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Review of Idriel’s Children

Idriel’s Children by Hayley Reese Chow is the second in a series of novels set in the fantasy world of Okarria. I don’t remember the events that led to picking up the first in the series, Odriel’s Heirs, but I was glad that I had. A richly visualized fantasy world, complex characters, and vivid writing made that book a winner. I immediately bought Idriel’s Children, hoping it was as good as the first.

It is.

From there, the heirs set off on a quest to find out who is raising an army of mesmerized people to do their bidding. The first book had an army of the undead. This time, the adversaries are worse. The “army” are regular people—alive, but under someone else’s control. Aza feels sure the key to this mystery exists in a place called the Shadow Plane, and she’s determined to get answers. A trek toward the Maldibor’s home, a diversion to see a magician, and other quests make up the majority of the novel.

Idriel’s Children continues the story with the children of the two main characters of the first book as the stars of this novel. In particular, the narrative follows daughter Aza, one of the three heirs of special abilities who exist to protect the world. Aza’s ability is to step into the darkness and disappear. She is a magic ninja with all the mastery of weapons of an assassin.

When Aza’s parents are called away for an important mission, it’s up to Aza and her brother Zephyr to run the school the heirs have built. Naturally, a group of cursed friends called Maldibors come looking for the elder heirs. When they find out the parents have left, the Maldibors settle for Zephyr and Aza.

The encounters and descriptions of people using their sword skills and magic move the novel along at a good pace. The description of the settings (e.g. chapter 13 has a fantastic description of a magical swamp) is far and away better than most fantasy novels. And Aza herself is as complex a fantasy character as any reader could hope for.

Idriel’s Children is an entertaining read and it has a few scenes that stand out. It also has two major reveals at the end, one about a friend and the other, a villain, that really pays off. The friend revelation is especially well done, and to me, a highlight of the book.

The first act has action and exciting scenes interspersed with character-building and plot-developing chapters. The second act is noticeably slower-paced. But the last third is exciting and really pays off.

Idriel’s Children is book two of (at least) three novels set in this world. I’m excited to read the third and find out where Hayley Reese Chow will take us next.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08XLBJJKZ

First book in series: Odriel’s Heirs

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Review of The Uncanny and the Dead

The Uncanny and the Dead is a horror anthology of bizarre and oftentimes lethal transformations. Many of the stories the collection presents have a Lovecraftian vibe with regular people encountering the weird or cosmic. Each eerie entry unfolds in a startling yet creative way.

Eight stories comprise the anthology of varying lengths. One of the longer offerings is “The Reluctant Husband” by C. M. Rosens. A collector of rare books is approached by a wealthy man interested in the arcane, and the wealthy man invites the collector back to his estate. A rare story where the narrative takes a sharp U-turn in the middle and changes from “Should I trust my employer?” to a tale of the macabre. I enjoyed the Lovecraftian tone, channeling said author closely. That’s praise, as this offering seems like a lost gem included in a Weird Tale magazine of yesteryear.

Another effective story was by L. J. Thomas’ “Gunslingers and Garlic.” This one stands out as different from the rest in the anthology. A reluctant librarian teams up with western sheriff to hunt down the vampire who turned him. More grounded in traditional creature horror than eldritch beings, this thriller is a small mystery, too.

“Hitchhiking” by Hester Steel is a fantastic use of second-person point-of-view. The reader is placed in the literal shoes of the main character hitchhiking up a hill when a vehicle arrives and picks “you” up. The twist is the character the reader is identifying with is the weird one. Effective and creepy, I’ll remember this one for a long time.

At the top of the list is the first story, “On Reflection” by Michelle Tang. Again, an effective use of point-of-view as a passenger on a cruise ship embarks on a pleasant holiday. But then why is everyone acting so oddly? And is it possible that the ship, and possibly his cabin, is haunted? This narrative unfolds masterfully with a truly gripping ending.

The anthology is worth a read. I preferred the first half of the book to the second, especially with respect to the variety. I appreciate the pains all the authors went through to make their particular story unusual and disturbing, inline with the theme. But “On Reflection” and “Hitchhiking,” in my opinion, really elevated the entire anthology.

URL: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QP22ZCT

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The Cement City

I enjoy story prompts. Havok, a flash fiction site, provides just the sort of prompts to inspire me. Every six months, they present a theme to authors with sub-themes each month. The subjects may be color, music, or vices/virtues. For January through June of 2023, the theme was the continents of the world.

I primarily write novels, but I also enjoy different challenges so I also construct short stories. Flash fiction (one thousand words or less, usually a five-minute read) is an even larger challenge. I love prompts because they constrain, and I enjoy pushing the boundaries of those constraints while still staying within its borders.

I decided with this theme, World Tour, I would write a few connected stories. I’ve tried this before, and while some of the stories were published, the thread running through them was lost. This time, I vowed to do better.

I think I succeeded.

My story “The Cement City” was published March 20, 2023 (https://gohavok.com). Note: If you’re reading this after that date, it will take you to a different story. After the date of publication, Havok puts their stories behind a paywall.

My short tale establishes the pattern of my series. A secret agent who travels the world looking for supernatural creatures to bring them “home” struck a chord with me.

Art by Dan Johnson

I have entitled the series “DEED,” short for “The Department of Extraordinary Emmigration Delivery,” and the stories will chronicle an agent’s, Rebecca’s, attempts to “bring them home alive.” The variance occurs in the settings and the quarry. Some of the fantasy beings are caught in “human” trafficking, but others are happy to remain where Rebecca finds them. Rebecca’s mission is always different, and she must leverage a variety of skills to rescue, convince, or educate her targets to accompany her to a safe haven.

“The Cement City” is set in Greece and Rebecca has her hands full with this mission. The target is highly dangerous to everyone around her, including Rebecca herself. Worse, this creature has run away on her own. Why did she leave the safety of her sanctuary? That’s a mystery that the DEED agent must unravel.

Enjoy!

Spoiler alert. If you want to know the identity of the supernatural creature in the story, scroll down to the bottom of this page.

Everything Else

Review of Secrets in the Mist

Secrets in the Mist, the first novel in the Skyworld series, is part adventure, part mystery, and all steampunk—a fascinating genre. Award-winning author Morgan L. Busse’s latest combines lighter-than-air transports with class inequalities and a strong undercurrent of Christianity into an unforgettable novel.

Young Cass lives on the streets and survives by thinking on her feet. She comes across the airship Daedalus where she’s offered a job. Upper-caste Theodore (Theo) Winchester is a scientist who cares more about people and science than politics and privilege. He’s concerned about the mist that shrouds the surface and the lower parts of the mountains. And in that Mist? The infected, known as the Turned, seek their next victims.

For the first quarter of the book, Cass and Theo go about their own business until they cross paths. When they meet, the novel kicks into high gear. Close encounters with deadly adversaries, both living and unliving, make for some tense sequences.

Cass’s growth from street urchin to one of the leaders of the ship, and her longing for a home and how she’ll fight for it, makes her a delightful main character. Theo’s righteousness and steady resolve hardly changes despite the revelations he encounters. A third “character” is the setting. All people live on mountains or islands floating in the sky as in a Roger Dean painting. All the elements of steampunk are here, and for once, a real use for goggles than just for show!

While the novel never gets downright horrific or gruesome, the scenes are plenty tense. And the descriptions of the surface world are captivating. As this is the first part of a duology, no one should be surprised that the novel ends on a cliffhanger. Fortunately, the second novel is available.

The style of the novel is fairly simple and straightforward. It serves the purpose of the narrative and never shortchanges the descriptions or the dialog. Overall, the story pulls you in and doesn’t let go for a moment.

Secrets in the Mist builds a unique and riveting world with characters you care about and stakes that are as high as the mountains people live on. The first book kept me turning pages. I’ll be sure to pick up the second one soon.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B093MLRFYW

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Tell A Fairy Tale Day 2023

For Tell a Fairy Tale Day, I’m making available new content.

Read my free short story, The Third Time is not a Charm, about a rogue cat person who kidnaps Snow White.

My new page detailing my fourth upcoming novel, Will Be Done, is now live.

And read my review of author C. Rae D’Arc’s Fairest and the Frog.

Purchase my fairytale-based novels on Amazon: Kingdom Come or On Earth, As It Is or Kingdom’s Advent or Deliver Us or Kingdom’s Ascension

Anthologies. I’m also published in the anthologies Moonlight and Claws, Havok Casting Call , and Who’s the Monster. All available on Amazon.

I’ve published over ten short stories in various online publications, including Havok and Every Day Fiction

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Review Fairest and the Frog

Cover Fairest and the Frog

C. Rae D’Arc’s first entry in her Dreaming Princesses, Dreaming Beauty, focused entirely on Emer, a combination Sleeping Beauty and one of the Twelve Dancing Princesses characters. With her newfound ability to control plants, Emer has recently awakened in her kingdom Somnus and found it in ruins. The awakened princess is determined to find her other sisters (i.e. the other Dancing Princesses). That quest is taken up in this follow-up novel, Fairest and the Frog.

The second novel of the series follows Emer along with two of her sisters: Marin and Pearl. Both were put into a deep sleep after being poisoned. The “dream” they have transports them to Earth in modern times, allowing the reader to view our world through a fairytale character’s eyes. For example, Marin’s examination of a kitchen and Pearl’s dinner of spicy food make for great segments. Each dreaming princess must accomplish a goal to return to Somnus. The two narrative threads follow their fairytale origins closely, I won’t spoil it to tell you which ones. Marin’s sequence follows her original plot more closely than Pearl’s. Pearl’s segment is more of a side adventure within her fairytale. Both have action, romance, and humor.

Marin’s segment is at the start of the novel. She was married before entering the dream so her tale continues with her husband, Ranae, joining her on Earth. But Ranae, in particular, comes over transformed. This setup opens the door for humor and mystery which allows the narrative to glide along as the characters do on a boat on the ocean. I enjoyed having a main character in a fairy tale who was already married as it shook up the traditional boy-meets-girl plot. This narrative also is more like a quest with a puzzle at the end Marin has to solve. That said, this character’s part feels short, and because of the setting, the enjoyable segments of a fairytale princess discovering our modern way of life isn’t as prominent as it was in the first novel.

My complaints are addressed in Pearl’s half of the book. With Pearl, author D’Arc nails the voice of an innocent royal-born-yet-still-teenage girl. In Pearl’s section, she adopts an identity with a guardian and a job at Warwick Castle. Her adventures are a bit more engaging because she interacts far more in our world with characters from the first novel. The scenes with the other characters come off charming (pardon the pun), and her plight by the end of the novel makes the reader feel for her.

The two parts are interlaced with Emer and her band of heroes searching for her sisters while avoiding villainous ogres. Emer is afraid that her beau, Caden, may be more interested in one of her more beautiful sisters. It’s a bit of a stretch as the first novel cements Emer and Caden’s relationship, but Emer’s fears offer an interesting reflection on how our society views women, in particular, what we value as “beauty.”. Her concern about Caden’s affection is a clever bit to add to a fairytale narrative.

Filled with great love for fairytales, the twist of having them interact in our world, and a series arc that progresses, I found Fairest and the Frog hard to put down. If you are a fan of fairy tale princesses and what “comes after,” you’ll love this series.

First novel in series

Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BT4KCZ6H

First in the series: Dreaming Princess.

Everything Else

Review of Animal Kingdom

Cover of Animal Kingdom

For this anthology, Havok asked writers to create stories about animals. Whether they galloped, slithered, or swam, the stories had to have some animal kingdom element in its plot. The variety of what the authors produced is amazing.

I read the stories and rated them based on the entertainment value, the writing itself, and how well the animal was incorporated. High marks if the animal’s characteristics were central to the story (i.e. the writer couldn’t have swapped in any generic animal). I was also drawn to stories where it shed our multi-legged friends in a new light.

Since the anthology is about animals, this review will focus more on the stories with solid “animal” ratings, but I wanted to point out what scored high in the first two categories. The story with the highest entertainment rating, regardless of the animal, was “Theirs” by Pamela Love. This unique take on a familiar theme was satisfying to the last sentence. I went back and read it again immediately.

The story whose prose swept me along was “Change of Heart” by Beka Gremikova. It’s a rare case of second-person point-of-view that works (they often don’t). “Change of Heart”, strictly with its writing, allows the reader to personally feel what the main character is going through.

And now the animal ratings. Both “Theirs” and “Change of Heart” scored high enough to be mentioned here as well. Both used their animals—and to mention what they are is a bit of a spoiler—to great effect. 

It’s rare when I rank a humorous story high on my list but “Negotiations of an Igneous Nature” by Michael Dolan had me chuckling with both the first and second sentence. The story has comedy and creativity in its depiction of how salamanders and dragons are interconnected. 

Speaking of dragons, the imaginative tale of “Taming the Volcano” blends tension, adventure, and heart. Author Cassandra Hamm has taken the tired idea of a dragon as a winged reptile flying around and breathed some new fire into it.

Another highly rated story has pigeons as its focal point. In “Preserving Peace” by S. E. M. Ishida, a lone pigeon becomes a McGuffin in a future society where nothing is as it seems.

Dragons, flying manta rays, and other creative creatures are standard fare in Animal Kingdom, so a simple story of normal birds in cages wouldn’t seem as exciting. Yet “The Queen’s Aviary” by Mia Rumi demonstrates how a well-told story without magic or technology may captivate a reader. The same holds for Andrew Winch’s “Duty.” This fictitious piece depicts a familiar situation, but the point-of-view changes to the dog. In particular, how a dog thinks and reacts.

Finally, I thought “My Friend Pher” detailed the best combination of story and animal. Ronnell Kay Gibson’s short story about a photographer and a Barbados threadsnake exemplifies the bond we have with the creatures of the earth. Humor, danger, and a narrative that could only work with a snake all combined to show why we love to read animal tales.

This anthology contains so many good stories I didn’t mention. I hope you pick it up, cuddle with your favorite furry (or scaly) companion, and read it.

Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BKX3JPR2

Everything Else

Review of Elatsoe

The winner of a Time Magazine award, Elatsoe (Ellie) Bride is a descendent of the Lipan tribe of the United States. But this isn’t the United States you know and love. This is a United States with magic, with ghosts, and with vampires all living together. When Ellie’s cousin Trevor is murdered and, at the same time, sends a long-distance message in her dreams, Ellie’s problems just begin.

The world created in Elatsoe is fascinating and often mirrors our own, especially in terms of social ills. People subtly discriminate and not-so-subtly alienate Ellie and her people as she looks into Trevor’s death. Even knowing the identity of the murderer doesn’t help as the killer is a well-respected doctor (most of this comes out in the first chapters).

Ellie is a great hero for the story. An aromatic, heritage-proud, and magic-enhanced individual, she’s an interesting character. Nearly all of the novel is told from her point-of-view. Ellie drives a car investigating her cousin’s death at a mysterious location in Texas. Her friend Jay is an unconventional sidekick, and most of Ellie’s family and other friends serve the novel well. With these types of stories, there’s often the problem where you can’t have a good-hearted character kill an evil villain, but the villain has such control that calling the police isn’t an option. This dilemma is satisfactorily resolved.

For such a praised book, I was surprised by a few technical issues. An abrupt point-of-view change near the end seemed out of place. I also had a hard time determining if this was a YA or a MG book. I could argue it both ways. Ellie is seventeen in the novel, but she seemed more like fourteen to me. And while I liked most of the book, I thought Jay was a shallow character and not much of a foil or sidekick to Ellie. My last quibble is Trevor tells Ellie everything about the murder. It’s not much of a mystery, though I suspect it wasn’t intended to be.

Overall, this is a fine book for a certain type of reader. Someone who enjoys a relatively clean book (just language and some violence) but loves darkness and weird environments. Someone who can forego a romantic subplot in favor of a rollicking adventure. And someone who likes to see justice done over a traditional mystery. I think a few readers will walk away puzzled, but the ones who stick to the end will likely enjoy this novel.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BRBL9JR

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Review of The Midnight Folk

John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk was published in 1927 to great acclaim—so much so it received a sequel The Box of Delights. I came across this children’s book in search of a Halloween tale in the spirit of The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury. I kept it on my list until October but put it down halfway through that month as the novel wasn’t what I expected.

While I have entitled this post a “review,” this may stray far from a typical review of a book and more of an analysis of how much children’s novels have changed in the last one hundred years. If I had to review it, I would say it was disappointing, jumbled, and tedious. It has long stretches that had nothing to do with the plot, and the narrative was nonsensical at times. Pretty harsh. I struggled to read all of it until I had to adjust my attitude and read it in the spirit for which it was intended. A spirit of a bygone era.

Now, some of my criticism remains. Compared to The Wizard of Oz, written a couple of decades earlier, The Midnight Folk pales in comparison and ages far worse. The Oz series by Baum remains widely read today because it has the landmarks of children’s writing. Though Baum writes down to his readers (a no-no today, and something The Midnight Folk doesn’t do), The Wizard of Oz has a solid plot, creative characters, and memorable sequences. The Midnight Folk lacks all of this.

Again, in the 1920s, books for children were limited and those that existed were fairly dry. After fairy tales, you didn’t have much of a selection. This gap was filled by The Midnight Folk. If you think of it as a loosely coupled set of short stories to engage the imagination of children, it’s a far better reading experience. Witches, talking animals, pirates, mysterious maidens, mermaids along with rainstorms, typhoons, desert islands all combine into a sequence of adventurous stories. The book also has a setting, an English estate with a surrounding countryside, that is perfect for our young character to explore. Unfortunately, there are no chapters, another downside. But if there were, each chapter would be an exciting jaunt for our main character Kay. Where will he go this time and what trouble will he get into?

Once I realized this wasn’t a Halloween tale—yes, the main antagonists are witches but they could just as well be a group of evil women—and more of a disconnected adventure tale, reading it became easier. And I could see how it would inspire children in the 1920s, including Madeleine L’Engle who wrote the Afterword in my copy.

Be warned, it has racial stereotypes that I wish weren’t present, and the lack of chapter breaks is maddening. Nonetheless, I would recommend it to future writers who want to break into middle grade books. This is what you don’t do: too many characters, ex deus machina, bait-and-switch, and long sequences. It should help generations to come write better stories for young, creative readers.

And while Box of Delights looks like a lot of fun, I’ll pass.

URL: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1590172906

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The Three Doorways

A pivotal point in my novel “Deliver Us” involves the characters traveling to other worlds. Three doorways are opened up to allow the characters to travel to a gothic horror, a proper-manners romance, and a dystopian scifi world. Illustrator Dan Johnson has captured this moment perfectly. I’m proud to present it here.

The Three Doorways