Ace Double Novel 37062: The Inheritors / The Gateway To Never, by A. Bertram Chandler Just a quick note about these two short novels that make up an Ace double that I recently devoured after pulling it down from my shelves. The book, an Ace Double published in 1972, presents two science fiction stories about …
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Turn On The Heat, by Erle Stanley Gardner Erle Stanley Gardner created more than the always triumphant lawyer Perry Mason. So prolific was the writer-lawyer that he fed the pulps with stories from the pseudonymous pens of over a half dozen noms de plume, creating dozens of characters pleasing readers of mysteries and westerns for …
The Ragged World: A Novel of the Hefn on Earth, by Judith Moffett This ‘fix-up’ novel* about the interactions between Earth people and ecological aliens was so ponderous and so swathed in psychobabbulous platitudes that I almost began to sympathize with the Sad Puppies.† Almost. Even this pointless set of interminable tales of deus ex …
I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept. The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy, by Marjorie Kelly Returning to a book almost twenty years after its release may bring many pleasures, surprises, or insights. Reading an author’s words decades after they were written may cause us to nod our heads in …
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The Camp-Meeting Murders, by Vance Randolph & Nancy Clemens A fairly pedestrian mystery story is enlivened by its depiction of small-town life in the South and by the peculiar spinster narrator, Bedelia Alcott, who plays the traditional part of the clueless detective in her misguided musings about the central crime, the murder of a Holy …
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James O. Causey’s Frenzy is a scathing noir novel about a vicious, vulpine grifter with big plans and bigger failures, a feral fox among wolves who wish to tear out his throat if he makes just one false step. He makes several. But he survives each beating, each attack, each checkmate by fast talking, flight, …
Some trepidation is normal when visiting a old friend with whom one has not passed any time for many years. One fears that he has changed, that you’ve changed, that neither of you are the persons who once shared the deep intimacies and easy bonhomie that make up true friendship. How pleasant it is, therefore, …
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or, Through the mirror of Curt Hopkins’s poetry, and what I found there The first book of poetry by Curt Hopkins, The Dog Watches and other poems, shows off this American writer’s talent for picking out the poetic shards of life from the collision between humans and the onrushing train of time and thought. In …
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Nightwatch, by Andrew M. Stephenson Too much and too little compete for the reader’s inattention in this barely workable SF book in which the most human characters are robots. The protagonist, though purportedly a human earthman, seems to understand human emotions as poorly as the author understands actual human beings and such things as plots …
Roald Dahl’s classic work of children’s fiction, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is neither very good nor very bad, unlike the ridiculous stereotypes of children presented to us by the author. The book is ‘classic’ in the both senses: old and made into a movie. (Two, actually, but the second does not improve the Gene …
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