All You Can Eat

I was lucky enough to be added to Deadite Press's reviewers list, and received a review copy of Shane McKenzie's All You Can Eat from them. It was a cool book.

You can look at it as a sort of zombie novel. They aren't the shambling, undead sort of zombies. These are waddling, grotesquely obese living zombies.  This is caused by a Chinese restaurant whose owner added a secret ingredient to the buffet to make people like his food. The problem is, he added too much, and now anyone who eats his food becomes obsessed with it to the exclusion of all else. If they can't get at his buffet, his patrons will eat anything else they can get their hands on, including other people.

This was a great, fun, gory story that horror fans will enjoy. The only thing that I expect to see complaints about--and I always see somebody complaining about this stuff on Amazon--is the length. As with much of what Deadite publishes, this is a novella. At least that's what I assume it would be classified at as the actual story only runs for about 110 pages.  As far as I'm concerned, anyone who would complain about that is a moron.

The Killing Moon

I love fantasy novels, but these days I don't really read that many of them any more. This is because most epic fantasy has been taken over by these large ever expanding series where you have to read a dozen books (and wait a decade or so if it's an ongoing series) before you finally get he whole story.

You don't have to worry about that with The Killing Moon. This is essentially a stand-alone epic fantasy. Yeah, it's part of the series, but this doesn't have one of those annoying cliff-hanger ending where you need to pick up book two to find out what happens next.

The story is interesting. It's set in a city with a priesthood that can siphon power from dreams to use in magic. In the process they often kill people, but that's usually reserved for the dying or those deemed corrupt.

The problem is that there is corruption in the leader of the priesthood and in the city's Prince. This leads to a nasty monster called a Reaper killing people.

I really liked this book. Even though I've been trying to avoid getting into any new series, I expect I'll pick up the sequel at some point.

Long Island Noir

Well, after a month-long hiatus, I'm back with another review. This time it's not bizarro fiction (though there will be more of them coming soon). This time I'm reading a collection of noir short stories.

I think I should start off by saying that this isn't the sort of book I'd normally read, so even though I'm reviewing it, I'm not going to give it a star rating. The only reason I'm reviewing it is because I got it through LibraryThing's early reviewers program and therefore have to review it. If you're wondering why I requested a book in a genre I don't really read, it's because there's a short story by Nick Mamatas in it, and I enjoyed his novels.

As to Long Island Noir (Akashic Noir), I can say that I didn't enjoy reading this book very much. As it is a book of noir fiction, and therefore full of dark and often depressing stories, that's really not unexpected. I can say that I thought all the stories were well written, and if you enjoy noir, then you'll probably enjoy this book.