Christopher Golden

4.5

Book source ~ NetGalley

Ben Walker, employee of The National Science Foundation (lol, not really - he actually secretly works for DARPA) and survivor of the Mount Ararat incident (among others that are secret) is called in when weird shit is found at an archaeological dig in Northern Iraq. Because that’s what DARPA (The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) does – investigates natural and unnatural phenomena in case it could be dangerous and used against the US and obtain it if at show more all possible. In Mosul he meets up with Kim Seong who works as an advisor and observer for the United Nations. She and Walker had survived the horror of Ararat and if they’re both at this dig, then the weird shitometer is likely about to bury the needle. Will Lady Luck shine on them again?

I thought my heebie jeebies had all been heebie jeebied out when I finished Ararat. Wrong! Sweet Mother of Pearl! Walker and Kim step into yet again. Archaeologist Sophie Durand has been at her dig, The Beneath Project, for months when a small room is discovered off a worship chamber inside the underground city. And off of that hidden room is another hidden room. One that should never have been found by anyone. Ever. Because man, oh man. It’s bad. Ever hear of Pandora’s Box? Yeah, that box. Only, it’s actually a jar. I mean, if it really is Pandora’s Box/Jar. Because, is it? Oh! But guess what? There’s more! When the dig is attacked by jihadists, Ben, Kim, and dig workers have to deal with bullets topside and the jar in the city underneath. You’ll have to decide which option is the worst. Because EEEEEEEEE!

Keep hands and feet inside the car at all times and stay strapped in until the very end because this is one wild ride! Near non-stop action, heart palpitating danger, mysterious happenings, horrifying deaths, and danger to the extreme had me gritting my teeth and leaning anxiously forward in my seat on more than one occasion. Great setting, wonderful characters (I worried so much as to who would survive), history, action, danger, and horror. It doesn’t get much better than this folks. show less

*Book source ~ Library

Calexa Rose Dunhill isn’t her name, but since she can’t remember who she is she names herself from the surroundings in which she woke; Calexa from the crypt nearby, Rose from a gravestone and Dunhill from the cemetery. Until she can figure out who killed her, why she woke up in a cemetery, why she can see spirits and who she is she decides it’s safer to make her home in a crypt. With the unobtrusive help of the old caretaker, Mr. Kelner and an old lady, Lucinda show more Cameron, who lives across the street from the cemetery, Calexa survives for months, but is no closer to discovering anything about her past. Then one night she witnesses a murder and she has to make a decision. Let the murderers get away with it or call attention to the cemetery and hope she’s not discovered?

I love this story and the artwork. Who is this girl? Why did someone try to kill her? Why was there no mention of her disappearance in the papers? What the hell is going on? Gah! I need to know! The teens who commit the murder in the cemetery are fucked up. I mean, seriously, what the fuck?! That is just so FUBAR. Calexa’s solution to reporting the murder is brilliant. Anyway, I’m glad Calexa has Mr. Kelner and Lucinda. Now, if they can just figure out the mystery that is her then I’ll be happy. show less

Christopher Golden will always have a soft spot in my heart. Why? Because when I read the first two books of this Shadow Saga back in the nineties, they pretty much blew me the f*** away. I thought the characters were delightfully historical, especially because it was real historical and interesting characters being pulled through time because they're now vampires, and also because this was on the forefront of the UF movement making an enormous splash and paving the way for the TRULY super show more popular ones that came later.

Only, this one never QUITE took off the way those others did. And that's a real shame. Why? Because of the freaking AWESOME SCOPE. It began with vampires pitted against the evil Catholic magician army who kept opening gateways to actual HELL, the subjugation of vampires who aren't exactly evil, just bound by magic to seem that way, and then there was the whole soul thing. Vampires have souls.

Sound like a common enough UF? I mean, besides an army of Catholic magicians opening up city-large gateways to hell to fight the menace of the vampires that they, themselves, made?

Okay, skip that for a moment. Those were the older books. The characters were pretty much larger than life and delightful but sometimes they were somewhat TOO much drawn with a broad-tip pen if you know what I mean. Very little subtlety. But who cares, especially when you have our modern world overrun with city-block-sized demons and good vampires learning to fight and transform in the daylight, or Peter being locked away in hell for a little real-time but for him it's a thousand years, him coming back as one of the most powerful magicians EVER, and battling it out in some of the hugest OVERPOWERED battles I've ever seen in any modern fantasy. In any UF, even.

So why isn't this more popular, again? Why isn't he revered as a god?

HELL IF I KNOW.

So then the third book came around and tons of my favorite characters died and a very unsatisfying end happened and I got BUMMED OUT. Enough that I didn't bother looking to see if he wrote any sequels.

Hint: He did. Four more.

Guess who got embarrassed and ashamed? That's right! ME!

I didn't do any re-reads. I just jumped in with book 4 after a LONG hiatus. How did it go?

Good. I was pretty much WOWed all over again with the magic, the baddies, the enormous scope transforming our modern world as the big bad demon transported whole towns to hell. En-masse. With lots of blood and gobbling of poor people. And armies stepping in to get stepped on. And even the super OP Peter getting his a** handed to him.

Cool. So cool. It's the scope, the descriptions, the HUGE magic on par with Feist or a number of regular big-magic fantasy authors, only it's ripping apart our modern world. :)

And then there's the conflict and harmony of Peter's infernal magic with the Gaia magic. And the love story with the actual magical whirlwind ripping apart waves after waves of demons.

Was I wowed? I was wowed.

Christopher Golden may not have a lot of subtlety, but his hold on grand ideas, gratuitous satisfaction with big magic and bigger gore, and the whole ball of yarn that is his world-building more than makes up for any shortcomings.

Think BIG SCALE COMIC BOOKS with an independent story that shakes the hell out of you. Doing what only novels can do. There's a reason why he's well known as a comic author now. And it's generally because people loved the hell out of what he did in his early novels. :) I assume.

I know he never lost his knack. Whatever issues I had with book 3 is wiped away with the cool bits in book 4. :) show less

When you're putting together a zombie anthology, there are really two choices you can make. The first option is to have the anthology be full of Romero-inspired flesh eaters, which pleases the hard-core zombie fans, but can make for a boring and repetitive anthology. The other option is to include stories with zombie-like undead creatures, which generally annoys the hard-core zombie fans, but usually makes for a better anthology.

21st Century Dead: A Zombie Anthology, goes for the second show more option, which I think was the right choice. There are about three (or maybe four) stories in the anthology that I wouldn't classify as having actual zombies in them. The rest do have zombies in them, though they aren't all flesh eaters and they aren't always central to the story. I generally enjoyed the stories in the collection. To break things down, there was one story I hated, one story I loved, one story I kind of disliked, and sixteen stories that I liked to one degree or another.

The story I hated was "The Dead of Dromore," by Ken Bruen. I actively disliked the characters in this one, who are a band of mercenaries paid to go into a zombie-infested town to rescue a survivor, and who would rather murder all of the other survivors than rescue them for free. Disliking the characters isn't usually enough to get me to dislike the story itself, but the style was. It has way to many sentence fragments and short sentences for my taste. Plus there's a lot of weird formatting where single sentences are broken up to be spread across several paragraphs, looking something like this:

"Helped there by a combination of

The CIA

Mossad

And the Chinese"

Spreading a single sentence over four paragraphs is just annoying. If I thought it was just a product of my copy being an ARC, I could overlook it, but I suspect that it is intentional.

The story I loved was "Ghost Dog & Pup," by Thomas E Sniegoski, which was one of the less zombie-centric stories. There are zombies in it, but they don't really show up until nearly the end and aren't the focus. At its heart, I would call this one a boy and his dog/ghost story. I suspect the reason I enjoyed it so much is because, being a dog lover, I've always been a sucker for boy and his dog stories.

The story I kind of disliked was "Tic Boom, A Love Story," by Kurt Sutter. In this case, the story was interesting, but as with the story I hated, the style annoyed me. Kurt Sutter is the creator of Sons of Anarchy, and this is his first piece of published prose. As such, it isn't surprising that his story reads more like a screenplay than a short story. It doesn't make the story bad, but it did distract me a bit too much.

Since this review is getting a bit long, I'll just briefly go over the other stories that stood out to me. I really enjoyed Brian Keene's "Couch Potato" and Jonathan Maberry's "Jack And Jill," which isn't surprising as those are two writers I really enjoy. Despite finding his politics abhorrent, and his tale not being an actual zombie story, Orson Scott Card's ""Carousel" was a good story. Chelsea Cain's "Why Mothers Let Their Babies Watch Television" was pretty funny. "Tender As Teeth," by Stephanie Crawford and Diane Swierczynski, was interesting because it was about a person who'd been cured of zombieism.

Despite having a couple of stories I didn't like, this was a good anthology that I recommend for the zombie lover. show less