An H. Claire Taylor Twosome

Warning – minor spoilers ahead, since these are the seventh and third novels in their respective series.

Jessica Christ 7: The End is Her

“There are few things on this planet that you truly should do, but trying your best to love everyone is one of them, and you do it by making the choice that you will.”

“Even the impossible to love ones?”

“Especially them.”

While I can certainly imagine this interaction between Jesus and one of his friends, I can’t say that I expected to see it in a series that featured him as platonic BFFs with a gay media mogul, took a couple of detours to dream sex with angels, and is named after his sister, Jessica.
Yet, here we are.

This last installment of the Jessica Christ series is perhaps H.’s* finest writing to date. From a practical standpoint, this makes sense because seven books in, you’d expect an author to have such a finely tuned image of the world they’ve created. From a metaphorical standpoint, it had to be: after six books of setup, Jessica is precisely where she is supposed to be, whether she wanted to be there or not. Taylor had to bring her A-game to wrap up all the threads she’s got dangling out there.

Over the years we’ve seen Jessica confront evil on both the small scale and the temptations-of-Satan scale. We grew up with her, navigating friendships, her first period, high school football, college sororities, and small business ownership. We’ve been privy to her internal dialogue with her Father and seen her pull off some of the oddest miracles you could imagine. All through this, she has been drawn inexorably toward her ministry: to bring peace to one of the World’s Great Empires. And here we are.

While consistently full of Taylor’s wry humor, the opening quote is indicative of this novels’ more serious bent toward social justice themes. This should be unsurprising: Jesus and Jessica are half-siblings, after all. And while I imagine that when she plotted out the series, Taylor was not expecting to publish JC7 in the middle of the mainstream acceptance of the Black Lives Matter movement, I can’t help but think that that, along with three and a half long years of the Trump presidency, had some impact on the final product. Whatever the reason, I found this episode to be the most satisfying of all.

To be clear: Jimmy is still creating chaos, the White Light Church is as crazy as ever and Destinee McCloud is just as over the top as she always has been. Everything that I loved about the first six books isstill here, just with that little something extra. It’s a great ending to a great series.

If you don’t mind a little blasphemy with your humor, this is a good enough series that even after buying the ebooks, we ordered paperbacks straight from the author to support her writing career. If you’re curious about the series but not ready to take the plunge, you can read a free short story featuring Jessica here

Killhaven Police Book 3: Shift out of Luck

While “Brock Bloodworth” is a figure with something of a sketchy past, H. Claire Taylor’s husband is a police officer in Texas, so as far as police procedurals go, this one’s got some pretty good fact-checking. Well, maybe not fact-checking per se (the vampires, were-things and such are probably imaginary), but at least the procedure part is probably right.

This is the third story featuring Normal Green, the only pure human on the Kilhaven Police’s Fang 900 shift. In a way, he’s kind of like Judy Bunny from Zootopia: all he has to keep himself alive and serving-and-protecting in a world filled with paranormal predators is his heart and determination. After his initial training in book one with his werewolf FTO, Heather Valance, Green has hit the streets for real, chasing down meth-addled lycanthropes, breaking up leprechaun fights, and discovering that not everything in Kilhaven (and the rest of the world) is quite what the powers that be want people to think.

This is where we find him in Shift Out of Luck. The first two books hinted at something being not quite right between the vampires and the rest of the population. There is, at least on paper, a truce in place that keeps everything peaceful. But when Green, Valance, and others in the Fang 900s start to connect the dots between missing were-children and violent flare-ups in other parts of the world, it becomes clear that the established social orders aren’t just crumbling, they may have already collapsed.

Just as with the Jessica Christ series, these books aren’t for kids. There’re sex and violence and drug use and all the things you would expect from books with this sort of premise. Who they are for is anyone who likes detective stories and is up for a clever, paranormal twist on the genre. I tore through this one the day it came out and I can’t wait for book four.

*I like to think myself funny by referring to her as H. rather than Claire. I’m probably not, but I like to think so anyway.

Kindred, by Octavia Butler

Like many folks right now, the issues surrounding George Floyd’s murder has got me thinking about my own place within an unequal society. I’ve spent time reflecting on the times when I myself have been part of the problem, either through conscious action or through casual inaction. This is “deep thinking” stuff and while I’m making a point of reading some nonfiction books on race relations (stay tuned for future reviews), nonfiction has never really been something I read for enjoyment. It should come as no surprise that 99% of what I’ve read during my life (that wasn’t assigned by a teacher) has been science fiction or fantasy.

I definitely came as a surprise to me that when I looked over my bookshelves, I was hard-pressed to find any authors of color there. Like, any. This was by no conscious decision on my part, it just sort of happened. In middle school, I went through a serious Piers Anthony kick, spurred by the Xanth series that was for sale at the Scholastic Book Fair. During high school, my reading selection was most often influenced by which omnibus Science Fiction Book Club tomes had the best novel-per-price cost. More recently, I’ve picked up books by recommendation or ads, or for my kids (such as the Percy Jackson series).

Now, if you were to tell me that Suburban Houston book fairs and multi-book contracts from large publishing houses favored one racial group over another, it wouldn’t come as a major shock. In terms of my own personal selection, though, it was through pure happenstance.

So…I was ready to pick up a new book, there are people of color writing fantasy and sci-fi, why not grab one of theirs instead of another Heinlein or Donaldson or Stephenson? And that brings me to today’s book: Kindred, by Octavia Butler, a writer who won two Hugos, two Nebulas, a Locus. Seems like a pretty darn good place to start.

Kindred begins in the 1970s (the same decade the author wrote it), and while it is technically a time travel story, it’s definitely not your typical sci-fi with lasers, aliens, or other obvious tropes of the genre. Dena Franklin, a Black woman married to a White man, finds herself mysteriously transported from her living room to what she later learns is the antebellum South. There, she discovers a little boy (Rufus Weylin) drowning in a river, and she does what anyone would do – she wades out to save him. After Dena administers rescue breathing, the mother, rather than being grateful, hurls slurs at her. When the boy’s father shows up with a gun, back to the twentieth century our heroine goes. This is only the first of many such experiences, and to avoid spoilers I will only say that she and the boy are powerfully linked, with her trips “back” coinciding with other times the boy was in mortal danger.

Ok, so maybe it’s a little tropey, but where many stories like this would take the path of silliness or romance, this story uses the trip to narrate the daily lives of African slaves and their owners from the perspective of a modern-day Black woman. Suffice to say, it’s not pretty. We see, through Dena’s eyes, the brutality of the masters, the overseers, and the “patrols” that traveled about to catch runaway slaves (which made me immediately think of John Oliver’s recent, excellent, monologue). We also see the Black-on-Black racism that Ibram X. Kendi describes in his 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist. The house slaves look down on the field slaves, and the field slaves look back at the house slaves with disgust. Most interesting was the love/hate relationship between Rufus’ family and Dena herself. Having seen her disappear into thin air only to return to once again save the boy’s life, the Weylins knew that she wasn’t like the other slaves. And, of course, the fact that she was far more literate than any of the nearby Whites made her stand out even more. Yet, when all was said and done, their sense of entitlement and superiority kept them from seeing her as anything more than just another ****** whose purpose was to serve her masters. After all, she kept showing up to save the plantation’s scion, just like a good slave would.

This book isn’t for the squeamish – there are lynchings and whippings and rapes. This is definitely no romanticized Gone With the Wind version of the antebellum South. But then again, perhaps it is for the squeamish after all. With all the people complaining about taking down statues or the removal of the confederate flag from NASCAR because “it’s heritage, not hate,” perhaps a little reminder of exactly what that heritage was is just what’s called for.

Age of Night by Amanda Kahl

I stumbled across Age of Night purely by coincidence. I was running in and out of my local independent bookstore The Briar Patch to pick up a book I’d ordered for my son and Amanda Kahl, AoN’s author was there with a table, in costume, offering to sign copies. She had just published the third compilation of her webcomic and in pure independent author solidarity I asked the cashier to ring up one copy of each, and because I was in a hurry I’d pick them up the next time I came through.

Me being me, I then promptly forgot about them. The next time I was at the store the owner mentioned that I had some books waiting for me, which was delightful. It was like Christmas coming early (or, I guess, late). I took them home and got right to work reading them.

Drake and Thelonius are best buds, each running away from their own unpleasant past. Drake is the current incarnation of a demigod traditionally used by (and chained to) the high priestess, and in his past lives was often little more than a blunt-force weapon. Thelonius is a trained assassin who fled the forced retirement that would have come from the marriage his family had arranged for him. The pair stumble into Rhonwen, a newly minted healing mage off to her first job and Kamaria, a thief living outside the good graces of the guild. The series is subtitled: “Search For Freedom: Find Your Place,” which perfectly describes what all the characters is trying to do, each in their own way.

Not wanting to spoil any of the story’s fun, I will leave the details out, but the foursome embark on a continent-spanning quest fraught with danger. A second set of relatively minor characters engage in a parallel journey of their own, with the two groups occasionally interacting. By the end of the third volume, the two are completely at odds, and I’m somewhat irked that the current encounter is as yet unresolved.

These are graphic novels, so are a relatively quick read. Kahl is both a gifted writer and a gifted artist: the primary characters have deep, well envisioned backgrounds and motivations, and many of the panels can only be described as exquisite. As I finished each volume (which includes exclusive mini-stories along with concept art) I eagerly reached for the next. And for those who don’t want to wait for a compilation, Kahl has a Pateron available for as little as $1 a month. Age of Night has a presence on Facebook as well, where you can find (among other things) some pretty cool videos of her drawing and inking her strips.

Buy if: I’m actually gonna stop doing this. If I take the time to post one of these, assume that it’s worth buying if you find the concept interesting. I don’t have time to finish reading books I don’t like, and I definitely don’t have time to post about them.

Age: 11+

The Quest for Perfection (Is a Damn Fine Thing) by Chris Patrick

Chris Patrick’s first novel, The Quest for Perfection, is a fictional docu-novel about what happens when the best of scientific intentions are hijacked and sent awry by the taint of self-interested financing. The novel’s narrator slips back and forth between reporting transcribed conversations with the only survivors of a botched (and deadly) set of experiments and traditional third person narration based on those conversations.

Tom and Issie, a married pair of neuroscientists, experienced a family trauma that focused their research on creating a perfect, virtual, world within an individual’s own mind. If, they reasoned, they could determine just what it took to make others whose lives had crumbled experience perfect happiness, perhaps they could recapture their own lost bliss. Full of ideas but empty of funds, they pitched their theories to the eponymous director of the Wells Foundation, a future-oriented organization full of funds but empty of scruples. Harold Wells isn’t so interested in happiness. Rather, he latches on to the fringe possibility that the human brain could be trained to perform extraordinary feats within the virtual world, then bring that ability to the conscious world.

Almost from the get-go, the experimental process experiences problems. The study’s volunteers begin to die. The subjects still alive began to experience flickers of their old, broken lives. The scientists watching from behind the glass begin to have second thoughts. And of course, none of this is taken well by the Foundation.

Patrick’s story is great. Really great. The characters are compelling, the plot interesting and even a little exciting. I loved this story.

But…the initial version released in February 2019 is riddled with typos. These run the gamut from simple misspellings to what look like incompletely replaced sentences with multiple versions of pronoun/verb combinations. They occur pretty consistently throughout, although there are some pretty clean stretches that let me get into a reading groove. None were such that they ruined my enjoyment of the story, but they did have the effect of bumping me out of the immersion. This is a real shame; as I mentioned above, I loved the story. I reached out to Chris before publishing this review, and he assured me that he went back through the novel and fixed all the errors. Assuming this is true, I have no reservations about recommending the book.

I have previously read Patrick’s two short story anthologies, and neither of them suffered from these sorts of mistakes, so he clearly has a talent for writing. I think I was just unlucky to have picked up the book before all the bugs had been squashed. Lord knows my own late-drafts continued to have errors in them that I needed help finding and correcting.

Age: Teen+

Buy if: You’re willing to overlook some issues with the prose to lose yourself in a current-day sci-fi what if.

Don’t buy if: Typos ruin your reading enjoyment. Instead, put it on your Amazon wish list and check back in a few months. As noted above, this concern has apparently been corrected. Unless the story itself does not interest you, this is a solid purchase.

Sister of the Circuit by Amanda Orneck

I first read Amanda Orneck’s writing during the Nerdist novel contest that brought Its All Fun and Games to print back in 2016. She writes strong female characters in clever, well fleshed out worlds, and I quickly became a fan of her writing. Sister of the Circuit, originally titled Deus Hex Machina (which I thought was the coolest title ever), is about Isidore RAM, an up and coming devotee within a techno-theocratic nation state in what is current day California. Among her duties as an initiate for the Church of Technology include patrolling the virtual world to ensure that the sanctity of the design code is maintained. In essence, she’s a bug-quashing zealot.

On her final test before officially becoming a member of the clergy, she is contacted by a rogue element within the system. This experience results in her being both excommunicated and banished from the only home she’s known for the majority of her life. All of this happens within the first couple chapters, leaving the rest of the book to detail her adventures outside her cloister as she first to prove her innocence and return to the fold. As you might expect, these adventures introduce her to a wide cast of characters, both friendly and malevolent, and yield discoveries that cause her to grow as a person and begin to question the fundamental truths that had guided her life. And, of course, behind the scenes, the Church’s high priestess has her own plots at work.

Sister of the Circuit is a solid cyberpunk read, substituting the Church for the omnipowerful corporations pulling the strings in a Shadowrun-esque world, and sprinkling in a couple dollops of combat mechs for good measure. The characters generally have solid motivations driving their individual choices, though I’m a little flummoxed by why one particular one acted as they did (either I missed it or it’s a legitimate deus ex machina). The novel ends on not one but two cliff hangers left to be resolved in future installments. I’ll be grabbing it as soon as it is released.

Buy if: You’re a fan of Shadowrun or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (That’s not to say that Orneck’s writing is as good as Stephenson’s but that her merging of the “real” and virtual world makes me think of Snow Crash)

Don’t buy if: You’re not a fan of Sci Fi or find the premise of an increasingly important virtual world one disbelief too far for suspension.

Age: 13+

Critical Failures by Robert Bevan

Anyone familiar with my writing knows that I love a good portal fantasy. People from our world thrust into a world of magic and adventure has almost limitless possibilities in how the story could proceed. My own first experience with the genre was a series of books by Joel Rosenberg called Guardians of the Flame that I read back in High School in the late 80s. So when I saw an ad show up on my Facebook feed a few years ago advertising a portal fantasy comedy series, it was an easy bite. This isn’t a 2019 read per se, as I read the latest installment last year.  But on a recent drive taking my daughter back to college I bought book one on Audible because I’d heard great things about it.

In gaming a critical failure typically results from rolling a 1 on the die, and often leads to hilarious mishaps (here’s a famous meme example), and Bevan’s characters are, themselves, a bunch of failures. Tim runs a sketchy fast food restaurant called the Chicken Hut, and Cooper and Julian are adults whose professional careers have peaked at the role of Pizza Delivery Boy. After annoying their new “Cavern Master” Mordred with off color jokes about his appearance, his mother, and any number of other things, Mordred uses his magical dice to send them into the C&C world to fend for themselves.

Unfortunately, the very last thing that Cooper did in the game before this happened was to jokingly chop the head off a local guard.  I mean, he was just an NPC anyway, and not even an important one, so why not? Unsurprisingly, the local militia has a very different opinion and the disoriented players suddenly had to deal with the consequences of their idiocy.

This begins a series of (mis)adventures that span six full length novels and thirty or so short stories. The vast majority of the humor is off color, juvenile, and either focused on someone’s mother’s loose morals or related to farts and other bodily functions. Cooper’s character is, after all, not only a jerk, but also a half orc with a Charisma of 4. For those unfamiliar with D&D and similar games, this makes him not only universally unlikeable but almost guaranteed to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, often accompanying his verbal diarrhea with literal poop dripping down his legs. For some, this line of humor will quickly go stale. For others (like me) it never seem to get old, just like people still find “That’s what she said” funny all these years after its first utterance.

And just in case there was any doubt, the series’ tag line is “Swords, Sorcery, D*ck Jokes,” and one of the novels is subtitled “The Phantom Pinas.” A pinas is a boat, but, well, you can guess where the jokes went with that one, especially since a pinas is a kind of junk.

One last thing to mention is that the audio book is every bit as great as I had heard. The voice actor plays with accents, affects and volume to give each of the main characters (and some of the minor characters) distinct personalities in a way I haven’t always heard. If you’re an audiobook person, this is a great one.

Buy if: You like stupid, rude, or raunchy humor in your fantasy.

Don’t buy if: You are easily offended or under 16 (and even that may be pushing it)

Age 16+

The Animal in Man by Joseph Asphahani

Maxan is a fox. Scratch that. Maxan is the only remaining fox, after first his family and then his friends in the rogue’s guild were killed. With nowhere else to go, he enlists in the city guard, using his natural stealth and cleverness to act as a scout and rooftop observer. This job has become only more important over time, as an increasing number of the town’s residents slowly return to their species’ wild, feral roots.

On one mission into the city’s quarantined districts Maxan makes several stunning discoveries. First, he is not the only living fox, after all. And second, this new vixen is a member of a shadowy organization charged with guarding the world against ruination caused by misuse of ancient technological artifacts. Unfortunately, the leaders of an upstart religion and their secular pawns want those artifacts for their own use.

It’s not long before Maxan and his only friend – a rhinoceros, of all people – find themselves in the midst of this shadow war, uncertain of whom to trust but nonetheless feeling the need to act. And, of course, there is the question of the buried technology’s origin. Who created it, and how does it relate to the animals’ recent sentience and self-awareness?

The Animal in Man uses as its guide Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and it’s not at all hard to draw parallels between Asphahani’s story and mankind’s own struggle to put aside its violent tribalism and build a sustainable, peaceful society. It is absolutely not preachy, however, so don’t worry about being talked down to.

This is the first of a planned trilogy, and promises a deep, engaging story.

Buy if: You like a good, rollicking fantasy but also like to think about deeper questions about life.

Don’t buy if: You are looking for a breezy read. There’s a good deal to chew on here.

Age: Teen+

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

We Are Legion (We Are Bob). What an absolutely absurd title…how could you not love it? I received this book as a Christmas gift from my nephew’s fiancé this year – she had recently read it and though that I would like it as well. She was absolutely right.

The (sub)titular Bob begins the story as a tech mogul who had just cashed out of his startup for the dreamed-of fabulous riches. Among the first things he did with the money was to sign a contract with a cryo-preservation company to save his body upon death, bringing him back when whatever killed him had been cured. It’s not a bad plan, I guess. I could swear I heard that Walt Disney did it years ago. Maybe that was just urban legend, but I’m too lazy to take the 15 seconds to actually google it.

As one would expect, Bob does in fact die. When he wakes up, however, it’s not to a miracle of medicine bringing him back from the dead, but to the new reality that his body went to the old meat grinder and all that’s left of him is an AI imprint. It turns out that there is a new space race, with nation-states vying to be the first to send off their exploration probes to the stars. And guess who gets to pilot those drones? You guessed it, the AIs!

Advances in mining technology an 3D printing means that when Bob gets to his first stop, one of his first priorities is to build additional probes and copy himself into their newly built AI systems. Interestingly, while they may well become legion, they are not all Bob. Each replicated imprint is a little twist on basic Bob, with different parts of his underlying character being more or less prominent on each new copy.

In addition to the quite enjoyable plot following Bob from the current day US to the future, the book touches lightly on what it means to be human and be alive. It’s a nice extra layer on which to chew as you read, but not central to the story that this can’t be a bedtime read. There are two additional books in the Bobiverse series, and I’m looking forward to reading each.

Buy if: You’re a SF fan, especially if you like space exploration

Don’t buy if: You are looking for galactic space battles or aliens. Humans are the only advanced sentients

Age: Teen+

Eastwind Witches Book 9 (Hallow's Faire in Love and War) by Nova Nelson →

My first book of the new year was the latest installment of a series I followed all throughout 2018. I picked up the first Eastwind Witches cozy mystery purely on a whim and a recommendation by an author friend of mine, H. Claire Taylor.  I’d never heard of “Cozy” as a book descriptor before, and she explained it meant no bad language and no on-screen sex. Ok, I don’t put any of that in my books either, so for 99 cents, why not give it a try?

Crossing Over Easy tells the story of Nora Ashcroft, high performing Texan restauranteur, who dies and “crosses over” to the town of Eastwind. She soon discovers that not only is she a witch (with a sarcastic, lazy, bacon-loving familiar the size and shape of a newfie), but the special kind of witch that can communicate with spirits. The only other Fifth Wind witch in town takes her under her wing, and Nora soon finds herself solving a murder mystery. It seems that the ghost of the departed had some unfinished business.

These are not deep literature. They are fun, light, peppered with humor and a touch of romance. There is a touch of the love triangle that I typically avoid, and several books in it becomes a love square (pyramid?). The books themselves are quick reads though, and most of the stories focus on the underlying mysteries, so if you want to skim through the triangle/square stuff it’s easy to do. Having said that, I’ve bought each new novel on release date so I could find out what happens next. That’s about as ringing an endorsement as I can give.

Buy if: You enjoy supernatural stories, particular murder mysteries, you are looking for a light reading diversion, you like “romance” stories but more in a flirty way than a bodice ripper

Don’t buy if: You are looking for heavy duty spell-slinging, or explicit romantic scenes.

Age: Teen+