I just finished reading all three Thrall books back-to-back. If you’re a fan of vampire pulp, or werewolf pulp, or a mashup of both, then this is for you.

Several steamy sex scenes per book, as required by the genre. Not so many as to be tawdry, and not so few as to disappoint and be conspicuous by their absence.

The whole thing is told first-person by a character who gets nicknamed “Buffy” as in vampire-slayer, by one of the other characters.

Very action packed – like a mission impossible episode, or a cheap Taiwanese kung-fu action flick (you know, the ones with the dialogue in Cantonese, and subtitles in Mandarin). The authors have created a rich enough world, with enough hints of back-story and history before the action begins that the world is compelling right away.

However, by the end, I was getting a little tired of the main character narrowly missing disaster and emerging victorious – there’s an improbable save nearly every 20 pages. The diving saves kept getting less and less believable and more and more implausible as the story progresses, even for a vampire/werewolf series, where as a reader I’ve already agreed to suspend disbelief.

The ending in the final book was rushed and felt way too quick. Like the authors had a contract for a set number of pages and had planned poorly and suddenly ran out of pages, and so rather than go back and rewrite some of the middle to get more room, just rushed through to the end.

Ah well. Worth the $5 for each of the three books in paperback.

This is my favorite Clive Barker book ever. A long epic story that takes you thru multiple adjacent worlds effortlessly and engagingly. I’ve gone back to re-read it a number of times now. There’s magic and mayhem reminiscent of Roger Zelazny’s Amber. Horror that puts you in mind of Stephen King’s The Stand. Fantasy that puts you in mind of J.R.R. Tolkien. And all deliciously combined in a way that cannot be matched by any other author.

Abarat (a young adult book by Clive Barker) is Imajica for the weak. Good, but not the full-strength stuff. But you, gentle reader, want the real thing.

An article I wrote in 1995 appears on page 339 of this German-language book about the internet.

Well, I read one of the other Crimson Moon novels a few years back, (either #1 or #2, since the events in that novel pre-date this one) and somehow picked this one up at the bookstore without recalling I’d already started the series.

Pretty standard supernatural vampire werewolf thriller genre. Hot female lead character. Lots of slobbery bad guys (the bad guys are Vampires in this universe, and the wolves are (mostly) good, and the humans are mostly naieve). Less sex than average.

Good character development. A complex plot is carried forward from the previous one I read, but without so much mind-numbing complexity (see my review of the Malazan series) that I couldn’t pick up where this book started, and didn’t feel the need to go back and find the other one so I’d understand what the heck happened.

Will definitely be looking for the rest of the series now.

got this from the bargain bin at a local bookstore.

it’s a slow-moving but interesting account of the personal histories of some important dead mathematicians. along with some of their most important work.

probably not worthwhile unless you have an interest in the personalities behind the work, and some interest in the work itself.

One might try to compare the Malazan series with

• Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove
• Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind
• Lazarus Long series by Asimov
• Lord of the Rings by Tolkien

But the only similarities that I can find is that they use the same alphabet. And even then, not so much, given that Tolkien invented several new ones for his books.

Malazan are unecessasrily confusing, complicated and convoluted. The series I mention above each demonstrate that you can write a long series of fantasy books with lots of characters and locations without losing all your readers along the way. This series fails to do so.

No better than bad samizdat fanfic newsletter writing. Yes, I know some fanfic is fabulously good, but when it’s bad it’s shamefully bad. Except that in the case of Malazan, it’s expanded to an enormous number of thick tomes thru some demonic pact with an evil publisher seeking to destroy your will and eat your soul.

Perhaps a better comparison would be to vampire-pulp series like

• Rachel Morgan series by Kim Harrison
• Anita Blake series by Laurell K Hamilton

except that both of these series are still way better written, plotted, scripted and executed. So it’s still not a fair comparison, since after reading Malazan you the reader and not a character in the books, end up as a drooling shuffling undead meal for a vampire.

Then I realized I knew exactly where this sort of writing comes from. An automated markov chain prose generator program makes exactly this sort of mind numbing mishegas. I once wrote a generator like the one the author must have used on my own website to produce candidate holywood movie plots (hit refresh a few times to see it generate a new plot with each refresh)

Okay, I’ve now read seven of the Anita Blake novels back-to-back (yes this is number nine, but I read 1-6, then 9 and still have remaining on the nightstand 10,13. I got confused in the bookstore buying, okay).

This one develops the Edward character much more fully, and very vividly. The dramatic tension is much better now, and and the internal dialogue inside Anita is better.

And the monotonous repetition of description that was really hurting my enjoyment of the first few novels has finally gone by the wayside. Laurell K Hamilton still repeats herself far too often, but reading all these back to back is actually insightful in that I can see her growing in strength as an author from book to book. A bit like a vampire getting older and and stronger. Heh heh.

I know a bit about native religions in mesoamerica, and it’s an interesting thesis that Hamilton puts forward about who the “gods” really were. One that makes me chuckle (in a good way) all the way thru the book, actually. On the otherhand, Hamilton may have done some research into it, but not much more than Professor Dallas, a character in the novels, whose research seems to consist of watching a vegas-style show at a nightclub of an aztec religious ceremony.

The fourth of the Anita Blake series. Again, not as tasty as Kim Harrison’s work (Rachel Morgan) but better than some of the vampire-pulp genre. Lots of biting, even if there’s not so very much sex. Of course, biting is a proxy for sex in vampire books, and we all know that.

It still annoys me that Laurell K Hamilton seems to keep a bunch of descriptive phrases on “auto fill” in her word processor.

For example, every time someone sits with correct posture it doesn’t always need to be followed by the exact words “My stepmother, Judith, would have been proud.” At least mix it up and say “Judith still bemoaned the fact that I never sat that way. I always disappointed my stepmother.”

Descriptions of guns are word-for-word identical between the books. Stuff like that. It’s not endearing, and it’s actually starting to get in the way of my enjoyment of the series. And I’ve still got the next five books already bought and laying by my hand this vacation.

I marked it Worth Consuming but my recommendation would be to not read lots of this back-to-back if you can avoid it.

Kim Harrison rocks. I’ve anxiously awaited every Rachel book so far, and have devoured each like a rabid werewolf gnawing at it’s hapless prey.

Unlike the Anita Blake series (by Laurell Hamilton) this series by Harrison always surprises and delights.

I know I’m rooting for Rachel to do her vamp roommate. You know what I mean. Oh yeah.

I’ve got the first nine Anita Blake with me on vacation and I’m reading them all back-to-back. And while I’m enjoying them, I am not enjoying the fact that Laurell Hamilton is reusing descriptive text again and again in each book.

Heck, even the first paragraph of this book started off with repetitive description that I’ve heard too many times.

I voted the book worth consuming but I like Kim Harrison‘s books better. And Harrison doesn’t keep repeating herself.