Eric S. Brown

First of all I have to say I didn't want to read C.H.U.D. LIVES!: A Tribute Anthology because it was based on the 1984 cult classic horror movie. It's been a long time since I've seen the movie so I didn't remember it well. I got this book because I've read a lot of the authors in it before and Crystal Lake Publishing puts out some awesome horror anthologies. I also loved the idea that it included interviews with a couple of the people who worked on the C.H.U.D. movie. It felt like a love show more letter to people who never forget the horror films they grew up watching. For the record if you love 80's pop culture this book has a lot of references to the 1980's which was a great decade for horror.

One of my favorites of the 19 stories in this book was Strange Gods by Christopher Fulbright and Angeline Hawkes. There's a new religion in the sewers of New York. They worship two gods named Gog and Magog who bring purpose and purity to some but a vicious death to others. I love the concept of people trying to find meaning in a city where homeless people are getting eaten by monsters. I enjoyed the religious references here and the will to survive of the non-believers and how the non-believers come across as normal compared to the ones who started a new religion.

Another good one was Lost And Found by Greg Mitchell. This one is about a Grandpa taking his granddaughter to New York to visit her uncle just before the C.H.U.D's wreak havoc in the city. This story deals with themes of redemption and standing up against the things you fear the most. For a short story it makes a great point on the importance of family and deals with both a physical horror with the C.H.U.D.'s and the psychological fear of abandonment and feeling powerless.

Samsa's Party by Ben Fisher was another one that stuck out for me. This one is about a man whose back has been against the wall his whole life and recently he's been living in the sewer. Things get worse though as people in the sewer go missing and the ones left are changing into something horrible. What I loved in this one was how so much depth is given to the homeless people before they become victims to what lurks in the darkness. Monstrous Me by Martin Powell is in the same vein. It's told in a diary format and follows the story of a woman who is slowly changing from human into a C.H.U.D. I loved how the change happened as the main character loses her taste for food and craves human flesh instead. The author makes you care for this person and then you watch her slowly loose her mind and become a monster.

Reading C.H.U.D. Lives! is like reading a 1980's horror movie if that was possible. Even the stories I thought were mediocre were still a lot of fun to read. Each story seemed to have heroes that had a lot of depth to them while the C.H.U.D.s came across as the ultimate unstoppable horror. In a world of vampire and zombie anthologies this book stands above the rest by being based on a movie that many people probably don't remember. This book is a must read for hard-core horror fans. show less

Here are some good things:
⚫️ This book is full of action and humor.
⚫️ Kaiju are cool. So are ragtag space crews.

Here are some not so good things, and some that are downright bad:
⚫️ The Cap'n Tightpants avatar is overdone and not at all original. Many (most) of the characters are stock characters.
⚫️ As a matter of fact, quite a bit of this story is derivative.
⚫️ This book has two authors listed. Is that correct? If it is, that's a bad idea when only one of them is up for show more an award.
⚫️ Typos. So many typos. Careless ones, too.

tl;dr
This isn't award winning stuff. It is fun, though, and would have gotten a 3 star rating had it not contained so many errors and typos. I think I'm going to check out Cordova & Brown's Kaiju series. show less

Jason Cordova is a nominee for the 2015 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

The shady captain of a merchant starship accepts a job from a secretive government agency, retrieving the database of a spy ship that crashed on Gorgon IV, a.k.a. Murder World. It's apparently not the first time Vincente Huerta has accepted dubious jobs from dubious clients or from the military before, and he'd probably be better off financially if he didn't drink a good deal of the profits. He also has at show more least one ex-wife he owes a substantial amount of money to. It's his saving grace that he has Jasmine, his pilot and a thoroughly kickass woman with no apparent reason to put up with him. She could surely get a better job!

After an encounter with the ex-wife to hire mercenaries, and another stop to buy fuel from a stoner gang called the Wild Ones (no, really, their security is so good their guy on watch is smoking a reefer on duty, but it's okay because they are all badass fighters like Jasmine), the Fancy zips off to Gorgon IV.

It's not at all clear that they knew before they arrived why Gorgon IV is so dangerous it has the nickname Murder World. They seem completely surprised by the conditions there.

At no point does Huerta make an intelligent decision. If he listened to Jasmine more often, he'd make less stupid decisions. Unfortunately, Jasmine has no objection to both of them leaving the ship, leaving the mercenaries they don't know and have no reason to trust unsupervised on the ship, while they go negotiate with the Wild Ones. When Kirk took his entire command staff down to an unknown or otherwise risky world, at least he was leaving competent and loyal Starfleet officers behind on the Enterprise.

And the quality of Huerta's decision-making doesn't get better.

I wish this were being played for laughs. I don't see any evidence of that.

The characters are cardboard. The prose and the plot are clunky. I wasn't overly impressed by Cordova's other sample in the Hugo Voters packet, the short "Hill 142," as I thought its inventions were arbitrary and not supported in the story, but it's professional level work. This isn't.

Not recommended. show less

I hope this is the worst that Jason Cordova writes, because if this is his best and Cordova is up for the Campbell Award for best new writer, science fiction is seriously hurting for good new authors.

Honestly.

Murder World: Kaiju Dawn opens on an a spaceship captain who is something of a skallywag, but lacking all of the amusing characteristics that make skallywag's entertaining and endearing. He's just disgusting, self-interested, and rude. I never quite figured out why I should like him. He show more isn't attractive, evidently capable, or even honorable. There's just no reason to like him. Or believe that anyone would follow him. Heck, I kept expecting his first officer to just knock him off and take over the ship and the job.

The plot left a lot to be desired, too. Talk about predictable...or cliche? Yeah, cliche. And boring. I quit early. Life is just too short.

Look, this is the first thing of Jason's I've looked at, and it felt like a first attempt, a first draft. I'm not sure if the editor published it by accident or if there's a market out there for kaiju heavy plots (a clue: there is, but even that market deserves a better plot, a likelable (or at least capable) protagonist, and fewer cliches. I'll give Cordova a second chance, but I'm not sure I can give him a vote for the Campbell this time around. Maybe next year. show less