Lord Samper's Library

  Page Count: 261 Pages When I picked up ‘The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume 1’ last week, the plan was to read the three books in between, well… All the other books that are waiting ‘patiently’ in the TBR pile. No urgency, just another way of adding a tiny bit of variety to my reading diet ;o) And now here I am, a few days later, having just finished off what I can only describe as an ‘Aliens Reading Frenzy’. What happened? Well, my posts on ‘Earth Hive’ and ‘Nightmare Asylum’ can speak for themselves but the bottom line is that fun was in short supply until I found it here. That’s what led me into ‘The Female War’, in record time, let me tell you about it… Ellen Ripley is back! Waking from a long journey in space with a mysterious hole in her memory, Ripley finds her way to the Gateway station and a meeting with Wilks and Billie. Ripley has the beginnings of a plan, a plan that might help humanity take the Earth back from the Aliens. Ripley also has a secret though, one that s...

  Page Count: 52 Pages It’s not just zombie movies that I’ll watch, regardless of quality… If a film, or book, starts with the words ‘Earth vs.’? I’ll be there for it. And now I’ve said that, I’m just going to have to read ‘Earth vs. the Nudist Camp Freaks’ and ‘Earth vs. the Star Mummy’ (the two other novellas in this series) as well. I wouldn’t want to make a liar out of myself (dammit). Anyway… One of my ‘daily blog visits’ is ‘Paperback Warrior’ and that’s where I first saw that 1950s Earth had a problem on its hands with a big ol’ horde of Lava Spiders . Well, I had to head to Pine Grove and check out the situation… Tonight’s special features takes place on a quiet Friday night in the small coastal town of Pine Grove. Strange lights appear over Shasta Island and an explosion rocks the beachfront. Fireballs rain down from the sky as lava bubbles from the hidden volcano, unleashing a nightmare of hellfire and blood on the town. Watch in horror as the Lava Spiders surge across ...

  Page Count: 271 Pages Well, yesterday wasn’t the ‘day of reading’ that I’d planned; more like a day of playing on my phone (with an ill-advised break for a scary movie that wasn’t scary at all) and trying to stay awake. It did get to a point though where I thought, ‘if I don’t read something now…’ and resolved to do something about that. The immediate TBR pile wasn’t particularly inspiring so in the end, I figured I’d go back to the ‘Aliens Omnibus’ and see what happened after Wilks and Billie escaped the Alien home world. ‘Earth Hive’ had its issues but there was enough there for me to want to keep reading . Turns out that it was a good choice of mine :o) ‘Nightmare Asylum’ was a big improvement on ‘Earth Hive’ and all of a sudden, I’m back in the groove again. Billie, Wilks and Bueller (well, half of him anyway…) have escaped the Alien home world, on board a pre-programmed robot ship, destination unknown. They will eventually make it back to Earth but not until they’ve spent so...

I really almost did... :o)  Reading has kind of stalled over the last few days (mostly work but I’ve also developed an annoying habit of falling asleep the second I turn my work laptop off…) I’ve got no plans for today so hopefully I’ll be able to do something about that, fingers crossed ;o) In the meantime? I’ve had better luck staying awake for movies over the last week (although I still managed to sleep through a good chunk of ‘Shin Godzilla’, dammit) so let me quickly tell you about some of those… ‘Rammbock: Berlin Undead’ (2010) For better or worse, I’ve never been what you’d call an ambitious man but I do have things that I want to do, one of those being to watch as many zombie movies as I possibly can. Not your ‘standard ambition’ but it gets me through the day ;o) Anyway… ‘Rammbock’ is a zombie movie that I seemed to keep finding in various ‘zombie movies you should watch’ YouTube videos but never managed to track down the film itself. That changed the other day when it su...

  Page Count: 277 Pages Sorry about the ‘blog silence’ yesterday… Blame it on a mixture of work and a ‘long lunch break’ involving a trip to my GP and then on to the hospital for more blood tests. Yay. It did give me a bit more free time, for reading, though so I’m not complaining too much. Work continues to be demanding so I was pretty glad to escape into a book. Anyway… I’ve had ‘The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume 1’ on my shelf for a couple of years now but have somehow never quite got round to picking it up; it’s a thick old book and I think that’s put me off a little. Until yesterday that is… Instead of taking on the whole book at once, I thought I’d tackle it ‘one book at a time’ instead and, here I am. ‘Earth Hive’ was up first and… They come in silence like death in the night. They are perfect killing machines. They are the Aliens and some people value them above all else. But the attempt to weaponize a creature of such tremendous power is a very dangerous game for the inh...

  Page Count: 126 Pages If you see an old ‘Doctor Who’ book featured here, the odds are that a copy of it came home from the library with me, when I was a lot younger, and now I’m trying to find my way back to a time when things were a little more care-free (even if I didn’t realise it at the time…) What? Work has been a nightmare recently and a ‘nostalgia hit’ makes everything a little easier to manage ;o) That was definitely the mood I was in yesterday, that’s why I settled down with a copy of ‘The Face of Evil’ and tried to put a little distance between me and everything else. And it worked, that’s the main thing. Setting the controls for Earth, the Doctor is surprised when the TARDIS lands in a primeval forest. Has the tracer gone wrong or has some impulse, deep in his unconscious mind, directed him to this alien planet? As he explores, the Doctor meets Leela, a warrior banished from the tribe of the Sevateem; through her, it gradually becomes apparent that the constant war bet...