I’ve enjoyed reading fantasy fiction since I was a pre-teen, but I’d never before delved into paranormal romance fiction. A review of Ophelia’s Julien’s Haunted made it sound interesting, though, and having recently read my first romance fiction, I figured I might as well take the plunge, and I downloaded Haunted. Which turned out to […]
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Gary’s Top Comic Books (of 2012)
March 1, 2013 
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The following post is by Gary Brown and is reprinted from his zine, Oblio. Each year I take some time to look back on the previous 12 months and pontificate on what I think were the best dozen comic books of that period. As in the past, I remind my readers that these are MY […]
Read moreThe Law and Annabelle
February 22, 2013 0 Comments
I suspect that I’m not exactly in the traditional target audience for romance fiction, but the blurb for The Law and Annabelle by L. K. Campbell did get my attention: the book sounded like an amalgam of western, romance fiction, and murder mystery. I thought, man, if you threw in some aliens or time travelers, […]
Read moreThe Lenient Beast
February 15, 2013 0 Comments
Fredric Brown was a master of the flash fiction form long before the term was coined. Back in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, when genre publications labeled such pieces “vignettes”, Brown wrote scads of them, many of which were collected in Nightmares and Geezenstacks, which I recommend if you can find a copy. His other […]
Read moreDownstate Story XXI
December 29, 2012 0 Comments
The latest issue is out of Downstate Story, an annual of original fiction from Peoria, Illinois, and one I recommend to fans of short fiction. Editor Elaine Hopkins assembles a fine group of short stories each December, and I’m happy to buy and read it every year. Her selections usually highlight the strange under side […]
Read moreIs Science-Fiction Dying?
October 25, 2012 2 Comments
IS SCIENCE FICTION DYING? The question may seem dubious or melodramatic, but there’s been a fair amount of talk on the internet about this over the past few years. People in the Yahoo science-fiction discussion groups have discussed it, and bloggers, some of them pros, have written about it. Myself, I don’t know if SF is dying, but it […]
Read moreStupefying Stories (January 2012 Issue)
April 25, 2012 0 Comments
YOU MIGHT WANT TO CHECK OUT THE JANUARY ISSUE OF STUPEFYING STORIES. A few of the stories are so-so; they suffer mainly from a tendency to cram in way too much exposition right at the beginning, though they generally have interesting premises and/or situations. A couple of the other stories are gems, though. “Morality for Alchemists […]
Read moreRemembering Gage Park (a review)
February 5, 2012 0 Comments
Remembering Gage Park by William P. Shunas; self-published through Xlibris; copyright 2010. Available at Barnes & Noble (www.bn.com), Amazon.com, and at http://www.Xlibris.com/Bookstore. Paperback $15.00-20.00. Kindle edition $7.69 A fictional memoir, Remembering Gage Park begins: “I was eight years old when I met Connor. That was they day he nearly put out my eye. You […]
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