Pirates. Magic. Zombies. Pseudo-history.

More often than not, a story with this many excellent ingredients is less than the sum of its parts. Fortunately for the reader, this Tim Powers knows what he’s doing.

The story of John “Jack Shandy” Chandagnac, a sailor whose revenge mission to the new world is interrupted when his ship is attacked by pirates and he is forced to join the crew. The ensuing journey entails Blackbeard, the Fountain of Youth, voodoo, zombies, and of course, copious amounts of rum.

Powers tells the mythology of voodoo magic and Ponce de Leon’s fountain with the depth and authority of someone who knows the history, and he captures the awe that these explorers had for the new world before it was civilized. He also does a great job of snowballing the action; the further into the book I got, the faster I read. The stakes are higher with every page and the action rises with them, and right when the situations are becoming borderline ridiculous, Powers scales it back just enough to keep you in the story, and provides the exhausted reader with an ultimately satisfying payoff.

Bottom line: On Stranger Tides is what happens when you give the right ingredients to a great cook. Definitely recommended for fantasy enthusiasts.

As a long(ish)-distance runner, I was stoked to hear about Running From the Devil, Jamie Freveletti’s debut novel about a long-distance runner and cosmetics chemist who finds herself running from guerillas in the Columbian jungle after a plane crash, using her endurance running skills and knowledge of plant chemicals to try to evade her captors and help her fellow passengers make it to safety.

Freveletti does a solid job of bringing depth to her characters, and she moves the action along at a fast pace which had whipping through it to see what would happen next. The only problem that I had with the novel was at the end, where the real world that Freveletti establishes is undermined by a conclusion that wraps up a bit too tidily to sustain believability. Still a decent read though, Running From the Devil was a few tweaks away from being great. If this is where Jamie Freveletti is starting from, I can’t wait to see where she goes from here.

After really enjoying Dan Simmons’ The Terror, I was stoked to hear the subject for his next novel- Charles Dicken’s final, incompleted mystery novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
In it, Simmons uses his considerable skill for blending fact and fiction, following Dickens (through the voice of narrator Wilkie Collins, a fellow writer and friend of Dickens) through the train wreck that introduced Dickens to Drood, the mysterious stranger who changed his life (and may have played a part in ending it), and the bizarre behavior that followed. What follows is a traipse into London’s seamy (to say the least) under-underworld, a look as psychosis, and an account of Dicken’s decline and eventual fall.

The story is intriguing and the characters are engaging, but Simmons occasionally slows the narrative by falling into traps of verbosity. Too often I found myself distracted by overly descriptive prose and rabbit trails that seemed unnecessary. While the ideas were great, and I was left with some compelling imagery, I found it too hard to wade through the fluff to get to the good stuff.

Jonathan Maberry’s The Dragon Factory continues the saga of Joe Ledger, Mayberry’s featured protagonist and a team leader of the Department of Military Sciences (DMS), the United States’ ultra-clandestine team of special operatives who work with a blank check and near-total autonomy from the rules and regulations of modern warfare to keep the country (and the world) safe from its biggest threats.

With his first Legder novel, Patient Zero, Maberry started out with a bang, putting the DMS up against ‘walkers’, a virally-animated version of the walking dead. The Dragon Factory ups the ante with competing groups of geneticists, one group churning out genetically enhanced mercenaries and genetically manipulated monsters, and the other continuing the Nazi’s quest to further the master race. Both groups are at each other’s throats, and both want to eliminate the DMS.

Fast-paced, violent and suspenseful, Mayberry writes in a manner that grabs readers by the wrist and drags them through his vivid imagination, and his characters are likable, often relatable characters that are easy to grow emotionally invested in, leading to long nights of white-knuckle reading.

Don’t plan on putting The Dragon Factory down until you’ve finished it.

Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice, by Laura S. Scott

Statistics were dry
But anecdotes compelling
Confirming our choice

Poker Nation: A High-Stakes, Low-life Adventure into the Heart of a Gambling Country, by Andy Bellin
Brilliant history
An intimate look inside
The world’s greatest game

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir, by Haruki Murakami

A great novelist
A life of running, writing
My two great passions

My Work is Not Yet Done, by Thomas Ligotti

A look at madness
The first two acts terrific
The third act lost me

Patient Zero, by Jonathan Maberry

Read this one before
I posted about it here
One of my favorites

I’ve always been a fan of short story collections. The short story is a great, under appreciated form of prose-since the writer doesn’t generally have the space to become long-winded, the stories come out lean, terse, and to the point. I always think that the best writers are the ones who can tell a great story without a bunch of verbosity.
Short stories are a great way to discover new writers as well, and Poe’s Children: The New Horror, edited by Peter Straub is no exception.
Poe’s Children took me through a series of stories the likes of which I’d never seen. Usually a collection has one or two tentpole stories surrounded by sub-par offerings, but Straub collected a strong series of horror stories. Of course, Straub’s, King’s and Gaiman’s stories alone are worth the purchase price, but the rest of the book was (for the most part) consistently solid, with standout stories like John Crowley’s Missolonghi 1824 and Thomas Ligotti’s Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story.

This is a little late, but a few weeks ago I read Pirate Latitudes, Michael Crichton last book. It was actually found as a finished manuscript in his desk after he’d died, and I blew through it in about a day.

As it’s name suggests, Pirate Latitudes is a traditional pirate novel in setting, but Crichton makes it a heist film, as its protagonist, Captain Charles Hunter, is charged with stealing a fortune in gold from a feared Spanish fortress and puts together a crack team of professionals to help him pull it off.

It’s a great concept and Crichton creates great characters, but there’s a rushed feeling to the book. It lacks the descriptive depth that Crichton generally puts into his books and there’s so much action crammed into the narrative, it seems like a series of books was condensed into a novel.

While the concept is rich, and the characters are compelling, the execution of the novel is a bit lacking, and I’d chalk that up to Crichton’s passing. I still recommend it, as the good outweighs the bad, but I can’t help but think that if he’d had more time, this would have been an epic, rather than just plain fun.

Probably stemming from my own delusions of grandeur, I’ve always been fascinated by conquerors of old, and Hannibal was one of my favorites, but history books are generally pretty dry, filled with dates and lacking any kind of narrative form. Hannibal: The Novel did me a great service by turning the details and legend of the Hannibal mythos into a coherent, engaging narrative that neither vilifies it’s hero nor justifies his actions.

The story is told in retrospect from Hannibal’s perspective, giving insights into his motivations. There’s lots of emotional input and his tactical genius is prominently displayed. If I had one complaint, it would be that the battle scenes seem rushed through, often taking no more than a paragraph to describe an entire day of warfare.

While it isn’t perfect, Hannibal: The Novel made it easier for me to envision Hannibal the historical figure and motivated me to learn more about him, so I’d call the novel a success.

Stephen King’s latest book, Under the Dome, is about a small town on the East Coast that finds itself encased in a glass dome.

It’s a simple enough idea, but King turns that one-sentence premise into 1074 pages of lightning narrative. The dome is semi-airtight, lending itself to create its own atmosphere, and the mystery of what it is and where it comes from is very engaging. More so than the dome, however, King makes the dome’s inhabitants vastly more interesting. The interactions and clashes that occur within the trapped community had me riveted-during one particularly intense stretch, I found myself reading until 3 a.m.

King’s got a way of putting regular people into outrageous situations (vampires, aliens, giant beasts from other dimensions) and somehow making the people more interesting than their often-supernatural surroundings, and Under the Dome is no exception. If you’re not a fan of King, this may not be for you, because this is a great example of what I love about him-outstanding circumstances, interesting character dynamics, and his “Uncle Stevie” storytelling style.

When books creep into four-digit page counts, they usually enter one of two categories: the “I don’t think I can get through this” category or the “Thank God this isn’t over yet” category. Luckily for us, Under the Dome falls into the latter.