Tag Archives: Raven’s Reviews

Review: Empire by David Dunwoody

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Empire
By David Dunwoody (website)
Gallery Books
Trade paperback, $15.00

Reviewed by Raven

Blurb:

The year is 2112.

The crippled U.S. government and its military forces are giving up the century-long fight against an undead plague. Born of an otherworldly energy fused with a deadly virus, the ravaging hordes of zombified humans and animals have no natural enemies. But they do have one supernatural enemy: Death himself.

Descending upon the ghost town of Jefferson Harbor, Louisiana, the Grim Reaper embarks on a bloody campaign to put down the legions that have defied his touch for so long. He will find allies in the city’s last survivors, and a nemesis in a man who wants to harness the force driving the zombies—a man who seeks to rebuild America into an empire of the dead.

Empire was a super-quick read. I breezed through it in two days. It’s sort of a debut; it was David Dunwoody’s first novel, although this is the second edition. The hook for me was Death fighting zombies. His doing that makes sense, right? They’re defying him by being undead, and of course he finds it a tad annoying.

The story is a lot more complicated than just Death fighting zombies, though. There are human survivors fighting zombies and a human villain creating and controlling zombies. I wouldn’t even say Death is the main character, although he’s a major character. It’s basically a sprawling story that takes in all aspects of the zombie war in Jefferson Harbor. We even get to look through the eyes of some of the zombies.

If you like zombie novels, like gore, don’t mind explicit near-rape (I had to skim that scene), and are a fan of cinematic writing, you should like Empire. What do I mean by cinematic writing? Dunwoody’s style moves the story along fast, but he concentrates mainly on plot. There’s not a lot of room for character development, especially of minor players. Most of the human characters spend the book running away from zombies most of the time, and most of the zombie characters spend it running after dinner (humans) most of the time. It was like watching a zombie movie: the majority of it is about fighting zombies. Also, the cast of characters was so huge I couldn’t keep them all straight, especially since some of them had similar names.

I did manage to keep the plot threads straight, although I wouldn’t have minded more clarification of the human villain’s ultimate aims, which stayed nebulous. Of all the plot threads, I’d say I was most invested in three of the storylines, one of them being Death’s. Another one I enjoyed was about a cop who’s just trying to hold things together as well as he can. Given the number of zombies running around, it’s not well.

I’m guessing most people reading this book are looking for a fun romp with zombies, and they’ll probably find it here. Dunwoody’s pretty good at tackling all aspects of zombie-ism, including the impact on religion, although when he touches on that, he never makes a firm statement for or against the different characters’ beliefs. Various powers, animate and inanimate, seem to be hovering around, but it’s not clear who or what they are. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with his treatment of religion. I would have preferred to know what statement he was making.

My biggest problem, though? I concluded I’m not a fan of zombies. That’s no reflection on Empire. It’s purely personal. This novel was my first foray into the world of zombies (unless you count Shaun of the Dead), and my disbelief kept coming unsuspended. For some reason I can deal with vampires, who are also undead, but the idea of scores of zombies shambling around doesn’t seem to work for me. I didn’t put this book down, but I probably won’t read another zombie novel. But if you’re a fan of zombies and you’re looking for the fun romp I mentioned above, you might want to give Empire a shot.

Empire will be available on May 16th.

Debut Review – Three Days to Dead by Kelly Meding

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Three Days to Dead
Kelly Meding (website)
Dell
Mass market paperback, $7.99

Reviewed by Raven

A murdered woman wakes up in the morgue, in a stranger’s body, with three days to figure out who killed her and why. After those three days are up, she’ll be dead for good. With that plot, I couldn’t pass this up. It’s 100% high-concept, as they say in Hollywood. You can hook your audience on the plot with one sentence (okay, maybe two). I got hooked, at any rate.

Blurb:

She’s young, deadly, and hunted—with only three days to solve her own murder…

When Evangeline Stone wakes up naked and bruised on a cold slab at the morgue – in a stranger’s body, with no memory of who she is and how she got there – her troubles are only just beginning.  Before that night, she and the other two members of her Triad were star bounty hunters — mercilessly cleansing the city of the murderous creatures living in the shadows, from vampires to shape-shifters to trolls. Then something terrible happened that not only cost all three of them their lives, but also convinced the city’s other Hunters that Evy was a traitor . . . and she can’t even remember what it was.

Now she’s a fugitive, piecing together her memory, trying to deal some serious justice – and discovering that she has only three days to solve her own murder before the reincarnation spell wears off. Because in three days, Evy will die again – but this time, there’s no second chance…

However, one of the downsides of a high-concept plot is sometimes the book (or movie) ends up being mostly plot-driven, and characters don’t get developed as fully as readers (or viewers) might like. That was the biggest problem I had with Three Days to Dead.

The plot itself was fine. It hit all the right beats in the right places and included a twist I hadn’t predicted to get the characters out of a tight spot near the end (I did predict the subsequent twist on this twist). The story was resolved satisfyingly. But as someone who reads for character, I felt a lack.

Evy Stone, the murdered protagonist, is a bounty hunter who hunts “Dregs,” non-human creatures who would love to replace humanity with themselves. Actually, not all of these creatures are bad, and Evy doesn’t hunt indiscriminately. The novel includes a bunch of supernatural races, some pure evil, others less straightforward. Kelly Meding even manages to get away with elves.

Now, Evy should have been a character I’d enjoy spending time with. I tend to go for dark characters with gray morality and trauma and tragedy in their pasts. It doesn’t get much more traumatic than dead, and I think you could say as a bounty hunter operating on the fringes of society, Evy’s in the gray zone. Granted, she had some strikes against her. She’s a kickass female urban fantasy protagonist, and I’ve kind of had my fill of those. But I went into the novel hoping I’d like her because I liked the novel’s hook so much.

But I had trouble empathizing with Evy. Actually, there was only one character I found myself empathizing with, and he wasn’t major AND he got killed off (it’s not a spoiler since I’m not telling you who he is). The characters served the plot well, but they didn’t give me the emotional connection I was looking for. That made this novel less memorable and engaging than it could have been. Also, if a novel is the first in a series, which this one is, and has a self-contained plot, which this one does, then the main reason I’d go out and buy the next book would be I couldn’t get enough of the characters. If the characters didn’t leave as much of an impression on me as I would have liked, I probably won’t buy the next book (or get it as a review copy).

Of course, not everyone is like me. I’d love to hear from other people on why they continue to buy the books in a series.

My final verdict on Three Days to Dead: For fans of highly plot-driven urban fantasy with a kickass female protagonist, I can recommend Three Days to Dead as a read you’ll probably enjoy. But if you read for character, you might want to browse significant chunks of this novel to make sure Evy’s going to work for you before you commit.

Debut Review – Soulless by Gail Carriger

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Soulless
By Gail Carriger (website)
Orbit
Mass market paperback, $7.99

Reviewed by Raven

Soulless was a fun novel. Mix Victorian England with vampires and werewolves and a coy sense of humor, and this book is the result. I think I can safely recommend it for fans of urban fantasy and Jane Austen (I know, Jane Austen is Regency, but still).

The narrative style and characterization made the book. That coy sense of humor I mentioned? It’s front and center in the tongue-in-cheek narration. In some books the narration is invisible, but in others you want to savor the turns of phrase the writer uses. Soulless falls into the second category.

Then we have our heroine, Miss Alexia Tarabotti. She’s not your typical Englishwoman of the time. For one thing, she’s devoured all of her father’s scientific books, so she knows far more about subjects like biology and anatomy than any proper young lady should know. She’s a spinster. She can negate supernatural powers with a touch. She’s also (*gasp*) half Italian. Shocking.

She’s surrounded by a cast of fun and quirky secondary characters, and let’s not leave out her love interest, Lord Conall Maccon. He’s single, gorgeous, and an Earl, which makes him the toast of London society despite his unfortunate Scottish heritage. He’s also a werewolf employed in the intelligence community, and he leads the investigation that forms the core of the plot. Miss Tarabotti, of course, does most of the actual work.

The plot itself is serviceable, but it’s not the novel’s strongest point. In fact, I guessed who the ultimate villains would be as soon as they were mentioned. They were also flatter characters than our hero and heroine and their friends. And some of the final resolution was just a little too pat. I found it wasn’t the story that kept me turning pages, it was Miss Tarabotti and the narration.

Here and there I had a few technical quibbles. Point of view switching in the middle of a scene. Occasional misused words. However, I was having so much fun with the book that I overlooked those.

I did have one big issue with the romantic relationship, and I can’t tell you what it was because it would be a spoiler. Now, if you know me, you know romance is often not my thing, but I’m fine with it as long as everybody involved acts like a rational human being (I can’t stand storylines where our heroine mentally reverts to a 13-year-old maturity level as soon as she meets the hero). In Soulless, nobody became suddenly immature. I actually thought the romance was handled very well except for that one spoiler I can’t reveal. Sorry.

Overall, this novel was a treat. I’ve already flipped back through more than once to reread particularly delicious scenes. Soulless will be taking its rightful place on my bookshelf.

Book two in this series, Changeless, releases on March 31, 2010.

NOTE: I’m not the one who thinks there’s anything wrong with being Italian or Scottish. That’s the prevailing opinion among London socialites in the book.

Debut Review: The Birthing House

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The Birthing House
The Birthing House (Amazon USA – UK – Canada)
By Christopher Ransom (US Website, UK Website)
UK Publisher: Little, Brown (Sphere) (Jan. 1, 2009)
USA Publisher: St. Martin’s Press (Aug. 4, 2009)
Hardcover
Excerpt (pdf)
Review copy provided by Little, Brown.

Reviewed by Raven.

I started The Birthing House (debut showcase here) with high hopes. A birthing house, which I had never heard of before, is apparently a house owned by a doctor, and women would go there to give birth. The idea behind The Birthing House is that birth, the beginning of life, is just as traumatic an event as death, the ending of life, so it’s just as likely to open the door to evil and result in a house becoming haunted. This concept intrigued me, and I liked the writing style in the excerpt, so although I rarely read ghost stories, I wanted to read this book.

Having read it, I still think the concept is intriguing. I enjoyed the way Christopher Ransom pulls the reader into the head of his main character, Conrad Harrison. However, a couple of things kept me from enjoying the book as much as I wanted to.

One biggie was I felt Ransom didn’t exploit the concept fully. He set up a lot of births and upcoming births (several pregnant women, a clutch of parthenogetic snake’s eggs, and a number of odd, apparently ageless children born in the house). The problem was none of these setups really paid off. Instead the book took off in a different, less original direction, and most of these intriguing mysteries never got explained. The less interesting story we got instead even made me roll my eyes at one point, unfortunately.

I guess I’ve read books before where the author seems to run out of steam in the second half, although I see it more often in movies. Most of the time it seems to happen in works with a high, easily explainable, original concept. Well, this book has one of those. It hooked me with the “birth opening the door to evil” idea. But, as seems to happen with these concepts all too often, the author didn’t explore every angle. So, while the concept made me read the book, I wasn’t satisfied.

So, a note to writers writing strong, original concepts: follow through. In the case of The Birthing House, the whole book should have reflected the birth/evil idea. But instead this idea seemed to go by the wayside halfway through.

I also wished the hero were more active and, well, more heroic. Instead of working to solve the mysteries he was encountering, he moped around and reflected on his past. Granted, his past tied into the theme, but I would’ve loved to see him presented as a guy taking action to whip this house and its ghosts instead of letting them whip him.

But I probably could have forgiven the hero for being passive (okay, maybe I could have) if the novel had been strong in the second half. Can you tell I’m gritting my teeth with frustration because it wasn’t? The mysteries I wanted to see resolved are still mysteries.

Has this happened to you? You’ve been hooked by a concept and disappointed by the execution? It really does frustrate me, because strong concepts have so much potential to become strong novels (or movies) that I hate to see them not do so.