At the moment I’m between books, having finished the last one and not picked a new one yet, so there’s no Teaser Tuesday for the week. Instead I reached into my vast pile of rejection letters and pulled out this one, from The JABberwocky Agency, for a book that you may have seen mentioned here once or twice …
Author: James Viscosi
Teaser Tuesday 2/26/2013: “Ghosts of Rosewood Asylum”
This week’s freebie book is Ghosts of Rosewood Asylum, a novel that I would (so far) characterize as “Grave Encounters” meets The Little Stranger meets my own Night Watchman (though without the gore). Two teams of ghost hunters — one of which is led by a man who has his own ghost following him around — investigate a Chicago-area haunted asylum, site of numerous suspicious arson fires and wandering apparitions. What could possibly go wrong?
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Teaser Tuesday 2/12/2013: “The Last Ringbearer”
Having finally finished Gust Front and having proceeded to polish off Flowertown, I am now reading The Last Ringbearer, a book by Kirill Eskov (translated from the Russian) which postulates that the events of The Lord of the Rings are another example of history being written by the victors. In this telling, Sauron is just another king, Gandalf is a pompous ass who wants to destroy Mordor to stop its incipient industrial revolution, the elves are xenophobic and manipulative invaders from another dimension, Aragorn is a grubby usurper who murders Denethor (who was actually the king of Gondor rather than a mere steward) and keeps Faramir and Eowyn as hostages to ensure the cooperation of Rohan and Gondor … you get the idea. While not up to the level of other revisionist literature like Wicked, it’s interesting enough, and it’s freely available for download in various formats (to the displeasure of Tolkien’s publishers, apparently). More money to buy medication for Tucker!
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Teaser Tuesday 2/5/2013: “Gust Front”
Still reading Gust Front by John Ringo — this is one big book! Since last week’s excerpt was all about running away, I thought it would be appropriate for this week’s excerpt to be about what happens when the invaders reach Washington, D.C., and begin trying to take the Mall and, specifically, the Washington Monument. As a bonus, it’s from the point of view of the same person whose unit was fleeing through Arlington National Cemetery, too.
Teaser Tuesday 1/29/2013: “Gust Front”
Well I’m now at 83% of the way through Gust Front by John Ringo. The Posleen have arrived with an army of a few million heavily armed centaur-shaped aliens. What do you do when you’re outnumbered a hundred to one by enemy berserkers? You do this:
Teaser Tuesday 1/22/2013: “Gust Front”
At the moment, I’m about 25% of the way through Gust Front by John Ringo, in which the alien Posleen are poised to invade the earth. At least, that’s what they keep saying; there’s been no actual sign of the Posleen yet. But I’m sure they will be arriving any time now! *checks watch*
Review: “Beasts of the Southern Wild”
So it’s been a very (very) long time since I posted a movie review, and the Oscar-nominated “Beasts of the Southern Wild” seems like as good a film as any to break the lengthy review hiatus.
Teaser Tuesday 1/8/2013: “A Hymn Before Battle”
So not long ago I started reading a book called Gust Front, which very excitingly starts in the middle of a galactic war between a group of aliens called the Posleen on one side and a Galactic Federation consisting of several other alien races plus the Terrans on the other. I eventually realized that the reason Gust Front starts that way is that it’s actually the second book of the Posleen War, the first being A Hymn Before Dying, which I switched over to and am now reading. No harm done, except that there’s at least one character in this book that I know survives into the next one. Spoilers!
In this scene from A Hymn Before Dying, a friendly alien called a Tchpth, which looks like a crab, is explaining to the President and his advisors why using nerve gases or other chemical weapons against the Posleen is doomed to failure.
“Your vicious and disgusting mustard gas would make me quite ill at lethal concentrations, but nerve gases would be completely ineffective. Despite my oft-noted resemblance to a cockroach or a crab you are much more closely related to your order crustacea or arthropoda than I.”
Oh, snap! Take that, you vicious, backward omnivores (another pet name the Tchpth have for humans)! With friends like these …
And of course, here’s this week’s excerpt from The War of the Ravels, in which Mercy is suffering from altitude sickness, and would like someone to bring her a cup of soup. And possibly a blankie.
A diagonal gust of wind knifed across the cliff face, reminding Mercy that her attic room and her bed and anyone who might bring her soup were all far, far away. There must be somewhere better than this she could be, though. She tried to get up, but her muscles wouldn’t cooperate, as if something were holding her to the ground; after a moment she realized it was Nebandalex, restraining her. “Do not try to get up again,” he said. “The last time, you collapsed and nearly started rolling down the mountain.”
Hmm, rolling down a mountain is bad, unless you’re a boulder. And even then it’s probably not that much fun for the boulder.
“The War of the Ravels”, Then and Now
So lately I’ve been doing mostly Teaser Tuesday posts, which are quick and fun, but for the last post of the year I thought I would go back and do another comparison of an original scene from the Shards follow-up, The War of the Ravels, and the same scene as it currently stands in the draft revision. (The final revision will be done in 2013.) Although the scene name remains the same for the moment, and the activity in the scene is similar — Mercy is still going after Daras-Drûm, AKA the death-wind — the setting has totally changed. There’s no longer a flashback to Yexandor’s place (which in the current version was no longer a temple, but instead a fallen tree) and a certain blue-skinned sorcerer, whose influence is alluded to in the original scene, is no longer involved in the death-wind’s activities. But other than that it hasn’t changed at all.
Teaser Tuesday 12/18/2012: A Plague of Demons
This week I’m reading A Plague of Demons by Keith Laumer, another of the e-books that I downloaded directly from Baen’s Free Library. This is not the sequel to the much-loved A Plague of Angels (that would be the quite avoidable The Waters Rising); rather, it’s about aliens in North Africa harvesting brains. Why? I don’t know yet. Maybe they sell them in roach coaches that roam zombie-infested areas. (Or maybe not.)
Then I re-crossed the street, slowed, and gave half a dozen grimy windows filled with moth-riddled mats and hammered brass atrocities more attention than they deserved. By the time I reached the end of the long block, I was sure: the little man with the formerly white suit and the pendulous lower lip was following me.
Another protagonist being followed by another unskilled tail? I see a trend! Clearly our villains need to invest in a training program for their operatives.
And, of course, here is this weeks teaser from The War of the Ravels!
“They were issuing weapons to every man who could hold a blade,” Cynidece said. “Even you probably would have gotten one, if Aldric hadn’t tucked you into his fancy cab and given his horse a smack on the rump to make it run along home.”
Viscosity 