indie author – The Burkshelf

Shelf Life — Dragon Apocalypse: The Complete Collection Burns with the Fires of Imagination

GDB January 28, 2019 No Comments

Judge this book by its cover. I did, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Dragon Apocalypse: The Complete Collection by James Maxey is a thick-as-a-brick compilation of four hack-n-slash action fantasy novels (plus the original short story that inspired them): Greatshadow, Hush, Witchbreaker, and Cinder (plus “Greatshadow: Origins”).

Just to be thorough, I did a quick image search of each individual novel’s cover art, and my initial thesis still holds up. Badass lady jumping down a dragon’s throat, small woman with big hammer versus ice dragon in a frozen wasteland, dragon attacking ship on a storm-wracked sea, they all check out. And they’re all pretty good indicators of what kinds of stories to expect on the following pages.

Read to the end (of the world)

Shelf Life: Book Reviews

Shelf Life — The Bone Queen is Breezy, but a Gruesome Good Time

GDB July 22, 2018 No Comments

I know it’s gauche to start an essay with a definition, but bear with me for a second, I promise it’s relevant.

Pulp fiction is technically defined by how it’s published, in magazines made with inexpensive wood pulp paper, priced cheaply to be sold and read in bulk. Sometimes this “quantity over quality” approach applied to the stories themselves, but sometimes it didn’t; pulp fiction, like all fiction, is only as good or as shoddy as the author writes it.

But beyond the technicalities of publishing, pulp fiction also developed a sort of overarching genre definition based on some recurring themes that tended to crop up in the stories again and again, regardless of categories like fantasy, noir, horror, etc. — namely, big, bombastic heroes squaring off against sinister, mysterious villains in dangerous, exotic locales, featuring beautiful women of both the damsel and the deadly variety.

All of this is to underscore that pulp fills a certain niche in fiction, and that The Bone Queen by Andrea Judy (disclaimer: another indie author friend of ours for several years now) falls squarely into this niche, so the answer to the question “But is it good, though?” will vary depending on where a reader stands in relation to said niche.

Do I like it? Yeah, I think it’s pretty good. The narrative isn’t deep or particularly nuanced; it doesn’t ask any tough questions or make many thoughtful moral arguments; and the fact that it’s an origin story for a character named “the Bone Queen” means you kind of know where the book is going to end up, more or less, from the word “go.” But it’s an entertaining trip getting there, straightforward and simple and fun, and full of rotten, visceral imagery, dark magic, and bone-crunching (in the most literal sense possible) action.

Read down to the bone

Shelf Life: Book Reviews

Shelf Life – The Grey Bastards Will Ride You Hard and Leave You Wanting More

GDB April 10, 2018 No Comments

Hot take: Orcs are bitchin’.

Big, tough, ripped, brutal badasses, for years they’ve been the go-to choice in fantasy for evil power players in need of intimidating mooks. More recently, modern fantasy has granted them a PR boost, both in reimaginings and in original stories. Black-and-white morality is out of fashion, shades of gray are in, and this gives orcs the opportunity to take the powerful, intimidating, dangerous image they’ve cultivated through decades of villain status and turn it toward nobler (or at least more sympathetic) pursuits.

No character is more interesting than the reformed villain. Put simply, orcs are the bad boys of the fantasy world.

The Grey Bastards by Jonathan French And the warhog-riding half-orc bikers of The Grey Bastards are the bad boys (and girl) of the orc world.

Mix Sons of Anarchy with Shadow of Mordor and you’ll get a world similar to the Lot Lands of Jonathan French’s The Grey Bastards, where gangs of orc-human hybrids ride monstrous swine called barbarians as they patrol their anarchic wasteland, keeping the humans of Hispartha safe on one side by fending off the raiding parties of full-blooded orcs that routinely probe their lands from the other.

Although, confession, I don’t know how accurate this analogy still is when it comes to quality, because I’ve never actually seen Sons of Anarchy or played Shadow of Mordor. I’ve heard pretty good things about both, though, which makes me think the comparison still holds up. Because I have read The Grey Bastards, and yeah, it’s good. It’s really, really good.

Read in the saddle, continue on the hog!