James Lovegrove takes us back out into the Black with his second Firefly novel, The Magnificent Nine. Once again, he has an ear for the dialogue and the pacing of the series and translated it nicely to a novel. As the title hints at, the story is a bit of a riff on the classic…
Category: The Book Shelf
Dungeon Crawler Carl (2020) – Matt Dinniman
I thought it would be funny. I had no idea it would be as funny as it. I laughed. A lot, and I knew going in that this was the first book in a series, so I wasn’t worried when it got to the ending and not everything had resolved itself. Carl is a bit…
Firefly: Big Damn Hero (2018) – James Lovegrove
If you’ve been visiting the blog recently, you know I’ve been revisiting the beloved series, Firefly. I’m very excited about more adventures in the ‘Verse, even if it’s an animated one. And while I own, and love a lot of the comics that sprang up following the film, Serenity, I had never read any of…
Screaming and Conjuring (2025) – Clark Collis
Clark Collis delivers a fantastic look at the horror genre and its revitalization during the run of films from the game changing Scream in 1996 to the haunted house Conjuring of 2013. That seventeen years of cinema saw countless genre films released, and it documents its growth and evolution. Collis explores them all, the high-profile…
Star Trek: Across the Universe (1999) – Pamela Sargent, and George Zebrowski
Sometimes I just want to travel with old friends. And the oldest of those friends, are the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, Captain James T. Kirk commanding. As the Pocketbook series continued, the stories have gotten stronger, tying in with the ever-expanding franchise’s continuity. Across the Universe takes place during the original five-year mission. The…
The Hitchcock Hotel (2024) – Stephanie Wrobel
A group of friends who haven’t seen one another since university are invited to an old friend’s renovated hotel, a tiny house that looks somewhat like the Bates Motel. In fact, the whole thing, book and hotel, is an homage to Hitchcock. There are secrets and reveals as the story plays out through its three…
The Devils (2025) – Joe Abercrombie
I was absolutely charmed by this book. It’s like the Dirty Dozen goes on a fantasy quest, and nott only is it filled with great beats, solid action, and fantastic characters, it also has an incredibly sharp with. The narrative follows Brother Diaz, in a medieval world not quite unlike ours, he’s been given a…
The Night House (2023) – Jo Nesbo
Jo Nesbo has made a career of writing dark mysteries and psychological thrillers, but when I came across a horror novel he’d written, I just had to take a look to. It’s an interesting tale, if a little uneven, there are some nice twists and reveals and for the most part, it works well, but…
The Wheel of Time – Book 1: The Eye of the World (1990) – Robert Jordan
Looks like I may be buckling up for another epic adventure as I read the first volume in a fourteen volume series (and these books aren’t short). The Eye of the World is the first book in the epic Wheel of Time series. I was a little dubious as the first half of the novel…
The Star Wars Archives (2018) – Paul Duncan
I took my time coming to this one, but The Star Wars Archives is a fantastic read. Over the decades, countless books and articles have been written about the making of the original trilogy. But The Star Wars Archives, overseen and edited by Paul Duncan may very well be the definitive retelling. There are interviews,…
The Mind Reels 