Niteblade News

Posts Tagged ‘A.R. Braun’

Tapestry of Tales

Book review by A. R. Braun

In Tapestry of Tales, Sarah Deckard gives us a multitude of protagonists and antagonists to entertain us deep into the night with the timeless writers’ question, What if? What if the elder brother of twelve sisters becomes a necromancer and tries to destroy them by dancing them to death? What if when a princess kisses a frog, it brings her to ruin? What if waking Sleeping Beauty invites a sanguine doom?

Sarah’s warped fairy tales bring to mind yarns I learned in school with a fresh and evocative twist. The lusty, violent and sometimes perverted plot twists are something you’ve never read before, though you’ve perused the basic plots. ”Zodiac Dancers” brings the reader to a hidden underworld of dangers. “The Enchanted Kiss” makes the reader question selfishness. “The Sleeper” ends in a way you won’t see coming, showing her expertise when working in the dark fantasy genre.

I found the collection quite refreshing, a genre I don’t usually read but was able to enjoy whole-heartedly. The tome is not predictable or tiresome, the stories bringing to mind morals, questioning avarice and narcissism and evoking surprise and sometimes shock when the endings are revealed. I definitely recommend this to any fantasy aficionado.

                                            Hiram Grange and the Digital Eucharist

                                                   Book Review by A. R. Braun

Hiram Grange is an unlikely hero. With a penchant for loose women, drugs and booze, who would expect him to be a demon hunter? But that’s exactly what he is, fighting to keep the demons in hell and off the streets. A long-haired, gun-toting protagonist who loves hard-loving, young chicks? You know I’m all over this series!

In Hiram Grange and the Digital Eucharist by Robert Davies, Hiram shows up with his cohorts, preventing a demon named Giblis from entering our world. He does so, but not without sacrificing the life of his now worst enemy’s girlfriend, a lithe, supple beauty. The other survivor gives him The Scorpion’s Kiss, a bomb blast of a drug stash, hoping it will do him in. Hiram must go up against the Occultionist’s Tower, a deadly corporation helping the demon, Giblis, come back into the world . . . and now he’s hunting Hiram, the man responsible for preventing his entry last time. Will Hiram have to drink The Digital Eucharist, a symbiotic potion primed to take the conscience of man away, to gain entry and fight the demon?

I enjoyed the raw humor and the subject matter. It wasn’t a bad novella by any means. Some of the description at the end I felt a bit anticlimactic. Everything else was rock solid, nothing boring and tedious. There’s plenty of gripping, gory details and amazing artwork throughout the graphic novella. The non-cumbersome ninety-seven page read held my attention throughout. It’s definitely the best graphic novella since Stephen King’s Silver Bullet. I could have done without the author’s comment at the end, saying mimetic writing is for wimps when talking about writing of lobster girls and laser beams. Seeing as two other writers wrote the first two books, this comment doesn’t make sense to me. Otherwise, a quick, fun read that kept my attention.

A. R. Braun

Around a Dark Corner
Book Review by: A.R. Braun

Jeani Rector’s Around a Dark Corner is a refreshing collection of short stories that genuinely creeped me out. The book has the look of a small press publication, and if you can get by all the typos and the overuse of passive, to-be verbs like “was” and “were,” you’ll be able to enjoy this work. I found myself liking a little over half of it. She’s done her homework as far as research, and there are some great descriptions of what happens to the body after death. Especially gut-wrenching were “The Dead Man,” “A Medieval Tale of Death,” “The Spirit of Death,” “Horrorscope,” ”Maggots” and “Flight 529.”, a story of a plane going down through the protagonist’s point of view.

The story that stood out to me as far as greatness was “Horrorscope.” I’m always going to give kudos to any writer that names her story after an Overkill song–I don’t know if this was intended–and the rantings of a madman in second person had me cringing in my seat.

Although she seems to have mastered the short story, I didn’t care for the long short story, ”Lady Cop,” and the novella, ”A Teenage Short Story.” The long-winded stories came off a bit simplistic and heavy-laden with what seemed like rushed content just to fill up space. I have to ask myself why a high school girl would care about a murder in 1935, but I won’t give away the ending or too much content.

I recommend Around a Dark Corner because a little over half the short stories sent shivers down my spine and had me wincing.