The Rules of Supervilliany, Reviewed

Up next is my review for C.T. Phipp's The Rules of Supervillainy. Gary Karkofsky is an ordinary guy living in a world where supervillains, zombie uprisings and kaiju attacks are deemed to be mundane annoyances, though his own life will change dramatically after the Night Walker, Falcon Crest City's longtime protector, dies and Gary finds his magical, sentient cloak. Imbued with superpowers, Gary decides to embark on his life-long dream of becoming a supervillain...if he can get his wife to agree to it.

This book is a fun, funny read (or listen, I got a review copy of the audiobook). It's an ode to geek culture, and the nerd references come fast and furious. Buffy, Star Wars, Alien, and bunch of others I probably missed, not to mention superheros large and small referenced or parodied. The jokes hit more than they miss, with some genuine laugh out loud moments. The casual inclusion of several LGBT characters is also a nice touch.

My one issue with the book is it struggles to find a consistent tone. Gary, AKA Merciless, the Supervillain without Mercy, almost defies categorization. He's not evil enough to be a supervillain, and not good-natured enough to be a superhero, or even a true anti-hero. The way he flip flops from helping the heroes to hurting them and back makes him almost seem bipolar at times. The book is too funny to be serious but too violent and nihilistic to be a straight up comedy. Didn't turn me off to the book, just bugged me a bit.

The audiobook is narrated by the ever-dependable Jeffery Kafer, who is a perfect fit for the sardonic superhero genre, and he does good work here. So if you like superheros (and who doesn't in this day and age), check it out!

-Mike, out

SNEAK PEAK: The World I Woke Up To

Hi boys and girls!

It's National Novel Writing Month. and in honor of that I have a special preview of my next novel, The World I Woke Up To. It's still very much a work in progress, I'm just over halfway through the first draft. I hope to have it done and published by this time next year.

Here's a brief description:

Kaylee Crawford has always been more comfortable in the company of animals than people, and when neglectful owners dump a big black dog named Beast at the shelter where she volunteers, she feels a special connection to the remarkable animal...one that will come in very handy when, in a horrifying instant, it's not the animals she has to worry about biting her...

As the world collapses around her, she must fight to survive and keep her younger brother safe. As they and new companions both two and four legged embark on an perilous journey to escape the carnage and find sanctuary, Kaylee is forced to wonder: is anywhere truly safe in this brave new world?




Elizabeth City, NC


“What’s going on?” Danny called out behind her.


“Tammy says there’s a marina on the other side of this bridge, if we can get the bridge down we might be able to secure a boat and get the hell out of this place. We have most definitely overstayed our welcome.”

“How are we going to get the cages on the boat?” Danny asked, skeptical of this new plan.

Kaylee sighed. “Cross that bridge when we come to it.” She gestured to the open bridge span. “So to speak.”

They walked up to the door to the bridge control station. Beast walked up first, sniffing. He didn’t seem to be alarmed, and that gave Kaylee some confidence that the coast was clear. She twisted the knob and the door creaked open on rusty hinges. Both trained their guns out in front of them as Kaylee used the flashlight app on her phone to scan the area. The room was clear, so they made their way to the control panel. To their shared dismay, neither saw anything resembling a mechanical backup to the electrical system used to raise and lower the bridge.

Suddenly she heard barking. “The dogs on the trailer,” she thought out loud. A shot of panic ran through her veins. They’d left the vehicles and the two people least able to defend themselves with only a pistol and a sword. Forgetting about the bridge, she ran back out the door onto the road, looking for signs of danger. She stopped to get a better look, but the world around her was pitch dark and the light from her flashlight had impaired her natural night vision.

Danny quickly caught up to her. “See anything?”

“I can’t see shit. Too damn dark.” She switched on the the NVG’s and held them up. She gasped. In the glowing green light she could see figures standing on the roofs of the buildings across the street. All perfectly still, all watching them intently.

“They’re on the roof,” Kaylee said quietly, fighting the fear rising up in her.

“What are they doing?”

“They’re...they’re just standing there. Watching us.”

“Well, if they’re playing it cool we will too. Walk slowly to the truck, start it up, and get a move on. We’ll cover your exit, and be right behind you.”

“Why are they..why aren’t they attacking? There’s at least a dozen of them up there.”

“Don’t know, don’t care. I just want to get the hell away from them.”

They made their way back to the cars, trying not to look up at the roofs too much. Kaylee climbed into the cab and started the engine.

“What’s going on? What’s got the dogs all worked up?”

“The rooftops of the buildings immediately behind us are crawling with infected,” Kaylee said as calmly as she could manage.

“So they don’t see us yet?”

“Oh, they see us all right.”

“Then why aren’t they attacking?”

“That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question now, isn’t it?” She backed the truck and trailer up, or tried to at least. It took her several frustrating tries to get into a position to continue straight on Water Street. She saw the 4-Runner start to follow along as she picked up speed, then watched in fascinated horror as figures began falling from the sky. They jumped from the two story rooftops and landed in crouching stances, then got to their feet and started after the two vehicles. Why now!? Why did they wait til we left to attack? This made no sense…

Well, that's all for now. Stay tuned for more updates, and look for my next book review, The Rules of Supervilliany, coming up in the next few weeks.


-Mike, out.

The Last Ship, reviewed.

And now for something completely different...

Today rounds out my literary tour of the apocalypse. We've seen the improbable alien invasions and the laughable army of mantis men, and now we take a sharp detour into the terrifying specter of a nuclear war, a prospect perhaps more pressing now than any time since the end of the Cold War, with US and Russian combat aircraft now operating on opposing sides in the war-torn clusterf**k that is the Middle East. So with that happy thought, welcome aboard The Last Ship, by William Brinkley.

I usually save my reviews for young adult fiction, though I read plenty of adult fiction too. Can't honestly say why I've decided to add this book in here. I suppose it is a book that will make you want to talk about it. Regardless, this book is very far from being YA, both in difficulty and subject matter. 

In the closing years of the 20th century, the nuclear-powered destroyer USS Nathan James is on patrol in the Barents Sea when something both unthinkable, and yet, felt by many of her crew as inevitable, happens: they receive orders to launch some of their nuclear-tipped Tomahawk missiles at their target city of Orel in Russia. This they do, and then proceed out of the Barents Sea to find the world in ashes. Their war lasted four hours, and that was the easy part. They will now embark on a nearly year long voyage around a world they no longer recognize, where deadly radiation has turned the land to poisonous wasteland, and turned the few survivors they find there, both human and animal, into the walking dead, already decomposing even though they will live on for a few more days or weeks. With their homeland presumed lost, their mission now becomes finding some bit of uncontaminated land that will support them before their nuclear fuel runs out and they become a ghost ship, forever lost at sea. 

The book's narrative is told from the perspective of her captain, Tom (given the last name Chandler on the TNT series, here never named), and he is a vividly sketched character. We see him whole, his decisive outward demeanor and inward neuroses and vanity, his strengths and weakness, hopes and fears. We see him growl at a mutinous subordinate, "Get off my ship." We see him cry after sex (which, fair warning, we see in graphic and rather crude detail. I'm not opposed to depictions of sex in fiction, but I've noticed that male authors, as a general rule, seem to have a lot of trouble writing it well.) 

In fact many of the characters in this book are rich and well drawn, as is the world they inhabit. It's a very immersive book. At first you may have some questions about Captain Tom, given the admiring, almost leering way he describes the physiques of his male crewmembers, and how he "knows nothing of women" and was initially horrified when he learned he would be commanding one of the first mixed crews (the book was written in 1988, shortly after the Navy first opened sea-going billets to women). Tom changes his tune fairly quickly once they are aboard and quickly prove themselves equal to their male peers. One in particular will become especially important. More on her later. 

Captain Tom is also very long winded and has apparently decided to preserve every single word in the English language. If you know me IRL, you know I have made a fairly lucrative career of making myself seem smarter than I really am with the use of a very large vocabulary, so it's been a very long time since I've read a book that sent me reaching for a dictionary so often. One reviewer said that Brinkley never uses a fifty cent word when a two dollar word can be found, so if you're not a fan of big words, or small, difficult words, steer clear. It's also strange, the manner in which he narrates and how everyone speaks. Captain Tom in particular sounds like an 18th century sea captain, more than a digital age Navy man, like a Patrick O'Brien book that swapped sailing frigates for guided missile destroyers. The book is also over 600 pages, the audiobook version weighing in at a crushing 30 hours. None the less, I found myself not being particularly anxious for it to be over, so engrossing the was the story. 

The book is often very poignant, this mostly due to the interaction between the James and the Russian missile submarine Pushkin, which they first encounter off the coast of France. The ease at which the two crews, from nations that just destroyed each other, integrate and come together to eventually form a single community, a single crew, highlights how pointless and unnecessary the war was. You keep expecting tension or outright conflict, but it never comes. We never find out what started the war or who fired first, and both captains seem to agree it doesn't matter. Everyone lost. 

Tom's chief concern, sometimes it would seem more than nuclear fallout or diminishing fuel and supplies or mutinous crew members or violent storms or even a serial killer among ship's company, is the rather lopsided ratio of men to women, and the fact the surviving crew of these two ships may very well constitute the only hope for perpetuating the human race. The book spends an inordinate amount of time working out the logistics of what the crew comes to term "the arrangement", and it's a little off-putting. 

A slight detour into rant territory: At one point during the voyage a female crew member is subject to a violent assault, sadly not that uncommon in real life among women in the military, nor, rather shockingly, even among men. The captain's reaction, however, is diametrically opposed to what typically happens in the real world. In real life these incidents are often squashed, swept under the rug, the perpetrator going free or perhaps a slap on the wrist. They are never marooned on a highly radioactive island, left to die a slow horrible death of radiation sickness or avail themselves to the .45 service pistol the captain so thoughtfully left him. In fiction you often see these violent revenge fantasies towards rapists, yet in real life this is almost never the case. I find this dichotomy puzzling, though I have no explanation for it. I was also put off by the fact the offending sailor is never named, though it makes sense from the Captain's perspective, not want to attribute humanity to a person he has condemned to such a fate. 

One other rant. As I mentioned, many of the characters are well drawn, and perhaps none more so (besides Captain Tom) than Lieutenant Gerrard, the ship's supply officer and highest-ranking female officer aboard (and while we get to know her, ahem, intimately, I don't recall ever hearing her first name. Regardless she is one of the most compelling, best-written supporting female characters I've ever read in fiction...right until the end when Brinkley completely throws her under the bus, in a shocking act so out of character and so inexplicable it nearly ruins the whole book. I got to the finale and wanted to flip a table.  

But while I can't quite forgive that, and for all its other flaws, I still really enjoyed this book. I can't say I truly enjoyed my time at sea, but it surely had its moments, and this book often made me nostalgic for having a steel deck under my feet, watching the sunset over the water from the bridge wing. 

Like the other two books in my apocalyptic book tour, this one has also been been adapted to the screen, though as a TV show and not a movie. While I have come to enjoy the TV show in its own right, if you have come to the book by way of the show, understand they are nothing alike, and the show took only the title and the name of the ship, and the first name of the captain.

-Mike, out.  

Grasshopper Jungle, reviewed

"Those of you who volunteered to be injected with praying mantis DNA, I've got some good news and some bad news. Bad news is we're postponing that test indefinitely. Good news is we have a much better test for you: fighting an army of Mantis Men. Pick up a rifle and follow the yellow line. You'll know when the test starts." -Cave Johnson, Portal 2

Author Andrew Smith's personal mantra is "Keep YA weird." Mission accomplished, Mr. Smith. Singlehandedly, I might add. This is one weird book, like few I've ever read before. If that quote from Portal 2 seems random, it is, yet it still sums up the overall plot of this book as well as anything I could probably generate on my own.

The basics are this. The book is narrated by Austin Szreba, a teenager of Polish descent in the economically depressed town of Earling, Iowa. Like many teens, Andrew is a jumbled mess of hormones, complicated by the fact his best friend, Robbie, is gay and, while he is very much in love with his girlfriend Shann, he loves Robbie too. You would think this seemingly mundane life problem would take a backseat to the six foot tall praying mantises that start hatching out of the townspeople and eating everyone in sight. You would be wrong.

This book is many things, straightforward is not one of them. Andrew interweaves his family history, stories of a mad scientist who created the mantis men, his relationship problems and everyday struggles, even his brother's combat injury in Afghanistan, in a rich, often humorous, sometimes poignant tapestry. It's much more a coming of age story set against a darkly comic (if not gruesome) apocalypse, rather than an end-of-the-world thriller. Not at all what I was expecting. One critic said Smith must have been channeling the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut, and the book is very reminiscent of books like Slaughterhouse Five. The ending, in particular, took me completely by surprise.

It's not my favorite book, but if you don't mind a detour into the eccentric, it's worth the read. Like the last book I reviewed, The Fifth Wave, this one is also being adapted into a movie, with Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, Shaun of the Dead) tapped to direct. I think it should be right up his alley.

-Mike, out.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine...

Getting back to the roots of this blog, I will be returning to book reviews for awhile. I've been on a post-apocalyptic kick lately, probably seeking inspiration for the book I'm working on now. Three books, all about dealing with the world's end, and they could not be more different. One a very good if fairly standard YA thriller, one a very weird YA book that could have been written by the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut, and a very adult book that reads like a Patrick O'Brien novel if Jack Aubrey traded his 19th century sailing frigate for a 21st century guided missile destroyer.

Today's offering is The Fifth Wave, which asks the question, "What would happen if a civilization that had mastered interstellar travel decided they had a beef with us?", and answers that question with "We would get our asses handed to us, quickly." The book centers  on 16 year old Cassie, one of the very few humans who survived the first four waves of the alien attack, and mostly centers on her desperate quest to reunite with her little brother. Along the way she is shot by a Silencer, an alien in human form who roam the countryside in a "mopping up" operation, hunting the last remaining human survivors. Seemingly miraculously surviving this encounter, she is found by a local farmboy, Evan, who nurses her back to health and seems eager to help Cassie find her brother. But the invader's most devastating weapon is the fear and distrust they have successfully sown among the human survivors, making them wonder who is an alien hiding in plain sight, and Cassie must decide if she can trust Evan, who's obviously hiding something...

The other part of the book centers on Cassie's schoolmate and long time crush Ben, who's been taken along with other surviving kids to a military base, and pressed into service to fight the alien invaders. After a brutal training regiment (that kind feels like a weak rip-off of Full Metal Jacket), Ben and his squad are sent off to strike back at their faceless enemies. But something is off about their mission, their training, and most of all their commanders...

The two narratives finally intertwine in a satisfying and thrilling climax, which sets up the next book in the series. The book is immersive and well written, and there's a lot I like about the Others and the way they attack humanity, and shows more realistically how such an advanced civilization would walk over us without any trouble, and the only reason they haven't killed everyone by the end of the first book is (MINOR SPOILER ALERT) not all the aliens are on board with the "kill all humans" plan.

Overall, I liked this book quite a bit and look forward to reading the next book in the series. It's been well received and also has been adapted into a movie starring Chloe Moretz and Liev Schreiber due out next year.  Check it out!

Profiles in (Moral) Courage

Howdy folks! After a very long hiatus, I'm back! Been a busy almost-year. My epic two-and-a-half year odyssey to move out to the country has finally come to a successful conclusion, and I'm halfway done with the first draft of my next book! Working title The World I Woke Up To, it is apart from the world of The Eighth Day, though once again it will center on a group of young people about to have a very bad day :)

(Note: the following post contains spoilers for The Eighth Day) 

So Bruce Jenner is a woman now.

I don't know how you all feel about that, I know that it's so far down on my list of things to worry about it hardly bears mentioning. Personally I don't care. In my humble opinion people ought to be free to live the way they want, as long as they're not hurting anyone else. I kinda thought that was the whole point of America. But the conversations it has started have certainly been interesting to observe.

A lot of people seem up in arms about Caitlyn Jenner's ESPY award. I saw a lot of social media posts outraged that the runner up was a wounded soldier, and they were incensed that she could be called brave in light of what he had done. Let's ignore for a moment that the meme was bullshit and there are no “runner-ups” for the ESPYs....you know what, let's not ignore that. I'm awfully tired of people making shit up to push their agendas. If you find you have to lie to further your cause, you need to take a step back and ask yourself, “Am I really the good guy here?” (Hint: No. No you are not.)

But back to my main point. There are different kinds of courage, and physical courage is no more important than moral courage. In fact, I think physical courage is far easier to come by. It's rarely more than a few blocks away, at your local fire station, police preceint, or military base. Men and women who signed up to kick open a door, no way of knowing what was on the other side; a roaring inferno, a deranged gunman, a booby-trap IED.

It's been said the average person fears public speaking (and, more to the point, public judgment and scorn) more than death. I don't know if that's actually true or not, but from reading dozens of aviation and maritime accident reports I know that some people literally did fear speaking up more than death, and death is what they got. They knew something was wrong, that bad decisions were being made, that they could die as a result, and still they kept quiet. 

I've tasted fear a time or two, battled it back, and moved on with the task at hand. In the end, it didn't seem like that big a deal. What I wish I had was more moral courage. To be able to rock the boat, confront head-on the rampant racism, sexism, homo- and transphobia I find myself surrounded by on an almost daily basis, and not from behind the relative safety of a keyboard. That, I feel, takes a great deal more courage than putting one's self in harm's way. I'm proud of the one time I stood up to a bully for a friend, but the pride in that one shining moment is outweighed by the shame of all the times I could have but didn't. 

I've known lots of people we might call brave, for putting their lives on the line for one reason or another. Yet I can only truly recall witnessing one person who continually displayed moral courage. I was very privileged to serve under a commanding officer who on several occasions stood up to his higher ups when they pressured him to sacrifice the safety of his subordinates for the sake of financial or political expediency. I can't say with certainty that this was what ended his career, but it certainly didn't help, and I wouldn't bet otherwise. And considering I was one of those subordinates, I am eternally grateful. I hope he sleeps soundly at night in the knowledge that he brought all of us home safe. What he did requires a special kind of bravery that I think is far harder to come by than physical courage.

In THE EIGHTH DAY, Kathy Winters never flies or jumps out of a plane, or disarms a bio-weapon, and just barely escapes the two physical altercations she's involved in. Yet I have long considered her the bravest of my protagonists, and the real hero of the book. It is the moral courage she displays at the beginning of the story, standing up for Jay in the most public way possible when he becomes the ultimate outcast, that will ultimately allow them to save the world. She could have easily staid quiet, or even offered support in private. Most of us would have probably felt behind-the-scenes support would be effort enough for a friend in such a situation, but if that's all she had done, he would have gone to jail, and the Last Triumvirate's conspiracy would have continued, undetected and uninhibited until it was too late. Especially for a teenager, who generally doesn't deal with life-or-death situations and at an age where social ostracism can indeed be the worst fate life can dole out, I think her actions are even braver than her male friends (particularly when considering she doesn't know the stakes of inaction, where as they are keenly aware of what the respective outcomes will be if they don't act).

I don't know Caitlyn Jenner personally and can't speak to her motivations for conducting her transition in such a public way, but the scorn and bile already directed at her has only proven her bravery, and if she can use her celebrity status to help see that trans people are treated with the same respect and dignity every human being should be afforded, then I say Bravo Zulu, Caitlyn.

-Mike, out.