple lines in length that I oftentimes find myself re-reading full paragraphs to fully appreciate the words on the page.  Other times I re-read a line or paragraph to fully appreciate the picture Barker is painting with his words.  Other times I have to re-read a paragraph because I accidentally skipped a line and got lost, as if stumbling through a hedge maze.

All of these reasons, combined with the actual hefty word-count, has made Imajica a chore.  Not an unwieldy chore, and not a chore I am going to cast aside and ask someone else to do.  But its tough.  Its tough to dedicate so much time to a single volume.

I am a man of instant gratification- that is why I sometimes have a hard time working on my own writing.  I enjoy writing, but there is absolutely no guarantee that anyone else will read it, or that I will eventually earn some monetary reimbursement from it.  So many times I eschew writing for those activities which will give me instant gratification: reading comics, playing video games, watching TV, or reading books.

With Imajica, there is no immediate gratification.  It is an enjoyable read, and while the trip is as important as the destination, looking at the tome and realizing anew each time I pick it up how much is left, reminds me of how much more I have to go.  And it is daunting.  Because I know that in the same time I am reading this I could be completing a half a dozen other books from beginning to end and have the enjoyment of the trip as well as the conclusions.

But I am not a quitter and I will continue with the trip as long as it takes me for as long as it takes.  And just hope it is all worth it in July when i eventually put the book down for good.

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Technorati Tags: Books, Clive Barker, Horror, Imajica

Star Wars: Legacy of the Force is a nine part series set several years after the last major trilogy, New Jedi Order.  It is written by three authors, each penning three of the novels.  The authors include, in no particular order, Aaron Allston, Karen Traviss and Troy Denning.  Denning is the most well known, having written many Forgotten Realms trilogies for TSR, now Wizards of the Coast.

This story line, to be blunt, shows the transformation of Jacen Solo from a mere foot soldier in the new Galactic Alliance, into a new Emperor.  This story can not be read in a vacuum; to fully understand the characters and their motives, you must be familiar with the events of both the New Jedi Order story as well as the Dark Nest trilogy.  Jacen’s actions and transformations are directly related to his experiences in these novels.

First off, it needs to be said, that this story was a little too long.  I think seven books would have been perfect (though, with three authors, each needed to be given an equal number of books, and six would have been too short, unless each was expanded 50 to 100 pages).  Anyway… I’m not going to judge whether the story was good or not.  This is not a stand alone story.  It exists within the framework of the expanded Star Wars Universe, and is an integral part of the mythology.  Its not a single, off-shoot story that can be easily judged based on its relevance and execution.  This story defines the characters and their futures, and as such, in my mind, simply exists.  now, their are elements to the story I liked, and others I loathed, but the series does follow the natural progression and evolution of the characters and the universe.

I’ll tell you one thing I really disliked and felt slowed the story to a crawl at some point: Boba Fett.  We all love the Fett from the movies.  But each of Karen Traviss’ novels dedicates half of the pages to Fett, his family, his home life, his home plant, and his status as the leader of the Mandalorean people.  It’s interesting, I guess, fleshing out the character from mere mercenary to an actual, dynamic character, but it was too much.  Now understand, Fett plays an integral role in the end game of the story, and his back story and the associated characters to play a major role, but i felt it was too much.  I felt that the same results could have been achieved through different means with a more satisfying experience.  Whether or not focusing on Fett was Traviss’ idea, or the idea of the braintrust behind the expanded universe, i don’t know.  But what I do know is that too much time was focused on Fett.  Don’t get me wrong, some people may like this.  or love this.  Because Fett is a beloved character in the Star Wars Universe.  But I felt that it lengthened the story too much, causing it bog down too much at times.

A second issue of mine was the villain in the books.  We have Alema Rar, a Twi’lik Jedi driven insane during the Dark Nest Trilogy, and Luminya, another Jedi from Luke’s past.  Both play integral roles in the story, but quite frankly, neither of them are that interesting or compelling  characters.  The only villain worth the ink is Jacen Skywalker.

What did I like?  We get to see the deaths of many major characters (I won’t ruin this for you), many Jedi battles, plot intrigues, and a lot of suspense.  We see the return of the Imperial Remnant and Admiral Daala.  And we get the slow, deliberate transformation of Jacen Solo into Darth Caedus.

The story of Jacen Solo is not original.  But what is these days?  We start with a man who wants to help the Alliance as it deals with the defection of Corellia and several other major planets.  We see a man who begins his quest with good intentions before being sucked into the Sith philosophy.  And like so many men in history and literature, the innocent desire to do good for the sake of all gets twisted into a philosophy of the means justifying the ends.  And over the course of the series, Jacen slowly grabs for power, doing horrible things in the same of the greater good.  He kills a terrorist during an interrogation.  He subverts Ben Skywalker.  He orders his parents killed.  He goes after Luke.  He kills a lot of innocent people.  He sacrifices his own fleet for nothing more than pride.  And, by the end, he is willing to do the same acts that Palpatine did, supposedly for the greater good. 

Watching Jacen’s fall from grace is a sobering peek into the minds of men who think they know better than everyone else what’s best for them.  At the beginning, you can sympathize with Jacen, with his actions, with his reasoning.  He is the most  tragic of figures, and the seeds of his rise and subsequent fall are evident early on.  The authors show us step-by-step how Jacen is drawn to the dark side and how he slowly becomes the monster he ends up being.  As a reader, its intriguing to look at the slippery slope Jacen finds himself on and wondering, on a personal level, how far we would go as individuals to achieve his goals.

This is a different type of series from New Jedi Order, in that NJO was several smaller, sometimes independent stories, woven together to form the larger tapestry of the Yuuzhan Vong War, and each individual trilogy or duology or stand alone book could be judged on how well it integrated with the larger story.  But this series is a single cohesive story and can’t be jugded by the same standards.  And again, that’s why I will not judge it on the merits of the meat of the story.  But in conclusion, I will say that I believe that same story could have been delivered in a shorter, more cohesive story where Fett, as well as other chaff, could have been minimized.  But in the end it was a good, thought sometimes very predictable and slow, expansion of the Star Wars Universe.  And like with any good story,  for every conflict that was solved another was created,  setting us up for the next intriguing chapter in the expanded Universe.

If you have any comments or more specific questions, feel free to comment.

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Technorati Tags: Allston, Darth Caedus, Denning, Expanded Universe, Jacen Solo, Jedi, Legacy of the Force, Luke Skywalker, New Jedi Order, Sith, Star Wars, Traviss, Yuuzhan Vong

If you are looking for that teenage gothic angst crap, you won’t find it here.  I’m in my 30′s with one child here and another on the way.  But if you are a fan of Stephen King or Dean Koontz or Clive Barker or Neil Gaiman, if you are a fan of fiction that tweaks the mind and asks you to think, then you will enjoy what lurks within this website.

This is the first short piece of fiction I wrote for this website, though it is not the title piece.  I intended to start this site with “Pandora’s Children” as the initial story, but as it is so often with fiction, the story took on a life of its own as soon as the first word was typed.  And the result was a story about 7,000 words longer than I planned.  But what are you going to, right?  Fiction is a living, breathing creature, and once life is breathed into it, like a wild horse, it gallops where it wants.

Instead I give you “The Devil’s Toothache”, a more managable tale of about 6,000 words which can be enjoyed  in ten minutes, though I feel that it has vast re-reading potential.

I welcome any and all comments and critiques, so don’t be shy.

That being said, please come in.  Click on “The Devil’s Toothache” above.

Come in and meet the first of Pandora’s Children.

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Technorati Tags: barker, Horror, King, Koontz, Short Stories

Just finished the Dark Disciple trilogy (otherwise known as the amber trilogy), and I will admit that i was disappointed.  I don’t know what i was expecting, but something more than this, especially coming from one of the two Dragonlance paragons, Margaret Weis.  Any time Weis or Hickman do a Dragonlance story, I guess i expect something… epic.  Or funny.  Cause I loved the Doom Brigade Books.

This trilogy just lacked umph.  I expected something again to Chronicles or Legends.  or even dawning of a new age.  I expected a dozen intriguing characters.  i expected adventure.  Instead we get three main good guys and handful of bad guys.  I guess the major problem is that the trilogy features the gods as some of the main characters, and the main enemies, and while that for some reason works  in the Forgotten Realm novels (Cyric books were awesome), it falls a little flat here.

Another reason I expected more is because the  War of Souls has been over for almost seven years, the Dragon overlords are dead, and I was looking forward to the next big step in the world.  There have been a dozen novels or so exploring the world after the war of Souls, and I thought it was time for the next Major Conflict.  The next world-defining trilogy.  Except we get a somber trilogy, that, while a good read, leaves the reader wanting something more.  A monk of Majere, a kender, a dog, and Mina just doesn’t add up to exciting.

Obviously, if you are a die hard Dragonlance fan, you will, and should, read it.  It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t exceptional.  I was looking for epic, but instead got narrow-focused with very little world-shaking developments.

Now I’m just waiting for the last book in the Lost Chronicles trilogy to be released, Dragons of the Hourglass Mage.  while this is set in the past and not the future, I think I will find the dynamic characters and epic story I am looking for.

And of course, I look forward to the next big Dragonlance story.  I wonder if the consequences of this book will have large ramifications for the future of the continent, but I can’t imagine that they will.  I can only wait and hope.

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Technorati Tags: Amber, Books, Dark Disciple, Dragonlance, Fantasy, Review

Ever since Bag of Bones, I have been less enthusiastic about King’s new novels, and often wait several years to read them.  Don’t gte me wrong, I go out and buy them as soon as they are released, but I let them fester on my bookshelf while I attend to shorter paperbacks.  I did them same thing with Cell and with From a Buick 8.

The funny thing is, once I start reading one, I am instantly engrossed and quickly reminded that, however dull the book appears from the description, it is better than 95% of the books out there.   And once I started, I flew through the 600 pages in two weeks (if I had extended periods of time in which to curl up and do nothign but read, i would have finished it much more quickly).

It’s not great story-wise, but it doesn’t have to be because King’s prose and characters are strong enough to engage you.  It’s no Shining or the The Stand or It, those that we now consider classics, or even Desperation or Needful Things, which are newer classic in my mind, but it isn’t as slow and ponderous as Insomnia or Gerald’s Game. 

I’m not going to go into plot details because the plot itself is irrelevant when it comes to a King review, especially a quick mini-review.  A geat author like King can make even the most inane plot enjoyable (for example, The Regulators, a Bachman Book, released along side Desperation.  Stupid story, but still readable.)  What makes or breaks King are the characters and the pacing, and both are executed well in Duma Key.

It’s a good read, a quick read despite it’s girth, and worth the time.

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Technorati Tags: Duma, King, Review, Stephen