Lord Samper's Library

Sorry it has been quiet here these past couple of days… I’ll be honest, the mixture of medication that I’m on (and the heat) left me absolutely shattered and in no fit state for work, or blogging. So, I did neither :o) Took a couple of days off sick (back into work on Monday) and didn’t even think about blogging. I have been up to other things, mostly cat-sitting (the girls and my ex-partner are away) and all the ‘fun’ that entails – no pun intended ;o) At the time of writing, the cat ‘most likely to do a runner’ is snoozing on a chair; the cat ‘most likely to snooze on a chair’ legged it after dinner and hasn’t been seen since. I’ve got another week of this :o) What I also have though is access to my ex-partner’s Disney+ account and I’ll be using it, over the week, to catch up on, well… I don’t know :o) Any recommendations? I do know that I am way behind with my ‘MCU watching’ so yesterday, I figured I’d put a little dent in that list and... ‘Thunderbolts*’ (2025) When a group of spec...

  Page Count: 124 Pages So yesterday was sick leave (nothing serious, don’t worry) and I spent the day in my trusty comfy chair, working my way through ‘Todd and the Book of Pure Evil’ (funnier than I thought it would be). Luckily for this post, I also spent a chunk of my time reading ‘Doctor Who and the Monster of Peladon’; a book that I haven’t read since, erm… a long time ago. Yep, this is one of those posts where I end up feeling really quite old… Anyway, a re-read then but it had been so long that it felt like I was coming to the book for the first time. Let me tell you about it… Fifty years after his first visit to Peladon, the Doctor returns to find that Queen Thalira has inherited a troubled kingdom from her father. Membership of the Galactic Federation was expected to bring peace and prosperity to the planet, but the spirit of the sacred monster Aggedor is once more spreading terror and death. The Doctor uncovers a treacherous plot to steal the mineral wealth of Peladon, a...

  Page Count: 405 pages After a ‘not so great’ experience with ‘Domain’, I really needed my next read to be a decent one, that’s what led me back to ‘Carnage Unending’; an anthology that I’d started reading, about a month ago(ish) but had somehow found its way way to the bottom of a pile of books on my desk. It’s funny how that seems to happen fairly regularly at the moment… Anyway :o) I figured a little ‘Warhammer 40k’ reading would be a safe bet and I’d already read a fair chunk of 'Carnage Unending' so it would be a fairly quick read as well. As it turned out… Both of these were true, to a point. I’m not going to go into my usual ‘something for everyone’ spiel (oh, hang on…) but lets just say that for me, ‘Carnage Unending’ was a decent palate cleanser after ‘Domain’ with a varied set of tales from the sides of ‘Imperium’ and ‘Ork’. The other thing I realised is that after a ‘negative read’, I am much less inclined to stick with a story if it’s not doing it for me. I’m sure ...

  Page Count: 482 Pages (I skimmed a lot of pages though, that should tell you something right away…) Now here’s a book that I first read at high school and my latest copy has been sat on my bookshelf since August last year, waiting patiently to be read (in the way that only a book can). The last time I read it was back in 2014 and to be honest, I didn’t particularly enjoy it . It has been a few years though, and the other two books have featured here so… It felt like time to round things off and have the full trilogy feature on the blog. I know, sometimes that's all it takes for me to decide on my next read ;o) Still not keen on it though, at least I can say I’ve (re)read all three books now. The long dreaded nuclear conflict. The city torn apart, shattered, its people destroyed or mutilated beyond hope. For just a few, survival is possible only beneath the wrecked streets – if there is time to avoid the slow-descending poisonous ashes, But below, the rats, demonic offspring of th...

I’ve spent the last week, or two, working my way through a rewatch of the ‘Slasher’ series and it has been great. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into great detail here because, well… There are already posts here that do just that, I’ll link to them at the bottom of the post ;o) And that’s what led me to this post… I was (re)watching ‘Slasher: Ripper’ and realised that I’d never posted about it here. Being the kind of guy who ‘has to get the whole set’, that’s where this post comes in. And while I was watching ‘Ripper’, I found out that ‘Hell Motel’ has loose connections to the series so I gave that a go as well. While I’m hanging out with my daughters today, have a read and see what I thought of these two shows; both were good but I enjoyed one more than the other… ‘Slasher: Ripper’ (2023) It’s 1904 and the upper-class of Toronto are left reeling when one of their own is brutally murdered by a killer known only as ‘The Widow’. Detective Kenneth Rijkers must find the killer and his in...

  Page Count: 144 Pages It wasn’t just ‘Doctor Who’ books that I bought, in Greenwich, the other day. I don’t normally go into ‘Casbah Records’ but I saw a little sign, saying ‘books for sale’, and figured… Just this once :o) ‘Turf’ is one of those titles where I see #1 in ‘Forbidden Planet’ and think to myself, ‘I’ll pick up a copy next time’. The next thing I know, it’s years later and I’ve just found a really nice looking collected edition (still wrapped up in the plastic) in a Greenwich Record Shop. I thought to myself, ‘if I don’t read it now, I’ll have retired by the time I next remember to read it…’ So, that’s what I did. New York, 1929: The height of prohibition. Gangs fall like bloody dominos as the mysterious Dragonmir family fights to rule the city and begin to wake the Old One – a gigantic sleeping vampire buried in the roots of their mansion. But an unlikely alliance between tough guy Eddie Falco and an alien gun-runner leads to an uneasy stalemate. Meanwhile, a strong...